The Anecdote; or Why the Professional's Biographer Quit After Chapter 1

I remember my best friend from grade school. I remember meeting him that first day, him coming up to me in his glorious pudginess, me with my crayons trying like hell to color one thing, just one thing inside the lines (this, of course, long before white out made coloring much easier), and him asking me what my name was.
“Myer,” I said not even bothering to look up from my paper.
“Hey, that's cool. My name's Brian, too!”
At this point, I looked up.
We were friends ever since, and I never bothered to correct him, so he called me Brian ever since that first day. Brian was clumsy, pudgy, and extremely slow. Mentally, I mean. It was like his ring of fat inhibited all of his exterior actions as well as the interior ones. I mean, coloring was my hardest subject due to a lack of dexterity in my fingers, as proven by my equally inept attempt at learning to play piano, but outside of that, my intellect only suffered from the fact that teachers couldn't teach me enough. Brian, on the other hand, his worst subject was everything. While this constantly made conversations one-sided, especially when I became interested in things like black holes somewhere around the 4th grade, I still liked having him around. I guess it kind of felt good to have a lackey of my own.
Not that I treated him like a lackey, mind you. We were good friends, and I treated him that way. Even though he always called me Brian, even introduced me to his parents as Brian, and I still let it go unnoticed.
Brian and I were generally inseparable through our formative years, playing at recess together, sitting in desks right next to each other, passing notes about video games or the stupid fad where girls decided to change their names to such and such pop star that they idolized. We even toyed with the idea of being blood brothers. We spent a few afternoons sharpening sticks into knives to cut our hands with, but after a bit of reading, I got the impression that if we happened to be different blood types, we would catch diseases and die, so we decided against it.
But it soon came to my attention that, though I was tolerably popular with the other kids, poor Brian was socially retarded. He would do the strangest things to get attention and usually end up crossing some line you didn't think possible for an eight year old to cross. While in grade school, I could deal with my best friend being unpopular, even very disliked, but once we got to middle school it became impossible to handle. How could I continue being a likable social creature when my closest companion revolted all others? If I was going to, say, throw a party, most people, assuming that Brian would be there, would give some excuse as to why they could not attend. Instances like this became more frequent and more enraging until I finally decided to confront Brian to discuss this with him, the goal being to cut ties. It was the only answer I could find to solve my social problems.
To end the relationship.
I began the discussion with reminisces, quoting the age-old, “... we've been friends for a long time, now...” and finally broached the subject:
“Brian, I can't be your friend anymore if it is only going to keep me from making other friends,” I know it was tactless, but I've never really been one for tact. “Other people don't like you, and it's making me suffer socially. Basically, you're dragging me down with you, you see?”
I remember him shuddering and averting his eyes, his forehead soaked in perspiration, a look of mingled shock and sadness smeared across his chubby face. I remember when he looked down and to his left, and his curly hair shook with his jowl, and I felt a brief tinge of pity.
“But Brian...”
“My name's not Brian. It's Myer.”
At this point, he looked up.
“I know,” he said, and then he walked away sobbing to himself as he trudged down the corridor. “I knew all along,” I heard him say to himself.
For a long time I was confused about that. For years, I didn't know what he had meant when he had said that he knew my name was Myer. It was such an enigma to me. I wouldn't say it tortured me, but it did confuse me a great deal, and sometimes when I was alone, his voice would pop into my head, telling me he knew my real name the whole time, but still insisted on calling me Brian, and I would think about what he meant. I honestly didn't come to any conclusions regarding this mystery until after I had graduated from Dartmouth.
I figured maybe he was trying to impose his identity on me. Let me explain: By giving me his name, he was able to live vicariously through me. He was intelligent, well liked, attractive; through me he could be all of these things. I assumed that whenever he heard, “Great job, Myer!” or “Myer, do you want to be my boyfriend?”, or any of the things that happened throughout our grade school lives where I received some sort of attention, he heard his own name, subconsciously substituting it for mine. In this way, he was able to be who he wanted to be: Me.
I can only guess that losing that sole part of his identity that could do anything, that had a limitless future, losing this caused him to take his own life. His parents found him in the living room where we used to play video games, the television left on and blaring. He had stabbed himself repeatedly in the stomach with one of the wooden knives we had sharpened to make us blood brothers. The news said that he had apparently stabbed and cut himself until there was nothing left of his insides (well, maybe they said that, or possibly I romanticize the past).
After his funeral, which I dutifully attended, becoming the social creature I had wanted to be was a very easy task. No one avoided my parties, everyone wanted to be my friend. I've had a theory that Brian's death somewhat facilitated this, that possibly at first, people felt sorry for me. But any way it came about, I was given every opportunity to succeed in my life, socially, politically, and fiscally immediately after Brian was out of the picture, and I made those opportunities count.
Now, looking back on that tragedy, I think of all the Brian's in the world and smile down on them from my office overlooking the city. I smile because I know what makes them tick. I know who they are, and why they are. And I think about how I'll never have another friend like Brian. Read more...

The Room With The Projector

I gripped the baseball bat like a vice, but my palms were soaked with sweat. I knew that if I even swung it just hard enough, it would fly from my hands and soar away and I would be left defenseless, but this bat was all I had. It was all I could find. I only hoped it would be enough.
My friends, all three of them, had given me reassuring smiles and good luck pats and kisses, and that had built me up for the stairway down, but now, having descended into hell, those small reassurances melted away fast leaving me, and just me, to fight the devil. We had decided that it was better for one to explore the lower corridor, rather than all of us get killed trying to find a way out. If I found the exit, I'd hurry back, hoping I wouldn't get caught in transit and we'd leave. If I found death, I wouldn't come back, and they'd try another door. Four people, four doors, there was a good chance one of us would live.
I was praying that this way wasn't the way out. The red wallpaper and dim lights amplified the sense that I was delving into Hades itself, not to mention the portraits, all blotted out with black ink. Equal distances between each. All the way down the hallway. There were no doors but the one at the very end with some sort of picture on it that I couldn't make out until I got within a few feet: it was a poster from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, completely unblemished. Gene Wilder smiled down at me with all the wonderful secrets that hide inside his glorious factory, but also in his eyes, one could find the sinister lurking and working in his brain. Especially in this light. I remembered a line from the book: “No one ever goes in, and no one ever comes out...” This should have been enough of a hint to turn around and tell my friends that this was not the way out, but I persevered, hoping that I was wrong about what lie behind the door.
I reached down and touched the door knob. It was warm, and my sweaty hand slipped on the brass, but I grabbed it and turned it, pushing the door open.
The room that awaited me was cramped with clothes on one side of the room, but the other side was uncrowded. It was dimly lit, but only three of the walls were red here, one was white with black scribbles from a permanent marker. There was no door, but the most intriguing thing in the room was the presence of an old 16mm film projector on a table facing the white wall and a chair beside it. It was threaded with some sort of film.
I think it was more curiosity than a sense of duty that led me to the projector and sat me down in the chair. The bat still clutched in my hand on my lap, I flipped the switch on the projector and it began to heat up.
The light turned on and covered half the wall, but the first few frames were empty, allowing ample time to get started before the movie itself started. I don't know how long I sat there before an image appeared, but I knew that with the first frame of the film, I would never see my friends alive again. Hopefully, they were dead already. With any luck.
Frame by frame passed, the people in the film running. The stationary camera seeing all. The killer killing. The gore became so much that, to keep my sanity, I focused all of my attention on the clock at the back of the room. The room my friends were in. The room these people died in.
I watched the clock move inexorably, second by second. I couldn't tear my eyes away. The clock was the only thing I could truly comprehend in the scene. I watched it as the time passed from 11:40 to 11:55. There was no sound, but I knew these people had screamed. The camera didn't catch everything, but I knew I didn't want to know what it didn't see.
The clock reflected the camera, a silent partner to the hideous acts on film, honestly keeping time while the other recorded the details. They had no hearts, though with their turning gears and consistent clicking, one would think they did. These things had lied to us. They had seen things that they didn't tell us about. Staring at that clock, I wondered what every clock I'd ever glanced at had seen, what history it hid inside its bastard gears. Had the clock at the train station seen a rape? Maybe even several? Had my high school history class's clock witnessed drug abuse? Maybe Mr. Furley fingering a tenth grader who wanted an A? And still it kept time. I wondered what clocks had seen my own petty crimes. Punching someone to see them cry, underage drinking, hitting my girlfriend, then holding her down. They were nothing in comparison to what was being projected on the wall before me, but with my crimes and the killer's, the clock never stopped, or reacted in anyway. It just watched, unabashedly, almost gladly. I had never heard of such amoral nihilism. I hoped that the clock in the room had stopped. I prayed that my friends were dead already and not going through these atrocities. I prayed that the camera was broken. But the clock on the projector continued to tick, as though it saw no point in stopping.
At exactly 11:57 and 24 seconds, my concentration was broken as the room shifted like it was on some sort of horrible ride, but the clock stayed in the same spot. I soon caught on that the camera itself was moving, and that the clock was in the room I was sitting in. The killer, having finished with the poor kids, was moving the camera from its stationary spot to God knows where, but the clock remained, vigilantly counting down to midnight. Transfixed, I couldn't tear my eyes away. The room swung left then right as the killer stepped over the bodies which had so recently been alive. He tripped over one, and the rest of the frames where halfway gone where the film had shifted over. All the while, the clock blinked maliciously.
I watched the dots speed across the left hand side of the projection, struggling to fix itself. When it finally did, I saw clearly the familiar hallway I had just exited. The black portraits, the red walls, the light dripping down like blood from the ceiling. I watched in horror as the door at the end of the hallway floated towards me until it filled the whole screen, already open, a light flickering within. As the camera reached the door, I heard the click-click-click of 16mm film from behind me. I kept my eyes fixed on the clock as it and the projected clock lined up, reading the same time: 11:58 and 42 seconds. The precision and timing which the killer had used. The fact that somehow, it was always the same.
Before me, on the wall, was the back of someone's head, staring at another film. The camera stopped moving, and the killer walked in front of the screen, and I knew at that moment, as I dropped my head in defeat, that the man in the film was doing the same thing behind me.
And the clock would keep ticking as though nothing had ever happened. Read more...

The Rationality of Numbers

“Reason is immortal, all else mortal”
-Pythagoras

The student had been studying the problem for months, staring at the straight lines and the numbers until some epiphany would come and all would be well. He had well deteriorated in the past three months, seldom wasting his time with such luxuries as food, water, or sleep. No, none of that was important compared to the solution. There had to be a solution.

He had drawn and redrawn squares of different sizes, lines of different lengths and found that for some, the outcome was simple and straight forward, but for most he found that the outcome did not actually exist. It made no sense to him, nor anyone else in the Brotherhood, all confounded by this anomaly. Even the Master had spent weeks racking his brains. He had torn his robes, he had eaten sand, he had slammed his head against whatever hard, flat object was near, as they all did, but still the answer eluded them all.
Entering his fourth month on the problem, the Student found that the other Brothers had moved on to other problems to remove themselves from the tortuous unanswerable. They begged him to follow suit, but he refused. Triangles of different sizes and proportions littered his home and his mind, until his wife was compelled to return to her mother's home.
He continued recklessly and madly, seeking the solution that would bring him sanity. At times, the townspeople would hear him in the middle of the night mumbling incoherently in a ridiculous tone, at first just numbers, but soon devolving into a stream of babbling interspersed with insane laughter. The families nearby, worried for their children's sake, also moved away leaving him alone to consider the problem in his solitary madness.
He roamed about his abandoned corner of town, eating the leaves and bark from the trees and carving triangles into each oak in the neighborhood, until he finally became agoraphobic. Sealing himself in his home, he became obsessed with being clean and scrubbed himself raw with a sponge he had made before with some cork and some twigs from the tree in his yard. At first the twigs would break, but after a while, the jagged, little things became too small to break anymore.
One night, a thousand years after the problem began, he stared at the triangles for too long. They took a form before him, they took on a meaning which they had previously lost.
A dog barked outside, and whatever sanity remained within him snapped and was lost forever.
His mouth fell open, and tears welled in his eyes. His torn skin seemed to draw itself tighter about him, particularly about his decrepit face, but he felt cool everywhere. He stopped mumbling, scratching; he nearly stopped breathing. He believed that he had found the answer at last.

Three days later, he emerged from his abandoned corner of town and sought out his friends in the Brotherhood. They stood in awe of him, knowing that days before, he was a blithering maniac, but now he seemed so composed and in control of his senses. He was even smiling. His body was still worn with signs of the madness creeping through his intestines, still lacerated and strained, but his demeanor was that of a normal, healthy gentleman of his rightful age.
The Brothers were so excited to finally have him back from the edge of lunacy where he could converse and share his genuine insights with him once more that they immediately told the Master of the Student's apparent resurrection from his malady. The Master declared that they would sail on the Mediterranean that afternoon to celebrate his return. The Student was extremely pleased and eager to espouse what his madness had wrought: his epiphany and his terrible proof.

The sea was a deep blue that did not bother to reflect the sun as it set on the horizon. The land was flat and far away, along with the world. It became less of a certainty and more of an absurdity, which is why the Brotherhood often sailed for celebrations: to remove themselves from the absurdity of the less intelligent world. On the sea, they were free from the constraints placed on them by their dimwitted fellow man: while on land, they would be heralded as witches, but on this boat, they only heralded themselves, and they could identify however they saw fit.
The wine was passed around and their tongues loosened as ideas flowed freely like the water carrying the ship on the crests of its gentle waves. Finally the Student decided to unveil his epiphany, and his madness was laid bare for all.
With a knife, he drew a square on the deck of the boat, one unit by one unit. The Brothers gathered round, remembering the fateful problem that had driven him mad in the first place and whispering secret prayers that he would not fall away again, not now, not here. He drew the fated diagonal and pointed at one half of the square, the loathsome right triangle, and triumphantly shouted the incantation of the formula that each had come to know and hate, that each had felt a tinge of madness from studying:
“One square added to one square is equal to two. Now, what square alone also equals two?”
The question the Brothers hoped they would never hear again was once more uttered. They stared, some hopeful that this all-to-recent lunatic may have found the piece that connects all, that somehow while he wandered the back of his brain all those years, he had managed to unlock some treasure of unknown knowledge. Others were incredulous.
With a smile, the Student carved a strange symbol that looked like a lightening bolt piercing the number two. The most vulgar of the incredulous Brothers spoke up asking, “What the hell is that?” Still smiling, not even bothering to look up from his insane creation, he chuckled, more to himself than to anyone else, that it was, “an irrational two.”
His joke was not well received. He began scrawling more ridiculous characters into the deck, but the crowd that had gathered around was breaking and falling away, whispering about his remaining malady. Some reached out to touch him, their sympathy overwhelming them, but the Student paid no heed to them, but instead continued scratching his bizarre language and mumbling his babbling lunacy. Presently, a Brother happened to look down at the ramblings, and when he saw and understood, he cried out and fell backwards. He went into a cold sweat, breathing heavy breaths, and pointing at the scribblings, a look on his face of fright beyond fright.
The Master came forward to see what had so disturbed the young student and driven him to such a state so instantaneously. He crouched beside the Student and read over the absurd proof. The Brotherhood once again crowded around to observe.
On the deck, in a wild scrawl was the following:

√2 = m/n assume that m/n is a fraction in lowest terms
2 = m2/n2
m2 = 2n2 m must be a multiple of 2, call it 2q
4q2 = 2n2
2q2 = n2 n must be a multiple of 2 as well
The Student fiddled expectantly with his knife, waiting for someone to utter the inevitable statement. His breath hung on the air, waiting for some fool to say what everyone saw but dared not mention. He cut his hands wringing the sharp instrument, but he paid no mind. Soon, he thought, they will know that my madness was warranted, and my genius assured. Finally, after the sun hung just so for days, a Brother whispered the annotation that made all things clear:
“But... that's impossible. How can m/n be a fraction in lowest terms when both numbers must be divisible by two?”
“Exactly!” the Student shouted, leaping to his feet in wild exultation. “Only an irrational number would act that way, and so it is irrational! And this irrational number's square alone is equal to two!” He began to dance wildly about the boat, while the other Brothers simply stared at the deck in awe and horror. This madman, this lunatic, with his terrible proof had rent the world asunder. The goddamn fool, if numbers cannot be rational, then there is nothing on Earth that is.
This fear of the mystical “irrational number” gripped the Brotherhood one by one as they looked up from the proof and focused their eyes on the mental dwarf whose mind had wrought such foolishness. Locked in the mirth of his lunacy, he did not notice when their faces became stern, nor when they made the decision that he must die for entertaining the very idea that the world could be anything but rational. When they rushed him, he believed they were going to celebrate with him, but in an instant, they had thrown him off the side of the ship.
Only the Master remained behind to contemplate the proof, and as he heard the splash of the Student when he hit the water, he reached out with his cancerous hand and whispered to himself, “I never would have believed that the rationality of Numbers so closely mimics the rationality of Men had I not seen the proof with my own eyes.”
Read more...

The Inner Sanctum

I've always been fascinated by bathrooms.
I don't know what it is, but it's one of the creepiest (and thus, most hidden) things about me. I just like taking stock of what is behind the bathroom door. Public, private, domestic, foreign, it doesn't really matter. There's something interesting in each one, but also, each one is inherently and wonderfully different. Have you ever noticed that no two bathrooms are exactly the same? Sometimes they are reverse of each other, but never exactly the same. Perhaps this is where my slight eccentricity comes from.

I feel like, in order to justify myself, I must give an example (that's probably the only thing that will keep my audience with me), so here's a couple, “For Instances,” for you.
For instance:
Once,visiting a high school in some unthinkably small town in northwest Oklahoma, I came into a bright lime green room with tiled walls. The bathroom was nothing special unless you had to use it. At this point, one becomes acutely aware of the absence of one major requirement for privacy: a door. The stalls had no doors. Added to the already limited privacy of a public bathroom, with stall walls that cover, roughly, your strike zone (mid thigh to shoulder), the bathroom was both voyeuristic and frightening. I wondered how teachers could even use these bathrooms, since merely entering them while they were being used by anyone younger than eighteen would constitute a criminal sex offender charge. I wondered why, if one was trying hide from a bully, the school thought it was necessary to make the old “standing on the toilet and locking yourself in the stall” trick from The Fugitive impossible. They're going to get beaten up anyways, is it really necessary to take the sanctity of refuge from them? That's like making Anne Frank and her family hide out in the open, preferably in Hitler's front yard. I said a prayer for the poor kids and went my way.
Another time, on a popular state university's campus, I stumbled into a bathroom whose immediate qualities were heat and stagnant air. Interestingly, since the air conditioner was broken, explaining the heat, they had four fans set up seemingly at random about the room, causing an incessant hum to pervade the soul of the place. This was made all the more interesting by the fact that despite the fans best efforts, the air remained completely stationary, as though they had been placed exactly where they were for that specific purpose by some perfectly insane mathematical genius.
These little bits and pieces of atmosphere which crafted a bathroom of slight interest were immediately dwarfed when one reached the urinal and looked down: the bottom of the porcelain bowl looked astonishingly like the face of a Stormtrooper's mask in Star Wars: the drain in four vertical slits that mimicked their breathing holes, the roll of the bowl hinting at the existence of eye holes.
So, as I began to relieve myself, I was allowed a brief but wonderful fantasy wherein I was Han Solo, the only character with the audaciousness to even contemplate the wondrous feat I was committing, peeing straight into the face mask of one of Princess Leia's prison guards. Needless to say, this was one of my most edifying and memorable bathroom experiences.
But the real point I'm getting to is my most recent conquest, which will also live on in infamy in my mind: my first visit to a women's bathroom.
See, up until very recently, I had confined myself, out of good conscience and manners, to men's bathrooms alone. While this offered some breathtaking experiences such as that aforementioned, I presently became painfully aware that each bathroom has a counterpart which I was forced to forego on account of my sex. It was like deciding to see the world, but only being allowed to see Florida: while Florida is an interesting place, there's so much more to be seen.
So one evening, sitting alone in my room thinking the last paragraph (verbatim, give or take a few syllables), I came to the conclusion that I would obviate good manners and etiquette, and I would enter the forbidden women's bathroom the next day. For glory, for science. So, I staked one out on another popular university campus, a bathroom that was not often visited so I would not be caught, but I could take note of my surroundings without much worry. I found one secluded enough to my liking and waited for my opportunity.
The woman I saw go in finally came out, and now... it was my turn.
I casually glanced about me to check if the coast was clear. It was not, there was a twenty-something sitting at a nearby table studying. My reason said to wait until the coast was clear, but my gut wanted to enter that bathroom now! I figured if I just nonchalantly wandered into the bathroom as though I thought it was a men's bathroom... I got up and whistling with my hands in my pockets, sauntered toward the door like a cartoon character trying to go unnoticed. It had not previously occurred to me that this never works, the student obviously noticed me, but I had gone too far to turn back now. I continued my subtle sneak, opened the door, and entered.
To my complete and utter surprise, there were no toilets in this room, just a large couch and some coffee tables with some magazines strewn upon them. What the hell, I thought for sure I had come in a women's bathroom door... After some thought, I figured out exactly where I was: a waiting room.
A waiting room?! They had a waiting room?! Why can't they just wait outside? They need a special couch filled room just to wait to go into the bathroom? The fairer sex was becoming more confusing by the second.
As I began to open the next door, I wondered if this would be an actual bathroom, or another type of room in a long chain of chambers leading to the symbolic grail, like each room contained a secret trial to get to the next like in Indiana Jones (for some reason, Harrison Ford and bathrooms are apparently inexorably linked in my mind). But instead, I found the the room which I sought: the inner sanctum of the women's bathroom.
It was surprisingly boring. Read more...