A Very Barthelme Christmas
By George Wehrfritz
Is it appropriate to call this a situation? Interfacing within parameters you freely selected, conversing at your behest about events in the little city which – although you purchased it outright some years back – retains laws on its books that must be heeded?
Your bloody footprints suggest blown glass or molded plastic manufactured overseas. Bandages conceal wounds inexpertly treated. Mirrored ornaments of indeterminate composition so recently hung from the noble fir in your living room now litter the oak plank floor in a thousand glistening shards beside Little Dickey’s Wild West playset and Jane’s Hoppity Hop – each a gift from Nana.
Please stay on the line while we access your records to determine if everything is A-Okay in this case.
Per the contract.
By “case” we reference Complaint B7-2453/NA-F, filed on 12/25 at 10:58 PM Central Time. Our “everything” encompasses unbridled postmodernism, symptoms of which sometimes include a rash. Or gaiety extruded (after too much eggnog) into grief and deep confusion, protracting and solidifying over the modern Christmastide via algorithms not dissimilar in their eeriness to that once aroused by entities known collectively as ghosts.
Allegorical apparitions. Fiendish figurative faeries. Bedeviling clients in your age and income demographic — ghouls past, present and future, hell-bent. In driverless Amazon Prime vans packed tight with youthful regrets, simmering ructions involving family or friends, future karmic comeuppance out for final delivery. Technically ones and zeroes. Coursing silicon-based circuitry 1/20,000th the thickness of a human hair at light speed.
Boo! doesn’t begin to do them justice.
Did our associate not warn you this might happen? That a virtual haunting could transpire?
Just checking for the record. For the record, you understand. As regards a recent hire who (subsequent your transaction and our Initial Public Offering) was placed on administrative leave. “No choice in the matter,” HR determined, citing idiosyncratic over-exuberance regarding sales commissions, a tendency not uncommon with actual client-facing people.
Not an AI. Not even a somebody who reads much Donald Barthelme or cracks more than the occasional graphic novel about soldiers contesting battlefields resembling Macy’s on Black Friday. Still, your reference to #bluechristmas should have raised a red flag.
“Just pick from the list of recommended seasonal themes,” he encouraged on recordings made for quality purposes. “Or select your favorite, I dunno, author.” The essence of whom our chemists would distill into an Approximation Elixir in FedEx-friendly pill form for delivery to your doorstep in time to enhance this holiday season most memorably. Once dissolved under your tongue.
The police report indicates suboptimality. Neighbors concur. Also please note: 1) the Barthelme formula was bespoke(he is no Stephen King as book sales go); and 2) “memorable” can encompass situations darting right off the map.
The police report documents a Noble Fir Incident “following a Christmas meal featuring ham (too dry), cranberries (from a can) and Nana’s banana cream pie (beats mincemeat).” An incident “triggered by television commercials somehow.”
Unrelated to the stuff we shill, shilling stuff invariably manufactured overseas, stuff made invariably of plastic, stuff invariably designed to probe your innermost – how best to put this? – fissures. Needs, wants, marsupia for psychic nourishment; not cracks so much as zippers, or maybe Velcro, binding the constituent parts of selfhood together like some outfit Michael Jackson might have worn for his 70th Birthday Tour had he lived that long.
Did our associate not convey that your dominant emotion might be sadness? Legal deems this potentiality implicit.
Is your family safe?
During moments of despondency, try and imagine what clients who selected Danielle Steel or Joan Collins are getting up to about now, including saucy romps on bear rugs beside fireplaces draped in mistletoe, amorous gymnastics unhindered by replacement joints, refractory periods or murky crime syndicates. If, at intervals, your mother’s voice chimes in with “made your bed, now sleep in it,” or “I never taught you the world was fair,” consider that she may be right. And how she tells you so every holiday — which makes you right for not being altogether sure whether she is a figment of your current walkabout or an artifact from conventional life.
We understand your seasonal anxiety. Preliminary satisfaction data shows that other clients — a small number, pinkies plus toes more or less – also report suboptimality characterized “intertextual.” We have come to suspect 1) intermittent QC deficiencies tainting a single globalized supply chain, and 2) hive-mind faith in pharmacological solutions “just one phone call away.”
Your family did leave in the Buick, correct?
Then we are A-Okay.
Thank you for accessing our automated optimality hotline. Even on Boxing Day. Even though you ought to be out visiting friends with boxed candies, not homebound ruminating inner urges you struggle to resist. Extreme urges that must be resisted.
But wait, there’s more! Updated optimality guidance indicates that you qualify to receive our free Times Square Ball Drop bonus enhancement (chewable) delivered to your home by 12/30. Updated guidance further conveys that Yuletide’s thrall may cloy like a schnapps hangover so long as melancholy remains your dominant emotional state.
Nothing more can be done without supervisory approval so try and sleep if you can. Imagine, if helpful, a terrifying but harmless nightmare or maybe a beta test undertaken overseas to optimize algorithms. And when, at intervals, your mother chimes in with her Nana lullaby voice singing “If something sounds too good to be true …,” consider that she may be right.
That is the situation then. Suboptimal perhaps. Though we are nowhere near ready to call it a situation.
END
George Wehrfritz was an Asia-based correspondent for Newsweek magazine until he
took early retirement in 2009. He began writing short fiction during the pandemic, and his recent stories feature in Periscope Literary, The European Literary Review, Pere Ube and Spoon Knife 8 (forthcoming). He enjoys small boat sailing and large home-improvement projects undertaken with his wife, a teacher. He lives in Salinas, California.
