Green is the dominant color on the jacket of Richard Bausch’s latest short story collection. A red-headed woman (or girl; it’s hard to tell which) stands in the foreground at the bottom right corner. Wearing a white sleeveless top and tutu-like knee-length tulle number, she covers her face with both hands as if either crying or counting down in a game of hide-and-seek. Scrolling out behind her is a verdant field with a few dark fir trees shrouded and half-vanished by a descending fog.
The title is centered in big white text, capitalized and punctuated like a sentence: Something is out there. The book’s epigraph, borrowed from Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate, echoes the theme proposed by its cover’s text and photography: “…people are much more unhappy than one might think… and there is no such thing as a grown-up.”
The paradox of innocence is ever-ripe for literary exploitation. We can attribute most of our mistakes to it — to desire, confusion, curiosity, and fear. A character who errs for any other reason will be unsympathetic; or worse, she will be dull. She will lack vulnerability, a trait that every reader demands of his protagonist; and Richard Bausch is savvy as ever to such demands.
Every character in Something is out there possesses a secret. Diana Thornhill has a weekday tryst with someone she met on a website for married people who want a no-strings-attached fling. Lyndhurst, Jr. is waiting in a car for his roommate to return from a cocaine deal that he worries has gone awry. Walker Clayfield is in love with his older brother’s wife, whom he suspects of having an affair; and in his jealousy he pursues a reckless vision of justice. Dale and Tracy are expecting but hesitate announcing the news to their friends Gabe and Martha, who’ve been together for three years but still aren’t married. Father Hennessy, guiltily bored by his parishioners’ confessions, is jostled from his stupor by a precocious and arthritic teenager in the throes of an existential crisis: What was God thinking when he created the dinosaurs and let them roam the earth for millions of years? In the face of such unanswerable questions, we’re all like babies who stare in blinking wonder at what they’ve never seen before.
But nowhere is the juxtaposition of innocence and experience better epitomized than in the title story of Bausch’s collection. The family in Something is out there has already experienced a significant trauma in the course of a few hours and are worried — in large part because a snowstorm is rapidly rendering roads impassable for the cousin and nephew driving in from out of town — that they’re in store for more misfortune. Their paranoia peaks when the power fails and leaves them in that most archetypal of fear-inducing elements: total darkness. It descends on them “like a judgment.” The mother must restore perspective by telling herself and her whimpering family, “It’s a snowstorm. What happened today is over.”
But the past persists, which may explain why most of these new narratives are so open-ended, and why some of these characters are in situations far more ambiguous (if not downright worse) than those that earlier sections of their stories found them in. As a fiction reader who places so much value on redemption, I was pleased to find myself unmiffed by Bausch’s lack of it. Along with deftly crafted sentences and artful play with point of view, it was conflict — not its resolution — that kept me reading. And it was the comfort of knowing that, regardless of whether we escape or find whatever is “out there,” we’re never alone in hiding or in seeking.
