I Think You're Totally Wrong

by David Shields

  CALEB: I didn’t. I saw him perform about eight years ago and bought the CD. When you mentioned Mountain Con in that essay, I looked at my CD and noticed James Nugent’s name.

  DAVID: They sound great. It’s so polished. What’s the name of the song?

  CALEB: “Future Burn Out.” You didn’t recognize it? You’ve written about them.

  DAVID: I must admit I didn’t. I have the ear of a penguin.

  CALEB: You ready for some music and chess?

  CALEB: There’s a cold war going on: art vs. life. Shields vs. Powell.

  DAVID: Man, I can barely remember.

  CALEB: Are you that rusty?

  DAVID: I’ll give it a shot.

  CALEB: Ain’t like riding a bicycle.

  DAVID: I’ll try. If I get killed, so be it. This is the queen (thump). Queen on color.

  CALEB: She has a necklace. These pieces are odd looking. It’s the chess set my dad had as a boy. The king has a beard.

  DAVID: I’ll start and go out with a bang.

  • • •

  DAVID: (thump) I like the idea of a little chess game where I get mad. It’d be hard to transcribe. I’m playing a little recklessly. What was my mistake? Shoot. Dumb. What am I thinking?

  CALEB: (laughing) That’s staying in.

  DAVID: Like Wallace when he loses at Ping-Pong. Hmm. My mistake. What an idiot. Oh my god.

  CALEB: You haven’t played chess in a while.

  DAVID: Helpless. You’re good, but this is all pretty basic stuff. I’m oblivious. Boy, I was just excited that some of the moves came back to me. This one’s over.

  • • •

  CALEB: (setting up the pieces) I can’t play chess at home, on the road, or around Terry.

  DAVID: Why not?

  CALEB: If I play, I tune out and she goes bananas. I never play chess on my computer.

  DAVID: Why not?

  They begin another game.

  CALEB: Same as why I stopped smoking pot. I wouldn’t be able to stop. On our honeymoon, she and I were in Flores, Guatemala, and stopped off at an internet café. Terry finished her email and I told her that I wanted to finish my chess game, so she went to our hotel, about a five-minute walk away. An hour later—she’d say three hours—she comes back and I’m still playing chess.

  DAVID: Computer chess?

  CALEB: Yahoo Games.

  DAVID: Have you gotten good?

  CALEB: My game has stayed more or less the same as it was in high school. A friend and I play through email. One game lasts weeks. Anyway, from the first game I could see that you haven’t played in a while. You made an unorthodox opening.

  DAVID: I played seriously the year I had a broken leg in high school. The apex of my chess career was dreaming in chess notation.

  CALEB: Want another beer?

  DAVID: No thanks. (thump, thump, thump) Let’s see, I move there, you grab this guy … (thump) I get confused sometimes.

  CALEB: I’d like to teach my daughters chess. Chess helps you think. You can make a lot of analogies to life. Most people think intuitively. Chess exposes this. Namely, what looks good at first glance, prima facie, might be an error. And from that you learn to question judgment. Speed chess, on the other hand, is more instinctual.

  DAVID: Obviously.

  CALEB: “Look before you leap” or “see a chance—take it.” What do you do? Okay, you have two objects: one is worth a dollar more than the other, and they are worth a dollar ten total. How much is each object worth?

  DAVID: Unless I’m missing something, isn’t one object a dollar and the other a dime?

  CALEB: That’s a difference of ninety. One’s worth a hundred and five. The other’s worth five.

  DAVID: True that.

  CALEB: You have doors A, B, and C. Behind two of the doors are goats and behind one is a car. You pick door A. The announcer goes to door B and opens it: it’s a goat. He asks you if you want to take door C or keep door A. Should you switch doors?

  DAVID: The guy could be lying, so what difference does it make?

  CALEB: Assume he’s not. Three doors: behind two are goats, and behind one’s a car. Whatever door you pick, you get what’s behind.

  DAVID: And you want a car?

  CALEB: No, you live in the Himalayas and want a goat. When you pick door A, he opens door B and there’s a goat, and he hasn’t opened door A or C yet, but he gives you the option of switching from A to C. Do you switch?

  DAVID: I gotcha.

  CALEB: Do you switch?

  DAVID: To door C? Umm, I would say no. I’d stay.

  CALEB: Wrong. If you switch, you’ll have a two-in-three chance of getting the car. If you stay, you have a one-in-three chance.

  DAVID: Isn’t there still, at this point, an equal one-in-two chance?

  CALEB: No. You switch and you always have a two-in-three chance of getting the car.

  DAVID: Is that really true?

  CALEB: By switching, you can expatiate your wrongness two out of three times.

  DAVID: I’m not sure “expatiate” is the right word.

  CALEB: You have to switch.

  DAVID: Are these math puzzles?

  CALEB: Math and logic.

  DAVID: Are you good at math?

  CALEB: I scored two hundred points higher in math than verbal on the SAT. I was an average English student.

  DAVID: I barely passed trigonometry. Hearing all these logic puzzles makes me think about something a student told me the other day about David Wagoner. Did you ever study poetry with him?

  CALEB: No.

  DAVID: Perfect example of misapplied logic.

  CALEB: Hold that thought. I’ve got to pee.

  DAVID: When Wagoner taught, he required his students to present their work by reading it aloud in class. That way he wouldn’t have to read their work on his own time.

  When Wagoner retired ten years ago or so, David Guterson got up and told a funny story about how whenever he tried to track down Wagoner for a response to his work, Wagoner would say, “Just keep writing.” Guterson pretended that Wagoner was actually providing deep Buddhistic wisdom, forcing the apprentice back onto his own resources. Wagoner stalked out of the ceremony, furious.

  The story this student told me was that Wagoner advised his grad students, “Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Don’t do drugs. Don’t have too many sexual partners. Be a cautious, risk-averse person because—look at me—I’m eighty-four, I still have this mane of silver hair, and I’m still cogent and writing poems and you, too, if you’re lucky, at eighty-four, can—”

  CALEB: I saw this blog once that posted a list of keys to being a writer and one was not drinking.

  DAVID: That’s such an inadequate response to existence, and Wagoner’s work suffers from exactly the same caution: every poem he writes is about how he took a walk in the woods and came across a snake or a dying ember, which turns out to be a symbol of something or other. I know I’m guilty at times of being overly careful about health and food, etc., but even I know the point of life can’t be to die at ninety-two safe and secure in your jammies.

  CALEB: This girl, a friend from Whidbey Island, Samantha, had a fling with Harv—his name is Harvey, but we call him Harv. It’s a good story and happened here in Sky when Harv was staying out here. And before I begin I’d like to say that that writing mantra “show—don’t tell” is bullshit. You don’t show stories; you tell them. Too many writers “show.”

  DAVID: No kidding. I’m the one who taught you that twenty years ago.

  CALEB: Write expediently. Speak expediently. Okay, Samantha and Harv were colliding into each other. Backstory: Ten years earlier, Harv had a fling with Jen while Jen had a boyfriend. Six months later Harv bumps into Jen at a party and she’s six months pregnant. Harv says, “Mine?” Jen says, “It’s not yours.” A year goes by and Jen calls. “Harv, my boyfriend made me give the baby a paternity test. It’s not his. Come on in.” So Harv goes in and boom, he’s a dad. Ten years later Harv and Jen are together, and the
n Samantha comes into the picture.

  At the time Samantha was seeing Jefferson, a meth head ex-con. Jefferson and Samantha dated for four years. Anyway, when Jefferson was five, he saw his seven-year-old sister hit by a car. They lived in a trailer park and the local drunk nailed her. Jefferson went home and told his mom. His sister died. Later, Jefferson married young, at twenty-two, and has a two-year-old son. Son contracts a disease, they perform tests on Jefferson, and Jefferson discovers he’s not the biological father.

  DAVID: At this time is Jefferson with Samantha?

  CALEB: No, this is years before Samantha. Like I said, it’s backstory. Jefferson confronted his wife, she confesses—big blowup and breakup. Since then Jefferson learned a trade, he works, but when things get bad he turns to drugs. He’s nice, quiet, introverted, and not an idiot. He once was reading Moby-Dick. I tried to talk to him about it. “What do you think?” And he gave one-word answers. “Good.” Or: “Interesting.” He’s fifteen years older than Samantha. Samantha’s young, cute, and fun. We don’t know why Samantha keeps going back to him. She wants out. It just drags on and on.

  So when Harv and Samantha hook up, they carry unhappiness. Harv tells Samantha he and Jen are kaput, invites Samantha to Skykomish. Samantha and Harv spend a couple days here, everything’s great, and then Jen calls and says she’s driving to Skykomish with their ten-year-old son. Evidently, Harv and Jen are not kaput. Jen’s an hour away. Harv is trying to get Samantha out the door. Six weeks later Samantha finds out she’s pregnant.

  DAVID: Have these people not heard of birth control?

  CALEB: Go figure. Samantha’s sweating for a few days. It turns out the fetus is Jefferson’s. Samantha dumped Jefferson and now has a four-year-old son. Jen left Harv, got a degree from the UW, and now works at Boeing. Harv’s derailed but hanging on. Same with Jefferson.

  DAVID: You’ve got a good bad novel on your hands. I don’t really have anything to say other than “There it is: real life comin’ at ya.”

  CALEB: What sort of response is that?

  DAVID: There’s no particular larger—

  CALEB: It’s just what happened. It’s not a—

  DAVID: Do you know the Danish TV show The Killing?

  CALEB: My sister lived in Denmark for four years. When she was here this summer, she dropped off the whole series. My parents are watching it now.

  DAVID: Twenty one-hour episodes. It’s not great, but it’s good. You watch it in Danish with huge English subtitles. By the end, you’ve convinced yourself you know Danish. It’s an endlessly elaborated investigation into the murder of a high school girl.… This song is so beautiful.

  CALEB: “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam.”

  DAVID: That voice, the bottomless sadness of that voice.… I get bored easily by the plot, it takes a million times too long to get there, but it finally builds to something very beautiful. Brag points: I figured out who the killer is in the first episode. It—

  CALEB: Aargh. Stop. Anyone who didn’t appear in episode one will be eliminated as a suspect.

  DAVID: Uh, it actually wasn’t in the first episode, come to think of it. It felt like the first episode. I figured it out toward the beginning. The killer may have been anywhere in the first several episodes. Anyway, what these twenty episodes build to is this: the men are always certain, and they always get it wrong. Basically, men know nothing and women know everything, intuitively. In some sense it’s a feminist parable disguised as a detective story, but it’s very delicately done. The merest bass line thrumming away. When you told your story about Jen cheating on her boyfriend and then Harv cheating on Jen and then Jefferson seeing his sister die and becoming a meth head and on and on, I was only slightly interested in it. It was just a “story.” It has to flip over into something, into “X.” I need an X factor. Without that, it’s just life.

  CALEB: Let’s talk about that former student of yours you keep writing about—the guy who served time in prison for “shooting a dude” and whose prison credo “Do your own time” you don’t like.

  DAVID: “His stoicism bores me.”

  CALEB: Why keep writing about him?

  DAVID: I’m running out of ideas. That’s where you come in. You’re fresh blood.

  CALEB: Ha ha.

  DAVID: I’m serious.

  CALEB: I want to know more about this guy. Did he kill or injure his victim? Was it assault? Was it murder? Manslaughter? How many years did he serve? In your books, the only question you ever ask is, “How do we deal with the fact of mortality?” In essence, “We die. What do we do about that?” That’s your modus operandi, but I’m interested in why we kill.

  DAVID: Why people commit individual murders or genocide?

  CALEB: In Vollmann’s Butterfly Stories there’s a restaurant owner in Phnom Penh who survived the Khmer Rouge, watched them kill his wife and children, and did nothing because if he’d showed emotion, he, too, would have been killed. Vollmann writes a sentence or two about suffering and moves on. I wanted Vollmann to stay.

  DAVID: And what I loved is that Vollmann moved on. He knew we could fill in the blanks. That’s where the art comes in.

  CALEB: I grew up around Cambodia, metaphorically. My parents went to Angkor Wat in 1956; they shot 16mm film. My dad was in Saigon for a year, and he has a lot of books from that era. They subscribed to National Geographic. I remember this issue: “Kampuchea Wakens from a Nightmare.” I was maybe twelve years old. After college, Cambodia became an obsession. I became engaged to a Cambodian woman; it lasted a year. Later, I went to Cambodia. I’m now writing a Cambodian woman’s biography. That’s my X factor: suffering, the sociopath, the serial killer, atrocity, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, what motivates Ted Bundy?

  DAVID: Do you somehow think that will get you closer to anything?

  CALEB: It seems futile, but yes, I do.

  DAVID: Yeah, let’s hear about another murder. You got the happy solution to murder?

  CALEB: What’s frustrating is the vacuum. No one’s interested in Cambodia, but we follow celebrity waistlines. Books about Cambodia and such: I read these books over and over again.

  DAVID: What kind of books—genocide porn?

  CALEB: Atrocity can become cliché, but—

  DAVID: I’m much more interested in pulling back and seeing the big picture.

  CALEB: Huh?

  DAVID: My closest friend, Michael, has been spending the last decade writing a book called Investigation into the Death of Logan. His father died in Vietnam in ’63, almost certainly a suicide. His wife, Norma, died at forty-six of cancer. And German soldiers in World War II had to return home from the Eastern Front because the war had made them insane. Michael is convinced that he and Norma decided she didn’t need to get a biopsy—when she did—because Michael had been so obsessed with his father’s death for so long that the two of them, Norma and Michael, just couldn’t deal with any more incoming. What Michael loves about the German soldiers is that they couldn’t handle the war. Through them, Michael—

  CALEB: There’s no satisfying X factor to life: people suffer and die, and that’s it, but that’s what I’m interested in. Let’s get to life, not this evasion of life, not “escaping reality” hunger. Maybe your friend thinks he’s gotten to something, but it’s personal and not universal.

  DAVID: I couldn’t disagree more. You’re missing the entire point of art.

  CALEB: I get what life’s about.

  DAVID: Sometime soon I want to write a book where I talk to three guys around the corner from me: the owner of a French bakery who fled from Vietnam, an Iraqi guy who runs a mailing service, and the owner of the overpriced restaurant Kabul, who left Afghanistan.

  CALEB: That’s a book I’d read.

  DAVID: I’m sure I cartoonize you, too, but I think you cartoonize me as unaware of the world. I think of myself as political.

  CALEB: Politically naive.

  DAVID: Let me get to my point. I’m also interested in why human beings behave the way they d
o—how could I not be? You’re trying to take the position of “Open it up—I want to hear about people’s lives.” Okay. Sometimes, though, my reaction is just “Heard it. Heard it. Tell me something new.” The endless complications of that soap opera you were spinning out—this guy fucked that girl and that girl fucked this guy—who gives a shit? I don’t know these people. You know them; they’re part of your life. Me, I’m bored. You have to cut to the fucking chase: what’s the point?

  CALEB: That’s a legitimate response. You investigate abstract questions; you keep circling back to them. You want these serious epistemological and existential questions: What’s “true”? What’s knowledge? What’s memory? What’s self? What’s other? What’s death? I’ll quote Gertrude Stein: “There ain’t no answer.… That’s the answer.” I want to ask questions that have substantive answers: Why do we kill? Why do we inflict pain? Why do we suffer? How can we stop suffering?

  DAVID: And I’d say the only way you can get at those questions seriously is to watch how you yourself think.

  DAVID: A former student of mine is writing about her marriage to a Libyan Muslim. She’s a blonde beauty from San Diego. Her daughters wear the veil. She and her family live in the Research Triangle in North Carolina. Her name’s Krista Bremer.

  CALEB: Is she Christian?

  DAVID: Not particularly.

  CALEB: In name only?

  DAVID: I guess.

  CALEB: Because it’s illegal if she’s not “of the book”—namely, a Jew or a Christian.

  DAVID: But don’t be atheist.

  CALEB: Or Hindu or Buddhist or Wiccan. When I worked in the United Arab Emirates I had to fill out paperwork, and my employers told me to check the “Christian” box, even if I wasn’t. Also, and I realize you’re more Jewish than me—

  DAVID: I’m not really that Jewish.

  CALEB: You were raised that way. In that one story, your stand-in uses an anti-Semitic slur, tells his father, and the father goes ape. I never had that.