Surviving 'Immobility' And End Times

Surviving 'Immobility' And End Times
Review by Michael Schaub
April 12, 2012

Immobility
by Brian Evenson

Stories about the end of the world are as old as literature itself. From the tale of Noah's Ark to the plague-ravaged landscapes of Mary Shelley's controversial 1826 novel The Last Man, writers have long held a morbid fascination with the possibility of a future apocalypse.

It was all fantasy, of course, until August 1945, when the world learned the threat of widespread destruction was much more real than anyone could have imagined. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, post-apocalyptic literature, and humanity itself, would never be the same. As Josef Horkai, the anti-hero of Brian Evenson's new novel Immobility, reflects: "We say no to sixty-six thousand dead in a single bomb blast over a defenseless foreign city, and then we do it again, a hundred thousand this time. ... Humans are poison. Perhaps it would be better if we did not exist at all."

Immobility takes place years after "the Kollaps," an unspecified cataclysm that decimated the planet, leaving only a handful of people barely alive and the world transformed into a hellscape: "no living thing, not even a cockroach, nothing but wrack and ruin ... marks of calamity, terror, distress." Josef Horkai doesn't remember much about what happened — he's been kept in suspended animation for years, possibly decades, and awakened by a mysterious group of survivors keeping shelter in the ruins of a university. He's paralyzed from the waist down, but that doesn't stop the group's leader from asking him to go on a cryptic mission to steal a vitally important cylinder from a mountainside fortress, miles away. With the help of two men who take turns carrying him, Horkai reluctantly sets out across the desert to find the precious container.

If there's a novel that Evenson was born to write, this is the one. The author is well-known both for his challenging, postmodern fiction — think David Foster Wallace and Blake Butler — and the mainstream science fiction he writes under the name B.K. Evenson. In Immobility, he draws from both literary traditions to create a driving, terrifying tale that wavers between despair and hope, nihilism and an almost religious sense of possible redemption.

Brian Evenson is the author of The Wavering Knife and Last Days and the director of Brown University's Literary Arts Program.

Evenson's prose is, as usual, perfect — intelligent but unpretentious, and perfectly evocative of a barren, brutal world that's been mostly given up for dead. He doesn't pull punches when he describes the cruelty of the wasteland that the planet has become — in one chilling scene, he describes the corpse of a man, his head, forearms and lower legs amputated, nailed to the front of a ruined hospital. It's an image that perfectly encapsulates the savagery of the new world; like the novel itself, it's merciless and unforgettable.

Immobility is not, of course, the first book to consider the life of the planet after a global annihilation, but it's also a novel without any obvious antecedents. There are thematic similarities to Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but Evenson's vision is as unique as he is. It's not an easy book to read, but it's an undeniably important look at what we're at risk of becoming — a nightmare world without hope, reason or compassion. "It's never fair," as Horkai says. "Why should it be?"

First page excerpt: Immobility

When they first woke him, he had the impression of the world becoming real again and he himself along with it. He did not remember having been stored. He could remember nothing about what his life had been before the Kollaps, and the days directly before they had stored him were foggy at best, little more than a few frozen images. He remembered tatters of the Kollaps itself, had a fleeting glimpse of himself panting and in flight, riots, gunfire, rubble. He remembered a bright blast, remembered awakening to find himself burned and naked as a newborn—or perhaps even more naked, since all the hair had been singed from his body or had simply fallen out. He remembered feeling amazed to be alive, but, well, he was alive, it was hard to question that, wasn't it?

And then what? People: he had found them, or they had found him, hard to say which. A few men banded together, acting "rationally" instead of "like animals," as one of them must have put it, attempting to found a new society, attempting to start over.

Not having learned better, he thought grimly, the first time.

Was it all coming back to him? He wasn't sure. And how much of what was coming back was real?

What was his name again?

* * *

At first he couldn't feel his body at all. He heard noise around him, the low rumble of ordinary mortals muttering to one another, the scuff of feet against a floor around what must be his receptacle. He tried to move his mouth and found he couldn't, that he couldn't even feel it, that he wasn't even completely certain that he had a mouth. It made him nervous. He tried to lick his lips, but either nothing happened or something happened that he couldn't feel.

His eyelids were closed, but there was the slightest gap between them. He could just see out, could see light, a slight blurriness of semi-differentiated figures, nothing more. He tried to will his eyes open further, failed. Nor could he move the eyes themselves: they stayed staring, fixed, his mind very clumsily processing the thin slit of reality available to them.

He tried to swallow, but couldn't move his throat. Am I breathing? he wondered, but figured that no, he was in storage, he wasn't breathing, wouldn't breathe until he was fully awake. Assuming he understood the process properly, he was still frozen. He shouldn't be experiencing anything at all yet, shouldn't even be able to think. Why could he?

Horkai, he thought suddenly. Josef Horkai. That was his name. It came, flashing back and forth and painfully through him. He tried to keep hold of the name, tried to wrap it around himself and tie it in place with something else, some other fact, anything.

Horkai, he thought. Occupation? Before the Kollaps? Now?

Nothing came. Be patient, he told himself. Let things come as they will.

And then the name flopped away, vanished in darkness. He tried again to blink, and one eyelid closed fully and held there. The other remained as it was, slit open, but the pupil behind it began to slide, smearing away the little bit of blurred vision he had and coming to rest against the backlit inside of the lid.

He sensed something on the horizon, in the vague redness, coming toward him. His eyelid slid open a little, but he couldn't tell if he had done it or if it had been done to him.

And then there was a roaring and what was coming arrived and turned out to be pain, madly beating its wings. He hurt like hell, every part of him, and since he could not tell where he ended and the rest of the world began, it felt like the entire world was awash in fire. And still he couldn't move, couldn't cry out, couldn't take air into his lungs, nothing. It was terrible, as terrible as anything he had ever felt.

And then slowly it receded, melted away, leaving in its wake a slow twisting and turning of naked sensation that refused to drain off. He could feel parts of himself now, though those parts still felt awkward and dampened, as if wrapped in gauze. One of his eyes sprang open and he could see a blurred thumb and forefinger sheathed in latex holding the eyelids apart. Behind and past them, an arm and vague shapes, several of them, that he guessed to be human. Similar to human, anyway. And then suddenly a blazing circle of light.

"Pupil contracts," he heard someone say. A male voice, hoarse, similar to the one he had heard earlier. "Vision's probably okay."

The blazing circle disappeared, its afterimage tracking across his vision and the figures resolved briefly into being. And then the thumb and forefinger let go and he saw only the inside of his eyelid again.

"What was that?" asked someone new, in a distracted voice.

None of the voices sounded familiar. Then again, why should they?

"I said," the first voice said, louder this time, "that he'll probably be able to see."

"That's not what you said."

"Vision's probably okay, I said. Amounts to the same thing."

"Have it your way," said the other. "Hand me the hypodermic."

Silence. And then all at once the remnants of sensation that had been eddying seemed about to burst. All his nerves burned at once. He tried to scream but nothing came out.

He lay there immobile, certain he was dying, until, mercifully, like a candle, he was snuffed out.