NER fiction reader Anastasia Langner speaks with contributor Imad Rahman about delusional characters, the IRL body versus the online body, and domestic tension in his story “Ed Thinks of Everything” (45.1).
Anastasia Langner: It’s my understanding that you’re based in the Midwest. Are you hoping readers will visualize a specific geographic setting for “Ed Thinks of Everything”? Or are we to believe that the story’s chaos can happen anywhere?
Imad Rahman: Part of the real-world inspiration for the story comes from some Next Door posts about dangerous-looking coyotes prowling the streets of inner suburbs just outside Cleveland, Ohio. Which got me to the weird horror of zombie coyotes and the weirdness of online communities. When I picture it, the story could really take place anywhere a fenced-in yard and a decent Wi-Fi connection bisects the former natural habitat of the normally reclusive coyote.
That said, the story does unfold through my own personal lens of the Midwest (primarily Ohio). I’ve spent more than half my life in the region, the longest I’ve lived anywhere. I’m trying to write about the weirdness of the world as I see it and the first place I often filter that world through is Ohio, or more recently the landscape unfolding outside the window on my weekly commute between northeast Ohio and central Pennsylvania. It’s become a default setting of sorts, the places my immigrant heart often gravitates towards because they’ve become familiar (while also remaining strange). There is, especially in these freaky times, something to be said for the comfort of the familiar.
AL: What influenced the writing of this story?
IR: After seeing those Next Door posts I knew I wanted to write an epistolary piece and I knew I wanted to write about zombie coyotes. That got me to thinking about Joe Hill’s story “Twittering From The Circus Of The Dead.” He gets into some really interesting spaces there and it’s so fun to read. I really wanted to lean into that energy. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” was one of the first short stories that I fell in love with. It’s creepy and funny, but creepy where it might be funny (the buildup), and funny where it should be creepy (the ending). Many years later, when I read Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals,” I felt it again, the echo of the creepy and funny ways the places you inhabit push you towards your inevitable doom regardless of whether you play by the rules or disobey them.
I’m also leaning, I hope, into the logical weirdness of Donald Barthelme. I’m thinking “Some Of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” but “Rise Baby, Rise,” George Saunders’s terrific essay about Barthelme’s story “The School” was also very much on my mind, as was the Saunders story “CivilWarLand In Bad Decline,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People,” and Stacey Richter’s “The Cavemen In The Hedges”—stories where things are weird but also take place in near-worlds where our weird is their normal. And really, I’m hopefully channeling some weird folk horror here, that’s what I really wanted to lean into. Part of me saw this as a riff on Midsommar set in an imaginary Ohio instead of rural Sweden and with home surgery instead of ritual sacrifice. If this were a movie, I’d love for all the characters to be played by Mindy Kaling and Nicholas Cage.
AL: Human connection, for so many of us, has defaulted to being mostly or exclusively online. How might your story speak to living and establishing relationships in the Internet age? How has the Internet changed our relationship to pain? To our own bodies?
IR: Oh, this is such an interesting question. I’m both terrified of and fascinated by social media, its voyeuristic nature and ability to create communities that can feel like home. I wanted to let that paranoia and fascination seep in a little here. If you fully commit to your own online world, you could find that community you’ve been dreaming of, or you could end up in a cult. I tried to lean into both impulses for as long as I could, though this was probably never a story destined for a happy ending.
I wanted to write an interactive confession, where someone puts all this intimate weirdness online and people respond with their own weird agendas without questioning the initial weirdness. So maybe being a person in the Internet age makes this story possible? We are who we are in person, but we’re also who we are online (or pretend to be online), and often there’s a disconnect. I’m interested in that disconnect and in the spaces where our online lives intersect with our in-person lives, especially when it comes to local chat groups and what reasonable expectations of privacy such interactions might allow.
Once Ed’s fingers get severed in the opening sentence and we learn he’s sworn off hospitals, I really had to commit to the body horror, to moving the story forward in ways (hopefully) empathetic but also scary and funny and weird. I was thinking a lot about how there are always two realities at play: the one you experience IRL and the one you project outside onto your screen of choice. You might then have two bodies with which to experience different forms of hope and joy, and different forms of disappointment and pain. I tried to lean into that as I was writing.
AL: How did you choose the form of this story? I think an instinct in recreating chatrooms or online forums in prose is to recreate line-by-line comments and replies, rather than chunk replies into paragraphs. Why did you chose the latter?
IR: Long story short, rhythm and pacing and voice (all of which might ultimately be the same thing?). I let my instincts guide me through a story, and in this case those instincts told me to listen. The story had to sound right when I read it out loud. I tried it the other way first, to make it look like it might if you were to read it on a screen in real life, but it didn’t move right when I read it on the page and it didn’t sound right when I read it out loud. I couldn’t control the beats. So I finally wrote it the way I heard it, wanting to get the reader as close to my experience of the story as I could.
AL: There’s a lot of context that lives off in the wings: Tanya and Ed have discussed the impending arrivals of aliens and ivermectin as a valid medical treatment for humans. Tanya also recounts how Ed had some traumatic experiences while previously working in the medical field. In your opinion, why do we conjure delusions as an act of self-preservation? How has that in itself become so politically salient?
IR: Thanks for noticing that! So much of this story exists in the wings for me. I wanted the voices, primary and secondary, to have agency even if that agency leads to doom and everyone but the doomed knows that to be true. And on that note, delusions are self-preserving, aren’t they? At least in fiction (in that they’re interesting). Some of my favorite characters are reaching for something we know they’ll never find. Quixote, for instance, wouldn’t exist if he wasn’t deluded (I mean, he would but he’d be just another ordinary dreamer we’d never read about—good news for the human being, bad news for the story, etc.) And the interesting thing for me about “delusional” characters is when you can allow for the possibility that they’re not deluded. So much of mystery, suspense, and horror springs from that. What if the house for sale at the end of the cul-de-sac actually is haunted? What if the pleasant new neighbors really are serial killers? What if the mysterious midnight shapes by the edge of the woods are zombie coyotes that will leave you alone if you just put up a gated electrical perimeter fence? What if random strangers online are actually dispensing advice with your best interests at heart if you could only read between the lines?
AL: How did you land on the title “Ed Thinks of Everything”? Do you consider it to be emblematic of Tanya’s struggle? Is the phrase “thinks of everything” meant to be a double entendre?
IR: I didn’t have a title until Tanya reaches under the kitchen island to find a machete taped there because she needs a weapon and here is a weapon because, of course, Ed thinks of everything. Tanya’s struggle for me is her switching back and forth between “I love you, Ed” and “Fuck you, Ed.” Their relationship might be defined by Ed making the big decisions and Tanya providing operational support. So on one level, there’s that combo of both affection and resentment, which is a domestic tension I like exploring as a writer. As you know, Ed spends most of the story in a near-comatose state; I kept wondering what all the chaos would look like from his point of view, what he’s thinking of, although that’s perhaps another story á la Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet In The Brain” . . .
Anastasia Langner (she/they) is a fiction reader for NER. She is a recent graduate of Kenyon College, where she read and interned for Kenyon Review. Currently, they are a first-year English teacher in Connecticut, simultaneously working toward their MSEd from University of Pennsylvania. They intend to pursue an MFA in fiction writing.
Imad Rahman is the author of a book of connected stories, I Dream of Microwaves (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004). His short fiction has appeared in, among others, One Story, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, New England Review Digital, and the anthology xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (Penguin Books, 2013). He’s also the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award and a Creative Workforce Fellowship through the Cuyahoga County Community Partnership for Arts & Culture (CPAC). He currently teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program.
Imad Rahman photo courtesy of the author