Gloves Off: Bryan

Let's Talk About Emotional Authority

Today We’re Going to Take a Longer Look at Swimmers by Bryan Wiler

To read the story as originally published, please click here.

Swimmers

They tell you not to do it. I mean, it’s right there in the pre-op instructions – “Do not eat or drink anything after midnight before your surgery,” like I’m some kind of gremlin. It’s in the paperwork twice, in fact, first in italics in the second paragraph, and later in bold on the back of the page, likely because the list of patients who ignored the initial warning had grown too long so some auburn-haired Lynn or Debbie in the office (who actually prefers to be called Deborah) got sick of filling out the reports post-surgery and decided to take matters into her own goddamn hands and put it on the BACK of the page too.

My Input: Okay, all good, but would you consider cutting the “I mean” in the second sentence? The sentence works as a good tease and hides the “I” so that clause — I mean — is it really needed? Seeing how the first three paragraphs ride on this device, would you consider driving it toward the absurd? For example, “They tell you not to eat mangoes or watermelon or fried oysters or ostrich eggs or…” You could run with that, and button it with, “I know because I asked about those things in particular.” Or, button with some version of “You can’t ask them about eating what I actually ate all night.” That’s a rather Amy Hempel tease.

Beyond that, did you look at opening with just “They tell you not to”? It cuts the tease by only two words. However, your way ends on a hard dental consonant, so I understand.

The voice is compelling, as is the veiled system that’s depicted. My lingering need is for a sense of emotional authority. A vulnerability that makes me engage with the narrator. Please consider how a character like Jame Gumb from The Silence of the Lambs can be engaging; sure he skins women and wears their hides as a suit, but he’s got a tiny poodle named “Precious” and he moons over old black-and-white films of his mother as a failed Hollywood starlet. The story’s other psycho, Hannibal Lector, demonstrates “head” authority by reading Clarice Starling’s character by her appearance. In the book, Lector tells Starling her entire sexual history simply from the string of gold beads she wears as a necklace. Yet Lector isn’t readily likeable, not until he bonds with Starling and spares her life. Jame is likeable, why?

Please bear this in mind. What can be done to make our narrator more emotionally present in this story?

And the written pre-op instructions are just the cover-your-ass document for the medical center, really, since the nurse and surgeon both made the same point during the consultation. “You need to arrive at the surgery center by 5:45am, and remember nothing to eat or drink after midnight,” the nurse said. Apparently assuming I didn’t take her seriously, either because she was a woman or because she went to community college, the surgeon followed it up a few minutes later with “Make sure you get whatever snacks or drinks in your system early, because once the clock strikes midnight you’ve gotta’ shut it down until after the surgery is done.”

The point was clear, and I’m not a retard. It made sense and everything. But if I’m being honest, I didn’t expect things to last that long, and when it was clear they were going to, we were well past the point of bailing out.

My Input: Would you name the nurse Deborah? That way she could move from the speculative to the real; even if the nurse’s name isn’t Deborah, calling her that would suggest that to the narrator all such people are interchangeable. And by using her twice, you’d plant her in the reader’s mind for a finale near the end. It allows the narrator’s subjectivity to gradually become real, and the reader might notice how what begins as fantasy morphs to become the “truth.” To add insult to injury, since the narrator alludes to sexism, would you add the superfluous sentence “The surgeon is a man” after the surgeon’s quote? If you’re gonna dick, dick hard.

Ultimately, the powerless character of Deborah becomes the greatest truth teller.

And I have to admit, I adored the crazy sentence I didn’t expect things to last that long, and when it was clear they were going to, we were well past the point of bailing out. But I still agonize over a better phrase/word to replace “expect.” Would you consider “bank on” or “look ahead to” or something more colloquial? That might require changing “last” to “lasting” but I’ll always look to replace a thought verb (expect) with something more touchy-feely. For example “If I’m talking straight, I didn’t bank on that long, and when it was crystal they were going longer, hell, we were well past the point of bailing out.”

My point is, you begin the opening sequence with a very clear sentence. You make the circumstance clear. So as you transition into the drama,¹ do you see how you can risk a longer more burned statement?

We were scheduled to start the event at 7:00pm the night before surgery, which based on prior experience told me we’d wrap up by 11:30pm at the latest. Plenty of cushion baked in, not that I expected to need it. When you’ve done enough of these, you get a good feel for how long each one will take. Sure, there are outliers – volunteers that hold out as long as possible just to prove a point, or those who cut bait after less than a minute because they need to get back home to their wife and kids – but the average time is just over five minutes. 50 volunteers, five minutes each, about 15 seconds of changeover time from one to the next. Four hours, 20 minutes, give or take.

It all went wrong from the start.

My Input: Not sure if “the event” is sticky or particular enough. Can you use a word that’s odd enough that it will snare us and not be confused with the surgery itself?

Maybe the problem is that you’ve used so many numbers in this sequence.² The times. The numbers of measuring minutes and seconds. The number of volunteers. This packs so many abstracts into the passage that it might help to replace bland words like “event” and “volunteers” with stranger jargon words that will register as unusual in the reader’s mind. Likewise, using the word “it” — It all went wrong from the start — gets confusing, because I’m not sure if “it” refers to the event or to the surgery.

Aaron, the project director, was almost 20 minutes late and we couldn’t start without him, since he had the release forms in his possession. Without signed forms by every single volunteer, the entire event would need to be shit-canned. You can do it, technically, but missing a signature on even one of the 50 releases isn’t good enough. 49 is false advertising. 49 is keep scrolling to the next one. 49 is just another nobody. 50 is what we needed. 50 is The Empire Strikes Back. 49 is The Phantom Menace.

Finally, mercifully, a frazzled Aaron rushed through the door, spewing a stream of “I’m sorrys” and “Today has been a nightmares,” and all 50 volunteers signed their form. Some even ventured to read it first, while another wanted to use an alias before Aaron convinced him the names of the volunteers would be kept in strict confidence, not appearing anywhere in the publicity material. All 50 would be faceless, nameless props for the purposes of the project, completely unidentifiable to anyone viewing the end product.

My Input: Would you replace “Aaron” with a role-based name such as “Legal Services” or “Standards and Practices.” A proper name — Aaron — hints at nothing about the “event.” A more particular noun will begin to move us into this strange backstory, and “Standards and Practices” can still bring the coffee.

Consider that one of your “horses” in this story is names. You began that with the Lynn/Debbie/Deborah bit. To build on that bit, can you create and morph new/better ways to reinvent that naming device?

Maybe the surgeon gets a name, a full name such as “Dr. Lester B. Braddock III” while everyone else is christened by how the narrator views them. Fuck-up Aaron would therefore get a nickname that encapsulates our entire history with Aaron, because our narrator has a long history with Aaron’s snafu’s. As always, how the narrator describes/names the world should say more about the narrator than about the world.

“Ok, we’re a go,” Aaron announced. “Positions! Let’s get into positions, everyone!” Then, after a half-beat, “Wait, where’s Terri? Where the fuck is Terri?” She was the only one who knew how to safely operate the drone, which was key since there were some shots we needed to have from above, along with a pivoting, 360-degree view of the action. Absolutely, positively needed to have. Groundbreaking stuff. Wait until you see it.

My Input: How does Aaron feel about Terri? This will deepen the horse of names. Not only does the narrator rename his underlings, but Aaron does the same to his own underlings. And — hate to beat a dead horse — using a nickname such as Mr. Fag Town or Airhead will help hold those quick-created characters in our heads. Would you consider a role-based name “the lady from Continuity” or “our money man”?

Somehow, numbers and proper names never seem to stick in my mind. A cemetery is all numbers and proper nouns, so I seldom recall more than the flowers and headstone shapes.

“Coffee run,” someone said from the darkness, and Aaron slammed a fist on his knee. 7:29pm. We were really cutting into that cushion I thought we didn’t need.

The smell of peppermint lattes arrived an instant before Terri, who absorbed a fuck you glance from Aaron before setting two cardboard trays of drinks on the snack table and grabbing the case with the drone inside. “Volunteer number one, you’re up,” Aaron said, motioning to the stumpy, spectacled guy standing along the back wall with both hands in his pockets. He shuffled to the chair in the center of the room and sat with a thud as the drone buzzed to life, quietly humming overhead. The spotlight flipped on, reflecting off his glasses and shimmering, sweaty forehead, as the house lights dropped.

My Input: And that’s why I loved “cut into the cushion,” and it landed so nicely. You used a physical phrase to depict an abstract. Lovely! To help ground the scene physically, would you make some food present? Cinnamon roles instead of peppermint lattes? Perhaps some sort of cookie or juice that’s allotted to the volunteers as if they were giving blood. The presence of food — things the narrator will be forbidden — will help keep that condition in mind. Hunger will give you an on-the-body element, because for now the story risks being too vague: We’ve no idea what the surgery entails or the “event.” Belching would also help ground us in the narrator.

In hindsight, it’s clear that the narrator’s suffering from neck pain. That pain might be the emotional toehold we need to engage with her.

7:36pm. I needed to hustle.

After plowing through hundreds (thousands?) of volunteers over the years, for the most part they blend into one seething, anonymous pile of flesh. I don’t remember names or faces. I don’t remember their initial reaction when we start or how quickly they clear out when we’re done. I don’t remember what they say. Maybe this time is different because of how it ended. Maybe I remember so many of them because I was in the recovery room 16 hours later, escaping from the fog of anesthesia with newly stabilized vertebrae in my cervical spine, trying not to puke.

My Input: “I flash back on a withered arm. I can picture a club foot from maybe the Falco era.” If you can particularize something but not names and faces, that will help us tolerate the lack of names and faces. And would you consider putting only the back story into past tense? As it is, both the flashbacks and the post-surgery are told in past tense. Having a shift to “… because I’m in the recovery room… (present tense)” would help signal the shift between the back story and the current post-op situation.

As follows, the past tense would resume for the next shift to backstory.

Volunteer #1, he of the hands in pockets, was silent and motionless throughout. No discernible reaction to any external stimuli, until the finish. You can’t fake that.

Volunteer #9, ponytail of red hair and massive feet crammed in a pair of too-small sandals, was a potpourri of grunts and moans, seemingly in pain from beginning to end. Smelled faintly of sharp cheese, but I couldn’t place the variety.

My Input: Okay, you’re giving us specific visual details, but can you widen those to verbs (other than “is” or “has”)? How does the narrator determine the sandals are too small? I loved that you used “place” instead of a thought verb.

Can you begin to pay off the alluded-to elements? It’s difficult to be with both the vague surgery and the vague “event” that’s taking place in the backstory. If either the surgery or the event becomes more tangible, we’ll have more to cling to.

Volunteer #12, shaved head with full tattoo sleeves on both arms, was a fountain of toxic masculinity the second he sat down, full of “fucking bring it on, bitch,” but he sheepishly slid off the seat and into the shadows after less than 45 seconds.

My Input: Please, please, please avoid boiled-down concepts such as “toxic masculinity.” If you simply had #12 say that line of dialog, you’d allow us to decide who he is. That goes for “sheepishly” as well. Wouldn’t unpacking his tattoos allow us to rate him? Likewise a verb such as “ducked into the shadows” or “slunk” would let the reader decide the volunteer’s frame of mind.

Volunteer #22, tall with a full head of salt and pepper hair, dressed like he stopped here on the way to the opera, threw off the schedule further. Five minutes passed with barely a response, let alone a sign the end was approaching. His black Lombardy hornbacks shifted slightly, but otherwise he was a statue. 10 minutes. 12 minutes. He adjusted the cummerbund. I used every approach I had ever learned, even made up some new ones, but was met only with his severe stare and shallow breathing. As we crested the 15-minute mark (usually enough time for three volunteers to be ushered through the line), there was finally a breakthrough. Unable to endure any longer, he bucked and kicked, then quickly departed with a string of epithets.

My Input: Have we lost the drone? Consider that when you introduce a video monitor or drone or camera phone, you have a new device for framing the scene. Can we see a volunteer — or even the narrator him/herself — through the drone’s POV? That would allow you to depict the narrator’s stress, and the doughnuts, and Aaron as the clock ticks.

In effect, the drone’s POV would be the narrator disassociating. Rising and hovering above the scene like a ghost.

The drone’s POV would move us outside of the narrator’s head. It would present her looking at herself, seeing her own pain or flaws. Whenever you allow a character to describe herself in the third-person, you can buy huge sympathy. Think of Marla in Fight Club as she berates herself to the paramedics who are arriving to save her. Such a detached shift to third-person via the drone… might be the emotional avenue we need to feel love for the narrator. We’ll see her flushed and holding her aching neck while eyeing a stopwatch…

We were in serious trouble. First Aaron, then Terri, and now Placido Domingo or whoever, and after 22 volunteers it was 11:21pm. Unless the next 28 followed the lead of the skinhead and gave up after less than a minute, I was absolutely going to violate the pre-op instructions.  

Volunteer #29, gorgeous with well-manicured hands and a deep, smoky voice, only lasted for six minutes, but I wished it was 12.

My Input: Loved “Placido Domingo” because it allowed the reader to connect him with the opera-dressed guy. Can you unpack “gorgeous”? I’d rather see fewer volunteers, but see them depicted in particulars that stick. How he occurs as gorgeous will tell us so much about the narrator’s tastes/life/history.

A tangent: The other day at the bank, as I was leaving the building, I saw the usual measuring stick on the doorway. The one used to judge the height of bank robbers. Those graduations of four feet, five feet, six feet marked on the doorframe. Paired with each abstract unit of measurement was a color. In effect a swatch of red marked the six-footers. Yellow, the five-footers, etc.. It caught my eye because such colors gave a potential witness a second avenue for recalling the criminal’s height. When you love/hate something it’s because it resonates with a memory. Thus “gorgeous” brings to mind what from the narrator’s life?

That avenue into gorgeous might be the peek inside we need. Think of how Jay Gatsby invites everyone to his parties — thousands of drunken boors — always hoping that just one will be his lost love, Daisy. What is this narrator hoping to find as she hurts her neck and ropes in so many men? What has broken her heart so badly that she’ll do this to find redemption?

Subconsciously, is the “event” a means for recreating or reconnecting to something lost?

Volunteer #33, who wore a thick parka the entire time, whispered “What now, Mom? What now?” through clenched teeth before succumbing and deflating like a child’s balloon.

It was already 12:15am. “Remember, nothing to eat or drink after midnight…” played on an endless loop in my mind as I wrapped up the thirties and forged on through volunteers 41, 42, and 43. There was no pulling the plug, not after all the work it took to get us to this point. The dozens of hours spent recruiting and vetting volunteers. The countless calls and emails to find a facility that would allow us to rent the space, even after learning what the project was all about. Obtaining funding for the equipment, which wasn’t cheap and required me to put up my car as collateral (which still pisses me off, because why wasn’t it Aaron? He was the project director; I’m just the one who motivates the volunteers to react).

My Input: Can you give us a sense of the volunteers still waiting? Can you use them to suggest the purpose of this event? Are they restless? Can you allude to the conditions they’re about to face? How are they steeling themselves in preparation? How are they passing the time? Studying their phones? If you can show us one “volunteer” who has an emotional motive, it will help hook our emotions.

Volunteer #45, another hero who wanted to prove he could hold out longer than the rest of them. Picture your high school math teacher, but give him a lustful grin and strong hands. He was proud, no doubt, of the 14-minute performance that left me thoroughly drained. I’d been at this for more than five hours.

Volunteer #48, who tried to leave not once but twice because of how late it was and only stuck around because Aaron quietly slid him two crisp hundreds (50, not 49), was an asshole from start to finish, constantly calling me a cunt and a whore. He pulled back a hand at one point as if to slap me, but security (far enough away to stay out of the shot, but close enough deal with guys like this) promptly shoved him back down and, no more than 30 seconds later, he surrendered like they all do while the drone circled wordlessly a few feet away.  

My Input: As mentioned, can you show us the preceding scene — the attempted slap, the name calling — through the drone? Again, the drone is good psychological displacement. The abundance of numbers still eats at me. The volunteer number, the time numbers, the money numbers. You’ve hidden the nature of the surgery and the nature of the event, and you’re trying to distract us with details about the volunteers… but is that enough?

Would allowing the volunteers to eat and drink help? It might underscore the fact that the narrator must abstain.

Nobody was more excited than I was when volunteer #50 sat down and got prepped. He was normal in every way, with the subtle aroma of vanilla bodywash, a pair of grey joggers, and a red quarter-zip pullover. Not memorable under typical circumstances, but it was 1:52am when we started and I was doing the math on how much sleep I was going to get (not much), while also dreading what the actual risk was for violating the surgeon’s orders. So yeah, I remember #50, and the four minutes it took for him to decide enough was enough.

My Input: Again, what is the narrator hoping to relive during this ordeal? What is running through her head? What does this on-going act represent? And, no, I don’t want to see it spelled out, but can we see enough hints that we’ll begin to suspect what’s really going on?

Take a look at The Man Who Loved Flowers by Stephen King. It’s Modernism, but it depicts the kind of ritual your narrator might be staging.

I cautiously sipped a bottle of spring water on the drive home, sick to my stomach and hallucinating with exhaustion.

My Input: Would you consider putting this drive home earlier in the story? It would allow the hallucinations to depict certain volunteers and/or food. Or the exhaustion hallucinations could give us a clue about the narrator’s private life.

As the story continues, I sense that the surgery concerns a neck condition. Can we have a sense of the symptoms much earlier? This would help us grasp what’s at stake. For instance, if the narrator’s numb fingers let slip a cup of coffee or the steering wheel.

I considered cancelling the surgery when my alarm went off at 5:20am, but the neck issue had been plaguing me for months. The tingling and numbness in my hands had gotten far worse, to the extent that I was sometimes unable to hold a pen or cup of coffee, and it had started to travel up my right arm as well. This couldn’t wait much longer.  

It was right there staring me in the face, the second patient intake question on the little tablet they gave me: “Have you eaten or had anything to drink since midnight?” I could have tapped “yes” and put an end to the wondering right there, rescheduling the procedure for another day, but if I did that you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

My Input: Okay, I see your payoff building. Might I suggest the classic go-to of asparagus? Nothing does the job like asparagus. Can you tease the neck-throat injury/condition so that we’re shocked that we didn’t connect it to long-term blow job trauma? Can a doctor or nurse snap some x-rays onto the walls and bloviate about blunt force trauma to the back of the esophagus? I want big medical words.

Any doughnuts or snacks might still serve to misdirect the reader from the real thing that’s being consumed during the “event.” And you do need a better name for the event, something like “GeysterFest” or…

They called me back to pre-op a few minutes later, I put on the surgical gown, and the nurse gave me a summary of what to expect, but I was too distracted to pay much attention. My guts bubbled and churned nervously as I was wheeled into the OR, and the bright overhead lights caused me to squint as I counted down from 10 for the anesthesiologist like a good little girl. 9…8…7…until, nothing.

***

Regrets, the moment I opened my eyes in recovery. Buried under a heavy heated blanket, nausea swept over me, my head floating in the delirious aftereffects of isoflurane, and I debated if vomiting was going to undo the work that had just been done to my vertebrae. A nurse rushed over, clearly seeing the panic on my face, but was a split-second late with the bucket as the contents of my stomach detonated across the room.

My Input: Ah, here’s your money shot. What goes into that bucket must revisit every vanilla-body-wash detail, or as many as you can manage. The puked-up mess must make the entire hidden world visible to everyone. All sins must be revealed.

Would you consider putting the surgeon into the line-up of volunteers? That big doctor name would really pop here.

The remnants of volunteer #7, nutty with a sticky consistency that made it hard to swallow, splattered across his hand. Volunteer #13, who clearly had eaten mountains of pineapple in a misguided attempt to make his semen taste better, would be horrified to know a male nurse in Recovery Room 2C may have tasted it as well. Volunteer #25 barely had any gravy left when he finally burst into my mouth hours earlier, presumably because he had preemptively masturbated before arrival in the hopes of lasting longer (it’s not every day that you get a blowjob from a porn star, after all), but his noble little load was now mixed with countless others on the front of Rob’s light-blue scrubs. My belly ejected the sad and foul-smelling offering of volunteer #38, the massive and highly acidic cream of the opera singer, and the frankly delicious yogurt that spurted from the averaged-sized member of Mr. Irrelevant at the back of the line shortly before 2am. It was all there, the cock rockets and baby batter from 50 different nameless, faceless dicks, brewed for hours in my stomach before escaping to form a festering slick of ejaculate across the black and white tiled floor, now the home to millions of tiny swimmers searching for an egg to impregnate. Volunteer #3 dripped from the edge of the metal table. Volunteer #36, who tried to give me his number and exploded with such force that I almost choked when it slapped against the back of my throat, was slowly leaking into the folds of the blanket. Volunteer #47, an ogre of a man with an intimidating hog of at least 11 inches that made my eyes water, probably never expected his juice to be strung like a spiderweb from my mouth to my left hand, while volunteer #11’s jizz disappeared in the holes of the Crocs poor Rob had opted to wear to work that day.

My Input: This might be a cheat — your call — but can the nurse be Deborah, who asks about something that the narrator’s said while unconscious? In my experience, nurses have anecdotes about how patients reveal themselves while under anesthesia. Yeah, that’s a cheat — baldly naming the thing — but if you’ve given several clues beforehand, then the naming would just be confirming what the reader has already begun to recognize. This is where a proper name can mean everything and nothing.

In effect, the nurse asks, “Who’s Trevor?” And it would allow the reader to link Trevor to this constant exploration and the system the narrator has created.

You’ve done a great job in creating Lynn/Debbie/Deborah. Do you see how she can come back as a device — like the drone — to take us outside the narrator and show us something the narrator herself could never show us? Both the drone and the nurse can reveal something vulnerable and unflattering that the wounded narrator would never be able to reveal. That, that might be the emotional angle we need.

I didn’t eat after midnight necessarily, but I had a full stomach. The evidence was right there, patiently waiting for a mop and some paper towels. So yes, I suggest you take the doctor’s orders seriously.

But anyways, the project? It’s called The Big 5-0, and you can watch it on the Porn Palace website for free. I’m hearing we are going to be nominated for at least two AVNs, including Best Cinematography (Terri!! 😊) and Female Performer of the Year.

My Input: Here comes the pathos. We’ll be wrecked by this forced cheer at the end, but only if we’ve seen something hidden about the narrator. Consider the surfer girl monologue by Whoopie Goldberg. We’re laughing for seven minutes before she hits us with the sledgehammer.

By the end, all of the forced valley girl cheerfulness goes south when we understand the full nature of the character. Just listen to that pin-drop silence! You can have all the laughs you want, but can you bridge funny to the pathos?

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A special, big Thank YOU to everyone who posted in the Comments on the last go-round. It’s good to hear that some of this is useful. Whether it’s Tom’s advice or Peter Christopher’s or Amy Hempel’s, I’m thrilled that it’s helping people tell stories for better effect.

And thanks to Bryan Wiler for putting his work forward.

1. You begin showing things instead of telling them.

2. Numbers don’t land in my mind the way words land. And even verbs land better than nouns. Thus, ““beat the snot out of” registers better than “harassed.” Any phrase with a participle seems to work better than a more abstract one. “Bank on” v. “expect” for instance. That’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but vernacular turns of phrase seem to keep the reader from skimming. Chew on it.