Q

I saw a short story in The Atlantic (a publication that I generally respect) today that raised a lot of questions, namely:

• Why is this in The Atlantic?
• Is this a joke?
• This guy won a Guggenheim fellowship? Does the selection committee for those consist of Bono, Dave Eggars, and an orang-utan?
• Would college me have thought this was good?
• Would college me have written something like this to get an "A" in a class/impress a girl I wanted to sleep with?

I sent the story to my friend who teaches high school English in Indiana with the subject line "am I a bad person for thinking that this story sucks pipe?" She informed me that read the first three paragraphs and couldn't get past the casual stereotypes and hackneyed sex references.  Had she read further, her life would have been cosmically enriched by a yarn that wends from New York to Cuba to Kolkata to Houston and back to New York leaving a trail of twisted metaphors and smoldering sophistry in it's wake.  To be fair, it seems well-researched, in that it reads like the fictionalization of a caffeine-addled Wikipedia romp.

tl;dr

There's a Caucasian lady stuck in a cab circling an airport that is on lockdown because of a bomb threat.  The bomb threat turns out to be a false alarm caused by a mishearing of the word "balm" as pronounced by an Indian national who is also the cousin of a waitress at a restaurant that the lady in the cab once ate at.

Do you see how everything is all connected?

There's also a lot of hamfisted circle imagery, most egregiously in the allophonic repetition of the letter "O" (GET IT!), but while the peripheral characters are oh so multicultural in the calculated manner of an Apple commercial, the axle upon which the great chakram verily doth whirl is (surprise) the white lady in the cab.

I googled the author, who (again, surprise) is a jizz-colored greybeard in a charcoal turtleneck who has written a bunch of novels, won all the important mid-tier literary awards, and has a cushy teaching position at the University of Houston.  The fact that they let this man instruct undergraduates is itself a comment on the sorry state of our education system.  He writes about race in the cocksure mode of a man to whom race means nothing.  His characters are all such lazy racial caricatures that I wanted to print it and mail it to him covered with hieroglyphic red ink and an admonishment to visit the Writing Center.  To be clear, I didn't find O offensive (I'm deliriously white and male; nothing really offends me) so much as just tacky and smarmy.  In form and substance, it reminded me of the film Crash: another "post-racial" fairytale shimmering with enough respectably platitudinous bunk that Ta-Nehisi Coates named it the worst movie of the aughts.

But, I get it; writing fiction is hard and I shouldn't criticize until I've endured the agony of molding my deepest soul into Courier New.  So, armed with a B.A. in English, seething indignation, and about an hour before I fall asleep, I give you:

Q: A Short Story about Everything and Nothing.

Greekletter Tau--September 12, 2016--no rights reserved (seriously, I don't care)

A quite long queue had formed outside a usually quiet Qdoba in Albuquerque, disrupting the manicured symmetry of the quaint fast-casual establishment exactly like the tail sticking out of the letter Q, Q, Q...Q?  What a quizzical quaver, Q!  Singularly useless in English orthography, Q dangles from the alphabet like a half-picked scab.  Vestigial as the human appendix, a lazy afterthought of a letter that some overworked scrivener of antiquity cobbled together from O and a comma probably as a practical joke that no one ever got wise to.  If you love your child, do not give them a name with a Q in it.

AAAAANYWAYS, waiting in queue outside the Qdoba in Albuquerque, a Millennial Caucasian venture capitalist fidgeted with her (you heard "venture capitalist" and assumed that this person would be male, sexist!) smartphone.  She was on the Tinders and the Facebooks at the same damn time, messaging both her best friend from college who was experiencing an unexpected and wrenching breakup and a 25-year-old Latino personal trainer with a waxed chest 0.8 miles away and weighing the relative virtues of Free Guacamole Wednesday and jackhammer-esque mid-day sex.  

Far away in Missoula, the college best friend spewed commingled tears and nasal mucus into a half-eaten half-gallon of Breyer's ice cream (Moose Tracks).  "I can't believe he left me for that skinny crossfit bitch" was what she meant to type, but clouded as her vision was by both lachrymal secretions and the searing agony of recent heartbreak, she instead typed "I ca belo h le m f th ski cei bitc" which her smartphone helpfully corrected to "I can believe he let me fuck the skiing ceiling Bitcoin."

The Millennial venture capitalist in Albuquerque LOL'd at her friend's malapropism, deriving a pleasant warming sensation from her recent resolution to forswear romance in order to pursue her love of money.  She tapped her platform heal impatiently, like an impatient horse, upon the heat-rippled asphalt.  What's taking them so fucking long?  I thought Mexicans could roll burritos like Speedy Gonzalez.

But the fellow rolling the burritos was rolling as fast as he could, which turned out to be not very fast, as he had been relieved of both of his thumbs with a machete for repeatedly failing to pay protection money to the local narco back in his homeland of Nicaragua, which is not Mexico.  The narco, a former Contra flush with dinero and rifles from the C.I.A., had a prominent gold incisor which gleamed in the tropical sun of Xolotlan--the sun to which the burrito man's ancestors had sacrificed unnumbered hearts, ripping them still throbbing from chests with cruel obsidian and the same sun which, even now, emitted a high energy photon like a dart from Apollo's bow, like the tail of the letter Q, which would (8 minutes from now) pierce the upper atmosphere, evading ozone molecules and fine carbon particulates, and strike an electron in a thymine base in the regulatory region of the gene PTCH1 in a neoplastic basal cell situated at tip of the Millennial venture capitalist's aquiline nose, exciting it to a higher energy state and causing the thymine base to dimerize with a neighboring thymine base which would cause a transition mutation upon the next round of cell division which was the last lesion needed to push the cell into malignant berserkergang, dividing uncontrollably and largely unnoticed by the venture capitalist who would think she just had a particularly intractable zit until the mass had grown so large that it could not be excised without permanent facial disfigurement which would largely ruin her Tinder prowess and cause her (she would say) to get passed over for a promotion that she had rightfully earned and spiral into depression, weight-gain, and alcoholism--as he grinned like a jaguar while his henchmen hacked off the burrito man's thumbs.  

Okay, you get the damn point.  I'm going to sleep now.  Maybe I'll write more later, but probably not.