The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020

by John Joseph Adams

  I don’t think the new ones are as nice anymore.

  I lost that one when I was thrown by a horse one time in college. It was in my pocket, and when I got to my feet, bruised and hip aching, it was gone. And no amount of searching turned it up.

  * * *

  There are a lot of them on the internet.

  But the damned things ain’t cheap. And how do you tell which ones are counterfeit?

  But maybe the pen I was using at the time . . .

  At the time it happened? At the time I learned the thing I can’t remember? At the time I did the thing I don’t want to remember?

  But I didn’t have the pen long. Did I?

  In any case, maybe that pen would help me remember.

  * * *

  I spend way too much money on it. And it comes.

  I hold it in my hand. It feels . . . itchy. But it doesn’t fill me up with memories the way the other one had.

  * * *

  I remember the unused pages at the back of my old notebooks. There were always a few.

  I find myself taking the books down off the shelf, thumbing through them. The unburned ones, of course. Thumbing through the burned ones would have been unfeasible, and even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t accomplish much of anything beyond getting my fingers ashy.

  I find myself looking at ink colors, organizational choices. How my handwriting has evolved.

  We lose all the best things to time.

  But time brings a lot of benefits, also. Freedom from old wounds, for example.

  Perspective.

  Grace.

  The wisdom to identify the heads that need to be busted, and the courage of your convictions to go out and bust some heads.

  * * *

  I have a couple of dozen old notebooks. And at the end of almost every one of them is a swath of pristine pages. Somewhere between twenty and fifty, a full signature at least and maybe two or three—just sitting there wordless and ignored.

  Even after I stopped burning them, I guess I never really finished a notebook before I moved on. The lure of the next book was already there, like a pressure inside me urging me to set this one aside and pick up the perfect one that would be waiting. Untrammeled. Pure.

  Without any mistakes in it.

  Yes, I hate using broken things. Dirty things. I hate things that are cracked or warped or seem old and in disrepair.

  So I would get to the point where I could conceivably justify discarding the old book with its scuffed cover and frayed page edges and all the mistakes inside it. And I would switch to a new one, clean and unscribbled-in. And out the old one would go. Into the flames, at first. Later, onto a shelf with its sisters.

  * * *

  I can touch the notebooks. I can always touch the notebooks.

  But they don’t go back far enough. They don’t have the thing that mattered in them. That had happened before. The thing that I can’t remember.

  The thing that had happened and been burned.

  The thing I use my new old echo of a pen now to write about.

  * * *

  With the one before him, I never argued. We never made enough demands on each other to have anything to fight about.

  With him, I think I fought all the time. I remember . . . screaming matches. I remember arguments that made me doubt my sanity. I remember him telling me I said things I couldn’t remember saying. I remember letting him win because I couldn’t keep track of where the goalposts were, and because I never learned to argue to win.

  I never learned to take up space in other people’s lives.

  * * *

  I wish I had known to be wary of the urge to crystallize my identity, to declare myself a thing—one thing, or another—and not accept that I was a continuity of things that would always be changing.

  I might have been less eager to discard the thing I had been to become something new if I hadn’t been so afraid that acknowledging the old thing meant being trapped for all time. If I hadn’t been so afraid the people who knew me would never let me change, I might have held on to more of them, instead of shedding whole lives like a snake sheds skins.

  Of course, sometimes people won’t let you change. Because their self-image is bound up with yours, and they’re afraid of challenging themselves, too. Or because they want to keep you weak so they can own you. Or because their own identity gets stuck on you being and behaving a certain way. It’s a cliché to say that alcoholics and addicts often find they need a whole new suite of friends when they get clean, and their lives no longer revolve around getting altered anymore.

  But the thing is, over time, changes just become part of the status quo. Tattoos that marked a milestone or a rebellion to our younger selves soften into our skin, become unremarked. They become a part of us, a part of our image and who we are.

  What is mine, and what is not mine—our conception of these things changes as we grow.

  * * *

  I moved around a lot. As an adult, and as a child. I didn’t have any place that felt like mine.

  Until I met him. Until I met Joshua.

  * * *

  I write the name, and look at it, and know that it is right. I should be giddy with triumph. Blazing with the endorphins of having figured something out.

  I feel hungry, and dizzy. And tired.

  * * *

  I was sitting in a booth at the airport, crying on the phone. “I wish you had just shot me,” I said.

  At the time when I said it, it was true.

  Joshua was telling me about the girl he’d met. The girl who was helping with his plans. The girl who would be taking over for me, he said, so that I could get some rest. Get my head together.

  Get back to being right with the revolution.

  I asked her name. He told me. She was somebody I knew. I asked if I could come back after Thanksgiving with my mom. He said if I got right, I could. He said that my leaving to see my family had been a mistake, and I would have to make amends for it.

  “You can’t do this to her,” I said. “She’s just a kid. She doesn’t know she’s giving up her whole life.”

  She was the same age I had been, eight years before. I was a wizened old woman of twenty-seven.

  “Come back,” he said. “Forget about your mother. We can talk. That other girl doesn’t have to be involved.”

  My mom, whom I had not seen in four years because of Joshua, was dying. I reminded him of that. He reminded me that if I were a good revolutionary, that wouldn’t matter. “Anyway, remember what her husband did to you.”

  How could I forget?

  I have since, largely, forgotten.

  He hung up. I remember thinking, very clearly, He’ll use her up the same way he used up me.

  I wish I could say that thought is the thing that motivated me. I wish I could say that was the last time I ever talked to him.

  I sat there and cried for another hour, until I had to get up to make my connection. Nobody bothered me. People cry in airports so often, it’s not much of a spectacle. These days they cry and shout into their cell phones just about anywhere. Back then, the crying and shouting were more localized.

  Halfway to the gate, I stopped. I walked back to the phones. The young woman he’d replaced me with was a sophomore. Nineteen years old. I knew her name and where she came from.

  I called her family.

  “Your daughter joined a cult in college,” I told them. “You need to get her home.”

  I hung up. I ran for my gate.

  I just barely made my plane.

  * * *

  We have this idea that healing comes as an epiphany.

  We have it in part because epiphanies are narratively convenient. They’re tidy for a storyteller; there’s a break point, a moment when everything changes. An identifiable narrative beat. A point at which everything before is one way, and everything after is different. They’re satisfying. They provide catharsis and closure.

  Frustratingly, in real life, you often have to go back
and have the same epiphany over and over again, incrementally, improving a tiny bit each time. Frustrating for you. Frustrating for your loved ones.

  It would be nicer if you could just have that single crystallizing incident, live through it, and get on with being a better human being who was better at humaning.

  It’s comforting to the afflicted to think we only have to make one change, and we can be better. Boom, all at once. Wouldn’t it be nice if role-playing or primal scream therapy or rebirthing therapy or a hot, uninhibited fuck or a midnight confession or a juice cleanse or a confessional essay or a cathartic piece of fiction really could heal all the old damage just like that? In one swoop? Wouldn’t it be nice?

  Sure.

  Of course, it’s nonsense, like so many other narratively convenient things we learn about from stories. But like so many of the things we learn about from stories, it’s useful nonsense.

  And epiphany isn’t going to fix us. Maybe nothing is going to fix us. But recognizing the damage might help us route around it. Which isn’t nothing, you know?

  The truth is that you never get to stop dealing with the damage. You might get better at it. You might find a lot of work-arounds and you might be happier—or even happy, inasmuch as happiness is a state and not a process!—but happiness doesn’t just happen. And it doesn’t happen instantly but incrementally, with a lot of constant effort and focus.

  I was small, and the people who should have taken care of me didn’t. In some cases, they didn’t take care of me because they were awful people. In some cases, they didn’t take care of me because they had their own shit going on.

  I get that. I have spent most of my life with my own shit going on, after all.

  One of the things with having your own shit going on is that, first, it blinds you to other people’s problems. It’s hard to have empathy and remember that, as the saying goes, everyone you meet is fighting a great battle when your attention is all taken up by being on fire right now. It’s hard to find the energy to be calm and kind and to consider the divergence of experience of others when you’re exhausted and trying to keep your own head above the waves and you’re swallowing salt water and you have no idea where you are going to find the energy to keep kicking.

  Another thing about having your own shit going on is that until you get some perspective on it, that shit feels enormous. Like the center of the universe. And it kind of is, in that nobody who is excavating a pile of trauma like that has the energy for anything else except shoveling. But it becomes so all-consuming that it’s easy to forget that you—and your trauma—are not the only thing on anybody else’s mind, or even the most important one, because they’re all really busy thinking about their own shovels.

  They have their own shit, their own trauma and crisesdeadlinestaxeshealthproblemssoreteethfamilydramatoxicneighbors you name it eating up the lion’s share of their own attention. And that’s fine, is the thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. Your problems are your problems, and their problems are their problems, and that’s the way it’s actually supposed to be.

  But when you’re dealing with that much trauma, and it’s that raw, boundaries are another thing you wind up sucking at.

  Recovery, I guess I’m trying to say, makes narcissists of us all.

  So when I’m freaking out now about what people think of me or what they think is going on with me, I remind myself . . . I don’t merit more than a passing consideration in the day of most people I encounter. They just don’t think that hard about me.

  Thank God.

  People got their own problems.

  I certainly got more than enough of mine.

  * * *

  I saw her once more, even though I never planned to go back to Chicago. She came to see me after her parents let her out of the treatment program they’d had her committed to.

  She came to my mother’s house, where I was living. Working temp jobs. Never staying longer than a week because after a week, people start to loop you into the politics and then they expect you to get involved. I was in therapy, because my dying mother made me.

  Biggest favor she ever did me, in hindsight.

  She stood in the doorway looking at me when I answered, framed in the greens of the yard. She studied my face. We were both a little better-fed than we had been.

  And then she said to me, “I don’t think you can fully appreciate how much I hate you.”

  I smiled as if she had accepted my offer of tea. “Oh,” I said, feeling the swell of self-loathing in me like a rising magma dome, “I think I can, most likely.”

  * * *

  Before I digressed, what I was pointing out was that it doesn’t happen fast, when things change. It happens slow. It’s an unpicking. The Gordian knot is more of a problem when you’re in a hurry and you don’t have any tools—assuming you want the string to be useful for something when you’re done unpicking it, which I’ve always thought was the problem with the Alexandrian solution.

  Well, I had assembled my tools. With as much haste as possible, and it hadn’t been fast, honestly, despite feeling that amorphous sense of formless dread, the pressure pushing on my awareness constantly without any knowledge of where it was going to happen, or when.

  Now I have them. Pens, inks. A selection of flawless new notebooks.

  The first line in a pristine notebook is always a little fraught. That paper, so innocent. And here I am, intending to put a mark down that will scar it forever.

  Maybe the real reason I burned my notebooks was that I didn’t want the responsibility.

  Maybe that’s also why I never had children. Just stories.

  Nobody really remembers if you screwed up any given story, five years after the fact.

  Erase, erase, erase.

  There’s freedom in not being important. In not being seen.

  * * *

  I can’t touch food for three days. Unfortunately, not being able to touch the food does nothing to keep me from getting hungry.

  * * *

  There’s so much to forgive yourself for when it comes down to it. So many little cysts of self-hate and personal despair.

  “I need you to keep your promises,” I said. And that was the beginning of the end.

  He promised easily. Fluidly.

  Meaninglessly.

  And I kept on believing him. Forgiving him.

  Making excuses.

  I was so good at excuses.

  Not for myself. I was always culpable. And I always found ways to punish myself. I believed it when he told me I was wrong. My perceptions, my understanding of events. When he told me I must be crazy, because what I remembered hadn’t happened that way at all.

  I was unforgivable. I was sure.

  But then I asked him to keep his promises.

  And I started writing his promises down. In my notebook. With my pen.

  * * *

  I find the damaged pen in a box I didn’t know had any pens in it, at the back of a deep cabinet shelf. I rattle it reflexively, not expecting a sound. But there is weight inside it, and something shifts.

  I open it and find a narrow, black, beat-up old fountain pen I cannot identify.

  I mean, I know what pen it is. It’s one I must have been given by a family member, but I can’t remember what the occasion was, or who had given me it. I had used it all through college after I lost my graduation pen. But I don’t know what kind it is.

  It’s missing the gold trim band on the cap, and the cap doesn’t close and lock. I remember it having a satisfying click when I shut it. It’s so slender, I used to tuck it inside the spiral rings of my notebooks. It lived there. It was a good pen.

  It is full of dried ink, because I am a terrible pen custodian.

  I check the collector websites and can’t find anything like it.

  * * *

  There was a time I was a bad friend. I was in love with somebody, and they were in love with somebody else, and I was in love with that person, too. Looking back, I don’t think either
of them loved me.

  I didn’t handle it well.

  I remember sitting in a bar in a bad chain restaurant breaking up tortilla chips into crumbs with my fingers because I needed something to do while my friend broke up with me, and I didn’t have the will to eat.

  And I’d already picked the whole label off my beer.

  I tried to make amends, years later. I can’t blame them for not wanting to talk to me.

  I could have done without that memory. I had, for years, I now realize.

  Accountability. That’s another thing you lose when you erase yourself.

  Thank God.

  * * *

  Some of the pens start slipping through my hands. At first, the newer ones, or the ones that had been bought as replacements for ones long lost. The older ones fare better, as if every scratch on the barrel, every bit of luster worn by use from the nib, every imperfection, makes the object in my hands more real. Or gives my hands something to stick to as they become more phantasmal. More of an unreality.

  The older ones fare better. At first.

  Then those begin to fall through me, too.

  There is so much I still can’t remember. I frown at those pristine notebooks with their smooth, friendly paper. I stroke a finger over them, and sometimes I feel the nap of the page, and sometimes my fingertip sinks through.

  I know—I can feel—the memories down there, like shipwrecks under clouded water. But I can’t make out the shapes. Can’t describe what I know has to be there.