The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

by Dave Eggers

  Treasure Hunter's Assistant: Do you think the scroll is beneath the seventeenth-centuryfarmhouse? Or maybe in this dusty urn I just found? Looks like it's from Greece.

  Treasure Hunter in Charge: Nahh. Crack open that keepsake ornament with the glitter bonnet. I'm pretty sure it's in there.

  My thermometer was scroll-free. However, if there was ever any doubt about the thermometer being from the 1800s, I had my answer: in lieu of pendulums and chimes, it was filled with vials of mercury. Not just a bead or two, as in twentieth-century thermometers, but a post-apocalyptic supply dangling from chain after chain. For a moment I entertained the idea that the silver was on the outside of the glass, painted on there for some olden-timey reason I couldn't fathom but which would make perfect sense if explained to me on a guided tour of Versailles. As you can see here,folks, the toilets were sealed shut with beeswax each night. Can anyone tell me why? That's right, to ward offpig ghosts...

  Maybe the vials themselves were empty. But when I turned them upside down, the mercury did what mercury does—holds on for a heartbeat, fighting gravity like ice at the end of a glass before it comes crashing down on your teeth.

  "Fuck."

  "Pardon?" My cabdriver looked at me through the mirror.

  "Rien." I sighed, reattaching the tape. Okay, this is a bit of a problem!.

  Having just checked the airline's website for the most current regulations regarding hair conditioner, I knew that mercury was not among the substances welcomed by the TSA. I think It's generally important—nay, American—to know why you're being told a rule exists. Which is why I went online to begin with. But if it's four A.M. and you're full of French wine, there's really nothing funnier than the TSA website. There is no personality type untouched, no scenario unexplored, no rare-weapons collector unaddressed. The more obscure the warning, the better. I like to think I would be seated next to the guy who pitched a fit because he didn't realize he had to check his throwing stars and "realistic replicas of explosives." He'd probably gnaw his plastic water cup into a shiv out of resentment. It was in the midst of all this that I learned that, in addition to causing lockjawed flipper babies, mercury will eat through aluminum. Which is what planes are made of.

  So it's not actually the explosiveness of mercury That's a problem, no more than the handle of the knife or the center of the throwing star is a problem. You have to be a pretty genius terrorist to know how to make a bomb out of mercury. But you have to be only an average idiot to poke a hole in the plane.

  My plan was, for once, to stay very still and do nothing. In stressful situations, people often talk about a fight-or-flight response. Which, in my opinion, doesn't give enough credit to the more common reaction of curling up into a little ball. My history of explaining myself in Paris was peppered with failure. For once, I made the decision to play it cool. Or stupid. Whichever came first.

  The good news is that I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to be detained by security. Apparently, grinning like a moron as you slide sketchily wrapped prohibited substances through an X-ray machine will not make it okay that you have them on your person. I attempted to buddy up to the security personnel by getting them on my team, being overly cooperative as they escorted me into a small glass-paneled room noticeably reminiscent of the confession booth in Notre Dame. This was not the first time I had been taken to the special "threat to society" security room at the airport. The first time was when I had booked a sudden and nonsensical jaunt to Portugal and back. But at least in that instance, I possessed the confidence of innocence.

  Three guards, two women and a man with boobs, put on latex gloves, and one of them handed me a pair of scissors so that I might autopsy the mysterious package myself. For no particular reason beyond being given a knifelike object, I imagined stabbing one of them with the closed scissors. An excessive means of teaching them the hypocrisies of airport security? Sure, but in the visual, I also knew karate. So I hoped it wouldn't come to that.

  Two of the guards stood behind me as I sliced open the top of the bubble wrap. I thought this would be satisfactory. You could see the wooden top of something decorative. No wires or egg timers here. Still, they encouraged me to keep cutting. As I roughly sliced through layers of tape and plastic, I thought, If I was going to blow up a plane, why would I do it so conspicuously? Terrorism isn't customarily the terrain of reverse psychology. Ceci n'est pas un ticking suitcase! The whole Trojan horse bit doesn't have a place in the era of metal detectors.

  No matter, I still retained a skeptical appreciation for the law. Sometimes the best way to see your tax dollars at work and protectors in action is to get caught yourself. It'S when they gestured for me to take off my shirt that I lost that.

  "Pardon?"

  "Your shirt," said one of the female guards, pointing to make herself clear. In my carelessness with the scissors, I had actually managed to cut my shirt along with the bubble wrap. Surely, I thought, this will get me off the hook. I can't even cut bubble wrap successfully. Who's going to blow up a plane? Not I.

  She picked up the thermometer and held it the way one might hold a rabbit one has just shot. She quickly felt along the body for any irregularities but found none. She set it down and they all ran cotton swabs over the thermometer and consulted their military-style computer. They took turns frowning at one another, then at the thermometer, and then at the hole in my shirt. Something was showing up on the screen, but they couldn't categorize it. Whatever traditional bombs are made out of, this was not it. There must be some rarely registered airport security category that also includes gunpowder. If you are guilty of possession of these rudimentary explosives, men in wigs and brass-buttoned coats take you into yet another room and slap you senseless with their gloves. Only then may you board the plane.

  Man Boobs called in a supervisor, a diminutive but determined gentleman with bags under his eyes that looked like mine but permanent. He asked me to have a seat. He wanted to know where I got the thermometer, and I told him. He wanted to know when I had purchased it, and I told him. He wanted to know if I had purchased it or if someone had purchased it for me, and I told him, adding an "I wish." He wanted to know how much I had paid for it, and I beamed when I told him. But I wasn't about to tell them about the mercury. I had made it this far. The thermometer was the one piece of Paris that was mine. I was a terrible godless lying American idiot, but the fucking thermometer was mine.

  Bracing for the possibility of a lie-detector test, I tried to wind my mind back like a speedometer. Only a few hours earlier I was still ignorant of the thermometer's innards. I looked at the digital clock on the desk. I could feel myself about to confess. All I wanted was to crack open a fleece blanket as the flight attendants encouraged me to peruse my options for duty-free grilling equipment and Clinique.

  "Okay." The supervisor clicked his pen and slid it into his shirt pocket. "Just make sure you declare it at customs when you land."

  You mean if I land, I thought. If I really did have designs on blowing up the plane between here and New York, notifying customs was a bit of a moot point. It made me wonder what else they were willing to let go. I yanked my shirt down so that the hole was more of a slit and less of a belly-button peep show. I put the thermometer underneath my arm like the musical instrument it wasn't. A woman's voice came through the PA system, first in French and then in English. My plane was starting to board. I got up and thanked them for detaining me.

  Game of Her Life

  Tim Crothers

  FROM ESPN The Magazine

  SHE FLIES TO SIBERIA in late September with nine teammates, all in their twenties, much older than she is. When she won the match that put her on this plane, she had no idea what it meant. Nobody had told her what was at stake, so she just played, like always. She had no idea that she'd qualified for the Olympiad; no idea what the Olympiad was. She had no idea that her win would send her to the city of Khanty-Mansiysk, in remote Russia; no idea where Russia was. When she learned all this, she asked just on
e question: "Is it cold there?"

  But here she is, journeying with her countrymen twenty-seven hours across the globe. And though she has known many of them for a few years, they have no idea where she is from or where she aspires to go, because Phiona Mutesi is from a place where girls like her don't talk about that.

  Agape Church could collapse at any moment. It is a ramshackle structure that lists alarmingly to one side, held together by scrap wood, rope, a few nails, and faith. It is rickety, like everything else around it. At the church on this Saturday morning in September are thirty-seven children whose lives are equally fragile. They wander in to play a game none had heard of before they met Coach Robert, a game so foreign that there's no word for it in Luganda, their native language.

  Chess.

  When they walk through the door, grins crease their faces. This is home as much as any place, a refuge, the only community they know. These are their friends, their brothers and sisters of chess, and there is relative safety and comfort here. Inside Agape church it is almost possible to forget the chaos outside, in Katwe, the largest of eight slums in Kampala, Uganda, and one of the worst places on earth.

  There are only seven chessboards at the church, and chess pieces are so scarce that sometimes an orphan pawn must stand in for a king. A child sits on each end of a wobbly pew, both straddling the board between their knobby knees, with captured pieces guarded in their laps. A five-year-old kid in a threadbare Denver Broncos number seven jersey competes against an eleven-year-old in a frayed t-shirt that reads J'Adore Paris. Most of the kids are barefoot. Some wear flip-flops. One has on black wingtips with no laces.

  It is rapid-fire street chess. When more than a few seconds elapse without a move, there is a palpable restlessness. It is remarkably quiet except for the thud of one piece slaying another and the occasional dispute over the location of a piece on a chessboard so faded that the dark spaces are barely distinguishable from the light ones. Surrender is signaled by a clattering of captured pieces on the board. A new match begins immediately without the slightest celebration.

  Coach Robert Katende is here. So are Benjamin and Ivan and Brian. And up near the pulpit sits Phiona. One of two girls in the room, Phiona is juggling three matches at once and dominating them with her aggressive style, checkmating her young opponents while drawing a flower in the dirt on the floor with her toe. Phiona is fourteen, and her stone face gives no sign that the next day she will travel to Siberia to compete against the very best chess players in the world.

  Ice? The opening ceremonies at the 2010 Chess Olympiad take place in an ice arena. Phiona has never seen ice. There are also lasers and dancers inside bubbles and people costumed as chess pieces marching around on a giant chessboard. Phiona watches it all with her hands cupping her cheeks, as if in a wonderland. She asks if this happens every night in this place, and she is told by her coach no, the arena normally serves as a home for hockey, concerts, and the circus. Phiona has never heard of those things.

  She returns to the hotel, which at fifteen floors is the tallest building Phiona has ever entered. She rides the elevator with trepidation. She stares out of her window amazed by how people on the ground look so tiny from the sixth floor. She takes a long shower, washing away the slum..

  ***

  Phiona Mutesi is the ultimate underdog. To be African is to be an underdog in the world. To be Ugandan is to be an underdog in Africa. To be from Katwe is to be an underdog in Uganda. And finally, to be female is to be an underdog in Katwe.

  She wakes at five each morning to begin a two-hour trek through Katwe to fill a jug with drinkable water, walking through low land that is often so severely flooded by Uganda's torrential rains that many residents sleep in hammocks near their ceilings to avoid drowning. There are no sewers, and the human waste from downtown Kampala is dumped directly into the slum. There is no sanitation. Flies are everywhere. The stench is appalling.

  Phiona walks past dogs, rats, and long-horned cattle, all competing with her to survive in a cramped space that grows more crowded every minute. She navigates carefully through this place where women are valued for little more than sex and childcare, where fifty percent of teen girls are mothers. It is a place where everybody is on the move but nobody ever leaves; it is said that if you are born in Katwe you die in Katwe, from disease or violence or neglect. Whenever Phiona gets scared on these journeys, she thinks of another test of survival. "Chess is a lot like my life," she says through an interpreter. "If you make smart moves you can stay away from danger, but you know any bad decision could be your last."

  Phiona and her family have relocated inside Katwe six times in four years, once because all of their possessions were stolen, another time because their hut was crumbling. Their current home is a room ten feet by ten feet, its only window covered by sheet metal. The walls are brick, the roof corrugated tin held up by spindly wood beams. A curtain is drawn across the doorway when the door is open, as it always is during the sweltering daytime in this country bisected by the equator. Laundry hangs on wash lines crisscrossing the room. The walls are bare, except for etched phone numbers. There is no phone.

  The contents of Phiona's home are: two water jugs, wash bin, small charcoal stove, teapot, a few plates and cups, toothbrush, tiny mirror, Bible, and two musty mattresses. The latter suffice for the five people who regularly sleep in the shack: Phiona, mother Harriet, teenage brothers Brian and Richard, and her six-year-old niece, Winnie. Pouches of curry powder, salt, and tea leaves are the only hints of food.

  Phiona enters the competition venue, an indoor tennis arena packed with hundreds of chessboards, and quickly notices that she is among the youngest of more than 1,000 players from countries. She is told that this is the most accomplished collection of chess talent ever assembled, which makes her nervous. She is the second-seeded player for the Ugandan team, but she isn't playing against kids anymore; her competitors are women. She keeps thinking to herself, Do I really belong here?

  Her first opponent is Dina Kagramanov, the Canadian national champion. Kagramanov, born in Baku, Azerbaijan, the hometown of former men's world champion Garry Kasparov, learned the game at age six. She is competing in her third Olympiad and, at twenty-four, has been playing elite chess longer than Phiona has been alive.

  Kagramanov preys on Phiona's inexperience, setting a trap early and gaining a pawn advantage that Phiona stubbornly tries and fails to reverse. After her win, Kagramanov is shocked to learn that this is Phiona's first international match against an adult. "She's a sponge," Kagramanov says. "She picks up on whatever information you give her, and she uses it against you. Anybody can be taught moves and how to react to those moves, but to reason like she does at her age is a gift that gives her the potential for greatness."

  When asked about early memories, Phiona can recall only loss. "I remember I went to my dad's village when I was about three years old to see him when he was very sick, and a week later he died of AIDS," she says. "After the funeral my family stayed in the village for a few weeks, and one morning when I woke up, my older sister, Juliet, told me she was feeling a headache. We got some herbs and gave them to her, and then she went to sleep. The following morning we found her dead in the bed. That's what I remember."

  She tells also of being gravely ill when she was eight. Harriet begged her sister for money to take Phiona to the hospital, and though they were never given a diagnosis, Harriet believes her daughter had malaria. Phiona lost consciousness, doctors removed fluid from her spine, and Harriet was sure she'd have to bury another daughter. She later told Phiona, "You died for two days."

  Harriet, who is often sick, is sometimes gone from the shack for days trying to make money for her family's daily meal of rice and tea. She wakes at 2 A.M. to walk five kilometers and buy the avocados and eggplants that she resells at a street market. Phiona, who never knows when her mother will return, is left to care for her siblings.

  Phiona does not know her birthday. Nobody bothers to record such things in Katwe. Th
ere are few calendars. Fewer clocks. Most people don't know the date or the day of the week. Every day is just like the last.

  For her entire life, Phiona's main challenge has been to find food. One afternoon in 2005, when she was just nine but had already dropped out of school because her family couldn't afford it, she secretly followed Brian out of their shack in hopes he might lead to the first meal of the day. Brian had recently taken part in a project run by Sports Outreach Institute, a Christian mission that works to provide relief and religion through sports to the world's poorest people. Phiona watched Brian enter a dusty hallway, sit on a bench, and begin playing with some black and white objects. Phiona had never seen anything like these pieces, and she thought they were beautiful. She peeked around a corner again and again, fascinated by the game and also wondering if there might be some food there. Suddenly, she was spotted. "Young girl," said Coach Robert. "Come in. Don't be afraid."