Biography

He knew nothing. About everything. Too lazy to lie, he didn’t bother making excuses. There was no misunderstanding to blame. No bad reception, crossed wires, or background noise. No dozing middleman. There was only him. Him and the vast, sterile canyon where his knowledge should have been.

His biography would have read like a pamphlet on how not to live to be 39 years old. The graphic design would have been minimal, drawn from presets and templates mostly. School, school, another school, a larger school. He read the books he was told to read, grasping only the most superficial elements. His sense of literature was like that of someone who had never been above the second floor of any structure. How things fit together, how one thing informed something else with which it enjoyed no apparent connection. These things were beyond him. That this river wound, eventually, around a mountain, and emptied into an ocean. No. Too far removed. Too big. Too…

Names, he remembered. Situations in which he encountered names, he could also remember. But the important things—why he should care, the webs of people he encountered. The important things dripped away, down the many drains his ignorance bore around him. He understood the rules, or thought he did. He understood money intimately. Or thought he did. Money’s role in acquiring this or that. Yes, of course. Money’s role in shaping and guiding and manifesting people’s beliefs and actions. No, not at all.

He had friends. Or recurring acquaintances, more like. Small talk. Going for drinks. Hanging out. Everything fit into one of these small bottles arranged by someone else on shelves constructed by someone else. He was not unintelligent. Just spectacularly uneducated. Uneducable. He had tastes, favored this style over that one. He commanded opinions on many, hundreds, of topics. He knew nothing about them all.