CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

“Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he has yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid’s mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son’s hand. I see the pain I’ve caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam’s body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone.”

This is the last paragraph of the collection’s title story. The protagonist, killed by Sam, is able to gain insight into his past. Saunders’s choice to include Sam’s backstory here is done in an effort to show that every action, even the most inhumane, often has reason and counterweight attached to it. This stands in contrast to simply calling a killer “evil,” as that is a way of not attaching logic to the act of murder and dismissing it as an act that exists without any possible sociological context. We also see the irony in the action of the protagonist trying to change Sam now that he’s dead, and it’s too late to make a difference.

“The first great act of love I ever witnessed was Split Lip bathing his handicapped daughter. We were young, ignorant of mercy, and called her Boneless or Balled-Up Gumby for the way her limbs were twisted and useless. She looked like a newborn colt, appendages folded in as she lay on the velour couch protected by guardrails. Leo and I stood outside the window on cinder blocks, watching. She was scared of the tub, so to bathe her, Split Lip covered the couch with a tarp and caught the runoff in a bucket. Mrs. Split Lip was long gone, unable to bear the work Boneless required. She found another man and together they made a little blond beauty they dressed in red velvet and paraded up and down the aisle at St. Caspian’s while Split Lip held Boneless against him in the last pew, shushing her whenever the music overcame her and she started making horrible moaning noises trying to sing along.”

This is the opening paragraph of the collection’s second story. In Saunders’s worlds, nearly everyone seems to lose: Split Lip, despite being a murderer, suffers for having to care of his child, Isabelle. Isabelle, through no fault of her own, knows only difficulty in her life. Fundamentally, the worlds that Saunders creates are unfair ones: the deck is stacked. Saunders also purposefully dehumanizes Isabelle here, in order to re-humanize her at the end of the story.

“‘Please no,’ Split Lip said. ‘Who will care for my child?’ […] Norris paused, thinking, then blew his own brains out across the yellow wall.”

Saunders employs irony, in that what the reader doesn’t expect in this scene is for Norris to kill himself. Separately, Saunders turns Norris’s character once more: originally introduced as meek and caring, Norris, after the death of his brother, becomes a vigilant wino, vowing to take Split Lip’s life. Here, Saunders returns Norris to at least something akin to his original, caring self, though to do so, he has to take his own life.

“By then I was selling the hell out of Buicks at night. So I got a little place of my own and moved her in with me. Now we’re pals. Family. It’s not perfect. Sometimes it’s damn hard. But I look after her and she squeals with delight when I come home, and the sum total of sadness in the world is less than it would have been. Her real name is Isabelle. A pretty, pretty name.”

These are the closing lines of the collection’s second story. It’s never revealed, up to this point, why the story is called “Isabelle.”The word appears in the narrative only once in its penultimate sentence, despite appearing at the top of every other page, as the title of the story. The subtext of this is Saunders illustrating how Isabelle’s humanity has been there all along, if only someone would actually see it and install in her the dignity she deserves.

“So the upshot of it all is more guilt for me, Mr. Guilt.”

Guilt haunts multiple protagonists in the collection. In this case, the protagonist’s guilt extends from acting irresponsibly and in such a way where a child, Clive, is killed. Clive’s ghost is the protagonist’s guilt personified; the spectral version of the boy appears nightly at the protagonist’s bedside, providing details of the life he now never gets to have.

“Finally Simone’s ready and we walk over to Employee Underground Parking. Bald Murray logs us out while trying to look down Simone’s blouse. On the side of the road a woman’s sitting in a shopping cart, wearing a grubby chemise.”

While these sentences are non-essential to the broader plot of the narrative, they showcase two aspects common to all stories in the collection. First, there is the purposeful, needless capitalization of a component of corporate infrastructure: “Employee Underground Parking.” This capitalization places all things corporate first. Second, the description of the woman in the shopping cart is a way for Saunders to communicate tone through description. The protagonist and Simone are at odds with one another in this scene, and the image of the woman in the cart is able to highlight that discomfort indirectly, reinforcing the uncomfortable uncertainty between the couple.

“I go out and wait for [Simone] by Loco Logjam. I sit on a turnstile. The Italian lights in the trees are nice. The night crew’s hard at work applying a wide range of chemicals and cleaning hair balls from the filter. Some exiting guests are brawling in the traffic jam on the access road. Through a federal program we offer discount coupons to the needy, so sometimes our clientele is borderline. Once some bikers trashed the row of boutiques, and once Leon interrupted a gang guy trying to put hydrochloric acid in the Main Feeder.”

Saunders normalizes the abnormal, and this can be seen as a mode of hyperbole. It’s uncommon for theme park guests to pour dangerous toxins into the water of aquatic park attractions; it’s not uncommon for employees to get used to just about anything at a position, if they’ve been there for long enough, and treat such actions as commonplace. The latter happens consistently, if not virtually constantly, in the collection.

“‘I don’t hate you,’ he says, ‘but I can’t have you living on this earth while my son isn’t.’ […] ‘I understand,’ I say.”

Characters both minor and major find themselves ensnared by poor and/or ridiculous lines of thinking in order to either justify their own bad actions. There’s a bizarre and subtextual anti-logic to what the father says. Effectively, if his dead son could somehow again be alive, then the father wouldn’t have to kill the protagonist. This makes no sense, once unpacked; ironically, the protagonist claims to understand.

“A storm rolls in over the hills and brochure describing a portrait offer gets plastered to my chest. Lightning strikes the slaughterhouse flagpole and the antelope scatter like minnows as the rain begins to fall, and finally, having lost what was to be lost, my torn and black heart rebels, saying enough already, enough, this is as low as I go.”

These are the concluding sentences of the story and offer only ambiguity in regard to the fate of the protagonist; it seems just as possible that he’ll take his own life as it does that he’ll pull himself up and make positive changes.

“At noon another load of raccoons comes in and Claude takes them out back of the office and executes them with a tire iron. Then he checks for vitals, wearing protective gloves. Then he drags the cage across 209 and initiates burial by dumping the raccoons into the pit that’s our little corporate secret. After burial comes prayer, a person touch that never fails to irritate Tim, our ruthless CEO. Before founding Humane Raccoon Alternatives, Tim purposefully backed his car over a frat boy and got ten-to-twelve for manslaughter. In jail he earned his MBA by designing and marketing a line of light-up Halloween brooches. Now he gives us the brooches as performance incentives and sporadically trashes a bookshelf or two to remind us of his awesome temper and of how ill-advised we would be to cross him in any way whatsoever.”

This is the opening paragraph of the story. Here, we learn of the business model of Humane Raccoon Alternatives, along with the personality of boss Tim. The subtext of this is that there is a ruthlessness to the spirit of late American consumer capitalism—most embodied by entrepreneurialism and getting ahead of the competition at any and all costs, including lying and murder.

“These days commissions are my main joy. I’m too large to attract female company. I weigh four hundred. I don’t like it but it’s beyond my control. I’ve tried running and rowing the stationary canoe and hatha-yoga and belly staples and even a muzzle back in the dark days when I had it bad for Freeda, our document placement and retrieval specialist. When I was merely portly it was easy to see myself as a kind of exuberant sportsman who overate out of lust for life. Now no one could possibly mistake me for a sportsman.”

Jeffrey describes his obesity, for which he is consistently ridiculed by his co-workers. His low self-esteem, which extends from perhaps a lifetime of being made to feel Other, ultimately leads to him killing his boss and deciding to make himself boss.

“But Tim’s the boss. His T-shirt says: I HOLD YOUR PURSE STRINGS IN MY HOT LITTLE HAND.”

The amoral boss is a recurring figure in the stories in this collection. Despite there being moments, from bosses (such as Oberlin and Albert, in “Bounty”) where they would seem to be even-handed and democratic with employees, the sentence on Tim’s t-shirt is the bottom line, and underlings are never allowed to forget it.

“How do people get like this, I thought. Can they change back? Can they learn again to love and be gentle? How can they look at themselves in the mirror or hang Christmas ornaments without overflowing with self-loathing?”

Jeffrey offers these lines in response to overhearing the interaction between Tim and a woman that Tim invites to his BDSM sex dungeon. In so many instances, we encounter characters who seem to have had the humanity removed from them: Leo, in “Isabelle”; Tim, in this story; and most of the world, in “Bounty,” among other examples.

“Why defend someone who has no desire to be defended?”

This rhetorical question can be applied to a number of characters in the collection: Isabelle; the protagonist from “The Wavemaker Falters”; Mary, from “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror”; and Connie, the protagonist’s sister from “Bounty,” among others. If there is an ungiven answer that is perhaps proved by the protagonist in “Isabelle” becoming Isabelle’s caretaker, it would be: because it’s the right thing to do.

“What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.”

This line from Jeffrey is something that every protagonist in the collection could be heard saying. Barring “Isabelle” and “Bounty,” the fates of characters in the remaining five narratives go from not so good to worse over the course of their respective stories.

“Maybe the God we see, the God who calls the daily shots, is merely a subGod. Maybe there’s a God above this subGod, who’s busy for a few Godminutes with something else, and will be right back.”

Religion plays a prominent role in the collection; there are cases where theological tenets of goodness and virtue motivate protagonists to do the right thing (“Isabelle”), and there are cases where such tenets are considered but are failed to be acted upon (Jeffrey, in “The 400-Pound CEO”). As often, if not more so, there are cases of characters co-opting religion to justify their amoral actions (for example, Leo, in “Isabelle”). In this quote, Jeffrey attempts to understand the universe through effectively providing a corporatized version of Christianity: the boss is gone, and there’s some really bad, evil underling boss filling in for the actual boss, but just for a short while.

“Rockettown’s our ghetto. It’s called Rockettown because long ago they put a building there in which to build rockets. But none were built and the building’s now nothing, which is what it’s always been, except for a fenced-off dank corner that was once used to store dilapidated fireplugs and is now a filthy day-care for children of parents who could care less. All around Rockettown little houses went up when it was thought the building would soon be full of people making rockets and hauling down impressive wages. They’re bad little houses, put up quick, and now all the people who were young and had hoped to build rockets are old and doddering and walk by the empty building mumbling why why why.”

On multiple occasions, Saunders looks back in time to analyze the promise of industry for specific communities. This happens here and also in “Isabelle,” where we see white flight drive down property prices and have unemployment rise due to industry leaving the area.

“‘You were alone in the world,’ it says, ‘and did a kindness for someone in need. Good for you. Now post this module, and follow this map to the home of Mrs. Ken Schwartz. Care for her with some big money that will come in the mail. Fine someone to love. Your heart has never been broken. You’ve never done anything unforgivable or hurt anyone beyond reparation. Everyone you’ve ever loved you’ve treated like gold.’”

These are the last sentences of the story and speak to the moral ambiguity of the protagonist. In one way, his final act of erasing his own memories is selfless, in that doing so gains Mrs. Schwartz a better life, for her final days. In another way, his act is selfish, in that he’s also able to absolve himself of his own guilt surrounding his final fight with his partner, Elizabeth, which occurred on the day she died.

“It feels good to finally be asserting oneself.”

Moments of self-assertion in the narratives comprising the collection rarely work out well for those making them. On the majority of occasions that characters take matters in to their own hands, those actions spell doom. This is due to the selfish nature inherent in these actions. Exceptions to this are the protagonists’ actions in “Isabelle” and “Bounty.”

“‘Company spirit, lad,’ Albert says. ‘It’s the rudder on the otherwise wild boat of personal self-interest.’”

While the protagonists in the collection’s stories most often find themselves hemmed in by corporate policy and procedure, there are instances in which not adhering to said policy and procedure proves damning for the parties involved. We see this in “The Wavemaker Falters” and in “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror.” In both instances, the respective protagonists place self-interest before procedure, and suffer for it.

“He believed in people. He believed in the people on the other side of the wall.”

This is said about the protagonist’s father in “Bounty.” The notion of belief in others is largely absent and/or crushed in the collection. In the place of belief is monetization and hierarchy; those who do believe blindly in strangers are taken advantage of.

“‘Oh my God am I ever generous with my Employees. I prefer to call them Employees. Either that or Involuntary Labor Associates.’”

Here, a slave trader in “Bounty” manipulates the person selling the protagonist into believing he has an iota of care for the protagonist’s well-being. This is done by utilizing euphemistic language and titles. Shortly after, this same man beats the protagonist with boat oar for days upon days.

“‘Ask yourself this: if you’d go through all you have to save your sister, what would you do to save a million sisters? Imagine a Connie in every town you’ve passed through, Connies of all ages […] You could help give them dignity, a chance at careers children, homes, husbands, peaceful dotages. Isn’t that something to work towards? Wouldn’t that be a way of honoring Connie’s memory?’”

These questions, asked by Judith, leader of a revolutionary group, can be applied to the collection as a whole, and asked of many characters: will you put yourself first, or will you try to affect change in the largest way possible?