The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2016 (retail) (epub)

  The last monitor and IV drip had been detached, leaving him untethered. He moved his legs up into the sheet, lifted his arms. Their heavy thinginess, the constant need to pee despite the catheter, these were reassuring. They implicated him in being who he was, lying there, and the me-ness of the self he was considering. It provided a kind of animal certainty of the here and now. He might doubt everything else, but not that.

  On one such occasion he awoke deep in the night and his head felt clear, with an alertness, a sharpness he’d forgotten could exist. Exhilarated, he sat up and breathed deep. He was hungry. It was cold in the ward. And a new thought struck: Wasn’t himself some sort of amalgam of memories collected from boyhood on? Were the ones flicking about in his head still his? What a bizarre notion, he thought. Who else’s might they be?

  Almost without volition, a haphazard inventory flared, wild, charged with no little terror and fretting, leaping from one memory to another. What traces of himself might have disappeared entirely, lost forever? One recollection chased and tumbled into another by chance or association, or no reason at all.

  That ugly moment when Sandy Greenwalt, like him twelve years old and training in the same bar mitzvah class outside of Pontiac, had one day opened the desk drawer in his friend Jeremy’s bedroom. Who knew why? Looking for a pencil? But there lay exposed before the two of them the complicated army knife he’d swiped off Sandy’s bedside table some weeks earlier, naked and accusing. All the little blades and screwdrivers and bright red shell with its silver cross. He could no longer recall why he’d taken it, or even the scene of the theft. But, oh, how vivid that scalding instant of discovery and shame had remained.

  Without citing that precise example, Jeremy had often spoken over the years to his students about such peculiarly human capacities, often displayed or discussed in the very texts they were studying. The Greeks delved especially deep. That the memory of something shameful or embarrassing might eternally kindle a blaze of the original agony, piercing if brief. Stranger still to consider that the events themselves, distant in time and space, no longer existed anywhere except within the precincts of an individual skull.

  Sandy Greenwalt, and this too Jeremy never mentioned to students, had died long ago. A terrible death in a ditch, the rainwater only inches deep, him having crawled from a car wreck he hadn’t caused. So no one alive could testify against Jeremy any longer. No external correlative to the theft or the terrible instant of exposure in his bedroom survived. Even that damned Swiss knife was surely lost forever, buried in some unknown landfill. He alone remained custodian of the sin and shame after all these years.

  Except now there’d been a singular, revolutionary adjustment: cracking his skull on an asphalt bike path had apparently cauterized the memory. Oh, the original scene could still be summoned in detail—Sandy Greenwalt, long limbed and thick lipped, shaggy red hair, opening the drawer. The jerk of recognition and accusation in his eyes. Jeremy not saying anything, just closing the desk and walking away. But the burning guilt that had haunted him for twenty years and more had vanished. Not even a shadow of it lingered, almost as if the memory did indeed belong no longer to him but to someone else entirely. No matter that it existed only in this head wobbling on these shoulders. It was an eerie sensation, as if he were peering in on someone else’s private life.

  His skin itched. He’d already sat up in the hospital bed and flung off the sheet. Now he slid awkwardly down and sat heavily in a padded chair by the window. His legs and feet were cold. He realized he was trembling and also that a flood of panic unlike anything he could remember was welling into his chest and throat.

  Another memory came unbidden to test him, one with higher stakes: his first glimpse of Shivani Chatterjee nearly eight years earlier. Its details had been reliably seared into his synapses.

  Hot and frustrated, he’d been killing time on a block of dumpy bookstores and run-down bars across from the university, instead of laboring in the library’s unairconditioned stacks. The decisive chapter of his dissertation lay waiting, half-drafted in a spiral notebook, half-scattered about the airless carrel on note cards. An hour riffling through the same boxes of dusty books that had been on limp display for many months yielded nothing. Not that he expected any treasures. At last he was pushing open the shop’s front door and stepping warily into the ferocious sun, when this tall, thin figure strode past him purposefully on the sidewalk, arms swinging, bangles tinkling, fresh and light and oblivious to any heat. She wore a sleeveless sundress like all the Southern girls, but a silk scarf, magenta and bluebird blue, rippled at her throat.

  And he’s following her. He finds himself following her, trailing along behind. It’s already something more than curiosity. He’s never done such a thing. It’s not at all who Jeremy Matthis is or has ever been. Yet it’s so matter of fact, as if he’s been waiting for this all along and never had a choice. Turning into an alley, she tugs open the side door of the Methodist church, and before the screen can slap shut he scoots forward and slips inside too, right on her heels. Where wouldn’t he have followed?

  She’s arrived, it turns out, to attend a monthly meeting of the local Amnesty International chapter. Some ten or twelve other good and earnest souls have fluttered in as well. Okay, he’s all for this—he’s decided in an instant. He’ll pen letters of protest to all the oppressive governments on the planet, just so he can share the same musty air with this woman.

  A cascade of dark brown with a hint of henna, Shivani’s hair reaches her waist—she’s still unmarried, of course—with a ribbon of the bluebird blue gathering it at the back of her long neck. A trio of delicate gold bangles, the ones that had captured him on the sidewalk with their tinkling dance; they dance, sliding up and down at the wrist of one elegant arm.

  Had she noticed him before the meeting began? Eight years on and he still didn’t know for sure—she’d laugh, treasuring the mystery of her own thoughts in that Methodist church and the question of whether she’d even been aware of his presence. She never let on.

  More important, whether he was recounting the tale at a dinner party or the memory was scratched alive by a certain scent of rose (or mildew), it had always conjured as well a trace of his original breathless desire. Of the sexual dazzle. The delight in his own bold chutzpah. Something, too, of the dismaying worry throughout that interminable Amnesty session—there’d been so much political outrage to set down on paper—that when the instant finally presented itself and he mustered some brilliant hello, she might simply dismiss him out of hand like some furtive stalker. However faint, these feelings flashed along the sinews of his being, part of the fabric of his identity.

  Tonight the images of that faraway moment did flare vividly—sharper, cleaner than anything he’d seen or remembered in the long, fuzzy days since the accident. Tall and slim and elegant, Shivani came striding past him, turning at last into the church’s screen door. He remembered his own shoes sinking into the asphalt on that torrid afternoon. He must have followed her down the stairs—that he couldn’t recall—but he certainly did remember the musty basement and the smoky rose of Shivani’s cologne. Only later did he learn that her sister faithfully supplied it twice a year from a certain stall in Connaught Place.

  Jeremy sat panting in the padded chair. And as he spied now the further truth, a new truth, seeping through, he drew his legs up in the hospital gown to his chest and squeezed tight, as if to shut it all away. For it came to him that, vibrant or not, this memory, like the other, had been leeched dry of emotion at its heart. Though he might recall every detail, he felt nothing. The magic that had drawn him to Shivani and bound them together from that distant start, the fatedness and wonder of it all, had belatedly flashed out, fading gray, ashen, leaving behind only the tatty, worn shell of habit and everyday life.

  He might have moaned, but that seemed too dramatic. He felt too little. A strange distance or mutedness had been draped over his past, creating a chasm between a former Jeremy Matthis and the person he felt
himself to be in the here and now. He had changed. That was the thing. His life had changed. Not a lot. But enough.

  It now seemed to him that from the very first moment of waking days earlier, before he’d known where he was or what had happened to him, he’d been flung out stumbling on a journey over which he had no control or compass or guiding star. All he could manage was a kind of awkward staggering forward in the dark. Yet in this late night of the hospital ward, an unmapped land lay stretching before him.

  He was slightly dizzy and his head ached. He realized he was shivering again. Pushing himself up from the chair, he climbed back into the bed. He was breathing hard, and he wrapped his arms about himself. Sleep offered no refuge. His mind remained sharp and clear, and it was racing.

  —

  Only two hours later, never having slept, Jeremy Matthis rose once more and showered for the first time, with difficulty, in the tiny bathroom. He dressed in clothes that Shivani had brought several days earlier to cheer them both with the anticipation of his release, whenever that might be, back into the world. But it was a new world he now intended to enter, making a place for himself as best he could. He carried the largely empty suitcase with him.

  He announced his intentions at the nurses’ station, and after they had remonstrated and warned as he knew they must, they pointed him to the office where he would sign his release, absolving them, the hospital, its doctors and administrators, of all responsibility. Responsibility for himself was precisely what he intended to assume. When the final form was presented for his signature, he wrote the name Jeremy Matthis with a sense of eagerness and a bit of fear, because he suspected it might be the last time. He hadn’t yet decided what would take its place. Or what he would say to Shivani when she surely found him. He knew only that this was the journey, that this was the right path, wherever it might lead him.

  Shruti Swamy

  A Simple Composition

  WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN my parents decided I should take up the veena, and I began to receive lessons from a great musician who had fallen on lean times. I had little talent, and he was a strict teacher. He often yelled me to tears. “These are the fingers of a princess,” he would say, examining my hand for calluses and dropping it with scorn. My palm felt hot as I brought it back into my lap. “Again,” and as I began to play he would take up his instrument in a fit of irritated passion and override me with his music. “Like this.” He had thick brows and a fat, jolly nose that seemed out of character with the rest of his features; he always appeared to be scowling. As he played the veena his face became no more beautiful but it was touched by the grace of the music. His black eyes closed and his fingers moved with a subtlety I could never hope for. A simple composition, like the one he chose for me, became something else in the belly of his veena, something distilled to its essence. A longing for god, or for perfection. A longing for childhood or mother, a longing for lost days, or for a lover. His notes were never singular; he bent them into each other, playing just as time passes, one moment blending into the next. When he finished I could see tears in his eyes.

  I started to practice for hours in the evenings, and my fingertips toughened. I began to love the veena like I would a living thing, feeling tenderness as she lay in my arms, my fingers moving up and down her slender neck. But I could feel my lack of talent as my skill grew. Even to my own ears the music I produced sounded flat and rigid. I could bend the notes and quiver them, but the animating spirit that was supposed to be there underneath never appeared; it was like manipulating a puppet. But I felt it, that ache. Perhaps this is why I fell in love.

  The lessons took place in the sitting room of my house, where my mother sewed clothes for the poor while my teacher scolded me. It was dark in the sitting room—the curtains were always drawn to protect the furniture—and stuffy. The overhead ceiling fan turned too slowly to do more than stir the hot air, and often went off altogether with the power cuts. I had been left alone with my teacher only three times: when the cook had needed special instruction on the night’s meal, when the leather-sole repairman returned with our shoes, and when my youngest brother had fallen from his bicycle and came crying home with a scraped knee. During the first two instances I was tense, but my teacher hardly seemed to notice any change. During the third, he told me, “You’re improving.”

  “Not much.”

  “I can still see the work in your fingers.”

  “You have a gift so you can’t imagine what it’s like not to.”

  He looked at me sharply. He was not a young man. I knew almost nothing about him, where he lived, if he was married. Yet in that look, some knowledge passed to me, innocent as I was, about how he was thinking of me. He was considering me the way men consider women, with a grudging appreciation, even deference to their beauty. I could feel myself grow hot, not just my face, but my entire body, alone in that close room with him.

  “You give yourself an excuse that way. You’re too easily distracted.”

  I can remember being sixteen and feeling that love heavy in my chest. I was shy, with a moon-shaped face and neat black hair, and I was so dark that my marriage prospects would have been grim had my parents not been well-off. At school the girls thought I was dull and ignored me. At home, I had three brothers, all younger, who filled the house with noise, while I, even with my music, occupied the rooms very quietly, taking up very little space and demanding no attention. But attention mattered little to me, and less now that my desire for it was concentrated to a single source.

  When the afternoons became hotter my mother dozed in her chair during my lessons. There was a growing awareness between us, my veena teacher and I. He began to scold me even more fiercely for my ineptitude. But I started to realize that his sharp words were a substitute for something else, and I did not cry. In fact, it was all I could do to keep from smiling. One day, he asked if I could meet him at a park that evening. Not so much asked as told me, quietly but with no sense of wrongdoing, as my mother slept. The park was on the other side of the city, one I had not been to before. I didn’t think my mother would let me go, and in the intervening hours I became more and more agitated trying to think of an excuse. Ultimately, it was simple: I told her I was meeting a schoolmate to study. Since the days were long in summer I would likely be home before dark. She took no notice of the wild look my eyes had. I bathed and put flowers in my hair and wrapped myself carefully in a fresh milk-blue sari. My hands were shaking from excitement as I paid the rickshaw wallah.

  My veena teacher was waiting for me by the entrance. He had not changed out of the clothes I had seen him in last, and was soaked through by his own sweat. He was smoking a beedi, and when he saw me he stubbed it out carefully and put it in his pocket. His face looked rough and unshaven. He asked immediately if I was skipping my evening practice in order to meet with him. I told him I would practice when I got home. We began to walk in the park. It was lush, full of flowers and green trees, but it seemed oddly empty, especially for this time of day. The evening light was becoming a heavy orange, almost metallic. As we moved through the park I realized it was not empty: There were lovers hidden in every corner, behind bushes and low walls, and leaning against the pillars of the crumbling ornamental buildings. Yet he didn’t touch me. He told me that he was four years old when he picked up the veena for the first time: his father’s. His arms were not wide enough even to span the instrument, yet after he managed an awkward hold on it music came to him effortlessly and pierced him with joy. It was the joy, he said, of a loved one returned to you—one thought dead, lost forever. He knew he had only to wait for the skill of his body to catch up to the music inside him.

  Nothing felt like that to me. I didn’t want to tell him so. To me, music was the unity and division of tones, like a painting was the arrangement of colors. Beauty was a mathematical certainty that arose from a precisely correct combination. It was impossible for me to imagine him as a young boy.

  “You didn’t tell your mother where you were going?”


  “No.”

  He nodded. I studied him, his curls, his slender, beautiful fingers encased by rings, which he would take off with a kind of ceremony as he settled down for each lesson. His gaze was directed straight ahead of him, yet I knew that he was aware of me by how he seemed to ignore my presence. Somewhere in the distance, there was an odd sound, like a rusty gate opening.

  “What is that?”

  “A peacock,” he said.

  “No, is it?” I said. I knew the mewling cry of peacocks.

  “There’s something wrong with him.”

  The noise sounded again. And now there was something animal, ragged in it. Then the peacock came into view, brilliant and absurd. He had a strange, almost drunken gait, and when he got closer we saw knots of pink flesh where his eyes should have been. He heard our footsteps scuffing in the dust, and began to panic, running a wide, wavering arc through the dust of the path.

  “What’s happened to him?”

  “Someone’s cut out his eyes.”

  “You think a person did it?”

  “Not a peacock.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  He shook his head. “Poor fellow.”

  We walked for some time and it began to grow dark. The evening had swollen around me, I had sweated through my blouse. I feared I was utterly ordinary. The air smelled thickly of flowers, and in my desperation it became a cloying smell, smothering, and I wanted to pull the jasmine from my hair and throw it on the ground. He took me suddenly by the arm and led me behind a low wall where ten or twenty feet away two people moved against each other in the growing dimness. They made no noise, but I could see them: an unbuttoned blouse, hands that gripped tightly to the naked flesh. The sky was low, pinking. My veena teacher kissed me and put his hands on my breasts. His mouth tasted like the beedi he had been smoking, and some other, sweet-bitter thing—alcohol, I realized later. This should have been the moment of my truest joy, the kind of joy he had described as a young child first picking up the veena. But it felt like nothing, worse than nothing. I did not expect pain—but what had I expected? I started to feel for my voice, at first curiously, then frantically, as he pulled at the fabric of my sari and pressed his flesh into mine. At first I couldn’t find it. Then it was there, small but there, like a little white moth. I felt it come up in my mouth as he moved against me. I swallowed it down.