The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  I walk a new direction every day, until I do not recognize anyone or anything. Only the letters are the same, on street signs and in newspaper boxes, everything everywhere draped in red-white-and-blue. It is America’s Bicentennial. Bi, meaning two. Centennial, meaning hundred years. 1776 and 1976.

  The flags in shop windows and lawns twinkle like clues to another world where everything is truer and brighter and nothing is denied to me. Where Oakwood Ave. is green like meadows and bobbing in the wind, and Peace St. is not a place where car horns wail and men sleep with their feet on the sidewalks. This outside world makes me ill. Nothing makes sense. I come back to my apartment at the end of the day and feel I cannot trust anything.

  I have no books left. None: not any, not at all, not one. I read what is left: cereal boxes, warning labels, my life delineated into fat or iron, blindness or death. I try to read the shapes carved into the popcorn ceiling by the streetlights outside, and everything swims.

  My eyes feel like they are starving.

  Dr. Schaefer says I should write new stories. Dr. Schaefer says I can choose what is in them. “You get to invent yourself now, Charlie,” he says. “Pick the person you want to be. That’s what happens in America. You get to start over.”

  I try to explain to him go to the clinic or go to the zoo. He smiles enormously with an exclamation point. “That’s it precisely!” he exclaims. “Do you want to be Charlie who is sick and sorry for himself, or Charlie who has fun? Tell me, Charlie, where would you rather go?”

  I say, “The library.”

  Dr. Schaefer nods yes but his forehead is scrunched no. He lights a cigarette. He sucks the end and blows out smoke.

  He says, “You don’t need the library, Charlie. The library was an escape. Think of this as an opportunity. You’ve got a talent with words. You could go back to school. Journalism. Maybe advertising. Have you thought about that?”

  “No,” I say.

  Dr. Schaefer reaches for my chart. “The old you is gone,” he says. I want to ask how to make the library ban gone, but he does not have time to hear what I want. Instead he takes a green, spiral-bound notebook from his desk and puts it into my hands. He says, “Now is the time to write the new story of you.”

  That night, I try to write the story of myself. I use the green notebook. All of the words jumble in my head, with no order to them. I keep my mouth pursed up in a small 0, so that only one sound can come out at a time. I write with a ruler, so everything stays straight, but nothing helps. Too many letters, too many lines. Here and there a sentence pokes out, and it is like a small miracle: This is my day. I tear out the pages. Being mine doesn’t make a story worth telling.

  At night, I dream of paper leaves and trees made of fire.

  Once, I forget a word. I am on my way to the bathroom and I think, I am going_the bathroom and suddenly it is gone. The word means: move in the direction of something. Closer. Move at something. I panic, because without the word, how can I move? How can I do what I cannot say? I lie on the floor with my bladder aching and want to cry until there is a whisper in my mind like angels that says toward. And I know how to move forward again. This is not the me I want to make.

  I have to find new words.

  I do not know what day it is, or what time, when I get a phone call from Mother. She says, “Charlie, dear.” She calls me once a month, usually. Sometimes she forgets and two months go by but that is okay because she is very busy. It takes a lot of time to have an adult son. There is so much more of me to take care of.

  “How have you been?” she asks.

  “Fine,” I say. This means small and slippery and falling through the cracks.

  We talk about her bridge club and her church. We talk about if Linda will ever have children. Then Mother says, “Linda called last week. She told me you’re not allowed to go to the library anymore.”

  Oh. I fiddle with my fingers. They are out of key. “I was banned,” I say.

  Banned. Brand. A stigma stamped in my skin.

  Mother sniffs. “They sent you over there, and now they want you to be invisible. I think it’s sick. Denying a man the right to read. But that’s what we get, electing a Democratic governor.”

  I do not know the answer to the questions she isn’t asking, but I barely care. My mind is whirling. A man the right to read.

  “Mother, I love you,” I say.

  “Thank you, Charlie,” she says, and sounds surprised.

  We hang up, and I lie on the couch, seeing nothing, mind singing a man the right a man the right a man invisible the right to read. And me humming with it, because I figured it out:

  If I go to a new library, nobody will know me.

  And: If they do not know who I am, they cannot make me leave the library.

  I stay up late at night, thinking about this until my head hurts.

  I walk the next day to the CAT bus station, and I purchase a 30-day pass. It uses up nearly all of the money that Linda sent with her last letter, but I cannot make myself care. I have never been good with numbers anyway.

  I climb on the bus. The bus rattles. Inside of me, my organs rattle. I am afraid of being caught and turned away, but the bus driver doesn’t even look at me as I fumble with my bus pass. He looks at the numbers printed on it and finally he says, like he is surprised that I am still there, “Sit down, son.” I sit. I am so grateful that I smile at every person on the bus. It is my thank-you to them for being alive on the day that I get my world back.

  The new library is in a shopping center. At first I think I am making a mistake, but the driver says no, this is the North Hills branch. The cars in the parking lot shimmer in the heat. By the time I get inside, through the glass doors and into the air conditioning, sweat has stuck my windbreaker to my back.

  A librarian looks up when I step into the library, and every nerve in my body shrieks. I duck my head, turn blindly left. I end up in the children’s area. A new librarian looks up at me. She frowns. Before she can speak, I plunge left, and left again. I feel dizzy, and the walls lean out at odd angles. We know you Charlie you are not supposed to be here Charlie you’ll hurt us drown us burn us Charlie Charlie Charlie.

  Then suddenly the space opens up around me. I am in a place I recognize: Reading Room.

  The air is quiet. Other patrons float by like fish, weaving in and out of the stacks in earthy colors. I go to a table. I put down my bag and breathe a soft sigh. Then I go to the stacks like that is exactly where I am supposed to be, and I begin to pull down books.

  I know better than to try my library card. If they find out who I am, they will make me leave, and then I will be empty again, my shelves empty, no words left to me and mine. But now I know how to keep the words.

  At my table I take Dr. Schaefer’s green notebook from my bag and begin to copy the first book. Word. By. Word. It is slow going, and my hand starts to hurt, but I don’t stop. The library begins to darken and empty, and when the first closing announcement bursts through the intercom, I drop my book and scuttle out the door. In my old library, Miss Fowler used to have to come and make me leave, but here I am afraid of being recognized. So I go home before anyone can lay a kindly hand on my shoulder like a little white bird and sing, “We’re closing, Charlie. Closing time.”

  On the bus I smile the whole way home because my world has come back, and this is so true that one lady even smiles back at me.

  I get home with my notebook. I put my notebook on the table and think about all of the things I could do that are not reading my notebook: Eat soup. Go to the bathroom. Go . . . but the words get blurred in my head in a kind of hunger, and before I can help myself I have the notebook in my hand.

  I open it to the first page, and the paper crinkles a little. My eyes swim for a moment in the glory of words: all the lines and shapes and letters that say a million different things and all belong to me. My own book. I almost do not understand what to do with it.

  But then I begin to read, and that is when my heart breaks. Because I
know all of these words already. Because I read them all already. When I was copying them down.

  There is a dark feeling building and building in my chest, so hard and sharp-edged that it pushes the notebook out of my hands. I bite down on my forearm like they taught us, to don’t make a fucking sound when you see something you don’t want to see, like someone’s head blown away or their guts hanging out over their knees. I bite into my own flesh and bone, and in the biting my mouth is full and there are no words and there are too many.

  I wake up. I eat my oatmeal and don my blue windbreaker. I go back to the North Hills Branch and do not turn left.

  I pick a new book and begin again. When I realize that I am reading the book too much, I begin to hum in my head, to keep my mind completely blank so that my hand can copy now and my mind can read later. I hum a song called the 1812 Overture. It loops in my mind, all brightness and fireworks and triumph.

  I work for a long time at my table and nobody bothers me. I even get up to go to the bathroom, and as I pass by the desk, there are no lingering looks, no pointed questions punctuated “Charlie?” I go to the bathroom and come back to my table and embrace my newfound identity of nobody.

  On the bus home, two people smile back.

  At home I take out my notebook and I begin to read. And there, in my stilted handwriting, a beautiful first sentence: For a long time, I went to bed early.

  I read until the light drains from the room.

  I finish one book and start another. Chapter by chapter, I rewrite myself. In Agatha Christie, in Marcel Proust, in Kurt Vonnegut, in Richard Bach. The covers are luscious, titles cool and ripe on my tongue. I glut myself in ink, stained to the knuckles. Time passes in pages and in dried-up pens.

  It is late and what they call a Tuesday. I have been working on Cannery Row for the last several weeks, and am nearly complete. I place the period at the end of the second-to-last chapter, close my notebook. My hands are cracked but strong.

  I zip up my blue jacket and stand ready to leave, when a voice says, “Excuse me. Are you Charles Harrison?” and I jump.

  She has the right soft voice of a librarian. Also the glasses. Also the cardigan sweater.

  She has hair that is colored like sunsets and freckles flung in a star scape across the planes of her face.

  I have never seen her before. She should not know my name.

  “Please,” I say softly. I am caught. I want to hide, to go to earth, but I have no earth, just this word: “Please.”

  “I thought it might be you,” she says. “I have something for you. Hold on, I’ll go get it, all right?”

  I am banned caught in trouble tearing into two. Two syllables. Dismay, consent. “Oh,” I say, and “kay.”

  She beams, a spill of light. “Just wait right here.”

  I stand a second, a minute, unsure. She caught me she didn’t seem angry how does she know it was me she’s pretending she’s going to call the police she’s going to going to call the police. My feet drag on the tile. The second hand drags across the clock face.

  I will wait. She smiled. It is safe. I will wait.

  I wait twenty seconds exactly. Then I bolt out the door.

  I lie in bed a long time the next day, trying to find meaning in the bumps and shadows of the ceiling. I am trying not to think about Cannery Row, or about the way I feel when I am reading it. Like everything was wrong and now I am in a room full of music and laughter.

  I cannot go back to the library. It is not safe anymore.

  But.

  I climb on the bus and tell myself I am just going for a ride. My pass expires tomorrow. I may as well enjoy it. See the sights. I smile at everyone and it is such a good day that four people smile back and one person says hello. I feel like a true American citizen.

  (I get off at the library.)

  I duck my head and go straight for the reading room. I find Cannery Row behind the plant where I left it, and I keep my head down. I scrawl and I scrawl and I scrawl, waiting at any moment to feel the hand on my shoulder. Where were you? You ran away! You’re a criminal! You’ve been banned! You can’t be here! Security!

  Two pages left. One. I write the final words: And. Behind. The. Glass. The. Rattlesnakes. Lay. Still. And. Stared. Into. Space. With. Their. Dusty. Frowning. Eyes.

  I fling my notebook into my bag and dash for the door. I catch a blush of autumn in my periphery, and my steps do not falter. I vanish into the white afternoon light.

  You believed me, didn’t you? You saw me in your brain, vanishing. Which means that for one minute it was true, and now it exists, and will be true forever.

  But what also happened is this:

  Doc is washing glasses carefully because there is beautiful music and he is afraid of spoiling it when somebody sits down across from me and puts something on the table. The somebody is the red-haired librarian. The something is a crumpled yellow envelope.

  “You ran away yesterday,” she says.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I forgot.”

  She knows I am lying and I think she likes me a little less now. But she gives me the envelope anyway. There is a book inside, so stained and ugly and battered that the title is rubbed off its broken spine.

  But I know this book. I would know it anywhere.

  I want to push my chair back from the table, but I can’t move. I see faces smiling frowning shouting and I see jungle so thick that I’m afraid my eyelashes have grown up over my eyes.

  “This book,” I say through the jungle, “is gone.”

  The librarian does not understand. She gives a tentative smile. “I found this Joseph Heller mixed in with a large bundle of returns,” she says. “I thought someone had taken notes in the margins. And then I read what you had written and I thought . . . well, I thought you might like to have it back.”

  She reaches across the table and opens the cover and there is my name in red crayon. Written in my own handwriting. The pages flutter like crazed butterflies. I look down and see through the high whine in my ears that my hands are cracked and through the cracks I see names. Jimmy Metcalfe. Lucas Johnson. I see the way the light reflects on the water where they found that girl bathing. I see the song Joe Crispin played on his guitar in Quang Tri, and how it got stuck in everyone’s head for days, and we changed the words so many times that no one remembered the original. And how a month later, out of the blue, Soup came busting up singing your cheese is straight from hell and Joe laughed so hard he shot bug juice out his nose. I see C-Rations and finger necklaces curled like shrimp. I see all of us tired, and hot, twenty-one and younger and breathing Jimmy Metcalfe’s farts all morning on patrol through jungle leaves thick as eyelashes. And I see the way the air gleamed pink after Jimmy stepped onto the mine—the tiny click and then the sky blown apart and the whole world set singing, flashing white in the sun, pieces of flesh against the green like cherry blossoms in the first light of spring: so pink and bright that your heart rips in half at the beauty.

  One half says, the trees are on fire.

  The other half says, the trees are not on fire.

  Maybe both are true.

  I see this book inside Jimmy’s pack and then me taking it and writing down these words, a story hidden inside another story. I see the pages fill while the doctors patched up my leg and the skin scabbed over on my arm. I see the hospital bed with the ringing fading from my ears and my leg itching and burning and stinking in its cast. I see the medical review when no one in the room would look at me straight, and the smell in the air from the bed-wetters was so thick you could cut it with a knife. And I see the book on a plane, carried all the way home until I landed on American soil, and that chapter ended and I closed it.

  But then, here it is. On the table. In the library. And here I am.

  “This book is gone,” I say again.

  “No,” the librarian says, slowly. “It was just misplaced.”

  I think, This is not the place or time.

  “How did you know it was me?” I
ask.

  “We had a regional staff meeting at the beginning of the month,” she says. “Your name came up. There was a photo.” Simple as that. She does not say, you are a criminal. Does not say: you attacked Miss Fowler. Just. You came up. Like a flower.

  I push away from the table. “I am going to go home now.”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “You can stay.”

  “I am going to go home,” I say again, and leave.

  I do not smile at anybody on the bus. At the corner, I throw my Cannery Row notebook into the trashcan. No matter how hard I read and how hard I write, it seems like I can only have one story, after all.

  I try to do everything right. I wait until the sun goes down. I light the lights. I close the curtains, so that the echoes of me are not in the window. I sit across the room from the book that won’t let me go and wonder how long it is before the words harden back into truth.

  In her last card to me Linda wrote, Have you thought about keeping a journal like Dr. Schaefer said? I look at the card, alone on the empty bookshelf. On the front is a rabbit wishing me an Egg-cellent Easter.

  “I can’t write me down again,” I say to the rabbit.

  I pretend the rabbit can answer. It says, But you can write any story you want. You can make the words.

  The rabbit sounds like Linda. I want to make her happy but I know that I can’t. All I want is to be gone, like the book was supposed to be gone. Then I see the list above my door. The Things I Know To Be True.

  I detach it from the wall and try not to look at my hands.

  I write: Charlie didn’t go to war, and he didn’t kill anybody.

  And his mother let him come home again.

  And his sister lived there too and they went to the movies together.