Matthew Vollmer’s debut collection, The Future Missionaries of America, opens with the story of a young man wrestling to come to terms with the death of his best friend, and his guilt over his relationship with his late friend’s girlfriend. Most of “Oh Land of National Paradise, How Glorious Are Thy Bounties” is told in flashbacks as Harper sprints from his job as a waiter at the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park, back to the dorms, where his somewhat stolen girlfriend is waiting for him.
Hurtling his body through space, he believes, will alter his chemistry, will help rearrange and therefore maybe understand those words that, just before dawn, streamed from the sticky earpiece of the employee-dorm pay phone, the voice on the other end—so steady, almost serene—informing Harper that his best friend, Wesley Morgan Montgomery, had not pulled through the coma, that he had died in his sleep.
And it is in this first story that we find a sentence suggestive of Vollmer’s work as a whole: “this I’m-not-afraid-to-run-with-my-eyes-closed sensation propelling him forward.” Like Harper, Vollmer is not afraid to run with his eyes closed, to launch into emotionally charged territory, to tackle complex and heavy subjects with a light and honed hand. The reader feeds off his energy to tell these stories of loss and dysfunction because each one unfolds in a unique and compelling way.
What makes the collection memorable is Vollmer’s quirky mix of grief and irreverence, not unlike work by Kurt Vonnegut or George Saunders. “Man-O’-War” is the transcript of a lengthy message that Ted Barber leaves on his wife’s answering machine—only Ted’s wife died three months earlier, on their honeymoon. The only person he can talk about his dead wife with… is his dead wife. In part of his message, he tells her about the awkwardness of bringing up the subject of her death:
What am I supposed to say when someone asks? Yeah, you know, I was married before—but not for long, because after the wedding, my wife and I, we went to Mexico, where I got sick, and my wife tried to take care of me, but I was an idiot, because I was convinced my sickness was a sign, we were doomed, none of this would work out, which, hey, whattaya know, on the third day, we got into an argument and she went swimming in the ocean to cool off, and she swam out really far, got stung by a Portuguese man-o’-war, had a bad reaction to the poison, went into anaphylactic shock, and, as she tried to swim back, drowned.
It is lines like these that make you burst out laughing, but then immediately make you feel guilty for laughing—a signature of Vollmer’s talent for combining humor and pathos.
“Will and Testament” takes the irreverence factor even further, perhaps too far to be anything more than a clever commentary on alienation and capitalism. The piece is written as a will, detailing Andrew Walter’s wishes as to his remains and possessions once he commits suicide, to a group of strangers. He picks twenty-seven people out of the phone book and solicits them in hopes of finding just one executor for his will. He wants all but his brain, heart and fat donated to science. His heart will be buried in the family plot. His brain will be sliced into 66 cubes and sent to former employers as a memento. His fat will be put to use as fuel for oil lamps he wants sent to past love interests. As for doling out his meager belongings? Each award has a demented logic, such as:
Photographs of the undersigned’s acquaintances, though few and far between, should be sent to those friends, with this note attached: A hypothesis: if one is forgotten enough times, one ceases to exist. Forgive me if my failure to remember your face contributed to your gradual and inevitable annihilation. Yours, AW.
Some of the more serious stories keep returning to the subjects of the absurdity of the Adventist religion, alcoholism, infidelity, unrequited love, and early death, caused either by cancer, murder or suicide. In “The Digging” a teenage boy digs a grave-size hole as punishment at a strict Adventist boarding school. As Kyle tears up the earth, he digs in his mind through layers of grief over his father’s suicide, and his mother’s subsequent rapid transformation into a smiling Adventist, re-married within a few months of her first husband’s death. An apologetic letter from his girlfriend, detailing how she cheated on him with his best friend, burns a symbolic hole in his pocket. Once the hole is deep enough, Kyle jumps down inside and is finally able to express his pain. “It begins then, silently: Kyle’s mouth stretching wide, his chest convulsing soundlessly. Then it hits and Kyle is gone, disappearing into the storm that is his grief.” This concept of struggling to cope with one’s grief internally, and also struggling against barriers of expressing that grief physically, is a reoccurring theme among Vollmer’s characters.
Vollmer’s treatment of loss—sometimes with humor, sometimes with delicate tenderness, and sometimes with raw severity—works to flush out the world created in each story. His characters, while dealing with similar issues, are never mirror images of one another. His subjects, while heavy and sometimes controversial, do not come off as heavy handed, melodramatic or stereotypical. And again, it’s Vollmer’s gift for orchestrating moments of hope within hopelessness that are the most striking. In “Bodies,” an alcoholic becomes obsessed with a girl who looks just like his daughter, who was murdered ten years ago. He’s completely dysfunctional and has surrendered to living a pathetic existence.
As my daddy used to say: “Drink, drink, and drink some more, for tomorrow we die.” But tomorrow, more often than not, we do not die. Tomorrow we wake with blood in our shorts and a toothache of the heart, to make promises that seem keepable until the downslope awakens our indefatigable whims.
He realizes “a daughter who has been hacked to pulp can’t be buried.” Yet the story ends on a glimmer of redemption for the characters, “blind with the belief we might make something new.” What makes the last line heartbreaking, is the reader knows this glimmer of hope is just a mirage. But sometimes Vollmer’s hopelessness gets the best of him. In “Will and Testament” the form acts to the story’s detriment, never allowing us to understand “the undersigned.” We merely get a sense of his bitter and humorous disillusionment with the world. Occasionally, we are given too much back story, the characters spouting off large chunks of their history in a contrived way. And rarely, the mix of seriousness and irreverence is off balance, falling short of poignancy.
However Vollmer’s strengths far outweigh his weaknesses. The characters in The Future Missionaries of America are indeed missionaries. They are missionaries of the human condition. They movingly portray our glimpses of hope after loss, our delusions, our obsessions, philosophies, blind spots, and loneliness—a tribute to the author’s ambition to harness his own “I’m-not-afraid-to-run-with-my-eyes-closed sensation.”
