Richard Burgin's "Shadow Traffic'

In "Do You Like This Room?," one of the stories in Richard Burgin's new collection, Shadow Traffic, a girl comes up to her date's apartment, only to have him suddenly pull a gun on her. Pop-up violence is very much a part of Burgin's world, and what it reflects— where it comes from— is the sea of anomie and distrust in which modern society is slowly sinking.

It's not the job of a writer of fiction to explain why this is so. Kafka made no attempt to explain his world; he simply represented it. Its terror consisted precisely in that it was inexplicable, which meant that there was neither redress for nor escape from it.

Kafka's central insight is that ultimately we're all victims, and the only distinction between us is our position in the line. While we wait our turn, some of us are tasked with abusing others. It's an excellent description of the modern world, of course, but whereas Kafka is obsessed by hierarchy and subordination— the monstrosity he calls the Law— Richard Burgin, who writes within the Kafka tradition, has abandoned the search for origins, aptly reflecting our present condition.

In Burgin's (sometimes literally) shape-shifting world, persecutor and victim have become predator and prey in a game without rules where identity frequently changes. This can be scarier than Kafka. When we don't know who we are, we can always fall back on our assigned social roles— even the role of victim is comforting in that sense. But when no one assigns the roles, we're all simply monsters.

If Burgin came on this way, his fiction would soon pall. But his characters all think they own selves; they all claim the regulation hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, etc. Some of them are clearly mad, but their madness wears the normality of a seemingly constructed world.

Role reversal

Phil, the protagonist of "Do You Like This Room?", is not only plausible enough to lure a girl to his place; this particular girl is a psychotherapist, whose profession is to read the character and motivation of others. When Phil pulls his gun he mocks her trade, not only by having entrapped her but by turning her role on herself: She is now the one who will spend the "hour" under scrutiny, humiliation and fear. Yet that, too, is only the beginning of the story.

Burgin's tales characteristically turn on power relations, and these are often unsettled. He provides a tip-off to the idea in the title of the collection's first story, "Caesar," whose protagonist picks up a young cab driver and is then picked up himself by an older man with decidedly Roman tastes.

Dealer and client

In "Dealer," a drug hustler moves into the apartment of one of his clients and slowly takes over his life, but here too the power equation isn't what it seems. Dash, the dealer, turns out to be oddly dependent, and Jeff, the client and first-person narrator, dozes off when he's at last left alone:

"I had a crazy dream that I had a different body. It was me but I was taller and stronger and strode around the playground [where he had met Dash] like a giant. I saw the dealer shooting baskets at the other end of the court and began walking toward him wanting to see if I was as tall as him, when I woke up."

Jeff, the seemingly passive character, appropriates the more powerful physique and aggressive personality of Dash in the dream, thus revealing the latent purpose behind what had seemed his involuntary hospitality, and again the reader is forced to ask who is seducing whom. The story seems to move toward a physical confrontation between its two principals, but their duel— as so often in reality, acknowledged by neither party— breaks off with only a subtle hint that a battle has actually been fought, or rather a vaguely vampirish exchange of energies finessed.

Stealing space

Burgin's stories are typically told in the first person, but, as "The Dealer" suggests, you're ill advised to accept the point of view that seems to be suggested, or even the identity of the speaker. In "Single-Occupant House," we're introduced to an intruder who enters empty houses not to steal anything but simply to soak up whatever spoor of personality they may contain. The game is to leave no sign of entry, no trace of a self that tirelessly effaces itself in the act of appropriating the lived space of others.

"Maybe I'm an alien," the unnamed protagonist reflects, "the one the Internet is preparing people to meet."

Houses themselves are no less problematic than other people; Mason in "The Justice Society," is driven into the street by an apartment whose atmosphere seems so malignant that he's taken with a vision of being pursued by it, as if hell were following him— a wry turn on Mephistophilis's observation in Marlowe's Faustus that hell exists wherever the damned are.

Devils in groups

Burgin's resourcefulness is by no means exhausted in suggesting individual torment and the random collision of solitudes that, in his world, constitutes most human contact. Absent, so far, is the truly demonic, for hell is only seemingly disorganized, a state of personal misery and isolation. The devils are recognized by the fact that they come in groups, invariably to offer solace and relief— in fact, utopia. What they demand— unconditional submission— is precisely what they offer: that is, the final extinction of personality.

In "The Justice Society," the group that Mason stumbles upon dispenses "justice" in the form of awards its members confer on each other that parallel and "correct" those honors the outside world fails to bestow. This folly seems harmless enough until it becomes clear that the society's members must subordinate themselves totally to the leader, who assigns to each the recognition he has determined as their due.

This parody of divine justice suggests that injustice is preferable to the authoritarian falsity that claims to rectify it. Some of hell's rooms, it turns out, are preferable to others.

Rival drugs

Dueling groups are the subject of "Memo and Oblivion," one of the book's most inventive and provocative tales. Andrew has joined a society dedicated to promoting bliss through a memory-enhancing drug called Memo, which not only improves immediate recall but unlocks long-lost memories. Andrew is singled out to infiltrate the group's rival, which peddles Oblivion, a narcotic that promises Nirvana through induced forgetfulness. Since most of us would like to remember certain things and forget others, there would seem to be a market for both products.

Memo's partisans, however, see Oblivion as an ideological as well as a commercial opponent. Andrew finds himself caught in the middle, and suspicious that he has been set up. As his paranoia intensifies, he's left with a Hobson's choice— shall he take Memo to be more securely on his guard, or Oblivion to remove his anxieties?

Reshaping memory

The last story, "House," summarizes many of the book's preoccupations and themes. Tyler, a free-lance writer, is enticed to visit a mansion whose reclusive mistress promises him work on a new magazine. Here he is drugged, awakes a prisoner, and finds himself inducted into another secret society whose purpose is the eradication of that greatest human evil, freedom, through the selective reshaping of memory.

Kafka never got that far, but Stalin did— and, as Burgin suggests, the lure of the totalitarian solution seems implicit in the modern condition. Big Brother may not save you, but Big Pharma will.

Not all the stories in Shadow Traffic end bleakly. The hero of "Caesar," after a narrow escape, is permitted an unexpected moment of redemption and grace. In "Mission Beach," a father strives to clarify his love for his gifted but difficult boy. In "The Dolphin," a man talks a stranger out of a planned murder.

These are small and provisional victories, but no less precious for that: They are what the world allows. Still, when the hero of "Memorial Day" remarks near the end of the story that "I've entered the tub now where men shut their eyes to forget their lives for a while," we're ready to submerge ourselves a little too.

Richard Burgin continues to have his finger on the pulse of modern experience as do few others, and Shadow Traffic shows him at the top of his form, refining a vision that, story by story and volume by volume, has made him a master of contemporary short fiction and a prince of our disorder.