The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  “What’s to figure out?” I said. “I’m hurtling through time, strapped to an explosive device, my life. Plus, it’s beginning to look like a photo finish—me first, or the world. It’s not so hard to figure out why I’m not sleeping. What I can’t figure out is why everybody else is sleeping.”

  “Everybody else is sleeping because everybody else is taking pills,” he said. So I got a prescription from him, and I took the pills for about five nights running and flushed the rest down the toilet. They got me straight to sleep all right, before I’d even had a chance to boot up the worries, and I would sleep for hours and hours, but then I would wake completely exhausted, having spent my night fighting my way through dark tunnels that stank of a charnel house, thwarted everywhere by slimy, pulsing lumps, my own organs, maybe, and in the morning, when I’d get to work painting, I seemed to be sloppier, or less demanding than I’d formerly been. Maybe my painting wasn’t any worse than it had been, but I sure didn’t mind enough that it wasn’t better.

  So then, when I stopped taking the pills and it mattered again that my painting wasn’t better, I had to wonder why it mattered.

  I had to face it—my affect was blunted, pills or no pills, unless weariness counted as affect. So, I decided that I’d make myself stop painting for a while, or maybe forever—that I’d stop unless something forced itself on me that I’d dishonor if I didn’t paint better than I was able to. And so I did not send materials on ahead to Ray and Christa’s, because the trip seemed like an ideal opportunity to clear my mind of whatever impediments to that, and even if I was left with nothing in place of the impediments, at least the sun would be shining.

  I heaved my suitcase onto a luggage rack—things had been thought of—to get it out of the way of bugs, even though if there were bugs, I’d probably brought them along in my suitcase, and listed on my feet again. I needed to hydrate, probably, I thought, so I went downstairs and opened the door to the kitchen to search for water.

  A bony little person wearing a red and black checked shirt and skinny red and black plaid pants was sitting at the table, regarding me with huge black eyes that looked as though they were rimmed with kohl. He had a lovely, large, downward-curving nose, and a face so waxen and intense in its penumbra of black curls that it left an afterimage.

  “Am I disturbing you?” he said.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I mean, we’ve hardly met.”

  “The noise?” he said.

  Spread out in front of him on the table were scraps of fabric and colored paper and little figures made out of clay and wood and various other materials, a pot of glue, and some tools, including a little hammer—oh.

  “Hey, I loved Terra Nova Dreaming,” I said. “I really did.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because I could use your opinion on this new one. I want to try running it here, but it’s gotten pretty out of control—there are a lot of characters, including some bats that have to turn into drone aircraft and back again, which is a pretty tricky maneuver. There are a couple of kids from the village who can help me backstage, and Fred can deal with the lights, but I’d appreciate a good supplementary eye out front.”

  “Fred?” I said.

  “A guy who drives and gardens here and stuff. I don’t know what his name really is. That’s what Ray and Christa call him. He’s good at doing things, but he’s a bit erratic, I think. I don’t want to take too much of your time, though. Christa told me you were coming, and I figured you wanted to get your own stuff done, or why else would you be here.”

  “Well, I mean, to relax?”

  “Yeah? You must have a really unusual relaxation technique going.”

  I furrowed. “Why do you …?”

  “Hey, even some of the world’s champ relaxers didn’t show this season—haven’t you noticed? The whole crowd has bailed—all the other freeloaders and the usual apparatchiks … I’m here because I got evicted from my apartment when the arts program at the school where I was teaching got cut, and what with putting the new show together and not exactly having an income, luxury handouts were definitely attractive, whatever the hidden costs. I figured you were coming for some similar reason. Anyhow, the onus is on us, obviously.”

  “The onus …?”

  “The onus? To entertain, to distract, to diffuse, to buffer? On us, as in on you and me? Which is why I hardly ever put in an appearance at the main house, and, as I established the policy immediately, it’s been interpreted as a sign of genius, I hear from Fred, if I understand him correctly. Anyhow, I suggest that you adopt my example. ASAP, in fact, as things are clearly just about to get worse.”

  “Um … I’m kind of way behind you,” I said.

  “Hm.” He looked at me with a blend of interest and distant pity, like an entomologist considering something in a jar.

  “Two things,” he said, and he started in, quietly but implacably, like a fortune teller laying out the pitiless cards.

  “That can’t be true,” I said, when he had trailed off, gazing sadly out the window behind me. “Is that all true?”

  “Have a look,” he said. “See for yourself.”

  So I went to the window, and sure enough, off in the distance were bobbing lanterns, and I could see, as my eyes adjusted, the small line of people straggling down a dirt road toward the water, hauling little carts piled with bundles of stuff.

  “They wait all night for the boats, sometimes longer. First come, first serve, I gather. Even a few weeks ago, you didn’t see this too often, but now there are some almost every night.”

  Apparently most of the people in the area had lived for centuries by working little farms. But a few years earlier there had been relentless rain, and the flooding had washed out the crops, and then there was a second year of that. The third year was a drought, and so was the next one, so none of the new planting could establish roots, and it all blew away. People were exhausting their stores of food, but then Ray bought up lots of the farms, which, under the circumstances, he got at a very good price. And instead of planting grain or vegetables, he planted eucalyptus, which roots really fast, as a cash crop and to keep the bluffs from collapsing. So everyone was happy for a while. But in the summer there had been a few lightning storms, and the high oil content of the eucalyptus was graphically demonstrated when they burst into flame, burning down homes as well as whatever crops were still being grown by anyone who hadn’t sold their land to Ray, and food prices were skyrocketing. So naturally local people who could leave were leaving, and a lot of the foreigners, like Ray and Christa, who had places in the area were pulling up stakes, too. “So, that’s thing one,” Amos said.

  “Thing … one?” I said.

  “And thing two is that Zaffran has rented a place about five miles further up the coast.”

  “Zaffran? You mean Zaffran the model, Zaffran?”

  “Yup.”

  “But what does that, why should that be, oh.”

  “Yeah, it started back in the city, it seems. Or that’s what Christa seems to think. Zaffran’s Roshi is near here, and she comes every few months to study with him. She met him when she was here about a year ago, doing that preposterous spread for Vogue—all those idylls of her and the donkeys and the beaming peasants with the Photoshopped dental work. That’s how that whole donkey ride business started, in fact, with the cute bells and fringe and so on—it was the stylist’s idea. And anyhow, that’s when she took up Zen. There weren’t really any tourists here before the Vogue thing, but now there are plenty, so everyone in the village adores Zaffran because the tourist income is about all anybody here has to live on. And a couple of months ago Ray ran into her at some party at home, and she said she needed his advice about buying a place in the area, and, well, so that’s the story.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Anyhow, the cook is great, Marya, and she’s a real sweetheart. She’ll give you food to bring over here and heat up if you don’t want to eat at the house.”

  “Oh, God. Poor Chris
ta. I just can’t do that to her.”

  “Suit yourself,” Amos said. “But remember that she’d do it to you.”

  His point reverberated through my head like a slammed door. I should go upstairs, I thought, and leave him alone to work, but it was hard to move, so just to stall, I asked him what his new show was about.

  “Same old, same old,” he said. “Never loses its sparkle, unfortunately.”

  And as Amos began to present the familiar elements and entwine them in a simple moral fable, I began once again to feel that I was falling into a dream. There was the castle, the greedy king, the trophy queen. There were the ravenous alligators, watchfully circling the moat. Soldiers in armor poised at the parapet walls with vats of boiling oil at the ready, and behind them, inside the towers, the king’s generals programmed drone aircraft, whose shadows blighted the countryside.

  Who was the enemy? Serfs, of course, potentially, who mined underground caves with the help of pit donkeys, and brought back huge sacks of gold and jewels to swell the royal coffers. Because what if the serfs and donkeys became inflamed with rage? They were many.

  “But what the king and queen don’t understand,” Amos said, “is that the serfs and donkeys are already inflamed with rage, and the bats, who fly between the castle turrets and the mines, are couriers. They’re on the side of the serfs, because they love freedom and flying at night and justice, which is blind, too. And the donkeys, once roused, turn out to be indefatigable strategists.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Interesting.”

  “Yeah? I’m glad. It sure didn’t require much thought. But it’s got possibilities, I guess.”

  “What are you going to call it?” I asked.

  “What will I call it, what will I call it …” His attention seemed to be mainly on one of the little figures, onto which he was gluing something that looked, I noticed, like an orange prison jumpsuit. “Hm. I think I’ll call it The Hand That Feeds You.”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a—”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “It’s a great title. Hey, relax, I’ll find something more appropriate to call it for this audience.”

  “So how does it end?” I asked.

  “I’m not exactly sure yet, but this is what I’m trying out: there’s a huge popular uprising, and for about three minutes, there’ll be a rhapsodic ode, during which the serfs, the donkeys, the bats, and the audience rejoice. The end! everyone thinks. But no, because there’s a second act, and it turns out that the greedy king and queen are only a puppet government, keeping a client state in order for an unseen, unnamed greater power.”

  “You mean, like … God?”

  “I mean, like, corporate executives. And now that the king and queen have been toppled, a state of emergency has been declared and the laws of the land, such as they were, have been indefinitely suspended, and the corporate executives empower the army to raze the countryside and imprison the bats and the king and queen—everyone, in fact, except the strongest serfs and donkeys, who will continue to toil in the mines, but under worse conditions than before.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s very … that’s pretty depressing.”

  “Well, yeah, sure. But I mean, these are the facts.”

  “You know, I’m so tired,” I said. “Who knows what time it is at home. I think I better go upstairs. Do you have any idea where they keep the water?”

  “Here you go,” he said, opening a cupboard that held cases and cases of fancy bottled water. “So, good luck with that relaxing thing.”

  Back up in my room, it seemed to me that I could hear a low, steady rumbling, rising up from the village—just regular night sounds, of course. Just … the night sounds of anywhere …

  I studied the small, white pills Christa had given me. They were not very alarming, swaddled there in their tissue. They hardly seemed to count. Not that anything else did, either …

  I woke up not exactly refreshed, more sort of blank, really, as if the night had been not just dreamless, but expunged. In fact, where was I? I padded across the unfamiliar floor to the unfamiliar window, and the implausible reality reasserted itself. From here, I was looking out at cliffs and the sea, all sluiced in delicate pinks and yellows and greens and blues, as if the sun were imparting to the sleeping rock and water dreams of their youth, dreams of the rock’s birth in the earth’s molten core, the water’s ecstatic purity before it was sullied by life—as if the play of soft colors were the sun’s lullaby to the cliffs and the sea, of endurance and transformation.

  There was no trace of the people I’d seen the night before from the kitchen window. Could the whole conversation with Amos have been an illusion? There was not a ripple on the glassy water.

  A faint jingling was coming my way. I craned out and could just make out one of the local villagers, I presumed, or farmers—a dark-skinned man, wearing loose white clothing and a colorful broad-brimmed hat—leading a procession of little gray donkeys festooned with bells and fringed harnesses and rosettes, picking their way up a steep track, each carrying a big, sacklike tourist.

  I wandered over to my laptop, which apparently I’d left on, and called up my email—the Wi-Fi worked, just as Christa had promised—hoping for something to indicate that the world still in fact existed so that someday I might return to it. And—good heavens—there was something from Graham!

  All the fragrance from the vines outside blossomed in my room, as though there had just been a quenching rain. Happiness slammed through my body. I, in my desolation—despite the distance, despite our estrangement—had evidently succeeded in calling forth the true Graham, not just the apparition who had come to me in the airport. The lavish air enfolded me, and I breathed it in, expanding as though I’d been constricted in cold shackles for a long, long time. I restrained myself for one more voluptuous second, then opened his email.

  Prisoner?—it began—The world is large. You’re only a prisoner of your own fears. If you don’t like it in the prison of your fears, go somewhere else. Or stay there if you need to. But don’t blame me. You obviously expect me to be your solution, as if I were an arcane number of some sort by which you were neatly divisible. Why do you think anybody could be that for you? Why do you think anybody could be that for anybody? I’m not someone who falls short of me—I’m me. I’m not a magic number, I’m just some biped. Look, maybe my soul really is dust, but I mean prisoner? Slippers? Granary? Of course, I really don’t get what you’re talking—

  What? “Prisoner?” “Slippers?” “Granary?” Was Graham cracking up over there in Barcelona? And yet … Had some fleeting thoughts of mine actually reached him, bent, like little bent darts from Cupid? Or what was happening? I’d begun to tingle, as though I were thinning out, strangely; something strange was happening—Oh! No, no, no, no, no, no, no—Graham’s note was a response … a response to … to an email from me—apparently sent at 3 a.m.:

  When you sold me to them—I’d written—did you envision the consequences for me, the wandering in the tunnels, the sunless life underground, lit only by baskets of cold, glittering gems? What did you hope to gain by divesting me? A subsidiary? Gone are my days of sitting at the hearth, embroidering slippers for the little bats—as innocent as the king and queen are vicious—singing all the whilst I adorned the panels of the granary. Your support for their corrupt regime has cost you more than it has cost me! Yes I am a prisoner now, but your soul has turned to dust, these are the facts. The word “l***,” is that what I mean? I “l***” you? I am in a different country and speak a different language, where there is no word for “l***.” Oh Graham, Graham, am I going to die here?

  And then I finished reading his note:

  —about. (As usual, right? I know, I know.) Anyhow, I’m okay, in case you have the slightest interest in the actual me. Barcelona hasn’t really worked out, though, so it’s time to move on, I guess. Europe is really expensive, and it’s hard to get work if you’re not a member of the EU. But Africa is mostly in turmoil, and so is Latin Ame
rica. Australia? What would be the point? China’s impossible, and Japan is hurting these days, obviously. Maybe I’ll come back to the States just to regroup for a bit, though God knows it’s finished there, isn’t it—really, truly finished. Well, I hope you’re okay. You really, really don’t sound okay. Maybe you should see somebody and get some pills or something. Oh, by the way, I had to sell Blue Hill. I wish I didn’t, but I couldn’t bring it with me when I moved, and I couldn’t afford to put stuff in storage, and I figured that you might get some benefit out of the sale because the buyers were crazy about it and they own a lot of stuff, and maybe the guy will commission you to do a mural for one of his banks, or something. I’ll let you know if I’m coming back. Maybe we could get together for a drink. xo Graham

  “Whilst?” I thought—“singing all the whilst?” No wonder I couldn’t sleep—who would allow themselves to go to sleep, with all the stupid, rotting brain trash that would be waiting for you when you got there! How mortifying, how mortifying—and furthermore, Graham was right, if, in fact, I’d ever l***d him, it was the Graham—his very email made it all too clear—of my own devising. I reread what he had written, and then I read it again, and when I had recovered sufficiently I steamed over to the main house, where I found Christa and Ray at lunch, apparently not looking at each other or speaking. “What the fuck are those pills!” I said. “I wrote someone an email in my sleep!”

  Now Ray looked at Christa. “Did you give her one of my Serenitols? You gave her one of my Serenitols, didn’t you!”

  “So what?” she said. “I told you to throw that shit out.”

  I was just standing there agape. “You gave me some pills that make you email in your sleep?”

  “ ‘Some!’ ” Ray yelled. “You gave her some?”

  “I’m sorry,” Christa said to me, “but you said you were desperate. And they don’t do anything to most people.”