The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

by Dave Eggers

  He orders Alice Bhatti to put her tray and bandages down, which she does. She has realized that Teddy is serious. Suicidal serious maybe, but he is the kind of suicidal serious who in the process of taking their own life would cause some grievous bodily harm to those around them.

  Ortho Ward is unusually quiet at this time of day. Number fourteen, who is always shouting about an impending plague caused by computer screens is calm and only murmurs about the itch in his plastered leg. A ward boy enters the corridor carrying a water cooler on a wheelbarrow, and when he sees Alice and Teddy, he stops in his tracks. Embarrassed as if he has stumbled on to someone's private property and found the owners in a compromising position, he backtracks, taking the wheelbarrow with him. Sister Alice doesn't expect him to inform anyone.

  "What do you want, Mr. Butt?" Alice Bhatti tries to hide her fear behind a formal form of address. She has learned all the wrong things from Senior Sister Hina Alvi.

  "You live in my heart," Teddy Butt wants to say but only jabs the air with his Mauser, five times. In her limited experience with guns and madmen, Sister Alice Bhatti knows that when men are unable to talk you are in real trouble. She looks at him expectantly as if she has understood what his Mauser has just said, likes it and now wants to hear more.

  Mixed-up couplets about her lips and hair, half-remembered speeches about a life together, names of their children, pledges of undying love, a story about the first time he saw her, what she wore, what she said, a half-sincere eulogy about her professionalism which he was sure she would appreciate, her shoulder blades, all these things rush through Teddy Butt's head and then he realizes that he has already delivered his opening line by pulling out a gun.

  Now, he can start anywhere.

  Alice Bhatti thinks that she should not do Sunday shifts any more and instead should help her dad with his woodwork. If she lives to see another Sunday, that is.

  She looks beyond Teddy, outside the corridor; on the top of the stairs a man sits facing the sun like an ancient king waiting to receive his subjects. His legs amputated just above the knees, he sits on the floor, wearing full-length trousers that sometimes balloon up in the wind. He has a stack of large X-rays next to him. He picks them up one by one, holds them against the sun and looks at them for a long time as if contemplating old family pictures.

  Teddy Butt decides to start with her garbage bin. "I go through your garbage bin. I know everything about you. I see all the prayers you scribble on prescriptions. You never write your own name. But I can tell from the handwriting." He sobs violently and holds the Mauser with both hands to steady himself. The muzzle of his gun slides down a degree like an erection flashbacking to a sad memory. Sister Alice sees it as a sign from God. Bless Our Lord who descended from the heavens. God accepts her gratitude with godlike indifference. And Teddy straightens his gun. He seems to have found his groove and starts to speak in paragraphs as if delivering the manifesto of a new political party which wants to eradicate poverty and pollution during its first term in power.

  "The love that I feel for you is not the love I feel for any other human being. The world might think it's the love of your flesh. I can understand this world and their thinking. I have wondered about this and thought long and hard and realized that this is a world full of sinners so I do understand what they think but I don't think like that. When I think about you, do I think about these milk pots?" He waves his Mauser across her chest. Alice looks at his gun and feels nauseous and wonders if the peace and quiet of this corridor is worth preserving. "I think of your eyes. I think of your eyes only."

  The octopus of fear that had clutched Sister Alice's head begins to relax its tentacles.

  In her heart of hearts, Alice, who has seen people die choking on their own food, and survive after falling from a sixth floor on to a paved road, knows that Teddy means every word of what he has said. And he isn't finished yet.

  "I was standing outside the hospital hoping to catch a glimpse of you. It was a full Rajab moon. Then I looked up at the balcony of Ortho Ward and saw you empty a garbage bin. I saw your face for a moment and then you disappeared. Then I looked up again and saw that the moon had disappeared too. I rubbed my eyes, I shut them, I opened them again. I stood and kept looking up for forty-five minutes. People gathered around me, I held them from their collars, made them look towards the sky and kept asking them where the moon had gone. And they said what moon? We have seen no moon. Did you just escape from the Charya Ward? And then I knew that I couldn't live without you."

  A thick March cloud has cloaked the sun outside. The perfect spring afternoon turns into its own wintry ghost. The man with the X-rays is trying to shoo away a kite, which, confused by the sudden change in light, thinks it's dusk, and swoops down in a last desperate attempt to take something home.

  The final bell rings in the neighbouring St Xavier's Primary School and eighteen hundred children suddenly start talking to each other in urgent voices like house sparrows at dusk.

  Alice Bhatti bends down, picks the piss tray from the floor, holds it in front of her chest and speaks in measured tones. "I know your type," she says. "That little gun doesn't scare me. Your tears don't fool me. You think that a woman, any woman, who wears a uniform, is just waiting for you to show up and she'll take it off. I wish you had just walked in and told me you want me to take this off. We could have had a conversation about that. At the end of which I would have told you what I am telling you now: Fuck off and never show me your face again."

  Teddy Butt runs before she is finished. He runs past the legless man, now taking a nap with his face covered with an X-ray, past the ambulance drivers dissecting the evening newspapers, past the hopeful junkies waiting for the hospital accidentally to dispense its bounty.

  As he emerges out of the hospital he raises his arm in the air, without thinking, without targeting anything, and shoots his Mauser.

  The city stops moving for three days.

  The bullet pierces the right shoulder of a truck driver who has just entered the city after a forty-eight-hour journey; his shoulder is almost leaning out of his driver's window, his right hand drumming the door, his fingers holding a finely rolled joint, licked on the side with his tongue for extra smoothness, a ritual treat that he has prepared for the end of the journey. He is annoyed with his own shoulder, he looks at it with suspicion. His shoulder feels as if it has been stung by a bee that travelled with him all the way from his village. His left hand grips the shoulder where it hurts and finds his shirt soaked in red gooey stuff. He jams the brake to the floor. A rickshaw trying to dodge the swerving truck gets entangled in its double-mounted Goodyear tyres and is dragged along for a few yards. Five children, all between seven and nine, in their pristine blue-and-white St Xavier's uniform become a writhing mess of fractured skulls, blood, crayons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer lunch boxes. The truck comes to a halt after gently nudging a cart and overturning a pyramid of the season's last guavas. A size-four shoe is stuck between two Goodyears.

  School notebooks are looked at, pockets are searched for clues to the victims' identities, the mob slowly gathers around the truck, petrol is extracted from the tank and sprinkled over its cargo of three tonnes of raw peanuts. Teddy with his broken heart and the truck driver with his bleeding shoulder both realize what is coming even before the mob has made up its mind; they first mingle in the crowd and then start walking in opposite directions.

  A lonely fire engine will turn up an hour later but will be pelted at and sent away. The truck and its cargo will smoulder for two days.

  In a house twenty miles away a phone rings. A grandmother rushes on to the street beating her chest and wailing. Two motorcycles kick-start simultaneously. Half a dozen jerrycans full of kerosene are hauled into a rickety Suzuki pickup. A nineteen-year-old rummages under his pillow, cocks his TT pistol and runs on to the street screaming, promising to rape every Pathan mother in the land. A second-hand tyre shop owner tries to padlock his store but the boys are already there with thei
r iron rods and bicycle chains. A police-mobile switches on its emergency horn and rushes towards the police commissioner's house. A helicopter hovers over the beach as if defending the Arabian Sea against the burning rubber smell that is spreading through the city. An old colonel walking his dog in the Colonels' Colony asks his dog to hurry up and do its business. A bank teller is shot dead for smiling. Finding the streets deserted, groups of kites and crows descend from their perches and chase wild dogs that lift their faces to the sky and bark joyously. Five size-four coffins wait for three days as ambulance drivers are shot at and sent back to where they came from. Carcasses of burned buses, rickshaws, paan shops and at least one KFC joint seem to have a calming effect on the population. Newspapers start predicting "Normalcy limping back to the city," as if normalcy had gone for a picnic and sprained an ankle.

  During the three-day shutdown eleven more are killed; two of them turn up shot and tied together in one gunny bag dumped on a rubbish heap. Three billion rupees-worth of Suzukis, Toyotas and Hinopaks are burned down. During these days Alice Bhatti is actually not that busy. When people are killed while fixing their satellite dishes on their roofs, or their motorbikes are torched while going to buy a litre of milk, they tend to forget about their ailments, they learn to live without dialysis for their kidneys, home cures are found for minor injuries, prayers replace prescription drugs. Sister Alice has time to sit down between her chores, she has time to take a proper lunch and prayer breaks. Between cleaning gun wounds and mopping the A&E floor, Sister Alice has moments of calm and she finds herself thinking about that scared little man with the Mauser, his mad story about the disappearing moon. She wonders if he is caught up in these riots, if he is still having those dreams. She wonders if she has been in one of his dreams.

  Roger Ebert: The Essential Man

  Chris Jones

  FROM Esquire

  FOR THE 281ST TIME in the last ten months, Roger Ebert is sitting down to watch a movie in the Lake Street Screening Room, on the sixteenth floor of what used to pass for a skyscraper in the Loop. Ebert's been coming to it for nearly thirty years, along with the rest of Chicago's increasingly venerable collection of movie critics. More than a dozen of them are here this afternoon, sitting together in the dark. Some of them look as though they plan on camping out, with their coats, blankets, lunches, and laptops spread out on the seats around them.

  The critics might watch three or four movies in a single day, and they have rules and rituals along with their lunches to make it through. The small, fabric-walled room has forty-nine purple seats in it; Ebert always occupies the aisle seat in the last row, closest to the door. His wife, Chaz, in her capacity as vice-president of the Ebert Company, sits two seats over, closer to the middle, next to a little table. She's sitting there now, drinking from a tall paper cup. Michael Phillips, Ebert's bearded, bespectacled replacement on At the Movies, is on the other side of the room, one row down. Steve Prokopy, the guy who writes under the name Capone for Ain't It Cool News, leans against the far wall. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Peter Sobczynski, dressed in black, are down front.

  "Too close for me," Ebert writes in his small spiral notebook.

  Today, Ebert's decided he has the time and energy to watch only one film, Pedro Almodóvafs new Spanish-language movie, Broken Embraces. It stars Penèlope Cruz. Steve Kraus, the house projectionist, is busy pulling seven reels out of a cardboard box and threading them through twin Simplex projectors.

  Unlike the others, Ebert, sixty-seven, hasn't brought much survival gear with him: a small bottle of Evian moisturizing spray with a pink cap; some Kleenex; his spiral notebook and a blue fine-tip pen. He's wearing jeans that are falling off him at the waist, a pair of New Balance sneakers, and a blue cardigan zipped up over the bandages around his neck. His seat is worn soft and reclines a little, which he likes. He likes, too, for the seat in front of him to remain empty, so that he can prop his left foot onto its armrest; otherwise his back and shoulders can't take the strain of a feature-length sitting anymore.

  The lights go down. Kraus starts the movie. Subtitles run along the bottom of the screen. The movie is about a film director, Harry Caine, who has lost his sight. Caine reads and makes love by touch, and he writes and edits his films by sound. "Films have to be finished, even if you do it blindly," someone in the movie says. it's a quirky, complex, beautiful little film, and Ebert loves it. He radiates kid joy. Throughout the screening, he takes excited notes—references to other movies, snatches of dialogue, meditations on Almodóvafs symbolism and his use of the color red. Ebert scribbles constantly, his pen digging into page after page, and then he tears the pages out of his notebook and drops them to the floor around him. Maybe twenty or thirty times, the sound of paper being torn from a spiral rises from the aisle seat in the last row.

  The lights come back on. Ebert stays in his chair, savoring, surrounded by his notes. It looks as though he's sitting on top of a cloud of paper. He watches the credits, lifts himself up, and kicks his notes into a small pile with his feet. He slowly bends down to pick them up and walks with Chaz back out to the elevators. They hold hands, but they don't say anything to each other. They spend a lot of time like that.

  Roger Ebert can't remember the last thing he ate. He can't remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn't happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory—it wasn't as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz's ear. The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren't they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.

  Ebert's lasts almost certainly took place in a hospital. That much he can guess. His last food was probably nothing special, except that it was: hot soup in a brown plastic bowl; maybe some oatmeal; perhaps a saltine or some canned peaches. His last drink? Water, most likely, but maybe juice, again slurped out of plastic with the tinfoil lid peeled back. The last thing he said? Ebert thinks about it for a few moments, and then his eyes go wide behind his glasses, and he looks out into space in case the answer is floating in the air somewhere. It isn't. He looks surprised that he can't remember. He knows the last words Studs Terkel's wife, Ida, muttered when she was wheeled into the operating room ("Louis, what have you gotten me into now?"), but Ebert doesn't know what his own last words were. He thinks he probably said goodbye to Chaz before one of his own trips into the operating room, perhaps when he had parts of his salivary glands taken out—but that can't be right. He was back on TV after that operation. Whenever it was, the moment wasn't cinematic. His last words weren't recorded. There was just his voice, and then there wasn't.

  Now his hands do the talking. They are delicate, long-fingered, wrapped in skin as thin and translucent as silk. He wears his wedding ring on the middle finger of his left hand; he's lost so much weight since he and Chaz were married in 1992 that it won't stay where it belongs, especially now that his hands are so busy. There is almost always a pen in one and a spiral notebook or a pad of Post-it notes in the other—unless he's at home, in which case his fingers are feverishly banging the keys of his MacBook Pro.

  He's also developed a kind of rudimentary sign language. If he passes a written note to someone and then opens and closes his fingers like a bird's beak, that means he would like them to read the note aloud for the other people in the room. If he touches his hand to his blue cardigan over his heart, that means he's either talking about something of great importance to him or he wants to make it clear that he's telling the truth. If he needs to get someone's attention and they're looking away from him or sitting with him in the dark, he'll clack on a hard surface with his nails, like he's tapping out Morse code. Sometimes—when he's outside wearing gloves, for instance—he'll be forced to draw letters with his finger on his palm. That's hi
s last resort.

  C-O-M-C-A-S-T, he writes on his palm to Chaz after they've stopped on the way back from the movie to go for a walk.

  "Comcast?" she says, before she realizes—he's just reminded her that people from Comcast are coming over to their Lincoln Park brownstone not long from now, because their Internet has been down for three days, and for Ebert, that's the equivalent of being buried alive: C-O-M-C-A-S-T. But Chaz still wants to go for a walk, and, more important, she wants her husband to go for a walk, so she calls their assistant, Carol, and tells her they will be late for their appointment. There isn't any debate in her voice. Chaz Ebert is a former lawyer, and she doesn't leave openings. She takes hold of her husband's hand, and they set off in silence across the park toward the water.

  They pass together through an iron gate with a sign that reads ALFRED CALDWELL LILY POOL. Ebert has walked hundreds of miles around this little duck pond, on the uneven stone path under the trees, most of them after one operation or another. The Eberts have lost track of the surgeries he has undergone since the first one, for thyroid cancer, in 2002, followed by the one on his salivary glands in 2003. After that, they disagree about the numbers and dates. "The truth is, we don't let our minds dwell on these things," Chaz says. She kept a journal of their shared stays in hospitals in Chicago and Seattle and Houston, but neither of them has had the desire to look at it. On those rare occasions when they agree to try to remember the story, they both lose the plot for the scenes. When Chaz remembers what she calls "the surgery that changed everything," she remembers its soundtrack best of all. Ebert always had music playing in his hospital room, an esoteric digital collection that drew doctors and nurses to his bedside more than they might have been otherwise inclined to visit. There was one song in particular he played over and over: "I'm Your Man," by Leonard Cohen. That song saved his life.