Reviewed by Amilya Robinson
Sleep Tight Satellite
by Carol Guess
Tupelo Press
ISBN: 978-1-946482-90-7, Paperback, Oct 2034, 152 pages
“Fridays were the worst for Mira. They implied that the weekend was coming, something to be happy about, but there was no weekend anymore. There was only time, unrolling in an endless loop, and Zoom, recording it all for replay” (35).
Carol Guess, recipient of the Philolexian Award and author of Doll Studies: Forensics and Girl Zoo, investigates experiences that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic, a global phenomenon that has continued to plague our consciences in a recent work of fiction titled Sleep Tight Satellite. Coming up on its first anniversary, Sleep Tight Satellite is an interconnected collection of short stories, poems, scripts, and more centering queer characters, their relationships, and the innate resiliency that has ushered them through a life-threatening and fundamentally life-changing time. Guess’s work exposes the marrow of the queer experience, of the cyclical failure and success of romantic and platonic relationships, and of the way technology becomes a toxic, tarnishing companion when it’s all you have to rely on.
Guess pulls no punches when it comes to calling it like it is. Seven pages in and it’s declared by one of the character’s that “This was the start of the collapse. There would be no end to this. The President was burning the country to the ground and the sense that anyone might die at any time stopped being an existential theory and became an urgent reality” (7). One thing I like about this work is that as much as it is fiction, it is also based on experiences and events that are very real. The characters might be fictionalized but their encounters with the changing world, their mental and emotional obstacles, and the consequences of a president who has failed to protect them are very much a reflection of reality.
Speaking of a dose of reality, when Trump supporters and others storm the capital on January 6th, Guess reopens a window into the familiar experience of watching it all on TV. “It was another one of those traumatic days in US History,” an unnamed narrator remarks, “where something unfathomably terrible happens and then the government goes to war against the will of the people, except this time the people were going to war against the government. The people were terrifying. They looked ready to kill” (54). There’s a really apocalyptic feel to how this event is described in Guess’s work. Like someone sitting at home watching the news as a horde of zombies or the fatally diseased bang down the doors to the government. It’s like watching everything fall apart. I think Guess also does a great job of expressing the deep-seated horror of witnessing this mob-like mentality of blind followers being carried out.
Another common thread through the piece is a focus on technology, society’s move to the online sphere, and what that looks like from an intimate perspective. In one of the short stories that shares the title of the whole work, one character, Quinn, observes that “The pandemic had broken the last few barriers we had between surveillance and domestic space. All day long I spoke into a screen, exercised from a screen, watching faces onscreen. The camera followed me everywhere. I wanted something real. But who was I, with my job a giant spinning eye, to ask for privacy?” (20). There’s something almost invasive about living your life through screens. In moments when the isolation gets to you, it can feel like the very screens you rely on are hiding a watching, judging eye behind it. I think this character, as well as many of the other characters and short stories in Sleep Tight Satellite, do a phenomenal job of exploring the side effects of lacking human interaction and interaction with the outside world as we once knew it.
One of the most artful and evocative passages in the work begins like this: “Everyone was used to bodies back then. But now there was a way that what appeared on camera needed to be perfect. It was like bodies were divided in half, a magician’s assistant sawed at the waist. Below the belt, everyone was in their underwear or sweats, barefoot or wearing the ugliest shoes, sitting on milk crates with Legos or kitty litter or crumpled candy wrappers on the floor below the screen. But above the waist everything was on camera, and everyone was secretly thinking like Room Rater, eyeing plants, bookshelves, paintings. Scrutinizing hair and make-up, shirts and jackets, ties and jewelry. Mira felt more pressure than ever to look professional, whatever that meant” (37). I love the author’s proposed dichotomy of what’s inside of the camera frame and what’s outside. There’s this sort of panopticon effect, especially with programs like Zoom where you quite literally have window after window of these faces, or sometimes even worse, blank screens, in which you know people are staring back at you. It creates a magnified sense of self-scrutiny and a distorted lens through which you see yourself and others. This kaleidoscope online world where facades don’t reflect the truth of the inside lays a complex environment for Guess’s characters. Life in the online world, in which everything takes place within a few small squares and rectangles, suddenly becomes infinitely more important than it used to be.
Sleep Tight Satellite shines a spotlight on a cast of radiant queer characters, each with their own unique and painfully relatable obstacles. One of the obvious ones is the pandemic itself and the inability to fulfill our innate human desire for touch and skinship. In one scene, the main character describes a meeting with a date, “We stood together wanting more. We couldn’t kiss but let our puffy coat sleeves rub for sparks, touching elbows in the parking lot. We never let our faces near or looked into each other’s eyes. Our masks grew damp with words we didn’t say. (25). I like how the author plays with the idea that the very lack of touch and the present taboo of touch actually enhance those barest of touches. Despite its subtlety, this scene still exuded a feeling of warmth and intimacy as you’d find in a non-pandemic era blooming romance scene. In the same scene, the character expresses, “This is queer history too. We’ve always touched in public because we had nowhere to go. We’ve always fucked the ways we could with what we couldn’t lose” (25). This was another bit of poetic prose from Guess I couldn’t leave out. The way the words cut deep into generational wounds and into queer history but simultaneously paint this picture of a persistent community of people that refuse to fold against opposing forces is profound, inspired, and heroic.
Queer identity and how it influences and is influenced by the things that happen around us is at the core of Guess’s work. Along those lines, one character reveals, “Sometimes I didn’t know what I was. Sometimes I liked not knowing and sometimes not knowing felt lonely”(137). I love the juxtaposition happening in this statement. I think it does well to demonstrate the lack of knowledge we receive about non-heteronormative/non-white colonial identities as we begin our lives and how realizing that you don’t fit within those categories is such an integral part of the queer experience. But, there is also comfort in not belonging to tradition, to those expectations and standards, in not entirely knowing how to find your place in that kind of system that’s set up against you, because those experiences are inherently queer too.
Sleep Tight Satellite by Carol Guess is heartbreakingly human, beautifully vulnerable, and entirely unapologetic. Guess has brought forth a rich patchwork tying together poignant remembrances of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the complex web of queer relationships and identities. As memories of the lockdown move further and further into the forgotten reaches of our minds, Sleep Tight Satellite is a reminder of what is truly significant in our lives, of what becomes of us when all that has been built around us slips away and all we are left with is ourselves.
About the reviewer: Amilya Robinson is a senior at San Diego State University pursuing a degree in English as well as certificates in Children’s Literature and Creative Editing & Publishing. Currently, she writes creatively for SDSU’s first all-women-run magazine, Femininomenon, and edits for Splice, The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship at SDSU College of Arts and Letters. In the future, she hopes to begin pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing for Fiction.