The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.
1. Say you’re a zebra. Well, OK, say you’re an anthropomorphized zebra with the power of speech living in a world populated primarily by anthropomorphized zebras. Not all anthropomorphized zebras are created equal; nor, it seems, are they all the herd-focused equines we might imagine. Take you for example.
Owing to your lack of focus on the herd as a whole, semi-nefarious nature, and perhaps most of all your employment on zebra Wall Street, you committed various financial crimes for which you were charged, tried, and convicted. Yes, apparently, the zebra justice system functions a bit more reliably than ours does. Having bid a tearful goodbye to your ten(!) calves, you show up at the doors of zebra prison ready to pay your debt to zebra society. What happens next?
Are you hoof-printed? Forced to wear stripes? Forced to wear solids? What are the gangs like in zebra prison, anyway? Sure, this is zebra white-collar prison but there must still be gangs, right? How about the guards? What are they like? I mean, you know they’re not “nice,” they’re prison guards, but what species are they? Or are they, too, zebras?
Go wild on this. You know you’ve been cooped up as an anthropomorphized zebra WAY TOO LONG. Actually, you’re going to be cooped up a lot longer, but you get the idea. Bonus credit for a description of visitors’ day. I mean…ten calves? Do they visit in shifts?
ES: In fairness, I was capitalizing on herd mentality. That’s how Ponzi schemes work, and I maintain that Oats for Boats was a solid idea. I stand by it, even if I’m the only one who managed to get twelve super yachts out of the deal. It’s not my fault those other zebras weren’t closers.
On the upside, I look great in prison polka dots. They do hamper disappearing into the long grass, but being that we’ve grazed the prison yard down to the dirt, that’s not much of a thing. That’s fine too, because morning yoga in the yard is a bitch when there’s saw-tooth lovegrass poking you in the eye. We do have morning yoga. Zebra prison is ironically, pretty humane. Well, for me especially, because the guards are on the take. I lost touch with five of my calves during the Great Migration of ’18, but the other five run a casino in Macao, and the guards are always up for free nights and some chips on the house. There’s a rumor that the guards all used to be gnus, but they kept getting their horns stuck in the bars, so staffing adjustments were made.
I’ve got time left, and the only way to do hard zebra time is with a crew. There’s Little Mel, who is in for mail fraud, and is also very large—5’8” at the shoulder. There’s Bev, who’s our alarm system, because she’s still twitchy from the savanna. Inga is my cellie. She was part of a pill mill scheme with a bunch of zoo vets. She snores and tries to eat her bedsheet at night, but she did shank Marcella while on kitchen duty, so I keep her on my side. Then there’s Ulla. Ulla is from money. Nobody knows what she did and she won’t talk about it, but Little Mel says Ulla was barred from entering 17 countries before winding up here. Ulla says everything is just a misunderstanding around cross-cultural customs and ethics. Being that my super yachts were seized by the government, I’m counting on Ulla’s connections when I get out of here.
2. Why are the colors of house paint given such extravagant names like, y’know, Butternut Biscuit Beige and Pearl-Lustered Tangerine? Is it simply to sell more paint by appealing to the whimsy of the apparently quite whimsical paint-buying public? Are the name-givers frustrated artists or, still worse, frustrated marketing MBAs? Or is there something even deeper and darker than art and MBAs at play here? What’s your theory?
ES: I know I was suckered into buying a trim color called Puffball. I figured, “Hey, I’m a cute person, I need a cute trim color.” Puffball turns out to be a yellowish off-white. If it was called “off-white, a little yellow”, I’d be asleep in the paint aisle with a bunch of swatches as my pillow. But Puffball? Cute as hell. I want to boop Puffball on its little paint nose. I think these names come about specifically to target aspirational suckers like me, which means, it’s all marketing. I’m imagining you get to be the Official Paint Namer after you work your way up through marketing; it’s got to be a coveted position, an earned one. You need to know that industrial interior paints can have names like “Apex Blue” but not “Cornflower Daydream.”
There’s probably an artist consultant who has a direct line to the gurus over at Pantone. For fun, let’s say Vivienne is a consultant. Vivienne appears at the quarterly Paint, Inc. meeting with a selection of seasonal colors, most of which are chosen to confound her many lovers, current and former. This color book is then passed to Brent—Official Paint Namer. Brent reviews Vivienne’s proposed names (Dismal Misery, Whimsical Vengeance, Louis’s Teeth) and recognizes that they are unmarketable to the aspirational content creator. Then, relying on his marketing genius, Brent realizes that Louis’s Teeth is a great color for a nursery. It’s gender neutral, borderline pastel, and won’t need to be changed when that room eventually returns to being an office or guestroom. Boom. It’s Puffball, and it becomes the color of the year for aesthetic posters, and the trim in my living room.
3. Please solve the following unrelated set of simultaneous equations using only sentences:
(Entropy – Mount Everest) / (Blue + Potato) = (Milan Kundera x Land Shark)2
Vanity + (Hunger / Love) = Turing Test – (Napoleon / Big Mac)
ES: Time spoils food and romance alike.
Beauty is a mannequin with a toupee, gazing into a mirror.
4.What are you thinking?
ES: It’s hilarious that I decided to answer all these questions on a legal pad first. As though the yellow paper gives zebra prison some real heft, or I’m gonna prepare a brief about Pantone color selections. What the heck, Swyler? Just type it out like a normal person.
5. You’re sad because yesterday you lost your job as a first-year barista. However, owing to the kind ministrations of techno-capitalism, you’ve already been contacted by an executive recruitment firm tasked with finding a new Thanos for the Marvel universe. No, I don’t mean a new thespian to play Thanos. Josh Brolin, all his body paint, prosthetics, CGI and whatever are safe. I’m talking about the real Thanos.
Negatives: If you get this role, you’ll be forced to become a two-dimensional being in more ways than one.
Positives: The compensation and benefits package is simply incredible, otherworldly if you will.
Verdict: You want this job. Nay, you NEED this job.
At the end of a battery of interviews, personality and intelligence testing, and other borderline Orwellian processes you sit down with the firm’s CEO for a final interview. This CEO, let’s call her Z, is so well regarded in the field of executive recruitment that if the interview goes well enough, you’ll get the job. You will be Thanos.
A grueling six-hour interview ensues in which you are refused everything from water to Kleenex to a phone call. You feel like a prisoner. You, in fact, feel so much like a prisoner that you say to Z, “I’m really starting to feel like a prisoner here.” Z assures you you’re not a prisoner, that you can get up and leave any time, but leaving will impact your eligibility for this coveted role as 2 D supervillain. You get up to leave anyway. You’ve really had it with this Z’s bullshit at this point. However, she raises a hand to cut you off before you can go. “Just kidding,” she says. “There’s only one more question, and if you ace the answer, you’ve got the job.”
You sit back down. “What is it?” you ask.
“Instead of being able to blink half the beings in reality out of existence, the Infinity Gauntlet allows you to select one famous dessert to blink out of existence. You must choose the famous dessert, the absence of which from our timeline would have the most far-reaching negative effects on reality. Which dessert do you choose? Please describe the effects corresponding to its nonexistence in detail.” Please be comprehensive and convincing. Your future career as a wealthy, famous two-dimensional supervillain is on the line.
ES: Birthday cake is gone. Snap. Right out the window with that token of annual joy. You might think, wait, does cake still exist? Sure, it does. But birthday cake is gone. You know what goes away with birthday cake? Birthday candles. You know what birthday candles are for? Birthday wishes. Snap. I’ve now taken your cake and all your wishes out of existence. No bike, no promotion, no getting into that school, definitely not getting that part, no abs for you this year, none of it. That one really good person who keeps using their birthday wishes on world peace? Ha. Good luck, buddy. That powerful group wish for an awful person to die in humiliating fashion on live TV? That mighty group wish’s power? Gone. So, you think I’ve taken away a middling treat that’s often too dry, or dense, or too sweet, or soggy. A treat that people can do without. You dare to say, “No big deal, I like pie better anyway.” Wrong. I have in fact erased the world’s most powerful wishes, and all the joy that comes with wishing them.
Am I Thanos yet? C’mon, man. I really need this gig.
6. Is God real?
ES: Were there a god, I would want God to be specifically for this very needy little planet, and for that god to be a giant benevolent cephalopod who resides at ocean depths we have not yet considered, and for this mighty creature to roll its great eyes at how small the human species is in the face of the universe. I’d like to think we’re part of its collection of interesting objects it keeps in its garden, and that when we cry to this God for help, it answers us only with the unfurling of a single arm that sends a rippling current through the universe. So, no, God isn’t real, but a cephalopod god should be.
Erika Swyler is the nationally bestselling author of the novels We Lived On the Horizon, Light From Other Stars and The Book of Speculation. Her writing has appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Literary Hub, VIDA, Catapult, The New York Times, People, and elsewhere. She lives on Long Island, NY, where she is a museum worker. Find her at erikaswyler.com.
Kurt Baumeister is the author of the novels Pax Americana and Twilight of the Gods, the latter of which was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction. His work has been covered by Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review of Books, The National Book Review, Literary Hub, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The Millions, Catapult Magazine, F(r)iction, Big Other, Bending Genres, BULL, [PANK], Lit Reactor, and others. Baumeister’s interviews, essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Brooklyn Rail, The Good Men Project, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Weeklings, and other outlets. An acquisitions editor with 7.13 Books, Baumeister holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Authors Guild. Find him at kurtbaumeister.com.