In Venita Blackburn’s original, fierce first novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, Coral E. Brown, a graphic sci-fi novelist, finds her brother dead by suicide and splinters into separate selves. As she fends off grief and horror, the futuristic machines she’s invented to narrate her own novel step in to tell the story with tender, wry curiosity about humanity. As these machines say from the start, “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” Of course, since the machines are her creation, she is telling the story, but obliquely, as a novelist does. They investigate her deep past and family and report on her thoughts and actions after her brother’s death. They draw conclusions about human relationships to destructiveness, debt, desire, minor fame, avoidance, denial, fan fic, and the devastating, insatiable human craving for “More.”
As the novel opens, Coral stands by while the EMTs deal with the body of her brother, Jay, her train of thought already unrolling into the machines’ analyses. Her brother’s phone “ding[s] and vibrate[s] like something hungry.” A message from her niece, Jay’s daughter, Khadija, postponing a family dinner: the phone is unlocked, and Coral reads it. Something simmers in her so that when she comes home from the hospital at midnight, full of rage-grief and questions about his life, she begins to search through his other text messages. He has only 30 contacts, which increases her fury at him. Even before his death, she was the only one in touch with other family members and the one who had to make all the arrangements and pay for family funerals. Now she will have to notify everyone of his death. In the middle of a long rant, aloud, to herself, she says, “I’m not some kind gay nun with a credit card. I have shit to do. Now I have to be the middleman in the family because you never talk to anybody.”
She cannot directly access her grief for her brother, but losing him is the end of the life she’s known. Her machines, again, express this for her as they puzzle out humanity. Their marvelously incongruous lists try to capture, after the end of the world, everything that was weird, remarkable, and even ordinary:
We were not there at the end of humanity, but we can name all the things that were present: soda cans, dogs, herpes, foil balloons, boxing gloves, dish soap, combustibles, fireworks, helium, lithium, echinacea, monosodium glutamate, chlorine tablets, cotton swabs, antiperspirant, Velcro, turkey bacon, and not much else of great interest. We catalog now. We organize the data that remains, which is all that remains. We are the machines, yes, but we are the children and we are learning and we are obsessed as children were obsessed with the day, the tilt of the sun and how if put through glass it can become a weapon in the palm.
Coral is already in the habit of splitting into her own creations before Jay’s death: Wildfire, her graphic sci-fi novel, is about a debt collector–assassin who, like Coral, is Black and lesbian but, unlike Coral, is fully in charge of herself, no matter what. Instead of notifying Khadija and the others, though, Coral begins to text them from Jay’s phone as if she is Jay, and though she makes no conscious decisions about this, she uses these texts both as deflection and as a way of reinventing his life, deepening his connections even as she frays her own. During this fraught week, her body revolts—another split, the primal self overcome by loss. She’s unable to properly eat or sleep and not always able to keep down whatever she does eat. Still, she tries to carry out her life—from appearing at a conference to sign copies of her graphic novel to dating a stranger (not a woman with whom she might have a relationship but a “beautiful sociopath”).
Meanwhile, as Coral wrestles with loss and denial, it’s up to the machine consciousness to sort through her old family memories. Coral is so numb and displaced that the collective voice of the machines carries most of the yearning as it recalls her family events, romantic encounters, and interactions with the addicted, complex mothers of the book, both Coral’s and Khadija’s.
The machines work to contain the chaos that’s overwhelming Coral, through the lists and through what they call clinics: the Clinic for Excavating Repressed Memories in Search of Solutions to Current Crises, the Clinic for Dying While Willfully Participating in a Poorly Thought-Out Cultural Trend and Becoming a Martyr for Revolution, the Clinic for Weaponizing Fame in Order to Achieve Public Adoration and a Cover for Myriad Crimes. Although the names of the clinics are ironic, in these sections of the book, the machines generalize insightfully about human life and sympathetically chronicle some of the most touching incidents of Coral’s past, such as her deeply engaged interactions with her niece, who had been, as the machines tell us, “a selfish child with great and terrible intelligence.”
Some of the characters and strategies of this novel show up in earlier forms in Blackburn’s brilliant short and flash fiction collections: Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, which includes her short story “Fam,” about a precursor for Khadija (“my lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin”). Blackburn’s mastery of crisp, intimate voices—sometimes scathing, sometimes full of longing—gives both her stories and the novel a haunting, polyphonic range of tones.
In Dead in Long Beach, California, the denial, the lists, the clinics, and Coral’s frantic attempts at preserving her usual life and living Jay’s can postpone for only so long the questions of how Coral can tell Khadija the news and what will happen afterward. But Blackburn understands more about human capacities than Coral, her nameless fictional assassin, and all the machines do. All of the dazzling, unsettling splits in consciousness, all of Coral’s evasions, return to the messiness and surprises of real life, which can’t, in the end, be contained, categorized, defined, or predicted.•
Join us on July 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Blackburn will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
