This Is Only a Test Read online

  “This Is Only a Test exposes our fears—real and fake, invented and embedded—of disasters. Through Hollars’s own experiences, research, and rememberings, he examines how our fears are often unfounded or inflated, even created. B. J. Hollars is in a field all of his own.”

  —Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir

  “Through spare, haunting, and heart-wrenching prose, Hollars deftly guides the reader from the tornado-torn streets of Tuscaloosa to the lakes and rivers of Wisconsin, from his backyard to nuclear Japan, and ultimately into those tiny intimate moments of fear that shape a new father’s consciousness. Combining a novelist’s ear for dialogue and drama with a poet’s eye for detail, Hollars’s essays delve into the hard spaces, mapping out a place for hope, or at least some small moments of happiness.”

  —Steven Church, author of Ultrasonic: Essays

  “In these quirky, inventive stories, B. J. Hollars depicts a world both dangerous and unreasonable, a place where the local TV meteorologist assumes the quality of a god. Character may not be fate in This Is Only A Test but the reverse is always true—we reveal ourselves by our response to the random cruelties of the universe, from errant meteor strikes to a small child’s fever rising in the night.”

  —John Hildebrand, author of

  The Heart of Things: A Midwestern Almanac

  “This Is Only a Test is an immediate read. I don’t only mean you should read it immediately, though I do mean that deeply. I mean the act of reading this wonderful new collection is close, personal, and compelling. The book is nearly alive in your hands as each story, and then each implication, each idea unfolds. In one section, a tornado falls from the sky and the family—husband, wife, dog, and unborn child—seek shelter in a bathroom tub. But what do you say, think, wonder about, and do when the event is over? What do you tell your future child? How do you talk to anyone else? Whether it’s storms, or drowning, lake monsters, incendiary bombs, or a child’s fever, these events, present and historical and intimate, seep into every later moment. This is an elegantly written book about how we love each other in a terrifying world.”

  —W. Scott Olsen, Editor, ASCENT magazine

  “There’s plenty of room aboard the Hollars bandwagon, and here’s your chance to experience what his growing audience already knows and loves—his warm intelligence, his companionable voice, and the how-does-he-do-it trick of spinning terror into tenderness.”

  —Bryan Furuness, author of Winesburg, Indiana

  “In the face of disaster, of childbirth, of fatherhood, Hollars finds the perfect middle-ground in the strange void between loss and gain: that the center, despite what the numbers tell you, isn’t zero, but something greater than that—a souvenir to say that we are here and we are answering impossible questions the best and only way that we know how.”

  —Brian Oliu, author of Leave Luck to Heaven

  THIS IS ONLY A TEST

  Michael Martone

  THIS

  IS

  ONLY

  A

  TEST

  B. J. Hollars

  This book is a publication of

  Indiana University Press

  Office of Scholarly Publishing

  Herman B Wells Library 350

  1320 East 10th Street

  Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

  iupress.indiana.edu

  © 2016 by B. J. Hollars

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hollars, B. J.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  This is only a test / B. J. Hollars.

  pages ; cm.— (Break Away Books)

  ISBN 978-0-253-01817-5

  (softcover : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-0-253-01821-2 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3608.O48456A6 2016

  813'.6—dc23

  2015013860

  1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16

  To Meredith, Henry, and Eleanor,

  who always allow me to retake the test.

  I came to explore the wreck.

  The words are purposes.

  The words are maps.

  ADRIENNE RICH, “Diving into the Wreck”

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  I. DIZZIED

  Goodbye, Tuscaloosa

  A Test of the Emergency Alert System

  Epistle to an Embryo

  To the Good People of Joplin

  Fifty Ways of Looking at Tornadoes

  The Longest Wait

  II. DROWNED

  The Girl in the Surf

  Dispatches from the Drownings

  Buckethead

  The Changing

  Death by Refrigerator

  III. DROPPED

  Fabricating Fear

  Fort Wayne Is Still Seventh on Hitler’s List

  The Year of the Great Forgetting

  Hirofukushima

  Punch Line

  Bedtime Story

  Works Consulted

  Credits

  Book Club Guide

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a book, like enduring a disaster, requires all hands on deck.

  And so a warm thank-you goes out to my family, friends, and supporters who have often manned the buckets to keep this ship afloat.

  Additional thanks go to the editors who have previously published these works, including Nik De Dominic, Marcel Savino, W. Scott Olsen, Steven Church, Karen Craigo, Cory Aarland, Adam Kullberg, Roxane Gay, S. L. Weisenberg, Dan Wickett, Matthew Gavin Frank, Dinty W. Moore, Shena McAuliffe, Adam Weinstein, Kim Groninga, Anjali Sachdeva, Sam Martone, Jeff Albers, and Allegra Hyde.

  Thanks to Walter Font of the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society for his additional fact-checking as well.

  Thank you to my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, and in particular, Chancellor James Schmidt, Provost Patricia Kleine, President Kimera Way, Dean David Leaman, Dr. Carmen Manning, Dr. Erica Benson, Dr. Audrey Fessler, Dr. Jenny Shaddock, Dr. Justin Patchin, Dr. Jason Spraitz, Professors Max Garland, Jon Loomis, Allyson Loomis, Molly Patterson, John Hildebrand, and Karen Loeb, as well as Joanne Erickson and Vickie Schafer. I could go on.

  Thanks also to my gifted graduate assistants, Alex Long, Laura Becherer, and Josh Bauer—all of whom dug deep to make this a better book—and to my undergraduate students, who make me a better writer through their own work.

  In addition, thank you to Dr. Karen Havholm and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, whose University Research and Creative Activity grant proved vital to this project.

  And, lest I forget, the Bama gang, especially those I met on the UAEDFL gridiron.

  Thanks, too, to Brendan Todt, for the edits and the correspondence, and to Jill Talbot, for the feedback that eased the doubt.

  To Mom, Dad, and brother—can we consider this your Christmas present?

  And to my own family, who served as witnesses to my head-pounding, hand-wringing, and tiger-pacing as I tried to tease these essays out.

  Finally, thanks to all the nameless folks who didn’t just write the
ir way out of disasters, but clawed their way out; the people who did what had to be done when it had to be done because they knew no one else was doing it.

  THIS IS ONLY A TEST

  We can’t stop tornadoes. But we can live

  through them when we know how.

  Tornado Warning: A Booklet for Boys and Girls (1981)

  I.

  DIZZIED

  Goodbye, Tuscaloosa

  BEFORE

  Let me tell you about my wife and my dog and our bathtub. How just minutes prior to the storm—minutes prior to peeling the cushions from the couch and positioning them over our heads—my dog and I stood barefoot in the grass staring up at a swirling sky.

  She began to bark at it.

  “Quiet,” I hissed. “No barking at tornadoes.”

  I pulled the dog back inside, checked the television, but it wasn’t until the power cut out that we were prompted to enter the tub. The meteorologist—who would become a god that day—had just switched from radar screen to video feed, and in those final seconds before we were plunged into darkness, the TV revealed a single gray cloud narrowing as if sucked toward the ground through a straw.

  Flashback to the tornado drills of my youth—folded face-to-butt in the bowels of Lindley Elementary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Face down and neck covered, in the rare moments when the drills turned real, I’d steal a glance at our lion mascot painted on the school’s cinderblock walls, hoping he might protect us.

  Just days before, during a pep rally, our principal had made one thing clear: “Nobody messes with the Lions!”

  Not even tornadoes? I wondered.

  Back in the tub now, and there are no lions anywhere, just a dog that for the first time in her life is subdued. We are all humbled that day, but she is the first, her quivering head tucked tightly beneath my knee.

  Here, in the bathtub, our privacy is on display: my dandruff shampoo, my wife’s pink disposable razor. To the left of these things sits our mango mandarin body wash, which I wonder if we’ll ever use again.

  My wife’s voice overpowers this wondering, overpowers the sound of the tree limbs scraping the bathroom window as well.

  “I had to interview a Vietnam vet once,” she says from her place beneath a couch cushion. “Back in high school. For social studies. I drove all the way out to his house, and it was when we were having all those really big storms, remember? And so I got there and he said he’d forgotten I was coming. He said his son’s home had just gotten blown away and our meeting had slipped his mind.”

  She’d never found the proper time to tell me this story, but that late afternoon, trapped in a tub, I’ve at last become a perfect audience.

  “We rode around in his golf cart,” she continues. “He told me of the destruction he’d seen.”

  My wife, dog, and I pull closer into our bunker, awaiting what will later be called the second most deadly weather outbreak in recorded history.

  Yet somehow, through some luck, we are the glass eye in the storm that sees nothing. And we are the deaf ear, too, hearing only the drip, drip, drip of the rusted showerhead.

  A moment passes. Then another.

  “Is it over yet?” my wife asks, peeking beneath her cushion.

  I’m not sure it’s even begun.

  AFTER

  I will spare you the destruction.

  You can imagine, I’m sure, what a tree looks like horizontal, or a house turned inside out. You can imagine also what it means when people say “leveled.” What it means when they say “vanished.”

  Stories of legs in the front yard, of victims wrapped in trees like tangled kites. Stories of how all that people have left in the world now fits neatly in a grocery cart.

  Do not read this too closely. I am trying to spare you the broken glass and the blood.

  What I can’t spare you is the strangeness of living in a tornado-torn town amid writers who, much like myself, have a tendency to turn everything poetic.

  Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black[cloud].

  In the [Emergency] Waiting Room

  Our poet hands are softer than cream cheese, and though we hardly know how to swing an axe, this doesn’t keep us from trying. But eventually we grow tired, sore, and return to our more familiar tools—paper and pen—as we rebuild our town word by word.

  But before all that—before the axes and the paper and the pen—my wife, dog, and I wake early to retrace the tornado’s path. It’s the morning after, and with each step, we try to make sense of our shifted landscape.

  But the cars used to be here, I think, running my eyes the length of the empty lot, so why are they now there?

  Along the route I pick up a newspaper and listen for the prosody in the reports.

  Read the repetition: “unrelenting,” “unprecedented,” “devastating.”

  And hear the cadence in the quotes: “digging with their hands,” “sifted through the remains,” “First responders didn’t attend to the dead . . .”

  Every headline displays the word RAVAGED or RUBBLE, and regardless of which story you read, you’re told to turn to page 7A.

  But not before making a choice:

  SEE DEATH

  or

  SEE SURVIVORS

  The morning after, we see a bit of both.

  We join the city’s pilgrimage, shuffling directionless down the center lane of 15th Avenue as the sun begins to rise. We are a tailgate without a football game, a processional without a funeral. Through it all, my dog pulls hard on her leash. She doesn’t like the sound of chainsaws or shouting or silence, and she is overwhelmed with far too much to sniff—the bolt of cloth flung a hundred yards from Hobby Lobby, the milk bottles still upright in the shell of a Krispy Kreme.

  All of this seems like a dream, which is the closest we’ve come to dreaming in twenty-four hours. We hadn’t slept well the previous night, mostly due to the students partying in the apartments behind our house. They’d blared their music louder than the warning sirens, allowing every sound to float down from their balconies, infiltrating our half sleep with shouts for Ping-Pong balls and Solo cups.

  But we were kept awake also by the whispers we repeated beneath the sheets—“If we’d died,” my wife said, staring at the plus sign on her pregnancy test, “then no one would’ve known about you.”

  So many lost so much that day, but we still kept our secret.

  A Test of the Emergency

  Alert System

  Directions:

  To the best of your ability, please answer the following questions.

  1.) Which of the following is not currently found in my bathtub?

  a.) My wife

  b.) My dog

  c.) My unborn child

  d.) Tornado

  2.) Which of the following activities are best performed while enduring a disaster in your bathtub?

  a.) Secret sharing

  b.) Secret keeping

  c.) Dog petting

  d.) Scrubbing the tub

  e.) All of the above

  3.) Which of the following is the proper response in the immediate aftermath of a disaster?

  a.) Calling family

  b.) Calling friends

  c.) Waiting for the cell phone signal

  d.) Continuing to wait for the cell phone signal

  e.) Leashing your dog

  f.) Unleashing your dog

  g.) Introducing yourself to God

  h.) Introducing God to your wife and dog and unborn child

  i.) Living up to your part of the bargain

  j.) Exiting your house

  k.) Wondering how your plant didn’t tip

  l.) Drinking a beer

  m.) Drinking two beers

  n.) Drinking zero beers and remembering your part of the bargain

  o.) Drinking four beers and remembering your part of the bargain

  p.) Pouring your beer in the sink

  q.) In the grass

  r.) In the plant that didn’t tip

  s.) Telling your
wife the words that got stuck in your throat in that bathtub

  t.) Writing your wife a note—it’ll last longer

  u.) Taking a photo—it’ll last longer

  v.) Crumbling that note, that photo, and cracking that beer instead

  w.) Unleashing yourself to God

  x.) All of the above

  y.) Some of the above

  z.) None

  4.) True or False: You were just a little scared.

  5.) Which of the following newspaper quotations has been fabricated?

  a.) “We saw it spinning across the street . . .”

  b.) “I was standing at the door and saw it coming.”

  c.) “. . . I looked out the window and saw it hovering over the lake . . .”

  d.) “I was just trying to get my grandkids something to eat.”

  e.) “It just sat there too. Like it was chilling.”

  f.) “I have a shell of a home; just four walls.”

  g.) “I pulled two dead bodies from a . . .”

  h.) “I found an elderly lady and a three-year-old . . .”

  i.) “People laid blankets over the bodies of neighbors . . .”

  j.) “First responders didn’t attend to the dead.”

  k.) “It happened too fast to be scared.”

  l.) “This just can’t be true.”

  m.) None

  6.) Which of the following tools most effectively removes debris?

  a.) Chainsaw

  b.) Axe

  c.) Bow saw

  d.) Poem

  7.) Where is the silver lining?

  8.) In what ways did your students respond to your attempts to contact them?

  a.) With kind assurances of his safety

  b.) With concern for your safety

  c.) By writing you a poem

  d.) By writing you an email

  e.) By asking you for her final grade

  f.) By thanking you for an “awesome” semester

  g.) By wishing you the best of luck in your new job