A fantastical exploration of the ache that comes with wanting the impossible

To desire the impossible is only human. Most of us have, at one time or another, wished to relive the moments when we were happiest, magically reshape the world as we would like it to be or even live forever. These impulses are sometimes disdained as childish, born of a failure or unwillingness to accept an intransigent, entropic world. Yet perhaps it’s a childlike resistance to so-called reality that gives impossible desire its irreducibly human ache.

Many such scenarios can be found in Anita Felicelli’s new collection of short stories, “How We Know Our Time Travelers.” Though these 14 miniature crises contain numerous fantastical or science-fictional elements, they are fundamentally explorations of this stubborn, very human attachment to things that cannot be.

(WTAW Press)

The world Felicelli depicts is recognizably our own, if slightly askew. The stories take place in the recent past, the present and the near future. The setting is pretty much always, it seems, Northern California, a land of drought and wildfires in the book, as in life. Technologically the twist is only marginal: This is the sort of world where an app might allow couples to score each other (horrid, plausible), where artificial intelligence might offer solace in the face of bereavement (a world in which we already live). Only one of the stories exceeds 20 pages and it’s probably the least interesting; the best are short enough that their uncanny atmosphere doesn’t have time to become diffuse. Felicelli describes the book as being “full of waking dreams and half-real dreams on paper in which time is out of joint.”

Her subjects — our impossible dreamers — include a woman who sculpts from clay the child she always dreamed of having, a tech bro who builds automaton replicas of his ex-girlfriend and a lonely young man trying to build a time machine while looking for love online. In one story, a man re-creates his wife, children and dog as holograms after their deaths, complete with 4DX accoutrements (“From a pipe installed in the rafters, jasmine wafts in, her scent”). A compellingly queasy feeling of unhealth and unease hangs over many of these tales. Most of Felicelli’s characters, one feels, would benefit from therapy.

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Readers will likely find timely resonances in the late-capitalist doominess of “How We Know Our Time Travelers.” Felicelli, who has reviewed books for the Los Angeles Times, has spoken about the influence the turmoil of 2020 and her own health challenges had on the book’s genesis, highlighting in particular the stress of living through a pandemic while taking immunosuppressants, that year’s California wildfires and overwhelming election anxiety. “It felt like we were living through a kind of apocalypse, end times,” she said, “or that I was at the end of everything, anyway.” Her millenarian angst is manifest in the stories’ depiction of catastrophes both environmental and human-caused: the tsunami that threatens the lover-friends on the beach in the book’s first story, the nuclear fallout that leaves the Golden Gate Bridge “a shadow of what it once was.”

But while there are clear correspondences with our present malaise, the best of these stories tap into more primal anxieties and archetypes. “Assembly Line,” one of the strongest, is essentially Bluebeard for the age of AI. The story is told from the perspective of Ashlin, an enamelist struggling, for reasons she can’t pinpoint, to remember who she is. “When she reached into the recesses of her memory for her first experience of enameling, the day when she fell in love with it, she pushed up against darkness and clouds.” One of her students, Jason, who says he works in AI, seems strangely familiar. “She felt pulled, dreamy, magnetized to his side by an unseen force.” They start dating and within a month he asks her to move in. “She still hadn’t seen the whole house, but it was infinitely more comfortable than her tiny apartment and he was the only person she knew, so she shrugged. Why not?”

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This dissociative kind of decision-making is a common feature in Felicelli’s stories. In some cases, it’s a feature of a character’s mania or delusions. In Ashlin’s, we soon discover it’s more likely a direct consequence of her curious origin. For one day, in a room Jason has forbidden her to enter, she discovers a whole rack of duplicate Ashlins. These are robots, she learns, encoded with as much of their original — Jason’s ex-girlfriend — as he’s able to capture through programming and fabrication. These simulacra-girlfriends are an outward expression of his blocked feelings, his unresolved yearning. They’re also deepfake sex dolls. No wonder Ashlin feels so weird.

The half-remembered, the automaton, the lifelike: These are the elements that give many of Felicelli’s stories their surreal quality. There’s a dreaminess to the structure of the collection, too. Details and characters interpenetrate stories that might otherwise seem to occur in separate universes, much as dreams bleed one into another. As a word or idea metastasizes in the drowsy mind, so an uncommon word like “seawall,” which appears several times across different stories — as much a bulwark against rising dread as swelling tides — can be made to chime with unexpected resonances.

But what of time travel? Though a literal feature of some of these stories, it also seems to carry metaphorical freight. “Time travel” is a way of describing the unbidden return of long-dormant feelings or how trauma can trap us in the past. As in “Love Songs for a Lost Continent,” Felicelli’s first collection, and her novel “Chimerica,” fairy-tale and legendary archetypes from both her native Tamil and European cultures irrupt exotically into the text. Their inclusion demonstrates how resolutely the residue of childhood can linger; the reemergence of forgotten but impossible desires is a natural consequence of our failure to move on from them. We know our time travelers, simply, because we recognize their faces.

Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.