What Is This Thing? by Gabriel Blackwell
Associate editor Hannah Cajandig-Taylor on today’s bonus short: “What Is This Thing?” is playfully self-aware, asking both the narrator and reader to question how we perceive knowledge, status, and the desire to relate to one another through the anxieties and traumas we carry. Gabriel Blackwell’s story is a chaotic and lovely delight.
What Is This Thing?
I had this thing on my arm, on the back of my arm, so I asked my friend, What is this thing? and she said, I’m not a doctor, not, I mean, a medical doctor, though, really, she is not any kind of doctor; like me, she does have a master’s degree, but, because she has started teaching at the local community college, she has recently introduced this new ambiguity into her title. This is at least the second time she has used this line on me—I’m not a doctor, etc.—no doubt to get a laugh out of me, which is pretty easy to do but not that easy. It’s possible she’s used the line on me more than twice and I’m somehow conflating both of the previous instances? I’m not sure, but, anyway, when I reminded her that she really is no kind of doctor, medical or otherwise—she still hadn’t looked at the thing on my arm—she told me she does not, on the first day of class, tell her students to call her Doctor or Professor, but she also doesn’t correct them if, later in the semester, they call her one or the other (though she isn’t either a doctor or a professor, only, officially, an “Instructor”; I know because I looked her up on the school’s website). She tells me she really does it for her colleagues, some of whom are very touchy about their titles—perhaps, she tells me, because of the institution and its seeming hostility to tenure and the (financial) reward of even the most outstanding research, but I know that actually she does this mostly for her, and the thing about the colleagues just makes that truth a little easier to accept. I guess, in the interest of being perfectly open about things myself, I should say that she has used this line on me in the past because I have come to her with medical complaints, maybe even often, even though I know—and if I hadn’t known it, she would then no doubt have told me—she is unqualified to assess them or to reassure me about their seriousness. So now I’m wondering why it is I tell her about my health problems at all, and the only idea I have, the one I keep coming back to, I am telling her, is that really my health problems are the only way I have of relating to other people anymore, the only things I think I share with other people, and it is just at this moment that the busboy picks to drop the bin, and just at that moment that our waiter, who is exiting the kitchen through the door conspicuously marked IN, picks to say Wow, just put it anywhere.
Gabriel Blackwell is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Madeleine E. "What Is This Thing?" is part of a collection of 101 essays and fictions, all written under constraint, titled Correction. Correction was Rescue Press's Open Prose Selection for 2019 and will be published in spring 2021. Blackwell is the editor of The Rupture.
