A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

In a private moment of self-reflection, a man confronts the farce that he is. All his worst instincts, habits of mind, predictable appetites and easily parodied past actions crystallize in that moment into a punch line that prevails above all his refinements and respectability. He is a human exaggeration—if not to his associates or loved ones, then to himself. Then the moment passes. He ceases looking at himself in the mirror, turns on the tap and splashes water on his face. He returns to flesh and blood, to power incarnate, to possibility. He washes his hands of the past and leaves that temporary station where he was briefly nothing but a joke and walks out again, into the future.