Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next week, we’ll finish serializing the remaining chapters of Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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Someone is talking too loud to not be heard while queuing for the bathroom on the plane and Jason had to google it: dom drop, a precipitous decrease in endorphins after intense coitus (see also sub drop). Why a woman adjusting her bra is extremely erotic but a woman scratching her crotch is mildly unsettling and a man adjusting his package is attractive to no one, he assumed, even gay dudes. But what did he know. Only 90% similarity at the genetic level to viruses from pangolins. Less than one in ten could correctly identify a pangolin out of a lineup that included a Komodo dragon and various birds, snakes, fish, a velociraptor, a raccoon and a pangolin. Too low of similarity to be the original host, was this evidence of tinkering by humanoids? Accidentally released? How does it go from living in bats or pangolins forever and then one day all of a sudden a person gets it and it’s spreading like wildfire. Forget for a minute the source of the information and just think rationally about whether this makes sense. Released on purpose followed by a clandestine vaccination campaign (or maybe vice versa?) domestically and to cripple global markets and emerge as the sole superpower? Western values collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions and selfishness. Tom Hanks testing positive in Australia is the Magic Johnson moment for what everyone was then still calling the Wuhan virus in polite conversation. This had gone too far, Hanks a national treasure. Texts about whether so and so had been exposed. Self-quarantining. NBA cancels. NCAA cancels.
Jason collected his belongings from the conveyor belt and sat down to tie his shoes just past the TSA zone, glancing at his locked phone screen and the preview of a text from her that read ‘You’re going to see this on the news…’ and tossed his phone into his bag without reading the rest of the text. Cleveland Hopkins International Airport probably only earned that moniker based on one cargo plane full of rubber dog shit to Toronto each year. There’s a Great Lakes Brewery, Panini’s greasy spoon and the ubiquitous chains, plus ample plugs for the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame, one of two nonfamilial reasons to visit the city (the other being open heart surgery) which had been on a rollercoaster of improvement and decline since a nadir in the 1970’s, with the late 80’s Browns, mid 90’s Indians, early 2000’s Lebron 1.0 and 2010 Lebron 2.0 constituting the peaks. What was he going to say when he saw her? The scenarios played through his mind for the past 48 hours but the immediacy now of his mother’s—why could he not suppress the urge to use the word incarceration—placement, against her will, in an assisted living home and then triaging all the while a mix of legitimate, as he saw it, concern about the fitness of the place and the attentiveness of the staff. Why is there a lactation unit, he asked his sister when she told him about the place and her laugh was dry and humorless.
There was an unsavory exchange with one of his mother’s physicians, Dr. Srinivasa Shivashankar, in which Jason found himself lambasting the man, who as it happened was nearly 12 full inches shorter than Jason, for not enrolling his mother in an experimental drug trial because of something called exclusion criteria and one of them was his mother’s blood pressure was too high and what the fuck was the point of calling it an experimental trial if people couldn’t opt in if they wanted to, and he ended up getting in Shivashankar’s face, this incredibly warm and patient and caring person who had a friendly, flirty rapport with his mother, who called him Srinu, that made her smile and who on other occasions had displayed a preternatural ability to put his sister and him at ease when talking about his mother’s cognitive decline over the past year. Shivashankar, who was probably Jason’s age or a few years older, said that he was sorry but that Jason and his sister had been given the wrong information by his colleague and the senior principal investigator on the clinical trial but that he, Shivashankar, had been instructed by the IRB specifically to include hypertension as an exclusion criteria and that he, the senior principal investigator, must have forgotten to tell Jason and his sister about this fact given that his mother had a systolic arterial pressure of 140 at rest, which was the cut off, and they couldn’t just go ahead in light of this because the Phase III results, on which Shivashankar was also a participating investigator, had shown an increased risk of something called MACE, which was an acronym Shivashankar said for things including heart attacks and then Jason snapped that he knew what a heart attack was his wife was a cardiologist. This was followed by the unseemly in-his-face moment, which was followed by an expletive volleyed at his sister, both of which Shivashankar responded to by looking at the floor and Jason thought his head was going to explode and he turned to walk toward the elevator and heard his mother calling—Srinu are you there? I’ve misplaced my glasses—from the exam room as the doors opened and he stepped in. Like a fucking buddha this guy’s calmness, which Jason blamed for making him even more angry with himself. His sister was sitting drinking coffee when he returned from pacing the parking lot and before he could attempt an apology, she began in a tone that signaled the events of a quarter hour prior were stricken from the record and told him about an orthopedic doctor who was coming to see their mother for her hip that was sore from a spill in the shower the day before. How he believed at some atomic level that if you worked hard enough to have a job as a physician it gave you the right to act however you damn well pleased and the fact that he was out of control and Shivashankar so patient and empathetic and downright godsent for his mother pissed him off and made him feel like some people are just better than others, deep down.
It was the year that a reporter found out about a discussion about sketchy dealings regarding Trump’s re-election when Rudy Giuliani butt-dialed him. Twice. There’s another term that he overheard: Edgelord. It sounds pervy but actually is quite banal. It’s someone who intentionally talks about controversial, or edgy, things on Twitter or wherever, just to get people’s dander up.
