Jonathan Callahan" />
  • ABOUT
  • PRINT
  • PRAISE
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • OPENINGS
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • CONTACT
The Missing Slate - For the discerning reader
  • HOME
  • Magazine
  • In This Issue
  • Literature
    • Billy Luck
      Billy Luck
    • To the Depths
      To the Depths
    • Dearly Departed
      Dearly Departed
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
  • Arts AND Culture
    • Tramontane
      Tramontane
    • Blade Runner 2049
      Blade Runner 2049
    • Loving Vincent
      Loving Vincent
    • The Critics
      • FILM
      • BOOKS
      • TELEVISION
    • SPOTLIGHT
    • SPECIAL FEATURES
  • ESSAYS
    • A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
      A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
    • Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
      Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
    • Nature and Self
      Nature and Self
    • ARTICLES
    • COMMENTARY
    • Narrative Nonfiction
  • CONTESTS
    • Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
    • PUSHCART 2013
    • PUSHCART 2014
Fiction, LiteratureNovember 22, 2013

The Witness

By Jonathan Callahan

True story, more or less: On the morning of July 28, 1945, an errant B-25 bomber emerged from a thick fog hung low over midtown Manhattan and plunged into the Empire State Building’s seventy-ninth floor. The explosion expelled elevator-car-operator Betty Lou Oliver from her car and left her badly burned. After receiving preliminary first-aid she was placed by emergency-aid workers on the seventy-fifth floor into another elevator—whose shock-weakened cables promptly snapped and sent her on a nearly-eighty-floor plummet to the building’s sub-basement. She survived the fall.

**

April, 1945

—Still but okay: granting it’s maybe your basic meat-and-potatoes ethical dilemma, concedes Oscar Oliver, Torpedo-man, Third-Class. He swallows, resets his stein atop the single wet ring its base has deposited on the unvarnished teak. —What’s the difference? For me, ultimately. In terms of how I ultimately decide to act?

—The difference?

—Yeah. I mean, does it really matter whether these are not necessarily uncharted? In terms of as philosophical waters? I’m wondering.

—Does not matter. Matters absolutely nil, is exactly my point, O. Doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter whether it matters for you or anyone else whether it matters or if there’s a fucking difference between whatever you even just said. Ultimately. Cept to the one person on the planet who gives a shit what you decide. Just pick something and quit blowing what still strikes me as a potentially salvageable night out there on the town, as they, as they say in other parts … his over-the-shoulder gesture broadly indicates the bedlam just beyond the bar’s patio, the beachside thoroughfare like some vast kaleidoscope projecting patterns of raucous young men in lieu of colored light, the bands of land-hungry seafolk who troop the boulevard in search of native treats… —if you weren’t fucking set on spending the rest of it staring into your beer.

T-M,3C Richard Phurst shakes his head, vigorously rubs his nose, eyes a white-skirted waitress’s dark legs as she sways past into the noodle-bar’s deeper gloom. His stein is down to mostly suds.

—Look, says Phurst, —you want my advice? … Pretend you do. I say forget the whole thing. As in don’t think about it. Lose the memory.

Oliver shakes his head. —And what, he says, —just pretend nothing even happened?

Phurst’s hand goes up in a later era’s crossing-guard’s traffic-halting semaphore.

—Not pretend, man. Pretend’s got nothing to do with it. You don’t have to pretend shit. Pretend means you actively do something with your brain. What I’m saying is you’re already doing too much. He leans back, runs a finger down the robust jutting eminence of jaw—I’m proposing more like the opposite of that. Do less. Don’t think about this shit. You’re already thinking too much is the real problem.

—I don’t see how not thinking about it’s gonna—

…does it really matter whether these are not necessarily uncharted? In terms of as philosophical waters?
—Cause what’s the point of thinking bout a problem you can’t solve? Like remember how Floyd would, he’d be out there on the grounds at like 0400 every morning before PT doing the shit with where he’s trying to jump up and touch the basketball rim only he’s fucking as tall as my mom when she’s not wearing shoes, and this is a small woman, O, Sicilian, maybe I never told you, the height’s on my pop’s side, plus she’s starting to hunch, which I’m saying there’s no fucking way he’s touching that rim whether he jumps one time or ten thousand. Or a million. And plus too if you wanna talk about faithful, you have been serving God and Country with plenty of faith, is something to remember. If you’re looking for something to remember here.

—

—No need for that look, Oliver.

—What look? There’s no look.

—Okay, there’s no look. I’m experiencing, I’m getting fucking ecstatic visions of a certain facial expression—which is still on your face as I speak, by the way—okay now it’s gone. But that was, that was a fucking look on your face there, a second ago.

—A look conveying what, did it look like?

—How the fuck should I know, it was your look: you tell me. Hey, Miss? Excuse me, Ma’am?

The hostess, half-empty pint-glasses perched and tottering, tray borne on one open palm, currency flapping from a pocket of her apron, pivots, squints back into the light.

—Nother round, the same?

She nods. Phurst returns a nuanceless wink.

—No look! All I’m saying is, seems like your advice is just to act like this isn’t a problem that’s kind of important to me, cause maybe in your opinion it shouldn’t be, or it’s, well, it’s inconvenient. And you’re saying because it’s a problem with no easy solution I’m supposed to just give up or like quit trying to find one through the application of, of rigorous dialectic. Seems like an easy way out, you know?

—No. Wait, what? What I’m saying, it’s a stupid fucking problem that only a panty pisses his first night away of shore leave on, is what I’m saying. That you should fucking exercise discretion when deciding what’s important since let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die, which this is the fucking Bible, am I right?

Oliver smooshes his face between both hands, puffs out a half-belch/sigh. Phurst reaches across the table as if to grip his shoulder or execute some similar fraternal gesture, prematurely withdraws.

—Just remember this, though. Leaving aside the fact you seem to be kind of blatantly overlooking—i.e. there’s at least a decent chance she could leave you over this, right? This is something you’ve considered? And even if you work out some kind of understanding, the wife’ll, well she’ll be in a whole lot a hurt she isn’t feeling now—shit she has no reason to feel, ever—if you do decide to open your mouth—

—Yes, but I detest a lie.

—And this is from the book too?

—Well? Marlow’s got a lot of valid insights. Especially the further he gets up the riv—

—So you’re saying, what you’re saying is it’s more important to you that you not be stuck with the discomfort of telling a lie than it is for you to spare her, the woman you supposedly love a little pain that she only ever feels as a result of knowing about your fucking up. And this is, this is noble, O? You tell her what you did, she’s gonna hurt. The other hand, who hurts if you don’t tell her? Only you, right? One way to look at it.

Continue Reading

1 2 3 View All →

Tags

fictionJonathan CallahanStory of the Week

Share on

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
Previous articleGun Club
Next articleNine and a half weeks

You may also like

Billy Luck

To the Depths

Dearly Departed

Ad

In the Magazine

A Word from the Editor

Don’t cry like a girl. Be a (wo)man.

Why holding up the women in our lives can help build a nation, in place of tearing it down.

Literature

This House is an African House

"This house is an African house./ This your body is an African woman’s body..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

Shoots

"Sapling legs bend smoothly, power foot in place,/ her back, parallel to solid ground,/ makes her torso a table of support..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

A Dry Season Doctor in West Africa

"She presses her toes together. I will never marry, she says. Jamais dans cette vie! Where can I find a man like you?" By...

In the Issue

Property of a Sorceress

"She died under mango trees, under kola nut/ and avocado trees, her nose pressed to their roots,/ her hands buried in dead leaves, her...

Literature

What Took Us to War

"What took us to war has again begun,/ and what took us to war/ has opened its wide mouth/ again to confuse us." By...

Literature

Sometimes, I Close My Eyes

"sometimes, this is the way of the world,/ the simple, ordinary world, where things are/ sometimes too ordinary to matter. Sometimes,/ I close my...

Literature

Quarter to War

"The footfalls fading from the streets/ The trees departing from the avenues/ The sweat evaporating from the skin..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Literature

Transgendered

"Lagos is a chronicle of liquid geographies/ Swimming on every tongue..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Fiction

Sketches of my Mother

"The mother of my memories was elegant. She would not step out of the house without her trademark red lipstick and perfect hair. She...

Fiction

The Way of Meat

"Every day—any day—any one of us could be picked out for any reason, and we would be... We’d part like hair, pushing into the...

Fiction

Between Two Worlds

"Ursula spotted the three black students immediately. Everyone did. They could not be missed because they kept to themselves and apart from the rest...."...

Essays

Talking Gender

"In fact it is often through the uninformed use of such words that language becomes a tool in perpetuating sexism and violence against women...

Essays

Unmasking Female Circumcision

"Though the origins of the practice are unknown, many medical historians believe that FGM dates back to at least 2,000 years." Gimel Samera looks...

Essays

Not Just A Phase

"...in the workplace, a person can practically be forced out of their job by discrimination, taking numerous days off for fear of their physical...

Essays

The Birth of Bigotry

"The psychology of prejudice demands that we are each our own moral police". Maria Amir on the roots of bigotry and intolerance.

Fiction

The Score

"The person on the floor was unmistakeably dead. It looked like a woman; she couldn’t be sure yet..." By Hawa Jande Golakai.

More Stories

Sengetæppet Tavs

Original Danish text of Cecil Bødker’s ‘Tacit the Bedspread’.

Back to top
One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at maryamp@themissingslate.com.

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

Read previous post:
The Sleeping Dictionary

Jacob Silkstone reviews Sujata Massey's 'bold and ambitious' new novel.

Close