This post is the work of Rob Kunzig, a recent Kenyon College graduate.
A few months ago, my father was servicing an elevator when a safety disengaged and the car fell on his head. He was flown by helicopter to a hospital in northern Delaware where he was received in a stable, but severely traumatized, condition. While CAT scans were conducted, my mother called with the news, and I booked a pair of tickets to Philadelphia International. In my carry-on I tossed one book: The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, edited by Tobias Wolff. I chose a book of shorts because I wasn’t sure my father’s anesthetized brain could clutch on to a longer narrative; I chose a book at all because I had faith in literature’s power to soothe, or at least distract.
How stupid of me to forget that some short stories, and those in Wolff’s volume in particular, rely on sudden emotional injury–bad medicine for a man laid up in a bed in the Shock-Trauma Intensive Care Unit.
On the flight home, I paged through the old favorites assigned for a sophomore-year fiction workshop. Little stars were inked next to the titles on the contents page: Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs,” Stuart Dybek’s “Chopin in Winter,” Stephanie Vaughn’s “Dog Heaven,” Robert Stone’s “Helping,” Denis Johnson’s “Emergency.” I remember liking “Emergency,” so I turned to that first. It didn’t take long to realize that this would not do. Second page:
Around 3:30 a.m. a guy with a knife in his eye came in, led by Georgie.
“I hope you didn’t do that to him,” Nurse said.
“Me?” Georgie said. “No. He was like this.”
“My wife did it,” the man said. The blade was buried to the hilt in the outside corner of his left eye. It was a hunting knife kind of thing.
My father had already survived one nightmare, and asking him to endure Johnson’s nightmare-vision of two ER orderlies strung out on LSD was asking too much. It’s not that “Emergency” is too blood-and-guts (though at one point Georgie notes “There’s so much goop inside of us, man”); actually, candied spurts of blood might help distract from the aching emotional vacancy, the deep shadow to the shallow gore. When the narrator accidentally crushes a huddle of baby rabbits, it’s not the violence that unsettles, but rather the fact that he was trying to keep them warm, trying to save them.
I thought “Rock Springs” might be a better choice. I remembered a rougeish couple on the lam, the nuclear family exploded and reassembled in a stolen car. I wanted the inevitable dark side to be lurking subtext; I wanted, absurdly, something fun.
“Rock Springs” is about abandonment. The narrator lives his life fleeing forged checks and arrest warrants, and in order to give his daughter “a better shake in things,” he shacks up with Edna, who agrees to leave for Florida with him on a “Why not.” Mechanical problems cause the trio to divert into a town called Rock Springs. The narrator discovers that the “big lighted assemblage of white buildings and white lights“looking like some unbelievable castle” that overshadows the town is actually a gold mine, and is awestruck: How can such treasure be so unprotected, so forgotten? “I thought there should’ve been a wall around it with guards,” he thinks, “instead of just the lights and no fence.”
Naturally, the narrator knows that love in his lifestyle is just a matter of who leaves first, and when Edna announces her intentions to disappear on a Greyhound the next morning, he’s angry, but not surprised. The story ends with him browsing among cars in a hotel parking lot, possibly shopping for a preemptive getaway. So complete is his isolation that he turns to the reader: “what would you think,” he asks “a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night, looking in the windows of cars“Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come to him? “Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? “Would you think he was anybody like you?”
Whatever was dripping into my father’s arm from an IV bag, it wasn’t the ringing loneliness struck by “Rock Springs.” My mother, brother and I would be spending days by his bed, and to tell him a story about abandonment would seem antithetical, counterproductive.
The rest of the stories were similarly disqualified. Their power was not healing–not the right kind of healing, anyway, not the gentle medicine needed to coax a mind out of terror and nightmare. The surgeons were waiting for my father’s swelling to go down before they “introduced more trauma” to his wounds with reconstructive surgery; likewise, I would have to wait for his eyes to open before I read him “Rock Springs” so he knew that I was reading it, and that I would not leave him.