Book Three, Chapter Four
“Scape-Goats”
It’s strange to re-encounter the characters in these stories only to discover, in many cases, that they’re now younger than I am. When I first read these books, in high school, these jaded hedonists and criminals, these sexually omnivorous pleasure-seekers and self-medicators, they all seemed so much older and so much more experienced. Now I’m on the ill-fated voyage with the bitterly self-absorbed holiday-makers of “Scape-Goats,” and I find myself one year their senior. I don’t even think of them as adults anymore, because since I’m still a kid, anyone younger than me must be as well.
At least now I have some context into which I can put the 26-year-old oversexed backstabbers on the good ship “Emanuelle”–they’re rich hipsters, trust-fund kids. They’re at home enough on this yacht that they–I say “they” rather than “Barker” because this is the first story in the collection narrated beginning to end in the first person–don’t even bother explaining whose it is or where they’re from. It doesn’t really matter, though, since the point of the story is that they’re all going to end up swept away by the tide of time. Rather literally, in fact.
I think this is another very fine story, owing mostly to the way it focuses on the emotions of futility and resignation, too rarely tapped in a genre that is tailor-made to make use of them. In that way it’s the spiritual sister to “Pig Blood Blues,” right down to the animal imagery in both story and title–“Scape-Goats”‘ doomed sheep are every bit as memorable in their passivity as the pig was in its aggression.
What you really have here is four irredeemably solipsistic people–even Frankie, for all her insight into the callowness of herself and her companions, can’t seem to will herself out of it; for pete’s sake, she fucks a guy because she can’t be bothered to deny him–who are forced from being the only things in their respective worlds that matter into things that don’t matter at all. To do this Barker relies on images of some of nature’s great levelers–erosion, putrefaction, the fog, the sea, the sweep of history. The brief moments of initiative and even savagery that the characters display seem even more pointless when contrasted against these insurmountable forces. It’s only when it can’t possibly make a difference anymore that Frankie shows a flash of true feeling for another person; it’s only then that this beautiful young woman, who’s paraded her nakedness and her sex before us like they couldn’t be more inconsequential to her, becomes truly attractive; it’s only then that the loss hurts us, and becomes hard to forget.