Art/Writing/Lettering/Coloring by Nick Drnaso
Published by Drawn and Quarterly in May 2018.
. . .
Systematic lying creates what communications scientists call a “disinformation situation,” in which everybody eventually begins to distrust, demonize and diabolize everybody else.
-Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977)
“Do I remind you of his madness? I’m honored.”
-Dialogue from Rampo Noir (2005)
"I'm on the other side of that wall if you need anything."
-Boundary Technician Calvin Wrobel in Sabrina (2018)
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Sabrina has murder and it has mystery, but I'm not sure it's a murder mystery. I guess it's a murder mystery for awhile, but then the murderer is revealed along with his motive . . . and the story keeps rolling along. Sabrina then becomes a story about the survivors, their grief, and the well-meaning efforts of those that try to help them survive the psychological devastation of having a loved one brutally murdered. All of this occurs in the grotesque arena of the twenty-four hour cable news/clickbait cycle intensified by an always online spectator class hungry to exploit tragedy for cash and clout by promoting conspiracy theories to a non-critical American public.
Our murder victim is Sabrina Gallo. We first see her with her sister, Sandra, spending the evening in their parents' house, catching up on their lives. Eventually, Sandra leaves for her apartment, while Sabrina stays behind to housesit. Then, the next day, Sabrina leaves the house, and she is not seen again in-person by the reader. As we turn the pages, we may well question our memories of that first sequence. We may find ourselves flipping back, or we may find that too disturbing, like looking at a ghost. Sandra comes back, and we may well wonder how vivid her last memories of seeing her sister alive could be, and how accurate.
In the fullness of time, the murderer is revealed as a twisted, empty-headed loser with a windy online manifesto cut-and-pasted from the most putrid corners of the men's rights activist message board anti-reality. Mercifully, we are spared the text itself, but we already know the type. He's killed before. He's died before. And now he's metastasized again within another willing vessel. Sabrina gives us his final repose: smiling face above the waterline of a bathtub filled with his own blood. Prior to ending his own life, he videotaped himself murdering Sabrina, the details of which we are, again, mercifully, spared. But the evil of his act endures, for he mailed VHS dubs to various media and public figures, and now it's available on the Internet forever.
Sabrina's boyfriend, Teddy, has to first deal with the trauma of her disappearance. He goes to stay with an old high school friend, Airman Calvin Wrobel, a 'boundary technician' for the Department of Defense. Calvin becomes something like a hero in the world of Sabrina, selflessly offering up his home to Teddy, who is fast sinking into an all-consuming depression. Calvin buys food for Teddy. Calvin is nonjudgmental, not putting any undue pressure on Teddy to leave the house or magically 'get over it.' Calvin might be one of the most pure-hearted heroes of recent fiction.
That's not to say Calvin doesn't have his flaws. His wife left him, taking their daughter down to a new home in Florida. Calvin's nice, but a bit of a space cadet. By his own admission he's too emotionally detached. He likes pizza and playing massively multiplayer online fantasy RPGs and military shooters. It's easy to see how someone could get bored being married to Calvin. Our hero seems to help Teddy for altruistic reasons, but it's obvious that Calvin is also trying to do the right thing as a way of proving to himself that he isn't a total failure as a provider for others.
Teddy sinks into despair. He has trouble getting out of bed. He can barely speak in complete sentences. When the news breaks that Sabrina has been murdered a month after she went missing, Teddy loses all control and has a brawl with Calvin-also mercifully offstage for the most part. Sabrina is mostly oblique when it comes to violence and aggression. The danger is primarily psychological. Can we trust the people around us? Can we rely on ourselves to bear up under the weight of tragedy? Sabrina is one of two named characters who actually die in the story-the other being her murderer-and yet there's a pervasive mood of disquiet. Atrocities-mass shootings-are referenced in passing, and Sabrina takes on a quality of documentary even though it is a work of fiction. We are clearly in a version of the Permafucked American Hellscape of conspiratorial disinformation, white supremacist terrorism, and misogynist terrorism. Always online. Never closes. Always open, a gaping maw, to swallow us all.
Except, perhaps, for Calvin. The emotional detachment that drove away his wife ironically allows him to persist in a blandly cheerful, can-do manner. He takes nothing personally. He cries when he reads clickbait 'uplift' articles about random acts of kindness. We may sneer at his normie-ass gullibility, but his is the most even of keels.
Meanwhile, Teddy loses himself in the ramblings of an AM radio conspiracy monger. Sabrina generates a surprising amount of suspense out of a despondent man lying on a matrress in his underwear while listening to a portable radio.
Mainstream media looking to capitalize on a gruesome murder story come knocking on Calvin's door. Online conspiracy grifters spread viral lies and denialism to shore up their personal brands. Calvin starts getting emails from a nutcase. Is there more danger waiting in the wings?
Of course, the news cycle and the parasitical conspiracy grift cycle must move on to fresh atrocities, fresh blood, but Calvin, Teddy, and Sandra are still stuck with their tragedy. Even the narrative line of Sabrina seems to drift into meaningless traversal as the numbness of loss negates fictive purposefulness. One strange digression involves Calvin looking for a restroom at a supermarket. Another entails Sandra getting ensnared by an insufferable open mic poetry conclave. One especially bleak diversion has Calvin try to cheer up Teddy by turning on the TV only to end up watching a news package about the grand opening of the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. Perhaps the most merciful drift happens when Teddy gets absorbed into a Where's Waldo?-esque children's book left behind by Calvin's daughter. The page is filled with a scene of cheery, messy non-lethal chaos. Adulthood doesn't seem to be functioning like it was promised. So, take a few steps backwards, I guess. Reality, what's left of it, will keep.
Unless it doesn't.
