Reviewed by Michael Signorelli
5.14.07

The Session places its reader in a state of perpetual readiness. It exudes a dark spontaneity that breeds a giddy fear and includes, among other things, the possibility of growing legs. Its form, its pace, and its lightness (weighing in at a waifish 64 pages) make this a strangely potent debut by Aaron Petrovich from Hotel St. George Press, an imprint of Akashic Books.

Petrovich, a writer of fiction and theater in Brooklyn, begins this novella in dialogue with a statement of intent: “What we’re after here is the truth of the situation?” The responsibility to fulfill this intention promptly falls into the idle (addled?) hands of two Detectives—both named Smith. Reminiscent of Estragon and Vladimir in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the words tumble out of this pair like jacks.

The Detectives Smith and Smith investigate an ethereally set crime scene where the Mathematician, a sort of disembodied figure of renown, was brutally eviscerated by his “entire attendant audience” during the “first in a now defunct series of lectures.” To get their bearings, the Detectives engage in some light chatter, cautiously moving toward a mutual understanding of what may or may not have taken place.

I’ve got it.
I’m pleased to hear it.
In the palm of my hands.
That’s the wrong place for it.
On the edge of my seat?
In anticipation of…?
…
…What?
What?
What are you waiting for?
Who says I’m waiting?

As the dialogue continues, their voices reveal definite symptoms of personality. The senior Smith ably leads the investigation, deigns to his protégé’s questions, and pursues truth as one resigned to its shifting nature. The other, often unsure of himself, yields to strength, seeks validation, and is prone to flights of ecstatic fantasy. It’s as if they’re drawn from competing yet complimentary regions of one mind, one’s lows nullifying the other’s highs and vice versa. But sometimes, and not just for the reader, there’s some trouble telling who’s who:

This truth won’t come listlessly upon you.
Like the feral field mouse upon the hungry jaws of the bathing snake?
Not this truth, Smith. Not this of truth.
I’d rather you didn’t call me that.
What?
Smith.
It’s your name.
I’m aware of that.
I’m not to call you by name?
You are also called Smith…
When I’m speaking to you, Smith, you’ll know it.

Exhibited here we have one of the few clear “themes” to hang a hat on—the crisis of identity. The younger Smith reveals a nervous preoccupation: to lose the sense of separation, to speak to oneself as if to another person would represent, for him, a reintegration into “the cycles of growth and decay on the Earth—from what rank and rotten organism they no longer are able to think of themselves as separate.” He continues, “If I no longer were able to think of myself as an entity that is separate from the world that surrounds him, I should find myself feeling rather—unable to go on.” The Detectives revisit this issue now and again but, for the sake of the faintly moving plot, do eventually go on.

Apparently, the Mathematician’s lecture, entitled An Introduction to the Elusive Precepts of Essencism, had granted the audience “definitive proof of a finite future,” seemingly, an experience of the end of their being, then returned them “as one and at once to the…now futile present.” Projections of “holographic light” exacerbated their disillusionment and led to the audience’s “singular loss of its collective mind,” which concluded with the disappearance of the Mathematician’s internal organs. It’s your textbook crime scene.

After bringing the whole cannibalistic lot to the asylum for observation, the Detectives encounter the Doctor, the only other voice in the narrative, who acts both as a wedge driven between them and as a unifying other. Admittedly, there’s more of the latter. The Detectives seem to take exception to the Doctor’s intrusion into their work and generally berate him. Here the Doctor begins:

I see. And are you also finding my patience amusing?
They’re funny, yeah.
My patience.
If a bit bug-eyed, if you know what I mean.
Little bit round the bend.
On the brink.
But a real laugh-riot, in a sort of daffy sort of duck sort of way.
I said my patience.
Yeah, I heard you the first time, Caligari….
Are you understanding the difference between my patience and my
patients?

The Detectives have a fine time frustrating the Doctor and insert witty asides that are not necessarily relevant to the present action but that add an unpredictability and playfulness to the dialogue. Even so, the Detectives exercise a brand of focus when the issue of name-calling again arises and the Doctor attempts to alienate the Detectives from one another: “…while I should not have wanted to interrupt your soliloquy, it is time, now, to mediate upon what differences have arisen between you in the condition of your bereavement.” The semi-conscious self-reference in the term “soliloquy” deepens the suspicion that the Detectives are not your traditional, physically separate, investigative team. Is “soliloquy” meant to poke fun? Or are these Detectives truly of one mind?

The answer to that silly question hardly matters. Combined with Vilem Benes aptly off-balanced monotypes, Petrovich has crafted a work that bewilders, that echoes, that exists in gleeful solidarity, and that will draw its reader in a sharp intake of breath. He maintains a tempo of language that never falters and manages to shape layers of meaning and premonition from the raw material of speech. And, in the end, light is shed on truth, or this of truth, anyhow. If the Detectives are not exactly Estragon and Vladimir, they might be cousins.