The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014

by Daniel Handler

  They have to leave their car at the bar that night and take a taxi home.

  “Fun time?” he asks.

  She doesn’t answer. She’s passed out against his shoulder. She’s away again, wherever she goes. He tries to remember to be happy.

  They get home late, and he helps her up the stairs. They fall asleep on top of the covers, and soon he is back in the ocean. He kicks to stay afloat. The towers rise up and buzz with electricity. He sees the rowboat. It’s closer than ever before, cresting every wave. Walker can see now that a solitary figure is rowing the boat. The boat comes closer and closer, but not so close that Walker can see the man properly. “Well, you’re a strong swimmer,” the man calls out, and Walker is awake.

  He takes his time getting out of bed. Claire is fixing breakfast when he comes downstairs. He plops down on the stool at the kitchen island and watches her scramble the eggs and drink tomato juice, her usual hangover cure. Her pink robe swishes along the floor when she turns to pour him some coffee.

  “How’d you sleep?” she asks, surprisingly chipper.

  “I slept okay,” he reports, which is more or less true, and she returns to the stove. He doesn’t ask her how she slept. Part of him would rather not know. “Listen, I think I need to tell you about something,” he says and waits for a reaction. “About someone.” The radio is on above the fridge. The sunlight sparkles in the metal sink under the window. Claire has her back to him. Finally her spatula goes still in the pan. He has her attention. They have nothing to do today but be together. He considers what to say next.

  V. V. GANESHANANTHAN

  K Becomes K

  FROM Ploughshares

  I RECENTLY WENT to an appointment with a terrorist I used to know. He lives near me in New York City, and when he wrote me a letter that said Dear Sashi, come and see me, without thinking very much about it, I did. Even when I was a little girl in Sri Lanka, before I had ever heard the word terrorist, I knew that when a certain kind of person wanted something, you did it without asking a lot of questions. I met a lot of these sorts of people when I was younger because I used to be what you would call a terrorist myself.

  I helped these people for a friend, and I left them for the same reason. So you must understand: I am not an unlikable person, and neither are all terrorists. That word, terrorist, is too simple for the people I have known. It is too simple for me, too simple even for this man. How could one word be enough? But you asked me a question, so I am going to say it anyway, because it is the language you know, and it will help you to understand who we were, what we were called, and who we have really become.

  We begin with this word. But I promise that you will come to see that it cannot contain everything that has happened. And while I am no longer the version of myself who met with terrorists every day, I also want you to know that when I was that woman, when two terrorists encountered each other in my world, what they said first was simply hello. Like any two people you might know or love.

  I met the first terrorist I knew at the precise time in his life when he was deciding to become one. In 1981, when I met K, I was almost fourteen years old. He and his family lived down the road from me and mine, in one village of a Tamil town called Jaffna, in Sri Lanka. The Jaffna peninsula is the northernmost part of the island. Many people have died there: some killed by the Sri Lankan Army, some by the Indian Peace Keeping Forces, and some by the Tamil separatists, whom you know as the terrorists.

  In the village where we were born, everyone was related to, hated, and loved by everyone else. In that heat, we needed and worked for each other. Now that I have lived through more than twenty seasons of snow, I dream of the village heat mostly in terms of fever. Some women carried cheap umbrellas to protect their faces from the sun. But the heat was not only outside us—we created it too. Our mothers cooked over wood stoves in hot kitchens, and we boiled water for tea almost hourly. We lit oil lamps before our household shrines and touched torches to roadside refuse. We mourned around burning pyres, undaunted. If we had let the heat faze us, we would not have survived. And we did more than survive, truly: we studied. I wanted to become a doctor. K wanted to become a doctor. And this was what made us alike.

  He had the upper hand from the first, not because he was older, or a boy, but because I began as his patient. On the morning that we met, I was boiling water for tea. I had to use a piece of cloth to hold the pot to avoid burning myself. But that morning, the cloth slipped, the handle slipped, and the pot slipped, pouring scalding water all over me. I screamed and screamed for my mother—Amma! My high, shrill voice carried out onto the road, where K was passing. Hearing my cry, he swiftly stopped, let his bicycle fall in the dirt at our gate, and ran inside.

  By the time he reached me in the kitchen, Amma had already found me. I screamed and cried and called every god I could name. Bubbles rose and popped on my skin. I could hear myself boiling and blistering, and looking down at myself, I could see it. Amma was sobbing, too horrified to move.

  “Sit!” he said, and pointed to a chair. When I kept screaming, he pushed me down into the chair and peeled my blouse up, baring my hot stomach. I heard Amma’s cry of aiyo! as though from a great distance. Snatching a bowl of eggs off the table, K began cracking them onto the burns. Her eyes widening, Amma moved forward as though to stop him.

  “It will cool the burn,” he said quickly, blocking her.

  Trying to master the pain, I tried to focus on anything but the wounds. I stared at him and saw only his thumbs, working in and out of the eggshells, scraping the slime of the whites out cleanly and onto the swelling rawness of the burn. He did it very quickly, as though he had had a lot of practice, as though he were making a cake and every precious scrap of egg were going to be eaten. I remember those thumbs, and I remember the eggs—they were so cold, and my skin was so hot, so hot that I cannot quite believe that the eggs did not just cook on my flesh. He was right—it did help. When the last of the six eggs was cracked and cooling on my skin, K looked up at Amma.

  “Are there more?”

  “What?”

  “More eggs?” She blinked, then nodded. “Good—cover the burn with a few more. The doctor—I should go—”

  When K came back with the doctor half an hour later, I had finally stopped crying. The doctor looked over the makeshift dressing with approval. “Whose idea was this?” he asked.

  “His,” Amma said.

  So I began as his patient, though he ended as mine.

  So many foods remind me of K now. He is on each wiped plate and inside each cold glass; each cup of hot milk tea with sugar is one he refused. The eggs I make myself each morning, Tabasco or Clancy’s Fancy hot sauce sliding bloodily across the top, are the ones he cracked onto my body. His family gave me varieties of fruit that are unattainable or tasteless in this country. When he came to visit me a few days later, his aunt came with him, bearing my favorite mampalam—mangoes—and valaipalam, the special, small, sweet bananas that grew in their yard. My mother must have mentioned that I liked them. The fruit pleased me, but for once, I felt more interested in the strange boy, who until this moment had belonged more to my brothers, his schoolmates, than to me. I tried to examine him without being too obvious about it. His shirt was tucked unevenly into his trousers, which were too large for his body. He looked sturdy, but not skinny, and he had a rim of hair on his upper lip that was not quite a mustache. It barely showed—he was dark from the sun, even though as an asthmatic, he had not been allowed outside very much. He had thick spectacles, which he took off and wiped carefully with a handkerchief. A woman’s handkerchief, I noticed. Later, I learned that it had belonged to his late mother.

  While he polished his spectacles, I took a good look at his face. He had a thin nose, a full mouth, and a high forehead with a gently curved widow’s peak, which might have accounted for his seeming older than sixteen despite the lack of facial hair. Most boys that age in our village had mustaches, my brothers included. K could not seem to manage one. But behin
d the spectacles, his eyes were lovely and old, full of a certainty that appealed to me. I wanted that certainty for myself, to be someone who could look at burned flesh and not hesitate to touch it.

  He replaced his spectacles, and when I realized that he was studying me with equal intensity I looked away.

  His aunt fussed over me, and my mother let me off from the usual duty of serving them tea. I had never done it with the appropriate grace, and the burn, stiffening, made me move even more awkwardly than I did naturally. Instead, I sat and talked to his aunt as he continued to study me. Finally, she and my mother stopped talking about the near-tragedy and began talking about the upcoming temple festival. K looked over at my mother and his aunt, who were deep in conversation, and then back at me. The thick lenses distorted his eyes, but it was too late: I already knew they were lovely.

  “So. How are you feeling now?”

  “I hardly knew you were there,” I said. “It hurt that much.”

  He would teach me, later, to lie about what hurt and how much. Most women, he would say, are naturally much better liars than you.

  “And now?”

  “Now? Better. But it itches,” I said, plucking at my blouse. “How did you know what to do?” I had had time, in the intervening days, to become curious about the science of what he had done.

  He shrugged. “It made sense, even though it wasn’t modern. The protein and fat of the egg soothe the burn.”

  “Thank you,” I said awkwardly.

  “Don’t scratch it—you’ll get a scar.”

  I moved my hand away from my stomach, and we sat in silence for a moment.

  “Are your brothers here?” he asked finally.

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  I took that to mean that his aunt had made him come with her to visit me, that he had little use for girls and little use for me. So we were not friends at first, although he had already been more intimate with me than any other boy I had known. I frowned when I thought about that, about his peeling the blouse away from my skin, about how that skin had looked when he had done it. He had not seemed at all taken aback by the sight of the wound, the volcanic molten look of it. I admired that steadiness. But I was also embarrassed by the recollection of the nakedness of my pain. His certain hands had touched me as though it was not an intrusion, as though it came naturally, although during that moment of looking down at my own body, I had been horrified at the sight of myself. His sureness made me wonder what it would take to horrify him.

  Although we had already had that intimacy, although certain barriers of propriety had been breached, it had been a forced breach required by the circumstances, and friendship did not come easily to us. We would have to go out of our respective ways to become friends, and I was not, at first, inclined to go out of my way. I was embarrassed, and I did not like feeling obliged to someone I considered a stranger. Our paths had crossed rarely. He was two years older than me; he went to the famous Jaffna Hindu College. He belonged to my brothers, after all, and he was a boy, and therefore our friendship was unlikely. Even when I saw him at the temple, we were separated by the traditional divide between men and women.

  The next time we saw each other was at the temple, in fact. I saw that his mustache appeared slightly more successful, and noticed his quick glance at my belly, where one of my mother’s old sari blouses covered the bandages from the burn. Suddenly conscious of new breasts, I lowered my arm across my body and looked away. The mustache looked foolish to me. He was not unusual, standing among the line of men waiting to be blessed. You, you American, you would have thought him just one of many dark men with white smiles. And, you know, you would have been wrong.

  K died on a September morning in 1987, on a stage that had been specially built for him to do so. It was outside the Nallur Kandaswamy Hindu temple, one of the temples of my childhood, and his childhood—one of our holiest and most loved places. At the time of his death he had not taken food or even water for eleven days. It was the morning of the twelfth day of what was being called his satyagraha. A word that refers to the tactic of nonviolence that Mahatma Gandhi originated.

  He died at 8:37 a.m., at the age of twenty-one, with a rebel’s name that was different from the one with which he had been born and with which I had loved him. It was a Saturday. Today Tiger supporters around the world mark this time as a holy hour, but I can tell you that at the moment of his death K was still an ordinary man—just a grownup version of the boy who had lived down the road from me in our village. His death made him no more saintly than he had been in life, which is to say not very. He was neither more moral nor more honest than the governments he protested. If anything, he was less so, and this made it harder to let him die, because I resented his death more. It was worse to mourn him, knowing truly what he had done. His face was harder to look at and to love, which I already did. Hunger had carved new hollows out of it. His mustache had wilted over his cracked mouth, shielding it from sight. He looked older and more austere. If I had not known already that it was K, I might not have recognized his body. When I bathed him each night with a wet cloth, it was like touching a stranger. While in many ways he did resemble the boy who had been my friend, in its hunger and thirst his body had traveled a great distance from its previous self. Perhaps I should say that he looked as he might have looked in fifty years, had he lived—and never fasted.

  K and our superiors had chosen this hunger strike as a method of protest against the government of India, which in its attempt at peacekeeping had instead become embroiled in our war. Forty years after Gandhi, in Sri Lanka, the Indian army occupied Tamil homes, crowded Tamil villages, raped Tamil women, and burned Tamil houses. They had burned his not so long ago. The occasion for K’s decision to fast was an India-sponsored accord that he believed ignored the Tamil interest in a homeland. Both he and I were connected to the movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Tamil Tigers, which for years had used violence and guerrilla warfare against the Sri Lankan government. That government discriminated against Tamils, but our own dubious morality was not lost on me. No one I knew in the movement would have dared to say such a thing aloud. At the same time, I understood that no act of violence we had committed had ever attracted as much support for a homeland as the act of violence K committed now, on his own body.

  Thousands and thousands of people crowded all around us. I felt both alone and the desire to be alone. I could not count how many people there were around us, but I did not know any of them the way I knew him. There might have been as many as a hundred thousand. People swarmed, clinging to each other and to the stage’s edge. When they came too close to me, I fought down an unreasonable alarm. They meant no harm, but they were hungry for him even as his body consumed itself. Many of them had been fasting in solidarity with him. Like him, some of them were also performers and opportunists. Our leaders had scattered speakers and microphones through the crowd, and for days, people had taken turns standing in front of them and crying out their grievances. Their eyes looked dull and enormous, rimmed with red. Now, after days of noise and threats of disruption, the temple was finally silent. The speakers hummed only with wind. No one knew what would happen at the moment of death. There had been rumors of rioting and calls for blood. For the moment, we felt only a terrible sense of anticipation made of both eagerness and fear.

  I myself stood on the stage with K’s doctor, the Tiger physician with whom I worked. I shook a little and tried to hold myself very straight. It was hot—very, very hot, and I had been standing there since sunrise, when I had gotten up from where I slept near K. I looked down at him where he lay on the floor of the stage, surrounded by the flags of the Tigers. I had known and watched the rhythm of his breathing for years in private. To do the same in public felt like a violation, but the irresistible rhythm of habit compelled me: his chest rose, his chest fell, his chest rose, his chest fell. His glasses slid askew, more askew with each slow breath, his eyes closed under them as though he were just
nodding off on his veranda at home. His chest rose; his chest stilled, and once more I anticipated its descent. I waited, and the space of that wait grew infinite.

  If you had asked me immediately afterward what I did as he died, I would have told you that I bent down to touch my forehead to his, that his skin felt warm and dry, that he still smelled faintly of iluppai flowers and other growing, living things. I would have told you that I went with him into the endless country of that trapped breath, a place where neither of us could cry out or make any human sound. I would have told you that although I had known that he would die—known it, perhaps, from the first time I had chosen to help him—that although this was the seed that had been planted, and watered, and planned for, in the face of its bloom, the air stopped in my throat too, and I could not believe what we had done.

  Later, other people told me that when he died, I did not touch him: I stood apart from him on the stand and moved my hand to my mouth as if to silence myself.

  The doctor put his hand on my elbow, which was wet with perspiration.

  “Sashi,” he said. “Sashi.”

  And then I breathed again, and K did not. It was the first moment in which such a thing was possible, and the sharp quickening pain of it stunned me. How swiftly the world reshaped itself around his absence! Perhaps someone you know has died and you have a sense of what I mean: the horror of knowing that everything is going to continue very nearly as it did before. People will do their jobs; you will even do yours, although you did not know that you were capable of it.

  Everything in medicine has its order, and this is also true of death: it has to be announced, the hour marked and recorded. The doctor, I understood, was going to pronounce it. I was glad to be spared this; even steeled as I had been for days against this inevitability, it would have been a very permanent thing to have the declaration of K’s passing be something that came from my mouth. And it was a moment for the spotlight, which suited the doctor and did not suit me. I watched him play to the tense and waiting theater of people, as I would not have done. He leaned down over the prone body of my friend and with an exaggerated motion, put two fingers to the curve of K’s dry neck, and then to the inside of his dry wrist. I had never imagined that someone could be so utterly parched. K looked as though, were he to be cut open, he would not even bleed.