The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  Our mother was allergic to most animals. But my sister’s reprimand probably hurt her feelings, so she ushered my nieces into the circle room and told them a Jesus story. One about his entering a town and healing a blind man by spitting on his eyes. As our mother spoke, my sister banged pots and pans. Our mother always loved Christ, but she probably loved him more after her husband died and she was left broke, not fully bipolar but not right in the head, with four kids age six and under. She prayed to Jesus for help, and later that week our father’s older brother, a confirmed bachelor and an asset-management specialist, offered to let her bring us all to his ranch and live with him, and to send her kids to college. To thank him, our mother cleaned and cooked for our uncle and the arrangement worked out, mostly. To thank God, she attended church twice weekly and spoke with Jesus for an hour every day.

  From the kitchen, my sister ordered our mother to stop proselytizing; our mother kept speaking. Her voice was sweet in a way it rarely was. Our mother loved Jesus. I didn’t condemn her. Personally, I agreed that many Jewish guys were extra-talented, kind, and good with touch, and I’d had “relationships” with emotionally distant, mostly unavailable Jewish guys myself, so I sympathized; my older sister did not.

  When my sister repeated her request, our mother yelled, “Then Jesus asked, ‘What do you see?’ and the blind man said, ‘I see people! They look like trees, walking around!’” and, temper shot, my sister ordered my nieces to play in their rooms.

  Everyone slumped in the living room. Our uncle asked who wanted to go for a walk; no one did. Our mother sneezed. Our uncle said, “I guess I’ll go by myself, then!” and left. We all read—my siblings books, my mother a magazine called Real Simple. The bells’ carol played and the tree’s lights twinkled. I was reading a biography of my favorite writer, who at forty-five begged Stalin to be allowed to finish his work before he was shot by a firing squad, when we heard a thump thump thump in the hall.

  “What’s that?” one of my brothers said.

  “I don’t know,” my sister said.

  We heard shrieks and giggles.

  “Jump!” a voice cried.

  We entered the hall and saw that my nieces had used their old tights to affix a coyote to the bannister. It was a donkey piñata, really; but they’d glued red-brown felt to it and taped coyote ears to its head. They’d cut holes where the donkey eyes had been, and in the holes they’d taped Doritos. My elder niece dangled a cat toy on a wire and made its attractive end bounce near the Doritos. Chocolate panted and lunged at the toy madly, fatly, his belly heaving. But each time he failed to reach it and fell with a thump. Crow watched from the top of the stairs.

  Adira peered at her.

  “Crow!” she urged. “Get it! Come!”

  My sister asked what they were doing.

  Adira muttered.

  My sister said, “‘Kamikaze Cat Training’???”

  “We’re teaching them to fight coyotes.”

  Her blue-black hair flared, tangled, around her shoulders.

  “We’d train Crow,” Adira said, “but she won’t come near Chocolate. He bullies her and she’s scared.”

  “First of all,” my sister said, “that’s not a coyote. It’s a donkey. Chocolate does not see a coyote. He sees Doritos.” Cats were not smart, she said. Cats were dumb. Crow was not being trained. She was watching the girls act stupid. No cat could kill a coyote. Furthermore, no cat was in danger, because no cat was ever going outside.

  My sister said that she needed help in the kitchen, and told my nieces to clean up their mess.

  I’m sure other families have fallen into bad holiday moods over similarly trivial incidents.

  But I felt a sadness. I couldn’t knock it; I don’t know why. At any rate, I had to contemplate the prospect of my family eating wheat lasagna, which had goitrogenic effects; though, regarding that, they didn’t believe me. My family found my health ideas absurd. My brothers, both dentists, had told me that my nutritionist work should be illegal, because only doctors are qualified to dispense supplements; my sister said that I’d never make rent as a nutritionist, and that I should give up. I was forbidden to offer Kunda the most common-sense advice. I considered, still with wonder, my clients who’d got pregnant: a dozen women in their mid-forties who had each had three failed I.V.F. treatments before they did protocols with me. Many had had repeat miscarriages, several had ovarian cysts, and all had tried unsuccessfully for years; but once we had replenished their minerals, supported their thyroid and adrenals, used herbs to balance their hormones, and changed their diets, they’d all conceived. They’d all had healthy, non-retarded babies. They’d sent me referrals, but not enough. My sister was right: I couldn’t pay my bills. I’d spent a few hundred bucks on Google AdWords, but I made bad ads and they didn’t work. My Web site was ugly. I’d had some unsatisfied clients, old ladies who’d gained weight instead of losing it, and they’d Yelped me, calling me a quack. I thought about how, if I helped Kunda, I’d have a district medical officer’s Yelp endorsement, and how many clients that’d get me. I didn’t give a fig about Kunda’s sensitivity; I was dizzy, from actual dizziness or from grandiosity; I thought, So what if my degree’s an Internet diploma?

  I was slicing onions when I noticed, beyond the kitchen’s glass doors, my mother standing in the back yard, staring contemplatively into the distant pines, under that pale vast Shuswap sky.

  My sister said, “What’s she doing?”

  We wandered toward the glass—my sister and I, her husband, my nieces behind him—and saw that my mother was watching Chocolate, who was hunched privately at yard’s edge, depositing number twos into the grass; as we observed, a handsome coyote the size of a large dog, but more yellow-gray and with a long narrow snout, strolled into the yard, bent down to Chocolate as if to whisper in his ear, and bit his throat. It pulled, ripping flesh, and the cat convulsed. The coyote plucked up Chocolate’s body and trotted into the trees.

  All I remember of the ensuing chaos is my sister’s husband shouting in a high, almost teen-age voice, “You weren’t supposed to let the cat out! Why’d you let the cat out? You weren’t supposed to do that!”

  Apparently, our mother had thought the cats were still allowed outside to use the bathroom at dusk. She was watching Chocolate, she explained. “I was right there,” she said.

  We had thirty minutes until our guests arrived.

  I dripped medicine in my room. I’d put it off because there’s a thing called a Herxheimer reaction: when you kill thousands of bacteria the remaining billions heighten their activity. I often hallucinated after dripping. I disliked feeling cold fluid slide through my veins. Also, inserting tubes into my arm-port was embarrassing and I tried to do it privately, so as not to repulse my family. Now I had to make a sixty-minute I.V. drip in thirty, so the pressure was high. I was lying on my bed, feeling logy, when the door swung open. A second later, Crow jumped onto the bed. A minute later, a hand tapped the door; Adira asked to enter.

  I said it was her room.

  She was wearing her gray track pants and a SpongeBob T-shirt. She hopped onto the bed and lay to my left. She asked what I was doing; I said I was dripping; she nodded. She’d been “tick sick,” so she knew what it was. She reached across me to pet Crow; Crow let her. She read her book, then said, “I don’t want Crow to die,” into the pillow. I told her not to be stupid; she said, “Someone will let her outside, I know it,” and I said, “You’re being stupid“ and she said, “You’re stupid,” and I said, “You’re stupid like SpongeBob“ and she said, “SpongeBob’s awesome, I love SpongeBob!” and I swore that no one would let Crow out. Then I looked to my right and saw an old woman, as dark as night, bent and withered but still strong and smiling grimly. She had sharp teeth and yellow eyes, and was crouching. I jumped. My niece asked why I’d jumped. I explained that I’d dripped too fast. My niece said reasonably, “Why don’t you slow it down?” and I said because we had guests coming. I wiped my eyes, gook came out; I looked at my
fingers, they’d puffed like sausages. My niece asked what I’d got her for Christmas, and I said something cheap and small, which was true.

  She smiled and said, “I bet I like it.”

  I said, “Listen, tardface, no one’s letting Crow outside.”

  We slept.

  The thing with nieces, K, is that they just happen. You may be a broke, semi-jobless loser who’s never loved, hates kids, and is repelled by marriage, and suddenly your successful sibling may have these things: babies that look like you and know your name. And there’s nothing you can do. I remember this one time, the year I took a job in Vancouver (the worst place on earth) to be near my sister, and she drove down to visit with her husband and my nieces, Lily still a baby, Adira then two, this wild fast skinny thing with an elf face and ebony hair, and we hiked through Lighthouse Park, along a trail that wound two miles through thousand-year-old cedars and descended steeply to an inlet called Starboat Cove, and my niece ran its length but on the way back got tired, and I asked if she wanted a piggy-back ride. I probably said, “Smellface, want a ride?” and she said, “Yes!” and my older sister got an odd look and asked my niece, “Do you want me to give you a piggy-back ride?”; there was a pause, these white clouds moved in the perfect sky above the cove, the ocean smacked saltily, fishily on the rocks below our feet, and my niece composed her face as if contemplating how to put things; I knew my sister would always be her one love—we all knew that—but she said, in her breathy two-year-old voice, “Sometimes when your heart is big, all you really want is Aunt D,” and I was, like, “Great, I’m fucked, I’m going to like this kid, this niece thing, forever.”

  We’d slept through dinner. I was glad, because I’d decided to starve myself in order to starve the Bartonella. My sister offered me food and I declined, though ravenous. I saw by the remnants on the counter that my family had consumed ten pans of buttered squash, twelve loaves of bread, and eight vats of lasagna. I was surprised but didn’t dwell on it. Holidays make people hungry. My relatives are fit and they exercise and have good metabolisms. However, the sight of ricotta droppings made me nauseous, and when I pulled the trash compactor out from the counter I saw thousands of silverfish sliding atop squash peels. My stomach rolled; they sparkled and slithered. I closed the drawer. My sister asked what was wrong; I said nothing, opened the trash, saw only squash rinds. I helped carry eight pecan pies into the circle room, where relatives were settling into couches, and a strange thing happened, or I guess not so strange, when you consider that I’d dripped my I.V. too fast; instead of my beloved family and pleasant in-laws gathered around the tree, sitting on the circle room’s several couches, I saw animals. My sister’s father-in-law, a witty, retired postal worker who was now making well-deserved cash selling disaster insurance, was a wily wild boar, wearing plaid pants, a blue polo, and a bow tie, with a bald boar’s head and bristles coming out of his large tan ears. He was telling my brother-in-law—a timid giraffe in a blue T-shirt, with two hooves poking out of each jean leg—about some fire/tornado/hurricane packages he’d sold in new developments, and his snout nodded as his maw said, “Went like hotcakes.”

  My sister’s mother-in-law, in real life a beautiful textile designer, was a kangaroo, her soft brown legs splayed on the couch, knitting next to my younger niece, who looked up at her adoringly; my sister, I’m sorry to say—don’t think badly of me, blame the Bartonella—was a Chihuahua who went yipping around the room bringing everyone a slice of pie by carrying each plate in her mouth, and whenever her mouth was free she’d yip, “How are you? We have mulled wine!” Everyone was talking happily. The kangaroo told my sister in a warbly voice, while stroking her pelt with one paw, that she and her husband had coyotes in their back yard, too, and had kept their cats inside for years now; she looked over to the boar, who was adjusting his bow tie, and said, “Greg’s thinking of shooting some! Good money for the pelts!” and my sister panted and yipped, “Let’s not talk about that right now! I don’t want to upset the girls! It’s Christmas!” and the kangaroo said, “Of course!” and my mother, a flushed potbellied pig who wore a pink velour dress and was seated next to a hairy gentleman with dark fur and a fedora, snorted, “Marianne, how are your fair-trade scarves doing? Are your scarves in a department store?” and all these people—or animals, I have no idea—were eating pecan pie. I knew I was hallucinating, but the part I felt sure was real was that they were consuming eight pies, and the Chihuahua yipped, “Cassandra! Do you want a piece, maybe a small one?”

  I shook my head. I knew she didn’t want me to eat it, even when she offered me the plate in her mouth, because her tail flattened and her mouth growled, so I declined and the Chihuahua said, “Adira? Pie?” and my niece, beside me on the couch, accepted. As she ate, a hairy orangutan with a big pink nose and beady eyes, who in real life was her uncle, the secretary, gnashed his teeth from across the room and said, “Adira, you’ve gotten taller! If you eat another bite of pie, you’ll be taller than your mother!” and the Chihuahua jumped up and down angrily and said, “Nononono, not yet!” and a beautiful gray-skinned elephant wearing a purple sari, seated on the couch beside the orangutan, touched his shoulder with her trunk, and her gray lips said, “She’s got another year before she’ll catch her mother,” and, beside me, my niece grinned.

  I don’t know, K, why my inflamed brain turned my district medical officer sister-in-law, a tall Hindi woman with wide cheeks and curly black hair, into an elephant—I think it was the association of elephants and Hinduism, plus I’m racist. At any rate, all was well. I’d accepted that I was hallucinating and decided to retire, pleading illness, when the Chihuahua declared it time for the most important Christmas Eve tradition: everyone must open one gift from under the tree; both my nieces exclaimed “Yay!” and in the ensuing pause the hairy gentleman across the room, who wore a fedora and a gray suit and had gray fur on his chin, appraised my elder niece and said, “Adira, you look very attractive this evening.”

  No one spoke. The kangaroo frowned and her needles paused; the potbellied pig turned pinker. I felt my niece push backward, into the couch. I thought, Ah well, it’s done. I don’t know why I thought that, except that suddenly I tasted corn syrup, lard, and stale pecans in my mouth; I don’t know who put them there. The Chihuahua yipped, “Uncle D! You should compliment Lily! Lily has a new dress on and a bow in her hair! Adira’s wearing old track pants and a dirty T-shirt! Lily is the one who looks pretty!” The distinguished gentleman turned to my younger niece, who was now admiring her own dress, and said, “Lily, you also look very pretty.”

  Everyone observed my nieces.

  As the pie sugar hit my blood I felt a surge of—adrenaline? neuron death? It was true about the track pants—for the last year, my elder niece had worn nothing but nylon track pants, because anything else bothered her skin. The word “skin“ flashed through my mind as I considered this, and I felt wired, alert, crazed, and I saw the elephant across the room. Her gray skin was wrinkled, and as she peered at the grandfather clock in the hall I remembered that wrinkles indicate iodine deficiency, and that the elephant was trying to get pregnant, and I yelled, “Kunda, do you think lately you have wrinkles?”

  The kangaroo frowned and said, “Everyone has wrinkles!”

  The Chihuahua jumped up and down and said, “Yes, that was rude! Everyone has wrinkles!”

  I was implementing a business strategy from a book called “How to Master the Art of Selling,” whereby you ask your potential clients questions they’re bound to say “yes” to. You start with something easy, like “It’s a nice day out, isn’t it?” and keep going. Once they get in the pattern of saying “Yes,” they can’t stop—that’s the idea. I knew certain things about Kunda, because she was a woman suffering from infertility, plus she was an elephant, so I said, “Kunda, I suspect your body temperature’s low. Do you often feel cold?”

  The elephant stared at me. Her trunk curled down. She said, “I do feel cold often. Why?”

  I looked at her
gray, bald head and sad brown eyes. I said, “Kunda, your eyebrows are thinning at the outer edges, aren’t they? In fact, I don’t think you have eyebrows at all! Are you losing hair in the shower drain?”

  The elephant’s hooves went to her forehead. Her mouth dropped open.

  The orangutan next to her frowned.

  Everyone stared at me.

  I thought, Yes!

  I said, “Kunda, do you crave sugar in the afternoon? Salt? Caffeine?”

  The elephant peered at me. Slowly she said, “Yes. Why?”

  “Ignore her!” the Chihuahua yipped. “She’s tick sick! She has Lyme disease!”

  Beside me, my older niece said, “Aunt D, what are you doing?”

  The kangaroo said that she didn’t think this was a nice conversation.

  I peered at the elephant, on the couch. “Kunda,” I said. “You look big to me. Do you have belly fat? Are you having trouble losing weight?”

  In reality, K, Kunda was slender. But I knew that women in their forties are paranoid about everything, and for no reason that I understand I was intent on showing Kunda that she was suffering from iodine deficiency.

  I said, “You’re cold and fat around your middle, right?”

  The elephant nodded.

  The orangutan yelled, “I won’t stand for this! You’re saying things that are totally inappropriate!” It came at me from across the room; I was afraid, in fact terrified, and my niece whispered, “Aunt D, stop,” and I yelled, “Too bad, Kunda. Those are all symptoms of a deficiency in iodine, the mineral most essential for fertility. That’s why you can’t conceive!”