The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

by Dave Eggers

  Abner Harris raised his hand. Ms. Swenson never did learn not to call on him. Perhaps she was distracted by the glimmering vision of wigwams in her mind, a whole village of them where she might have lived gently and happily in the absence of us. "Yes, Abner?" Ms. Swenson said.

  "Is that what holes are always there for?"

  "Is what what they're always there for, Abner?"

  "So smells can escape? Is that what, like, Sarah's hole is there for?"

  "Sarah's hole?" Ms. Swenson said, musingly, failing for so long to understand, though Sarah was already blushing. When Ms. Swenson got there, two high red spots appeared on her cheeks. "Abner, that is inappropriate," she said and yet managed to sound as if she were asking his permission to reprimand him.

  "What is?" Mock innocence was mortally wounding to her; she couldn't help taking it at face value. We waited, snuffling into our hands and tasting the salt of our palms, chewing on the skin around our fingernails with the glee of what was coming: her floundering speared-fish flopping.

  "To speak about the..." flop, flip, "private parts of others."

  "But Ms. Swenson," said Billy Nichols, drawn to the blood in the water, "which parts are private? I forget."

  We squeaked our sweaty hands against our desks in joy. Now she would have to say them, say those words. What could be more wonderful? We would hear them from adult lips.

  And that was when it happened. We would wonder, ever after, what caused it: the force of the bottled-up, forbidden words that we were calling forth or the hammering blows of the humiliation we were delivering. Whether the force came from within or without. Ms. Swenson, in her agitation, flicked her webby hair behind her ear, chalk still in hand, and in the process flicked something off of herself. It flew forth with so much force that the act would have seemed intentional but for the puzzlement on her face. An earring, we assumed at first, but the earrings Ms. Swenson wore were not that large.

  Hannah Perkins, in the first row, began to scream. She was peering over the edge of her desk at the thing on the floor, and she curled her feet up under her as if to keep them away from a mouse. Without consciously deciding to move, we left our seats and clustered around the space in front of Hannah's desk.

  The thing on the ground was an earlobe.

  It looked very fleshy, detached, though Ms. Swenson had never before seemed to have especially fleshy ears. It sat on the ground like a fat, self-satisfied earthworm, one that had perhaps eaten its brethren. Ms. Swenson's small gold hoop earring was still in place, puckering the roundest part of the lobe's belly. There was no blood; there was simply one ragged edge. Naturally, we looked from there to the edge of Ms. Swenson's still-attached ear, the matching puzzle piece, the yin to the lobe's yang. No blood there either. Then we looked at her face.

  "Hmm," Ms. Swenson said. She turned away. We thought she might begin to scream. Instead she went calmly to her desk, swished a tissue from its box, and returned to the lobe on the carpet. She covered it with the tissue, and for a second it seemed she might leave it there, a small sheet over a small corpse. Then, with an expression of distaste, she reached out and lifted it just as she might have lifted a dog turd. She walked back to her desk, opened the drawer, and placed the lobe inside. She shut the drawer softly. Only then did she look at us. She seemed to have just remembered where she was.

  "I can trust you, I think," she said, "not to mention this to anyone." We were surprised by the lack of a question in her voice. We nodded, twenty-six heads in unison, the first grown-up promise we had ever made, one of the few some of us would ever keep. "Now, I believe we were discussing the wigwam."

  Here are the parts that Ms. Swenson lost in the days that followed: the tip of a shoulder, three molars, the end of her nose, her lower lip, and assorted fingers and toes, including all of the fingers of her right hand except the thumb. She still managed to hold the chalk by pinning it between thumb and palm. Her penmanship didn't look too different than usual. We applauded this triumph, literally applauded it with our shamelessly whole hands, and she acknowledged the tribute with a nod before continuing with the lesson. There was something different about these lessons now. We were attending to them anew, horrified, rapt. Ms. Swenson was not a dramatically better teacher than she had been before—she still apologized and bobbled, though the missing lower lip gave her an irritated expression—but we were dramatically better students. We wondered which of her words would move her enough to move a part off of her, and the wondering made us really listen to those words, which made us learn from them, in most of our cases for the first time. We learned to multiply and divide gracefully, to conjugate French verbs, to spell "ambiguity"; we learned the order of Civil War battles and the types of rocks, igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary. This progress was so painless it was scarcely noticeable to us. Ms. Swenson had become a mystery, and so she gained our devotion. Our love and our fear of her grew in direct proportion to the little sheeted lumps in her desk drawers. Once, at recess, Tom Milk brought out a tissue bundle he said he had stolen from the desk; he claimed it was the left index finger we had seen her shed two days earlier. His reluctance to let us see it was the tip-off, though, and when Shawn Greggors seized it from him and shook it out, nothing but more tissues emerged, and they danced merrily away across the pavement. You could not have paid us, any of us, enough to touch the genuine relics.

  It was two weeks from the first earlobe to the culmination. We had all known for days that some end must be nearing, but still we were unprepared.

  Ms. Swenson was explaining the mating rituals of frogs. "The male gives a little call like this: whoo whoooo," she said. She sounded more like an owl. She crouched down to approximate a frog with her carriage. "He tries to call as loud as he can. The female hears the call and thinks, Oh my, what's that? And then she gives a little hop."

  This was where Ms. Swenson forgot her limitations and gave a little hop of her own to demonstrate. It was a small hop, but it was enough. In addition to the thump of her weight as her feet hit the ground, there was a sound like a large wet sock tearing. Both of her legs detached somewhere near the hips and fell away beneath her skirt. Her torso plummeted. "Oof," she said with the impact, and her shoulders separated from her chest, and her head separated from her neck and landed facedown on the carpet.

  There was a silence.

  "Okay," Ms. Swenson said. Her voice was a little carpet muffled, bright with effort. "That wasn't so bad. Not as bad as I thought it would be. Melanie?" Melanie was the girl at whose socks Ms. Swenson was now staring. "Melanie, would you please put me on that chair?"

  Melanie did not want to touch the head, we could all see this, but how do you refuse a request like that? She picked Ms. Swenson up, holding her far away from her own body, and carried her toward a chair at the front of the room. "At least that's over," Ms. Swenson said en route.

  When Melanie put her down, though, we could tell that it wasn't over yet. A great hunk of Ms. Swenson's hair came away in Melanie's hand; Melanie shrieked softly and brushed it off against her pants. Ms. Swenson didn't seem to notice. As we watched, one of her eyebrows lifted from her face like peeling paint and fell in a curl to the seat of the chair. Her upper lip was starting to look crooked. "Children, we must be quick, now," Ms. Swenson said. "It is time for you to show what you have learned."

  We misunderstood her at first. We rummaged frantically for pencils and paper. Some of us set to work multiplying and dividing; others began to spell out previously elusive words. Still others began lists of facts. We could have filled pages and pages with those facts. We could have wallpapered the classroom with them.

  "Not that!" Ms. Swenson said. We looked up at her. An eyelid slipped its moorings. "Is that all you know? Is that all I have taught you?" Her panic had set the eyeball beneath the crazily hung eyelid rolling; we wondered if she could still see out of it.

  We waited for her to regain her composure and tell us again what we were to do. We wanted to please her as much as we had ever wanted anything.<
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  "Why must you persist in aggravating me? You know what I want," she said. "I want to see you come apart. Haven't I been demonstrating for weeks now? Haven't you been paying attention? All of you ought to know how it is done."

  We watched her. Those of us who had understood were hoping we hadn't. Ms. Swenson's patience had run out. "Show me, children!" she screamed. "Perform!"

  But the force of that P was too much; it blew her upper lip clear off. She saw it sail away from her, hit the edge of Melanie's desk, and stick, and she seemed to surrender. We had thought the finale would be spectacular. We had been waiting for days for her eyes to pop cartoonishly, for her to fling a moist slab of tongue toward us. These things did not happen. She just gave a sigh, and the head sank to one side a little, and that was all.

  All except for the feeling that we felt next.

  It began differently for each of us, Ms. Swenson's final lesson. Some of us felt it gathering in the tiny bird-bones of our fingers, some in our hard, pink, healthy gums. For some, it came first to the pristine joints of our vertebrae. For still others, it settled in the unobstructed tunnels, gleaming and smooth, that led into and out of our childish and unscarred hearts. But though it took so many different forms, the beginning itself was universal. Not even the most whole among us was exempt. You would not have seen a difference to look at us, but we had changed, were changing, as our seams learned how to loosen. We were becoming divisible. In this way, Ms. Swenson prepared us. For the future is gated, and there are tolls to be paid.

  Art of the Steal

  Joshuah Bearman

  FROM Wired

  THE PLANE SLOWED AND LEVELED out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998, and the evening wind was warm. If it kept cooperating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target.

  A couple of days earlier, Blanchard had appeared to be just another twentysomething on vacation with his wife and her wealthy father. The three of them were taking a six-month grand European tour: London, Rome, Barcelona, the French Riviera, Vienna. When they stopped at the Schloss Schönbrunn, the Austrian equivalent of Versailles, his father-in-law's VIP status granted them a special preview peek at a highly prized piece from a private collection. And there it was: In a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight-sensitive pedestal—a delicate but dazzling IO-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl. Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try to take it.

  The docent began to describe the history of the Koechert Diamond Pearl, better known as the Sisi Star—it was one of many similar pieces specially crafted for Empress Elisabeth to be worn in her magnificently long and lovely braids. Sisi, as she was affectionately known, was assassinated 100 years ago. Only two stars remain, and it has been 75 years since the public had a glimpse of...

  Blanchard wasn't listening. He was noting the motion sensors in the corner, the type of screws on the case, the large windows nearby. To hear Blanchard tell it, he has a savant-like ability to assess security flaws, like a criminal Rain Man who involuntarily sees risk probabilities at every turn. And the numbers came up good for the star. Blanchard knew he couldn't fence the piece, which he did hear the guide say was worth $2 million. Still, he found the thing mesmerizing and the challenge irresistible.

  He began to work immediately, videotaping every detail of the star's chamber. (He even coyly shot the NO CAMERAS sign near the jewel case.) He surreptitiously used a key to loosen the screws when the staff moved on to the next room, unlocked the windows, and determined that the motion sensors would allow him to move—albeit very slowly—inside the castle. He stopped at the souvenir shop and bought a replica of the Sisi Star to get a feel for its size. He also noted the armed guards stationed at every entrance and patrolling the halls.

  But the roof was unguarded, and it so happened that one of the skills Blanchard had picked up in his already long criminal career was skydiving. He had also recently befriended a German pilot who was game for a mercenary sortie and would help Blanchard procure a parachute. Just one night after his visit to the star, Blanchard was making his descent to the roof.

  Aerial approaches are a tricky business, though, and Blanchard almost overshot the castle, slowing himself just enough by skidding along a pitched gable. Sliding down the tiles, arms and legs flailing for a grip, Blanchard managed to save himself from falling four stories by grabbing a railing at the roof's edge. For a moment, he lay motionless. Then he took a deep breath, unhooked the chute, retrieved a rope from his pack, wrapped it around a marble column, and lowered himself down the side of the building.

  Carefully, Blanchard entered through the window he had unlocked the previous day. He knew there was a chance of encountering guards. But the Schloss Schönbrunn was a big place, with more than 1,000 rooms. He liked the odds. If he heard guards, he figured, he would disappear behind the massive curtains.

  The nearby rooms were silent as Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn't register that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that covered, too: He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth's bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.

  Within minutes, the Sisi Star was in Blanchard's pocket and he was rappelling down a back wall to the garden, taking the rope with him as he slipped from the grounds. When the star was dramatically unveiled to the public the next day, Blanchard returned to watch visitors gasp at the sheer beauty of a cheap replica. And when his parachute was later found in a trash bin, no one connected it to the star, because no one yet knew it was missing. It was two weeks before anyone realized that the jewelry had disappeared.

  Later, the Sisi Star rode inside the respirator of some scuba gear back to his home base in Canada, where Blanchard would assemble what prosecutors later called, for lack of a better term, the Blanchard Criminal Organization. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a criminal mastermind. The star was the heist that transformed him from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal virtuoso.

  "Cunning, clever, conniving, and creative," as one prosecutor would call him, Blanchard eluded the police for years. But eventually he made a mistake. And that mistake would take two officers from the modest police force of Winnipeg, Canada, on a wild ride of high tech capers across Africa, Canada, and Europe. Says Mitch McCormick, one of those Winnipeg investigators, "We had never seen anything like it."

  Blanchard pulled off his first heist when he was a six-year-old living with his single mother in Winnipeg. The family couldn't afford milk, and one day, after a long stretch of dry cereal, the boy spotted some recently delivered bottles on a neighbor's porch. "I snuck over there between cars like I was on some kind of mission," he says. "And no one saw me take it." His heart was pounding, and the milk was somehow sweeter than usual. "After that," he says, "I was hooked."

  Blanchard moved to Nebraska, started going by his middle name, Daniel, and became an accomplished thief. He didn't look the part—slim, short, and bespectacled, he resembled a young Bill Gates—but he certainly played it, getting into enough trouble to land in reform school. "The way I met Daniel was that he stole my classroom VCR," recalls Randy Flanagan, one of Blanchard's teachers. Flanagan thought he might be able to straighten out the soft-spoken and polite kid, so he took Blanchard under his wing in his home-mechanics class.

  "He was a real natural in there," Flanagan says. Blanchard's mother remembers that even as a toddler
he could take anything apart. Despite severe dyslexia and a speech impediment, Blanchard "was an absolute genius with his hands," the teacher recalls. In Flanagan's class, Blanchard learned construction, woodworking, model building, and automotive mechanics. The two bonded, and Flanagan became a father figure to Blanchard, driving him to and from school and looking out for him. "He could see that I had talent," Blanchard says. "And he wanted me to put it to good use."

  Flanagan had seen many hopeless kids straighten out—"You never know when something's going to change forever for someone," he says—and he still hoped that would happen to Blanchard. "But Daniel was the type of kid who would spend more time trying to cheat on a test than it would have taken to study for it," Flanagan says with a laugh.

  In fact, by early in his high school years, Blanchard had already abandoned his afterschool job stocking groceries to pursue more lucrative opportunities, like fencing tens of thousands of dollars in goods stolen by department store employees he had managed to befriend. "I could just tell who would work with me," he says. "It's a gift, I guess."