The Life of an Unknown Man

Short Story for https://substack.com/@mattstoller

1

The Bebop News

It was Cambridge, but it wasn’t. No towers to academia. No ginormous classrooms to pseudo-metamorphosis-philosophy. It was like there was Oxford, the town, and Oxford, the University.

And still, Matt was self-conscious. In crossing the street he was taller than tall, with an exclamation point. He walked through the budding leaves on the trees, wishing he could have a sap as sweet as the sugar maple. But he knew inside if you did not see the sap in the room, it was probably you. Time to tap in a heel toe heel toe, especially on the heel to his face. He got to a mud puddle and saw his golden blonde face. On anyone else, it would be handsome, but he did not feel handsome. More precisely, he felt the opposite in almost every way. He was too gangly and had no prospects for a girlfriend as a result. The memes were against him on every television he saw. Matt, he told himself, you need a better meme. He wanted to be understood most of all, and he thought that the best way was to have a multitude of eyeballs fixed upon him.

He approached the house that doubled as the place where the new medium was going to take flight. And probably crash without a trace. It was the story of an unknown man, which in this case meant him.

As of the stairs two people, in Oxford cloth shirts, were working already at the large table in what used to be the living room. One was the white-haired man who wanted to get back in the game and the other one was, like himself, someone who wanted desperately to sink one’s teeth into a new medium: he was until recently very Old School. The newspaper was dead, and everybody knew it. what was not apparent was what could replace it. there were several ideas including magazines on the wire. But something needed to be immediate, and Matt could see that it needed to have humor and connection, which is something that it did not otherwise have. And the humor was Matt’s forte.

He slid through the front door kept the briefest “hi” that had ever been recorded and set up his laptop to get started on launching their new website. He didn’t like the title “blog” but those were the brakes - after all, he wanted to live. Living was the only game in town. However, his father disagreed and thought that commodities were a better bet. He danced under the table bop news swaying shuffle and immediately thought about how far he had come. Which is to say precisely nowhere, yet.

And yet, it was showtime and he more to be the ringleader of the spectacle.

But he flipped open the laptop and started his basic programs. His browser loaded about 25 different sites, all blogs, on the left and the right. He paused to get the blogspeak vocabulary running. It was different and the same as newspeak. Different because it was more flippant with less reportage tone of voice.

It was his opinion that picking fights with people who were on the same side as you was a good idea. This is because you agreed but you could disagree by basically agreeing. This was the power of memes: they were divided by uniting. Then he looked at the other side and saw that a particular article in the preeminent blog was gaining a huge amount of attention.

He immediately started to type. This was going to be good. He looked up and saw that the other people were writing. He just had to be more intense because he wanted to be a blogstar in the firmament. He looked up at the bookshelves and wondered whether Chekhov snarked and snatched ideas from the headlines.

Then he simply asked the Éminence Grise what was on today’s agenda.

EG – “ I am still sorting out the kerfuffle that you decided to use a different software than one of my friends has written.” Kerfuffle - that was something that nobody raised in really dot com aged used.

At this point, his Old School companion piped up: “That is my fault, but his software is not good enough for running the blog as it stands.” He then took the hard computerese look that often won him the argument without actually saying what was better and what was worse. “I’ll point out that we got some national coverage.”

Matt had to admit that the page was good. But he moved the attention back to people, not things. So, Matt piped up: “The writer just wants to get in on the game.”

OS: “Pointers welcome. So, what are you going to write for your 11 AM slot?”

Matt looked off into the distance and confidently said: “I have a plan to get traffic. What are you going to do?”

OS: “Get some links from our side by placing comments that will lead back to our site.”

Matt: “Sounds like grunt work.”

The OG just leaned forward and extended his arms beneath his elbows in a chimpanzee style.

Then added for emphasis: “Ping, Ping, Ping.”

Matt: “Pong right back at you. I am going to take on not the subject but the talking about the subject. I think there is a problem.”

OS: “ I used to play Pong. Do you think that this plan of yours will work?”

Matt: “It gets back to my mantra: praise conflict. Sometimes it is not what people say but the way they are saying it in a group which is the real topic. It is the hooting that hollers. It is a sneeze splatter disguised as discourse.”

OS: “Hyped up by the power of intertoobs. Go and run with it.”

Matt: “To be honest I thought that this style of talking about things went out with high school. IE the old school.”

The other two looked blankly back at him. Matt kept staring and finally, both of the others had to say something.

OS: “When you write, go with the idea that no one else is reading. Because no one else is.”

Then the EG piped up: “You don’t know what you thought until you read what you wrote.”

And at this point that was tearing in two his keyboard like there was no tomorrow. Because certainly there wasn’t today. Money was tight in an era where some people got it easy.

By 1 o’clock the comments were pouring in, good, and bad, and the “quibbling chorus” who managed to hold both sides at once. But it was a huge flood, to their minds massive in its dimensions, and all of it had Matt’s name. Yesterday he was nobody, today he was starting to be somebody. And that is the kind of meme he liked.

It was partially true: he didn’t know what he thought until he had read the comments on what he had written. What blogging did was it presented new words for a new age but that moment was cleaning. But he looked at be comments again.

The eyes were focused on him.

2

Walking Down the Aisle (with a gutless noose)

An annulo of boars’ heads would be more interesting than this. Unfortunately, he had no salami. Just a goliath of a project that might turn out to be a book. Or just a big exercise in econosplianing. It is like having to tell people that he was from New York, only in the neighborhood of Miami, sometimes gets a laugh and sometimes he looks into the face of his conversant's eye and realizes there was no converse in reverse. Because in Matt’s mind, Miami was New York on permanent vacation. With deck chairs on the fishing boats substituting for executive tables in high suites. You just had to learn how to walk this way, because Miami had a different style of ambulating. Or you could say New York was Miami trapped in an elevator. Same difference: in another place you were going to the bottom in spades or going to the top in hearts.

He looked out the window, scratching his Oxford cloth sleeve, and for a moment he could imagine being at school and he was working on a paper at Widener stacks. The only difference is that when he was in college the ratio of thinking to reading was entirely different. Because after all, you didn’t really need to know what you were talking about for writing a paper. He could see the trees towering higher than they ought to be in this were a real town next to a real city. But he was in the Harvard Yard with grass spewing from the manholes. And on those trees were bluejays and ants. Caw! Caw! Caw! He didn’t like to think about how much his a profession resembled the blue jay especially when trying to warn the dance that things were not going so well versus the postwar economy.

He looked out again, to the leaves which were lush green right now but would be a cascade of yellow and orange in only a few weeks. Then came the period where the overloaded became undersleep. And the panic came for some of them. The noose comes for thee. And if you take biology the are moose at the Harvard Forest.

He looked down, at the ground, turkeys were disappearing in and out of the hedgerows. But what he saw in this look out the window was a more social object than a physical object: inside this square of grass, there was something very much the case to a secular sort of religion that was imbibed during his time here. Along with a metric fuckload of just slightly better than the cheapest beer available. He heard that the upperclassman placed Sam Adams after their foyer into Fourier’s in the science building. But he had an allergic reaction to anything resembling differential or integral, so he did not know. He looked down at the words of the current book he was looking at and realized that the symbols may have been in the Latin alphabet, the language only marginally resembled formal English. In the Latin text, there was Greek, which was mathematics in drag.

Then in the mid-morning light, he saw a woman, a shapely woman, a shapely put-together woman, and he knew that she had to have at least some sliver of intellect. He wondered if there was some way to get out of researching and go off searching. Probably not. That the Red Sox never won a title until they had a profusion in their locker: he knew that he had to get through this phase of his career and impress the woman, note “the.” He could not help watching the young woman flit across the asphalt campus between the on unmowed lawns. For a moment he basked in the fantasy.

Then sat back and wondered what it would take to get one’s published book inside these hallowed walls. He would think of a bride, but humor did not carry the same weight in Harvard as it did on Capitol Hill. In Washington, he just gathered quips and laughs and everything would go the way he wanted it to. Unless you get mean. He had to have the gift that James Buchanan had when to know when to the fangs away.

He looked rightwards inside and finally saw the stacks: row upon row of in the aluminum shows and then walls. Organized by type with doors between sections and curved around so that you could see below several students studying firmly. And he understood that these collections were just a barrier to ideas. But only get ideas our submitted to other people who also cracked the spine. It was precisely a club that you could join or a seal of approval and you could leave these stacks to their musty tomb. He decided at that point that once he had finished the book he would go to in place where people lived. Because beyond anything else, you wanted to live.

He realized that he was not getting anything done in Widener, and tried to make up his mind whether he should go to Tatte, which was the successor to Au Bon Pain only three steps upwards, in quality and price; or showed he to go to Bartleby’s and stuff his available orifices would the burgers that they were so justly famous for.

Then he stopped. He was in the engine's weight to the yard, behind him was the lush patina of learning. A headed was the bustle of Crass Ave. He could go to the left and choose the fat of Bartleby’s, but since he was skinny he could afford a splurge, to the right he would then arrive at Tatte’s. It was no difficulty to look inside his stomach and see whether the needed crammed or merely satiation. But what would she do?

He turned to the left.

Through the arbor that hucked the xeroxes that advertised the intellectual subwares of the Harvard life. Plus, in some cases, the elixir of alcohol was top of the list for the people who flocked to that sort of gathering. But he you that she wasn’t one of all those types. He had that Old School sense.

Once he was through the doorway of Tatte, immediately scanned for the woman with the black hair that more than caught his his fancy. He smelled the croissants with their buttery bouquet of freshness, but they did not interest him. He could smell the coffee from regions unknown steaming, but that did not interest him. He was looking for a floral scent that he imagined that the young woman would wear. And on his did one his next inhale he knew that she was over in the corner. Then he saw her face.

One of his core advantages is that he could stride, with a bound, past group of people engaging in trivial conversation.

But when he got up to her she looked up and she said: “Do I know you?” She pursued him up and down but was unimpressed by his Brooks Brothers attire. She even sniffed as if to say it was much too early 1800’s.

And he did not have anything to say. The pink lips were poised and her Far Eastern cheeks were high on her face as if she was ready to dismiss him.

After one look out the window at the towering edifice of Widener, he could only stare transfixed, as if he or a frosh learning his way through the curriculum, and again as many gut classes as he could. Then he tried a joke got went immediately flat. He was double-plus Dane bramaged, in a newspeak loss of vocaubulary syntax. But it did not matter. His eyes were fixed like a link.

The eyes were focused on hers.

3

 The Beginning of an Unknown Life

This is Washington, not the state but the state of mind.

And right now, Matt was in a particular state of mind, that of being just barely, not a father. He wandered around be National Mall and looked at the Washington Monument. Looking at the trees that probably murmured to themselves that there was another one and he doesn’t know what he is in for.

And he probably admitted that was so. When he had first met his wife, so long ago, everything was a different kind of new. One where the humor and somber mixed so together so easily. Then he spied a couple, a word that used to connote a weakness and the man to him. It too was only at that point that he truly looked very carefully at careful air slow stroll. He realized that he was about to be part of the baby carriage set, hand bound to bar and chain for the next few years. And what disgusted him the most was that they were in kind of peace, and he desired it more than anything he could imagine. Repulsive. And just simply not fair. Why couldn’t humans live forever rather than to reproduce in such a random collage?

Then he her the phone. And it was a particular way which said to him: abandon all hope ye who enter here. And he became like a zombie following be rituals to take his wife to great another being into the world. And he knew that the first thing it would do was cry, and that would be a perpetual refrain from there on in. In the back of his mind, there was a chant: She has broken. She has broken.

Once they were up in the in the OB/GYN, the first step was triage. It had an unfeminine ring to it. The hope was that he did not find out that this activity was condemned to failure before it had begun.

There was a counter chant from his wife: I don’t want any more pain relief than is truly necessary. When he looked around, he saw that the nurse said yes but her hands said We shall see. The hands were dubious. They examined her with the kind of professionalism that he didn’t see in bank regulation or financial transactions. More’s the pity.

Then in the delivery room for about one hour in his wife was delirious and she begged for anything to these the trauma and the agony.

The rest was all repeated signals that showed the baby was in fact healthy and doing well. However, it also to take a very, very, very, very, long time. And all he could do was watch as the spectacle moved forward.

And then the moment of birth happened so suddenly that Matt was almost unaware. There were a few things that needed to be done but he could see that the professionals were on top of their game. The wife motioned to him to look at their first child. He looked at the face, and there were some tears and a mixture of features from both in a distant Kaleidoscope. There was a welling up inside of Matt.

The baby looked upwards self-consciously as if its fate was going to be decided.

He remembered that he first felt the kind of glimmering in his soul that he did now.

The eyes were focused on him.