Featured Fiction: Charles Baxter
Charles Baxter is the author of twelve books of fiction and three books of nonfiction.
He is retired and lives in Minneapolis.
An Introduction from John Fulton
Charles Baxter is a master of the short story and novel forms, but readers may be less familiar with his recent work in miniature or micro fiction. These pieces recall the very short work of Kafka, Lydia Davis, Borges, and Richard Brautigan but are entirely his own. They work like riddles that develop by posing problems and then seeming to give solutions that very quickly turn into questions—a mobius strip of questions that at once puzzle and clarify, obscure and illuminate. In these stories, IDs only blur our likeness while journals confuse mundane fact with fantasy until one becomes the other. Baxter shows us how the secret lives we live are so buried that we ourselves don’t know about them; trying to document who we are leads to the confusion of recognition. Scarily, he also shows us our own political moment. And while we think we’re reading about someone else entirely, we turn the corner of one of his sentences and see ourselves. There is pleasure here but also the uncanny experience of knowledge becoming ignorance. Enjoy!
Double Entry
A woman keeps two diaries. The first diary contains the small details of her daily life: her car’s dead battery, her strange co-worker in the payroll office and his almost inaudible humming that lasts most of the working day, her son’s progress through high school, including his part in the school’s musical, Les Miserables. She is married, not happily but not unhappily either, a condition she cannot define and that has no name. She loves her husband but . . . ? He loves her, too, in his distant, uncommunicative manner. One day while shopping she accidentally drops a glass container of soda, breaking it, and this event goes in the diary. The trouble with the stove’s oven goes into the diary. From time to time she notes the weather, particularly if the day is too hot during the summer and too cold during the winter. She sometimes has a pain in her arm, and that goes into the diary. She worries about politics and her husband’s health. The only trouble with this diary is that it’s really ordinary, and she can hardly bear to read it. It feels like a scarf she has knitted around nothing.
In the second diary, she writes down her private thoughts and imaginings: she details how, day by day, she has been swept away to one of the capitals of Europe by a powerful, mysterious man who is obsessed with her and loves her in a way no one else can, because no one else knows her as this man does. He can be coarse and rude, but she forgives him because he is so intuitive; some men are like that. In bed, she and he are like tigers, clawing their way to each other’s soul. In this diary she imagines starting a business, a consulting firm, that will teach public figures how to speak clearly and forcefully; she makes millions, and in this diary she budgets out the charities to whom she gives large sums. In this diary she offers fashion tips, notes how she has slimmed down at the gym and how her beauty has caused heads to turn. She writes down how she has given speeches to large audiences and how she is surrounded by people who want her autograph. She writes about her mansion, the landscaping of the grounds, the difficulties in retaining certain standards of excellence.
She manages to keep the two diaries separate for years. It is like double-entry bookkeeping.
But when she reaches the age of fifty, something happens. In the first diary, the one chronicling her daily life, she begins to describe a trip to Paris that she claims she has taken with a devoted friend. She describes the meals, the hotel, the shops, the compliments she receives on her perfect, beautiful French accent. There has been no such trip but on certain days she thinks maybe there was. In this diary she takes a lover—not a man, this time, but a woman who had heard her play a Chopin etude on the piano and fell in love with her. From this point on, she cannot write the diary of her daily life without weeping at all the wonderful events that she almost believes have happened to her. Her son has grown up without any trouble and has married and now he and his wife have two beautiful children. She herself has won a Rolls-Royce in a raffle. She has a podcast and an advice column. In this diary, she says she has moved to Barbados, a place more beautiful than Mankato, Minnesota, where, the first diary says, she actually lives. In this diary, the world’s climate has become normal, and countries are governed by wise old men and women.
One morning, however, she writes in the first diary that she herself has died, and now she has to write her own obituary. She drops the pen, closes the diary, and gets up to water the plants on the windowsill. Then she writes the obituary. It is one paragraph long, and quite brief. Then she burns both diaries, and no one notices or asks her about the ashes in the fireplace. But she herself has not noticed the ashes from the two diaries written by her husband, which he had burned a few days earlier, in the same fireplace.
In the Hospital
I went in for some minor tests. My back hurt, so they gave me an MRI. Then they said that the MRI showed a shadow near my lung. It was bright and dark at the same time, so they were puzzled, this team of MDs. They gave me a questionnaire, but they didn’t like the answers, so they asked me to draw the face of a clock showing that the time was ten minutes past eleven. A.M. or P.M.? I asked, but no one laughed. More frowns. Doctors hate jokiness. They don’t teach irony in med school. We’ll have to do surgery to see what that shadow is, they said, and, oh, by the way, please drink this radioactive syrup. So I did. I did everything they asked me to do; I was compliant. When I came out of surgery, I was tied to the bed in the recovery room, wrists and ankles. Do you have any relatives? they asked me. Because we’re going to have to institutionalize you. They told me my body was a big enigma and that recovery would require baby steps. Then it was all about Sign here and Sign this. I signed everything once they took off the cuffs. Thank God for insurance. I’m in a room now with bars on the windows. You’d think I’d be unhappy, but the truth is, I really like it. They take care of me here. I wish they ran the country the way they run this place.
Real I.D.
For Pua
First we said that the name on her birth certificate didn’t match the name on her driver’s license: two letters were missing and where did they go? Nowhere. Into thin air. The name on the birth certificate also didn’t exactly match the name on the marriage license, and her face on the driver’s license didn’t quite match the way she looked now, what with the curly hair she had on the picture that was now unaccountably straight, or vice versa, and we noticed that the voice didn’t match, either—the perky voice she seemed to have yesterday at the DMV versus the voice she had today—one of them sounded enthusiastic about us and the other one didn’t. When we asked her about whom she loved, the person she mentioned was not the person we have listed in our records back there in the filing cabinet or on Google, and we certainly won’t show you those records, because she thinks the meaning of life is not what we think it is, and what she thinks may be subversive and actionable, and it’s just possible that the Grand Jury is considering her beliefs, because, what with the terrorists and all, those terrorists disguised as servers at Dairy Queen, etc., you can’t be too careful. We don’t feel safe and possibly we never will feel safe, with all those people with their odd names walking around everywhere, disguised as us. So: no ID for you, or for her, or for anyone else who is not identical to us.
That Thing
There was always that thing. You could name it, but you didn’t want to, because when you named it, it reappeared. To comfort you, they marshaled their clichés. Time heals all wounds. You’ll get over that thing. How can you get over it if you think about it every day, when you’re washing the dishes or feeding the dog? It’s like a large black box in the room of your mind, and you must walk around it: that box, that wound, the mostly immovable thing that’s trying to define your life. You look at it but sometimes find yourself living inside it. If it can’t define your life, it would settle for being everywhere in your life, like a lover. They—the counsellors—want you to talk about it. But you have talked about it. That’s how you know that talking about it won’t help. The black box doesn’t move because of talk. What will move the black box, which looks like it’s bolted to the floor? They have drugs. You can buy their drugs. The drugs, which are supposed to help, make the black box harder to see. Some of the drugs decorate the black box with flowers and smiley faces. When the flowers wilt, the black box is still there, wearing its smiley face. Tears will not cause the black box to dissolve. That has been proved. What about love? No one loves a black box, and the black box won’t love you back, though some of them have been known to rust. In a few cases, the black box has disappeared for no reason at all. That thing, a black-box house that you’ve lived with, is now suddenly gone. A miracle! But like all miracles, this miracle has a cost. Where will you live now that it’s been removed? In what enclosure will you take shelter? Can you let the pain fall to the ground and let the ocean waves wash it away?