The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  The truth of working as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot for the Coast Guard is that you don’t get to do a lot of actual rescuing. Deal had been in the Coast Guard for eight years, flying a Jayhawk for three, and he had never once pulled anyone alive from the water. They had all trained for it countless times, plucked dummies out of the ocean, run through checklists and drills until they had them memorized. But the reality was that almost every time a person went overboard in the North Atlantic, he drowned.

  At 2:19 p.m., the helicopter crew finished another parallel search pattern—their third of the day—and radioed to Sean Davis to request a new one. They were about an hour from bingo fuel, the moment at which they would have only enough gas to make it home. And once they stopped to refuel, they knew, they would be in fatigue status, and Coast Guard regulations would then stipulate that they couldn’t take off again until the next day—at which point Aldridge would be well past his nineteen-hour survivability window.

  Davis radioed back from New Haven with some unwelcome news: Sarops had crashed. The search had been going on so long and involved so many assets that the system became overloaded; the screens in the command center simply froze. After much shouting and cursing and pounding on keyboards, Rodocker had to restart the system, and now he was typing in all the relevant information again. For the time being, Sarops couldn’t produce search patterns. Davis instructed the Jayhawk crew to return to its base in Cape Cod—even if Rodocker was able to get Sarops running soon, bingo fuel was fast approaching, and there wouldn’t be time for them to do a full search pattern anyway.

  They radioed back and argued with Davis. They were out there anyway, and they still had a little fuel—why not give them something to do? The search unit in New Haven finally agreed, and in the command center, Rodocker, Winters and the command duty officer, a civilian named Mark Averill, huddled around Rodocker’s computer and looked at the latest Sarops map. Pointing with his finger on the screen, Averill proposed a simple track-line search: the Jayhawk would head south-southeast for about ten miles, straight through the main search area, then turn sharply to the north for another ten miles, then veer north-northwest, which would take the crew straight back to Air Station Cape Cod. It wasn’t a conventional pattern, and it wasn’t Sarops-generated, but it would have to do. Davis radioed the coordinates to Deal and Jamros, who fed them manually into their autopilot, and at 2:46 p.m., the helicopter started moving again.

  Twelve minutes later, Ray Jamros called out “Mark! Mark! Mark!”—only now he was much louder and more insistent than he had been all day. Deal hit the mark button in the cockpit and turned the helicopter around. And there was John Aldridge, sitting on the rope between his two buoys, clutching his boots and waving frantically. Bob Hovey, the rescue swimmer, clipped his harness onto the helicopter’s hoist cable, and Hill lowered him into the water. As Hovey swam to Aldridge, Hill lowered a rescue basket, and Hovey helped Aldridge climb in. Just as Hill was about to raise him up, Aldridge realized that his boots were floating away, and he yelled to Hovey to grab them and put them in the basket with him.

  After Aldridge was safely in the helicopter huddled under blankets, Deal flipped the radio to channel twenty-one and called Sosinski, who was somewhere below them, staring out at the water, still looking for Aldridge. “Anna Mary,” Deal said, “we have your man. He’s alive.”

  There’s a bar in Montauk, a few steps from the Anna Mary’s slip, called the Dock, a dark, wood-paneled place with stuffed animal heads on the wall and signs that say things like “No Shrimpers, No Scallopers,” and “We’ve upped our standards. Up yours.” It is one of the dwindling number of places in town that feels as if it belongs to the people who live and work there year-round. If you step inside the Dock any given afternoon, you’ll very likely find fishermen drinking and talking about ballgames and elections, D.U.I.’s and divorces. You’re very likely, too, to hear them talking, sometimes overtly, sometimes not, about the loss of a way of life—the government regulations that make it harder to make a living as a commercial fisherman, the vanishingly small margins for doing the dangerous work they do, the way this place where they’ve made their home is less recognizable to them with each passing year.

  In the weeks after Aldridge’s rescue, I talked to several local fishermen on the docks about the search, and not only did they all admit that they cried when they heard the news that Aldridge was safe, but most of them teared up again, despite themselves, as they were telling me the story. It was hard to say what, exactly, was bringing them to tears. But what seems to go mostly unspoken in their lives is the inescapable risk of their jobs, and the improbable fact that Aldridge hadn’t drowned in the Atlantic somehow underscored that risk for them even more. He’d kept himself alive in a way that few people could, had managed to think and work his way through a situation that, for most of us, would have been immediately and completely overwhelming. And he’d willed himself to live. To be a fisherman and to really know the danger of the sea, and to think of Aldridge in the middle of the ocean for all those hours refusing to go under—maybe that was too much to contain.

  The person who seems least shaken by the experience is John Aldridge. He spent the night after his rescue in a hospital in Cape Cod, being treated for hypothermia, dehydration and exposure, but he has no post-traumatic stress, he told me: no nightmares, no flashbacks, no fear when he goes out on the water to work. The Coast Guard pilots and the men in the search unit in New Haven express a certain understandable pride when they talk about their work that day, and when Aldridge talks about it, he sounds the same way. “I always felt like I was conditioning myself for that situation,” he told me one day in September while we were sitting in the Dock. “So once you’re in it, it’s like: All right, I can do that. I did it. I had that sense of accomplishment. I mean, thank God I was saved, yes. Thank God they saved me. There’s no better entity than the U.S. Coast Guard to come save your ass when you’re on the water. But I felt I did my part.”

  For the people around him, though, things haven’t been quite so easy. Aldridge’s father told me that he still often wakes up around 3 a.m. and can’t get back to sleep. “It’s something that you can’t kick,” he said. “It’s never out of my mind. Never.” A few weeks after his son’s rescue, John Sr. got a tattoo on his arm: a pair of big green fishing boots, and between them, the G.P.S. coordinates where his son was found.

  Anthony Sosinski still seems shaken as well. For all his happy-go-lucky charm, his love of life, something changed for him on July 24. The last time he and I talked about it, we were sitting in the wheelhouse of the Anna Mary, which was tied up at the Town Dock. “More than anything, I think about it when I’m out there working,” he explained. “It was the whole feeling of helplessness. Something was torn out of me, and that part doesn’t just show back up.”

  For Montauk as a community, the ocean remains a blessing and a curse. It is the lifeblood of the town, the essence of its economic livelihood, the reason the tourists keep coming back. But it is also a constant threat. In September, a twenty-four-year-old Montauk commercial fisherman named Donald Alversa was killed on a fishing trip on a dragger off the coast of North Carolina. Alversa grew up in Montauk—he went to school with Sosinski’s older daughter—and Sosinski and Aldridge attended his wake.

  The funeral home was crowded, and the mood was somber. When it was over, the Dock filled up, and the mourners drank late into the night. The next evening, after Alversa’s funeral, Sosinski and Aldridge met at the Anna Mary. They loaded on bait and ice, steered her past the lighthouse and went back to work.

  TOM MCALLISTER

  Things You’re Not Proud Of

  FROM Unstuck

  “ARE THERE PEOPLE living inside our pipes?” my wife asks.

  “Of course there are not people living inside our pipes,” I say, but: of course there are people living inside our pipes. Where does she expect them to stay? A hotel?

  The thing she has never understood, will clearly never underst
and, is this: real estate. Capital. Supply, demand. It’s the reality of the world. Homes are not affordable. Banks are broken. So you move inside somebody’s pipes if you have to move inside somebody’s pipes. It’s happening everywhere.

  They’re not proud of it. But life is full of things you’re not proud of.

  She tells me to Drano the pipes, so I ask her if she’s okay with the moral implications of massacring the people inside the pipes just because she doesn’t like undrained water rising above her ankles when she showers.

  “I thought you said nobody lived in there,” she says.

  “They don’t,” I say.

  While she’s out buying the Drano, I’m lying facedown in the tub, warning the people in the pipes. She doesn’t know them like I do, doesn’t respect them, but I understand where she’s coming from. The tub drains too slowly. They pose legitimate health and safety hazards—it has to be against the health code to have people living in there, with their back hair and fluids and communicable diseases. The chaos of their conversations rattles within the pipes, and when they shout at one another about money, the walls hum and clang. They claim they can’t see our bodies when we’re showering, but I suspect they can see our bodies when we’re showering.

  So I get it. I do.

  Still and also, I am not enthused about killing them just because their existence is a little inconvenient to my own.

  They think I’m bluffing. They say: You don’t have the guts. They say: Could you stop peeing in the shower?

  I say, “If you’re going to stay here, we need to establish some ground rules.”

  I am still in the tub when she returns from the hardware store, am still working out a verbal contract with the people in the pipes. Negotiations have been arduous; they won’t even make simple concessions, i.e., they won’t tell me how many people are in there, let alone agree to stop inviting friends over for parties.

  “Listen,” I said. “She’s home, and I’m the only one who can stop her from killing you.”

  This isn’t right, the patriarch says. He says: Threats of violence. What happened to good-faith negotiations? What happened to constitutional rights?

  Deeper in the pipes there is a flush of applause. He says: I’m sending an email to my congressman.

  I didn’t even know they had Internet access in there.

  My wife is downstairs mixing something in a bucket. Two parts water, three parts mystery powder, one part frustration. The mixture seems to be thickening, because she needs two hands to twist an old paint stirrer through it, and she’s hunkering to generate torque with her midsection and to power through with the legs. Her back is turned to me, and I think about making some kind of joke about witches and cauldrons, but I can’t quite come up with the right phrasing and anyway, she does not like jokes at her expense, not even flirty ones.

  We are both in our kitchen, which is fully upgraded and has new granite counters and custom cabinets and a heated tile floor and recessed lighting and everything else you’re supposed to have, according to the people on TV. When you don’t have children to pay for, you can afford the so-called finer things in life. The plan was to have three children. It would go like this: girl, boy, boy, and their names would all begin with the letter B, because my wife read on the internet that B is a letter of strength, is a structurally sound letter that would equip them for handling the daily grind, but the plan was flawed because you cannot make your bodies do what you want them to do on cue, you cannot predict that you will have faulty equipment incapable of impregnating your wife. We financed the kitchen upgrades with money that had been earmarked for Barbara’s college fund, the same way Buster’s summer camp money had paid for our bathroom remodel and Blake’s sports equipment and travel budget had been diverted to pay for last year’s seven-day, six-night, three-fight Caribbean cruise.

  She is wearing a tank top and her shoulders are more muscular than I remember. She seems to be calling on a younger version of herself to aid in the stirring, and I am moved, mindlessly, to sneak up behind her and grab onto her hips, kiss her behind her ear, tease her bra strap out of place with my teeth.

  She shrugs me away. “I’m stirring, can’t you see I’m stirring?”

  I can see it. I just thought she looked good, felt myself flashing back to weekends fifteen years ago, afternoons when she casually walked around the house nude and we cooked meals as a team and made plans with friends just so that later we could break them and spend the time together. Now we order Chinese. Now I have guys’ nights and she has girls’ weekends. Now she wears socks to bed so I can’t see her toes. Now I spend nights sitting in the bathtub and talking to the people who live in my pipes.

  She hands me the bucket and says, “Keep stirring.”

  The man at the hardware store—his name was Timothy, she tells me, even though I don’t care what his name is, or that the letter T is a bridge-building letter which means he’s skilled at connecting with people—was very helpful. He was waiting at the front door and when he asked if he could help her with anything, she told him she needed all the help she could get. My wife says he took her hands in his and looked her in the eyes in a really serious way, like a hypnotist or a furniture salesman, and he told her he had exactly what she needed. He led her to the storage room in the back to show her something special.

  “I don’t like where this is going,” I say, which is meant to be kind of a lascivious joke.

  “Okay, anyway,” she says, “He takes me back there and he pulls down a box from the top shelf that says Do Not Open.” It’s an elixir, Timothy told her, banned in the US because of some bureaucratic nonsense, accidentally shipped to this hardware store instead of some toy factory in China.

  What does the elixir do? It does everything. It solves problems. It’s like having a mom you can call on any time of day. “Why do you think Chinese people are so happy?” she says Timothy said. “Why do you think they’ve advanced so far beyond us?”

  What Timothy told her was we could use it on the drain, but we wouldn’t be exploiting its full potential. We’re supposed to apply it to any problem area. Two coats if necessary. I ask her if she’s sure this is a good idea, isn’t it maybe possible that this is a dangerous thing to do, and what if we get a second opinion from another person at a different hardware store? Or a doctor even.

  “One of us needs to be willing to solve problems,” she says. “One of us needs to be a doer.”

  It’s true, she’s the doer and I’m the reactor. Like when that swampy smell creeped up from the basement and I told her it’s just what happens to older houses—they start to smell—but she called in the building inspector and they found all that mold in the walls. Or like the time the sinkhole formed in our backyard and she wanted me to fill it but I didn’t fill it because it seemed like backbreaking work and anyway the new dirt was just going to sink too. So why delay the inevitable? But she called in a guy—she always wants to call a guy, and I have to admit the guy usually knows how to fix things. It seems to me that as long as things get fixed, it doesn’t much matter who gets the credit for the fixing, but my wife does not agree. When she wants something badly enough, she is a missile bearing down on an insurgent, she is momentum personified. “What if one of us needs to be a not-doer,” I say. “What if the thing to do sometimes is to not do anything?”

  “You’ve tried not doing anything for five years,” she says. “There’s nothing noble about moping around the house and wondering what happened to us. Sometimes you just need to hammer a nail a little harder. You need to tighten the screw.” She dips a finger in the bucket then swipes it across my gumline, says it ought to fix my crooked incisor, and maybe it will make my jokes funnier.

  Texture of a pulverized crayon, taste of an overripe orange.

  My jokes are equally as funny as they were fifteen years ago, when she thought they were plenty funny. I want that on the record.

  I dab some of the paste on her chin where she seems to have given up the fight against her pers
istent sprouting hairs. I rub some into her ears so maybe she’ll become a more generous listener. She shoves her index finger up my nose to stop my snoring.

  “What happened with the Drano?” I ask, her finger still in my nose. My mouth feels alien and my voice is distant, like I’m hearing an actor on a TV in another room.

  “I forgot about the Drano,” she says. She forgot about the Drano.

  There is a sound like cheering in the ceiling above us.

  Two days later, the elixir is half gone, and we are both covered head to toe in a turgid paste. She is nude and I am nude, both of us spectral in the glowing whiteness of the elixir, my joints feeling like a twenty-year-old’s joints—not my twenty-year-old self, but some other, better twenty-year-old, a high-jumper who can squat two-fifty and who never wakes up in the middle of the night with cramps in his legs. It’s easier to feel optimistic when your body feels so charged with possibilities; when you hit a certain age, you have to focus on just staying awake all day, and you don’t have time to work on marriage anymore, you want the marriage to work on itself. When we met, it was because the algorithms on a website determined that we were a good match; she wanted a man who didn’t drink and who ran 5Ks on weekends and who had a well-kempt beard and perfect vision and a decent job with potential for promotion and the know-how to make minor home repairs, and I wanted a woman who wanted a man like me, and the website delivered me to her. Computers are amazing, but they cannot predict everything. There was no way it could predict that I would have faulty equipment or that I would hate spending time with her family or that if I spent a couple of hours in the mornings browsing porn sites she would want to call it an addiction. The computer never could have known that even though we had fun on dates and we had the same taste in music and held roughly similar religious views, that we were not cut out for living together, couldn’t predict how quickly we would discover all the ways to irritate each other day to day and wear each other down to raw nerve endings that could be inflamed by even the slightest misstep. Couples counseling didn’t work for me. Eventually it turned into solo counseling for her every Monday and Wednesday evening.