The World is Square

Though this is a somewhat older piece, I always had an affinity for it. Structurally it's rather bizarre, and thematically it's all over the place, but I think I managed to do what I wanted with it.

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The world was square. How or why or just when it had stopped being a circle and become a square, nobody knew for certain. Some of them pointed out that the world was not a "square," was, in fact, a "cube," but all of the people who said things like that were squares anyway. Now, changes in the world were normal parts of life (after all, you couldn't seriously expect it would always rain or always be sunny, nor that the world would be perpetually flooded or in drought), but, even so, this was a rather major change by anybody's calculations.

Despite the revolutionary nature of this particular change, most people took it in stride. So the world was square, so what? Bills continued to be paid and the utilities continued to run. If the world had decided it wanted to be a square, that was an issue for the philosophers to debate or the scientists to study. For most people, it was just another hassle. For instance, the maps had to be slightly redrawn to accommodate what before this would have been geographical absurdities, and all of the spinning globes had to be recalled and spinning cubes issued in their place. Some people even had to cross from one of the six faces of the earth to another one on their way to work. This had to be done very slowly, however, to ensure that you didn't jettison yourself into the exosphere and fall off the face of the earth. Gravity was still in effect, naturally, no matter what shape the earth became. Cube, sphere, pyramid, it really didn't matter. The only problem was that gravity was very weak along the edges, and seemed to only really work on the six faces.

So Jim, having just read about this in the morning papers, sat in the middle of his living room with a blank look and an empty head as though he was either a lobotomy patient or in shock. It wasn't that Jim was a moron or that his face was inexpressive, because both of those things were completely untrue. Jim was actually very intelligent and rather proud of what intellectual powers he possessed, although there was certainly a great deal of people with prettier and more elastic faces than his. Jim had woken up to find that the earth was square, and this was naturally somewhat disconcerting to him (but not earth-shattering as the saying went).

He had gotten up with his hair standing stiff and straight up on the right side of his head from accumulated stress, dirt, and the molding effects of sleep, pulled on a bathrobe that had been a Christmas present from his much richer friend, and staggered outside to grab his paper and the mail, which he had neglected to bring in the previous night. This done, he sat down on the floor with the white envelopes smelling of glue and opened them. It was because of this unforeseeable mistake that he sat on the floor with the empty head and blank look.

The first letter was from Harvard Law School to which he had applied several months earlier, only a little while before completing his undergraduate studies at Stanford and graduating near the top of his class.

To Mr. Jim Finnick,

We regret to inform you that your application to Harvard Law School has been denied.

etc.

Sincerely,
[Illegible photocopied scrawl]
Dean of Admissions

This was a tad bit disappointing. He had higher hopes from the next one on which he set his sights. Perhaps a check.

Dear Mr. Jim Finnick,

You're fired.

Sincerely,
Jackson & Dale

P.S. Please return the fifty dollars you stole from the cash register last week. Don't make us involve the authorities.

They did not include a check. The next one was bound to hold some good news, however, and so he opened it with the hopes of three letters riding on one.

Dear Jimmy,

I've made up my mind. I am not going to marry you. Last night I agreed to marry Sierra, who gives me things you can't even begin to dream of. If you wonder why I left you, it's because you're pudgy and a boring conversationalist. Find a gym and a hobby in that order.

Love,
Mary

P.S. I'm keeping the ring.

Jim set this on top of the others and turned to the fourth one, now absolutely certain that there would be nothing but bad news. What else could go wrong, after all? And yet, the next envelope was from The Late Show inviting him to come work for David Letterman. In his excitement, it took him a moment or so to realize that the letter was not actually addressed to him. So he turned to the last bit of mail, noticing that it was a single piece of paper rather than another envelope of dread news. Probably an advertising flyer, he thought.

Eviction Notice.

Jim let it fall into the pile of all the other opened mail. That was it. Then he read the papers and learned that the US had political infighting, the Middle East had terrorism, China had lead, and, of course, the earth was square. For a long time afterward he couldn't really bring himself to think about any of it, but after a while he could concentrate on the fact that the earth was square. Whether he could only think of the squareness of the earth because it was most distant from him or because he now no longer had the petty problems of everyday life clouding his judgment Jim wasn't sure. What he was certain of was that the earth's nearly-overnight geological upheaval would have to be dealt with. So Jim made up his mind to contact some of his former professors and see what the earth's new shape implied.

Jim took a shower, got dressed, climbed into his car, and drove off. The car broke down three blocks from his house. A quarter of a mile and forty-two minutes later, Jim was on a city transit bus slowly heading to his destination.

It took a while, but at last he was in the office of his old professor of economics. Jim asked the man what the sudden change in the earth's shape portended. His professor replied:

"It's hard to say, you know. Moving across faces of the earth has to be done carefully anymore so you don't fall off the edge of the world. I suppose trade and commerce are going to be more or less confined to each particular side. The world'll probably divide up into six squares of influence, and a major economic power will come to dominate each one. Military expeditions will probably become very difficult affairs between faces, so ultimately we just have to hope each face regulates itself.

"Unfortunately, the southern states are on one square and the northern stares are in another, so it'll be anyone's guess whether or not the United States makes it through this whole thing intact or if we'll be seeing a resurgent Confederacy. At least California's in the same square as D.C. Without them this place would collapse in Roman-style bisexual orgies and our power plants would fail. Of course, both of those are half-true already.

"But if you'll excuse me, this isn't too terribly important at the moment. I have to go birthday shopping for an aunt and then I have to get my daughter a new pacifier. She managed to eat most of the last one. My son suggested we stick balsa wood in her face, but he's the one that let his boa constrictor loose in the house last week. It tried to eat the cat, you know. I think I told you about that. Now his snake is dead, the cat's at the vet getting broken bits of fang removed from its hind leg, and my son wants to have it put to sleep for murdering that grotesque, slithering reptile. So many things to worry about and there just aren't enough hours in the day. Good-bye."

Jim thanked his former instructor, and with that the professor was summarily gone.

His curiosity was not satisfied, however, and so he went to his psychology professor. It took him a while to find the man, however, because the professor had slept late that morning and only recently arrived. Jim asked his professor what the widespread effects of the earth becoming square were likely to be. His professor replied:

"Well, it's hard to say, isn't it? Everybody's different after all. I think it's safe to say the more developed nations will react more calmly and rationally than the rest of the world. Except perhaps for the Germans, but that place is like one giant psych ward anyway, so as long as they don't take out their deep-seated sense of inadequacy on the Jews or some other poor ethnic minority, we'll all be fine.

"Hmmm... As I see it, there will probably be a number of religious interpretations as to the significance of this event, though you know I sincerely doubt that God has anything whatsoever to do with all this mess. There will probably be a lot of grief caused by this geological metamorphosis, so to speak. My, another German reference. Or Czech, rather. It's just that I have a very bright German student in class this semester. Very bright indeed. She's a stunner...

"Anyway, people will be divided from those they know and loved, some on one face of the world, some on another. It's a rather tragic situation. But if you'll excuse me, I have a class to teach and a date to get ready for afterwards. Good luck with Harvard Law, I hope you get in."

With that he was gone. Jim still wasn't satisfied (was, in fact, more dissatisfied than ever), and so he sought out the professor at the school of engineering and put the same questions to him that he had to the other two. The professor replied:

"Obviously we'll be building tunnels now, probably all along the edges of the world, to connect our face with the other faces. That's going to take a while though, and it'll be disorienting for people who end up using it. What are you gonna do, right? But tunnels are exciting."

After this, the engineering professor apologized, but he was about to be late for a meeting. With a hasty good-bye, he made his rapid exit.

Distraught by how everyone was not only unaware of his own problems but blithely ignored what had happened to the world, Jim wandered around campus for a long time trying to think of what to do. It occurred to him that he could write his local congressman, but he was unsure of whether or not the federal government could actually deal with the problems of an entire planet. He was not a history major.

He shook his head and, feeling at once resigned and rebellious in equal measure, went off to Ace Hardware to purchase a shovel.

Fiction: Atvar Flashes You

Hello, boys and girls. Today I will be starting a new segment. You see, as I've said, I'm an obsessive writer, and I expend most of my energy working on fiction. From here on out, I will be posting occasional snippets of my work to the Accounts. For your enjoyment, of course, all...erm...one of you... In any case, here it is.

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The story of John J.'s life came out to mixed reviews. The most positive called it an “unspectacular if admirable endeavor which minimally achieves its purpose” - whatever that meant. Most critics, however, were not nearly as kind. One of their number wrote: “That any person could have the audacity to call what this man experienced a life simply astonishes me.”

It wasn't that John J. had been deviant or otherwise abhorrent in any way – at least no more so than any other human male since the advent of the internet – quite the contrary. John J. himself was actually surprised and distressed to learn that most people didn't like his life very much.

Of all the controversy that his life stirred up (some critics faulted his “excessive contentment” and found his propensity for happiness “dull and contrived”; others appreciated his “sunny optimism” but chided him for “going absolutely nowhere with it”) the one part that no one complained about was his birth. The father was an alcoholic and the family hovered just above the mire of abject poverty. Who didn't love an underdog story?

And after that, as the poet said, the dark. John J.'s childhood games were “far too cutesy,” his friends were “insipid, cookie-cutter human beings, half-baked and mass-produced,” and his first crush on little Jessica Parker was “sickeningly saccharine with a dash of deranged stalker thrown in for good measure.” John J.'s attackers demanded to know if he had orchestrated his life in such a way (which one Amazon.com reviewer labeled “more mindless than a daytime soap and even dumber than Seinfeld”) as to insinuate himself with the middle classes and pose as an “everyman.” His defenders, when they could be found, pointed out that John J. was middle class and thus had no need whatsoever to pretend.

The review of his life in the New York Times further questioned the veracity of John J.'s claim to have learned the English language at only nine months, but witnesses were eventually secured who could verify it. The controversies and doubts filled page seven, which is as close to the front page of that publication as John J. ever got. The apology and official retraction came in the form of a couple of lines of fine print crudely inserted between the Classifieds and the Obituaries.

John J.'s adolescence received much the same treatment. Although some critics found his chaste high school years “sweet and refreshing,” most hammered him for being “a caricature of Victorian morality that doesn't see the joke.” These same people deemed John J.'s first pseudo-intimacy with a woman at the age of twenty-three “utterly ludicrous.”

Virtually no reviewer could find a single redeeming quality in John J.'s wife – to John J.'s deep dismay – who, as it happened, was only the second woman with whom he had been intimate, and the question resounded across the internet: “how the fuck could anyone want to bone this woman?” John J. lost much sleep over this.

The birth of his first child was universally agreed to be moving, but, when the second one was born, people said that it “seems like John J. is just rehashing old material in an obvious ploy to artificially manipulate the emotions of the public and conceal the directionless floundering that permeates every moment of his life.”

Even his graduation from law school summa cum laude only elicited yawns. All he did was sit out in the sun for a number of hours, step up to the podium, receive his diploma, and leave with a rather nasty sunburn. He wasn't the valedictorian, and the person who was seemed incapable of delivering anything more than platitudes. One review labeled this an “unsatisfying and predictable conclusion to a meandering arc.”

They found his sometime use of pornography “sordid,” though it was hardly any spicier than a mild taco. They called him a hypocrite for committing tax fraud while lecturing his daughters on the importance of honesty. They laughed (or cringed) at the haiku and bits of free verse he sometimes wrote in the evenings when he'd had a couple glasses of wine. They hated his life for its emotionally discordant tones; they hated that it was a dissonant thematic mess; they hated its defiance of all laws of convention and its failure to take any clear direction after breaking them. But the thing they hated most of all was that it had no detectable rhythm, no conscious pacing, no sense of dramatic control. It was, in a word, crap. The sheer volume of slow creatures copulating to which the critics compared it (sloths, slugs, turtles, barnacles, pollen-bearing plants, etc.) would have filled a small book on its own.

Jack Steward of the Tetra-Weekly Show even devoted one relatively experimental segment to John J. The comedian-cum-cultural icon simply sat at his desk for a full minute, absolutely silent, staring at the camera, while drool and flecks of foam accumulated at the corners of his mouth. When that minute was up, he blinked, frowned in a his trademark depressing way, and said, “Now I know what it's like to be John J.” Before anyone had time to respond, Steward pulled out a gun and mimed committing suicide. It was his highest rated show of the month.

The most eminent of professional critics, Reginald Eggbert, putting the capstone on general public opinion, ended his review thus: “Unless you are personally invested in Mr. J., there is nothing emotionally gripping about his existence at all. It just sits there, sort of like a still life, except you get to watch the fungus and the mold and the maggots all have their way with it for nigh on half a century. And all the while, the man who supposedly owns it sits and stares blithely at what is, by the end, a big bowl of festering rot. Fungus soup. Decay soufflé. You would think people would have the modesty not to put their petty failures on display to be publicly humiliated. You would think that, but then you would be wrong. I shudder to think of what kind of person will be born tomorrow.” He gave John J.'s life one and a half stars.

After the popular critics had their crack at John J., it was the academics' turn. The deconstructionists hardly even bothered to acknowledge John J.'s life, dismissing it as “so obviously meaningless that it hardly merits a sustained analysis.” Other scholarly types were impressed that, for once, the descendants of Derrida made sense.

The realists loved John J.'s “simple earnestness.” They said this made him more relatable, and they used phrases like “common clay” and “salt of the earth” a lot. Not all of the realists were quite as impressed with his lack of aesthetic taste, however. One English grad student following in the realist tradition wrote on his blog, “His [John J.'s] capacity for interior decorating sort of reminds you of Weyoun and the Vorta. lol hai guyz, wut iz blew?”

Meanwhile, the New Critics tried desperately to detach something from John J.'s life which they could criticize, but this proved futile and they ended by instead pretending they'd never heard of him.

A very minute number of (neo-)modernists tried to carry John J.'s banner. They found his life a “brilliant piece of existence, worthy of a foremost spot in the history of man” and lamented, melodramatically and at length, the ignorance and smallness of the masses. This severely confused some of the Marxists, who wanted to defend John J.'s life as instructive of the contemporary class struggle (since John J. was a graduate of Columbia Law School devoting most of his time to the poor and thus had much contact with the waste of the capitalist system), but they didn't want to associate themselves with anything that could be linked to elitism. Fortunately for them, the modernists' contention rested on the idea that John J. was living a conventional life to achieve an unconventional effect, and this idea would ultimately not hold water. They were convinced that John J. was a very ironic human being and was being boring, as it were, sarcastically. The postmodernists, (to the public indistinct from the modernists in every way except for their vehement disagreement) disagreed.

The modernists pointed to a key event on day 8,830 of John J.'s life where he had come home and fixed himself a tuna and cucumber sandwich. Not a tuna sandwich with pickle, a tuna sandwich with cucumber. He had done this just to see what the difference was. They found this an exceedingly inspired move on his part, at once an acerbic criticism both of the concept of normalcy and of the shallow, timid “individualism” of contemporary American society. They lauded his subtlety and extolled his wit.

The Marxists, on the other hand, found this episode very distressing because all of John J. 's pickles were imported luxury pickles. The postmodernists argued that there was a religio-socio-politico-economic backlash against pickles and the cucumber represented nothing more than John J.'s acceptance of postcolonial realities. The New Critics sharply rebuked the postmodernists for turning to “outside” explanations for the cucumber, the realists rejoiced in the cucumber and its wonderful "naturalness," and even the psychoanalytic schools got in on things by asking if the cucumber was really just a cucumber. This outraged the feminists, who rebuked John J. on various grounds, few of them having anything to do with vegetables or even meals – strictly and non-euphemistically speaking – at all.

While the Marxists and the modernists and the postmodernists and the New Critics and the realists and the psychoanalysts and the feminists all badgered each other over the cucumber, a very bored assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Washington took the time to write a short article, the thesis of which was that John J.'s life was not at all ironic and the cucumber episode was both inane and irrelevant. It was universally acclaimed, and the anti-John J. crowd rejoiced. Amid the triumphant crowing of the postmodernists (whose position on John J.'s significance nobody could say for certain, not even themselves) the modernists quickly abandoned him.

John J. would have been much more upset by all this if the academics had had an audience large enough to require more than a single sack of potatoes to feed.

Thus, by the time all the reviews were in – and they arrived in a noticeably swift manner – the critics had achieved a consensus: John J. was a second-rate publicist and a twelfth-rate human being. All of this was, of course, emotionally devastating. When he had finished crying copious if bland tears of disappointment, John J. vowed to get a better life.

The critics never reviewed John J.’s tears, though. They never took any significant interest in anything about him once they had handed in their assignments early, never worried much about how specific their criticisms were or what would happen to the content of their complaints after the editors had their way with the criticisms’ form.

For John J., none of the details of the critics’ scheduling mattered. What did matter was fixing his life. There were, however, a few difficulties inherent in pursuing that course of action. The first was that, though John J. had always craved recognition, he liked his life as it was. He liked his legal practice which was devoted to aiding the disadvantaged. He liked his wife and the lazily harmonious love they had shared for twenty-seven years. He also liked his two young daughters. Yet people found his lawyering boring, his wife more boring, his daughters more boring still, and he the most boring of all for being content with it. One wit remarked: “You can't even call John J. the King of Mediocrity, because 'king' implies someone exceptional.” John J.'s mediocrity was not greater in quality than that of other people, it was simply more all-encompassing. It wasn't a ranking, the wit argued, it was a condition – like impetigo.

John J. pondered how best to go about crafting his new life. He considered modeling it on certain conventional genres such as horror, adventure, and lesbian erotica. Still, John J. kept coming back to what it seemed most people wanted. He was convinced that, although he was not spectacular, he could at least become a spectacle. It was the only way his life could ever be well-received.

After much thought, John J. decided on a plan. He knew what he had to do, and he threw himself into it with a passion. So the story goes, anyway. It’s somewhat difficult to reconstruct a precise chronology of events, but certain evidence, both documentary and anecdotal, does remain.

There is, for instance, a complaint on file which refers to strange auditory and olfactory emanations originating from John J.’s home. This complaint was lodged between seven and ten months after the last review of John J.’s life hit the stands. A local marriage counselor also claims to have seen John J. and Mrs. J. for several sessions, though he says the couple were going nowhere (because, try as they might to develop genuine issues, being content simply came more easily to them). Several doctors remember keeping John J. in the hospital for a few weeks after some kind of traumatic accident. John J. was even, apparently, charged several times with public indecency. There are also a few receipts from Home Depot; Marcus’s Tequila, Gin, and Ammo; and Jack’s Big Barn of Firestarting Supplies.

Sadly, no one quite knows how all this fits together. You see, no one is sure how or even if John J. did change his life, because no one paid him another ounce of attention, and he died some years later in destitution.