On There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories
There’s a temptation to say that Brad Watson’s stories, beginning with 1996’s Last Days of the Dog-Men and ending with Watson’s death in 2020, got stranger over the years, but I don’t think that’s quite right. The late stories are wildly strange, though. Take a look at the newer pieces gathered in the posthumous There Is Happiness—the scheming zookeeper, mauled and eaten one night, whose essence lives on, somehow, in a leopard’s “mighty defecation.” Or the shamed survivor of a car accident, who, that story’s theory goes, begins to undergo a “curious change,” growing “younger, until she resembled herself before her marriage,” before the “insanity slowly enveloped her shame and began to mold it into something altogether different, a form of clairvoyance, clairaudience, including the ability to read auras, so that she could see people on the sidewalk or in stores or in cars or on bicycles, in a new and profound way. She could tell which of these people were either evil or possessed the capacity for evil.” No one ever solves the string of murders that follows, the memories fade, years go by, the woman hiding out in the desert working as a waitress, with only “Elizabeth Bob,” a kind of sentient wig stand for company.
But there’s plenty in the late work that isn’t all that strange—divorce and hard drinking and strained parenting and the grief of a lost brother—elements you’ll see again and again in the earlier stories as well, not to mention in most any account of Watson’s own life.
And strangeness abounds in those earlier stories, too. The title novella of 2010’s Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, for example, with its young couple—high schoolers, pregnant, eloped, miserable in a stifling attic apartment—visited one night by an older man and woman in “identical pairs of white cotton pajamas.” The narrator wakes to find them sitting on the sofa. “They looked familiar,” he says, “though I couldn’t say I’d ever seen them before.” They seem friendly enough, smiling anyway. “We’re what you might call aliens,” the woman tells him. And she’s correct. You might indeed call them aliens, or you might call them patients on the loose from the mental hospital down the street. “They had drug cases over there,” we learn early on, “dementia, catatonics. Maybe a schizophrenic or two. Retarded people. People with injured or disoriented brains who thought themselves to be other people, elsewhere.” But it’s certainly possible that the man isn’t lying when he says, “We’re from a planet in another solar system only about five million light-years from here.” Sure, their bodies look familiar—those did come from the mental institution. “I used to be an usher at the Royal Theater,” the woman says. “This body did, I mean.”
It’s hard to explain, but I’ll admit, I find this oddly persuasive—the idea of body as vessel, inconstant in terms of habitation. And things get less steady as the story goes on, with the narrator and his wife waking the next morning to find that the world isn’t so rough after all—there’s fried chicken in the fridge, a cool breeze in the room—and then waking again, in a sense, again and again, living and leaving all the possible lives that might or might never unfold from that pivotal moment one hot night in their awful apartment. If nothing else, it’s a feeling that’s all too real—“a kind of limbo,” the narrator says, in which he would “live out some alternate life, and then come to on a park bench, or in the hospital again, or in my car somewhere, ignition on, engine dead, gas tank empty.” After one hospital stay comes the realization that he’s not alone. “I would see other people with these lost, somewhat sad looks on their faces,” he says, “and I would think that similar things were happening to them. But you didn’t ask. You didn’t want to get them started. There was the fear of the destabilizing admission. We left one another alone.”
At heart this is a story about the way we live our lives, how on earth we’re supposed to make choices without knowing where our moves might lead, how one act might alter the possibilities forever and we’ll never, no matter our vivid dreams, know how else things may have gone. What I’m fixated on now, though, is the mental hospital. It functions to enable the plot, of course, to have such bodies at hand. “It’s just easier, logistically,” the older man explains. “If there’s trouble with the police, or if the hosts have a little problem with the occupancy. And it’s just down the street.” But more to the point, the hospital gives Watson—or I should say, through the hospital, Watson gives us—a way to explain, dismiss, flatten the story’s strange happenings back to a familiar reality. If you’re inclined toward a reductive interpretation, you’ve got the chance to put a box around this alien business, along with all the talk of “negative energy” and “cosmic inflation” and “Kaluza-Klein” theory and all the other “terms some people are using these days” to grapple with aberrations in the “fabric of the universe.” It’s a sad way to read, perhaps, but you’re certainly free to sweep all of this aside and say all we have here is a case of good old-fashioned “mental problems.”
Looking back at the work this way, in its totality, I’m thinking the shift is less about the stories getting more strange, from one book to the next, and more about a kind of narrative re-orientation toward the strangeness all around. There used to be more hedging, early on, more distance between the story itself and the most bizarre possibilities, more shrugging as if to say, Well, this certainly could happen, but then again . . . maybe not.
Go back to that first collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men, from 1996. In the title story, we see a newspaperman on leave, separated from his wife, passing the time at a friend’s farmhouse, “a wreck,” as he describes it, “floating on the edge of a big untended pasture.” Along the way he muses “at how often dogs make the news.” The one “elected mayor of a town in California,” for instance, or the schnauzer with a knack for the piano. Plus the attacks, of course—the bitings and the surprising incidence of pets who manage, one way or another, to pull the trigger and shoot their owners. “One story, my favorite,” he tells us, “was headlined ‘Dog Lady Claims Close Encounter.’”
It was about an old woman who lived alone with about forty-two dogs. Strays were drawn to her house, whereupon they disappeared from the streets forever. At night when sirens passed on the streets of the town, a great howling rose from inside her walls. Then one day, the dogs’ barking kept on and on, raising a racket like they’d never done before. It went on all day, all that night, and was still going the next day. People passing the house on the sidewalk heard things slamming against the doors, saw dog claws scratching at the windowpanes, teeth gnawing at the sashes. Finally, the police broke in. Dogs burst through the open door never to be seen again. Trembling skeletons, who wouldn’t eat their own kind, crouched in the corners, behind chairs. Dog shit everywhere, the stench was awful. They found dead dogs in the basement freezer, little shit dogs whole and bigger ones cut up into parts. Police started looking around for the woman’s gnawed-up corpse, but she was nowhere to be found.
As it turns out, “some hunters found her wandering naked out by a reservoir, all scratched up, disoriented,” a few days later. “She’d been abducted, she said, and described tall creatures with the heads of dogs, who licked her hands and sniffed her privates.”
All this is, really, is an aside, Watson’s narrator, the newspaperman, sharing an anecdote he came across once in the paper. He found it interesting, so he passes it along. Why? Well, for one thing, I’ll wager it’s easier to dip back into memories like these than to stare down the more immediate situation—his own dead dog at home, the dead marriage, the affair that helped bring it all down, the job that maybe isn’t worth going back to after all… Why not linger in pondering lives more peculiar than your own? Why not catalog the possibilities?
It’s safe territory for the story, too, in a way. I think you’d call it a third-hand account, or maybe it’s fourth-hand—experience relayed to the police, then to a reporter, then read by our narrator, then recalled in memory some time later at the farmhouse, for us. “‘They took me away in their ship,’ the woman said. ‘On the dog star, it’s them that owns us. These here,’ she said, sweeping her arm about to indicate Earth, ‘they ain’t nothing compared to them dogs.’” The way this is nested midway through the action, I can’t help feeling like it’s more than an interlude; it’s an offer. Hear this woman out, the story seems to say. Let her world, loony as it may be, be a part of your own.
I don’t think this is quite what Joy Williams has in mind, in her brilliant foreword to There Is Happiness, when she says, “The next world(s) are always near in these stories.” I love that parenthetical plural, though. Watson brought forth so many worlds in his fiction, so many ways of imagining ourselves.
Occasionally there’s an unshackling, a suggestion that our lives might not be as limited as we’ve been led to believe. Maybe we aren’t so fixed in time, for instance. Like the widow Agnes in the early story “Agnes of Bob,” we might find ourselves in a drift, not unpleasant—for Agnes, it happens in the woods one day, with “spooky” trees towering overhead. “Agnes harked back to fairy tales heard in her childhood and imagined that she was a child walking in a forest where someone had long ago cut all the narrow rumbly streets along the old trails.” Note the phrasing: she “imagined that she was a child…” This isn’t just a memory. In her mind, she’s there again.
Or it might feel more like a clear-cut choice, a fork in the road—will I choose this way or that? This life or that one? Like the narrator in “A Retreat,” giving college another try, “hanging in there but not too well,” having been “depressed in general for something like five or six years,” we might sense some new possibility edging up over the horizon, a new world waiting for us to step into it. In this case, the moment crystalizes in a new apartment, which is actually a filthy old apartment, the site of a retired math professor’s lonely life, “holed up chain-smoking for twenty years” before an overdose. For the narrator, though, it has the makings of a fresh start:
I moved in and scrubbed streaks of tobacco smoke residue off all the woodwork with Formula 409. The stove was dusty but otherwise clean. The refrigerator was empty except for a two-month-old carton of half-and-half stuck to the shelf. I stripped up the old stained indoor-outdoor carpet from the floors and sanded the wood down to reveal a beautiful blond oak. I rubbed in Johnson’s Wax with my hands, buffed it with a rented machine, and then I lay out in the middle of the empty, polished expanse of narrow oak boards, my eye to the floor, each board like a golden lane leaping up and away down a gleaming runway. I marveled at the almost tactile sense of starting over, the clarity of vision, the simplicity and beauty of the big open room. From where I lay, the windows looked out upon open sky, a great big protective bubble of opportunity. I’d gone back to school to make something of my life, I could do anything in the world.
There’s an echo, I think, or more than an echo, of Kate Chopin’s 1894 classic, “The Story of an Hour,” with Mrs. Mallard not on the floor, but sunk deep in a “comfortable, roomy armchair,” eyes toward the sky outside, “drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.” A different situation, sure, but for a moment anyway, for Mrs. Mallard and for Watson’s narrator, too, there’s a new life out there, right there in the distance—tantalizingly close. Entirely plausible. As the stories go on, though, each in their own way, that new world that’s so inviting may as well be another planet
So often that’s the way it is with other worlds, that sense of impenetrable separation, whether it’s the divide between the living and the dead, the past and the present, or the many varied ways we find ourselves isolated here and now among the living—the secrets and sordid lies and double lives and hopes dangling just out of reach. Wilhelmina knows this, another elderly widow, in the early story “Bill,” whose husband “had courted her in a horse-drawn wagon” all those years ago. “An entire world of souls had disappeared in their time,” she thinks, “and other nameless souls had filled their spaces.” Now she has “her children and their children, and even some great-grandchildren, but that was neither here nor there for Wilhelmina. They were all in different worlds.”
At best, it’s sad but you survive. At worst, it’s more than sad, and still you’re made to survive, if in a strangled dislocation—a condition perhaps embodied best of all by Loomis, the divorced father in “Visitation.” The story opens with Loomis musing on the nature of his own despair. He’s stuck in a shoddy motel for a visit with his son, a motel he’s been to before for the same reason, but this time, this night, a woman he takes for a gypsy lures him to the pool. She seems suspect as a palm reader, but she sees right through him: why he’s here with his boy in a room upstairs, the failed marriage with the boy’s mother, a second failure thereafter with the woman he left the mother for. Loomis “felt suddenly, embarrassingly close to tears. A tight lump swelled in his throat. ‘And now you have left her, too, or she has left you, because’—and here the woman paused, shook Loomis’s wrist gently, as if to revive his attention, and indeed he had been drifting in his grief—‘because you are a ghost. Walking between two worlds, you know?’”
It’s a skewering so destabilizing we can’t help but doubt our senses, the way Loomis does, moments later when he heads back to the room and struggles with the key card a while before he gets in and closes the door and finds “he’d gone into the wrong room, maybe even some other motel. The beds were made, the television off. His son wasn’t there.” He is, of course, he’s there—the son—just in the bathroom. By the time he steps out yawning, though, it’s too late. “It might as well have been someone else’s child, Loomis the stranger come to steal him away.” Loomis sees the “same dazed, disoriented expression he’d had on his face just after his long, difficult birth”—another moment of terror as one world gives way to the next.
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It’s worth noting, too, that no matter the premise or how bizarre the surfaces of the world, Watson’s characters always ache and yearn in ways undeniably real. The stories ring true, in other words, even when the sounds are like none you’ve ever heard.
Take one last look at “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives.” It’s a novella that unsettles every which way, silly at times, strange throughout, but it will break your heart. I keep coming back to an early scene: the narrator, newly married, comes back to that awful apartment with his wife, Olivia nee Coltrane, who breaks down in tears. “This isn’t what I wanted,” she says, “I wanted to go to college. I wanted to date lots of boys. I wanted to graduate and marry somebody successful and live in a big two-story house and have lots of children but not like this, and not in a shitty old attic that’s hot as an oven, and not even graduate from high school. And poor.” They go back and forth, the narrator aiming to wring some kind of hope from the gloom. “Well, wait and see,” he says at one point.
I’m going to work hard, and build us a beautiful house—it’ll be like a mansion, to us anyway—and we’ll have beautiful children, starting with this one, and they’ll be so beautiful that people will hardly even recognize them as ordinary human beings, like a whole new amazingly beautiful and intelligent subspecies or something. Coltranians. Like you. And we’ll have dogs, and horses. A couple of fat, arrogant cats. And I’ll drive a cool Ford pickup, a good, solid, settled-down man . . .
He goes on a bit longer, detailing the other car, a Mercedes wagon for Olivia, and the boat, the lakeside cabin, but I can hardly get past the truck. No matter what follows—the aliens or whatever they are, the spun-out dreams of how life might be—no matter how far the story goes, this guy talking is still just a poor kid in a little town who wants so badly to have a “cool Ford pickup.” What could be more real?
If anything changed over the years, I think it’s how forceful Watson was in offering up his portraits of what might be. The world really is a strange place, even the earliest stories seem to suggest—just look how people behave. But look past it—don’t stop there—look past this world and see all the others. Those worlds are here, too. Or they could be.
