The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

by Sheila Heti

  I always thought it was such a cliché when women described giving birth as pushing something the size of a watermelon out of a hole the size of your fist. First of all, I don’t know about you, but the hole in my pink panther is not the size of a fist, and second, have you ever seen a baby? Not the size of a watermelon. Besides, babies are squishy. You know what isn’t squishy? An egg.

  Three weeks home from New Mexico, I gave birth to the egg in my bed, in the apartment, in the middle of the night. Earlier that evening, I got an inkling it wanted out of my body. I could not sit still. I just kept circling the island counter—round and round and round I went. I considered driving myself to the hospital, but what could they do? I asked myself. Around eight, I began piling every soft thing I owned onto the bed: washcloths and beach towels and the cushions from my couch. I shredded rolls of toilet paper with my fingernails, and crumpled up the Sunday paper’s holiday ads, sheets upon sheets of wrapping paper. I reached out to an old friend, a girl I knew from undergrad, who’d gone on to study veterinary medicine at Cornell. Relax, she assured me over the phone, you’re just nesting. When there was nothing left, I burrowed deep down in the bed and waited, and when it came time to push, I felt as though my body was being split open. I reached down and felt the tip of the egg peeking out from the space between my legs. Then, when I was able to get a good grip on it, I pulled that sucker out with a sudden pop. My hips disjointed and buckled back into place. I had never in my life felt more alone or more powerful.

  As difficult as the birthing was—I could barely walk the following few weeks—the month and a half, forty-two days to be exact, that came after were the hardest because of the waiting. With a normal child, the birth is the climax, the grand payoff for months of preparing. Not so with a Lizard-Baby. I relocated the nest to the slate slab and spent my days adjusting the temperature of the heat lamps, caressing this hard speckled thing that was of me but no longer a part of me. I lost weight. You have to eat something, Mother told me. If only I knew he was all right in there, I said, stroking the egg. She called Tomás, still convinced he was responsible for the mess I’d found myself in, and one night he showed up at the apartment, this time troubling himself to knock before entering. I slumped to the door. I don’t have the energy to go through this with you tonight, Tomás, I said. He grinned and held up a high-powered flashlight. I come bearing gifts. Trust me, he said. We went to the nest and turned off the heat lamps. The apartment was entirely dark. I did some research, Tomás said, flicking the lantern’s switch and shining the light through the backside of the shell. It’s called candling. And there he was, my son, floating in the fluid membrane of the egg, flexing his five fingers as if to reach out and touch me.

  When the Lizard-Baby hatched, it was like the best Christmas ever, though by then Christmas had long come and gone. The whole family was there—Mother and Daddy and my sister, Becca. Tomás was there too. We stood in a circle around the nest in the living room as the Lizard-Baby struggled to extract himself from the crumbling walls of the egg, nuzzling his way out with the flat of his nose. Daddy reached out to peel back a piece of the shell in order to assist him, but Mother swatted his hand away, saying, Don’t you rush him, Charles. He was born to do this. Does no one else think this is bizarre? Becca asked. Oh, shush now, Rebecca, Mother said. This is an important moment for our family, and I won’t have you spoiling it. Already, I could see that things were changing—my ascension in the family ranks. I could tell by the expression on my sister’s face that she saw it too. Becca, the favorite, was being usurped.

  To say people were eager to meet this miracle child of mine would be an understatement. The most adamant, I found, were the girls from the office. I’d been gone from work for almost eight weeks, and though my paid leave had run out, I told them I had no intention of returning. As if that matters, Margaret told me. A baby is a baby and we want to celebrate. We’re coming. So, true to her nature, Mother hosted a shower at the apartment. More of a luncheon, she assured me. Just a few of your coworkers, Rebecca, and myself. Nothing fancy. Finger sandwiches and iced tea. I don’t know how we’ll convince your father to stay at home, though, he’s so fond of the baby.

  At the shower, the women from work couldn’t get enough of the Lizard-Baby. They fawned over his skin, scaled and pale green, the way he periodically ran his tongue over his protruding black eyes to compensate for his inability to blink. Yup, my father said, look at those eyes. He definitely gets his eyes from my side of the family. And then he lowered his voice, His tongue though? One hundred percent your mother’s genes. Charlie! Mother said from the kitchen, but anyone could see she was blushing. Though I’m sure they all wanted to, Margaret was the only of my coworkers I trusted enough to hold the Lizard-Baby, but as she cradled him, he pawed at her shoulder and the setae on his toe pads snagged on the fabric of her cable-knit sweater. I’m so sorry, I said. We’ll replace it, I promise. Oh, please, she said. If you mind a mess, don’t hold a baby. That’s what I always say. The girls remarked on how well-behaved the Lizard-Baby was. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a newborn smile as much as he does, one said. Yes, he’s a happy baby, I agreed. Becca peered over Margaret’s shoulder. I think that’s just how his face is, she said. That’s because he’s always happy, Rebecca, Mother informed her. Becca was just sore because the week before, she had tried to scratch the Lizard-Baby under his chin and he bit her finger. Daddy snapped, He isn’t a dog, Rebecca!, as Mother whisked the Lizard-Baby out of the room.

  There are quite a few upsides to raising a Lizard-Baby, despite what you might think. I’ll hip you to one—its a lot less expensive than caring for a normal baby. I mean, have you been to the baby aisle of a department store lately? Nothing is cheap. But with Daddy’s admonishment of Becca in mind, I soon realized we could get everything we needed for a fraction of the cost at a commercial pet store. Take the crib, for example. An average crib can go for anywhere between $200 and $800, but I got a Petyard Pen Plus for $129.50 and erected it around the slate slab right in the living room. It even folds up, so I can take it to my parents’ or Becca’s if I want to. Also, doggie diapers. They’re less expensive than Pampers and there’s a hole for the tail. I even found myself eyeing those little garments, the kind that slip over the head of your pet and fasten around the waist. For Easter services, Mother brought over a little Jackie O coat. It was only $16, she said. I couldn’t help myself.

  We spent the Fourth of July with my family at my parents’ place up on Seneca Lake. Daddy set up the pen in my old room, but the Lizard-Baby spent most of the day on the couch with Becca. He’d finally started to warm up to her, due in part, I’m sure, to the fact that she’d taken to stashing dried mealworms in her pants pocket. She portioned them out one by one until the Lizard-Baby settled down on her lap. Sitting there, the look on her face was triumphant. Just try not to spoil his dinner, I told her. She responded by flipping me the bird. Rebecca! After dinner, we congregated out on the lawn for the fireworks display, but when the first one exploded, blossoming in the sky with a flash of light and a sonic boom that filled the air, the Lizard-Baby let out a sound I’d never heard from him before, a combination of his lovely chirping and the awful squawk woodpeckers make. The fireworks literally scared the piss out of him—I was wet all down the front of my shirt—and it took us hours to coax him out from under the deck.

  All things considered, I thought I was handling the whole situation with about as much grace as could have reasonably been expected of me. Even when Mother stepped on the Lizard-Bab/s tail and the damn thing fell off. Even when some punk at the grocery store turned to me in the check-out line and exclaimed, quite loudly, Dude, your baby’s a lizard! I took it all in stride. Still, nothing prepared me for the shedding. When I think of shedding, I think of Lassie. Or snakes. I think of Adam and Eve. I do not think of children. Imagine, your six-month old flaky and chaffing over the entirety of his body. You dowse him in baby powder until dusty white clouds trail behind him; you rub baby oil into the scales
of his cool green skin until he glides across the floor like a Slip ’N Slide, gleefully chirping. Still, at day’s end, when you put him to bed, he crinkles in your arms like packaging paper. Now imagine one day he slips from that skin as though from a wetsuit.

  It was September, the humidity of summer had recently lifted, and I hadn’t left the apartment all week. At that time, I was still waking up every few hours to feed the Lizard-Baby the small pink mice I kept in the freezer, or to deal with his dry skin, or to rock him to sleep, and by Friday, I’d hit a wall. I was making dinner and the Lizard-Baby was in his crib, playing with the makeshift rattle Daddy had dropped off earlier that evening—a brown paper bag filled with a handful of crickets, sealed and fastened to the end of a popsicle stick. When he shook it, the crickets popped against the bag, trying to escape their paper prison. Pop, pop. Pop, pop. I was straining the spaghetti when I heard a strange kind of crunching. I just assumed that, impatient and hungry, the Lizard-Baby had torn into the paper bag of the rattle, but when I looked up from the sink I saw that it lay beside him, untouched on the slate rock, and my son was standing behind a perfect opaque cast of his little lizard body, the head of which he’d begun to eat. I couldn’t help it; I screamed and dropped the spaghetti. Startled, the Lizard-Baby snatched the skin-sheath up in his mouth and greedily devoured the thing before I could reach him to confiscate it. I called Tomás, and when he finally showed up at the apartment, I thrust the baby upon him. I haven’t showered in three days, I haven’t slept in weeks, I’ve given birth to the Devil’s son, and now he’s eating—I can’t—I just can’t, I said. I’ve ruined my life! Then I went to my room, closed the door, and fell asleep crying.

  It’s a conversation I don’t think we have often enough. Or maybe we do, and before I got pregnant I just wasn’t paying attention. But I don’t even think that’s true, really. Even now, when I hear other parents talk about the difficulties involved in raising a child, how it forces you to completely reconfigure the terms of your life, it’s a side comment, a passing remark that’s casually dismissed in the face of all the joy that accompanies new parenthood. I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard a single parent make this assertion in quite the same way. Raising children is exhausting, and no matter how profound my love for the Lizard-Baby was, there were days when I woke up already feeling defeated as a human being. I slept clean through the night, and when I got up the next morning, I launched out of bed in a state of panic. How long had I slept? Where was my Lizard-Baby? I opened the bedroom door full of dread, but there was Tomás, calm as could be, in the living room, crouched over a small cube-shaped machine. He’d wrapped the Lizard-Baby up in a peanut-shell sling tied around his chest, and from it, the Lizard-Baby was reaching up with his little ribbed fingers, tugging at Tomás’s lower lip. He chirped and smiled when he saw me. Everything’s fine, Tomás said, flipping a switch on the machine, which began to emit a stream of fine mist. We just need to humidify the apartment.

  The Lizard-Baby grew at a reptilian rate. By October he was the size of a toddler and in complete control of his faculties. Even his tail had grown back by then, though it was fatter than before and a kind of cold gray color. I’ll never forgive myself, Mother said, shaking her head. I’ve scarred him for life. But the Lizard-Baby didn’t seem to pay much attention to this transfiguration of his body. At the end of the month, the entire family agreed, we’d take him trick-or-treating on Halloween. What are we going to dress him up as? Becca asked. Mother scoffed and Tomás laughed. Seriously? he said. It’s the one night out of the year when nobody’ll look at him sideways. I, myself, wasn’t so sure, but Tomás was right, the Lizard-Baby just passed as a particularly well-disguised child. Parents stopped us to applaud our work right there on the street. You must be in television, one woman said. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more realistic costume. Everything was fine, better than fine, until we stopped at a house where some guy insisted on getting a photograph of his kid, a Ninja Turtle, Donatello, I think, with the Lizard-Baby. I love those commercials, he said, pushing his boy shoulder-to-shoulder with mine, who was distractedly shaking the candy in his hollow plastic pumpkin, the sound no doubt reminding him of the rattle waiting at home. Just before the man snapped the picture, I remember thinking about the fireworks on the Fourth of July. The flash went off and the Lizard-Baby shrieked like a rabbit. The plastic pumpkin crashed to the ground, sending chocolate bars flying, and my son dropped to all fours and scampered off into the night, the neighborhood crowded with innumerable beasts.

  He’s a big lizard! I said, frantically trying to describe my son to one of the officers who’d shown up at the scene. All I could think about were those pet alligators that people abandon to grow up in the sewers. Yes, I understand, Miss, but what does your son look like when he’s not in costume? the officer asked. Don’t forget about his tail! Becca added. Yes! Mother said. It’s big and gray and ugly. No! Not ugly! It’s beautiful! My grandson is beautiful. Dear God, this is all my fault! The patrolling officers fanned out and canvassed the neighborhood. Do you have any idea where your son might have gone? No, Tomás said. He’s never been out this way before.

  An hour after he went missing, a woman, the one who’d made the comment about me being in TV, showed up with the LizardBaby. He was holding the hand of her young daughter. I can’t thank you enough, I said, clutching the Lizard-Baby to my breast. Charlie, where’s my pocketbook? Mother shouted to Daddy. We’re writing this woman a check. Please, the woman said, picking up her own child, a towheaded girl dressed as Kermit the Frog. We parents are all in this thing together. It’s not easy being green, I know.

  The next morning, Tomás came by the apartment with a suitcase and a cardboard box of his stuff. What are you doing? I asked when I opened the door. You can’t do this by yourself anymore, he said. He needs a father. He has a father, I reminded him. That may be so, he said as he brushed past me, but he still needs a dad. And that was that.

  In the end, I decided to return to work the week after Thanksgiving, almost a year to the day since I took my trip to New Mexico and everything changed. Tomás sleeps in the spare room, but most nights I come home and find him lying down in the baby’s pen, the Lizard-Baby curled up against his chest, soaking in the heat from his body. I stand there watching them like that, on the verge of a compelling happiness, and then I think, Where are we going to enroll him when the time comes for his schooling? Will the other children taunt him the way children do? How will he play sports or drive a car comfortably with that big tail of his? What girl will want to kiss a Lizard-Boy on the night of her prom? I tell myself I could navigate these things on my own, without Tomás’s help, without the assistance of my family, but I’m grateful I don’t have to, and when you get down to it, that’s a good thing, I believe.

  LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI

  ■

  Chasing Waterfalls

  Translated from Hungarian by John Batki

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  HE HAD ALWAYS PLANNED THAT SOMEDAY he would travel to see Angel Falls, then he had planned to visit Victoria Falls, and in the end he had settled for at least Schaffhausen Falls: one day he’d go and see them, he loved waterfalls, it’s not easy to explain, he would begin whenever he was asked what his thing was about waterfalls, waterfalls, he would begin, and he would get embarrassed right away, this whole thing got on his nerves, to be asked, and to become embarrassed because of it, just standing there like one smacked on the head with a frying pan, so that those among his acquaintances who knew about the thing chose instead to drop the matter, even though the question would have been justified, everyone around him knew that he liked waterfalls and that he had always planned on traveling to see at least one, as they say, at least once in his life, first and foremost Angel Falls, or Victoria Falls, but at the very least Schaffhausen Falls, whereas things happened quite otherwise, in fact utterly otherwise, for he had arrived at that time of life when one no longer knows how many years remain, possibly
many, perhaps five or ten or even as many as twenty, but it is also possible that one might not live to see the day after tomorrow. The sound of one of these falls, by the way, was constantly in his ears, after fantasizing about them all these years he had started hearing one of them, but which one it was he couldn’t know of course, so that after a while, around the time he turned sixty, he was no longer sure why he had wanted to see the first or the second or at least the third of these waterfalls, was it so that he could at least decide which one it was he had heard all his life, or more accurately the second half of his life, whenever he shut his eyes at night? or because he had actually wanted to see one of them. By a grotesque twist of fate he who in the course of all those years had been sent to just about every corner of the globe had never been sent near a falls, and this is how it happened that he of all people, who had this thing with waterfalls, found himself in Shanghai again (the occasion was of no interest, he had to interpret for one of the usual series of business meetings), and he, for whom all his life waterfalls possessed such a special role, now in an utterly astounding manner precisely here in Shanghai had to realize the reason why all his life he had yearned to see the Angel, or the Victoria, or at the very least the Schaffhausen Falls, precisely here in Shanghai where it was common knowledge that there were no waterfalls. He had been a simultaneous interpreter ever since he could remember, and of all things it was precisely simultaneous interpretation that exhausted him the most, especially when it happened to be for a business meeting in Asia, as was the case now, and especially when at the obligatory dinner afterward he was obliged to drink as much as he did this evening, well, what’s done is done, in any case, here he was by eveningtime, a wrung-out dishrag, as they say, drunk as a skunk, a used-up dishrag, this dead-drunk, here he stood in the middle of the city, on the riverbank, soused, dead drunk, a wrung-out dishrag, speaking sotto voce and not being terribly witty; so this is Shanghai, meaning here I am once again in Shanghai, he had to admit that, alas, he found the fresh air had not been all that beneficial even though, as they say, he had nourished great hopes for it, since he was aware, if we may speak of awareness in his case now, aware that he had drunk way too much, he had drunk far more than what he could handle, but he had been in no position to refuse, one glass followed another, too many of them, and already in the room he had felt sick, a vague notion churning inside him that he needed fresh air, fresh air, but once outside in the fresh air the world began to spin around him even more, true, it was still better here outside than indoors, he no longer remembered if he had been dismissed or had simply sneaked outside, it was alas no longer meaningful to speak of memory in his case at this moment as he stood in a peculiar posture near the upper sector of the Bund’s ponderous arc of buildings, he leaned against the railing and eyed the celebrated Pudong on the other side of the river, and by this time the almost disastrously fresh air had come to have enough of an effect for his consciousness to clear up for a single moment and abruptly let him know that all this did not interest him the least little bit, and he was terribly bored in Shanghai, here, standing on the riverbank near the upper sector of the Bund’s ponderous arc of buildings, this was made evident by his posture, and what was he supposed to do now?—after all, he could not remain leaning on that railing till the end of time in this increasingly calamitous condition. I do simultaneous interpretation, he said aloud, and paused, to see if someone had heard him, but no one had at all, oh well, of course, how could he have imagined that his announcement, in the Hungarian language, and in Shanghai, would be of any help, yes, that would be a tough one to explain, but to explain anything in his situation would have been a chore, I do simultaneous interpretation, he repeated therefore, while to the best of his ability he kept his head—that is the skull where the pain originated—completely still as he pronounced these words, his whole body went completely rigid, that was how he managed to contain the pain up there, trying to keep this pain from growing any more intense, for this was an intense pain that was getting so intense, so powerful, that it simply blinded him, or, to put it more accurately, he was suddenly aware that here he sat, stone cold sober, here, somewhere, in a location for the time being impossible to identify, all around him the roar, rumble, thunder of a traffic that was insane, everywhere, overhead, down below, on the left and on the right, yes, that horrific din simply everywhere, and here he was sitting right in the middle of it, but where this here was he had not the faintest idea, blinded, he could not see, and for that matter he could not hear, for the din he was hearing was just as powerful, and was increasing at the same rate, as the pain inside his skull. All of a sudden, pow, it began to subside, and the moment arrived when he was able to open his eye, only a slit, at first only a slit, but it was enough for him to establish that he had never before sat in the place where he was sitting, and perhaps no one had ever sat there before, for he immediately realized that he was sitting in the middle of expressways curving every which way, or, to put it more accurately, expressways arching in various directions, he was surrounded by expressways, no mistaking it, the image seen through the slit told him: expressways overhead, expressways down below, expressways to the left, and finally expressways to the right as well, naturally, his first thought was that he was not well, and the next thought was that not only he but this whole thing around him was not well, elevated expressways on many levels, who ever heard of such a thing. As a simultaneous interpreter he possessed certain areas of specialization, one of these being traffic and transport systems, and since he was a simultaneous interpreter with a specialty in traffic and transport systems he had a good hunch by now about where he found himself except that he refused to believe it, no human being could possibly be in the place where he now was, notwithstanding the fact that he could see the famous pillar down below with the dragons winding around it, oh no, he thought now, oh no, I am inside Nine Dragon Crossing, or as the locals say, Jiulongzhu Jiaoji, is not something a human being can be inside of, and the moment arrived when that slit became a full view, because by now he dared to open one eye, or one might have said that the eye simply popped wide open, for he was not hallucinating, he was indeed inside Nine Dragon Crossing, deep inside it, with his back leaning against the railing of some sort of pedestrian bridge, as if someone had propped him up against it. Now his other eye popped open most boldly, for this was the moment when he realized that he was high up, that this pedestrian bridge as its name indicated was a real bridge that rose in the air above ground level and was not merely bridging over something but in fact conducted the pedestrian at various levels of elevation among the expressways that ran up above and down below, running this way and that, was this a sane thing to do?! he asked himself, no it was not, he answered, so that after all—and here he lowered his glance to look in front of his feet—then I must be crazy, this is how it had to end, I got royally drunk, perfectamente drunk, so drunk that I ended up here, in this madness, I am imprisoned inside this madness. A person could not climb inside such a metropolitan highway whatchamacallit, especially not so that he ends up with his back propped up against the plexiglass siding of a pedestrian footbridge, and he is half toppled over and therefore leaning on his left hand to keep from sliding any more, no, not this way or any other way, this is absurd, I’m probably not insane, he reassured himself, I am a simultaneous interpreter, and I have perfect recall—he rose from his humiliating supine position on the pedestrian bridge—everything that needs to be known from a transport-systems point of view about an intersection like this is in my head down to the last detail, and he stood up, and although he had to grab onto the handrail at first, after the first three or four meters he let go of it and took some unaided steps relishing the full dignity of his balance, thus setting out on the pedestrian bridge toward somewhere, but as the bridge right away curved into a turn, leading toward a future that was too uncertain for him, he decided it was wiser to stop, and so he halted, and by now all was well, his head was clear, his head no longer ached, his head was capable of quite
lucidly making inquiries into existence, namely his own, which he proceeded to do, to wit, obviously there must be a reason that I have come to a point in my life where I must now declare what I have learned about the world in the course of sixty years, nearly forty of which have been as a simultaneous interpreter, and if I don’t then I will take it to the grave with me, but that, and he continued his train of thought, that, however, will not happen, and I am going to make my declaration right here, indeed, he would gladly declare himself here and now, but the problem was that he had learned nothing about the world, and so what was he to say, what indeed, that he was a simultaneous interpreter who had lived close to forty years devoted exclusively to his profession; he was not claiming that, for instance when he looked at, say, a deck of cards, he did not have some unanswered questions, because aside from his profession he also loved card games, and his question was, well now, was this a full deck of cards, or was it merely any forty-eight individual cards, but there were only those kinds of questions, the one particular question regarding the world itself, which, he was well aware, might be expected from an experienced simultaneous interpreter in his sixties, that one particular question, no, it had never occurred to him, so that if fate had now cast him here to make a declaration about that then he was in a fine pickle, for he didn’t know anything about anything, there was nothing he could say about the world in general, nothing he could put in the form of a philosophy of life, no, nothing like that, here he gave a slight shake of his head, what spoke to him is what he saw here, from this pedestrian bridge, but about life in general, alas, he can say nothing. Once again his eyes swept over the horrific cavalcade of ponderous expressway ramps stretching and arching above and below each other, and he could only gape this way and that way, he tried to follow individual stretches of highway in order to find out what direction they went in, but it proved impossible, at least from here, from the inside, the entire thing had ended up so bafflingly complex. He shoved himself away from the railing against which he had been leaning for the last few minutes, and taking the utmost care he nonetheless set out in the dark on that pedestrian bridge curving away into an uncertain future, until after taking exactly seventeen steps his form disappeared beyond the bend, and thus shortly thereafter all human presence ceased within the interior hell of Nine Dragon Crossing, which is no place for a human being in any case.