*

THE BRANDO OF BRAND X

Lee Jeanthorp made a plea to the rest of the world. “Be human,” he said. He had been the youngest person in his college graduating class, a Representative at the age of 26, a Senator at 30, sworn in as President the day after his 36th birthday. “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” joked the Chief Justice. “Would you rather I sang?” His term passed unspectacularly. He was out of office at 40, and across the next decade surfaced on the boards of nonprofits, in university administrations, and finally in business, most notably in his relationship with a company that described itself as “the Lewis and Clark of Ethical AI.” Lee Jeanthorp knew enough to laugh this off, but he was being paid enough not to laugh at all. “Be human,” he said. Had the checks not been cut, he would have probably said something different, talked about the end of Dead Souls (“before us the future looms dark, and that we can scarcely....” at which point the manuscript abruptly ended), or maybe horror movies, or maybe sports, or maybe sneaker design which he believed devoutly had peaked in the early 2000s where a state of equipoise had been achieved between traditional lines and futuristic materials. He could have done a few minutes on pizza, toppings or ovens, could have held forth for a while about noise rock from the Velvet Underground through Shit and Shine. The Jeanthorp bucket was full. For that matter, he could have gone personal. He had been straight all his life — had an ex-wife and a new wife, a daughter in her early thirties who had a degree in biophysics and a vocational passion for painting and a son in his early teens who liked to hang around the house, puppy-dog-style, saying how much he loved his mom and dad, skateboarding in the pool in the backyard and Lee and his wife Gerry agreed to keep empty, playing video games only occasionally, a blessing — but had the summer before also fallen without warning for a lawyer in McLean who had ties to the intelligence community and so was both paranoid about blackmail and able to determine that there was no imminent threat of it. “The leader of the free world and the feeder of the Lee world,” Frank liked to say, and then hum music that Frank thought was suited to an espionage thriller but sounded more like a calliope at a circus. It was all a circus. Lee, President Jeanthorp, felt at all times like he was falling through space, no ground beneath him and none on the way. He had nightmares of men punching his teeth out and telling him that he had disgraced the nation. He had peaceful sylvan dreams where deer approached him and he knew implicitly that one of these deer was somehow both Gerry and Frank and, there in the dream, Lee moved toward it but startled it and it started and bolted across the meadow and disappeared into a copse of trees. Lee could not always keep down food so he gobbled more and more interests. He added to pizza ovens a working knowledge of the history of the shape architecture of pasta. He went like an arrow through Sinclair and Norris and Zola. He made Frank listen to Popul Vuh. But if you were not pressed right up against him, like a nose against a storefront window — and only two people were, maybe four — you would see none of this. You would only see the handsome man, tall, not as skinny as he once was, hair graying at his temples. “Be human,” the man said. “Be human.” [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

A NICE GUY

Andy ran out to the balcony and started calling for his valet. “George,” he said. “George.” But George was not his valet. George was his landlord, three years his junior, a friend since college, a man eminently sensible and thus the obvious choice for Andy’s first call in times of distress. He had called George the first time, when he had been working at the city’s top marketing firm (Data Jones!) and been escorted to the door by a grim-looking vice president who had worn quite a different expression when, at the Christmas party the week before, Andy had put his hand on her knee. (She had seemed…receptive. “I once read a piece of yours about Hawkwind,” she had said.) He had called George the second time, after his wife had packed up her things into a U-Haul and then taunted him that she was moving in with the guy driving the van. (Andy didn’t fall for it. The guy was probably twenty-four.) He had called him the third time, when he had bailed out of the contract for his book about the sociology of sneakers the same week his brother Jeremy won an award for sequencing genes in such a way that even the most pessimistic scientists in the field admitted might eliminate something like half of all the blindness in the world. (That time, Andy had gone through a manic episode, convinced that the phrase was the key to an epic post-rock opera. “Half of all the blindness in the world,” he had said, more times than he could count, more times than he liked to admit, and had only stopped when a woman he had picked up at a party, a woman who had voluntarily undressed for him in the alcove that George rented to him for a pittance and was now in the process of unbuckling his belt, stopped suddenly and stared at him. “Stop it,” she said. “Please. If you have any thought of this continuing, for the love of all that’s holy, stop talking about half of all the blindness in the world.” He tried to stop. He could imagine her hair brushing over him. He could not stop.) The fourth time, he had been in Ancona, playing out the stub end of a grant he had received for chronicling the rise and fall of karst cave discos, when he had slipped and fallen on his wrist. He could not type. He drank copiously with the other hand. He called George collect from Genga. “Yes,” George said. “The room is available.” Andy thought he detected a sigh. When he arrived and unpacked, George was quieter than usual. Andy thought of asking why — he had heard something from a mutual friend that George’s daughter was going through a hard time, and someone had said that George himself was battling health issues — but he didn’t want to pry. He just unpacked into the tiny dresser that was by now among his oldest confidantes. When he went to the balcony to call for his valet, it was to save face both for him and for George. Andy had been there so many times. He clearly was not making progress. Letting him in, let alone letting him stay, was a form of enabling. And no one wanted to get a reputation as a doormat. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

A MAN CAN HOPE

In town he was a glider, moving over the streets, silent, borne on currents, watchful, wise, with a sense of streamline, with a sense of style. In the country he was a problem. He felt large and ungainly. He constantly discovered stains on his shirtfront. His eyeglasses shifted, slipped, and no longer served his sight. “Help me,” he’d cry. “I am in great discomfort,” nine syllables, the last eight of which were a waste. He met people and tried to deceive them by behaving in a manner commensurate with a confident man, a man of possibility, but they saw right through him. Reality ringed him like a cloud of stink. In town he was a glider, but he had not been to town in years. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

SATURDAY, MAY 9

The guy upstairs, George, had lived there forever, literally. That was Jack’s joke. He meant only that when he had moved in the other man had already been there and that he, Jack, suffered from a fatal curiosity regarding anything that preceded him. It was ironic, Freida said, because he was a historian. “Yeah,” Jack said, “but of ancient civilizations. One guy, even if he’s ancient, does not a civilization make.” For years George wasn’t the story. He came and went, thin, dapper, hat and walking stick. He made a little small talk like a pro. Jack was, if anything, higher on him than Frieda was. She questioned whether he needed the stick and also promoted the idea that he smelled like tobacco. Though Jack had never seen him smoking, Freida was so much smarter than he was that he assumed that she was right. Freida was a physicist. She was a whiz kid who got older and lost none of her whiz. Brooklyn Tech had anointed her the Next Big Thing and she sailed through Stanford and into Livermore with her luster undiminished. But when she turned forty-eight she started to falter. Not right away. She announced on her birthday that it was a highly composite number and went around the room explaining it, and for a month or so she basked in the glow of what she described as “not quite youth but everything is still in place.” Then one morning she asked Jack how old she was and he began to laugh but the expression on her face stopped him cold. Within six months she was forgetting the names of her colleagues. Jack became obsessed with safety, from within. He bolted and chained the door at night because he had read something about a wife with a similar condition who wandered out onto the street and was hit on the highway. Her nightgown floated down like a line of poetry. He was determined not to let this happen to Freida. With treatments, with nutrition, her memory rebounded a bit, but what came in the second wave was an obsession with George. She started telling Jack what George was wearing, and started pricing out George’s shoes, and then one evening he came home to find Freida missing. He panicked. He looked down in the yard and then unbolted and unchained the door he had just fastened and went upstairs to George’s place. He knocked and George answered, not dapper now but in a grey t-shirt and boxers. He heard a woman’s voice asking who it was, and the voice was Freida. Jack knew that in a movie he would have pushed past this skinny son of a bitch and confronted his wife but they were sadly mired in reality. “Just take care of her,” he said. Freida came home an hour or so later with a long story about how someone at the lab had invented a new way to cook eggs. That wasn’t even what her lab did. Jack sat at the kitchen table with a morose expression on his face and played “She’s Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina’s” over and over again on his phone. It was an inside joke between them from long ago, but this Freida didn’t know it anymore. Jack thought of a paper about how each human life repeats the stages of a civilization, rise, fall, kind of a psycho-anthropological take on ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. It took him everything he had not to explain it out loud. Freida, bright, busier than usual, announced she was going to shower. “The air conditioning at work is on the fritz,” she said. She went through the bathroom door, didn’t close it behind her, pulled off her dress over her head. The song was into its third or fourth loop. “This poverty is hurting my pride,” the Kinks sang, and Jack sang along with them. Light from the bathroom window reached him weakly, turning his face to tufa. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

ON THE RISE

He broke the silence, and in doing so broke the seal. He hadn’t spoken on the matter for a decade, during which the world had changed all around him. He had gone from a pauper to a king, literally, and then to a regular old billionaire. His name was on numerous tech companies. His face was on the logo of everything from clothing to frozen vegetables, though each represented only one of the many tentacles of his enterprise. The nation where he had ruled, a small mountain kingdom, had evolved from a tax haven for the ultra-wealthy to what one newspaper called “an experiential playground in which every village is home to some delightful diversion: laser tag, escape room, miniature golf. If you do not have fun here, then you are not here.” He owned the newspaper, of course. And yet, through that unprecedented upswing (“The Acclivitous Age” —The Herald-Beacon), he had remained mum on one matter in particular. And then, on a Tuesday, waking, feeling a new and not entirely unpleasant surge of confidence, he finally decided to speak up. “I,” he said, coming into the capacious breakfast room, where his wife was piloting a spoon toward a perfectly poached egg, “do not like your haircut.” [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

THE STASIS

Ken is sleeping. Then he’s not. He’s awake remembering his dream, at the same time thinking how strangely everything is mapped. You have to be asleep to dream, and you have to be awake to remember it. If you’re asleep and remembering it, that’s still dreaming. If you’re awake and dreaming, you’re not really awake. In the dream he’s remembering, he’s in a car driving along a rode that stretched on endlessly. “It’ll go everywhere and nowhere,” says a woman in the car with him. He doesn’t think he’s met her before, or rather his dream-mind doesn’t think so, but when he wakes he knows immediately who it is. It’s Penny. This also clues him in to when it is. A young Penny in a car speaking happily means that it’s 1994 or 1995. Those are the only two years possible. In the summer of ’95 he cried out “Look out behind you!” but she did not. A kid on a bike was bearing down on her. He hit her, this kid, breaking her wrist and taking a tooth. She blamed Ken, because, she said, his serious tone and his joking tone were too close together. “How was I supposed to know that you really meant to look out behind me?” she said. “What should I have said?” he said. She conceded that nothing would have worked, and then broke up with him. In the dream, neither of them were injured. She was put together perfectly and he was happy to see it. There were other people in the car from back then—Drew and Anita and Len and Bette—but they were flat pictures and never spoke. The road went on and on and as what was outside the windows changed, the dream-Penny kept up a guided tour. “This is the Bag District,” she said. “And this is the Ink District.” Or: “This is Hazzard Falls.” The scenery looked the same to Ken no matter what district or falls they passed. “You always deny that things are what they are,” Penny said. This was the real Penny, coming back six months after their breakup to try again, holding hands with him when they walked, joking that his touch was healing the wrist that had been broken and still hurt sometimes. “It’ll never end,” Ken says out loud, dozing off again, thinking not of the road in the dream, which won’t, but rather his time with Penny, which did, and his memory of her in the dream, which will. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

THE AFTERWORD

At his funeral, when they gathered, there was sighing more than anything, and Goldschmidt felt it first as a gentle wind but more and more as a fog rolling in, and then an affront, because it signaled to him how little there was to say about him. Sadness was fine. Sadness was great! The absence of it would have been a problem. But all the sighing in the world — and that’s how much there was in the room, he was pretty sure — couldn’t do the rest of the job. What had he meant to them all? What, specifically? Why was no one leaping up to the chancel to itemize his virtues? Bonnie was over there with her eyes half-closed the way she used to be when they fought about money or religion or politics but let’s face it mostly money. Julianna was in the back with her head held high, amazing posture of course, you didn’t forget that kind of thing just because your career in ballet comes to a crashing halt, but she couldn’t even look toward the front where the casket sat shining on the catafalque. Henry and Morris and Howard, his brothers, sat together in matching rumples and at least he understood their sighing: my brother, in a church? What would Mom and Dad say? But they never met Pilar, his second wife, and certainly they never heard her whisper sweet somethings about her Christian god as prelude to (and during) what she called “nightwork.” She was not there, Pilar. She was off in Marbella with her third husband, a tennis star. Goldschmidt took quick stock of the rest of the room, noticed a few childhood friends, a few business associates, one or two men as rich as he was. Right at the front was Quincy Wiggins, the smartest guy he had ever met, a painter, though he had introduced himself as a short-order cook because that’s what he was doing when he met Goldschmidt, flipping burgers and Adam and Eve on a raft. His paintings were mainly of bare-knuckle boxing matches down near the seafront and the light in them was luminous. Goldschmidt had never seen Quincy sit still before. When he descended a bit from the ceiling — that’s where he was, nothing so majestic as the firmament — he saw Quincy’s hands folded on his lap. He was making that same soft sound. But as Goldschmidt drew nearer, he heard a difference. Quincy was not sighing. He was laughing. He was the only one who had noticed what the others had not, that Goldschmidt had evidently been arranged in a hurry, and that though his body was at peace beyond life, halcyon in the half-couch, his hair was not, and a cowlick stuck straight up, an errant arrow in jet black. Quincy would preserve that detail in his next painting, a portrait, that would one day be hailed as a masterwork of its era, a satire of wealth and power, though he would insist to critics and collectors alike that it was not that at all but rather a loving attempt to remember his friend as he had been: ridiculous. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

BUS PASS

Eileen’s neighbor turned to her again to ask if this was her first time in Cairo. The question was polite, but she sensed a sinister undercurrent, aware as she did that it was not truly there. She was reading into the moment, or rather reading over it, solely because the man looked like an old character actor who had a habit of playing villains. Too much context was being brought to bear on the moment, which had drawn out now, the man and his upturned face still waiting for an answer. “Yes,” she said. “First time.” She kept going to fill the space she had created. “I am visiting my sister, who works at the American University. She is a linguist and a mathematician. Both sides of the brain. I teach too, but only high school, back in Pennsylvania. She and her husband recently had a baby.” This was enough. The man’s eyes were not sharp any longer but slightly glazed. His neck had drawn back his head almost imperceptibly, she had noticed. Freed from the obligation to account for herself, she experienced everything else now: the hot stale air in the coach, the smell of food coming from the back, the smell of smoke too despite the sign that prohibited it, the weight of her backpack on the tops of her thighs. The heaviest thing in there, the one doing most of the work, was the large book about the history of numbers that she was bringing as a present for her sister. What she did not tell the man was that the visit was not planned, had not been announced, and that she was arriving with bad news from home. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

FIRST PARAGRAPH OF UNWRITTEN BOOK (9)

It is hard to imagine a person as devoted to the happiness of others as Marnie. She came from modest means, but was wealthy by thirty thanks to her invention of a new kind of wearable technology: a necklace that delivered various calming pulses to the wearer. “What the Lilt is not is AI,” Marnie said at the launch. “There is nothing intelligent about it, exactly, and there is less artificial about it than you might think. In my mind it is more closely allied with crystal healing than networked glasses or even wired watches.” She spotted a question in the back and answered it almost before it was asked: “No health data is uploaded because none is collected.” After the launch there was a small dinner for angel investors — one of them, a Venezuelan futurist, took a shot at flirting, persistent for a little while, not quite obnoxious — and then Marnie was driven back to the hotel where she was staying. At nine, as scheduled, she called her wife and her daughter. “It went well,” she said. Her daughter beamed. “I tried,” Marnie said to Alice, “to explain what it isn’t, because that helps people to understand what it is.” Alice got it immediately. “Apophatic theology,” she said. “Maimonides would be proud.” Marnie stiffened. “Never met him,” she said. “How old do you think I am?” Alice was younger by a decade, midway between Marnie and Lucy, and though this could be a sore point, it could also be a soft landing spot. “You are so wise,” Alice said, bowing at the screen. After the phone call ended — Lucy had to go meet her boyfriend and Alice made a point of telling her not to stay out too late — Marnie read a book and drew in the small sketchbook she carried with her everywhere. If every day was like this, she told herself, then she would welcome every next day. But it wasn’t. “But it isn’t,” she said out loud to herself. At two in the morning, when she awoke with bolts of dread coursing through her, she put a thumb against the flat of the Lilt to unlock it and did her best to believe that the thrum of the thing against her breastbone would save not only her, but others down through history. Alice, at home, had no concept of the panic, and never would. That was the nature of Marnie’s love, rooted in a lie, desirous of the truth. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

COME IN AND DO THE POPCORN

They hired Bill to write a song about what had happened to Anne. They hired Samuel to write a play about what had happened to Lucille. They hired Ken to interview Kristen and pass a summary of his reporting on to Anders, who would be starring in a film that fictionalized her life, though Ken would change the setting from Missouri to Gstaad and Anders, in turn, would change the corrupt organization whose deviltry powered the plot from Housewares–Retail to the Snow Bike Club. Jean, who was in the midst of designing the world’s first fully automated mine, got the call from Kristen, who was so angry that her tears sizzled as they hit the phone. “You’re my third call today,” Jean said. “Lucille was cursing up a storm. Effing play this. Em-effing theater that.” Kristen asked after Anne, who was always the best of them, always the coolest head, always the clearest strategist. “Oh ho,” Jean laughed. “Come on now,” Kristen said. “Tell me.” She begged Jean to end the suspense. Panic hoisted her voice to the brink of a shriek. She needed to know that Anne had handled matters with her customary sangfroid. “I am sorry to report the precise mathematical opposite,” Jean said. “She was on video and I could see her knuckles like whitecaps along the top of her fist. If we were in an Old West saloon, she would have been smashing bottles ‘til dawn” The song, released in summer, was a chart-topping tale of one man’s struggle to overcome privation and cruelty: a real weeper. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

MOOSE, FRAIL TOM

A moose spoke to me and told me a story. I was in the forest then. I was called back because Tom was hurt. Tom is often hurt. He is made of glass. But this time it was serious and soon I caught what he had and then I, too, was headed for the hospital. I’m in the city today for that purpose, trying to figure out if the buzzing in my head is the same problem, give or take, as the soreness in his chest. One doctor said yes. Another said no. The third, the tiebreaker, just stared at my body for longer than was necessary and then reached out and touched my shoulder more gently than was comfortable. Did I date him once? I wondered that later, on the subway. Whenever I am on it, I think about dates of Christmas past, the presents under the trees, the joyful caroling. These are all metaphors for excitement, conversational or carnal. I remembered in particular one man who asked me to dinner with a steely tone that was hard to say no to, even though I had just eaten. Yes, it was that specific: an afternoon where I had grabbed an early dinner in anticipation of a long night at home making progress on my thesis, a quick stop in a bodega for cigarettes, and walking out just as he was walking in, a man more handsome than can be described in this modest paragraph. He was tall, broad, with a hint of stubble. He wore a hat that was like a battery heating up the crisp fall air. “I never do this,” he said. “But I have never had such an immediate response to a woman. I swear to you that I am an honest man and would not say this were it not true. You must have dinner with me.” We went to the nearest place, where I pushed some pasta around and thought fondly of the pizza from an hour before. The man told me his name was Eugene Richards. “That’s the name of a famous director,” I said. He nodded. Oh! He had started out in action movies but moved increasingly toward political cinema, couched in everything from comedy to melodrama. “I have ism in my veins,” he said. Eugene and I enjoyed a lovely dinner. It was replete with wine and compliments, at some point flowing from both sides. He kept a penthouse nearby and invited me back and back I went, to spend the night, to wake with a glow, to take the elevator down and step into the car that he had ordered for me to take me home. I got back around nine, a little panicked that I was behind on my thesis. Tom was just waking up. We had been roommates for about a year by then, since he had broken up with Andy and begged me to keep him company. That morning he was complaining about his knee and his hip and a spot over his left eye. Two of the three went away before breakfast. The thing over his eye turned out to be a tumor, benign. That was not the thing that was bothering him when I had to rush back from the forest. That was a collapsed lung. The forest, the moose, that was solitude, just for me, a way of taking stock of all that had happened, good and bad. Eugene Richards had perished in a small plane that caught power lines near Portimao Airfield during location scouting for a film code-named Still Mackin’. It sounded like a buddy comedy, a sequel maybe, but was in fact, as his inner circle knew, as I knew, a piece of muscular agitprop set among anarcho-syndicalists. In. His. Veins. My thesis had been defended successfully and I had in hand a doctorate that my broken heart did not wish for it to hold. I dated in a frantic dotted line, sometimes starting with the subway, while my main relationship became my friendship with Tom. The doctor who had stared too long at me asked me out and we had dinner. I broke up with him pretty quick, saying it was because he was treating Tom, but in reality It was because the dinner was only okay, not any kind of catch-fire. Tom died. I don’t think the doctor killed him on purpose or anything. Why even suggest that? That would be insane for anyone to suggest! The height of toxic narcissism! I didn’t make it back out to the forest. I stayed up late in the apartment and cried about Tom, about the tragic shortcomings of the human body, about the airfield. The next day I taught a seminar. Oh, my thesis? I haven’t specified because it would seem random. Eating From the Outside In: Food Packaging, American Consumerism, and Nutritional Fictions, 1945–1980. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

FIRST PARAGRAPH OF UNWRITTEN BOOK (32)

Dennis got to his seventies somehow still convinced that glasses were a sign of smart guys and that he didn’t like smart guys—he preferred loyal soldiers who stood around with their hands folded, sometimes nervously extracting a phone and checking to make sure that this or that meeting was still on or this or that call wasn’t missed. He liked these guys because they let him continue through each day with no thought of losing control, not even a fleeting one. So when his daughter suggested that he hand over the amusement park project to Colin Reeves, he was reluctant. Colin not only wore glasses, but sometimes carried a book, and he spoke efficiently and to the point but with a healthy portion of what Dennis called “twenty-two-dollar words”: ten-dollar words, but adjusted for inflation. No one else in his camp got the joke. Colin certainly did, and he didn’t laugh at it, but Dennis noticed a little smile tugging upward at the corners of his mouth. It wasn’t until about a month in that Dennis wondered if this guy was making it with his daughter. Her husband, Harry, was one of the loyal ones, and though everyone knew that he was blind as a bat, he had the good sense to wear contacts. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

WHAT GRACE LEARNED OVER TIME

Musicians were the best, actors the worst. Businesspeople fell somewhere in the middle. Tradespeople were better than average, especially carpenters. Magicians were worse than average but then they did this thing where they waved their hands and the chart inverted. Writers were nearly as bad as actors in that they always looked at a menu in a restaurant and scoffed at a typo or infelicitous description—the phrase itself, “infelicitous description,” came from one of them, a guy who showed up late with his shirt buttoned unevenly but still found it necessary to pellet-gun pedantry into the conversation, like reminding her that a langoustine was a lobster not a shrimp. Ranchers were thoroughgoing liars. People who owned pet stores were on fire in their minds in some fundamental fashion. (This was a smaller sample size, admittedly, but one of the two she went out with, a woman, was an exciting prospect at first but increasingly expressed homicidal tendencies toward humans even as she drunkenly rhapsodized about the “lovely and admirable glory of the parakeet, which we should not murder.” She put one hand on Grace’s forearm and then, thrillingly, alarmingly, the other on her thigh, and when Grace stammered a rejoinder — “uh,” she said, “I’m a person, you know, right, not a bird?” — she moved her hands further from elbow and knee and with burning bright eyes said “But are you?” (The other one was fine and they made out for a minute in a cab)). Bricklayers were principled as expected. Insurance agents were surprisingly introspective. Bakers were buffoons. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

FLY

Wanda Ten Visser got on a plane, the first one in years, to visit her daughter in California. Georgina had done it right at first, stayed in town, gotten married, built a house with her husband, who was named, if you could believe it, George. Wanda could believe it. She could believe nothing else. But George cheated and George drank and George put hands on, and Georgina packed everything into a Country Squire and said one word: “Sacramento.” That was the last Wanda saw of her daughter for a decade. Georgina got herself a job in insurance, a new husband — this one was named John Garfield, if you could believe it — and a darling baby girl. Wanda asked for pictures and received. One day the picture had a folded note beneath it. “Come and visit,” it said. “John Garfield would love to meet you.” Wanda couldn’t sleep. She knew she couldn’t go and imagined the disappointment in Georgina’s voice when she said so. The news would be broken, she thought melodramatically, and so would her daughter. But Wanda collected herself. She bought a hat like Princess Marina. She brought along a pack of extremely thin cigarettes she intended to hold but not smoke. She boarded the plane first by explaining to the crew that she had a nervous disposition. It was true. Halfway across the country she pressed the call button and insisted to the young woman who answered it that they were over an ocean. “This flight is over land the entire way,” the young woman said. “Now I can’t believe anything you say,” said Wanda. She began to speak more sharply to herself, and to her seatmate, a small elderly Japanese man who clearly understood not a single word. Twice the stewardess had to return to chide her. When they landed, Wanda was relieved, but everyone else was more relieved. Georgina met her at the airport, along with a tall man who could have been better shaven and a little girl who waved a pink handkerchief. “Grandma,” the girl said, and Wanda turned to look behind her. “Mother,” Georgina said, “come—she means you.” Everyone had a great laugh at that, even the stewardess, who was deplaning, and who now liked Wanda again. Later that evening, the stewardess would meet the pilot in a hotel room, where they would fight, where tears would fall, where blood would be spilled. But this was a time for family. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

A LITERARY MAN

Then, in the middle of the night, he woke up, noticed that the light in the other room was on — on but flickering, which told him which light it was, the bridge-arm over the armchair rather than the torchere by the doorway — and reconstructed what little he remembered of the evening, the new lounge in town, the conversation with the woman at the bar, she said Ellen, he said Bill, both for the moment truthful, the move to the corner banquette, the hand on the knee beneath the table, cab ride home, the numb fumbling on the sofa, the sudden request on her part to take a shower, the leaving of him to his own devices, which was one device, really, memory, and specifically a memory of Vivian, who had been the most recent woman on the couch before Ellen. Vivian had been his first wife, and only, a childhood friend who had gone away to college at fourteen as a result of extreme intelligence and learned that it was only one of a set of skills she could master, and not even the most important, except insofar as it allowed her to organize and execute the rest, which included social boldness and flamboyant creativity and a way with clothes that made people want to remove them, and then she was introduced to him at a Beltway party. “Madame President,” he said, before he knew who she was. She burst out laughing in a way that could not have been common for her at the time, when most of her movements were cunning and optimized. They married in four months. She never asked much about Bill’s business. All she understood was that he arranged for what he called the “retirement” of people who crossed people in power. That he was a moral cipher she knew and tolerated. Once she thought she was with child and that nearly undid him, since he could not imagine bringing a being into the world who was half him, half broken, no matter if the other half was Ellen in full flower. This started them down the road where he said little to her other than cruel remarks intended to make her mark off her distance from him. Eventually, he prevailed. She filed. Bill went back to the only version of himself that he could tolerate, days carrying out contracts, nights in the bars, ladies here and there. He traded in his expertise regarding people, which he never had, for an instant knowledge of which lamp was on. The one over the chair flickered. No matter. He couldn’t sit still long enough to read anyway. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

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HERE ALL WEEK

“We all have incorrect beliefs. I mean, I once knew a guy who thought he didn’t have any!” Jim was on the echo machine onstage in the club that his father had bought back in the eighties with stock market money he called “thrill-gotten gains” on the day he quit trading and decided to be the funniest guy around. He had succeeded, for one week. Gerald Freese had come to town fresh off a starring role in Is It Real?, the movie that had pushed him from star to superstar, and done three sets in three nights at the club, and Jim’s father had opened for him and, truth be told — and truth was told, by the News-Tribune, at least — blown him away. “Kenneth Bledsoe’s comedy, previously unknown to this critic, was the true star of the night,” wrote Morris Jeffs, the paper’s theater reviewer, moonlighting in comedy. “It was like never having seen a painting or never having eaten cereal and suddenly been placed in a position to see or eat see above.” Jeffs was a four-time finalist for the Oswald Award in Criticism. He had won once. He did not win the year that he sang the praises of Jim’s father, and he had died in the interim, as had Gerald Freese, as had Jim’s father. Jim found himself all alone, even when he was in the company of his wife Patti (the daughter of his father’s second wife, and thus some strange mathematical equation he felt compelled to solve), his girlfriend Lucy (his attempt to solve it), his friends Howard and Darrell and Pea-Pod, and his son, Fred, the result of a brief affair with a bartender he had met when he was nineteen. He thought that telling his truth would make him feel less lonely, which was why he had stepped onstage and flicked on the echo machine. His voice went out and came back. He felt even more lonely. Incorrect belief, he thought, and bulled forward into the next setup.

BELLY UP TO THE BAR

In the early years of the Free State, which was what she called the decade between Adam and Burton, she opened the Inn, a pub, really, if you cared to quibble, which some did. She named it after Kyteler’s, meaning after Alice Kyteler herself, a witch who wiped out four husbands. That was the name of the board out front, The Witch, where she chalked the names of the day’s four special drafts. She got in early and left late and never felt anything other than at home, even when she got eyes from customers, good or bad, the good sometimes leading to tipsy steps up narrow stairs to small apartments where she was treated to nights of what drunken men called bliss, the bad sometimes leading to the same followed by tears shed over the absence of anything better. Burton lurked for nearly a month before she ever knew his name. She thought of him only as the spindle, because he was tall and thin, because he spun yarns. “You see,” he said, “there are those who would see to it that the Inn be castigated for its backwardness, no television, no Internet, a foot showily in the past. I object. They say ‘place,’ ‘this place,’ but to me it is missing a single letter and should more properly be thought of as a palace. Fill the glass and with it the day.” She loved the way he spoke, and soon his mind, though it took her a while to realize that she could say to herself, if not quite out loud, that by this she meant him. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

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THE CRITICAL PROJECT

The most readable thing Manfred encountered all week was the sign in the bagel place that said “Order and Pay Here.” It was short and sharp, entirely aware of its purpose and also, just as importantly, of its limits. He admired it for its strength and its restraint in equal measure. The same week, he read four novels, all middling. One of them was a historical saga, four generations of a Boston family that had started in silversmithing and ended in banking. One of them was an intimate portrait of a young singer from Haiti who came the United States following the Hart-Celler Act, cast her lot with the counterculture, and discovered herself in the process. One of them was a surreal futuristic crime story in which a virtual second-story man broke into grand suburban mansions via internet connections and stole “trust.” The fourth was a lyrical story of loss and redemption set in Maine’s Somali diaspora. The Brahmin Course, Monday and part of Tuesday. Compas Point, the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday. Packet Man, Thursday and Friday. In the Bantu Way, Saturday and Sunday. Manfred churned through them diligently despite the fact that he had recently suffered a loss. His sister had been sick for a year, and in dire straits for four months. Manfred had been with her a few weeks before, aware that the end was drawing near, and had played checkers with her for hours, laughing each time she laughed, which was every time a checker of hers leapt over one of his. His sister was a book reviewer. Her daybed, which was where she slept now (“or not, as the case may be,” she said), was surrounded by piles of books. She couldn’t do any more than she had done, she said, though she had done plenty. “Here,” she said, foisting four into Manfred’s arms like she was sending him home with leftovers. She passed a week after checkers, and he tore through the books in her honor, in her memory. He was not a reviewer. He didn’t know quite what to say except whether he liked the books or not, and he did not. All were worthy of the word “novel.” All had plot and drive and heart. But the prose, the words at work, grated upon Manfred so severely that it began to hurt his head to hold the books in his hand. The Brahmin Course was somehow both florid and flat. Compas Point fluttered for a little while before it fell to the ground. Packet Man: incoherent. One paragraph in The Bantu Way gave him something to love, but only one, and that feeling sustained him for forty more pages, but only forty more. He was left broken on Sunday night, and famished not just for food, and that was what brought him to the place on the corner near his house, where bagels were served until late at night, where he ordered an everything toasted with olive cream cheese and then turned his head up and saw, like it was a beacon and he was a sailor in trouble, the sign. “Order and pay here,” he said. “What?” the man behind the counter said. He was a little angry, like Manfred was stealing his thunder. “Order and pay here,” Manfred said again, and took his everything, and left with nothing. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

PROMOTION

Life was a platform, and he had everything he needed there: a phone, food, companionship. He was happy. Then he looked to his right and saw a platform that was slightly higher, maybe three feet or so. He thought to himself that he might be happier on the other platform. The second platform also had a telephone, food, a companion. But he felt certain that the telephone was of a superior design and color, that the food was prepared better, that the companion would entertain and enrich him in ways that his companion could not. After all, the other platform was higher. He was consumed by the thought of jumping to it. He wasn’t sure if he could make the jump. He needed to make the jump. He agonized over it. He lost sleep, and when he did sleep, he dreamed about the slightly higher platform. Then one day he woke with the courage to jump. He knew that it was the day. He placed a final call on the telephone on the platform. He ate a final meal. He told his companion that he would be only one platform away, and that since it was higher, he would be able to jump back whenever he wanted. Then he took a running start and jumped, pushing off as powerfully as he could, certain that he would need all his effort to reach the higher platform. In the air he worried about falling into the void between platforms. What would that be? Death? Solitude? Neither was a thought that comforted him. Somehow, miraculously, his foot found the edge of the other platform. He landed there in a heap. He looked around. The phone looked about the same. The food looked about the same. The companion looked about the same. But at least he was higher. Then, as he was commending himself for having the courage to jump, the platform started to sink down, imperceptibly at first but then enough that he could see it move. It came to him in a flash: he had forgotten to figure in the effect of his own weight. He looked across at his former platform and it was rising. He closed his eyes. He opened them. He was standing on a platform. He had everything he needed there: a phone, food, companionship. Then he looked to his right and he saw a platform that was slightly higher, maybe three feet or so. [©1981 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]

*

A LADY MIGUEL MET

Griselda didn’t like her name at first but she came around to it hard over the years. “I have lived with this,” she would say, “and so I have lived.” She took an elevated tone and assumed a Transatlantic accent so that people would think she was joking but she was serious as a heart attack. She had borne the embarrassment of her name all her youth, suffered through insufferable teen years, had a brief respite in the form of a sweet early-20s boyfriend who called her Grizzy and somehow knew at that tender age not just how to reciprocate but how to extend himself without any thought of recompense. She would not see the likes of him again for decades. In her late twenties she went by “G.T. Patterson,” and it wasn’t until thirty-five that she began to come around. In part what encouraged her was her grandmother’s death, which led to research for the memorial, which led to the revelation, previously unknown to her, that her great-great-great-grandfather had named his daughter Grizelda, a “z” instead of an “s,” after the Nova Scotian poet Grizelda Elizabeth Cottnam Tonge, pen name Portia, and that the name hung there in the rafters of the family for generations. Griselda was not herself a poet. She was a travel writer. She hated the job, always had, worried about every way that she imposed herself upon the places she went, striding into an ancient city and looking for the best restaurants, dressing like she had jumped off the pages of a magazine created by and for the most selfish people on earth. She believed she was different, an explorer, out not for photographs or itinerary but for real discovery, something that would put her on her back, actually or figuratively, and reshape the way in which she understood the world. She came to this awareness slowly but arrived there with both boots, putting punctuation on this new sentence one day in Cuiabá, highly high in the afternoon after smoking skunk, half-naked with a young auto mechanic who had demonstrated talents previously unimaginable. She peeled herself up off the sofa and started for the door. She was, she told him in all the languages she knew, ten years his senior. He kept shaking his head and saying “não, não.” But it was yes. And that was why upon turning forty a few weeks later she both embraced herself and shoved herself rudely away, took measures both protective and destructive, turned in her “s” and took back the sizzling “z.” Now she could travel with open eyes. It was a form of poetry, no? [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]