I Think You're Totally Wrong

by David Shields

  Caleb laughs.

  DAVID: First of all, I’d be richer than that guy you know who wrote The Art of Racing in the Rain—

  CALEB: Garth Stein—

  DAVID: —which would be a very good thing. And second of all, people would not, I swear to god, go around killing one another, because they’d stop thinking that evil is “out there.” That’s why it’s so important to me to empty out Franzen. Everything he writes is in the service of fighting off any insight into himself and locating instead all shade and shadow elsewhere, out there, the next precinct over.

  CALEB: As opposed to evil inside.

  DAVID: You know it.

  CALEB: The common man will be evil. Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Stanley Milgram added the exclamation point with his experiments. Yeah, no duh, people are like this. Normal people will submit to authority and become sociopaths.

  DAVID: Right. And, boy, is Franzen always on his high moral horse. He, to me, is utter anathema, whereas Wallace, at his best, was always going deeper into himself, flaying himself alive in order for us to understand ourselves better. That’s a pretty big fucking accomplishment.

  DAVID: I’m your former teacher, I’m a much more established writer than you are, but you seem much more certain of yourself.

  CALEB: I tell Terry that I’m the king of uncertainty.

  DAVID: You are?

  CALEB: I’m so not certain, but when I say something I don’t incessantly qualify it with doubt. Inside—inside, I’m uncertain.

  DAVID: That’s a relief, and it makes me believe even more in you as a writer. It’s that Graham Greene line: “When we are not sure, we are alive.”

  CALEB: What do you think about Greene?

  DAVID: He has a Manichean view of the universe: good and evil.

  CALEB: Sounds pretty certain to me.

  CALEB: When Toni Morrison was nominated for a National Book Award and didn’t win, did she really say to a judge, “Thank you for ruining my life”?

  DAVID: According to my former teacher, yes.

  CALEB: It seems beneath her.

  DAVID: Why would it be beneath her? She’s just like anyone else.

  DAVID: Are you an atheist?

  CALEB: I consider myself an Einsteinian agnostic.

  DAVID: I’m an atheist. Tomorrow I might get hit by a bolt of lightning and change my view, but I’m living my life as if we’re animals and we’re here on earth, more evolved than a muskrat but not essentially different. My friend Robert, who’s Catholic, says the only thing that interests him is eschatology.

  CALEB: The study of shit?

  DAVID: Not scatology. Eschatology.

  CALEB: Oops.

  DAVID: Dostoevsky wondering endlessly, “Is there a god?” “If there is no god, how do we live a moral life?” “What happens after we die?” These are children’s questions. I’d rather talk about why we kill. What’s the difference between a Hindu god and an Incan god? You’re all deluded. What does Bertrand Russell call it? The celestial teapot. If you want to believe this teapot is magical, fine, but it’s no more meaningful than believing that a curtain rod carries divinity.

  CALEB: You hear about the dyslexic, insomniac agnostic?

  DAVID: I probably have, but I forget the punch line.

  CALEB: He stayed up all night wondering whether there’s a dog.

  CALEB: At family gatherings, I come across as a moronic dude who likes to drink beer. I’m accident-prone, I spill things, I break dishes, and I like sports. There’s a certain pretense on your part. You’re the artist above it all.

  DAVID: Well, sure. I’m very pretentious, but I’m not a snob.

  CALEB: In Black Planet you were. You had two season tickets to Sonics games and had trouble finding someone to go with you. You advertised, and then Henry offered to buy six tickets. Then you dismissed Henry because he worked at Elma Lanes bowling alley. You even wrote to begin the paragraph, “I’m a snob.” You missed an opportunity.

  DAVID: I know. I agree.

  CALEB: Henry represents the world.

  DAVID: If it turned out bad, it would have been better. Two hours of painfully literal conversation.

  CALEB: Again, you’re dismissing Henry as if everything will go over his head. And it might have, but stuff like this makes me wonder if you even want to understand people at “ground level.” Forget about the sixty to seventy percent of humanity struggling for basic comforts, food and shelter and survival; they have reasons why they don’t read. But even in America, of the population that can read and does read, many don’t read literary works. They’re not all morons. Why would they read David Shields if David Shields doesn’t want to hang out with them? Walk through a casino—look at everyone putting money in slots. Hang out in a dive bar.

  CALEB: Terry likes that I don’t like porn.

  DAVID: What man doesn’t like porn?

  CALEB: I wouldn’t say I don’t like it—I’m fascinated by it; I enjoy watching erotic images—but I’ve spoken out against it, too. Prostitution in Cambodia’s a lot different than in Vegas. I believe humans should be free to seek their own abysses. Anything is permissible as long as there’s no outside harm. I try to apply that to porn.

  DAVID: How does Terry know whether you do or don’t like porn?

  CALEB: She’s my wife. I don’t have porn. Okay, I have about ten Chinese Playboys from Hong Kong. They’re almost thirty years old. My mom bought them last time she was in Hong Kong.

  DAVID: What’s that all about?

  CALEB: My mom’s—well, a book of her own.

  CALEB: I stopped watching the Mariners because of Josh Lueke.

  DAVID: Is he the one who hit his wife?

  CALEB: That’s Julio Mateo. The Mariners released him.

  DAVID: Lueke raped a girl?

  CALEB: He was charged with rape. Lueke’s DNA was on the anal swab. He pled to the obscure lesser felony of “kidnapping with violence” and served time. He was in the minors, and I told Terry if the Mariners move him up from AAA, I’m done with the Mariners. He made the team, so I’m done, for what it’s worth. First year I’ve been in Seattle and not attended at least one game.

  DAVID: How did it come out that it was anal rape?

  CALEB: Just look on the web.

  DAVID: Is he that great of a player?

  CALEB: He throws ninety-five, has potential. He’s young.

  DAVID: He’s a reliever?

  CALEB: Uh-huh.

  DAVID: I wonder how they justified that. “Let’s give him a second chance”?

  CALEB: The Mariners fired the scout who recruited him.

  DAVID: It was the scout’s fault?

  CALEB: Lueke’s public statement was, more or less, “I made a mistake—talk to my lawyer.”

  DAVID: In The Fall there’s a Frenchman who welcomes and loves all humanity despite being surrounded by a war machine. One day he opens the door and is greeted by a bayonet to his gut. Camus then describes a woman forced to choose which child she wants executed.

  CALEB: When did Styron write Sophie’s Choice?

  DAVID: Twenty years after The Fall. I’d take any sentence of The Fall over all of Sophie’s Choice. In that Camus paragraph I get everything. I don’t need four hundred pages of Sophie’s Choice. The student of mine who “shot a dude”: you want a whole book about that. I’d say, “Just give me the line.”

  CALEB: I don’t want a book, but I want more. Prison life must be very dramatic.

  DAVID: What about prison life interests you so much?

  CALEB: They’re doing time. People who aren’t very reflective all of a sudden have nothing to do but meditate on life, death, crime, punishment, family, and pain. Everyone in prison has a story. There’s murder, capital punishment, redemption, recidivism, justice.

  DAVID: Not everyone in prison has shot someone. Some people just wrote a bad check.

  CALEB: You hear about the rapper who went to prison?

  DAVID: Uh-oh.
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  CALEB: “Rhyme and Punishment.”

  CALEB: I’m against the death penalty, but with an asterisk. I’m more against releasing the Lockerbie bomber after only eight years. The Scottish prime minister let him go because he had terminal cancer. It was the “humanitarian thing to do.” He lived the rest of his life, as a hero, in Libya. That’s cruel and unusual treatment of all the victims. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian guy who killed seventy or so people, has a possibility of parole in twenty-one years. Life imprisonment is superior to execution, but execution is superior to setting Anders Breivik free.

  DAVID: Now who’s the moral relativist?

  CALEB: (into DVR) It’s Friday, around noon, and we’re driving to the town of Skykomish for lunch.

  DAVID: Are Khamta and his wife trying for a second kid?

  CALEB: They weren’t at first, but now they are. She’s three or four years older than he is; I think she’s forty-one.

  DAVID: Is she a Buddhist?

  CALEB: Khamta is only mildly Buddhist. Julie’s traveled and she’s interested in Laotian culture, but that probably had little to do with her marrying Khamta, who left Laos when he was seven, stayed in a refugee camp, and was one of two families sponsored by the Methodist church in Coupeville.

  DAVID: What does Julie do?

  CALEB: She’s a photographer. She works for department stores, and she’s working now at McChord Air Force Base for some big project. She went to Peru and did a nice collage of children.… Okay, here’s the meth house we visited last night.

  DAVID: It’s brutal.

  CALEB: It’s an absolute sty. You wouldn’t have wanted to stay there.

  DAVID: I can survive anything.

  DAVID: When I gave that reading at Suzzallo, I didn’t recognize you. I don’t think I’d seen you for—what?—fifteen years if not more.

  CALEB: From 1991 to 2008! Seventeen years. We’d exchanged a few emails.

  DAVID: I remembered you as having long dark locks—down to your shoulders if not longer. Very dramatic. You looked like a heavy-metal drummer; it was a big part of your identity, I always thought. It was interesting to see the photos of you at your house—how your hair receded year by year. When did you join the bald club?

  CALEB: About ten years ago. I didn’t want to look like Gallagher.

  DAVID: Bald with long hair. Gotcha. Ridiculous.

  CALEB: Even short hair bald looks dumb. The skin yarmulke.

  DAVID: Shaved is the way to go. Just admit who and where you are in life.

  CALEB: It’s easier.

  DAVID: In my thirties I was endlessly trying to finesse my hair so it’d look decent.

  CALEB: I started losing my hair in my late twenties. I thought long hair was an asset with the ladies. Actually, for every one woman the hair attracted, it repelled ten. Terry said she wouldn’t have looked twice at me had we met in my long-hair days. The shaved head opens up the widest spectrum of options for the balding guy in the dating world, unless your head is shaped like a potato.

  DAVID: If I had my druthers, I’d have more hair. Baldness ages one. And a lot of the people Laurie has had crushes on had long hair—Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Todd Rundgren, Taylor Kitsch.

  CALEB: Taylor Kitsch?

  DAVID: The kid in Friday Night Lights. It’s nothing I think about overly much. I shaved my head by 1997, early forties.

  CALEB: I probably started to shave regularly when I turned thirty.

  DAVID: Now I do it practically every other day.

  DAVID: So this is the little town of Skykomish?

  CALEB: Burlington Northern, the railroad, leaked oil or pollutants into the water supply underground, and the whole town was dug up. There are two restaurants, but only one was ever open at any given time, and the grass you see used to be twenty-foot-deep pits.

  DAVID: Every building was simply picked up and moved?

  CALEB: Or razed. The structural engineers had to figure it all out.

  Train whistle.

  DAVID: Will this be endlessly long?

  CALEB: Could be five cars, could be a hundred. Barouh was with his girfriend and their son and dog down the mountain, straddling the track, not paying attention; the stereo’s blasting, and they didn’t hear the train whistle. The train nailed the bed of the truck, killed the dog instantly.

  DAVID: How dumb do you have to be?

  CALEB: Every time Khamta and I come to a train track, we shout out, “Barouh! Barooooouh!”

  DAVID: Is he an oblivious guy?

  CALEB: Unofficially, he’s got ADD. He’s hyper and always focused on something else. Whenever I call he says, “I’m busy—can I call you right back?”

  DAVID: Who was injured besides the dog?

  CALEB: The girlfriend and the son were airlifted by helicopter to Harborview. She was messed up, missed six months of work. The son just had bumps and bruises.

  DAVID: Barouh had no injury?

  CALEB: Just scrapes. Didn’t even see a doctor, but that was the final straw. The girlfriend left.

  • • •

  Here we are—the Cascadia Inn.

  DAVID: Laurie has what she calls “cellular issues”—periodic biopsies, mini-scares about dysplasia, her cells’ repair mechanism—but she doesn’t really fill me in on to what degree she’s worried, whereas I would tend to want to talk about it.

  CALEB: Maybe she’d like you to ask.

  DAVID: Believe me, I ask. She’s John Wayne: strong, silent type.

  WAITRESS: Hi. Two?

  DAVID: Two. Do you have wireless?

  WAITRESS: Yes.

  DAVID: Oh, good. Let me get out my laptop.

  CALEB: So Laurie’s okay?

  DAVID: We think so. She’s now a health fiend. How’s Terry’s health?

  CALEB: Three babies, three miscarriages. Basically, she was pregnant for five-plus years. I mean, she’s beautiful. She loves taking walks, works out at home with aerobics videos.

  DAVID: Who was that jumping up and down on the bed back at your house?

  CALEB: Gia; she’s the middle one.

  DAVID: Pretty cute. How about the other kids—are they as sweet-tempered?

  CALEB: I’ve won the lottery three times. You said you didn’t enjoy the first couple years of parenthood.

  DAVID: I struggled a little bit. Did you not?

  CALEB: Struggle? A little, but for every negative there’re three or four positives.

  WAITRESS: Today’s specials are a Denver omelet and the chicken salad sandwich. Coffee?

  DAVID: Do you know how to dive into a swimming pool?

  CALEB: Sure.

  DAVID: It’s something I’ve never learned to do.

  CALEB: You can’t?

  DAVID: I can sort of do it, but it’s basically a belly flop.

  CALEB: You’ve never dove from a diving board?

  DAVID: It’s embarrassing, but I’ve never learned.

  CALEB: You just jump headfirst. Let me show you a bungee jump.

  DAVID: Computer’s yours.

  CALEB: YouTube: Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Gimme a couple seconds. (plays video)

  DAVID: Were you afraid?

  CALEB: I was more afraid of chickening out.

  DAVID: How do you get back up?

  CALEB: A second person came down on a winch, latched onto me, and back up we went.

  DAVID: Are you proud you did it? Did you learn something?

  CALEB: Conquering fear—all that bullshit.

  DAVID: How did you get to the moment where you jumped off?

  CALEB: I’d made the choice the previous day, signed up, and paid ninety bucks. I imagined not doing it, and between the two, I had to jump. The guy counted down, “Five, four, three, two, bungee!”

  DAVID: Can I see the bungee jump again?

  CALEB: Sure. (replays)

  DAVID: It’s hard to imagine what’s in your body, your heart—I don’t know how you control that. You must have felt so relieved. Were you just hanging there afterward?

  CALEB: For about
five minutes, upside down, waiting for this guy to drop on the winch. The whole way back he told me about how they paid him a dollar a day to risk his life.

  WAITRESS: Are we ready?

  CALEB: Yes. I’ll have the Denver omelet.

  WAITRESS: The cook has stopped serving breakfast.

  CALEB: You want to see a video of [Terry’s sister] Tracy telling a dirty joke?

  DAVID: What do you think?

  CALEB: Okay, context: This is last May. We’re in Mexico for Tracy’s wedding and telling jokes at dinner.

  YouTube video:

  Caleb: Lights, camera, action.

  Tracy: Why are girls so bad at math?

  Jan (mother-in-law): Girls?

  Tracy: (holds index finger two inches from her thumb) Because men keep telling them this is eight inches.

  All: (laughter)

  DAVID: Do Terry and Tracy get along?

  CALEB: Best friends. Terry has three friends: her mom, her sister, and my sister. Tracy’s always over.

  WAITRESS: (giving David the bill and credit card) Here you go. This one’s for us and this one can be your souvenir.

  DAVID: Thanks a lot.

  WAITRESS: You’re welcome a lot.

  She leaves.

  DAVID: So if we came into town for lunch again, or dinner, would this be where we go? I liked it. They’re really friendly.