The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

by Dave Eggers

  ***

  Along with the field and the retirement home, several other properties had surrendered to the hotel grounds: Nona had to walk all the way around a large and irregular block to get to the entrance. She followed the boundary wall as it crooked left and right, at times trailing a hand on its high-quality matte surface, guessing at what it might conceal. What was the meaning of each swell and dip? What palatial amenities—indoor swimming pool, putting green, tropical glasshouse—could require these annexes and niches, this complex outline? It was impossible, now, to recall what had been there before.

  She came out onto the main road, holding her small bag close, and followed the wall along a last straight run to the entrance. It was a grand, curlicued, wrought-iron thing, painted glossy black. The guard seemed surprised to see a human being on foot at the gates, but opened them a crack to let her through.

  From the entrance ran an avenue of palms. Ahead, the building was indistinct: a shimmer of pink, a suggestion of steps ascending. The palms had not been there before, nor could they have grown so fast. They must've been transported whole from somewhere else, and then stuck into the soil like candles on a birthday cake. Nona remembered seeing a fully grown palm tree travelling down the road some months before, the bole laid flat on the truck bed like a giant's body on a bier.

  She proceeded up the avenue, glancing side to side at the tended lawns, the cool greens and whites of the flowerbeds, the dappled light. There were very few people around. A gardener stood motionless by a wheelbarrow, and a couple of tennis players patted a ball to and fro on a clay court in the distance. The air felt expensive: grass-scented and easy on the lungs. How could this all fit into what had been a small field, a block of fiats, a modest neighbourhood?

  The avenue was long. By the time she reached the marble steps leading up to the entrance, Nona's feet were aching, as if she'd journeyed miles. Inside the high-ceilinged lobby, though, her progress was marvellously eased. The light was subdued and soft music carried her to the front desk—a bank of smooth wood just the right height for weary elbows. Behind it flitted red-coated shadows, attentive and discreet. A young woman with dark eyes, dark polished skin and a red tuxedo jacket came forward, tilting her head.

  "I called yesterday," Nona said. "I have a booking. Your special?"

  The carpeted foyer damped her words and made them unconvincing. She fumbled in her purse for the newspaper cutting, for proof. But already the young woman had found her booking, received her payment with a smile—as if it happened every day, as if one did this all the time—and handed her a key card like a winning ticket. Number twenty-three.

  Nona found herself smoothly transferred into the care of a slim youth with neatly braided hair, the male twin of the receptionist. Polite hands lifted her bag and conducted her through the cool embrace of the elevator doors, up, and out into a golden corridor. The young man held her bag, not her arm, but Nona felt intimately escorted, barely needing to lift her feet. Door 23 fell away to admit her. As soon as the bellhop had withdrawn, she kicked off her shoes and collapsed across a huge white bed—the sheets as crisp and cool, she imagined, as a drift of foreign snow.

  Nona could not lie still for long, though. She rose and took a turn around her room, inspecting the surfaces, the knobs and drawers. She and Ray had only ever stayed in rundown country hotels, two-star affairs, or campsites. She fingered the fruit arrangement, peeked into the minibar and examined the bonbon on the pillow. It was all strange and extravagant: this lavish provisioning, so blindly generous. Rare gifts for anyone with a key.

  Nona opened the window, but felt no change. The air outside was as cool and conditioned as the air within. She leaned out—and there it was. Three stories below, beyond a strip of garden and just visible over the boundary wall: the alleyway, the house.

  From this unfamiliar angle, she saw that the windows of her home were too small, and unevenly placed. A couple were cracked. She could see the plumbing on the back wall, too, and a shameful stain spreading from one of the pipes. Nona felt a rush of resentment.

  Down in the alley, the pigeons—diligent heads bent, tapping away—made variegated patterns on the tar. Black and grey and white and mauve, each bird unique. They seemed to feed in silence, their clicks and coos too delicate to reach her ears.

  Now something else, a blunt grey knob, pushed into the frame. It was her husband's head, surprisingly thin on top, inclined towards the birds. His arm was extended in its frayed, familiar cardigan, and after a moment a bird hopped onto his wrist. An intimate view: she looked away.

  Nona had never been deceitful in her marriage, but she'd lied to Ray about this weekend. She'd used money from her own small savings to pay for the room, and told him she was off to visit her sister. Now the cost seemed much greater than when she'd cut out the ad for the two-night special. These were pleasures owed to him.

  But at the time of her decision—that champagne cork still slightly damp in her palm—some action had seemed urgently required. And perhaps he was glad that she'd gone, that she wasn't there to disquiet him with her sighs and carping, her impatient rustling of the newspaper.

  Directly below her window, peppermint grass flowed thickly to the base of the wall. There were parasols and camellia bushes and white garden furniture. A guest might sit down there of an evening, sipping a chilled drink, and never guess at what lay an arm's length away, on the shabbier side of the wall.

  Yet another attentive shadow in a red jacket appeared beside her garden chair, this one with a drinks menu. Everyone working here was young and unobtrusively attractive: eyes that took note but did not linger, voices low, manner deferential yet flirtatious to a finely judged degree. The waiter leaned forward, showing her the tops of his long eyelashes.

  "Gin and tonic, why not?" she said.

  All at once Nona felt happy again. The ease was back, the sense of smooth movement, although she was sitting quite still. She and Ray, she saw, lived backstage of a perfect piece of theatre. The lighting in the garden was impeccable: even and mellow, unaffected by the alleyway's brassy reversals of glare and gloom. The only sound was a precise ticking in the air—the piston spritz of unseen sprinklers, or perhaps it was the hushed beat of luxury itself. The gin appeared, in a tumbler chocked with ice. She sipped and felt the coolness spreading down into her belly.

  Some things were not controlled, however. Nona noticed white and olive streaks on the battlements: sure enough, the pigeons had left their mark on this side of the wall as on the other. And across the tabletop, a line of ants negotiated the crevasses and cul-de-sacs of the lacy metal to a spill of sugar at its centre. She imagined their tiny amazement at this manna. They made her think of Ray: their earnest, uncomplaining labour, their focus on the small satisfactions before them. She bent down to trace the line of insects to its source. It disappeared into the lawn and emerged again to doodle up the corner of a flower planter, along its edge and through a tiny crack at the base of the wall. So—lowlife ants, smuggling out the loot. Again she wondered: how long? For ants and birds and grass roots to level this wall again, grain by grain, to break open the path it had blocked?

  But she didn't really want the wall broken down. What she wanted was for it to draw open and enclose them all—Ray, herself and even the birds—within its charmed perimeter.

  She drank steadily, watching the ants come and go. Her glass emptied, and was filled. The evening light dimmed, while high above, the windows of the hotel began to shine—the angle oblique, the light more forgiving than it was at home. Small globes flickered on in the shrubbery, bathing the wall in dapples of rose and amber. Between the lights, the dusk softened and expanded. Patio doors opened and walls dissolved, making way for music, trays of cocktails, waiters, guests—such guests! Their clothes were precious and their scent was rare. Women leaned at elegant angles, calves taut above high heels. Men shouted with laughter, gloriously assured. More red-coated servers danced from the shadows, carrying ice buckets and bottle after bottle of champagne.


  Nona did not speak to anyone, content to let the crowd wash around her. She tickled her lip with the bubbles in her constantly refreshed glass; she smiled at the dark-eyed waiters. She kept half an eye on the wall, but in all the flow and movement it stayed where it was. Nona and the wall were still.

  Ah, but it must've been the drink. Later she would barely remember leaving the party, finding her way inside and along the hushed corridor. But the feel of everything remained: the textures of wallpaper, wood, and carpet. (Had she stumbled?) All so rich and inviting, so lush to the touch: luxurious friction. Was there a young man by her side, red-coated, bright-eyed, holding her arm? Perhaps. Certainly she felt accompanied, but it might've been the scented air itself that took her weight, that guided her to the proper door and pressed the handle down.

  Nona did not usually sleep naked or on her stomach, but that was how she awoke. She was in a cool, dark place. She detected the firmness of an unfamiliar mattress, and then—out of one eye—the grey field of a curtained window. Breaking the bed's hold, she turned onto her back, wedged herself up against the pillows and took stock. The room was bleary and ruffled. Against the habits of a lifetime, her clothes were strewn on the floor. And there were other shapes, small but troubling, in the dimness beyond the foot of the bed. A breeze belled the curtain and something pushed through with a rustle.

  She took a moment to let the scene develop. The curtains sucked out against the open window, as if the air in the room were plumping up, and the grey light strengthened.

  There were hunched figures on the sill, on the desk, on top of the standing lamp. Six, seven of them—a fidgeting crowd of small, dour spectators. At the foot of the bed, one shook out its wings impatiently, stepped side to side and ejected a splatter of white onto the duvet.

  Nona leaned over to the bedside table, poured herself a glass of water and drank deeply. Next to the jug were two wrapped biscuits on a dish. Digestives—the kind that Ray enjoyed with his tea. She pulled the cellophane off one, but her stomach turned at the first whiff of its mealy sweetness. The pigeons cooed and shuffled, turning their heads this way and that to follow her movements. She'd never thought of birds' faces as expressive, or even as faces—those carved heads set with glass eyes. But these seemed somehow expectant.

  Nona held the biscuit in her fingers. She broke it in two, in quarters, smaller, and offered the pieces in her palm. Black eyes observed her sidelong, but no bird moved. With a sigh she let the crumbs fall to the floor.

  In an instant the boldest bird had hopped down from the minibar, legs outstretched and wings braking. The others piled in. They were shades of the same grey as the carpet, but the birds' colour was alive and various. Wings fanned; snaky heads jabbed at the crumbs. Nona broke up the second biscuit.

  An extravagant thought came to her. Room service. The phone was to hand, right next to the bed. She ordered toast, coffee, aspirin. More toast. When the knock came, she went to the door in her dressing gown and opened it just enough to take the tray, ignoring the waiter's knowing smile. As soon as he was gone, she poked out a hand to slip the Do Not Disturb sign over the doorknob.

  Crumbs on the carpet, the credenza, the TV cabinet, at the foot of the bed. Nona poured herself a strong coffee and settled against the pillows to watch.

  More birds hustled in through the window, shouldering each other, flapping and squabbling. Their claws scraped and ticked on the veneer cabinets, snagged in the bedspread. Every now and then one lofted into the air, wings clapping, before rejoining the others. Nona found the coo and rustle strangely restful. There was a dusty, sweet smell of feathers and bird shit. Her eyelids dropped.

  She dreamed herself walking through the hotel, down a long gold corridor, looking for an exit. But there were no clear routes. The birds were with her, and they were trapped: flying into dead ends, wings battering against glazed windows and tangling in elevator cables. Nona pushed at the walls with her hands, searching for secret doorways, but the hotel could not be unbuilt.

  She roused herself to use the bathroom and drink more water, then crawled back under the duvet. The birds were dozing, perched on towel rack and headboard. She wanted to sleep with them forever, suspended three stories in the air.

  It was late afternoon when she finally rose. The pigeons had gone, leaving only feathers and the blots of their droppings.

  Already she could see that the room—despite the soiling, the smell, the feathers on the floor—was shrugging off this brief habitation. When the carpet shook its nylon pelt, all traces would be shed. Soon the room would be dreaming again in its pristine blankness: thoughtless, faithless, without memory.

  Nona dressed quickly, packed her few things, put out a large tip for the cleaning lady and left the key in the door. Downstairs, crossing the lobby, she avoided the eyes of the concierge.

  Then down the long avenue of rustling palms, each with its own tribe of birds lodged like seeds in the crevices between the fronds. The grounds did not seem so enormous to her now. In every direction—beyond the flickering mesh of the tennis-court fence, past the rose garden—a wedge of pink wall blocked her line of sight. By the time she passed through the gates, the sun was low.

  A block away from home, she heard the whistling. High and looping—not the birdman's, but still familiar. Funny that you could recognise the voice in a whistle. When she turned the last corner, Ray was in the alley, head cocked to the sky, birdseed in his outstretched palm.

  "Home early," he said.

  She put down her bag. "Missed you, didn't I?"

  "They didn't pitch up this morning." He let the seed fall to the ground and wiped his hand on his trousers. Fretful, like an old man. "Didn't come."

  "They'll be back," she said, taking his arm. "Those birds, they know which side their bread is buttered."

  She helped him into the deckchair and took her seat alongside. It was the time of evening when the sun's reflection cast its shadows at their feet.

  And so they reclined, Nona and Ray, their backs to the new hotel, saying a few quiet words to each other off and on. They watched the road and then the sky, and then the road again. That old road: altered but familiar, stolen from them and yet still theirs. Waiting in that changing light for the birds to find their way.

  Pleiades

  Anjali Sachdeva

  FROM Gulf Coast

  Del

  My parents were geneticists. They had a firm belief in the power of science to fix everything, to create everything. This belief was their religion, and they liked to proselytize as much as any born-again Christians. When they decided to have children they saw the opportunity to share their faith in science with the world. They wanted to make miracle babies so unbelievable that people would stop and stare, their own organic equivalent of a billboard for Jesus. Their original idea was to develop an in vitro procedure that would create identical twins. But they decided twins weren't spectacular enough, not enough of a challenge. They settled on septuplets. One fertilized egg split into seven pieces made seven sisters, all of us identical. Pleiades, my father used to call us, after the constellation of seven stars.

  All the major networks were shooting footage at the hospital the day we were born. Protestors traveled from around the country to Los Angeles so they could picket outside, with signs that said "Seven Deadly Sins" and "Frankenstein's Children." Even the doctors who delivered us expected us to come out with birth defects; half a dozen neonatal specialists were standing by. But they weren't needed. We were small—about two pounds each—but other than that, my mother says, we were perfect. Our lungs, our hearts, our brain activity were measured and found to be normal. We all had a wisp of dark hair at the front of our foreheads, and eyes that would turn from blue to brown. My parents didn't want rhyming names or alliterative names but they liked to show off their knowledge of Greek, and so we were Leda, Io, Zoe, Helen, Cassandra, Vesta, and me, Adelpha—called Del.

  My mother and father, in the magazine photographs, glow with a mixture of parental p
ride and professional elation. Without scientific interference identical twins account for one in every 250 live births, identical triplets one in two million, fraternal septuplets one in every four million, and my sisters and I just couldn't exist. But science made us and there we were, pink-skinned and button-nosed, each swaddled in our own colored blanket—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple—a wriggling, blinking rainbow.

  The tabloids ran headlines like "Forced Septuplets Really Alien Babies!" and "Test Tube Septs Share One Brain!" After our first birthday the publicity died down, although reporters came around now and then hoping to do follow-up stories. In the scientific community our celebrity never waned. Throughout our childhood we took trips to visit scientists whom our parents referred to as our aunts and uncles. These people smiled at us and sometimes gave us hugs like real relatives, but they also liked to look at our skin cells under microscopes, or watch us play together through two-way mirrors. My mother and father ran experiments, too, and by the time we were six we thought no more of giving a blood sample than we did of making our beds, picking up our toys, or any other chore.

  Our parents never told us which of us was born first because they thought it would affect our psychology. We reached the age of eleven considering each other separate in body but not in anything else. I have heard that twins, even identical twins with a particularly close relationship, like to emphasize that they are still individuals, but we did not. There's an old home video of us on the beach, eight or nine years old and wearing matching gold-spangled swimsuits. We move across the sand like a flock of birds in flight, wheeling with each others' movements, each head turned only a fraction of a second before the next so that it's impossible to say where one motion ends and another begins.