The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

by Dave Eggers

  “Yes,” said Charlie.

  “And some of it, well, it can’t be helped.”

  “No.”

  What were the kinds of things that people talked about before they had sex with each other? He tried to remember. Not work, not sport . . . Films? Were films any good? Had he seen any?

  “And neither of us have to do anything we don’t want to, do we?” Helena went on.

  “Absolutely not.”

  The “absolutely” contained too much conviction, he felt, and too much relief.

  “By the way. I’m not as anti some things as she made out. And I’m not as pro some of the others.”

  That didn’t sound good, either.

  “I mean, I am pro, obviously.” Was it obvious? “But not . . . not to the exclusion of everything else. Whatever the everything else might or might not be.”

  Helena looked momentarily alarmed.

  “When you say ‘everything else’ . . . I haven’t been with anyone apart from my ex for quite a long time. I’m not sure I know . . . I don’t know if I want . . . ”

  “No, please, I quite understand,” he said. “I’m not after anything . . . I’m not interested in, in . . . I’m just normal.”

  “Whatever normal is,” said Helena. And then, “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry about?’

  “I didn’t need to add that last bit. Everyone knows what normal is. Well, maybe not everyone. But . . . in this context. Oh, God.”

  Charlie laughed, mostly because he was desperate to laugh, and Helena’s despair provided some kind of opportunity. But then they were back to silence. Even the champagne was quiet.

  It was Helena who moved things along. She drank her cham pagne, put the glass on the desk, sat on his lap, and kissed him. Everything was easier after that. It probably wasn’t possible to be the opposite of someone in bed, but he tried: he didn’t want to be the person that Elaine had written about. And he didn’t need help from Miss Edwards once.

  “You know that nobody deserves that, don’t you?” she said afterwards.

  “What?”

  “That column. However angry she was with you, it was cruel. There’s always something to complain about, isn’t there? With sex, I mean. If you really want to. Faces and noises and . . . and demands. But it takes a very unkind person to do it. And that’s what people are saying.”

  “Which people?”

  “Her readers. They’ve turned. You should read the comments online. She’s overstepped a mark.”

  Charlie had never dared to look at the comments underneath Elaine’s articles, but when he got home later, he drank them in. Every now and again someone would say something cruel and mean about him, and initially he understood the sentence “This comment has been removed by the moderator,” which appeared several times on each page, to be sparing him even worse abuse. But the rest of the strange, angry little paragraphs, all written by people called Slaughterhouse6 or MissMiniver or AngryBrigadier or LordOfTheFiles, were so overwhelmingly hostile to Elaine that he realized the moderated remarks almost certainly hadn’t been directed at him. People hated her. Some of them hated her so much that they used the B word. There was a wrong way to be a husband, and there was a wrong way to be a parent, and there was a wrong way to read, and talk, and watch TV, and according to Elaine he had chosen the wrong way every time. But there was no wrong way to have sex, according to all the Lords and the Brigadiers, so long as nobody got hurt or bullied, and if you tried to say that there was, you got into trouble. Finally, finally, Elaine had revealed too much, and she was in trouble. He checked Twitter and he Googled her name and he found an apparently inexhaustible deluge of disgust. Her newspaper didn’t need two columns to play the Bastard-versus-Bitch game, in the end: Elaine was providing a stadium where the two teams could go head to head, and even though she was playing at home, she was losing. Maybe she’d lost. Maybe this was over.

  And then the following week, Charlie understood that she hadn’t even been using her best players. The only comfort he could draw was that she’d had to bring them on earlier than she might have hoped—she’d misjudged the sex column, and she needed to regain the ground that she’d lost with it. But once her big hitter was stripped off and ready for action, then it was all over.

  “There is something I haven’t told you,” the column began, “and I now realize that it’s relevant.”

  If you don’t know what I know, you’ll come to a premature conclusion about me, and how I write about my ex-husband. Some of you, I know, think that I have been too hard on him, that I have been punching below the belt, in more than one sense of the phrase.

  So you need to know this: Bastard is a banker. He’s not some harmless golf-playing local bank manager, either, or a staid, risk-averse employee of a private bank in the City. He’s a real bastard, one of the Canary Wharf bastards: a credit-swapper, a subprime lender, a quantitative easer . . . . It sounds like one of those logic exercises, that sentence: all bankers are bastards, my ex-husband is a banker, therefore Bastard is a bastard.

  A quantitative easer! Who did she think he was? The chairman of the Bank of England? Charlie’s first thought was that Elaine hadn’t listened to a single word he’d ever said. He’d tried to explain the difference between what he did, with his lunches and his clients and his occasional trips to Berlin and Chicago, and what the quants downstairs did. He’d told her how nobody within three or four thousand miles of the office had ever even met anyone who’d granted a subprime mortgage. She’d even written it all down, back in 2008, when she wanted to understand what was going on.

  But then he realized that she didn’t care about accuracy, and he felt stupid. Again. She knew that he couldn’t be a quantitative easer, that he wasn’t a subprime mortgage lender, that his job consisted of watching screens on behalf of people with much more money than him. She was just trying to cram in as many expressions as she possibly could in a few short lines to sketch the kind of bastard he was. It wasn’t about swearing in front of the children; his crimes were cosmic, and harmed everybody. He was the kind of bastard who could never be forgiven, the kind of bastard who had wrecked the economy, the country, the continent, the world, the future. He stopped reading. The worst thing was that the game wasn’t over, wouldn’t be over until she got bored, or her readers did; she could stand there pounding him week after week, and her readers would cheer her on.

  Charlie had never spent much time wondering what he wanted for himself. It had always seemed so obvious. He had met a beautiful, smart woman and he’d married her. He had embarked on a career that seemed to want whatever talents he had, and he’d made a success of it. He’d been able to provide his family with all the money they might need. What kind of idiot would need to reflect on any of that? He wasn’t even sure there had ever been any room for reflection. If there had been a fork in the road at any point in his life, then he hadn’t noticed it. All he’d ever done was put one foot in front of the other and keep walking. And if he’d stopped, just for a moment, someone would have knocked him over and trodden on him.

  Late on Monday afternoon, Tim Britton found him staring out of the window and down at the river below.

  “Fuck her,” Britton said. “Fuck her, and fuck her chippy readers, and fuck everyone else in the world who sits around scratching their balls and moaning about what we’ve done to them.”

  Charlie looked at him gratefully. Maybe Tim Britton wasn’t such an arse after all.

  “There’s a little gang of us going out tonight. Shit day. Steaks and a few bottles of Argentinean red. Do you want to come along?”

  Most of Charlie didn’t, really. He wanted to go out with other people, people who’d never even been to Canary Wharf, people who despised everyone who worked here and everything they did. But he didn’t seem to know anyone like that any more. He put on his jacket and took off his tie, and in the lift, surrounded by the men and women he worked with every day, men and women who had already started to flirt with each other, he f
ound himself getting hungrier and thirstier and louder.

  KIESE LAYMON

  How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance

  FROM Cold Drank

  I’VE HAD GUNS PULLED ON ME by four people under Central Mississippi skies—once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I’ve helped many folks say yes to life but I’ve definitely aided in few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun.

  ***

  I’m 17, five years younger than Rekia Boyd will be when she is shot in the head by an off duty police officer in Chicago. It’s the summer after I graduated high school and my teammate, Troy, is back in Jackson, Mississippi. Troy, who plays college ball in Florida, asks me if I want to go to McDonald’s on I-55.

  As Troy, Cleta, Leighton and I walk out of McDonald’s, that Filet-o-Fish grease straight cradling my lips, I hold the door open for a tiny, scruffy-faced white man with a green John Deere hat on.

  “Thanks, partner,” he says.

  A few minutes later, we’re driving down I-55 when John Deere drives up and rolls his window down. I figure that he wants to say something funny since we’d had a cordial moment at McDonald’s. As soon as I roll my window down, the man screams, “Nigger lovers!” and speeds off.

  On I-55, we pull up beside John Deere and I’m throwing finger-signs, calling John Deere all kinds of clever “motherfuckers.” The dude slows down and gets behind us. I turn around, hoping he pulls over.

  Nope.

  John Deere pulls out a police siren and places it on top of his car. Troy is cussing my ass out and frantically trying to drive his Mama’s Lincoln away from John Deere. My heart is pounding out of my chest, not out of fear, but because I want a chance to choke the shit out of John Deere. I can’t think of any other way of making him feel what we felt.

  Troy drives into his apartment complex and parks his Mama’s long Lincoln under some kind of shed. Everyone in the car is slumped down at this point. Around 20 seconds after we park, here comes the red, white and blue of the siren.

  We hear a car door slam, then a loud knock on the back window. John Deere has a gun in one hand and a badge in the other. He’s telling me to get out of the car. My lips still smell like Filet-o-Fish.

  “Only you,” he says to me. “You going to jail tonight.” He’s got the gun to my chest.

  “Fuck you,” I tell him and suck my teeth. “I ain’t going nowhere.” I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

  Cleta is up front trying to reason with the man through her window when all of a sudden, in a scene straight out of Boyz n the Hood, a black cop approaches the car and accuses us of doing something wrong. Minutes later, a white cop tells us that John Deere has been drinking too much and he lets us go.

  16 months later, I’m 18, three years older than Edward Evans will be when he is shot in the head behind an abandoned home in Jackson.

  Shonda and I are walking from Subway back to Millsaps College with two of her white friends. It’s nighttime. We turn off of North State Street and walk halfway past the cemetery when a red Corolla filled with brothers stops in front of us. All of the brothers have blue rags covering their noses and mouths. One of the brothers, a kid at least two years younger than me with the birdest of bird chests, gets out of the car clutching a shiny silver gun.

  He comes towards Shonda and me.

  “Me,” I say to him. “Me. Me.” I hold my hands up encouraging him to do whatever he needs to do. If he shoots me, well, I guess bullets enter and hopefully exit my chest, but if the young Nigga thinks I’m getting pistol whupped in front of a cemetery and my girlfriend off of State Street, I’m convinced I’m going to take the gun and beat him into a burnt cinnamon roll.

  The boy places his gun on my chest and keeps looking back and forth to the car.

  I feel a strange calm, an uncanny resolve. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. He’s patting me down for money that I don’t have since we hadn’t gotten our work-study checks yet and I just spent my last little money on two veggie subs from Subway and two of those large Chocolate Chip cookies.

  The young brother keeps looking back to the car, unsure what he’s supposed to do. Shonda and her friends are screaming when he takes the gun off my chest and trots goofily back to the car.

  I don’t know what’s wrong with him but a few months later, I have a gun.

  A partner of mine hooks me up with a partner of his who lets me hold something. I get the gun not only to defend myself from goofy brothers in red Corollas trying to rob folks for work-study money. I guess I’m working on becoming a black writer in Mississippi and some folks around Millsaps College don’t like the essays I’m writing in the school newspaper.

  A few weeks earlier, George Harmon, the President of Millsaps, shuts down the campus paper in response to a satirical essay I wrote on communal masturbation and sends a letter to over 12,000 overwhelmingly white Millsaps students, friends and alumnae. The letter states that the “Key Essay in question was written by Kiese Laymon, a controversial writer who consistently editorializes on race issues.”

  After the President’s letter goes out, my life kinda hurts.

  I receive a sweet letter in the mail with the burnt up ashes of my essays. The letter says that if I don’t stop writing and give myself “over to right,” my life would end up like the ashes of my writing.

  The tires of my Mama’s car are slashed when her car was left on campus. I’m given a single room after the Dean of Students thinks it’s too dangerous for me to have a roommate. Finally, Greg Miller, an English Professor, writes an essay about how and why a student in his Liberal Studies class says, “Kiese should be killed for what he’s writing.” I feel a lot when I read those words, but mainly I wonder what’s wrong with me.

  It’s bid day at Millsaps.

  Shonda and I are headed to our jobs at Ton-o-Fun, a fake ass Chuck E. Cheese behind Northpark Mall. We’re wearing royal blue shirts with a strange smiling animal and Ton-o-Fun on the left titty. The shirts of the other boy workers at Ton-o-Fun fit them better than mine. My shirt is tight in the wrong places and slightly less royal blue. I like to add a taste of bleach so I don’t stank.

  As we walk out to the parking lot of my dorm, the Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sigma fraternities are in front of our dorm receiving their new members. They’ve been up drinking all night. Some of them have on black face and others have on Afro wigs and Confederate capes.

  We get close to Shonda’s Saturn and one of the men says, “Kiese, write about this!” Then another voice calls me a “Nigger” and Shonda, a “Nigger bitch.” I think and feel a lot but mostly I feel that I can’t do anything to make the boys feel like they’ve made us feel right there, so I go back to my dorm room to get something.

  On the way there, Shonda picks up a glass bottle out of the trash. I tell her to wait outside the room. I open the bottom drawer and look at the hoodies balled up on the top of my gun. I pick up my gun and think about my Grandma. I think not only about what she’d feel if I went back out there with a gun. I think about how if Grandma walked out of that room with a gun in hand, she’d use it. No question.

  I am her grandson.

  I throw the gun back on top of the clothes, close the drawer, go in my closet and pick up a wooden T-ball bat.

  Some of the KA’s and Sigs keep calling us names as we approach them. I step, throw down the bat and tell them I don’t need a bat to fuck them up. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My fists are balled up and the only thing I want in the world is to swing back over and over again. Shonda feels the same, I think. She’s right in the mix, yelling, crying, fighting as best she can. After security and a Dean break up the mess, the frats go back to receiving their new pledges and Shonda and I go to work at Ton-o-Fun in our dirty blue shirts.

  I stank.

  On our first break at work, we decide that we should call a local n
ews station so the rest of Jackson can see what’s happening at Millsaps on a Saturday morning. We meet the camera crew at school. Some of the boys go after the reporter and cameraman. The camera gets a few students in Afros, blackface and Confederate capes. They also get footage of “another altercation.”

  A few weeks pass and George Harmon, the President of the college, doesn’t like that footage of his college is now on television and in newspapers all across the country. The college decides that two individual fraternity members, Shonda and I will be put on disciplinary probation for using “racially insensitive language” and the two fraternities involved get their party privileges taken away for a semester. If there was racially insensitive language Shonda and I could have used to make those boys feel like we felt, we would have never stepped to them in the first place. Millsaps is trying to prove to the nation that it is a post-race(ist) institution and to its alums that all the Bid Day stuff is the work of an “adroit entrepreneur of racial conflict.”