“I’ve a bone to pick with you,” he says in a deep, sonorous voice that carries just the faintest trace of a Glaswegian accent.
As soon as he speaks, I know who he is, and what bone he’s been gnawing for almost twenty years.
Stuart Ainsley was born in a moment of terror at the high school debate tournament in Madison, in the spring of 1986. Our topic was “Resolved: national handgun registration will reduce violent crime,” and we had drawn the negative. We were ill-prepared—all of our research that semester had been in support of the resolution—and badly botched our opening statement. I made an off-the-cuff remark about the number of violent crimes foiled by citizen gun owners, and during the cross-examination the team from Marquette Academy demanded a citation.
“Cite! Cite! Cite!” they chanted while I fumbled through my stack of index cards. It was a pointless search, I knew, because I didn’t have any such statistic in my sources. Probably the factoid had been derived from my father’s dinnertime pontifications and a clandestine peek at his National Reviews.
Sweat on my brow, fingers trembling, I blurted out, “Stuart Ainsley, Journal of American Criminology, Fall 1984.” The chanting subsided, and I hurriedly stuffed the card I pretended to read from back into the deck. We went on to lose disastrously, and spent the rest of the day roaming the second-hand record stores on State Street, glad to have the tournament out of the way.
I took the name for my citation from a character I played in the fall theater production. The play was called “Here and Now,” and was about a group of parents and students who met with the school psychologist to try to “relate” to each other. Stuart Ainsley was a hard-ass father of a pansy son who worshipped the high school football captain who turned out to be a closet pansy. Marco, who played said pansy jock, giggled into his fist when I shouted my citation, and I gave him a not-completely-friendly kidney punch when we were dismissed from the competition.
Mr. Ainsley turned up one more time in high school, when I need to back up my strongly-held conviction that homelessness was the end result of crass consumerism in a current events paper. I thought at the time that his quote—“we, as a culture, have learned to treat people with the same disdain we reserve for Styrofoam packaging, never seeing the soul inside the Big Mac box”—was very nice. Wholly fabricated, but very nice. I suppose I could have used it without the quotation marks, but they added such an air of authority, especially with the footnote referencing “Dr. Stuart Ainsley, UCLA.”
In college, Dr. Ainsley transferred to the University of Ohio-Miami, where he was a Wordsworth scholar, and to Bates College, where he published a compelling article on the events leading up to the toppling of the Allende government in Chile. Neither citation was really crucial to my grade. I would never have resorted to building an important assignment around his fictitious research.
At least not until graduate school. By my second year, I was burned out; the whole endeavor seemed pointless, silly, more than little masturbatory. I played games to keep myself going, to finish out this horrible decision to extend my studenthood. My favorite game was with the words “ubiquitous,” “tautology,” and “tendentious”: every essay I wrote had to contain at least one of these words, and if I could cram in all three I would treat myself to a glass of Serbian plum brandy at the Knickerbocker Saloon. I drank a lot of brandy that year.
That none of my professors got wise to my game suggests they were drinking a lot of brandy, too, or at least not bothering to read anything I wrote. So I started to play the Stuart Ainsley game with abandon. My master stroke was in a contemporary literary criticism seminar, for which I cast Dr. Ainsley as a recherché New Critic who insisted on close readings of Melville despite the recent scholarship that portrayed Moby-Dick in an unflattering post-colonial radical feminist light. In my final paper, I pilloried poor Dr. Ainsley for his myopic misprisions and pedestrian habits of mind, made him the foil of the literary enfant terrible as whom I had cast myself. My professor, a mustachioed little fascist who proudly proclaimed he had not read a novel or poem in twenty years, scribbled an orgasmic “Yes” beside each of my body blows against poor fictitious Dr. Ainsley and gave me an “A” for the semester. He never caught on that Dr. Ainsley championed my own beliefs, and that my arguments against him were flimsy, jargon-laden bombast.
“In a more civilized age,” the man in the shadows rumbles, “I’d challenge you to a duel and be quit with ye.”
“It was almost twenty years ago!”
“And it’s been smarting all these years, me boy. Ye’ve besmirched me name.”
He grabs the glass of Jim Beam from the stack of bills—mortgage payments feel less large with bourbon in the belly—and drains it in one swallow. He coughs and wipes a thick hand across his mouth. This Ainsley is not the mousy little man I had pictured; he has a touch of the pirate in him.
“You’ve never said anything I don’t believe,” I whisper. “You’ve always been there to back me up.”
He just glowers and raps his knuckles on my desk. His hands are much larger than I had imagined. They could wrap around my head with room left to squeeze.
Although Stuart Ainsley has been my favorite attributable source, he has by no means been my only. Once I learned, on that fateful Madison morning, that my words were weightier in someone else’s mouth, I’ve used the false citation trope many times.
Usually, it’s an anonymous or vague citation of a trusted news source. “I heard on NPR that…” “In the paper last week I read that…” “There was a great article in Dr. Dobb’s or Java World about…” No one follows up on these attributions; simply by giving credit for my ideas to someone else, they gain authority they’d never have from me alone.
Conversely, when I’m forced to give an opinion that I can’t attribute to someone else, I try to distance myself from it. At work, I’ve developed “Michael’s Public License,” my dark twin of the open source “General Public License.” I’ll gladly hand over obtuse Java classes and Perl scripts to my trusting co-workers, always undocumented, on the condition that none of it be traceable to me. If it works, the glory is yours; if it brings the network to its knees and garbles critical data, well, that’s a risk you took yourself.
“Ye’ve put words in me mouth,” Ainsley says, and leans in close to me. I can smell his breath, whiskey and sour milk, and his eyes drill into my face.
“Good words,” I say, backing away, embarrassed that my voice has gone squeaky. “Nothing I wouldn’t have said myself.”
“But nothing I said. Nothing I thought.” He stands and looks down at me. “Ye’ve made me an inconstant fool.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed you’re not very consistent…”
In college, Stuart Ainsley was a neo-Marxist. I imagined him to be like the Scottish socialists I met during my semester in London: cuttingly sarcastic, but extravagantly comradely. Then he went through a libertarian phase, sounding like a cyberpunk Adam Smith, before retiring as a stodgy old-guard classicist. His had been a checkered academic career indeed.
“What if I was always at misquoting you?” He grabs a stack of blank paper out of the printer and pretends to read from it: “Michael Hartford says … According to Michael Hartford … The noted authority Michael Hartford has stated …”
He repeats my name over and over, rolling the “r”s and swallowing the “h”, until it becomes just a series of sounds with no meaning. I feel anonymous, unattributed. Once I had entertained the fantasy of dropping out of my real life, buying a clutch of fake papers, and becoming Stuart Ainsley. I imagined checking into a rundown pensione in Tuscany, and saying to the tired old man at the desk, “My name is Stuart Ainsley; do you have a room with a private bath?” Had I known I could disappear just by saying my name over and over again, like a summoning incantation in reverse, I would have skipped out long ago.
“Do ye see?” he whispers, his broad face blotchy in the glow of the computer screen. “Do ye see? Ye’ve made me a fool.”
I shake my head and take the paper from his hands; the sheets are damp and wrinkled, he was gripping them so tightly.
“I understand,” I say, quietly, reasonably, like my English friends used to do when I became loud and American. “I do. It’s like an article I was reading in Harper’s, or maybe in The Atlantic, I can’t remember.”
And when he sits back in his chair, still breathing hard, I begin to cite my sources.