The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  My wife’s eyes are psychedelically charged, changing color from blue to green to a deep orange like a tabby. Her laugh is sharper and more crystalline. Her voice sounds luxurious but accessible, like a wind chime made of rare sea glass. She grabs a handful of the elixir and rubs it all over my groin and my faulty equipment, and immediately I can feel myself producing vibrant, potent semen, envision millions of B-named children swelling inside of me, begging to be released. We call out of work and pull the curtains and do things to each other’s bodies that we have never done, and she says she already feels like she is pregnant, already feels like a mother. Triplets inside of her, growing.

  The next day we are already running low on the compound, but we still have enough to keep us going. We hold hands because we want to, not because we need to put on a show for everyone at the company picnic. Her heart thumps against her ribs and we hear it like a bass drum. I tell her we ought to trade hearts, put mine in her and hers in me, see what happens. She says okay, but later, and then she says as long as we feel like we’re twenty, we should do what twenty-year-olds do. She says, “we were both so much better before,” and I look at her and I realize how sad she is to be getting old. I see how hard it is on her to be this deep into a life she doesn’t want.

  So I agree with her: let’s be twenty. Acting like a twenty-year-old means being reckless, it means feeling no pain ever, it means being oblivious to both past and future.

  We put on clothes and we go for a run, beyond our suburban development and alongside traffic and through woods as far and as fast as we can go until we are lost but we are not afraid. She climbs a tree and says she’s a squirrel and wants me to chase her so I chase her from tree to tree.

  We don’t get home until early morning, because we spend hours wandering the woods and then we hitch with a man who looks like his side job is modeling for Wanted posters. We sneak in through the bedroom window—I give her a boost, then she lowers the fire ladder for me to climb up. It’s as if we are young and our old, beaten selves are our parents waiting for us in the living room. She shushes me and I shush her and in the dark of our bedroom we both see everything so clearly it’s blinding.

  On the fifth day, there is no more elixir and the paste is flaking off of our bodies. My eyes feel heavy like ball bearings, and my throat sometimes closes involuntarily, forces me to consciously attend to my own breathing. My wife checks her pulse every ten minutes, says she feels like a bird, hollow-boned and graceful. She rubs her belly now and then, the absent-minded way an expectant mother is supposed to do. She presses my hand against her so that together we can feel the kicking of the triplets she is incubating. This wasn’t the plan exactly, but it’s better than having no plan at all, she says. The people inside the pipes seem to be having a party, the pipes groaning and whistling urgently, the house clattering like an overworked radiator.

  On the sixth day, she rolls out of bed, spends a long time in the bathroom. I watch her still shadow beneath the door. She turns on the exhaust so I can’t hear her crying—an old trick.

  My body is turning forty-three again. I feel growing pains like I’ve never felt before.

  The door swings open and she emerges slowly. Her eyes are swollen and her mouth looks like a collapsed bridge.

  “I got my period,” she says. Even in the pipes there is silence.

  My tongue tingles, my hearing is alarmingly acute, but otherwise, I am back to normal, which is to say I am worse off than I was a week ago because I’ve tasted the good life and lost it. We both go back to work on Monday. And we revert to watching television quietly next to each other on the couch. We order Chinese for dinner and eat leftovers for four days. At night, I lie in the tub and talk to the people in the pipes. They seem happy, relatively. They seem settled. They’re developing a small business in there, removing unwanted body hairs from other people’s home pipes, and they don’t think there is any reason to ever return to the surface. They say it was bad at first, but the fresh start has rejuvenated them.

  I ask if maybe I can come down and visit sometimes.

  This isn’t a tourist resort, the patriarch says. This is our home.

  My wife wants to know who I’m talking to at night. She says she can hear me, says I should level with her and tell her if I’m having an affair.

  I tell her I must be talking in my sleep.

  “But you’re not in bed,” she says.

  “I’m thinking of moving into the pipes,” I say.

  She goes to the hardware store that weekend, saying as she leaves, “I am going to fix this thing.” Because divorce is not in her plan. Having a husband in the pipes is not in the plan. The elixir will get us back on track. She will buy enough to last as long as we need to feel something other than what we feel.

  When she comes home, she tells me Timothy is gone, nobody knows what happened to him. Nobody has ever heard of the mystery elixir.

  She removes a bottle of extra strength Drano from her bag. The label says eliminates even the toughest clogs, and there is a picture of an anthropomorphized clog—a mucousy, sinister knot of sludge and grime—screaming in terror as the patented formula advances on it.

  She says, “If you can’t take care of the problem, then I will.”

  I chase her up the stairs, but what am I going to do, tackle her? I am not going to tackle my wife. I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t hate her. I just also don’t love her.

  She pours the entire bottle into the tub’s drain, even though the label says a half-bottle will do the job. The liquid is silver like mercury, glugs out of the bottle with drunken hiccups. The label says to allow thirty minutes for the liquid to penetrate the obstruction, and I envision it creeping like lava through the homes of my friends in the pipes, drowning them, igniting their lungs and chewing through their intestines. My wife and I sit beside each other on the tub’s edge for a half hour listening to a shrieking like failing brakes. She won’t let me leave, says I need to hear this, and I tell her she is a monster, ask how could you do this to anyone, let alone the harmless people in the pipes? I turn on the faucet, but that seems to expedite the process, the echoing, gurgling screams more frantic than ever. My wife sits behind me sweating, crying onto my shoulder, decade-old tears welling up from her, and I think, I should be in there too. Even as they’re dying, I want to crawl down inside with them, to feel the burn on my skin, to feel myself purged, to be propelled through fevered heat and anguish and terror into whatever lies on the other side.

  PAUL SALOPEK

  Out of Eden Walk

  FROM National Geographic

  IN 2013 PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING journalist Paul Salopek began walking through the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopa. For the next seven years he planned to retrace the footsteps of human migration, out of Africa and across the world. He is currently in his third year of walking, somewhere near Tbilisi, Georgia at the time of this writing. Along the way Salopek has been posting dispatches about the things he sees and the people he meets. His writing effortlessly blends historical information with contemporary observations, painting a rich, layered portrait of each location he visits. We have gathered some of our favorite posts here, beginning in Jordan, in the first few days of 2014.

  Tomatoes

  January 9, 2014

  Near Al Quweirah, Jordan, 29°42’56” N 35°17’14” E

  We walk out of the desert and come to where the earth rises and falls beneath our footsteps in long, regular wales, like corduroy—fields of plowed sand. The hills of Wadi Rum fade in iron-colored light. Dusk is falling. It grows colder by the minute. A path leads through the thickening dark to tents that glow yellowly from within, like belled medusas adrift in a sunless sea. We tether our two cargo mules to large stones. We approach the first tent.

  “Sala’am aleukum,“ calls Hamoudi Enwaje’ al Bedul, my guide.

  The tent, which had been noisy with voices, falls silent. A man throws back the flap, and after an exchange in Arabic that lasts no longer than thirty seconds, he waves us
in. Fifteen people sit inside atop foam mattresses. A sad-faced woman layered in sweaters—blue tribal tattoos dot each of her wrinkled cheeks, dot her chin—loads more sticks into a small woodstove. She beckons us to sit near the heat, in a circle of staring, wild-haired children. She pours us glasses of syrupy tea. She serves us a platter of fresh tomatoes, pickled green tomatoes, fried broccoli.

  “There is no meat,” the man apologizes. “Here, we only dream of chicken.” Everyone in the tent laughs.

  They are tomato pickers. They are Bedouins from Syria.

  Officially, there are 550,000 Syrian war refugees in Jordan. But most people know better. The true number might be twice that. Tens of thousands of refugees languish inside two gigantic UN camps. Others drift into urban slums where they beg at potholed intersections. And many more, like the 104 people encamped outside Al Quweirah, rent out their muscles at desert farms. Many Jordanians complain bitterly about these guests. Unemployment is ruinously high in Jordan, where the local poor can’t find work. The small country has been staggered over the years by throngs of Iraqi refugees, by long-homeless Palestinians, by émigrés fleeing troubled Egypt. Syrians are just the latest neighbors to arrive in exodus. They are a breaking wave of war-displaced people that ripples back millennia, to the conquests of Babylon, to the wanderers led by Moses through the wilderness.

  Our host, a small, friendly, energetic man, tells this story:

  Bashar al-Assad, the chinless ophthalmologist who presides over the abattoir called Syria, sent tanks against his own people the summer of 2011, following the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring. Shells ripped into bakeries, plowed into parks, drilled into apartment blocks. Soldiers shot every sheep and cow in sight. Wheat crops were torched. “We burned our family papers, our shoes, to survive the winter,” the man says. “There was no bread. We tried grass to try to stop our hunger.” Then one night he and his family—he sweeps an arm around the tent—grabbed their chance. They slipped through the siege lines and crossed into Jordan. The snow on the mountain passes reached their knees. They carried the smallest children.

  “War, war, war. Syria goodbye.” He slaps his palms together, cleaning off imagined dust. “It’s finished!”

  All of the tomato pickers came from the same Syrian province, from villages near the ancient city of Hamāh. Poor, star-crossed Hamāh! In 1982, the country’s then-dictator—Al-Bashar’s father—leveled the city during a previous uprising. (The CIA is believed to have supported the toppling of Syria’s first elected president in 1949, initiating an unforeseen chain of coups that led to the Al-Bashar regime.) Hamāh fell to Tamerlane in 1400. It fell to Crusaders in 1108 and before that to Muslim armies in the seventh century. Almost 3,000 years ago, an Assyrian conqueror named Sargon II captured Hamāh and flayed alive its king.

  About 120,000 people have died in the current civil war. I ask the man if he has lost any family members. He nods. A brother. A son. Shot by government troops in Hamāh. The woman gets up and leaves the tent. She doesn’t come back. We all sit quietly for a moment under her beautiful handiwork: fine embroideries called sarma, which she has pinned to the inside walls of the canvas. She lugged these gold and white remnants of home with her across the Jordanian frontier.

  In the icy morning Hamoudi and I heft our saddlebags onto the mules. The animals have gorged overnight on too-ripe tomatoes. The fields around the camp are garish with them. Hamoudi, a tribal man, a Bedouin, gives the woman, who has reappeared to brew tea, the jacket off his back. He gives her our cheese.

  “It’s cheese,” he assures her when she stares at the foil-wrapped wedges in her calloused palms. She raises the cheese to her forehead. “Praise God,” she says.

  We walk on.

  “Solvatur ambulando,“ Diogenes proclaimed: “It is resolved by walking.” But do you actually believe that grief can be walked away? It is like these goddamned tomatoes. Given the hands that picked them for $11 a day, you would think they would be inedible—too bitter to swallow. Toxic with pain. But they aren’t. They are good tomatoes. They taste just fine.

  (Note: Names of refugees have been intentionally withheld for their safety.)

  The Eddy

  March 27, 2014

  Ghor Al Safi, Jordan 31°02’22” N 35°29’16” E

  A sodden dusk.

  We walk into the small market town soaked, muddied, dizzied by an astonishment: the first rains in a year of trekking. Rain varnishes the town’s cratered pavements. Electric shop signs glint and glitter in the rain. Car taillights spill their cherry hues into puddles. In the drizzle, the street lamps burn like fireballs. A carnival of reflected light. Yet the rain deters no one! The streets are filled with splashing people. We tug our two weary pack mules through damp crowds at intersections. We are seeking lodging—a roof, a room, anything. But what are these townsmen doing outside? Are they celebrating the precipitation? It seems plausible, in such a parched Middle Eastern town. I glimpse their faces. I am startled. They are African.

  “Never use the word abed here!” Hamoudi Enwaje’ al Bedul, my Bedouin guide, whispers into my ear. He wags a finger in warning. “Big problem!”

  As if I would. Abed: slave, an Arabic insult for Africans. A painful slur. Hamoudi is tense. He is out of his element—a tribal man, this citizen of the desert—in such an alien place. But I am warmed, comforted, charmed even: I lived in Africa for more than a decade. It is my favorite continent. And here, somehow, I have stumbled across a remnant population of Africans living in the Jordan Valley. I am transported instantly back to the walk’s starting line. As it turns out, though, we may both be mistaken, Hamoudi and I.

  “I don’t know where we come from,” says Muhammad Zahran, the director of the local museum, who permits us to sleep in the guard’s kiosk. “I’m not sure we came from Africa. We could have been Ottoman soldiers. Many people here are from Amman. Or Bedouin tribes or Egyptians. Or Palestinians or Syrians. We are mixed.”

  Zahran refers to his ethnic group, the Ghawarna—dark-skinned Jordanians who farm the great alluvial fans south of the Dead Sea. I stare at him, puzzled. He looks like my friends from Ethiopia or Somalia. Moreover, cursory research reveals that scholars agree: The Ghawarna, who number in the tens of thousands, are genetically African. They came to Middle East unwillingly, as slaves, either to work in twelfth-century sugarcane fields (a colossal sugar mill has been unearthed near Ghor al Safi) or as house slaves in the nineteenth-century. But the townspeople I question, like Zahran, bat away the idea. They frown. They shrug. They disagree.

  “Maybe it’s the sun here,” the manager of women’s sewing coop, Nawfa al Nawasra, suggests. “Maybe it just burns us darker.” Al Nawasra informs me that her ancestors come from Iraq.

  What is going on?

  “The Ghawarna have been the subject of color prejudices for a very long time in Jordan,” says Edward Curtis, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University, in Indianapolis. “The local solution, in this context, is to adopt a totally Arab identity.”

  Curtis recently conducted an ethnographic study in Ghor al Safi and concluded that no identifiably African folk traditions exist. No oral histories peg Africa as the ancestral home. Such is the power of discrimination, underdevelopment, and shame in one of Jordan’s poorest regions. Relatively little intermarriage goes on between the Ghawarna and other Jordanian ethnic groups.

  “I came looking for a narrative of black Muslim pride,” Curtis says. “But that turned out to be my own American idea. These folks don’t even see themselves as African. They are Arabs who happen to be black.”

  The basis of identity, of race, is not in any sense granitic.

  It is highly fluid. It is like a river—a tidal stream, in fact: Its flow is not linear, but one that winds and bends, drifting first in one direction, then in another. Not only could our direct ancestors have been different colors through time: Given the right combination of migratory patterns and solar exposure, they could have been different colors several times over. This isn�
��t a philosophical viewpoint. It is genetics. Scientists think that skin pigmentation can change appreciably in as little as 100 generations.

  The next morning Hamoudi and I plod north up the Jordan Valley. We drive the two mules before us.

  We are both mistaken about the river’s eddy called Ghor al Safi. Walking fast, Hamoudi puts uneasy distance between himself and a town of apparent outlanders—Africans—who are as culturally “Arab” as he. And I am far more African, in my memory, than the wary black residents of Ghor al Safi whose kinship I clumsily seek out. The Ghawarna teach us this. We are, for better or worse, whoever we say we are.

  Bang

  July 7, 2014

  Nabi Salih, West Bank, 32°01’0” N 35°7’29” E

  We turn the corner of the road when the first round whips in. It kicks up dust one yard in front of Bassam Almohor. He stops walking.

  “We’re being shot at,” my guide says. His voice is aggrieved. “That was a bullet.”