“The Hole in the System” is my speculative fiction short story. It was published in Hexagon Speculative Magazine on September 1st. You can read it here.
“The Hole in the System” is based on three things. It’s about a plague of holes. It’s about systems. And it’s about the shopping cart theory, the viral theory that you can determine whether a person is a good or bad member of society depending on whether they return their shopping carts.
When I first came across this green text I thought, “Well, that makes some sense.” But it seemed too easy. The theory doesn’t account for people who are physically disabled and who may struggle to return their cart. I’ve also heard excuses like, “Well I should leave it out in the parking lot because I’m creating jobs and creating jobs for like the cart runners.” Not true. Clerks or shelf stockers return them. I know, because I did it when I worked at Lowe’s.
And what if somebody can’t return their cart, such as during a storm? What if you have children screaming for ice cream and the grocery bag tore and oranges are rolling across the asphalt in every direction and you’re late for ice skating lessons, and as you pull out of the parking lot, you see the cart drifting into the sunset, but it’s too late for regrets? You are already a Bad Person and must bear your sin.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote The Gulag Archipelago, said:
“If only it were all so simple! If only they were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts to the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
I reread this quote from Sozhenisky in an article in The New Criterion by Gary Saul Morrison “How the Great Truth Dawned”. Morrison followed the quote with one of his own. “We are never closer to evil than when we think that the line between good and evil passes between groups and not through each human heart.”
The shopping cart theory tried to draw the line. That’s why it was suspect.
“A Hole in the System” would have bombed if its message was, “People aren’t evil for not putting away their shopping carts because context matters.” I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to escalate and get at the heart of why people found the shopping cart theory so intriguing.
So I thought about Martha Nussbaum’s book, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy. The book points out that most elements that make up a good life depend on factors outside of our control, such as being born somewhere with free and accessible education, clean drinking water, low violence, stable jobs and housing, etc, not to mention people who care about us and our wellbeing. Luck has a lot to do with us living well and having agency in our own lives. Luck buffers people from chaos.
We can increase our luck, so to speak, through systems and technology. For example, air conditioning can be life-saving as temperatures increase (see Seattle). Water purification can save us from poison water, even if we’re not aware it’s poisoned. Even shoes can protect us from snakebites. While technology buffers us from chaos, we don’t always own technology.
Who owns the systems that protect us from the world? Rarely us. The systems that buffer us from chaos on a massive scale, like modern plumbing, healthcare, and food distribution, are often too large for any one person or administration to control completely. The know-how required to keep water flowing through the pipes, electricity squiggling through the wires, and hot-potato the potatoes from dirt to dinner table would take several lifetimes to acquire. We only have two hands, one brain. Our trust in other people to keep these big systems ticking verges on belief.
So if nobody owns the system, what happens when systems break down? I thought of this question often when my dad had emergency bypass surgery in October, during a COVID-19 surge that clogged up the hospitals. He went to the hospital with severe chest pain, and there were COVID patients coughing in the waiting room. He got one of the last open beds.
In The Fragility of Goodness, Nussbaum talks about this ancient queen in a tragic play. The queen was really big on behavior–you know, performing the right rituals, proper greetings, that sort of thing. She believes she’s a good person because she views maintaining these societal expectations as her duty and believes she has a good life because of her actions.
But then the queen loses her daughters to rape and warfare. Her wealth vanishes, her husband leaves her, and she’s left alone in the world. Her belief system for understanding the world and living well within it broke, through no fault of her own. And she understandably loses her mind.
Perhaps she could have kept herself together if she realized that sometimes bad things happen through no fault of your own. But she lost everything. If your behavior has no bearing on whether you live a good or bad life, what can you do? Why be good if good doesn’t come back to you? Going insane is the only place the queen can go. Going insane is taking shots in the dark, hoping something sticks.
When terrible things happen to you, you make bargains with the world, and do things that don’t make sense. But you need to do it, even if you know that they don’t make sense, because you subconsciously believe, “If I just do things right this way, then I’ll be rewarded or this bad thing will stop happening to me.”
On the day before Dad went into surgery, I told him that he’d make it through and that I loved him. I thought that if I missed the chance to say it, he would definitely die. While he was in surgery, I listened to my favorite album: Death Cab For Cutie’s Plans. The album’s name comes from the lead singer and songwriter, Ben Gibbard:
“One of my favorite kind of dark jokes is, ‘How do you make God laugh? You make a plan.’ Nobody ever makes a plan that they’re gonna go out and get hit by a car. A plan almost always has a happy ending. Essentially, every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time. I really like the idea of a plan not being seen as having definite outcomes, but more like little wishes.”
Link
Common-sense is a belief system, and I lost my faith in 2020. It was easy to resent people for not returning their shopping carts. It seemed like the smallest, indivisible unit of human decency, the closest thing to an atom of morality. And people didn’t do it. I sometimes wondered if I was wrong for wearing a mask when most people didn’t–still aren’t–even as Oklahoma became number 2 in the nation for COVID-10 test positivity. I wondered if I was insane. Especially because I didn’t often feel sad or scared or angry. I was often happy.
Trevor Noah once said in his memoir, Born a Crime, that he can’t help but find things funny. There could be a giant asteroid on a collision course to Earth shaped like a dick, and he would absolutely laugh at it, still quaking in his boots. Me too. Even the stupid crazy shit people did during lockdown made me laugh.
One of the funniest tidbits I found in 2020 was the wiki page for holes. Someone on Twitter mentioned that some philosophers consider holes as ontological parasites–they can’t exist without something to exist in. So I thought, what if there was a plague of holes? That holes were actually parasitic and could spread, but nobody knew why? Think about all the holes you depend on in your daily life! A doorway. A coffee mug has two kinds of holes–the handle and the cup. What is plumbing but a tangle of extendable holes? How terrified people would be! What crazy shit would people do to feel like they had some agency over their lives?
At first, “A Hole in the System” was a very serious short story. It was actually meant to be horror. But as I wrote, I imagined this one scene which I found excruciatingly funny. I put it aside, but my mind kept returning to it. And I thought of how, during lockdown, I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the things that were happening.
Against all odds, my dad lived.
“A Hole in the System” doesn’t ask, “how do we know who’s good and evil?” That’s not the point. The real question is, “How do we live and be good when things don’t make sense?”
Postscript
I wrote “A Hole in the System” in June, and Hexagon accepted it for publication in July. In August, ten months after Dad’s bypass and four days before his birthday, on August 4th, 2021, Dad passed away. He had just gotten his gallbladder removed. I didn’t say “I love you,” before he went into surgery. I was going to share an airplane GIF with him and joke with him about it after he got out of the hospital, maybe pop home with some cookies or cinnamon rolls to help Mom. The surgery was supposed to be in-n’-out. People get their gallbladders removed all the time. The surgeon said his gallbladder was worse than they thought, but the surgery went well, and he was resting in the hospital. Suddenly he aspirated and his heart gave out.
I cannot help but think that if I had said “I love you”, he would still be alive.
The original meaning of “A Hole in the System” has shifted for me. Dad had his emergency bypass surgery in October, during a COVID wave which clogged the hospital system in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In some sense, this wave wasn’t as psychologically bad as the ones that came later. We didn’t have vaccines then. I also thought, stupidly, maybe this is what will get Dad to eat some plants that haven’t been deep-fried or slathered in ranch dressing.
The day Dad came from from his bypass surgery, I watched him wheeze into the kitchen, breathing as if he had walked up the staircase of a skyscraper, rip open a package of store-brand vanilla Oreos, grab a handful, and stumble into his recliner to put on a WWII documentary. He and Mom had stopped by Walgreens to pick up bandages, medical tape, and prescriptions, in addition to Whoppers malted milk balls, Dove chocolates, and cookies. I couldn’t believe it. He later said that the doctor told him that all four of his valves were 99% blocked and it was a miracle that he was alive.
I joked with him, “Does this mean you’re going to eat your veggies now?”
He replied quietly, “Probably not.”
Dad had had a stroke when I was in middle school and spent a month in the hospital. The experience left his face askew. His left shoes had deep scuffs because his left leg lagged permanently. He changed nothing about his diet. If anything, he got worse, because we didn’t go camping or bike riding together any more. He had other health issues as well, ones we didn’t talk about, but whose prescription bottles heaped on the kitchen counter.
It’s difficult for me to believe that Dad wouldn’t change his ways after the stroke, even though I saw that he didn’t. What greater evidence do you need to change your diet than a stroke–a rare type of stroke too!–and all four heart valves 99% blocked?
“A Hole in the System” asks, “How do we live when things don’t make sense?” But there’s a second story brewing in my brain. One that asks, “How do you stay the same when the world gives you every reason to change?”
I can’t write it now. I’m still too angry. Dad had his gallbladder surgery during another hospital surge– after the vaccines were cheap and readily available, when people had every reason to take them and easy ways to get them. Dad went to the ER with severe abdominal pain at 4am and was seen by a doctor at 3pm, because there were so many people sick. His own brother couldn’t make his funeral because he works for the government and they locked down travel restrictions a few days before he was to fly out. When we ordered his headstone for his grave, the administrator told us that because so many people were dying, it would take twice as long to get it.
The administrator wasn’t wearing a mask, and neither were any of the administrators at the funeral home.
I have no words.