Scott Rettberg

The ending comes as no surprise. The ending comes a day late and a dollar short. You wish you could change the ending but it’s always too late. The ending justifies the meaning, or vice versa. You keep putting off the ending, but you know it will eventually arrive. The ending is teleological. The ending gives shape and definition to your existence. Without the ending you would drift, endlessly. You have nightmares of infinity. The ending is your satisfaction and your disappointment. The ending is the point at which order is restored and new things begin. The ending is in the air, apparent. Everything that begins must rise and converge.

When Saddam Hussein was executed, I was traveling between Philadelphia and Chicago, waiting for the boarding announcement at the Philadelphia airport. They played the footage over and over again on CNN, on the screens throughout the terminal. I looked at all the faces around me and I wasn’t sure how to read them. Disgust? Satisfaction? A lot of ambiguity was in the air. The children all looked confused. They had questions and their parents would later have to answer them. I wondered how many of them were flying for the first time. It occurred to me that I had never before watched a hanging. They walked him across the gallows to the trapdoor. He refused the hood. They derided him. He looked fearful and defiant and courageous. How many of the children were flying for the first time and how many of them remembered September 11th? There was no connection between this and that but for fear and causality. How would I explain this to them, to the children hugging their teddy bears and clutching their blankets tightly, excited and anxious about their first flight, watching a hanging, over and over again? There are chains of events in the world. These things won’t always make sense, and in the end the world is often quite a brutal place. But airplanes hardly ever crash, and even though all that seems so close to you now, it is really far, far away from us. We are safe here and I will buy you an ice cream now. Let’s go.

We remember the first fire, the first car crash, the first televised catastrophe, the first assassination, the first death we see first hand. We remember the man falling to the ground clutching his chest in agony, the tightening of the noose to the condemned man’s neck. We’re more inclined to forget the first time we taste strawberries or the first time we dance. These endings frame our lives, every tragic one of them.

How It Happens

The fire was momentarily traumatic. All of my belongings up in smoke. All the goldfish boiled alive. All of my photographs and sketchbooks, the letter from the old girlfriend, things I had intended to finish writing but never again touched, a variety of electrical appliances including a slow-cooker I used three times and a waffle iron I used maybe four times, a cocktail shaker I used often. Don’t get me started on the books. I can’t mention the books. My favorite chair. Television, that didn’t matter much, needed a new one anyway. Various childhood mementos I kept in a box, several seashells from the time Melissa and I went to the shore before she dumped me, drawings from my nephews. Cuban cigars I never smoked. Several bottles of liquor, mostly the kind of sweet aperitif you get as gifts and never drink anyway. One decent bottle of scotch. The CDs I hadn’t already thrown away and two milk crates of vinyl. Tragic, that. A burned down house has a certain distinctive smell to it, and they are not all the same. All my spices in the cupboard made a contribution. Certain T-shirts are irreplaceable. Though nothing really is, you know, is what I’m trying to say. You forget and your brain fills in the empty space with more everyday garbage. Everything I hadn’t uploaded was gone. Various importance vital records, my passport and birth certificate. Many pans were intact except for their melted handles. The cast iron skillet was a little warped but otherwise fine. I kept that and a few of the Planet of the Apes action figures that were only slightly melted into the positions that I had arranged them in. It was a hell of a way to come home from a vacation. But you get over it.

Standing there among the ashes and all the soppy gray shit that had sort of been a life, I thought of all the things I would need to think of, and decided to move on instead. I don’t think the fire was my fault. I suppose it could have been. I had been away for ten days. Could I have left the iron on or something? I don’t even iron my clothes. It seemed likely more happenstance. Why did I live in Columbus, Ohio to begin with? There were better places, weren’t there? I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, it was a good enough community and the job was you know just fine but for me to have ended up there, sorting through the wreckage of a burnt out apartment after spending a disastrous week in the Smokey Mountains with two friends from college who I didn’t even really seem to know anymore just seemed . . . I don’t want to say ironic because, you know, it really wasn’t ironic, more like somehow arbitrary. How did I end up in marketing research? Just what is marketing, anyway? I never really understood the point. Why was I here? There, I mean. I could have been anywhere, yet there I was, in Columbus, Ohio, and I wasn’t even a soccer fan or an alumni of Ohio State. What the fuck? I wasn’t even from Ohio. Was I upset? I wasn’t like crying or anything. I was kind of numb and also sort of free or whatever. I still had my credit cards and a liberal arts degree and a personality that could pass for agreeable though even I had to admit that my life had become uninteresting. Who gives a rat’s ass what type of snack chips average consumers prefer or what deodorant soap they’d like to use, for instance? I didn’t. This wasn’t really like a moment of awakening for me, either, it would be too strong to say that. I had known that nothing new was coming for a long time. But I still had nothing to lose, was my realization. I could go virtually anywhere and, I hesitate to say start over, I mean I was thirty years old so I couldn’t get my youth back or whatever but you know what I mean. Just leave. I didn’t call anybody or anything. There might have been messages on the machine but the machine was just a lump of plastic. I wrote my Mom a letter from Wyoming. How I ended up in Wyoming herding sheep I have no fucking idea. I’ve got nothing wise to say about journeys. It’s really no better anywhere. You just end up somewhere doing something. That’s just how it happens, man.

Bully

The kid comes home from school roughed up again, hating the world, hating you for having him, hating the horrible age with all its rough edges and cruel children. There’s little you can do to help. There are things you can’t say. Things you can’t say because you know they would be poor parenting in spite of the fact that you consider them to be true. Like the fact that about ten percent of the people that you will meet, child, are bad, plain and simple. Evil little shits who will get pleasure from torture from now until the end of their days. Most of them will be losers and will fall off but others will rule the world. You will need to develop strategies, child, to deal with them. In all likelihood, they will be stronger than you in the way that brutality is always stronger than mercy. You can’t tell the boy that he needs to fight back, that he needs to become stronger, that he needs to hurt the bully any way he can, because you don’t want the child to enjoy inflicting pain on others. Yet you wish he could put needles under the bully’s skin that would tear at the little creep from the inside, endlessly. You ought not tell the child to hide his tears because you know that those who are in touch with their feelings are ultimately stronger. Yet inside you are screaming because you know that the bullies always smell weakness on other children and tear at it like jackals at the wound. You could talk to the teacher or the parents of the little monster but you know that that will lead nowhere, to even more severe ambushes, round dark corners and out of sight. You would like to have a few words with the other parents, to tell them what a miserable job they have done with their bad seed which has grown into a vicious weed, but you know that it would lead nowhere. In spite of yourself you wish for a tragic accident involving a school bus and a bully bragging in the street. And your child is weeping in the next room, bruised and bleeding. Your efforts are futile and he won’t open the door and there is nothing you can do about this misery. This will pass, child, this will pass. You prepare some platitudes, saddened by the knowledge that you can no longer protect him. You open the newspaper but you cannot turn the pages.

Plenty

This is a book by an author I met once. This is a book by an author with wounded hands who cried too much when you beat him at poker. This is a book by a dead man. This is a book by a conscientious woman who resisted the force of the powers in charge at the time. She is also dead. This is a book your great-grandmother wrote recipes in. This is the book your great uncle was carrying the night he was shot. I’ve never read it. It might be good. This is the book that most profoundly affected me when I was a child. This is the book your father kept all of his debts in before they came to take him away. This book is my diary that I kept for a few years when I was your age. You can’t read it, sorry. This is a book about meatpacking plants in Indiana. I’ve read it. Kind of boring, but graphic. This is a book about sex in India. It has pictures. You can’t read it. This is a book about icebergs written one hundred years ago. Can you believe it? What did they know about icebergs? This is a book written by a romance novelist well before they knew what sex was. This is a book about jazz. Jazz at the time was better than rock and roll. Do you know what rock and roll was? You don’t, do you? This is a book about Jesus. He died and came again. This is a book about Mohammad. He’s Islam. This is a book about easter eggs. Do you know that the Russians made elaborate jewelry in the form? This is a book about sonnets. They are kind of poem. This is a book about love. Your father wrote it before he died. He was a handsome man. This is a book about Hannibal. He used elephants in a military campaign. He crossed mountains. He was magnificent. Your father died when you were very young. This is a book about boy scouts. Your father was one. He learned to build fires. This is a book about securities. I’ve never read it. This is a thesaurus. It tells you not what words mean but what other words are like them. Your grandmother liked magazines. The thing about magazines is that nobody keeps them. We’re so alone. This is a book by a French philosopher who lived for a period of time up in a mountain. This is a book by an American who lived in a cabin. This is a book by a Greek who lived in a cave. The man who wrote this book became chancellor of a university under Hitler and was discredited. The woman who wrote this book was courageous in front of Congress when they asked her to turn in her friends. The man who wrote this book lost his mind tragically. The girl who wrote this book died during the Holocaust. Aunt Jean wrote this book. I think I’m the only one who ever read it. This is a cookbook. The best recipes have handwritten notes about things you can substitute in a pinch. I’m very sorry about what you’ve had to go through. I have tried to love you. I’m sorry that I’m dying. This book makes no sense to me but it is very famous. This book is about a war in ancient Greece that nobody remembers but because of this book, everybody remembers it. Write things down. This book is about Dublin. Will you have more tea? Don’t worry, there’s plenty.

Sinkhole

“We discussed all of the scenarios involved in buying the old house and having the baby at the same time before we made the move. We made sure there was no lead paint or asbestos. We got those little plastic plug things for the outlets and those little plastic hook things for the cupboard.”

“Hook things?”

“Safety latches.”

“Ah yeah. Bartender, two more.”

“There’s a lot to think about. When you’re cooking you need to keep all the handles pointed toward the back of the stove. You can’t use tablecloths because a toddler could pull them down. You gotta keep all the cords coiled. All the cleaning products out of reach. Coffee, tea towards the center of the table. Knives.”

“Well that’s obvious. Cutlery and babies don’t mix.”

“In locked drawers at all times. We got rid of the block.”

“You thought things out.”

“We read up. We had to fasten all the bookcases to the wall, and we didn’t put books in the bottom shelf. We scrutinized all the toys people gave us at the shower. We threw half of them away. Choking hazards.”

“You can’t be too careful.”

“I learned CPR. We practiced the Heimlich on each other. The well we debated. A beautiful stone well, must have been there for a hundred, hundred and fifty years. At first I wanted to keep it. But.”

“The baby in a well scenario.”

“That’s right. You imagine. We got it filled in.”

“Right move. Should have been enough.”

The wind howled outside and rattled the windows. Another storm coming.

“Shampoo, soap, medicines, everything out of reach, everything locked down. Vacuumed twice a day. Could have eaten off that floor. Hired a specialist to check the basement for mold. You start looking, you start to see hazards everywhere. A home is a dangerous thing. An infant is infinitely vulnerable.”

“You don’t need to talk about this, Frank. If it, you know.”

“No, no, it’s okay. It helps.”

They were alone in the bar. The bartender, a slender man in his early twenties, was absent-mindedly picking his teeth at the other end of the bar while watching the Weather Channel. They sipped at their third glasses of scotch.

“I can’t imagine what you’ve been going through.”

“You try to think of everything. You try and try. But the earth itself. The ground that you stand on. You don’t think that’s going to come crumbling down.”

“At least she survived.”

“It was an awful noise, Joe. One minute she was standing there, and then there was this, this horrible kind of slurping noise. Her, her scream and a, a kind of gurgle. Just mud. The sounds, Joe, the sounds are what I remember.”

“You went in after her, Frank. Nobody could have expected more.”

“It was too late, she was, they were, already broken inside. By the time the ambulance got there it was too late.”

“So where’s she now?”

“She’s at her mother’s in Omaha. I don’t think she’s coming back.”

“Frank, you really tried. No one can blame you.”

“It’s like there was a test, and I failed it without even knowing it was a test.”

“Nothing’s safe anymore.”

His Long Pause

Because the world is round, it rotates and days accrue. Because days accrue, he begins to feel the weight. He feels the weight because more and more days accrue and he feels that his best days are gone. Because he feels that his best days are gone he feels regret. He feels regret because of the choices that he made, and he takes them apart one by one, and he feels tired. Because he feels tired one day he cannot get up. Because he cannot get up he sleeps. When he can sleep no more he turns.

It is not that the job means nothing. The job has meaning but he cannot get up. He might prefer to go to the job but he feels the weight. He feels the weight because he is stuck back in time. At some point it occurs to him that he needs to eat. He needs to eat to live. There is light outside and it is bright. Around one or two he rises and makes his way to the cupboard, where he finds and opens a can of beans. He could turn on the television but he does not. There is light in the window and he looks out it, at all the people moving outside. They are always outside, always moving. He pours himself a glass of water and drinks. He eats half the can of beans and then he is not hungry anymore, not much. There is dust in the air. He returns to bed.

Work will call today, he thinks, and they do, and he does not answer. The machine sounds happy, happy to handle the call. They wonder where he is, and why he hasn’t called back. They say they are worried. Does it matter? They called yesterday too. They might call tomorrow. They might stop calling. He’s not really waiting for a call from her. He expects nothing of her. Also gone like other things. Someday soon he will have to go out and get food. He will run out, and he will need to eat. He turns up the heating, just a little, to make the room warm. He turns and tries to sleep. There is only yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and so on. He will not stop or go on. Time is like this sometimes. It will continue like this for a while. And then.

Switching gears again for the last week of the thing-a-day project. This week I’ll be writing very short stories in swift careless drafts. Without further ado:

Love and Capital

“The truth,” she said as she leaned over and whispered into his ear, “is that having money, a lot of money, feels good.”

“You mean being rich is an intrinsic good?”

“Hell no, it just feels that way. It feels real good, Bobby”

He was puzzled as to what they should do now, and where they should go next.

“Isn’t it possible that this money will, like, destroy us? Make us I don’t know, irresponsible and vain, and what, shallow?”

“Should we give it all to the rainforests, Bobby? Or the monkeys? Should we buy enough goats to feed all of Africa? Should we air-condition the planet?”

“Damn it Susan, don’t be glib. This is serious. We have an opportunity to do good things.”

“And bad things.”

“I don’t want to be evil.”

“We’ll get an investment adviser, Bobby. Relax. This is a good thing. We’re wealthy now, Bobby. We’re people of means now.”

“But what does it all mean?”

“It means we buy a yacht, Bobby, and we sail, and we fuck. A lot.”

“Each other?”

“Of course. At first.”

“And then?”

“And then you fuck whoever you want to fuck Bobby, you’re fucking rich.”

“And you?”

“I’m fucking rich too, Bobby, don’t you forget it. I can fuck the Lithuanian national rugby team if I want to.”

“Well.”

“Well. Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

“Don’t you think we should do something about the body first?”

“Spoilsport. Did you bring a saw?”

“A saw.”

“Jesus, Bobby, we can’t just leave it in one piece. We need to carve it up. Don’t you think? Don’t you watch television?”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

“No one said it would come easy.”

There was a silence, and an awful smell.

“Don’t cry, Bobby.”

“I love you baby.”

“I love you too, Bobby, I love you too.”