Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

by David Shields

  Subject, not seeming to appreciate or comprehend what he had just been told, asked again why Interviewer had not brought Mother and Father with him.

  Interviewer inquired as to why he alone was not sufficient.

  Subject said it was because Interviewer was a vile and wicked serpent.

  Interviewer reminded Subject that he was the one who had just been crawling around in a filthy hole like a reptile.

  Subject reached out and placed his hand on Interviewer’s shoulder, stating that even though Interviewer was a silly, stupid, stubborn man, he pitied Interviewer.

  Interviewer knocked Subject’s hand away and said that the only reason he had come to see Subject was because he had been assigned by a professor to interview a moron.

  Subject shoved Interviewer.

  Interviewer shoved back.

  Subject boxed Interviewer’s ears, causing extreme pain.

  Interviewer leapt on Subject, knocked him down, and sat on him, pinning Subject’s arms as a safety precaution.

  Subject, using his typical childish maneuver, sank his teeth into Interviewer’s wrist and thus managed to wriggle free. Subject ran away laughing and yelling unprintable insults having to do with Rosie McCarthy.

  Interviewer pursued Subject but was unable to catch him.

  Interviewer was forced to terminate the interview and to take Subject’s metal object with him.

  On his way out of the home, Interviewer hid his bitten wrist in his pocket. He told the cookie-eating Sister in the office that Subject had hurried off to the recreation building, but before leaving had expressed satisfaction regarding a sudden inspiration for a new invention on which he wanted to start construction directly. Interviewer told Sister that Subject had given the object to him as a gift.

  Object now sits on Interviewer’s desk.

  As of this time, no meaning has been derived by Interviewer from the object. Subject would undoubtedly say that it is because Interviewer is not looking at it properly through a telescope. Interviewer would respond to this by declaring that he will never purchase a telescope in order to gaze at the object. The purchase of a telescope in order to gaze at a pile of rubbish close enough to spit on is the act of a moron. Interviewer is certain that the object will never be seen more clearly than he is himself viewing it at the present moment.

  However, as a last-ditch effort, and in order to be as fair and unbiased as possible, Interviewer took one of his own pennies, one that might have been spent on well-deserved pastries, and wired it onto the object. Interviewer then sat and studied the object for twelve minutes, to no avail. Subject’s object, like Subject himself, remained stubbornly opaque and whimsical. This fact should come as no surprise to Interviewer. Interviewer has never known what to make of Subject, nor has he been able to decipher what makes Subject tick. Furthermore, he has never once been successful in his attempts to clearly communicate his own thoughts and feelings to Subject.

  However, Interviewer is not one to give up easily. It is certain that when Interviewer next calls on Subject, Subject will no doubt be engaged in another activity of a pointless and selfish nature and, as no other person seems to want to shoulder the burden of attempting to make Subject face the truth about his actions, Interviewer will once again step into the breach.

  On future visits, Interviewer will remain at all times objective. He regrets that he lost his temper and removed an object Subject apparently found to be important, even though it is ugly and useless.

  If physically attacked, however, Interviewer retains the right to defend himself.

  Interviewer is well aware that straightening Subject out will be a difficult feat to accomplish. As Dr. Grubb has said in his lectures, it is nigh on impossible to reason with a moron, and with that statement, Interviewer must heartily concur. His recent interview with Subject has demonstrated as much. In fact, all of Interviewer’s experience with Subject has underscored the truth of this assertion. Dr. Grubb has also opined that morons are a corrupting influence on the rest of us, but I must differ with Dr. Grubb on this point.

  My brother, Richard, as far as I can see, has never had any influence on anyone, most especially not on me. In fact, neither one of us has ever had any effect on the other.

  For example: When Richard was fourteen and I was ten, he tried to enlist my aid in stealing an organ-grinder’s monkey, telling me that the organ-grinder was abusing his monkey and that it would be better off living at our house. I told him that this was a very bad idea, and then I explained why. Stealing was stealing, I told him, and he could be arrested. If he was arrested, Mother and Father would be humiliated. Even if he was not arrested, we could never take care of a monkey in our home. There were too many breakables. Besides, we didn’t know anything about the care and keeping of monkeys. Anyhow, I reasoned, the monkey might be perfectly happy capering about in a plaid bathrobe collecting coins in a silver cup. It was not up to us to judge whether or not a monkey was happy, even if we could. The monkey belonged to the organ-grinder. This should have been the end of the matter.

  But with Richard there is never an end to the matter. Against all my counsel, Richard went downtown, distracted the organ-grinder, snatched the monkey, and ran away. He brought the little monkey, whom we named Willie, back to our house in a shoebox. We attempted to hide Willie in Richard’s room, but the creature escaped and Mother caught him pulling the tail feathers out of her stuffed cockatoo. It was an extremely unpleasant day at the Lee house.

  However, what I took away from this incident was not that I was right and that morons are incorrigible, and I do not recall that the incident ever created in me a desire to go forth and be wicked also. Nor do I dwell at all upon the upheaval and commotion that resulted from my brother’s crime. Instead I remember how Richard, when the police finally arrived, clung desperately to Willie, who only wanted to escape his grasp. I cannot forget how Richard’s face looked as he attempted to cuddle the ungrateful monkey to his chest like a ring-tailed baby and how I, forced to stand there and witness this spectacle, would’ve given anything, anything at all, if the beast would only cease its caterwauling and throw its arms around my brother, just for a little while, and love him back.

  10

  Reference #388475848-5

  Amy Hempel

  To Parking Violations Bureau, New York City

  I am writing in reference to the ticket I was issued today for “covering ‘The Empire State’” on my license plate. I include two photographs I took this afternoon that show, front and back, that the words “The Empire State” are clearly visible. I noticed several cars on the same block featuring these license plates on which these words were entirely covered by the frame provided by the car dealer, and I noticed that none of these cars had been ticketed, as mine had. I don’t mean to appear insolent, but I am wondering if the ticket might have been issued by the young Hispanic guy I sometimes see patrolling the double-parked cars during the week? I ask because the other day my dog yanked the leash from my hand and ran to him and jumped up looking for a treat. He did not appear to be comfortable around dogs, and though mine is a friendly one, she’s big, and maybe the guy was frightened for a moment? It happened as I was getting out of my car, so he would have known it was my car, is what I’m saying.

  “The Empire State”—it occurred to me that this is a nick-name. I mean, police officers do not put out an all-points bulletin in The Empire State, they put an all-points bulletin in New York, which words are also clearly visible on my license plates. In fact, there is no information the government might require that is not visible on these plates. You could even say that the words “The Empire State” are advertising. They fit a standard definition: a paid announcement, a public notice in print to induce people to use something, the action of making that thing generally known, providing information of general interest. Close enough.

  I have parked my car with the plates as they appear in the accompanying photos on New York City streets for five years, since I drove the car out
of the dealership on the Island five years ago; it has never been a problem until now. (I bought the car without ever reading Consumer Reports. I checked with a friend who said the price I was quoted was a reasonable one, but that I should refuse the extended warranty the dealer was pushing. “I’m trying to do you a favor,” the dealer said, pissed off.)

  At the time I bought the car, I didn’t know I would soon be back living in the city, and hardly ever needing it. I had thought I would stay the two-hour drive east. What is the saying?—“If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

  I haven’t kept track of everything I’m supposed to do with the car, but your records will show that I paid the ticket for my expired registration the same week it was issued. I did better with the safety inspection, and FYI, I’m good through November.

  It’s not really about the money, the $75 the ticket would cost me. I wouldn’t mind writing a check for that amount as a donation to a Police Athletic League, or a fund to help rebuild the city. I’m not like the guy at the film festival yesterday who asked the French director in the Q and A after his film was shown, “Are we going to get our money back?” I hadn’t even wanted to see the film; before we went, I told my date what I did want to see, and he said, “They stole the idea from that other one, the one where they ate each other.” And I said, “No, that was the plane crash; this is the two guys who had the mountain-climbing accident. It’s a documentary.” And he said, “What isn’t?”

  Then, after the French film, after the audience applauded for this major piece of crap, the date and I cut out and went to a place he had heard about in the East Village for tea. It turned out to be someone’s exotic version of high tea, so instead of scones and clotted cream and cucumber sandwiches, we were each served a teaspoon of clear, rosemary-scented jelly with a single pomegranate seed inside! What came after that were these teensy cubes of polenta covered in grapefruit puree, all floating in a “bubble bath” of champagne. Then came a chocolate truffle the size of a tooth. The fellow and I were giddy. It was pouring outside, and when we left, after the tea ceremony, we didn’t want to leave each other, so we walked another couple of blocks to see a second movie, one he wanted to see, and I didn’t tell him I had already seen it because by that time I just wanted to sit next to him in the dark. “I wonder who that is singing,” I whispered at one point in the sound track. He didn’t know, but I did, from having read the credits the first time I saw the movie. “Kind of sounds like Dave Matthews,” I said, knowing I was right. “Let’s be sure to check at the end,” I said. “I’d like to get it for you.”

  Music keeps you youthful. Like I’m not the target audience for the Verve, but this morning I put on that song that goes, “I’m a million different people from one day to the next—I can change, I can change . . .” and—what’s my point? I was in a really good mood when I found the ticket on my windshield. Then how to get rid of the poison, like adrenaline, that flooded my system when I read what it was for?

  There is a theory of healing based on animals in the wild. People have observed animals that barely escaped a predator, and they say these animals lie down and shake, and in so doing somehow release the trauma. Whereas human beings take it in; we don’t work it out, so it lodges in us where it produces any number of nasty effects and symptoms. If you follow a kind of guided fantasy, supposedly you can locate a calm, still place inside you and practice visiting it over and over, and that’s as far as I got with this theory. It’s supposed to make you feel better.

  Maybe I should sell the car. But there is something about being able to get in a car and leave when you want to, or need to, without waiting to get to a car rental agency if you even know where one is and if it is even open when you get there.

  Like last week, after a guy grabbed my arm when I was running around the reservoir, when he was suddenly in front of me, coming from the trees on the south end of the track, and no one else was around just then and I couldn’t swing around wide enough to get completely past him, and he grabbed my arm. I think it was my anger that made him finally release me, because that is what I felt, not fear, until I got back home with a sore throat from yelling at him to leave me the fuck alone. I was shaking like crazy, and it wouldn’t stop, so I walked a block to where my car was parked, and I drove for a couple of hours to the ocean. My right leg was bouncing on the accelerator from nerves for much of the way, but I stopped for coffee and when I started up again I steered with my knees, the way real drivers steer, with a cup of coffee in one hand, playing the radio with the other. So maybe I am a wild animal, shaking off the trauma of near-capture.

  There were actually two men at the reservoir. And I thought it was odd that when the first one grabbed me, and I reflexively swung my free arm around to sock him in the chest, the other man didn’t stop me. Because he could have. He watched, and listened to me yell, so I don’t know what the deal was. But I think it was worth paying the insurance and having to park the car and get this ticket to have the car there to use that day.

  You could accuse me of trying to put a human face on this. And you would be correct. But is there anything wrong with that? Unless the ticket was issued by the guy my dog startled, I know it isn’t personal. But I’m not a person who can take this ticket in stride with the kind of urbanity urbane people prize in each other. I feel I must question—and protest—this particular ticket.

  I want what is fair. I don’t want a fight. But the truth is, I’m shaking—right now, writing this letter. My hand is shaking while I write. It’s saying what I can’t say—this is the way I say it.

  11

  Q: Do you believe that this machine could be helpful in changing the government?

  A: Changing the government . . .

  Q: Making it more responsive to the needs of the people?

  A: I don’t know what it is. What does it do?

  Q: Well, look at it.

  A: It offers no clues.

  Q: It has a certain . . . reticence.

  A: I don’t know what it does.

  ■

  Q: A lack of confidence in the machine?

  ■

  Q: Is the novel dead?

  A: Oh yes. Very much so.

  Q: What replaces it?

  A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.

  Q: The same thing?

  A: The same sort of thing.

  Q: Is the bicycle dead?

  ■

  Q: You don’t trust the machine?

  A: Why should I trust it?

  Q: (States his own lack of interest in machines)

  ■

  Q: What a beautiful sweater.

  A: Thank you. I don’t want to worry about machines.

  Q: What do you worry about?

  A: I was standing on the corner waiting for the light to change when I noticed, across the street among the people there waiting for the light to change, an extraordinarily handsome girl who was looking at me. Our eyes met, I looked away, then I looked again, she was looking away, the light changed. I moved into the street as did she. First I looked at her again to see if she was still looking at me, she wasn’t but I was aware that she was aware of me. I decided to smile. I smiled but in a curious way—the smile was supposed to convey that I was interested in her but also that I was aware that the situation was funny. But I bungled it. I smirked. I dislike even the word “smirk.” There was, you know, the moment when we passed each other. I had resolved to look at her directly in that moment. I tried but she was looking a bit to the left of me, she was looking fourteen inches to the left of my eyes.

  Q: This is the sort of thing that—

  A: I want to go back and do it again.

  ■

  Q: Now that you’ve studied it for a bit, can you explain how it works?

  A: Of course. (Explanation)

  ■

  Q: Is she still removing her blouse?

  A: Yes, still.

  Q: Do you want to have your picture taken with
me?

  A: I don’t like to have my picture taken.

  Q: Do you believe that, at some point in the future, one will be able to achieve sexual satisfaction, “complete” sexual satisfaction, for instance by taking a pill?

  A: I doubt that it’s impossible.

  Q: You don’t like the idea.

  A: No. I think that under those conditions, we would know less than we do now.

  Q: Of course.

  ■

  Q: It has beauties.

  A: The machine.

  Q: Yes. We construct these machines not because we confidently expect them to do what they are designed to do—change the government in this instance—but because we intuit a machine, out there, glowing like a shopping center . . .

  A: You have to contend with a history of success.

  Q: Which has gotten us nowhere.

  A: (Extends consolation)

  ■

  Q: What did you do then?

  A: I walked on a tree. For twenty steps.

  Q: What sort of tree?

  A: A dead tree. I can’t tell one from another. It may have been an oak. I was reading a book.

  Q: What was the book?

  A: I don’t know, I can’t tell one from another. They’re not like films. With films you can remember, at a minimum, who the actors were . . .

  Q: What was she doing?

  A: Removing her blouse. Eating an apple.

  Q: The tree must have been quite large.

  A: The tree must have been quite large.

  Q: Where was this?

  A: Near the sea. I had rope-soled shoes.

  ■

  Q: I have a number of error messages I’d like to introduce here and I’d like you to study them carefully . . . they’re numbered. I’ll go over them with you: undefined variable . . . improper sequence of operators . . . improper use of hierarchy . . . missing operator . . . mixed mode, that one’s particularly grave . . . argument of a function is fixed-point . . . improper fixed-point constant . . . improper floating-point constant . . . invalid character transmitted in sub-program statement, that’s a bitch . . . no END statement.