At the center of Vienna, USA is probably the best story of the collection, “Local Man Struck By Lightning Survives.” A product of an unwritten story about clouds and my stint as a reporter during the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Festival, it portrays a remarkable incident in the life of Richard Higgins, reporter. Higgins views mankind as utterly depraved and sinful yet finds himself fascinated with a young woman of incredible innocence and joy.
Again, the problem of evil and pain enter the story, rather forceful this time.
Here’s a bit from the intro:
He took a job as a reporter for The Vienna Clipper, writing twelve inches on old women making quilts and old men doing one more year what they had done every day of their lives, writing thirty inches on men found dead in their bathtubs and women found in other men’s beds. Not a printed letter of news escaped the outskirts of Vienna, but reams of bleeding black print rushed into the office, and he sorted through it, grappling with the mundane masquerade of human endeavors, reading and reporting, outfitted in black shoes and black hat, writing, gallons of ink issuing from his pen, and from his pen to his typewriter, and from his typewriter to the ceaseless presses, expelling the vast sum of human activities in ten pages daily, and while the pictures of the times turned to color, Higgins produced in black and white.
But of the thousands of bylines he amassed, of the miles of newsprint that marked the metronomic meter of his daily existence, of the news stories he authored, of the columns and interviews attributed to his name, the people of Vienna took no special notice except for one, and one in which his name appeared not in the byline, as a god dictating his creation, but as a player in the story itself. And the headline read:
Local Man Struck by Lightning Survives