by Roxane Gay
Rahad and Wyatt played for an hour to small crowds overflowing from the popular Chinese restaurant next door and a few stragglers who drifted over from a nearby hot dog cart. Eastern men, like themselves, on breaks from their restaurant jobs. Most wandered away after a few seconds, realizing that they couldn’t enjoy the music for the commotion of the street. Others recognized a melody and nudged each other. Do you remember this? they murmured in languages he didn’t understand. But Rahad understood that you always know—if yours are the fingers that strum the strings—when someone recognizes your sound. And isn’t that all there is to want?
Some gave money, and at first Rahad stopped to explain that this wasn’t their purpose. Finally he gave up, but made sure that his sitar case was closed and stowed behind him and that his jacket was nowhere in sight. If he offered no place to drop money, the people would understand his intentions. Most didn’t, throwing coins onto the blanket instead.
“Where are your music big shots then, agha?” said Rahad, grinning at his friend. He didn’t mind if none of the promised record executives appeared. He enjoyed playing in this great cavity of noise, alone in a human swarm. He was doing something worth remembering, even if it was foolish and self-indulgent. And he was in New York.
“We must be patient,” said Wyatt.
“Come, I buy you Starbuck,” said Rahad, packing up his instrument. He was desperate for a coffee, a feeling that always reminded him to text Yasmine.
In the café, Wyatt ordered a foamy latte. When the barista muttered, “So you want a cappuccino, then,” he shook his head sadly at Rahad. “These young generations think we are all terribly stupid, always in risk of poking out an eye if not for their instruction.”
They sat down at a table near the window, watching their corner in case their record producer exited the subway at just that moment.
“I hoped to have coffee with Yasmine,” said Rahad, checking his phone. “Especially this time that we come by bus. Twice before I came by car and she chose café with no parking spot and I got ticket. Then drove back in dark because I’m not welcome even on her couch. This treatment is normal for American parents, I think. After that, I sell the car. I only kept it for visiting often. But who wants to be burden?”
“My son is same. I am borrowing car, driving hours, and last minute, poof, canceled.” Wyatt shook his head and stared into his latte, the foaminess of which obviously irritated him. “My son, he is thinking I am stupid. Where he gets this?”
“Is problem of generation,” said Rahad. “We come to West, suffer in learning language in adulthood, which we can never lose accent or get joke and so on. But kids go to school and learn in a normal route with other first citizens, and later they think we are dumb or at least considering us lower than themselves. My daughter asks always, ‘Did you google this or that like I tell you?’ She thinks she is my teacher.”
Wyatt’s hands flew up in agreement, so that his spoon splattered foam on the table. “My son wants me to do video online instead of telephone,” he said. “I tell my son, ‘Oh, good try, good try. Next time, can you tell me something? Do you speak Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi? Can you write in these language? Can you change yourself every hour according to situation? Can you keep your American pride in foreign city? You can upload videos on social sites, nothing else. But Indian people can speak in minimum four languages. And we know when to put away all four and listen sometimes, too.’” Wyatt chuckled a little maniacally, scooped some foam out of his coffee, and stared at Rahad. “Did you ever read Pnin?” he said. Rahad shook his head. “Is about bumbling immigrant, but lovable because he is arriving new, learning, missing home. My son brings this book one day from school,” he paused, as if wondering why he had mentioned it. “New arrivals, they have reason to be confuse, they must be missing home. But I say, fuck old country—I don’t miss it. Is whole world that changed too quick! I am exile from my own child. It’s like I try to jump gorge and got foot permanently stuck.”
“Yes,” Rahad laughed. “Is like pushing against an unbrokable wall.”
“But we have music, right?” said Wyatt, tapping his paper cup against Rahad’s as if to toast. “Music from the world.”
Rahad watched his friend as he lifted his cup to his lips. Again, something was wrong with the way Wyatt spoke. “Your English is improving, my friend,” he said. “Gorge is not word I know.”
Wyatt wiped his mouth and let out a breathy, tittering sigh. “Nothing is improving, sahib,” Wyatt said, his tone changing, his eyes emptying of the eager joy he seemed to carry in abundance. “Life is easier if people think you just arrived, you know? They expect, twenty years here and you should have made it.” It took a moment for Rahad to realize, given his own troubles with English, that his friend was speaking without his unmistakable lilt. Now Wyatt sounded like the Indians Rahad had known in Baltimore and Tehran. “There are things you need,” Wyatt continued, “things to survive, and you don’t have it yet. Why not? You must be stupid. You must not have studied the culture hard enough. You must be hostile to it. Who needs that, brother? I’d rather be a lovable FOB than a failure whose story has grown stale.”
What careful thought his friend must have put into every sentence he uttered. This new voice struck Rahad hard and he was quiet for some time. A proud look passed over Wyatt’s face, like a person who had written a moving melody. He raised both eyebrows, sucked something out of his teeth. “See, twenty years ago when we were new, the new ones were invisible, too. Now everyone’s read Pnin and those FOB-y bastards are loved, and us who lived here for twenty years, we’re fucked again. Who has a kind word for someone who can’t find their foot after that long? See? Fucked from both directions.”
“So not born in DC then?” Rahad asked, feeling duped and a little angry. How had he grown so close to this man?
“All FOBs say they’re born in DC,” said Wyatt, then added, stroking his salt-and-pepper chin and reprising his phony accent, “That is a big, big true.”
“You give me headache,” said Rahad, touching his temple. He remembered the day they had met, thinking Wyatt was a crazy man. Now Rahad thought he might be a disturbed scholar, or a mystic, or a traumatized poet. How did he talk to his son? Rahad wondered. Did he put on the same new-immigrant act, hoping for a glimmer of sympathy? It would be misguided, Rahad knew; displays of foreignness were the children’s greatest irritation. “I need another coffee. Too much Wyatt thinking for today.”
“Vadhi,” mumbled his friend as he emptied his cup. He rose and gestured toward the counter. “Vadhi is my good name. I’ll buy as a sorry for lying. You buy next one.”
Rahad spent the rest of the night playing melancholy songs in the corner by the subway entrance. During prime theater hours, Times Square was slightly less manic, and he enjoyed hearing his own songs under the feverish lights of a New York evening. They ate at the last open hot dog stand before the owner packed up and left. Late that evening, as they rode the last bus back to Wilmington, he phoned Yasmine again. He started to tell her about Wyatt and the Vietnamese woman, about the spicy soup and the naan from the brick oven, wanting her to share in his astonishment at the gifts of the universe—these scattered foreigners sharing from their food stamps and loose change, finding joy in music. He wanted to say, Azizam, trust the universe. Life can be easy if you let it be. But Yasmine’s breath grew quicker. “Baba joon, are you in trouble?” she said. “Why are people giving you food? If you’re in trouble—”
He cut her off, “Oh Yasmine, hush!” he said. “It was potluck dinner. I call for another reason: Did you go online today?”
She breathed out, relief kneading every syllable. “Of course I did. It’s my job.”
“Will you go to a page that I say? I give you address if you have pen.”
“Don’t need a pen.” He could hear the fast clicks of her keyboard. “Go ahead.”
He recited from memory the addresses of the three websites, the ones the Internet had granted to his former career. She was silen
t, and he didn’t ask if she had finished typing. “Lately these appear on Internet,” he said. “I want to tell you, I think they are good. Of highest creative quality. Maybe later I post them on Facebook.”
“Oh yeah?” she said. She cleared her throat, as if responding would cost her something. Where had she inherited this pride? From the elder ustad Sokouti, perhaps.
“Well?” he said. “I’m famous. Aren’t you impressed?” She laughed and said that she was. He wanted to tell her that he knew more about the Internet than she thought. Maybe not the codes and formulas and shortcuts, but he knew its spirit, its sweeping reach. This entity that granted a measure of justice—Trust the universe, he had always told Yasmine—it had circled the air above them, coloring their relationship from the time she was a student. He wanted to say, Yas, I know the Internet isn’t some deity. I know it’s made up of people trying to inscribe the void, to mark the very ether with what they’ve lived and what they know. Thank you for etching me a corner in that vast, unfathomable place. He wanted to tell his daughter that he knew she respected him, or some former, more essential version of him. But enough had been said for one phone call. “I find it very artistic, Yasi joon,” he said. “It captures the years.”
All through the bus ride home, Wyatt sat silently, his head slumped against the window. Rahad was glad for the quiet, unsure of what to expect the next time his friend opened his mouth. Did it matter? When had he ever anticipated anyone’s next syllable? His daughter’s, least of all. Maybe such harmony wasn’t needed to enjoy a drink with someone. Maybe the earth wouldn’t collapse on itself if a person you love didn’t cosign your every move, or you theirs. “A big true,” he said to himself and chuckled.
The two men walked from the station back to their rooms at the YMCA. They parted ways in the corridor, each saying a few words about the next day’s plans, the possibility of a warm naan from a pizza oven, the other residents who might join them in a song or two, the whereabouts of that reedy Vietnamese voice they had come to enjoy. Rahad dug into his pocket for his keys, and when he pulled his fingers out they were covered in a white dusting of baking soda. He glanced back at Wyatt entering his own room, hunched from fatigue, looking a decade older, an accustomed sort of quiet surrounding his steps. In their short friendship, Rahad had overlooked so much that had been hidden in the artificial cracks of this man’s speech. And yet Wyatt had knocked on Rahad’s door every day, hoping that, after enough afternoons together, Rahad—a true and verified musician of Tehran, a traveler and student of the world’s many strange rhythms—might say, Stop pretending now, my brother. I know your sound.
But Rahad hadn’t heard; maybe he was no master at all.
He unlocked his own door and turned on the lights. In all these years, what other voices had he only half heard? Maybe he still needed a more practiced ear. He sat on his bed, looked out onto the parking lot, and listened: to the low roar of a passing car, to stoned men talking in the corridor, to the mattress creaking under his weight. He thought of his wife with her glorious unwashed hair, the artful websites their daughter had made, and Baba with his students on the veranda, all their idle talk of sitar songs and why one should never touch a Western guitar, of how to listen for music amid the human noise.
Téa Obreht
Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure
from Zoetrope: All-Story
One evening almost thirty years later, a call from an unknown number. The ringing brings your husband out of the kitchen, ladle still in hand. This is the prelude to the only scenario that keeps him up at night: some stranger, a kelp-rig medic perhaps, interrupting dinner to notify you that your son has been killed, washed overboard somewhere off the coast of Cambria amid the gray roil and boom of the Pacific.
To flaunt your immunity to these catastrophic fantasies, you let the phone ring and ring.
Tom’s smiling, but he doesn’t find it funny. “Pick up, Syl.” Then, after a moment: “Fine. Why don’t I just cancel our anniversary picnic and volunteer us for roadside cleanup instead? I know how you love scraping those possums off the freeway.”
When you finally lift the phone to your ear to deliver the usual greeting—“Rayles-Brennan residence, home of the Arbor Cottages in scenic Grey’s County!”—you get the wind knocked out of you. It’s not a medic. Not a telemarketer. Not the Mammalian Gene Bank of the Rocky Mountains inquiring if you’d like to increase your annual donation.
It’s Wade. Your Wade. So long-lost that his name overcomes you as first a sensation and then a smell before finally taking lettered form. Wade Dufrane. Calling from some other lifetime, his voice as familiar as your own, saying: “Syl?” And then: “I knew you’d sound exactly the same.”
In a minute, it will hit you that of course you sound the same. But for now—for this particular second—there’s just that one-note whiff of Fell Gulch in January, of pine and woodsmoke, of you at twenty, assisting your father up the narrow stairs to the office of Serenity Pods overlooking Main Street. Through his coat sleeve, Dad’s elbow feels like a bag of bolts. Somewhere outside, the Rendezvous Trio is fiddling an overzealous two-step for the benefit of the tourists.
Serenity Pods occupies the attic above the Well Digger’s Wallet Saloon, where your childhood friend Kenny Kostic tends bar. In the six years you’ve been helping him oust inebriates, you’ve never thought to investigate where the back stairwell leads.
Dad’s monstrous shirt hides the black threads of more than a dozen mole excisions. Six foot three and down to 140 pounds, he’s taken pale frailty to another level. And now here’s Wade Dufrane, tall and ginger-stubbled, good-looking in the way of people who don’t know it, manning the front desk in a white linen getup.
The place looks like a celestial break-room. Everything hums: the bare bulbs, the sleek computer panel, the wall painted up like a field of tree-brindled snow. At its center stands a thick black elm. Its roots twist around a subterranean teardrop, in which a glyphic body lies folded.
Wade maneuvers you both to the sofa with pamphlets and rank gray tea, then carefully sits between you.
“So—which of you is looking forward to reabsorption?”
While Wade talks your father through the marketing collateral, you try to smother your irritation. Let Dad get the reassurance he needs: that he’s doing the right thing, that pod burial restores soil nutrients, that you just don’t get this kind of solace from a coffin.
“Something about committing to reabsorption just gives folks a sense of peace,” Wade says. “I know it did for me.”
Conveniently, Wade’s own father had signed the entire family up for pod burial back when the process was still new. “Not to mention far more expensive,” Wade says, skirting around the price, “but I figured: if it could offset some of my parents’ debts to our world, worth every penny.”
You can’t help yourself: “Yet here you are, sucking air and drinking water—I guess that means your folks are still in arrears.”
Dad says: “Syl. Please.”
Wade, as it happens, came dangerously close to reabsorption when he was a teenager. Some vague cardiac incident briefly killed him en route to the hospital. He perceived himself floating up, above the gurney, above the bald EMT trying to resuscitate him. Of his three remaining sensations—besides filial love and the strange, sulfuric odor of his chest hair frying under the paddles—what stood out most was how complete he felt, knowing that he would soon give sustenance to a new tree. Even his miraculous return to his body, and the continuation of his life, haven’t dispelled the strength of that feeling.
Dad nods gravely. As if Wade’s story has firmed the legs of a newborn notion.
“We want to take a couple of days,” you say, standing to leave. “Consult with the rest of the family.”
The rest of the family consists of an uncle in Cleveland who hasn’t returned your father’s calls in years and the dog who’s been underfoot ever since the combined chaos of veterinary school and bartending forced Kenny to abandon her at
your house.
Wade insists you take all the time you need. “It’s a tough mind-shift. In the end, we’re all just items awaiting protective enclosure. Most of us have a vision of what that is—a coffin, an urn. Not everyone can get used to the idea of a tree. But remember that with a Serenity Pod, the whole world is your memorial.”
The trouble is, he really means it. The spell is cast. All the way home, Dad rests his head dreamily against the window. The tram winds past the Refuge boundary, past Highness Park, with its cocoa stands and skate rentals and brightly bundled husks of winter tourists, and then up Painter’s Knoll, where the constellated hillside mansions recall the Fell Gulch of twenty years ago, when people were still able to convince themselves that everything would work itself out somehow, as it always had before.
Your father had been one of those people. Then came the Posterity Initiative, and a complete 180. He spent your entire childhood collecting prairie grasses for the Rocky Mountain Seed Vault, tallying pollinators, teaching you to culture penicillin. All the while bewailing what was lost: bacon and air travel and elephants. Things you would never have, thanks to his generation’s excesses.
You could never see the point of his retrospective hand-wringing.
At home, Dad fans the pamphlets out on the dining table. He shouts pull quotes over the crack of your knife on the cutting board: “Did you know that the average Serenity Pod offsets two peoples’ worth of carbon dioxide a year?”
“If it’s so clean, they should be paying you to commit to it. Not the other way around.”
“Ha.”
“Don’t you think this is all a bit premature?” He looks up from the blue columns of numbers on his napkin. “We haven’t got the biopsy results back. You’re probably not even dying.”