by Jesse Ball
They called me back in and gave me an exam booklet. There was a question written on the board. The question was:
Why Hitler?
On the first page of the exam booklet it said I could write as much or as little as I felt like. It said it in this way:
An answer of any length might be sufficient.
I thought about it for a little bit and didn’t write anything. I figured the fewer cross-outs the better. Also—I figure, any part of it might be the test, so I should hoof it and get something down, since they might be watching through a camera and might disallow whatever I write after the first five minutes. That’s how I would do the test, if I were them. My aunt would think of some even sneakier shit, I bet. Like, someone talks to you in the waiting room before the test, and that is the test.
I thought about that, and then thought about thinking about that, about her, and then I thought about her husband and how it was funny that in his letter he hadn’t seemed that smart, but maybe he was smart in some other way. Or maybe he was nervous writing letters from a military barracks, so he did it in a strictly ordinary way. That could be why she kept the letter. It was some sort of bravura performance of writing a lame soldier-letter-home-to-his-sweetheart. I bet there are coded parts I didn’t understand.
So, why Hitler?
There are a few questions I could answer. I figure the test wasn’t so much about what I wrote, but about which question I could intuit.
Why Hitler? could be:
Why was “Hitler” the one who committed a nice fat genocide and captivated the world as a figure of evil, where “Hitler” is the particular archetype of a Hitler sort of person, of which there might be several. If you imagine there are many sorts of evil archetypes, the question could be—why this “Hitler” rather than a different Hitler. In other words, if the world were a bit more faintly greenish colored, and a butterfly flapped its wings into tatters in a zoological garden in Brussels, maybe the Hitler that we would have gotten would have been a different one. Maybe he would have loved peacocks or something, and used gypsy musicians for his military marching bands. He’d still have been bad—just a different sort of bad, right?
According to this logic, I would have to say, my answer is: pick any event, historically, that you want: the dauphin stubbing his toe, for instance, and it’ll lead you right on to this particular “Hitler.” Change any of those things, and you get peacock Hitler. We’ll just class whichever of the other Hitlers gets chosen as peacock Hitler. You understand, we aren’t specifying anything other than that he’s the one who appears when the dauphin doesn’t stub his toe.
But, there are other why Hitlers, and maybe a different one is more interesting. It could be why Hitler?, as in, why did this man, “Hitler,” manage to become Hitler? As in, within the span of his life, how did an ordinary person transform into a monstrous sort of venal godhead and can the reason be found in his actual physical body, or was it just the events that surrounded him and swept him along? So, in my answer, I would be choosing from between those two, sort of a nature versus nurture thing.
A third option is, why Hitler?, as in, why are we asking you about Hitler? That’s a tricky question. There are some obvious answers, like because the idea of Hitler freaks people out and makes them behave badly. It reduces people to intellectual weaklings often. So, the why there would be—because you are trying to reduce me to an intellectual weakling.
Another reason along those lines is: to get rid of a cultural advantage. Pretty much everyone has heard about Hitler and can say some clever Hitler stuff, so it doesn’t test historical knowledge very much. I mean, maybe there’s a Malaysian punk band called Hitler, and if somebody writes about that, they do fine.
But, I think the best question asked by the question, why Hitler? is: why do we as humans refuse to recognize that a life has fixed proportions and can’t go beyond itself? Why do we allow people to be blown up into monstrous caricatures of celebrity that extend to such grotesque lengths that they efface our lives, the only lives that are real? In other words—the existence of Hitlers makes you putting your shoe on a bit trivial. But it isn’t trivial at all, it’s your shoe!
The answer to that question is more complicated. It is possibly a question that is deserving of an answer. But, I am definitely not prepared to answer it.
So, I just wrote down this whole angle of thought with all the various questions they might be asking and then a part at the end where I apologize for giving up, but mention that: I think it is connected with man’s fruitless search for meaning, sorry if that’s a cop-out.
There was a little bell and when I rang it, Tracy came in, gave me a banana, and told me I could take another twenty-minute break. I walked down to a lake that was next to the chemistry building and watched some turtles hang out on a log. Being a turtle is essentially a royal flush in the game of life. Things can’t eat you. You hang out in the sun. I don’t know what they eat, but they don’t look very hungry. If they were they would have evolved the ability to move faster so they could stop being so hungry.
The final part of the test was also in that room. When I got back, Tracy had set up a camera on a tripod. It was facing a box outlined on the wall.
The camera can see the whole box, she said. Once I start it, anything in the box is recorded.
And sound anywhere in the room, I said.
That’s right, sound too.
Is the only microphone in the camera?
That’s the microphone.
Can I see what the image looks like?
She thought about that for a second.
No, you can’t. All right, I’m going to read you a script. Then, I’ll leave. The camera starts recording a few seconds after I leave. I think it is a five-second delay. Also, if you want to use the chalkboard, there is chalk there below.
Great.
Here we go.
She read from the sheet:
Tell us a joke.
She left the room.
I brought a chair over and sat with my back to the camera. I didn’t like having it look at me.
TELL US A JOKE
Beekman said that a high-enough score on any one of the three tests could get you in, but good results on all three would not. I thought that was a mean thing to say, and not very helpful, though I’m sure he meant well. Anyway, I don’t even know why I cared about passing the test. If I’m competitive, it’s usually about things that don’t matter to other people.
TELL US A JOKE
When I get in a tough spot, as you might have noticed, I like to think about what my aunt or my dad would do. I used to think about my mom like that, too. Don’t think she isn’t a fascinating character in her own right—just as great as my dad or aunt. But, thinking about her, well, it just doesn’t get me anywhere anymore. Even now, I wish I hadn’t brought it up.
TELL US A JOKE
I hate telling jokes on command. It has to be one of the worst situations a person can be in. That’s why you have to respect the jesters of medieval times. They were always ready to be funny, but in exchange they forfeited all dignity—and in return, they got a special kind of permanent dignity that wasn’t destroyed by scrounging around with the dogs to get a scrap now and then. Or “that’s how it’s been told to me. Maybe there weren’t even jesters. Have they ever found any jester bones? If they have, I certainly haven’t seen them. That would be something—to see a full set of jester bones in a museum, strung up like an ankylosaurus.
The funniest things are usually the most revealing. I thought about Lana and I thought—she is really good at telling stories. I’ll just tell one of the stories that she told me the first time we hung out.
I turned my chair around.
TELL US A JOKE
Okay, so this is a true story. There is a golden eagle that was being observed by scientists, and it found a spot on top of this cathedral where it could nest. It liked that spot pretty well. I think there ended up being two of them—which means it somehow convinced ano
ther one the spot was good, but that isn’t part of the story. The story goes like this: the eagle looks around for food in the town, but it is having trouble finding food, so it starts hunting people’s dogs. First it kills a Chihuahua. Then, it kills a Yorkie. It catches a guy with his Belgian Malinois on his back stairs and whips the Malinois off so it falls to its death, then it drags it god knows where to have a nice meal.
Okay, so this is funny to begin with. I mean, if you like this sort of thing. But, what’s funnier is this: one day it kills this beagle, and the beagle is wearing a kind of stupid knit party hat. While it is eating the beagle, I guess the beagle turned out to be a good meal and the golden eagle lost its cool, the knit party hat, which was bright purple and green, gets transferred onto the eagle’s head. It gets stuck there, somehow it is thoroughly stuck to the eagle’s head. What does this mean? And this is the joke: for the next two months, people were running around in this town pulling on their dogs’ leashes and looking to the sky for an eagle wearing a party hat. And sometimes the eagle comes. There’s even a video of it—the eagle is doing a cool eagle dive, and the party hat is flapping ominously in the wind.
BEEKMAN
Beekman asked me how it went, and I said: they don’t let you down these Hausmann people. That is a real test. I mean—certainly you can chop up a group of people with that test. You can slice them up real thin.
He asked me if I got sliced up thin.
I said, it was more like in a dream where I was both being sliced and the one slicing.
Beekman told me about a samurai sword exhibit he took his son to once and how the blades are all very beautiful but you know that each and every one got tested on a peasant’s back.
GARDEN
When I got home, my aunt was sitting in the garden. She was drawing a diagram on a piece of paper. I sat next to her.
What is that?
It is for you, she said. I am preparing a plan for you to make a garden like this if you want to, sometime in the future.
Her rules were: plant some things almost randomly. Let weeds grow. If you like the weeds, then weed the plants out.
She had a diagram with all the beds that looked like this:
BED (weeds) BED (garlic) BED (weeds)
BED (carrots) BED (weeds) BED (weeds)
BED (dirt) BED (dill/weeds) BED (
She wasn’t finished yet.
How did the test go?
I kind of kicked at the ground a bit and didn’t say anything. My right sneaker had a huge hole and you could see my big toe sometimes.
We need to get you some new shoes, she observed. I think there is a box with a few pairs in it at the church.
I said, Beekman was pretty nice, telling me about the test.
She said she had talked to Beekman on the phone and he seemed, yes, like a nice man. I asked her why she had talked to him on the phone.
She said he had called. She answered the phone. Then she was talking to him on the phone. That was the order of events.
I said, but why did he call?
She said, he needed permission if he was going to give me a ride somewhere. Otherwise he could be accused of all sorts of bad business.
That’s the world we live in, she said.
We sat there for a while. I noticed that her hands were shaky as hell. They are just trembling and trembling. It made my stomach feel funny.
Lucia, dear, did you ever think that maybe I died already—when the ambulance came for me, and that you have just been imagining all this ever since because your mind can’t cope with the reality of the situation? Right now, you are just sitting here by yourself in the garden, for instance, and …
Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
My aunt likes to put it on me sometimes. She calls that sort of thing an improvement lesson.
I’m just bringing you up to snuff, she says.
THE PAMPHLET!
And now I will put in my pamphlet (after this).
It’s my opinion that you will find it to be quite interesting. Of course, you may hate it, and that would be completely understandable. I tried to make the language more formal—since I was imagining as I went that I don’t know who will read it. Sometimes you put a thing out into the wind, and the wind carries it—to where?
There are a few copies of this. My aunt has one. Lana has one. I stuck one in the library at school, somewhere it won’t be discovered for years.
You have seen the cover—I stuck that in earlier. So, I’ll just jump to the first page.
HALL
It was early—just before school. The hall had that feeling, like an empty train station. Any second this empty space would be packed with people and whatever was comforting about it would vanish.
I’d just printed the pamphlets out at the multimedia lab (on thick gray-colored paper)—which is the reason I was there early to begin with.
You can imagine how proud I was—I mean, I had never written a pamphlet before, not once in my life! And there I was, standing with them in my hand. Up walks Stephan and he asks me how the fire went. Of all the people. I was hoping not to see him.
I figured he’d ask, but I wasn’t prepared—not while I was holding my pamphlet! Also—what a jackass, to say that shit out loud. But, I guess his pride was hurt and he wasn’t thinking.
When I saw his pasty face, all I could think of was:
Can you imagine—to just go home when someone tells you to? Some people are soft all the way through, like a stick of butter.
That’s what I mean about accomplices. Wise up. No one is ever careful enough.
How did the fire go?
He said it in this nasty way that I’m sure you would have expected (now that you have gotten to know him a little), as if it were my fault that he ran off like a pussy when Jan told him to.
I shoved the pamphlets in my bag.
I didn’t go.
You didn’t go?
Listen, I’m too busy for that shit. It’s pretty immature anyway. Are you going to keep doing it? That guy seems like an asshole.
Yeah, I know he is. I grew up with him.
Lana came up just then and it was perfect.
She looked at Stephan with a bit of a sneer.
Hey, Lana, he said.
She looked at me, looked at him in mock horror, put her hand up to block the sight of him and asked me if he was gone yet.
I whispered, no, he’s still here.
Damn it to hell, Stephan, she said. Know when you’re wanted. Know when you’re not wanted. It’s a crucial skill.
He looked at me like I was going to stick up for him. No way!
He shrugged.
Later, Lucia, he said and walked off.
Lana pretended to throw up on the carpet.
So, he’s into you, huh. That’s too bad.
Why?
Because I would never let you hang out with that guy. Do you hang out with him? You don’t do you?
No.
Is he your boyfriend? Do you lie under him on his family couch? Do you have a visceral sense of how much he weighs when he’s on top of you?
Ugh, Lana, stop.
I would rather we both date my cousin. Matter of fact—reason I’m standing here. We’ve got something on for tonight. You’re coming. No choice.
She stalked off down the hall. I realized she was wearing pajamas and slippers. What a badass.
MEANING
A question I ask myself: what does it mean to make a pamphlet like that?
I am just starting my career as an arsonist, so you could say that it is my first entry in the field of arson, as a theorist. Right now I am a theoretical arsonist. Soon, I will be a theoretical and practical arsonist. Whatever Jan says about me being in the club now, I think it’s nonsense. Both sides of the coin—I don’t want any favors. If I am in the club it’s because I started a fire. And I haven’t done that.
That means, now the thing to do is for me
to set a really big fire.
The question is,
what will I burn down, and how will I get away with it.
I have to make my plans.
First thing to do was: steal some sheets of paper from the art room. I guess steal is a bit of an exaggeration. The art teacher is a sweetheart with me—I don’t have to steal the paper. She just gives it to me.
Paper.
Pencil.
Straightedge.
Drawing board (to be returned).
Compass (to be returned).
For those of you who haven’t got the first idea about how to do a thing right—this is the way. You get some paper and you plan the whole business, right from the get-go. You don’t expect that things will happen perfectly—of course not. But, you end up better situated than some jackass who never thinks ahead. Or, you should. I guess there’s no guarantee even of that.
By the way, they found the guy who started the music room fire. It was the fat guy, Ray, who I heard mention the Sonar Club that first time, the guy from detention. I know because I had to go to the office to get permission to leave school early to visit my mom, and he was there with his family. He was wearing a suit, like graduation or something. That’s when I knew—Ray is gone for good.
