The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  The sky can be so solid gray in Michigan, like wet concrete, churning without breaking for days. Under it, this home, sinking into the earth, the earth digesting its own paradox, in silence.

  JASON LITTLE

  Borb

  FROM Borb

  Beginning on the next page are a series of excerpts from Jason Little’s Borb, a collection of comic strips featuring a homeless, alcoholic man. The collection was published by Uncivilized Books in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  LAUREL HUNT

  Last Poem for OE

  FROM Salt Hill

  Tell me how the forest was glass and our stomachs were covered in rashes,

  how we sat in the trees

  and threw our shoes at the bears. Then the bears were undeterred

  and our shoes were gone. You were gone.

  At least you didn’t see the rashes.

  I only wanted the shape of you

  in bed beside me. I tried to measure you out in boxes of salt,

  in loaves of bread. Deer nosed at my sleeping body. They ate the bread,

  licked the salt. Bears ate the deer.

  Devour me, please, I said to the bear king.

  He didn’t though. Surprise. He took off his crown and lay beside me,

  until the shape of his body was the shape of your body, and the absence

  of his words was the absence of your own.

  You are tangible light, I said to the bear king. You are light

  made meat.

  In the morning, he was gone and I was covered in all the shoes

  he’d ever stolen. Years of shoes.

  Only that’s not true. In the morning I ate him.

  KENDRA FORTMEYER

  Things I Know to Be True

  FROM One Story

  I AM LEAVING the library when Miss Fowler stops me, peering through her glasses like they are windows in a house where she lives alone. She says, “Charlie, a patron saw you ripping up books.”

  “I didn’t,” I say. These words sound true, but Miss Fowler holds up The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Bits of paper flutter from its edges like snow.

  I know a man in that book. He was trapped underground, dying in the dark and the antiquated language. He coughed then. He rustles in the pocket of my windbreaker now.

  From elsewhere, Miss Fowler says, “Give me the pages.”

  “I am going to take him outside,” I announce. I declare. Declare which is like clarion call which is of trumpets. “I am going to take him into the light.”

  “Look,” Miss Fowler says. Her lips blow bubbles of words into the air: crisp, faceted ones like replacement and thin-filmed ones like expensive. She speaks to me like I am a child. Like operations can smooth these cracked, dark hands, like damages can topple the twenty-seven precarious years stacked in my name. I try to listen but my eyes jump to the rack of newspapers behind her, the small truths of their headlines swimming up like snakes: CARTER WINS DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION IN NY. MONTREAL PREPARES FOR 1976 OLYMPIC GAMES. NORTH, SOUTH VIETNAM PREPARE FOR REUNIFICATION.

  Miss Fowler says last chance, her eyes blinking behind her glasses like she is drawing the curtains and they are a color she never particularly liked.

  She says, “Give me the material or we’re revoking your borrowing privileges.”

  It is the we that frightens me, because I can see Miss Fowler, but I cannot see the rest of we. They could be anywhere, plural.

  Slowly, I draw the crumpled pages from my pocket, the clamshell edges glinting gold.

  Miss Fowler waits until I put them in her hand, nose curling. She eyes my blue jacket, careful not to touch my skin.

  “Thank you, Charlie,” she says.

  This is my day: I wake up. I make oatmeal. I eat my oatmeal, and I go to the library. I go to the library because it is full of words, and I trust words. They make things real.

  Words like: this is my apartment. Like: I have lived here alone for eight months. Like: it is small, and dark, and the air conditioner is broken, and no one is on the other end to fix it when I call. All true. My sister Linda pays the rent, but we both agree that this is my apartment. The same way everyone agrees that I can’t live with Mother, even though Mother says it’s because I’m too grown-up to live at home and Linda says it’s because Mother’s a selfish drunk and then apologizes and looks exhausted.

  Is it any wonder that I prefer words?

  There is a list above my bedroom door. I do not remember making it, but it’s in my handwriting. This is what it says:

  These are the things that I know to be true:

  1. The past and future exist through stories

  2. Stories are made of words

  3. Words make the future and past exist

  This means: if I went to the VA clinic yesterday I can say, “I went to the clinic yesterday.” Then there it is, in your head, like a real thing: a little image that is me at the clinic. I could also say, “I went to the zoo yesterday,” and then that would be real in your head instead. You would not know the difference. I might not know the difference. I could believe the words I went to the zoo or I could believe the words I went to the clinic.

  Maybe both are true.

  It is some several tens of thousands of words later, or a dark night, a long winter, a little girl losing her mother, a retired detective taking on one last case. There is a body in a dumpster when I feel a touch on my shoulder.

  “I thought we talked about this.” It is Miss Fowler. Her words are the same but her voice is the word truncheon.

  “Oh my God,” I say. There is a hand lying on top of a McDonald’s wrapper. Its fingernails are blue.

  “Charlie,” Miss Fowler says again. Then I look up and scream, because the hand is on my shoulder on my shoulder and suddenly Miss Fowler’s face is far away shouting “Charlie! Charlie!” and all of the other faces are turning to see us, like too many small dark moons. The hand is gone from my shoulder and it is waving through the air and it is attached to Miss Fowler and I am screaming but the fingernails are pink and there is no dumpster and I am in the library and slowly I am breathing, breathing, calming.

  There is a man standing in the doorway of the reading room. He is in a uniform. My muscles flinch to attention, and then down again. It is not the place or time. Linda is always saying those words, ever since I came back home. Charlie, this is not the place or time.

  Miss Fowler holds a book with a woman on the cover, her face curling at the edges. “I told you, Charlie,” Miss Fowler says. “We can’t have you damaging any more books.”

  I look at the man in the uniform. I know the uniform is all I am supposed to see, but I can see his eyes, too, and they are full of pulling away.

  “It was the fire,” I say to the uniform man.

  Miss Fowler asks, “What fire?” There are teeth in her voice.

  “Her lover was burning alive,” I say. “She couldn’t stop it.”

  Miss Fowler looks pained. “So you tried to put it out.”

  “I did put it out.” I turn back to my book to the dumpster, but Miss Fowler closes the book. Her mouth makes a line like a broken-down L. It is not a word whose shape I understand.

  “No, you didn’t, Charlie. What you did was run a book under the bathroom faucet because you read the word fire.” She opens the book, points to a page. “Look, Charlie. Fire. F-I-R-E.” She rubs her finger on the page, and I wince. The word smoke floats past my eyelids and the back of my throat begins to burn. “See? No fire. Just four letters that won’t go away, no matter how much water you pour on them.”

  Her fingers are beginning to smoke. I can see her pink nails turning black, and still she stares at me from behind the windows of her eyeglasses. She does not flinch.

  “I’m sorry, Charlie,” she says. Her hand is beginning to sear and crackle around the edges. There is a smell like bacon. I gag, eyes watering. Miss Fowler says, “I know it’s hard for you to understand, but what’s in here? It’s fiction.” The flames are eating her sleeve now. One of her
fingernails peels off and lands on the floor where it writhes like an insect.

  “Miss Fowler!” I say.

  “And what’s out here,” she says, reaching towards me with a hand that is charred and bone, “is the real world.”

  “Stop it!” I shriek. “Stop! Stop!” I lunge through the fire that is eating her alive. There are flames dancing on the lenses of Miss Fowler’s horned glasses and behind them, something dawns in her eyes. Then my hand is on the book, and I can feel it singeing the pads of my fingertips as it sails across the room, arcing through the stacks like a firefly in the dark. My panic follows the book for a moment it will burn the library down but Miss Fowler is standing there next to me, and her skin is blackening and shriveling like a fungus. I know somewhere deep down that it won’t do any good her burns are too bad it’s too late but I tackle her to the ground, beating her with my coat, trying to put out the fire that’s everywhere, everywhere. People are shouting. The uniform man has left the doorway. He is beside me now, and he is holding my arms behind my back.

  “Miss Fowler!” I howl. “Miss Fowler!”

  “All right, buddy, that’s enough out of you,” the uniform man says and hauls me towards the door. I don’t want to go, but pain shoots through my shoulder and I stumble forward. “Miss Fowler!” I cry.

  I hear her voice say, “Thank you, Robert,” and I twist around. Miss Fowler looks tired, terrified, bedraggled. But soft and clean and whole.

  “You’re alive!” I shout to her. The man in the uniform is dragging me towards the door and my shoulder is crying in unwritten language, but I cannot stop staring, marveling at Miss Fowler’s wholeness. “I saved you,” I say. “You’re alive!”

  The man in uniform pushes me through the door. “Wait,” I say. My feet turn to syrup on the floor, dragging. I do not want to leave this house of words. Miss Fowler watches me go. Her mouth looks like the word sorry.

  The uniform man does not wait. The uniform man has no pity. He pushes me out into the dazzling sunlight.

  Then we get into his car and go to the police station.

  I spend one afternoon and part of a night in jail. They make me take off my belt and give them my wallet. There is nothing inside but a library card and a feather I found on a park bench. The feather is blue. The jail cell is gray like bad teeth and the word granularity.

  There are two men in the cell with me: one in a corner saying quiet, angry things, and another who just sleeps. The angry man rushes the door when I come in, and I fall backward against the uniform who shouts HEY HEY HEY and the angry man backs off, still saying angry things into the air, eyes jumping from one mildew-stained wall to the other. My heart and I stumble over to the opposite side of the cell, where the sleeping man sleeps on the concrete floor. His army shirt is vomit-stained and his beard is scraggly and his skin has been beaten into submission by the sun. I sink down by the toilet, biting the fleshy part of my hand. I try to tell myself this is jail instead of prison but it’s unfurling in my brain like a fire ant sting. The past and future are made of stories of words so I tell myself don’t give words to this. Don’t give words to this. Don’t give it any words.

  My sister Linda comes down from Richmond, a two-hour drive that takes three with Nixon’s new speed limit. She signs her name for my freedom at the maroon desk. Her face looks like it was in the middle of a wash cycle when she got the call—still damp and rumpled, halfwrung out. The policemen give me my wallet and jacket back. Linda has my keys. She makes a face when she sees my windbreaker.

  “You’re still wearing that ratty thing?” She looks me over, checking face, teeth. “Mom would have a conniption. What happened to that sweater she sent?”

  I shrug, zip the coat up to my chin. Cloaked in a windbreaker, I cannot be broken. It smells like safety, and me.

  They let Linda take me home. She ties a kerchief around her hair and lights a cigarette before starting her car which is a Dodge Dart. Her husband Lewis is not with her, which makes me happy because I do not like Lewis. He laughs at things that are not funny, and he makes too much money to be nice. One year on Thanksgiving he brought me some pamphlets that made Linda mad: they said Institutional Living Facility. Linda threw them in the garbage. She said, “Dr. Schaefer said he’s making progress.” She said, “For God’s sake, can’t you give him some time to recover?” My mother said nothing and only poured herself another drink. Lewis said, “It’s been six years.” And, “We’re paying too much for that damn apartment.” And, “He’s not okay, he’s crazy.” Those words have kept knocking around in my skull. When I try to imagine myself striding into the future, I trip over them like stones.

  Linda and I walk through the front door of my apartment. There are library books everywhere—books on the floor, on the sofa, lining the halls like yellowed border guards. Linda wrinkles her nose.

  “Can I get you something to eat?” I ask, because I remember that that’s what you’re supposed to do when people come to your house. I hope she won’t say yes because I don’t have anything except a can of SpaghettiOs, and I would like to eat it myself. But Linda shakes her head.

  “I ate on the road,” she says. “Stopped at a McDonald’s. Jesus, Charlie.”

  She starts to laugh, stops, then gives up and laughs anyway. I laugh too, politely, though I’m starting to wish she would leave.

  She wipes her eyes. “It’s not funny,” she says.

  “Okay,” I agree. Linda sits on my armchair and digs her finger into the stuffing. Her finger looks like a pink worm that cannot escape from her hand.

  “Why did you attack that librarian?” she says at last.

  “I didn’t,” I say, feeling uncomfortable. I don’t remember attacking anybody. But there are the words: You. Attack. “Did I?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

  She stares at me. “The librarian at Cameron Village,” she says. “Mrs. Fuller.”

  “Miss Fowler,” I say automatically. And then, “She was on fire.” Saying this makes me feel better. I think this will make Linda proud of me, but she looks at the sofa instead, at the little worm of her finger. It writhes in the Styrofoam innards of my couch.

  “Charlie,” Linda says. Her voice sounds tired, like it used to when we were kids and she was tired of playing whatever game we were playing. “I can’t drive down here every time you get into trouble.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “The woman’s not pressing charges, though Lord knows she could,” Linda says. “You got off easy. Not even a fine. They just banned you from the library. All the county libraries, actually.”

  I blink. I am just banned.

  Banned: officially or legally prohibited.

  Just: guided by truth, reason, fairness.

  My mind races.

  “For how long?” I say in a voice that is tight and high and not mine.

  Linda shakes her head. “It’s not a ‘for how long’ type of deal, hon,” she says. “That’s it. You’re out.”

  My lips work, but there are no words.

  The worm disappears from my sofa as Linda rises. She takes me in her arms. Her eyes are hurting for me, and blue.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she says. “You’re just going to have to handle it the best you can, okay?” She rocks me in her arms. She smells like french fry oil and Virginia Slims. “You’re going to be okay. You’ll find a new hobby. All right?”

  It is strange how everything in the room looks exactly the same while my world slides slowly sideways. I try not to watch as Linda packs up all of my library books. The fat classic editions. The dog-eared paperbacks. The worlds I know so inside and out that no card catalog in the world can make them not mine. I eat my SpaghettiOs and focus hard on all the new words I can make: flavormouth, redsauce. I try to make new words, new small truths, because if I do, I can make this moment into one where I am not twenty-seven years old and trying not to cry.

  Linda promises to drop my books off at the library on her way back to Richmond. She asks if I want to come and live wit
h her and Lewis, but I shake my head. I wish my sister would stay with me here, and we could move back again with Mother and things would be just like they were before my hands grew cracks, and when Mother could still look at me without flinching away and talking too loud.

  Linda presses some money into my hand, but I make my hand limp, and so she leaves the bills on an empty bookshelf before kissing me a kiss that is goodbye.

  I wonder if Linda would still come see me if she weren’t called sister. I wonder if the light would still fade if there weren’t a word night.

  It is a long, cold couple of weeks.

  This is my day: I wake up. I make my oatmeal, and I eat my oatmeal. My feet still want to take me to the library at first, and I have to fight them. “We are going somewhere new today, feet,” I say, and a little girl stares at me. I pull my blue windbreaker tight and drag my body north.