Raised in Captivity

by Chuck Klosterman

  “What kind of fruit?” asked Luke.

  “That’s an excellent question,” said Freddie. “Maybe mangoes.”

  “How many minutes are five?” asked Luke.

  Freddie smiled as he stood up. Michelle mouthed the words Thank you and pointed toward the far end of the park, down a slope and closer to the monkey bars. Purely for purposes of identification, Freddie considered inquiring about the ethnicity of the perpetrator, but immediately reconsidered (mostly out of fear of appearing racist but also because it seemed unlikely that any one park would contain two people matching this already highly detailed description). His mind shuffled through various concerns in the following sequence as he walked away from his son:

  Should I be doing this?

  How is this my problem?

  Don’t look at your phone.

  You know, my kid is awesome. Crazy how every minute I’m with him, I want to be somewhere else, but every minute I’m away, I immediately want to get back.

  Don’t look at your phone.

  Aren’t orange jumpsuits what people wear in prison?

  Do I live near a prison? Is it possible to live near a prison without knowing where it is?

  Luke definitely seems smarter than Caleb. More verbally advanced, for sure. He knows how to ask questions. That suggests critical thinking.

  If this pervert tries to fight me, I’m going to be so pissed at Michelle.

  I bet Michelle used to be a real Susan Glenn, though. You can tell by her bone structure. You can tell by her confidence.

  Don’t look at your phone.

  Why didn’t they install the monkey bars closer to the swings? That’s some bad urban planning.

  Oh look. There he is. There’s the guy.

  He was not an escaped prisoner. That, at least, was obvious. He was possibly homeless, but probably not. He was unshaven and a bit slovenly, but not to the level of Aqualung. His orange clothes were clean. His hair was combed to the side. He had a duffel bag half-full of fruit and was chomping on a pear. Was he closer to thirty-five or closer to sixty-five? Freddie could not tell. The mothers had incrementally herded all the children away from his bench, so he looked like a lonely person who loved citrus, waiting for a bus without a road.

  “Hey there,” said Freddie as he approached. He tried to wave in a friendly manner, but the motion of his arm more closely resembled an attempt to draw the attention of a helicopter. The orange-clad fruit-eater looked back and said nothing.

  “Hey, man,” said Freddie. “How are you doing today? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” said the man in orange.

  “I get that,” said Freddie. “But I have a little problem here, and I hope this doesn’t come across the wrong way. I’m here with my kid, and a bunch of other people are here with their kids, and some of the other people are saying you’ve been talking to the kids, and they don’t like that. I don’t know why they don’t like it, but they don’t. So maybe don’t talk to the kids so much. You seem like a friendly person, and I think maybe the first woman who complained might have her own issues. You know what I mean? I’m not completely sure what her deal is. But just be cool with the kids.”

  “This is a public park,” said the man.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Freddie. “I get that. I get it.”

  This was not going well.

  “I can’t help it if little kids are in the same park that I am,” said the man in orange.

  “I know. But you’re sitting alone in a park, which is a curious decision for this kind of park.”

  “What kind of park do you think this is?” asked the man, though his question wasn’t really a question.

  “It’s a normal park,” said Freddie. “But it’s the not the kind of park where people without kids generally go to, just to hang out and eat fruit. I mean, look around. How many adults do you see here without kids?”

  “How am I supposed to know who has kids and who doesn’t have kids?”

  “You don’t need to know that in order to realize it’s a strange thing to do.”

  “Are you employed by the park?”

  “No, I don’t work for the park,” said Freddie. “Why are you making this difficult? I’m just politely asking you not to talk to any children you’ve never met before. The other parents are concerned.”

  “But you’re not concerned,” said the man as he wiped pear juice from his chin with the cuff of his shirt. “They’re concerned, but not you. You’ve been coerced.”

  “You know, I wasn’t concerned,” said Freddie. “But now I kind of am. Now I think it’s a little disturbing that some guy in an orange jumpsuit is sitting on a bench eating a huge bag of fruit, trying to talk to random children and not recognizing why that’s a bad idea.”

  “How do you know they’re not the ones talking to me?”

  “What?”

  “The kids,” said the man in orange. “Maybe the kids are talking to me and I’m just talking back. How do you know it isn’t the kids who are bothering me?”

  “Listen,” said Freddie. “I’m not going to debate you on this. Don’t talk to the kids. Finish your produce and go home.”

  “I’m not going home,” said the man. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

  “Fine. Then eat your pears and keep sitting here,” said Freddie. “Just don’t talk to any goddamn kids.” Freddie thought this was a strong closing statement, due to his casual use of profanity. He turned to walk away.

  “Wait,” said the orange man on the bench. “Can I ask you a question?”

  Freddie turned and waited.

  “What time is it?”

  Freddie started reaching for his phone before stopping himself.

  “None of your business,” said Freddie, aware that his response made no sense.

  He turned around and walked up the hill, back toward Luke. His hands were shaking. The quivering embarrassed him, even though there was no one around to notice. Why was he so upset? The confrontation had not been violent or intense. He’d never felt threatened. But he’d started an argument with a stranger and lost decisively. His rival had outflanked him on every point, even though Freddie’s core contention was reasonable. Now he’d have to explain to all the mothers why the weirdo in the orange jumpsuit was still sitting on the bench, still chowing fruit. They’d ask him what was said, and Freddie would have to explain that he’d told the guy to leave and the man refused, proving Freddie’s uselessness. They’d want to know exactly how the conversation unspooled, and Freddie would defensively concede that the weirdo had a constitutional right to sit in a public park, which would make it appear as if Freddie were taking the weirdo’s side. There would be accusatory questions he could not answer. Maybe it would be better if he just grabbed Luke and went home. Maybe it would be better to just become the kind of person they’d all assume he obviously was.

  He reached the top of the hill and looked toward the swings. They were empty, surrounded by chaos. Mothers were running in all directions, pointing and arguing. Everyone was either talking loudly or texting furiously. Freddie could hear a siren in the distance, gradually drawing closer. Children were sitting on the ground in groups of three or four, staring at their parents and saying nothing. After a moment of panic, he saw Luke’s red hair beneath an oak tree and ran to him as fast as he could, picking him up in one swoop like a sack of potatoes.

  “Lukey,” he said. “What’s happening?”

  Luke’s expression was calm and focused, the same way it looked when he watched Peppa Pig. He considered his father’s question.

  “Something happened to Caleb,” said the boy, and Freddie was instantly ashamed by the depth of his own relief.

  Reality Apathy

  The text was from Susan, except that it obviously w
asn’t. It came from Susan’s number and mirrored her syntax and referenced a conversation they’d exchanged a few weeks prior, but it also included the phrase “weird flex, fam,” a phrase Susan sometimes employed but only as a means for making fun of people who used media aphorisms unironically. There was no possible way Susan would use such language earnestly while pleading for a temporary Venmo transfer. Still, the algorithm behind this text deserved kudos. It had managed to replicate Susan’s distinctive misunderstanding of punctuation and her propensity for needing money at odd hours of the weekend. There was a depth of humanity to the spam that felt novel. Micah wasn’t fooled, because he was impossible to fool. But he was impressed.

  The machines were getting better at this.

  They were always getting better. You had to respect that.

  Had this happened three years ago, Micah would have told Susan to change all her passwords. Had it happened last summer, he might have told her to consider encryption. But there was no need for that nonsense now. It would only waste both of their time. A better alternative was to just stop communicating with Susan entirely, at least until the new phones arrived that fall. She wasn’t the type of friend where private interaction was necessary. She rarely had original thoughts, and on the rare occasions she did, she wouldn’t waste them on interpersonal conversation. She’d post them in public. Her value was always accessible.

  Micah walked and scrolled and walked and scrolled, his neck craned forward at a 120-degree angle. He toggled through time and space, learning all of the things. Here was the president, speaking to a gaggle of reporters on the White House lawn, eloquently criticizing a new single by Quavo. Probably not real. Here was some audio of Joel Embiid claiming Trae Young was addicted to krokodil. Probably not real. Here was a story about China considering an invasion of India. Maybe true? Probably not true. Here was a drone image of people sunbathing topless at the McMurdo research station on the continent of Antarctica. Probably not real. Here was a link to a sex tape involving the archbishop. Probably not real. Here was someone reporting that Matt Damon was about to be arrested, including an embedded clip of Ben Affleck arguing for his innocence. That felt like a perhaps. Here was some footage of an alien mothership captured by a dashboard camera in Russia. Another perhaps.

  Downtown was so annoying these days. What was with all the moose holograms? They were everywhere now. Micah couldn’t even remember if they were supposed to be advertising or if they were supposed to be activism. He’d read, or maybe he’d heard on a podcast, that a certain percentage of these moose holograms were not holograms. A seven-year-old child had been trampled on Hennepin Avenue. Or was it that the moose was real but the kid had been a hologram? Weren’t they doing that now? Keebler would know. He wouldn’t know if the event had actually happened, but he’d know if people were saying that it did. He and Keebler were supposed to meet for hot turkey sandwiches at Keys at the Foshay “around noon,” which meant one-thirty. Micah still had two hours to waste, so he sat at a bus stop outside the diner and looked through a few hundred baby pictures of himself before returning to the ecumenical scroll. Here was the secretary of state having what appeared to be a stroke. Probably not real. Here was a list of ten facts he supposedly didn’t know about Harry Styles, except he knew nine of them and at least four were definitely false. Here was a slide show about illegal immigrants from Mexico being sold into slavery by legal immigrants from Norway. Probably not true. Here again was the secretary of state stroking out, although this time from a different camera angle and without audio. Here was Mark Cuban looking directly into the camera and explicitly advocating Maoism. Probably not real. Here were three high-resolution images of an elderly woman masturbating with an assault rifle inside a Baptist church. Probably not real. Here was an octopus. Probably not real. Here was a biracial woman he’d never seen before, live-streaming herself from a cave, talking about the relationship between global positioning systems and pancreatic cancer. That one was fifty-fifty.

  The next time he looked up, it was ten minutes past two. He could see Keebler through the frosted glass of the Keys front door, sitting at a booth, rewatching The Room on his wristwatch. Micah hustled inside and apologized for being late. Keebler said it was cool and that he didn’t even know what time it was.

  “You see the bishop taking the dirt road this morning?”

  “Naw,” said Micah. “I didn’t need to see that. How was it?”

  “Smart,” said Keebler. “Seamless. But the action starts too fast and goes on for too long. Overproduced.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought about the Matt Damon thing,” said Micah.

  “You mean the stroke? That was fake. That was fake yesterday.”

  “The stroke wasn’t Matt Damon,” said Micah. “The stroke was the other guy.”

  “What other guy?”

  “I can’t remember,” said Micah. “Something supposedly happened to somebody. It doesn’t matter.”

  A waitress with a beehive hairdo drifted over to the table and took their orders. Keebler wanted to finish the last ten minutes of the movie, so Micah took filtered photographs of the various patrons throughout the restaurant. When he rechecked the image he’d taken of an elderly couple sitting by the window, he noticed the silhouette of a moose hologram in the distant background, reminding him of the inquiry he’d pondered three hours prior.

  “I have a weird question,” said Micah.

  “GIF of Michael Jackson eating popcorn in the ‘Thriller’ video,” said Keebler.

  “The urban moose holograms. Some of those holograms are real moose, right? Like, two percent or something?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Keebler. “Is that true?”

  “I thought there was a report about a little kid who got trampled on Hennepin.”

  “I guess I did hear about that,” said Keebler.

  “Well, then the involved moose would have to be real,” said Micah. “You can’t get trampled by a hologram.”

  “Is it possible they’re all real?”

  “That can’t be,” said Micah. “I probably saw ten of them on my way over here. What would they be eating? Shouldn’t there be moose shit all over the sidewalk? Wouldn’t they constantly get hit by cars?”

  “You can’t really hit things with cars anymore,” said Keebler. “You basically have to try on purpose, and it still doesn’t work.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Micah. “I don’t really keep up anymore. Maybe all the moose are real. But how come you only see them downtown? Shouldn’t they be all over the suburbs?”

  “That’s a good point,” said Keebler. “They’re probably not real.”

  “The possibility of all those moose being moose never occurred to me until just now,” said Micah. “Now I’m always going to wonder. Every time I see a moose, I’ll wonder if I’m seeing a moose.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Keebler. “You can’t worry about that stuff. It doesn’t matter.”

  The waitress arrived with the food. It wasn’t what they’d ordered, but they ate it anyway.

  Reasonable Apprehension

  Come in. Sit. Relax. You’re the only appointment I have this morning, so we have plenty of time. Can we get you anything? Water? Coffee? Green tea?

  “No, thank you.”

  Did Jada take all your information?

  “She did.”

  Did she explain the billing process?

  “She said this first meeting was gratis, and then it would be a hundred twenty dollars per hour after that, assuming you agree to represent me.”

  Yes. That’s totally correct. And every hour is broken down into quarters, so if something only takes fifteen minutes it’s only $30. Almost nothing takes only fifteen minutes, of course, but sometimes something will take an hour and two minutes and the client will wonder why she was charged $150 instead of $120. From a billing perspective, two minutes and f
ifteen minutes are the same. Do you get that? From a billing perspective, two seconds and fifteen minutes are the same. We always round up. Does that make sense?

  “I think I understand.”

  I’m sure you do. It’s not complicated. It’s industry standard. Now, over the phone, you said you’d been charged with assault. Is the charge only assault, or was it assault and battery? Did you make physical contact with the alleged victim, or did you only threaten the alleged victim with the possibility of violence? Please be honest with me. Don’t hold anything back. I need to know everything, so that I know what not to ask.

  “I made no physical contact with the person. I did not even threaten the person. But the person felt threatened.”

  How did they classify the threat?

  “The person believed I was going to bite them.”

  Were they correct in that assumption? Were you going to bite them?

  “That’s the problem. I don’t think so, but maybe.”

  Uh-huh. Okay. I’m going to presuppose that you were intoxicated at the time of the incident?

  “No, not at all. I don’t drink.”

  Oh. Sorry. In that case, I apologize for my conjecture. I should stop making assumptions and just let you explain what happened. Tell me what happened.

  “Do you want the whole story, or just the end?”

  Let’s start with the end. Who accused you of the potential biting? Was it an acquaintance? A boyfriend or, you know, a girlfriend?

  “It was a stranger. Someone on the street, just outside of a 7-Eleven.”

  A stranger, on the street, near a place of business.

  “Yes.”

  What was your interaction with the individual? What was the nature of the dispute?