The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  I still see many of the people from my time in prison, including other prisoners and my first lawyer, Lea Tsemel. She’s like a mother to my wife and me. She still visits me now. She’s a good person.

  Now we have two girls and two boys. It’s even. The boys are ten and seven, and then the girls, five and two. To raise a baby girl is much easier than raising a boy. They’re much calmer, and they’re nicer, easier to deal with. Boys just want to rebel all the time. But my boys are not aggressive. The kids just want to play. They’re very sweet.

  Of course, I worry about my kids and the situation they’re growing up in. I want my kids to grow up in a good atmosphere, with justice and liberty and freedom, and a life with no problems. We’ve been deprived of so many things, and that, of course, always takes its toll on you. So whatever my kids ask from me I get for them. I buy them expensive bicycles and that sort of thing. Allegra says no, but I spoil them because I was deprived of so many things when I was a child. I want my children to have what I never had. I admit, I have a psychological problem with shoes! I buy them for my kids all the time. Every one of my four children has dozens of pairs of shoes. Every time Allegra asks me, “Why did you buy that?” I say, “You can’t possibly understand.” One of my daughters also has five little backpacks.

  I would like to go to the U.S. to visit my wife’s parents. My wife is an American, but the U.S. government rejected our visa application on security grounds.* What’s the security problem? I haven’t been convicted of any crime by an Israeli court since I was a child. I’ve been trying to get a visa for a long time. The lawyer for the visa asked for $120,000. We’ve stopped trying.

  From a physical aspect, I do still have effects from the torture. I still can’t feel my left hand completely due to the nerve damage I got from being handcuffed. And it’s not easy to live with the fact that I went through such a horrible experience. It has impacted me.

  I probably would be different today if I hadn’t gone to prison. Probably I would’ve gone to med school instead of law school. But I’ve never really thought much about how my life would be different if I hadn’t gone to prison, because this is life for thousands—millions even—of people in refugee camps in Palestine, in Lebanon, or in Syria. It’s not a personal problem, it’s a broader thing. I want to solve it because it affects everybody else, not just me. If the situation doesn’t change, my son Quds may soon have the same experience. This is a problem for generation after generation—we’ve been fighting for sixty-five years. It’s going to be the same thing until we break the cycle.

  DANA SPIOTTA

  Jelly and Jack

  FROM The New Yorker

  IN THE DAMP LATE spring of 1985, Jelly picked up the handset of her pink plastic Trimline phone and the dial tone hummed into her ear. She tilted the earpiece slightly away from her and heard the sad buzz of a distant sound seeking a listener. How many times had she fallen asleep after saying goodbye and not managed to get the thing on the cradle? The little lag when he had hung up but she was still on the line, semiconnected, in a weird half-life of the call, followed by the final disconnection click, then silence, and then, if she didn’t hang up, sharp insistent beeps. These were the odd ways in which the phone communicated: urgent beeps to say, “Hang up”; long-belled rings to say, “Answer”; rude blasts of the busy signal to say, “No.” The phone was always telling her things.

  She pushed the eleven buttons—the 1, the area code, the number, zeroing in, the nearly infinite combinations ousted—her fingertips not needing to feel the groove of the numbers but feeling it nevertheless. So many distractions, unneeded and unwanted. She had to concentrate to keep the information away. There was a bird outside, trilling at her. It was at least fifteen feet from the closed window, but it still bothered her. It was probably in the Chinese oak in the courtyard. The ring of another person’s phone sounded so hopeful at first, and then it grew lonelier. It lost possibility, until you could almost see the sound in an empty house.

  He didn’t have an answering machine. Make a note of that. A distinction. She could let it ring all day. Was that true? Had anyone ever tried it? The plastic handset rubbed against her jaw and her ear. She tilted it away again. If she lay on her side and let it rest on her head, using a hand only for balance, she could talk for hours.

  “Hello?” said a male voice, clearing itself as it spoke, so that the end of the word had a cough pushing through it. Then came another cough. Was this the first time he had spoken today? Or had she woken him up? Talking to someone just roused from sleep offered a special, intimate opportunity. But it carried high risk, also. The woken person could feel startled or vulnerable, and then grow angry as the reality of the call’s interruption reached his conscious mind. It had happened to Jelly once: “Why the fuck are you disturbing my sleep? You have no idea how hard it is for me to fall asleep. And now. Well, now I’m awake for the goddamn duration, you bitch.” Even Jelly couldn’t break through a feeling like that. But this man just finished coughing and waited. She closed her eyes and focused on the white of ease, of calm, of joy. The pure and loving human event of calling a stranger, reaching across the land and into a life.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice sliding easily through the “l”s, to the waiting, hopeful “o.” She always took her time. Nothing made people more impatient than rushing.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Nicole.”

  “Nicole? Nicole who? I think you have the wrong number.”

  This was a crucial moment.

  “Is this Mark Washborn?”

  “Uh, no. I mean, Mark. It isn’t. Who is this again?”

  “Nicole. I’m a friend of Marks. I thought this was his new number.”

  “No. That’s weird. I know Mark. I mean, he’s a good friend of mine.”

  “Oh my. How awkward. I am so sorry I disturbed you, uh . . .” She rarely used “uh,” but it was an important wordish sound that introduced a powerful unconscious transaction. Used correctly, not as a habit or a rhythmic tic, it invited the other person to finish the sentence. It was an opening without content, just the pull of syntax and the human need to complete.

  “Jack. Jack Cusano.”

  “Jack Cusano? Not Jack Cusano the record producer?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Jack Cusano who also composes film scores? You did that gorgeous work on those Robert DeMarco films.”

  “That’s right.” He laughed. His laugh cleared out his throat a bit more. She lay back on the pillow, held the phone so that it barely touched her cheek. She imagined her voice going into the transmitter, sound waves being turned into electrical pulses, sent up the wires to the phone lines to a Syracuse switching station, then turned into microwaves speeding across the country with the memory—the imprint—of her exact tone, her high and low frequencies, her elegant modulations, to the switching station in Santa Monica, which sent electric current up the P.C.H. to a Malibu beach house and into Jack’s receiver—undoubtedly a sleek black cordless phone. So fast, too: instantly turned back into a sound wave by the tiny amplifier near his ear. All that way, all those transformations, but no distortions. A miracle of technology. The sound was as clear as speech in a room. She could—amazing—hear the ocean in the background. A gull, the sound of water pulling back from beach. She could almost hear the sun shining through his west-facing windows.

  This was another crucial moment. She knew that she could not initiate anything more. She had to wait for him to open it further. She could not get anxious. She crossed her legs at the ankles, pulled her kimono robe over her knees. She was a little cold. She wanted to be in that room with the beach smell and the sun on the windows. She waited, closed her eyes. She heard him cough.

  “So how do you know Mark?” he said. He sounded friendly and a bit amused now.

  Jelly made an “em” sound in her throat, with a little push through her nose. It sounded thoughtful, vaguely affirmative. She knew that, even if she had to say no at some point, she would say it
low and round and long, so that it sounded as if it had a yes in it somehow. Or an up-pitched-down-pitched mmm-mmm, like a hill. The hum took you for a ride, just under the nose with the mouth closed.

  “We talk a lot. Early-morning talks, middle-of-the-night talks. Sometimes we talk for hours.”

  “Yeah? What about? Are you a girlfriend?”

  Jelly laughed. These men all had “a” girlfriend, meaning several at any time. She never wanted to be one of a number. What Jelly wanted was to be singular. Not even “a friend.” She wanted a category of her own construction. Something they never knew existed.

  “No,” she said. “Actually, he talks to me about his writing. He reads me what he’s written that day. I listen and tell him what I think. He says it gives him motivation, knowing that I’ll call, and he has to have something good to read to me.”

  “Really?”

  “He never told you about me?” she said.

  “No, but I don’t listen to everything Mark says. He tends to fill the air with static. At a certain point, it’s just ambient noise.”

  She laughed. He laughed. Jelly sat up, stretching her back straight, feeling her spine arrange itself in a line above her hips. She switched the phone to the other ear and relaxed the tension in her neck. She took a breath. So much of this involved waiting, silence, timing.

  “So I have to go, Jack. I am so sorry I disturbed you.”

  “No. I mean, no problem. I had to get up. I usually don’t sleep this late. But I was working all night on this piece.”

  “You probably want to make some coffee and get back to work.”

  “Yeah, but not really.”

  “Is it for a film score?”

  “You know, it isn’t. It is just a thing I had in my head, and I was playing with it. Using the keyboard. It’ll end up in a film score at some point, I’m guessing.”

  “Really? You don’t watch the film and then compose to it?” she said.

  “Yeah, I do. But I also import melodies and musical ideas I have. On file, so to speak.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “So, would you like to hear some of it?”

  “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, wow, I would really love that. Yes, please.”

  “OK, good,” he said. “Hold on.”

  Jelly closed her eyes and leaned back again. She called this body listening. It was when you surrendered to a piece of music or a story. By reclining and closing your eyes, you could respond without tracking your response. Some people started to speak the second the other person stopped talking or playing or singing. They were so excited to render their thoughts into speech that they practically overlapped the person. They spent the whole experience formulating their response, because their response was the only thing they valued. Jelly had a different purpose in listening to anything or anyone. It had something to do with submission, and it had something to do with sympathy. She would lie back and cut off all distraction. The phone was built for this. It had no visual component, no tactile component, no scent wafting, no acid collection in the mouth, no person with a hopeful or embarrassed face to read. Just vibrations, long and short waves, and to clutch at them with your own thoughts was just wrong. A distinct resistance to potential. A lack of love, really. Because what is love, if not listening, as uninflected—as uncontained—as possible.

  She took a deep breath, relaxed, and let the music find her.

  “So that’s it,” he said, and let out a tight, nervous laugh.

  Jelly opened her eyes, expelled a small sigh into the receiver. “It’s wonderful,” she said.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “There were these little leaps with each reprise.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  Only after she was done listening did she form her response. And it worked like this: you found the words—out of a million possible words—that truly described the experience. That part, the search for the right language, was fun, almost like solving a puzzle. You thought of the word, and then you felt it in your mouth, pushed breath into it, and said it out loud. The sound of it contained the meaning—she had to hear the words to know if she had it right. Then, as it hung there, she revised it, re-attacked it, applied more words to it.

  “It gave me a remarkable feeling of lifting. Not being picked up or climbing. Not even like rising in an elevator,” she said. “Or an escalator. Not quite. More float in it. Maybe like . . . levitating.”

  “You levitated while listening to my little piece? Right on.”

  It did feel like levitation. Waves of sound. Waves on the ocean. Floating on the water. Floating on sound waves. Levitation. What Jack didn’t know was how easily this came to her.

  “I have to go, Jack. I’m afraid I’m late.”

  “Oh, no, really?” he said. She heard the hard fizzle of a match strike, and then a sharp intake of breath followed by a blowing sound: lighting a cigarette. She knew the sounds that people made on the phone: the bottle unscrewed or uncorked, the pour of liquid over ice and the cracking of the ice. The sip—so slow it was painful, the delicate, discreet sound of a swallow. And this sound, lighting a cigarette. But with a match, not a lighter. He was a smoker who used matches instead of a lighter, which made him a certain kind of person. Because a match had drama. A match left you with a flame to shake or blow out. And a match left a pleasant phosphorus smell lingering in the air.

  “So nice to talk with you this morning. Nice to meet you, Jack,” she said.

  “The pleasure, Nicole, is mine. So when can we talk again? Can I call you sometime?”

  Jelly sat up. Held the phone back for a minute. She moved slowly in these moments. The giveaway was not his request. The giveaway was that he’d used her name. She had him.

  “I do have to run. I promise I’ll call you soon,” she said.

  “I look forward to it. Anytime,” Jack said.

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  “Bye.”

  She would not call anytime. She would call on Sunday, at the same time. Only Sunday, and it would only be her calling him. Parameters. Predictability. That was the way it would work best for both of them, for this thing they were building between them. He wouldn’t understand. He would want to call her, have her number. He would want to talk at other times, more often. But she knew what was best, how to do this. Pace was important. She would make him her Sunday call, and, as the weeks of talks went by, he would accept her terms. He would begin to get great pleasure out of counting the days until Sunday.

  “Hey, babe,” Jack said when he answered the phone.

  “Hi, Jack,” Jelly said. She was sitting on her couch. She had the trade papers—Variety and The Hollywood Reporter—on the coffee table in front of her. Next to the papers were a large magnifying glass and a highlighter. The rain was coming down hard. Later it would turn into wet, sticky snow. The news called it a “wintry mix.” It would freeze up and make the sidewalks ice sheets by morning. The weather made it difficult for her: if the sun wasn’t out, it was low-lit, low-contrast gray with hidden ice. If she was lucky, she would hear and feel the ice cracking under her feet as she stepped, but mostly it was silent slick surfaces, which made walking frightening. And if the sun came out it was high-glare, every surface a beautiful but painful shimmer of reflected light. The winter was different every day, and you had to plan and react and accommodate it. There were easier places for a low-vision person like her. For anyone, really.

  “Congratulations on the Grammy nomination,” she said.

  “Thank you. To tell you the truth, it doesn’t mean that much. They can barely find five people who qualify in that category. Some of these things, if you submit and your name is known, you’re automatically nominated,” he said.

  “But you’ve won before, and surely there’s nothing automatic in that?” Jelly pulled her thick chenille robe around her. She had a cold, and she’d s
pent the morning sipping tea with lemon and honey. Her throat felt swollen, and even swallowing her saliva caused a sharp pain, but it hadn’t affected her voice yet. She held an ice pack wrapped in a dishtowel. As she listened to Jack, she pressed the cold compress to her throat.

  “True,” he said.

  “And it’s such a perfectly realized recording. The production is outstanding—anyone would recognize that,” she said. She heard him light a cigarette.

  “I watched ‘A Woman Under the Influence’ yesterday,” Jelly said. Jack loved John Cassavetes movies, and he had sent her a private video copy, impossible to find.

  “Yeah? What did you think?”

  “I think it’s my favorite one. Gena Rowlands is mesmerizing, the way her vulnerability just crushes everyone around her.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” he said. “I love that scene where she’s waiting for her kids to get off the bus.”

  “Yes, she’s so excited she’s jumping from foot to foot, looking down the street, asking people for the time.”

  “Right! I love that. That’s what I’m really like, way too much. When I was working at home and my daughter was little, I used to get so excited when it was three o’clock and she was coming home.”

  “You?”

  Jack laughed. “Nicole, inside I am Gena Rowlands.”

  “I believe it. I’m glad,” she said. She made herself swallow a sip of tea. She felt the movement in her ears. “So how did it go last night?”

  “Shitty. I’m not feeling it these days.”

  Jack frequently stayed up all night working. Jelly called at 2 p.m., about an hour after he got up, by which time he had eaten his eggs and drunk his coffee. Read the Sunday New York Times.