The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

by Sheila Heti

  Henry King discovered that the inside of Henry King looked like any meat one might buy at a butcher’s shop. He smiled wryly, and perished.

  17

  Henry King wore a special shirt for people who may be one day kidnapped. This made him more comfortable in day-to-day life. He bought special shoes for people who need to survive short falls. He wore an actual helmet. He covered his crotch with a semi-articulated neoprene-and-steel codpiece. This odd appearance was sufficient to provoke a mob in Buenos Aires, where he was killed while attempting to enter a soccer stadium. Thirty people stood on his head until it was flat. They left his body alone.

  18

  “Heinrich König?” asked the man with the expressionless face as he pointed the Ruger LC9 at his skull. “Henry King,” corrected Henry King, shaking his head. But the dark-suited man had already pulled the trigger.

  19

  Henry King must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, for he was not to be found among those who had successfully navigated the river and now floated on in the lake, cans of Schlitz balanced on their bellies. Instead his tube popped and he was swept along by currents and bashed by rocks until his corpse was caught in a backwater. It lay there bloating in the company of his own can of Schlitz, which, thanks to the water, was ice-cold.

  20

  The bottles in the cellar were delicately balanced. Removing the ’45 Château Margaux brought all the other bottles cascading down on Henry King. He lay there half-crushed and badly cut, dying, stinking of expensive wine.

  21

  It was a mistake to try to separate the two fighting pit bulls. Henry King was fairly certain both of them bit him repeatedly, but was in no condition to ascertain which one tore his throat out.

  22

  Henry King died of the kissing disease. Those he knew preferred not to speak of it.

  23

  Henry King played a game called Clouds and Jewels with the cooks in a sinister Chinese restaurant after the usual mahjong game was over with. Clouds and Jewels, as they called it, involved eating small bits of one thing disguised as another and guessing what was what. At least that’s how the first cook explained it to the detective, as they stood there in the harsh fluorescent light of the kitchen, looking down on Henry King’s corpse, where it rested beneath the filthy card table. “I know what you mean,” said the detective, carelessly.

  24

  “Henry” King, in reality Henriette, leaned her musket against one wall of the dilapidated French fort, removed her regimental coat, laid her cocked hat on a chair, and shook out her long hair. What will history think of me? She wondered. At that moment a French light infantryman who had been disguised as a pair of candlesticks stood up on the table and shot her through the face with an outdated heirloom arquebus: some sort of matchlock, one might say. That a man who would disguise himself as a candlestick should have such a weapon . . . it is inevitable, thought Henriette, and promptly perished.

  25

  According to twelfth-century parish records, the king had been accosted by a smiling man who claimed his name “to be a reverse of thine own, sire. Thou art King Henry, and I am Henry King.” King Henry’s response was to have Henry King beheaded.

  26

  Henry King seemed to have been turned to stone. There was a great deal of consternation among his neighbors: half believed he had been petrified, the other half believed he had made a statue of himself and then left town. Discussion became argument and argument became fisticuffs, and in the brawl that followed, Henry King, or his representation, was knocked over and broken to pieces.

  27

  Henry King went to Hokkaido to see the cherry blossoms. Never mind that there are better ones elsewhere; it was to Hokkaido he went. And, quite simply, the visit was too much for him. Even these so-to-speak Hokkaido cherry blossoms, they were too intense, too perfect, too redolent of life’s equal measure of splendor and strife: he collapsed on the spot, clutching at his chest. “I confess!” he cried, beginning a sentence he would never end.

  28

  Henry King, world traveler, sat staring at his plate. There was, he was fairly certain, a snout, a foot as well, a gummy ear edged with a thread line of dark bristles. If they can eat it, it must be all right, he told himself, and dug into the meal that, months later, would end up being the death of him.

  29

  His last memory as Henry King was the stick coming down toward his face. It was followed as if without transition by the smiling face of a nurse, but by then he had lost track of his name and never quite managed to retrieve it.

  30

  Henry King was an extra in an Andy Warhol film in which the twenty prettiest girls in New York City climbed up a ladder and fell off into the East River. The last one fucked it up really badly so Andy Warhol said get the next prettiest thing on the set up that ladder pronto and Henry King was next prettiest but couldn’t swim. They made him go anyway.

  31

  “Henry King, you say,” said the grizzled old man to the investigating officer. “He never told me his name but I suppose it must be him. You’ll find him at the bottom of that,” he said, and pointed with the stem of his pipe to the edge of the ravine.

  32

  In the dream Henry King was thrown free of the car and, though badly injured and comatose for weeks, managed to survive and go on to marry, have children, and have grandchildren, finally dying peacefully at a ripe old age. In reality, Henry King, asleep at the wheel, was killed instantly when his car crossed into the other lane and struck a semi head-on.

  33

  The phone call came late at night. “You’ve been activated,” said a flat, expressionless voice. “Excuse me?” said Henry King. “The puppy is out of the crate,” said the voice. “But I don’t have a puppy,” said Henry King. There was a long pause. “Incorrect,” said the voice. “You will be terminated.” “Terminated?” said Henry King. “Hello?” But the line was already dead.

  34

  At security, Henry King found he had forgotten to bring the note from his doctor, and had his inhaler taken away. On the plane he was seated next to a woman trained as a nurse, and when he began to have trouble breathing she did her best to talk him through it. “Breathe through your nose, honey. Breathe through your nose,” she kept saying in a voice so calm and so relaxed that he was surprised, when he opened his eyes, to see so much fear gathered in her face. His breathing grew worse and worse. An emergency landing was made, but by the time they touched down he was already dead.

  35

  Henry King felt his way along the crack in the bathroom wall. He slowly wormed his finger into it, though doing so stripped his finger to the bone. His hand followed, then his wrist, then his whole arm. To make the rest of his body fit, he had to pound it flat by beating the body repeatedly with a cast-iron pan. After that, though, it was easy. Before he knew it he was back behind the crack. But it was too dark to see what, if anything, was there, and though he had managed to work his way in, he did not have the same success working his way back out.

  36

  The path wound slowly along the narrow spit of land and through undergrowth and trees. Here there was a damp earthy smell and there the woody tang of eucalyptus. Henry King could see the waves below, the sound of them more distant than he felt it should be. A path led down to a beach but was blocked off with police tape and a warning. He ignored both. At first the going was easy, then more difficult, then the sides of the path crumbled and gave way and Henry King began to scramble back up. And then the whole path went, and he along with it.

  37

  Henry King rode the glass elevator up to the thirty-first floor so that he could look out and see the lights and the enormous Christmas tree in the square. In the brief pause between when the doors opened and when the doors closed again, he could not help but imagine what it would be like to fall from this height, to go tumbling down the side of the building and flash into the ground below. It came to him so vividly that for an instant he felt he was living ha
nd in hand with his own death. Then the doors closed and he rode the elevator down again and walked home alone.

  SEO-YOUNG GHU

  ■

  A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major

  FROM Entropy

  INVOCATION (WINTER 2015–16)

  It’s evening in Queens, New York. Alone in my apartment, I’m grading student papers and drinking ginger tea. The phone rings. For some reason I forget to check the caller ID before answering, “Hello?”

  A woman’s voice: “Hi, Seo-Young?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m calling from Stanford to ask about your experience while you were here.”

  (blank space)

  The blank space above: a representation of my immediate response to the caller’s words.

  I almost can’t believe that this is happening. Stanford is reaching out to me. Will Stanford apologize at last? That is all I have ever wanted: an apology.

  My experience while I was at Stanford.

  The story tumbles out. It’s a story I have told numerous times already—to psychiatrists, to close friends, to myself, to lovers, to neurologists, to therapists. The story begins with my suicide attempt at age 21 and ends with Stanford’s own punishment of the professor in 2001: two years of suspension without pay. I describe the long horrible months of sexual harassment. I describe the rape—or the parts of it that I can bear to mention out loud. I add that I never pressed charges or received any money from either Stanford or the professor. All I did was tell someone else who told someone else who started the fact-finding investigation that resulted in his punishment. I have never sued the rapist, the department, or the school—despite the time I’ve lost and the fortune I’ve spent as a consequence of the harmful culture at Stanford that enabled the professor to injure me as well as others.

  The monologue is disjointed and long. I hadn’t been expecting this call. I haven’t had time to prepare. And yet I’ve had too much time to prepare: nearly fifteen years.

  There is a silence after I’ve finished speaking. I start to wonder if perhaps the caller has hung up on me. I start to worry she won’t call back.

  But she’s still there. “That’s . . . awful,” the woman is suddenly saying. “I’m so sorry. I’m just a Stanford undergrad. I was actually calling Stanford alumni for financial donations, to ask you for a gift of, but, I don’t, I mean, in this case, for you . . .”

  Something is happening to my eyes. The room has begun at once to darken and to seem much too bright. Or is something happening to my mind? Bright like sunlight at noon in Northern California on a cloudless day. But I am in Queens, New York City. The year is not 2000. What time is it? How old am I? Something is happening to reality. A sickening gust spreads throughout my internal organs. The phone I hold is shaking. My hands and arms are shaking. I close my eyes. I imagine feathery bandages made of photons holding together the jigsaw of my body. The shaking subsides.

  “No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” I manage to say, and I mean it. “Tell me about your studies.”

  “Sure,” she says, and begins to talk with cheerful confidence about her major, which is not English but history. She’s excited about her academic career. As I listen to her, I murmur vague, pleasant, encouraging utterances. I’m happy for her. She has a bright future. “You have a bright future,” I say. We wish each other well. Somewhat awkwardly the dialogue ends.

  For several moments I am dazed. Inexplicable giddiness has begun to seep into my head. I can hear air seeping into a balloon. The balloon is beige. The phone is warm in my hand. Most balloons are not beige. The gust of nausea rapidly gathers in my chest. I rush, half-stumbling, to the kitchen trash can.

  I throw up.

  DISCUSS THE FOLLOWING QUOTATION.

  “There’s a great pleasure in teaching freshmen because you’re sort of being folded into their lives at a particular, powerful moment in which you can make a difference,” he said in the 1996 interview. “And to some degree, you can ‘convert’ them to English. It becomes a way of trawling for majors.” (Source: Cynthia Haven, Stanford Report, August 17, 2007)

  SOURCES AND ALLUSIONS.

  He found me in a place known as the Farm.

  His field: to grow a special breed of harm.

  His stock of antique furniture and dolls

  And manuscripts he nurtured in his walls.

  A culture of “American” indifference

  To rape he tended with uncommon sense.

  Exactly how I came to be a thing

  For him to call his own is still a thing

  I can’t or won’t remember. He misused

  His powers to leave minds like mine abused.

  Where others who preceded me fare now

  I often wish yet do not wish to know.

  Sometimes I dream that his rare book collection

  Is made of all “his” women turned to fiction.

  IS THIS AN EXAMPLE OF IRONY? EXPLAIN YOUR ANSWER.

  I grew up pronouncing the word “women” the way my Korean parents did: the same way we pronounced the word “woman.”

  It was the professor—my rapist—who corrected my pronunciation of the word “women.” Since then, every time I have uttered “women,” I have remembered his voice.

  It—his voice—it accompanies mine like an accent. “Women.”

  HERE, I FILLED OUT THE FORM.

  Year of birth: 1978.

  Place of birth: northern Virginia.

  First language: Korean. To this day I have dreams in which my young mother is holding me in her arms and whispering to me in achingly melodic strings of Korean syllables.

  Second language: English. When I started school, the teacher told my parents that if they wanted me to succeed in America they would have to communicate with me exclusively in English. From then on my mother and I were estranged. We spoke to each other in an English filled with gaps. It took me decades to recognize the sacrifice my mother made when she stopped speaking to me in our native tongue.

  Language spoken by parents to each other: fluent Korean. I grew up hearing marriage as a foreign language—literally and figuratively. I grew up hearing the sound of Korean as a language of Korean-bound han syndrome, disappointment, fury, resignation, the sense of being trapped forever, resentment, guilt. Every other word: a door slammed.

  Faith system(s): raised Roman Catholic by my mother and Confucian by my father. Currently agnostic.

  How parents met: Their marriage was arranged.

  Significant family trauma(s): the Korean War (which orphaned my father and made him watch his beloved elder brother die); my mother’s sister’s suicide when I was a child; being run over by a car as a child while waiting for the school bus; struggling as a Roman Catholic teenager with my romantic feelings for a female classmate; being hospitalized during my senior year of college following my first suicide attempt; being raped soon after my first suicide attempt by a professor at Stanford University, where I was just starting a Ph.D. program in English language and literature.

  IS THIS AN EXAMPLE OF IRONY? EXPLAIN YOUR ANSWER.

  His interests included the Declaration of Independence. He wrote a book titled Declaring Independence.

  SYMPATHY FOR JAMES COMEY. SUMMER 2017.

  He had called me at lunchtime that day and invited me to dinner that night, saying he was going to invite the whole cohort, but decided to have just me this time, with the whole cohort coming the next time. It was unclear from the conversation who else would be at the dinner, although I assumed there would be others.

  It turned out to be just the two of us, seated at a small table in the middle of his favorite restaurant.

  The professor began by asking me whether I wanted to stay on in the Ph.D. program, which I found strange because he had already told me twice in earlier conversations that he hoped I would stay, and I had assured him that I intended to. He said that lots of people wanted to work with him and, given the academic pressure and job market, he would understand
if I wanted to walk away.

  My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me beg to work with him and create some sort of intimate relationship. That concerned me greatly, given that I wanted to be his advisee.

  I replied that I loved my work and intended to stay, write my dissertation, and receive my degree. And then, because the set-up made me uneasy, I added that I was not “interested” in the way people who are dating use that word, but he could always count on me to work hard and try my best to produce good scholarship.

  A few moments later, the professor said, “But I’m lonely. I’m needy. I need to feel desirable. I need you to desire me.”

  I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. I wanted to leave. Instead I froze.

  The conversation then moved on, but he would return to the subject near the end of our dinner.

  At one point, I tried to explain why it was so important that my personal life be independent of my professional career. I said it was a conundrum: Throughout history, some people in institutional positions of power (e.g., straight white male professors with tenure and endowed chairs, among other privileges) have decided that their positions authorize them to use less powerful people (e.g., 21-year-old first-year graduate students who happen to be female, mentally ill, and 1.5–2nd generation Korean American) in ways that make the powerful even more powerful (while putting the powerless in a risky situation). But the abuse of power can ultimately make the powerful weak by undermining public trust in institutions—including academic institutions—and their work.