The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

by Dave Eggers

  “Oh, they’ll be fine,” Tammy said. “They probably do this every few years. Your friend and her sisters are probably used to it by now.”

  Luz had told Kayla the names of places they had lived, yet somehow these names had made Kayla think only of things Luz had seen that she hadn’t: cacti, the City of Angels, the Pacific. She had not connected these names with the frequent departures they implied. She had not made the connection and Luz had never summoned it. But Luz had known. And when she waited with Kayla on the front steps for Tammy to pick her up on that final night, she must have suspected that they were seeing each other for the last time. She had said nothing. She had issued no warning and no declaration of enduring friendship or of love.

  “Maybe she’ll write you a letter,” her grandfather said when they got home.

  “That’s a help, Dad, get her hoping for that,” Tammy said.

  Kayla knew her mother was right. There would be no letter.

  “You know, I always thought they were illegal,” Tammy said.

  Kayla felt everything she had lost with the departure of the Lopez family converge upon her mother’s words as upon the blade of a knife. The months of summer stretched before her, endless and humid and lonely. It was her mother’s fault. She could not explain why, or how, but it had something to do with these words, as if when she spoke them she had retroactively set everything in motion, and taken everything away.

  Right after Tammy’s mother left, her father had sent Tammy away to the country for a week to stay with the family of an Amish man who had given him seasonal work as a picker a few times. It was the height of summer. The family’s five children brought Tammy around on their daily chores. She pulled a warm egg out from under a chicken, squeezed the rough teat of a cow, and ran out before supper to the dooryard garden for green beans. In the mornings, the eldest daughter worked Tammy’s hair gently into twin French braids, and every night Tammy awaited the moment when the sisters took off their white caps and unpinned their hair, revealing the hidden wonder of its length. They had no television; at night they sat together and sang songs Tammy didn’t know. One in particular she loved, a German hymn she sang to herself for years after out of fear of forgetting it, until she finally did.

  It was a capsule of time existing apart from the rest of her life: the kitchen table that was a thick velvety slab of wood, the sweet flutter of Amens after grace, and the mysterious wild flavor of deer meat. It was all so wonderful, and how badly she wished she had been born into a family like this. Yet all week she was rocked by feelings of loneliness, discomfort, and yearning she could not explain.

  When her father brought her home, she entered the dark house and saw that he had neither washed a dish nor put a single thing away all week. The disorder landed on her with the soothing relief of a familiar hand, and she realized that what she had felt at the Amish family’s house was nothing more than simple homesickness. There it was, then, the intractable problem of her life: No matter what she did, all of her best efforts to remake her life would always be a little bit spoiled, because the best things would never feel like home.

  The tree was an oak behind the blue dumpster at the far edge of the sushi restaurant’s gravel lot. It had a disorganized crown of branches—the limbs twisted as if engaged in a dull struggle against each other.

  Kayla climbed to a branch six feet off the ground. The smell of rotting fish rose from the dumpster. Below her was a patch of packed dirt just large enough for a girl. It was the first day of summer vacation. The sky was glacial blue but the sun was hot, and seemed to bear down from just above her shoulder.

  Through the tiny window that looked out onto the lot, Tammy watched her daughter. Kayla’s legs were so skinny they glinted in and out of view—sometimes you just had to believe they were there because of her big white sneakers and her bright yellow shorts. Tammy was pleased when Kayla hoisted herself up into the tree. She so rarely saw her daughter evince signs of a spirited, courageous self. Tammy worried she had failed her in this way: She had managed to raise a good daughter, but had been too tired, stretched too thin, to cultivate an animating spark. Sometimes when Tammy came home from work and found Kayla and her grandfather asleep against each other on the couch with the television on low, she worried Kayla secretly wished to be her grandfather’s little old wife, the bulk of life gotten over with already, the quiet glide to the finish all that remained.

  She watched Kayla stand up on the branch, her left arm anchored to the trunk. Kayla leaned forward and peered down at the ground below her. She began to lift her hand away from the trunk.

  “Kayla!” Tammy shouted through the window.

  Kayla, who in her head had already been falling like a dream, her bent arm gunning for the packed dirt, looked across the lot and saw her mother’s face in the window. She put her hand back on the trunk.

  Tammy was beneath the tree before Kayla even reached the ground. She scooped her daughter into her arms and held her so firmly against her body that it was painful for them both, parts of each of them poking and jabbing at the other.

  “What were you thinking?” she said, squeezing Kayla tighter. “For fuck’s sake why did you want to do a thing like that?”

  Kayla didn’t know what she could say.

  “Why?”

  It was many years later, and Kayla was the age Tammy had been then, before she thought of what she should have said to her mother. With Luz, she had longed for the accessories of injury—casts, slings, the envy of classmates—but had been too afraid of the pain to let anything happen. Up in the tree it was the pain itself she wanted. She wanted to feel the loss of the Lopez family in her bones, to alchemize all that had happened into a suffering whose parameters were completely knowable. She wanted her mother to carry her in her arms to the emergency room feeling guilty and neglectful. Most of all, though, she wanted to show her mother that she, too, could bravely endure whatever was thrown at her. She, too, could carry on.

  But by then Tammy had been dead for two years. Kayla would never get to tell her why, or to say that she was sorry—all that time she had thought Tammy was nothing but her mother. She would never get to ask her how she kept her head up in that town, where everybody discounted her and nobody admired or even acknowledged all she had sacrificed, the miracles she had worked to give her daughter a chance at something better.

  Vera. Pearl. Tammy. Kayla. They were a string of missed connections. Wisdom was slipping through the cracks between the generations. Essential things were not being passed on. What things? The kinds you couldn’t learn from anybody else. The kind you just had to make do without.

  ANDREW TONKOVICH

  Falling

  FROM Ecotone

  THE SIR JAMES TEMPLEMAN I KNOW liked nothing better than to instruct the groundskeepers to dig another foxhole and install into it another atheist. We had at the plantation at the time of the “accident” 145 full-time nonbelievers enrolled in the campus’s subterranean residency program: skeptics, freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, some of them scientists and some academics, and some just sad, angry, bitter individuals who took Sir James up on his offer of free room and board, as it were, and a generous stipend upon completion of the program, one of many grants, fellowships, and endowed chair positions sponsored by the International Templeman Prize for Faith in Science.

  There had been only five vacancies that summer, though we at TempleLand held every confidence that they’d soon be filled too. The holes had since the program’s inception become quite elaborate, cozy even, each with carpeting and satellite, Wi-Fi, and hot meals delivered by our on-site service staff, island locals who live in the small fishing village at the far end of the bay. Among the professional and academic anti-god crowd the place had become, I was told, something of an easy prize, low-hanging fruit on the foundation and conference and grants circuit. Most of them didn’t take the challenge at all seriously, and TempleLand’s complex of palm-circled foxholes was considered by them, cynically if you ask me, a de facto artis
t’s colony or even a kind of writer’s retreat. It was a free tropical vacation away from the lab, classroom, or lecture hall, a respite from what must be for these cynics the exhausting if otherwise unrewarding work of setting good people against the divine, the miraculous, the unknowable. And, after all, as Sir James liked to point out privately, nobody listened to or compensated them adequately for their atheism, humanism, or rationalism, not the secular foundations or the government—not at the rates he did anyway—nobody except a sincere old man who loved and feared his Jesus.

  Still, considering we had graduated only three scholars in five years of the program, it must be conceded that this was never what you’d call a particularly successful experiment. Lacking what they called a control model, the secular critics asked, how would results be measured? Faith, answered Sir James, is not of the quotidian or the calculable.

  This was a problem, of course, or would have been except that the problem of calculating the unknowable, the unseeable had as far as I could tell most always worked for us, not against us, had worked to our advantage as believers and to the disadvantage, it seemed, of the nonbelievers, who demanded more.

  Sir James liked to speculate further that, although the results of the program would be, like the divine itself, indeed difficult to quantify on the skeptics’ terms, these results would nonetheless exist, publicly documented or not. There would be, he was confident, deathbed conversions and secret confessions, children of our alumni baptized in private. There would be doubt and prayer, and submission and redemption, that no one would ever, ever know about except, yes, our Lord and Savior. Hard hearts would be softened. For that possibility Sir James Templeman, philanthropist, was willing to spend a few million dollars of a fortune one hundred times that size, built on faith, and yes, on prudent investing in commercial real estate and mutual funds.

  We were located on a private island in the West Indies, with guest houses, a dining room, library, landing field, swimming pool, golf course and lawn bowling, a small chapel and on-site medical support, in addition to the magnificently restored colonial mansion in which Sir James, a widower, resided. I had my own comfortable apartment in the carriage house, with a view of the sea on one side and the hills from the other. Sir James took his tea each morning in the solarium of the main residence, among his beloved prizewinning orchids, often with a personal guest who was staying with us just then, a con gressman, member of Parliament, college dean or chancellor, writer, minister, rabbi, lama, or mullah.

  After breakfast they often toured the grounds together, Sir James and the visiting senator or journalist or clergyman, stopping occasionally to chat briefly with a subterranean-dwelling nonbeliever-in-residence working in his or her quarters. Walking with the aid of a cane, Sir James would point out a foxhole, sitting inside it a well-known prizewinner, esteemed scholar, PBS host, investigative journalist, or somebody else unable to resist what must have seemed the jackpot of free time to conduct research, read, collect no-strings-attached fellowship money—round-trip airfare from anywhere in the world included—just to show up the famous philanthropist even while, yes, the scholar humbled himself before God if also perhaps humiliating himself in the eyes of his colleagues back home. So, yes, the conversations were brief, if mostly cordial.

  A residency lasted forty days, the same period Christ wrestled Satan in the desert. If the participants left early, they naturally forfeited the money. But if they completed their underground tenure, when they stepped out of their foxholes each received generous compensation and could take the opportunity to elaborate on the mystical or, as more likely occurred, exercise their God-given (as Sir James liked to remind them) right to brag that they still rejected the spirit, had found no evidence of it, and so had cheated the foundation after enduring five weeks in a luxurious burrow.

  We were proud of our successes, however few. The three men who’d indeed come to embrace the divine, to find faith, were a Danish chemist, an American MBA, and an Indian hydrologist. They used their time in the foxhole to study Scripture, search their souls, and write scientific papers that affirmed a spiritual dimension in, respectively, the areas of chemistry, the free market, and the study of water movement, distribution, and quality. The title of the hydrologist’s report, “Living Waters,” delighted Sir James.

  The three scholars had looked for and found scientific proof of the hand of the divine, and were eager to share it. Their subsequent proposals to fund research in this important work were accepted by the Templeman Science Institute in Colorado Springs, Colorado. They eventually left their home institutions and were given permanent po sitions, fully endowed research chairs, at the institute, and they and their work were featured on our website.

  You might have heard that Sir James had plans beyond the foxholes and the universities. Yes, there were other big ideas in the works: a privately funded manned space launch, a faith-based interplanetary satellite exploration program, an all-Christian professional baseball league. Mystery may be found and experienced everywhere, Sir James always said, and the Templeman Fund helped to sponsor the search for it. I looked forward to helping him realize this dream as his secretary, his trusted confidante. But this was not to be, not after the disappearance of the atheist Dr. Simon Killacky, age forty-eight, a part-time geology instructor, speech team faculty advisor, and women’s softball coach from a small community college in Orange County, California. He had been at the estate fewer than three days. An unattractive if gentle man, Killacky had been welcomed at the landing field on a Friday, provided a lei and a Bible, been driven in a golf cart to his assigned hole, and clocked in by noon, thus beginning his first day. I myself did not speak to him beyond reviewing the rules. I observed him sign our standard legal agreements, answered a few routine questions, and had no interactions with him on Saturday at all. He seemed tired, perhaps anxious, when I met him, which is what I later told the investigating authorities, who reconstructed events based on evidence found in his foxhole, which is to say very little evidence at all.

  It seems Dr. Killacky ate his early evening dinner on both Friday and Saturday nights, read portions of Scripture and sections from textbooks and scientific journals (passages still marked with Postits), made some notes, sent a handful of e-mails, called his lawyer on his cell phone, used the small bathroom facility, and then pulled the fiberglass roof over his hole and, it seems, went to sleep. Thus he passed his first two days, giving no indication of any behavior other than we anticipated.

  Indeed, on the second night, the authorities concluded, he retired at about the same time, though, of course, there were no witnesses. Individual foxholes are purposely distant from one another, perhaps fifty meters apart, and neither of the two nearest residents, a black lady Marxist historian from Oakland or a botanist from Winnipeg, noticed or heard anything. In retrospect, we might have installed sensors or even surveillance cameras, but, even now, these seem an intrusion and a violation of the spirit of the wager, the contract, the premise of what was, to Sir James’s mind, both a scientific laboratory and hallowed ground.

  On Sunday morning at 8 a.m., the staff delivered Dr. Killacky’s breakfast tray at the edge of his as-yet unopened residence. An hour later, observing the breakfast untouched, and concerned that he had not yet awakened, the server summoned the security chief, who pulled back the opaque roof to discover Dr. Killacky missing and in his place a new hole, situated in the center of the foxhole, about a meter wide. This second hole, clearly much deeper, was very dark. The circumference of this perfect circle—there is no other way to say this—was of a human torso.

  All items in Killacky’s accommodations remained, untouched, the laptop and Bible and his personal notebooks, the scene suggesting that the atheist had dug down a few feet for some reason and was perhaps trapped down there, or even hiding.

  Alas, investigation of the hole quickly established that this was not at all the situation. Security summoned me almost immediately and, skeptical, I soon had to concede what was obvious if unbelievabl
e: that this was a very, very deep hole, perhaps indeed bottomless, as our security chief, a local man, would insist over and over. And which would later seem to be proven.

  And, yes, certain facts could not be denied even early on: absent footprints or other evidence, it seemed Killacky had to still be down there, deep down inside of the hole, however shallow or deep. Feeling foolish, if desperate, I directed the staff to secure first one ladder, then a longer ladder, then a length of stout rope. Then they tied that rope to a longer rope, weighted with a hammer of all things, the handiest object available, lowering and lowering the whole contraption until we soon ran out of line, forty, fifty, one hundred meters, neither locating Killacky nor reaching bottom, and hearing and seeing not a thing.

  News of Killacky’s disappearance leaked before I could notify his wife or the embassy, and soon the media arrived, the print reporters and TV people with cameras. I apologized to Sir James, who per sonally supervised the rescue attempt from his wheelchair, parked at the edge of the site, but he understood and agreed that we should cooperate and provide the press complete access. “We have nothing to hide,” he said.

  The scene soon became a familiar one, day and night, quickly developing into the “Atheist Lost in a Hole” story and the “Earth Swallows up Nonbeliever,” with the twenty-four-hour cable stations sending their celebrity anchors and investigative reporters, these familiar on-camera personalities standing on the lawn wearing khakis and guayaberas, attempting to answer for their viewers the question of how this was possible and who Killacky was and, of course, where we were and what the Institute’s work was. They reminded viewers and listeners and readers of Sir James’s remarkable biography, the life story of a southern-born gentleman, Rhodes scholar, lifetime Presbyterian knighted by the Queen of England, who had renounced his US citizenship and moved to the island for tax reasons and to promote the investigation of the universal and divine, to advance the consideration of the holy as part of a new model of scientific inquiry.