Six Fictions — Gabriel Blackwell

ARTIFICE

The man thought about writing about a child in a classroom being told what to write for

some sort of school writing competition, a competition with a prize that, the man

thought, would reflect the poverty of the school and its surrounding community but also

in some sense the values it aspired to: a paperback book, possibly, a pass to a museum.

The man thought about writing this in order to better understand how the person telling

the child what to write thought about what she was doing or, as the man suspected,

didn't think about what she was doing, and the man thought about writing this in order

also to discover how the person telling the child what to write had arrived at this child

and not one of the many others she taught and interacted with on a daily basis. The man

thought about writing about this child and this teacher also because he understood that

the situation he'd imagined wasn't implausible—he, the man, hadn't personally

experienced anything like it, but he'd read stories in which similar things had happened.

Most of what the man wanted to know, the man understood, rested in the story he

thought about writing, which is to say, in a story that hadn't yet been written, and this,

the man thought as he thought about writing the story, created a parallel impulse in him

to think about the dictated story of, say, explorers coming upon evidence of a forgotten

civilization while looking for some other, much less sensational thing—a river's

headwaters, maybe. But such a story, the man realized, wouldn't serve the man's

purposes at all; it was an inexact analogue, the man thought, thinking about the story of

the child and the story of the explorers. He saw, in other words, that there was some

knowledge he wanted to gain for himself, and that that knowledge was somehow cached

in a story that was fiction, and that fiction hadn't yet been created, which is to say that

the knowledge the man was looking for didn't actually exist and couldn't be found until

he himself had created it, which meant that what he was really doing wasn't looking for

knowledge at all—the process he'd designed in order to find out about what he was

trying to find out would never produce what he'd hoped it would produce—but it didn't

follow that he knew what he was doing instead. The boy, the man had thought, would, in

the story that hadn't been written but which might have somehow contained some bit of

knowledge the man writing it wanted to possess independently of the story, win the

competition based on what the teacher had told him to write and thus learn the lesson

that this was how the world worked. The man was probably thinking about, rather, what

other children, children whose mothers and fathers told them to write what those

children then wrote, would learn as a result of the boy whose teacher told him what to

write winning the competition. He must have been thinking about that, about the

difference between a parent and the extent of their understanding of the competition's

rules and goals and the teacher who'd designed that competition and acted even as a

judge for entries submitted to that competition, because if he was thinking instead only

about the teacher telling the child what to write and the lesson the child learned as a

result of then winning the competition, well, that represented knowledge the man

already had, and so there would be no real reason to then go on to write that story at all.

There is always in writing—and I write this for those who aren't themselves writers—this

fleeting moment when I think I can see the precise relationship between what naturally

occurs and what is created, why, I mean, anyone would ever feel called upon to create

anything at all, what purpose the created serves to a species that, like every other

species, evolved to live in a purely natural world, but has nevertheless found itself

moving further and further into a world of its own devising. No mention is made of what

was discovered in the story the child wrote or why it might merit a story of its own.

SELF-HELP

This morning, I spent more time than I ought to have spent thinking about other

people's problems. This was because I thought, for an hour or so before falling asleep

last night and again for maybe ten minutes this morning, that I might have a problem

other people had, a problem I thought other people had because it had been the subject

of popular narratives. It turned out I probably didn't have this problem, and I came to

believe that the prevalence of stories about this problem most likely had to do, I thought,

with the flaws of the people who made their livings creating popular narratives; I mean

that popular narratives seem mostly to be attempts at a kind of wish-fulfillment of what

their purveyors tell themselves others wish for; not extrapolations or critiques of reality

and yet somehow also not fantasies, which tend, in my experience, to be idiosyncratic,

more complexly fulfilling: Instead, they're entertainments that seek to create or prolong

anxiety rather than relieving it. But the problem with the latest splashy memoir wasn't

that it didn't relieve anxiety, it was that it wasn't really a memoir, the reviewer said; the

review went on to say that the book, which took as its subject the author's divorce, came

across as a self-help book, and was therefore a polemic, although the reviewer didn't use

this word because it was the kind of word that editors would claim readers wouldn't

understand; because those editors believed strongly in their understanding of how other

people thought they felt empowered to claim their personal prejudices were facts about

the world. This book, wrote the reviewer, could have advised against marriage but

instead it counseled its readers to seek divorces because the author had once had ideas

about marriage that had proven false for her, and she had then sought and been granted

a divorce. Because of this book, there could, in the future, be a book about the author's

successful remarriage and her realization of the extent of the abuse she'd suffered earlier

in life (i.e., now), which had led to a kind of derangement, out of which derangement her

earlier (i.e., current) idea of the world had come. This book was, in other words, one I

hadn't read and so I had to pretend as I read this review that it was really as the reviewer

described it, a memoir about a bad marriage that pretended to have some other purpose

but that most readers would see had taken the form it had taken because of market

forces that demanded some sort of controversy accompany the release of such an

unprofitable thing as a book. One could easily imagine, reading this review, people who

exploited the religious buying the book in order to burn it for advancing the idea that

marriage was an evil or anachronistic thing—think of the sales, other people responsible

for suggesting that the memoir take the form of a self-help book might have said in

meetings with others who similarly saw books as long bets in the form of blocks of wood

pulp. The style of the book would have to be carefully managed by editors paid to carry

out the visions of publicity agents so that readers wouldn't instantly recoil from yet

another person who routinely said we when what she meant was I. I didn't then walk in

on my wife, who was nursing our infant son in the next room, to ask if there was a

problem; we hadn't had a fight and really there would have been no reason for me to

suspect that there was a problem between us except that these popular narratives

asserted that this was precisely when a problem must exist—when one person involved

in a relationship that involved another person didn't understand that there was a

problem, which is to say when the problem that two people had was a problem only one

of them had. I didn't ask her what was wrong because I understood that my wife would

then have thought, with justification, that something must be wrong. And the review

asserted that the reviewer's husband didn't do at least one of the things the memoir's

author's husband had done, and the reviewer didn't plan on getting a divorce as a result.

STORYTELLING

What can it say about me that when I am fortunately infrequently called upon to

attempt to correct someone else's behavior or attitudes (hopeless, woeful), my instinct is

always to first try to think of a story I can tell to that person that will, somehow, at least

in my mind, very possibly change their behavior or attitudes—often, again, in my mind,

changing them nearly totally, and often also inducing in them feelings of intense

remorse or regret, which is to say that, in my mind, I make myself stand in for them and

understand perfectly why other people are so disappointing to me—and by doing so

alleviate or resolve some problem, even as, in writing, where I do really almost all of my

storytelling, I refuse to allow that the point of telling a story could even possibly be

didactic? I may mean that when telling stories in writing I consciously avoid stories with

any obvious point (or, as must be obvious, that I'm indifferent to finding one), but then

that's something I've written about before; one can consult those other pieces of writing

if one has nothing better to do or if one mistakenly believes one wants to hear more

about it. Here, what I'd wanted to tell had to do specifically with this wanting to address

problems in my life away from writing through telling stories; to be clear, it was always

only a want—in every case, I ultimately decided not to tell any story in order to attempt

to address the problem, instead I always brought up the problem more directly and then

did what I could to convince the person that it was a problem and that others saw it as a

problem and that others would therefore treat them or think of them in ways the person

didn't seem to want to be treated or thought of if they couldn't find it within themselves

to change their behavior or attitudes. What I'm getting at, in other words, is my own

chronic failure to account for myself wanting to write at all, wanting to tell stories, I

mean, an inexcusable desire, it seems to me now, telling you all of this. And then look

again at that first sentence, where it isn't clear whether what I'm saying is that in those

circumstances I'm tempted to tell the story to the person said to need the change in

behavior or attitudes or that I'm tempted to tell the story to the person calling upon me

to change another person's behavior or attitudes.

SAMARITANS

An eleven year old has been suspended from a Catholic school for taking a standardized

test instead of reporting that a classmate displayed a bullet to him while the class

rearranged their desks for the test. The boy waited to report his classmate so that he

could take the test during the time allotted to it, and so that, after the test, he could leave

the room and report the bullet to the school's principal without his classmates knowing

he'd reported it. The principal suspended him for waiting to report what he'd seen,

claiming that, in a different situation, one that, in other words, didn't come to pass, the

period that elapsed between him seeing what he'd seen and reporting what he'd seen

could have been the difference between yet another horrific incident or, for the other

children at school, just another day at school. The other boy, the one with the bullet, was

also suspended, but because what he brought to school and displayed to the first boy

was a bullet and not a gun, and because he and not the first boy was presumed to be

innocent of foreknowledge of the consequences of his actions, the principal suspended

him for the same two days she suspended the first boy. Because these were the only two

boys who were suspended, the first boy's mother says, their classmates will have no

trouble figuring out who told on who; the mother, a law enforcement official according

to reporting done before the boys returned from their suspensions, says her son didn't

want to be seen as a snitch, but, because of the school's decision to punish him, he has

had the ability to define that aspect of himself denied him. The school was then anyway

closed for the rest of the week—and the boys' suspensions delayed—due to what were

judged to be credible threats received by administrators via email; a man an hour away

in another state has now been arrested for making these threats. It's said that he made

the threats after seeing the story on the news. Syndicated news commentators say that

this man must have a preexisting mental illness for the story to have caused such a

reaction in him, that nothing that happened at the school really could have caused this

man, a state away and with no children in the school, to threaten the school in this way.

The punishments that could possibly be imposed on the man were created, in theory, to

deter him and others from making future threats, but one shouldn't take that to mean

that those punishments are also effective in deterring the acts of violence he threatened;

no, the law can only punish offenders for their offenses and even when that deterrence is

effective, it doesn't and can't carry over to other, different offenses. Of course I

understand that the story has more to do with the duty to warn than with the Good

Samaritan, but still I find myself thinking about the Good Samaritan and the common

misunderstanding that Samaritan means, simply, stranger, someone without any ties

to the person in need of their aid when in fact, scholars say, that isn't the significance of

the story at all; the Samaritans were the enemies of the Jews, the subjects of the Jews'

most calumnious rumors. That one of these hated people would have stopped to help a

Judean when a priest and a fellow Judean both walked past him without stopping,

wasn't this the thing Jesus wanted his listeners to understand? To me, and because it's a

parable, it seems clear enough that the real significance there is that the story is

fictional, told to illustrate a moral precept rather than report a fact; the Samaritan in

question didn't exist, which I guess is also to say that no one stopped to help the man

who was robbed, beaten, and left on the side of the road—worse, rather than help him,

some of those who heard his story invented helpers for him in order to illustrate the

righteousness and, ultimately, the utility of their views—but then I guess it would also be

the case that no one passed him by, either.

PARTY

In the game, the doll said the secret word that had been, the girl knew the doll knew,

forbidden by the rules of the game. The punishment for breaking what was really the

only rule was beheading, so, using her safety scissors, the girl awkwardly exacted a

third-party punishment on the doll until she was interrupted by her mother's return

home. The mother's concern, curiously, seemed to be for the scissors, now in two pieces

and, according to her, unusable. When she was later asked, out of an attempt to assuage

the guilt of having treated a small child the way one would treat an adult, what the secret

word had been, the girl first refused to say and then, shortly after and without further

prodding, conspiratorially whispered that the secret word had been beheaded. Although

she was asked, she wouldn't say whether her answer represented the truth or if it was

the word that occurred to her because it was one the officer had just used, an unusual

word the girl maybe hadn't heard before, who knows? Because the girl had, at the time,

just been to a friend's birthday party where she'd learned there were such things as

party games, now (then) everything she did with her dolls was a party game. The party

was, the child said, the doll's birthday party; the doll had been beheaded at its birthday

party because it had lost the game it suggested the bear and the snake and the spider

play. But then details that might later and to strangers suggest mental disturbance were

all perfectly familiar to the parents of three and four year olds who anyway made up a

majority of the mother's online audience. Online, on video, holding up the broken

scissors and seen by thousands and then tens of thousands more after her arrest, this

mother threatened to behead the girl's teddy bear—regifted, it was later revealed, from a

flower arrangement sent to the girl's grandmother in hospice—if she couldn't take better

care of her things. The mother began sawing at the bear with one arm of the scissors. As

anyone looking in from outside the home could have interjected, the problem lay in the

girl not understanding that some actions, most actions, had irreversible consequences

one couldn't foresee, and also in the woman's failure to understand the same thing. The

woman, in other words, enacted a second-party punishment on a third party for what

had been, in the girl's party game, a third-party punishment, but thought of the drama

with the bear as virtuous because it had been enacted as a consequence of the damage

done to the scissors and therefore to her savings or lack thereof, and therefore to the

possibility of the child's college fund, not for any damage done to the doll, a toy neither

the girl nor her mother seemed to regard as important or even remember had once been

at the center of the whole thing. The court's eventual punishment, one could easily see,

was for the damage done to the girl and so had to be considered textbook third-party

punishment. The judge hearing the case was later criticized for a reference made in an

opinion in an unrelated case and members of the political party that controlled the state

legislature were said to be considering her impeachment. This was the word that

occurred to them because it was a word that was, just then, seeing renewed use both in

the media and elsewhere (the most interviewed member of the party had been, before

she ran for office, a schoolbus driver; the other one often appearing on the news had

been in real estate). Parents in the state barely restrained themselves at home; because

their children's teachers were all mandatory reporters, instead of exacting the kinds of

punishment they imagined, they voted and watched this mother's videos. After the

verdict was handed down, there was pressure on the platform from social media

accounts seeking engagement to demonetize the videos; in the event, most of the money

went to pay court fees; very little went to support the girl, now staying with a second

cousin.

MOTHER OF INVENTION

The right-wing tabloid has reposted a video in which the man's adult son angrily

recommends assassination (he means murder and suffers from grandeur, delusions) as

really the only remedy for what he claims is oppression, vague and nefarious, an

inescapable-until-now government conspiracy. (The mistake he makes in misidentifying

the target of this conspiracy—himself rather than, for example, all those sharing his

views—is, along with the lighting, largely responsible for his lack of an audience.) He

then holds up his father's severed head, a head that, according to the accompanying

article, had been placed in a plastic bag and the bag then placed in what the article refers

to as a silver bucket; in most other articles, this bucket is simply a pot, an oddly

emblematic domestication. The platform to which this video was uploaded has taken it

down and vows to take it down again when it is reposted; everyone expects it will be

reposted; because it was only up for five hours, and because the man's son had only a

little over 100 subscribers, some number of whom were undoubtedly alts, there will be

demands on certain websites that it be reposted so that the momentary thrill of deluding

oneself that not everything online has been sponsored and is therefore trivial or

exploitative can once again be more widely felt. The right-wing tabloid has at least

blurred the head, the bucket or pot, the bag. The article claims that the father was a

federal employee—the reason given by the son for his murder—but also that there is no

evidence the father was a federal employee (later, other, more responsible outlets will

report that he was a federal employee). It further claims—and by contrast with the

bucket and employer, this claim won't require correction in the future—that the son's

rant resembles the so-called beliefs of a movement online propagated by teenagers still

years away from encountering narratives complicated by reason or empathy; like other

outlets owned by the idle rich, the right-wing tabloid has heavily invested in the

promotion of dangerous mental illnesses. The article's author seems to object most

strongly to the son's attempt to blame others for his own ill fortune, highlighting the

son's attempt to bring a lawsuit against the federal government for allowing him to take

out student loans to attend a university and receive a degree in agribusiness

management even as it could only have been obvious that the result would be that he

would thereby become an overeducated white man, unemployable and friendless.

Understanding people may choose to see such a lawsuit as evidence of the son's

reluctant recognition, at some extraordinarily obscure level, that he's suffering from

severe debilities he can't hope to overcome alone, but the tabloid, as far as anyone can

tell, has never listed understanding as among its required or preferred qualifications in

job ads. Instead, the article is padded with photos of the son's four album covers,

amateurish to a degree that, some say, suggests a conspiracy against the

conspiracy-minded or else may be evidence of AI involvement—does he have five fingers

or six?—and a picture of two of the son's self-published books, both with covers featuring cartoon speech bubbles offering lavish self-praise clumsily placed on top of

photos of the son taken from extremely low angles, angles intended, one supposes, to

give viewers the impression that this is a person to look up to. One may impute such

post facto intentions while also believing the son merely had no tripod, no

photographer, not enough patience to arrange for an approximation of the one or the

other; one wouldn't have to look far for other examples of the phenomenon. These, I

mean, are what is sometimes called formal innovations; we marvel at the inferred

explanation, the narrative created, before we take a second, more sympathetic look at

the effect itself, and, after, it's no longer possible to see the two separately.