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Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
In “Worst-Case Scenario,” the closer to Wilson’s debut story collection, the narrator has a job with Worst Case Scenario, Inc., a sort of doomsaying consultant firm. His job is to visit clients’ homes (such as the woman who wants to ensure her house is safer for her newborn) or businesses and quantify disaster. This isn’t the type of job one temps-to-perms: You have to have a predilection for gloom. When assessing the mother’s home, he says, “Her house is, without question, a house filled with theoretical tragedy, with possible sadness.”
That is, in a sentence, Wilson’s bailiwick. Throughout Tunneling, his characters face potential sadnesses and nebulous anxieties that feel no less real to them for not actually existing. In “Grand Stand-in,” the elderly, female narrator works as a grandmother-for-hire, to pass on bad news. In the title story, the narrator and two of his friends—just graduated from college and driftless in a painfully recognizable way—take to smoking pot and digging extensive, labyrinthine tunnels beneath their hometown.
Wilson animates his stories with a smart sense of humor. The lonely narrator of the title story majored in Morse code in college and bemoans the fact that all anyone wants to know how to tap out is “I love you” and “SOS”: “And if they were in a situation where they actually had to resort to using Morse code for help, well, they weren’t going to get it. They were going to die.” Humor is key to the clever-by-half stories, but it comes naturally to Wilson and his characters. As ridiculous or absurd as their situations become, like most post-grad foibles, it’s all of their own doing.
