The Evening Tree, by An Anonymous Author

The delivery was not going to be for another hour, but Buck Duckett was already lying in the cold field under a pile of moss. The grass was chilly and the dew was already soaking into his coat, but he didn't mind; he thought it would hide him better. There were no voices yet, no lights, no cartons of pants changing hands, and all that existed were the shadows of trees. Dark forests represent something frightening to us, echoing something buried deep in human psyche. It might contain wolves or bears or something else-- the fact that our minds are capable of conjuring stories has allowed us to create a foreboding roster of fictitious beasts and monsters lurking there. There was something primeval about these fears. Buck Duckett, though, was not thinking about those things. He was contemplating the trees and the concept of eternity. It was a comfort for him to think about the almost unimaginably long life span of the trees surrounding him standing as sentinels over this athletic practice field as he waited for the Colonel to arrive with his shipment of trousers, before he would have to stop contemplating and return to the his own mundane business.

This is all I managed to write. Several weeks ago, I logged onto the web and got an e-mail soliciting a story about a pants detective for a minor college football website and I had declined because I did not know what any of those words meant and I was working on a book of essays about the objects in my bathroom and what they said about my deepest fears and insecurities. But the e-mails kept coming every day. They became more insistent, almost hectoring and more and more cryptic. Why a pants detective? Apparently, more than a decade ago an athlete got in some sort of trouble for selling autographed football pants and a perverse and psychologically damaged website editor thinks this is still funny. This assignment was nonsensical and insulting, but I was stuck on an essay about how the rubber ducky represented the unpredictable tyranny from my volatile father that I was desperate to avoid passing onto my own children, and a creditor was calling me every day demanding payment one of the houses I had purchased on a small, bleak island where I could pace and smoke, so eventually I gave in. I hoped that no one I respected would see it.

Apparently in United States college athletics there are, or were, rigid codes about amateurism policed by a small cadre of investigators that would allow the institution to punish athletes or institutions for paying players. This system could not be more alien to me. I am told that college sports there are big businesses, and the teams play in enormous stadiums. I went on the web and looked at some videos and the spectacle was impossibly lavish. This is a very different situation then sports here, when my friend Geir got a chance to try out for the Fløy football team at 17 and was sent a bus ticket and paid 3,700 kroner for his trouble before getting unceremoniously cut. We all got extremely drunk that night and he turned his ankle badly getting chased by a neighbor who had caught us urinating in his garden, and Geir had to write to Gjøvik-Lyn and Tromsdalen telling them he was on crutches and could no longer make their try-outs.

The short story assignment felt like a straight jacket. No matter how much I walked around the forest path smoking and brooding or drinking fifteen cups of coffee and staring at my computer, I could not even begin to think about how to write about something as profoundly stupid as a man who investigates pants. When I asked for more details, the editor told me that recently the college athlete association had changed the law making it legal for students to advertise products and get paid and hypothetically could, under certain arrangements, receive an unlimited number of free pants without consequence. This made the idea not only stupid but impossible. But in a moment of weakness I had signed a contract, and the threat of entering into international legal conflict over a story about a pants detective became so onerous and miserable that I sat down to write. Buck Duckett. What an idiotic name.

I sent an e-mail to my friend Per, who had experience teaching at an American university in order to see if he could offer some insight into the profound quagmire I had found myself in. He told me that my assignment had nothing to do with American sports and had been conjured up by a madman. "I do not want to alarm you, but I would check to see if you are the victim of a prank. Do you remember, for example, when the Paris Review got Coetzee to cover an entire season of arena league football and he embedded himself with the Chicago Bruisers? When he found out it was a jape, he got so enraged that he tried to fly to New York to bludgeon Plimpton with a dial-a-down but they would not let him on the plane with it." But after checking with my American agents, I sadly found that the Buck Duckett enterprise was too real and evidently inescapable.

I logged onto the web and clicked the link the editor had sent me to look at other Buck Duckett entries. What I saw was appalling. It was all third-rate detective nonsense and shoddy, almost illiterate parodies, and the other authors had been able to submit them anonymously to protect their literary reputations, if they had any. When I was fourteen years old, I was working at my school's literary magazine called Det Alvorlig. I published a poem in nearly every edition, but the editor, a boy a year older named Espen, had clearly set himself up to the be star. At every one of our parties in the woods while the rest of us would be drinking ourselves into oblivion with the reckless enthusiasm of young people who had just discovered getting drunk, Espen would be lounging on a log issuing his literary pronouncements, damning the literary establishment, and (this infuriated me) surrounded by girls. Espen had always been kind to me, welcoming me to the magazine, publishing my work, and being gently encouraging and because of that I despised him. In retrospect I wanted him to hate me, to fear me as a rival who would take control of the magazine through the superiority of my work, and I took his kindness as a condescension but at the time I only felt sourness and fury. I felt that his poems were mediocre and derivative. We were teenagers, and all of our poems were mediocre and derivative at best; the work we churned out that was wholly original was embarrassing (I published a poem from the point of view of a train engine that had very strong right-wing political convictions and quarreled with his communist caboose). By the spring, I had decided that I could no longer bear his literary swashbuckling and needed to destroy him. As a young teenager, it is very difficult to engineer a rival's literary destruction. I know this from fending off numerous attacks from a Swedish memoirist who published a nine-volume account of observations about his own life cheekily titled "The Little Red Book," and who remains beneath mention. I had lodged in my brain that Espen's poems were largely derivative of the early twentieth-century poet Olaf Bull. Not only were they essentially plagiarized, as far as I was concerned, they were also anachronistic, the themes and language plundered and thrust haphazardly into a more contemporary style. The previous summer, at my summer literary magazine independent from the school magazine, another student had told me that I was badly regurgitating Tarjei Vessas, and the experience had been utterly crushing, a blow that still reverberates in me every time I publish anything, an icy fear in my spine that a critic will rise up and blast me with the Vessas smear.

I biked to the library and searched and searched until I found a book bearing the logo of the Olaf Bull Society and then I tucked it into my shirt, took out a pair of meat shears that I had found in the kitchen, and neatly removed the logo. I pasted it to a paper and then used the magazine's mimeograph machine to make it appear like crude letterhead. Then I began typing. The letter accused Espen of "gross misappropriation" of Bull's prose and said it was "perverse and disgusting" how he had "warped it and inserted contemporary cultural references like one of those surrealist faeces paintings." I used the phrase "literary disfigurement." The letter contained a shockingly long and detailed set of decreasingly plausible thefts that I kept adding because I believed that the letter had to have heft in order to land with the most devastating effect. It had not occurred to me in the frenzy of my hatred that the idea of a literary society viciously attacking a teenager publishing in a student literary magazine was so implausible and insane that it could not possibly be real; I had instead focused on making my accusations seem more literary and became proud of how incisive my critiques had been. It did not occur to me, at least, until several seconds after I loosed the letter into the post addressed to the student magazine, when the ridiculousness of the letter, its pettiness, and its obvious path to my hand exploded in my brain like a detective solving a mystery, like perhaps this idiotic Duckett character finding a pair of fucking pants, and it was too late. I tried using a branch and a piece of chewed gum to try fishing out every letter in the box one by one until I could find mine (surely the fattest envelope) and destroy it, but people kept coming by and I had to pretend that I was not trying to break into a mailbox and was merely loitering near it with a disgusting stick and gum apparatus like it was some sort of new youth trend that I had seen in a magazine. When the letter arrived, I was ridiculed. I had tried saying it was just a silly prank, but the savagery of the barbs and self-seriousness of the letter contained no whimsy and just venom. I was cast out of the magazine and its woods parties. Three weeks later, Espen was hit by a train and everyone was so wracked with grief that the letter largely went forgotten or unremarked upon. We all had been so aged by loss and shock that it seemed impossible to remember anything so childish had happened.

I looked over my Buck Duckett paragraph and could not summon the dignity to actually finish it. The entire episode was too sordid, and I was prepared to endure a lawsuit and sell two or three of my other rustic smoking cabins to compensate. I invite the editors of this horrible blog to do their worst.