“The Love Letter,” the second story in Vienna, USA, is a strange story. Without revealing too much, it’s about Mark Parrish, who doesn’t want at all, and so he drags a young lady into his experiment to determine why people willingly suffer because of their desires.
Of all the stories in Vienna, USA, this is the one I probably come back to most often. “Local Man Struck By Lightning” is probably the better, more literary story, but I find something fascinating and pertinent in “The Love Letter.”
Here’s a bit from the second page:
The first entry in this journal, written with great effort over a period of three hours, with a break for dinner, culminated as follows, the original words written in precise, formal block letters:
St. Paul writes, “I have learned the secret of being content in every circumstance.” I did not know there was a secret. I have always been content. I desire nothing. As proof of my assertion, I will record several past incidents.
When I was in fourth grade, we played kickball at recess. My friends took the game seriously. Once, we lost when Peter, the captain of my team, dropped a ball he should have caught. He was red in the face from anger as we lined up to go inside. He called himself “Stupid.” I told him he shouldn’t bother himself – it was only a game. “Don’t you want to win?” he asked. I told him I liked to win because my teammates liked to win, but that I did not care whether we won or lost.
When I was in high school, my house burned in a fire. My classmates wanted to comfort me. They brought gifts to replace the items I had lost. A teacher asked if I was okay. I told her yes. She didn’t believe me, so I told her that I had only lost stuff. It didn’t matter.
When I was twenty-two, my mother tried to set me up on a date. I didn’t go. She asked if I wasn’t lonely. I said I liked company, but I liked solitude as well; if she would like, I would go on a date, for her sake.
That was all he wrote. He reread it several times. He corrected classmates; he had spelled it as two words. After some consideration, he added a final sentence: I have never wanted anything that I could not easily go without.
As always, you can purchase the ebook or the PDF. (Sorry, Kindle version still forthcoming.)