Finchesque

The final exam of the 141 Creative Writing Studio was created to fuck over every student. Finch and the professor got along throughout the semester. Finch would tell the professor all about his aspirations to become a director, about how writing just wasn’t enough for his brain. From classmates’ slips of tongue, he earned the reputation of the most amusing yet hardest classmate to work with in the class. His latest work was about two sapphic women quarrelling over the wreckage of their party the night before, as the g-force exceeded human capacity after a moon mission going awry. The professor praised the concept and the execution of how he conveyed the couple's imminent death. Still, the dialogue felt inauthentic, as if it were bits and pieces stolen from other sapphic works.

 

Benjamin Finch’s final exam prompt was: “What led up to the person you are today?” Finch stared at the prompt on the bright white computer screen for a minute. He couldn’t discern whether the professor had given him an easy way out since he had tried to overachieve so often before, or if it was a trick. It was purposely vague. What aspect of Finch could he be curious about? How much does the professor want to know? Finch could tell him about his childhood or the high school fiascos he got himself into. The philosophy lessons his father taught him when he was younger. 

 

It clicked. The ocean screensaver flickered across the room. Duke Ellington blared. It clicked. For the climax of his favourite class, he had to go out in a tear-jerking bang. He wrote down an outline for poignant life stories, but it lacked the punch. He realized the prompt wasn’t asking for trauma dumping. In his experience, trauma did nothing but make people pity him. They create a complete ass-backwards narrative of him in their heads, twenty years of incompetence. All they see is a poor puppy, wailing for a saviour. The last thing he wanted was a self-pitying memoir.

 

He couldn’t bear to stare at the depression of the attempted exploitation of trauma for two journal pages. He decided to ask twenty men on the street about their life stories. When Finch was young, his father used to go on tangents about his philosophy that people in small towns looked like they were waiting to be asked about their latest ideas. He imagined the way they tried to intertwine a quirky stance, like a flamingo at the bus stops, with the uncomfortable, long stares into the windows they all seem to adopt. 

 

Five thirty sharp, Finch arrived at the train station, and his first victim was a businessman sitting on the bench. It ran well over the time Finch calculated, and the man left crying before the finish.

 

While walking through the train cars, Finch caught six victims, but they dried up quickly when they started talking. He felt that for the first time, his father might have been wrong.

 

 He met three friends at the second station he arrived at, where he had to gently explain to their wives about the importance of keeping it only men; they didn’t buy it, but they weren’t the fighting type. His friends only told stories that would defeminize themselves in front of their lovers. 

 

 On the train to Boston, Finch took a stranger to his favourite Japanese diner, and they spoke too far deep, far too fast, and Finch learned many things he wished he hadn’t known about. He also tried to pry interviews from the waiters, but he couldn’t untangle their broken English, and they couldn’t understand his southern accent. He left the stranger with the bill. He walked up to his father’s from there and picked up his car.

 

Finch pulled eight aside while intruding on the town of Sunderland during a town meeting. He thought the elders were all wonderful, but while rereading, many of the words made him curl his toes.

 

The 20th interview was from a hole-in-the-wall town. By this time, Finch had been given some shrooms and a number by a pretty girl while getting coffee at the rest stop. Finch drove as far as the psychedelics would allow him to, then he pulled his car into a parking lot and sat down next to a homeless man outside the drugstore. They must have spoken for at least three hours because the trip's cooldown stage started. It was eleven o’clock, and the page looked like children’s artwork. 

 

Finch drove the car back to his father’s house and took the third train back at 12 am to his apartment. Upon stepping into the train, he noticed the vibes shifted as the LEDs were unusually blue; it reminded him of his own room. He strolled through the walkway, counting all the empty seats. He noticed a girl holding a book between her legs. The only other members of this train were an old foreign man on the phone and a couple sleeping together in the far back.

 

“Can I sit here?” Finch asked the girl. She looked up at him and moved her backpack from the seat. Finch sat down. “What book are you reading?”

 

“It’s…Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.” She flipped the book over to look at the cover.

 

“I fucking love Kafka! He’s one of the reasons I write! I want to get a name just like his. Y’know Kafkaesque.” The foreign man turned around and shushed Finch. He gestured an apology.

 

“What genre do you write?” She closed the book and looked at Finch.

 

“All kinds. All I know is that I hate memoirs.” His face sunk into his hands

 

“What’s wrong with them?”

 

“All day, I’ve been trying to write a stupid memoir for my stupid creative writing final exam. I don’t have a life story. I create art to escape the world. I’m not Elizabeth Gilbert. I don’t have massive revelations about my life, so I went out and interviewed twenty men, hoping I could grab bits and pieces just to get this shit over with, and guess what? Nothing. When I was a kid, everyone had some miraculous story that they held above their head.” He pulled the journal out of his satchel and hands it over to her.

 

She flips through the pages, skimming them.  “You’re interviewing people to escape the disappointment yourself, then only looking for a piece of you in their statements and finding nothing but disappointment with the results.” She laughs. She’s on the page that looks like scribbles. “Every person is you. The universe is you. The only way you’ll ever look at the world is through yourself.”