Tenth of December

“Think of all the resources we’ve invested in you, Beloved Only. Dad had said, I know we sometimes strike you as strict but you are literally all we have.”

Kyle Boot’s central conflict is his mutual desire to come into his own as an independent person and his awareness that his parents’ rules—while overwhelmingly strict—are coming from a place of genuine love. Their desire for control and safety doesn’t end up wining out, in part because Kyle realizes that non-action as a witness of a life-threatening situation is an untenable moral stance. His parents’ position leaves him with no agency for himself and with no purpose in the larger community and is about maintaining the status quo instead of Doing the Right Thing.

“Sometimes she’d wake up crying from the dream about Kyle. The last time, Mom and Dad were already there, going, That’s not how it was. Remember, Allie? How did it happen? Say it. Say it out loud. Allie, can you tell Mommy and Daddy how it really happened?

I ran outside, she said. I shouted.

That’s right, Dad said. You shouted. Shouted like a champ.

And what did Kyle do? Mom said.

Put down the rock, she said.

A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse.”

Alison’s parents are a sharp contrast to what the reader sees of Kyle’s parents in that they foster and care for her emotional life rather than trying to control it. More than that, they encourage her in this moment to reify the truth of the good parts of what happened rather than lingering over the trauma and potential disaster, suggesting that Alison’s belief in the goodness of the world is something that needs to be actively constructed, both through the work of Doing the Right Thing and through actively, repeatedly imagining the world in which good happens. Saunders moves the story into the future to reiterate this point.

“We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us.”

The point of view of “Sticks” is an indeterminate number of grown children, and their feelings about their father are left unstated throughout the story except in implication. The “also” in this quote does a great deal of meaning-making for the reader, as it reveals both that their father was an unkind man and that they have become people who are unable to empathize with him. Reading the subtext of the story reveals deep sadness and desire to connect underneath the father’s odd behavior, a desire that’s denied by the narrators.

“Please do not touch anything, please do not touch, she said to Josh and Abbie, but just in her head, wanting to give the children a chance to observe her being democratic and accepting, and afterward they could all wash up at the half-remodeled McDonald’s, as long as they just please please kept their hands out of their mouths, and God forbid they should rub their eyes.”

Marie’s internal dialogue reveals the hypocrisy of her behavior. She doesn’t want to be democratic and accepting; she wants to appear to be democratic and accepting to her children. She is more interested in presenting the face of a good person than in doing the work of being nonjudgmental, a character trait that is apparent throughout the story.

“The boy came to the fence. If only she could say to him, with a single look, Life will not necessarily always be like this. Your life could suddenly blossom into something wonderful. It can happen. It happened to me.”

Marie is coming from what she believes to be a good place in reporting Callie for her treatment of Bo, but she is doing so from her own perspective without considering that she may be wrong. As such, she is a well-meaning middle class woman who will do harm to a poor family because she can only approach the situation from her own rigid belief system, which is made in part as a response to her own upbringing and the traumas she experienced there. In this way, she misunderstands empathy, thinking that it means making sure everyone and everything aligns to her standards instead of considering that other standards may be legitimate.

“What a fantastic game changer. Say someone can’t love? Now he or she can. We can make him. Say someone loves too much? Or loves someone deemed unsuitable by his or her caregiver? We can tone that shit right down. Say someone is blue, because of true love? We step in, or his or her caregiver does: blue no more. No longer, in terms of emotional controllability, are we ships adrift. No one is. We see a ship adrift, we climb aboard, install a rudder. Guide him/her toward love. Or away from it. You say, ‘All you need is love’? Look, here comes ED289/290. Can we stop war? We can sure as heck slow it down! Suddenly the soldiers on both sides start fucking. Or, at low dosage, feeling superfond. Or say we have two rival dictators in a death grudge. Assuming ED289/290 develops nicely in pill form, allow me to slip each dictator a mickey. Soon their tongues are down each other’s throats and doves of peace are pooping on their epaulets. Or, depending on the dosage, they may just be hugging. And who helped us do that? You did.”

Abnesti’s speech reveals the intention behind the experimental drug Jeff has been given, but it ignores the horrifying moral ramification and sets the stage for the justification to come in the story. It also furthers the theme of Soft Power and the Nature of Control. Abnesti has created an argument that frames the corporate desire for power over humanity as a fight for the common good when it’s really a dissolution of free will.

“Suddenly I was waxing poetic. I was waxing poetic re what Heather was doing, and waxing poetic re my feelings about what Heather was doing. Basically, what I was feeling was: Every human is born of man and woman. Every human, at birth, is, or at least has the potential to be, beloved of his/her mother/father. Thus every human is worthy of love. As I watched Heather suffer, a great tenderness suffused my body, a tenderness hard to distinguish from a sort of vast existential nausea; to wit, why are such beautiful beloved vessels made slaves to so much pain? Heather presented as a bundle of pain receptors. Heather’s mind was fluid, and could be ruined (by pain, by sadness). Why? Why was she made this way? Why so fragile?”

Ironically, the drugs that control Jeff give him the ability to make a moral argument about the situation he’s in and question the purpose of suffering with new clarity. In doing so, he arrives at one of the most difficult existential questions, and it’s his ability to articulate the problem clearly that helps him understand his own complicity in the suffering of others in the present and the past. This sets up Jeff’s decision later in the story and presents the story’s central argument about what it means to do the right thing while suggesting that human connection supersedes corporate control.

“At birth, they’d been charged by God with the responsibility of growing into total fuckups. Had they chosen this? Was it their fault, as they tumbled out of the womb? Had they aspired, covered in placental blood, to grow into harmers, dark forces, life enders? In that first holy instant of breath/awareness (tiny hands clutching and unclutching), had it been their fondest hope to render (via gun, knife, or brick) some innocent family bereft? No; and yet their crooked destinies had lain dormant within them, seeds awaiting water and light to bring forth the most violent, life-poisoning flowers, said water/light actually being the requisite combination of neurological tendency and environmental activation that would transform them (transform us!) into earth’s offal, murderers, and foul us with the ultimate, unwashable transgression.”

The drugs that Jeff is subjected to at Spiderhead lay bare the unfair reality of humanity: that even the worst people are victims of physical and chemical circumstance. He counts himself among the worst people, and he is also proof that they are capable of change and therefore deserving of compassion or forgiveness. As the experiments of Spiderhead reveal people’s tenuous relationship to free will, they have the inadvertent effect of proving that people like Jeff do not deserve to be experimented on regardless of what they’ve done in the past.

“Now we all know that one way to do a job poorly is to be negative about it. Say we need to clean a shelf. Let’s use that example. If we spend the hour before the shelf-cleaning talking down the process of cleaning the shelf, complaining about it, dreading it, investigating the moral niceties of cleaning the shelf, whatever, then what happens is, we make the process of cleaning the shelf more difficult than it really is. We all know very well that that ‘shelf’ is going to be cleaned, given the current climate, either by you or the guy who replaces you and gets your paycheck, so the question boils down to: Do I want to clean it happy or do I want to clean it sad?”

“Exhortation” is a dark satire of the power structure between management and employees, and this quote has several key elements: euphemistic speech that downplays the moral implications of the work, a request for the employees to dehumanize themselves in order to be better capable of doing the work, and an implicit threat that employee livelihood is at stake. These different strategies are all used toward a message that posits that the employee is powerless in the face of corporate authority, and the question left to them is framed as a binary choice about attitude to obscure the complex moral questions of complicity, the need for economic stability, and human dignity.

“[…] if we are unable to clean our assigned ‘shelf,’ not only will someone else be brought in to clean that ‘shelf,’ but we ourselves may find ourselves on that ‘shelf,’ being that ‘shelf,’ with someone else exerting themselves with good positive energy all over us. And at that time I think you can imagine how regretful you would feel, the regret would show in your faces, as we sometimes witness, in Room 6, that regret on the faces of the ‘shelves’ as they are ‘cleaned,’ so I am asking you, from the hip, to try your best and not end up a ‘shelf,’ which we, your former colleagues, will have no choice but to clean clean clean using all our positive energy, without looking back, in Room 6.”

Toward the end of the story, the implicit threat becomes explicit, though it is still written in coded language: Failure to enthusiastically comply with company dictate will result in bodily violence. The story posits capitalist society as a structure of victims and perpetrators, and there is no in between or staying on the sidelines in the company or in the hinted-at dystopia beyond. It’s particularly telling that as the memo unfolds, it becomes clear that its purpose is not the stated one—to address low morale—but a more nefarious desire to eradicate the belief that there can be anything besides the perception of high morale leading to high productivity.

“‘What seems to be the problem, Al?’ Mom had said. ‘Everyone’s calling me bossy and fat,’ he’d said. ‘Plus they say I’m sneaky.’ ‘Well, Al,’ she’d said, ‘you are bossy, you are fat. And I’m guessing you can be pretty sneaky. But you know what else you are? You have what is called moral courage. When you know something is right, you do it, no matter what the cost.’”

This passage is an example of the Imagined Conversation motif that runs throughout these stories: Al’s conversations with his mother are the primary way he is able to achieve any self-reflection, but it is quickly offset by her feeding into his concept of himself as a person who deserves to be the protagonist of any situation. He has not demonstrated moral courage during his encounter with Donfrey—in fact, he has been petty and caused harm—but his belief in himself as a person of good character supersedes his actual effect on others.

“Why beat yourself up about this and, in so doing, miss the beauty of the actual moment?”

Al’s capacity to rationalize interrogating any negative feelings demonstrated here mirrors moral questions asked throughout the collection, both explicitly and implicitly. The difference between those questions and this one is that Al uses his focus on goodness to avoid empathizing with people he may have harmed. He would rather take the easy path of focusing on the aesthetic beauty of nature—which does not have the capacity to judge him—than engaging with a more accurate version of who he is and how he impacts his community.

“He sat a minute, breathing deeply. An old man in filthy clothes staggered up the street, dragging a cardboard square on which, no doubt, he slept. His teeth were ghoulish, his eyes wet and red. Roosten imagined himself leaping from the car, knocking the man to the ground, kicking him and kicking him, teaching him, in this way, a valuable lesson on how to behave. The man gave Roosten a weak smile, and Roosten gave the man a weak smile back.”

Al Roosten ends his story unchanged, having fully rationalized his own behavior, and he regards the unhoused people that hang around his store as a problem deserving of physical violence rather than as fellow human beings. But there’s an element of recognition here as well, suggesting that Al is really driven by self-loathing rather than a belief in his self-importance. The punishment he imagines doling out may be the one he thinks he deserves.

“When will I have sufficient leisure/wealth to sit on hay-bale watching moon rise, while in luxurious mansion family sleeps? At that time, will have chance to reflect deeply on meaning of life etc., etc. Have a feeling and have always had a feeling that this and other good things will happen for us!”

The narrator’s diary outlines a tragic belief that is a common corollary to the American Dream: that there is some nebulous future in which the problems of capitalist society will cease to be a concern for the individual. Instead of looking at the systemic, economic, and cultural factors that create inequality, he believes that he will be able to escape the struggle altogether. The tragedy comes in the fact that this creates an impetus to always put off happiness until some future time of wealth and prosperity, which echoes contemporary critiques of capitalism.

“Do not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate.”

The narrator fails to see the corrosive effect that comparison has on his family and himself. Instead, he focuses on the desire for status symbols and is unwilling to think about the consequences of that desire for himself and for the broader world. At the same time, he’s able to see that the system is unfair, though by positioning himself in the middle he thinks of himself as without agency, which is both dehumanizing and allows him to participate in the dehumanization of others.

“Death very much on my mind tonight, future reader. Can it be true? That I will die? That Pam, kids will die? Is awful. Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like.”

Amidst the worry about the unfairness of being trapped in the middle class and unable to show off his status and wealth, the narrator’s real anxiety emerges: the inevitability of death. It’s telling that the character is able to articulate this fear without seeing the way it’s connected to his larger desire to be rich and provide for his children; instead of pushing him to think about what he should do with his life and with his relationships, it merely puts more urgency on how unfair his life is.

“[…] be not afraid, you will return, & return in victory, w/big bag of gifts, etc, etc. And now? No money, no papers. Who will remove microline? Who will give her job? When going for job, must fix hair so as to hide scars at Insertion Points. When will she ever see home + family again? Why would she do? Why would she ruin it all, leave our yard? Could have had nice long run w/us. What in the world was she seeking? What could she want so much, that would make her pull such desperate stunt?”

The narrator is unable to empathize with the Semplica Girls who run away because he’s unable to see that the questions he’s asking are answered in his own behavior: the desire for more, which in their case is a desire for basic human dignity. In his own story, the quest for human dignity has manifested in a relatively shallow pursuit of status (built off of the more sympathetic desire to provide for and protect his children), and he can’t see the parallels because he ultimately doesn’t see them as trapped within the same system of desire as he is. He is displaying the same failure of empathy that his father-in-law showed him when he denied his request for help.

“‘I’m grateful for your service,’ the man said to me.”

This sentiment is repeated throughout “Home” by many characters. Each time, it is meant as a gesture toward empathizing with a returning veteran but reveals how facile and insincere that gesture really is. As the story progresses, it becomes a nearly comedic interjection used to dismiss Mikey’s lived experience and put him in a framework that others can understand rather than grappling with the awful things he’s done and experienced.

“I tried to save a few [tadpoles], but they were so tender all I did by handling them was torture them worse. Maybe someone could’ve said to the guy who’d hired me, ‘Uh, I have to stop now, I feel bad for killing so many tadpoles.’ But I couldn’t. So I kept on rake-hurling. With each rake hurl I thought, I’m making more bloody bellies. The fact that I kept rake-hurling started making me mad at the frogs. It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over. Years later, at Al-Raz, it was a familiar feeling.”

Mikey’s explanation of his shame spiral over a high school job is used as an exploration of the way awful feelings can become bearable through normalization, which is one of the coping strategies he uses in his actions throughout “Home”: The only way to manage the shame he feels is to “go out, get more shame” (183). What’s telling here is that he associates his actions in Al-Raz with senseless violence he committed on harmless animals as a teenager and notes that he is unable to alter his behavior, suggesting that he’s been conditioned to accept authority throughout his lifetime, not just while he was in the military.

“Okay, okay, you sent me, now bring me back. Find some way to bring me back, you fuckers, or you are the sorriest bunch of bastards the world has ever known.”

Mikey’s final exhortation to his family is tragic: He’s aware of the casual complicity that everyone has in the war, and he has borne their facile thanks that covers for fear and disgust. What he needs, though, is empathy, which he has only found from a stranger who happened to be in the same battle as him.

“And then: What ho! Had charged. Up crude ladders, with manly Imprecations, although I could not recall the exact Imprecations, nor the outcome of said Charge. Kyle departed anon. I did happily entertain our Guests, through use of Wit and various Jibes, glad that I had, after my many Travails, arrived at a station in Life from whence I could impart such Merriment to All & Sundry. Soon, the Pleasantness of that Day, already Considerable, was much improved by the Arrival of my Benefactor, Don Murray.”

“My Chivalric Fiasco” is an exercise in style, as the main character Ted shifts into high, noble diction as the KnightLyfe® takes effect. The shift in style also reflects a shift in attitude, as the character takes on an unshakable moral code of virtue that ends up being his undoing. In this way, the story questions how the roles people play, whether it’s as an employee or as a person who is pursuing virtue for its own sake. Ted comes to disaster because he is unable to think through the consequences of doing his very narrow, very prescriptive version of the right thing.

“Soon Allen had become THAT. And no one was going to fault anybody for avoiding THAT. Sometimes he and Mom would huddle in the kitchen. Rather than risk incurring the wrath of THAT. Even THAT understood the deal. You’d trot in a glass of water, set it down, say, very politely, Anything else, Allen? And you’d see THAT thinking, All these years I was so good to you people and now I am merely THAT? Sometimes the gentle Allen would be inside there too, indicating, with his eyes, Look, go away, please go away, I am trying so hard not to call you KANT!”

Don Eber’s decision to die by suicide is rooted in his past experience with his stepfather Allen, who had a prolonged terminal illness. For Eber, the change in Allen was unbearable and created a barrier to empathy, and his worry is that he is quickly headed to the same relationship with his own family and wants to spare them the suffering. Underneath that is a more selfish reason: He does not want to be someone who becomes so thoroughly dehumanized that he becomes monstrous.

“Every step was a victory. He had to remember that. With every step he was fleeing father and father. Farther from father. Stepfarther. What a victory he was wresting. From the jaws of the feet.”

The brain tumor’s effect on Don Eber’s language centers creates opportunity for Saunders to engage in play around language and set up new meaning. Here, the conflation between farther and father becomes emblematic of Eber’s quest to escape the fate of Allen and to escape from his role as a father.