I started reading this short story two weeks ago. I finished a couple of pages, loved it, and then set the book down. Two weeks passed. This is not a reflection of Rebecca Makkai's cool and inventive story, but of the time management challenges faced by writers and readers everywhere. My son must be fed. My body must be cleaned. My work must be done. As essential as writing and reading are in my life, sadly, sometimes they get pushed to the side. The good news is that I always manage to course correct. I sit down with my planner in front of me and I make time like some people make cookies. I can't make cookies to save my life, but I can turn my daily planner into a living and breathing thing with nothing more than the force of my will and a perfectly sharpened pencil. Yesterday writing was pushed aside. Today, I write. There's always today.
Now for the story. I pulled out the 2009 version of The Best American Short Stories a couple of weeks ago with the intention of picking a story whose title jumped out at me. To begin, Alice Sebold edited that year's collection and I adore what I've read of hers, including Lucky and The Lovely Bones. Sebold's memoir, Lucky, which details her sexual assault in college and its aftermath, took place at my own alma mater, Syracuse University. Years after Seebold's attack, I played frisbee and had picnics in the park where she was raped, never knowing the sad legacy that park held in its history. If you've only read The Lovely Bones and haven't yet made it to Lucky, do read it.
I chose Rebecca Makkia's story, "The Briefcase," because a briefcase seems like something that almost always holds a secret. Today, they also feel like a bit of an anachronism, like the businessperson's version of Blockbuster Video, as more offices go paperless and iPads or netbooks replace our thick stacks of papers and reports.
I've been thinking in terms of Goal, Motivation, and Conflict in my writing lately so I'm going to approach my reading of this story with those concepts in mind.
Goal: The unnamed prisoner escapes his bondage in what I read as a dystopian future, though I suppose it could have also been in a not-so distant past, or even in the present. When the guards see that a man is missing from their line, rather than taking the time to hunt him down, they replace him with the first man they see on the street: a professor carrying a briefcase. When the line marches on, the protagonist steals the briefcase and decides to steal the professor's identity as well. His goal: weave himself into his new life without getting caught.
Motivation: The prisoner's goal is survival. We can only assume that his replacement, the professor, and the other 199 men in that line are dead. Should he be revealed as a fraud, death will be his final sentence too.
Conflict: Using the generosity of the professor's friends and a post-office box, the prisoner lives in safety for a year. He deals with the guilt of knowing that his own escape directly caused the death of another man by telling himself that in living, he is living for both himself and the professor. But his plan fails when the professor's widow seeks him out and exposes him as an impostor.
My favorite part of this story is that Makkai manages to pull "it" off without identifying her main character's name, the location, or the time in which "The Briefcase" takes place. Even without those details, we are still drawn into the world and the protag's journey. I don't know how Makkai pulled that off exactly, but she does.
