The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  The orangutan stopped inches from me. “That’s enough!” he said.

  The elephant turned mauve. She rose clumsily and headed toward the kitchen.

  I struggled to frame my closer as a “Yes” question. I yelled, “Kunda, if a cheap nutritionist in-law who charges cheap rates could help you fix these problems cheaply, you’d want help, wouldn’t you?”

  Suddenly it was done. Instead of an elephant I saw a lithe, forty-something Indian woman striding toward my sister’s back door. She opened the door, closed it carefully behind her, and walked into the dark yard. My sister, not a Chihuahua but a tallish blond investment banker with great skin and runner’s legs, twisted my right wrist. She said, “Everything you said is unacceptable.”

  Some of our relatives—our gray-suited uncle, his mouth curled as if a friend had told him a joke; our mother, in her pink velour dress; my sister’s husband’s parents, the ex-postal worker with his bald head and bristly black brows and his slope-faced, brown-eyed wife—stared at me, appalled, from a couch; on a love seat, one of my brothers leaned toward the other and whispered, “We might commit her; Nina will pay.”

  Beyond the glass dome of the circle room was clear black sky; under the Christmas tree sat mounds of gifts decked in sparkling gold-and-red paper and tied with organza ribbons.

  I said, “I apologize.”

  I kept saying it.

  My sister sighed and said that someone should go to Kunda; her husband said that he would, but my sister said, “No, let me.” She walked through the kitchen, slid the heavy glass door open, and strode out. Behind her, the black cat sauntered across the kitchen tiles and out the door and into the grass. It padded left, past the swing set, and headed into the trees.

  That’s how we reentered the forest, now frigid and pitch black. Though it was late, all of us lurched through the woods, calling the cat’s name. My sister didn’t own enough flashlights for everyone, so we searched in clusters and pairs. The trees were dark, still shapes; I heard twigs crack and people in distant places call the cat’s name. It was terrible and no one spoke much, but at one point my sister ended up next to me, and said, “I don’t want to discuss this evening right now, because I’m too upset, but . . .” She’d worked hard to make the holiday nice for everyone, she said, and to enable everyone to get along. She’d worked hard to make me happy, too, and it seemed that all I wanted to do was criticize her and make people upset; I wasn’t myself, and she was curious—what had she done to me, to deserve this? And I was, like, Christ. I felt terrible. I knew she’d spent days shopping for gifts, party favors, groceries, stocking stuffers; she’d bought us all snow boards and ski passes—time she barely had, since she worked eighty hours a week at her banking job. She tried so hard and no one thanked her. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, I’m sick—” and she said, “Don’t use that excuse.” She’d had Lyme disease, too, she said. Maybe she hadn’t had Bartonella, but she’d had spirochetes in her nervous system, they’d affected her neurologically, and she hadn’t acted like I was now; her throat caught. The real me felt ashamed and said, “You’re right, I’m so sorry,” but Bartonella heard her say, “Bartonella,” and awakened. Bartonella me yelled, “You want to know why? Because I’m pissed at you, bitch!” and she gasped and asked how dare I call her that? And added that, truthfully, she was angry at me, too; I heard branches rustle and, distantly, someone call, “Who’s there?” but, out of my head, I said, “Bring it on, bitch! Here’s my chin!” I saw my sister frown and rear back. Then an immense fist like a sledgehammer punched my jaw.

  I fell on my butt on the trail. An orange pain was my jaw and also the world. I had three faces and saw three sisters. It wasn’t she who’d hit me—it was the orangutan. Rather, the secretary, Kunda’s husband; I heard him say, “I’ve never punched anyone before, I was just so mad about what she said to Kunda,” and my sister muttered, “Done is done,” and the willowy black shadow of one of my brothers said, “She sort of . . .” and the other’s said, “Deserved it,” and the secretary touched my face and said, “No worries, it’s not dislocated“; the others showed up, my nieces asked what happened, my sister’s mouth opened and closed, as did the secretary’s, and I said, “I fell and hit my jaw on a stone.” My sister announced that we weren’t finding Crow tonight and should go home. My nieces protested that we couldn’t leave Crow, so my sister told them that she was probably hiding in a safe place in the forest, just waiting for daylight to come home.

  Adira begged us to leave the sliding door open for the cat. My sister didn’t want to wake up to raccoons in the kitchen, but my niece insisted. So my sister—who couldn’t deny her daughters anything—said okay.

  The weird thing about blood-sugar issues is that they don’t go away just because you’ve had a bad Christmas. I woke up at 3 A.M. The house was quiet. I guessed everyone was asleep. I figured I could sneak into the kitchen and eat half a pecan pie and no one would know. I entered the kitchen and found half a pecan pie, covered in foil, on the counter. I unwrapped it. I already tasted it in my mouth, even before eating it; that’s the horrible thing. Stale pecans, wheat crust, lard, and corn syrup—I was desperate for it. Outside, it was coal-black. Cold wind blew through the open door. I stuck my finger in the pie and scooped out a big blob. The pecan-syrup blob was moving toward my mouth when I heard a high-pitched cry, outside in the yard. I felt afraid. I put the blob back in the pie tin, and stepped away; a black ball shot into the kitchen, moving toward me fast, uttering a high sound, once-cat, but it moved on its belly, pulled itself forward by using its front paws, which scraped madly, nails clicking, across the floor; it had no legs, only a head and a torso, it seemed to roll past me, it paused between the circle room and the kitchen and looked at me. It was Crow, but her back legs seemed to have disappeared—she was half a cat and her face looked gigantic, puffed to twice its size. I’ve never been so terrified of anything in my life, and nothing else has ever made me so sad as hearing that pitiful cry and seeing the cat with no hindquarters.

  My sister appeared in the hall. “God,” she said. “We have to get it out of here. I don’t want the girls to see it, it will upset them—”

  My elder niece appeared. She said simply, “The coyote ate her legs,” and walked toward her cat, and my sister yelled, “Don’t touch her! She’s hurt, she may bite you,” but the kid knelt by the cat and pressed her hand along its back; it didn’t move, and my sister rushed forward to pull my niece away, but as soon as she neared the animal it opened its mouth, its enormous swollen face twitched, and it released two gelatinous orbs.

  Once they came out, the cat’s face became normal-sized. The whitish blobs slid across the floor—golf-ball size, like undercooked eggs with red tendrils. In one I could see the golden disk and the dark pupil.

  My sister said, “What are those? Ugh!”

  My niece said, “She got them.”

  Revelstoke is an unusual town. The veterinary clinic’s reception contains Oriental rugs and damask couches, and the clinic stays open all night, even on Christmas. We took the cat in and they operated immediately, saving one hind leg, which had been folded behind her; the technicians weren’t certain, but they said that the thighs appeared serrated by coyote’s teeth, and all seven of them—there were seven technicians—said they’d never seen a cat get away from a coyote, and that it was a miracle that she was alive. We left the clinic at 6 A.M., the pet’s remaining leg in a cast, and I’m sure you saw this coming, K, but the sky had grayed over, and, as we left the clinic and saw the firs on the distant mountains, down came white flakes, huge, far apart, as large as in picture books, the first of the year, and they fell onto our tongues, as if the earth were saying, “Jesus is Lord,” or else, “Here is some snow,” or just, “Global warming hasn’t killed me yet, I’m alive.”

  A somewhat odd thing happened that morning. My sister, who stuck up for me when she was a kid, but whom no one stuck up for—ever, in any way—thanked our mother and uncle for coming, and to
ld our uncle that he had to go.

  Some say that those born between December 22nd and January 19th carry existential sadness within them. They say that Capricorns are at the end of their line; everything they want to do, they have to do within this life. Perhaps that’s why they’re stubborn plodders who’ll trek step by tiny step to reach their goals. I’m a hundred per cent sure that, as a Russian Communist, K, you’ll say that that’s bunk, and that I should never mention astrology in a story again. For what it’s worth, I write to you as one child of winter to another.

  SHEILA HETI, HEIDI JULAVITS, LEANNE SHAPTON

  Wear Areas

  FROM Women in Clothes

  THREE YEARS AGO, Heidi Julavits, Sheila Heti, and Leanne Shapton sent out a series of questions about fashion to hundreds of women. From these surveys they compiled Women in Clothes, a panoramic look at female style and its relationship to identity and story. As Julavits says in the introduction to the book, “I don’t check out men on the street. I check out women. I am always checking out women because I love stories, and women in clothes tell stories.” The book discusses wetsuits, knee socks, pantsuits, pearls, floral-prints, and everything in between. And it also examines women’s diverse and complex relationships with their bodies. For example, in the following images, which were dispersed throughout the book, several women annotate a blank body outline drawn by Shapton.

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | GINTARE PARULYTE

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | RIVKA GALCHEN

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | ANA BUNčIĆ

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | JINNIE LEE

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | ADITI SADEQA RAO

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | JILL MARGO

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | ANNA BACKMAN ROGERS

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | MARGO JEFFERSON

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | ANNIKA WAHLSTRÖM

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | LITHE SEBESTA

  AMMI KELLER

  Isaac Cameron Hill

  FROM American Short Fiction

  HIS CHILDHOOD WAS IDYLLIC but strange. Isaac spent a lot of time alone, wondering how every grass and leaf and creek reflecting dense branches could be a different color of green, was excused from Sunday school after taking up a precise count of people killed by God in the Bible. Isaac began reading adult books from the library in the fourth grade. He was not physically bullied because he was female.

  In high school he connected with other kids who were a bit different: the local doctor’s girl, ethnically Chinese; the Indian twins whose parents owned the paint store, the very smart girl whose face had a layer of fat over one cheek covered in fine downy hair. That was about it for Calhoun County, West Virginia. He excelled in school, chose a small college where the focus was on classics. He could have gone anywhere: he’d received a near-perfect score on his ACT test, was brilliant and female from one of the poorest counties in the United States. But he chose what he chose and graduated early, then left for Mexico with his best friend. I might have met him there—my parents were missionaries, mostly in the rural areas, though we spent my high school years in D.F.—but I didn’t. Isaac went on to Guatemala by bus, then Honduras, which was dangerous in those days. The girl he’d gone with came back to the States to study social work. Isaac got work in the kitchen of a cruise ship and rode it to Greece. One night, he was assaulted in the fifth-level basement below decks and broke the man’s wrist. So he off-boarded without his final paycheck in Catalonia, where I might also have met him—I was doing study abroad in Barcelona because it was far from my family—but again, we did not meet.

  Isaac worked in restaurants, became as proficient in Spanish as he was in Greek and French, had his first affair with a woman. It was a good time to be in Barcelona. I was back in college at Brigham Young. Isaac wanted to be a writer, had the sense he was a writer, but when he sat down to write stories he simply could not make his characters do anything. He lost his job and stole like the natives and Australians and Germans he squatted with. When he got down to his last three hundred dollars, he booked a ticket home.

  He was twenty-four now, the year when most young people think themselves adult. But he did not yet know where he was supposed to be. He followed a friend he’d met abroad, an American boy, skinny and fey, to San Francisco and lived in the boy’s kitchen, where he discovered sex. He slept with men and women and people who didn’t consider themselves either and was surprised to learn afterwards he could maintain eye contact during job interviews. Isaac moved into a lesbian commune, which became a queer commune when three of his housemates began taking hormones that deepened their voices and broadened their features. It was here he learned to frame walls and do plumbing, but when a building-code inspector passed over their renovations only to refer to Isaac as his housemate’s “girlfriend,” Isaac found himself hollowed out by a sense of dissonance so strong it bordered on grief. Isaac was not a woman. All his life, he had struggled to make a place for girls—in machine shops and calculus classrooms, S&M bars and kitchens—but it had yet to cause him to arrive in himself as a girl. And now the other people who’d made the compromises he had made were leaving.

  One night Isaac climbed the gate of an abandoned Victorian, then shimmied up a drainage pipe to the roof overlooking Capp Street, where he plunged a syringe filled with testosterone into his thigh. He was not looking forward to telling his mother and sister but otherwise felt no shame. There was only a quarter moon, and Isaac scraped the inside of his calf climbing down, where an infection grew for which he needed to go to the ER and give a fake name.

  He continued taking hormones and working in kitchens, leaving each when the pronoun some of his coworkers used conflicted with the pronoun others used. One day a conflict over the rack of ribs Isaac was handling, in which two waiters tripped over their cross use of he and she, then turned to him with predatory eyes, changed something. Isaac bought a pick-up truck and drove out to the national forest outside Arcata, got on food stamps and slept in a tent some nights, under the camper top others, for six months. He found the nearest library and kept the books dry in the front seat, cooked beans and grains on a camp stove, knew something about gathering wild greens, decided hunting wasn’t worth the effort after a cost-benefit analysis. His mother and sister sent letters General Delivery to the town’s post office, ten miles from the mouth of the logging road that led to his camp.

  Isaac rarely saw another human during those months, and he did not miss them. But he was missed by friends in the city, was well loved for his unconventionality, his spirit, by people who knew better than to try to bring him back. I’d moved to San Francisco by then on a writer’s fellowship applied for on a whim, and though I was not remarkable in any way, I went to performances sometimes, at the Bearded Lady and elsewhere, crossed paths with his friends, remember his name being mentioned with affection. We still hadn’t met. Isaac’s genetics had set him up to be hairy, and by the time the year was over he had a wooly beard, looked for all the world like a West Virginia mountain man become a California weird one, no trace of girl visible to the outside world. Being a man is a rougher life, but it’s far easier to be left alone and this suited him. Having been raised a girl caused Isaac to act in ways that seemed, for a man, gracious. On visits to the city, in his truck stinking of motor oil and whiskey and mud through so many layers of army canvas, he was more beloved than ever. But he had no money and so could do little. His diet was not good, his world was too small, his face more weathered than it should have been. He was twenty-eight when he went back to trying to write. He had a long-term lover now, a man like himself, and they invented characters jointly, then each tried to write separately.

  He’d smoked half a pack of cigarettes and sweat through his clothes when I met him outside an Oakland bar that could have been anywhere. He was heading back north the next day to sleep on a friend’s land and build with her. Isaac was
agitated because he could not make the old man he and his boyfriend had created perform any action whatsoever. Later, he succeeded in writing a short piece featuring a purple sky with stars like arrows, in which the man finally changed a tire.

  I was instantly taken with him. I did not know he had not been born a man and I did not date men, so I thought it was simple affection. I told him I was a writer, and though this means nothing to most people until you prove you are not a bad one, he bought me a whiskey. He was wearing cowboy boots and a Western shirt like many of the more hip bar goers, but there was nothing artificial about him. Maybe I noticed the rings of dirt around his wrists or the smell of him, I don’t remember. But I had the sense he could have appeared at any moment in history with the same facial expression, a credit I would not have given myself. We exchanged email addresses but never wrote. And I forgot about him the way you forget about a dream until you have it again and wake up stunned, only then sure it meant something the first time and something more for coming back.

  When I saw Isaac again it was a year later in San Francisco. I had a teaching appointment at the prestigious university where I’d done my fellowship, but I hadn’t written in six months. At twenty-seven, on the verge of becoming a writer, I was watching this dream slip away, a plate spinning out of control on the long finger of an acrobat. In the mornings I would drink coffee and sit at the desk, then look down to the dark hairs on my stomach, alternately feeling exhausted by my own revulsion and ready to make friends with it. I was pretty sure all human beings steeled themselves against the ungovernableness of their own flesh, but also: it was too easy to make my characters do things. It became clear to me as I imagined them yelling what I could not myself say, or convulsing without losing fluid during chemotherapy, or working joylessly to make a small part of their environment better: I feared and resented them all.