Faking It Until I Made It
Tummy aches, Aristotle, and something about communism I don't quite understand yet.
I once acted sick to get out of school. Don't pretend you haven't.
The idea of suffering another half-day of arts and crafts was the most intolerable thought I could imagine at that moment in my life. At eight or nine years old, I guess I'd just had it. I'd done enough that day already. I was ready to cash out my pension. Not even a gigantic pancake breakfast could inspire a wont of motion in me. The only spark I felt was a pressing need to apply what energies I did possess towards doing nothing at all.
I set to my task with the seriousness of the long-ago incarcerated method actor. I lurched slowly. I moaned and groaned as I imagine the last iceberg will someday soon. I allowed a drop of spittle to loiter and linger near the corner of my mouth below eyes glazed by naught but my slovenly desire to see will to power. A fine charade, I felt. I did not tell my mother as much. That would have ruined it. Instead, the performance was perfected as I signed it with a malnourish.
“My tummy hurts. I don't think I can go to school.”
Squatting down eye level with me, she asked, “When was the last time you moved your bowels?”
Now, this was the first time I'd ever heard this question. I've since heard it many times. I've even had opportunity to ask it somewhat seriously in my finest Leslie Nielson voice. But at the time I did not know what a bowels was nor how one moved it, but I knew better than to lie to my mother. So, I said no. I had not moved my bowels nor anyone else's no matter what she may have heard.
“Well,” Mom prescribed. “Go poop and if you still don't feel good you can stay home.”
“But I don't have to poop!”
“Shucks,” she said. “I guess it's school then.”
I lacked further legal recourse, so I headed to school. On the walk there, as I notably and graciously left every single mailbox on the route as unmolested as I found it, I kept going with the part. I re-entered character. I began to imagine I could feel a nausea bubbling from below, threatening to break out in full-blown boil before long. But that was too silly a feeling to feel without witnesses. An act without an audience. So, I stuffed the feeling down until reaching school where I'd find an adoring public to suffer before.
Once class sat down at our desks I hastily set to selling my story. I made myself sweat as I wielded scissors to produce a little cardboard cutout of Lenin. Then, delving deep into prior experience like all the great thespians of this or any other age, I conjured the nausea I held at bay before. I let it bubble up and percolate unrestrained at my desk while I glued my little bald dictator to a shabby paper rostrum.
I would explain for arts and crafts class we were making dioramas of what we did last summer but it's hardly relevant. The crucial part for this story was the belly bubbling I'd cultivated turned to more of a roar than I'd anticipated. My teacher, a perfectly lovely if forgettable woman whose name, face, and legs escape my recollection, requested without any delay I see the nurse after possibly moving my bowels. Glory, Hallelujah. Some traction. The revolution had arrived.
“Please take your diorama, too,” she asked. “You're upsetting the Polish students.”
Upon visiting the nurse, I took my role as sickly student further. I added a slight shake to my hand to compliment the sweats and glazed look which began to come naturally to me by now. I barely had to focus on it at all. And the nurse, after ensuring a quick bowel movement was not a possible solution, called my parents and told them to come get me. I protested strongly, explaining I was perfectly capable of walking a mile home alone, it was just arts and crafts I couldn't tolerate at the moment.
“Your father is on his way.”
She was not lying. Unlike someone in the room. My father arrived to pick me up in his business suit all kitted out for work not school, and we headed to the car in the parking lot. This is, for whatever reason propels memory's method, one of my strongest, most vivid, and cherished recollections. I do not know why, nor do I care to auto-therapize on it. I just remember the sunlight baking the blacktop, my father asking me how are you feeling, and would you like to race to the car, my boy?
You're gods damned right I would like to race and thank you very much for not inquiring into my bowels, Father, but you're still about to get smoked, son. I took off to the car, scampering as I'm sure I did, and looked back to see my daddy running, too, his tie streaming behind a beaming, smiling face like a dog with his head out the window. No bowels to move, no revolutions to model, no business, just joy.
When we got home, however, I began to suspect I had invested too heavily in the role. As I walked in the house, I had a sudden urge to sit down, but rather than do the sensible thing, I jettisoned about five pounds of pancakes and a liter of maple syrup onto the chair, instead. Curious that.
So far as pretending to be sick goes, I'd say at some point, I actually became sick. I believe Aristotle called it becoming, or something of a similarly poor translation, which just means fake it until you make it in the end. To become something you must behave like it first, until eventually, you are that thing. This is why AI writers are lost. They've begun to emulate the worst consumer product among us. They set out on a quest to be all fake and lame and they, like me, succeeded in becoming.
“Hey, Dad,” I asked after having expelled a once-phantom payload. “What's a bowel movement?”
“Communist revolution,” he replied. He's a bit of a joker, you see. We're not sure where he got it from but we all agree it's nice to have a funny person in the family.
“Everyone kept asking me if I'd done one recently, today. A bowel movement, I mean.”
“No son of mine is going to move bowels like that,” he replied. “Your answer better have been no.”
As I wiped post-processed maple syrup and the shame of success from my lips, I moaned, “I think it was until it wasn't.”
I hadn't yet learned whenever I try to act like anyone else, even a different version of me, literally my own damned idea of myself, I puke my guts out. ‘Tis best to just be, and not become sick, if the quest means horking all over the furniture in the end, anyway. That's what happened. That's the reality.
So, I ask decades later in response to the endless question of moving one's bowels, “Am I already everything I'm ever going to be? Are you? And how best does one go about modeling this dilemma in a second-grade diorama? I'm still missing a credit.”
Sic vivitur.