The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014

by Daniel Handler

  Lifeguards differentiate between a swimmer in distress and someone who’s drowning. We expect victims to shout and flail and wave their arms, and swimmers in distress may do that—panic when they realize the water’s too rough or deep and they’re not strong enough to make it to shore. Drowning, on the other hand, is deceptively quiet. Looking back, I wonder why all of us who were subject to my grandfather’s assaults—me, my sisters, my cousins, and my mother, her sister, their cousins before us—didn’t display more unmistakable signs of distress. It seems strange there wasn’t more ferocity in us, but I guess we were absorbed in staying afloat. We turned on each other sometimes. We knew instinctively how to hurt. We quietly laid siege to ourselves. There would be eating disorders, self-harm, substance abuse, and destructive relationships. As a kid, I engaged in the occasional skirmish with adults. When, clearing a Thanksgiving table, I refused to touch my grandfather’s plate. When I whirled on my mother, chasing me for some backtalk, and socked her in the stomach. But mostly I was good. Mostly I sank. Resistance was playing dead, pretending to sleep so soundly I couldn’t be moved, going limp, going blank. The drowning person can’t wave her arms; she can’t shout. She tries in vain to use the water as a ladder to push herself up; she angles her mouth toward oxygen. Drowning is quiet: the head tilts back, the eyes glaze over, the victim slips beneath the surface.

  Leaning over the ferry railing, I imagined Abby’s smooth head emerging from our foamy wake. A wake. When we learned about homonyms in third grade, I was fascinated. Every afternoon after school, I scoured the dictionary for more pairs to bring in for my teacher. Two words that looked and sounded the same but meant different things. Doorways into different worlds. Wake: to rouse or become roused from sleep; a watch kept over a body before burial; the track of waves left by a ship or other object moving through water. The roiling water behind us that marked the place where we’d been. A wake: where Abby’s family had sat with her and said good-bye; where men wore suits and cried and ladies set casseroles and cakes on kitchen counters. A wake, awake: conscious, having your wits about you. I hated waking up. In the morning, dreams still clutched like dark weeds; I wanted to sink back into sleep and stay. A wake, awake. A word could mean one thing and another. A thing could be one thing and another. In the ocean, my mother grew light enough for me to carry; I could pick her up like a baby or a bride. I endowed The Saltwater Twin with that magic. She was all-powerful—more powerful, anyway, than me or any of the adults I knew. And she was gone from the world, for good, while I was stuck where I was.

  Everyone acted like things were normal. They talked about rain and carpool; they chopped onions and poured milk. Outside was green lawns and fresh paint. Outside was living rooms kids weren’t allowed in, with petit-point pillows and crystal dishes of candy made to look like pebbles. Kids with perfect bedrooms and perfect Halloween costumes. I knew a girl whose Raggedy Ann was so big she wore the doll’s clothes for Halloween till she was ten. Kids in the suburbs caught on early to what was important, the things that made the world easier to take. If you wanted to be unique, you could maybe wear an Izod in a funky color or admit that you liked to read for fun. Questions were uncool. Everyone was supposed to act like they knew what they were doing at all times. Shallow: where the water was warm and safe. Shallow was every day in the suburbs, every conversation, most every expression on every face. Shallow: the breaths we took when we were afraid, the way someone breathes when she’s drowning.

  I didn’t feel normal. I felt like an anomaly, some kind of monster or feral child accidentally dressed in a Snoopy T-shirt and corduroys. I felt dark; I felt deep. I could drag a sailor to his death. I asked questions; I wondered incessantly about what was unspoken, underneath.

  In Sunday school, we learned about transubstantiation, in which bread and wine really turned into the body and blood of Christ. When the altar bell rang, I looked for some tear in the air, some juddering of magic, listened for the whisper of the Holy Ghost. After I received communion, I’d hold the host in my mouth and wonder what it would feel like to be chewing on sinew and flesh, my mouth filling with the blood of Christ. I imagined the taste of jungle gym, penny, a thickening in my saliva like milk. The communion wafers turned to paste in my mouth while I knelt and puzzled over the way something could seem like one thing and all the time be something else. I learned to hold a notion close, just shy of truly believing it, managing in that way to give credence to two, often disparate, things at once. I lost baby teeth, picked out socks; I had sore throats and Easter dresses. I faced my mother’s hysterics, my grandfather’s assaults. I believed in Middle-earth, looked for secret passageways, prayed for signs. I managed somehow to live in the world that was and in the world I conjured. It was a way to believe things I knew weren’t true—that my family was the sunny Sunday family building castles on the beach, that I wasn’t growing up on a sinking ship.

  Maybe—when someone close to you died or someone did you harm or maybe simply when you emerged from a dark movie theater onto a bright sidewalk full of people hurrying home to dinner—you’ve felt, somehow, the world split in two. Ordinary things—coins clinking into the machine on the bus, the key rotating the lock on your front door—feel jarring, surreal. Yet you keep going. You ride the bus, you open your front door, you put something on a plate, you eat, you watch TV. Somehow you find a way to be in two worlds. One fades; the other comes to life. We shift and rattle and float between. People do this. It’s remarkable and ordinary. This must be how my grandfather lived. I know it’s how my mother survived. She found other, more palatable things to believe—that she was her father’s little princess, that we were all warm and safe in the bosom of a beautiful family. I learned this lesson well, the knack of splitting the world in two. There’s little incentive to distinguish between real and pretend when what’s real is often intolerable, so frequently I drifted somewhere in between. I used to cry sometimes, in secret, when I finished a book. Sometimes I’d finish the last page then start the whole thing again. My childhood games were about acting out the stories I loved or plotting for a rosy future. I daydreamed about someday.

  Dwelling on how things were going to be helped me cope with how they were. I still do this. I can imagine the built-in bookcases I covet for my living room and the vintage mantle where I’d arrange soy candles and maybe some branches. I can imagine the art that would be on the walls, which would be a soft gray-green, and the ottoman would be upholstered in maybe a cherry-red print instead of the grimy wheat color it is now with a lot of cat scratch threads hanging off it. A person can get too good at imagining things. When you live in fantasy, being in the flesh-and-blood world can start to feel alien and heartbreaking. You’re not really present if you’re always imagining something different. I’ve accepted some things I shouldn’t have—jobs, relationships—because I’m good at tolerating. I’m good at getting things over with while plotting something beautiful and fantastic. Staying submerged for extended periods—in books, fantasy, television, whatever—can make you like one of those blind fish that glow in the dark, a creature that swims away from light. The Saltwater Twin gave me a way to imagine myself strong and powerful; she gave me a world where I was safe. But she also represented a death wish. She was a siren. Her song rang in my ears.

  At the end of our vacation, my father drove the station wagon into the belly of the ferry, and we clanged upstairs to the deck. Shouts of “’Bout a coin!” drifted up from below. They were there every summer—boys treading water in the murky green harbor, calling for coins from the passengers waiting onboard for the ferry to depart. “’Bout a coin!” The coins fell silver and flickering, and the boys disappeared after them. I imagined kicking down, eyes stinging with salt, catching nickels, dimes, and silver dollars as they tumbled, sunlit, into the dark water. One by one, the boys surfaced, slick-haired, and called to us again. Then the ferry whistle blew, and the boat lumbered away from the wharf. The wind picked up. I watched the gulls bank and plummet, cocky and shrill. Out on the
open water, I pressed against the rail, eyes on the waves, watching intently for signs of life.

  ADAM JOHNSON

  Nirvana

  FROM Esquire

  IT’S LATE AND I CAN’T SLEEP.

  I raise a window for some spring Palo Alto air, but it doesn’t help. In bed, eyes open, I hear whispers, which makes me think of the President because we often talk in whispers. I know the whisper sound is really just my wife, Charlotte, who listens to Nirvana on her headphones all night and tends to sleep-mumble the lyrics. Charlotte has her own bed, a mechanical one.

  Yes, hearing the President whisper is creepy because he’s been dead now, what—three months? But even creepier is what happens when I close my eyes: I keep visualizing my wife killing herself. More like the ways she might try to kill herself, since she’s paralyzed from the shoulders down. The paralysis is quite temporary, though good luck trying to convince Charlotte of that. She slept on her side today, to fight the bedsores, and there was something about the way she stared at the safety rail at the edge of the mattress. The bed is voice-activated, so if she could somehow get her head between the bars of the safety rail, “incline” is all she’d have to say. As the bed powered up, she’d be choked in seconds. And then there’s the way she stares at the looping cable that descends from the Hoyer lift, which swings her in and out of bed.

  What can really keep a guy up at night is the knowledge that she doesn’t need an exotic exit strategy, not when she’s exacted a promise from you to help her do it when the time comes.

  I rise and go to her, but she’s not listening to Nirvana yet—she tends to save it for when she needs it most, after midnight, when her nerves really start to crackle.

  “I thought I heard a noise,” I tell her. “Kind of a whisper.”

  Short, choppy hair frames her drawn face, skin faint as refrigerator light.

  “I heard it, too,” she says.

  She spent months two, four, and seven crying pretty hard—there’s no more helpless feeling for a husband, let me tell you. But this period that’s come after is harder to take: Her eyes are wide, drained of emotion, and you can’t tell what she’s thinking. It’s like she’s looking at things that aren’t even in the room.

  In the silver dish by her voice remote is a half-smoked joint. I light it for her and hold it to her lips.

  “How’s the weather in there?” I ask.

  “Windy,” she says through the smoke.

  Windy is better than hail or lightning, or, God forbid, flooding, which is the sensation she felt when her lungs were just starting to work again. But there are different kinds of wind.

  I ask, “Windy like a whistle through window screens, or windy like the rattle of storm shutters?”

  “A strong breeze, hissy and buffeting, like a microphone in the wind.”

  She smokes again. Charlotte hates being stoned, but she says it quiets the inside of her. She has Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition in which her immune system attacks the insulation around her nerves, so that when the brain sends signals to the body, the electrical impulses ground out before they can be received. A billion nerves inside her send signals that go everywhere, nowhere. This is the ninth month, a month that is at the edge of the medical literature. It’s a place where the doctors no longer feel qualified to tell us whether Charlotte’s nerves will begin to regenerate or whether Charlotte will be stuck like this forever.

  She exhales, coughing. Her right arm twitches, which means her brain has attempted to tell her arm to rise and cover the mouth.

  She tokes again, and through the smoke she says, “I’m worried.”

  “What about?”

  “You.”

  “You’re worried about me?”

  “I want you to stop talking to the President. It’s time to accept reality.”

  I try to be lighthearted. “But he’s the one who talks to me.”

  “Then stop listening, okay? He’s gone. When your time comes, you’re supposed to fall silent.”

  Reluctantly I nod. But she doesn’t understand. In the third month of paralysis, she did nothing but watch videos, which made her crazy. It made her swear off all screens, so she’s probably the only person in America who didn’t see the video clips of the assassination. If she’d beheld the look in the President’s eyes when his life was taken, she’d understand why I talk to him late at night. If she could leave this room and feel the nation trying to grieve, she’d know why I reanimated the commander in chief and brought him back to life.

  “In regards to listening to the President,” I say, “I just want to point out that you spend a third of your life listening to Nirvana, whose songs are all from a guy who blew his brains out.”

  Charlotte tilts her head and looks at me like I’m a stranger, like I don’t know the first thing about her. “Kurt Cobain took the pain of his life and made it into something that mattered, that spoke to people. Do you know how rare that is? What did the President leave behind? Uncertainties, emptiness, a thousand rocks to overturn.”

  She talks like that when she’s high. I decide to let it go. I tap out the joint and lift her headphones. “Ready for your Nirvana?” I ask. “That sound, I hear it again,” she says.

  She tries to point, then gives up and nods toward the window.

  “It’s coming from there,” she says.

  At the window, I look out into the darkness. It’s a normal Palo Alto night—the hiss of sprinklers, blue recycling bins, a raccoon digging in the community garden. Then I notice it, right before my eyes, a small black drone, hovering outside my window. Its tiny servos swivel to regard me. Real quick, like I’m snatching a cookie from a hot baking sheet, I steal the drone out of the air and pull it inside. I close the window and curtains, then study the thing: Its shell is made of black foil, stretched over tiny struts, like the bones of a bat’s wing. Behind a propeller of clear cellophane, a tiny infrared engine throbs with warmth.

  I look at Charlotte.

  “Now will you listen to me?” she asks. “Now will you stop this President business?”

  “It’s too late for that,” I tell her and release the drone. Together, we watch it bumble around the room, bouncing off the walls, running into the Hoyer lift. Is it autonomous? Has someone been operating it, someone watching our house? I lift it from its column of air and, turning it over, flip off its power switch.

  Charlotte looks toward her voice remote. “Play music,” she tells it.

  Closing her eyes, she waits for me to place the headphones on her ears, where she will hear Kurt Cobain come to life once more.

  I wake later in the night. The drone has somehow turned itself on and is hovering above my body, mapping me with a beam of soft red light. I toss a sweater over it, dropping it to the floor. After making sure Charlotte’s asleep, I pull out my iProjector. I turn it on and the President appears in three dimensions, his torso life-sized in an amber glow.

  He greets me with a smile. “It’s good to be back in Palo Alto,” he says.

  My algorithm has accessed the iProjector’s GPS chip and searched the President’s database for location references. This one came from a commencement address he gave at Stanford back when he was a senator.

  “Mr. President,” I say. “I’m sorry to bother you again, but I have more questions.”

  He looks into the distance, contemplative. “Shoot,” he says.

  I move into his line of sight but can’t get him to look me in the eye. That’s one of the design problems I ran across. Hopefully, I’ll be able to fix it in beta.

  “Did I make a mistake in creating you, in releasing you into the world?” I ask. “My wife says that you’re keeping people from mourning, that this you keeps us from accepting the fact that the real you is gone.”

  The President rubs the stubble on his chin. He looks down and away.

  “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” he says.

  Which is eerie, because that’s a line he’d spoken on 60 Minutes, a moment when he expres
sed regret for legalizing drones for civilian use.

  “Do you know that I’m the one who made you?”

  “We are all born free,” he says. “And no person may traffic in another.”

  “But you weren’t born,” I tell him. “I wrote an algorithm, based on the Linux operating kernel. You’re an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person’s images and videos and data—everything you say, you’ve said before.”

  For the first time, the President falls silent.

  I ask, “Do you know that you’re . . . that you’ve died?”

  The President doesn’t hesitate.

  “The end of life is another kind of freedom,” he says.

  The assassination flashes in my eyes. I’ve seen the video so many times it plays without consent—the motorcade is slowly crawling along while the President, on foot, parades past the barricaded crowds. Someone in the throng catches the President’s eye. The President stops and turns, lifts a hand in greeting. Then a bullet strikes him in the abdomen. The impact bends him forward, and his eyes lift to confront the shooter, a person the camera never gets a look at. A dawning settles into the President’s gaze, a look of clear recognition—of a particular person, of some kind of truth, of something he has foreseen? He takes the second shot in the face. You can see the switch go off—his limbs give and he’s down. Men in suits converge, shielding him, and the clip is over. They put him on a machine for a few days, but the end had already come.