The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

by Sheila Heti

  “And David’s might be Davidina, Davidette, Davidelle?” David said.

  “I have known a Daveene,” David said.

  “Why not change your name?” David said to Davida. “I’m changing mine. I’m changing it from David Landers to Brad Thorpe.”

  “What’s wrong with David Landers?” Davida said.

  “Everything,” David said.

  “I have always known that someday I would marry a man named Brad Thorpe,” David said. “Something in that name inspires absolute confidence.”

  “How seriously am I supposed to take that proposal?” David asked.

  “Hi, I’m Ned,” Ned said.

  “What?” several Davids said.

  “Ned Braverman,” Ned said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “But how can this be?” David said. “How did you get here?”

  “David invited me,” Ned said.

  “David the host?” David said.

  “Did someone call me?” David the host said.

  “David, can you explain this?” David said. “This fellow is named Ned Braverman. He says you invited him.”

  “There is no beauty that hath not some strangeness in it,” David said.

  “What?” Ned said. “Who’s strange?”

  “The spot of filth without which the whole cannot cohere,” David said.

  “Did you just call me filth?” Ned said. “That’s it. I’m out of here.” He left, slamming the door behind him.

  “What is happened?” Davide said.

  “Good riddance,” David said, rubbing his hands together. “We don’t want that kind at a David party.”

  * * *

  David took a position of authority before the window that looked out onto West End Avenue. He cleared his throat. He said, “Excuse me.” He hit a glass with a fork.

  “Now that I’ve got your attention,” he said.

  “Do you think he’s suffering from dementia?” David whispered to David.

  “Look at his cheekbones,” David said.

  “Wasting,” David said.

  “I heard he’s just out of the hospital,” Davida said.

  “Now, you may wonder why I’ve called you all here today,” David said. “Of course it’s because of your name. The name we share. Some of you may think this a silly reason to throw a party, but I don’t see it that way. Families gather. Well, we’re a family. The family of David. I am David, hear me roar. Davids of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. David row the boat ashore. David from mountains, go where you will go to. The Davids, united, will never be defeated. Little Davey was small, but oh my.”

  He started to sing.

  He fought big Goliath,

  Who lay down and dieth . . .

  “I wonder if he’ll do the next verse,” David said to David, but he did not. Instead he bowed his head, at which the guests broke into loud applause.

  The party resumed. The only person who seemed to want to talk to David the host was Davide the Italian, who took his hand and said, “I want just to say, I am glad you are not dead soon.”

  David and David, meanwhile, had moved together into a corner.

  “I find this all deeply depressing,” David said.

  “Je suis d’accord,” David said.

  “What say we make a run for it?” David said. “Maybe get something to eat?”

  David gave David the once-over. It was a considering once-over. Then he smiled and said, “Why not?”

  They left without saying goodbye to anyone. Up Columbus Avenue they walked, to Tom’s Diner, which Suzanne Vega had not yet made famous. It was eleven-thirty in the evening and the place was only half-full. One David ordered scrambled eggs with hash browns, the other a hamburger with a green salad, though he would have preferred fries.

  “Were you at the march last week?” he said once their food had arrived.

  “Which march?” David asked, shaking ketchup onto his hash browns.

  “The one on Wall Street. In front of the stock exchange.”

  “No, I missed it. How was it? Did you lie down in the street until the cops carried you off?”

  “I didn’t,” David said, “but other people did. Actually the thing I remember most about this particular march is the chanting. At first we were all chanting the usual things. An army of lovers cannot lose. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it. And then this woman—I have no idea who she is, she has horrible teeth—she suddenly started chanting, ‘No more shit!’ All by herself, at first. And then a few others joined in, and a few others, until everyone was chanting, together, ‘No more shit. No more shit.’ Even the people in the street, the people who were just passing by, the stockbrokers we were keeping from getting into the stock exchange, they all got into it. ‘No more shit.’ I mean, you really can’t put it any more plainly than that. Can you put it more plainly than that?”

  “I’m sorry I missed that march,” David said. “I’m not sorry I went to the David party. At first when I arrived I wished I hadn’t gone but then I changed my mind.”

  “How long do you think he’s got?” David said. “David, I mean.”

  “Who knows? Weeks? Months?”

  “I hope longer. With this new drug, I hope—”

  “Promises, promises,” David said. “Promises, promises, promises, promises, promises.”

  They ate until there was nothing left on their plates. Not a scrap of toast was left, not a fragment of egg or meat. That evening there would be things they would not talk about, conversations they would not have. The what’s-your-status conversation. The sexual-history conversation. The is-oral-sex-safe conversation. Both of them knew that these conversations could not be avoided, that they were just around the bend. And yet, for now, that bend was one they chose, by some unspoken accord, to ignore.

  Outside, it had started raining. The rain battered the windows. Every time the doors of Tom’s Diner opened, cold, wet gusts of wind blew through.

  “So here’s my question,” David said. “If we get married—I’m not saying we will, but let’s say we did—how will we tell each other apart?”

  “I’ll never call you Davey, if that’s what you’re asking,” David said.

  “Oh, but you can,” David said. “I’ll let you. You and my father.”

  Then he did a surprising thing. He took David’s hand, pressed David’s fingers deep into his water glass, and guided them over his own head. What water his hair did not hold fell over his forehead, behind his glasses, into his eyes.

  “There, you have christened me,” he said.

  KATHERINE AUGUSTA MAYFIELD

  ■

  The Reenactors

  FROM Columbia University School of the Arts Thesis Anthology

  THE NIGHT JAVIER COMES HOME from the dead the first thing his mother does is check his teeth. His entire family is inside the house waiting for him, sisters and girl cousins crowded behind the bay windows so close the steam of their breath melts the frost outside. Faintly, from the deep interior heart of the house, music. Everyone is holding champagne flutes, even the children, who spill theirs in little streams through the model Christmas village and seashells on the window’s inner sill.

  Javier tries to count them, can’t remember how many sisters he has and how many cousins, but they keep pushing in front of each other, waving, calling out. His mother’s hands are still inside his mouth, and he is clutching a duffle bag, can’t wave back. All he can do is stand there and let himself be watched. The return is always something miraculous. He is what is going to save them all. He has been told to let them reacclimatize.

  One girl, a teenager, bangs her fist against the glass, suddenly and with enough power behind it that the holly wreaths shiver. His mother doesn’t turn. Like everyone else, the girl is dressed somberly, as if for church. She says something he can’t hear, repeats herself. Maybe his name, or a threat. She might be one of his sisters. Her hair is black and has the same curl to it that Javier’s did at his time of death. She has
, he thinks, brown eyes.

  She’s talking to him, still knocking hard against the glass, and he can see that her knuckles are raw and dragging red, until two more girls grab her by the shoulders and pull her away. The windows are double-paned, reinforced against tropical storms, so whatever she’s shouting is muffled, and soon more people shove their way to the front to look at him.

  It’s a week until Christmas in North Carolina, and since his death in August the house has been repainted shrimp-shell pink, and is tinseled in silver.

  His mother feels with her thumb the place where his bottom teeth crowd together, then reaches further back to check the fillings, to feel the unevenness where he chipped a molar on a cherry pit last spring. She didn’t have these imperfections memorized when her son was alive, but now she has his dental records, just like Javier does.

  His mother’s fingernails are long and freshly painted; he can taste the polish as they scratch at the back of his throat, starts to gag, stops himself. She’s crying, makeup running, not barefaced like in the photos he saw of her. She’s calling him beautiful, darling, love, returned, my angel, my baby boy, mi cielito. Takes her fingers from his mouth, him swallowing, her hands still wet with saliva holding his face, and Javier drops his bag to the deck and leans to hug her. After death, like in life, he is exactly eight inches taller than her.

  She has remade herself for him too: mascara stippled onto her cheeks and eyeliner shaky like she doesn’t do it often. She is older than he realized she would be, and more fragile. Under his hands her sweater is pilled and sagging under the weight of a dozen jeweled pins, snowflakes adorned with pearls and gold-boughed trees and sequin-eyed Santa Clauses. He hugs her tighter, listens to them click together. Black slacks, permed hair, house slippers that now must be soaked through from the gloss of ice. Her back is rounded and warm. She feels like a mother should.

  “Mom,” he says in the southern accent he has practiced, “Mom, I’m home.”

  “No,” she says. “He called me Mama. But you at least you got the teeth right.”

  The original Javier died on a NASCAR speedway in the middle of the state on a thickly humid twilit night this past summer. A gleaming fleet of cars gone sprawling, crumpled, airborne, a bang of charcoaled light as a fuel tank burst. On the television in her bedroom two weeks short of her fifty-sixth birthday, Javier’s mother watched his car leave the ground. The replay took the seconds piece by piece: the race car’s upward arc into the catch fence, which snapped back like breaking fingers until inertia reversed and threw it forward. The car’s safety harnesses unzipped as it fragmented, its contents falling to streak against the asphalt as a crowd of twenty thousand screamed. The cameras were too high, angles all wrong to show exactly what happened to her son. The commentators were silent. Did not say anything as the pit crew ran forward, one man, then everyone else at once.

  Javier’s new incarnation, before he was Javier’s new incarnation, saw the pictures online. Grainy with pixels, taken from high up in the stands, but still: skin glistening and opened up like the membrane of fruit. His body had wrecked into its individual parts, like it was something meant to be shared among many.

  The original Javier was voted Best Hair his junior year of high school, was introduced to stock-car racing by his cousin Consolata, and voted Most Likely to Succeed three months before his graduation. At the time of the crash, he was twenty-six, had driven racecars professionally for the last seven years, and been engulfed in flames twice. At the time of the crash, he wore mandatory fireproof coveralls and underwear, and fire-retardant gloves and socks. Heat shields on the bottoms of his shoes. Had previously broken his collarbone, and a growth plate in his right arm in childhood. Spoke Spanish almost fluently, wanted to learn Portuguese, enjoyed unwinding in front of wilderness survival reality TV. Was a registered Republican and afraid of dogs and led Bible study at his family’s church, Our Lady of the Seas. His signature dish was ropa vieja. Sometimes, as a hobby, he built model towns. Javier is survived by a mother, three sisters, four aunts, two uncles, six cousins, all girls, a wife, and a daughter, age two. Javier’s family has been in mourning for the last four months.

  Before Javier was Javier he was Buck, a schoolteacher in Wyoming who died of smoke inhalation during a wildfire, and who was resurrected to live for another four months in order to walk his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. Before that he was Kenny, suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in a garage in Indiana, woken up to keep his elderly father company until his passing eight months in. And then Bernard, black ice, returned from the dead to support his wife through her chemotherapy sessions. And then Damien, cause of death late-stage Lyme disease, made alive for three more years to attend his children’s soccer matches and grow orchids with his husband in a Los Angeles hothouse.

  Most families hold on to their reenactors, but not always. Buck’s wife said the sight of him made her too lonely and demanded her daughter let her father go back to death. After three years, Damien’s husband still thought of himself as a widower. Bernard’s wife died, and no one else in her family wanted to sustain him. Same with Kenny.

  Javier’s family might be different. Health insurance covers this new Javier, under the clause of preventative medicine, and Javier’s mother is picking up his new duffle bag with all his old clothes she sent ahead and opening the door to the family home. There is tinsel in her hair and tears drying on her face. She has a slight double chin. She turns her soft warm back to him and takes him by the hand to lead him into her son’s life.

  “Mama,” she reminds him again. “That’s what you called me.”

  The family home is lined with Javier’s handmade villages and miniature forests, created from wire and felt and voltage. The trees are all evergreen, no more than three inches high, and hum with the minute electricity of their lights.

  “You find model towns relaxing,” his mother tells him as they sit down to dinner.

  Javier already knows this, just like he also knows he wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon before he became a racecar driver, and believed in both ghosts and aliens. He is paid to know these things. His job is to embody. He is convincing.

  The house is narrow, shotgun style, and five card tables have been laid out down the hallway, where his entire family now sits, loud laughter, smiles, conversation. All of them, grief cauterized. His daughter is on his lap. Her name is Loma, she is dressed in white lace, and too young to remember her father, but she will know him now. Before them a welcome-home dinner has been laid out, Carolina barbecue and pasteles steaming from their banana leaves, mofongo and fried okra and chuleton. More champagne, and eggnog now. The wind is pushing against the house, which rocks gently on its stilts. Javier’s wife has not yet spoken to him, will not yet look at him, and has not dropped her hand from Loma’s downy head. Javier’s mother is the one who brought him back. His wife has not agreed to his resurrection.

  When he was Damien, his husband would not leave him alone with the children for the first six months. He was good at being Damien, looked like him wholly, and in the family photos you could not tell the difference, could not place the precise date of death. His first night as Damien, there was no welcome dinner. The house was filled with Precious Moments figurines and gardenias and terrariums. A pink sunset outside and dogs under the table, and he touched his husband’s cheek, but his husband said, eyes closed and shoulders stiff, “Please don’t.”

  The agreement is that you go for accuracy above all else. The agreement is that you do anything so as to be believed. It’s noble, he was told when he joined. You are donating your body to continue old life. This is how to transmute a soul. This is how to fix sorrow.

  One of Javier’s three sisters died of a blood infection in early childhood, but looking down the table now, he cannot tell which one is a reenactor. They all look seamless, glossy dark hair and gap teeth and eyes that crinkle, even the one who shouted at him earlier through the glass. They replaced her almost instantly, before the wake, even. He does not k
now why it took them so much longer to find a vessel for their son.

  BEN PASSMORE

  ■

  Your Black Friend

  FROM Your Black Friend and Other Strangers

  KATHY FISH

  ■

  Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild

  FROM Jellyfish Review

  A group of grandmothers is a tapestry. A group of toddlers, a jubilance (see also: a bewailing). A group of librarians is an enlightenment. A group of visual artists is a bioluminescence. A group of short story writers is a Flannery. A group of musicians is—a band.

  A resplendence of poets.

  A beacon of scientists.

  A raft of social workers.

  A group of first responders is a valiance. A group of peaceful protesters is a dream. A group of special-education teachers is a transcendence. A group of neonatal ICU nurses is a divinity. A group of hospice workers, a grace.

  Humans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an exhilaration, now: a target.

  A target of concert-goers.

  A target of movie-goers.

  A target of dancers.

  A group of schoolchildren is a target.

  KRISTEN ROUPENIAN

  ■

  Cat Person

  FROM The New Yorker

  MARGOT MET ROBERT on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines.

  “That’s an . . . unusual choice,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually sold a box of Red Vines before.”

  Flirting with her customers was a habit she’d picked up back when she worked as a barista, and it helped with tips. She didn’t earn tips at the movie theatre, but the job was boring otherwise, and she did think that Robert was cute. Not so cute that she would have, say, gone up to him at a party, but cute enough that she could have drummed up an imaginary crush on him if he’d sat across from her during a dull class—though she was pretty sure that he was out of college, in his mid-twenties at least. He was tall, which she liked, and she could see the edge of a tattoo peeking out from beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. But he was on the heavy side, his beard was a little too long, and his shoulders slumped forward slightly, as though he were protecting something.