The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  The evening air outside the open window smelled vibrant, as though the intensity of the heat had been skimmed off its surface and all the living things underneath were finally allowed to breathe. Occasionally trains went by just a few blocks away, but they sounded strangely muted and distant.

  “Speaking of restaurants,” Saki said, three beers later, “I have this recurring dream.”

  “About a restaurant?” Toru glanced at her. Having given up on the movie, she was leaning on the low windowsill, her elbow sticking outside and her cheek resting on the back of her hand. “A nightmare, no doubt.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a nightmare, quite. But I’ve had it for years. I’m in this crowded restaurant, with or without other people, the details always change. I place an order, but after waiting for a long time, I realize I’m not getting the food. So I go look for my server and find the kitchen closed in the back. I return to a different, dark room, and my food is on the table with plastic wrap over it, and there’s a note stuck on it. Like a Post-it note. This makes me very sad, and the next moment I find myself in an empty house.”

  Toru waited. “And then? What happens in the empty house?”

  “That’s it,” she said. “That’s the end.”

  “Saki.” Toru tapped her shoulder, but she didn’t budge. While he finished the movie, she had fallen asleep on the floor. Her long hair hid most of her face, but he could see that her cheek was flushed and her mouth was open.

  Toru moved the coffee table to make room for the futon next to her and rolled her over onto the sheet. She was alarmingly light. He observed her shoulder move up and down almost imperceptibly with her breathing, and noticed the imprint left on her temple from the floor.

  The bottom of her shirt had ridden up a little. Toru was tempted for a moment to peek, to confirm the stab wound and, more importantly, to see how the subtle but unmistakable roundness of her breasts worked. Whether they were real.

  Once, after walking home together, Toru had asked to use the bathroom at Masato’s house. No one was home, and Masato invited him to stay for a snack. While Masato went to get things from the kitchen, Toru used the bathroom and poked around, just so he could report back to Kyoko. Masato’s room, which he found down the hallway, was dim, with the curtains mostly drawn, and surprisingly messy. Strewn clothes covered most of the available surfaces, with textbooks and magazines and candy wrappers entangled in them, while the cream-colored walls remained strangely unadorned. There was something odd about the room, though Toru couldn’t immediately put a finger on it. And then he saw what it was. Among the formless piles of clothes were several pairs of girls’ underwear.

  Saki twitched her fingers in her sleep. Toru stood up, picked up the empty cans, and turned the lights off.

  “Don’t you want to get out a bit?” Toru said to Saki a few days later. They had finished breakfast, and he was rinsing the plates. “Walk around or something? I guess you’re still recovering, but I’m sure if d feel better than sitting in this dingy room all day.”

  Saki looked up from the fashion magazine she was leafing through. In the evenings she would go to the convenience store near the station while Toru cooked dinner—the only time she would go out—and always come home with a new magazine. A small stack was starting to form on the floor beside the coffee table.

  “I don’t have a key,” she said.

  She was sitting on the floor in a pair of jean shorts, leaning against the table with one leg folded at her side and the other one, the one with the old scar, stretched out. Though they had just eaten, she was snacking on some potato chips. The fan next to her face mussed her hair every time it swung past, revealing her forehead.

  “No one would break into a dump like this,” Toru said. “There’s nothing to take.”

  “But I have all my stuff here.”

  Toru put away the coffeepot and stood wiping his hands on the towel. “Trust me, nothing will happen while you take a little walk.”

  “The thing is,” Saki said, “my apartment got broken into while I was in the hospital. The same boyfriend.”

  Toru sighed. He bunched the towel and tossed it on the dish rack. “He systematically destroyed everything I owned,” Saki said.

  “Fine,” said Toru, “I’ll copy the key for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and her smile made Toru wonder if he had been tricked. He still hadn’t asked her when she intended to leave.

  “Look, I won’t even pretend to know what it’s like.” He sat down across the table from her. “But your situation sounds serious. Shouldn’t you seek out some professional help?”

  Saki went back to flipping through the magazine. From the open window the mechanical sound of cicadas seeped into the room and filled the little silence between them.

  “Did you talk to the police?” he said. “I mean, this guy sounds like a psychopath. What did they do with him?”

  “Nothing,” Saki said. “I told them I was mugged. Didn’t see any face.”

  “What?”

  “The police won’t do me any good. Trust me.” Without taking her eyes off the pages, Saki reached for more potato chips and nibbled on them.

  “Are you trying to protect this guy?” Toru said. “Is that it? After what he’s done to you?”

  Saki abruptly closed the magazine and tossed it onto the pile. “How about we go for a walk together?” she said.

  Toru blinked. “Now? I have to go to work.”

  “Can I come along then?” she said. “I’d like to see what you do with the vending machines.”

  She picked up a glass with some melting ice cubes at the bottom and tilted it back to get a trickle of water. The clinking of the ice cooled the stale air in the room by a fraction of a degree.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Toru said.

  “But you’re making the rounds all by yourself, right?” she said. “No one’s going to know.”

  “I’m going to a different job today,” he said.

  Saki raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”

  “I have this part-time job,” he said. “A seasonal one.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  Toru hesitated for a second. “I work at a cemetery.”

  “A cemetery?”

  “You know it’s Bon this month, but a lot of people can’t make the trip these days. So they hire someone else to do it for them. Some people more than once a year, but mostly just for Bon. It’s the peak season.”

  “So you go visit and clean the graves of people you don’t know.”

  “Right.”

  “That sounds great,” Saki said.

  One step out of the air-conditioned train, the chorus of cicadas once again vibrated the heavy air. Toru’s ears had grown numb to the incessant ringing, but he felt it loudly on his skin. There was not a hint of breeze and walking was an effort, as though wading through thick liquid.

  In public with Saki for the first time, Toru felt self-conscious, his movements somehow encumbered by her bare-legged presence. The whole walk to the cemetery, Saki followed a few paces behind him at a leisurely pace, dangling a shopping bag of cleaning supplies. Toru thought she was favoring her scarred leg, but the unevenness in her gait was subtle enough that he could have been wrong.

  Sometime in late fall, back in eighth grade, Masato had jumped from the third-story balcony at school. A group of male students who had been with him at the time said it had been a dare, just a joke, that no one had expected him to actually jump. Others who had seen it happen confirmed that he had voluntarily climbed over the railing. When the assistant principal spoke about the incident to the student body, he referred to it as “an accident resulting from reckless behavior.” They were not to confuse selfish acts that inconvenienced many people with courage.

  Masato broke a number of bones and didn’t come back to school after he was released from the hospital months later. His family had supposedly moved to another town. But by then it was past winter break, and his empty desk had lo
ng since been taken. The rumors and hushed excitement had grown stale.

  Toru and Saki stopped to buy flowers near the station, and picked up boxes of sweets and fruits along the way for offerings.

  “Wow,” Saki said. “Fancy. All that for dead strangers?”

  “I’ll get reimbursed, of course.” Toru neatly folded the receipts into his wallet. “And we get to keep the food. We have to take it home because we can’t leave it out at the grave. It’s just a gesture.”

  “I suppose that’s what counts,” she said. “A gesture.”

  The cemetery had sprawling paved grounds and no temple. Toru stopped at the management office to check in and pick up the assignment for the day, then went to fill a bucket with water.

  “Whenever I think of a cemetery, I picture it in the summer,” Saki said, watching Toru clean. “Quietly grilling under the sun, just like this.”

  Toru was on his fifth grave. Saki had closely observed the process the first time, and then had wandered off for a while to walk around the grounds before finding him again. This grave had a fairly new, elaborate headstone, its corners still sharp and its surface polished.

  “I guess I do, too.” Toru had removed the wilted flowers and incense ashes from their receptacles and was sweeping the tiny plot of land. “Because we used to play in the cemetery near our grandparents’ during the summer. But an old man chased us with a broom this one time, saying we’d be cursed for disturbing the peace of the dead.” He halted the sweeping and looked around. “I just remembered that. One of my cousins yelled back, ‘Soon, when you are stuck under one of these stones, I bet you’ll wish you had some company!’”

  Saki contemplated this for a second. “Do you think it’s really peaceful there?” she said. “On the other side?”

  Toru glanced at her. She was tracing the clean edges of the gravestone with her long finger. The sun was already high, and everything in sight had a bright shallowness to it. A tiny thunderhead poised over the distant treetops, but no shade was in sight. Just then, there was something so delicate about Saki that for a second Toru had an urge to shield her from the harsh light. He shook the thought away.

  “I personally don’t believe in the other side,” he said.

  “Then you don’t think there’ll be suffering, either?” she said. “Like punishment?”

  The sweeping done, Toru poured some water on the gravestone and started wiping it down with a cloth. “You mean like hell?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just some sort of consequence. Of your life.”

  “I’ve always imagined it’ll just be complete nothingness. Back to zero,” he said. “Would you get me the toothbrush?”

  Saki bent down to search in the shopping bag. “Complete nothingness. That doesn’t sound too bad.” She handed him the toothbrush and rested her butt on the marble ledge marking the next plot, stretching out her scarred leg. “But what if you’ve done something horribly wrong in your life?”

  “Like what?” Toru went on scrubbing the letters engraved on the stone. This one said “Tajima Family” on the front, with individual names and years on the back. Some of the stones were so worn he could hardly make out the letters, while some of the new ones had a name or two in red letters, indicating people who were still alive. He never understood the rush, the urge to have somewhere to go after this life.

  “Like if you’ve seriously harmed someone. Or killed someone.”

  “I don’t know,” Toru said. “You’d live with the consequences then, right?”

  Saki remained silent for a second. Toru could feel her eyes on his back.

  “What if that wasn’t enough?” Her tone sounded provocative, but Toru couldn’t be sure. “What then?”

  Toru ladled more water onto the gravestone and placed fresh bundles of flowers in the vases. The sky was overbearingly wide-open above them. His shirt clung to his back. The blinding sun was all around them, reflecting off the cement and white pebbles.

  Kyoko and Toru never talked about Masato after the incident. Toru sensed Kyoko’s intense shame and fear, and knew better than to bring up her crush on the bullying target. They acted as though nothing, not even a quiet ripple, had disturbed the smooth, continuous surface of their daily lives at school. But that meant they had to pretend that the months leading up to the fall had never happened, that this thing that had structured their days had never existed. The two of them hung out less and less, in a way that felt inevitable. It didn’t occur to Toru until much later that Kyoko must have seen him as a threat, a ticking bomb that could be her undoing at any moment. That she might have desperately wanted to get rid of him. By the time they started the new school year in April, the two of them were going around in different circles.

  “Of course,” Toru said carefully, “it would be comforting to think there’s something just about the whole thing in the end. That those who’ve done wrong wouldn’t ultimately get away with it. But I have a feeling it doesn’t work that way. We probably have to work things out on this side.”

  Saki picked up one of the rough-edged stones at her feet and toyed with it, as if to read something in the texture of its surface. She then straightened up, pocketed the stone, and walked around the grave. “God, it’s hot,” she said. “I should have brought my hat.”

  “You shouldn’t just be standing around.” Toru felt relieved. “You’ll have a heat stroke. Maybe you should go home.”

  “I’m fine,” Saki said. “I kind of like it here.”

  “Why don’t you go inside for a bit, at least?” he said. “And you could get two more bundles of incense for me on the way back.”

  While she was gone, Toru finished laying out the offerings and putting the cleaning supplies away. Although it was close to Bon, there weren’t many other people visiting the graves on a weekday. He heard some kids shrieking in the distance and their mother calling after them. There was an old woman several rows away, pulling weeds under a broad-rimmed straw hat. When Toru stood up to stretch his back, the woman looked up and nodded approvingly. Toru nodded in return. He then realized he had thrown away the fresh flowers that he had just placed in the vases. He searched for them in the garbage bag, cursing himself, and put them back. They looked slightly disheveled now, but then again, he and Saki would be the only ones to see them anyway. He couldn’t think straight. It was the heat.

  For a while after the incident, Toru occasionally found himself picturing the scene on the balcony. In his mind, there was a haunting fierceness to Masato’s action. Toru hadn’t been there, not exactly; he had been copying Kyoko’s homework in the classroom, and when he’d looked up, sensing the commotion on the balcony, Masato was already on the ground eight meters below. But Toru sometimes imagined that Masato’s eyes had actually sought him through the window, that it had been Masato’s gaze that had made him look up. That their eyes had met. This couldn’t have really happened, because all Toru could see from where he sat at the far end of the classroom were the backs of his classmates, indistinguishable in their gray uniform sweaters. And yet the more he thought about that day, the more vividly he could picture the look on Masato’s face.

  Did his classmates also see it—anger, hatred, defiance, or was it mere desperation?—flicker in those large but normally downcast eyes? Toru tried to imagine the discomfort spreading among the group of boys as Masato climbed over the railing, even as they sneered at his bluff. And the shock that must have rippled through them when he jumped. The brutal instantaneity of the fall, how there was no moment of suspense in which he seemed to become airborne, as in a movie, but how instead the body just hit the ground with a dull thump before they could grasp what was happening. Had there been time for Masato to feel the triumph, the satisfaction, before the pain came? Had he been able to see the astonishment and perhaps awe on his classmates’ faces high above? Toru didn’t even know whether Masato had fallen facedown or up.

  When Saki came back, she stood next to Toru and prayed with him. The clean grave smelled fresh from
the evaporating water and the incense. Toru never knew what to say to the dead strangers, but he always put his palms together, closed his eyes, and thought something general and polite. This time, though, with his eyes shut, he could think only about Saki. He really needed to ask her to leave the apartment before he got entangled in some mess. Before it was too late.

  But instead he said, “Shall we get something for lunch?” He felt lightheaded. “Something cold?”

  Saki kept her eyes closed and finished her prayer before turning to him. “That sounds good,” she said.

  For the next few weeks, Toru went to clean the graves in the morning, and then worked the late shift refilling the vending machines. Now that she had the key, Saki seemed to go out regularly. Most days he would find her back in the apartment when he came home, reading her magazines and nibbling at sweets from the cemetery. Sometimes she would come back while he prepared dinner. They would always eat together, and afterwards they would have some beer and watch a movie on his computer. Somewhere along the way, their days started to acquire a new, plain rhythm, hypnotic in its simplicity and almost indistinguishable from the routine he had established alone.

  He spent one evening with his girlfriend, but he was distracted. The thought of Saki sitting around his apartment while he ate at a restaurant and had sex in an air-conditioned hotel room kept him restless. It was easy to picture her at the coffee table munching on potato chips for dinner, and he wondered if he should have prepared and left something for her. In bed, he found himself going rough on his girlfriend, as though trying to dig through his thoughts to the body beneath him. His girlfriend noticed.

  “What’s on your mind?” She was fixing her hair in the mirror, combing it back into her usual, simple low ponytail. The room was by the hour, so they never lingered.

  “There’s a bit of a situation.” Toru sighed, already dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed. “I should probably explain. It’s just that I don’t know—”