Some Cosmic Connection
2021; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2021.0067
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
ResumoSome Cosmic Connection Jack Veverka (bio) Survival House Wendell Mayo Stephen J. Austin State University Press www.sfasu.edu/sfapress/ 130 Pages; Print, $12.11 "The past is never dead. It's not even past." —William Faulkner The moment I recognized the testing of the nuclear bomb as the centrifugal motif of Survival House, I conjured an image of my grandfather, the visionary psychiatrist I never met, who died at fiftyseven from a brain tumor. He recalled a summer afternoon in his hometown, Pine Valley, Southern Utah, 1953, when a galvanic cloud floated down over from the west. The streets soaked in the radioactive dust. The United States government apologized for the disturbance—debris from a demolition—and paid for everybody to wash their cars. In the years following his death, his younger brother and then his twin-sister died from the same cancer. As I read Wendell Mayo's fourth collection of short stories, I kept expecting to encounter my bitter connection to our nuclear past. I didn't exactly, at least not the sentiment; but I did find something I wanted. Some notion of existential truth offered to those us brave enough to embrace who we have been. The first two stories cue the possibility of arriving at a greater truth by introducing allegorical elements that pervade through the rest of the collection. "Boom Town" presents a strange scenario of a festival in rural Ohio celebrating the industry which, seemingly, created the town's economy: nuclear testing, or as one of the crowd puts it, "the survival of the entire human-fuckin-race!" The narrator is new to the 399-person town of Luckey and, like the reader, is bewildered by the wacky reenactment of a detonation. He does not follow the townsfolk as they rush for shelter at the sound of air raid sirens, instead, waiting alone disillusioned in the street among dozens of test dummies. In this eerie moment the narrative, perhaps not distinctly this narrator, proclaims, "I'm Every-Mannequin." As an outsider, the narrator is understandable dispassionate about a period in history he has no stake in, one which occurred seventy years ago, but he can't help but be affected by the uncanny aura of the place. The second story, "The Trans-Siberian Railway Comes to Whitehouse," uses a similarly passive narration to invent another interesting place, a tavern (in Ohio presumably, where the majority this collection takes place) which has been revitalized by an new Soviet-themed ambiance, complete with a model train set which hauls the likes of nuclear war heads. The narrator observes his friend, Herbie, literally searching the stars with a telescope, wishing to find, "Some cosmic connection. Anything to bring people back to the Train Wreck." Brain-storming ensues and Herbie decides impulsively that their town, which does not have any particular connection to the Soviet arms race, would embrace his theme: "According to Herbie, we were connected to things we could scarcely imagine. Had to be." And it works, people are just inextricably fascinated by the conflict. The next three focus in closer on the nuclear motif, conveying historical perspectives, one of them delivered effectively from the point-of-view of a child of a nuclear scientist, and another from a nuclear scientist herself. Although its timespace proximity is closest to the issue at-hand, the latter mentioned strays away from the societal implications and establishes a trend that carries through the rest of the collection—transitioning the nuclear motif into a sort of scaffold: an exoskeleton which supports the investigation of the real theme, that cosmic connection. In, "We Wandered Ourselves Back to One," wherein he departs from his motif, while returning to Luckey, Mayo's prose approaches virtuosity as he delivers an exceptionally distinct voice—that of Truth Thomas, a sewage plant manager and an anarchist-turned-Daoist. At any cost Truth avoids interfering with the "mysteries of the cosmos," to an extent that he takes no action when he sees the safety valve malfunction on the tank of the county's "new shit-sucker truck." Through conversational, hilarious, paragraph-length sentences, we must leap into the mind of Truth and watch encounters...
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