the Introduction from
'The Complete Short
 Works of Daniel Pagoda

I had class later on that evening. On my way, I saw Mike smoking outside, sidled up to him and asked if he really thought the book was as good as he said it was. He seemed offended.

“I was just asking,” I explained. “Someone I know got it and read it one day. He said it wasn’t very good, and I trust his opinion.”

Mike stood up straight, studying me. “What did he say?”

“He didn’t think it had much of a point to it.”

“Your friend just doesn’t get it. The point was that it had a point, but you need to put your own point into it to figure out the point for yourself.”

I blinked. “How can a book have a set meaning if you substitute your own ideas entirely?”

He looked hard at me. “A book like that has to have a point to it. Why else write it?”

“So, you don’t think the writer is laughing somewhere because he wrote a pointless book that everyone else thinks has some secret meaning in it?”

He flicked his cigarette on the ground and glowered his way to class.

I replayed the entire conversation in my head on my way to Psychology. I wanted it burned into the curvature of my skull for the next time I sat down to write, but I wouldn’t be able to write it all down until after class. Some of the information might be lost by then.

There’s got to be a better way to remember story ideas, I thought.

Three days later, I finished a story called “Swindled,” a series of unrelated events and images so disjointed and abstract that it conned the reader into looking for deeper meaning. Anybody searching was welcome to read the title. I almost stained myself laughing at that.

I mailed a copy to The Lynch Mob addressed to Michael Harper personally and went back to whatever passed for normal college life.

While I waited for Mike’s reaction, I spent my time revising a story I had been working on for a while called “The Face.” Once that was finished, I sent it to our English department head in consideration for a creative writing scholarship they had advertised all around campus.

“The Face” was published some years later, in one form or another, and appears somewhere in this very book. It’s one of the good ones, by the way.

Mike didn’t say anything to me about “Swindled” for two weeks, which led me to assume he either thought it obtuse, or actually received the joke and was far too irritated with me to say anything. Regardless, it slipped my mind and my attention once again narrowed to Professor Mark’s English class.