What Would You Do?

Mostly what I want to tell you is to get yourself a set of wheeled furniture casters like these, sooner rather than later. It doesn’t have to be those specific ones, just something like that—a set of four, to put under the corners of whatever large piece of furniture you might want to move. Get them before you need them, because when you realize you need them it might already be too late.

The rest of my family spent most of June traveling in New Zealand while I stayed home to take care of the dog and the cat and the rabbit. I’ve already done a lot of traveling in the last year and I didn’t mind some quiet time at home. But although I’m nearly half a century old, my executive function is still not great, which is partly why you’re receiving this today instead of last Tuesday. I already know that I’m very bad at living alone. In order to maintain a normal diurnal schedule, eat meals at conventionally appropriate times, etc., I rely on being surrounded by other people doing those things who can serve as positive role models for my beautiful imperfect brain to emulate. The only thing that can help, in the absence of good role models, is keeping myself very busy. Unfortunately I’m also bad at starting tasks.

However, while my brain may not have improved much in 48 years, I have learned a lot about operating it. There are a few tricks that I know to work. One is to severely reduce my set of daily tasks to, for example: eat, sleep, and walk. That didn’t seem like it would be appropriate in this case. Another trick is to overload myself with projects and have all the necessary supplies on hand and visible, so I can easily put off one job by working on a different one. I will happily accomplish an incredible number of tasks as long as I can be procrastinating on at least one of them at any given time. But moment to moment, I can’t predict which one will need to be the one I’m blowing off, so it’s important to have a broad range available. If there’s just one thing I must do, it will never get done. If there’s a bomb that needs to be defused, you better also tell me that I have to make a grocery list or we’re all gonna die.

So rather than resign myself to wandering around an empty house for three weeks drenched in shame for squandering the opportunity to do some invasive maintenance and repairs, I prepared an overload of work to complete while they were gone. I announced that I would repaint my bedroom for the first time in the 20 years we’ve owned this house, replace our saggy, ten year old mattress, replace our puppy-chewed living room furniture (the dog is now fully six Gregorian years old), and repaint the living room floor, which was also last refinished in 2004. We ordered a new couch and a new mattress, my wife picked out paint colors for the bedroom, I stocked up on TSP, brushes, rollers, and so on.

Also, just a couple days before everyone left, I bought a dirty 1977 Cape Dory sailboat and vowed that I would have it in the water bobbing at its mooring before everyone was back. I did not accomplish that one. Any day now, though.

Every Stephen King story is the answer to a “what if” question. What if there was a global plague that killed 90% of humanity? The Stand. What if your toddler got hit by a truck? Pet Sematery. What if it was eternity in there? The Jaunt. What if a finger came out of your sink drain? The Moving Finger.¹ What if aliens let you telepathically communicate with your typewriter? The Tommyknockers.² What if you were an author doing a whole lot of cocaine? Also The Tommyknockers.³ What if there was a tiger in the school bathroom? Here There Be Tygers. Trust me, it works for all of them.

In 1982, King published a book of four novellas titled Different Seasons. Sandwiched between Hope Springs Eternal’s Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, which would be adapted into the beloved hit movie The Shawshank Redemption, and Fall From Innocence’s The Body, which would be adapted into the beloved hit movie Stand By Me, is one of the toughest reads in the whole Stephen King oeuvre: Apt Pupil, seasonally labeled “Summer of Corruption.” The “what if” question for Apt Pupil is something like: what if Nazis aren’t the result of interwar economic conditions in Germany or a charismatic political leader or even antisemitism per se, but instead exist as a permanent potentiality inherent to the human soul? What if some part of us just gets off on cruelty? What if the Nazis could be anyone, anywhere, given the right permission structure and role models?

The story finds a normal teenage boy in a fictional town in Southern California who becomes fascinated by the Nazi atrocities he learns about in history class. Then, in an evil stroke of luck helped along by his own research and cleverness, he discovers a notorious Nazi death camp guard hiding out in his very own town. The boy, Todd Bowden, blackmails the Nazi fugitive into telling him stories about what he did in the Third Reich. The death camps, the ovens, the showers, Bowden wants to know it all. He wants to know what it felt like to control other humans. To place yourself above them, existentially. To exercise the power of life and death at a whim.

So the two fall into a kind of Dienstags mit Adolf relationship, graduating from telling stories to Nazi cosplay to killing animals and eventually people, first separately and then together. Succumbing to this depravity wreaks havoc on Bowden’s sleep and grades, and eventually his pet Nazi blackmails him right back, forcing him to pull his grades up or be exposed as the kid who helped hide a mass murderer and world historic villain. Ultimately, in the King story, Bowden spirals out completely and takes a rifle up to the hillside over a freeway to take as many people as possible with him before he’s killed by the police.

Like its bookending stories in Different Seasons, Apt Pupil was also adapted into a film, by the director Bryan Singer in 1998. Singer changed the ending, having Bowden escape consequences completely and graduate as valedictorian, giving a speech about choices, taking for his example the myth of Icarus, who “for a brief moment… felt what it was like to live as a god—to touch the sun.” The only character who knows what Bowden really did is his guidance counselor, emolliently played by a mustachioed David Schwimmer at the peak of his Friends fame, who confronts Bowden at home after graduation and is sent packing with the threat that if he talks, Bowden will claim he was groomed and sexually abused. Given Bryan Singer’s own reported predilections and eventual legal troubles, including accusations that date back to the production of Apt Pupil itself, today this scene reads like a creepy preëmptive self-justification.

Like the novella, this film was never beloved by much of anyone. Both versions place us almost entirely in young proto-Nazi Bowden’s head as the POV character, and invite us, if not exactly to empathize with Bowden, at least to interrogate whether we too haven’t felt the tiniest twinkle of a similar nasty thrill, perhaps at a story about a murder? Or a historical atrocity? Are we sure, ask King and Singer, that we couldn’t ever become something like this? Cormac McCarthy made a similar suggestion a decade before King, describing his hillbilly serial killer and necrophiliac Lester Ballard as “a child of God much like yourself perhaps.”

The only question is how much like yourself?

Another quirk of my defectuous gray matter is often misinterpreted as competitiveness, which it does manifest as in some circumstances, but it’s actually more of a general spirit of opposition. If you tell me I can’t defuse that bomb, there is no force on Earth that’s gonna keep me out of the Hurt Locker.

So to overdetermine my success, I proclaimed to my children that I would easily have all the painting and boat repair finished before they got home. My children, who have grown up watching me fail to complete project after project, scoffed at this, as well they should and as I was counting on them to. Being told by my own treasonous spawn that I wouldn’t succeed? This is rocket fuel for tedious work. And there is nothing more tedious than interior painting—a job that involves hours of fussy, messy, and labor intensive preparation leading up to mere minutes of roller work, which as everyone knows is the only fun part, and by the time you get to it it’s not even that fun.

Painting the bedroom also first required taping and mudding a stretch of long-neglected bare drywall, which means drywall dust. I couldn’t do that and also sleep in the room, and a large new sectional sofa was on its way, so I hauled the old couch and ottoman to the dump, and then moved all the remaining living room furniture off the part of the floor to be painted. Another good motivational trick is urgency, which can almost always be manufactured somehow but in this case was real, as I would have to take delivery of the couch when it arrived and I had nowhere to put it that wasn’t right there on the floor that needed painting. Painting the living room floor was also much easier and less involved than painting the walls, trim, and floor of my whole bedroom, and once it was done and the new couch arrived, I could sleep down there while I made a mess of my bedroom.

So that’s how I spent the early weeks of June, while ICE used Los Angeles to test its plan of putting American cities under military occupation and abducting their most vulnerable residents to be shipped off to concentration camps run by acquiescent authoritarians abroad. Occasionally my family would ask how thing were back home, and all I could say was “Bad.” They didn’t particularly need to worry about it while they visited Hobbiton and saw the blue penguins, there was nothing they could do. I was right here and there was nothing I could do either.

But it was hard to express the feeling of acceleration, of events starting to slide from bad to extremely bad, with the specter of atrocity lurking just at the horizon, almost in view. Almost here. That feeling was what reminded me of Apt Pupil, which is drenched in the same nauseating miasma of acceleration toward atrocity, of purposeless cruelty not just employed but enjoyed, savored with sick delight and no prospect of consequences.

In hindsight, Apt Pupil the novella arrived at what would turn out to be the nadir of Nazism in American popular culture. A stretch of the 80s where most adults still knew someone who had personally killed Nazis, while the actual events of the war were fading into black and white documentaries on the History Channel. Everyone could cheer as Indiana Jones killed Nazis with a perfectly clean conscience, because everyone agreed that they were History’s Greatest Monsters, and also that they were so comprehensively defeated that it was safe to bring them back as onscreen nasties and cannon fodder.

The 90s would see a wave of TV and movies where neo-Nazis were presented with more empathy and subtlety, as Noel Murray wrote in Mel Magazine in 2019, citing Apt Pupil as one example of a 90s Nazi renaissance in US pop culture:

I first read Apt Pupil some time in the late 80s or very early 90s, during a middle school and early high school period of obsession with Stephen King. And while I’ve forgotten a lot of the King I read back then, I never forgot Apt Pupil because it was one of his only stories that genuinely scared me. It’s not the pleasantly creepy chill that he offers with stories of the supernatural that you can enjoy and then brush off because you know there isn’t a monster in the closet. Apt Pupil asks “hey, what if Nazis came back because a normal all-American boy, much like yourself perhaps, gets a kick out of the idea of lampshades made from human skin?” In late 1980s America, that sounded impossible—everyone knew the Nazis were the ultimate Bad Guys, right? But Stephen King is a very talented writer, and he doesn’t let you brush this one off. He puts you directly in the head of someone who knows that Nazis are evil, and wants to be one anyway. Nothing supernatural happens in Apt Pupil. It’s not a ghost story. It’s a story about evil, but scrupulously real, human evil. To his credit as a human being but his detriment as a futurist, Stephen King’s answer to his own question was to imagine that kind of evil would rapidly destroy anyone who embraced it. Just seventeen years later, Bryan Singer offered a different answer.

Stephen Miller was born in Santa Monica in 1985.

When we studied the Holocaust in school, kids of my generation were generally invited to consider the question: What Would You Do? Uniformed thugs in the employ of an out of control authoritarian government snatching your neighbors off the street and disappearing them: What Would You Do? The structures of your democratic system of government failing one by one, not the immovable stone tablets you imagined them to be but a string of dominoes, easily knocked over: What Would You Do? The news media and all the institutions of civil society rolling over and showing their bellies so fast it seems more like they were just waiting for an excuse: What Would You Do? Flagrant injustice, rubbed in your nose, day after day: What Would You Do?

Of course we would stand up for what was right. Of course we would hide the fearful and innocent targets of the regime in our attics and crawlspaces. Of course we would oppose the dictator, join the resistance, maybe… sabotage a bridge??? It’s unclear which bridge or how that would help, but surely we would know these things when and if that unthinkable day came. We would be ready, and we would resist.

And now, here it is. As Donald Trump laughed and mugged for cameras in front of the chain link fences of Florida’s new concentration camp, as Kristi Noem and Ron DeSantis joked in front of the kennels they had built for human beings they planned to abduct and confine there, human beings they planned to starve and torture there, what I did was: paint my bedroom.

What Would You Do? I would carefully scrub the accumulated decades of grease off the old paint with TSP, making sure to rinse well so as not to leave a residue that hampers adhesion by the new paint. I would cut in with a 2 ½“ angled brush around all the window and door trim. I would listen to podcasts while I shuffled along the baseboard on my knees, pausing occasionally to stretch my aching back. I would make hot dogs for lunch and eat them while reading posts on Bluesky about the passage of a bill through Congress that will ramp ICE funding up to levels competitive with other countries entire military. I would text my wife in New Zealand that things back home are pretty bad, and I don’t know what to do.

I would dig up the 1998 film Apt Pupil from a file sharing network and watch it on my phone, because I knew I wasn’t up for a re-read of the novella. Not now, probably not ever.

I realized after moving all the living room furniture and putting in the new couch with my friend Matt’s help that I couldn’t possibly paint the whole bedroom at once. I’d have to move half the furniture to one side of the room, paint the walls and floor on the empty half, and then move everything to the painted half to finish the rest. Some of this furniture moving would necessarily have to be done across soft newly painted floor. It finally occurred to me to wonder if there was some sort of device that could help with this, and of course there is. For less than a hundred bucks you can get a set of wheeled casters that make even the largest and most cumbersome furniture easy to roll here or there, all by yourself, no dragging or scratching the floor. I ordered a set from Home Depot, who will do same-day delivery to the ferry, and later that day I picked them up from the dock here on the island. It was so easy, after so many years struggling to move furniture around by myself. Why didn’t I ever think of this before? I don’t know.

So if you also don’t know what to do, here’s all the advice I have: get yourself a set of rolling furniture casters. It’s not much, but you’ll probably find a use for them. Best to get them now, because you might need to move some furniture in a hurry. Or you might need to help somebody else move.

1  Really.

2  Really!

3  Both the fictional premise and the real life circumstances of its composition, which is a neat trick.