Winston-Salem, NC: C&R Press, 2019. 182 pages. $18.00.
Caleb Michael Sarvis’s short story collection Dead Aquarium or i don’t have the stamina for that kind of faith address a simultaneous sense of banality and heartbreak with one voice, setting contemporary sufferings in apocalyptic landscapes. Touched with mundanity, realism, and sense of inescapability from inevitable disasters, this refreshing collection is sporadically sparked with moments of absurdism that rescue it from a wholly post-modern bleakness. Walking this line between an outright-absurdist text and one which seems to hold a desire to be felt by its readers sincerely and precisely, Dead Aquarium tours its audience through everything from impending divorces to a drowning infant squirrel which “spasms like a nightmare” in a gutter. Both the real and the unreal crash into Sarvis’s narrators, leaving behind a sense that the hallucinogenic and the realistic are both capable of bearing significance, impact, and deep worthiness of being read.
In the novella “Emerson,” for example, Xavier sees a talking miniature T. rex named Sebastian, witnesses the dedication of an ineffective superhero, and both supports and spars with twin boys whose chaotic habits for drinking and stealing construction equipment threaten the town’s very infrastructure. While the pieces in Dead Aquarium are not structured with a shared narrative, their mutual alcoholism, wonder, defeatism, and moments of unexpected loveliness bind them together in something that falls between a collection and a short story cycle. Together the stories seem to gesture at the place between destitution and triumph, embracing both harsh realities and vivid fantasies with similar weight and care. In this treatment of addiction, boredom, and desperation, Sarvis offers his readers a way to comprehend how the impossible can become a critical way of exploring and surviving the actual.
Situated with a strong sense of place in and around Florida, Sarvis features storms, alligators, and romantic exes treading the same literary streams. The narrator of “Terra” sets up an accidental community in his backyard as people gather to watch a Jaguars game before a hurricane strikes. The speaker’s ex-wife streaks across the TV in a promotional stunt where she jumps out of a helicopter despite the pending storm. When the feed cuts out before she lands, the speaker feverishly calls the charity his ex-wife is jumping for to ask if she made it, and in response he receives a string of enthusiastic proclamations that exemplify Sarvis’s wit, humor, and dedication to quick and incisive sentences. The woman on the telephone tells him:
She was amazing. She was a bullet then an albatross. A bomb and then an angel. When she landed I thought there was an earthquake, the applause was unanimous. She never even opened a parachute, either.
The woman goes on to say of the speaker’s ex-wife and her stunt that “America is proud. We can believe again.” These ambiguous but declarative sentences, filled with a bizarre but intoxicating heroism, are rife throughout Dead Aquarium, and work to bring life to impossible ways of being and feeling. A man watches a sports game, drinks, and experiences longing for his ex-wife; in Sarvis’s hands, this situation explodes into a story of a storm, an impossible jump, a family living beneath a tree, and more, all without losing its core of realistic and empathy-inviting desperation. The feelings of these stories are familiar but are made fresh by their position in and among absurd acts, people, and bodies. Alongside the narrators of this book, readers will wait expectantly as hurricanes and misplaced statues of koalas seem to cut through the pages with equal gravity, unveiling Sarvis’s talent for portraying the everyday and the ridiculous within a surprisingly-believable coexistence.
As it exhibits the odd in contrast to the everyday, Dead Aquarium also carefully and disturbingly peculiarizes the normal. For instance, the “knobby and soft” object in the story “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” resting in an Italian salad alongside grape tomatoes, is described as “a leather-coated rock” and is, in fact, a woman’s detached thumb crowning the spinach. Baylee blames the loss of her thumb on the cold winter, though as the story develops, the circumstances of her detachment become complicated by her tenuous relationship with her husband, Roscoe, who is preoccupied with making robots. At a moment of significant connection with Roscoe, Baylee’s thumb “hops out of her pocket” and “attaches itself to its rightful place” as if a piece of machinery. Conversely, while the organic is mechanized, we see a robot in need of work that “wobbles like a baby deer” and advocates for its own completion. What constitutes a body and what constitutes a machine are things made almost synonymous in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” allowing the panini-press mouth of Roscoe’s creation to possess a human desire while Baylee’s detaching thumb is given predictable mechanics to both attach and separate in the cold of either winter or isolation.
The story ends with snow falling outside the window, a moment in which the quick mention of winter and cold weather is able to build on the story’s premise, heightening the falling snow into something that prophesizes further marital disconnection. The architecture of this story, as well as the others in the collection, show an attention to detail and showcase Sarvis’s ability to commit to the individual image. In doing this, Sarvis is trusting his readers to invest in the nonsensical as a vehicle for revealing how bizarre, painful, and unbelievable the real circumstances of life can be. We may be reading about Baylee’s involuntary amputation with all of our fingers attached, but certainly the ache of growing distant from a loved one and detaching from parts of oneself in the process is something many people have known. Sarvis tells us the snow falls, and, with the story that precedes this, we get all the information of coming loss in an instant. We are not told about loneliness, we are instead allowed to feel it.
Within scenes of substance-dependence, the protagonists of Dead Aquarium begin to open to coexistence and culpability, but none quite arrive at complete recoveries. Left in the lurch of possible upward momentum, these stories avoid a moralism that might reduce each character to an AA promotion, and instead leave space for the meaning of these narrative arcs to be more open, fluid, and experiential rather than didactic.
This collection imparts a look into grief-flooded lives led by people who are often complicit in their own sinking. Drugs, beer, and bourbon circulate through these narratives as if passed from one protagonist to the next. However, even given its themes of futility and struggle, moments of affection and connection shine through and show humanity in the midst of despair and disillusionment. Experimental, jarring, and naked in its vivid depiction of human desperation, Dead Aquarium presents the reader with a drowned fish and then gently dooms them to fall in love with it.
