The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  Harley was sympathetic, offering him some of the Seconal her doctor had prescribed for the insomnia that sometimes plagued her when she was getting her period.

  An old news story came back to him—from somewhere in England, if he remembered correctly—about a former army major who couldn’t get along with his wife. One day, after one of their many fights, he read an apology she’d written him—Darling, I’m sorry. No one is to blame but myself. Please forgive me—and saw a made-to-order suicide note. He arranged it to look as though she’d hanged herself. And he’d have gotten away with it, too, except that he confessed to a friend and ended up swinging from a rope himself.

  It amazed Roden that someone strong enough to kill another person would not have the willpower to keep a secret. But he knew that it happened all the time.

  Drugging Harley with some of her sleeping pills and tying a plastic bag over her head: of course he’d considered it. But he didn’t have any convenient little note, did he.

  Summer was gone, but while the weather was still warm he continued to haunt the city. With the new season the streets were more crowded, people moved faster, with more purpose and energy.

  Having studied the posters, he now had a better idea of what went on at Lincoln Center. He still thought about wanting to have more culture in his life. But he didn’t have to sit through a whole opera or ballet to know he would hate it.

  Once school started, he found himself drawn north to the neighborhood around Columbia University. At first he felt self-conscious in places that were obvious student hangouts. Then one day a waitress asked him if he had his ID—there was a student discount, she explained—and he realized that he’d been silly to think he stood out. In a T-shirt and jeans and the denim or army jacket he usually wore, he could easily pass for a student.

  On campus one afternoon, obeying an impulse, he trailed some students into a building and found himself outside a lecture hall where a class was just starting. The room was about two-thirds full. Ducking his head, he went to sit in an aisle seat in the last row. He glanced sideways at the teacher, who faced the class from behind a small wooden table with a glass of water sitting on it, like a man waiting to be served dinner. Roden was astonished that a professor would show up to work like this man: tieless, with a big stain on the front of his sweater vest, chin stubble, and a mop of uncombed hair.

  Roden slumped in his seat, wondering what he’d say if the teacher asked what he was doing there. But why did he feel so fucking nervous? His heart was pounding, for Christ’s sake. Self-loathing rose like mercury in his gut. He could barely listen to what the teacher was saying.

  But even after he’d calmed down, he had trouble following. The name Marx kept coming up. The name was pretty much all Roden knew about Marx. He figured he’d have understood more if he’d been to the previous classes.

  Soon he stopped listening. If he’d been less self-conscious, he’d probably have dozed off, as he noted two other guys in the room had done already. The teacher must have seen them, too, but to Roden’s surprise he ignored them. He remembered the Catholic schools he’d gone to, where no kid ever would’ve gotten away with that, and it struck him that college life must be pretty breezy.

  There was one student who kept interrupting the teacher by raising his hand as if he had a question. It never was a question, though, but always just his own thoughts—usually at some length—about what the teacher was saying. The teacher appeared to have no problem with this, but Roden thought the kid was showing off. Even more annoying was the fact that he wore his long hair in two pigtails, with a headband. When he looked in the mirror he probably saw a Comanche brave. What he should have seen was a girl. A very homely girl.

  Later, he came across a course catalogue in a student lounge and learned that the course he’d been trespassing on was called Introduction to Marx. The surprise was that it was listed as a philosophy course. He’d always thought Marx was a politician, not some kind of philosopher.

  At first he thought he’d misheard when the homely girl called the teacher Professor Marx. But in fact it was just one of those funny coincidences—and not really such a big coincidence, either, he thought, remembering that there’d been a Lenore Marx in his high school. A real cunt, as he recalled. Lenore Marx had been a candidate.

  Toward the end of October he and Harley went to a wedding. The bride was his cousin, Gene’s youngest daughter, Shay. At the reception, which was held at a restaurant in Montauk, Roden and Harley were dancing. Harley preferred fast music, because, unlike most husbands, hers danced well, and with him for a partner she could put on a show. But this was a slow song.

  She had a habit when slow dancing of rubbing her forehead back and forth against his chin. The coconut scent of a new cream rinse she’d started using filled his nostrils, reminding him of suntan lotion. Reminding him of the beach. Of Aruba.

  “Do you remember the first time we ever danced together?” she said.

  “Yes,” he lied. He wondered if she’d felt his heart jump. But what the fuck was she talking about? What had made her ask him that now?

  Just then the song ended, and they pulled apart. His heart jumped again when he saw her expression. It wasn’t like Harley to be sentimental—that was another way she was different from other women. Yet here she was, out of the blue, looking misty-eyed, talking mush.

  To cover his discomposure he said, “I’m out of smokes. I’ll meet you back at the table.” There was a cigarette machine in the lobby. He took a few minutes longer than necessary, but he was still agitated when he returned to the banquet room.

  Instead of going back to their table, Harley was now sitting at another table, next to her friend Angie. The two had their heads together, but when Roden approached they sprang apart as if a bee had flown between them.

  It could have been anything, he told himself later. Any kind of girl talk. Women often huddled like that, looking all urgent as if they were discussing matters of state when in fact they were just gossiping, or, even more likely, tearing apart one of their friends. Besides, he didn’t like Angie and she knew it, and she tended to go quiet around him.

  Several times in recent days he’d been on the point of asking Harley if something was wrong, but he was leery about where the question might take them. Until they got to Aruba, he thought, the less said between them, the better. But all his admirable patience was wearing thin, and January had started to feel very far away.

  He was afraid of losing focus. He wanted it to be ever clear before him: his purpose, his decision, the reason Harley had to die.

  Though he still didn’t know what he was going to do with his life, he often felt on the verge of an important discovery. At the same time, he felt that Harley was in the way. Her very existence was holding him back, preventing him from being who he was meant to be.

  He knew he would never marry again. Marriage was all wrong for him—he should have learned from his parents, who’d only made each other miserable. The truth was, he couldn’t bear to live with the mistake he’d made, the humiliation of it.

  And there was something else, something that had started long before he’d ever met Harley. By high school, it had already become a habit. He’d pick out a certain person because of something about her, maybe the way she talked, or the way she dressed or wore her makeup or her hair—some particular thing that got to him. She might have a sarcastic streak, like some of his teachers. Or she might be stuck up (Lenore Marx), or maybe just obnoxiously loudmouthed or conceited or dumb. And he’d feel a flood of venom and think, She is a candidate.

  It was always by strangulation. And it wasn’t that he never had murderous feelings toward any male—he did, often—but, for the full-blown fantasy, the candidate had to be female.

  In his head he had strangled the assistant principal, several teachers and fellow students, and dozens, if not hundreds, of strangers. And one particular snub-nosed cheerleader many times.

  His sickness—he did not shrink from calling it that—was so
mething he waited to outgrow, like his habit of lifting purses, or his other juvenile delinquencies. But though once he’d reached manhood he wouldn’t have dreamed of slashing the tires of a stranger’s car, of murder he did dream. Of murder he dreamed more and more.

  This candidate. That candidate.

  But there were times when it wasn’t just this or that particular female. It was everyone. People he knew, people he didn’t know. People. They were all candidates. And whenever he let his thoughts run free in that direction, the wildness of his own imagination shook him to the core.

  Then, during the last year of his mother’s life, his thoughts of murder waned. Though she’d had a full-time home nurse, her dying gutted Roden, leaving him hollowed out like a jack-o’-lantern, and when she died his grief was far worse than when he’d lost his father. It was the strongest emotion he’d ever known.

  And then he met Harley.

  Was blinded by the luster of her silver-blond hair—

  Her lean tanned legs—

  Her sumptuous breasts—

  Her mouth with its taste like vanilla.

  No sooner were they man and wife than the sickness returned. But there was this difference now. He was no longer appalled. He was not a child anymore, the fear of God had long left him. He hadn’t believed in God since he was ten years old.

  Time passed, and the two feelings grew equally, like twin demons developing inside him: the desire to be wifeless, the desire to kill.

  He thought of it as a correction. Striking through his marriage, his mistake. Burying his humiliation.

  Clear and simple. Or at least it had been clear and simple—before. But then things for which he wasn’t prepared started happening. He was tortured by the fear of a flaw in his plan, the fear that he lacked some essential piece of information. Or he was losing his nerve.

  Driving away from the wedding reception, he asked Harley as casually as he could if everything was OK and he felt her go rigid at his side. A chill little laugh, followed by her clipped assurance that of course everything was OK, why wouldn’t it be OK, followed by a yawn. Her tell: Harley always faked a yawn when she was lying. They were both silent for the rest of the way home.

  That night, Harley took a double dose of Seconal before going to bed. Roden got up several times in the night. He paced the room, stopping to gaze down at her sprawled, inert body. Dead to the world. He pondered the expression, running it like a bit of ticker tape through his head until it was drained of sense.

  Why does she have to die?

  She has to die so that he can be free.

  She has to die because he has to kill someone, and she is the obvious candidate.

  He isn’t going to waste a lot of time thinking about whether or not she deserves to die.

  Kneeling by the bed, the way he’d been taught as a small boy to say his prayers, he went over the plan again, step by step.

  There’d be no time afterward to fuck her. Not for the first time does this thought leap and bark at him. The idea has always excited him, but he knows it’s too risky.

  Dead to the world. She doesn’t even flinch as he stands there loudly cursing her in the dark.

  Were it not for the Valium and the nitrous oxide they’d given her, he might never have learned the truth. But when she came home after what was supposed to have been a breakfast date with Angie, Harley was weepy and babbling.

  When Angie tried to hustle her upstairs—“She’s just a little dizzy, she just needs to lie down”—Roden asked her to leave. Angie looked scared then, obviously reluctant to leave Harley alone with him. But he’d spoken in a way that made her go at once.

  He followed Harley up to their room, where she crawled into bed and blurted out everything.

  When he tried telling her that it was OK, he wasn’t upset, he wasn’t angry at her, it was as if she was deaf. It soon became clear that his feelings were not what she was concerned about. Nor was she crying because she’d had a change of heart about the baby.

  She was afraid of going to Hell.

  “Oh, Roddy, what if God won’t forgive me?”

  “What are you talking about? You don’t believe in all that Catholic crap anymore, remember?”

  It was true. They’d been married in a church because Harley wasn’t going to be denied the lead role in a big church wedding. But neither of them had been to Mass in years.

  There could be no doubt, though, that she was genuinely scared. A Catholic upbringing is something you never really leave behind.

  He could not calm her fears. He was having enough trouble trying to stifle his own feelings, or at least not give them away.

  He was thinking that now he wouldn’t need a suicide note.

  He was torn. Part of him said better stick with the Aruba plan, switching to a whole new plan was reckless. On the other hand, now that this unexpected chance had come, shouldn’t he seize it?

  Harley didn’t discuss her feelings with him again, but he eavesdropped on her phone calls with Angie.

  What if the Catholic Church was right? In that case she had committed a mortal sin: premeditated, cold-blooded murder.

  She was not herself. Don’t take his word for it, ask her best friend. Harley was frightened, depressed, tormented. That guilt would drive her to swallow all her pills at once was tragic but understandable.

  He knew Harley well enough to know that her state of mind wouldn’t last forever. He must act while she was still in the throes. On the other hand, he mustn’t be too rash, or he might trip himself up. But now that he knew he wasn’t going to have to wait till January, some of his old patience had returned. He decided to give it a week.

  I wish I could explain to you in a way you’d understand. Believe me when I say I never meant to hurt you. But I’ve been living a lie for too long. We both have. This whole marriage has been a lie from the start. Now I’ve met someone else, someone who loves me more than you ever could. And I’ve gone away with him. I don’t know what else to tell you, except to repeat that I didn’t mean to hurt you. And that I feel sorry for you. You are so out of touch with your own feelings. You are so self-absorbed you don’t see what’s going on right under your nose! The abortion was a terrible thing for me. I didn’t know if the baby was yours or his. Not that it matters now. But in the end I see that it was really a good thing because it got me to decide once and for all which man I truly wanted to be with.

  He didn’t stop to think—the whirring, crashing activity of his mind could not be called thinking. He threw back some scotch, got in his car, and drove to the little sunburned shack near the train station.

  “Hey, Jack, what’s happening, man?”

  “Jake,” he corrected.

  He used his bare hands, choking her from behind, surprised at the force with which she reared, nearly throwing him. When he got his breath back he removed her bra, the same red bra she always wore.

  The man was watching TV, as usual. The sound very loud, as usual. He turned his head at the last minute but it was too late.

  This one was harder. The man had thick, rubbery rings of flesh around his neck. Roden was afraid the cheap bra would snap.

  A black-and-white movie was playing. An old western. Roden could watch what he was doing superimposed on a scene of masked men on horseback bearing down on a stagecoach.

  It was done. For an instant he felt sapped of all strength. He had to resist the urge to drop to the floor.

  Driving away from the house, he marveled at how quick it had been. How quick and easy.

  It was done. It could never be undone.

  With the woman he’d felt the euphoric rush and release his fantasies had prepared him for. But it was killing another man that made him feel proud.

  He’d never known what the man’s name was, or exactly what his relationship was to the woman. The woman had called herself Marilyn, a name Roden had always liked.

  He didn’t think Marilyn deserved to die. But he didn’t feel bad for her, either. She was a whore, and whores got m
urdered all the time. It was one of the things whores were for.

  MARIA REVA

  Letter of Apology

  from Granta

  Don’t think.

  If you think, don’t speak.

  If you think and speak, don’t write.

  If you think, speak and write, don’t sign.

  If you think, speak, write and sign, don’t be surprised.

  News of Konstantyn Illych Boyko’s transgression came to us by way of an anonymous note deposited in a suggestion box at the Kozlov Cultural Club. According to the note, after giving a poetry reading, Konstantyn Illych disseminated a political joke as he loosened his tie backstage. Following Directive No. 97 to Eliminate Dissemination of Untruths Among Party Cadres and the KGB, my superior could not repeat the joke, but assured me it was grave enough to warrant our attention.

  One can only argue with an intellectual like Konstantyn Illych if one speaks to him on his level. I was among the few in the Kozlov branch of the agency with a higher education, so the task of reeducating Konstantyn Illych fell to me.

  Since Konstantyn Illych was a celebrated poet in Ukraine and the matter a sensitive one, I was to approach him in private rather than at his workplace, in case the joke had to be repeated. Public rebuke would only be used if a civil one-on-one failed. According to Konstantyn Illych’s personal file (aged forty-five, married, employed by the Cultural Club), the poet spent his Sundays alone or with his wife at their dacha in Uhly, a miserable swampland thirty kilometers south of town.

  Judgment of the quality of the swampland is my own and was not indicated in the file.

  The following Sunday I drove to Uhly, or as close as I could get to Uhly; after the spring snowmelt, the dachas were submerged by a meter of turbid water and people were moving between and around the dachas in rowboats.

  I had not secured a rowboat for the task as the need for one was not mentioned in Konstantyn Illych’s file, nor in the orders I was given.