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Fiction

Bubblegum Prayer

Dawn Muenchrath considers the nature of art.

He said later that he knew almost immediately, knew before he’d finished reading it through – before he’d even reached the third stanza. That happened sometimes, every once in a long while: a piece of art – a movie, a novel, or in this case, a poem – that didn’t reveal its treasures slowly but instead all at once, bowling you over with the staggering force of its insight, the words leaping off the page to take hold of your hunched shoulders and shake them, to remind you not just why you loved art, but why you loved life – or why you had loved life, and could again.

For the first time in thirty-five years, Elroy packed his papers (yes, he still insisted on hard copies of everything) into his briefcase and left the office early. It was June, raining, and he didn’t have an umbrella or a jacket, he marched into the street with his head held high. He gazed upward and laughed in wonderment as fat drops smacked his forehead and flowed in rivulets down the lines of his face. He walked from the office towers to the park with the pond, and followed the paved path along its perimeter. He admired the new leaves trembling on the elms, the ducks preening in the water, and even smiled at the smattering of fellow walkers and joggers sharing the path – these health-conscious people who normally irritated him. For over an hour he walked, until the storm had cried itself dry, the sun had cut through the clouds, and the fresh smell of wet stone wafted up from the concrete. Then he headed out of the park, and up the hill to the old brownstone, the one that had made sense when there were five of them (if you include the dog), but now seemed excessive. Inside, he peeled off his wet clothes, dried with a towel, and tied on a robe. Then he took the poem from his briefcase and sat down to read it again.

The next morning he showed it to Alina. Of all the girls who worked at the office, he liked Alina best. She had long, dark hair, green eyes, and a small, thin mouth, and she reminded him not only of his eldest daughter but also a little of his wife when she was young and beautiful. Standing by the coffee machine, he waited patiently as she read, her eyes flitting back and forth rapidly, lips wordlessly mouthing the verses.

She looked up, wiped a tear from her eye. “My god, Elroy.” She sniffled.

“What did I tell you?” he said with a smile.

“My god,” she repeated.

By ten o’clock everyone in the office had read it. Theirs was a mid-sized paper, but the Arts & Literature section was small, getting smaller by the year, and so most people reading it had not read a poem in quite some time. Francesca proposed that she hadn’t read a poem since ‘Flanders Fields’ in the fifth grade, and there was a murmur of agreement. No matter. It didn’t take an expert to see that this one was something special – a winner, and then some.

“It’s like…” Francesca began, and everyone turned to her eagerly, poised to agree: “It’s just like so much yes.”

Everyone laughed.

Someone else tried: “It’s this moment. It’s now. But, also, it’s… more.”

“It’s what we’ve all been thinking.”

“It’s what we’ve all been feeling.”

“It’s what no one has been able to put into words before.”

“It’s going to go viral.”

“So viral.”

They were all curious, naturally, about the poet. The name on the online submission form read, cryptically, ‘L.P. Page’, but the gender, age, and ethnicity boxes had all been left blank.

Since Elroy was the Managing Editor of the section, it fell to him to contact the winner of the ‘Poem of the Year’ prize. Typically, alongside the poem, they printed a photograph of the poet and a blurb about how they’d written the piece.

Elroy settled himself in his chair and sipped some water. He was imagining the poet as a young woman, twenty-something, with dark hair and a nice smile. He supposed he was imagining someone like Alina, who was an aspiring writer herself. He picked up the phone, dialled the number provided, and listened to the ring. This was the best part of the job: delivering good news. Making someone’s day. Perhaps changing, however slightly, the course of her life.

After five rings, the call went to voicemail. But the canned voice that told him to leave a message belonged not to a young woman, but a man – no, a boy, a teenage boy. He sounded entitled. Bratty. Elroy hung up.

Determining he would try again after lunch, he pulled out the proofs he was working on for an interview with a very famous author, but he found he couldn’t bring himself to care about the author’s current favorite writing destination. Who had thought that was an interesting question? All he could think about was the poem. He had to know.

He called again. In fact, he called five times. Then, finally, the call was picked up.

“Hello?”

“Good morning,” Elroy said. “I’m calling with regards to the poem ‘Bubblegum Prayer’ which was submitted to our Poem of the Year Contest. Are you the writer?”

There was a pause. “Damn, did it win?” A chuckle. “Is that what this is about?”

Elroy looked around his desk, at the piles of print-outs, at the framed photograph of his daughters barefoot on the dock by the lake, and considered hanging up. He closed his eyes and counted to five.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said.

“Holy shit!” A pause. “There’s some cash with that, right?”

“There is a monetary prize associated with the winning poem, yes –”

“Awesome. Do you need my banking deets? Or will you guys just send me a check?”

“Someone will be following up about all that,” Elroy said. “For now, however, I’d just like to say congratulations –”

“Thanks.”

“We were also hoping you could provide, on the record, a short statement to be included alongside the poem.”

“Come again?”

“In the past, winners have commented on their inspiration for their poem, their influences, their writing process…”

“Ah. Okay, okay.” The line went silent. Then there was the sound of a door. Traffic.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, sorry, still here. I’m just thinking. ‘Bubblegum Prayer’, that’s the poem that won? You’re not just messing with me?”

“Do I sound like the type?”

The boy laughed. “Okay. Okay. Cool. Well… I didn’t write it. I mean, I’m the creator, but I’m not a poet. I programmed the code that wrote it. How’s that for a statement?”

Mobius Strip by Venantius Pinto
Painting © Venantius J Pinto 2024. To see more of his art, please visit behance.net/venantiuspinto

Having ended the call, Elroy remained motionless in his chair for some time. Perhaps if he happened to forget the unpleasant revelation, everything might go on as normal. He could make up something, a harmless quote, to put in the blurb. The boy on the phone might not even care. He seemed mostly concerned with the money, and, moreover, not particularly precious with his words. Then again, he could have easily kept the vital bit of information to himself. He’d told Elroy for a reason.

Elroy called Alina into his office. At first, she didn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible. That poem had spoken to her soul. Elroy loved her even more for her romanticism. He was not, as a general rule, one to solicit advice, but he asked her what she thought should be done. She raised her hands in exasperation. “This is over our heads,” she said.

By two o’clock, the Editor-in-Chief, another senior Editor, Gerrie, and three junior Editors, including Alina (in case the young people might have some special insights on the matter of technology) had been called into Elroy’s office for an emergency meeting. Like Alina, they were all initially disbelieving. It was an insult to their own sophisticated literary sensibilities to think they might have been fooled by a computer. Once the matter of pride had been put aside, the contest rules were dug out from a dusty filing cabinet and read aloud. Twice. The issue of human authorship was not even mentioned. It was simply assumed.

The six faces grimly exchanged glances around Elroy’s desk. Alina looked down at her hands. The Editor-in-Chief cleared her throat and suggested, with unusual hesitancy, that, perhaps, it was their duty to share this poem with the world – regardless of, or even because of, its origins. There were a few nods. But Gerrie straightened in her chair, shaking her head: “What about our duty to protect true art?” she said.

“But what is ‘true’ art?” Alina asked, her face flushing pink from the attention.

No one had an answer.

The Editor-in-Chief got up and walked to the window. The sky was blue and cloudless. She turned back to them. “Well…” she said, “The way I see it, our hands are tied. With the writer notified, we have no choice but to go ahead and break the story, warts and all. Otherwise, he’s liable to blab to another publication.”

No one said anything, but instinctively, the group turned to Elroy, who had said little since the meeting began. “If anything could use a good scandal to shake things up, it’s poetry, isn’t it?” he said, with a shrug. On this, everyone agreed.

They went public with the story that Friday. They published the poem in print and online, alongside the so-called poet’s admission that he’d coded a program to write it (he refused to provide a photograph), and a lengthy essay meditating on the meaning of art and authorship. However, judging by the comments proliferating on social media, most hadn’t bothered with the essay. They had their own opinions, and didn’t need any further information to confirm them.

By midnight the story had been picked up by all the major news stations in the country, as well as many internationally, and the poem itself had been translated into fifteen languages (in some cases, with the help of AI). In the coming weeks, the paper received some praise, but considerably more condemnation. Several talk shows reached out for an interview with Elroy or the Editor-in-Chief, but they both declined. L.P. Page was similarly evasive. By some reports, he had received as many as fifty death threats, and fifteen marriage proposals.

At the end of the month, on his therapist’s recommendation, Elroy took leave for a month to go to Los Cabos and decompress. He also invited Alina along, and paid for her ticket.

He was sitting beachside, sipping black coffee and reading a dog-eared copy of Dickens one morning, when Alina came running down from the hotel, flip-flops smacking against the rocky path, phone clutched in hand. “Elroy! Did you see the news?” She was wide-eyed, breathless.

He set down his cup and said, not unkindly: “If it’s about that poem, I don’t want to hear it.”

“You’ll want to hear this.”

She passed him her phone and sat in his lap as he adjusted his glasses to read the article.

The boy, the programmer – the bogus poet – had been found dead in his home. Police said the place had been ransacked, the computers stolen.

Oddly, Elroy felt neither shock nor sadness. He felt as if he’d known all along that this was coming. He said something appropriate to Alina about the senselessness of a young life lost, and they headed back up to the restaurant to have breakfast. Over their toast and egg-white omelets, they talked less than usual. It seemed everything about the issue had already been said. When the waiter came to clear their plates, Alina said she wanted to go for a swim in the ocean. Elroy said he’d meet her there, he just wanted to stop at the room for a moment first.

There, he set his suitcase on the bed and unearthed a small square of folded paper from beneath his clothes. The mattress squeaked as he sat down and uncreased the paper. For perhaps the hundredth time, he reread ‘Bubblegum Prayer’. When he was through, he felt better. He refolded the sheet, returned it to its spot at the bottom of the suitcase, and changed into his swim trunks. Then he headed out into the sunshine to meet Alina.

Dawn Muenchrath is a writer of fiction and poetry based in Calgary, Alberta.

• This story was provided by After Dinner Conversation, an independent nonprofit that promotes philosophical and ethical discourse by publishing short fiction: afterdinnerconversation.com.

Questions For Consideration

1. Is something art because of what it means to its creator, or because of what it means to the consumer? Can something be art without the creator intending it to be?

2. What (if anything) is the difference between using a program to write a poem, Photoshop to make a photo, or a camera obscura to create a painting?

3. Do you think the newspaper should have retracted the poetry award? Why; or why not?

4. Would it make any difference if the program had produced dozens of poems and L.P. Page selected his favorite to submit, discarding the others? What if he had made minor word changes prior to submitting it? Is there some minimal level of choice that makes a computer-generated poem a human creation? If so, what is it?

5. Would it make a difference if Page were a genius programmer, and others wouldn’t have been able to write the code to produce such an impressive poem?