It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  The city or the landlord cut his water off; Tommy Rimes turned it back on through the aquarium hose.

  The iPhone sounded.

  “Melanie?” Michael said after seeing the screen and answering.

  “They’ve closed down the street in front of your building,” she said.

  “The police?”

  “No, the protesters. They want the city to leave you alone. One group is raising money for your rent and four lawyers are working for injunctions against the landlord. Other tenants are making complaints about health and safety infractions. A journalist asked the president about you but he refused to comment and it’s been all over the news.”

  “What has?” Michael asked his ex.

  “The president not saying anything.”

  Michael tried to remember why he had decided to stay in his apartment. It was the storm. He was just too afraid because of the threat the news media made out of the storm. He was afraid, not heroic.

  “Michael?” Melanie said.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Max Strummer, who owns Opal Internet Services, wants you to do a daily podcast from your phone. He wants me to be the producer. Isn’t that great? You could make enough money to pay your rent and lawyers. He said that if you couldn’t think of anything to say we could send you text files that you could just read.”

  “I have to go, Mel,” Michael said.

  “What about Mr. Strummer?”

  “I’ll call you later,” Michael uttered and then he touched the disconnect icon.

  After turning off the sound on his phone, Michael went to sit in his favorite chair. It was extra wide with foam-rubber cushions under white cotton brocade. There was a lamp that he’d plugged into the power strip hanging halfway down his wall from the ventilation grate hole. The light wasn’t strong enough to illuminate the whole room, just the area around his chair.

  Reclining in the oasis of light, Michael tried to make sense of the storm and his street being closed down; of the young women who loved a man they’d never met; and Melanie, who had changed from an ex-girlfriend to a maybe-producer.

  When no ideas came he turned off the lamp, hoping that darkness would provide an answer. It didn’t. He was trying to recapture the moment when everything had made sense and he’d taken action without second-guessing his motives.

  Feeling lost, he looked across the room and saw a blue luminescence. It was the phone trying to reach out to him.

  Half an hour later he went to see who was calling. There had been a dozen calls. Most of the entries were unfamiliar, but one, instead of a number, was a name that he knew.

  • • •

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Balkan?”

  “Mr. X?”

  “No, no, this is Michael.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you call me on city business?” Michael asked.

  “They wanted me to call but this is your nickel.”

  “I’ve been looking at the internet,” Michael said. “People all over the place want to protect me. They’re offering money and legal support. One guy named Strummer wants to hire me and my ex to do a podcast for him.”

  “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you said that you wanted people to realize what they had in common.”

  “But between them,” Michael said, “not outside.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Not like a natural disaster or some enemy,” the young bearded man replied. “I don’t want to be the discounted meal at the fast food chain that you can buy in Anchorage or the Bronx. I don’t want to be anything except an idea.”

  “But you’re a man.”

  “Thanks for that, Bob.”

  “For what?”

  “I needed to talk to somebody about these thoughts in my head. I couldn’t get them out if I didn’t have anybody to talk to. I know that you’re working for them but right now they don’t know what to do. In that little window you helped me. You really did.”

  “Helped you what?”

  “I got to go, Bob.”

  “Where can you go, Michael?”

  “You always ask the best questions.”

  • • •

  The next morning Michael was standing in his kitchen eating from a can of pork and beans with a teaspoon when he noticed that the spigot had a slow drip. Michael wasn’t sure if it was the dripping or his talk with the city psychologist that made up his mind.

  He tested the hot water and then called Melanie. She was surprised to hear from him and happy that he had decided to do his first podcast. He was careful, and she was too, not to talk about love.

  • • •

  At four in the afternoon Michael was ready. He had refused to allow Strummer to dictate what he said. He ignored the checklist of subjects his internet listeners might want to hear about.

  Michael had the bathtub draining when he started recording and had to close the bathroom door to keep out the noise.

  “My name is Michael Trey,” he said into the receiver with no notes or even a notion of what exactly he’d say. “I have lived in Manhattan for seven years and I was scared about Hurricane Laura, so scared that I haven’t left my house since it broke. Because I wouldn’t go out I lost my job and my girlfriend, and the landlord has been trying to evict me. I’m broke and they keep turning my utilities on and off. I have hot water right now and so I’m going to take my first real bath in weeks.

  “My neighbor, Tommy Rimes, pushed a power strip and a little hose through the ventilation duct and so I’ve been able to get by. I’ve seen videos of people down in the street supporting me. I like that but it’s misguided. What they should do, I believe, is lock themselves into their own houses and turn off the world outside. I don’t know if this would be possible or if it would make any difference at all but that’s all I’ve got.

  “What I’m saying is that the president didn’t talk about me because there’s nothing to say. It is us who should be talking to him. It’s us who need to get the red lines out of the bottoms of our screens because we’re in it together as far as we go. But maybe, maybe that’s impossible because we do things primarily as mammals, not men and women.

  “That’s really all I have to say. I know there are people out there who want a daily report from my musty apartment but really all they have to do is listen to this, what I’m saying right now.

  “Goodbye.”

  • • •

  Michael turned off his phone before running the hot bath in the deep, cast-iron tub. It was this tub that had made him take the apartment in the first place. The hot water felt so good that he groaned when he first sat back. The stinging in his wrists subsided and he wasn’t frightened except if he concentrated on the hue of the water.

  He was exhilarated at first and then tired the way he used to be as a little boy getting into his bed. He wondered if anyone would ever make sense out of the fear-herding that all the people, and maybe all other creatures, of the world lived under.

  He would have liked Melanie to say that she loved him but only if he didn’t have to ask.

  WALTER MOSLEY is one of the most versatile and admired writers in America today. He is the author of more than fifty critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and the Nation, among other publications. In 2013, he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, and he is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  * * *

  “Good News!”

  1.

  Or so at first it seemed.

/>   I’d been named valedictorian of my class at Pennsboro High School. And I’d been the only one at our school, of five students nominated, to be awarded a federally funded Patriot Democracy Scholarship.

  My mother came running to hug me and congratulate me. And my father, though more warily.

  “That’s our girl! We are so proud of you.”

  The principal of our high school had telephoned my parents with the good news. It was rare for a phone to ring in our house, for most messages came electronically and there was no choice about receiving them.

  And my brother, Roderick, came to greet me with a strange expression on his face. He’d heard of Patriot Democracy Scholarships, Roddy said, but had never known anyone who’d gotten one. He was sure that no one had ever been named a Patriot Scholar while he’d been at Pennsboro High.

  “Well. Congratulations, Addie.”

  “Thanks! I guess.”

  Roddy, who’d graduated from Pennsboro High three years before and was now working as a barely paid intern in the Pennsboro branch of the NAS Media Dissemination Bureau (MDB), was grudgingly admiring. Smiling at me strangely—just his mouth, not his eyes. I thought, He’s jealous. He can’t go to a real university.

  I never knew if I felt sorry for my hulking-tall brother, who’d cultivated a wispy little sand-colored beard and mustache and always wore the same dull-brown clothes, which were a sort of uniform for lower-division workers at MDB, or if—actually—I was afraid of him. Inside Roddy’s smile there was a secret little smirk just for me.

  When we were younger Roddy had often tormented me—“teasing,” it was called (by Roddy). Both our parents worked ten-hour shifts and Roddy and I were home alone together much of the time. As Roddy was the older sibling, it had been his task to take care of your little sister. What a joke! But a cruel joke that doesn’t make me smile.

  Now that we were older, and I was tall myself (for a girl of my age: five feet eight), Roddy didn’t torment me quite as much. Mostly it was his expression—a sort of shifting, frowning, smirk-smiling, meant to convey that Roddy was thinking certain thoughts best kept secret.

  That smirking little smile just for me—like an ice sliver in the heart.

  My parents had explained: It was difficult for Roddy, who hadn’t done well enough in high school to merit a scholarship even to the local NAS state college, to see that I was doing much better in the same school. Embarrassing to him to know that his younger sister earned higher grades than he had, from the very teachers he’d had at Pennsboro High. And Roddy had little chance of ever being admitted to a federally mandated four-year university, even if he took community college courses and our parents could afford to send him.

  Something had gone wrong during Roddy’s last two years of high school. He’d become scared about things—maybe with reason. He’d never confided in me.

  At Pennsboro High—as everywhere in our nation, I suppose—there was a fear of seeming “smart,” which might be interpreted as “too smart,” which would result in calling unwanted attention to you. In a True Democracy all individuals are equal—no one is better than anyone else. It was okay to get Bs, and an occasional A–, but As were risky, and A+ was very risky. In his effort not to get As on exams, though he was intelligent enough, and had done well in middle school, Roddy seriously missed, and wound up with Ds.

  Dad had explained: It’s like you’re a champion archer. And you have to shoot to miss the bull’s-eye. And something willful in you ensures that you don’t just miss the bull’s-eye but the entire damned target.

  Dad had laughed, shaking his head. Something like this had happened to him.

  Poor Roddy. And poor Adriane, since Roddy took out his disappointment on me.

  It wasn’t talked about openly at school. But we all knew. Many of the smartest kids “held back” in order not to call attention to themselves. HSPSO (Homeland Security Public Safety Oversight) was reputed to keep lists of potential dissenters/MIs/SIs, and these were said to contain the names of students with high grades and high IQ scores.

  Of course, it was just as much of a mistake to wind up with Cs and Ds—that meant that you were dull-normal, or it might mean that you’d deliberately sabotaged your high school career. Too obviously “holding back” was sometimes dangerous. After graduation you might wind up at a community college hoping to better yourself by taking courses and trying to transfer to a state school, but the fact was, once you entered the workforce in a low-level category, like Roddy at MDB, you were there forever.

  Nothing is ever forgotten; no one is going anywhere they aren’t already at. This was a saying no one was supposed to say aloud.

  So Dad was stuck forever as an MT2—medical technician, second rank—at the district medical clinic, where staff physicians routinely consulted him on medical matters, especially pediatric oncology—physicians whose salaries were five times Dad’s.

  Dad’s health benefits, like Mom’s, were so poor, he couldn’t even get treatment at the clinic he worked in. We didn’t want to think what it would mean if and when they needed serious medical treatment.

  I hadn’t been nearly as cautious in school as Roddy. I enjoyed school, where I had (girl) friends as close as sisters. I liked quizzes and tests—they were like games at which, if you studied hard and memorized what your teachers told you, you could do well.

  But then, sometimes I tried harder than I needed to try.

  Maybe it was risky. Some little spark of defiance provoked me.

  But maybe also (some of us thought) school wasn’t so risky for girls. There had been only a few DASTADs—Disciplinary Actions Securing Threats Against Democracy—taken against Pennsboro students in recent years, and these students had all been boys in category ST3 or below.

  (The highest ST—SkinTone—category was 1: “Caucasian.” Most residents of Pennsboro were ST1 or ST2, then there was a scattering of ST3s. There were ST4s in a neighboring district and of course dark-complected ST workers in all the districts. We knew they existed but most of us had never seen an actual ST10.)

  It seems like the most pathetic vanity now, and foolishly naive, but at our school I was one of those students who’d displayed some talent for writing, and for art; I was a “fast study” (my teachers said, not entirely approvingly), and could memorize passages of prose easily. I did not believe that I was the “outstanding” student in my class. That could not be possible! I had to work hard to understand math and science, I had to read and reread my homework assignments, and to rehearse quizzes and tests, while to certain of my classmates these subjects came naturally. (ST2s and ST3s were likely to be Asians, a minority in our district, and these girls and boys were very smart, yet not aggressive in putting themselves forward—that’s to say at risk.) Yet somehow it happened that Adriane Strohl wound up with the highest grade-point average in the class of twenty-three—4.3 out of 5.0.

  My close friend Paige Connor had been warned by her parents to hold back—so Paige’s average was only 4.1. And one of the obviously smartest boys, whose father was MI, like my dad, a former math professor, had definitely held back—or maybe exams so traumatized him, Jonny had done poorly without trying, and his average was a modest/safe 3.9.

  Better to be safe than sorry. Why had I ignored such warnings?

  Fact is, I had just not been thinking. Later in my life, or rather in my next life, as a university student, when I studied cognitive psychology, I would become aware of the phenomenon of “attention”—“attentiveness”—that is within consciousness but is the pointed, purposeful, focused aspect of consciousness. Just to have your eyes open is to be conscious, minimally; to pay attention is something further. In my schoolgirl life I was conscious, but I was not paying attention. Focused on tasks like homework, exams, friends to sit with in cafeteria and hang out with in gym class, I did not pick up more than a fraction of what hovered in the air about me, the warnings of teachers that were nonverbal, glances that should have alerted me to—something . . .

  So it happened
: Adriane Strohl was named valedictorian of her class. Now I can see that no one else who might’ve been qualified wanted this “honor”—just as no one else wanted a Patriot Democracy Scholarship. Though there’d been some controversy, our principal was said to favor another student for the honor, a boy with a 4.2 average but also a varsity letter in football and a Good Democratic Citizenship Award, whose parents were of a higher caste than mine, and whose father was not MI but rather EI1, a special designation granted to Exiled persons who had served their terms of Exile and had been what was called 101 percent rehabilitated.

  Maybe the school administrators were worried that Adriane Strohl would say “unacceptable” things in her valedictorian’s speech?

  Evidently I had acquired a reputation at school for saying things that other students wouldn’t have said. Impulsively I’d raise my hand and ask questions. And my teachers were surprised, or annoyed—or, maybe, scared. My voice was quiet and courteous but I guess I came across as willful.

  Sometimes the quizzical look on my face disconcerted my teachers, who took care always to compose their expressions when they stood in front of a classroom. There were approved ways of showing interest, surprise, (mild) disapproval, severity.

  Of course, all our classrooms, like all public spaces and many private spaces, were monitored. Each class had its spies. We didn’t know who they were, of course—it was said that if you thought you knew, you were surely mistaken, since the DCVSB (Democratic Citizens Volunteer Surveillance Bureau) chose spies so carefully, it was analogous to the camouflaged wings of a certain species of moth that blends in seamlessly with the bark of a certain tree. As Dad said, Your teachers can’t help it. They can’t deviate from the curriculum. The ideal is lockstep—each teacher in each classroom performing like a robot and never deviating from the script under penalty of—you know what.

  (Was this true? For years in our class—the class of NAS 23—there’d been vague talk of a teacher—how long ago, we didn’t know—maybe when we were in middle school?—who’d deviated from the script one day, began talking wildly and laughing and shaking his/her fist at the “eye” [in fact, there were probably numerous “eyes” in any classroom, and all invisible], and was arrested, and overnight Deleted—so a new teacher was hired to take his/her place; and soon no one remembered the teacher who’d been Deleted. And after a while we couldn’t even remember clearly that one of our teachers had been Deleted. [Or had there been more than one? Were certain classrooms in our school haunted ?] In our brains, where the memory of ———— should have been, there was just a blank.)