Hannah Smart
THE DETRIMENT OF DOUBT
“Hello, I’d like to report a fire at the Gerry’s Pizza off West Ninth Street.”
“Okay, and your name, sir?”
“Gerry Parker.”
“Could you describe the situation?”
“I am seated in the restaurant parking lot about twenty feet from the double-paned glass door customers use to enter the building. The flames have moved through the restaurant and are threatening to enter the liminal buffer space between the two sets of doors leading to the outside and inside of the restaurant, respectively—the area where guests wipe off their boots and queue to be seated on particularly busy days. The flames are licking the inside doors. I am sitting on the curb, smoking a cigarette within a safe distance.”
“Anyone in the restaurant?”
“Part of me wishes Rebecca were in there.”
“But no one is?”
“Long history with Rebecca. You wouldn’t want to hear it.”
“I certainly don’t. So the restaurant is totally devoid of people?”
“Roger that. I’m the owner. I was working late, cleaning up. We closed at nine. I figure not much to do at home, since—”
“Do you know how the fire started?”
“Since I don’t have anyone to come home to, I mean.”
“Sure. So how did the fire start?”
“You know, it was the weirdest thing. Sorry. Let me light another cigarette real fast.”
“I’d really like to get the full scoop as soon as possible.”
“There we go. Sorry. I smoke when I’m nervous. I have the thing going now—should be smooth sailing for the next few minutes. What was the question again?”
“How did the fire start?”
“Well, I was in the back of the restaurant with my little Gerry’s Pizza apron on, scrubbing out some fry baskets with a trusty piece of steel wool. Sometimes you need to break out the steel wool to really get all the little greebles of fried gunk out of the delicate metal webbing.”
“And then what?”
“I heard a great sound from the inventory closet. Like the universe itself had just let one rip.”
“And did you go check on it?”
“Not immediately. I assumed something had simply fallen down—a large stack of frozen pizzas, perhaps—and planned to get to it at my earliest convenience. The flames have moved into the liminal space now. They’ll likely begin licking the outer door soon.”
“Which is why I’m trying to make haste. At what point did you become aware that there was a fire?”
“Why do you need all this information?”
“I’m sitting in my office taking notes, sir. We’ll be dispatching somebody momentarily.”
“Well, so I was thinking about my wife. Ex-wife, I mean.”
“Rebecca?”
“And how I was probably responsible for the divorce. She wanted kids; I didn’t. I enjoyed our mutual solitude. She thought I was a loser for this. You know how it goes.”
“Don’t I.”
“That’s the cliché part. But the non-cliché part is that I was realizing I didn’t really like being alone—the comfortable aloneness I’d felt with her was not real existential aloneness. I hadn’t felt real, unadulterated aloneness in twelve years. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be truly, inescapably alone with only your own thoughts rattling around in your brain twenty-four seven. I needed someone to talk to, desperately. I missed her. I loved—well, I love her . . . still.”
“But you wish she’d die in a fire?”
“No. Where’d you—”
“You said earlier that you wish Rebecca would die in a fire.”
“Rebecca, not my wife. Rebecca is this annoying employee of mine. She’s always got her phone out on the job, texting some ne’er-do-well boyfriend named Blaze. She burned two whole pizzas once—almost set the place on fire, come to think of it—and when I confronted her about it, she cried.”
“But she didn’t start this fire?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“Why unfortunately?”
“Because it would mean she was still in the building when the fire happened.”
“Right. So how did the fire happen?”
“I kept scrubbing for a bit. There was this one really difficult spot, I remember—a piece of fried shit just absolutely wedged in there like no one’s business. Then I heard a horrific whirring sound, as if spacetime itself were on crack cocaine.”
“And then?”
“Sorry. Just lighting another cig. It’s cold out here, and the moon is barely a crescent. I’m relying on the cigs for warmth, light, and stress relief, at this point.”
“And then?”
“Well, and then I went to open the door of the inventory closet, of course, and that turned out to be a mistake. Do you think I made a mistake with my wife?”
“Not really my place to say.”
“Because this one time, yeah, a friend of ours was throwing my wife a surprise birthday party for her fortieth. And I figured, well, what’s the point? But the friend really wanted me there at her house to jump out from behind a couch and yell ‘surprise!’ or whatever—juvenile stuff, right? Like, are grown adults who’ve been preoccupied with suspicious tasks all day and then led into a room blindfolded really taken aback when it turns out the room they’ve been led into is a surprise birthday party? Stop and smell the breadcrumbs. It’s all a collective fiction—the whole charade of having had the rug pulled out from under you. And I . . . this is going to sound stupid.”
“What?”
“Well, at around the time I was supposed to head out for the party, I was embroiled in a really heavy losing streak of online chess. You know how it goes.”
“Sure.”
“The way one loss makes you flustered, and you have to, like, counterbalance the negative energy of the universe, so you play again, but because you’re flustered this time, you lose again. And now it’s getting really dire. You’re two matches in the hole. You can’t quit while you’re ahead because there is no such thing as ‘quitting while you’re ahead.’ But doubling down could mean landing yourself in even deeper doodoo. You might win. You might pull yourself out. But pulling yourself out becomes harder with every subsequent loss. You need to win three games to recoup two losses. If you lose a third, you now must win four. At what point does it stop?”
“I, uh, don’t know.”
“After forty-three doomed games, I finally looked at the clock and realized that I was not only late for my wife’s ‘surprise’ party but had completely missed it. She’d be on her way home by now, and I’d need a plausible excuse for why I wasn’t there.”
“How recent was this? I mean—what am I doing? What happened after you opened the door?”
“I think that was the last straw, really. The divorce papers were presented to me the next week. My wife didn’t even have the gall to do it—got some snooty lawyer to do it for her, which I don’t even want to think about the fees involved there.”
“Did you ever try talking to her about it?”
“She never wanted to, I don’t think. Have you ever had anything like that happen to you before?”
“Have I ever ditched my spouse’s surprise party to play online chess?”
“Not that, necessarily. But come on. Do you have a husband or anything? Have you ever hurt him? Or—since you’re kind of on the other side of it—has he ever hurt you?”
“This conversation isn’t really about me, nor is it about your divorce.”
“God, I’d like to murder Rebecca.”
“Back on Rebecca again?”
“After my divorce, Rebecca went and made it all about her.”
“By talking about her divorce, you mean?”
“Exactly. Well, not hers so much as her parents’. People are always acting as a parental divorce is the most traumatic possible occurrence one can live through. My parents got divorced, and I survived. Didn’t even think about it, really—I was in college when it happened. Got two Christmases the next three years. It’s nothing compared to the pain of losing someone yourself. My parents’ shit—I knew that had nothing to do with me. But this? I’m agonizing over where I could have possibly gone wrong. Like, was it really the surprise party chess debacle? Rebecca hasn’t even been divorced, for Pete’s sake. She hasn’t even been married. Isn’t that something?”
“Sure is. Anyway, back to the door.”
“I have a confession to make.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not really smoking. You think I’m on like my third cigarette, but really, I don’t even have my cigarettes with me. I could sure use one. I don’t know why I said I was smoking. I think I just needed an excuse for the natural pauses in my speech, and it felt like you were rushing my story.”
“Okay. That’s fine. The fire, though.”
“Of course. So I opened the closet door, and there was an intense crackling sound as the flame spread across the floor. The crackling was like if the entire quantum realm had simultaneously decided to host a sponsored, micro-NFL match in the world’s smallest but most populous stadium.”
“And then?”
“I ran for it, I guess. Ran outside.”
“Any clue as to what caused it?”
“I thought it was the chess thing, but I’m starting to think maybe that wasn’t really it.”
“The fire, I mean.”
“I think I’m difficult to be around. ‘Self-obsessed,’ as my ex-wife put it. Though perhaps she was just looking for a way out. I don’t think I’m self-obsessed. I’ve never been able to look at myself in the mirror for very long—have always thought I look kind of boring and standard-issue. And my job? Nothing to write home about. My ability to string words together into aesthetically pleasing sentences? Subpar—I’m always falling back on the same stock phrases and tired similes. And my chess skills—well, what does a forty-three-game losing streak tell you about those? If anything, I’m self-dissatisfied. That should be a psych term, don’t you think?”
“Uh, sure.”
“The real thing I think did it was that—that—so my wife’s a songwriter. And this . . . we were already on the outs by this point, I think. She had a friend whose husband just walked out on her. Completely up and walked out, leaving behind their five-year-old son, and my wife wrote him a song to help him cope. The son, I mean.”
“This story sounds vaguely familiar.”
“Anyway, I heard the song and I loved it. I wanted to help with it. You know, I play a bit of guitar and harmonica here and there and thought I might add some tasty licks to the recording. She was all ears. She thought I was doing this incredibly selfless thing and had, like, transcended my self-obsession and finally completed the larval stage of emotionally stunted adult male development and was absolutely jumping out of my skin at the opportunity to comfort this little boy in a fully selfless and non-transactional way. So my wife produces the song, and I go, ‘Thank you for writing this song for me.’ I thought it was for me, see. I thought she was trying to apologize for the fact that things weren’t going well between us. That’s the real reason I was so into it. I hadn’t remembered anything she’d told me about the little kid or his deadbeat dad. I thought this was, like, our reconciliation song.”
“I . . . ”
“And can you really blame me? Anyway, she got real mad when I told her who I thought the song was about. She was like, ‘That is just like you, Gerry, always thinking everything is about you.’ Was I wrong to assume it was about me?”
“I’m not sure. Look, do you have any idea what caused the fire in your restaurant, sir?”
“No, ma’am. I sure hope I don’t lose any money over this. The divorce fees are already stripping me raw. Luckily, I have a pretty good insurance plan.”
“What’s the status of the flame now?”
“Just about out of the building. You sending anyone or what?”
“They’re on their way, sir.”
“They’re on their way as in you’ve already sent them?”
“I’ve told the dispatchers to gear up.”
“So they’re not on the road yet, right?”
“Should be on the road once we have all the information we need.”
“You have more than enough information, I would think. I’ve gone and spilled my guts to you. It’s only fair you tell me something about yourself.”
“I didn’t ask you to spill your guts, sir.”
“In the interest of balance, I mean.”
“I don’t know. You didn’t like it much when Rebecca—”
“Rebecca is an insolent sixteen-year-old, and you’re, from what I can tell, a mature and confident woman who—”
“Wait, Rebecca is sixteen?”
“Yeah. Probably part of the reason she hasn’t been divorced yet. But I don’t even know your name, for Chrissake. Tell me something comparable. Assure me I’m not alone in this cruel existence.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Just let me think of something.”
“Tell me when you got it.”
“Okay. Got it. So when I was about twelve, I had a friend staying over at my house. I can’t remember all the details, but she was really getting on my nerves. My family had a pool out back, but it was October and fifty degrees outside and cloudy in that gross damp way that makes you feel like you’re in the world’s coldest sauna, so there was a tarp covering it, and I was a pretty adept swimmer, but I knew my friend couldn’t swim all that fast or competently. I also knew, and here’s where I feel the most guilt, that she looked up to me. We were the same age, but she had a follower-type mentality I thought was pathetic at the time but now realize is just the preteen’s way of establishing a core sense of identity.”
“Get on with it.”
“Right. So we go outside to the pool, and I strip off my clothes and ask her whether she’d like to see a trick. She says ‘Of course,’ so I peel back a bit of tarp at one corner of the pool, take a deep breath, plunge into the icy water, and swim through the tarp-covered darkness to the kitty-corner end, where I peel back the corner on that side and climb out. The tarp was too heavy and airtight to peel back in the middle, rendering this trick only possible if you could swim the entire distance in one breath.”
“And if you couldn’t, you’d just drown?”
“That’s the implication, yes. So I called across the pool and asked her whether she’d like to join me. She said ‘Of course’ again and jumped in and swam all the way out into the middle, which seemed to be the exact point at which she ran out of air—there was this horrible thrashing sound against the middle of the tarp.”
“Like the Milky Way Galaxy itself was having really rough sex.”
“Sure. So in that split-second moment, my life—or rather, her life—sort of flashed before my eyes, and I realized that she could actually die if I didn’t do something, so I swam back out to the pool’s dark, sinister center and grabbed her and dragged her to safety. She was nearly unconscious by the time we surfaced. I still don’t know what possessed me to carry out that whole ruse. Once her death was a genuine possibility, I knew I didn’t want it, but for some inexplicable reason, as I had watched her naïvely disappear beneath the surface of the pool, some part of me had been hoping she wouldn’t make it out.”
“Wow. Is that true?”
“Yep.”
“But I’d have no way of knowing if it wasn’t, right? Like you could have just pulled it from, for example, a Beatles documentary you watched last weekend or something.”
“I suppose. But I didn’t.”
“Well in that case, I don’t think it’s at all comparable to what I’ve told you.”
“Maybe not—I mean, I was quite young at the time, and she technically got into the pool of her own free will, and I didn’t actually let her die.”
“No, I mean . . . what I’ve confessed to you are simple mistakes, but you . . . you almost killed someone.”
“I’m aware. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about it.”
“One more thing. You’re going to hate me.”
“What is it?”
“The flames aren’t licking the door. I can’t even see them.”
“So the fire is still contained within the building?”
“Within the kitchen, even. I’m sitting at a table indoors just watching it. It doesn’t seem to be moving anywhere. An absolute sluggish drunkard of a fire. Like if the sun itself had a few too many. Reminds me of my ex-wife when she got home from that surprise party. This fire is slower than Rebecca is at manning the register. You should see her tapping stupidly at the keys with just one finger. You’d think she’d never seen a button before in her life. Only uses one finger. Yet you’d be dumbstruck by how quickly she can fire off a multi-claused text message to good old Blaze when she thinks nobody’s watching. It baffles me where some people’s priorities lie. Anyway, what I’m meaning to say is that if you need to send . . . aid somewhere else first, I can wait.”
“So what did the dispatcher in the video do wrong? Yes . . . Taylor?”
“Oh, I wasn’t going to answer. I just had a counter-question. Why did you make us watch that?”
“Standard training video. Dispatchers need to be prepared for all kinds of calls.”
“But it was so bizarre. Not even getting into the contents, why was the guy making the call naked?”
“It’s quite possible that the people you receive calls from will be naked.”
“But we won’t have any way of knowing that, so how is it relevant?”
“There’s a lot you won’t know, and you should be prepared for anything. So what did this dispatcher do wrong? Peter?”
“She kept interrupting him when he was trying to tell her about his life. He was obviously hurting deeply, and all she cared about was the superficiality of the fire.”
“But—”
“Raise your hand, Pat. Yes?”
“But what he was giving her was far from the most important information. He didn’t even mention the man with the ski mask and the gun who walked silently through the set.”
“I guess. But—”
“Hand, Peter.”
“But, and maybe our boss can enlighten us on this, how are we supposed to get to the bottom of what’s really going on when all we have is disembodied words? How do we know whether there’s really even a fire?”
“Anyone have any ideas? Jordan?”
“We can’t, so it’s probably best to behave skeptically.”
“Peter?”
“But if we do that, there will be a whole lot of fires that won’t get put out.”
“So what you’re getting at, Peter, is that we should trust people? Accept that what we hear is only part of the truth, and then choose to believe that part, for whatever it’s worth? Alex, stop yanking out the grass or I’m going to have to start holding these meetings in a boring HR office like all the other supervisors instead of in the seventy-three-degree beauty of nature.”
“What grass?”
◊
“Peter?”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you calling me right now? I was just in the middle of—where are you?”
“Just driving home from dispatcher training.”
“Then why do I hear club music?”
“Genuinely no idea. Hey, I was wondering whether we might talk. I have a lot on my mind.”
“I was just getting ready to send Jacob off to his chess class, but I guess I have time, if it’s quick. What’s up?”
“I’m sorry I left.”
“Now this I don’t have time for.”
“No, just hear me out. When I came home that night, and Jacob was already in bed, and you weren’t there, and when you did get home at like four a.m. you had a frazzled bedhead—”
“I did not!”
“Whatever. And then when you told me you were at a parent-teacher conference—one that I’d never even heard about—”
“I didn’t say parent-teacher conference; I said PTA night.”
“Same thing.”
“They’re not the same thing, though. Not even close. See, you always do this—you always warp things I’ve said to confirm your fucked up suspicions.”
“But when all that went down, you must have known what I thought, right?”
“I don’t ever know what you’re thinking, Peter. I’m pretty sure this was like our whole problem to begin with. You’d always passive-aggressively let things simmer for months until they came to some bubbling head, by which point you’d had ample time to twist your memories of what each of us had said to each other to fit whatever narrative made you look the most righteous, and once you’d been fully and utterly convinced of your own righteousness and my unarguable villainy, you’d tell me everything at once—every fucking problem you’ve ever had with me—much like you’re doing now.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do now.”
“And I’d be all ‘Why didn’t he mention any of this all those times I asked whether he was okay and he said yes?’”
“Why did you never say that to me then? When we were still together?”
“Are my words really worth anything to you? You didn’t believe me about the PTA night.”
“Maybe I don’t have to believe you. Maybe we can’t choose what we believe and what we think is bullshit. Maybe the fact that we can’t choose what we believe is just a natural part of life everyone but myself has just learned to live with, and it’s about time I learn to live with it too.”
“How do you plan on doing that? I mean, you said it yourself—it’s not a choice.”
“I don’t know. But I’m tired of this epistemic paranoia. I don’t think it should be my responsibility to separate all the universe’s bullshit from its Truths.”
“But there have just been times, with you, where it’s like . . . either I’m crazy or you’re lying.”
“For me as well.”
“And I don’t want to think of myself as crazy.”
“Nobody does. But do you remember that time when we were both really drunk back in high school, and it was August, and we were looking outside at the vibrantly green grass, and we were commenting on how green it was, and how we’d both always liked that particular shade of green, and one of us—I think it was me—said that maybe the green you see isn’t the green I see, and like, our entire subjective experiences of green are based on a fictional collective we’ve all just agreed to buy into, as, like, a society, and there’s no way of describing what my green looks like to you, because any explanation would be in terms you’ve also learned to associate with the color green, and thus, the only way for me to know the truth would be to literally peel back your skull and crawl into your brain and sit behind your eyes and see the world as you for a bit?”
“I remember.”
“It’ll be a lot of work, but let’s embrace the subjectivity of existence. I’m coming over.”
“Now?”
“I need to see you. I need to become more than just a disembodied voice to you. I need to know that we’re both real.”
“I just—it’s been so long. What if whatever we thought we had—that spark or flame or whatever—doesn’t exist?”
“I guess I won’t know until I get there.”
Hannah Smart (who has previously published under the name Ambrose D. Smart) is a fiction writer and literary/pop culture critic. Her short stories have been published in or are forthcoming in West Branch, The Harvard Advocate, Puerto del Sol, The Rupture, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others, and her essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, Potomac Review, and The Sunlight Press. She is the founder and editor in chief of experimental journal The Militant Grammarian, a three-time presenter at the International David Foster Wallace Conference, and a writing studies professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. Visit her website.
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