There is always a forgetting in the remembering: Nervosities by John Madera

Nervosities, the debut short story collection from New York City based writer John Madera opens halfway around the world, amid the congested narrow laneways and confluence of contradictions that is Varanasi. An unnamed narrator has arrived in the holy city from his home in the unholy city of Las Vegas, in 2006, just days before a series of bomb blasts will render the city of funerals even more funereal. In the meantime, he will submit to the rhymes and rhythms of the place, driven by his own solemn agenda:

Think of me as a pilgrim—why not?—but not one tinkling bells, lighting candles or incense, clapping hands to wake up a god; not a seeker of relics, of transcendence, of release from earthly indignities, but as one contemplating the calamity of his life, one regarding ancient ruins as mirrors of his own rubble; or, instead, as a man with an unclean spirit like one of those biblical unfortunates wandering around vacant spaces, seeking solace and never finding it; an extinguished man; or perhaps as a man in pain seeking a cure for an illness he knows there is no cure for because what can cure nothing when something, no, countless somethings were the cause of that nothing?

In a crowded environment, filled with constant sensory stimulation, suddenly set off course by unexpected violence, the narrator finds himself caught up in his own recollections, justifications, questions, and commentaries, drifting off, more than once, into a sea of ellipses. There is, in his mind, only one reason to come to Varanasi, and to that end he is unwavering.

If this story, “Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs,” is any indication of what one can expect in the thirteen stories that will follow, it is that you can expect the unexpected. Initial collections like this, drawn as they tend to be, from material written and often published over an extended period of time, can be weighed down by a certain degree of sameness. Not so in this case. Madera’s stories are surprisingly energetic, varied and frequently experimental. Having said that, his typical narrator/protagonist does tend to be a rather damaged, neurotic specimen, even if each one is damaged in his (and occasionally her) own way.

“Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan” for example, follows the attempt of a man to find a place for himself back in the city after a period away (for reasons that are revealed in due course), but the accommodation—basically the couch—he was promised is revoked at the last minute, leaving him ready to go with no place to be:

And so the solitary unmoored himself from the boondocks and soon found himself standing on a familiar platform facing a familiar map and looking at encircled words, which said, “YOU ARE HERE,” the solitary feeling strangely flattened, not two-dimensional but emptied, without substance at all. How could he be there if he was here? He was not there, could not be there, but the map said he was there but here he was, here, standing on a familiar platform facing a familiar map feeling he was misreading it as well as being misread by it, feeling he was neither here nor there, feeling he was something real made increasingly abstract, tapering and tapering until he finally disappeared, which reminded the solitary of the many moments he had trouble with touchless, movement-sensitive machines, like towel dispensers and toilet flushers, automatic lighting and verbal address systems, non-contact toilet switches, each one failing to register his presence, as if remarking on his insubstantiality, the home security alarms failing to go off, marking him as the very definition of a false alarm. Where was he then if he was not here? Who was he if he was not here?

He does manage to secure temporary lodgings, first house- and pet-sitting for a friend, then at the apartment of a “friend of friend,” while a job and a more permanent placement remains elusive. Unmoored and haunted by absences, he finds the most unlikely companionship in an eccentric homeless man.

Madera’s characters, misfits, migrants, lonely widows, seem to come up against a world in which the everyday challenges of life are amplified or twisted. A fondness for vivid, visceral vocabulary and long serpentine sentences lend his stories their own particular momentum. He often engages in verbal playfulness—”I had been albatrossed to the job for so long now” or  “she spandexes her legs”—and allows his narrators, amid the drama and trauma of their lives, to pull up observations that speak, not only to the business of living, but the way we tell stories about it:

Relying on your memory, I realize, or trusting your memories is like dreaming your life instead of living it, existing, if you could call it that, in a space where details and so-called facts are played and replayed before your eyes, where you shuffle them, perhaps, into some kind of order but really haven’t done anything, made any real choice, and while you think you’re seeing what you should see in order to make a decision, you’re actually trusting in what you’ve imagined instead of paying attention to what is happening all around you. At the same time, I also know that to reject memory and memories would reduce me to being merely an actor acting without thinking, a dangerous man, in fact, dangerous mainly to himself.

The range of themes, voices, and settings packed into this collection is wide—each piece heads into fresh territory and even those that may touch on familiar ground, say, the mind of a traumatized soldier, are approached from original angles. Together, the stories gathered in Nervosities offer slices of contemporary American life and culture reflected in a cracked funhouse mirror, frequently dark but always honest.

Nervosities by John Madera is published Anti-Oedipus Press.

Author: roughghosts

Literary blog of Joseph Schreiber. Writer. Reader. Editor. Photographer. View all posts by roughghosts