by Kidd, Chip
And rebuilding. I’ve learned from the best.
The two great teachers in my life: Winter, who taught me who I could be, and Milgram, who taught me who I really was.
And that is a problem of locomotive proportion. By far the hardest I’d ever been assigned.
And now what? Now, finally, after so many missteps; I will meet the train. I will solve it.
The only way I can. You see, I figured it out—the best way to survive an on-coming train is to leap onto it the second before it hits you. If you do it just right, you can make it. Even Tarzan did it once, believe it or not, this one time he—
“I know that look.” The bartender’s voice, a finger-snap to my face. “It’s a girl. It’s always a girl.”
“Vodka,” I managed. “Neat.” Asshole.
“But I’ll tell ya something, I mean it. If she walked in this bar, right now, do you know what you’d do?” He reached for a bottle, a shotglass. “No matter how much she hurt you, no matter what happened, if she asked your forgiveness, you’d give it.”
“Please—”
“Because here’s the truth:” I. Hate. You.
“When it comes down to it,” he smiled with a self-appointed, ten-cent, seen-it-all authority, “hey, everything’s forgivable, right?”
A QUESTION THAT BEGS YET ANOTHER BRIEF
TYPOGRAPHIC DIGRESSION.
Typography can do a lot, but it has its limits like everything else. Words, too. Sometimes you feel something so profoundly and yet so strangely that it defies description. No way of expressing it is right. And yet, because you need to tell someone, to show someone, you have to try.
What if you feel it this way,
FORGIVE ME.
But you feel it this way, too?
Forgive me.
And when you try and say it like this,
Forgive me.
It comes out like this:
Forgive me.
So what is the lesson here? Maybe it’s impossible to articulate, and that’s the lesson. Or maybe this time there just isn’t one.
“Right, sport?”
Or if there is, it could simply be that at crucial moments in one’s life, bartenders should just shut the fuck up.
With hands that wanted to strangle him, I downed the shot and put two bits on the bar. With feet that wanted to kick his throat, I strode out. Down the walkway. To the platform.
Right on schedule. There it was. Weird: the great and terrible train; now that it was here—finally here, hissing epic shrieks of black impatience—I wasn’t scared of it anymore. I was ready to enter it, resigned. Even grateful.
Here we go.
And so I did.
With less than an hour till the end of the trip, I brought out my own schedule: yes, it was time. Time to implement the plan. I rose from my compartment, walked to the bathroom at the end of the car, locked the door behind me.
A mirror above the fetid sink. Turning my head, I brought myself to look at me for the first time in what seemed like months, at my ears, with their little wonder-flaps.
Don’t fail me now.
Extracting the amber bottle from my vest pocket, I unscrewed the cap, emptied it into my hand.
Thank you, Tip. You’ve given me so much, you really have. The tablets shone like stars in the universe of my palm—blasted out of orbit, on their way to another galaxy.
They are enough for what I need. It says so, in a little warning, right there on the bottle itself.
Cue the flask of Seagram’s. Then it occured to me, on the cusp of my finality, that I shouldn’t take them all at once. Better done in segments, like chapters. With the first gulp of six, it’s Before. The second, During. The third, After. The fourth…After That.
And it struck me, as the last of them went down, how easy it is to accept that once something is swallowed, it no longer exists—whether it’s an excuse or an execution order.
DURADREAM HELPS YOU SEE THE NIGHT
And so now they didn’t.
You had the right idea, Hims, but the wrong technique, the bum luck. Like always. And now, I am stealing your idea. But I’m making it foolproof this time. It’s not what it appears to be. This is how it will go:
The pills consumed, I return to my seat. We reach my stop. The conductor taps my shoulder, I slump. An ambulance is hastily called, my parents notified. There will be worry, then relief. My stomach will be pumped, the crisis averted. And then I will wake up. And I will have my life back. The horrible freight will have been unloaded and taken to be burned. I will be twenty-two again, instead of a hundred.
And I will start over, go back to the firm, I will heal things with Tip. I will be forgiven. I will go on to do great things. The right things this time. I will have learned and proven: The solution needs to be as devastating as the problem.
So that’s the plan. It is obscene in its self-indulgence and narcissism and I’m not proud of it.
But it will actually work, for me. And I will survive it.
And on my way back to my seat on the largely deserted car, it occurs to me: Himillsy, did you have Darwin’s tubercles? Funny, but as often as I gazed longingly at your glorious head, years ago, months ago,
…I can’t remember.
SIGNING OFF.
CONTENT AS SINCERITY.
Oh! Is it that time already? And we’ve only just scratched the surface (to use a metaphor). But we have no control over these things, do we? And so, I thought I’d end tonight’s program in my most earnest guise, Sincerity.
There really isn’t much to say. This is me, Content, in my most basic, uncomplicated form. I simply am what I say I am, with nothing to hide and no other agenda.
Okay, I’ll admit: I can be a bore. I am your driver’s license. I am a price tag, a phonebook, a lease, a road map, a will.
But…I’m also a construction paper birthday card, scrawled in crayon with hysterical devotion by a child who actually loves you. I am the dead mouse lying faceup on your welcome mat, left just for you, by Mittens, your cat.
I am the Constitution of the United States.
And don’t forget, when I am angry, I am this:
“HAVE YOU NO DECENCY, SIR?”
Please, please, don’t confuse me with Deception or Irony or Metaphor or anything else. If you can learn to recognize me, and accept me, then you’ve learned a great deal indeed.
Well, I’ll be saying good night now. I hope you’ve enjoyed our brief time together, and if you only remember one thing this evening, I sincerely hope it’s this:
What it all boils down to, what only ever really matters the most when it comes to Content, is Intent.
And I mean that.
With all my heart.
“Which leads us to now. Right now.” I am actually saying it out loud, in our compartment, to the man across from me, our knees avoiding each other like the wrong ends of magnets. My seatmate: a greasy, corpulent slob in a skintight pinstripe suit and a dingy pink broadcloth shirt dotted with stains. Asleep. As if rendered helpless by some sort of virulent cheese poisoning. I have been telling all of this to him, everything, because he was someone I could tell it to and pretend he was listening. It helped me stay calm. But that was all in the past. And now it is now, almost the end of the trip. I can’t think about the past anymore.
I am erasing it. I cannot fail. God, this is finally starting to feel…good?
Ten more minutes go by.
And now the train…screeches to a halt. No platform outside, pitch black. In the middle of nowhere. What’s going on?
An announcement over the public-address system: “We’re being held here by the dispatcher, waiting for the northbound train to pass. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
Dear God.
Not now. Get moving. Moving moving moving.
Ten more minutes evaporate. Twenty. I search frantically for the conductor. Nowhere in sight.
The PA cackles again:“We’re sorry, passengers, there seems to be a mechanical problem at the trac
k switch. Please be patient.”
Nonononono.
And then the truth, the real truth, springs open like a Venus flytrap—I’d thought that I was leaving them: Sketch, Tip, Himillsy. Winter. Milgram. Mom and Dad. Leaving them.
But I’m not.
The trap closes shut, the air thins, and now I understand: It’s not that at all, it’s the opposite—they’re leaving me. That’s what’s happening. And I suddenly can’t bear it. How can they, how CAN they? Don’t leave me, please.
Good-bye.
“Huhh-ummf.” Jumbo is stirring. Shaking his big bulbous head with a snort. Like the bloated dirtpig he is. He could never, ever understand this loss. He is immune to human understanding.
Get this train moving, for the love of God. I’m dying. I can’t die here. Not part of the plan.
He grabs the paper bag next to him and unfurls the crumpled lip, hauling out a bulging submarine sandwich a good foot and a half long. He pokes at least a third of it into his piggy maw. And chomps. Chewing, in broad, barnyard fashion.
What an omnivorous swine. God, how I hate him. Hate what he is—the gluttony of the world. He is Man at his worst, exactly the kind of scum Milgram is lifting the rock to expose.
Don’t stare, don’t stare. I do anyway—it is like watching a boa constrictor unhinging its jaw and devouring a toddler. Then, it all just stops, completely this time: the hoagie suspended in front of him, he is not moving anymore. As if someone just took the key out of his back. What the piss is going on?
He gapes at me, full in the face, his hoggy hole full and dilated with a horrid muck of wet bread and mangled cold cuts. The smell is nauseating.
Now he’s trying to tell me something.
“Ack.”
“Hmmm?”
“Ack.” No, not trying to say something. No.
He is choking.
Choking on the sandwich.
Turning blue.
No. Don’t leave me. Please. Pleez.
Puleeze. I tri to stan. Stand. Oh.
It’s hard. Haaarrrrrrd.
Ooooh.
Da drugz. Da drugz arr wurking doo faszt. Doo faszt.
Nooooo. Nodd now. Nodd now! Gedd upp gedd upp! Eye halve do helb him.
Heel dye.
Vall. Eye vall ondo thuh vloor. No gedd up. Heez joking. Joking!
Breed. Eye muz breed. Breed deeeeeeeb.
Eye bull mi-zelf ubb. Pleez, pleeze. Eye maig mi arm muve. Yez. Eye bull id ubb and pudd mi fingas doun hiz throde. All da whey doun.
Id duzzunt wurg. Dammid!!
Zo eye hawl ovv annd zlapp im onda baag! Az hart az eye can!!
Hee jurggs annd jurggs. Pulleeze.
Eye zlap im ah-ggen!
Annd. Yez!!
Wee vall do thuh vloor ann hee heevez, hee…vom-eddz all ova mee.
And I vom-edd all ova him. Da bills. Dey arr beeyoudifool.
Hee iz shaygging annd shaygging. Annd breeding. Breeding.
Dadd fadd sunuvabidge izz BREEDING!
Annd eye um…Habby.
Eye um HABBY. AH-GGEN!!
.
for
J. D. McClatchy
THANK YOU
Colin Harrison
Sarah McGrath
Amanda Urban
Dave Eggers
Joan Brennan
David Rakoff
Charles Burns
Julie Lasky
Tim Young
Debbie Millman
Dan Frank
Michael Bierut
The Bogliasco Foundation
John Fulbrook
Chris Ware
Author’s Note
While this is indeed a work of fiction, all details regarding Professor Stanley Milgram’s 1961 “obedience” experiments are historically accurate (including all of the language in the recruitment ad), based on Milgram’s own published accounts and repeated viewings by the author of his documentary film footage of the procedure.
A mere twenty-seven years old when he conceived the idea, Milgram was scoffed at by his colleagues in the psychology department of Yale University after they read his proposal. They predicted that only one-tenth of one percent of the subjects would deliver the highest level of shocks. The results, after nearly a year of study: Over sixty percent of the hundreds of test subjects administered the full 450 volts.
The obedience project brought Milgram nearly instant worldwide fame; but ironically, it also may have led to his undoing. He was denied tenure at Yale and then Harvard, largely based on accusations that the experiments themselves were unethical and put their participants through undue emotional stress. Legislation was soon introduced that would render conducting such an experiment impossible today. Milgram (who also originated the theory of “six degrees of separation”) eventually became a tenured professor of social psychology at the City University of New York. He died of a heart attack, in 1984, at the age of fifty-one.