The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

by Dave Eggers

  John Weber did not seem himself. I found him one morning sitting at the kitchen table, gazing out the window at the mountain. In the next room, I recalled, the head was doing exactly the same thing.

  "John," I said. "What's the matter?"

  "Nothing."

  I stood there, unsure what I should do. Had John Weber just turned down an opportunity to speak? He looked so glum. So serious.

  "No, what?" I persisted.

  He turned to me now, slowly, and regarded me as though he were deciding what sort of person I was, whether I could be trusted with what he had to say. After a moment, he came to a decision.

  "Well, to be honest, for a while, there, I wasn't sure about you. You're a little self-absorbed, you know. But I guess we're really friends now, aren't we?"

  "Sure." I thought of the condom, nestled in its tiny secret bed, and felt guilty.

  "I've decided to ask Sandy to get engaged."

  I tried, but failed, not to say, "Really?"

  "Yes. And if she agrees, I am going to make love with her."

  Regret flooded my body—I had passed up the chance to never hear this!

  "I have a plan," Weber said, brightening. "I'm going to invite her on a hike. Up Mount Peak. And we're going to go all the way to the Beavers sign. And I'll propose to her, and if she says yes, I'm going to point down at our roof and say, 'See that? That's where I'm going to make passionate love to you as soon as we get down there.'"

  "Umm, you want me to make myself scarce?"

  He waved his hand. "Ahh, no, doesn't matter, hang around if you want. Anyway, then we're each going to take a white stone from the Beavers sign and we're going to bring them down here and lay them next to the bed while we do it. That's the plan."

  "There's a big pile of the stones out back," I pointed out.

  "The stones aren't the point, roommate," he said. " Getting the stones is the point."

  "I see."

  "And plus," he said, his dark mood utterly dispelled now, "I have something else for her. A very special thing I've been making."

  "Wow."

  "Do you want to see it?"

  "I think that's just between you two."

  "That's a good point. I can't show it to you. What was I thinking? It has to be pure."

  "That's romantic," I said.

  He was euphoric now. "Really? You think so?" He stood up. "Oh man, this is so awesome. I am so gonna get engaged to her." And before I could stop him, he came to me and hugged me. "Thanks, man. You're the greatest. I was so wrong about you."

  "You're welcome," I said uncertainly, and withdrew from our embrace. Weber threw on his coat and marched out the door, presumably to go set up his Big Day.

  That day came quickly. The following Saturday the two of them appeared at our door in their excursion getups: fleece jackets, tan shorts lousy with zippered pockets (new ones, with more pockets than ever before), sleek boots of synthetic fabrics in natural colors, and matching backpacks with a single, diagonal padded strap. Weber looked elated. Sandy looked skeptical. The backpack strap was very wide and kept pressing into one or the other of her small breasts, forcing her to adjust it every thirty seconds or so.

  "I got us some stuff," Weber said.

  "I can see that," I replied.

  "It's all for our special day."

  Sandy said, "I still don't see what's so special about it."

  "Everything," Weber said, taking her hands. "Everything about it is very special." I caught a glimpse of Sandy rolling her eyes.

  They turned and headed out. But after a moment, Weber came back. He hurried over to me and laid his hands on my shoulders. Even through my oxford shirt I could feel how damp they were.

  "I won't be the same when I come back. You need to understand that, roomie."

  "Okay..."

  "Old John Weber will be no more." His face appeared beatific, or perhaps just flushed. "You won't be able to count on my advice—new John Weber might be beyond all that. So I just want to tell you now—you need to change, too."

  "Do I?"

  "Put it all behind you. The trains and stuff. All your Internet groups. Find purpose for your life. That's all." He lifted his hands and brought them down on my shoulders a second time, perhaps a bit too heartily.

  "Did you look on my computer?" I asked him.

  But he only shook his head, his real head, the less intelligent of the two. "So long," he said, and marched out the door.

  Here's what had happened the night before: I strolled right into the fishing and hunting shop just before it closed and asked Ruperta if she'd let me take her out to dinner. She said yes. We got into her car and drove east around Mount Peak, and then south behind its much more impressive twin, Mount Clark. Eventually we came to the large log structure that housed Pappy's Best Steaks Ever Grill, where, if you had the money and, more importantly, the desire, you could walk around back and pick out, from a meadow, which grassfed steer you wanted to eat that night. They would slaughter it on the spot, and when you were through eating, they would load the leftover butchered cuts, wrapped in white paper and packed into cardboard boxes, onto the bed of your pickup truck.

  We did not choose that option, though. Ruperta had some prime rib and I ordered barbecued chicken.

  "You're not going all hippie vegetarian on me, are you?" she asked.

  "Chicken's not a vegetable," I argued.

  "It's close."

  We didn't say much during the meal. Afterward we drove out to the all-night shooting range and I watched Ruperta spray a man-shaped target with hot lead underneath the arc lights. I was impressed—she was very good. When she was through we sat in the car and made out, and she lay her fat little hand on my crotch.

  "Is this real?" she quipped.

  "Ha ha."

  "You should know I slept with my boss a couple of times."

  "Oh," I said. I had assumed, of course, that she would go seeking amorous companionship, but it was hard to imagine it really happening. I felt very small.

  She frowned and removed her hand. "Hmm. Just like old times."

  And so all this was on my mind as I sat and watched through the kitchen window as Weber and Sandy scaled the mountain. Now, I am not big on epiphanies. But as their bunched, indistinguishably hairy calves vanished from the frame, I felt a bottomless hole open up in the floor of my soul, and I knew with sickening certainty that if I did not leave this place immediately, I was going to die here. John Weber would marry his weathered nymph, and they would keep me, like a son or drooling pet, in this hideous little clapboard prison. Or worse, Sandy would decline to wed, and then Weber and I would be alone. One way or another, I would never escape Weber. His avidity was more powerful than my aversion. He had a life-force—he had joie de vivre. All I had was a collection of train books and an intimidating ex-girlfriend.

  Maybe he was right about me.

  I went to Weber's room and pawed, once again, through his possessions. I had my own things, of course, mementos of an unremarkable life, stored away in boxes and crates in the closet, but they didn't interest me. I knew Weber's better than mine. The head still stood on its pedestal, gazing out at the mountain's cheesy face, and was I imagining it, or did it look a little smugger these days, a little more glib? I don't know what made me do what I did next—some uncharacteristic upwelling of personality, maybe—but I dropped the packet of state-themed postcards I was holding, took three steps across the room, and mashed in Weber's nose with my thumb. I gasped, as if having just watched someone else do it. The face was ruined of course; the jolly ape Weber had always secretly resembled was revealed in all its glory, with my whorled print in the center of it.

  That was that. I was gone. I would leave it all behind. I ran to the bedroom; snatched up my wallet, an extra pair of eyeglasses, and my only pair of clean socks; and bolted for the door, shouldering on my coat as I went.

  I made it to the middle of the gravel lot before I changed my mind. The air was chill, the sun was nowhere to be found, and I ha
d already lost heart. I couldn't just leave. I couldn't just start over. What had I been thinking? I was not that kind of man; rather, I was the kind of man who endured, ignored, and took his lumps. Perhaps I could mound the nose back into shape. I turned and drew a deep breath.

  There was a rumbling. Thunder, I surmised—or a big rig passing on the freeway. But I could feel it in my stomach, in my bowels, and I knew that this was something else, a new sound, low and terrible.

  A moment later, dozens of animals, their patchy fur standing on end, came pouring around the sides of our building—squirrels, deer and elk, grouse and chukkar, a mountain cat and a lone galloping moose—and streamed past me as if I were a rock or tree. I did not understand what it was I was seeing. The animals fled, the rumble grew in intensity, and I looked up to see an avalanche fast approaching, scouring the mountain clean: a white wave of little boulders, ten years of Sisyphean teenage ambition loosed from the tyranny of the text. The BEAVERS sign, ruined, and on the rampage.

  A hundred lifetimes might have passed in those awful moments, as the stones screamed down the rock face—a hundred of my lifetime, anyway, which might as well have been lived in a second, for all the good it had done anyone—and buried our lousy little shack of a home. Buried is the wrong word, perhaps. Annihilated is more like it. Our apartment unit, all of the apartment units, were crushed. The wave stopped at my feet, half-surrounding me in an implausible arc of evident magnetic repulsion, and I stood there blinking at the dusty ruins.

  Of course there would be lawsuits, lots of them. There would be resignations, elections, excuses, exhortations. The landlord would flee. The Open Space Committee would be formed. The high school would change the name of its mascot. And, in time, the crushed bodies of Weber and his girl would be found in the rubble, and upon her broken finger, an engagement ring. This last, of course, is the detail that would be best remembered: a love so strong, it brought down a mountain.

  My own life, though, would never be so romantic. I would merely shack back up with Ruperta, regain my potency, and happily apply myself to a life of connubial resignation. When a heart attack claimed her lovesick employer, Ruperta would buy the business for a song and open three more across the state. She would become mildly famous throughout the region for her amusing television ads in which she lured whitetail deer with a come-hither glance. And when I proposed marriage to her, she would respond by driving us to the courthouse to get it over with.

  As for Mount Peak, it still stands, renamed Mount Sandy, thanks to the passionate lobbying efforts of Weber's fiancee's mother and father. (Weber's family, for their part, just wanted to put everything behind them.) Nature has been allowed to reclaim it—the logging roads closed, the housing project bulldozed, the forest reseeded. From our taxidermy-festooned house across town, the saplings seem to shroud it in a haze of new green, like a girl in a peek-a-boo teddy. By the time we're old, it will be wearing a heavy coat, like a stout old fellow with a war wound.

  This I am looking forward to seeing from the picnic table on the back deck, where I have learned to tie flies for my domineering wife. It is a pastime designed to endure, a tedium of infinite small variations. Weber was right about me, that I would be better off with some kind of purpose. I'm not a man, not really, just the gray clammy shadow of one—startlingly realistic at times, sure, but the product of hands not my own. I sit, bent over my vise, under the watchful eye of Mount Sandy, and expect to be here, still doing the same thing, when I drop dead of old age.

  For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question

  Mac McClelland

  FROM Mother Jones

  "DO YOU WANT A CIGARETTE?" I ask Htan Dah, holding up a pack of Thai-issue Marlboros. We are sitting on opposite sides of a rectangular table, talking over the spread: three bottles of vodka, two cartons of orange juice, plates of sugared citrus slices, nearly empty bottles of beer and bowls of fried pork, sweet corn waffles, pad thai, a chocolate cake. We share the benches with two guys each, and half a dozen others hover.

  The men are all in their twenties. Most of them are solid and strong and hunky; their faces shine because they're drunk, and it's July. They could be mistaken for former frat boys unwinding after another tedious workday.

  Except that they're stateless. They are penniless. They speak three or four languages apiece. Two of them had to bribe their way out of Thai police custody yesterday, again, because they're on the wrong side of the border between this country and the land-mine-studded mountains of their own. Htan Dah's silky chin-length hair slips toward his eyes as he leans forward. My Marlboros are adorned with a legally mandated photographic deterrent, a guy blowing smoke in a baby's face, but it doesn't deter Htan Dah. Nor is he deterred by the fact that he doesn't smoke. Tonight, he is flushed with heat and booze and the virility and extreme hilarity of his comrades. Tonight, as always, he is celebrating the fact that he's still alive. He takes a cigarette. "Never say no," he says, and winks at me.

  ***

  I'd arrived at Mae Sot a few weeks before. This city in western central Thailand is a major hub for people, teak, gems, and other goods that enter the country illegally from Burma. The place is rife with smugglers, dealers, undocumented immigrants, and slaves. My bus arrived in the late afternoon. I wasn't connected to any aid or charity organization—I'd just happened on a website of a group that said it was promoting democracy in the Texas-size military dictatorship of Burma, and eventually volunteered, via e-mail, to help its activists living in Thailand learn English. (As I was to discover, the particulars of their mission were far more dangerous, and illegal, so I'll refer to them as Burma Action.)

  At the station, I was met by The Guy, whose name wasn't The Guy, but whose actual name I didn't catch when he mumbled it twice and then just shook his head and laughed when I asked him to repeat it one more time. After a brief ride in a three-wheeled tuk-tuk, we arrived at a gold-detailed black gate that stood heavy sentry at the road. Behind it stood Burma Action's local HQ, a big but run-down house, two stories of worn wood and dirty concrete with a balcony on the left, cement garage on the right. The Guy gave me a quick tour. The "kitchen" had a sink and some dishes; cooking took place out in the dining room/garage. He took a few steps farther. "Bathroom." He gestured into a cement-walled room through an oversize wooden door. There was a squat toilet set into the floor, and in lieu of toilet paper a shallow well with a little plastic bowl floating on top. There was also, running the length of the left wall, a giant waist-high cement trough filled with water and dead mosquitoes.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "A bath."

  I looked at it, jet-lagged. "How does it work?" I asked.

  He exhaled hard through his nose, a whispery snort. "Like this," he said, pantomiming filling a bowl with water and dumping it over his head. "Are you hungry?"

  I asked The Guy what was in the soup he offered me.

  "I don't know the word in English," he said. "Leaves?"

  Close. Twigs, actually. The Guy pulled a stump of wood up next to me at the table, and watched me chew through the sauteed woody stems.

  "So, where are you from?" I asked.

  "Me?"

  I nodded.

  "I am kuh-REN. Everybody here, we are all kuh-REN."

  Oh, man. It was starting to come together now.

  When I'd landed in Bangkok, a Burma Action employee had picked me up at the airport to make sure I found the bus station and the right eight-hour bus north. She was tiny and Thai and heavily accented, and repeatedly told me during our cab ride that everyone I was about to be working with was Korean. It seemed sort of weird that a bunch of Koreans would move to Thailand together to work for peace in Burma, but I thought that was nice, I guessed, and even wrote in my journal, relievedly, "Koreans tend to have excellent English skills."

  When I'd arrived at the Mae Sot bus station, The Guy had asked if I was his new volunteer.

  "Yes," I'd said. "You're not Korean."

  I'd done my homework before leaving the States.
I had read about the Karen. But I'd only seen the word written down, and had assumed that it sounded like the name of my parents' blond divorced friend. I didn't know how it was pronounced any more than most Westerners would've been certain how to say "Darfur" 10 years ago.

  When I turned the corner from the kitchen into the large living room, four pairs of dark eyes looked up from a small TV screen. I smiled, but The Guy, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, didn't make any introductions, so I sat on the marble floor among the legs of the white plastic chairs the guys were sitting in, quiet amid the rise and fall of their soft tonal syllables, deep, bubbling, like slow oil over stones. The TV blared Thai. Mosquitoes sauntered in through the screenless windows, possible hosts to malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis. I'd no natural resistance to the latter two, and I'd opted against taking the sickening drugs for the former. Not wanting to be the white girl who ran upstairs to hide under a mosquito net at dusk, I watched the guys laughing and talking, like a partygoer who didn't know anyone. I pulled my air mattress out of my bag and started blowing it up. I got bit. I scratched. I shifted my sit bones on the shiny tile. Finally, I stood up.

  "I'm going to bed," I told The Guy.

  He nodded, and looked at me for a second. It was 7:30. "Are you okay?" he asked. I'd just taken twenty-seven hours of planes and automobiles. I'd glanced at the phrases "Forced marriage" and "Human trafficking" on a piece of paper taped to the wall behind the computers in the adjacent room. I said that I was fine and headed upstairs. I dropped my air mattress under the big blue mosquito net and lay down. I had no real idea who these people were, or what they did here, or even what I was supposed to do here. I appeared to have my work, whatever it was, cut out for me, since The Guy (real name: The Blay) seemed to be among the few who spoke English. My digestive system had its work cut out for it, too, since these guys apparently ate sticks. Lying there, listening to my housemates laugh and holler downstairs, I comforted myself with the thought that these Karen seemed nice. I couldn't have guessed then, drifting to sleep to the sound of their amiable chatter, that every last one of them was a terrorist.