I have one memory of sobbing under bright white lights, some terrible noise cracking into speakers turned too high. This might have been a dream.
For a long time after, I was estranged from music. What feelings normally mediated themselves in soundscapes, a well I could plumb for composition, hit me with their full blunt force.
Now I was trying to reenter music by making it in a new way, the way I imagined a sculptor makes a sculpture, to work with sound as if it were a physical material. Music was undoubtedly my medium: I had perfect pitch, a nice singing voice, and I liked the monasticism and repetition of practice. According to my grandmother, I had sung the melodies of nursery songs a whole year before I learned to speak. But I had the temperament of a conceptual artist, not a musician. Specifically, I was not a performer. I hated every aspect of performing: the lights, the stage, the singular attention. Most of all I could not square with the irreproducibility of performance—you had one chance, and then the work disappeared—which, to be successful, required a kind of faith. The greatest performers practiced and practiced, controlling themselves with utmost discipline, and when they stepped onto the stage gave themselves over to time.
This was also why I couldn’t just compose. I wanted to control every aspect of a piece, from its conception to realization: I did not like giving up the interpretation of my notes and rests to a conductor and other musicians.
I wanted to resolve this contradiction by making music in a way that folded performance theoretically into composition. Every sound and silence in this album would be a performance. I would compose a work and perform it for myself, just once. From this material I would build my songs. If the recording didn’t turn out, I abandoned the mistakes or used them. I didn’t think about who the music was for. Certainly not for a group of people to enjoy with dance, as my previous album had been—I too had been preparing for celebration. My new listener sat in an ambient room, alone, shed of distractions, and simply let the sounds come in.
* * *
In the morning Tony showed me a video of three husky puppies doing something adorable. “Look,” he said, pointing up and out the window. From the skywell we could see a sliver of blue.
We got up and confirmed that the smoke had lifted. Tony reported from Twitter that the nearest fire had indeed been tamed. “Huzzah!” I said. I walked outside to wait with him for his Uberpool to work. The sun was shining, the air was fresh, the colors of this relentlessly cheerful coast restored. I kissed him on the cheek goodbye.
I watched his car drive away and couldn’t bear the thought of going back inside. My legs itched. I wanted—theoretically—to run. I put in earbuds and turned on my audiobook. I walked around the neighborhood, looking happily at the bright houses and healthy people and energetic pooping dogs.
In the audiobook, things had also taken a happy turn. The lady protagonist, who had escaped Earth on a light-speed ship, found herself reunited in a distant galaxy with the man who’d proved his unfailing love by secretly gifting her an actual star. This reunion despite the fact that eight hundred years had passed (hibernation now allowed humans to jump centuries of time) and that when they had last seen each other, the man’s brain was being extracted from his body in order to be launched into outer space (it was later intercepted by aliens who reconstructed his body from the genetic material). She had discovered his love in that final moment, when it was too late to stop the surgery—aside from then the two had barely spoken. Now he was finally to be rewarded for his devotion and patience. I thought the author had an exciting imagination when it came to technology but a shitty imagination for love. Somehow I found the endurance of this love story more unbelievable than the leaps in space and time.
That afternoon I tried to work but didn’t get very much done. DINNER OUT? I texted Tony. For the first time in a long time I wanted to feel like I lived in a city. I wanted to shower and put on mascara and pants that had a zipper.
Tony had a work event. I texted Jen. SRY HAVE A DATE! she wrote back, followed by a winking emoji that somehow seemed to say Ooh-la-la.
I decided to go out to dinner alone. I listened to my audiobook over a plate of fancy pizza, shoveling down the hot dough as I turned up the speed on my book. By the time I finished the panna cotta, the universe was imploding, every living and nonliving thing barreling toward the end of its existence. I looked at my empty plate as the closing credits came on to a string cadenza in D minor. I took out my earbuds and looked around the restaurant, at the redwood bar where I was sitting, the waitstaff in black aprons, the patrons in wool sneakers and thin down vests, the Sputnik lamps hanging above us all. Would I miss any of this? Yes, I thought, and then, just as fervently, I don’t know.
Outside, the sky was fading to pale navy, a tint of yellow on the horizon where the sun had set. A cloudless, unspectacular dusk. I walked to dissipate the unknowing feeling and found myself at Chinaman’s Vista, which was louder than I had ever heard it, everyone taking advantage of the newly particulate-free outdoors. I weaved through the clumps of people, looking at and through them, separate and invisible, like a visitor at a museum. That was when I saw, under a cypress tree, a woman who looked exactly like Jen, wearing Jen’s gold loafers and pink bomber jacket. Jen was with a man. She was kissing the man. The man looked exactly like Tony.
I was breathing quickly. Staring. I wanted to run away but my feet were as glued as my eyes. Tony kissed Jen differently than he kissed me. He grabbed her lower back with two hands and seemed to lift her up slightly, while curling his neck to her upwardly lifted face. Because Jen was shorter than him. This made sense. I, on the other hand, was just about Tony’s height.
I blinked and shook my head. Jen wasn’t shorter than Tony. She was taller than us both. Jen and Tony stopped kissing and started to walk toward me, and I saw that it wasn’t Tony, it was some other Asian guy who only kind of looked like Tony, but really not at all. Horrified, I turned and walked with intentionality to a plaque ahead on the path. I stared intently at the words and thought how the guy wasn’t Tony and the girl probably wasn’t even Jen, how messed up that I saw a whitish girl with an East Asian guy and immediately thought Jen and Tony.
“Chenchen!”
It was Jen. I looked up with relief and dread. Jen stood on the other side of the plaque with her date, waving energetically.
“This is Kevin,” she said. She turned to Kevin. “Chenchen’s the friend I was telling you about, the composer-musician-artiste. She just moved to the city.”
“Hey,” I said. I looked at the plaque. “Did you know,” I said, “Chinaman’s Vista used to be a mining camp? For, uh, Chinese miners. They lived in these barracklike houses. Then they were killed in some riots and maybe buried here, because, you know, this place has good feng shui.” I paused. I’d made up the part about feng shui. The words on the plaque said mass graves. “This was back in the . . . 1800s.”
“Oh, like the Gold Rush?” Kevin said. His voice was deep, hovering around a low F. Tony spoke in the vicinity of B flat. I looked up at him. He was much taller than Tony.
“Yeah,” I said.
I stood there for a long time after they left, reading and rereading the historical landmark plaque, wishing I could forget what it said. Chinaman’s Vista, I thought, was a misleading name. The view was of cascading expensive houses, pruned and prim. The historic Chinese population, preferring squalor and cheap rents, had long relocated to the other side of town. Besides me and probably Kevin and half of Jen, there weren’t many living Chinese people here.
* * *
What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I want to be a witness to history, to any kind of time passing?
* * *
The temperature skyrocketed. Tony and I kicked off our blankets in sleep. We opened the windows and the air outside was hot too. Heat radiated from the highway below in waves. The cars trailed plumes of scorching dust.
Tony texted me halfway through the day to say it was literally the hottest it had ever
been. I clicked the link he sent and saw a heat map of the city. It was 105 degrees in our neighborhood, 101 at Tony’s work. We didn’t have an air conditioner. We didn’t, after all my disaster prep, even have a fan. Tony’s work didn’t have AC either. Nobody in the city did, I realized when I left the house, searching for a cool café. Every business had its doors wide open. Puny ceiling fans spun as fast as they could but only pushed around hot air. It was usually so fucking temperate here, the weather so predictably perfect. I walked past melting incredulous faces: women in leather boots, tech bros carrying Patagonia sweaters with dismay.
My phone buzzed. Jen had sent a photo of what looked like an empty grocery store shelf. It buzzed again.
THE FAN AISLE AT TARGET!!
JUST SAW A LADY ATTACKING ANOTHER LADY FOR THE LAST $200 TOWER FAN
#ENDOFDAYS?
That weekend I took Tony to the mall. Tony had been sleeping poorly, exasperated by my body heat. He was sweaty and irritable and I felt somehow responsible. I felt, I think, guilty. Since the incident at Chinaman’s Vista I’d been extra nice to Tony.
The AC in the mall wasn’t cold enough. A lot of people had had the same idea. “Still better than being outside,” I said hopefully as we stepped onto the crowded escalator. Tony grunted his assent. We walked around Bloomingdale’s. I pointed at the mannequins wearing wool peacoats and knitted vests and laughed. Summer in the city was supposed to be cold, because of the ocean fog. Tony said, “Ha-ha.”
We got ice cream. We got iced tea. We got texts from PG&E saying that power was out on our block due to the grid overheating, would be fixed by 8 P.M. We weren’t planning to be back until after sunset anyway, I said. I looked over Tony’s shoulder at his phone. He was scrolling through Instagram, wistfully it seemed, through photographs of Jen and other girls in bikinis—they had gone to the beach. “But you don’t like the beach,” I said. Tony shrugged. “I don’t like the mall either.” I asked if he wanted to go to the beach. He said no.
We ate salads for dinner and charged our phones. This, at last, seemed to make Tony happy. “In case the power is still out later,” he said. We sat in the food court and charged our phones until the mall closed.
* * *
The apartment was a cacophony of red blinking eyes. The appliances had all restarted when the power came back on. Now they beeped and hummed and buzzed, imploring us to reset their times. Outside the wide-open windows, cars honked and revved their engines. So many sounds not meant to be simultaneous pressed simultaneously onto me. In an instant the cheerfulness I’d mustered for our wretched day deflated. I found myself breathing fast and loud, tears welling against my will. Tony sat me down and put his noise-canceling headphones over my ears. “I can still hear everything!” I shouted. I could hear, I wanted to say, the staticky G-sharp hiss of the headset’s noise-canceling mechanism. Tony was suddenly contrite. He handed me a glass of ice water and shushed me tenderly. He walked around the apartment, resetting all our machines.
We took a cold shower. Tony looked as exhausted as I felt. We kept the lights off and went directly to bed. Traffic on the highway had slowed to a rhythmic whoosh. I wanted to hug Tony but it was too hot. I took his hand and released it. Our palms were sweaty and gross.
I was just falling asleep when I heard a faint beep.
I nudged Tony. “What was that?” He rolled away from me. I turned over and closed my eyes.
It beeped again, then after some moments again.
It was a high C, a note of shrill finality. I counted the beats between: about twenty at 60 bpm. I counted to twenty, hoping to lull myself to sleep. But the anticipation of the coming beep was too much. My heart rate rose, I counted faster, unable to maintain a consistent rhythm, so now it was twenty-two beats, then twenty-five, then twenty-seven.
Finally I sat up, said loudly, “Tony, Tony, do you hear the beeping?”
“Huh?” He rubbed his eyes. It beeped again, louder, as if to back me up. Tony got up and poked at the alarm clock, which he hadn’t reset because it ran on batteries. He pulled the batteries out and threw them to the floor. He lay down, I thanked him, and then—beep.
I sat on the bed, clamping my pillow over my ears, and watched Tony lumber about the dark bedroom, drunk with exhaustion, finding every hidden gadget and extracting its batteries, taking down even the smoke detector. Each time it seemed he had finally identified the source there sounded another beep. It was a short sound, it insisted then disappeared: even my impeccable hearing could not locate where exactly it came from. It sounded as if from all around us, from the air. Tony fell on the bed, defeated. He said, “Can we just try to sleep?” We clamped our eyes shut, forced ourselves to breathe deeply, but the air was agitated and awake. My mind drifted and ebbed, imitating the movements of sleep while bringing nothing like rest. I couldn’t help thinking that the source of the sound was neither human nor human-made. I couldn’t help imagining the aliens in my audiobook preparing to annihilate our world. “Doomsday clock,” I said, half aloud. I was thinking or dreaming of setting up my equipment to record the beeps. I was thinking or dreaming of unrolling the sleeping bags in my bunker, where it’d be silent and I could sleep. “Counting down.”
“I’m sorry,” Tony said.
“It’s okay,” I said, but it wasn’t, not really, and Tony knew it. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. Between the cosmic beeps his lips smacked open as if to speak, as if searching for the right words to fix me. Finally he said, “I kissed Jen,” and I said, “I know.”
Then, “What?”
Then, “When?”
My eyes were wide open.
“Last November.”
High C sounded, followed by ten silent beats.
“You were in Germany.”
Another high C. Twenty beats. Another high C.
“I’m sorry,” Tony said again. “Say something, please?” He tightened his hand. I tried to squeeze back to say I’d heard, I was awake. I failed. I listened to the pulses of silence, the inevitable mechanical beeps.
“Tell me what you’re thinking?”
I was thinking we would need a new disaster meet-up spot. I was wondering if there was any place in this city, this world, where we’d be safe.
ANDREA LEE
The Children
FROM The New Yorker
The adventure of the lost heirs begins when Shay and her friend Giustinia run into Harena at the Fleur des Îles café. This happens in the early 2000s, at the same time that a criminal at large on Anjavavy Island is cutting off people’s heads. The mysterious beheadings are not connected to the events recounted here, except to establish the lawlessness that is always present behind the dazzling Anjavavy panorama of sugar-white beaches and cobalt sea. The crimes begin to surface one hot January morning, as a French hotel manager is taking his predawn constitutional along Rokely Bay and spies through a mist of sand flies something just above the tide line that looks like an unhusked coconut. It turns out to be a human head, one that was last seen on the shoulders of a part-time sweeper at the Frenchman’s hotel.
In the next months four more severed heads are discovered, hideously marooned near grounded pirogues, on paths through the sugarcane, and even on the rocks that are used by villagers as public toilets. The victims are all men from various Malagasy tribes: Antandroy, Tsimihety, Sakalava—night watchmen and groundskeepers of so low a status that no one bribes the island gendarmerie into investigating their deaths.
This is the state of affairs when Giustinia arrives from Florence to spend two weeks at Shay’s place on Anjavavy, before embarking on a trek on the main island of Madagascar. It is early summer, and the two of them have the Red House—the vacation villa and small hotel owned by Shay and her husband, Senna—to themselves: most of the staff is on leave, and the place is empty both of paying guests and of the swarm of family that will come from Milan in August; Senna will arrive later in the month. Giustinia is a poet and a critic, an elegant woman who became friends with Shay wh
en Shay translated some of her essays for an American magazine, and they discovered that they shared a passion for Victor Segalen’s eccentric early-twentieth-century monograph on exoticism. But while Shay, an African American scholar transplanted to Italy and, for part of each year, to this small island in northern Madagascar, finds her interest drawn to restless expatriate artists of color, Giustinia, whose noble family has ancient roots in Tuscany, most often writes about the inescapable pull of a place to which you belong entirely. Her regal air is quite unconscious, based mainly on the authority with which she can speak about famous authors she knows. In spite of her worldly connections, she has the unexpected ingenuousness of those rare aristocrats who are still safely contained within their insular history. Shay intends to keep from her the news that there is a serial killer at large.
* * *
A week into Giustinia’s visit, the two friends go food shopping in Saint Grimaud and, after the heat and the stench of the outdoor market, stop for a cold drink at the Fleur des Îles. Harena is just leaving the café as they pull up in the truck. When she sees Shay, she calls out a greeting in her childish voice, raises one slim brown hand, and flashes her incandescent smile. Then she floats past the one-legged beggar perched on the Fleur des Îles steps and climbs into an odd-looking customized dune buggy, where a bald middle-aged Frenchman sits beeping the horn impatiently.
“What a stunning girl,” Giustinia remarks as she and Shay chase flies from a sticky table on the veranda and settle themselves where they can keep an eye on the baskets of vegetables and bread in the back of the pickup.
The Best American Short Stories 2020 Page 24