The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  "Come on!" they call.

  "Go," I say. "I'll catch up. I've got a sudden craving for dragon burgers."

  A smile wavers on the Dungeon Master's face. Because I am brave, I realize, he will spare me.

  I charge the dragon, leap with my sword for his throat. Rainbow flames pour over my magic chain mail.

  The Dungeon Master flicks his eyes at my roll.

  "You're dead. Deep-fried."

  "Huh?"

  "A craving for dragon burgers? You think you're in a movie?"

  "No," I say. "A game. And I have magic chain mail."

  "Bogus magic chain mail," the Dungeon Master says. "You bought it off that wino monk."

  "It's held up okay until now."

  "You thought you could kill a dragon? Sorry, my friend. Long may we honor the memory of Valium."

  "This is bullshit."

  "Bullshit?" the Dungeon Master says. He's wound up. He really isn't that well. "It's not bullshit. It's probability. What, you gonna kwy? You gonna kwy like my little bratha? Life is nasty, brutish, and, more to the point, it sucks. Get it, bird dick? How's your two-handed bird dick now?"

  "It's okay," I say.

  The remainder of the group makes it out of the mountain maze, but the goats turn out to be shape-shifters, just as Cherninsky warned. They transform into ogres with huge spiked maces. It's hardly a fight. Before he dies, Cherninsky's thief does manage to stick an ogre with his dirk. The ogre turns back into a goat, then into Cherninsky's dead sister, drenched, draped in seaweed.

  "Just a little girl," the Dungeon Master says.

  "You freak," I say.

  Cherninsky's got his pen out, and I think he's about to go for the Dungeon Master's neck, but then he starts to bawl.

  "Cry it out, sweetheart," the Dungeon Master says.

  "Leave him alone," I say.

  "This doesn't concern you," the Dungeon Master says. "Just back off. You have no clue."

  "Okay," Marco says. "It'll be okay."

  He sounds like my father.

  "The hell it will," the Dungeon Master says.

  The Dungeon Master holds up the note Cherninsky passed him.

  "Wait till you hear this," he says. "Your pal was planning to steal everybody's gold. He wanted me to roll for it."

  "He's a thief," I say.

  "Go ahead, defend him."

  "I am."

  Brendan freezes in his chair. Cherninsky keeps weeping. Marco bobs up and down, mumbles a prayer of okay.

  I stand, whack the screen off the Dungeon Master's desk, see the dice, the sheets of graph paper, the manuals and numerical tables. There are doodles on the blotter. Giant vaginas with angel wings, mostly. They soar through ballpoint clouds.

  "I said never touch the screen," the Dungeon Master hisses.

  "And I say don't flash girls you will never have at the ice rink. Don't set fire to your shits in the parking lot. You're a mental case. They should have kept you locked up."

  The Dungeon Master comes around the desk and I think he's about to make a speech, but he lowers his head and spears me in the gut. We crash together to the floor. He squeezes my throat. I palm his chin and push. Marco screams, and I'm almost out of air when Brendan climbs the Dungeon Master's back and bites his head. They both tumble away. The door bangs open and Dr. Varelli leans in.

  "Play nice, you goddamn puppies!" he bellows, then shuts the door.

  We lie there, heaving. My wrist throbs. I smell raspberry soda in the carpet.

  The Dungeon Master paws at the blood on his head. Brendan rubs his tooth.

  "You children," the Dungeon Master says, then rises, and lumbers off. We hear him scream at his father in the kitchen. He calls him a loser, a lesbian.

  "It's been a little difficult around here," Marco says.

  I crawl over to the window. In the next yard, some kids kick a ball. It looks amazing.

  My broken wrist takes a long time to heal. I stay clear of the Varelli house, and at school only Eric signs my cast. He puts his initials on it, as though his full name would announce too heavy an association. The deal is that I don't have to get a job until the cast comes off.

  I join the afterschool club, roll a ranger called Valium the Second, but nobody thinks it's funny. Why would they? Lucy Mantooth plays a wizard-thief. It's clear that she doesn't want me in the club.

  Eric lives near me, and sometimes we walk part of the way home together. He likes to cut through some trees on a path near the Varellis' house, and I don't say anything. One day we see the Dungeon Master's Corvette in the driveway. His father bought it for him last year, but the Dungeon Master has never driven it. He doesn't even have a license.

  "You like our game so far?" Eric asks.

  "It's cool."

  It is cool, despite the death stares from Lucy Mantooth. We fly dragons, battle giants, build castles, raise armies and families and crops. But something is missing. No goblin child will shank you for your coin pouch. You'll never die from a bad potato.

  "I think Lucy likes you," Eric says.

  "What's the giveaway? The fact that she never talks to me or that she rolls her eyes whenever I say anything?"

  "Both."

  "I guess I don't know much about girls."

  "You'll learn," Eric says. "You've been hanging out with those weirdos."

  "Everything's weird if you stare at it," I say.

  "I don't know about that," Eric says. "We're sponsored by the school, just like the chess team."

  I get bored with Eric's game. Lucy Mantooth never warms up. Her wizard-thief leaves me for dead in a collapsing wormhole. Was there something I was supposed to say? I resume my old routine: peanut butter, batch, nap.

  One day I'm headed home to do just that. A sports car pulls up to the sidewalk, a midnight-blue Corvette.

  "Need a ride?" the Dungeon Master asks.

  I don't, but slide in anyway. I've never been in a Corvette.

  We drive around town for a while, past my school, the hobby shop.

  "Thought you didn't have a license," I say.

  "Who said I do?"

  The Dungeon Master smiles.

  "There are rumors and there is the truth and there are true rumors. You want the rundown?" he asks. "Here's the rundown. Hit a kid with a bat and gave him brain damage, yes. Flashing, yes. Burning my bowel movements, no. Have I been to the bughouse? I've been to the bughouse. Am I insane? Does my opinion even count? Remember all the newspaper stories about how the game makes kids crazy? Makes them do horrible things?"

  "My mom clips them for me."

  "Love those. Take, for example, suicides. The game doesn't create suicides. If anything, it postpones them. I mean, the world gives you many reasons to snuff it, got to admit."

  "I'm fourteen," I say. "I don't know what I admit."

  "In another age you could be a father already. In another neighborhood, even."

  We drive for a while. We're a few towns east.

  "Nobody's seen you lately," the Dungeon Master says. "Marco says you play with some snotty faggots at school."

  "I stopped."

  "You hear about Cherninsky? He got caught with all this stolen musical stuff in his garage. Amps and guitars and drums, the whole deal. Tried to dump it in the reservoir, but the cops got most of it. Now his dad might go to jail."

  "His dad?" I say.

  "Harsh, right? Anyway, we're into war-gaming now. Real technical shit. It's not the same. Brendan can barely handle it. We're doing Tobruk. I'm Rommel."

  "The Desert Fox."

  "You read," the Dungeon Master says, though I picked up the name from an old tank movie. "That's what I like about you. That's why I thought I could teach you."

  "Teach me what?"

  We pull into a scenic lookout, the Palisades. Past the bushes in front of us the cliff drops sheer to some rocks in the Hudson. The Corvette idles, and I wonder if I made a mistake when I accepted this ride. The Dungeon Master looks off across the river as though ready to jump it.

&
nbsp; "Teach me what?" I ask.

  The Dungeon Master guns the engine. I turn to him—that pale skin, the fine-spun beard, the bright, bitter eyes.

  "Teach me what?"

  His answer is another rev. His fingers drum on the gear knob. We're going to fly a dragon, after all. Part of me is ready. Maybe it's the part that kept me in Dr. Varelli's study so long.

  "Whoa," the Dungeon Master laughs. "You're shaking."

  He shifts into reverse and swings the car around. Soon we're back on town streets.

  "Had you shitting," he says.

  "You did."

  "I'm doing that for real at some point."

  "Oh," I say.

  "But not for a while."

  "That's good."

  "My dad's kicking me out after graduation. I think it'll be better for Marco. That kid needs to bloom."

  "Where will you go? Your mom's house?"

  "My mom doesn't have a house. She died when Marco was born."

  "Really? I'm sorry. I figured she just left."

  "Well, guess that's true in a way. No, I've got a cousin in Canada. We might room together."

  "That'll be cool."

  "Probably not. Here we are."

  "Okay," I say. "Thanks for the lift."

  "You were almost home when I picked you up."

  "Still, thanks."

  I'm cutting across the yard when the Dungeon Master calls my name.

  "No hard feelings, okay?" he says.

  I stop, picturing him there behind me with his ridiculous head sticking out of the passenger-side window, but I cannot turn around. I'm still trembling from our drive. Do I have an almost uncanny sense in this instant of what's to come, some cold swirling vision whose provenance I do not comprehend but in which I see the Dungeon Master, blue-cheeked, hanging by his communion tie in Dr. Varelli's study, and Cherninsky, his dad in prison, panhandling with the scrawny punks, the pin-stuck runaways in Alphabet City, and me, Burger Castle employee of the month for the month of October, degunking the fryolator in the late autumn light?

  Of course I don't.

  "Really," the Dungeon Master calls again. "No hard feelings."

  It must be the dumbest thing he's ever said. No hard feelings? What could ever be harder than feelings?

  I want to tell him this, but even as I turn back the Corvette peels away.

  Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart

  Rebecca Makkai

  FROM Tin House

  WHEN CARLOS ASKED WHY I would risk my whole career for Peter Torrelli, I told him he had to understand that in those last three years of high school, Peter and I were the only two gay boys in Chicago. Because I really believed it, back then, and twenty-five years of experience proving otherwise was nothing in the face of that original muscle memory: me and Peter side by side on the hard pew during chapel, not listening, washed blind by the sun from the high windows, breathing in sync. It didn't matter that we weren't close anymore, I told Carlos. The point was, he'd been my first love. I'd never actually loved him, but still, listen, believe me, there's another kind of first love.

  It was during one of those long lectures or concerts or assemblies that Peter and I had discovered our common neurosis: the fear of magically switching bodies with the speaker or singer or priest, and then having to improvise an exit. I would slide toward Peter on the pew, open a hymnal, and above "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" scribble in pencil: "Tuba player?" Peter would look up to the stage to watch the fat Winnetka sophomore puff his cheeks like a blowfish and write back: "Stop playing—no one misses a tuba." "1st Violin?" I wrote. "Feign a swoon," he'd write back. And then he'd mouth it to me, relishing the oooo of swoon. We joked about this fear, but really I think it bothered us both—this idea that we might suddenly be thrust in front of our peers and examined. It doesn't take a psychotherapist to figure out why. Peter later claimed the whole reason he became an actor was that the only way he could enjoy a play was from the inside.

  Everyone else knew it was his looks. I hadn't understood until we were sixteen what it meant to turn heads. I'd considered it a figurative expression. But when we stood in line at Manny's, or walked down Dearborn toward the bus, he was a human magnet. He was the North Pole. The girls at school would feel his sweater and tug his necktie. He said he had a girlfriend back east, that she was Miss Teenage Delaware, and everyone believed it. How could he not be onstage with that dark, sad face, that ocean of black hair, those sarcastic eyes? By the time we graduated, he'd done two seasons of professional summer stock. I was the varsity soccer goalie, and he was a movie star walking among us. When we sat together in chapel we looked like the kings of the school, and nobody knew any different.

  And then the next day we were thirty-eight years old, and Peter fell to pieces. During a matinee of Richard III, in the middle of the second act, my friend abruptly and forever lost the ability to act. He said later it was something about the phrase "jolly thriving wooer," the strangeness of those words as they left his mouth, the pause a second too long before Ratcliffe entered. Since Peter told me all this, I've read the page twenty times in my Signet Classic—which is how I know that Peter's next line, as Richard, was "Good or bad news, that thou com'st in so bluntly?" It was a line he'd have made foul jokes about backstage. "And I said it," he told me. "But it came out in this voice, like all the costumes had fallen away, like I was some kid in eighth-grade English and I had to read my poem out loud. It was just me, and there was no character, no play, just these words I had to say. You know our whole thing about leapfrogging into someone else's body? It was like that, but like I suddenly leapfrogged into myself." He said he could see each face in the audience, every one of them at once, smell what they'd eaten for lunch. He could feel every pore of his own skin, and the ridiculous hump strapped to his back. Backstage, they knew something was wrong even before he started to shake. By the end of the next scene, the understudy was dressing.

  Peter told me this the next week over lunch. Actually, he told me many times, over many lunches in the following year, as if through the retelling he could undo something. We met every other Thursday at the Berghoff, where he'd have root beer and I'd have two pale ales and we'd both eat enormous plates of bratwurst and chicken schnitzel and noodles with butter sauce. We had set these lunches up two years earlier, very formally. We'd been in and out of touch for ages when we found ourselves alone on the living room futon of a boring party in Hyde Park, drunk, wondering aloud if knowing each other when we had acne was the reason we'd never dated as adults. We had kissed just once, sophomore year, when we stayed behind after a SADD meeting to pick up the leftover fliers. I didn't know he was gay. I hardly knew I was. He came over with the green fliers in a stack as if to hand them to me, but when I took hold of the papers he pulled them back and me with them. The only person I'd ever kissed before was a girl named Julie Gleason. Afterward he said, "You're pretty dense, aren't you." That was it. We didn't talk for two weeks, and then we were best friends again, before the paper cuts on my palm had even fully healed.

  I had looked at him that night at the party—beautiful and grown up, with a beer bottle sweating against the leg of his jeans—and said, "I never see you anymore."

  He said, "Yes, I'm slowly becoming invisible." Peter was the kind of guy who would try for any joke, any chance to flash his perfect orthodontia. Even when it wasn't funny, you had to appreciate the showmanship. And then he looked at me seriously, which was rare at the time. "We should get together and talk. I mean regularly, because I miss you. It would be like therapy." I should have known I would always be the therapist. I told him once that he was the Gatsby to my Nick Carraway. He flashed his teeth and said, "Yes, but I throw much wilder parties."

  And like stupid little Nick, I ended up trying to fix things. If I hadn't spent American Lit distracted by Zach Moretti and his amazing forearms, I might have registered that these stories never end well.

  Let me say, Peter had been brilliant. Chicago breeds its own stage stars who stay local even if they'
re good enough to go to New York, and he was one of them. When I saw his Hamlet at Chicago Shakespeare, all memories of Mel and Lord Larry vanished in a celluloid fog. He was the right age, the right build, and those eyes could turn like lightning from irony to terror. I wonder how that colored our friendship, that I saw him simultaneously as Peter and Hamlet. If nothing else, it made me more tolerant of his ramblings and neuroses.

  After the night he froze up ("The Night of Which We Shall Not Speak," he called it whenever he spoke of it, which was constantly), he took sick leave for a week, then tried again. If anything, he was worse. He quit before they could fire him, and spent the next two months looking for work. He walked into each audition knowing everyone in the room had heard about his big dry-up. It couldn't have helped.

  A few months later, Peter moved to southern Wisconsin and took a job doing dinner theater, and our lunches became less frequent. In late November 2005, almost a year after The Night of Which We Tended to Speak Obsessively, we sat near a window in the Berghoff and watched the year's first snow collect in the street. He told me about his new role as Bob Cratchit in something called Let's Sing a Christmas Carol! The director wanted British accents from everyone. Peter could do a perfect one, of course, but not without sinking further into the hollow cadences, the glazed eyes, the strangling sense of the ridiculous.

  "Most of them sound southern, it's terrible," he said. He was on caffeine or something worse. He was literally bouncing on the springy seat of the booth. "The eleven o'clock number is, I shit you not, called 'God Bless Us, Every One.' Jesus Christ, you should hear it, it sounds like Scrooge drops by Tara for pecan pie." Every time I saw him he talked faster, as if he were running out of time. He still flashed the smile, but perfunctorily, as if displaying his incisors for the dentist.

  When our food came, he finally asked me a question so he could stop talking and eat his schnitzel. "How's life in phone-a-thon land? Are you giving away thousands of tote bags?"

  I worked in special events for NPR, and for several years before we officially reconnected, Peter and I would run into each other in the restaurants of the monstrous tourist trap on Navy Pier where Chicago Shakespeare and Chicago Public Radio both live. Once, after we'd drifted apart for a few months, our lunch parties at Riva joined together, and when someone introduced us and said we might hit it off, we started laughing so hard Peter dropped his wineglass.