A story about shame and forgiveness

I started this draft on the date listed, but it is now June 3, and I've been removed from it for some time. Rather than keep waiting on it I've decided to just post it as is and come back to it later.


A man stands on a street corner. He is wearing what remains of a suit, leather shoes, tie--what remains after being subjected to the elements for too long. He hasn't had anything that could be considered a real meal in days. He calls out to passersby with a quiet desperation, as if he's afraid that they'll actually hear him but needs them to hear him all the same. "I have something--something I need to say," he whisper-calls to him. "Can I tell you my story? Will you listen?" He reaches out to touch a man's coat sleeve as he goes by--the man flinches away instinctively and doesn't give it a second thought as he rushes along. The city has tuned out people like him. He isn't homeless, far from it. The first week or two he was out here his wife came by every day, pleading with him to look at himself, to stop acting like a nut, and to come home. She stopped coming after awhile, having given up. He used to be in charge at a major corporation, but they wouldn't take him back, now. It starts to rain. He scrunches his face up in frustration and stamps his foot in the growing puddle. "Someone, please!" A woman walking by just then stops, thrusts her hand into her purse and brings it back up with a couple scrunched up bills. "Here," she said, shaking rain water off of her bangs, "you can have this." He shook his head at her, "But I just need to tell somebody--" "Go inside and buy some food. Someone cares about you," she said firmly and, pressing the damp dollar bills into his hand, continued on her way, leaving him with the money he didn't need and the secret that he couldn't get rid of.

Reaching her apartment building, she fumbled with her keys in the downpour but finally made it inside. Five different meows greeted her from the five stray cats she now called her family. After wringing out her wet hair she split a large can of food among them and flopped down onto her sofa and turned on the television. After flipping through the six channels she got and determining that nothing good was on TV, she turned it off. She would watch a movie but she was taping Wheel Of Fortune for her older upstairs her neighbor who couldn't figure out how to use a VCR. She went back into the kitchen but failed to find anything edible except for a couple individually wrapped slices of cheese, the heels of a loaf of Wonderbread, and a few cans of Miller. Dave would want to eat this stuff when he came over later, if he came over later, so she left everything where it was and decided to order pizza. She would order a large so that she could take it to work for lunch tomorrow, assuming Dave didn't eat all the leftovers and that she'd find time for lunch. She worked the early shift at a hospital cleaning floors. She spent her whole day, every day, serving people, helping people, sacrificing her own comfort so that other could be happy. It was a necessary sacrifice, and perhaps one day she would feel like she'd made up for what had happened. As Tiger rubbed against her calf, she picked up the phone and dialed for pizza.

"One large olive, thin crust, got it. That'll be $13.07, it'll be there in thirty minutes." Order taken, the pizza was made, baked, packed, and sent out with three others. The car he drove had a lit up sign on the stop advertising their pizza and the fact that if he's delivering these pizzas, he can deliver one to you, too. The wipers did their synchronized parallel dance, doing little to keep the torrent at bay and his vision clear. Gloomy, rainy night--perfect night for some metal on the radio. He turned up the volume and nodded his head in rhythm to the song as he drove on through the storm. A commercial came on the station and he reached down to switch to another one. His hand missed the dial, and he turned to look down and find it. Just as he brought his head back up he noticed the car directly in front of him was stopped. Though he breaked immediately, in the rain it wasn't good enough, and the delivery car plowed right into the stopped vehicle. Much to his dismay, his first thought was not to the safety of the passengers of the other vehicle but that he wasn't going be to able to make this delivery and would probably lose his job. He began to cry.

The Empty Museum

(First draft.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, come one, come all
I've got something here you've just got to see
Gentleman and Ladies, heed my call:
A museum, that is positively Empty.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, I said Empty. An Empty Museum.

"Empty?" you say, "What is there to see in an empty museum?"

What indeed, my friends. What indeed. That it is Empty is key--for only something that is Empty has room to hold all of the Nothing that is there.

You heard me correctly, ladies and gentlemen! You'll find Nothing in the Empty Museum! Room after room, there is Nothing to see. Never before have you seen so much nothing in your lives!

We have No paintings, No sculptures, No historical artifacts of any kind--there is simply isn't room for them, with all of the Nothing inside!

"But nothing is...nothing!" you cry, "how can nothing fill a museum?"

You are astute, madame, that "nothing is nothing," as you put it, but tautologies never helped anyone understand anything (much less nothing!). For what Nothing is, is Everything that is not Something, and believe me, ladies and gentlemen, that is QUITE a lot.

"Alright, alright," you say, "you've peaked my interest. What do I have to pay to visit this empty museum?"

Why, it costs you Nothing! After all, it's only fair. However, should you feel so inclined as to Empty your pockets while you're there, Nobody, and I mean Nobody, will stop you.

Moments of amusement

This is a little pre-emptive since the course is not yet over, but here are some phrases that have passed through my ethics prof's lips during lecture that delighted me:

people are not just really bad parrots

Kant was really a huge science fiction geek

The Passion is an Arameic horror film

apparently Kant was a riot, and in certain respects kind of creepy

2700 boxes of books

I have three brothers: Joachim, So-and-so, and me!

nonesense on stilts

the tango-dancing epistemologist

[From Gary Watson:] Why should we care about living distinctively human lives rather than living like pigs or gangsters?


Here are some phrases from my Fiction and the Moral Life notebook as well:

Time eats its children (11 but not the 12th)

the Marquis de Sade should have been allowed to watch TV and that's all

a big book about nothing!

Ideas for stories

• a mysterious hallway
• a man who wants nothing more than to become a traitor to his country but who cannot because he is just a nobody who has no important information, access, or skills

If I want to write about ethics, I'm going to need to start inventing tragedies.

Belief

(I thought of this a couple weeks ago. It needs work, but this is the basic concept.)

When you go to the theatre to see a play, something special happens.

Something special has to happen because when you’re there you know that it’s all just pretend, that those are just sets, those people are just actors with separate lives, and the situations are just made up, and it is all just a performance. But something allows you to forget all of it, for the span of that performance, so that the story and events therein can really come alive.

Sure, it helps if the actors are good. It helps if the scenery is convincing, or at least beautiful. It helps if the script is compelling, and honest.

There is this beautiful idea, though, that the power of transformation is really in the hands of the audience. All those other things help, but they mean nothing if, in the audience’s critical, powerful eyes, the stage if just filled with wood, cloth, people, and words. There is magic in the audience’s gaze capable of bringing whole new worlds to life before them, like magic.

It’s a very nice idea. But it isn’t true.

It isn’t far from the truth, but the assignment of agency isn’t right. The power does not belong to the audience, and it isn’t really magic. The truth isn’t so nice.

Beneath the stage, in the dark, there are people. Well, I don’t know if you can call them people, anymore.

They’re really more like what’s left of people, when the body is gone. I don’t mean like memories that the living retain, but rather, that part of a person that makes him or her, him or her. Call it a soul, call it imagination—it’s the part of a person that believes in things.

Except the bodies are still there, just withered. Their flesh is pale from existing only in the dark, and their eyes are dead. Just the bare essential nutrients are pumped in intravenously, to maintain the firing of neural pathways, the only function of these beings, anymore.

Wires and cables emerge from their scalps like Gorgons’ hair, trailing off into the dark recesses of the cavern beneath the stage, channeling the power of belief from their minds and into—

They believe. And because they believe, you can believe in something that you know to be a pantomime. Sacrifices must be made for the sake of art.