Richard Burgin’s ‘Hide Island’

Sex, drugs and money are the reigning passions in Richard Burgin's new story collection, Hide Island, with love a distant but critical fourth. Critical, because in Burgin's dark, dystopic vision, human society is mostly an arrangement for predators to seek their prey, and vice versa.

The principal difference between the two seems to be that the predatory class knows better what it wants, while those to be preyed on mostly wander clueless until they fall into the particular trap for which they are destined.

The divisions aren't that neat, of course. All of Burgin's characters are needy and frightened on one level or another, and this need—and the relative ability to satisfy or assuage it— dictates actual behavior. The result is a series of collisions in which no outcome can be predicted in advance, and in which the tables are occasionally turned.

Speech as aggression

In "The Endless Visit," Carla is the mistress of a wealthy older man, Walter, about whose wealth she fantasizes as they make Viagra-aided love. She also models for a butch painter, Barbara, who turns her subjects into abstractions that look like "dismembered animals or worse."

Barbara's particular mode of aggression, however, is speech. She imposes long monologues about her personal and professional frustrations on Carla, who for her part can't interrupt the flow: She’s the classic good listener who doesn't really want to listen.

Barbara, like Walter, has the drop on Carla. As Burgin suggests:

“Speech was, like everything else, about aggression. You talked because you talked first. You got the power of talking because you seized it. It was the contemporary version of the Western gun duel. Whoever drew first and shot killed the other with their speech—only it was a slow death through repeated verbal assault.”

Violence as turn-on

Burgin encapsulates here his vision of civilized savagery: The power of speech is simply a highly developed claw that some can deploy to their advantage and others, unable to resist, are forced to submit to.

Carla is at the breaking point of violation, and when Barbara first seduces her and then attempts to send her off not with money but with one of the paintings Carla hates, Carla turns on her with sudden violence, as if to shield the last wall of her identity or to repay what has finally become an unending series of small mortifications. Even then, however, Carla cannot own her act, but simply abandons it.

This story has a neat twist, even though we’re given to understand that Barbara's own need for dominance and love (two imperatives that go very uneasily together) make her vulnerable even in a predator role.

In the jungle, predators search for food, an uncomplicated need definitively met. Among humans, hunger is finally emotional, since the fulfillment of nonsexual animal needs is mostly taken for granted, and sex itself is so fully enmeshed in fear and isolation that its physical expression is a feedback loop that gives no lasting satisfaction.

Vengeful high

Passivity and aggression figure, too, in the book’s opening story, "Atlantis." Stacy is a sometime drug dealer who gets through his days with a pharmacopia that takes him up and brings him down, as if his own skeletal musculature has collapsed. His girl friend Rina, a damaged runaway, has hit bottom with him and wants to free herself, but fears desertion and solitude more.

Stacy proposes that they visit Ike, an older drug dealer in Atlantic City who gave Stacy his first stake and whom he regards as a father figure. Instead, they encounter Ike's son Dom, who—himself on a vengeful high— brutalizes both of them.

Violated but still alive, they decide to return to Stacy's apartment, which now feels like a tomb but is also their only safe place. Neither lover, it is clear, has the strength to break the destructive pattern of their lives, and Stacy's addled quest has only brought them into the hands of a genuine predator who leaves them technically alive only from lack of interest.

Trauma of memory

Burgin carries off his tales with a deceptively light touch that brings one into them as if their circumstances and the relationships they depict are perfectly ordinary and natural; this is simply the way things are. At play, however, is a deeper concern with the nature of identity itself and the processes— particularly memory— that support it.

Memory is mostly traumatic, and so— beyond the temporary therapeutics of drugs and the schematics of predator-prey relationships— its potential manipulation is the final quest of society itself. Burgin has dealt with this in previous works, and it is the focus of the novella, “The Memory Center,” with which the book concludes.

"The Memory Center" takes place in the near future. Two competing drugs, Memo and Oblivion, contest the memory market; the first enhances recall and the second radically diminishes it.

Between humans and robots

Foster, a disappointed Memo user, falls into the clutches of Dr. Rohr, who specializes in operations that selectively rearrange memory, eliminating painful recollections and leaving pleasurable ones— in short, a personality transplant. Foster desires to remodel an anxious and unsatisfactory self, but he’s also partly under Rohr's spell.

Since we're a bit beyond the present, Rohr's clinic is partly staffed by robots, one of whom tells Foster that humans work there too but "It's not always easy to tell them apart." Do the robots have difficulty identifying humans, or vice versa, or has the difference between them become irrelevant, since functionality is all that counts?

Foster is of course about to submit to a procedure that will redesign his brain, which will make him in some sense a robot. The choice appears to be between being the victim of oneself or the victim of another.

Foster tries to escape, only to be dismissed by Rohr as an unworthy subject. But Rohr himself is suddenly revealed as querulous and old, not the master magician who will solve the problem of humanity but simply a man terrified of his own approaching end. Foster is left by the road, the mind that is both his anchor and his millstone still intact, and the task of living still before him.

Father and son

Love does prevail in one story, "The Diary of an Invalid," which describes the relationship between a father and son who share a private language and fantasy life, as if in compact against the world. It's a fragile relationship that must inevitably change, but one touched with a deep and sustaining intimacy.

Achieved humanity, Burgin suggests here, is possible— a miraculous occurrence in the dance of dark souls that is his fiction, but the redemptive possibility that alone keeps us going.

"You die of your life," one of Burgin's characters says with shattering simplicity. But another counsels, "Courage, in the end, is all we have”¦ it's even more important than our identity."

It's the essential truth that's wrung from Richard Burgin's deeply impressive fiction. The final mystery about us is not that we suffer but that we find in ourselves the willingness to endure.