Literature's effect on my future study of the law

It looks like after nine months of looking for a job, applying to three different schools for three very different ideas, getting six job offers I decided I didn't want, and generally feeling for most of 2025 like I don't have any great path forward with my life, I'm going to spend 2026 in law school. I got offered a full ride to the only law school that's within driving distance. I don't feel complete certainty this is the right decision. It's not the material; I've started reading through three of the law books we'll be using in my first semester, and I find law interesting enough I don't think I'll hate what I'm doing, at least while I'm in school. It's more a question of uncertainty whether law four years from now will be a relatively secure path to a good career. There are concerns about AI taking jobs, or whether anyone will hire someone who by then will be in their late 50s and just coming out of law school. But the job search these last nine months has been discouraging enough that this seems like a risk that's just barely worth taking. I'm going to need to work until seventy or near it, I think, and that means it's probably better doing what it takes to find something I'd enjoy and something that will pay decently rather than just settling into whatever I can find and trying to ride it out until I can fully retire. 

As I've been looking through these law books, it's pretty clear that my past study of literature is going to have a strong influence on how I think about the law. Probably the most important issue from literary criticism and literary theory that's going to color how I see the law is the notion of intent.

Three types of intent

This is something I've talked about so many times on this blog, anyone who reads it regularly is probably sick of hearing me talk about it by now. I spent a lot of time on it in my post about how to think of homoerotic subtext in the Frodo-Sam relationship, which was one of the posts I've written that got the most hits. Perhaps clairvoyantly sensing my own future entrance into law school, I looked at types of intent in a post on what I saw as the weaknesses of originalist readings of the Constitution. I'm sure I've covered intent in criticism elsewhere, because it's something I think about almost every time I start to pull apart a work of literature.

If you haven't read those posts before or if you've never thought much about what it means to consider what a literary work means, here's my much shorter version. Most people assume that to consider what a piece of literature--a poem, a short story, a novel, an essay, etc.--means is to figure out what the author meant when they wrote it. This seems like it's a common-sense approach, and in fact most people tend to act like almost the only way to get an iron-clad answer about what a poem means is to find an interview with the author where the author answers that very question. Failing that, as we do in almost every real-world case even when the author is still alive and much more when the author is long dead, we read about the history big and local during the time of the author's life. We research the author's autobiographical information. We read the letters they wrote, read the speeches they made, study the various manuscript versions available of the works we want to know better. Piecing all this together and adding a little bit of psychological inference ("He wrote this to cope with the loss of his third child") is how we best determine the meaning of a given work. 

As reasonable as this sounds, there are problems with this seemingly common-sense approach. One is that a poem or novel is an intentionally imaginative work. In a work with great imagination, an author often isn't trying to convey intent in the same way they are when they leave a note on the door saying they're going out for milk. Meaning is much more open-ended, and authors themselves aren't necessarily thinking of what something "means" when they write a fantasy novel about a three-headed dragon or a lyrical poem about watching a boy try to tie his shoes. 

Secondly, the more complicated the work one writes, the less one is able to control the meaning. If I tell my wife I work late tomorrow, the meaning is pretty clear, but if I try to explain to her my feelings for her, I might say all kinds of things that could be construed in many ways. For example, if I tell her, "I like the way you look when you get all dressed up and put on makeup," I might be saying I think that her choices in how to adorn herself for very formal events are especially praiseworthy, but what she might hear is, "I wish you'd quit dressing like a slob all the time and not wearing makeup." 

And here, I might object, saying she has mistaken what I meant, and maybe I have a point, because I know in my own mind what I was thinking. But is she totally wrong? What if she's lately mentioned a few times that she feels like she's letting herself go, and she thinks I no longer find her attractive? Given this context, mightn't she be justified in thinking, based on what I said, that I meant something else? Mightn't my text have a life of its own, one that is at cross purposes with what I thought my intent was?

I want her to use the intent of the author (me), but she is using the intent of the text. That is, she's judging based on what I actually said. And maybe she's got a point. Maybe I meant to give her a compliment, but, given the context of everything, I might have said something that had a meaning I didn't intend. I can't complain that she's willfully misconstruing me, because I have an obligation not just to say what I think is right and assume everyone will do the work to get inside my head and fix the imperfections of my speech, but to craft speech that actually says what I mean it to. 

Maybe my wife and I will be able to go to therapy and work through communication enough that I will make slightly better utterances and she will be a little more able to understand what I had in mind when I said them, but with literature, the utterances are so complicated, and the mind of the author so remote, we will never be able to to achieve the same level of understanding. A 1000-page novel set in a fictional medieval Europe has, by its very nature, a much more complicated system of meaning than my short, mostly declarative sentence about my feelings. 

Some readers will attempt to deal with this by denying that a story means anything. It's just there because it's fun or interesting, and to try to make it mean something more is a trick played be people who want to sound smart or start controversies. But this over simplifies the human mind, which always tries to make meaning out of stories. Particularly with a well-crafted story or poem or song, where everything was put there for a reason, it's logical to assume that there are at least some conclusions we can make about those decisions. If everyone dies at the end of the story, what does that say about the universe of the story? If all the women in the story are fatuous publicity whores, what kind of message does that convey about women, or at least about the kind of woman who is in the story? Those kinds of questions aren't gratuitous; they're baked into our DNA as human readers. No human would read those kinds of narratives and not attempt to create a theory that makes sense of them.

I think the real problem people have with reading from what the text says instead of what the author thinks she meant is that you can end up with a reading that the author herself would deny. Doesn't the author have a more authoritative say than the reader about meaning? While it's valid to give authorial interpretations a privileged position on the basis of being interesting, I think the reason we shouldn't deny readings that the author disagrees with is twofold. First, authorship and criticism are two different skills. It's quite possible the writer, although he has great imaginative sight and powers of summoning worlds with words, isn't actually very good at reverse engineering and figuring out what an already created work means. Many authors are lousy critics. (Which is why I wonder so much why Best American Short Stories keeps having authors pick the best stories instead of critics. Also nearly all contests have authors as the judges.) The second reason is that literary creations are works just like chairs and power tools and steak sandwiches. If the creator says, "This is a comfortable chair because I made it with velvet so it would be comfortable," but the critic says, "This is not a comfortable chair because it has a giant lump in the middle," the critic is well within his interpretive rights to do so. The critic is using the text of the chair, whereas the creator is using his intentions. Isn't the critic's reading from the text the more valid one?

The third type of intent happens when readers interact with a work and it takes on a life of its own. Say that a creator makes a crockpot, and nobody thinks it's a very good crockpot, because it burns its users. But the users eventually find it actually makes a very good space heater for the same reasons that made it a bad crockpot--it puts off heat around it. The creator might be upset, but the users are happy. This might be the case when a work of art develops a following of rabid fans who create their own subculture based on the art. Perhaps most people who have interacted with the work more casually think this subculture is silly. Maybe even the author thinks it's silly, but the fans are happy. This type of intent is the intent of the reader. The reader is entitled to this type of intent. After all, they're the ones the work was meant for.

Applying types of intent to the law

When considering the law, as in any other kind of interpretive venture, we have to consider which type of intent makes the most sense. One very influential school of legal interpretation is the originalist school. Five of the nine Supreme Court justices are at least partly adherents of this philosophy. Originalism is located somewhere between intent of the author and intent of the text. As Justice Barret explained a few months ago on an episode of the podcast We the People, originalism tries to avoid some of the weaknesses of authorial intent thinking. It isn't trying to use psychoanalysis to dig up the unobtainable mental states of Madison, et.al. in 1787. Rather, it aims, whenever the text isn't extremely clear (meaning it isn't saying something unambiguous like "the President has to be at least thirty-five years old") to find the "original public meaning." That is, with a textual passage that could be read multiple ways, such as "No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," one way to help fix the meaning is to look at how it was understood as a practical matter at the time it was adopted. 

This was, quite controversially, the logic that supported the decision in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Originally, when the Supreme Court ruled in Roe that a woman's right to an abortion in the early stages of pregnancy was protected, they reasoned that decisions over reproduction and family planning were core rights that would be included in "life" and "liberty" under the Fourteenth Amendment. In Dobbs, the Supreme Court decided instead to look at the long tradition of the United States to see if society considered the right to an abortion to be a core liberty covered in the Fourteenth Amendment at the time it was passed. Not surprisingly, it was not, because it was passed in the mid-nineteenth century, when women couldn't vote and those who could had very different notions about the rights of women than we do now. 

The strength of originalism and original public meaning (OPM) is that at least we know what we're using as the basis for argument. We might disagree about what a law means, but it can't just mean anything. We know what kinds of evidence we are considering: the text of the law itself and the historical records of how people understood and put the law into practice. The closer those records are to the time of the passing, the more authority they hold. 

I don't mean to outright condemn originalism, or to suggest that those who hold to it are intellectual weaklings. It's a coherent theory. Reasonable people (to use the Holmes test) could stick to it throughout a lifetime without getting themselves into any greater a self-contradiction than proponents of almost any other theory would. If one of the goals of law is to provide predictability, it has more hope of that than many other legal theories. Still, the weaknesses of OPM are many. First, when there was always a diversity of opinion about how to read the law, whose original public meaning do we decide from? Do we pick the one that's the most ubiquitous in the available records? The one the Supreme Court first went with, no matter how convoluted the reasoning? (If so, this would leave us with some very unfortunate readings of the Fourteenth Amendment from the Chase Court.) Do we ignore essays, editorials and law review articles from the time of passing and only focus on statutes? If so, wouldn't the statues lead us in a circular direction? Consider abortion and the Fourteenth Amendment. If we only look at statues at the time it was passed, it's not surprising that a right to an abortion wasn't considered a core liberty at the time of its passing. Women suffered from all kinds of legal and social prejudices, and those were reflected in the statutes. But maybe the point of the Fourteenth Amendment was to reverse some of the statutory prejudices at the time. If so, an OPM reading would defeat an amendment meant to change the status quo, because it would only look to the status quo itself to determine what the norm was. It would require strict scrutiny for any non-enumerated rights, even if the intent in passing an open-ended amendment was to leave the door open to many unenumerated rights. It would require specific language in the Constitution, when it has, since its first draft, been a document with a predilection for strategic ambiguity. 

When considering Constitutional questions, diversity of opinions among both authors and original recipients is more the rule than the exception. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention (which was originally supposed to just edit the Articles of Confederation, not write a new constitution) disagreed every day among each other about what they should write. Opinions changed throughout the months of the convention. Opinions of framers continued to change after passage of the Constitution. Most importantly, immediately after passage, it became clear that there was a difference of opinion within the original public as to the meaning. It took less than ten years for parties to form because of a difference in Constitutional theory. These differences of opinion were strong and never went away. The Civil War was a very bloody and expensive disagreement about differing Constitutional theories.

All of this is to say that the original generation that wrote and passed the Constitution did not agree on what they had agreed to, and no successive generation has been able to agree, either. Many of the first Supreme Court justices were framers of the Constitution (Jay, Rutledge, Wilson, Iredell, etc.). Because the Supreme Court originally gave its opinions seriatim, or one opinion for each justice, we can see that even in the very few cases the court originally took on, the founders didn't agree about what the Constitution meant. 

Even if everyone in this photo were a brainwashed member of a death cult, there is no way you get that many smart guys into a room and have them all agree about anything.

When there is disagreement among even the original public that liquidated (to use the Madisonian term) the meaning, a contemporary court determined to use original public meaning is likely to use its own prejudices to determine which opinions among the original public mattered. In Dobbs, the court shrugged off evidence of widespread practical indifference to abortion laws, particularly prior to "quickening." It privileged statutes over historical research into folk customs. This is neither intent of the text nor of the author. It's intent of the reader, in this case the reader being the six justices who signed off on the decision. 

Maybe intent of the reader is impossible to avoid in any interpretive effort. We'd like to think that in the law especially, intent of the text should be the main focus, because whatever was said before or after passing the law about why we passed it, the text itself ought to be the main focus, because it's what we can say the people have actually agreed to. With intentionally ambiguous phrases in law such as "liberty" and "due process," we are forced into the same kind of position we are with respect to imaginative literature. If it's not a straightforward law, we can have a room full of people insisting they are the only ones looking closely at the text but all disagreeing on what it means. We might all agree that it doesn't mean just anything, and we might even mostly get to some general agreement about the ballpark it's in, but there is room enough to accommodate the entire political spectrum from right to left within the text, and the text is really all anyone can hold us to. 

Making this whole situation worse for those who would like clarity, our common law tradition has attempted to deal with ambiguity in the law through precedent, meaning the law isn't just the law, but the tradition of interpreting the law through past decisions. Those decisions themselves include ambiguities which then must be interpreted and liquidated. The law doesn't become clearer through the years; the body attempting to understand it merely grows, and rather than coming to a better understanding of what anything means, we simply deal during different political periods with whatever constraints on the law different groups can achieve. 

OPM not only occupies a middle ground between intent of the author and intent of the text. In fact, it also is adopting quite a bit from intent of the reader, because by looking at how people understood the law, it is dipping its toes into something that in literature is called reception theory, which is very much within the tradition of the intent of the reader philosophy. 

If we are going to use intent of the reader to interpret the law, why not go whole hog about it? Since we today are the people bound by the law and the ones who have to deal with its consequences, and not the people who originally passed it, why not submit it to the public today how we ought to read the law? Why limit the intent of the reader to five people in robes, however learned in the law they might be? Why rule out readings of the law that look to high-level intent, rather than the specifics of how that intent was incorporated at the time of its writing? Why couldn't a contemporary justice say, as Jesus once did, that the laws are made for man, not man for the laws? 

In saying that in evaluating a term like "liberty" by what we mean now rather than what it meant to given readers in the past, I am not saying we ignore denotative meanings. If "gay" meant "happy," we shouldn't try to read it like it meant what it means now. But terms that have always had expansive or protean meanings, like liberty, should be allowed to drift with time. It matters more what people think liberty means now that it matters what people thought it meant just after the Civil War.

Navigating out of nihilism

Like a lot of people, I assume, for the past ten years I've been kind of stuck in a state of deep anxiety when thinking about political life and discourse. It feels like somehow, we've gone from the very healthy and enlightened notion that reasonable people can disagree about many things to the notion that because reasonable people disagree so much, nothing is true. If something were true, we'd all agree, right? So since we can't agree, that must mean the truth doesn't exist, and therefore whatever you can convince people is true is as good as the truth. What makes this kind of cynical nihilism so frustrating is that it uses many of the same devices and tools as an earnest searcher for truth does. Its rhetoric is similar. On the surface, it feels like political sophists using cheap rhetorical tricks to win over the masses are playing the same game the earnest are, so how could we get mad at them?

I don't think the problem is originalism. Originalism is just a method for trying to make sense of legal texts. Its not a monolithic movement. Outside of the Supreme Court, originalists who fundamentally agree on method still disagree about where the methods take them. For example, some originalists agree with unitary executive theory and some don't. The way out of cynical nihilism isn't to pick a better theory of interpretation, because any theory can be used to argue for bad interpretations. And I don't necessarily think that originalists are inherently more cynical than anyone else is.

When I've moved between different kinds of intents as a literary critic, I've generally done it based on which way of looking at a text yields the most interesting reading. Perhaps with literature, there's less of an imperative to find the "right" interpretation, because "right" has a different meaning in literature than it does in law. If Frodo and Sam really do exhibit homoerotic subtexts, nobody is going to go to jail or lose their business. Nor will those things happen if Frodo and Sam don't exhibit anything homoerotic in their relationship. Literary reading perhaps matters most because it allows us to use enjoyable narratives to practice reading ambiguous texts for meaning so that we are better at it later when it has more immediate consequences. 

But that's not to say that literary reading doesn't have any stakes of its own. When we read a story or poem that stirs our imagination through its own imaginative efforts, it forces us to ask fundamental questions of meaning not just in literature, but in the cosmos. If this story moves me, why does it do that? If this ending makes me sad, why? If I think the picture this story paints of reality is true or false, why do I think that? If this poem has given voice to something I've always thought but never been able to put in words, what are those words? 

Using literature to better understand the big questions is a humanistic pursuit, because these questions are inherently human questions. Consistent with the literary pedagogy of my time, I've mostly followed a text-based approach, for two reasons. One is that it's the simplest and yet the most flexible. If there is a dragon in the text, we know we have to deal with a dragon and not the history of agriculture. But dragons mean so many things metaphorically and metonymically that the readings one can draw from the presence of a dragon are limitless. If the dragon is in the text, and there aren't any limitations set on what the dragon might connote, then we are free to see our own extended meanings. The second reason is that whatever intent the author had, she tried to accomplish it with a product, and that product is the text. The text is meant to be seen as the final result of the intent without reference to other things. 

However, if reading literature is an inherently humanistic quest, then it's important not to lose the human element by burying it in text. I used to think "intent of the author" readings were simplistic and naïve; now, decades after leaving those kinds of readings behind, I find myself drawn to them again. Maybe we can't enter into the actual mental state of the author at the time of final revision, but we can, through close attention to the text, try to recreate what Wayne Booth called "the implied author." This is the author we have to imagine to ourselves as having written the text we are reading. 

We do this kind of reading all the time when we see graffiti. It's a very simple message, usually, but that doesn't keep us from drawing big conclusions from what we see. There was a urinal at my job once that had a placard over it that bragged about how much water the agency was saving by having a flushless urinal. On that placard, someone scribbled the word "stinks!" From that one word, I could imagine an independent thinker, someone who doesn't just accept that because someone is telling him that a given step is a good one that it is one. I imagine a likely political conservative, someone who is skeptical of efforts to improve the environment and thinks they often do more harm than good. 

Maybe I've read too much into that one word, but I can't help trying to do it. I suspect it's a common condition. We try to reason our way out to the characteristics of the person writing a text, at least enough to imagine what might have been going through their heads when they wrote something. That doesn't mean that if I read about a kind character I think the author was kind, but it means I can assume some things about how the author understood kindness.

In the law, I think I am likely to adopt something of an "implied author" approach to law, one that tries to unite the three intentions. We read from our intent as readers to live in a just and happy world back to the minds of the writers of our laws. How do we accomplish this? Through the medium of the text. The text is what links author to reader.

The effort in reading the law, then, is like the effort in reading literature. It's not a question of simply trying to figure out what a text means (intent of text), or what someone meant by a particular text (intent of author). It's realizing that the brightest minds of past generations have dealt with problems similar to the ones we face and trying to understand how they answered them through the medium of the text. 

I realize that in law school, and even more after law school when I'm grinding through immigration forms or depositions or whatever else it is I'm actually doing, nobody is going to be asking me anything as lofty as what my judicial philosophy is. Nonetheless, I can't help trying, when pouring over textbooks full of the records of past generations trying to figure out fundamental issues in society, to solve the same problems along with them and figure out what I think of those solutions. 

The future of this blog as a home for literary criticism

I intend to try to still do literary criticism on here. I don't know if that's realistic. Law school is demanding for younger, smarter people than me. For me to try it at my age is possibly foolhardy. Even if I greatly reduce my goals so that I only do Best American Short Stories in a year, that might be too much. I only have so much energy to read and think and write, and any mental resources I use for the blog will be unavailable for law school. Still, I intend to try. These years of literary thinking have left a mark on me that's been obvious from the moment I started reading my first law textbook. 

Even though literature seems to not want me, in the sense that I continually get my work rejected, I still think the discipline of reading critically is one that's worth the effort. I plan to keep trying to make the effort. 

My Thanksgiving time travel story for your enjoyment

Once in a while, I put one of my own stories on this blog. They seem to get as many readers when I do this as they do when I get it published somewhere. And even if I did get this one published, it'd be hard to get it timed exactly right to come out right on Thanksgiving, which seems like the best time to read this. 

So here goes, one of my own stories.

 

Herald

At first, it annoyed me that Elmer made me learn time soaping from her in person. Truth be told, it annoyed me at second, too. Couldn’t she have just given me the password to a secret wiki page or something? Why had she made me practice with the dispenser in her basement over and over for months? And why had she made me go all the way into Greenpoint for one particular kind of apple fritter she just had to have before bringing it all the way back to her place in Brooklyn to practice?

Now that I was actually holding one of the bones to a four-story high baby Yoda, though, I was glad she’d made me do all the training in person. Soaping wasn’t about science or technique as much as it was about psychology in practice. Not really something a wiki page could teach you. It was a kind of Jedi mind trick, an irony not lost on me based on the balloon I was trying to keep more or less tied to the Earth. I was so nervous, I couldn’t even feel the bone—what viewers at home would call a rope—in my hands, and I half feared I’d be carried off into the sky with the baby Yoda. I guess the name of the thing was actually Grogo. I don’t know. I don’t have Disney Plus.

“This is more of a workout than I thought,” one of the other volunteers said to me, huffing as she said it and pulling down more than was necessary. She was short, and the physics of it pretty much dictated that all the taller handlers would be shouldering the real weight. She should have faked effort until we got to Herald Square to deliver her message. That was her real purpose in being here. That was all of our real purpose in being here. How else would the competition to stand in the cold all morning for free be so fierce?

I forget what her story was, what kind of message she was hoping to send as a stowaway. We’d all exchanged our stories in the pre-dawn dark. Hers was probably something about love. That’s what more than half of us were here for. It’s what got me into soaping in the first place. When I first reached out to Elmer to teach me, I wanted to make Elaine forget the things I’d said to her at Thanksgiving a year ago.

“Port side, a little more slack!” Elmer ordered the volunteers, running up and down the columns. “And don’t forget to smile! You’re in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Enjoy yourselves a little.”

We all tried to smile, but we forgot her command almost as soon as she moved around to the other side of the balloon. Who could smile when we were all so close to the moment of truth? To work right, time soaping required absolute focus at the right moment, and we all feared that if we focused too much on anything else before we got to the end, we’d wear ourselves out prematurely.

Having run from one end of a column to the other and back again, Elmer eased up to the front and slowed to a walk.

            “I know it’s hard to relax,” she said, in a voice low enough only the first row of spectators in Bryant Park could hear. “But trust me, your message will go out a lot better if you’re calm. You’ve got this. Good luck, washers.”

            With that, our backs straightened and our flagging arms grew strong again. Elmer was a good pilot. Actually, her name wasn’t Elmer. It was Nancy, but I hadn’t known that until she’d introduced herself in the wee hours of the morning as the pilot to the other balloon handlers.

 

            She’d had me call her Elmer from the first time we met. She said it’s what all the time soaping mentors went by. I guess it came from something they used to do a million years ago called Ham radio. Back then, before the Internet and wiki pages and helpful how-to TikToks to show you how to do everything, there was no way to learn the hobby except to have someone who’d been doing it a while show you. There were guidebooks and stuff, I guess, but there was a lot of equipment involved, and it was pretty complicated, so the best way to learn was to sit with an actual human guide. These guides were called Elmers. She told me why, but I forget. I’ve called her Elmer since I first found her through Bubble, which is like Craigslist, but on the dark web and only meant for time soapers.

            Dark times led to the dark web for me. After two years with Elaine, I’d said one stupid sentence at her parents’ house, and that was the end of it. I wanted Elmer to help me undo it, or to at least make it seem undone to Elaine.

 

            “We’ll pull up right at the end,” Elmer Nancy said to me in an even lower voice. “While we’re waiting, the actors will run on and do their thing. That’s your moment.”

            It wasn’t as cold as we’d hoped. It’s a lot easier to hide the dispenser over your ear if you’re wearing a hat. For that reason, most of the volunteers had started out with them on in the morning, but I was sweating so bad I had to take mine off back at Columbus Circle. The few still doggedly keeping theirs on looked like they’d been cooked in one of those roasting bags for turkeys. Hiding it in my pocket wasn’t a bad second option, though. I could still pull it back out when I needed it.

            “Remember,” Elmer Nancy advised us one more time, “You aren’t trying to convince anyone, because there’s nothing to convince them of. The way it is in your head is the way it is.”

           

“The way it is in your head is the way it is” is a mantra she’d been drilling into me since the first time we’d met. When I knocked on the door to her brownstone, she’d opened it quickly, snatched the box of pastries from me, pulled me inside with a quick glance down each side of the street, and took me to the basement. She’d inhaled both fritters and waited until the last bite had fully travelled down her gullet, her eyes closed to savor every hint of flavor. At some point, she decided she was done, opened her eyes, and that’s the first thing she said to me. The way it is in your head is the way it is.

I was confused, because I was hoping to make it so the way it was in my head wasn’t the way it really was anymore. I wanted to change the past, undo what I’d said. She said that’s not how time soaping worked. Time travel was impossible—another frequent truism of the time soaping community—but if you could convince someone that something else had happened in the past, didn’t that come to the same thing? Anyway, she said what I was feeling was regret, but that regret wasn’t how to change the past. If you transmitted even a sliver of regret, the dispenser wouldn’t work. You had to believe that the way you wish things were or the way things had been was the way they really were. That was the only way to change the mind of the receiver, and in so doing, to change the past.

 

We passed 37^th, and I found that now I was pulling harder on the bone than was necessary, wearing myself out as much as the woman next to me had been doing. We all were. We were in the zone now where the crowds thinned out, because the television broadcast limited viewing near Herald Square and the big finale. We were all getting close to show time. Volunteers patted their pockets with a free hand to make sure their dispensers were still there. We’d all been given these white and black jackets that said The Mandalorian on them, and we’d tucked our devices into them.

It was an open secret that nearly all the balloon handlers were there to time soap. At first, the parade had tried to stop it, but then they almost couldn’t get anyone to participate, so they had to relax a little bit. You were allowed to soap as long as you kept it reasonable. Convince the person you’d been crushing on that he’d actually been in love with you their whole life? Fine. Get your bosses to unfire you for that outburst? No problem. Just keep it discreet. The main time soaper on top of Macy’s was for the big corporations that paid for it. Your ideas were allowed to hitch a ride, but only if it wasn’t something that would go messing with their profits. One year, a soaper tried to convince the whole world that Santa Claus didn’t exist. For thirty minutes, capitalism seemed doomed, until Santa came along at the end of the parade and the corporate soapers managed to undo the damage just in time. Considering how well you have to understand the subtleties of the human heart to make soaping work, it’s amazing how well the folks who work for evil corporations do at it. Because of scares like that in the past, you could only get into the parade now if you had someone who’d vouch for you. Elmer Nancy had gotten me in. She’d been a balloon pilot for years. Nobody questioned her.

I thought one more time about scrapping the mission Elmer Nancy had given me, of going back to the original plan of trying to soap Elaine into thinking I’d never said what I’d said. It was so stupid. Her parents had kept pushing wine on me, and I don’t usually drink, but I didn’t want to be rude. And then it took so long to get dinner out, I just kept getting drunker and drunker. Elaine’s mom, whom I just called Mrs. Wanjiru, said that she hoped I wouldn’t find her cooking too strange. She’d never seen a turkey until she was twenty-five, she said.

“I’m sure if you can cook a warthog, you can cook a turkey,” I said. Mr. and Mrs. Wanjiru both laughed, but Elaine went cold, and she dropped my hand she’d been holding on the couch as we watched the parade. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she was angry. I would have asked what I said that was wrong, but someone named Jordin Sparks came on to perform, and suddenly I realized that I’d always loved her music and I pulled out my phone to download all of her songs on Spotify.

Elaine barely spoke during dinner. I should have been concerned, but I was, for reasons I didn’t stop to consider, so excited to go book a trip on a Disney Cruise Line, I just couldn’t bring myself to think about it. It wasn’t until after dinner when I was taking Elaine home that I realized how badly I’m messed up. I didn’t catch everything she said, but as words like stupid and Americentric and insulting and racist burst out, each one popped a bubble of thought that had been floating in my mind, bubbles having to do with a movie I suddenly wanted to watch or Broadway show I suddenly wanted to see or how glad I was that Al Roker was still alive and how much I hoped he’d be back next year.

I tried to stammer out some kind of explanation. Wait, did I want to explain? Should I just apologize? But if I apologized, would that mean I thought I was totally wrong? Hadn’t her parents just made a joke about how easily I got sunburned, and wasn’t I just trying to make us all comfortable with each other by making it okay for us to tell jokes we wouldn’t say in public? I felt like maybe I was two-thirds wrong and one-third right, but that my two-thirds wrongness was mitigated by having been a hundred percent soused. But I couldn’t both apologize and explain at the same time. I had to pick one or the other, and it confused me so badly I chose neither, and I yelled at her instead, and we were done by the time I pulled into her driveway.

That’s why I’d volunteered. We’d all volunteered for some reason similar to that. I wanted to make her think I’d never said it. Was I going to punt that all away now because Elmer Nancy had filled my head full of talk about responsibility to society?

There were more delays as we got closer to the finale in front of Macy’s. Some acts performing in Herald Square hadn’t had to march the whole way—who was going to make Cher wave along the whole damn parade route?—and they had to be weaved into the rotation so they could perform in front of the cameras. It didn’t really seem right to me. Was this a parade or a lip-synch concert? If something couldn’t be marched along a parade route, did it belong in a parade? But there was big money paying to put those acts in, so the definition of a parade got stretched as long as the route along 6^th Avenue.

I was waiting for one of those acts to go on. That was going to be my moment. If I held to my course, that is. Elmer Nancy had seemed so convincing in her basement when she’d asked me to do it, I couldn’t tell her no. But now I was thinking back to Thanksgiving a year ago and reliving how lonely I’d been in the year since, and I didn’t care about the world. I wanted Elaine back.

 

“Time soaping isn’t time travel,” she’d said to me when she first pulled out a dispenser in her basement and started to show me the basics of it. “It was invented as sort of a side effect of the search for time travel, though.”

I tried to listen as I turned the dispenser over and around in my hands. It looked like the kind of headset we’d all had to start using for video meetings when the pandemic started, the kind with a pullout microphone, only the microphone was sort of a jagged ball and it was supposed to go to the back of your skull instead of in front of your mouth.

“Scientists and nations tried for a long time to discover time travel,” she said. “But they finally decided it was impossible. The universe protects causality, it turns out.”

I thought I could guess what “causality” meant, although it was a word I’d never used before. It didn’t help me to follow what she was saying, though.

“Early on, we realized that you couldn’t send, say, a whole person into the past or future. Their mass was too great. In order to travel in time, you’d have to somehow have negative mass, so you could go faster than the speed of light. Nothing we know of has a negative mass, of course, and a whole human being has a mass so large it couldn’t begin to get near that fast.”

I install heating and cooling systems for a living. I can read a schematic and I understand how electricity works. I can even do mental math pretty well, which has given me the false impression over the years that I’m smart in science and math. But this stuff was over my head. I thought hard of a question I could ask that would sound halfway smart, enough that she didn’t kick me out for being too stupid to learn.

“If you can’t send a whole person into the past, what about a message, like a radio message? Those go about the speed of light, don’t they?”

“We used to think there was some hope in that,” she told me. “But over time, we started to think about it. Let’s say you could send yourself a message in the future. So you start to send it, but as you’re about to send it, a message comes to you from the future telling you to destroy the machine. So you destroy it, but by doing so, you make it so the device never existed, meaning you couldn’t have gotten the message from the future in the first place. It makes no sense.”

            She brushed crumbs from her blouse. I didn’t know if she really understood physics or she was a crank. She seemed a little undignified for a physicist.

            “Aren’t you just describing what makes sci-fi stories about time travel confusing? Just because it’s confusing doesn’t mean it’s impossible, right? I mean, the soapers work, don’t they? If not, what am I doing here?”

“Oh, they work alright,” she said. “But those paradoxes aren’t just potential plot holes. They’re the reason we know time travel can’t work. Have you ever heard of Hawking’s cocktail party?”

I knew who Stephen Hawking was, and I thought of making a joke about how lively a party a guy in a wheelchair could have thrown, but then I realized that jokes like that were the whole reason I was looking to go into the past to fix my love life in the first place.

“Hawking threw a cocktail party in 2009. It had champagne and caviar and balloons and everything. But he didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. He figured that if anyone actually figured out time travel in the future, they’d be able to get the invitation and come back in time to attend. Since nobody attended, he figured that time travel was impossible.”

I stood there trying to understand how the timing of that worked.

“So if time travel is impossible, what am I doing here?”

“Time travel doesn’t work because the universe doesn’t violate the law of causality,” she said. She was standing in front of a wooden workbench under a long, hanging fluorescent tube light. Dust was falling on her, and she looked gray and indistinct.

“A city is burned because a cow kicked over a lamp. If the cow doesn’t kick over the lamp, the city doesn’t burn,” she said. “Everything causes something else. Time travel would alter the series of causes and events, and the universe just doesn’t like that, it would seem.”

“So the dispenser…”

“There is something, though, that confuses causes and events all the time. The human brain. If you can convince the human brain that the past was something other than it was, you can make someone see the whole chain of causation differently. For them, at least, the message got there before the event. Get enough people to change their perception, and the world, at least this world run by human brains, really does change.”

This sounded like an episode of something I’d seen.

“You mean like a brain worm? Something that inserts itself into your memory and makes you think it was there all along? Like Photoshop for somebody else’s brain?”

“That’s a little bit crude, but it’s not too far off, I guess. People’s memories aren’t really all that stable to begin with. They’re always looking to rewrite their past to what they wish had happened. They just need a little push. That’s what the time soapers are. The same way soap changes water molecules so they penetrate clothes better, the time soap dispenser sort of makes the brain a little more absorptive. Enough that you can send a thought to it and it will accept that thought as its own.”

I felt a little disappointed. I wanted to go back in time and unsay what I’d said. But here she was talking about some kind of hypnosis or something where I’d just convince Elaine I’d never said it. What would happen when some stimulus made her snap out of it and she realized she hated me again?

“Of course, to make it stick takes a lot of power. I’m talking 1.21 gigawatts kind of power here.”

I felt like that was a reference she expected me to get, but I had no idea what it meant.

“When the first bubble makers were being made, it was nations that paid for them. You can see why the CIA would be interested in technology that could make all our enemies think they’d already lost, or that they loved us after all. But all of our adversaries developed similar technology at about the same time, meaning they kept cancelling each other out. Every nation still has a dispenser or two, just to keep things equal, but they’re useless now, except for making sure nobody else takes over the world through suggestion.”

“So this dispenser I’m holding…”

“Is useless in itself. It’s far too weak to soap a brain on its own. It has to hitch a ride on something much more powerful. You need your signal to hide in a much stronger signal.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“Well, the biggest soaper still in existence is at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade,” she said. The dust below the light shimmered like a halo around her head. I couldn’t tell what color her hair was.

“The parade? You mean Santa and Miracle on 34^th Street and Snoopy balloons?”

“That’s the one.”

“What the hell is a soaper doing there?”

“Nations can’t use soapers for defense purposes, but companies can. They just have to keep their purposes below the level of something another nation would care about enough to fight it.”

“So who is behind the Macy’s Parade soaper?” I asked.

“Oh, whoever has a shitty movie or television show nobody cares about but which they need people to care about. So they have a huge and powerful soaper sitting on the roof of Macy’s. When a balloon for some Nickelodeon show goes on the air, they hit the soaper and suddenly, children all over America who are watching the parade at Aunt Sally’s find they need to borrow their parents’ phones immediately to stream the show. A singer nobody has paid attention to in a decade suddenly has a resurgence. A musical about to open its run that nobody has bought tickets to suddenly sells out.”

“How does it work so well?” I asked. I was hungry and wishing I’d gotten a pastry for myself.

“Think about it. Everyone watching the parade is in some kind of awkward family setting. They’re at a house they’re anxious to leave. They’re hosting family members who annoy them. They’re meeting their future in-laws and they’re nervous. And it’s not even noon yet, so they’ve got hours left to go. And here’s this parade of floating balloons and vanilla announcers losing their absolute fucking minds with excitement over it. It’s all very disorienting. Leaves the mind very open to soaping, especially when the world’s most powerful commercial-grade soaper is beaming thoughts at you.”

 

We were making the turn onto 34^th Street now. Elmer Nancy was busy guiding us through the turn, which wasn’t easy. It would have been challenging for the Marine Corps, getting the left flank to wheel while the right flank held firm. I was near the front of the balloon, and I looked into the baby Yoda’s eyes. They were black and expressionless with no pupils, sort of blank the way an ancient Greek statue was. It was as if the baby Yoda didn’t want to influence anyone with its own emotions. It wasn’t going to tell me what to do. Within your own heart look you must.

We were in Herald Square now, within site of the front of Macy’s and the cameras and the performances. I could almost hear Al Roker, now back at the parade, frothing at the mouth and about to give himself a heart attack with excitement.

“Okay, we’re going to hold up here while they bring an act on in front of us,” Elmer Nancy said. Then, lower, she added, “Clear thoughts. Best wishes.” She was looking at me when she said it. I still couldn’t tell what color hair she had, and I swore her face looked different than it had before. I wouldn’t have recognized her if it weren’t for the voice in my head asking me one last time for a favor. Remind me of why I did this, it said.

As we held Grogu in front of the performance area, a DeLorean pulled out in front of us. Its doors popped open, and out came an Einstein-looking older man in a white hazmat suit and a younger man with curly hair, tennis shoes, and a red sleeveless vest. Music came on, and they danced and lip-synched their way through a routine. I couldn’t really hear what the song was about, but I thought maybe it was something about science and time travel. Eight very attractive female dancers came on, shaking their way through what was probably the exposition to whatever musical they were brainwashing people into wanting to see.

Elmer Nancy had said it was a movie when she was a kid. A series of movies, actually. It had meant a lot to her, but she didn’t think I needed to watch them in order for me to help her. In fact, maybe it was better if I never watched Back to the Future. I’d have a clearer head that way.

A week before the parade, she’d told me what she wanted from me.

“I need you to send a message that time travel is possible. That if someone only works hard enough, they’ll be able to find a way to make it happen. I want you to say that this has been a dream since someone was a kid and first watched those movies.”
            “Who am I sending this message to?” I asked her.

“To me.”

 

I pulled out my dispenser and put it on my head. I would only get the chance to soap once. All the companies who paid Macy’s for a spot in the show had their own bubbles going out. You could sneak in a small message here or there, but if you tried to soap a second time, they’d catch you and squelch your message. I had to decide. Would I help out Elmer Nancy or would I wait until Back to the Future the Musical cleared off the stage and go send Eileen a message of love with all the other balloon holders?

Grogu’s eyes seemed to grow a shade darker, as if to emphasize that the answer wasn’t anywhere outside me. To send a message with my own brain that would implant in the brain of another, I had to be absolutely clear in my own mind. I looked at Elmer Nancy. She gave me a slight smile and blinked slowly. Not really a blink so much as a message of understanding. I know it’s hard, she said. I’d do it myself if I could soap my own mind. Wouldn’t the whole world be easier for all of us if we only could?

The song changed. You gotta get back in time, it said. Over and over, it said it. I looked into Grogu’s eyes and thought yes, you’ve got to get back in time. You can do that through time travel. Isn’t this a wonderful story and not in any way convoluted and isn’t this musical delightful and not at all a shameless cash grab aimed at Gen X and their sentimental money? This is brilliant, I thought, and I tried to mean it. This is brilliant, and everyone should aim to be an eccentric scientist in a hazmat suit with white Einstein hair who turns a car into a time machine. Ignore the plot holes. It makes sense. Do this with your life.

 

The actors cleared off the stage. Elmer Nancy directed us forward. The crowd cheered. We were on, and while sixty balloon holders sent their desperate messages as inconspicuously as they could, the announcers said something cheery. Then our time was up and we were headed off to go deflate the balloon by sitting on it until all the air was out.

Had it worked? After the balloon was folded and put away for next year, I couldn’t tell that Elmer Nancy was any different. All the people I’d marched with for the last few hours were texting the loved ones they’d just tried to soap. Some got immediate responses and some were still waiting, chiding themselves for not having believed enough.

Relieved at last of her piloting duties, Elmer Nancy strode over to me with such determination, I was afraid she was coming to yell at me for not having done my job right. Instead, she asked me to go eat at a place in Koreatown she knew was open.

 

I let her order for me. I didn’t know a damn thing about Korean food, and I wasn’t even sure I could locate Korea on a map. A year ago, I might have made a joke about Gangnam style or whether the restaurant served dog, but I didn’t make jokes like that anymore. I was going to shut up, eat what she told me, and wait for her to talk.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had to ask someone to do this for me,” she said. She wasn’t half bad with chopsticks, and she was digging into a number of bowls filled with green or red plants I didn’t know.

“Why hasn’t it worked before?” I asked, wondering if our talking about it this way meant it also hadn’t worked this time.

“Oh, it’s worked, but each time, the same conglomerate that sponsors the Macy’s time soaper has gone back and erased the memory. So I have to fight back.”

“Why would they care what opinion you hold of a silly 80s movie?”

“Because that movie is what inspired me to first get interested in time travel. Which then led me to realize that it would never work, but time soaping might. Which then led me to invent the technology.”

“You mean you’re….”

“Nancy O, the inventor of the time soaper, the technology nobody admits exists but every powerful entity on Earth is using.”

And suddenly I saw her. The brilliant Korean-American scientist even I’d heard about. She was quoted on every documentary about anything involving science. But I, and probably most of the country, didn’t know what she was famous for or why everyone thought she was so brilliant.

“I never wanted to make the soaper for commercial or government purposes,” she said. “I originally thought of it as a tool for therapists. Something to help people out of their bad habits. If you think you’ve never smoked, it’s a lot easier to quit smoking. If you think you’re assertive enough to tell your boss he’s creeping you out with his sexual jokes, you’ll be assertive.”

I tried stabbing one of the green things enough to get the pointy end of the chopstick through it and use it as a skewer. It only worked enough to flatten it out. Elmer Nancy picked it up and put it on a little plate in front of me. I stared at it, not sure how to get it from the plate to my mouth. I wished she’d have just fed it to me.

“Of course, you can’t develop something like a soaper without the resources of a big institution. I started with my university research lab, hoping that’s all I would need, but before long, we needed help from the government, and then industry heard about it and got involved. We didn’t just need help with equipment and power, we needed test subjects to send and receive the ideas. We needed psychologists to figure out what kind of suggestion would work. It got away from me very quickly.”

I gave up on using the chopsticks like pincers and just picked up the green thing with my fingers and put it in my mouth. It was oily and spicier than I expected.

“There was a scary moment there where it seemed like governments were going to be able to use it for domination through hypnosis. We got lucky that it was possible to cancel out soap with more soap. But then companies came in to use it for advertising, which of course had been their intent all along. I resisted. I started to speak out in public, making it known to everyone that this technology existed and what it was being used for.”

A server piled meat on a grill. She didn’t look at me, but Elmer Nancy spoke to her in Korean, and the server handed the tongs to her and left.

“I suppose you can guess why not everyone knows about it even though I’ve made it known to the world?” she asked me.

I thought about it. Normally, I’d have failed to come up with the answer right away, written myself off as an idiot, then panicked and lost the thread completely. For some reason, though, this time I didn’t. I kept on track. What was the most likely reason? And soon, I had it.

“The companies that use the soaper erased it from everyone’s mind?” I said.

“Exactly. Of course, soaping isn’t an exact science. It’s kind of frothy, so to speak. They couldn’t completely wash away the memory of something that had so fully gotten into the public consciousness. And there are irresponsible uses of it that threaten its secrecy. A few years ago, they loaned a soaper to a rich man who wanted to be a politician. He started using it all over the place to make everyone think he hadn’t said things he’d clearly said before, or that he hadn’t done things he’d definitely done. It actually got him elected president. It would have worked even better, but he was so capricious about how he used it, the time soaping would start overlapping with other time soaping, and soon the people he was trying to influence just started running into each other. The companies eventually had to steal it back from him to get him to quit messing up their tool. So there is still some public knowledge of it they can’t erase, but it exists somewhere between rumor and conspiracy theory. Only people desperate enough to need it end up finding out the truth.”

People desperate enough to need it. People like me. I’d screwed things up with Elaine. Elaine, who I’d loved from the minute she met me at the door when I showed up to fix her thermostat. She’d been holding a six-pound dog in one hand and a spatula covered in cake batter in the other. She was wearing a purple tank top and white shorts in the middle of winter because her thermostat wouldn’t shut off and her apartment was eighty-eight degrees. When she said, “The damn thing won’t shut off, I’m sweating my tits off in here,” I’d thought that if I were around her, I couldn’t imagine ever feeling sad again. And here I’d been without her for a year and I’d been sad the whole time.

“I’ve been playing a game of cat and mouse with the big corporations,” Elmer Nancy told me. They half erase my mind to get me to quit trying to tell the public about their tool or to develop a rival to it, then I, who have just enough memory of being a part of it to know I need to reverse it, manage to get my memory back. I fight them for a while, then they manage to get the next soap savant to override my memory again.”

She seemed calm for someone whose brain was a battleground and knew it. She had the serenity of a baby Yoda balloon. The barbecued meat, which she’d handled herself, was half gone.

“If you already know who you are, more or less, what do you need people like me to remind you of it for?”

“Because I want to design something so good, it breaks the corporate soapers altogether. Something that people can use to improve their lives, not just something companies can use to sell crap to us. To do that, I need to believe I can with all my heart. I need to believe I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life. I need a story about having seen a story about time travel when I was a kid and making up my mind that was what I was going to do.”

“But you know I put it there. How can you still think it’s real?”

“It honestly doesn’t matter if you know it’s made up. If the memory is there, it’s real. People who’ve been through trauma keep living the same thing over and over even after they know it’s gone. The dispenser does the same thing, but in a more useful way.”

I was still hungry, but I was out of water and didn’t see the waitress anywhere to ask for more. Without water, I was afraid to keep eating.

“Each time, I come back a little better,” she said. “A little smarter about how it all works. That much soaping, that much openness to suggestion in the brain—it doesn’t make you softer. It makes you stronger. And here’s what I think I realize this time, now that you’ve helped me break free again. Causation. It isn’t what you think it is. You aren’t miserable because of what you said. You’re miserable because of what you didn’t say afterwards. There’s no soap in the universe that can take back the worst things we’ve done. To some extent, you can’t change causes, even in people’s minds. But you can change effects, and when you do that, it changes how people perceive the cause itself. The way to change the past isn’t in the past. It’s in the future, in how you react to what you did.”

With that, she tucked into the meal and didn’t speak again until she’d cleaned up everything on the table. I was hungry after marching all morning, but I looked around helplessly for someone to ask for water while she finished it all. When the last morsel was gone, she stood up and dropped what looked like a poker chip on the table. I picked it up and looked at it. It had an engraving of bubbles on one side and Buddha on the other.

“Here you go. Congratulations, you’re an Elmer now. Use it wisely, and pass on what you’ve learned.”

After she had gone, I realized she’d left me to pay the bill.

 

On the train back to Queens, I signed up for a free trial subscription to Disney Plus. Even if you knew you were being manipulated, even if you were part of the manipulation, literally pulling the strings the whole time, the trick could still work on you. I started to watch the first episode of the Mandalorian.

When I came out of the station by home, I turned off the show. I wanted to do something about the future that would change not the past, but the effect the past was having on me. I pulled up a text box for Elaine. My phone still remembered the last angry thing she’d sent to me a year ago.

I thought of explaining myself, of telling her that of course I hadn’t meant it like that and how could she think that I could, after I’d learned so much because of her I could even tell when she was speaking Kikuyu and when she was speaking Swahili. I could have tried to explain it, but explanations don’t change the future or the past. I could only think of one thing powerful enough to do that. So I wrote Elaine nothing is right without you and nothing ever will be and I’m so sorry and I sent it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

             

           

           

Literary tourism: "Miracle in Lagos Traffic" by Chika Unigwe (O. Henry Anthology 2025)

I joked a couple of posts ago about how doing a compare and contrast was a lazy way to make it seem like I was really engaging with a story while not actually working all that hard. It's partly true and partly just a self-effacing joke. There is still some thought involved, but the built-in structure of comparing two stories does tend to make it easier to decide what you're going to write about. There's nothing really wrong about comparing one short story to another as a way of teasing out what's interesting about the one you're looking at. But darned if I'm not here two stories later in the 2025 O.Henry Anthology and the first thought that comes to me after reading "Miracle in Lagos Traffic" by Chika Unigwe is that I should compare it to "Sickled" by Jane Kalu, which appeared earlier in this same anthology.

They're both set in Nigeria, and both have teenage girls with serious illnesses. Both sick girls even have the same name--Ije. One family is a middle-class Igbo family with two daughters living in Lagos. The other is an Igbo family with two daughters that has recently fallen out of middle class status. In "Sickled," the older sister of the sick girl is the first-person narrator, while in "Miracle," the mother is the first-person narrator. 

One thing I like about the O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a. "The Best Short Stories," compared to Best American Short Stories, the other main literary fiction best-of short story anthology to come out every year, is that the editors are willing to pick stories that play off of one another like this. BASS is more likely to pick one Nigerian story and, having checked a box off of its list in order to achieve a goal of a diverse menu of stories, move on to some other part of the world. O.Henry is willing to put stories in an anthology that invite comparisons, that take on more meaning when juxtaposed with the other story. 

Until this year, this thematic gathering was sometimes a lot easier to see, because O.Henry didn't follow BASS in ordering its stories in alphabetical order of the author's surname. From what I can tell, that's new to O.Henry this year. Instead, O.Henry would group stories based on their interplay with one another. In 2019, they put five coming-of-age stories back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. I wish they had done that here with these two stories, which I'm pretty sure were both picked partly because of how well they complement one another. 

A different direction

In spite of how neatly they'd provide a compare-and-contrast project for me, one that would allow me to wrap up the anthology and move on to whatever comes next, I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to use this story as cause to muse for a moment on the act of reading a short story set in a place like Nigeria as a Western reader with no deep knowledge of the country.

Unigwe was born and raised in Nigeria but lives in the United States. While Nigeria is full of English speakers, typically, when we read a story by a Nigerian set in Nigeria, that writer often has had a chance to leave Nigeria for a significant part of their formative years. For example:

• Chinua Achebe: born in Nigeria, traveled for work to London occasionally before making it big with Things Fall Apart. Lived most of the last twenty-three years of his life in the United States.

• Wole Soyinka: Educated in both Nigeria and England.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Moved to the U.S. at nineteen to study.

• Ben Okri: Spent early childhood in London

• Teju Cole: Born in the U.S., raised in Lagos, moved back to U.S. at seventeen for college. 

That means the experience someone like me is getting is mediated by someone with significant Western understanding. Of course that's a good thing. Great writers like these, with a foot in both worlds, are able to translate their understanding of one world into the other in such a way that someone like me can more easily digest the information. But that ease of digestion comes with a cost. It's like eating at a Nigerian restaurant in the U.S. that alters favorites for American diners. It's close, but not quite the real thing. Maybe I wouldn't like the real thing, and if I'm being honest, yeah, I'd probably prefer a meal I will like if I'm only going to eat once or a few times. But if it were really going to matter that I understood Nigeria on a deeper level, then I really need to go eat the real thing. Even if I hate it. Even if it gives me terrible diarrhea. 

American military forces have been in South Korea since the end of the Korean War. There's an enormous apparatus there for Americans stationed in the country, one that allows them to live in Korea without feeling too lost most of the time. You can go have Korean "experiences," but they're curated by locals who know how to make the experience enjoyable and safe. Some Americans go away from their time in Korea thinking they really understand something about Korea, but they don't. They can't speak a lick of Korean. They've never eaten anything but bulgogi and kalbi. 

I don't know Korea like a Korean would, but because I speak passable Korean, I had a different experience when I've been there from what most Americans would. I at least have been in conversations with locals in their own language, seen bad, good, and indifferent behavior from people who didn't care that I was watching. I've eaten food that made me sick and food that isn't in any restaurant in the States. I've karaoked 70s Korean tunes and followed Korean news for domestic, rather than foreign, consumption. 

None of this makes me a Korea scholar, but it does mean I understand what farcical bullshit the "Korean experience" experience is. It's the same thing for people who think they're becoming cosmopolitan by checking off countries on a travel list, thinking that because they've been to the twelve places it's safe for tourists to go, they're worldly now. They're actually worse than people who've never traveled, because now they'll substitute their bullshit experience for just being humble enough to admit they don't know anything. The two-star general with a Korean driver who interprets for him and takes him everywhere is quite likely more mistaken in his understanding of Korea than the dude from his hometown who can't locate Korea on a map. 

Reading stories like this is the literary equivalent of a three-day trip somewhere

Look, I'm not in any way ripping on "Miracle" here. It's a fine story. It leaves the reader in the same place of moral ambiguity as the readers of the real-life news event that inspired the story. Yeah, you know that paying an unfortunate person for the kidney is immoral, but also, it's kind of understandable, and when the person doesn't end up fulfilling their end of the bargain, maybe you even feel like they've committed about one-eighth of a sin. It would be good grist for "Literary Court," if I didn't think I'd played that out already. 

There's nothing wrong with the story. In fact, it's the story's total okayness that makes it a good candidate to be the one where I finally stop and more fully consider the notion of including stories like this in an anthology meant for Western readers. (Also, it's the last story in the anthology, and now this post can serve as a wrap-up, because I was thinking to talk about the same thing in a wrap-up anyway.) 

I can guarantee that some of those Western readers of this book know even less about Nigeria than I do, and they're going to use the occasional story that a Western anthology uses to "round out" its collection to fake knowledge, either to others or to themselves. They'll feel like they've done something to become citizens of the world, the same way some travelers congratulate themselves on making themselves better people for having gone to Budapest. It doesn't. Without serious work to understand other parts of the world, traveling just upgrades you from ignorant to ignorant and privileged enough to travel. 

Let's say you are a securities trader. You try to fulfill your democratic duty by following the news, going deeper now and again by reading a longer story on the weekends. You've traveled a bit for work, say to Dubai and London. Most of your time and cognitive energy is spent on your job, but you do the best you can outside of that to improve your mind. You only can read one work of fiction a year, and since this is a highly regarded anthology, you make that your choice. Now these two stories are most of what you know about Nigeria. That, and a few stories you've heard from a woman at work who's from there. How does any of this affect you when you hear the White House, say, threatening military action against Nigeria for persecuting Christians?  

I'm not sure. I like to think that maybe it at least makes you think that Nigeria is a complicated place, and a simple take like "Nigeria persecutes Christians" is probably not quite getting to the heart of it. After all, aren't the parents in "Sickled" super, over-the-top Christians? And is anyone persecuting them? Aren't they doing a good job of ruining their own lives? That's possible, but maybe the well-meaning-but-busy futures trader takes away from it that Nigeria is a dangerous place, full of violence, because that's certainly a take one could have from "Miracle in Lagos Traffic." An alien reading this story might draw that conclusion. Mightn't a reader like this have an intuition where it seems plausible that Nigeria is persecuting Christians, or at least that it is inept enough to allow large-scale persecution. The government in "Miracle" doesn't exactly seem active in preventing crime. And the government in "Sickled" is a military dictatorship, although it's from decades ago. Come to think of it, our reader wonders, maybe those Christians in the story from decades ago are facing hardship now? He'll never know, because now he has to get back to work.

Not sure what the conclusion is

So what would I recommend, not putting stories like these in an anthology? Probably not. I mean, it's still a good story, and it shouldn't get ruled out because it might make someone smug and dumb instead of just dumb. But I do think part of the goal of making these anthologies "well-rounded"--one of the most unfortunate clichés in English, but okay, let's use it--is to give people at least some kind of cursory look into the minds of people from very different backgrounds. Maybe it's not so much to "teach a little about Nigeria" as it is to just experience Nigeria as a setting in a story in which the main point is to live through the psyche of a character in that setting. But some learning about Nigeria does happen. I Googled what a harmattan was while reading the story. I'll never remember that in a month, but maybe it gave me one trillionth of the feeling of living in Lagos for a second. It made me look up the news article about the senator who tried to buy a kidney for his daughter. A window into a few tableaux isn't deep knowledge, but it is knowledge of a sort. I'm not sure I can answer the question of whether something is better than nothing or whether a little learning is a dangerous thing.  

Reading stories like these, unless you happen to have done pretty thorough research or have a lot of experience with the culture coming into it, requires discipline. It also requires humility to prevent your self from making wide generalizations based on a narrow window into a fictional-but-based-on-at-least-some-truth world. Most humans aren't that disciplines, though. They take one fact they know and extrapolate wildly from it. They say Emily Dickinson's poems aren't worth reading because they heard somewhere she lived alone and was weird. They write off North Korea as a credible threat because Kim Jong Un has a funny haircut. So there's a bit of a risk to stories like these, curated by writers who know us so well, they don't let us get lost and terrified in a foreign land. 

O.Henry does something else that BASS doesn't ordinarily do: it included a few stories in translation. If I had to use some kind of fictional narrative to introduce someone to South Korea, I think I'd be more likely to use a novel in translation or even a soap opera with subtitles rather than a story written originally in English by a Korean-American. There is something quite different that happens when you experience art in which a culture is representing itself to itself than with art where a skillful guide represents a culture, knowing it's intended mainly for someone outside that culture. 

Ideally, we'd all have time for both kinds of stories, both those from inside the culture and those created specifically for export. I don't want to rule out the exports. I've certainly written more than my share of those stories myself, based on the hope that I had done enough work to present at least some truth from a different culture back to my own native one. My only point is that it seems to me that most Western readers get more of the literature meant for export, and that when you're consuming this, you have to have an extra level of vigilance to prevent thinking it gives you more knowledge than it does.