Tag Archives: fiction

December 14, 2025 · 10:05 pm

Goodbye Columbus

You saved your panic for the last act, didn’t you? Roth, I’m talking to you. You had Neil, your stand-in, your man—your young Jewish protagonist—clutching for answers, calling on Brenda, the girlfriend from the other side of the tracks, to come clean and admit to all that would fit his projections: he’s unwanted, an outsider who never really had a chance. It’s unfair what just happened, by the way—that thought that just disappeared due to an errant stroke of a finger. What happened? Words just left, retrievable only by the technically adept. Anyway, it’s like what happened to Neil. His confidence: it just left him in the end. His sense of assurance, of being loved and having a future of his choosing, because that’s what was owed to him, had just vanished.

           Brenda wouldn’t cop to it, of course, the ulterior motive he assigned to her. She was in denial, like she had been from the outset, playing it cool, pretending to not remember Neil when he first called, full of chutzpah—there, that’s the word that got away. She sorta came clean in the first few passages, saying she liked him, wanted to sleep with him, steal away from under the noses of affluent parents, find herself in Short Hills, New Jersey, not Connecticut, where school and high society beckoned. In the middle act, they slip and slide, playing at love, making love, discreetly and with reticent suggestion, fifties style. Neil was pre-sexual revolution, all from the boys’ side of things: do it for me, he said, regarding the diaphragm that became the point of contention, the fly in the ointment for a silent class war. It would increase his pleasure, was his argument to her. Would it? They’d know it already, the kids today. Nothing new anymore about carnal knowledge, the defeat of sexual guilt. But this was a post-war, fifties neurosis being navigated, with sex as the battleground. Naivete aside, you’re made to wonder as a sympathetic reader where the story was headed had it not been for the sexual mishap. What’s the future of a young aspirant couple heading into the sixties, scratching at their pants, but with much to look forward to, it seemed.

           It all blows up like a sudden cold war crisis. Neil’s panic seems to have him looking backward to a fear that has sat dormant thus far, squeezed into the subtext of an otherwise bland coming of age tale. What happened? Did something disappear, like words from a screen in our digitally cloudy age? No, a discovery of a physical object was the problem: discovery of the diaphragm by a priggish parent whose attachment to decorum and probity is at once ignited, only that’s not the true crisis from Neil’s point of view. What’s on his mind is what’s on Roth’s mind having been in psychoanalysis and then decided to make the Freudian arts a motif in his stories. So, with that in mind, Neil has it out with Brenda about the diaphragm, about why she let it be found by her snooping, we-thought-we-raised-you-better mother. Why didn’t she take it to school, avoid the problem of it being found, Neil asks. A mother going through a daughter’s belongings: that’s to be expected, he chastises, perhaps thinking of Jewish mothers in general and his own burning sexual guilt. Brenda has an explanation, an excuse for her laxity, only Neil is having none of it. His sense of persecution is piqued, and is foregrounded as they fight, which leads to a deadened climax—their break-up. Now the chutzpah with which he once approached Brenda and later called upon her, feeling brazen and hopeful, is gone, displaced by a paranoia that was previously absented, but ever floating in the literary unconscious. Don’t you know? He says as she bristles at his insinuation that she’d deliberated this discovery. No, she insists. Now she’s estranged from her parents, having disgraced them with her sexual impropriety. Why would she do that on purpose?

           But what Neil experiences, what he feels and what he calls upon the reader to acknowledge if she won’t, is his rejection, as if this were all pre-ordained. Yes, she liked you. She wanted you. She might even have fought someone over you in the unseen, unwritten scenes of a middle act. But in the end, she can’t have you and you can’t have her, not even in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, plus being equal. And worst of all, you can’t even get it straight, as in the truth, if there are blind spots. That this was her plan all along—a dalliance, but not a life due to her myopic self, which is foreshadowed in their first meeting—is his and our putative takeaway. She didn’t remember him, she first claimed, being demure and foreshadowing their unhappy end. She asked him to hold her glasses at the pool. She didn’t see him. Goodbye Brenda, and middle America. Goodbye Columbus is the name of the story.

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April 21, 2025 · 6:09 am

Wow

Wow…

              The narrow hallway of the eighth floor stretches westwards to a cul de sac and a small waist-high window letting in sun from a Pacific horizon. You can almost hear the echoes of an architect screaming to a builder, give ‘em some light, please. The units are a good dozen to a floor, expertly welded into a taut floor plan that allows an illusion of space being devoted elsewhere. As I walk down the wing towards Steve’s address, I note the change in color scheme and the insulated feeling. The walls are a cobalt blue exuding calm and security, a far cry from the sunburnt orange that adorned the interior when I’d first visited years ago. The once-well trodden carpet, similarly singed, has been replaced by a thicker material that fully absorbs footsteps, vacating the last sounds of an old creaking floorboard. Disconcerting, I imagine, for those residents whose ears are never far from a front door, worried that someone unauthorized might be in the building, stalking.

              I press on Steve’s doorbell and hear no sound. Even the ping of a simulated bell is subdued in this determinedly buffered setting. Steve answers the door, beams half of his amiable smile through the crack and then opens up the space after the briefest of hesitations. I walk in past a plain door, unpocked by ornate divots, with only a penny-sized spy-hole blemishing its surface. Doesn’t he trust it? I wonder, regarding Steve’s pause.

              “Hello dear boy”, he says in a slightly affected voice—his nod to my British heritage, which he thinks entails people greeting each other with overwrought expressions because that’s how they do it in period dramas or hoary Ealing comedies that somehow drift into modern minds. He gestures welcome with a wave of his palm and beckons me past a kitchenette towards a cluster of furniture and dense ephemera. Apologies follow: “sorry about the…”, and “I’ve been meaning to…”. When we lived together, once upon a time, I might have scoffed and remonstrated, depending upon my mood. In my fantasy of lived disgust, I might have kicked something, sent a console, a bucket of food, or a lounging pet flying across the room. That’s when we had standards followed by expectations, plus an appetite for conflict. It’s years later now, so like the walls and the floorspace, the feelings have softened. Anyway, nothing in this space serves as a centerpiece. It’s all a trail of bits and pieces, some discarded, others merely detained ahead of a hateful deportation. The inviolate fixtures are a wall-sized television and a triumvirate of computer screens that transform a living space into the semblance of a stock exchange floor.

              I am stepping over and in between piles of consumer and consumed goods, heading for a dead end. “Sorry”, says Steve, realizing there’s nowhere to sit. Outside, on a tight veranda overlooking a glassy vista and concrete cityscape, there’s space for a chair that looks dusty and unused and flanked by a wooden structure partially wrapped in mesh wire.

              “It’s okay for me to stay, right?” I ask uncertainly, half-plaintively.

              “Oh sure, sure,” he replies. “In fact, I might be joining you. My friend Sara also might come”.

              I stare back with a blank expression, thinking there’s a piece that’s awry in Steve’s thought. “Might come? You’re thinking of coming to my graduation?”

              Steve’s neck snaps backwards as his eyes roll upwards. It’s like I’ve delivered a blow to his right side and he’s heading down for the count. “Aw shit, that’s right! I forgot about your thing. Sorry, I’ve been all turned around lately. I thought you might be at the protest tomorrow”.

              “Nah, I don’t think so,” I respond coolly, having half-expected this misunderstanding of why I’m visiting his urban lair. Steve shrugs. “Any chance you can come by later, maybe we can have dinner together, you can meet Sara”.

              I could care less about his friend Sara. “I’ll be eating at the center with some colleagues. There’s a dinner gathering after the ceremony”. He nods faintly. He can tell by the flat tone and terse delivery that I’m annoyed he’s forgotten.

              “Got it. This is your training program you’ve been doing, huh? That Freud thing”.

              “Analytic training”

              “Right. Do you get a pipe and a tweed jacket, or something?”

              This quip merits an indulgent grin, not quite the derisive smirk I’d prefer to give. I have his half-effortful hospitality to think of, to feel grateful for, though a hotel room will seem a good alternative at this point. Making a token effort, Steve grabs a cushion, wipes a swath of litter from a couch—ostensibly my bunk for the night. Then he asks that I excuse a phalanx of cans and bottles atop an adjoining breakfast table. “I’ll get rid of them later,” he says. “They’re just rinsing out, don’t want to put them away and get mildew”. That pings a memory. Back in the day, Steve was often saying stupid things like this to justify not doing something.

              “What’s the box for on the balcony”. I don’t care about this box just beyond a sliding door any more than I do his friend, but the awkwardness of Steve’s neglect is impinging upon my nerves.

              “That’s for chickens,” he says, prefacing an impending spiel.

              Chicken shit, I’m inclined to reply. “Doesn’t look big enough,” I say, indicating the box’s seeming three-foot length, its piecemeal disposition. “Where are the chickens?”

              Steve often answers questions not yet asked, aiming for what he knows instead. “Soon”, he says. “Collecting them this weekend. Been planning this for weeks, studying the raising of foul for ages. Gonna grow my own eggs, get ahead of rising prices. I just gotta put the box together some, wrap the mesh around it, do one or two other things”.

              “So, it’s a coop”

              “Sort of, mini one. Got a southern exposure here, plenty of sunshine. No predators around, of course. Just gotta watch the weather. Should be okay in spring heading into summer, though”

              “You got enough space? Kinda tight out there, isn’t it?

              “They only need a few square feet to walk, run around in”

              “Take a shit in”

              “No kidding. Got a few bags of shavings to lay down. Gonna start with three, see how they do, whether they fight, which happens if there isn’t enough space”

              “Don’t you have a cat?”

              “Miete? She died last year. Thought you knew”

              “Maybe you told me. I would’ve remembered, I think. Sorry”

              “No worries. Anyway, you ready for your big day?”

              Steve held a sudden look of cheer upon his face, suggesting I’d touched a nerve mentioning his cat. Now my life was a useful pretext for a change of subject, his chicken interest notwithstanding.

              I heave a practiced sigh. “Been ready for I don’t know how long. Feels like I’ve been doing this forever”

              “I bet. You started this…when?” I can tell he needs me to fill in all of the gaps of his unknowing, and as I do, I’ll see that his eyes glaze over and his mind will drift back to images of plywood, mesh wire and carefully marshalled chicken shit.

              “Seven years ago is when it started. You might remember the last night I stayed here overnight. I was applying still, had interviews with institute faculty at Zion hospital the next day”

              “Right. I remember that now. I seem to recall you saying it would take a few years, not seven though. Why so long?

              “Some elements are like college—you complete four years of seminar. The cases that are analytic: they have to get approved, plus you have to write an academic paper that’s more or less like a doctoral thesis. That’s what took the longest”

              “So remind me, if you don’t mind, what happens next? Do you get an extra credential?”

              “I’m a psychoanalyst”

              “Okay, you’ve said that before. But what does that mean? Could I just call you up and ask you for psychoanalysis, come lie on a couch in your office and have you interpret my dreams?”

              “That’s the last thing you’d want, believe me”

              Steve burst out a light chuckle. “Why? Am I that bad? Beyond help?”

              “Let’s just say it wouldn’t be your thing. You’re more of a go-to-a-retreat, take ketamine with somebody watching and then have what you think is a cathartic experience followed by a day at a spa.”

              “I have done something like that actually. My therapist, whom I see about four times a year recommended something similar to me, only with psilocybin, not ketamine”

              “So, did you do that?

              “Not yet. Haven’t gotten around to it. We’ve been doing EMDR, which I also find cathartic—lots of childhood stuff comes up for me. Deep stuff. You should try it. Or, you should get the certificate for it, gets lots of clients that way”

              “I did…twenty years ago. Now I do psychoanalysis, that Freudian thing I’ve mentioned a few times over the last few years. It’s different. It’s an older model of treatment: the patient speaks. An analyst listens. No drugs. No tricks. And you meet four times a week, not four times in a year.”

              “Four times a week! You’re kidding”

              I am not kidding, my face says. I’ve said this to him before, several times in fact.

              Steve’s incredulity resumes: “I mean, I know you’ve mentioned that before, I just can’t believe anyone does that. Jeez, who can do that? Who has the money for it?”

              “You’re presuming that an analyst would charge you three hundred dollars per hour like the person who watches you take acid does”

              “Well, okay, so you’re saying it’s less expensive, but still…the time…”

              “What about it?”

              “Who has the time? Plus, I don’t know. I’d run out of things to say”

              For a half-minute I remain still-faced, myself incredulous, except to think you might. I hold my mean-spirited tongue, for a moment at least. I gaze around, shoot incriminating glances at random objects that signify a random existence.

              “The time? Like the time spent staring at that trio of screens, or that massive Orwellian eye in the middle of your wall-space? The time spent binging on eye candy, brain candy, or actual candy? Run out of things to say? If you mean platitudes, banal chatter, the dinner theater of modern politics, then sure, you’d run out of things to say? If you mean catching up on what’s happening in your life, or even retaining what’s happening after the last time you spoke to someone, then sure you’ll run out of things to say. If you mean external events, or how’s your health or how’s the family doing, or the kind of stuff anyone can understand without much effort at explanation, then sure you’ll run out of things to say. If you mean the stuff that you think others will understand or not form a half-understanding judgement or sample of disgust about, then sure you’ll run out of things to say”

              At once, Steve frowns and speaks in a low, measured voice.

              “You sound annoyed. Have I annoyed you?”

              I pause for effect and hold my friend’s attention with a fixed, unblinking glare. “That’s psychoanalysis,” I say.

              He shakes his head, befuddled. “What? what is psychoanalysis?”

              “What you just did. You responded as if everything I just said had something to do with you, or you and I”

              “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to make this about me—”

              “I’m not criticizing that, you prat. It is about you and me. That’s what I’m saying—what you just did was an analytic thing to do, and a truly interpersonal thing to do, only it’s ironic because you think it’s merely self-centered”

              He shook his head again. “Right. What? What are you saying? Making it about me, or about you and I is the right thing. How can that be?”

              “It’s easy if you think about a principle that you haven’t been studying and thinking about for nearly a decade but I have. It’s this: when YOU’RE TALKING TO SOMEONE, WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY IS AT LEAST PARTLY AND SOMETIMES MOSTLY ABOUT THEM”

              “Why are you yelling?

              “I’m not…okay, I am…just because you haven’t listened, not really. Nobody really…”

              By this point Steve was staring at me like an emergency room nurse performing a mental health exam. “My big day. It is a big day, and I didn’t fully realize until today that it bums me out that you barely understand what it’s about, this big day of mine.  You think it’s a kind of joke, featuring cliches…”

              “Wow, I never said—”

              “I know you never said. You never had to say it directly. And it’s not your fault. It’s at least mine as well, the fact that we don’t get each other”. I gaze about his living space again. “I don’t get how you can live like this. That’s my judgement. You’re like those chickens you’re gonna raise. You wanna know how? They don’t have sphincters, chickens. They don’t control their shit. They just walk around and release and they don’t pick up after themselves. Someone else has to do that for them”.

              This remark freezes my old friend. He looks stunned, eternally undecided. Trying to seem poised, Steve walks over to his front door and pulls it open like he wants me to leave. With a cold, glassy shine in his eye, he asks, “How’s your wife doing?”

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March 23, 2025 · 9:00 pm

Lent

Lent. I’m meant to be in self-denial, abstaining from my habits in observance of grief. I’ll have to call her back, tell her I’m not coming. I don’t want to, though my reasons are no longer about sex. I already made the date, and I’m minutes away now. Damned regret. Always happens in the minutes following the decision, when there’s time enough to think. It shouldn’t be like that. Instead, it should be like magic, like a burst across a threshold into a bathed red-lid room. You’re in, and there’s nothing left to think about until it’s over, after which the thinking is all downhill. I’m going to hell. Anyway, this isn’t like that yet. This is still ripe with anticipation and surging dread. The picture’s still in my head of my would-be date laying enticingly on a bed against the base of a camera phone, peering into it, upside down, assuming a position below the viewer’s gaze, summoning from her void with her gravitational pull. The picture from the site reveals where she lives, where she stays for hours upon hours, waiting for a hungry text, an appeal. Is she available? Of course she is. Give her a minute, she says. Give her ten. Then come right over. That’s how long it takes her to splash on some make-up, deodorize a crevice or two, and then appear within a shadowy entrance behind a frayed screen door. Does she have a cancellation policy? Does her business model attend to regret, besides squeezing the time between contact and consummation, ever narrowing the gap, making it an exact science. Get ‘em in, get ‘em out, before they change their minds. That will have been the training. The real pros, the elders of the schema will have taught how to deal with buyer’s indecision and remorse.

              So, it’s an obligation now, not just a pleasure activity. Actually, it’s not much of a pleasure, now that I think of it. When and if I think of it. I feel nothing as I approach rendezvous: no excitement, not even fear. Just a dull buzz creeping in my ears as I pull into a space and reconnaissance the scene from a nearby parking lot. White noise in my head, I look out: just a strip-mall with a liquor store, a smoke and donut shop, plus a condo spread, practically attached: a blur of commerce and cheap living where the ring cameras outnumber the people and the whiff of cheap weed permeates the neighborhood. The abodes are across an iron fence divide, on a second floor overlooking an unkempt garden quad. Dry vegetation covers a dirt patch that no one has serviced while an adolescent palm tree sprouts hopefully through its center. Debris is pooled in a cemented corner, slipping down the cracks of broken stone that protrudes because an eruption of some kind once occurred and then just…stopped. A woman passes my car, shoots a glance at me, then again as she moves past a tattoo parlor, heading towards the housing units. There’s a hint of a smile on a taut face, possibly a come on, or a knowing smirk. Is she my date? I wonder as she enters a gate to the complex. Or is it a disapproving neighbor? She turns disinterestedly and makes no further eye contact, which puts paid to the first idea. If she was waiting for someone, she’d have looked a third time, I figure. Instead, I look up to see whether a curtain will stir from a window, revealing a pair of eyes spying on the lot, waiting on a visitor. I want recognition, then a sign, a further invitation, like a crooked finger gesture, plus a shifty look elsewhere to indicate risk and thrill. 

              Two gallant duties come to mind: firstly, to complete this act, perform due diligence. It’s only fair, after all. This is how one faction of the other half lives, how it makes its living, and who am I to tease with opportunity only to then back out due to moral neurosis. But the other voice is strong also, knowing that thought number one is merely guilt displaced from its proper source. It’s saying it’s that time of year, to sacrifice pleasure and observe pain, and then feel its grim satisfaction. There’s justice to be served here of an ancient kind, plus an old penance to be paid. The church is only blocks away. Still time to turn on the ignition, back out of this space, and have no one mortal be any wiser except yourself. That curtain will stir and those waiting eyes will watch you back away, and tsk in stolid disgust, but you have blessed comfort and sanguine wishes awaiting. The incensed ambience, seminarian dignity, and fraternal order is welcoming, and promissory of sanctum. The glances there will be modest and kind, not cynical, opportunistic, and there will be no crud gathered in the corners of a doorway, and no acrid taste in my mouth. So, I’ve made a decision. The desire for this other thing is gone now, for now. I feel its leaving, like it might as well have absented itself days ago. There are weeks left in Lent, and maybe I’ll face this battle again before the season’s over and the feast begins anew. I get out my phone and text, “sorry, can’t make it”, with no explanation, knowing it wouldn’t matter. Minutes later I’m at the church, feeling like I deserve to be there, and there’s no pause between my turning off the car’s engine and opening the door. As I exit, I feel the buzz of my phone and glance down to see the terse reply of my disappointed date. “You’re an idiot”, she writes.

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February 1, 2024 · 5:05 am

No one wants to see a sad animal

What happened? It went away, my last essay. I didn’t even say goodbye. It just disappeared, vanished into the cloud, it promised, only it didn’t settle there. Why? Because its keeper, its God, the internet, was not turned on. It had turned a blind eye, so the elegiac missive was gone, now shut behind a door (or “window”), that read something like, we’re not sure what happened—did you delete? It was my fault, basically, said the computer. And so, it was my fault, this unnoticing of detail, my inattention to detail. Pity, I thought, not angrily, more forlornly. Oh well, more thoughts down the drain, rather like the residue of a dream. But there is continuity, I’ve thought in the hours since. There’s continuity in similar problems arising, with similar underpinning themes: I missed a box here, having not checked something materially important. I didn’t dot an I; I failed to reset a password. As a result, there will be no access to pragmatic life. Problems, like deaths, happen in threes, and nothing gets sent to a heavenly cloud for safekeeping. Rather, I am stuck here on earth amongst the weeds and the glitches, contemplating something…something like the links between happenings.

              I mean, it is at least apropos that the lost essay had something to do with death, and in particular, a good-humored, if sardonic look at death. It featured a not-quite dream but written rather something like a dream story about a figure who is announcing their forthcoming death to a group of half-attentive friends. They are getting messages about a memorial date for a passing that hasn’t yet happened; a passing that, by implication, will occur suicidally, hence the precise anticipation. The responses of the friend group are variably confused. Their text messages were really funny, I can tell you. I know because I wrote the lines and then sent them to the cloud, thinking it would keep them safe—that it had a hard and reliable foundation. A cloud holds, I believe, but it also releases in rain. And I’d missed something important about how that works. Anyway, back to those friends and their funny if dispiriting reactions. They would not make it to the memorial because they weren’t given the proper notice. They need a week, they were consistently saying. And that was the joke, the central gag: people aren’t there for the big stuff, the death stuff; they are elsewhere, busy with their lives, but often pretending they are there for one another, like my essay was there for me fleetingly, and promising to stick around. It would catch me later, it seemed to say. It would never—what’s the term— “ghost” me.

              My protagonist, my guy, Jim, was set to ghost people, first by dying, but then, even before that, by not talking to them anymore. That’s how pissed he was by the half-hearted and therefore heartless reaction to his admittedly desperate memorial ploy. Only one person gave him the time of day. Rachel, a one-time crush and then heartbreaker, had always cared enough to appear out of thin air from her own itinerant life to come save the day or do something decisive and right. She’d act the angel, I thought, now thinking she could emerge from the same cloud in which the previous essay was buried. What’s the problem, she’d chide, though she knew really what was up. She’d gotten news through a sparse grapevine that my guy was in despair over an illness that was tying the hands of doctors. Oncologists, I called them, alluding to the specifics but dodging the C word. Jim never liked that word. Doesn’t like the way it sounds, the way its cadence spreads. Let’s cut to the chase, past the unmentionable pain, and then get to an even less mentionable pain: whether people in his life will show up for him, actually make an effort and care.

              “That sounds like self-pity”. Good old Rachel. Not angelic, but always cutting to the chase in another sense. Straight to the point. Good stuff. In fact, Jim never liked this side of Rachel. It’s the reason he got over the crush. He wanted softness in her to match the softness in his own belly. He wanted to lie on his back and have her rub his, ya know, belly.

              “And that’s bad, I guess?” That was about the memorial, not the belly.

              “Well, what did you expect? And I’m not talking about how gruff and clueless Paul is, or how preoccupied Jane is with her life. But…a memorial, really?”

              “What?”

              “Kinda creepy. I mean, is that a joke? Are we meant to say, oh sure, go ahead and kill yourself, we’ll be there on Saturday”

              “Well, no one even mentioned that part, it was—”

              “It’s hard to know when to take you seriously on that shit. You have a dark humor. It’s not the first time you’ve made a sideways suicide threat, plus it sends people into denial. They don’t know what to do”.

              “Well, they could do something, not just not say anything”

              “They did. They texted me, asked me to call you, and yes—part of that is not knowing how to deal with it—the other part was thinking I could”

              Jim wasn’t sure he agreed with that assessment and felt like saying so, but Rachel brooks no cheap jokes when she’s in her righteous stride, so he thought the better of it. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go, he reflected in a protracted, silent pause. Rachel was silent also, waiting for what she figured was Jim’s sulking to pass. This wasn’t even how this author figured this would go. My head was in the clouds, chasing lost words. Originally, this was a surrealist skit about deadness in society dropped into a little mischief about deadness. The lost script featured quips about whether the memorial could be re-scheduled for another day; whether refreshments would serve Vegans—that sort of thing. It was dually designed to lighten people up and yet make them feel uncomfortable. What Jim truly wanted he couldn’t ask for, but he could allude to it by speaking on behalf of his German Shepherd, Beowulf. He wanted someone to commit to taking care of the dog: to feed him, adopt him, whatever. He figured that would touch everyone’s heart, stir some action upon the loss of the master. The reasons would touch upon Rachel’s critique of Jim, which no one would direct at Beowulf. They’d all want to see his tail wag. No one wants to see a sad animal.

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