Jack Nicholson, now in his eighties, has been known to do short haul trips in an odd truck that has a flatbed in front of the cab, and when I was at a warehouse recently needing to get to the airport with a box of meringues, for some reason, and Jack Nicholson appeared, I thought the least I could do was ask, which was how I ended up riding in this truck and getting a picture of us. Which is the dream I just woke from a few minutes ago, of course, but no more unlikely than close to half the country almost re-electing a fascist President in the midst of a pandemic that has killed a quarter million Americans. A pandemic he has been for nine months now less interested in than his Twitter feed, which is kind of like when you think about it you rushing into a burning house and seeing your grandpa playing with a Nintendo Switch and him yelling, “Hold on, hold on!” All of this is no less imaginable, though, than herds of bison only six, seven generations ago so huge that they took three days to pass by, or flocks of passenger pigeons so thick all you needed to shoot one down was point your gun in the air and pull the trigger. You didn’t even have to look up. Which is to say, what is imaginable and what is unimaginable changes from day to day. What this means for fiction right now is hard to guess. I’m sure literary magazines are starting to get hundreds of (mostly badly written) pandemic stories, and maybe also having now and then to turn down an otherwise excellent story which, because of one unfortunate critical detail that ignores The World As It Is Now, is just not quite believable anymore. Back last spring when we were thinking we might flatten the curve by June, Charles Yu wrote an article in The Atlantic titled, “The Pre-Pandemic Universe Was the Fiction.” But this is something anyone who reads or writes stories, even “domestic realism” stories, say, has always on some level known. That life, as Yu says in that article, is not stable, but precarious. Really, precariousness—whether you’re reading Isaac Asimov or John Cheever—is the very stuff of fiction. An argument could be made that we now just have more stuff. I’m not sure how my own writing’s going to change from all this. I’m writing a story at the moment where the pandemic has entered just as abruptly as it did in real life, but who’s to say whether this is going to seem like life, in the end, or a schtick? And how many outlets will there be left for it once it’s finished anyway, how many lit mags, how many bookstores a year from now? The writer of literary fiction was already about as quaint as an oboe player before this whole calamity came down on our heads. We do not know, we do not know. All we know is that the levee broke, and we are all coursing down the wash. Whether in the end we are the storytellers or the story has yet to be seen.
Rob Ehle’s short story, Bible School, is forthcoming in FICTION No. 65. His fiction has appeared in The New England Review, Epoch, Zyzzyva, American Short Fiction, and similar magazines. The art director at Stanford University Press and a former Stegner Fellow, he is currently working on a historical novel set in late nineteenth-century California, among other projects.