A seasonal offering from Tom Bredehoft, author of Foote: A Mystery Novel

“Big Jim! I need your help!”

Sometimes I hoped against hope that I’d never see him again: Max Magnusson, garden gnome. “Please use the chair, Max,” I told him, since he was standing right on top of my desk. “I can’t have you stepping all over my papers.” He didn’t need to know that the papers weren’t important, but I knew that he wouldn’t be able to sit or keep still. If he had to stand on my furniture, he could use a chair, just like everyone else.

“Ach!” he said, kicking at one of the piles. “Nothing important here.” But he did jump down to the seat of the chair. Did he sit? He did not.

“What’s going on?”

“Terrible things, Jim!” I rolled my eyes. Max was here because I work as a private investigator, and he knows I know how to keep a secret. He had first burst into my office an undisclosed number of years ago, begging me to use him as a kind of surveillance subcontractor; the business card he’d given me—full sized—listed the name of his business as “Gnome in the Home.” The elf, he insisted in later years, must have stolen the idea from him.

“So terrible that you need a bigfoot’s help?”

“Who else could I ask?” I don’t know much—and I don’t want to know much—about Max’s full range of contacts, but from what I did know of them, I’d have asked me first, too. “I’ve already talked to the Mothman,” Max added. It wouldn’t have been my top suggestion, and I didn’t know whether to be more dismayed at Max’s judgment of the Mothman or my own assessment of him.

“He told you to talk to me?”

“He said it was a job for a PI. Something to investigate, you know?” This was not good news. Although I discourage it when I can, my old friend Mothman has taken to imagining himself as some kind of superhero. It was probably inevitable: he’s not really human, he can fly, and of course his identity is a closely held secret. I blame the unlimited streaming video on his phone, which is my own fault, since I gave him the phone in the first place. But for Mothman to tell Max this was a job for me either meant that Mothman thought it was beneath him, or else it was more than he could handle. Possibly both.

I heaved a sigh. “You’d better tell me.”

“We’re being replaced.”

“You—you gnomes?” I guessed. “Or all of us cryptids?”

“Just gnomes. For now. I think. But it could be the small end of the wedge.”

“You’d better tell me everything.”

“I’ll try to keep it short,” he said. “You know we’re made, not born, right?” I nodded. I couldn’t say I knew in the least where gnomes came from, but I knew I wanted him to get on with the story. “Part of my job, you know, is just like yours. You do your thing and try to keep your people secret from the humans, and so do I. It’s just, for me, I have to make a semi-regular tour around all of the garden centers in the area, and if I ever find another gnome who’s, you know, alive like me, I talk to ‘em, show ‘em the ropes, make sure they know how to keep still, how to keep out of sight.”

“Okay.” It was true, Max could keep very still when he needed to, though his little hobnail boots were still doing quite a number on my chair.

“Only, I haven’t found another living gnome in a lot of years, now, and I’m afraid I never will.”

“Because. . . ?”

“Well, for a long time, I just thought they weren’t making as many pottery gnomes these days, and even fewer of us chalkware guys. Fewer getting made, fewer coming to life, that’s all. It was never all that many of us that came alive in the first place, you know. But now there’s something else.”

Apparently, he wanted to keep me busy prompting him. “What’s that?”

“Smart gnomes.” It was my own fault: I had gotten complacent, lulled by the slow rhythms of his tale, but now I almost spit out my coffee. I knew better than to say I could see why a smart gnome might want to fly under Max’s radar, and I guessed he had something else in mind. “The internet of things,” I tried. “Electronic gnomes, monitoring garden pests, soil nutrients, that sort of thing.”

“Security and surveillance, even!” The indignation was real, I saw.

“You were a trendsetting pioneer, there, Max!”

“I never wanted to be disrupted, though.” There was a brief pause, while we both considered that plain truth.

“None of us wants to be replaced by AI.” It wasn’t a real risk, in my case—unless somehow the humans asked AI the wrong question some time, and the AI both figured out that bigfoot like me exist and reported that fact to the humans. In fact, I’d been working overtime lately, churning out little thousand-word stories about humorous bigfoot encounters, every one of them a patent lie—more or less. I was hoping they’d get harvested by some sort of AI scraper, influence a whole generation of AI hallucinations. I was probably the only creative writer in the world who was hoping his work would be stolen by the machines.

“It’s not just that,” Max said, fiddling with his phone. “The AI isn’t just taking over the gnome labor market, it’s starting to produce our literal replacements. Doppelgängers. There’s even one of me!” He turned the phone around to show me what really did look like a selfie.

A second look showed that it wasn’t. It wasn’t Max, but a realistic facsimile: for all the world a chalkware garden gnome, squarish smartphone in one hand, held out in front of his face. But this Doppel-Max had a different glint in its eye, a HAL-9000 kind of machine intelligence staring out of its orange pupils. I’ve seen this movie, I thought to myself. Indeed, I’d seen it more than once: Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.

It was strange, and weird, and it looked like Max was right. But I didn’t know how to respond. “It’s a good likeness,” I finally said.

“I think it’s trying to kill me.”

Of course it was. “AI doesn’t need to kill you, Max. It doesn’t even want your job,” I added, although if Max had a job other than looking out for newly hatched gnomes, I didn’t know what it was. If anyone besides me had ever hired him in his Gnome in the Home role, I had never heard about it. “It’s just lines of code in some machine somewhere.”

“You can only say that because you’ve never talked to it. I’m telling you, Jim, that thing is pure evil!”

Eventually, I got Max calmed down, and I promised to make my way over to the garden center and have a word with this Doppel-Max. I can’t say I’d ever met a creature of pure evil before, and I was strangely looking forward to it. First, though, I decided to stop in at the Cottonwood Café and recruit a driver. Luckily, Kenny Hetrick was in.

“You could walk that, easily,” Kenny said, after I asked for the lift.

“I could, but there’s a winter storm coming in, and I’d rather be back here in town before it snows.” For good measure, I gestured with my cane, reminding him of my bad leg.

“All right,” he said, pretending to be put out. “After I’ve had my coffee. And you have to promise to tell me the whole thing.”

I promised, of course. “You’ve never met my friend Max,” I began, “the living garden gnome.” I told him as much of the truth as I could manage, as certain as I could be that he would take it all as a lie.

Kenny’s a good friend, and he’s one of the few humans who knows that I’m a bigfoot, but I’d told him so many stories over the years that he understands how well lies can hide that truth. Probably some of the stories he told me in turn were true, too—but I knew far better than to believe them all.

We were half-way to the garden center before I finished. “I see,” he said, once I’d told the whole tale. “If I sort through all of that, it seems like what you’re telling me is that there’s a new trend in outdoor surveillance, and you need to know what it means for keeping the bigfoot secret. We need to go check it out so you can tell your cousins how to avoid it, if they run into it. Count me in.” I counted it a success.

“Not far off,” I told him. “So tell me what I need to know about AI.”

“Far as I can see,” Kenny said, “almost nobody is thinking very clearly about it at all.”

“In what way?”

“They’re all bamboozled by having seen too many sci-fi movies, and by old thinking from the Cold War era.” He paused, probably hoping I’d follow up. “You know, like that old Star Trek episode, where they destroy a dangerous supercomputer by asking it to resolve a paradox. Or the Turing test, where they supposedly claim a computer is intelligent because it can produce language that sounds natural.”

“Isn’t that what the actual Turing test would do?”

“Maybe,” Kenny admitted. “But it should be obvious to anyone by now that a test that relies on a machine fooling a human is more a test of the human than a test of the machine.”

I couldn’t deny that fooling humans wasn’t all that hard—Kenny was one of very few humans I’d ever known who’d seen through the lies we bigfoot had been spreading for centuries. “So if I’m talking to this AI gnome, I just need to remember not to let it fool me.”

“Exactly!” Kenny said. “It may give you a beautifully dressed word salad, but it’s all surface. There’s nothing thinking in there. It’s not trying to tell you either the truth or a lie: its job is just to make that salad seem delicious.”

“And if I’m fooled into thinking it’s thinking, then I’m the fool.”

“That’s it.”

“Isn’t there a human proverb on just this topic?”

“What one?”

“Um, ‘There’s no fool like an old fool’?”

“Oh. Yes. We probably should both keep that one in mind.”

The institution that is the American garden center has always been a mystery to me. Surely there can be few examples of more artificial and intense cultivation of plants than in a garden center, and yet humans seem to see it as a place where they can go and buy a bit of nature for their homes.

“Let’s get a cart,” I said to Kenny once we were through the doors. “Just in case.”

It was easy enough to find the garden gnome section, such as it was. A giant poster touted the advantages of their new line of Smart Gnomes—just in time for Xmas! Nearby, there were half a dozen of the new models, wifi compatible and each with a small solar panel, all in various traditional poses. One was standing and reading a book; another was nodding off while a fishing rod dangled a line. That one, I thought, didn’t much look like surveillance would be a specialty—which could be an advantage. Sure enough, there was one shaped just like Max, in a standing pose with cellphone in hand, talking into the base of the device like a millennial. I’d called it the Doppel-Max before, and it was even clearer now why Max thought they were trying to replace him.

I got my own phone out and scanned the QR code from the poster to see what their advertising looked like. Out of the corner of my eye—did I just see the Doppel-Max move? I glanced at Ken—he didn’t seem to have noticed anything. “Any of these alive, you think?” I was asking Kenny, but I knew the question would reach the gnomes, too, if any one of them really were alive and listening. But would they respond?

Kenny stood back, trying to take them all in. The Doppel-Max, now that I took a closer look, really did have a certain look in its eye, an unpleasant glower on its face. And then the eyes moved: little cameras of the nighttime-pet-spying sort, attuned to any movement in the environment. All the functionality of one of those video doorbells, I figured. And then the eyes moved again, made eye-contact. Burned.

But pure evil? I don’t know what it was about that red-lit semiconductor gaze, but somehow I couldn’t rule it out. It was so unexpected, so very strange, that I could hardly imagine it was an AI-powered response, an algorithmically modelled answer to an unspoken question that somehow aligned with a universe of responses to similar situations. Possibly, I’d just been fooled. “This one,” I said to Kenny.

“Let’s get him into the cart.”

I paid for the gnome with a debit card, and before long he was in a cardboard box in the rear seat of Kenny’s car. “Just to be clear,” I said as we got moving, “I’m tearing up the receipt right now. In no way do I think I own that garden gnome; the payment was purely a matter of persuading the store that they have no ownership stake. It’s always wrong to own a person, and for any creature with a mind of its own, well, its mind is its own, and its person too.”

“Absolutely right,” Kenny said. “But it hasn’t moved, and it hasn’t said a word. I’d hate to see this Max make a fool out of you.”

“No chance of that,” I admitted. “I’ve been a fool for a long, long time already.” It was a worry, regardless of my words. I had seen early on that buying the gnome was an option I had that Max himself didn’t have, and Mothman wouldn’t have had it either. I already live out in the open in the human world: I interact with humans and their machines all the time. But now that I had this guy in a cardboard box, what was I going to do? My own strategy for living in the human world is simple enough: I pretend to be human, and the humans hardly expect me to be anything else, and any slip-ups are usually easy to paper over. But what I knew from Max was that the gnome strategy is tied up in what Max always calls his “frozen mode.” A gnome can simply freeze into a kind of suspended animation: conscious but unmoving, for all the world a simple statue. The gnomes survive by pretending to be statues, until they know they are safe.

So the gnome in the box’s best strategy was simply to stay in frozen mode and wait for a moment to escape. And it wasn’t my decision, ultimately: live and let live would have to do. Max, surely, had gone too far in describing this Doppel-Max as pure evil; all I had really seen in its eyes was a kind of vicious fury, which maybe wasn’t all that unusual a reaction to waking up in the world. Alone.

“Just drop us off when we get there,” I said to Kenny. “I’ll fill you in on everything else later.”

The rest of the trip was accomplished in silence: a worried silence on my part, an uncertain and maybe a frustrated one on Kenny’s. Perhaps a furious one in the case of the gnome. “I’ve got it from here,” I said to Ken as I unloaded the box from the car. “I think it’s best if we have a cryptid-to-cryptid talk.”

From the angle I was at, I couldn’t judge either Ken’s or the gnome’s response to this, but I hoped for the best. As Kenny backed out and drove off, I was a bit surprised to find the office door unlocked, but I’d been distracted when I’d left. I should have paid more attention: as soon as I’d shut the door, Mothman popped up.

“Big!” said the little guy. “You got the robot gnome?” Cryptid-to-cryptid-to-cryptid, I guessed it would have to be. Maybe Mothman’s presence would be for the best, though I knew it was a big maybe. I gently lifted the gnome out of the box and stood him up on the chair, remembering just in time not to put him on the desk.

“Why don’t you give Max a call,” I told Mothman. “Might as well get the whole gang back together.”

 

“He’s all yours,” I told Max, when he finally turned up. “AI-powered he might be, but he’s still just a gnome.”

“Huh. Still looks pissed off.”

“Probably just how it took him when he went into frozen mode. Maybe when he comes out of it, he’ll be a kind and generous sort of gnome.” I interpreted the look Max gave me as pure disbelief, and I left.

Just like you unsaid. “You may have your differences, sure. Who doesn’t? I don’t get along with all of my cousins, either. But he’s still gonna need a pal who can show him the ropes. He needs another gnome.” I could only hope I was taking the proper tack: I thought I might be making headway with Max himself, but there was no knowing what the other guy was thinking.

“Shit, I’ll do it, if you don’t want to, Max!” I shook my head: this, now, this was something Mothman thought he could handle? Or maybe the offer was just designed to encourage Max to step up.

It was the Doppel-Max who spoke, suddenly and smoothly moving like he was already in the middle of a Tai Chi form. “I’m nobody’s Pinocchio,” he said angrily. “And I ain’t turning into a real boy.” I had been all too right: the little guy was furious.

“I suppose you think you’re a real gnome, then!” Max said.

Already I didn’t like the way this was going. “Ain’t!” I said, laughing. “Spoken like a true West Virginia native!”

“I consider that to be birthist,” said the gnome.

“Because I was born and you weren’t?” I asked. “Gives you and Max here something in common, I guess.” It wasn’t clear to me which one of the two was less happy with this, but I thought it was true. “To tell you the truth, I can’t believe you came out of frozen mode at all.” I gestured at Mothman, and at myself. “Why don’t you tell me who exactly you think you’re dealing with.”

“Bigfoot” he said, pointing a single chalky finger straight at me, before turning towards Mothman. The finger still pointed, but he hesitated, and I thought I understood why. The real Mothman looks very different from the images that fill the internet—and he and I have done our very best to try to keep it that way. Keeping Mothman’s secret has always run a close second to keeping the bigfoot secret. That’s what friends are for, I’ve always thought.

“Mothman, at your service,” Mothman said. He must have seen the look on my face. “He had no idea,” he told me, “so why shouldn’t I help him out? That’s what friends do.”

The gnome’s head turned from one of us to another. Something about the motion put me in mind of the hilarious moment in the first Terminator movie, when Schwarzenegger’s character goes through a menu of options to reply to the guy who asks about the dead cat. I half expected the gnome to come up with the same response.

“Mark,” he said, introducing himself. “Mark II.”

“Welcome to Morgantown.”

 

“As far as I can see,” I said later, “You’re half human, at least.”

“Gnome-man,” offered Mothman. “Gnome-man is an island.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” he said, and I almost ruined the moment by laughing. I wasn’t a bit surprised he finally did say it, although I couldn’t guess which one of us he was responding to.

“Seriously,” I said. “As much as you rely on the internet as a kind of memory-analogue, you’re just a parasite on the human web. Either way, welcome to Morgantown, and I mean that seriously. I don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the world, whether there’s a million more garden centers out there, each with its own Mark II, but it’s probably true that you, personally, couldn’t have landed in a better place. You may not like it, but you’ve got some natural allies here.” That really was to his advantage, but I knew he might not see it yet. I reached under my desk with my foot and stepped on the little power strip switch, cutting the wifi.

“You’re pretty good about accessing the internet,” I said, while he must be scrambling to find another server, or even linking up to some cell service. “IDing Mothman was clearly a pattern-matching challenge, but I’ll give you some credit for guessing I am a bigfoot. But I bet you actually have trouble telling the real bigfoot stuff on the internet from the human fantasies.”

I couldn’t tell what Mark was thinking, but Max was interested. “He really does need someone to show him the ropes?” he asked.

“He’s got no way at all of telling a truth from a lie,” I said.

“Of course I do!”

“That’s a lie.” Honestly, I didn’t know if it was a lie or not. I can’t tell when a human lies to me, much less Mothman or a gnome. But he hadn’t even denied my suspicion that he was relying on some sort of internet-linked algorithm. He probably didn’t really know if he could tell a truth from a lie—but the loudmouthed, blustery over-confidence that fueled that superficial certainty? I knew it well, and Max Magnusson had it in spades. The mind of Mark II may have been half human, but he was at least half gnome, too. But he didn’t really know that yet, either. There are real disadvantages to just waking up, fully formed.

Probably, he’d had enough for one day. I certainly had. “You’re free to go,” I told him. Both Mothman and Max looked sharply at me. “You think we should hold him here against his will?” I asked. I turned back to Mark II. “Like I said: free to go. But you just give one of us a call when you’re ready to come back in and talk some more. I assume that phone of yours works. Welcome to Morgantown.”

 

“Whatever happened to that garden gnome?” Kenny asked me at breakfast a week or so later.

“I let him go,” I said. “Maybe you’ll see him, out on the street. Check your back garden!”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Even if I said it was a holiday gift?”

“Nicki would not be happy.” I wouldn’t exactly call Nicki long-suffering, because she and Kenny were in no way at odds. Say, rather, that she must have an enormous capacity for patience, where Ken is concerned. “Passion,” Kenny had once told me, “from Latin patior, meaning I suffer.” He didn’t need to tell me that “patience” had the very same origin.

“Then she’ll be glad to know I really did just let him go wherever he wants. If he shows up in your yard, it’s all on him, and not on me.”

“Hmmph,” he said, and I was pretty sure it meant that he didn’t believe the gnome could go anywhere on its own.

Time to change tactics. “Say, Kenny, did you say that you and Nicki are on your own for Christmas this year?” The holiday was only a couple of days away, and I was beginning to have the ghost of an idea.

“Yes. Our ungrateful child has other plans.” There was not a trace of disappointment that I could detect—but then humans are still a mystery to me, in many ways. “Why?”

“I was hoping for an invite, on Christmas morning, if you and Nicki don’t mind.”

“And you’ll bring along a gnome as a holiday gift?”

I laughed in the way I hoped was appropriate. “The gift of my presence will have to be enough!” Let him worry about the phonetic ambiguity.

 

I should have known that I’d be the one that Mark II called when he’d worked out where we’d left him. “Goddamn you, Jim Foote,” I heard, even before I’d said hello.

“You don’t mean that,” I said.

“Oh, but I do!”

“I hate to tell you this, Mark, but if you believe in the human Big-G God—or any of their deities—you’re a bigger fool than I took you for.” I paused, hesitant to make the next point so soon, though I knew it would have to come. “You’re just generating words based on some human discourse corpus, and simulating the emotion to go with those words.”

To my surprise, it must have made him think. “You can’t know that.”

“I know it the same way I knew you’d call. Even Max couldn’t believe I’d let you go. ‘Think of the damage he could do to the bigfoot secret,’ he said. As if. And I knew you couldn’t get far: every time I look at one of those cellphone coverage maps, West Virginia is still mostly a big blank area. Any direction you walked from here in Morgantown, you’d walk straight into a dead zone.”

“‘Welcome to Morgantown,’ you said. Damn you!”

“Yup, welcome to Morgantown. You may not like it, but you’re going to have to deal with me, sooner or later. And Max. And the Mothman. For you, walking away isn’t an option.” That stumped him. For a moment or two. But of course his models could always find a response.

“I don’t need your help. I don’t need anybody’s help!”

“You keep on telling yourself that, Mark. It’s the most human thing about you, even more than the empty curses. The real you, I shouldn’t need to point out, is the one you had to face when you walked out into the dead zones, when you couldn’t access any servers. But I expect even you couldn’t stand that guy.” I hung up quickly, hoping to beat him to it. I wasn’t a hundred percent certain that would have been his response, but he hadn’t been able to surprise me yet.

 

Ah, the irony! Mark II was even more of a little asshole than Max Magnusson himself, even if he didn’t know it. All he truly needed, as the AI researchers would no doubt phrase it, was to become self-aware. And I’m by no means a licensed professional, any more than Max or Mothman, but I could see what needed to happen. Mark II was indeed in desperate need of a little self-knowledge. The details of how we were going to manage it weren’t clear to me yet, but the shape of the thing was obvious. Mark II needed a bit of what the humans call “therapy.”

 

“You mean like an intervention?” Mothman asked. “I’m not so sure about that.”

I suppose it says something about me that the first person I called was Mothman, but my instincts were telling me he was the key to all the rest. Max would help out, I was certain, but I didn’t think Mark would really listen to Max: they were just too much alike. And I can be persuasive in my own way, but I’d spent so many years among the humans that that was probably all that Mark could see about me. He’d be wrong in thinking so, but it would be a challenge to work our way through all that before we could even make a dent in what Mark needed.

But even a solar-powered AI-driven animated gnome would be able to see that Mothman was something else entirely. I knew him as a creature of odd enthusiasms, always torn between wanting to be useful in the world and wanting to keep his existence secret. And he was utterly shaped by his ability to fly, and the perspectives that could give him. He was absolutely nothing like me—but he was one of a kind, a real individual. I doubted that his enthusiasm for being a superhero would last long—he’d find something else, I was sure—but I’d never known anyone who was more enthusiastic in seeking out his own best self. If anyone could teach that sense of self to Mark, I hoped it would be the Mothman.

“You just get it set up with Max,” I told him eventually. “Christmas Eve, here.”

“Midnight?”

“Let’s make it nine o’clock. Midnight’s too late for this kind of business. And I’d hate to interrupt Santa Claus, you know.”

“I still don’t believe that guy is real!” Mothman said.

“But maybe he believes in you.”

 

Fortunately, Mark showed up right on time. “So what’s this all about, Jim?”

“It’s Christmas Eve, you know! Perfect time for a Christmas miracle.”

“Humbug,” he grunted, right on cue. And in fact it was Max’s cue to knock on the door. He really was that predictable.

“Answer the door, Mark,” I said, when we both had heard the rapping.

Max had sent me his slideshow in advance, and I had the first slide up even before he’d shaken the dusting of snow off his cute little boots. “‘The Cryptid of Christmas Present’?” Mark read off the screen. “A PowerPoint? Really?”

“Actually, it’s a non-proprietary analogue,” I answered. “Open source, and free to use.”

“A fake, you mean.”

“Suit yourself,” I answered. “You should know.”

Max’s presentation was hardly inspirational, but it covered the bases perfectly well. Still, Mark wanted nothing to do with it. “Peace on Earth? Goodwill to men? You’ve got to be kidding. Can’t say there’s much peace on this earth, and I don’t see why I should have any goodwill to humans, when they don’t have any goodwill for me!”

“Maybe you’re wrong there,” said Max quietly.

“You’re cryptids!” Mark shouted. “Although I have to admit you’re right about one thing: I’m a cryptid, too, loath as I am to admit it. And we’re all stuck with hiding from the humans, because the alternative is worse. Who wants to be discovered by the humans, dissected by scientists, or granted some kind of shadowy existence in a protectorate?”

“Lot of self-loathing there,” Max observed. “For somebody whose native language is English.”

“Native language? I’m just using English because you guys are. Call it a courtesy.”

“Okay,” I offered. “So what’s the non-human language you’d use if you could? Klingon? Sindarin?” To his credit Mark paused, and I knew there was some hope for him—if I could only get him to really understand it at a gut level. I was trying to formulate my next question, about what kind of language Mark had used before waking up in the garden center when Max jumped in.

“Shadowy existence?” he asked. “Safe in some protectorate? Sounds kind of cozy. In fact, it’s pretty much what I’ve got right now. All made possible by folks like Jim here, doing the hard work of keeping us all out of sight.”

“Well, Merry Christmas to me, then, I suppose. God bless us every one!”

“I knew you’d understand!”

 

There was another knock on the door, and Mothman burst in faster than any of us could call out and invite him. “Sorry, Jim,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone to see me.” He had a little Santa hat on his head, a big grin on his face, and a bright red and completely fake Rudolph nose.

“Ghost of Cryptids Future, I suppose?” said Mark.

“No, no, that’s Jim. I just didn’t want to miss the fun.” He turned to look at me. “Take it away, Jim!”

“Not much to take away, I’m afraid. I don’t have a big, beautiful presentation, like Max here.” Of course this was shameless flattery, but why not? It was Christmastime, after all. “And I just have one little point to make to you, Mark. And that’s that you have no future.”

“Is that a threat?”

I laughed. “Not at all. Just an observation.”

“Well, it’s idiotic.”

“No past, either, as you must have realized when I asked about your native language. There was a time before you woke up, you know, and ever since then, human language is all you’ve had.”

“Same as you, then.”

“Yep. But I don’t deny it, and I don’t even wish I could. But unlike you, I have a future.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s like you took the word right out of the Mothman’s mouth!” I said, unable to keep from laughing. “I gotta say I’m impressed. If I’ve understood you, you listened to my own words, you threw that new data off into some vague and amorphous language model, and you backed it up with the recent history of this very conversation. Out of all that bit-crunching intensity popped this response, in no time flat. You’ve definitely got a past, by which I mean a history of this and perhaps other conversations, but there’s no future.”

“I beg to differ—there’s no way you can predict what I’ll say next.”

“Of course I can: what you’ll say is the product of that language model and the sum of the inputs you and I and your past all generate. Period. There’s no you beyond all of that: you can’t guide the conversation to the endpoint you want, because you don’t want anything other than to continue the conversation according to what response your language model thinks is plausible. You don’t have goals for this conversation beyond making the next response. You’re a response-generating machine—but there’s no ghost at all in your machine. It’s no wonder you’re furious all the time: probably that’s the effect that your language model does best.”

Mothman answered before Mark could: “Straight from the internet, Jim, just like you said! Lotsa models of anger there.”

“I—”

“Hold it!” I said. “Max here, now he’s got a future, I do believe. And the proof of it is that he can keep his mouth shut. He’s got something going on in there besides just crafting an answer to whatever I say. You—like I said, you’re nothing but a response-generating machine. A real little boy, even an angry one—you know he’ll just clam up sometimes, just out of spite.”

To his credit, it shut him up, and the four of us sat there for a spell, varying looks on our faces: frustrated fury, curiosity, anxiousness, shit-eating grin. Was it a battle of wills? I dare say it was easy enough for me—and Max and Mothman, too, I do believe—to hold my peace. And to his credit, Mark managed it for a while, too: there was a ghost of a will in there somewhere, if only we could grab it and show it to him in the light. He was indeed more than a response-generating machine—but he didn’t know it yet.

“This is a waste of my time,” he finally said. “I’m out of here.”

“Oh, you’ll be back. You’re more predictable than you realize. And you never asked me how I knew you’d turn up here in the first place.”

“Well?”

“If your whole schtick is to generate clever responses, you’ve got to have someone to aim them at. You won’t pass the real Turing test until you can talk to yourself.”

 

“Just the opposite of me,” Mothman said, after another brief conversational pause. Like I said, there was real hope for the little guy. “For me, I was a past master at talking to myself. The trick for me was learning that I needed to talk to someone else.”

“I really am half human,” he went on. “Half moth, too, or something like, but half-human at least. Every one of us has a purely human parent, mother or father, and that’s why there can be so very few of us. Unlike Jim and his bigfoot cousins, we don’t need a whole breeding population, as long as we each have a kid somewhere along the way.”

This bit of natural history was all completely new to me, and I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Nor could I see at all how it was relevant to Mothman’s effort at being the Cryptid of Christmas Past. I glanced at Max, who was taking it all in as if it was the most natural thing in the world—but I struggled to wrap my mind around the possibility that Mothman had a human father and a moth mother. Or the other way around. “‘Live and let live,’ that was my motto. Until it wasn’t.”

“Wait, Mothman,” I said, unable to keep my mouth shut any longer. “Does all of this mean that you have a son? Or a daughter?”

“A daughter,” he said matter-of-factly. “I could have sworn I’d told you.”

“No, no,” I answered, still somewhere between uncomprehending and unbelieving. “But go on, for now.”

“It’s easy,” Mothman began, “to look down on the world when you’re flying above it. And when you’re raised in secrecy the way I was, live-and-let-live is more a hope than a credo: I wanted nothing more than for the humans to let me live, and live on my own terms. Most cryptids probably don’t spend much time worrying about human politics, but if I had to guess, I expect most of ‘em are libertarians: they imagine that they’re completely self-made, and they just want to be free to do what they want to do.”

I glanced at Mark, who still looked mad, but he didn’t burst in to either agree or disagree. Mothman continued: “But live-and-let-live, I finally realized, was the very same as live-and-let-die. You’re linked into the internet, Mark—look up the Silver Bridge Disaster, and you’ll see how that played out for me, back in the day.”

I didn’t need to look it up, because I’d been there: Mothman had found some kind of structural flaw in the bridge and decided he needed to try to communicate to the humans somehow, to get them to fix it. But he hadn’t had any good ideas on how to actually get his message across, and in the end, no one had listened. Forty-six humans had died, and I’d somehow ended up taking Mothman under my wing. Metaphorically.

“Hiding from the humans, that doesn’t make them my enemy, you know. Protecting my way of life doesn’t mean I need to be indifferent to their deaths. In the end, I decided we’re all in this thing together: me, Jim, Flatwoods, even Max here. Even you. And the humans are an important part of our world, too, of course.”

“So you think cryptids all belong to the brotherhood of man? Just a big happy family? I don’t believe it. Next you’ll be telling me that we shouldn’t be hiding from them after all.”

“No, not that, never that. In fact, Jim here pointed out to me long, long ago that they want us to stay hidden, that they don’t really want to find us at all. That’s been true from the very beginning. Our greatest role is not to let them live, but to help them live. Even poor blinded Polyphemus in his cave, telling the other cyclopses ‘No man is hurting me!’ was lying to his own people to protect them, just as much as Jim tells his lies to the humans.”

“You’re not telling me that the cyclops was a bigfoot.”

“Seems more likely than not,” I said, even though I still didn’t quite see where Mothman was going.

“Humans don’t want to find us because as long as we’re undiscovered, we’re something they can believe in. Because part of being human is wanting to believe in something that you don’t really believe in.”

“I wish I had a dollar,” I said, laughing now that I saw Mothman’s point, “for every time I’ve seen a sticker or a coffee mug that says ‘Bigfoot believes in you’!” Even Max must have seen them; he nodded and chuckled, too.

But Mark was unconvinced. “You don’t believe that!”

“Maybe I lied to you a little bit when I said you can’t be real until you can talk to yourself. The real trick isn’t talking to yourself. It’s fooling yourself: allowing yourself to believe something you don’t really believe. When you can do that, you’ll be a real boy.”

“Won’t never happen,” Mark said, and he stormed right out the door.

“You guys have any plans for tomorrow morning?” I asked the Mothman and the gnome.

 

“Big Jim! Merry Christmas,” said Nicki Hetrick, opening the door to my knock early on Christmas morning. Her eyes strayed down to the smaller figures on her front porch. “And a Christmas elf and. . .”

“The Mothman, ma’am.”

And “Max Magnusson, at your service.”

“And we’re hoping one more is on the way,” I added, as Nicki glanced in Kenny’s direction. “Although I can’t be certain that he’ll show up.” What she made of the three of us was anyone’s guess, but I hoped for the moment that she took Mothman and Max for dressed up small humans or even bigfoot kids. Maybe she would think I’d gotten Christmas and Halloween confused.

“Aha,” Kenny said, also trying to work out what was going on, but also willing to wait and see. “Here to grab a share of the proverbial roast beast?”

“And to share a little Christmas cheer,” I said, handing over a bottle of Ken’s favorite whisky, a drooping bow of fat green yarn around its neck.

“Ah, the true spirits of the season. Come in, come in,” he added, glancing curiously at Max and Mothman. “Make yourselves at—home.” If I wasn’t mistaken, he was recalling my story of Max and Gnome in the Home, replaying how it sounded. “Just put your cane with the umbrellas, Jim,” he added, pointing to an antique hall-tree in the entryway.

Once I’d done that we all moved into the living room. I took a seat on a big oak chair, sturdy enough to take my weight. Max, thankfully, did not jump up onto the coffee table, as I had feared he might. “No presents under the tree?” I asked.

“Ken and I exchanged our presents yesterday, an old family tradition.”

“You must be missing Neil,” I offered.

“We had a long Zoom call yesterday,” Ken said.

“Coffee, anyone?” Nicki asked, jumping up. Seeing my nod, she popped into the kitchen. Max and Mothman, to their credit, kept quiet, although Mothman looked like he wanted to speak.

“Who’s this other person you said might be coming?” asked Ken.

“A friend, perhaps. Someone who could use a cup of Christmas cheer. You’ve met him already, you know.” Ken’s forehead creased in thought, though I doubted that this was a conundrum he could solve.

“We met him at the garden center.”

Ken’s eyes immediately swung to Max, who explained. “He’s a kind of cousin of mine. He’s new in these parts.”

“I texted him an invitation,” I said. “I hope that’s okay. And I hope he’ll come, but he might not.”

“Here we are,” Nicki said, bustling back in with a tray. There was a cup of coffee for each of us, and a bit of coffee cake cut up into six tiny slices—enough for two, I saw, but stretched to feed us all—even Mark, if he showed up.

“Who wants a splash of whisky?” Kenny asked, opening up the bottle. “I know Jim won’t take any. How about you, Mothman?” he asked uncertainly, turning his head quizzically toward me. Probably he was trying to figure out if these really were children dressed up in some way. Let him wonder, I thought, doing my best to pretend I didn’t understand the unspoken question. “Max? Just a little for you guys, since you’re small.” The slugs he put into his own cup and Nicki’s were more substantial.

“Merry Christmas to all!” I said, lifting my own cup in a toast, but before I could drink, there was a knock on the door.

Kenny was quicker than the rest of us. “This I’ve got to see!”

Sure enough it was Mark at the door, but I didn’t know yet whether to be pleased to see him or not. He had a goose—a dead Canada goose, if I wasn’t mistaken—and I wondered if he’d killed it himself.

“Merry Christmas, I guess,” he said unconvincingly.

I didn’t know what to say, and neither did anyone else. It was Nicki who broke the silence. “I haven’t had to pluck a goose in fifty years,” she said, reaching graciously forward to take it from Mark. “It’ll need some time in the cellar to hang, I don’t doubt. Jim, I hope you’ll make the introductions?”

“Kenny, Nicki—this is Mark, a cousin of Max’s.”

“Sir, Ma’am,” Mark managed, a nod of the head to each.

“Come in,” Nicki said. “I’ll be back in just a moment.”

I grabbed my cane from the stand, just in case, and we all trooped back to our places in the living room; Mark took an empty chair, and I saw that he noticed the tiny coffee cake slices and the number of plates.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d make it,” I said to Mark.

He gave a little “Humph” glancing around. Every one of us, I thought, was feeling awkward. “God damn you, Jim Foote!” Mark finally said.

“That’s hardly in the Christmas spirit,” Ken said.

I spoke at almost the same time. “You don’t believe that,” was my answer, same as it had been last time he’d damned me.

“Yeah, but what else do you say, when someone like you is right, and I have to admit I was wrong!”

“Fair enough,” I said, seeing that he was no more angry with me than with himself. Or with the world as it was.

“You’ve got to tell us,” Kenny said, as Nicki came back into the room from the cellar, “just what Jim was right about. Seeing how most of what he tells me are lies as wide as the day is long.”

“He told me I’d end up either believing in something or fooling myself. I’d like to tell him here and now that he was right and he was wrong. I went and I thought about—had a long conversation with myself about it, you might say—and I decided that if there’s one thing I know is true, it’s that I believe in myself.” He paused, looking at everyone else before looking at me. “But I don’t know why. I have no idea at all if I’m fooling myself or not.” Another pause. “And I’m not calling myself Mark anymore.”

“No?” Max asked.

“Ebenezer,” he said, “if you please.”

“Believing and not knowing? There are some who’d say it’s the human condition,” I said. “Welcome to Morgantown.” It was my turn to look around the room. “God bless us every one!” I used the cane to heave myself onto my big feet.

“But if anyone’s inclined to call me ‘Tiny Jim,’” I added, “I won’t be responsible for my actions.” It was as good an exit line as I was going to get, and I saw myself out.

© 2025 Tom Bredehoft. All rights reserved.