The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

by Dave Eggers

  This could have taken days, this journey, yet my vision, in direct opposite proportion to my shrinking size, only broadened as I shrank and the tunnel shrank. And so I saw all around me a giant tableau of history, time, faith, layers and layers of geological strata corresponding, yes, directly and precisely to the story of our Creator’s handiwork, the destruction, the birth, just as the missing scientist had explained in his paper and no doubt further detailed in his notes for those who knew how to read them.

  I was Jonah, and then Daniel. I was Jacob, climbing down a ladder. As I fell I knew it was also on top of, above, and behind Dr. Killacky and the dog Jo-Jo, that I was borne on the tailwind of Sister Alpha and the twelve other disciples, even, lo, on the bodies and spirits of multitudes. I seemed not to be falling faster. My body would, I knew, reach something called free fall, a point where I would not drop any faster, but I was not sure if this was true for falling down holes, or of how gravity worked miles and miles under TempleLand and the island. I had entered the portal to another world, if not yet entered that world itself, by looking into Sir James’s wise, ancient eyes and finding nothing of myself left. I needed to be here, for him as much as for myself.

  I woke after some time to darkness and coolness, reached out gingerly to touch the slick, wet walls of the tunnel, brushing them barely with my fingertips, at a speed of what felt sometimes fast, but sometimes so slow I might not be falling at all. Proximity to what must have been the earth’s core began to warm the tunnel. It was dark there, but not as dark as you might imagine.

  And who, I wondered as I fell, is anyone to judge me, or science, or Sir James? I heard his voice as I fell, and felt relief, peace. I wondered now what everyone, except Sir James, had been so scared of. I felt more alive than I had ever been, or felt, in my life up above. Still, I expected only more, and I looked forward to reaching the end.

  I heard my own voice. There was no echo here. There was no beginning after awhile, not that I could recall, not to me and not to my journey. There was no end, not to believing, not to faith, not yet anyway, and I fell, fell, fell confidently, which is a feeling unwelcome to those on the surface, frightening, but which I assure you was the anticipation and excitement of arrival. “Remember this always,” was all I thought, spoke, heard, all three of them the same expression.

  And when I woke, here I was in, yes, this small chamber in the very center of the planet. I had indeed become smaller, and so fit perfectly with the others, and I took my place standing in the crèche. The scene was arranged as it should have been, with Dr. Simon Killacky standing on one side, wearing a beard and robe and carrying a staff, Sister Alpha sitting in her blue gown, and Jo-Jo guarding the manger.

  She smiled at me, this young and beautiful Sarah Hoolihan, and then beckoned, and the humiliating scenes of her on the video and in the photographs were no more. I approached, welcoming her invitation, and peered inside the humble cradle to adore the infant and to feel, at last, the complete joy and assurance of the sight of him, here, in the world at last, that world rediscovered by a man of science and a man of faith and, lo, there he was, Sir James, a tiny baby at rest in swaddling clothes, laid in the warm, dry straw. Around us knelt and prayed the rest of the disciples wearing their purest white, with candles burning eternally around us, the grotto illuminated by the tiny flames as well as by the bright blue eyes of the child.

  And after I had adored him, and been found again in those strong and gentle eyes, I returned to my own station, where I am now, kneeling forever and eternally, together with the others here in the enduring and real world where science and hydrology will never, ever find us and cannot deny us, no, not hidden deep in the earth’s core.

  MADHURI VIJAY

  Lorry Raja

  FROM Narrative Magazine

  WHAT HAPPENED was that my older brother, Siju, got a job as a lorry driver at the mine and started acting like a big shot. He stopped playing with Munna the way he used to, tossing him into the air like a sack of sand, making him sputter with laughter. When Amma asked him anything, he would give her a pitying look and not answer. He stopped speaking to his girlfriend, Manju, altogether. He taunted me about playing in the mud, as he called it, breaking chunks of iron ore with my hammer. With Appa especially he was reckless, not bothering to conceal his disdain, until he said something about failed drivers who are only good for digging and drinking, and Appa wrestled him to the ground and forced him to eat a handful of the red, iron-rich earth, shouting that this was our living now and he should bloody learn to respect it. Siju complained to the mine’s labor officer, Mr. Subbu, but Mr. Subbu dismissed it as a domestic matter and refused to interfere. After that, Siju maintained a glowering silence in Appa’s presence. When Appa wasn’t around, Siju sneered at our tent, a swatch of blue plastic stretched over a bamboo skeleton. Never mind that he was being paid half a regular driver’s salary by the owner of the lorry, a paan-chewing Andhra fellow called Rajappa, because Siju was only fourteen and could not bargain for more.

  Never mind that Rajappa’s lorry permit was fake, a flimsy transparent chit of paper with no expiry date and half the words illegible, which meant that Siju was allowed to transport the ore only to the railway station in Hospet and not, like the other drivers, all the way to port cities like Mangalore and Chennai, where he’d run the risk of ar rest by border authorities. Never mind that the mine’s lorry cleaners, most of whom were boys my age, called him Lorry Raja behind his back and imitated his high-stepping walk. None of it seemed to matter to him. And, as little as I wanted to admit it, he was a raja in the cab of that lorry, and moreover he looked it. His hair was thick and black, and a long tuft descended at the back of his neck, like a crow’s glossy tail feathers. His nose was straight, and his eyeballs were untouched by yellow. His teeth remained white in spite of breathing the iron-laden air. He seemed, when he was in the cab of that lorry, like someone impossible and important, someone I didn’t know at all.

  The ore went to the port cities, and then it went onto ships the size of buildings. I hadn’t seen them, but the labor officer, Mr. Subbu, had told us about them. He said the ships crossed the ocean, and the journey took weeks. The ships went to Australia and Japan, but mostly they went to China. They were building a stadium in China for something called the Lympic Games. Mr. Subbu explained that the Lympic Games were like the World Cup, except for all sports instead of just cricket. Swimming, tennis, shooting, running. If you won you got a gold medal, Mr. Subbu said. India had won a gold medal in boxing the last time the games were held.

  The stadium in China would be round like a cricket stadium, except ten times bigger. Mr. Subbu spread his arms out wide when he said this, and we could see patches of sweat under the arms of his nice ironed shirt.

  The whole world worked in the mines. At least that is what it seemed like then. There was a drought in Karnataka and neighboring Andhra Pradesh, and things were so bad people were starting to eye the mangy street dogs. Our neighbor poured kerosene on himself and three daughters and lit them ablaze; his wife burned her face but escaped. Then came the news of the mines, hundreds of them opening in Bellary, needing workers. And people went. It seemed to happen overnight. They asked their brothers-in-law or their uncles to look after their plots and their houses, or simply sold them. They pulled their children out of school. Whole villages were suddenly abandoned, cropless fields left to wither. Families waited near bus depots plastered with faded film signs, carrying big bundles stuffed with steel pots and plastic shoes and flimsy clothes. The buses were so full they tilted to one side. There wasn’t enough space for everyone. The people who were left behind tried running alongside the buses, and some of the more foolish ones tried to jump in as the bus was moving. They would invariably fall, lie in the dust for a while, staring up at the rainless sky. Then they would get up, brush off their clothes, and go back to wait for the next bus. For months my family watched this happen. We didn’t worry, not at first. Appa had a job as a driver for a subinspector of the Raichur Therma
l Power Plant, and we thought we were fine. Then there was the accident, and Appa lost the job. He spent the next few weeks at the rum shop, coming home long enough to belt me or my brother Siju or Amma. After that was over he cried for a long time. Then he announced that we were going to work in the mines. All of us. Siju, who was in the seventh standard at the time, tried to protest, but Appa twisted a bruise into his arm and Siju stopped complaining. I was in the fifth standard, and to me it seemed like a grand adventure. Amma said nothing. She was pregnant with Munna then, and her feet had swollen to the size of papayas. She hobbled into the hut to pack our things.

  Within a week, we squeezed onto a bus that was leaking black droplets of oil from its heavy bottom, and Appa bought us each a newspaper cone of hot peanuts for the journey. I flicked the burnt peanuts into my mouth and watched as the land slowly got dryer and redder, until the buildings in the huddled villages we passed were red too, and so was the bark of the trees, and so were the fingers of the ticket collector who checked the stub in Appa’s hand and said, “Next stop.” We lurched into a teeming bus station with a cracked floor, and I asked Appa why the ground was red, and he told me this was because of the iron in it. While Appa was busy asking directions to the nearest mine that was hiring, and Amma was searching in her blouse for money to buy a packet of Tiger biscuits and a bottle of 7Up for our lunch, Siju came up to me and whispered that, really, the ground was red because there was blood in it, seeping up to the surface from the miners’ bodies buried underneath. For months I believed him, and every step I took was in fear, bracing for the sticky wetness of blood, the crunch of bone, the squelch of an organ. When I realized the truth I tried to hit him, but he held my wrists so hard they hurt, and he bared his teeth close to my face, laughing.

  That afternoon, just about a year after we had come to the mine, I was working an open pit beside the highway, along with a few other children and a handful of women. I squatted by the edge of the road, close enough that the warm exhaust from the vehicles billowed my faded T-shirt and seeped under my shorts. The pinch of tobacco Amma had given me that morning to stave off my hunger had long since lost its flavor. It was now a bland, warm glob tucked in my cheek. Heat pressed down on my skin, and there was a sharp, metallic tinge to the air that made me uneasy. The women, who usually laughed and teased each other, curved their backs into shells and hammered in silence. The children seemed more careless than usual because I kept hearing small cries whenever one of them brought a hammer down on a thumb by accident. The horizon to the west was congested with a dark breast of clouds, but above me the sun blazed white through a gauze sky. The monsoons were late, too late for crops, but I knew they would hit anytime now. Over the past week, furious little rainstorms had begun to tear up the red earth, flooding various pits, making them almost impossible to mine. I remembered that during the last monsoon, a drunk man had wandered away one night and fallen into a flooded pit. His body, by the time it was discovered, was bloated and black.

  Lorries crawled in sluggish streams in both directions on the highway. The ones heading away from Bellary were weighed down with ore, great mounds wrapped in gray and green tarpaulin and lashed with lengths of rope as thick as my ankle. The empty ones returning from the port cities rattled with stray pebbles jumping in the back. The faces of the lorry drivers were glistening with sweat, and they blared their horns as if it might make the nearly immobile line of traffic speed up. Now and then a foreign car, belonging to one of the mine owners, slipped noiselessly through the stalled traffic. I recited the names of the cars, tonguing the tobacco in my mouth: Maserati. Jaguar. Mercedes. Jaguar. Their shimmering bodies caught the sun and played with it, light sliding across their hoods, winking in their taillights. The mine owners lived in huge pink and white houses on the highway, houses with fountains and the grim heads of stone lions staring from the balconies. I looked up as a sleek black Maserati went by, and in its tinted window I saw myself, a boy in shorts and a baggy T-shirt, crouching close to the dirt. And standing behind me, the distorted shape of a girl. I stood up quickly, hammer in hand, and whirled around.

  Manju flinched, as if I might attack her with it. A few days before, I had seen two kids get into a hammer fight over a Titan watch they had found together. One of them smashed the other’s hand. Later I found a small square fingernail stamped into the ground where they fought.

  “I’m not going to hit you,” I said.

  Her slow smile pulled her cheeks into small brown hills sunk with shadowy dimples. She smoothed down the front of her dress, which was actually a school uniform. It had once been white but was now tinged with red iron dust. It wrapped around her thin body, ending below her knees and buttoning high at her throat. Her hair spilled in knotted waves down her back. She and her mother had arrived at the mine around the same time as we had. Her mother was sick and never came out of their tent. I didn’t know what was wrong with her. For a while Manju had been Siju’s girlfriend, saving up her extra tobacco for him, nodding seriously when he spoke, following him everywhere. Then he had stopped speaking to her. The one time I asked him about it, Siju leaned to one side, curled his lip, and spat delicately into the mud.

  “Hi, Manju,” I said. We were the same height, though she was a few years older, maybe fifteen.

  “Hi, Guna,” she said, and squatted at my feet. I squatted too and waited for her to do something. She picked up the piece of ore I had been working on and gave it two halfhearted taps with her hammer. Then she seemed to lose interest. She let it fall and said, “He came by already?”

  “No,” I said.

  I liked Manju. Whenever journalists or NGO workers came to tour the mines, Manju and I would drop our hammers and prance in circles, shouting, “No child-y labor here!” According to the mine owners, it was our parents who were supposed to be working. We simply lived with them and played around the mine. The hammers and ba sins were our toys. The journalists would scribble in their notepads, and the NGO workers would whisper to one another, and Manju would grin widely at me. Then, after we found out about the Lympic Games, we had contests of our own. Running contests, stone-throwing contests, rock-piling contests. The winner got the gold medal, the runner-up clapped and stomped the dirt in applause. I liked playing with Manju because I almost always won, and she never got angry when she lost, like the boys sometimes did.

  “Manju,” I said now. “Want to race? Bet I’ll get the gold medal.”

  But she just shook her head. She stared up at the lorries. She was thin, and the bones at the top of her spine pushed like pebbles against her uniform. I wanted to reach out and tap them gently with my hammer. One of the lorry drivers, a man with a thick mustache, saw her watching and made a wet kissing sound with his lips, like he was sucking an invisible straw. His tongue came out, fleshy and purple. He shouted, “Hi, sexy girl! Sexy-fun girl!” My cheeks burned for her, and I could feel the weight of the women’s gazes, but Manju looked at him as if he had told her that rain was on the way. I busied myself with filling my puttu with lumps of ore. Each full basin I took to the weighing station would earn me five and a half rupees. On a good day I could fill seven or eight puttus, if I ignored the blisters at the base of my thumb.

  I felt the other workers looking at us, the frank stares of the children. I carefully shifted the glob of tobacco from my right cheek to my left.

  “You shouldn’t be playing those dumb-stupid games anyway,” Manju said.

  “No?” I said cautiously. “Why not?”

  Manju said, “You should be in school.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It had been two years since I sat in a classroom. I had only vague recollections of it. The cold mud floor. Sitting next to a boy called Dheeraj, who smelled of castor oil. Slates with cracked plastic frames. The maths teacher who called us human head lice when we couldn’t solve the sum on the board. All of us chanting in unison an English poem we didn’t understand. The boy stood on the burning deck. The antiseptic smell of the girls’ toilet covering another, mustier,
smell. Dheeraj giggling outside. Then three, four, five whacks on the fleshy part of my palm with a wooden ruler, and trying not to show that it hurt. The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled.

  “You used to come first in class, no?” Manju said. A gray gust of exhaust blew a wisp of hair between her teeth. She chewed on it. Her face was whiskered with red dust.

  “How do you know?”

  “Siju told me,” she said, which surprised me. “Siju said you got a hundred in every subject, even the difficult ones like maths. He said you shouldn’t be wasting your potential here.”

  I had never heard him say anything like that. It sounded like something an NGO worker might say. I wondered where he had heard the phrase.

  “But, Manju,” I said, “I like it here.”

  “Why?”

  I was about to tell her why—because I could play with her every day and because the mine was vast and open and I was free to go where I liked, and, yes, the work was hard but there was an excitement to the way the lorries rumbled past, straining under their heavy cargo—but right then Manju dropped her hammer.

  In a strained voice she said, “He’s coming.”

  Siju’s lorry looked no different than any of the others, except that it had been freshly cleaned. It had an orange cab, and the outer sides of the long bed were painted brown. The bed bulged with ore, like the belly of a fat man. Siju was clearly on his way to the Hospet railway station. The back panel of the lorry was decorated with painted animals—a lion and two deer. The lion, its thick mane rippling, stood in a lush forest, and the two deer flanked it, their delicate orange heads raised and looking off to the sides. Siju was especially proud of the painting, and I knew he stood over his lorry cleaner each morning, breathing down the boy’s neck to make sure that all the red dust was properly wiped off the faces of the animals. His insistence on keeping the lorry spick-and-span was part of why the lorry cleaners made fun of him.