The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

Hal returned to the compound to sleep, and I waited outside until the kid pushed through the door with a variety of coffee mugs carabinered to the webbing of his enormous ruck. “Ready!” he announced. And, with his headlamp on high, we set off down the steep, icy road.

  Falling snow converged to a vanishing point in the beam of the kid’s headlamp. When he fell behind, I could almost reach out and touch this point. But then he’d trot up alongside me, mugs clattering, and it would recede. On one such occasion, he presented me with a handful of bullets.

  “Can I trade these in for hollow-point?” he asked. “I heard you guys roll with hollow-point. I also heard you guys muj up, in turbans and man jammies and shit, with MP5s tucked up in there. Like, ka-chow! That must be wicked! And I heard you guys have makeup artists that turn you into village elders so you can drop mad PSYOP on the GENPOP. Is that true? You don’t have to tell me, but holy fuck!”

  The kid fell behind, caught his breath, and trotted up beside me again.

  “So can I get an MP5?” he asked.

  I ushered the kid to the TOC and showed him Levi’s computer. After booting up mahjong, he was quiet.

  My next task was to put Levi on the rotator at dawn. The rotator was a cargo helicopter that every morning ran a clockwise route around the AOR. From our outpost, it would fly to Bagram, where Levi could catch a transport home. With daybreak less than an hour away, I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat back to watch the drone feed.

  The drone was on the wrong side of the storm that sat over Logar, and its camera, which normally looked down on our targets, was searching a dark wall of cumulonimbus for a hole. Not finding one, it punched into the thick of the storm. For a moment, it seemed like it would be OK, then ice piled onto its wings as if a bricklayer had thrown it on with a trawl, and the drone hurtled toward earth. I wrote down its grid, because if it crashed we’d have to go out and fetch its brain. But as the drone fell into warmer air, the ice peeled away, and when it leveled off, its camera remained facing aft. I watched the drone pull a thread of the storm into clear morning air. By the time I heard the rotator’s approach, the storm had passed.

  Outside, covering everything was a pristine layer of snow, which dawn had turned pink. I started the pink HiLux. I honked the horn and it made a pink noise. Levi emerged from his pink tent with his pink ruck. I drove him down a pink road to the pink LZ. The rotator came in sideways, and its thumping rotors kicked up a thick pink cloud. Crouching, Levi and I ran through the cloud to a spot alongside the warm machine. A crewman opened the side door and handed me the mail, which included a package from Levi’s mother. Then Levi hopped aboard and was on his way home.

  The sun rose as I drove back to the TOC, and the whole outpost sparkled at the edge of the war. The stamps on the package from Levi’s mother featured Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The detail chosen was Icarus drowning. What was not shown was how the world went on without him.

  The new liaison was asleep in Levi’s chair when I got back. I opened the package quietly, so as not to wake him. More Kattekoppen. I put it on the shelf with the rest and was about to go to bed when the phones started ringing.

  Two soldiers on their way home from a bazaar south of Kabul had taken a wrong turn. They’d hit a dead end and been ambushed. Bloody drag marks led from the scene, which was littered with M9 and AK brass. Witnesses said that the soldiers had been taken alive, which meant a rescue operation, led by us. We received pictures of the soldiers from a search-and-rescue database. One soldier had a chin and the other did not. The TOC filled with CIA, FBI, and ODA. Then a massive helicopter slung in the missing soldiers’ ruined truck. Its windows had been shot through, and bullet holes riddled the skin. The door creaked open, and blood trickled out. Their smell was still in it, along with the stuff they’d bought at the bazaar, intact in a flimsy blue bag.

  The drag marks at the scene led to a tree line. The tree line opened onto a number of compounds, which we raided that night. Those compounds led to other compounds, which we raided the next day. The second set of compounds led to a village, which, over two days and one night, we cleared. That delivered us to a mountain. It took two nights and a day to clear all the caves up one side and down the other. Which led us to another village. And so on.

  Time became lines on a map leading in all directions from Chin and No Chin’s ambush. We searched for them night and day.

  One night, we were moving along slowly, with the moon casting our shadows on the snow and the wind in our faces, when an air-raid siren blasted and a small village suddenly appeared on our left in an explosion of light. The village was just beyond a tree line. I could feel the siren in my throat. Fearing an ambush, I radioed the howitzers for a fire mission.

  “Send it,” they replied.

  While calculating the target coordinates, I noticed that the leaves shone like silver dollars in the wind. Kids in the village, awakened by the ruckus, quit their beds to run under the streetlights. Women chased after them. Men appeared on their roofs to wave to one another, and to shout back and forth over the siren’s blare: Isn’t this something!

  This, we later learned, was the unexpected restoration of power after months without—the opposite of a rolling blackout. The resulting commotion continued until one light went out, then another. Until the women had chased the kids inside and the men had waved goodbye. Until all the lights were out. Then someone shut down the air-raid siren, and its blare died to a whistle, and the whistle died to a tumble of bearings. After which all was dark and quiet.

  “Send your fire mission,” the howitzers repeated.

  “Never mind,” I said. And we continued on our search.

  If we’d been asked how long we’d go on searching, our answer would have been: as long as it takes. Think of the families back home. Baby Chin. Mother No Chin. But in truth there were limits, and we had methods for determining them. From the streaks of blood found in the drag marks, we ascertained wounds. From the wounds, we developed timelines. And we presented these timelines on a chart, which read from top to bottom, best case to worst. By the time that village lit up beside us, we were at the bottom of the chart. The next night, we started looking for graves. And although it seemed as if we were forever tripping over graves, when it came time to actually locate a specific one we couldn’t.

  There was no time to sleep. My fingernails stopped growing. My beard turned white. Cold felt hot and hot felt cold. And soon enough, I began to hallucinate. One night, as we approached a well, I watched Chin jump out and run away, laughing. Another night, I saw No Chin ride bare-ass up a moonbeam.

  Meanwhile, the Mahjong Kid had proved himself worthy by having the howitzers fully prepped for that pop-up nonambush, and for every close call since. At first, I preferred Levi’s circles to MJ’s hyperbolas, which opened onto an infinity that no howitzer could possibly reach. But then, as the search for our missing comrades wore on, producing only dry holes and dead ends, the idea of thrusting death somewhere beyond the finite gained a sort of appeal.

  We were down to almost nothing on the unwanted-food shelf. Only the Kattekoppen and some kind of macaroni that required assembly were left by the time we found No Chin’s body in a ditch outside Maidan Shar.

  No Chin had a note in his pocket indicating the whereabouts of Chin. We would find Chin buried under a tree by a wall. We hiked to trees without walls, walls without trees, graveless walls, and treeless graves, until finally, by a process of elimination, we stumbled on the right combination and dug.

  Under a thin layer of dirt was a wooden box. Crammed inside the box was Chin. Prior to the mission, I’d filled my pockets with Kattekoppen, which came in handy, because Chin was decomposing and covered with malodorous slime. The smell only got worse as our medic stuffed Chin into a bag. Others gagged and puked. But I popped a steady supply of Kattekoppen, which kept the smell at bay.

  The next morning, when the rotator arrived, we slid Chin in one door and Levi hopped out the other.

  It was a bright warm morning
. The snow had melted and the sun rose on a muddy world. Levi and I got into the HiLux and, on the ride away from the LZ, I congratulated him and asked how it felt to be a father.

  “It is strange,” Levi said. “I have never much worried, but sefferal times a night now I wake up afraid the boy is dead. And I sneak into his room and, like this”—he wet an index finger and held it under his nose—“I check his breeding.”

  From Levi, hunched over, with his finger under his nose and his knees above the dash, I looked out the windshield at the war, which, stampwise, could’ve been a scene from Brueghel’s Triumph of Death—one that, even without a skeleton playing the hurdy-gurdy, or a wagon full of skulls, or a burning shipwreck, or a dark iron bell, still raised the question of salvation. At the smoldering trash pit, I turned and drove toward the artillery range.

  “We will make a fire mission?” Levi asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Excited, Levi got out the big green radio and started messing with freqs. I parked at the edge of the range, where the ashen hulks of what might once have been tanks had been bulldozed into a pile. Presumably, the same dozer that had cleared these wrecks had also scraped the giant concentric rings in the field of mud before us. Way out on top of the bull’s-eye was our target, Chin and No Chin’s truck, right where I’d asked for it to be slung.

  Hal and I had met at the dog cage the night before to discuss the rise of MJ and whether or not Levi still had a place with us. While the dogs rolled around, we’d devised this test.

  I sat on the hood of the HiLux as Levi shot a bearing to the target with his compass and gauged the winds by the smoke blowing off the trash pit. Then he called it in, his Dutch accent somehow thicker after two weeks in Texas. But the howitzers’ read-back was good. And soon enough, I saw iron scratches against the clear blue sky. I followed them to impact, where fountains of mud ascended from white-hot flashes. The mud fell, the booms rolled by, and I saw that the hits were good: the truck was badly damaged.

  Still, enough of it remained to be hit again, without question. While Levi questioned, the magnetic pole upon which his bearing was anchored drifted ever so slightly; the breeze against which he’d applied his correction stiffened, and the men cradling the heavy shells of his next barrage cursed the unknown reasons for the holdup.

  BRENDAN MATHEWS

  This Is Not a Love Song

  FROM Virginia Quarterly Review

  SHE WAS KITTY to her parents, Katherine to the nuns in high school, Kate when she was in college. But to anyone who knew her then—Chicago in the first years of the nineties, her hands tearing at her guitar like a kid unwrapping a Christmas present—she had already become Kat.

  Like the rest of the ramen-fueled hordes of art students and rockers-in-training, we lived in Wicker Park, where rents were low and apartments doubled as studios, rehearsal spaces, black-box theaters, and flophouses. The park itself was still a rusty triangle of scalded grass littered with needles and broken bottles. It would be a few years before the new trees and the swing sets and the DIE YUPPIE SCUM stencils on the smooth-bricked three-flats, before the press would hype Chicago as “the next Seattle,” and record-company types started skulking around the bars. Back then, there weren’t any boutiques on Damen selling $500 sweaters—just bodegas, auto-body shops, and empty storefronts whose faded signs whispered of plumbing supplies and cold storage.

  Later there would be the brief flurry of albums and magazine covers, but back then the only people paying attention to her were the music nerds on the lookout for the next band you hadn’t heard of and the rock critic from the free weekly who wrote mash-note reviews of any girl with a guitar. And me, of course, but by then I’d been paying attention to her for so long that I’d started to make a career out of it.

  Interior. Stairwell. Evergreen Avenue loft.

  She stands in the doorway, a ghost outlined by the yawning black of the stairwell. She looks drained, which is how she often looked in those days. Her arms are folded across her chest and her skin bleeds into the T-shirt, white on white. Her hair must have been black then, because in the picture it’s fused with the empty space around her, and her face really pops: jaw set, teeth bared, eyes canted to the side, as if the shutter caught her the second before she spit out some curse. Maybe this was the night the van got torched by our next-door neighbors—teenage Latin Kings or Latin Lovers or Latin Disciples, we hadn’t yet figured out how to read their tags. Maybe it was the night the bass player told Kat he was going to law school. Or maybe she’d just been ambushed by Zlotko the landlord wanting to know For sure, no joking, when you pay me my rent, huh? When you pay me my rent? You can say that the way her body burns a hole in the middle of the image is just a photographer’s trick, a little darkroom magic to saturate the blacks and flush everything to the whitest white, and you’d be right. But you can’t deny that she’s pissed.

  Interior. Basement of Kat’s parents’ house. River Forest, Illinois.

  If you can’t imagine Kat in the gray skirt and Peter Pan collar required by the nuns at our all-girls high school, it’s probably because you’ve never seen the pictures I took when I was the president and only dues-paying member of the photography club and Kat was spending afternoons and weekends punching out songs in her parents’ basement and running them through the four-track she bought with a summer’s worth of babysitting money. She was my only subject—my muse, you could say—but that was because she was the only one who would sit still while I fussed over lenses and light readings and angles. It wasn’t patience: even then she was focused; even then she was very good at tuning out background noise. I took rolls and rolls of film of her bent over her guitar, her hair a veil over her eyes, her lips soundlessly counting out the beat. Then I’d disappear for days of red-light seclusion in my studio, which my parents insisted on calling the laundry room. A set of these pictures, soulful black-and-whites mostly, spiked with a few hallucinatory color shots, won the school art prize senior year and had the added bonus of convincing every girl in our graduating class that we were lesbians. It’s too bad we weren’t; maybe we wouldn’t have been so lonely, so frustrated, so perpetually amped up.

  Interior. Fireside Bowl. Fullerton Avenue.

  Kat is onstage, surrounded by cigarette smoke and crowd steam, her eyes raked up at the low black ceiling. The smoke drifts into the shafts of light pouring from the Tinkertoy overhead rig, gives a shape to the air, makes visible the currents. You can see the way the heat from the crowd rises and then bends back on itself in ripples and swirls. For all the movement on the floor, from shoe-gazer swaying to manic pogo-ing to grand-mal moshing, the real action is above, where the air surges with color—candy-apple red and freeze-pop green, children-at-play yellow and police-light blue. Not that she ever looked at the crowd when she sang. The eyes of other people distracted her; the way those eyes begged for instant intimacy wasn’t just an imposition, it was an affront. An assault, even.

  She didn’t look into the crowd, she looked over it, at some safe, empty spot on a far wall, or a point on the ceiling where hands and faces could not reach. When she first started playing out in clubs where there was no stage, just a space on the floor to set up, her insistence on staring at the ceiling or squeezing her eyes shut tight gave her the look of some mad, ecstatic saint. People said she was blind, or epileptic, or terminally shy. Whatever they believed, they were talking about her, and she needed that kind of an advantage—that lingering hold on the crowd’s mayfly attention—if she didn’t want to get lumped in with every other band thrashing through its twenty-five minutes. (“Which band? The one with the freaky girl singer with the messed-up eyes? Oh yeah, they were pretty good.”)

  Once she moved up to places with a stage that set her above the crowd, her eyes didn’t have to roll so far back in her head to find that tranquil spot in the ceiling. Some people even kidded themselves into thinking that she was looking at them, in those rare moments when her eyes flicked down to check her crabbed, chord-making fingers on the
neck of her guitar. But she wasn’t willing to share what she was feeling with anyone, not if sharing meant locking eyes with some other face out there in the dark and exchanging a smile or some acknowledgment that, hey, we’re both in this moment together. Because that would have wrecked it. For her, I mean.

  Box 5, spool 3.

  MALE VOICE: What’s her deal, anyway?

  KAT: inaudible

  M.V.: Because it’s weird.

  KAT: inaudible

  M.V.: How am I supposed to do that? I can’t turn around without her going click click click. It’s like she’s a spy or something.

  KAT: She’s not spying on you. She doesn’t give a shit about you.

  M.V.: Then why is she always taking my fucking picture?

  KAT: Because she’s spying on me. You’re just . . . scenery.

  School portrait. Seventh grade. Ascension Elementary School. Oak Park, Illinois. Kat smiles, lips together, to hide her braces. Photographer unknown.

  If you wanted to go back to the very beginning, you would have to start with the days when her brother Gerry wanted to be Jimmy Page and Robert Plant all in one and his best friend had a drum kit so there was no question who got to be John Bonham. Gerry liked Led Zeppelin because they were loud and their album covers had secret symbols and some of the lyrics made references to The Lord of the Rings. He explained what the symbols meant, but he said Kat wouldn’t really get it until she had read all of Tolkien, including The Silmarillion. She hadn’t been able to get through The Hobbit. That’s practically a kid’s book, he told her. It doesn’t mention the Valar or Númenor or any of the important stuff.