The Moral Equation
Bryan Hurt
How do you fit romance, politics, a moon colony, and some cows into a speed-time-distance word problem? Read Bryan Hurt to find out.
Happy All Hallows’ Day,
The Editors
A says what B did was wrong, even though B doesn’t think so. B admits the optics aren’t great, but B didn’t hurt anyone or do anything that wasn’t consensual or break any rules—legal, moral, or otherwise—so maybe A should mind their own damn business. Anyway, it’s not like A hasn’t engaged in some questionable moral behavior.
Take for example, that time A put their ex, C, on blast for no apparent reason, revealing C’s mental health struggles to everyone on the internet—all because, what, A had a bad day or something? Not that A’s entirely wrong to condemn some of C’s recent activities. B agrees that C’s public support of the politician D is ugly and irresponsible, and probably a sign of C’s mental illness.
Both A and B agree that D is irredeemable, a terrible human being, the worst of the worst. Once, back when they were still friends and drinking together, A joked they wished the assassin’s bullets hadn’t missed. Two inches!
D’s sins are much-alleged and often proven, and so don’t bear exhaustive repeating. D raped people. D cheated hard-working people out of their money. D openly admires past and present world dictators, especially those who have committed violence against their own people. Some people say that D’s behavior is explainable, if not excusable, because of D’s horrible father, E, who was belittling and abusive. E said D was fat. E said D would always be a disappointment.
Just like D, E did terrible things. E was a slumlord. E was a racist. E rented his shit-hole apartments to people like F for way too much money and then evicted them just so he could rent them to other hard-working suckers whose skin-color he liked better.
From that perspective, maybe it was understandable, then, that F burned down E’s building. After all, F’s apartment was everything. F and his wife lived there. F’s five-year-old daughter. F’s daughter’s goldfish. Where were they going to live now? Who’s ever heard of a homeless goldfish?
So, yes, he started the fire (rags and gasoline) because what else was he going to do? How else do you make rich people regret something?
G was just an innocent bystander. G’s apartment was three floors above F’s, and G knew what was happening as soon as he smelled the smoke wafting through the floorboards. Oh no, he thought. The life he’d worked so hard to build. The life he’d scraped together out of hard work and nothing. He put down his coffee and shuffled to the door. He could feel the flames already on the other side, licking against the door handle.
G had lost everything once already, which was why he was in New York in E’s shitty apartment in the first place. You see, many years ago G fled Europe because of H and what H was doing to his people. G’s mother and father and aunts and uncles and trainloads of other people. They went into the camps and only smoke came out. It went on like this for years and years. Millions of people.
Some people say that H wouldn’t have been so bad if not for his art teacher. If only the art teacher had been kinder and encouraged H’s meager talents. But the art teacher, I, was a frustrated artist. It’s like they say: those who can’t do, teach. Which was too bad, too bad, because maybe if he’d been a better painter, or had put his ambitions elsewhere, he wouldn’t have taken his frustrations out on H, and someone like H would never have happened.
I wasn’t terrible at painting, just not good enough to be great at it. I’s paintings were full of rage. When you looked at them you could feel I’s rage in the brushstrokes. He painted landscapes, cityscapes, portraits of people sitting, staring, and half-smiling, and they were all so rageful. You’ve never seen so much rage in a haystack, rage in a cow, rage in the half-smile of wrinkle-faced old woman. It was the rage of being good not great. Of seeing the gulf between good and great and not being able to cross it.
But in the future, in the far-flung future, people will study I’s paintings and see greatness in them. Look at that rage-filled cow, they’ll say. Look at that rage-filled building. In the future, I’s paintings will hang on the sterile white walls of the municipal buildings of the Moon and Mars colonies.
Because the far-flung future will be built on rage. Rage, it will be discovered (as it’s always been known), can do great damage to the distance between good and greatness. J knew this (D’s distant relative). J was in charge of building the Moon and Mars colonies, and he didn’t care how many people died or got hurt in the process. All he cared about was that the colonies got built (on top of mountains of bones and the skeletons of rocket ships) and that he would be remembered forever.
We can’t say why J was like this. Perhaps it was because he was distantly related to D and E, and that he also admired H and I, and science shows that some behaviors are genetic. It wasn’t because of J’s parents, who, despite their terrible lineage, were kind and supportive. J’s father, K, was especially big-hearted. Back before the last pygmy hippopotamus died, he gave away half his fortune to save the dying species. He cried at the drop of a hat. A minor chord. A baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. An abandoned glove on a park bench. K was always crying. When J came home from school, he’d see his father crying in front of the daytime news. All his generational wealth, all his privilege, and what had he accomplished? He hadn’t even been able to save the pygmy hippopotamuses.
The hippos, of course, were useless. It didn’t matter whether they lived or died. What have they ever done to justify their existence? They didn’t even taste good. It was just like a billionaire to spend his money on something so frivolous. That’s what L thought. L who owned the toxic waste factory. L made sure his factory dumped its toxic waste into the river where the last of the pygmy hippos lived, just to stick it to the bleeding-heart billionaire. Plus who cared? Plus who was going to stop him?
M poisoned the pill factory. N killed cats. O hunted people for sport. P was just a regular rage-filled person in the rage-filled future. He ran raging through the streets, smashing store windows.
Q lived on the Moon. His job was to sit in front of the red button. “Don’t press the red button,” J said, “unless I tell you.” But then Q discovered that his fiancé, R, who was stationed on the Mars Colony, was cheating on him. Then all he could think about was pressing the red button.
Press.
Don’t press.
Press.
Don’t press.
Press.
Kaboom.
No more Moon Colony.
R learned about the Moon Colony while she was in bed with S, scrolling on her tablet. Was it wrong her first thought was Phew? At least she didn’t have to worry about Q anymore. It wasn’t that she hated Q, or wished him dead, but he’d been taking the news of her relationship with S so badly. He refused to move on. The constant messages. All those crying emojis. She was sad Q was dead but relieved she could continue loving S without feeling guilty about it.
S was in love with R, but he was also in love with T, U, and V. He had love, so much love, and thought it would be selfish to not share it with everyone. After R finished crying on him about Q, he took his tear-stained shoulder to bed with T. T was his favorite lover. He knew someone with so much love shouldn’t have favorites, but R was needy and possessive. U was sad and cried after sex. As a child she’d lost her parents when a madman poisoned a pill factory, and she wouldn’t move beyond her tragic backstory. V thought everything was funny, even S’s penis. “Look at the turtle,” she’d say when he took off his pants. “Hello, Mr. Turtle.” S’s penis was not a turtle. T, however, was aloof like a cat. Did she want him or not want him? Intriguing!
T liked light sadomasochism. S liked it when she tied him up and blindfolded him. Today she handcuffed him to the bedpost. “What are you doing?” he said, after she snapped him to the bed and stepped out of his eyeline. All he could see was her bedroom porthole and the vast expanse of space outside. Stars and nothing. Then V stepped into his line of vision. Then U. Then R. Then T.
We heard you had so much love, they said. We heard that you’ve been sharing it with everyone.
“Hello, Mr. Turtle,” said V, her pruning shears snipping the air in front of her.
W, in the oxygen garden, couldn’t hear S’s screaming. He also couldn’t find the pruning shears. Where had V put them? Forgetful V! So cute! Always laughing! It was a shame that V was in love with S, that lout, always strutting around the Mars Colony in his epaulets like he was so important. W should tell V that S was sleeping with everyone. It would be painful to hear, yes, but that’s what friends do. They tell painful truths, and W was nothing if not friendly—and an ally.
He was an ally to V but also to all women. He’d read all the books and understood women’s struggles. Feminism! There were so many waves of it. The first, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, all the way to the current wave. He liked to picture actual waves breaking against actual cliff faces. Those plucky women. Always trying.
Maybe once he told V about S’s many infidelities, she’d finally see him as more than a friend and move him out of her friendzone. She’d realize that her perfect man had been there right in front of her all this time, working alongside her, trimming and tending to the plants that provided the very air they breathed here on this otherwise barren and inhospitable planet. W: her friend and coworker.
He wished he was a poet so he could poetically express how their love was like the plants they tended together. It was the air. It had roots. It grew and propagated. Oh V! He lifted his eyes to the transparent dome above him so as to gaze out at the starry heavens. What was that he saw floating out there in the vacuum? Small and flesh-colored? A finger? No, not a finger. The errant biomass landed on the tempered titanium-silicate glass pane and left a bloody streak. He saw clearly what it was. Circumcised. Then the lonely organ careened into space and drifted until it was swallowed by the cosmos.
*
Back on Earth, and now back in the present, the cow looked up at the sky as if it could see the streaking lights of the meteor shower. Stupid cow. Stupid meteors. X resented being awake so early. The sky was blue-black and filled with falling stars. The eastern horizon had just begun glowing.
X resented his job, but what can you do? You have to work to put food on the table. While the cow looked at the sky, X stunned her then slit her neck. He pushed her onto the belt that fed her to the next station. He did this again and again. Stun, slit, push. Dozens of cows each day. Hundreds.
Y hung the cows on the hooks until their blood drained out, and then she skinned them. Then she cut them in half. Then she cut them in half again. Sometimes, X sent her a cow that wasn’t quite dead so she looked into its scared, alive eyes and beat it on the head with her special cow-beating hammer. Sometimes, after work, X and Y went out together for beers and delicious cheeseburgers.
Z was a baby, but an evil baby. You could tell just by looking at her. Her eyes. So evil! That’s why her mother tossed her out the car window. She landed in a ditch, swaddled and still alive, and waited, evilly, for someone to find her.
And then what happened?
*
The ditch sat between a field of cows and the road A used to bike to work each morning. While A biked, and Z waited, and the cows chewed grass (and waited even if they didn’t know they were waiting), A thought about how mad they were at B.
Bad B.
Careless B.
Immoral.
Which brings us back to the problem posed at the beginning of this story.
If A is biking west at fifteen miles per hour and Z is waiting evilly in the ditch, can you, dear reader, use all the clues we’ve planted above to figure out what B did that was so bad, allegedly?
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Bryan Hurt is the author of the story collection Everyone Wants To Be Ambassador To France (Starcherone/Red Hen), selected by Alissa Nutting as the winner of the 10th Annual Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. He is the editor of WATCHLIST: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest (OR Books/Catapult), which included stories on the theme of surveillance by T.C. Boyle, Etgar Keret, Carmen Maria Machado, among others, and has served as Editor in Chief of The Arkansas International, which won a Whiting Literary Magazine award under his stewardship. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and named finalist for the Calvino Prize and Horatio Nelson Prize in Fiction. He’s received fellowships from the Sewanee and Tin House Writers’ Conferences. Bryan holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, and last year was a Wolfson Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas and is currently an Assistant Professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.