The Aesthetic

His mother, a lifelong Catholic, was upset that he was no longer going to church. “Is it because you don’t believe in God.”

“No,” he said. “It’s because I do believe in God.”

She sat on the floor of the Whole Foods and wept because the only flowers they had were those damned poinsettias.

Hasbrow was obsessed with the idea of time travel. It wasn’t because of some regretful incident in his past, or a desire to understand a historical figure. No, it was because he wanted to see Timbernen’s painting, Lake of Reason, before it burned in an Austrian museum during a WWII raid. He began his quest with only a slight understanding of science – but he had money and incredible desire. Finally, in his late-80s, he pulled off the trick, and managed to put himself in the museum an hour before the raid that would destroy Timbernen’s famous work. Standing in the gallery at last, alone with the painting that had captivated his imagination for decades of his life, it struck him that the painting was a little more yellow than he had thought. And the female depiction of Human Intelligence was cartoonish. Ah well, he thought.

“And ADD, pah, nonsense!” Sterner waved his hand in the air dismissively. They were walking across the quad now, and it was windy, and he had to shout over the air. “Why do you think we’re on the Internet, a million channels on the TV, staring at our iPhones every waking second? It’s because the world has gotten incredibly boring. It’s easy to say we have some kind of condition that keeps us from paying attention to anything, because the alternative is that there is nothing going on that’s worthy of our attention. But that is really what’s happening! Here we are, two thousand years after Christ and we are bored out of our socks.”

Monty believed seriously in the conspiracy of things. He believed that when an umbrella exploded in the middle of a downpour, it was not an accident. Neither was it just bad luck when a cup of coffee splashed on his white shirt just before a job interview. And that infamous disappearing sock – certainly not his fault. Things, to his mind, had a mind of their own, and they were not friendly. So he gathered a group of like-minded folks and created a community in the Mojave Desert dedicated to “responding in kind to the hostility of objects.” In all, 47 people adopted an intentional life that was separate from things. There were no houses, no possessions, no art projects, nothing. Just the rudimentary tools that they needed to prepare their simple meals. Their clothes were simple smocks that they accepted wearing only so long as they acknowledged that the clothes themselves would try to change them. In the first four days, more than half of the community abandoned the encampment. In a month, another ten were gone. Now, several years later, it is thought that only Monty is still out there, living without the conspiracy of things to bother him.

Mary’s dog, Jesse, had a problem with his foot that required a small surgical procedure and some stitches. In order to keep the dog from chewing on the stitches, Jesse was given a plastic cone to wear for two weeks to give the area time enough to heal. On day three of Jesse’s recovery, Mary felt a sharp pain in her right shoulder while playing tennis. Now, maybe now is the best time to note that Mary had this strange compulsive habit of occasionally biting her shoulder – not all the time, but just when it itched or felt funny. Anyway, she went to the doctor for her shoulder, and he said that there was a bone chip or something. Mary decided to take care of it right away, so the doctor did a quick arthroscopic procedure the next day. No big deal, until two days later, when Mary returned with her sutures all messed up. Mary told him that she couldn’t help biting the spot, so the doctor tried wrapping it in heavy gauze. But the next day, she was back again with the sutures out of place. So, the doctor gave her a cone to wear, for two weeks. The following Saturday, Mary took Jesse for a walk, and the two of them walked boldly through the park, wearing their cones.

When he was a spy for the police, his code name was Osiris. When he moved up to the Ukrainian federal service, his code name was Winter Lion. Later, when he was spying for the Soviets, he went by the name Boris350. Then, for the Russians, he was Hugo. During his brief time with the Israelis, he was Sunsetter. Interpol gave him the code name Osprey, which the FBI changed to Blue Osprey when it absorbed his mission. A year later, with the NSA, he was called Redhawk. Now, with the CIA, he had a new name, Blackbenny. And sitting here in front of the nuclear weapon, only needing to log into his laptop to enter the seven-digit number that would disarm the device, he is suddenly drawing a blank about his username. Is it the name of his first dog? The street he grew up on? Oh, for chrissakes.

“Before the what hits the what? Hey, have you ever actually seen shit hit a fan? I mean, real shit? Perhaps you should do some checking before you open your big stupid mouth. For instance, dry shit doesn’t do much of anything — just kind of clanks against the fan, maybe turns to dust if it’s really dry. Super gooey shit just sticks to the blades and gets stuck in the gears. Sure, if it’s really wet, thin shit, OK, then maybe a big mess. But there’s a big gray area here.”

The Russians planned well for the needs of their Soyuz astronauts during the expected two-year duration of the trip to Mars. Enough food was stored for twice that duration, and hydroponic pods in the rear of the capsule provided for fresh produce. But planners were also attentive to the men’s sexual needs, and so the eighth crew member was Sasha, a 29-year-old prostitute from Kiev with a degree in astrophysics and a record of five completed triathalons. After six months, however, her presence in the capsule became an issue to the men, who began fighting over her attentions. In another month, one crew member, Boris, the communications technician, was dead. Moreover, Sasha had begun to exert control over the remaining men through the careful allocation of her attentions. When it came time to send the lander to the surface, Sasha had taken full control of the mission. And when the door to the lander opened upon the red planet, it was Sasha who would go down in history as the first human to set foot on the surface of Mars.

Rosemary was a wiz with spreadsheets. She could manipulate numbers, de-duplicate, and pull off multiple complicated formulas simultaneously. She was revered for her skills throughout the bureaucracy. Not so well known to everyone was her skill with a bow and arrow. While she had never been asked to shoot an apple off someone’s head or split an arrow on the target, she had no doubt that she could do it. But, as will inevitably happen when someone has two such prominent skills, they were bound to find an overlap. On this day, her supervisor asked her to perform some kind of miracle with the sales numbers from the previous fiscal year, and Rosemary responded by pulling out a tight little recurve from under her desk and snapping an arrow across the entire office that split the air like a laser and found its rest in a portrait of the founder, directly in the pupil of the left eye where she intended it.