The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  Dill returns to Maine, where he becomes the state taxidermist, and where his greatest achievement seems to have been the transformation of Wapiti, “a great male elk,” who “died in the zoo at the Soldiers’ Home.” His ambition strains. “It is not technique and method that makes a taxidermist superior,” he will write, many years later, “but rather, a God-given gift of keen insight and a feeling for outline and form as nature has given it to our wild creatures.”

  He begins to send out his CV.

  One reaches Nutting, a thousand miles away in Iowa, who just happens to be looking for a new head taxidermist. Out of twenty-four applicants, he chooses Dill, who accepts with a letter signed “Your obedient servant.”

  It is not clear when Nutting first broaches the idea of the cyclorama, but he must have been watching Dill closely, weighing whether he was worthy of the vision. He watches as Dill sets about transforming tired exhibits—the warthog heads staring blankly from mahogany plaques, the kangaroos with sad skins manged by time, the owls that listlessly grip boring brass T-bars; watches as he banishes bottles of pickled things, groups displays according to habitat, trains students in his newly launched laboratory of “Taxidermy and Plastic Art.”

  Art. That’s the key word for Dill.

  He insists that taxidermy, conceived of and displayed as art, “can reach where books seldom go to the improving of men’s minds and helping them to higher conceptions and new appreciations of nature and her manifold and marvelous worlds.”

  At last, convinced, Nutting approaches him about transforming the birds of Laysan into art.

  Dill—Your obedient servant—Dill, with his dreams of helping man to higher conceptions—Dill, who can still recall the saw-whet owl in his hands—of course, he accepts.

  Letters fly back and forth between Nutting and the U.S. government, negotiating access to Laysan. Supply lists are drawn up (sugar, rice, tapioca, dried cod, beef tongue, aspirin . . . ). Finally, on April 5, 1911, Dill, along with a landscape artist from the Field Museum in Chicago, who will paint the twelve-foot-high, 138-foot-long backdrop of the cyclorama, and two of Dill’s zoology students who will assist in the collecting and skinning of samples, set off from San Francisco aboard the U.S. cutter ship Thetis. Thetis, the mother who, in Greek myth, tries in vain to make her son immortal.

  From Dill’s account of the mission: “About 11 o’clock on the seventh day, the island was sighted. We expected to see clouds of birds about it, but in this we were disappointed.”

  Sometimes there is no bridging the distance between what we imagine we are prepared for and what we must discover on our own. The pristine, untouched island of Nutting’s memories—the cyclorama’s inspiration—no longer exists. Feather hunters in search of plumes to adorn ladies hats have discovered Laysan, too. Over the past few years, they have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of birds—sometimes hacking off wings while the birds are still alive, because the hemorrhaging makes the feathers easier to pluck. By one estimate, perhaps ninety percent of the island’s original bird population is gone.

  Dill and his group land on a beach that is littered with rotting carcasses, “bones bleaching in the sun.” They find clubs and nets, swarms of flies, more flies than Dill has ever seen. In an old shed, thousands of rotting wings, stacked until they have touched the rafters and then burst through wooden walls with their cascading weight.

  There are also rabbits, thousands of rabbits, racing across the soft white sand on their padded feet, burrowing among the albatross and tern nests, devouring the juncus and other grasses and bushes that provide valuable bird habitat, “their bodies concealed among the thick growth, [so that] only their ears show. At times there are so many ears protruding, they resemble a vegetable garden.”

  The rabbits are all that is left of a German immigrant who had come to Laysan to make his fortune mining the island’s thick deposits of guano. Concerned about how to feed his operation, he decided he could bring rabbits, let them breed, then can their meat—Belgian hares and English hares “that have crossed and produced some strange-looking animals, both in form and color,” according to Dill. Unchecked, with no natural predators, they are steadily taking over.

  Poor Dill. One of the things he has prided himself on is how faithfully he has always tried to re-create what he finds in nature. He thinks of it almost as a calling—“to see things as they are and render them faithfully.”

  And so he does his best to collect what he can of the Laysan that he finds: the bristle-thighed curlews, who “come up around our camp uttering their peculiar complaining note,” the wandering tattlers who hide among the reefs, the turnstones who spend “most of their time feeding on the small flies with which the shore and the water are black.” He urges the group to collect dead birds if they can find them, but still, the scope of this project demands so many specimens they must kill hundreds. Later, he will tell the student paper, “We skinned birds from morning to night.”

  He brings home thirty-six large crates filled with the bodies of nearly three hundred birds, eggs, nests, Laysan sand, casts of the island’s leaves and branches, photographs, pages of notes and sketches. And then he begins the meticulous, painstaking work of rebuilding Laysan in a corner of Macbride Hall, a process that will ultimately take three years.

  When the cyclorama finally opens to the public in 1914, it is exactly as Nutting had intended, the rush of silent wings all around, an invitation to step into a kind of stilled documentary, to “visit” Laysan and its birds without ever leaving the state of Iowa. But it is not a Laysan that exists anymore. In some ways it is a Laysan that never existed, a memory of a memory of a memory, which was already vanishing before Dill even started his work. In fact, three of the species of birds Dill collected will be named extinct before his cyclorama even opens.

  Today, the concept of the cyclorama itself is endangered, abandoned long ago to more truly interactive experiences, moving pictures and computerized displays. Iowa’s Laysan exhibit is one of the few remaining natural history cycloramas in the United States. Most people arrive here by accident, suddenly cast ashore on Dill’s forever island. But the longer we stare at it, the more unsettling its unwavering beauty becomes, perhaps because on some level we sense that it is a record, not of what is, or ever was, but what we wish, against all evidence, could be.

  And yet what if he had spent those three years in his laboratory giving form to the nightmare landscape he discovered, stretching its ugly skin around the facts that none of us are eager to consider—that this is what our presence really looks like in the natural world, the buzz and hum of our competing desires, converging, swarming, until all that is left is a pile of feathers, dried blood on the sand.

  Would that have changed him, stopped him from snipping from the newspaper tips on how to kill flies (could he still hear them, buzzing still, back on Laysan)? After years of faithfully noting he was a Unitarian in his university personnel files, would he have kept filling in that line, rather than abruptly leaving it blank? Was it just an unfortunate coincidence that a pamphlet printed to celebrate an anniversary of the cyclorama declares that it was “Composed and Executed by Professor Homer R. Dill”?

  How to admit that maybe what we imagined to be a feel for outline and form as nature has given it to our wild creatures really means that we are good at skinning dead things.

  Then again, perhaps the vision of Laysan he left for us—unspoiled, untouched—was the only way he could see it, and the only way he wished all of us to see it, too. Maybe, in the end, there is really more truth in his lie. Because when we all are nothing more than a few crumbling papers in a forgotten file, the birds will go on moaning and skittering in the more perfect world he made for them. And how many times do you have to visit, held back by the glass, before you realize it is a world entirely without us. A world wiped clean of our presence. As if we were never here.

  KYLE BOELTE

  Reluctant Citizens

  FROM ZYZZYVA

  WE ARE RELUCTANT citi
zens, the twelve of us—fifteen if you count the three alternates—sitting in the wood-paneled box on the side of the windowless courtroom in San Francisco. Already we are staring out into the distance, straining to stay awake, as the judge reads us his opening instructions. It is the first day of the trial.

  Yesterday, we arrived in the basement jury intake room and began the waiting that would last a day and a half, and that was only the beginning.

  Those potential jurors who were loud or outspoken were dismissed. Near the end of jury selection, as the pool shrank, the potential jurors became louder, more outspoken. Several told the judge outright that they were biased, that they could not be fair.

  There were two people I spoke to yesterday who would have gladly served, both retired and seemingly looking forward to something to do for three or four weeks. But they were both dismissed during jury selection. It was not altogether clear why.

  And so here we are, the ones who didn’t make a fuss, resigned to be here, to do our duty. (We joke with one another that next time we too will be brash, and loud, and outspoken, though I’m not sure any of us could follow through on it.)

  As the attorneys’ opening statements begin, we slip into our roles, and try to stay awake, as we listen to the details of an on-the-job accident that happened more than six years ago.

  “Has it only been forty-five minutes?” the juror in front of me asks, on Monday, when the judge gives us our first break during the witness phase of the trial. “I’m not sure I can make it if it’s only been forty-five minutes,” she says. We all smile, let out a long exhale. There are three weeks of witnesses scheduled.

  Weeks of witnesses testifying about a construction site, about the proper way to climb and descend ladders, about medical diagnoses, about surgeries, about insurance payments. Large binders full of documents rest on the tables before the Plaintiffs’ attorneys and the Defendant’s attorney. They are full of contracts and photocopied pages from safety manuals and medical reports. The case is an endless stream of details.

  As far as I can tell, the case rests on whether or not a construction company doing demolition in an old hospital building should have filled in shallow holes they had created in the floor. (The Defendant says the company only does demolition, not construction; the Plaintiff maintains the holes were a hazard and should have been filled in.)

  An electrician working for a different company was descending a ladder one day six years ago and stepped onto the lip of one of the holes (the sides do not agree on the use of the word “hole”—the Plaintiff uses the term while the Defendant, if it refers to them at all, calls them “depressions” or “the different elevations of the floor”).

  When the electrician’s foot landed on the lip of the hole (or depression), he twisted his back. The balance of the case rests on whether we, the jury, think the first company is at fault for the man’s twisting and subsequent injuries.

  During breaks, we all grab our phones to check the time and scroll through emails. Our attention spans are shot, killed long ago by our many screens. We lean in to whisper to one another. How we are dying of boredom. How the monotony of the proceedings is driving us crazy.

  The Plaintiff has just been telling us about the pain he is in. About how he does nothing all day. How he watches TV until he is bored, and then lies down, and then gets up to walk around, and then lies down again. He can read only a few pages in a book before he is overwhelmed by headaches.

  PLAINTIFF’S ATTORNEY: Can you describe your life, at present?

  PLAINTIFF: I don’t do anything. I have no life. I just exist.

  It is tempting to see the Plaintiff’s situation as a metaphor for the American working class. His injury occurred in 2007, just as the real estate and construction industries were teetering on the verge of collapse. He’s white, has an eighth-grade education. Beyond that, his only schooling was a four-year apprenticeship when he was young. He has no savings.

  He worked as an electrician for forty years, before the accident. He was a union man. He lives in an outer suburb of San Francisco, in a trailer park, but was injured six years ago working on a big project in the city. Now he is without work. Has not worked in six years. According to his lawyers, he will never work again.

  It’s tricky business, this, making metaphors of men. San Francisco is in the midst of a real estate boom. Prices are climbing ever higher, meeting and eclipsing pre-crash levels. Construction projects are going up throughout the city: lofts, condos, bars, restaurants. Construction jobs are coming back.

  The members of the jury are mostly professionals. A chief executive officer, a chief operating officer, a few tech workers, a corporate attorney (mergers and acquisitions at a tech company), a research physicist, several nurses, a jeweler, a student. All educated. Six men, six women. Four people of color. (The three alternates are men, one Asian-American, one an immigrant from France.) One member of the jury and one alternate are gay.

  At breaks, the physicist takes out his iPad and scrolls through its pages as he walks around the building’s outer hallway. A tech worker takes out his MacBook Pro and sends emails. “Pretending to work,” he tells me.

  Each morning we discuss if and when the parties might settle, and when we might be released. Employers are nervous about lost productivity. We’ve been told the trial will last three and a half weeks.

  One morning, the judge instructs us to strike from the record the Plaintiff’s testimony that he cannot afford health insurance. We are told that we are to forget this information. To pretend that we never heard it.

  I come to like my fellow members of the jury. I would be happy to have them on a jury if I ever were in the Plaintiffs’ or Defendant’s positions. Though they do not want to be here, I sense they want to do the right thing.

  It occurs to me one day that the people of this country are like the members of this jury: we want to do the right thing.

  And yet, we do not want to be here. We do not like how time-consuming voting is; we would rather play a game on our phone than read the news; we would rather focus on our own lives than the lives of others. We have internalized the mantra of The Individual. We are forever turning inward, into our own concerns.

  It occurs to me—though I’m not sure I’m comforted by the thought—that we are creating our democracy, even as we inherit it.

  The judge tells us we will not have court the next afternoon. “The attorneys in this case will not be available for trial,” the judge informs us. “They will be meeting tomorrow afternoon, and their meeting may affect the length of this trial.” We secretly discuss our wishes that the meeting will lead to a settlement, the end of the trial.

  The morning after our free afternoon, the judge arrives, the clerk introduces the case, and the judge asks the Plaintiff for the next witness. He does not mention the previous afternoon’s negotiations.

  The injured man is not the only Plaintiff in the case. His attorney is joined at the Plaintiffs’ table by an attorney representing the worker’s compensation insurance company that has paid almost half a million dollars for the injured man’s medical bills and disability payments. The insurance company is here to recoup what it paid to the injured man. One company is suing another company. We were told during the judge’s opening instructions to treat the insurance company as if it were a person.

  Each day, the clerk introduces the case to the judge. He reads the name of the case as [Injured Man’s Name] vs. [General Contractor’s Name].

  Halfway through the second week, one of the members of the jury slips a piece of paper to the clerk with a question on it: why is the general contractor’s name part of the name of the case, when it is a subcontractor, not the general contractor, that is being sued?

  When we come back from break the judge calls the attorneys into his chambers for a sidebar. When they return, the judge explains to the jury that the case will, from now on, be known as [Injured Man’s Name] and [Worker’s Compensation Insurance Company Name] vs. [Subcontractor’s Name]. The prev
ious name, we are told, was the name of the case when it initially showed up in court.

  There is a murmuring in the jury box.

  For two days the attorney for the insurance company has been mentioning a Dr. Bathgate whenever he can. He has been trying to get witnesses to describe a report written by Dr. Bathgate. Whenever he does this the attorney for the Defendant objects.

  “Objection. Hearsay,” he says.

  And every time the judge agrees.

  “Sustained,” he says, over and over.

  Who is Dr. Bathgate?

  “What day is it?” asks one of the jurors who sits in front of me, right before court begins, in the middle of the week, in the middle of the trial.

  Today, when cross-examining a witness who works for the insurance company, the attorney for the Defendant mentions Dr. Bathgate. Behind him, the insurance company’s attorney raises his eyebrows.

  A few moments later, the attorney for the insurance company stands to re-question (“redirect”) the witness. He asks about Dr. Bathgate’s report.

  “Objection. Hearsay.”