The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

by Dave Eggers

  Fan Ping said that he was thirty-seven years old and that his mother had died three years earlier. He worked for a gas station, Sinopec, and made four hundred dollars a month. He was one of those known as a guang gun, or "bare branch," unmarried, a victim of demographics in a country where 20 million men went without wives. "What am I supposed to do now?" he said.

  The crowd of onlookers registered their concern and curiosity. Some in the back were laughing, unsure of what indeed was transpiring, or just made nervous by it. I had an irrational flash of hating those people in the back, of wanting to lash out, but all that really mattered was keeping my body between Fan Ping and the railing, in case he made another lunge. Eventually Mr. Chen appeared and dismounted from his moped. On cue, the crowd parted while Mr. Chen stepped forward, invested with the power and understanding of all the nuances at play here. Fan Ping started his story again— army ... sick father ... dead mother ... gas station ... so sorry to try to kill self—and Mr. Chen asked me to let go of the man, something I wasn't at all inclined to do. Then he pulled out a camera and took Fan Ping's picture, which seemed, at best, like an odd way to begin and, at worst, like a major violation of the man's privacy. Then, glaring straight at Fan Ping, who stood slumped and dirty, with bloodshot eyes, Mr. Chen spoke.

  "I should punch you in the face," Mr. Chen said. "You call yourself a family man ... A son ... Chinese? If your father hadn't been in the army, and if you didn't try to kill yourself just now, I'd punch you. You're not thinking—or are you just shirking your responsibility? I really would like to punch you now. Hand over your ID..."

  Fan Ping seemed utterly flummoxed, reaching into his pocket and fishing out his identification card. Mr. Chen made a show of studying it, then derisively handed it back—was this a diversion, part of a new therapeutic method?—and in the same brusque tone asked what in the world was he thinking, coming up here like this? Fan Ping replied that he wasn't thinking at all; he just didn't have the money necessary to care for his father—and that his life boiled down to this vast, sorrowful futility.

  Mr. Chen sized him up again, with a withering look. I could see part of Fan Ping's blue sock poking through the worn leather of his shoe. "Yes," said Mr. Chen dismissively. "We all have our troubles."

  Watching Mr. Chen face off with Fan Ping in that gray late afternoon was like watching twin sons of different mothers: They were both short and stout. Mr. Chen asked Fan Ping where he lived. A country village outside the city. Mr. Chen asked how he'd gotten to the bridge. By foot, from his job. The conversation went on like this for some time while slowly Mr. Chen's tone shifted from outrage and aggression to a more familiar, fraternal concern, even sweetness. "I promise you that there's nothing we can't fix," he said, "but first we have to get you off this bridge." Then later: "I'm here to help you." In his dishevelment, Fan Ping didn't seem capable of movement, as perhaps he hadn't entirely given up on the idea that had brought him here in the first place. And Mr. Chen intuited this. He moved in closer and clasped his hand, a special shake, a locking of pinkies that meant brotherhood, then didn't let go, dragging Fan Ping to the fort and a bus stop there while the crowd followed. He arranged for Fan Ping to meet him at his office first thing Monday morning. He wrote the address on a scrap of paper and stuffed it into Fan Ping's pocket. He punched the digits of Fan Ping's cell-phone number into his own.

  "You promise you'll be there," Mr. Chen said.

  "I will," said Fan Ping.

  "Unless you try to jump off the bridge between now and then," Mr. Chen deadpanned. It wasn't quite a joke, but Fan Ping laughed, as did several in the crowd looking for some sort of release—and then Mr. Chen made it all okay by laughing, too.

  Meanwhile, the student reporter from Shanghai grabbed me, tottering on high heels, and asked if she might conduct an interview. Not waiting for an answer, she began peppering me with questions, compensating for my lack of Chinese with her almost-English: "Do American engage in this so-called suicide event?"..."From bridges is always the favorite, no?"..."Does American—you—have fixes for problem?"..."Do you also enjoy Sex and the City?"

  I couldn't even pretend. My hands, which rarely shake, were shaking. And I floated from my body, watching Mr. Chen and Fan Ping walk ahead, watched—from some high, hovering angle—as Mr. Chen placed the man on a bus and Fan Ping squished down the aisle in his disintegrating shoes and took his place by the window, looking straight ahead. The bus gurgled, backfired, then lurched forward, gone in a plume of gray smoke. That's when some part of me came tumbling back down to myself. I turned and strode back out on the bridge to the spot where Fan Ping had readied to die. I came to the railing, peered down once more to the dark, roiling waters, and felt as if I might regurgitate my lunch noodles.

  There would have been no way to survive that fall. And for some reason, standing there, I felt a sharp pang of loss, though no one had been lost. I felt I'd been a step too late, though I'd been one step ahead. It wasn't Fan Ping I was thinking about; it was all the other lives—within me and disparate from me—that had been lost. Yanking Fan Ping from the railing hadn't offered a stay of any kind; instead, it brought death nearer. Mr. Chen wasn't a caricature but a bearer of so much imminent grief. I was bound to him by a feeling Mr. Chen had elucidated for me in one of our talks, a feeling of standing in a spot like this on the bridge, after an incident like this, hovering between heaven and earth, "heart hanging in air."

  Back at home, the months passed, and so the day-to-day reas-serted itself. And yet sometimes, randomly, Mr. Chen appeared in my mind, standing guard at his station at the South Tower, scanning the crowd. And on those few occasions when I found myself describing what happened on the bridge to friends, I could hear my voice retelling the story of Fan Ping, and it sounded preposterous, even delusional. It sounded as if I might be a man of comical self-importance or full of conspiracies, the sort who wears a hat that reads They spy on you. Soon I stopped mentioning it altogether. After Fan Ping pulled away on the bus that day, I had joked with Mr. Chen about catching up to him on the big scoreboard of lives saved.

  "It's 174 to 1," I told him. "Watch your back."

  He smirked dismissively and said: "You're only given a half point for that one."

  As it turned out he was right again. He already knew what I'd later find out. That is, if I'd ever imagined saving someone from a bridge, it probably would have been a fantasy bathed in altruistic light, in which I ... SAVED ... A ... HUMAN ... LIFE! But then it slowly dawned on me: I'd tried to stop Fan Ping merely so I wouldn't have to live with the memory of having watched him fall. My worry now was that he would somehow succeed in trying again.

  So I contact Mr. Chen. He tells me that on the Monday morning after Fan Ping tried to kill himself—the morning that the two men were supposed to meet at his office—Mr. Chen arrived at work and his boss promptly fired him. He left the office building immediately and went to his station at the bridge, not so much because he was despondent but because that was where he felt he belonged. All the while, he dialed Fan Ping's number over and over again, but the phone was out of order. And remained that way, all these months later.

  There's nothing to do now, says Mr. Chen, but wait for him to come back. Rest assured, he'll stop Fan Ping. Even as he's recently saved a father, and a few students, and a woman with a psychiatric problem. He knows what Fan Ping looks like. In broiling heat and blowing monsoon, he's out there, ever vigilant, waiting in his double duck-bill, scanning the crowd for Fan Ping—and all the others, too, who might possess thoughts of a glorious demise. He assures me he'll be waiting for them all—and you and me, as well—binoculars trained on our murky faces, our eyes sucked downward, trying to read the glimmer off the surface of the river below.

  The only question remains: Can he reach us in time?

  Homing

  Henrietta Rose-Innes

  FROM Agni

  BEFORE, IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN a good road.Never big or busy,but alive, with an open feel despite the cul-de-sac. Ray and Nona's
house took up one side, and opposite them was a sports field, ringed by shaggy eucalyptus trees. Unusual, fortunate, to have so much green space in the middle of town. People came past all the time: dog walkers, soccer players, domestic workers taking the shortcut down to the taxi rank. Somewhere among the houses on the far side of the field, a man kept homing pigeons. In the evenings you could hear his looping whistle and see the flock turning, specks against the blue of Table Mountain. Nona and Ray always listened for the birdman's call.

  At the end of the road was the face-brick retirement home. "Look at the oldies," Ray said, watching through their kitchen window as a posse of ancient women—and one man—ventured out from the home. It was a short walk down to the shops on the main road.

  "Don't laugh. That's us, all too soon," said Nona.

  "Doesn't bother me," said Ray. "Potter down to the shops, read the newspaper, have a cup of tea. Looks all right."

  This was pretty much their schedule anyway. Nona was in her early sixties, Ray five years older. She'd done secretarial work and he'd been a safety inspector, but that was all in the past now. Although they were both in good health, it was easy to imagine the years ahead, living where they did. One day she and Ray would pack a small overnight bag, close the door behind them and simply walk up the road, into old age. And he was right: it wouldn't be so bad. They'd stroll around the field in the evenings, arm in arm. She wasn't ready for it yet, but she was also not afraid.

  So it was upsetting when the old-age home closed down. Ray and Nona read the news in the paper, but by then it was a done deal. Overnight, all the residents were bussed out to bigger institutions in the bleak northern suburbs, far from the old part of town. The place stood vacant for barely a week before the workmen arrived, throwing up hoardings across the facade and also, shockingly, around the perimeter of the field. A high wall rose at amazing speed and was painted a peachy pink, and behind it there reared the pink backside of a new hotel. The noise of construction, which went on for months, was unbearable, but the greatest affront was the size and fleshy colour of the thing. Set down like a giant Monopoly piece, fatly overflowing its Monopoly square, the hotel filled up the space where the old-age home had been, and then turned the corner in an L and filled the space directly opposite Ray and Nona's kitchen window too. Brash, three stories tall, and featureless except for a row of mirrored windows that faced them over the top of the new wall.

  "Are they even allowed to do that?" asked Ray.

  "They already did," said Nona.

  And at a stroke, the road was mortally wounded. Nobody rode a bicycle past Nona's kitchen window any more, nobody walked a dog. The birdman fell silent: the sky in which his flock once stirred had turned into pink-painted plaster.

  As the weeks wore on, the tar cracked and developed sunken patches. Dandelions grew up between the pavement edging stones. No council workers came to clean, to clear the drains or fix the potholes: it seemed the road had been erased entirely from the city maps. In dying, it gave off the sweetish, not unpleasant smell of living matter breaking down, like compost.

  It had long been a habit of Nona's, a little game, to look around at the city and think, How long would it last, if people were to vanish overnight? How many months or years before the bush came back, before birds made nests in the office blocks and troops of baboons started lifting chunks of tar from the road?

  Not long, she realised now. Not long at all.

  The new wall remained flawless. The paint was good stuff: it did not flake or puff with damp. Everything else in the alley, however, was in decline.

  What disturbed Ray and Nona most was the least material of things: the light. The house was much darker than before, and the road almost always sunk in shade. They noticed it especially in the mornings, when bars of pale gold used to drop through the kitchen window, illuminating the cornflakes and coaxing the two of them into the day. The sunlight still came in, but at the wrong time, and from an unnatural direction—east in the evenings. The first time it happened, Ray went outside to investigate.

  "It's the windows," he called back into the house.

  Nona joined him. The alleyway was strangely lit, as if with several weak spotlights. Indeed, it was the mirror-glass windows of the hotel, three stories up, reflecting the evening light. The new hotel had not only stolen their sunrise, it had slipped them this phony sunset in exchange.

  "Well, that takes the cake," she said, eyes stinging slightly from the glare. Ray said nothing, just fetched a stiff-bristled broom and started sweeping away the last of the sand left on the pavement by the builders.

  "It would be baboons," Nona explained once again. "They're clever, and strong, and they've got fingers. Plus those teeth."

  "I disagree. Dogs. Dogs would rule. The pack instinct would take over." Ray was almost horizontal on the deckchair as he spoke, staring at the sky, although there was less of it now than there had been. They'd taken to sitting in the alley in the oddly lit evenings, as if it were part of their property.

  "Well. Maybe, for a while. But the baboons would win out in the end. One on one, I'd put my money on a big male baboon. Dogs are too soppy. Half of them would pine away for their owners. They'd just lie down and die. And they wouldn't be able to open tin cans and things."

  Nona could picture this all quite clearly, and with a kind of satisfaction: the baboons roaming the aisles of the abandoned supermarkets, the ravening dogs locked outside. Baboon babies playing on her kitchen table.

  "Okay," conceded Ray. "Maybe baboons—on the ground. But the pigeons would do fine too. They'd carry on as per normal."

  This was true. She liked that about birds. How they were adaptable, and took advantage. Walls were no problem, they could use walls, but they could also coast right over them if need be.

  The deckchairs were Ray's idea, his way of making peace with the new lie of the land. But for Nona, although she took her place next to him in the evenings, the resentment did not fade. Every glance at the bland pink wall was a small humiliation. She wondered if there were wealthy guests already in the rooms, behind the glare of the windows: German tourists, Brits, Americans. She stared at the panes quite frankly, confident that no one was looking back. Those windows were not watchful eyes. They were more like expensive sunglasses: whoever was behind them wouldn't care to gaze down on Nona and Ray.

  "Miss those birds," said Ray, blinking up at what was left of the sky.

  And then one evening the pigeons came, a cloud of them, nine or ten, settling and separating into a row on top of the boundary wall. Ray saw them first, as he and Nona were eating an early dinner at the kitchen table.

  "Look who's here!"

  "What? Who?"

  "The birds, the birds! The birdman's birds."

  "How can you tell?" Nona peered through the window. They looked like regular street pigeons to her. Or were they sleeker, with a pedigree shimmer to the wings, and especially finely sculpted heads and beaks?

  Ray hurried outside with a couple of crusts. The birds seemed to have been waiting for him: when the bread hit the ground, they descended, cooing and beating the air.

  "Hungry," said Ray.

  "Nonsense. A pigeon will never starve." Although who could say, with these fancy racing birds?

  "And lost. They don't know the way home with this blooming big wall here."

  "They're homing pigeons. They know the way."

  "No, they do get lost," said Ray. "I read about it. They have magnets in their heads, and they get ... I don't know, depolarised." He brushed the last crumbs off his palms, thoughtful. "Poor little buggers."

  Now, on schedule, came the light from above, that unnatural flash that hurt Nona's eyes. For a moment she saw a great bird settling over them, a firebird with its wings outstretched.

  "That's what it is," Ray said. "The light, the reflections. It's confusing them."

  "Well. They probably have lice. Or bird flu. They look a little off."

  The next day, Ray went out and bought a sack of birdsee
d, and after that the pigeons came twice a day, which Nona thought was excessive. Mornings and evenings, they sat waiting for him in a row on the wall, raising their tails to defecate. At least, thought Nona, most of them faced the alleyway, shitting judiciously down onto hotel property.

  They read in the "Tonight section of the Cape Argus that the hotel was a luxurious place, patronised by politicians and celebrities, both local and international. Some evenings they could hear the revels: laughter, music. On one occasion, fireworks. But no gaiety spilled over the wall onto Ray and Nona. All they got was the coloured glaze of party lights reflected in the windows, and the vibrations of popular songs through the bricks.

  Nona moaned about the noise going on till all hours. Ray didn't seem to mind so much, or even to notice. Twice a day the birds came to his feet, and he fed them. Nona, though, felt on edge, distracted by the flare of the evening sunlight and then the shadow that followed. Even as the hotel lit up for the evening, gloom gathered at the base of the wall and flooded the alley to its mouth.

  What she did not confess to Ray was how the pulse of the music also excited her—even prone on the ratty deckchair, on the shady side of the wall, among the dandelions and pigeon crap. It made her shift and sit up, straining to decipher the noises. Shrieks of pleasure. Crashes, laughter. A girl pushed into the pool? A smashed champagne glass? Once, sitting there beside Ray, she heard the distinctive pop and fizz of a champagne bottle, and then—miraculous—a cork came flying over the wall and landed in her lap. She held it up to Ray, eyes wide, but he was half-asleep and hadn't seen.