The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  I get to hava khori before Sarah. It is dark and the late-winter air is a little cold. I lay a blanket down for us to sit on, under the camera so the guards won’t be able to watch.

  When she comes out, I ask her if she wants to walk. We do a few rounds, my heart pounding as I try to make small talk. Then I stop and sit us down on the blanket.

  I take her hands in mine. The single light, high up on the opposite wall, drowns out any view of the stars, but it casts a soft yellow glow on her face. Her hair is long now, drawn back in a ponytail, but I can’t see much of it under her purple hijab. Her lips are slightly redder than usual, probably from the strawberry jelly she uses sometimes for lipstick. She is beautiful.

  I can see in her eyes that she doesn’t know what I’m going to say. I’m shivering even though it isn’t cold.

  “Baby, I didn’t want to do this here. I wanted it to be somewhere beautiful, but—“ She looks confused and a little worried. “Will you marry me?” Her body jolts with surprise. She squeezes my fingers. For a few moments, she says nothing. I hold my breath. Then she says yes.

  I tie the rings onto each of our fingers and we hold each other, looking into each other’s eyes, smiling.

  SARAH (February 2010)

  About a week ago, the guard opened my door to hand me my lunch. Suddenly, another guard called her from down the hall and she left in a hurry. Standing with my food in my hand, I noticed a narrow, open crack in the door’s seam, which usually let in no light. She’d left it open. What difference does it make, I thought to myself—frozen with my eyes fixed on the crack—if my stupid door is open? In the hallway outside my cell, there is a video camera mounted on the wall. This hallway leads to another hallway with another camera. With no help from the outside, there’s no possibility of escape.

  For months I had dreams of that damn door being left open—of magically walking out to freedom. Now that it actually was, all I wanted to do was close it. So I did.

  JOSH (March 2010)

  What I look forward to most is hava khori. It’s the time of day when I stop reading, writing, exercising, and just connect with my two friends. Increasingly, though, it doesn’t work out like that.

  The arguments can be about anything. Shane wants to share meals at hava khori; Sarah doesn’t want food to distract us during these precious times together. Sarah and I want us three to read the same books at the same time; Shane doesn’t. Sarah wants us to appeal for clemency and apologize, but Shane and I don’t want anything that hints at admitting guilt.

  I wrack my brain for an escape from our routine. I propose that we celebrate as many holidays as we can think of—as creatively as we possibly can, disregarding the actual calendar if we feel like it.

  The night before Palm Sunday, each of us creates a personal system for palm reading. A few days later we decide it’s Ash Wednesday. We smear our faces with the chalky prayer stone, laughing at how ridiculous we look.

  On Friday, I arrange a makeshift Seder plate: a hard-boiled egg, salt water, a fish bone as a lamb shank, lettuce as a bitter herb, and dried, flat Persian bread for matzo. Halfway through the Passover story, Sarah gets the giggles and can’t stop. She curls into Shane’s arms, laughing and embarrassed by her girlishness.

  Shane looks at me, clearly uncomfortable. I call off the meal, a little ticked. I put effort into making the Seder special, and I refreshed my memory by reading the story of Moses in the Koran. Passover is my favorite Jewish holiday.

  I peer down at my pathetic Seder plate, then over at Shane and Sarah balled together, and then I look over the walls to the cloudy spring sky. I quickly let it go. It was a nice week, but these distractions couldn’t last forever. Our holiday season is over.

  SARAH (April 2010)

  I’m in the middle of my exercise routine, doing jumping jacks and pushups, when I see a flurry of motion outside the slot on my door. I look down to find a tight ball of tissue paper on my floor. If the guards catch whoever threw this, my door will burst open any second. I will eat the note before they can take it.

  Carefully smoothing out the crumpled note, I read: “Dearest Sarah, I am Zahra. Do you remember me? I have been very worried about you, my dear Sarah. They took me to a different section for talking with you, but now they have brought me back. Are you okay? Do you need help? I will talk to you tonight when the guards are sleeping.”

  I can’t believe it’s her! It was almost four months ago that they moved Zahra. I’d often wondered what happened to her, but I never expected to see her again.

  Later that night, there are loud knocks on my wall. I hear my name being whispered into the hallway. I crawl toward my cell door.

  “Hello,” I whisper timidly through the slot.

  “Sarah,” the voice replies, “I am Zahra. Do you remember me? I’ve missed you. Are you okay? Are you still alone? I’ve been very worried about you.” That night we devise a method of communicating through notes written on scraps of cardboard. She will write with a pen she stole from her interrogators and I will use a small piece of metal I’ve fashioned from a tube of Vaseline that leaves a mark like a pencil.

  Zahra and I decide to hide our notes in the trash can in the bathroom. She balls hers up in toilet paper and I stuff mine inside soiled-looking maxi-pads—places the guards will never look. When one of us has a new note waiting, we will let the other one know by three hard knocks on our common wall.

  I sometimes wait for days or weeks for the right opportunity to pass a note or exchange a few words with Zahra. I wait till the right guard is working—the one who never bothers to check on me through my peephole—so I won’t get caught writing. I memorize the guards’ footsteps and the patterns they walk in through the halls. I save a portion of beef stew in which I carefully soak a maxi-pad overnight, then let it dry for a day or two until it authentically looks like menstrual blood. If anything feels off, even the smallest detail, I abort the project.

  Zahra is bold with the guards, sometimes making jokes, sometimes yelling at them. “I will not cry for these bastards,” she writes me. “I will not show them my tears.”

  “We have to stop,” I write to her one morning. “I’m afraid we’ll get caught and they’ll move you. Zahra, when we are both free, I’ll come to see you in the Netherlands. We’ll spend days together dancing and talking. We will be friends forever.” A few days later Zahra passes by my cell and leaves another note balled up on my carpet.

  “They are moving me again—don’t cry, Sarah! I don’t know what will happen to us, but remember you are never alone here. Sarah, please remember that Iranians are not bad people. We love the American people. I love you. No matter where they take me now, I will try to find you. Remember to listen for me—I will call out your name at night.”

  Over the next several months I sometimes catch a glimpse of Zahra’s pink jumpsuit hanging on the prison clothesline. When the guards aren’t looking, I run my hands across the pretty color and sneak a few nuts or a piece of candy into her back pocket.

  SHANE (May 20, 2010)

  The guard we’ve nicknamed Dumb Guy is at our door. He hands us a bag of brand new jeans, shirts, socks, and sneakers with shoelaces. “Put these on, quickly,” he says, and leaves. We’ve been planning for this moment. Our moms have told us in letters they were trying to come and visit us.

  After Dumb Guy is gone, I go to the bathroom. A tiny note, covered in microscopic writing, is wrapped tightly in plastic and stuck inside the outer lip of the sink. It’s small enough to fit discreetly between my middle and ring finger.

  Josh and I have practiced this many times. I tape the note to my penis.

  They took Sarah’s pen first, so we knew to hide one of ours before they raided our cell. I scribed this letter with our secret pen over several days while Josh stood watch for guards. It describes in detail what happened when we were captured and lays out a schedule of all of the events of our detainment, including prison transfers, hunger strikes, the arrival of books. It describes our daily routine an
d lists our email passwords in the hope that someone will change them. It has a list of songs we sing that we want our friends and family to listen to.

  We are transported in a van with fogged windows to a hotel in another part of the city. Large, unsmiling men with radios and bellhop uniforms take us to the 15th floor. I ask to use the restroom, where I untape the note and put it in the coin pocket of my jeans.

  They line us up in front of a set of double doors, where we stand on a red carpet, the kind movie stars walk down. Lights and cameras are blazing. The next thing I know, my mom is in my arms. I feel a warmth so pure that it awakens an old, lost part of me. I become loose in a way I haven’t been since we were hiking up that mountain 10 months ago. I pull the note out of my pocket and squeeze it into my mom’s hand. As I hug her, I tell her to hide it. She tucks it into her bra. Then, she whispers into my ear, “I love you, Shane. I can’t wait to have you home.” In this moment, I feel halfway there.

  The men in suits sit us all down on a couch in front of a wall of cameras. Livia Leu Agosti, the Swiss ambassador, sits with us. I don’t understand how this is happening. After all those months of not letting us have pens in order to prevent any chance of communication to the outside world, why are they putting us in front of cameras, giving us a chance to say anything we want?

  “What happened at the border?” a reporter asks.

  “We never walked into Iran,” I say, then stop myself. I know our interrogators wouldn’t want us to answer that question. I feel an overwhelming need to self-censor. “We can’t really talk about that,” I say.

  Suddenly, I realize why they brought us here—they aren’t afraid of us saying anything they don’t want us to. They control us. If I say anything even slightly offensive, any plans they might have to release us could be canceled. They exercise the same power over our mothers.

  Something is different about my mom. She has always been a tough, no-nonsense kind of woman. Now she won’t let go of me.

  “I hope they let you come home with us,” she says. Her words make my heart drop into my stomach. “I don’t think that’s going to happen, Mom,” I say gently, squeezing her hand. The three of us believe we’ll get out eventually, but we know the Iranians arranged this visit in order to hold us longer. By allowing us to see each other, they can claim they are making “humanitarian gestures,” subdue international pressure, and put the focus back on the United States to reciprocate.

  The suits tell our moms they can remove their hijabs. They leave the room. At last, we are alone.

  Leu Agosti jumps up and walks around the room, lifting up garbage cans and carpets to check for recording bugs. “This hotel is very famous,” she whispers. “This is where they bring prisoners to do videotaped confessions.” We ask her about the on-again, off-again talks over Iran’s nuclear program. She says she doesn’t believe that our detainment is directly tied to the nuclear issue, but “it doesn’t help.”

  Mom talks about my friends as if they were hers. She and Sarah’s mom have been living together, working on our campaign full time. Our friend Shon Meckfessel, who was with us in Kurdistan, is moving in with them. Dad is raising money through hog roasts in rural Minnesota and by raffling off Bobcat skid loaders.

  Sarah and I signal each other with our eyes and come together. We kneel on the floor in front of our moms and hold their hands. “Shane and I are getting married,” Sarah says.

  “Congratulations,” they both say, somewhat nervously. I try to read their thoughts. Are they worried that we’re being rash, planning out our futures in such an extreme situation? Are they, both divorced, trying to hold back their own fears of marriage? Sarah shows them her ring of thread, and they soften, cooing about how romantic we are. Sarah’s mom asks, “Can we tell the media?”

  SARAH

  I can’t get over how strong my mom looks. All these months I’ve been imagining her defeated and broken, but I was wrong. I don’t have to protect her from what’s happening to me. Even if I want to, I can’t.

  I ask her to follow me into the bathroom. We walk past the secret police hand in hand and lock the door behind us. “Mom,” I whisper, “about four months ago I found a lump in my left breast. It’s big and sore, and wasn’t there before. They took me to the prison doctor but didn’t allow me to ask her any questions. A few weeks later, they took me to a real hospital for a mammogram, but I haven’t seen the results. They say I’m fine, but I’m not sure I believe them.” I lift up my shirt and guide my mom’s hand to the spot that’s been tormenting me. Her skilled fingers gently prod the area—after a few seconds she looks up at me and shakes her head.

  “It’s not cancer, sweetie. It’s just a totally normal lump. You don’t need to worry anymore.” My mom has been a nurse for more than thirty years—I know she wouldn’t lie to me about this. We hear a knock at the door and Dumb Guy tells us to come out.

  “You’re fine,” my mom says. “Know that—but don’t stop demanding medical care. This is really important, okay?”

  SHANE

  The suits bring us menus and encourage us to order. I ask for shrimp and a chicken sandwich and fries and Coke and coffee. I eat it all, as well as some of the fruit heaped up on the table in front of us. Sarah sings songs she has written in prison. It is starting to feel surreal, like someone telling us to have fun at gunpoint.

  Two hours after we eat, the Iranians tell us it’s time to go. We hug and kiss our moms and say every last thought we can think of as they usher us slowly down the hall. We wait in front of an elevator. When it opens, a man invites our moms to enter. They do, and we stare at each other, them on one side of the threshold and us on the other. Just as my heart starts to break, something inside me turns off.

  Four months later, following international publicity about her health problems, Sarah is released on medical grounds. Over the next year, she meets with everyone from President Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Oprah Winfrey and Sean Penn, working nonstop with our friends and families on a campaign to get us released.

  Josh and I are tried by the Revolutionary Court, on charges of masterminding an American-Israeli conspiracy against Iran, and sentenced to eight years. Eventually, the sultan of Oman pays a million-dollar "bail” and the two of us come home. (The sultan goes on to use the back channel opened up during the negotiations for our release to rekindle US-Iran nuclear talks.) Josh connects with his middle-school sweetheart, Jenny, and two years later their son, Isaiah, is born.

  We also hear news about Sarah’s cell neighbor, Zahra with the pink jumpsuit. One morning, nine months after Sarah last saw her, she is taken out of her cell to Evin Prison’s death chamber. She is executed by hanging.

  CHRISTOPHER MYERS

  Letter to My Grandnephew

  FROM PEN America

  ANDERS CARLSON-WEE

  Dynamite

  FROM Ninth Letter

  My brother hits me hard with a stick

  so I whip a choke-chain

  across his face. We’re playing

  a game called Dynamite

  where everything you throw

  is a stick of dynamite,

  unless it’s pine. Pine sticks

  are rifles and pinecones are grenades,

  but everything else is dynamite.

  I run down the driveway

  and back behind the garage

  where we keep the leopard frogs

  in buckets of water

  with logs and rock islands.

  When he comes around the corner

  the blood is pouring

  out of his nose and down his neck

  and he has a hammer in his hand.

  I pick up his favorite frog

  and say If you come any closer

  I’ll squeeze. He tells me

  I won’t. He starts coming closer.

  I say a hammer isn’t dynamite.

  He reminds me that everything is dynamite.

  DANIEL ALARCÓN

  The Contestant

  FROM The
California Sunday Magazine

  THE PERUVIAN VERSION of the international television game show franchise the Moment of Truth arrived in Lima in mid-2012. By that time, the program had been produced in dozens of countries around the world, including the United States, where it aired on Fox in 2008 and 2009. In Peru, the show was called El Valor de la Verdad (“the value of the truth”), and the format was essentially the same as it had been everywhere else: A contestant is brought into the station and asked a set of questions, some banal, some uncomfortable, some bordering on cruel, all while hooked to a polygraph.

  The answers are cataloged. Then, a few days later, the contestant is brought back to go through the questions once more, this time before a studio audience. The answers given are compared to the results of the polygraph, and for each truthful response, the contestant wins money. If she lies—or rather, if the polygraph says she lies—she loses it all. Naturally, the more money at stake, the more compromising the questions become. The contestant has the option of calling it off after each answer.

  In Peru, the show’s host was Beto Ortiz, who in a recent national poll was named the country’s most powerful TV journalist. A balding, heavyset man in his mid-forties, Beto has long been one of the more successful and controversial figures in Peru. He is sharp, inquisitive, funny, and has gained millions of fans; the television critic Fernando Vivas, who writes for El Comercio, Peru’s most influential newspaper, described Beto as “a monster on the scene, with all the ambivalence implied by the word ‘monster.’”