A fantastical exploration of the ache that comes with wanting the unattainable

To need the unattainable is barely human. Most of us have, at one time or one other, wished to relive the moments after we have been happiest, magically reshape the world as we wish it to be and even stay perpetually. These impulses are typically disdained as infantile, born of a failure or unwillingness to just accept an intransigent, entropic world. But maybe it’s a childlike resistance to so-called actuality that provides unattainable need its irreducibly human ache.

Many such situations could be present in Anita Felicelli’s new assortment of brief tales, “How We Know Our Time Vacationers.” Although these 14 miniature crises include quite a few fantastical or science-fictional parts, they’re essentially explorations of this cussed, very human attachment to issues that can’t be.

The world Felicelli depicts is recognizably our personal, if barely askew. The tales happen within the current previous, the current and the close to future. The setting is just about all the time, it appears, Northern California, a land of drought and wildfires within the e-book, as in life. Technologically the twist is barely marginal: That is the form of world the place an app would possibly permit {couples} to attain one another (horrid, believable), the place synthetic intelligence would possibly supply solace within the face of bereavement (a world during which we already stay). Solely one of many tales exceeds 20 pages and it’s most likely the least attention-grabbing; the very best are brief sufficient that their uncanny ambiance doesn’t have time to change into diffuse. Felicelli describes the e-book as being “stuffed with waking desires and half-real desires on paper during which time is out of joint.”

Her topics — our unattainable dreamers — embody a lady who sculpts from clay the kid she all the time dreamed of getting, a tech bro who builds automaton replicas of his ex-girlfriend and a lonely younger man attempting to construct a time machine whereas on the lookout for love on-line. In a single story, a person re-creates his spouse, youngsters and canine as holograms after their deaths, full with 4DX accoutrements (“From a pipe put in within the rafters, jasmine wafts in, her scent”). A compellingly queasy feeling of unhealth and unease hangs over many of those tales. Most of Felicelli’s characters, one feels, would profit from remedy.

Readers will seemingly discover well timed resonances within the late-capitalist doominess of “How We Know Our Time Vacationers.” Felicelli, who has reviewed books for the Los Angeles Instances, has spoken about the affect the turmoil of 2020 and her personal well being challenges had on the e-book’s genesis, highlighting particularly the stress of dwelling by means of a pandemic whereas taking immunosuppressants, that yr’s California wildfires and overwhelming election nervousness. “It felt like we have been dwelling by means of a sort of apocalypse, finish occasions,” she mentioned, “or that I used to be on the finish of every part, anyway.” Her millenarian angst is manifest within the tales’ depiction of catastrophes each environmental and human-caused: the tsunami that threatens the lover-friends on the seaside within the e-book’s first story, the nuclear fallout that leaves the Golden Gate Bridge “a shadow of what it as soon as was.”

However whereas there are clear correspondences with our current malaise, the very best of those tales faucet into extra primal anxieties and archetypes. “Meeting Line,” one of many strongest, is actually Bluebeard for the age of AI. The story is informed from the angle of Ashlin, an enamelist struggling, for causes she will’t pinpoint, to recollect who she is. “When she reached into the recesses of her reminiscence for her first expertise of enameling, the day when she fell in love with it, she pushed up in opposition to darkness and clouds.” One among her college students, Jason, who says he works in AI, appears surprisingly acquainted. “She felt pulled, dreamy, magnetized to his facet by an unseen drive.” They begin relationship and inside a month he asks her to maneuver in. “She nonetheless hadn’t seen the entire home, nevertheless it was infinitely extra snug than her tiny house and he was the one individual she knew, so she shrugged. Why not?”

This dissociative sort of decision-making is a standard characteristic in Felicelli’s tales. In some instances, it’s a characteristic of a personality’s mania or delusions. In Ashlin’s, we quickly uncover it’s extra seemingly a direct consequence of her curious origin. For sooner or later, in a room Jason has forbidden her to enter, she discovers a complete rack of duplicate Ashlins. These are robots, she learns, encoded with as a lot of their unique — Jason’s ex-girlfriend — as he’s capable of seize by means of programming and fabrication. These simulacra-girlfriends are an outward expression of his blocked emotions, his unresolved craving. They’re additionally deepfake intercourse dolls. No surprise Ashlin feels so bizarre.

The half-remembered, the automaton, the lifelike: These are the weather that give a lot of Felicelli’s tales their surreal high quality. There’s a dreaminess to the construction of the gathering, too. Particulars and characters interpenetrate tales that may in any other case appear to happen in separate universes, a lot as desires bleed one into one other. As a phrase or concept metastasizes within the drowsy thoughts, so an unusual phrase like “seawall,” which seems a number of occasions throughout totally different tales — as a lot a bulwark in opposition to rising dread as swelling tides — could be made to chime with surprising resonances.

However what of time journey? Although a literal characteristic of a few of these tales, it additionally appears to hold metaphorical freight. “Time journey” is a approach of describing the unbidden return of long-dormant emotions or how trauma can entice us prior to now. As in “Love Songs for a Misplaced Continent,” Felicelli’s first assortment, and her novel “Chimerica,” fairy-tale and legendary archetypes from each her native Tamil and European cultures irrupt exotically into the textual content. Their inclusion demonstrates how resolutely the residue of childhood can linger; the reemergence of forgotten however unattainable needs is a pure consequence of our failure to maneuver on from them. We all know our time vacationers, merely, as a result of we acknowledge their faces.

Charles Arrowsmith relies in New York and writes about books, movies and music.