Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

by Harrison Scott Key

  People think college educators make good money because people are dumb. I could have made more money cleaning vats at a hummus factory. Lauren waited tables and made more cash. Am I complaining? No. There’s no universal human right that declares all doctors of philosophy deserve a base middle-class salary. It was a rude awakening is all. That is the story of most careers, an escalating series of rude awakenings, culminating in a retirement party.

  The most devoted celebrants of Mississippi State would tell you it is a proud and earthy institution, a great moral counterbalance to the aristocratic corruption of its depraved rival, Ole Miss, which is true, in a way, or was true many years ago, in generations past. Bob Dylan never had to write protest songs about State.

  As a boy, I’d always understood Starkville as a kind of Manichean contrary to Oxford, the ideal destination for ambitious young farmers, who longed to study poultry management and the animal reproductive arts, where one might learn the fine art of semen collection and rectal palpation, should that be of interest.

  When I visited for my interview, I noted with some relief that the university was not as the younger me had remembered it, all cattle runs and chicken houses, but in fact enjoyed a commodious library and as much bourgeois zeal as every other American university, with perhaps more camouflage footwear than is normally observed, and which only made it feel like home. And that’s what it was now. Home.

  But something in me didn’t sit right. As soon as we moved to Starkville, I felt like a hog being shoved into a trailer, with a sickening sense of where the trailer might be headed.

  I attempted to teach play analysis to two hundred and fifty humans in a capacious auditorium where most of the students played Uno or napped. I made an effort to hew to high standards, as eager young faculty will do, going so far as to fail several students on my first exam. As a result, one young man threatened me with his python, via email. Another explained in person that because I had failed him, his father was going to make him go to Afghanistan to die for his country, although I am pretty sure the young man failed at that, too.

  To make matters worse, I’d recently quit smoking, which led to a significant increase in the eating of cake-based foods, which led to an increase in the wearing of fat-based pants. I took to weeping a lot, in university parking lots and public restrooms, my new fat jiggling in a totally non-jolly way. I felt old and sad. I wanted to die, to be dead, the deadest man alive, to burn it all down and start over, but no: I had a job, and a wife, with her own burning desires, of babies, a house, a home.

  * * *

  I tried to shake it off, the weird nameless sadness that gripped me like a great gorilla hand. Someone had told us that it’d be good for our marriage to have no television, that it would compel us to cohabitate organically, and so we did that. We played gin, charades, Pictionary. We made brownies and ate them all and pretended like we weren’t both getting fatter. We were happy, even if I was sad. I learned a lot about my wife during the “Year with No Television,” as it came to be known. Her favorite thing in all the world was eating cakes and pies and brownies, with which she drank the very coldest milk.

  “Let’s save room for dessert,” I’d say, at dinner, facing one of those casseroles, a mother’s recipe, designed to feed a battalion, chock with caloric victuals, butter and starch and meat, enough to power a team of bricklayers through a day, and which must now be eaten by two young people who do not fully realize how fat it is about to make them.

  “We can just have dessert for dinner,” Lauren said, teaching me perhaps the most important life lesson I would ever learn, which is that if you don’t want to eat the main course, you don’t have to: You can eat a whole peach cobbler instead.

  “And that’s it? That’s our dinner?”

  “Why waste our calories?” she said, microwaving the Pyrex.

  It was the most sensible advice I’d heard in three years.

  “I like this diet,” I said.

  “The cobbler has fruit, so that’s our vegetables,” she said, pulling the masterwork of buttered pastry out of the microwave and scooping ice cream onto the gurgling surface.

  We played games, so many games. I cleaned up on all the language games, Scattergories, Scrabble, inviting me to showcase the ocean of two-dollar words I’d been compelled to learn during a decade in our nation’s universities. In Trivial Pursuit, I’d get some obscure question right, about the birthplace of Martin Van Buren, say, and she’d roll her eyes. The uselessness of the information was evidence enough that I was lacking in moral fiber.

  “It makes me angry that you know that,” she’d say.

  When it was time for her to dominate, we turned to games of speed and memory, at which she excelled. She dominated a game called Rubik’s Race, a two-dimensional spinoff from the popular cube puzzle of the 1980s, in which two competitors raced to complete a single flat Rubik’s puzzle, matching it to a randomized pattern determined just before the game commenced, painfully frenetic and anxious, players sliding pieces as quickly as possible, the winner (her) slamming down a frame on her winning puzzle, the loser (me, always me) looking on in amazement.

  “Let’s start over!” I’d say, in the final seconds of the game, right before she was to win.

  “I’m amazing!” she’d say, laughing madly.

  “Your beauty distracted me.”

  It was the sort of impressive feat one typically associated with idiot savants on The Montel Williams Show, blind children who sculpt or who play a concerto after hearing it once.

  “I am the champion,” she’d say. “I am always the champion.”

  “I married a freak.”

  “So did I.”

  These were happy, if impossibly hard times, our checkbook empty and fallow, the teetering towers of student loans casting a shadow over everything. I possessed the highest degree capable of being earned in all the world but made so little money. I hadn’t expected to be this poor after so much effort. I’d been a fool. After all that school, how had I ended up in the very same bondage as my father, professionally miserable and financially impoverished? I could’ve been laying waste to all the thyroids in exchange for great heaping buckets of gold. We could’ve been playing Pictionary at a beach house if I had just bitten the bourgeois bullet and become a shit-ass lawyer. Was poverty the price of doing meaningful work, and how was this work meaningful again?

  I tried to ignore the question, and Lauren helped with that. We listened to the radio, and I rewrote the songs for her as I had for others in my childhood, and she laughed the way I’d always wanted the prettiest girls to laugh.

  John Mayer’s “Your Body Is a Wonderland” became “Your Body Is a Chuck E. Cheese.”

  We’d be naked, doing what you do when you’re naked, and I would sing to her.

  “You want love? We’ll make it,” I’d sing, followed by verses about making sex athwart the Skee-Ball lanes. “Swim in a big sea of tickets.”

  “Gross,” she’d say, laughing.

  Sometimes, I sang that her body was a Disneyland.

  “After all that cobbler it’s more like a Disney World,” she’d say.

  “Your body is a Dollywood,” I sang. “And your urethra is the toilet of the Dollywood.”

  “Oh goodness, I’m wetting myself,” she’d say, holding her now urine-soaked crotch, while I marveled that such a thing can happen to an adult. The first time her bladder exploded in my presence, I simply could not believe it. I had not known this was a thing. Where I grew up, out in the country, if you soiled yourself after a certain age, they sent you to a sanitarium.

  We laughed often back then. Sometimes I think it took us so long to conceive a child because it’s hard to do that when you’re wetting yourself, which I made her do a lot, even in the darkest days of my depression.

  “She softens you,” old friends said, and I tried not to be insulted that we’d been friends for ten years and they’d never alerted me to my need for softening. Maybe they had. Maybe I hadn’t been listening. I
was listening now, and all I heard was my own softened rage and general unhappiness, in the midst of all this simple, unsullied marital joy.

  That first year of marriage, as much as we laughed, I still got in fights with the kitchen sink, tried to rip doors off their hinges, considered disfiguring myself with the iron. In one especially dark moment, I watched an entire episode of PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

  * * *

  I don’t want to be overly dramatic and tell you I was suicidal, but I’ll say this: I started to do that thing that all depressed people do where you start to think, Hey, if I die, at least it will be a change of scenery. Those were bleak days. I took to reading the Bible, alternating Psalms with Edward Albee plays.

  One day, there I was, dressing for work, the way normal people do, when I noticed an unfortunate wrinkle on one leg of my pants.

  “Look at this,” I said to Lauren, who was dressing for work, too.

  “What?”

  “Here,” I said, pointing out the wrinkle, at which point I began weeping uncontrollably.

  “Goodness, what’s wrong?” she said.

  I collapsed onto the floor and laid there and wept, which, let me just say, is not a thing I do. I do lots of odd things, but I am not a floor weeper. I have ridden flaming bicycles down the street, rappelled off the roofs of condemned hotels, and courageously attempted to outrun the law enforcement agencies of at least two southern states. I’d always believed I was a strong man, but I was wrong. I was weak as a kitten, there on that floor, while my new wife stared.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I stayed home from work that day and sat on our little apartment balcony, contemplating, the way one does, trying to think up answers to the question of my sadness, none of which existed in my head. I drove through the black beautiful fields and woods of Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, and found no answers in the wind through the windows, and I stopped and walked through Tombigbee National Forest, and found no answers in the sweat of my brow or in the cocklebur on my socks, and by eventide, answers having eluded me, I took my Bible to a bar in downtown Starkville and sat there drinking and trying and failing to pray.

  I looked in the Psalms for a message, a warning, anything. Lord, you are the blah, blah, blah, and the sun and the moon and the blah, the Psalmist wrote.

  I kept riffling. I was going to find something meaningful in that goddamned Bible or drive my car into a river. I found myself staring at Psalm 102.

  For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth.

  My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread.

  By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.

  I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.

  It was the word pelican that got me. You don’t see pelicans in ancient literature very much. Owls, fine. But the freakish and ungainly pelican, he is not a prime-time bird. This bird, I felt, was me. Here I was, wandering the wilderness of my hopes and dreams, bones turned to ash, heart like dead Bermuda, so sad and lost I didn’t even want to eat bread, which is pretty sad.

  It’s funny, what makes you feel better. Because just like that, in a rush of air and words about a friendless, breadless, boneless aquatic bird, the bleak wilderness in which I’d been dying cracked open and I finally felt like maybe I remembered what I should do with my life.

  * * *

  I drove home from the bar in a blaze of joyous wonderment and found Lauren in the kitchen, returned from her double shift, clutching a plate of unheated leftovers comprised of a cold sweet potato and a biscuit.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said.

  It strikes me now, as I write, that I hardly knew this woman who stood before me, both of us young and poor and ignorant of what was to come. We’d been married for eight months. What I was about to tell her could end it all. It was the kind of announcement that breaks vulnerable little infant marriages right apart.

  I told her. I said, “I’ve been very sad.”

  She said, “I know.”

  “I am going to quit this job. I hate it so much.”

  She said, “I know you do.”

  And then I said it.

  I said, “I want to write a funny book. That is what I’m going to do.”

  I’d been too foolish and ignorant to see it before, I explained to Lauren, but I knew, yes, this was why I was born, of course, the thing I had been called to all along, as a boy who wrote song parodies about love and flatulence, a young man who did puppet healings and helped his classmates plagiarize, as a college student who read funny books and got so fired up with joy that my very organs felt illuminated, a young man who grew quiet and pensive and stared longingly at Eudora Welty’s window and wondered how I, too, could make a living just sitting in my bedroom all day. Eudora was up there in her bathrobe, I just knew it. I wanted that life, I told Lauren, there in the tiny kitchen. I wanted to write funny things for people to read and laugh and have their heads explode, and if I did, we could maybe have it all—a house, a family, a future, children, enduring happiness, all of us wearing our bathrobes, and all our organs illuminated, joyful and bright, until the end of days, amen.

  We would start over, hit reset, begin the game again if we had to. All I needed was her blessing. She stood there. I stood there.

  “Is this real?” she said.

  “It’s the realest thing that ever was,” I said.

  I was unsure what to do next. Should we fall into one another’s arms and weep out all the sadness and make love like otters?

  “Oh, okay,” she said, heating up her yam. “If that’s what you want to do.”

  This is what love looks like. Sometimes, it looks like a person saying, Oh, okay. Not getting weird, not interrogating, not having a conversation. Just saying, Okay, cool.

  Inside, maybe she was dying, too. Maybe she was privately, inwardly freaking out, that I was about to hurl everything into a crevasse, including our chances at economic stability, but her bearing countenanced only confidence and faith and belief that I knew what I was doing.

  That night, we made love like humans. We did this all night, or at least for several minutes, and then I lay there next to Lauren, considering how beautiful life can be. I was going to write a book. Would I become famous? Fame would be all right, I guessed. Tremendous wealth, also, is no crime. One could do much good with large stores of gold. Perhaps I would be one of the good famous people, kind to animals and the elderly. I would start a foundation and fund scholarships for the children of the non-famous. It was all very exciting.

  “Night, night,” Lauren said.

  “Night, night,” I said.

  I was twenty-eight years old when my seventh dream was born—the magical number, the holy number, jersey number of Jesus, quarterback of dreams. This was it. This was the one, manifest from fetal urge into something I could finally say out loud without feeling like a liar. A fool, maybe, but not a liar. I could look up into the sky and see this desire full and bright. There it was. Everything had been leading to this.

  “I will do it,” I said into the dark.

  “What?” she said, nearly asleep now, eyes closed.

  “Write a funny book,” I said.

  It was a beautiful little dream. I swaddled it in the blanket of my heart, kissed its soft froglike skin, smelled its beautiful dream-baby smell. This little dream was going to grow big and try to kill us all, but I had no idea.

  Act II

  THE ASS IN THE CHAIR

  Chapter 4

  The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.

  —DONALD BARTHELME

  THE DAY AFTER I HIT RESET ON MY GENERAL LIFE PLAN, I went to the bagel shop where I graded papers before class, only today, the papers could go eff themselves. I was now a Great American Writer and had an obligation to my vast imaginary readership to write a Great American Book.

&nb
sp; I opened the laptop. I would write a sentence. Something, like, insane. Something very imaginative. I would make it a story about a man, yes. A man. A white man, sad and fat. Like me! But wait, who was this sad, fat man? He needed a name. I couldn’t go writing stories with nameless characters. I wasn’t Kafka. But wait! Was I Kafka?

  What I needed were some names for all the people in my Great American Book. I obtained a phone book from the lady behind the counter and flipped through it for all the best names, and then I made up some of my own.

  Atwood Radishberry

  Linda Henbarley

  Dale Wagontrain

  Wagontrain was not a real last name, probably. But now it was, because I had just made it one. I’d already contributed to the evolution of American letters and the robust multifariousness of the English language. I was an artist. I felt so alive.

  It was now ten thirty in the morning. I had officially passed my first three hours as a Great American Novelist, in which I had created three character names, determined that I was probably not Kafka, and written nothing. Later, after a full day of teaching, I went to the library to see about my calling. What I needed was some help. How does one write a book, exactly?

  * * *

  The complexity of the dream had suddenly revealed itself to me, the numberless and variegated decisions that must be made to manifest even a single paragraph onto the hateful whiteness of the screen. I’d written paragraphs before, of course, but not these kinds of paragraphs. What was Dale Wagontrain’s job, for example? What in god’s name do his teeth look like? Has he had reasonable dental care? What in the hell is this story about? How much should people talk? Is Dale the narrator? What the eff kind of name is Dale, anyway? What is he, a tractor salesman? What did I know about the retail tractor business? Was I supposed to go interview a tractor salesman at the Oktibbeha County Co-Op for clues about an imaginary man’s imaginary interior life?