The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014

by Daniel Handler

  Walker feels idiotic for coming and tries to think of the best way to extricate himself from the situation as quickly as possible. The man wears a starched red shirt with pearl buttons, tucked tightly into a pair of gray corduroys despite the summer heat. He is a small man, shorter than Walker. His eyes are gray, almost translucent.

  “I think I’ve got the wrong Alan Gass,” Walker says. “But just in case, do you know a Claire?”

  Alan licks his bottom lip. He says that he knew a Claire once, way back in middle school. But he hasn’t heard from her in decades. So, no, currently he does not know any Claires.

  “That’s all right. Like I said, wrong Alan Gass. I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing.” Walker turns to leave.

  “Before you go,” Alan says, “now that you’re up here, could I get your help with something right quick? I got a kid coming later who’s supposed to help me, but he’s not the most reliable.” Alan shapes his hand into a bottle and pretends to guzzle from it. “Good kid, though.” On the wall above the television, a two-by-four with splintery edges forms a shelf over white brackets. There are—how many? six, seven—eight chocolate Easter bunnies on the shelf, still in their boxes. Alan Gass notices Walker noticing the bunnies.

  “My favorite holiday. The company that makes them went out of business years ago. They’ll be worth a fortune in ten, twenty years.” Walker nods and asks what Alan needs from him. They go into the kitchen. The refrigerator has been pulled away from the wall and unplugged, the door ajar. A towel across the floor collects the water as it drips from the freezer.

  “I’m selling it,” Alan says. “Got a good price for it. Only catch is that I gotta have it downstairs by noon.”

  Walker has never moved a fridge, but he knows the job will not be easy. Looking at the refrigerator, he’s not even certain that it will fit through the front door. And then there’s the matter of the staircase. But Alan has a dolly for that. He promises that it won’t take long. He’ll even throw in a few home-brewed beers as a thank you. Walker says that won’t be necessary. He rolls up his sleeves. He’s ready to do this. Alan goes into a back room and returns wearing a back brace.

  “Old injury,” he says. “You don’t need to worry.”

  They tip the fridge backward so that Alan can wedge the dolly underneath. Slowly, they wheel it out of the kitchen. The doorway is tight. The entire wall shakes as the refrigerator passes through the frame. One of the Easter bunnies topples off the shelf and hits the floor. Alan lets the fridge come down flat so that he can examine the bunny’s box. Through the clear plastic window, they can see the broken chocolate.

  “Damn it,” he says. The plastic tray slides out of the box like a gurney. He offers Walker a piece of an ear. “Never goes bad.”

  The ear is hollow. Walker doesn’t want any chocolate. Alan sucks on a piece thoughtfully.

  “So you’re looking for some other Alan Gass, huh?” he asks. “Never really think about there being other Alan Gasses out there.” Walker nods. The funny part, he says, is that the Alan he’s looking for might not exist.

  Alan swallows the chocolate. “Might not exist?”

  To his own surprise, Walker tells him everything—about the real Alan Gass, about the dreams.

  “Huh,” Alan says. “That’s wild.”

  They rock the fridge backward again and wheel it out the front door of the apartment. They take a break on the landing at the top of the stairs.

  “So what if I’d been him? What would you have done?”

  “I have no idea. I didn’t plan that far ahead.”

  “Pretend I’m him.”

  Walker pictures the man in the Lexus. The white shirt. The blurry face.

  “I suppose I’d tell him to stay away.”

  “But she’s my wife,” Alan says. “I’ve been with her longer than you have. I should be telling you to stay away. I love her and I’m never letting her go.”

  “Okay, I get it.”

  “You think she loves you like she loves me? She married me. That’s a sacred vow.” Alan smiles. “Whoa, you should see yourself right now. You look like you want to hit me. Is this really bothering you?”

  “You’re making me feel a little like he’s the real one, and I’m the dream.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re no dream. Look, you want to know my honest opinion? You got nothing to worry about. We all got an Alan Gass,” Alan Gass says. “We all got our fantasies. In high school, my Alan Gass looked a little bit like my Spanish teacher, only sexier. She was this beautiful woman with shiny dark hair and a little vine tattoo on her back and this amazing accent. I can’t tell you how many times I thought about her late at night alone in bed, if you know what I mean. But she had no blood in her veins, you follow? There was nothing to her. Her skin was made of the same thing they use for movie screens. You can project whatever you want onto someone like that.”

  They lean the fridge back toward the stairs on the dolly and slowly lower the wheels down onto the next step. Alan has the dolly handles; Walker is below it, keeping it balanced. They lower it another step, and then another. Walker is sweating. On the next landing, they take another break.

  “I wouldn’t care about a fantasy,” Walker says. “Fantasies I understand. But Alan Gass isn’t a fantasy. Fantasies don’t have faults. But he does, and she still loves him. That’s what’s so unnerving.”

  They rock the fridge back onto the dolly and drop it down another step. Walker counts off the steps as they approach the bottom. Three, two, one. They are in a very small space. Walker opens the front door with his backside. They try to roll it through, but the fridge is too wide for the door by almost five inches. Alan can’t believe it. He says he measured the frame. Walker glances at his watch. He has to go soon, he says. He’s already two hours late for work. They’re in the middle of a new production, a play that takes place on a cruise ship lost at sea. He needs to be there soon to meet with the costume designer. Alan looks exhausted. He says he understands. Even if he and Bobby have to take the whole goddamn fridge apart later, they’ll get it through that door one way or another. He tells Walker to wait right there on the stoop. He’s got something for him.

  Walker fixes his sleeves and wipes the sweat off his forehead. When Alan returns, he’s holding a small boxy tape deck. He pushes the eject button and extracts a gray cassette with a thin white sticker across the front. It says I ♥ MONICA KILL DEVIL HILLS SPRING BREAK SISTER GODDESS, but that is scratched out. Below that, it says, zzzzzzzzz.

  “This is going to save you,” Alan says.

  “An old mixtape?”

  “Ever heard of sleep suggestion? I took a Spanish class a few years back and made a tape to listen to while I slept at night. Don’t laugh. It really did the trick. You can have this. I think it needs D batteries. Press this button, and you can record. Create your own tape. Tell her she’s married to you, not Alan. Tell her whatever you want. Once she’s asleep, press Play. Few weeks of this, you’ll never hear another word about this marriage thing.”

  The machine is heavy for its size. Walker holds it like a handgun in a paper bag. He tries to give it back, but Alan won’t take it.

  Claire gets some bad news. A lab, somewhere in Europe, has constructed a black sphere and plans to flood it with something called K-matter. She emails Walker about it at work with a frowny-faced emoticon. If the experiment in Europe works like they think it will, she says, then particles cannot half-exist. The researchers will have effectively disproved Daisy Theory.

  That night he gets home late and finds Claire already in the bed under the covers with her grandmother’s rosary beads. She isn’t religious. He’s never known her to even set foot in a church, but she loved her grandmother. The beads are wrapped so tight around her white palm that they leave small indentations when Walker pries them loose.

  “Say they disprove it,” he says. “Where does something go when it stops existing?”

  “Where does it go?” she asks. “Nowhere. It
doesn’t exist.”

  “But nowhere is somewhere.”

  “This isn’t where versus somewhere else. This is being versus non-being.”

  He strips down and gets into bed, cuddling up behind her. Once she is asleep, he waits for something to happen. He’s not sure what. Claire’s dream marriage makes a certain kind of awful sense: a theoretical husband for the woman who spends her days in a theoretical haze. Her advisor was never the threat; it was always Alan. He watches her sleep as if the drama is unfolding just behind those eyelids. Maybe she will say something in her sleep. It would be like eavesdropping on a conversation taking place in a universe that Walker cannot reach, one where Walker does not even exist. He tries to imagine not existing. He imagines darkness, the absence of thought, but then his thoughts invade, and he exists again. Claire, he wants to call out. Claire.

  “Claire.” She doesn’t budge. He places his palm flat between her shoulder blades, her skin warm through the T-shirt. He shakes her gently and feels her body tense.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  “Where were you?”

  “What?”

  “Were you with him?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. Go back to sleep.”

  “If you ever stopped dreaming about him, for whatever reason, would you be upset?”

  She rolls over to face him. Her loose state championship volleyball T-shirt twists tight under her stomach.

  “I’m beginning to regret I ever told you about Alan.”

  And why did she? Guilt, most likely. She turns back over and drifts away again. Walker climbs out of bed and goes downstairs. He digs some D batteries out of a cluttered drawer and plops down on the sofa with the tape deck. The old batteries are corroded, crusty, and white. He inserts the new ones, rewinds the tape to the beginning, and presses Record.

  “You are . . . very sleepy.”

  He presses Stop, Rewind, and then Record again. His lips are close to the microphone, two small holes in the plastic.

  “You will not dream about Alan Gass. You will not dream about Alan Gass. Alan Gass does not exist. Alan Gass is not a man. Alan Gass is not made of daisies. He is made of nothing.”

  He rewinds the tape and presses Record again. A new and less sinister idea: he could make a tape for himself.

  “You will dream about Alan Gass. You will tell him to stay away. You will dream about Alan Gass. You will dream about Alan Gass.” He presses Stop. This is going to take too long. Is there a button that makes it loop?

  “What are you doing?” Claire is at the top of the stairs.

  “Nothing,” he says and goes to the hall closet. He shoves the tape deck up on the high shelf and joins her in bed. That night he doesn’t dream about Alan. He dreams what he’s dreamed ever since work began on the new production—of a giant ocean with small gray waves. He is in that ocean. Lost in it. Tonight, in the distance, new details emerge: metal transformer towers that jut up into the sky, that crackle and hum with electricity, and far away, a boat that crests each wave. He cannot reach the boat. In the morning, he wakes up to steam slipping under the bathroom door in misty curling puffs. He can hear Claire humming in the shower.

  Everywhere he goes he sees a Lexus. Lexi. They are a species, classifiable but indistinct. He sees one in the fire lane in front of the liquor store, then another in the parking lot at the gym. The cars are empty. He feels ridiculous each time he glares into a car. The tinted windows reflect only his own face, grim and warped. There’s your Alan Gass, he thinks.

  Before Claire, he once dragged a date to a five-year high school reunion and made the mistake of telling the date that he’d slept with one of the girls in the room. The date wouldn’t let it go. She had to know which girl. She wanted him to point her out. She said she wouldn’t be comfortable until she knew. But why, Walker asked her. “So I can avoid her,” the date said. “Or maybe introduce myself. I don’t know. Something.” At the time, Walker found it amusing. God, he even made her guess the girl.

  He makes a full tape and sleeps with earbuds, his ears hot and sweaty. He tells Claire it’s music for the play. But he dreams only of the ocean, the gray water, the faraway boat.

  Alan Gass calls with what he can only describe as amazing news—news that he won’t share over the phone. Walker agrees to meet him at a pizza buffet called Slice of Heaven. They sit across from each other in a red vinyl booth that squelches under their butts. Aside from two dumpy women at a table on the other side of the restaurant, they are alone.

  Walker has already eaten lunch and doesn’t plan to stay long. But Alan is distracted. He wants pizza. A certain kind of pizza. He’s waiting for the waitress to bring it out on a tin tray. When she does, at last, dropping it on the buffet at the center of the room, Alan is up in a hurry. His body pressed hard to the sneeze guard, he loads his plate with one slice after another. He comes back to the table and takes a large bite. The pizza is yellowish and drizzled with a translucent pink sauce.

  “What is that?” Walker asks.

  “Strawberry cheesecake. Try a piece.” He slides the plate across the table, still sticky from the waitress’s rag. Walker declines and asks about the news that couldn’t be shared over the phone.

  “Be patient. You’ll find out in”—he checks his wristwatch, digital with an orange Velcro strap—“about ten minutes.”

  Walker takes the tape recorder out of his bag, slides it across the table to Alan.

  “Did it work?” Alan asks.

  “I’m letting it go. Like you said, some dumb fantasy.”

  Alan smacks on pizza and dabs the strawberry sauce from the corners of his thin pink lips. Though a thin man, he has the look of physical inactivity. He has a curved back, flaccid arms, and probably a poor heart. Something about this pizza buffet—perhaps the quality of the light or the greasy floor tiles—makes Walker feel exhausted.

  “Until you came to see me,” Alan says, “I’d never really thought about there being other Alan Gasses in the world. But that got me thinking. Somewhere out there is the best possible Alan Gass.”

  “And somewhere else is the worst.” Walker motions to the waitress.

  “I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle. Most Alans are. Statistically speaking.”

  The waitress waddles to the table, her stockings tan as crust, her eyes green as bell peppers. Walker asks for a coffee.

  “Over the last few days I’ve been digging around online and making some phone calls,” Alan says. “To other Alans.”

  “And?”

  “There’s an Alan Gass in Utah who runs a ranch. There’s an Alan Gass in New York who travels the country selling baseball cards.”

  The waitress brings over a mug and a hot pot of coffee, its steam thick with the smell of burnt peanuts. Walker dumps three creamers into the cup, turning the liquid a cardboard brown.

  “Oh good, you’re here,” Alan says to someone behind Walker.

  Walker turns. A heavy man in a blue polo shirt with eyebrows so dark and thick they look like two slits in his tan flat face smiles at them. His short hair is parted neatly down the middle.

  “Walker,” Alan says, “I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Alan Gass.”

  The man shakes Walker’s hand firmly. His knuckles are hairy. Alan makes room for the other Alan on his side of the booth and explains that the second Alan lives only an hour north of here and when he discovered he was a doctor, well, he thought Walker might be interested in that.

  “Doctor of what?” Walker says.

  “Of religion,” the man says, and grabs the menu from behind the napkin holder. “Mainly Eastern philosophy.”

  “You gotta try a piece of this,” the first Alan says. The second Alan says no thanks, he doesn’t have a sweet tooth. He’s going to have a calzone.

  “There’s another Alan Gass two hours from here,” the first Alan Gass says. “He’s invited me to see his collection of North American beetles. He studies them. Amazing, right?”

  “I wonder ho
w many of us there are in the world?” Dr. Gass asks.

  “At least a thousand,” says the first one. “We should organize a party. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Walker imagines an army of Alan Gasses. They are the building blocks of something larger and more monumental. He sips on coffee, listening to the two men compare their lives, both of them amazed that two men with the same name can have had such different experiences and opinions of the world. How did Walker end up here, in this booth, with these men? He drops a few dollars on the table and says he must be going. Both Alans reach out to shake his hand.

  The experiments in Europe—with the black sphere and the K-matter—have failed horribly. Claire comes home so excited she almost tackles Walker. The failure doesn’t exactly prove Daisy Theory, but the theory does emerge relatively unscathed. Particles, for the time being, can still half-exist. Walker joins when her advisor takes the entire team out for celebratory drinks. His boyish face glowing in a suit jacket, jeans, and sneakers, he steadies himself on an assistant’s shoulder and steps up on a booth, raising his dark whiskey glass high. Claire lets out a whoop.

  The music in the bar is disco music: Donna Summer maybe, but with a newer backbeat. Ben lures a research assistant onto the dance floor. Claire lures Walker too. They dance in the middle of the group. She spins under the flashing lights. She moves away from him. The dance floor is crowded. Bodies merge and move like extensions of the same gyrating creature. Claire orbits around Walker, but when he turns she’s disappeared. He stops dancing, the only stationary body in that sea, until she reappears again, moving away from the group and toward Walker with hands raised. She’s looking right at him. Their waists meet first.

  “I want to take you home tonight,” he says.

  “What?”

  She can’t hear him over the music. He kisses her. Kisses are a kind of vocabulary, he thinks. This one, both lips parted, tongues touching with the most delicate of flicks, has a particular message. The message is Let’s be happy, and that feels right, because in some ways, isn’t being happy a conscious decision one makes?