Downtown Owl

by Chuck Klosterman

  “John,” she finally said, “if you know anything about this situation, you need to tell me. I’m serious, John. You really need to tell me now. Right now. Right this second.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked. “What are you implying?”

  “John,” she said. “I want to know what happened to Darcy Busch. I want to know if you know what happened.”

  “I already told you that I have no idea,” he said. “And why do you keep using direct address during this conversation? ‘John. John. What do you think about this, John. Tell me what you know, John.’ Am I on trial? Tell me if I’m on trial.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sarah.

  “Don’t worry about other people’s problems,” he replied. And with that, the conversation ended, even though neither party fell asleep for at least two hours. It was the last time they would ever discuss such matters.

  Laidlaw still thought about that conversation they had in bed; he thought about it a lot. He thought about it while he smoked. What did she want me to say? he always wondered. What would have been the correct answer to those questions? He dropped his cigarette into the snow, briefly hugged himself, and walked back inside. He wondered how long it would be before Sarah asked the same questions about Tina McAndrew. Two weeks? Two days? Two minutes? His answers would have to be the same as they were three years ago. John Laidlaw did not know why he did the things he did. Does anyone?

  Back inside, he sat down in his La-Z-Boy and quietly watched Lawrence play with the magnetized racetrack he received during Christmas. Sarah was making waffles in the kitchen. “People will judge me,” he thought. “People will look at my life, and they will look at the decisions I have made, and they will always focus on this one specific weakness that I have. This one specific problem will define everything about my character. To so many people, this problem will be the only thing about my life that matters. And that is so unfair. I’ve done a lot of good things. I’m a great driver. My kid seems like a decent little person. I’ve read difficult books, and I’ve understood what they were about. My problem is plain, really: If I wasn’t attracted to high school girls, I wouldn’t have sex with them. That’s the whole dilemma. Is it my fault that I happen to work at a high school? It’s not like I selected these women arbitrarily. I liked all of them. How was I supposed to know that this could become a vice? Everybody has a problem. I’m sure my father had a secret problem, and I’m sure my son will have a secret problem. I didn’t decide to be like this. Nobody decides to have a problem. So why is this the only thing about my life that matters?”

  He walked across the room and awoke the television.

  “What were you doing outside?” Sarah asked from the kitchen. “Were you smoking?”

  “I was smoking,” he said.

  “Again?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Again, I was smoking.”

  “Do you want a waffle?”

  “No. But thank you.”

  “Do you have any plans for today?”

  “I’m going to watch the Rose Bowl at three thirty, and then I’m going to watch the Orange Bowl tonight.”

  “Who’s playing?”

  “UCLA and Illinois. Nebraska and Miami.”

  “Who do you want to win?” she asked, still in the kitchen.

  “I have no rooting interest in either affair,” he said. “I just want to watch them.”

  “I will never understand why you watch games you don’t care about,” Sarah said.

  “Those are the games I enjoy the most,” he replied.

  JANUARY 5, 1984

  (Mitch)

  Name: Mitch H.

  Class: English III

  Date: 1-5-84

  Instructor: Mr. Laidlaw

  Question 1: Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning to society. What was he warning society about?

  [Why would anyone try to warn society about a problem by writing a book about it? Wouldn’t it make more sense to run for president or something? But I suppose Orwell couldn’t run for president, being British.]

  Orwell wanted to warn us about the government taking away our freedom and turning us into human robots who will believe whatever we are told, even if what we are told is oppressive and cruel in an illegal way.

  Question 2: Who is “Winston”? What qualities define his personality? Compare and contrast those qualities with the characteristics of “Julia” and “O’Brien.”

  [Winston is the main character in the book and Laidlaw loves this book, so Laidlaw must believe he and Winston are fundamentally the same person. That’s usually what makes people love any book: They believe the story that they are reading is actually about them. I suppose Laidlaw relates to Winston because they’re both sex addicts without much grit. I guess that would make Julia like Tina McAndrew, although probably less hot. O’Brien was the most confusing character; he is clearly supposed to be evil, but I liked him the most. He was able to read Winston’s mind. He was kind of like a more skilled Zebra.]

  Winston is the main character in the book. He is noble, rebellious, and folds under torture. He hates rats and does not want his face eaten by them. Julia is the woman in the book who he has sex with. O’Brien is like a spy who Winston trusts, but O’Brien is actually not trustworthy and pretty much a spy. He uses the rats on Winston and makes him deny his feelings for Julia. O’Brien also has no first name, which is enigmatic.

  Question 3: Who were the Thought Police? What was thoughtcrime? How do these things relate (or not relate) to the class structure of Oceania?

  [Maybe Cubby Candy should fight Grendel with rats. If Cubby had a two-rat advantage, he would probably become the favorite. Actually, that seems like the kind of maniacal commando shit Candy would be into: He seems like the type of person who’d quietly walk around with a backpack full of live rats. He’d throw them into his enemies’ faces during fistfights. He’d be some kind of rat-throwing supervillain. Grendel would have to swat away the incoming rats like they were helicopters and he was King Kong. Maybe he could catch one in midflight and bite off its head. Or maybe he would ignore them completely and just punch away at the universe, covered in rats and blood and sweat and rat blood. He’d be like a zombie of the apocalypse, oblivious to pain. He’d be like Conan the Barbarian, but with heightened agility.]

  The Thought Police were like the KGB of Oceania. They stopped people from committing “thoughtcrime,” which was whenever people would secretly think about Big Brother in unflattering ways. This did not impact the class structure of Oceania.

  Question 4: Explain “doublethink” and “Newspeak,” using examples. How do these concepts symbolize Nineteen Eighty-Four as a whole?

  [This morning I walked past the new social studies teacher on the way to this class. She looked like shit. She said to me, “How is it going, Mitch?” I said, “Okay.” But this is not really true, because she did not specify what “it” was and I did not immediately assume “it” referred to any preexisting situation in my life. I’m sure she didn’t have any idea what “it” was either. She just said, “How is it going, Mitch,” because she wanted to say something aloud in public. Basically, she asked a question she didn’t understand, and I gave an affirmative response to that question, even though I did not know what I was responding to. Neither of us cared about what the other person was talking about or how the other person felt. We expressed two ideas that seemed to be interconnected, but neither of them was true. They were just words. They were neither good nor bad. They could have been any words, really.]

  Doublethinking is when you have two thoughts at the same time that appear to contradict each other, but you believe both of those thoughts are equally true. This is like “Freedom Is Slavery” or “Sadness Is Funniness.” Newspeak is a futuristic language where you eliminate certain words in order to make things more simple (“simpler”), such as saying “boring,” “doubleboring,” and “doubleplusboring.” These concepts symbolize 1984 because they make it possible to believe things t
hat don’t make any sense while being unable to explain why those thoughts are problematic, which seems to be the main thing Orwell is worried about.

  Question 5: In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the government attempts to a) observe the population at all times while b) falsifying the history of Oceania. What was the purpose of these acts?

  [What if Tina McAndrew isn’t pregnant? Just because everyone thinks they know something doesn’t mean it’s true. I mean, nobody has seen any baby. There is no proof. It could all be rumor. Maybe Tina is actually in a sanatorium and this “unplanned pregnancy” was the cover story. She wasn’t exactly normal. They say she believed unicorns were real animals until, like, the tenth grade. She saw some circus on TV where they glued a horn onto the nose of a Shetland pony, and she refused to question its authenticity. “Why would they lie about something like that?” she supposedly asked. “Maybe they’re just an endangered species.” There are several people who can verify her belief in unicorns. Taking this into consideration, I suppose it’s possible that she fabricated her whole relationship with Laidlaw and then claimed he got her pregnant in hopes of ruining his life. That’s not so implausible. Laidlaw deserves to have his life ruined. Then again, if he didn’t make love to Tina McAndrew, he probably didn’t make love to Darcy Busch, either. He probably didn’t make love to anyone, except his wife and maybe a few other normal-aged women he dated before getting married. So maybe he doesn’t deserve anything.]

  If you know what everyone is doing in the present and you dictate what they know (or believe) about the past, you can control the future.

  Extra credit: How does the book Nineteen Eighty-Four reflect real-life America in the year 1984?

  [They’re exactly the same, except everything is reversed.]

  1984 is very much like the world today, because everyone watches TV and we pay too many taxes. 1984 is also like the Soviet Union in many ways, and Big Brother is like a Communist version of 60 Minutes combined with President Reagan, if he were a Nazi. The U.S. is also like Oceania in that we are fighting a continual war where nothing happens. However, we are still a free society, so no major worries.

  JANUARY 7, 1984

  (Julia)

  They were all her friends now.

  She knew everything about them.

  She could look around the bar, and some of them would always be there, and those who were would always smile back. She was not a man, so they all liked to get drunk and tell her the semi-interesting stories drunks always tell in hopes that women will find them disturbed and sympathetic and vulnerable and desirable.

  Bull Calf was her friend. He was scared of things. When he was five, faulty wiring set his family’s house on fire in the middle of winter. His parents were not home. His older sister rushed into his bedroom and carried him outside. They stood barefoot in the snow and watched their home burn to the ground. It was a terrible, beautiful experience. Over time, it became difficult for him to differentiate between things that were scary and things that were attractive. This, he assumed, is why meeting women was difficult. When he was in second grade, older kids told Bull Calf that he would end up retarded because of his father; Bull Calf’s father thought it was amusing to let his eight-year-old son sip beer and get dizzy. Now that he was thirty-two, Bull Calf had sadly concluded that those children had been correct. He couldn’t get an interesting job and he couldn’t remember anyone’s phone number without writing it down. “If I ever have a baby,” he said, “I will never get it drunk.”

  Koombah was her friend. He liked to talk about isomorphism, although he was not aware that this topic had a name. “Being a farmer is like being an artist,” he would say. “It’s like being a painter or a sculptor: It doesn’t matter how good you are at your job, because you don’t have any control over the value of what you’re producing. Everything is dictated by demand and climate, and you can’t control either of those things. Two people will do the same things in the same way, and one will make a living while the other goes bankrupt. Sometimes I feel like Lou Reed.” People said Koombah looked like Rollie Fingers without the handlebar mustache. This meant he didn’t look like anyone. “Everyone talks like they’re on TV now,” he said. “I hate talking to anyone on Monday morning. Every Monday conversation ends up being an interrogation, because everyone watches 60 Minutes the night before and thinks all their conversations need to be an attack. TV controls the way we think we’re supposed to talk. People don’t even realize this is happening, but this is happening.”

  Disco Ball was her friend. He was a married man. He had fallen madly in lust with a twenty-four-year-old woman when he was only nineteen. Their wedding was picturesque and well attended. She was vivacious and loquacious, which made her flirtatious. Words ending in -ious are bad for marriages. Her behavior drove Disco Ball toward madness. He constantly accused her of cheating on him; it was all they ever talked about. They would go to lawn parties, and Disco Ball would spend the entire evening tracking her movements, mentally cataloging a checklist of future indictments. He could not stop himself from believing that his wife was having sex with every man she met. He opened her mail and looked through her purse. He asked trick questions about her day-to-day activities and assessed the credibility of her answers. He sometimes hid a tape recorder in the pantry, exited the house for the afternoon, and then checked the machine at night to see if she had made any suspicious phone calls while he was away. Finally, his vivacious, loquacious wife could not take it anymore: She arbitrarily claimed to have slept with the driver of a Schwan’s ice cream delivery truck, mostly because it did not seem to matter if she was unfaithful or not. When she confessed this fabrication to Disco Ball, he did not know how to react; he had obsessed over this event for six years, but he’d never rehearsed a response. He always assumed this would be the kind of information he would find out (as opposed to being told directly). Seeing no other viable option, he unzipped his pants in the living room and pissed all over his wife’s four-hundred-dollar stereo system. She responded by kicking him out of the house and ignoring all the apologetic phone calls he made twice a week. This was three years ago. He didn’t understand how to file for a divorce, so they were still legally bound by the state of North Dakota. “Misplaced jealousy,” Disco Ball was wont to say. “That’s what destroyed my marriage: misplaced jealousy. That, and the urination.”

  Drelf (the Drunken Elf) was her friend, but it was complicated. The Drelf had problematic, unpopular thoughts he was unafraid to speak aloud. He not-so-secretly despised all the people who made fun of his height, which meant he not-so-secretly despised almost every man he had ever met. When he was in grade school, he wrestled his tormentors and regularly won, sometimes biting their legs and shoulders. During his high school years, he dedicated summer vacations to physical self-improvement, eventually growing into a tenacious wingback who caught forty-four passes in a single season (an Owl school record at the time). While studying agribusiness at North Dakota State, he adopted the persona of pussy hound, sleeping with twenty-four women (a so-called “case of bitches”) in less than three years, including one All-American volleyball player who was seven inches taller than he was. He returned to become general manager of the Owl grain elevator and earned forty-nine thousand dollars a year, more money than almost everyone he knew. It did not matter. It did not make him a normal-sized human. He would grow despondent when he was intoxicated, and Julia would tell him that there were many, many things worse than being affluent and five foot four. “I suppose you’re right,” he would say. “I could be a midget. Or a midget woman.”

  The Flaw brothers (Ass Jam and Baby Ass Jam) were probably her friends, but she wasn’t positive; they didn’t drink very much.

  Buck Buck was her friend. Buck Buck had a clandestine compulsion: Whenever he sat across from another person, he was possessed by an overwhelming urge to lean forward and kiss them. The gender and age of the individual did not matter; a voice inside his brain kept saying, “Do it. Just do it. See what it’s like. See what hap
pens.” Buck Buck had never acted upon this urge, but it made him feel very guilty (and sometimes bisexual). One night in December he finally told Julia about this compulsion when Yoda’s was almost empty. Julia asked if he was only telling her this because he wanted to kiss her. “I do want to kiss you,” he said, “but only because you’re no different than anyone else.”

  Phil Buzkol was her friend. When he was nine, Phil built a snow fort with another boy named Toby Haugen. When it started to get dark, Toby went home. Four hours later, Phil’s parents showed up at the Haugens’ home. “Do you know where Lil’ Phillip is?” they asked. “He never came home for supper.” It was now 8:30 p.m. Toby said they had been building snow forts, but that was all he knew. Everyone got flashlights. Toby led a search party back to the spot where they had tried to build an igloo. They found nothing but whiteness and blackness. Somehow, the fort had collapsed. Phil Buzkol Sr. began to panic. He took his shovel and attacked the snow, seemingly at random. Almost immediately, he hit something that was kind of soft and kind of hard. It was his son. The flesh was stiff. The boy’s eyes were open. His arms were frozen above his head. They thought he was dead, but he wasn’t; his body had reflexively shut down the flow of blood to his extremities in order to keep his heart and brain alive. The fort had collapsed because the snow was dry and porous, which was the same reason stray molecules of oxygen were able to permeate the icy sarcophagus and nestle in his little lungs. His parents rushed him to the hospital. Lil’ Phillip did not speak for three days. Everyone feared brain damage. Here again, everyone was wrong. On the fourth day he started speaking and eating, and by the sixth day he was the same nine-year-old boy he had been before. For twenty years, Phil never discussed this incident with anyone. But he talked about it with Julia, because she was a girl. “For a moment, I was pretty fucking worried,” Phil said. “It was the scariest thing that had ever happened to me. It was probably the scariest thing that had ever happened to anybody. I’d dug one tunnel horizontally from the side of a snowdrift, and then a second one—vertically, from the top of the drift—that went straight down. The two tunnels intersected. That’s where I got stuck. I tried to enter through the vertical tunnel with my arms above my head, but I couldn’t make it all the way down and I couldn’t back up. That’s when the cave-in happened. It was unbelievable. I couldn’t believe it. Everything changed so quickly. And then—for maybe two minutes—I thought, ‘Fuck you, Toby Haugen. Thanks for killing me.’ And then I got scared again, and then I thought about my mom, and then I tried to dig my way out, and then I started to think about my mom again, and then I thought maybe I was just having a dream, and then I felt sleepy. That was the last thing I remember. It was really cold.” Julia asked if the event still haunted him. “Oh, not really,” he said. “I mean, obviously, yes. But not really. It’s mostly just a story I never tell anyone. These things happen to people.”