Something there is that doesn't love a pressure-treated privacy fence: "Time of the Preacher" by Bret Anthony Johnston (Best American Short Stories 2025)

When people who haven't been trained in literary analysis read the criticism of those who have, I imagine they often think the "pros" are just making it up and reading too much into the story. Lay people are probably prone to object, often with good reason, that "it doesn't say that anywhere in the story." 

I say "with good reason" because skepticism about unusual claims is typically a good thing. When Freud and his acolytes claimed to be able to interpret dreams, skepticism was well-founded. A lot of literary criticism probably feels similar to a lay person to the flim-flam interpretation of dreams. Both are claiming that an image can work on two levels: a literal or conscious level as well as a connotative or unconscious one. 

The difference to me is that with literary interpretation, treating an image or a word or a figure of speech like it might have a second layer of meaning is warranted, because words really do have connotations. We all experience this. It's why using words associated with monkeys or apes in close proximity to a black person is likely to draw anger. It's why conservatives get worked up about the treatment of the American flag or the National Anthem, although the former is just a piece of cloth and the latter just a song. Dragons, tigers, rainbows, spark plugs, Donald Trump's hair--all of them evoke both literal and figurative associations for us. The figurative ones might be hard to pin down, and they certainly won't be exactly the same in every person, but they objectively exist, and there will be an approximate nearness of meaning for most people. Or maybe rather than saying these things "objectively" exist, I should say they "phenomenologically" exist, which is to say that objectively, people nearly universally have a subjective experience. It comes to almost the same thing for interpretation. 

Two levels of political meaning in "Time of the Preacher"

In analyzing "Time of the Preacher" by Bret Anthony Johnston, I'm going to claim that there is a lot of political meaning in the story. This is true on two levels. One is that the main character, Holland, has pretty clear political opinions. This claim won't be hard to prove, because the story is full of evidence for Holland's political beliefs. The second claim is that the story itself holds certain political ideas, and this claim, I'll wager, will be met with greater skepticism, more objections of, "Where does it say that in the story?" 

Note that when I'm saying "the story" holds political ideals, I'm not saying Bret Anthony Johnston holds those ideas or that he meant to put them in the story. That may be, but when someone writes fiction, they're handling materials that are instable. All of those images and incidents and words, each of which has an uncertain connotative meaning, can end up creating meaning that the author did not intend. That's why most literary critics don't talk about what the author intended; they talk about what the text suggests. 

Meaning level one: Holland's political beliefs

It's pretty easy to prove that Holland leans conservative. The story is told from a third-person limited point of view, which means all of the thoughts about characters in the story are coming from Holland's mind. In the very first sentence of the story, we get Holland's impression of the people he is building a fence for. He finds them to be a "tiresome academic couple." Academic many not always mean "liberal," but it usually does, and it's clear that Holland, at least, thinks they are. Moreover, while still in the same neighborhood of the "tiresome academics," a man walking two small dogs asks Holland if he can build a skateboard ramp. Holland tells him no and then thinks one word to himself: "Liberals." Now, if Holland had simply thought this one person was a liberal, he would have thought "fucking liberal" or something like that. Instead, he thought in the plural, meaning Holland was lumping this one person in with others he thinks to be similar, and expressing a negative opinion about them as a group. I guess liberals walk little, annoying, pussy dogs and ask for stupid construction projects, in Holland's mind. 

If this wasn't direct enough, then his interactions with his ex-wife Mandy definitely are. Mandy calls him a libertarian, a group of people in some ways more liberal than conservatives (they generally are pro-legal-abortion), but also more conservative in some ways (they want to get rid of nearly all taxation). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which this story is set during, libertarians were bed fellows with Republicans/conservatives, because both wanted to limit the amount of government-mandated restrictions on personal activity. Holland, like many conservatives, wasn't a big fan of wearing a mask, and did so only perfunctorily to placate his liberal clients. When Holland and his wife had argued most recently, it had been about taxes and the mid-terms. When Mandy left Holland, she apparently left Holland's politics as much as him, because now she's married to a guy with the type of job Holland associates with rich liberals, and she also drives a Tesla, while he drives a who-gives-a-fuck-about-emissions pickup with a smoke stack. (Remember when Teslas were something liberals drove?) 

The pandemic wasn't the beginning of every act and possession becoming encoded for one's political beliefs, but it did become more pronounced at this time. The type of car one drove could tell something about your political beliefs. Whether you wore a mask said something about your beliefs. At work, a liberal co-worker friend of mine once got upset because a co-worker had a sign at his desk for Black Rifle Coffee. Only in a country where nearly any purchase can be coded for political beliefs would a coffee advertisement be an indirect way to put up a "Trump 2024" sign at your desk within a workspace where political signs were not allowed. "Time of the Preacher" makes use of these codes that we all recognize to tell us something about the characters. 

What the story says about conservatives and liberals

So it's pretty non-controversial that Holland is politically conservative. That doesn't mean that the story is, though. In fact, writing a story about a conservative can be a pretty effective way to critique conservative political beliefs. Is that what's happening here? I'm almost instinctively conditioned to expect as much, since this is an anthology of literary fiction, and the politics of literary fiction are pretty solidly liberal. 

However, I think the story's more complicated than that. During all three of Trump's campaigns, there was a tendency to equate blue collar workers with Trump supporters, and to claim that liberals were often well-off beneficiaries of a liberal status quo. The actual math behind this is not that clear-cut. A Pew Research poll in early 2024, before the election, suggested that 58% of low-income families supported Democrats. However, in the 2024 election, Trump split voters making less than $50K a year and won voters between $50,000 and $100,000. It's also a little bit tricky to equate "low income" with "blue collar," since many blue collar workers now make over $100,000 a year. But at any rate, Trump has certainly tried to associate himself with blue collar work, and there has been a shift in the direction of Trump among these voters, even if total blue collar support for Trump in particular and conservatives in general hasn't quite become totally overwhelming. At the very least, while I'm driving around Ohio, I'm not at all surprised to find a pickup truck with decals on it for an electrician or a plumber, and the truck has Trump stickers. 

In Holland's world, many of the stereotypes that Trump supporters have made hay with are existent, and pretty clearly so. Holland is a conservative blue collar worker doing work in liberal communities for wealthy liberal clients. Liberals look down on him for being blue collar. (Mandy makes fun of his smell and says he should bottle it, perhaps because she thinks liberal women secretly want to be with manly men like Holland. In any event, she's treating him in this respect like he's an "other" for working hard outdoors.) In spite of how liberals perceive him, Holland is brave and manly and resourceful and liberals are effete and cowardly, hiding behind masks and walls. Mandy has to call Holland to look for a snake because her software-designing husband "appreciates snakes even less than (Mandy does)."  

The story also challenges the notion that liberals are kinder than conservatives. When Mandy (is it too much of a reach to read "Mandatory" into her name, in the context of the pandemic?) needs help finding a snake, she calls ex-husband Holland, although she hasn't bothered to check in on him at any time during the pandemic. Mandy apparently comes from some amount of money, since she's taken over properties from her parents, but rather than call an exterminator and pay to have the snake removed, she calls on Holland. Maybe to seduce him one last time, maybe to cheap out, maybe because she trusts Holland more than someone she doesn't know. She certainly puts out a couple of signals that she might be open to seducing him, including mentioning it as a possible motivation. But whatever her real motivation, the point is that Holland comes. He is tolerant of Mandy's mental health issues (another conservative stereotype of liberals, particularly liberal women, is that they're all in therapy, all gobbling down psychotropic drugs, and all unhappy). He really tries to find the snake, at personal risk. Hell, Holland is even kind to animals, building a house for abandoned chickens. 

This doesn't mean, though, that the story is giving a full-throated endorsement to conservative talking points. For one thing, Holland, for all his bravery, calls himself a coward at one point, because he's too afraid to have an honest and emotional conversation with Mandy. Secondly, there is apparently a critical watershed moment going on in the world, and although Mandy recognizes it, Holland doesn't. 

Holland listens to Willie Nelson. Is this a signifier of a conservative, a liberal, or someone who rejects labels altogether? Stick around to find out. 

Two allusions

Figuring out what the story is actually saying about Holland as a person and about his politics can be helped by looking at two very subtle allusions the story makes. One is the name of Holland's fence company: "Good Fences." This is a reference to Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall." The poem is about two rural neighbors who repair the stone fence between their property every year. The narrator is a little confused about why they even bother doing it, when the fence just keeps toppling down, and it's not really keeping anything out. But the neighbor twice repeats the phrase, "Good fences make good neighbors." 

This phrase has come to be known for the way people cite it in earnest, when the original poem is questioning its validity. That is, people now say, "Good fences make good neighbors" as a pretext for building a privacy fence so they don't have to see their neighbors (in other words, to become bad neighbors). But "Mending Wall" is poking fun at the neighbor's fideism in the efficacy of fences. Good fences don't actually make good neighbors, it is saying. In fact, nature itself seems to be trying to rip down walls between people. 

Holland is, in some ways, the inverse of the saying, because he is a good neighbor who makes good fences. Nonetheless, those fences are making people into worse neighbors. And the worsening quality of neighbors is part of the whole threat that Mandy feels but can't quite express. 

The second allusion is in the story's final paragraph: 

..In the truck bed, the old recliner jostled, swayed. There, deep under the seat's cushion, the snake--a copperhead, hungry, still gray at five months old--lay coiled and alert. The world was reverberating from every dark direction, a chaos that frightened and confused her, so she curled tighter, made herself smaller. She stared with unblinking eyes into nothingness. She flicked her tongue, trying to decipher the numberless threats in the cold air.

This is something of a nod to W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which foresees either a sphinx reborn or the coming of the beast from the Revelation of St. John:

 ...a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Mandy senses that something epochal is happening, some fundamental change in the tides of history, but she can't quite put her finger on it. Three times she tries, and every time, she links it to the uncanny sense she has that it's a bad omen that her tenant, a preacher, has skipped out on her. "The world's on fire, and preachers are skipping out under cover of darkness" is one of them. Another is this: "I just keep thinking this is the end of the world. A snake in a house previously occupied by one of God's servants doesn't help." And finally: "If you can't count on a preacher to stick it out, who's left?"

Yeats' poem seems to think that something terrible is about to happen to world civilization as a result of the breakup of Christian consensus. Mandy apparently thinks something similar. Snakes, of course, play a fundamental role in Judeo-Christian mythology, with the serpent being what talked Eve into eating the fruit that ended paradise. At the end of "Time of the Preacher," the snake is a symbol of some profound evil waiting to unleash its venom on the world. That evil isn't the pandemic itself. The snake is afraid of all the noise coming from the truck. The noise is like all the bedlam of the pandemic. It's after the bedlam has died down that the snake is going to grow bold and come out to strike. 

Perhaps the real terror, the real snake waiting to strike at the heart of civilization and cause chaos, isn't the disease. It's the increasing alienation of people from one another. The liberal/conservative divide is an obvious example. We know just from seeing the car someone is driving whether they're in our camp. We can't imagine marrying or even being in close communion with someone who has different political opinions from us. Just before they leave one another from the preacher's home, Holland thinks of trying to run to Mandy to console her when she's crying, overwhelmed by the feeling the world is falling apart. He refrains, though, because he knows she'll just "fumble for her mask and retreat across the yard." 

We have a conservative who is still willing to brave the dangers of the pandemic and keep down one kind of wall, his mask. But he's not brave enough to risk approaching a liberal who hides behind her mask. The story seems to accept some criticisms of liberals, like that their insistence on safety ("safe spaces," after all, is a liberal creation) is helping to increase alienation rather than reduce it. But conservatives in the story are happy to help them build those walls, and they're also too chickenshit to go over the wall to connect. They'd prefer to write off the people behind masks and walls as "liberals" without even trying to connect. They're cowards, too.

Holland and Mandy both have a perspective to contribute to one another, but ultimately, they fail because each has their own particular kind of walls they put up. What results is a failed union, similar to our failing political one. 

A third allusion I'm not really touching

Holland listens to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Willie once put out an album called "Red Headed Stranger," which featured a song called "Time of the Preacher." Actually, the album has three different songs by this name. It's apparently a "concept" album, which I think usually means that the stories are linked and tell one running story. I listened to the album and can't really tell what running story is there. Nor can I tell what the "time of the preacher" is. The song basically is about a guy at the end of the pioneer age of America (1901) whose woman leaves him and he goes crazy. In two places, the song states either that the "lesson has begun" or that the "lesson has ended." So maybe the singer is the preacher. Or the "time of the preacher" is a time of historical change, when the voice of a preacher holds a warning for society. (To complicate all this, there is a movie based on the album that came out eleven years later, and it identifies an actual preacher named Julian Shay as the man who was jilted by his wife. I'm going to ignore the movie.) 

Willie Nelson is himself an interesting signifier politically. (Forgive me for my mistakes here. My mother loves Willie, but I'm far from an expert. I'm relying on Google to help me with this.) His "outlaw country" image made a lot of anti-establishment people embrace him. He was always into what might be called "progressive" causes, like his pro-environment stance, but many of his fans didn't really notice until recently, when he endorsed Democratic candidates. He's now beloved by the left, although the right hasn't completely abandoned him. Holland is still listening to him. Maybe Willie is a libertarian in the best sense, in that what he really wants is to be his own authentic self. Maybe Willie, and libertarians generally, are a potential bridge between left and right. 

Willie may or may not be the preacher of his song, but he is sort of acting as a preacher in the story, a voice still capable of connecting left to right. In a country where even your consumer choices are constrained by your politics, these voices are becoming rare. By identifying strengths and absurdities of both left and right, the story is also acting prophetically. The time of the preacher is partly about Mandy's understanding that the preacher's disappearance is a sign of the end, but it's also about how the story itself has arrived to offer a way out. The final lines of the story are the only ones that break from third-person limited (Holland has no way of knowing what's in the chair). So this seems to be the intervention of the voice of the preacher, telling us, prophetically, what is about to happen and why. 

See also: Karen Carlson's take on this story, which focuses more on the relationship between Mandy and Holland. 

A journal isn't an after-action report: "Gray, Cotton, White Lace Edges" by Isabelle Fang (Best American Short Stories 2025)

As I write this in early February 2026, I'm not quite sure how I got to where I am. A year ago, I was a senior North Korea expert at the National Security Agency. Although I never made any career decisions with the intent to make a lot of money, I was somehow making a larger salary than I ever dreamed was possible. Now, I'm nearly a year into my post-government career search. I recently dropped out of law school after a very short stint for the second time in my life. I'm DoorDashing while try to figure it out. So that's GS-15 senior analyst to DoorDashing in a year. 

It's already hard for me to retrace the steps that have led me here. I know I quit because I couldn't imagine working in a Hegseth-led Department of Defense, and I stand by that decision, whatever happens from here. (How could I work for a man who postures about being tough so much but who can't even do as many pullups as I can?) But since that one decision I know was right, it's been a cascading series of decisions that seemed sound at the time, like they might help me put my life back together, but which didn't pan out. This includes turning down some jobs because I thought I had a chance at a better one, and now I'm wondering what things would be like if I had just taken the bird in the hand. 

Of course, if I'm really thinking about origins of things, I'd have to go back a lot further, back to joining the Marine Corps thirty-five years ago, or getting married twenty-five years ago, or even before that, to my unfortunate seven-year misadventure in evangelical Christianity, or even back to my relationship with my parents who have always supported me but whom I feel like I often disappoint. 

I've often thought in my life that it's unfair that the me I was at any point in time was condemned to live with the prior decisions of a person who had my name but to whom I felt only a tenuous connection. This was especially true in the Marine Corps, when I had to finish out a full six-year enlistment because some idiot who wasn't me anymore signed my name to a piece of paper. I'm sure prisoners serving out a sentence feel something very similar. It's so hard to trace my own chain of decisions back in time through a tangled web, it feels like "I' just popped into existence yesterday, and I don't really have a causal connection to past versions of myself.

Journaling as a link between past and present selves

May from "Gray, Cotton, White Lace Edges" is similarly befuddled at how past versions of herself have put her where she is today. One earlier version of May decided, seemingly on a whim, to take up a boy at a college party on his offer to give her a hundred dollars for the panties she was wearing. This soon led to her selling her used panties online to guys who are into that stuff. Although she's a more mature version of herself now, she still has one customer, Bill. 

She's hung onto Bill because he's the "easiest relationship in May's life." He's also, as May will later put it, "the longest working relationship she's ever had." Although their relationship began under circumstances under which it can never be more than it is--how could she ever enter into a long-term romantic relationship, for example, with a man who was okay buying panties from a woman as young as May was when she started (19)?

Nonetheless, there are aspects of the relationship that are good for May's psyche. The best thing about it is that when May sends her underwear to Bill, she writes down what she was doing when she was wearing them. When she first started doing this, the notes were elaborate, and once she even embellished by saying she masturbated in them. Bill caught the lie, and told her she didn't have to say things that weren't true, that he really just wanted to know what she'd been doing. Over time, the notes became simpler. For example: "Got new boss coffee (splash of oat, 1/2 Splenda packet)." 

She had always suspected she'd be "a better person if she journaled," but she couldn't keep with it unless there was someone to keep her accountable, the way some people are about going to the gym. Bill was that someone. Over time, the "fake journal" aspect of logging her thoughts while wearing underwear became real: "He was a place to house all her confessions, like a real journal." 

There are other journal-like recordings of daily events going on in the story. May works for the crew of a reality show, and the show has gone on location to film the meeting of John and Ally. Ally is John's 19-year-old Filipina mail order bride. (Okay, not quite a mail order bride, but it seems like the relationship is pretty similar.) In some ways, she's similar to what May was like when she was younger: willing to use the Asian woman fetish/young woman fetish of some men to make a buck, although Ally has taken it to a whole other level, using John's credit card to pay her rent and for her braces. 

John, it turns out, has had one young bride from Southeast Asia before. That bride left him with five kids, whom he then raised, so he's not totally without empathy. Nonetheless, the reader feels much more sympathy for Ally, who is obviously making a terrible mistake with her life. The story doesn't treat male fixation on young women like it's an entirely unredeemable fault, but it is a fault. 

It was John's idea to invite the reality show to film him and Ally. Reality shows, with their to-the-side confessionals, have a journal-like element to them. The show will, one day, be available to both John and Ally as a reminder of the decisions they made that led them to wherever they will be in the days to come after the story is over. 

Not only one of the most famous journal keepers ever, but I have a suspicion he was also the kind of old man who would have been into collecting used underwear from young women. 

The efficacy of reminders of times past

Can we learn something from journaling about the mistakes we make that will help us to stop making them? John doesn't seem to be learning much; to the dismay of his friend, he seems to be running headlong into the same mistake he made before. May believes she's a wiser woman now than she was at Ally's age, although she still shows an adolescent penchant for being late and still is stunted emotionally by the grudge she bears against her father, yet another creepy old man in the story who liked his women young.

But maybe the point of journaling--or, as May does, keeping a memory box--isn't so we can go back later and put together a Power Point presentation of how to do better. Benjamin Franklin may have done that, but it's not the only purpose a journal can serve. We don't have to think that the goal in looking back at our pasts is to create the kind of "after action report" businesses seem to love to make, the ones that are either too obvious or too unhelpful to be of much use. 

Rather, maybe the value in looking back on our past selves is simply to feel a connection to those earlier versions of us. The end of the story isn't May making resolutions to mend her ways and follow the straight and narrow path. Instead, she's lying in bed. "At the bottom of May's mind, a nineteen-year-old girl. If May got close enough, she could maybe feel the meat on her arms." That is, she's coming into contact with her younger self, enough to feel like she can touch herself (unlike the fake touching herself she told Bill about). 

I said that the story isn't as tough on old men going after young women as it could be. That last line is one example, because it's a callback to when May saw John gripping Ally by the arms when they met. If John's relationship with Ally were only creepy and gross, instead of just mostly creepy and gross, May wouldn't have reflected it in her final thoughts.

A second way that the story isn't too tough on old men is that the person who gives May her final epiphany is Bill, the man who's been buying her underwear all these years. Bill seems to be the only person in the story who has reflected on his past and made a conscious decision to change. He's fallen in love and gotten married, and he knows this means he can't keep up his panty habit. He does two things for May that are actually very thoughtful. One is to buy her dinner at the same restaurant where her father once ruined a birthday for her, in what ended up being the final straw for her and her relationship with her dad. By doing so, he helped May to reclaim the part of herself that was lost to her damaging relationship with her father. The second kind thing he does is to return all of her panties and notes to her, thereby giving her a complete journal of all the years since she started sending him her underwear. It's this pile of laundry that enables May to finally connect with herself. 

The main theme of the story seems to be something like, "In order to be whole, you must maintain some kind of meaningful connection to your younger selves." I'm honestly undecided on whether that's true, whether it's therapy speak, or whether it's just the kind of theme that sounds good in a literary short story, because literary short stories often deal with themes concerning how memory builds our sense of self. Part of me is skeptical and thinks I could probably be fine waking up every day and not thinking much at all about how I got to where I am now and cursing the past versions of myself who put me here. Part of me thinks that by doing this, I might be damaging my current self-esteem, because if I can hate my past selves this much, then certainly future me is also going to hate the me I am now, which means the me I am now must also be trash. 

I'm a little more certain I agree with a secondary theme, which is that maybe we can be a little bit easy on some of the people who've been part of our bad decisions in the past. Yeah, maybe old men shouldn't be so quick to capitalize on the bad decisions of young women, but if an older, wiser woman is going to feel whole, it's going to mean having to come to some terms with the fact that those people with whom one made bad decisions were themselves making their own bad decisions, and also that by being part of our past choices, they've helped make us who we are now. That seems to be the source of some of the story's partial grace it gives to creepy old men.  

I think I go back to San Juan: "Maritza and Carmen" by Lyn Di Iorio (Best American Short Stories 2025)

Donald Trump does so many outrageous things, it's hard to remember the once-unthinkable thing he or his administration did last week let alone in his previous administration. But in 2017, for about a week, one of the things liberals pretended they cared about and Trump supporters pretended wasn't a problem was the response to two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico: Irma and Maria. What particularly incensed liberals--or at least what gave them a chance to seem upset so they could lash out at Trump--was how long it took to get Puerto Rico's shambolic power system back up and running. Perhaps the only long-lasting political effect for the mainland of the whole ordeal was a lingering image of Trump tossing paper towels in one of the worst photo ops of all time. 

For Puerto Rico, the after-effects have been much more lasting, and also much harder to pin down. One clear result seems to have been the growth of a larger block of Puerto Ricans supporting statehood. For a long time, there have been three blocks on the political future of the island: full independence from the mainland, full statehood, and a continuation of the current status of protectorate. Pre-2017, supporters of the status quo often argued that Puerto Rico had a pretty good deal that allowed them to have a mix of reasonable autonomy, low taxes, and protection from the United States. However, autonomy had already been undermined in the 2000s when Puerto Rico had been unable to pay its debts and been forced to accept an outside, unelected board to run its economic affairs. 

When the hurricanes hit and the federal government proved unable or unwilling to provide prompt aid, the "protection" leg of the old status quo platform suffered a serious blow. Since 2017, public sentiment in Puerto Rico for continuing the commonwealth has dropped significantly, while support for both full statehood or full independence have gone up. Right now, support for full statehood is the strongest sentiment by a healthy margin, with people feeling that if Puerto Rico were a state, it would have been given support that other states suffering from natural disasters have received.  

Identity and politics

"Maritza and Carmen" takes place after the two hurricanes, and it features a woman whose life has been completely erased by the storms. She can't remember her past, other than in flashes. When her new lover Juancho finds an article about her daughter who is looking for her, Maritza, who now realizes that her former name was Carmen, isn't especially interested in meeting her daughter Taína. Juancho reads about Maritza's real identity in the newspaper El Nuevo Dia--the new day--emphasizing that Carmen/Maritza is claiming her right to personal tabula rasa-hood.  

In a sense, by making the story all about Maritza/Carmen's desire to figure out her own identity and to reject whatever of her past that doesn't fit her new vibe, the story is taking a huge step back from the political. But as feminist theorists have been telling us for more than half a century now, the personal is political, because the rubber of power structures meets the road of personal decisions in the tiny decisions of our private lives. So Maritza's identity crisis is political; it's simply a political drama played out on a small scale. 

Maritza prefers her new life to her former life as Carmen. In her new life, she is sexier (both her daughter and Juancho use this word), thinner, and less uptight. It's tempting to think that Maritza, with her sudden power to remake herself, is a microcosm of Puerto Ricans post-2017. Maritza--whose very name is a diminutive of Mary/Maria, the storm that took her memory from her, although she claims to have taken her new name from the Nuyorican woman who saved her--is redefining her identity at a time when many of her fellow Puerto Ricans are doing the same thing. However, Martiza, unlike many others, does not seem interested in a more "authentic" version of Puerto Rican identity. She is dismissive of the patron of Juancho's cafe looking at reprints of a island artist, "as if she were in a gallery." When she learns that her daughter's name is Taína--closely related to the Taino, the aboriginal dwellers on the island--she reproaches herself for not picking a better, more original name. Her daughter bemoans the loss of a Taino relic, but Maritza has other worries. 

Although Juancho chooses the foods he makes based partly on "family comfort and criollo identity," Maritza seems not particularly interested in either. But it isn't just Boricua enthusiasm Maritza is short of. She's also not interested in her former ideologies that she embraced prior to the hurricane, the ones associated with life on the mainland or her former career as a police officer. When she learns that she was once married to a white man in New York, she has no interest in learning anything about him. When she finds out she used to be a police officer, she wonders why, when she dislikes the police. She mocks the "mainland American dream" of West Side Story by taking the name of the girl Maria from the musical and replacing it with the hurricane of the same name, then distorting a line from one of the musical's most recognizable songs: "Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria, all the horrible sounds of the world in a single word." 

Maritza is now in a state where she rejects both her pre-hurricane identity and any attempt to force her post-hurricane reality into too strictly defined a reality. She isn't a microcosm of the people, striving for a more authentic sense of identity. She isn't Puerto Rico, she's just Maritza, and she isn't looking to the outside world for meaning at all. In this sense, she's representative of another Puerto Rican reaction to the hurricanes: autogestión. It means something like "self-management," and, in spite of how non-politically Maritza attempts to hold to the view, it's a very political, social movement. Since Puerto Rico realized that the mainland isn't going to jump to any hoops to improve life on the island, the island has since begun to look to itself. Maritza is a more extreme version of this; for her, autogestión has to do with managing her own life.

It's kind of a humble choice. It may not sound as grand as a proudly patriotic, full-throated "Boricua" vision, one in which a person's every choice is circumscribed by the need to be authentically Puerto Rican. Maritza is more concerned with how the flowers she puts out on the tables look. It's a classic "tend your own garden" kind of ending, literally. It may not sound grand or inspiring, but in the reality of a post-Maria world--both the hurricane and the musical and all it represents--it's all Maritza can scrape together. 

One reality of the post-Maria world for Puerto Ricans--and for Maritza as well--is the loss of a sense of place. Although even long before 2017, Puerto Rican movement between the mainland and home was often described as "El vaivén," referring to the tendency of people to move back and forth, the hurricanes turned that up a notch. Many people soon after had no choice but to depart for the mainland. Maritza had returned to Vega Baja before the storms. If there was a born-again Boricua moment for her, it was then, before Maria, not after. Vega Baja was where her family was from, including one progenitor who had helped create the island's constitution. 

It's an interesting inversion of expectations. One would think that after the hurricanes, when the island became aware of the extent to which the mainland didn't really care, would be the moment of a turn toward Puerto Rican nationalism, but it isn't, at least for Maritza. This came before the hurricanes, and that turn is rejected as much as anything else by Maritza. After waking up with her memory gone, Maritza is in Arecibo, then she is sent to San Juan (passing by Vega Baja on the way). At the end, Martiza seems content to stay in San Juan, along with Juancho, whose name, like Maritza's, is a diminutive, in this case a diminutive of "Juan," the saint for whom the city in which they live is named. Both Maritza and Juancho are content to live diminutive lives shaped by the great events around them, and escaping only by their willingness to be too small to notice.

Life wish, death wish, red fish, blue fish: "Unfathomably Deep" by Sophie Madeline Dess (BASS 2025)

This must be that thing that happens once a year in blogging through a short story anthology where I have to pause to remark on how the stories in said anthology are not intentionally lined up such that two consecutive stories interact with one another. Best American Short Stories has long maintained a tradition of listing its stories in alphabetical order according to the surname of the author. They maintained this practice this year, in spite of the change of editor. So when two stories have similar themes or subject matter, it's a coincidence. 

Sometimes, it's one hell of a coincidence, though, enough to make me wonder if the guest editor selecting the winning stories is actually such a genius that, as they read through, they were able to consider how the stories would play out through juxtaposition by considering author surnames. "Let's see, yes, Wilson's story is about as good as Baker's, but if I choose Wilson, it'll go right after Weber, and both are about a family mourning the loss of a dog..." I can't believe any editor chooses stories like that, but in all the years I've been doing this, "Unfathomably Deep" by Sophie Madeline Dess, coupled with "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein, the story just before "Unfathomably" in the 2025 BASS, have got to the take award for "two stories most difficult to believe just happened to end up next to one another." This is because of the way both stories squeeze all the meaning they can out of the uncanniness of the female body. 

Freud just won't go away

I always wondered, from the first moment I realized there was such a thing as literary theory, why Freud was such a big part of it. In any anthology of or introduction to literary theory, psychoanalytic criticism will probably occupy a large chapter somewhere near the front (because it was, chronologically, one of the earliest influential theories in modernity). A good chunk of that chapter on psychoanalytic criticism will belong to the work of Sigmund Freud. 

When I first found myself spending a chunk of a semester learning to apply Freud to a literary text, I was surprised. Freud isn't very influential in the actual practice of psychology or psychiatry anymore. The science of the brain has advanced far enough that we can pretty easily dispense with a lot of his key concepts. For example, we don't really think that dreams are the unconscious trying to tell us something, even while repressing that message. I don't think anyone believes that women go around their whole lives wishing they had penises. Even if we aren't professionals in mental health or cognitive science, we can read his work and see a good deal more cultural assumption than rigorous science in it.

And yet...

Some of the major concepts in it have appeal, not as science, but as a way of explaining art and why certain motifs continually show up in literary works. Freud isn't relevant much anymore if you're going to a mental health professional to try and quit smoking or to deal with your anxiety, but it's hard to read some stories and not think of his categories. So as unlikely as it seems, Freud is still worth considering, not as a psychologist, but as a cultural thinker who brings psychology into the discussion of art. He's more Joseph Campbell than Michael Gazzaniga. 

I wonder whether doctors who did bloodletting or doctors who tried to fix patients based on the images from their dreams have done more harm in the world. 

Life and Death

Two concepts in Freud are the "life wish," which he called eros, because one way this wish manifests itself is in the decision to have children through sex, and the "death drive," which he called thanatos. Thanatos manifests itself in all of humanity's violent and risky behaviors. Since sex can be one of those risky things, it's pretty clear that the life wish and the death drive are kind of mixed up in one another. For a male to do his part in traditional procreation, he has to have an orgasm, which has been compared to death in many cultures and languages. 

In "Unfathomably Deep," the two drives are completely mixed up for Izzie, the first-person narrator. They're so mixed up, they almost have the same name. One is Danielle, her dead sister, and the other is Daniel, the doctor-in-training who's doing his OBGYN rotation at the place where Izzie is a hired actress playing a patient. 

But which is death and which is life? It'd be easy to say that Danielle, as the dead one, is the death drive, while Daniel, playing a doctor helping Izzie to achieve her make-believe pregnancy, is life. But when Danielle died, she was herself pregnant. And the frequent references to Medea, who killed her own children, mean that even Doctor Daniel's role in bringing forth children could be tied to death. 

When the story opens, we immediately get a very funny play on the meaning of the words of the title. Immediately below the title of the story and the epigraph from Medea, we get the opening line: "Three men were supposed to spread me open, check me out." Izzie, as a fake gynecological patient, is getting an exam of her "unfathomable depths." In Freud, the unconscious mind, deep waters, and the vagina all occupy similar psychological territory. There are a number of reasons why. The ocean is deep, the unconscious mind is deep. The womb is watery. The vagina is a depth to plumb. All are something primordial from which our existence stems. 

Izzie's psychotic break into her own unconscious comes on the bank of the river, and it is described in terms of falling into a depth: "Then, as you all know, I fell in. Not down into the water, but backward, into the steep ravine that's cracked up my brain." This psychotic break is then followed by Izzie plunging both herself and Daniel into the water, where she kills him with love.

In addition to being life, Daniel is also sort of an Adam-like person to Izzie. She is first attracted to him because he doesn't do the interview right. He reassures her when he is supposed to be clinical and unemotional. She sees him as Edenically innocent: "My god, it's gotta be so beautiful to be dumb. To be born with such a stagnant little forever face. To be born so entitled to a certain eternity. It's gotta be like nothing just to live and live and live and live!" 

Contrasted to Daniel's innocent stupidity is Rebecca...ahem...Apple, the genius. That is, the fruit of knowledge, contrasted to Daniel's Edenic and stupid innocence. What attracts Izzie, though, is the thought that she might find depth in Daniel. Or, failing to find it, to create it herself. 

Daniel is innocent and child-like and is training to help people have innocent babies, but Izzie baptizes him, against his will, into the depths of the unconscious, the "unfathomable depths" of the womb from which we come and which ultimately leads us to death. 

Look! It's all here in one painting! Life! Death! Water! Unconscious!

On the one hand, one could look at this story as just a rendering of the break of a mind traumatized by the death of a beloved sister. But it's more than that, because it takes the local trauma and mythologizes it to universal levels. "They say I'm made of myth," Izzie speaks to her listeners. At the beginning of the story, her listeners seem to be friends listening to her meet-cute about Daniel, but by the end, they seem to be more the psychiatrists treating her in a mental institution after she kills Daniel. Or has a mental episode in which she thinks she kills Daniel. Izzie means "myth" here as a lie; she's saying her listeners are skeptical. But also, she has become a myth. She's become Medea. 

A lot of people tend to wonder, when reading a Freudian explication of a story like this, whether the author intended it. I think it's quite possible, given how well-known Freud's basic ideas are, and the extent to which the story plays with them, that there was at least some conscious desire to make use of Freudian images. But also, it doesn't matter. It's an example of why Freud is still relevant: because his ideas, while not great for treating mental illness, can sometimes do a great job of giving us a language to discuss ubiquitous images and motifs that crop up in human thinking. Medea is a mother. Mothers are the source of life. Medea murders her children. Life and death are bound up together. The gift of life is always an eventual gift of death. When we overcome our death drive long enough to "dive into" the female depth and create life, we are also creating eventual death for someone else. This life may start out innocent, but eventually, it will get sucked into the business of life, which means it's on its way out of Eden before it even gets started. 

Anything can go wrong, but it doesn't: "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein (Best American Short Stories 2025)

A lot of story titles try to sneak in unassumingly and maybe even make you forget about them by page three. They also make an effort not to tip where the real heart of the story might be buried. That's true of "What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?" which was the last story in BASS I just posted about. At story's end, when I went back to the beginning and remembered that was the title, I had to do some post-facto thinking to re-insert the story's title into my overall understanding of it. Like many stories nowadays, it didn't even have the words of the title appear in the narrative itself.

None of that is true of "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein. Rather than being a quick onramp into the story, something I read and then immediately sprang past into the narrative, the title made me stop and consider it before I moved on. In everyday meaning--at least among the kinds of people likely to use "abject" in a sentence--the word means something like "extreme, but only for bad things." In my mind, the word most likely to follow "abject" in a spoken sentence is "poverty," and the words most likely to precede it are something like "He/she/they lived in..." 

So maybe it's just talking about "really bad examples of naturalism," or "naturalism taken to extremes that are bad." If that's the meaning, it sounds like something an erudite critic would say about a painting. What would this meaning of "abject naturalism" in the sense of "naturalism run amok" be? Well, that makes us consider what naturalism is. The line between naturalism and realism can be hard to draw, but one boundary we might use are these words from Encyclopedia Britanica: "Naturalism differed from realism in its assumption of scientific determinism, which led naturalistic authors to emphasize man’s accidental, physiological nature rather than his moral or rational qualities." 

This emphasis on the "physiological" nature meant naturalism was more likely than realism to focus on humanity's grosser functions, its various excretions and weird growths. It's borderline scatalogical, but not like a gross-out comedy; more like a gross-out horror. In this sense, naturalism matches the meaning of the term "the abject" from theorist Julia Kristeva. I've delved more deeply into the meaning of "the abject" in this analysis of its use in female horror stories, but here, I'll define the abject briefly as whatever reminds us of our status as animals, as blood-and-meat carrying bodies that die and decay. Women are particularly depicted as abject because, among other things, their monthly bloody cycles and their fertile bodies remind us of our "naturalism." If we think of naturalism in this way, and this meaning of abject, the title becomes something like "Abject Abject." A double dose of abjection. 

And that's what we get

From the first lines of the story, it's this kind of naturalism, the gross and abject kind, that we get: "The baby's father left before the Cesarean incision had fully healed, when it was still a raised red line, tender to the touch, glistening with Vitamin E oil." In its reminder that female bodies produce other bodies, that those bodies get scarred in the process, it's introducing us to the uncomfortable facts of the female body, the ones that horror movies play with.

In fact, there are a lot of hints at horror in "Abject Naturalism." The narrator, Toni, is a former creative writing student who's given up, but when she did write, she wanted to write scary stories, scarier than Stephen King. (And what, in society, it more "abject," in the sense of being "thrown out," than one of the many former students of a writing program who have now given up, "all early sense of specialness evaporated"?) At many points, we get hints that a horror story is about to break out. Toni lets her daughter Amelie go jogging, and we, along with Toni, worry she won't make it back. There is a neighborhood man, Marco, who gives Amelie a telescope. He seems harmless, but we worry that Toni's decision to put off Googling him might be a mistake. When Amelie, commenting on deformed animals at Chernobyl, remarks that "anything can go wrong," we might be tempted to see it as foreshadowing. 

Nothing ever does take that turn for the worse and terrifying, though. Toni certainly faces disappointment. Her writing never takes off, but the jerk who got her pregnant, a romantic-adjacent foil to her naturalist nature, not only abandons mother and daughter for "texts," but then he goes and has a successful writing career right where Toni can see it. So Toni's dreams don't come true, but it's not all bad. Having decided to keep the baby when she gets pregnant and then committing to motherhood, right away "something lucky happened" to Toni when she finds a cool apartment in a hip part of the city for a good price.

The "abject" never goes away. Rather, it's there on every page. From Toni becoming a phlebotomist who draws blood, to her friends obsessing about their children's periods, to the body odor of the homeless in the library where Toni reads the father's successful novels, there is plenty of the gross and everyday about the story, what my mother used to call "bathroom talk" when my siblings and I were kids. However, when Toni is touring her lucky apartment, she notices that although her Cesarean scar is smarting, it's now so subtle "she could almost forget about it." The abject is always there, but it's not so "abject," in the sense of it not being as acute. 

Graduation from "abject" naturalism to "mere" naturalism?

The title of the story comes from a criticism that Toni's writing instructor made of her work, calling a story in which a couple fights about a skunk they need to get rid of "abject naturalism." This instructor went on to say the story's weakness was that "the plausible was described plausibly, credible things occurred in credible order." This is probably similar to the criticism many have made about contemporary fiction in the realist vein. Anis Shivani has called it "plastic realism," and many other critics have bemoaned our era's overreliance on verisimilitude. 

Personally, I've been more annoyed by "plastic magical realism" in contemporary fiction than realism, as I feel like the fantastic is more likely to feel forced and fake, but in any event, you can be too much of anything. There can be "abject" anything. 

Naturalism was a strange name for a trend in art that wasn't really about seeing nature for what it was. Instead, naturalism tended to see nature only in its "red in tooth and claw" version, never the symbiotic one, and it saw humanity's fate within nature as basically doomed. "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane is one of the examples of literary naturalism most often assigned in schools, and if you've read it, that's the kind of "nature" that naturalism saw, a nature that was, at best, indifferent, and at worst (and more likely) out to get us. 

Toni's journey is the move from "abject" naturalism, one that fetishizes the gross and offputting and horrifying, to "mere" naturalism, one that can also see some good in the world because it actually considers the world on its own terms. She graduates from drawing blood to filing papers for the hospital, because paperwork makes more money. And naturalism, in the sense of letting nature speak for itself, is perfected in Toni's daughter, who uses the telescope to see the stars.

The strange climax

Toni and her daughter sharing a night looking at the stars through the now-fixed telescope is the denouement, but the climax is just before it, when Toni and Marco use the telescope to spy on the neighbors in their home. If ever there was a moment when the plot was going to take a turn toward horror, this was it. Suddenly realizing Marco used the telescope to look at people feels very Hitchcockian. But it turns out to be very tame. They see one person asleep and the other reading, occasionally scratching his balls. Toni finds "The dullness of the scene, the abject naturalism, aroused her." 

So is Toni's arousal her slipping back into fetishizing the abject? I don't think so. Instead, she's realized that the big, frightening thing, which is humans qua human animals, isn't really that frightening. It's more like what she'd always wanted to write, something much more terrifying than King, but also funny. The abject isn't terrifying. It's just a thing. That's naturalism that actually takes nature seriously. 

The story ends with as much abject grossness as it began with--Amelie throwing up in the coat room of her school after ODing on donuts and coffee too early in the morning. But Toni has come to terms with the abject now. She's gone beyond seeing nature as an impersonal force out to get us nearly to the other extreme: She reads the fact that "Bohemian Rhapsody," a song about a murder, ends just as she is dropping Amelie off for school in nearly providential terms: "When she starts the car, the radio is playing the right song, Freddy Mercury announcing a homicide, and they sing together, and it ends just when she pulls up to the school, as if God himself has set the needle down."

The world is a tough place. The story alludes to some of this toughness when Toni briefly thinks about the immigrant families in her neighborhood. I could probably just as well do an "against the grain" reading of this story that comes up with a reading totally at odds with the apparent catharsis of the narrator, one that argues that Toni only is able to become reconciled to abject nature and to develop a belief in at least some goodness in the world because of her privilege. But I leave that reading to others and stop here with the "with the grain" reading. 

My novel based on my career at the National Security Agency is now available--guaranteed to be one of the two best NSA novels by a former employee ever!

Do you get it? Because there have only been two. 

I’ve decided to go ahead and self-publish my NSA novel, the one I’ve been trying to get published for almost a decade now. It is not without a certain sense of shame and failure that I do this. Although there are plenty of authors now doing just fine in self-publishing, and some are even wondering, with traditional publishing in so much trouble, whether it might be the only way forward for authors, I can't get over the feeling that self-publishing is for amateurs who weren’t good enough to get published for real.  

But so be it. After sending out query letters to possibly as many as a hundred agents, and paying the money to go to a literary conference to meet agents, after having several say they admired it but it wasn’t for them, and after struggling to understand how something that meant so much to me could mean so little to the profession’s gatekeepers, I’m resigned to this. It’s too important to never share with the world, and if the world doesn’t want it, then I’ll have to live with that. There's a public service in publishing it, and I feel compelled to do it in whatever way available. 

A talented cartoonist, Jerry King, very kindly made the cover art for me.

I’m reminded of the example of Kilgore Trout, Kurt Vonnegut’s alter-ego sci-fi writer who appears in many of his novels. Trout had great ideas but poor execution, and both he and his works live in ignominy within the universes of the novels he appears in. Characters find Trout’s novels only by the greatest of coincidences. When they do find them, though, it always causes something that changes the whole plot, and often the whole world along with it. If Trout can live with the shame of being a failed writer who still believes in himself enough to get his stories out any way he can, then so can I. What happens with it from here is up to fate and whatever author there might be behind the big show.

There are some possible benefits to self-publication. As a former NSA employee writing (albeit very loosely) about analysis at the agency, I’m required to go through a pre-publication approval process for this book. That means some poor guy in the pre-pub office has to read all 80,000 words of this. I have no doubt this book is unclassified; I’ve gone to great, possibly absurdist, lengths to make it so. When I get back my approval from NSA, though, it will come with a note that says that if I change anything, I’ll have to get it approved all over again. If I worked with a publisher, there would be many rounds of editing, which is suffering enough for normal writers, but in my situation, having to work with my former employer working at my former employer’s pace, would be unbearable. Also, any interviews I might do would involve questions that, however reasonable seeming, might make me nervous. I might claim to be a bad boy, but at heart, I don’t really like to risk running afoul of authorities, especially not authorities I’ve finally gotten away from by way of retirement.

So this blog post is likely to be my only extra-textual commentary on the book. It’s perhaps a little unusual for an author to offer up an interpretation of his own work; for the most part, authors are authors and critics are critics, and if authors wanted to go around trying to say what stories mean they’d do that instead of writing the damn things. Since so much of this blog has ended up being about reading well, however much I started it with the intent to make it about writing well, I’ll offer my own take on what the novel might mean.

NSA has been criticized for being too intrusive. In my personal experience, it has resolved the balance between security and privacy in different ways over the past three decades, but in general, it has never been so far to either side that it wouldn’t have been within the lines of what most people would consider reasonable, if most people had the access to know what the agency really does and how it does it. In recent years before I retired, it might have even gotten a little bit deferential to privacy, to the detriment of its ability to do its core functions. If NSA were meant to be a backdoor to eavesdrop on Americans, it would be a miserable failure.

I wouldn’t die defending that understanding, but to me, the danger of an advanced surveillance program like NSA’s isn’t the risk of an omniscient despot using the knowledge to control subjects. The danger is in a country that lacks the self-knowledge to know what to do with the information it gets, no matter how much it gets. Knowing our enemies does us no good if we don’t know who we are, what we believe, and what we want. In fact, it will only confuse us.

I am only too well aware now of the faults of this novel. Its original creation was a blur, a true Wordsworthian spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. I’d been at the agency a little over a decade, and I’d just met a group of enormously intelligent co-workers who, for some reason, let me attend their weekly gatherings. It felt like thoughts were all coming together at once. I was also blogging on the agency’s internal system, and the reaction from fellow employees was positive enough to give me a false sense of having something to say. My employer was either tolerant enough or didn’t care enough to let me become a minor celebrity within out little world, and I thought it time to share my ideas outside the walls of Fort Meade.

Once it was written, I realized I had the “shitty draft” that all the writing books say is the sole goal of a first effort. Fine, rework it, they say, but once I had the world of Zendia in place and the person of Tom Williams and his family, I found myself unable to see it differently. My provisional draft ended up being hard to overrule, even when I was confronted with many passages that made me wince, and I probably pruned where I should have replanted.

Even with all the faults in the novel, I still think it’s worth putting out into the world, however humble its entrance may be. And I think it’s worth you buying, reading, and hopefully commenting on the book, for two reasons. One, it’s only three dollars. It's the lowest price Amazon will let me get away with, and I don’t want price to be a barrier for anyone. This is a public service, not a way to make money. Secondly, even with its faults, it’s important to support a former agency employee trying to share something about the work there. Because of the difficulty in pre-publication and the concern about what might happen if we try to publish something wrong (a frequently heard threat is that the agency will come take all the devices from our homes if we write something on one of them that they deem to be protected information), hardly any former employees ever say anything about the work there. The only ones who do are usually either disgruntled or they’re former executives who are kind of homers, meaning the voices aren’t very balanced. I'm neither anti-NSA nor excessively a fan. I am forever grateful to them for taking a chance on me when they hired me and for allowing me a voice--often a voice of rather strong criticism--while I worked there. The fact that was able to voice so much criticism and still have what by any measure was a very successful career says a lot about how NSA is a place that at least sometimes values truth over being told what it wants to hear. Still, all those criticisms I made had a source, and I couldn't help but see the glaring weaknesses I saw there. The results is that I’m as balanced a voice about that place as you’re likely to get, and your support of this book will hopefully encourage other, more polished voices of reason to share their stories.

 

Kilgore Trout’s tombstone read

 

Some Guy

Some Time to Some Time

He tried

 

That’s how I’d like this book to be read. Up against a lot of odds when it came to trying to write about my very secret workplace and what message I think the rest of the country should get about it, I tried.

The trans climax that never comes: "What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?" by Emma Binder (BASS 2025)

While being mostly unemployed the last ten months, I spent some time digging into the philosophy of religion. I don't just consider this to be the most interesting subject there is to study; it's the most essential. My interest in literature is really just a side quest of my main effort to figure out whether God exists. I gave a lot of thought to just becoming a full-time DoorDash driver so I could listen to philosophy podcasts while I work and then be free at home to read more, but I  ultimately landed on considering the people in my family and trying to find something that will provide for them a little better. So I guess I really am starting law school this week and putting the study of the thing I most want to do on hold for a while longer.

In any event, one of the side issues in the philosophy of religion is that of substance dualism. Are the body and the mind two things, and is the mind really the soul? Is who we really are somehow separate from the physical trappings we come in, even though we can't point to this other, more essential thing? Traditional philosophers are mostly the only ones who cling to dualism nowadays. The vast majority of scientists and philosophers believe that all we are is our bodies, that our brains are part of our bodies, and that our experience of a separate self apart from our bodies is somewhere between a useful fiction and an illusion created by old Western philosophy and theology. I would guess most everyday people have kind of muddled beliefs, and that if you were to ask them, you might get answers suggesting dualism, and you might get answers a materialist would make, depending on how you framed the question. 

It's kind of ironic that advocates for trans people end up promoting a kind of dualism. In a popular form of explaining their issues, they tend to talk as though they have a mind trapped in the wrong body. It's how Jazz Jennings explained things almost twenty years ago on 20/20, and it's been a pretty consistent trope of trans advocacy as long as I've been aware of it. The irony here is that trans advocates, who are about as far from traditional theology as you can get, are using a lot of similar language to that of traditional theologians, who are about the last people on the planet still talking about dualism and also some of the most hostile to trans platforms.  

Of course, people a lot smarter than me realized this long ago, and intellectuals associated with trans rights have already produced work that attempts to deal with this seeming inconsistency. One response is something like, "Well, we have to explain this to cisgender people so they'll understand, and because of the lingering influence of dualism in Western thinking, this provides an avenue that is politically expedient, if not strictly philosophically correct." Taking a different approach, Gayle Salamon has explained, using phenomenology (here, we can say phenomenology mostly means the study of subjective experience), that even though we don't have a separate soul, our psychological experience makes it feel like there is a disconnect between body and mind. It might be a disconnect between two physical systems, but it feels like a war between two separate things. 

I'm sure that dualists would seize on this "apparent but not real" contradiction and use it as evidence that the split is real, but I'm not mostly concerned with who is right in the dualism/materialism debate here. I'm just pointing out that trans narratives do tend to lead to a dualist, brain-vs.-body metaphysics.

And now we finally get to the story

"What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?," the third story in this year's Best American Short Stories collection, does some interesting things with the dualism (real or implied) of many trans narratives. Early in the story, Cody, the trans man protagonist, thinks back on past visits to Pearl Lake in rural Wisconsin where he grew up. During the time of the flashback, he would have been living as a young woman who felt out of synch with his body. At the lake with his sister Molly, though, he felt comfortable: "Out there, in the shadow of the woods with only himself or his sister, Cody had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose. He was an animal among animals. He felt the clock of light in his blood."

In this flashback, Cody is having one of his few moments of feeling whole. How did he accomplish that wholeness? Not by uniting mind to body, but by obliterating mind. In many forms of traditional dualism, it's having a mind/soul that sets humans apart from animals. But Cody is here "an animal among animals." That is to say, his mind isn't out of synch with his body, because it isn't there. That's why he "had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose." 

Cody's fleeting moments of happiness as a teen weren't a result of the union of an estranged body and mind, uniting, after much work in therapy and much medical intervention through testosterone and other treatments. His happiness isn't an improved dualism; it's an enthusiastic embrace of materialism. There is no conflict between mind and body because mind doesn't exist. As part of this instinctive, animalistic happiness, Cody felt "the clock of light" in his blood. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, clocks have served as cruel masters of humanity. We have to get up when they tell us to, go to bed when they tell us to, and plan to arrive everywhere when they tell us to. But animal, materialist Cody lived by the circadian clock of light that he felt inside of him. There was no society telling him how to be based on what it saw; he was free from a society handing him his identity. 

This looks a lot safer than what the guys in the story were doing.

The climax that comes and the climax that doesn't

There are two climaxes teased in "What Would I," one that happens and one that doesn't. The first one takes place all within the first five pages. Cody sees a bunch of guys ice fishing on ice they probably shouldn't be on, because the weather has been warming. But they're guys, who always think they know best and always underestimate the danger they're facing, so one of them ends up in the drink. Cody hesitates to go out to help him, and then, "without another thought"--his materialist, animalistic self reasserting itself--goes out to help him. 

This first climax ends with a setup to the second one, the one that never happens. Cody, having saved Greg, the man who fell in the ice, wraps him up with his jacket, and then he forgets to get his jacket back before Greg drives off, taking his cell phone and wallet with him. This leads to Greg tracking down Cody and inviting him out to drinks.

Cody reluctantly agrees to go to the local watering hole, the kind of place where tough and burly local men hang out. The whole time Cody is there, he's worried about them "clocking" him, a twist on the internal "clock of light" Cody felt before. Cody grew up around people like this before taking off to a friendly queer community in rural Massachusetts, and he's aware that if they do clock him as trans, it might be dangerous for him. So we, the readers, are waiting for one of two climaxes. Either Cody will be clocked and have to run for his life, or he will be clocked, and we will find out that hey, surprise, the guys are cool and let Cody know he's safe with them. 

Neither of these endings happen, though. Instead, Cody gets progressively more and more frightened that they will clock him, and he bolts as soon as he thinks he can do so with dignity. One of the three men at the bar follows him into the parking lot, but not to beat Cody up. Just to say thanks for saving Greg and to give Cody a hug. It's acceptance, but not the big Acceptance of what we might call an "ally" in the parlance of our times. 

While fretting his way through the night at the bar, Cody tried to use his father's clothing as armor, literally. He hoped the clothes would "shield" him and allow him to be one of those people who "moved through the world unquestioned." Based on Kevin's growing inquisitiveness, the shield might have only been partly effective. Cody kept hoping in the bar for a song to come on that would "anchor him in his body," meaning return him to his unitary, animal state, but it doesn't come, and he's left with the weak devises of subterfuge to hide his split selves from others. Cody barely manages to escape with his dignity. As he leaves the bar, he feels that he has been released "from a frozen world into fresh air and life." He couldn't find his unitary and animal self in the bar, trying to blend in as a man among other men. He isn't "anchored" again until he's far from the bar.

Cody's story as a small-town, rural queer kid who grew up troubled and misunderstood, then found acceptance, identity and happiness when he left, is a pretty standard story, told in almost every queer community in America. Cody muses on how he is a different person depending on his environment. When he feels safe, he's "easy, warm, funny, and shameless." Cody wishes he could be this person in Iron River where he grew up. He senses that he needs to come to grips somehow with Iron River, even if he never goes back once his dad either dies or recovers. Maybe he will never feel like his complete and comfortable self there, but he knows he has to learn to at least be okay with having come from there. 

At the end of the story, Cody has not managed to find a way to live permanently in the materialistic, animal self that brought him the only happiness he ever knew while growing up in Iron River. He is out walking on the ice. Earlier, he thought of how the ice was all connected, but here, he is thinking of the fractures in the ice, and he wishes he could be "brazen and unafraid, like any other man." At the end, not only has Cody has gone back to a kind of fractured dualism, but instead of the triumphant uniting of the soul and body that sometimes comes with the dualist view, the two seem as far apart as ever. We are denied a third climax, the psychological climax of Cody either absorbing his discordant soul into his materialist body or uniting soul and body into a unified whole.

The part where everyone hates me

I've admitted before to being a bad liberal when it comes to trans issues. Although I fully believe in supporting anyone in a quest to find fulfillment, and completely reject traditional notions of sex and gender that would critique trans goals either on religious or natural law grounds, I still don't think everything I'm being told by advocates for trans rights makes sense to me. To greatly simplify, my doubts come down to two things. First is the seeming muddling of sex and gender terminology that some advocates use, then applying that conflation to policy goals. The second is a more practical one: I don't think the care now available is advanced enough that it accomplishes its goals. If you could take a pill and magically change your male body that's out of synch with your female brain into a female body that went along perfectly with how you see yourself, great, do it. But what we have is painful, long, comes with risks, and still leaves many people worrying the whole time that they'll be "clocked." My hesitation to accept sex reassignment surgery isn't a moral objection; it's an entirely pragmatic, and it's kind of like me thinking that getting a hip replacement right when the procedure was first invented wasn't necessarily a good idea. 

"What Would I" offers both the materialist and the harmonized-dualist solution to fractured trans identity, but neither is a complete solution. The animalistic, materialistic solution is only achievable in the right environment. Unsafe environments make the corporal grounding needed impossible. So it is a partial solution, but not a complete one. The harmonized dualism possibility is limited by the state of medical technology. "T" can help, but it's not going to fully prevent raised eyebrows, even from people who mean you no harm, because they are going to sense that something is different. 

None of this is a reason to abandon trans political goals. But it is a reason to separate the language of advocacy from the language of real, lived experience. To advocate is to lie. You might wonder, if I feel this way, why I'm about to go to law school, when a lawyer's chief job is to advocate. It's a good question, and an even better one when I consider who much the law school's advocacy for the law as a profession annoys me. They can't stop talking about how hard law study is and how different legal work is from everything else. This isn't truth talking; it's the desire to make law sound important. It's exaggeration meant to improve the standing of the profession. I hear similar things from every profession when they try to make what they do sound more difficult than people think it is, just like advocates for political groups always try to make their plight sound as dire as possible. 

I am skeptical of the truth of propositions from advocates, but I can accept a kind of social dualism, one in which we allow advocates to do their thing but where we also reserve space for ourselves to be honest about what lived experience is like. Trans advocates can say, "Here's a problem, and here's a solution that would help if we could do it." If the lived experience of trans people demonstrates sometimes that this solution isn't always as great as advocates make it sound, that's actually okay. Advocates do their thing, sometimes, to give us space to try solutions that are less than ideal. 

When I read trans stories, I am trying to understand how the trans person views the problem, what solutions they look to for their problem, what they hope those solutions will do, and then whether those solutions actually do the hoped-for thing. What I like about a story like this one is its break from advocate-like narratives. You might do everything to try to find happiness as a trans person, and it still might not work. Or it might work, but only in the right environment. That actually helps me feel more connected to the needs and wants of trans people rather than less, but it means they're just like everybody else, groping in the dark for what they hope will make them happy, maybe succeeding a little bit here and there, but also meeting with failure as much as anything. Far from making me think that everything the advocate pushes is bunk, it makes me think that this is a group I can find common ground with and maybe even understand, because we are both equally lost and looking, perhaps quixotically, for light at the end. 

Andrea Long-Chu wrote an op-ed years ago explaining that her upcoming sex transition surgery might not make her happier, but that it shouldn't have to in order for her to be allowed to get it. The idea behind trans rights isn't that everything they try will work. It's a big problem, one that is probably beyond our current medical capacity to fix so that everyone will feel "in their body" in every environment. But the point is to give people the freedom to try solutions and the support to maximize success and mitigate failure. This story is a useful, honest, and human portrayal of someone stumbling through as he tries to navigate a problem with the solutions available. 

For Karen Carlson's take on the story, which includes an analysis of the title which I neglected to do, see here.