by Alissa Hattman

In her essay collection Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt writes that “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” While political theory or cultural criticism might seek to define, answer, or name, storytelling invites us to experience the world through implication, to wrestle with ambiguity or contradiction in an effort to activate meaning that might otherwise be hard to pin down. Arendt’s use of the word “error” underscores that sometimes the rush to define can be counterproductive, even dangerous.

Debbie Urbanki’s short story collection Portalmania is a case in point, as it is less interested in defining the world on the other side of a given portal and more in the portal’s potential to puncture the fabric of societal assumptions and norms. These nine stories traverse the territory of fantasy, science fiction, and the absurd, but like the portals themselves, the book seems to occupy the liminal space of the in-between. Experimental in both genre and form, Portalmania invites us to hold nuanced and sometimes contradictory versions of truth, with topics ranging from parenting and neurodiversity to partnership and sexuality, not to mention notions of storytelling itself.

In the first story, the existence of portals helps a girl imagine alternative ways to think about home. The girl’s obsession with finding her own portal continues into adulthood, even as her mother insists that “this place could feel like home if you tried harder.” The mother sees the portals as flights of escapism, while her daughter views their potential as self-actualizing: “It isn’t abandonment at all. . . . It’s about believing in the possibility of other worlds and finding the world where you belong.” Even as portals start to overwhelm the ailing mother, she cannot see beyond her narrow definition of home.

Allowing and accepting the imagined worlds of others isn’t without its complications. “LK-32-C” is a story about a boy named Luke, his mother Beth, and Luke’s invented exoplanet. As Luke slips further into the imagined world, the family (which also includes a father and daughter) become more concerned. Beth tries everything to help Luke—a change of diet, a calming space in the house, ear protection when his sister is noisy—but nothing works. After a series of violent incidents at school and at home, a psychiatrist recommends a therapeutic boarding school for Luke. Beth attempts to connect with Luke by asking him questions about LK-32-C, but even that becomes fraught: “His drawings made me think, My son has something worthwhile inside of him. He has an entire world inside of him. I wanted to look at the drawings instead of him. I wanted him to stay away from me.”

The three-part story tackles complicated questions about parenting and the dangers of alienation via the imagination. Urbanski’s formal choices add depth and dignity to the characters: The first part is written in third person where we see the whole family together, while the second and third parts are from the perspectives of mother and son, allowing them to voice their own accounts. The effect is that both characters have agency in the story, while also highlighting their separation. As Beth grapples with being a “good parent,” we get to hear what Luke wants:    

Why do people think everyone requires a mother? You did what I wanted you to do, which was to let me go. In the evening, I lie on my back and stare up at the point in the sky where I think you are. The silence around me is like a parent finally giving me what I need. The silence puts its arms around me.

Portalmania is intimately concerned with storytelling itself—who speaks and who is silent, who forces their definition or narrative onto others, who believes the story (or doesn’t), and how to tell a story in a way that people will listen. In “How to Kiss a Hojaki,” for example, Michael is experiencing his silent wife changing into someone he doesn’t recognize. He feels threatened by this and aggressively rejects his wife’s transformation, in some cases physically rewriting the boundaries she has set: 

By the end of the summer, his wife had struck their monthly night of intercourse from the calendar. She had also stopped talking. I am changing into something else! Something that cannot have sex, she wrote. “I’m your husband!” he insisted, rewriting their sex night onto the calendar. She crossed if off with a thick black marker. He wrote it on again.

As the two struggle with their marriage, the political backdrop reminiscent of the 2016 election grows tense, which only amplifies the division within the household. Michael’s inability to understand his wife, as well as the changing world, makes him confused and enraged:

“My wife is turning into something that is not human,” he had told Dr. Sabrina at their previous session. Women did not use to believe they were turning into something else. If they turned into something else, it used to be not okay. The boundaries of what was human and acceptable used to be very clear. Michael liked how things used to be. There used to be a time when, if you were born human, it was difficult—impossible?—to leave your humanness behind. “Define human,” Dr. Sabrina had challenged him, raising her eyebrows like this was a complex argument, one that would really stump Michael. “Define wife,” he had shot back. “Define husband. Define spouse. Define conjugal obligations. Define making love. Define the legal definition of a marriage.”

This terror of illegibility is so threatening to Michael’s sense of self that he is willing to commit violence to preserve his definition of marriage. While the therapist in “How to Kiss a Hojaki” asks Michael for his definitions, the therapist in “Hysteria” suggests that Rebecca use tamer words to describe her experience of marital rape: “I wonder, can we try substituting certain words here, as an experiment?” she suggests. “He says he loves you when he’s having sex with you—when he’s making love to you—when you are having intercourse with each other. When he is exercising his conjugal rights, if we wish to be old-fashioned about it. The language you choose is important here.” In suggesting gentler words, the therapist’s revision minimizes and distorts Rebecca’s reality.

In “The Dirty Golden Yellow House,” Urbanski makes explicit the backflips writers often do to make taboo subjects, such as domestic violence or rape, “palatable” for the general public. Throughout the story, the writer voice interjects: “I realize this is not the most fun paragraph to read but try to stick with me here” and “There are some funny jokes about r—. I am saving them for later.” The writer even offers suggestions for readers who might be surprised or disturbed by such a topic:

I’d like to provide you with some background and statistics on marital r— now. Please skip the next two paragraphs, resuming your reading with the phrase Later that month, if any of the following apply:

• You consider interruptions like these an affront to your personal fictional escapism.

• You think marital r— in a story is stupid because why doesn’t she just get a divorce so we can stop talking about it.

• You are a marital r— expert.

The narrator then provides some statistics and goes into definitions of sexual coercion and consent, finally saying, “the boundaries of where consent ends and r— begins are still under debate and still broadening.” Urbanski’s use of metanarrative in “Dirty Little Yellow House” implicates us, the readers, as storytellers as well; it forces us to pause, to consider our preconceived expectations, and to witness these normalized abuses not just in the story but in our lives.

Throughout Portalmania, we see characters’ conflicting or confused definitions of love or partnership or home, but there are also significant moments in the collection where characters offer self-definition. One of the stories in which a character is being most honest with herself is “Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions)”:

I live at the intersection of a sex-repulsed asexuality and depression, the depression chronic and usually low grade but occasionally suicidal. Which came first? Did my depression lead to my asexuality? Am I depressed because I am asexual? Did both emerge simultaneously or were they always there? Questions of causation are a distraction from what’s important. I arrived at this intersection, and I stayed. The intersection looks modern enough, glass walled on the outside, all smooth reflective surfaces, but inside it smells dank, like a cellar, and the walls pulse like red alarms. I tried to want to be here.

Self-identifying as asexual or depressed is of course different than defining how someone else (e.g., a wife, mother, or writer) should be. While forced definitions can be oppressive and harmful, self-definition can be liberating. That’s not to say it’s easy to do, but in a very real sense it takes the story back from others’ reductive and harmful projections.  

Urbanski’s stories turn the world outside-in, boldly exposing the psychic core of what is unsaid and unseen in all its brilliant, hard-to-define strangeness. While Portalmania centers the silenced, the ignored, the victim, the abject, the disappeared, the lost, and the misunderstood, the collection exists within a larger ethos of courage, care, and self-autonomy.