Pure Writerly Moments 2 (Short Stories, Essays, Book Reviews, and More)

Giving Testimony, or a Review of Slaughterhouse-Five

Daniel Clausen sits in a supermarket coffee lounge in Nagasaki, Japan, a crumpled candy-bar wrapper by his notebook, and contemplates the unlimited cruelty of humanity. A Tralfamadorian tourist sits next to him, nothing but a hand with an eye in the center, trying to pass for human by wearing a miniature cowboy hat. It tries to converse with the human known as Daniel, but its mouth noises make transdimensional vibrations that send him twenty years into the future.

There is now a stump where Daniel's right arm used to be. He can no longer see out of his right eye. A young girl holds a futuristic recording device to his mouth and asks him to give testimony. His mouth is dry and all he can think about is water. He gets confused easily. There was a bright light, an incredible hotness...but he can't remember much else, as if a Tralfamadorian hand-body is blocking his thoughts. The girl looks at him earnestly and suddenly he's in his old room in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

It's 2002. He's twenty-one and reading literature about the Holocaust. He reads Jakov Lind and tries to think deep thoughts about human enfeeblement. It's a nice place to be. An apartment on the lake...

A young Jewish professor had told Daniel there was no meaning in human barbarity and evil and then asked him to make meaning of barbarity and evil in a ten-page paper. A funny thought crosses Daniel's mind as he tries to put words on paper. Evil isn't rare or spectacular, but instead as mundane as shitting. A holocaust is humanity's way of taking a shit. But then, he couldn't write a paper on that. Taking a human tragedy and turning it into a university paper feels like applying low-grade toilet paper to a massacred porta-pottie after a chili festival.

Now, he's sitting in a writer's workshop with Kurt Vonnegut who slaps his head in frustration. The Tralfamadorian next to him is vigorously taking notes trying to pass for an earnest human student. Daniel is not sure what Mr. Vonnegut is disappointed in -- this book review from 2021, the literature paper from the year 2002, or the general inability of humans to evolve beyond their existence as large and small scale cruelty machines...or possibly it was just that last line about porta-pottie and chili festival...

"Book reviews can be tools of violence too," he says to Mr. Vonnegut, and the Tralfamadorian opens and closes its hand to signal it is clapping.

"Dresden," Daniel mouths with his dry lips. The young woman gets confused. It's 2041. His lips are dry and he tries to point to the water with his stump, but the girl wants something else. She wants Daniel to tell her something that happened a year ago. She wants him to bleed into her recording device. She wants him to say why 2040 was uniquely terrible. She wants him to say some inspiring bullshit about never again, when the rule is perpetual recurrence in different forms.

He's in Ft. Lauderdale again. It's 2002. It's 9:48 pm. It's a calm night and he can hear the water of the lake gently lapping against the shore from his apartment. It's glorious to live by the water, but not so glorious to have to manufacture pages out of thin air about humanity's infinite capacity for cruelty. He's managed to write three pages. Something about identity during the holocaust...and it hits him. His inspiration has manifested itself.

Daniel goes to the toilet.

Why the chili?

It's April 2021, many years before the catastrophe, a blinded right eye, a stump, and a testimony that he is supposed to give. Daniel rests in his thermally regulated office space. He looks over Nagasaki and marvels over the book he has just taken from the library. It is not toilet paper. It did not try to put lipstick on a slaughterhouse. It tells him that the slaughterhouse he is a part of is special, erratic, chaotic, unpredictable. There is a way to put catastrophe on paper...