It was Superman.
And Charlie had a good car.
And a library card.
And he was never hungry again.
I sit and wait for those words to become truth, and my stomach rumbles. I underline, never hungry, but it rumbles again and my world blurs. I shred the list into pieces so small that they slip through my fingers like water, spilling onto the bare floor and down over my dry and rootless feet.
This is where the story ends. But.
The sun comes up again the next day. The sun always comes up again. It doesn’t know when to quit, maybe because it doesn’t speak any language that can tell it no.
So I get up. I make my oatmeal. I eat my oatmeal, and I go to the bus stop. The bus driver looks at my 30-day pass and shakes his head at me.
“Sorry,” he says to the zipper of my windbreaker. “This expired yesterday. You’ve got to go get a new ticket. Sir,” he says. “Sir?”
But I am not listening. I am looking past him at all the people on the bus, their feet secure in boots, their faces as closed as books on a shelf. The whole bus of unwritten words humming, waiting, sentences strung out in infinite lines across the city. Carefully, I shred my ticket. I shred the expiration date into pieces. Then I find a seat and wait to be carried, like everyone else, into some bright and not-yet-written future.
DAN HOY
Five Poems
FROM The Deathbed Editions
Miracle
I follow everyone out of the elevator and up to the roof. We’re all of us sitting on real grass next to a pool. There are trees and everything. It’s a miracle, really. I get overly aware of my brain as an apparatus, like a pair of binoculars. I’m wearing jeans and shoes with socks. Everybody else seems fully integrated. / Why would I text you this. / I’m standing at the rail and pretty sure it’s the most panoramic thing I’ve ever seen. There’s this whole other world made entirely of rooftops like a city built on the ruins of another city. Anybody not on a rooftop is living in the past. I see four or five people dancing like assholes like a hundred yards away but there’s no music or else the music is just this sense of being a part of the sky and therefore everything. Somebody suggests going to an actual club. Ideally I’ve alluded to some mystery illness earlier so I can make reference to it now and bail. Instead I’m going to have to live life and fuck everything I know in the face.
The Baseline
Just the fact this video exists and is happening. When we’re in the car with the top down and the sun flares I want to die. The way everything is cut together with the palm trees and everything. People who think this video is just ok are dead to me. For people who are against life the esplanade is like outer darkness. The chorus alone is proof that going solo is some next level shit. Taking it next level is all I care about. Without this video the world is a total piss hole and even then. I love you.
Life
This photo says everything I want to say about life. The entire canvas is the sky. These bathing suits are from all eras combined. How the four of them are facing each other their hands on their hips. Except for the hand touching its thigh in defiance. This is a dramatic moment. Something permanent is being decided here. The tiny airplane entering the frame like an accident. This is where time is born.
Waterfront
Really not in the mood to do this thing today so I leave a VM that says somebody died. I’m just like standing on the edge of a pier the sun blasting off my chest like a power saw. Next thing I’m doing is gripping both hands on the wheel ready to just fucking do it. This isn’t even my car. I push some buttons and hurl my brains all over the sidewalk. Stagger toward these pedestrians like what. Take out my phone and I’m like what. I’m throwing my feelings under the bus like an advertisement. Everything I do is the future.
Empire
This song is like someone pouring a cherry slush into my ears. I have to remember to tip the cab driver extra for the ambiance. What am I talking about. I step in a puddle on purpose and go up or down some stairs. People try to talk about my condition but I’m not having it. My human condition. My phone is a tether to the world I don’t need so I let it fall over the balcony. I let everything fall to the floor like an empire. This is without doubt my greatest triumph.
XUAN JULIANA WANG
Algorithmic Problem Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships
FROM Ploughshares
TO BE A GOOD computer scientist, a man needs first to understand the basics. Back away from the computer itself and into the concepts. After all, a computer is just a general-purpose machine; its purpose is to perform algorithms.
It is due to the fact that algorithms are unambiguous that they are effective and executable. However, algorithms aren’t only for machines. In designing an algorithm, a person can execute a complex task through observation and analysis. To be a good father, it would be a logical assumption that these same acquired skills should apply.
As I used to say during my lectures at Dalian University of Technology some thirty years ago—Everything in life, every exploit of the mind is really just the result of an algorithm being executed.
For example: To peel garlic
Obtain a bulb of garlic and a small baggy
As long as there is still-wrapped garlic, continue to execute the following steps:
Break the garlic petal from the garlic bulb
Peel off the outer skin
Put the smooth garlic into the baggy
Throw the skin into the wastebasket
To my students and colleagues I famously said the same can be applied to something as complicated as getting married. As long as an adult male is still without a wife, continue to execute the following steps:
Ask librarians, family members, and coworkers if they know any single girls
Invite girls to watch movies
Assess compatibility facts as follows:
Beauty
Family
Education
If compatibility measures up to previously set standard, move to step 4, if not, start from beginning.
Ask the girl to be wife
A coworker introduced me to my ex-wife. Her nose was too small for her face, her hairline too high. However, she came from a family with good Communist party standing and we attended similarly ranked universities.
One day on the way to see a play, she lost the tickets and I yelled at her for being careless. I thought that was the end of us. Then on the way back, I stopped along the street and tied an old man’s shoes for him. She agreed to marry me after that.
There was a miscalculation in this equation, which I see now of course. I liked the girl I married very much, but not the woman she became after we immigrated to America. This woman never respected me. All the data was there to be sorted, I just didn’t decode it until it was too late. She had this way of making me feel spectacularly incompetent. She was a literature major in college, she had what people said was a nice sense of humor. Once I took her to a company party and all anybody could talk about the next day was how beautiful and amazing my wife was. That was when it began to bother me. That people didn’t think I deserved her. That they thought I was somehow less than her.
I don’t think she understood the protocol of being a good wife. “Let’s go into the city and eat at a nice place,” she used to say. Why? So I could feel more out of place not being able to read the menu? No thanks.
But without her, there would be no daughter, Wendy. There’s that to consider.
Now that I’m old, I see my theory prove itself day after day. Until illness and then death, life is the result of a series of algorithms being executed. The GPS in my car is using an algorithm, taking into its calculations a satellite moving through space, transmitting down to me to tell me where my car is.
So right now I need to make an algorithm to solve the problem of Wendy. My only daughter, who I somehow managed to drive away from me—door slamming and little eyes pooling up during dinner.
I wish to concentrate
on the relevant details of our relationship, from tonight and beyond, in order to break down our problem into something that can be decoded, processed, and used to save our relationship. How did I hurt her? Will she ever come back to me?
The evening was one of those calm, snowless December evenings in Westchester County. My daughter, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly a year, was home on vacation from studying in England and planned to spend two weeks living in her old bedroom. I had already prepped the pigs feet to throw in the pressure cooker. When she walked through the door, pink-nosed and taller than I remembered, I felt such a rush of affection for the girl that I went right up to her and pinched her arm really hard.
I broke down these two weeks into pseudocode just to see how it was going to work out in my mind:
If (daughter comes to stay)
then (if (temperature = cold))
then (enjoy home cooking)
else (watch movies)
else (buy her consumer electronics)
“Baba, is it your goal to make me obese?” she asked when I showed her the five-pound bag of uncured bacon shoved in my fridge. I replied, “Oh, come on, little fatty, you know you crave my pork stew,” and she laughed. She hadn’t changed very much, had the same chubby little hands that I love squeezing. She still had my smile, the one that was all gums.
Even before I had finished putting out all the vegetables and meats on the counter for prepping, Wendy was already showing me pictures of all her trips. She’d been to France, Italy, and Spain. I pulled my head back so that the countries got into focus.
“Where are pictures of you?” I asked as she clicked.
“I was too busy documenting the landscape.” She went through the snapshots slowly, importantly, lifting her computer to show me pictures of bus stops, lampposts, jars of pickles.
“How do you have so much time to travel when you’re supposed to be studying?” I asked.
“You think I went all the way to England just to sit in my room? Besides, all the Brits do it too.”
For me, she speaks Mandarin, which had gotten rusty. She mispronounced words and made up her own metaphors. But I loved hearing her talk, just like when she was a child, telling me stories while I tried to teach her how to make a good steamed fish. While her mother would be out taking real estate courses or painting a still life, Wendy would always keep me company in the kitchen. I didn’t want to look at the pictures, but I was happy having her voice fill up the house. I gutted a red snapper and stuffed it with ginger.
“Can’t say I have the same attitude toward education,” I said. I handed her a potato peeler and she finally put away her laptop.
“Of course, I studied too, Dad, and I made a ton of friends from all over the world,” she said.
“That’s good, expanding your horizons,” I said.
“There were Chinese students at my school too. Bunch of wack-jobs. They just stayed in their dorm rooms and made dumplings all the time. You could smell the chives from the hallway.”
I nodded, and she went on, “In England. Can you imagine?”
“And they were your friends too?” I asked.
“No, they never talked to me. Probably because I spoke English and didn’t study engineering.”
She started chopping the carrots into strips, and I showed her how to make them into stars, “but I didn’t go over to England to pretend like I lived in China, you know?”
“Probably good you weren’t friends with them,” I said solemnly. “The only Chinese kids that get to study in England have to come from crooked families with embezzled money.”
“I can’t imagine it would be all of them,” she said, squinting at me. “There was this one crazy thing that happened while I was there. There’s a lake in the middle of campus where the university raised exotic geese. Then one day, the caretakers noticed that one of the Egyptian geese was missing its mate.”
She stopped talking until I gave her my full attention. “Turns out this guy from China had killed it! Goose dumplings.”
She put down her chopping and with great affect said, “The University expelled him.”
“That’s a pity.”
“Isn’t it? It’s so awful.” She said. “Why did he do it? Even if he didn’t know they were pets. What makes him see a beautiful bird and immediately want to make it into food?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Wendy,” I said. “Here, help me over here.” How would she know that my brothers and I used to kill sparrows with slingshots as food to eat. How we shot so many sparrows the birds couldn’t land, so exhausted they began falling out of the sky, dead.
“It’s just so typically Chinese too. His friends didn’t even protest or stand up for him.” She went over to the sink and began peeling the potatoes with great indignation.
If anything, I thought, it was she who protested too much. Always concerned with things that she has zero control over. Like missing her SATs for a hunger strike against the Iraq War, something she had nothing to do with. Maybe I should have told her, the happy dinners where those little birds filled up my little brothers’ swollen, wanting bellies. Maybe a little American like her might have understood after all. The water boiled and the fish was steamed.
Then there was the wine.
“I brought you this wine, Baba, carried it on my back through three border crossings,” she said. “It’s from Ravello, below Naples, on the way to this beautiful town called Amalfi.” I nodded at the unlabeled bottle, which was made of heavy green glass.
“It was a family vineyard. The vintner said it was the best wine he’s ever made. The vines grew on the cliffs facing the ocean. I had to hitchhike just to get this bottle for you.” The girl kept going, excitedly, her hands remembering Italy.
Right then the phone rang; it was Charles and Old Ping, my two divorced and now bachelor buddies. They were wondering what I was doing for Christmas dinner. They had nowhere to go that night, so naturally, I invited them over.
“Come! We are going to have great food, and my daughter’s here,” I said.
I smiled at Wendy and she shrugged and went about opening the wine. She couldn’t have been upset about that, could she? Having my best friends over to share our Christmas dinner? No way, she wouldn’t be that selfish. In fact, even though she’s not very logical, she was always a remarkably reasonable, well-behaved child.
My ex-wife and I, we never hid things from her; she shared equal partnership in the family.
Maybe there were some things we shouldn’t have told her. She probably shouldn’t have been at the lawyer’s during the divorce agreement where I probably shouldn’t have yelled at her crying mother, “What are you going to actually miss? Me or the money?” That was probably a mistake, but I can’t do anything about that now.
Was it the wine? I bet it had something to do with that wine. As we were preparing the last of the food, we had a rather unpleasant conversation about the fundamentals that make up a good bottle. “The most popular cocktail in China right now is the Zhong Nan Hai no. 5,” I said. “They say it was created by former Premier Jiang Zemin himself: wine with Sprite.”
“Ba, let me tell you some of the basics. So the most common red wines are Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Syrah,” she said. She continued on like an expert, “Wine is not supposed to be ganbei-ed, the way you do it. It’s supposed to be tasted and sipped, since it’s about the appearance, the smell, the aftertaste.”
“That sounds like a needless hassle to me,” I said. “It’s a drink.”
“You know, you were probably destined to be a lonely migrant farmer, but instead you were blessed with me and you don’t even know how to appreciate it!”
She circled around the kitchen counter and stood facing me. “Come on, I thought you’d like knowing about this,” she said, as she slowly opened the bottle. “While I’m here, maybe I can take you to a wine tasting in the city. It’ll be really fun!”
“You can save your energy, Wendy. Your old man is not fancy, and I’m not going to
sniff booze like a snob. I’m a working-class guy, in case you forgot,” I said with a sniff, “while you were in Europe.”
I took a sip from the glass she poured me and said, “I feel that in my experience, the best wine is wine that is over 14 percent alcohol content, with a wide neck; preferably the bottle should have a large indent at the bottom.”
I thought I saw her roll her eyes at me, so I said, “When did you get so stuck up? Did you learn that from your mother?” and she turned away from me.
The previous situation can be broken down into pseudocode:
If (daughter is frustrating) then (compare her to her mother)
While (daughter shuts up) do (change the subject)
When the doorbell rang, Wendy ran over to answer and I assumed everything was back to normal. She was very polite. I didn’t even have to ask her to help unpack the two cases of beer into the fridge. What a sight my friends must have been to her! Old Ping was as unwashed as ever, but he had changed out of his work overalls for the occasion. Charles still had paint splatters above his eyebrow, and his hair had grown long everywhere that was not bald.
When I tried to offer them Wendy’s wine, both of them initially refused.
“I don’t know about foreign liquors. Most things white people like give me the runs,” said Charles.
“I’ll stick to my baijiu, but thanks, little Wendy,” said Old Ping, whose eyes were already rimmed with red. He must have started drinking in the car.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 Page 36