Demo - "What You Wish For"

   "What You Wish For" is, quite frankly, more than a little problematic. Ken, a newly married and generally contented guy, brings his wife to visit the place where he grew up. Formerly a suburban neighborhood, it's now a ghost town, abandoned and overrun with weeds. Ken remembers being bullied for his mixed heritage (his father a white, American soldier married a woman of Japanese ancestry) by all the other townspeople except a gardener - the only other Asian in town. When Ken's puppy is killed by the racist father of a racist bully (also the gardener's employer), Ken loses it. All the rage he feels is released and he reanimates the town's dead animals. His zombie puppy kills the racist patriarch and the other animals begin killing anyone nearby. In the middle of the rampage, the gardener warns Ken that "hate will eat you too" and, just like that, Ken stops animating the animal corpses. The adult Ken recalls the gruesome event over an image of young Ken rubbing his puppy's ears while the bloody carcasses of the murdered townspeople lie sprawled all around. Ken remembers it as "the one day I lost control, the one day I got mad. The one day I let those feelings out." He doesn't tell his unnamed wife but he shares a look with his dog, the same dog he brought back to life now grown, and ponders the wisdom of the gardener's words. "That gardener was right, hate will eat you up, if you let it. I stopped in time, and yeah, life is good now. But I will never forget how close I came." The final image is of the town, in the fading light, peacefully nestled under a clear sky and gentle mountains.

   "What You Wish For" is, most earnestly, a cautionary tale against letting the hatred of others consume you. Racism creates a cycle of anger and retributive violence that will never solve anything. This is clear. However, the metaphor that Wood & Cloonan use to tell this story is more than a little extreme: Ken kills the racists who have made his life painful. It seems a rather disproportionate response to say the least. Wood & Cloonan seem to want to illustrate the destructive anger that the victims of racism feel and this would be all well and good if Ken didn't murder an entire town because he was bullied. This is terrifyingly close to many other incidents of violence in North America in the last decade and a half (Columbine being the most seared into the public imagination) and the resemblance, unacknowledged by the text, leaves this reader with a gnawing sense of disquiet.

 

  The weaknesses of Wood & Cloonan's extended metaphor in this story are multiple. The most uncomfortable is the fact that the text seems unaware of the irony of Ken's statement that he will never forget how close he came. How close to what? Murdering an entire town because he was angry? Oops. Ken's power seems to be that he is friendly with death [see cover, above right] and that he can bring back dead things. Perhaps he brought the dead townspeople back to life and they all ran away, thus leaving the town empty. There is no indication in the text that this happened, but one might imagine that if Ken did kill a whole town he would be somewhat less contented. The lack of acknowledgment for this incongruity is glaring. Furthermore, the seemingly well-adjusted and happy Ken stands at odds with the text's two moments of fleeting recognition of the disturbing magnitude of his actions. The first is the look of fear on Ken's parents' faces during his killing spree before they slam the door on him, potentially implying that they never spoke to him again. The second occurs in the panel where young Ken sits with his puppy, surrounded by the bodies of those he's killed. The caption reads "not mad anymore." Madness seems to be the realm to which young Ken fled when his puppy was killed and it's quite possible that the whole event was a macabre fantasy rather than an enacted massacre. Ken even admits his recollection isn't entirely reliable: "I remember that day well enough," he says. Yet the text on a later panel when Ken stops by his old house asks "did they deserve it?" implying that the racist townspeople did, in fact, die. The resurrected puppy would imply that Ken does, indeed, have the power to reanimate the dead and would give added credence to his recollected version of events.

   Regardless of whether or not Ken actually did go on a murderous rampage or if he merely wanted to, the metaphor for letting go of hatred being the solution to racism is underdeveloped. Ken is happily married "to the best girl in the world." He has a condo, "a good job and a killer record collection, too." He is haunted by the events - not the deaths of individuals but of those deaths as signifiers of the possible magnitude of his rage if he unleashes it. Rage, an entirely understandable and natural consequence of racism, is a matter of choice. The language of choice permeates this story. Though anger is an autonomous response, to let go to of hate is a conscious choice, illustrated by the sudden and complete change that Ken undergoes after the gardener imparts his wisdom. To let go of hate is an individual proposition.

   The fact of individual choices being enough to overcome racism is hinted at as being insufficient early in the story when Ken defines the American Dream as getting "one up on everyone else." This prototypical individualist mantra (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) is briefly interrogated. But Ken is able to achieve those things after he leaves town and his condemnation of the American Dream is more a critique of suburban prejudice than anything else. He is not interested in how the American Dream functions except as a frame of reference to the bigots on his street. They are not even representatives of endemic or systematic racism. They are not the people who can pass Ken over for promotion or who will deny him a bank loan. They're just the dumb redneck racists, the easy ones to dismiss. 

   It isn't entirely fair to criticize "What You Wish For" for being a shallow examination of racism. The story is a shallow examination of racism but it doesn't set out to be much more. It is, foremost, a story about the need to let go of hate. What it does, though, is make me wonder about the limits of metaphor. Ken's unleashed rage is symbolic and, as such, engages in levels beyond the simple points of the plot. Ken's childhood town functions as little more than a reminder of the price of anger and a time he almost let rage consume him, not the site of a murderous rampage. It's not a real town; it's a nostalgic device. It has no function outside its limited mandate in the story. The fact that it is where Ken committed murder sits at odds with the tenor of the story. Ken's comment that he came "close" is entirely wrong because he didn't come close - he actually did let anger consume him for long enough to end lives. Just because those were the lives of poorly drawn characters for whom racism was their only defining quality and who didn't serve the text as actual characters, doesn't mean that he didn't cross a pretty clear moral line. The unsettling comparison to Columbine aside, "What You Wish For" seeks to actively engage in a metaphor for which it is entirely unprepared. The maneuvering of Ken from angry, possibly murderous, boy to well-adjusted member of society is probably the single biggest unresolved tension in the whole collection of stories. In the end, Ken's killing spree becomes a memory that makes him a better person - which makes "What You Wish For," quite possibly, the most disturbing story in all of Demo.

Next Week: "One Shot, Don't Miss"