Four Essays — Gabriel Blackwell

HORROR NOVEL

On the border, near the border, in the news, there is a trailer filled with human beings, human bodies, left with doors locked in the sun in extreme heat until a dozen of the human beings inside become human bodies, then two dozen do, then fifty, then fifty-one. Each day, in the news, for nearly a week, the number grows. This is related to the so-called border crisis, an abstraction, an idiocy. Each being, each body was a person; there are others who will weep at the thought that they can no longer speak to that person, hold their hand or touch their shoulder—is . . . is that something that needs to be said? And then, this morning, I'm asked, by what I'm reading, to reexamine an assumption I've basically always had: I'd long believed, with Freud and so many others, that dreams were a kind of residue of the day's events: Something happens to us while we're awake, and then, in a dream, we take out our memory of that occurrence and examine it in different contexts, different lights. Our brains or some other mechanism change the appearance of the occurrence, sometimes extensively, but it—the occurrence—must first have been something real, something experienced, before it could become part of the dream. But now, as I've said, I'm being asked to entertain a very different proposition, not quite its opposite, though, well, maybe: That our lives, what happens to us while we're awake, are only serieses of acts of expiation for what happens in our dreams. That is, when we wake, we act in such a way as to attempt to erase the stains of what occurs to us in dreams. I'm shocked I can find solace in such a belief; it's the feeling of putting on a pair of new glasses after having worn scratched glasses for years. It's easy to see why the opposite theory has so much more currency, even a century after Freud—we have the sensation (one wants to say the illusion) of free will while awake, while fate governs generally all of us in our dreams. But then it's not that this new—new to me—theory is any less intuitive; everyone I know even moderately well has complained to me at some point or another of not feeling themselves after not sleeping well, and then there are the expressions of disgust and horror at the recountings of nightmares, and the urge to share dreams that feature other people—clumsy attempts at seduction, some say—and the triumph one feels at the thought of vengeful dreams, dreams of flying. I understand that's not really what the theory means. I say it only to say that it will not come as a surprise to anyone that dreams can have effects on dreamers. Of course they do, one thinks, of course they do. What is the matter with me? When I dream of this truck in south Texas, I don't see any bodies in it. I don't see the survivors crawling out or being helped out or carried out. No, I'm a slow starter, a late bloomer. I see only the locked door, the state trooper approaching the locked door. Do state troopers carry bolt cutters or something else with which to open padlocks or other kinds of locks? I just mean did this state trooper have to call for help, too, to provide help? (Help? Did anyone survive to be helped?) One presumes someone has already tried the owner-operator. I mean, why go to all the trouble of breaking or forcing the lock when one can just get the driver to open it? But of course, the state trooper wouldn't be here if the owner-operator was here. They left, long ago. They have gone into hiding. How can anyone live under the shadow of such guilt? Do they see the bodies in their dreams? But then, turned upside down according to this other theory, what tormented dreams can have led to this outcome? What must all of the loved ones' dream lives have been like before this decision to abandon the truck and everything that came after?

SCREENSHOT

But there would be no reason to make it up, this viral post, and the result would anyway be at most a superfluity, nothing, really, since fictions exist solely to make themselves useful in the narrowest contexts: A screenshot, with a comment expressing outrage above it; in the screenshot is a comment expressing outrage about a retweeted post (it's important, connotatively, who retweeted it, but this passes in silence in the screenshotted comment; no, no one anymore says netiquette, not even ironically); the retweet retweeted to express outrage at the opinion being retweeted; the opinion retweeted, naturally, itself an outrage, seeming to be an opinion formed in reaction to something no doubt innocuous, by a person who has never considered not posting everything they think—authenticity, a fiction, now only ever arises out of a kind of strategized ignorance and thoughtlessness. OK, a commonplace. The person posting the screenshot is outraged on behalf of the retweeter, a writer. Anyone would be. Well, any writer. The retweeter is outraged on his own behalf—the tweet mentions him by name. The person who originally posted the tweet was first outraged by the retweeter or anyway something the retweeter wrote, but, as we've already said, outraged in a way that causes one to lose one's bearings momentarily. What was I saying? What? Oh, in the tweet? You ask as though you believed that, as a species, we're interested in why what happened happened when really it must be obvious even to you that we're only really interested in why we think what happened happened, I mean in lazy fictions rather than in those that have been thoughtfully composed. How exactly does one decide to what level to sink in the course of understanding themselves? I guess what I'm saying is that I can't answer that—it has taken me so long to get around to writing this that I've forgotten what the original outrage was. I remember it was a matter of interpretation, one party taking something as meant sincerely when in fact, said another party, it had simply been part of the fiction. But this is just it: When we lived there, archaeologists found shards of a pot used to store cooking oil that, for them, established definitively that the neighborhood we lived in, the street we lived on, in fact only two houses down from us, was the site of the oldest European settlement in North America. This pot was part of a rubbish heap. This was what the settlers left behind when they left, this trash. There was value in it only after a suitable amount of time had passed—in its own time, the pot had been worse than worthless, another thing to clutter up and weigh down the ship. Better to leave it. The settlers hadn't stayed; the title of oldest continual settlement had never been in dispute. No, where we'd lived for only a year, and where we'd only live for another year and a half had been the first place where Europeans had come ashore and stayed ashore, but, even now, it wasn't a place to stay. The team sat underneath blue tarp in the heat, its leader easily identifiable by his comical outfit: a straw hat with mosquito netting hanging down over his face, the only person in the neighborhood wearing long sleeves and pants tucked into socks. I saw them often at the ends of early morning runs, sweating and swatting away mosquitoes. There was a sense, I remember, that more might yet be discovered, something more impressive to the layman than this large shard of an old pot, but no, everything else was too small to have a story attached to it. There were contracts, memoranda of understanding: For a few months, this would be a site of historical significance, then, it would be a building site again. The cheap-looking new house that was built on the site was made with wood that wouldn't last a century or a storm of any strength, our neighbor told us. He was bitter, we said, because this new house had blocked the view of the bay he'd had since he bought his own house. Now his view was theirs, a situation no one would want for themselves.

APPEARANCES

My wife, while we're both in the bathroom, while our daughter, three, takes a bath, begins speaking to me as though mid-thought, meaning as though I had the context needed to understand what she's saying when I don't, a thing I often do to her and to others, yes, though when I do it, it takes a different form, my mid-thought speech always seems to come in a string of qualifications, almost the oral equivalent of an end user license agreement, one doesn't bother to find out what one is agreeing to because one is so eager to find out what one will be allowed to do if one agrees to what one hasn't understood, and hers, her form of speaking mid-thought, comes in the form of answering a question I haven't asked instead of the question I have. She works at the courthouse, that's something you should know, probably something I should have said. My wife. My wife works at the courthouse. Oh, and also: there's a trial going on at the courthouse when all of this takes place—see? This is the problem, that there's always more context that can—should?—be provided. This trial is the trial of a so-called school shooter, though really the boy is just a murderer. Or is he? This is what I ask, though my question takes the form of a statement, and my wife, correctly, understands it as a question, because, one can suppose, she has the proper context for doing so. I don't know anything about that case, I say, because I'm thinking I ought to know something about it, not because it touches on anything personal, only because it seems it is a semi-famous case here, where we live. That someone who murdered children at a school can go without breaking through into popular consciousness is extraordinary, isn't it? Yet more context for this time. Anyway, what I mean is I don't know what it is he has done. How many people did he shoot? How many did he kill? She, my wife, is telling me about his sentencing, about how busy the courthouse was for his sentencing, a sentencing hearing that took a week and, because—another bit of context—the night that this happens is a Friday, the sentencing has just concluded and she's telling me or just told me that he got 40 years. For an 18 year old, a kind of life sentence, I think—when he gets out, what hope could he possibly have for anything resembling a normal life? This, though, is an absurdity if the missing context is that he shot and killed people: I resist the idea that anyone can have what the rest of us consider a normal life after they've shot and killed another human being. But I'm thinking specifically of the penitentiary, of the penitent, of penitence, of, I mean, reform, or at least the theory of reform under which we, as a society, came to institute the penitentiary. To what purpose when one's entire life has been spent reforming? So what I'm asking is: What did he do? But my wife has decided to tell me instead that first he made threats, public threats, to shoot up the school. This led to authorities stepping in; they'd heard there'd been threats. Before the boy could return to school, he had to sit for a mental health evaluation. He sat for a mental health evaluation, but my wife implies this shouldn't, on its own, have been sufficient for a return to school. I freely admit to a certain carelessness in my thoughts. I don't know if it's fair to say I'm comfortable with chaos as long as it doesn't touch me, I think instead I've developed the only healthy attitude one can have towards the world. In any case, she says, So, he did the MHE (this is her life, she uses the acronyms) and went back to school, and on the first day, he showed up at the bus stop with this huge duffel bag that was so heavy he couldn't pick it up. So the bus driver, she tells me, helps him get it on the bus, and when they get to school, the bus driver helps him take it off the bus, into the school. Filled with guns. Where he then . . . does something. You can see how important context is, can't you? You can see how important it is to understand more than what's immediately apparent.

DISTRACTION

I've been telling my wife about the audiobook I'm listening to on my drive to work—it's about attention—just, this thing, that thing, not so much facts or argument as strings of words that can be said aloud without context after dinner during commercials when it's obvious she's not fully satisfied with whatever's on her phone. Probably I'm boring her. I mean, how interested could she possibly be in a book she isn't reading and that I'm implying isn't worth the effort? I might as well tell her about my day at work or my childhood. But she's a kind person, my wife. We get along. A kind person to listen to me telling her about this book she hasn't read, yes, but a kind person for other reasons, too, a forgiving person. She has forgiven me, I think, even when I didn't think I needed to be forgiven, for things, I mean, that didn't seem like transgressions to me. (I say this so I don't have to explain what they are; admitting guilt is easier than reflecting upon one's actions, and I guess after all I'm lazy in that way, though there are others who are lazier.) You're thinking: patient, too. Patient, forgiving, kind; these are the kinds of things one says when one is conscious of seeming to have ulterior motives if one should express oneself too forcefully or hyperbolically. Obviously, I feel strongly about my wife in the most familiar way. The book? It's about attention. Did I already say that? It cites a study that always leads one to the obvious conclusions; this must be a factor in the loss of our ability to focus, says the study, although to actually draw that conclusion—well, the study doesn't say that what was studied is a factor, that's what the author of the book says. It's his conclusion. (And anyway aren't we supposed to believe that studies are done to produce data and not conclusions? This is where I think I lose my wife. Not that she can't follow me, but there's our daughter asking for something, and my wife's own concerns and worries, which she's too kind, patient, and forgiving to detail to me, no doubt occupy her thoughts, too.) I just mean that the book makes liberal use of studies, a word whose meaning has changed in the so-called Age of Information, as more and more people are informed poorly. But the thing that I'm telling my wife is that this same book then goes on to talk about studies funded by companies that produce industrial chemicals, comparing these studies to those done by companies that once produced lead paint that found there was no problem with their products. We ought to be careful with studies, is the point this author is trying to make, I say, even while the rest of the argument, or rather, the counterargument, is that recent studies prove the point of the book. I've been all for exceptions ever since I was told I was a special child, but then the problem, I guess, never needs saying. My problem is that I don't have much to say, and no one listens to me. Good for them! I wouldn't listen either. This book, I tell my wife, is telling me I spend time reading to experience deep focus, a state that must be pleasurable or otherwise useful to me. But maybe it's only unusual or exceptional? It's presented as something few people have the leisure to do, and something that even fewer people are any longer capable of, a thing of great value, in other words, a self-pitying or self-aggrandizing way of thinking of time spent alone. As a child, and I can't be alone in this, I often stayed home from school, sick or claiming to be sick. Most of the time, I wasn't sick and I had no special reason to be at home, and those looking in from outside the situation might have ascribed my childish habits to anxiety, or to depression, or some other syndrome, but it's clear to me that what I wanted was either not to be always occupied in the way everyone demands others be occupied so as to make time for themselves or else only to be free to luxuriate in the passage of time, which amounts to the same thing, I think. Or is that, I ask, boredom, the conjunction of those two things? My wife shows, with her eyes, that she isn't listening.

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Gabriel Blackwell is the author of Doom Town and CORRECTION. He lives in Spokane, WA.