Night of the Living Rez

“Safe Harbor” is the only story in the collection in which the narrator is not directly named. This raises an obvious question: Is the narrator David, or Dee? It’s difficult to know if the stories narrated by Dee are ordered chronologically, but it’s implied, through details like the fact that Dee’s mother doesn’t yet know about his job at UPS in “Safe Harbor” but does in “Earth, Speak,” that this is the case. Talty’s resistance to answering this question potentially positions “Safe Harbor” as a kind of turning point in the collection, a moment in time in which David’s identity begins to transition into Dee. What, then, is the cause of this transition? “Safe Harbor” is a story intimately concerned with the threat of loss. It is the first time in the collection that David/Dee must cope with the notion that his mother—his most personal connection to his family and to his history—will eventually die.

David/Dee’s reaction to his mother’s seizure is one of great vulnerability. His desperate vows in the wake of her episode—“Right then I tell myself I will always bring her cigarettes; right then I tell myself I’ll watch that movie with Adam Sandler” (134)—speak to a profound sense of regret and the almost childlike notion that he can make everything right as long as he does everything his mother has asked him to. David/Dee’s reactions to this situation, though, escalate dramatically by the conclusion, in which he drives so recklessly he injures himself. This reaction is caused, in large part, by the fact that his mother momentarily forgets who he is and later chastises herself for his lapse. The potential losses that David/Dee must cope with here are doubled: It’s not only the possible loss of his mother but also the loss of the connection to Personal and Communal History that she represents. This moment marks a turning point in David’s life, after which he becomes Dee—pushing aside his more stable childhood identity and becoming a somewhat unreliable narrator of his own experience.