This Is Only a Test

“
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

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”

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

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 their 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)

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.