I Think You're Totally Wrong by David Shields Page A

death—the prose is joyful, even ecstatic.”
    DAVID: That sounds like me.
    CALEB: You thought it should begin in Seattle, because the first part was slow.
    DAVID: Where was the first part set?
    CALEB: A small town. The story was set chronologically. You wanted the novel to begin after the father died. You wanted flashbacks.
    DAVID: I do remember that. I remember I wanted to steal that line of yours.
    CALEB: And I should have let you. Then I could have said, “Gimme a blurb.”

    CALEB: Last night I woke up at four a.m., thinking about your X factor. And mine. I’m fascinated by death, but especially killing. There’s no more dramatic moment in life than killing,or watching someone dying. But killing entertains us. Why? Answer that, and you get to suffering. And where we fit in. How do we stop suffering? How do we love? Are you familiar with Haing Ngor and Dith Pran?
    DAVID: Of course. In
Swimming to Cambodia
, Spalding Gray talks about how Ngor played Pran in
The Killing Fields
.
    CALEB: Both of them thought
The Killing Fields
tamed death, made it palatable. In
Silence of the Lambs
Jodie Foster finds skinned corpses in swamps, but that’s okay. That’s entertainment. You ever read
A Cambodian Odyssey
?
    DAVID: I haven’t.
    CALEB: Haing Ngor’s autobiography, told to someone or other. Ngor witnessed a Khmer Rouge cadre get angry because this pregnant woman wasn’t working hard. The cadre took his bayonet, disemboweled her, sliced out her fetus, tied the fetus to a string, and hung it from a porch. There were about a dozen other small, shriveled, shrunken clumps hanging from the porch rafters, and until this moment Ngor hadn’t realized they were fetuses.
    DAVID: There’s nothing I can say.
    CALEB: In college I chose art before politics, but I changed. Politics, art, love, life—they converge. Brian Fawcett concluded
Cambodia
by meditating on Prince Sihanouk’s words: “The Khmer Rouge withheld the basic human right to be loved.” This platitude scores a direct hit on my X factor.
    DAVID: I’m sure I sound like a complete asshole, but that’s the problem: it’s a platitude. It’s not taking us anywhere interesting.

    CALEB:
(handing David a manuscript)
This is “The Biography of Davy Muth,” a Cambodian woman, pronounced “Dah-vee” but spelled like Davy Crockett. She’s been writing her autobiography for twenty years and recently asked me if I’d help. She lived in Phnom Penh, was a teacher, had four children and a husband who was a professor at a military academy. April 17, 1975, rolled around: over the next weeks she saw her husband loaded onto the back of a truck—last time she saw him. Her family then splits up: two of her children go with her sister and mother, and she takes two. They die—one executed, one poisoned. She doesn’t hear anything about her family until January of 1979, when Vietnam invades. She goes to a refugee camp in Thailand, is reunited with her other two children. Thai soldiers rape Cambodians; she and her sister dig holes and hide every night. She finally made it to Seattle. Through her story I weave: Why do we kill? Why do we enjoy killing if we think it’s fictional? Why are we fascinated with serial killers? Can this fascination lead to solutions? Can we develop empathy through imagination to finally arrive at action?
    DAVID:
(looking at the manuscript)
That doesn’t sound that far from my own Iraqi-Afghani-Vietnamese idea.
    CALEB: In your writing, you have a hesitancy to judge—a moral relativism that allows anything into play, and it comes across as amoral. You’re so hesitant.
    DAVID: You have a much more public and political imaginationthan I do. And I’d love to see if I can’t burn your village down to the—
    CALEB: I—
    DAVID: Let me finish, Caleb. It’s not as if you’re a hugely right-on person who is out there manning the