The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

by Dave Eggers

  I say, "Look, let me take you home. You're too sick to be doing this. We'll go together."

  She shakes her head.

  "Take a good rest then," I say, "how do you expect to get better moving around all the time? Stay in bed a couple of days, why don't you."

  "I don't want to rest. Let's drive the whole way tomorrow."

  "It's got to be another eighteen hours."

  "Please. I'll pay you if you want, lef's just go."

  "For Chrisfs sake, don't get insulting."

  She wakes me up at dawn, trailing her fingers along my cheeks, and I'd wager she didn't sleep the whole night. As soon as I'm dressed she walks outside and gets in the car, and I don't argue.

  By dusk my eyes feel like they're made of glass, but we're near the coast. I shake Del awake and ask her where she wants to go. She presses her hands against the window and squints into the darkness. "It all looks different than I remember it."

  Whenever we pass someone on the street she calls out to ask for directions, and the people point and wave us along, if they answer at all. We turn onto a bigger road with cars buzzing past, and as soon as we do I can smell the ocean. Del shivers in the seat beside me and grips my knee so hard it aches. It's dusk, and against the skyline you can see the lights of a carnival turning on, first the ferris wheel, then the booths, sending up a blaze of bulbs and neon to replace the fading sunset.

  "This the place?"

  "I don't know," she says. "I think so. It was just an empty boardwalk last time I was here."

  She leans against me as we walk down the midway, our arms looped together. Del looks all around her, gawking as if she never saw a carnival before, like she fell asleep in her bed at home and woke up here and can't figure out what the hell happened in between. We come to an amusement stand and the barker starts in on me, Win a prize for the pretty lady! He's got to notice how she looks, but I guess carnies have seen just about everything. He smiles at her like she was Miss America, and I give him five dollars for a stack of baseballs to pitch at the milk bottles. I hate this game—they weight the bottles so that it's almost impossible to win—but I do all right, two bottles down.

  "Anything in the bottom row," says the barker.

  "Pick what you want," I say to Del.

  She gets one of those glow necklaces and puts it on her head like a crown. The strange light makes her look almost normal. We buy an ice cream and a funnel cake and eat them next to the roller coaster.

  "This is almost like a date," she says.

  "I learned better than to date young girls like you; it's always trouble."

  "Do you date dead girls? I bet that's even worse." She smiles, but It's not a real smile, and she starts crying.

  "Come on, now," I say, and I put my arms around her and hold her head against my chest, green light from her glowing crown climbing up into my eyes. The roller coaster swoops over us, the people scream. The merry go round stops and a bunch of kids climb off and run past, laughing as they go. Del looks up and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.

  "Sorry," she says.

  "Nothing to be sorry for."

  "I thought I was going to make it."

  "Who says you aren't?"

  "I want to go down to the beach."

  We find the stairs that lead us to the sand, and as soon as we take five steps the light and the noise from the carnival start to fade. I put my hand around her waist to help her walk. The sand is white and fine and cool as Christmas, and it'll turn your ankles if you're not careful. We go down to the water's edge where the footing is better, where the waves sweep against our toes. Del takes her shoes off and throws them into the ocean before I can stop her.

  She takes my hand and guides it in between the buttons of her shirt, over her breast, presses it against the bruised spot on her chest. The flesh is even softer than I'd imagined; my fingers sink into it until I can feel her bones through her skin, and below them the shuddering of her heart.

  "This is what I feel all the time," she says, "only it's the whole world beating." She pushes my hand closer until I'm afraid my fingers will go right through the skin, and that heart sounds like it could devour me.

  Del

  For a moment, with Rob's hand against my chest, I can almost imagine a life all my own, almost understand how that could be fulfilling. He holds me to him and I am alive wherever his body touches mine. But ghosts with my face surround me, six other hearts beat in time with mine. There is nothing I can give him because nothing I have is mine.

  I step away from him, across the sand. A moist breeze skims my shoulders and I feel myself dissolve, as if the salt air could unravel my genetic code like a piece of knitting. Nature won't have me, won't let me buy my life with their deaths. Aberrations, abominations, Nature wants us gone. Who knew the world was so unforgiving, so eager to cull?

  There are shells, says Helen, don't cut your feet, and every shell touches the sole of my foot seven times. There is nothing strange in this anymore, that she can choke to death on her own blood while I sleep in a roadside motel, and yet still be with me days later, whispering in my ear. Walk into the surf, my sisters say, the ground pulls out from underneath our toes', the waves are sevenfold in their coldness, the salt air seven times as pungent.

  The water sings between my fingers, surges around my knees and shins as they press into the sand. Drink deep, my sisters say. This is where things crumble irrevocably, where there is nowhere left to go. We'll become salt. We'll become storm clouds on the water. And then emptiness, one to seven to one to zero in the space of twenty-three years. Science will have nothing to do with us anymore, nor we with it. We will be just a void in the cosmos, a dark place in the sky where there was once starlight.

  The Imaginist

  Olivier Schrauwen

  FROM Mome

  Mid-Life Cowboy

  James Spring

  FROM This American Life

  AT THIRTY-NINE, I TOOK A LITTLE inventory of my life, and found myself to be unremarkable in almost every way.

  For more than a decade I'd held a job writing ad copy and radio commercials in San Diego. I had a wife, two kids, two mortgages, Tivo, prescription reading glasses—and about twenty extra pounds that I no longer had the energy or ambition to lose. My fortieth birthday was only a couple of months away, in April.

  My wife Kellie had a brighter attitude about it all. "We'll throw you a big party," she said. "If 11 be fun."

  "I don't think so," I said. I didn't want a party.

  "It's your big four-oh," she said. "Think about what you want to do for it."

  I did think about it, for a long time. And in the end, what I thought was ... I'm going to do something ... big ... to help somebody else in a big way. It's going to be ... a great big thing, and when it's done, I'm going to feel really, really good. And helpful.

  "What do you mean help somebody?" my wife said.

  "I don't know," I said. It was still pretty shapeless inside my head. I used to be a boat captain. I knew parts of Mexico better than pretty much anybody. Maybe that was a start.

  "Who are you going to help?" my wife said. "Help them what?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Something's going to come up. Maybe an earthquake will hit, and I'll help dig people out. Or maybe a helicopter will go down in Baja. I could help find it."

  This was all met with the most epic of eye rolling. And sighing.

  ***

  At least twice a week, this conversation continued to divide us. She'd talk about party planning, and I'd have to remind her that I might not even be around. I might be out. You know, rescuing people.

  April arrived, and still no earthquakes or helicopters. So, one Friday, about five o'clock, right after work, I thought, maybe I should be a little more proactive. I did a Google search on two words that seemed to make the most sense for my plan: "Baja" and "missing."

  It might be time to explain the "Baja" part.

  In the late eighties, I worked in the area that the drug enforcement a
gency calls the western Mexico/Baja corridor. But I wasn't one of the good guys. It was over twenty years ago. I had just dropped out of college, and I was a little aimless, and I reconnected with a friend I'll call "Alex," back in San Diego. Alex had put together an enterprise moving methamphetamine along the west coast. Right about the time I arrived, a new law had been passed in the U.S. that made it tough to get the main ingredient—ephedrine ... but I was pretty sure we could still get it in Mexico. The border was less than a half an hour away.

  The ephedrine pipeline was easy to establish, and soon, it got filled with other stuff, too. Coke, marijuana. Personally, the drugs held no attraction for me, which made it easy to justify my actions. I mean, if these dirt bags wanted to ruin their lives with meth, let 'em.

  It turned out I was really good at the job. I got to know my way around Mexico. Around the marinas and hidden ranchos and dirt airstrips. Around the cops and soldiers. I came to love the Baja peninsula. But during this time, the business was falling apart back on the U.S. side. Alex and his pals had developed bad drug habits, and they got really sloppy.

  I'd been away in Mexico during two police raids on the house in San Diego. But I was there for the third one. I was arrested and taken to jail with the others. But the cops didn't have a warrant, and so they had to drop the charges.

  I moved out of the house. A couple of weeks later, some bad guys came in the middle of the night. Black sweatshirts, black ski masks. They beat Alex into a coma, raped his girlfriend. They stole everything they could get their hands on.

  After that, I packed up my red Jeep and I drove south to Baja. And I didn't come back for four years. By the time I moved back to San Diego in 1993, I'd fashioned myself into an upstanding citizen. An ambitious and enthusiastic member of the workforce.

  And life rolled along pretty much like I suppose it does for most people. An HMO, a 4O1k, a family. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But life was really ... steady. It was good—far better than I deserved.

  And so, on the eve of my fortieth birthday, I brought up Google and typed the words "Baja" and "missing."

  The top result was a day-old newspaper article about a fugitive couple wanted for kidnapping, and murder. The story, essentially, was that this couple, Richard Carelli and Michele Pinkerton, were a pair of chronic meth-heads who killed their landlord in San Francisco and then drove to Santa Cruz and kidnapped their own six-year-old daughter from the grandparents who had been given legal custody. And oh, yeah ... also on the run with them—their two-month-old baby girl. With Down syndrome.

  Clearly, these were not great parents. A year earlier, they were holed up in a motel when police raided their room and found them with a pile of stolen property and methamphetamines. Their daughter, Viana, then four years old, was found hiding under the motel bed. The newspaper picture of Viana showed a smiling little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, and a dress with pink polka dots. She looked just like my daughter Addie.

  Police had been searching for Viana and her parents for more than three months. This article said that a month earlier, a tourist might have spotted the family in a town called San Quintin, on Baja California's Pacific coast.

  Methhead kidnapper murderers on the run. I was a former meth supplier. I absolutely do not believe in destiny. But Jesus Christ.

  There was a link to a "missing" flyer with pictures and a phone number to call. I dialed, and a switchboard operator answered for the San Francisco police department. I realized I had no idea what to say.

  "Hi," I said. "I'm calling about a flyer. For a missing girl. Viana Carelli."

  "A flyer, sir?" the operator said.

  "Or I guess, a poster?" I said. "Like a missing poster."

  "Sir, do you know the whereabouts of a missing person?"

  "No," I said. "I want to hel ... I just need to talk to somebody in charge of the Viana Carelli case."

  "Can you spell that, sir?"

  I spelled the name. She put me on hold three times. Obviously I hadn't called the right person. I looked up other contact info for the San Francisco police department. I made a couple more calls, and quickly realized that I needed to fake a little more competence.

  Here's what I was going to say: "Look, I'm certain that there is a team of officers and volunteers conducting canvassing and search parties. I would like to volunteer to join the effort."

  But the conversation never got that far. Instead, each time, nobody knew what I was talking about. I finally convinced somebody to transfer me to the detectives' division. I got an answering machine message saying the office was closed until Monday morning.

  The lack of information—the lack of interest—by the police department was surprising. Unbelievable, really. This whole story had become front page news because of the way the San Francisco police had already bungled it.

  The newspapers said that after Carelli and Pinkerton's landlord was reported missing, the police didn't respond for a month. And when they did finally arrive at his building to look for him, they found his tenants, Carelli and Pinkerton, unwilling to let them search the property. A police dog keyed on Carelli's van in the driveway. There were bloodstains visible in the open garage. But the officers had no warrant. They allowed the couple to drive away in their beat-up, white Mercury sedan. The cops eventually towed Carelli's van, but then—incredibly—they didn't search it. On the impound lot, somebody finally looked inside and found the body of the landlord. He had been dead for six weeks. By this time, Carelli and Pinkerton were already hundreds of miles away. Cell phone records showed that they'd made it as far as Vegas. And then, for three months, nothing.

  So maybe the San Francisco police were not the best resource here. I looked online for volunteer groups. Flyer passer-outers. Candlelight vigils.

  Again, nothing.

  All that was left, at this point, was the little girl's family—the grandparents, and an uncle that the newspaper had called the family spokesman. Probably every nut job in the world was calling them—the smarmy investigators and the psychics. Grifters, con men.

  I found the uncle's phone number, and then just sort of dialed. It went exactly like you'd think it would. Which is to say, badly.

  If your main objective in a conversation is to convince someone that you're not crazy, you've already lost.

  Essentially, what the uncle said was: "Thank you for your concern. The police are doing everything they can. We appreciate the support."

  And then the call was over.

  I was on my own. To be honest, it felt sort of good. Sort of familiar. But better. Because I knew, without a doubt, that this was the right thing to do. I was going to Baja. Now I just had to go home and tell my wife.

  She wasn't happy.

  "You said you were going to help people in an earthquake," she said. "This isn't our problem. This isn't your fight." She was crying and yelling. "They're drug addicts! They're murderers!" She spent a long time listing reasons why I shouldn't go.

  I understood why she was worried. Baja's rough. Every couple of weeks there's another string of beheadings, or a government official hung from a bridge—usually thanks to the drug cartels.

  Last year a guy nicknamed El Pozolero—the stew maker—confessed to dissolving the bodies of more than three hundred of his victims in acid. These stories help keep Baja pristine. Free of tourists. Free of development. Free of laws. It is like the old Wild West. And like the old west, there's no cell phone service. So Kellie knew she couldn't even call me down there.

  I kept repeating the one thing she couldn't argue with. "Nobody is looking for those little girls," I said. "If I don't go, who will?"

  The next day—Saturday—I packed. Gas cans, topo maps, GPS, water jugs, Fix-A-Flat. I sent an e-mail to my boss saying that something sudden had come up, and that I would be taking a vacation week. Or maybe two. I took the lousy "missing" flyer that I had found on-line and redesigned it. I added a picture of the infant and a photo of a car in the Autotrader that matched Richard Carelli's white M
ercury. I translated the flyer to Spanish, and changed the headline to read " secuestrada," which means "kidnapped." I went to Kinko's and printed twenty-five hundred copies.

  Baja California itself is a dusty peninsula that begins near the San Diego/Tijuana border and ends a thousand miles later, in the resort town of Cabo San Lucas. There's only one road that runs from top to bottom, and at various points along the way, it passes tiny villages, and military checkpoints, and about two dozen of the state-run Pemex gas stations.

  Without much to go on, this is what I chose to believe: Richard Carelli knew nothing of Baja. He spoke no Spanish and had no friends. He had no weapons at this point, and no money. The family was still traveling in the Mercury sedan. They would not willingly double back through military checkpoints or cross into areas where they would be required to show ID and register.

  Between the beat-up sedan and the newborn, they had to be somewhere close to the highway.

  I spent the first day passing out fliers—at gas stations, at police stations. At military checkpoints, where I also passed out old Playboy magazines I'd put in my truck to grease the skids with soldiers, a trick I resurrected from the old days. I made countless stops and starts. At every market and rancho near a dusty crossroads I told the story.

  Not a single person had heard it before. But they were all titillated now, by the drama of the murderous couple and their poor children.

  Just before dark I arrived in San Quintin, the town where the couple might have been spotted a month earlier. Taco stands, bars, hotels, campgrounds. Nobody had seen or heard of the family.

  I went to bed sometime around midnight, but I couldn't fall sleep. I lay on the lumpy mattress and tried to envision every possibility. Were Carrelli and Pinkerton living in a village? Had they squatted at an abandoned ranch? Had they found a benefactor? Were they already dead? I wondered if maybe I was insane to be here. And sometime before I fell asleep, it hit me that they might not even have come to Mexico at all.