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The Incurables

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Mark Brazaitis

August 2012

Ryan Wilson

Thoughts of death, specifically suicide, dominate Mark Brazaitis’s The Incurables, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. The collection masterfully adds a spoonful of eccentricity however, as the dour characters seem to shrug off their plight, almost as if their strange adventures were as pedestrian as their hometown of Sherman, Ohio.

Thoughts of death, specifically suicide, dominate Mark Brazaitis’s The Incurables, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. The collection masterfully adds a spoonful of eccentricity however, as the dour characters seem to shrug off their plight, almost as if their strange adventures were as pedestrian as their hometown of Sherman, Ohio.

Take Drew Drewshevsky, aka “Dickie DeLong,” a recognizable porn star who has returned to Sherman in the title story after a case of herpes has ruined his ability to “perform” professionally. After a half-hearted suicide attempt, most of the tale involves his equally half-hearted treatment at a psychiatric ward where he meets Erica, a woman with severe depression who copes with her condition by using sardonic humor. “How was your treatment?” Drew asks her. “Shocking,” Erica replies. Such exchanges feel like Brazaitis’s reply to what the world makes of us all; as absurdities and tragedies mount, we can either wonder quietly at them or make obvious jokes to cope.

In “The Bridge,” a dark masterpiece, Sherman’s new sheriff opts to wonder as residents keep jumping from the town’s major overpass. The number of jumpers soon becomes an epidemic, attracting local, state, and national media, which only contributes to more jumpers. Unable to cope with the problem himself, the sheriff eventually accepts help from a local sorority offering to monitor the bridge at all hours. Big mistake. Yet the tale isn’t just ironically amusing. As the body count rises, we, along with the sheriff, begin to fear for absolutely everyone, even the sheriff, confirming how fragile and susceptible all can be. When eventually the town bridge becomes a Mecca for national madness, Brazaitis dips into magical realism, making the bridge a war zone for the desperate and determined.

Full-bore magical realism occurs in “I Return,” the hilarious account of a husband haunting his family who has contentedly moved on without him. Rejected, he seeks out his high school girlfriend, not for solace, but quite simply “to connect with someone who had once loved [him].” Yet the complication comes when the ghost finally admits that he really wants to haunt her for much more personal reasons: “She was kinder than I was, more compassionate, and I resented the feelings of selfishness, even meanness, this engendered in me. So I had despised her for what I lacked.”

Comparable depression motivates the second-person narrator in “Classmates,” as a man gives false pretense to interview the widow of a former classmate. He’s desperate not to know what was wrong with his former friend, but how alike they were/are. When he meets with the widow, several honest admissions occur as to how one guards and ignores depression.

Yet, hope endures in “Afterwards,” which deals with friendship in the aftermath of a brutal killing. When a man massacres his family after having apocalyptic visions about their future, his childhood friend sacrifices everything after accepting that the actions were simply an act of insanity. He never thinks otherwise, and eventually rebuilds his own life in the process.

Brazaitis’s tales never offer closure in the traditional sense, but The Incurables does offer comfort, as the title suggests, in the unfinished business of enduring what’s left after life and death have stripped everything else way. These stories, much like their characters, will surely carry on.

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