The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

by Dave Eggers

  Jonathan said nothing ironically. I often had the urge to look over my shoulder when I was alone with him to see if anyone was listening. Sometimes I thought I heard a laugh track in my own head, but it was always a few seconds behind the beat, behind the punch line—as if the laughter had been laid down on a separate track long before we started talking.

  It had been two weeks since Jonathan returned from the embassy with his barely legal passport. He was now running around collecting letters and forms from a variety of sources, many of whom seemed available for negotiation only through the instant messaging service on his Nokia phone. The small favors Jonathan asked me for were clerical: a color scan here, a photocopy there, and all of the legal odds and ends like the letter stating his salary (shockingly low) and other contract particulars from the manager of his club team. For everything else he had his friends—Nigerian men I kept a conscious distance from, as I did my ex-boyfriends. Jonathan had his friends and I had mine. During the rare moments our social Venn diagrams overlapped, they formed an elliptical of heavy drinking. I realize it’s not unusual for couples to have their separate orbits, but our social worlds were not separate in the sense of “your friend Rob could bring dessert wine to our dinner party.” Our realms were fundamentally distant. Jonathan’s friends brought nothing to the party, in my eyes, except trouble.

  The week slipped by. Finishing up at my office, I filed my second story of the week for Bloomberg and then began in earnest uploading party photos to my Facebook. I was about to call it a day. It was Friday afternoon and I was restless—Jonathan and I had only gone out once since Monday, since the day that Austin died.

  When I rang him up I was distracted, fiddling around with cropping an ugliness out of one of my photos, and there was a great commotion in the background when he answered:

  “My Sexy. Can you call me back in thirty minutes time, please? We are trying to bury my friend. His coff is beautiful baby—we all gave money. Please call me back, okay?”

  Austin. I knew Jonathan was one of the pallbearers, but I had forgotten the funeral was today. Not because Austin’s death hadn’t entered my world through my boyfriend, his close friend—all week Jonathan had been subject to peculiar cross-currents in which he amped back and forth between histrionic mourning and declarations of future vengeance toward individuals I did not know or care to know. And not because Austin’s death wasn’t a frequent topic of conversation around Phnom Penh; there had been three newspaper articles thus far, including an investigation into the Cambodian League’s treatment of its African recruits.

  The real reason the funeral had crept up on me was that no one could seem to settle on who should pay for it.

  I was with Jonathan on Monday, eating a late lunch in the restaurant with the pink halogen lights on Mao Tse Tung Boulevard. There was a crowd glommed around the corner TV set. The monitor was dim, but in the murk we could make out a tiny telescoped figure lying on a pitch, on his back with his knees bent, surrounded by other players. The soccer ball lay untouched, in perfect equipoise outside the circle the crowd made. From between the calves of one of the men I could make out a face: eyes closed, whiskey-colored skin, an unusually long, thin nose for a Nigerian; thick lips, slightly parted: Austin.

  The game was being broadcast live from Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium. The lunchtime crowd, Cambodian and Chinese men in their office clothes who had wandered over from steaming bowls of duck’s blood soup, tilted their heads philosophically toward the screen, cigarettes held out stiffly at their sides as the smoke curled and eddied around them. Our waiter, having finally located the remote, punched up the brightness on the monitor.

  A medic was sprinting out onto the field—a Cambodian boy who looked all of sixteen. He was wearing a white polo shirt with a blue cross monogrammed on the back, and the footballers parted to let him by. The medic dropped to his knees beside Austin’s head and cocked his ear between the boy’s nose and mouth, listening.

  And then it happened: the medic began massaging Austin’s limbs in the direction of his heart. Long, slow, stylized strokes like a Balinese massage. He massaged the body limb-by-limb, as if he had all the time in the world, as if everything that was going to happen had already happened and the critical thing was this charade, this languorous reenactment.

  As I watched I felt a whoosh! in my chest as if a decade of encrusted emotional matter was about to pour forth from a spillway in my rib-cage. I rummaged in my purse. I always tried to take what was in the Altoids tin discretely, but when I tipped the pills into my mouth I saw that our waiter, from across the room, was once again studying me. He had been shooting me glances ever since Jonathan—his back against the restaurant’s far concrete wall—had sunk down to the floor and began rocking back and forth, muttering to himself. Slipping the tin back in my purse, I met the waiter’s eyes and shrugged. It was inconceivable to me that I looked to him like someone who could do something. I knew how I looked to myself: I was standing in a duck’s blood soup restaurant in which there happened to be Chinese, Cambodians, and a huge, collapsed Nigerian, head in his hands, intoning O God O God O God. I walked over to Jonathan and placed my hand on his shoulder. Under the lights my arm glowed lurid pink.

  Monday night, after we had watched it all on TV, Jonathan had run off to join the group assembling at the morgue:

  “He was still in his soccer kit,” he told me afterward. “The exact same clothes he collapsed in! Baby, they did not even wipe the grass from his face. And so many dead Cambodians! Motorbike accidents. They were all hit by beeg car—a field of them!”

  A 70,000 square mile emergency room, Cambodia is not a country for getting emotionally involved in dramatic situations. Once I was walking in the shoulder of a wide boulevard with Jonathan when I noticed the pavement below us was now a patchwork of spent condoms. I squealed, hopping in an impossible attempt to sidestep the rubbers. Jonathan laughed at me, pointing to a utility worker a few yards ahead of us. Only the man’s head was visible; his body was swallowed by a manhole and submerged under the street. My eyes took in the three pyramidal piles surrounding the manhole: they were the color of dirty snow and made up of thousands of used condoms. I looked up in horror to the shops lining the street: the worker was clearing the sewage main in front of a love hotel.

  Seconds later came a loud WHACK and shouts from up the street. A Lexus had turned into oncoming traffic, hitting two boys zipping down the boulevard on a motorcycle. Their convulsing bodies lay in the street ahead. This was about as much as I could take. I’ve got to get out of here, I said through gritted teeth, but Jonathan was too interested in the surrounding drama—note: not traumatized; not disgusted—to hear me. The utility worker looked up from his task for a moment and then quickly resumed his shoveling. The whole abject scene contained a small epiphany for me: I was not as aloof as I thought I was. I needed to work at being aloofer.

  When Jonathan told me about the motorbike dead I did not grimace like a girl at his description.

  They had carried Austin off the field—after his massage—and loaded him into an ambulance that was nothing more than a white van with heavy curtains, an open interior, and “ambulance” decaled on its sides. The van had taken him to the hospital, where he was rolled into the ER under ancient oscillating fans and exactly nothing more was done for him.

  He was pronounced dead. In short order the body had been dispatched to the hospital morgue where it created a little stir among the Cambodian motorbike dead. Austin had been at the hospital for practically no time at all, so when Africans began showing up on the hospital steps an orderly was assigned to stand outside—there were that many of them—to shepherd the men to the morgue where they soon became the problem of the sour, liver-spotted coroner who had the aggressive, blood-shot stare of a former Khmer Rouge.

  They stood in a group of upward of twenty men, praying around the body. Towering over the group, massive as an old baobob tree of the variety round which West African witches have long held their covens—Agbe
ze.

  “Look around you,” Agbeze was saying to the assembled. “Do you see any Cambodians here who are not DEAD? Where is the owner of the team? Where is Austin’s coach? Where is your coach?” he said, looking pointedly at two hollow-eyed boys, also still wearing their white kits, their hands clasped pensively in front of them.

  The coroner and his two staff were eyeing the crowd warily, from the doorway of their corner office.

  “Do you see any of them here? Do you know why? Because they are too scared to show their faces! Because they know they did this to him! Because they brought him to their country like chattel and did not pay him even the money that would keep an old dog alive!”

  When Jonathan related this part of Agbeze’s speech, I said I didn’t know what slavery had to do with it.

  “Agbeze is a very powerful man,” Jonathan quietly replied.

  This was the first time I had heard my boyfriend refer to Agbeze as anything other than the “Nigerian President.” Agbeze was president of the Nigerian Community Association—a position I understood to be two parts conflict resolution, one part something else that couldn’t be discussed—and also held a professorship at one of the city universities. Doing interviews for the news wire, I had set foot in enough Cambodian institutions to picture his desk: a dark mahogany slab off a choked corridor, students in identical white shirts with gelled hair streaming past in the en plein air hallways, geckos with oversized vocals croaking from every corner and perhaps a chunk or two of wall missing. Nothing about this picture aroused my awe or respect. And yet Jonathan held Agbeze in high esteem. But what did I know? After all, it seemed the man wore many hats.

  At six o’clock I went home to my apartment. My roommate was out for the evening, and Jonathan had called me back at work (I had forgotten about the agreed upon thirty minutes) to tell me he was going out with Austin’s teammates, post-funeral, for a night of drinking. After dragging up five sets of stairs I walked out onto my balcony and slumped into the lavender-cushioned papasan chair. On my way home from work I had stopped by a pharmacy for two blisters of pills and a bottle of water. The pills were green and yellow and I popped four quickly through the foil before raising the water bottle to my lips.

  The previous weekend, Jonathan and I had attended a party on a colonial-era train recommissioned by a Belgian party promoter. Departing from the city’s rail yard an hour before sunset, the train had all the structural integrity of a Dorito chip: its boxcars crumbled and ricketed along the tracks, swaying under the weight of their twenty-first century revelers. A local DJ claimed an outpost for his MacBook between two of the cars and swing music percolated from small white speakers tethered to the same ceiling mounts as the train’s ancient fans, squealing within fan guards of loose and rusted wire.

  A tuxedoed man sweated up and down the aisles, replenishing the partygoers’ plastic cups from a seemingly endless bottle of champagne. Lurching in the aisle as the train picked up speed, Jonathan grabbed an empty seat and pulled me down onto his lap. Directly in front of us a group of detached-looking girls smoked Alain Delon cigarettes. Balancing me on his knee, Jonathan took back the cup he had handed to me during the lurch. The passenger seats had obviously been measured to the scale of a long-gone world: Jonathan’s thighs interlocked with the legs of the women opposite us like teeth on a zipper. “All my party people!” he said to our impromptu company, raising his plastic cup.

  The girls looked us up and down. I felt the gaze of a tall brunette flick between my face and Jonathan’s as if trying to assess if we were her joke or she was ours.

  The brunette raised her cup and locked eyes with Jonathan: “Santé! You are visiting Cambodia, no?”

  “No, no—I live here, in Phnom Penh.” Jonathan tipped back his entire cup of champagne like it was a whiskey shot. “My name’s Jonathan”—he licked his lips and extended his hand—“and this is my girl.”

  “Bonsoir,” I said, giving the ladies a noncommittal wave from Jonathan’s lap. All inquiries were directed toward Jonathan; he was obviously the experimental subject.

  “So, Jonathan,” the brunette continued, “and exactly where do you come from?”

  “I’m Nigerian,” he said with pride. “From Delta State. You’re French, right?”

  “Oui.”

  “What state?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I mean, what state are you from in France?”

  The brunette shot a glance to the companion to her right, arching her eyebrow. “Alsace,” she said, looking back at the two of us. “In France we call them provinces.”

  “Oh yeah,” Jonathan said. “Pardon me, okay?” I felt a prick of embarrassment run up my spine for him, but Jonathan appeared nonplussed. His eyes were wandering over the heads of the girls to the man in the tuxedo, now making another pass with the bottle down the aisle. I jumped up and grabbed my boyfriend’s hand.

  “Excuse us,” I said. “I need to get some air.” Down the aisle I pressed with Jonathan, gripping his hands like a trapeze bar. A man I knew—an Australian reporter—had a private bottle of champagne and was dancing on his seat, two unlit cigarettes dangling out of the corner of his mouth, around him, a flock of micro-skirted Vietnamese. A girl in four-inch Plexiglas heels wobbled atop her upholstered seat. Ay! She squealed as we pushed our way by, tugging at a strand of her long black hair that had caught in one of the wire fans.

  A trapdoor in my heart gave way and I felt like I was sinking deep into the floor: suddenly, Jonathan seemed very tall and far away. Walking behind him, I grabbed his shoulder and hoisted myself on my tippy-toes to whisper in his ear: “You’re so much better than these people, okay? I don’t want you to ever forget it.”

  “What’s that you say, baby?” His lips brushed against my ear but I shook my head, sphinx-like. The moment had passed. He turned again to face the back of the train, and, with his hands gripping mine behind his back, pulled me toward the caboose where a windy doorframe without its door gave way to a small viewing platform.

  When we stepped out, Jonathan turned his sights to the garbage slipping by under the platform’s metal latticework.

  “Those girls were mocking me.”

  “Just a little bit,” I said, reaching for his hand. I held it lightly, worrying my thumb along the valley of his palm. “Thank you for escaping with me.”

  “You know I’ll always stand by you anytime and anywhere. You mean a lot to me.” His voice was soft. “You know some people ask if love is worth fighting for—” Jonathan paused and looked up at me; I could see the red capillaries forked against the whites of his eyes. “Then I remember your face and baby, I’m ready for war.”

  Not even a week had passed since the train party but I could no longer recall what I said to Jonathan in reply. What I do remember is Jonathan framed against the sunset in his cheap white suit and the filthy children running after the slow-going train waving and shouting their Hello hello hello hello! I looked beyond the children and noticed the lean-tos extended to within kissing distance of the tracks. This was their living room and we were riding a train through the center of it. Never before had I stood on such a threshold: behind me was a glowing golden gyrating train full of cocktail dresses and assholes. Before me, the shantytown chased after us like a motley serpent, into the flooded rice fields.

  It was the street noise that finally jarred me back to the present. From my perch in the papasan chair I could hear children shouting in the street below and the man hawking his cart of pickled eggs. The density of Asian life, each apartment level like a cross-section of stone in which can be found sedimentary deposits of grandfathers, aunties, shopkeepers, kids, made my loneliness flare brightly for a second like a gas flame the moment the pilot is lit.

  It was then that I spied yesterday’s paper—it was under the rattan side table and I decided to revisit the piece on Austin’s death. As I reread the article, I realized that Agbeze was being quoted:

  They are engaged in human trafficking. A Cambodian Club Team pays
for the boy to come here. They pay for his passage. They make all the necessary arrangements and pay for his business visa. Thereafter, they pay him 200 U.S. a month to play 1:00 P.M. games five days a week in the tropical heat. This is all in the player’s contract. What is not in his contract is medical insurance. Or visa renewal. If a boy is sick or injured and cannot play, his salary stops. The team cuts him loose with no way to pay for his medical care and perhaps a visa that’s about to expire, and no ticket home. And where does this leave the African recruits? Very, very vulnerable. That’s where it leaves them.

  The article continued on the back page. I flipped the paper over and kept on reading, scanning the text for another quote by Agbeze:

  But the Cambodian Football Association is not entirely to blame, you see—they have just hit upon a strange fact about the African footballer: They will play for free if they have to. They love the game too much. And some of them will die for it.

  The green and yellow pills were sloppy (manufactured in Malaysia and full of God knows what), but necessary to my getaway. In case you think of me as a stoic or insensitive, let me tell you this: without narcotics I am soft as a Monchhichi. I have vast migratory pains that swoop and settle across my whole body. When I was fifteen, the doctors labeled them “fibromyalgia,” which is a medical term for pain anywhere and everywhere of unknown origin. It has something to do with my nerves, the nerve-endings as well as my emotions, both of which are often over-stimulated.