The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  I need to use the restroom, I said, nudging Satik with my foot and sitting up. Anil began another song on his harmonica. Satik rolled over toward the bathroom and the teenagers still bobbing the lights of their cell phones and laughing. I could feel Satik’s dark eyes on my back, but I knew my shirt covered the bulge behind me as I hiked through the sand.

  Two girls laughed in the bathroom, a part of the group camping and barbecuing for the full-moon festival. My bare feet in the gritty pools of bathroom water. A small, neat sign said, No durian, no washing of clothes, no bathing of pets. I thought the two girls might be tourists, because they chattered only in Chinese, or that they had switched specifically from Singlish so I wouldn’t understand them. I caught a look at myself in the mirror and realized what they might have been talking about. I looked crazed, a little drunk, and sleepless with bloodshot eyes. There was sand in my hair, and my braid reached large fingers of hair out to the humidity. I looked like someone to stay away from. Then I hoped there was enough money in the wallet to get me to the next place.

  I went into a stall and blew my nose loudly, snot black from smog on the toilet paper. I dug through the wallet. A photograph of Anil with a woman and a toddler, staring at the camera intensely; his Singaporean ID, his Indian ID, smiling in each; a credit card, useless because he could cancel it the instant he realized it was missing; and three Sing dollars. Nothing I could use. Nothing to keep me moving forward.

  I wedged the wallet in the waistband of my jeans. I smiled thinly at the two girls. I walked back between the mushroom tents and crab tracks. The rain had crusted the sand into small craters. The waves kept beat with the crunching of my steps. Satik spoke rapidly to Anil in Hindi, but they got quiet when I approached.

  My wallet is not here, Anil said.

  Oh? I said. Panic wrapped me in a hot blanket. I froze. Is it in the sand? I asked.

  Satik lifted himself up on his hands. Through the heat that rushed over me despite the cool rain, I didn’t even think of running. I felt like my knees would give out in the sand. I had never been caught before, not even close.

  Anil put his hand on Satik’s arm and used it to stand up. Yes yes, Anil said. I think I have let it drop.

  Because no one would be foolish enough to steal anything in Singapore, Satik said.

  I let my breath out in a rush. The rain deposited cool coins of water on my face. I didn’t even know exactly the consequences in Singapore. I guessed the worst. I reminded myself that I liked having two feeling, working hands. I was immediately sober. I said, We’d better start looking then.

  Anil picked up the blanket and Satik grabbed the trash. We retraced our steps to the beach. I tried to dislodge the wallet from the waistband of my jeans and drop it without them noticing anything. Anil kept reaching into his pockets and pulling them back out again, like he thought any moment the wallet might reappear in them. Satik kept his eye trained on me. He didn’t seem to be looking for the wallet at all. I, however, was looking very intensely at the ground. Every strand of seaweed, every piece of trash discarded, every rain crater, every grain of sand, which, Jake had said in one of his stupid mystical e-mails, can hold all the world’s happiness or none of it.

  When we reached the gutter to the street, I’d managed to get enough ahead of them that they couldn’t see me too well through the rain. I yelled that I’d found it, bringing my left hand down to the gravel, then up to grab the wallet from my right hand, and up above my head. I shook it a little bit for good measure.

  How like fortune! Anil said.

  I handed the wallet to him with all the satisfaction of actually finding it. He opened it. He let out a deep sigh of disappointment. The picture must have fallen out, he said.

  The picture isn’t there? I said. I looked at the ground, but I didn’t see anything except wet street. I bent over just to be sure, and as I curled I felt the photograph still tucked in my waistband.

  It’s the only photograph he brought, Satik said.

  This is terrible, I said. What was the photograph of?

  Anil had a wife and son. The picture was of the three of them. They’re still in India, he said, in Chandigarh. It was good, that they stayed. I loved my son too much, he said. I loved him so much that every night I would talk to my son on the couch in front of the TV, I would whisper to him all things. I would give him baths, and then one night when it was dark and the lights from the TV flickered across the room, the concrete and the carpet, my son grabs my face, and I turn away so that he will not catch my eye, and there is my wife in the doorway, with her look of anguish, her loss of both of us, our exclusion of her.

  He told me all of this in broken English, with the rain pounding in our eyes. It was just before dawn at this point, I could see the sky turning gray and green at the edges. The rain was pricking us like a million thorns. The twentysomethings had already zipped themselves up in their tents, although they were still awake. I could see the two girls from the bathroom playing cards through their tent window. Satik tried to smooth back his hair, but it kept streaming down his face with the rain and getting in his eyes.

  We can keep looking, I said.

  Anil said, Look, come to my apartment. It’s just next to the beach. We can walk. It is morning, and the rain continues. We will sleep.

  Let’s keep looking, I said.

  With this rain, that picture is already ruined, Satik said.

  Come sleep, Anil said.

  I said, I just met you.

  A guest bedroom for you. I make Satik sleep on the couch, Anil said. We’ve already talked so much.

  Satik said, We won’t hurt you. Just sleeping. I had planned on sleeping on the beach, but I had left my backpack and tent at the train station, and although I could curl on the beach between dunes, not with that rain. We had already talked for so long. I wanted to trust them. I wanted to return the photograph. Maybe I was still just the slightest bit drunk.

  I said yes. I would leave the photograph somewhere in his apartment where he’d think it had slipped out before he’d even left. They grinned. We picked our way through the puddles and stumbled like those who’d been awake for too long to Anil’s apartment a few blocks away. The sky sent up its colors at the edges like a curtain rising. The tiny elevator smelled like things that had been wet too long. The closeness of Anil and Satik’s two bodies, the strange smog glow tingeing the hallway green where a little light came in.

  —

  The apartment was small but clean. Satik went to the hallway closet for sheets to make up the couch, like he was barely a guest. Anil got me a glass of water to take into the guest bedroom that doubled as his office. I smelled like wet beach and seaweed. While they were busy, I used the bathroom sink to wash my face and my finger with a glob of toothpaste on it to brush my teeth. I left the photograph, wet and bubbling in spots, on top of the magazine rack where Anil would surely find it.

  Lying down on the bed felt like a giant sigh. I didn’t even bother to get under the covers. At first I kept jumping if I heard a noise because I thought it was the doorknob turning, but then the buzzing tiredness I felt won over. Just before I fell asleep, I thought about how maybe I could love Anil, but it’s one of those things; when you’re moving quickly through places, you love everyone because you don’t have to keep them.

  I woke to the sound of ship horns, the air conditioner humming its furious song. I inhaled wet musk and docks and burning wood. Between the black bars on the window, the sun was white and dim with smog. The lights on the horizon the previous night had been so dense I had thought they must be land, buildings, something solid. But that morning, what I had thought to be the lights of Malaysia had transformed into black ships packed tightly on the horizon like frozen ants. The tiny ships, stark and black, settled into the gray Borneo haze. The place I was moving on to and the way to get there had dissolved overnight.

  I sat down at the computer desk to collect myself. I thought I might cry, but instead I felt a deep hollowness inside me, and no matter ho
w hard I sucked in breath, I felt myself filling with only the wet Borneo smoke. I hadn’t cried since Rishikesh. I saw my future before me: I would set up camp on the beaches of Singapore, begging leftovers from trash cans until I could scrounge up a few wallets from the backpacks left outside the tents, and that is the way I would see the world. And then eventually I would get home when I’d had enough, and then I would get a job in IT, and every day I would manipulate data, program commands and black box methods, but I would look into this heart of the machine and it would be as incomprehensible to me as I had found the human world. I felt like Anil’s wife, staring at my own exclusion, everywhere people approaching happiness, and I grasped toward it with empty hands.

  The dark face of the computer in front of me reflected a blur of my image. I turned on the computer. I hoped that Jake had sent me an e-mail, one of his many saturnine messages that would end with promises of more to come. But more never did come, only the cryptic one-liners he had learned from the monks, or a one-sentence description of the Himalayas or the temple. I opened the browser, checked my e-mail. More spam from someone in Nigeria asking for Ponzi-scheme money. Nothing from my parents, who had disapproved of the trip and had sworn not to send one cent, even if it was to get me home. Nothing from Jake. His last e-mail had been accusatory, and I had yet to compose a good comeback for it. You don’t want happiness, he said. You want to blame all your tragedies on the world. Everything is maya. Your suffering is illusion; your happiness is illusion.

  I sat back in the chair. I could hear Anil or Satik clattering pots in the kitchen, presumably making breakfast. The clatters of pots were like the melody of the present, empty moments banging against each other to move toward the future. My eyes burned from the smog. And then I noticed it. A glaring, neon yellow Post-it note stuck to the computer screen with the word: swimlikeafish85624.

  I snapped out of all that longing and remembered what had brought me to that tiny apartment in the first place. I remembered the credit card in his wallet had worn the logo of an Indian bank, and I guessed that someone un-savvy enough to stick a password to his screen would be similarly naive in other ways; when I visited the bank’s website, his username was saved and automatically popped up. The only thing I needed to enter his bank account was his password. I typed in swimlikeafish85624. He had a credit card and a savings account with about five hundred thousand rupees, about ten thousand dollars. Surely, I thought, that was enough for him. Afterward I would wonder what is ever enough—enough places to visit, enough experiences, enough to understand, to be satiated, to be happy. I wired four hundred dollars to myself. It wasn’t enough to get me home, but it was enough to keep moving; to Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. By the time Anil would check his account, maybe some days from then, I would be across the bay and long gone.

  When I came out of the room, Anil was frying something that looked like pancakes. Satik snored on the couch.

  I should be going, I said.

  You must stay, Anil said. Today is a good day. I found the photograph. Have paratha!

  He flipped the pancake-looking paratha in the pan.

  I promised some friends I would meet them for one of the full-moon parades, I said.

  He didn’t know I had no one. I backed away toward the door. The knowledge of the stolen money burned in my brain like sunsets. I felt something hard underfoot, and then I was on my back with a loud crash.

  A plastic, red-white-and-blue tricycle rolled away from me into the living room. Satik startled and sat up on the couch.

  It’s for my son, Anil said. My wife and son are moving here soon. Just until we’re sure we can pay for it.

  I’m not too hungry, I said, picking myself off the floor. Thank you for the night.

  Satik leaned against the doorway to the kitchen behind me, his harsh frame hunched against the wood.

  Good morning, Anil said. I found the picture.

  How coincidental, Satik said.

  What a high vocabulary, I said.

  I looked over at Anil to see if he’d understood Satik’s code. Anil rounded the kitchen bar and came at me with his arms outstretched. I thought, this is it, this is when everything comes down. But it wouldn’t be then. I flinched when his arms wrapped my chest and took my breath away. His small paunch of a belly jiggled with mirth. He was hugging me.

  I said, Please, no need for hugs.

  Anil said, What a night. First time we have made a friend. Right, Satik? Stop by again if you’re still in Singapore.

  I smiled through my relief and said, I will. Good luck with your family.

  As I was shutting the door, I heard Satik saying his good-byes to Anil, that he had work to catch up on, boss.

  The hallway grayed with veils of smog. The open window’s tinsel decorations fluttered in a hollow breeze. A ship’s horn bellowed and another ship howled back. Just outside the window, seagulls screamed their bodies down to the littered ground. I pressed the button to the elevator. Behind me I heard, Wait! As I entered the elevator, no matter that I punched the close door button, Satik ran and shoved his hand in the shrinking space between the doors.

  He pushed into the elevator. His cheek’s harsh angles framed his dark eyes. It was a dark and deep abyss.

  And what did I think would happen then? That I, finally, would be punished, that he would be the bad guy, that the story of an innocent girl taken in by two men, strangers, would be played out the way those stories go? Satik’s hand in the elevator gripping my braid and pulling me down to the mildewed floor. I thought I could take happiness by force, but I wanted the world to punish me for my excess. I glared at him, I dared him, I gripped the elevator walls as we plummeted into the lower stories, I thought, here we go.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t even bother pushing it away. A cry caught in my throat.

  Do you want a ride? Satik said.

  What? I said. I drowned in the abyss in his eyes.

  A lift? Satik said. I can take you to your hotel.

  No, I said. I choked out a thank-you. Then we reached the ground floor and he walked outside through doors gaping open, mouths wide, and I saw that the hunger of the abyss was my own hunger.

  I stayed for a long time on a bench by the sea. The seagulls plummeted like dying jets and came back up with fish. Each breath was the acrid smell of burning jungles sliding off the waves. Seagulls screamed into the surf. I burned with shame. I began my last letter to Jake while I looked out at that false other shore that had disintegrated into ships waiting in the harbor to approach. I felt like I’d dove underwater without knowing how to swim, hovering between kicks, I sucked in a breath, the cool rush of air into my lungs, the sudden but slow hiss from the intake valve in my mouth, the pressure of a million years of water like an anchor, the whole false world above, and I can’t return.

  Dear Jake, I began, I know about happiness.

  Naira Kuzmich

  The Kingsley Drive Chorus

  ON THE CORNER OF Kingsley and De Longpre, we lived our lives pressed against the glass. Our husbands—carpenters, jewelers, mechanics, and laborers—spent their days without us. When they came home in the evenings, they were quiet and so we were quiet, too. Our girls retreated into schoolbooks with words beyond our knowing and our boys spilled onto the winding streets of Los Angeles. We had done what we could, all the things we told ourselves we could have done. We resigned ourselves to our windows. We wiped down the glass. We waved.

  The first time Carmen Oganesyan’s son, Zaven, called her from jail, she did what any of us would do: She blamed his friends. She told us she had a feeling when he first introduced Robert and Vardan to her, all those years ago. They were Mariam’s boys. They lived in #3. Robert and Vardan were a little too skinny in the arms, as if they hadn’t lifted a single weight in their entire lives. Their hair was spiked. Robert, fifteen at the time, was a tall boy who tried hard not to be. He wore oversized sweaters and pants that added bulk to his thin frame and he slouched when he walked. We all thought he’d have back
troubles by the time he was thirty, but he found himself with bigger problems much earlier. Vardan was a quiet child, then thirteen, Zaven’s age. Vardan’s quietness made us uncomfortable. You’d say hello as you passed him in the garden and he’d glance down at your heavy grocery bags and say absolutely nothing. These were not the kind of boys Carmen wanted her Zaven to befriend, but she had been glad that he was at least making an attempt to fit in; she and her husband had pulled him out of his happy life in Yerevan just months before.

  When Zaven called, Carmen was in the kitchen, preparing her famous kyoftas. Just imagine little eggs of beef, filled with more beef. They taste great with a squeeze of lemon. New Year’s Eve was approaching, and we were all busy making the same food, each of us hoping ours would taste different, better than everyone else’s. But no one could make kyoftas like Carmen. She had beautiful hands. After dipping her long fingers into the bowl of cold water, she’d mold the ground mixture into a shell, thumbing the beef and bulgur into place. The shells were thin, but never broke, and she’d stuff them with filling before closing them, always leaving an exaggerated tip that hardened after cooking. Everyone broke off that piece first. She’d joke that to make the perfect kyofta you had to pretend you were washing a child’s head. You had to be careful, certainly, but more than that, you had to do it with love. The egg always knows, she said.

  Only eighteen, Zaven was out on bail the next day. Carmen was a proud woman, but not enough to let him stay in jail. She asked us for loans, a hundred dollars here, a hundred there. Some of us helped; most couldn’t. All of us, even those without sons, sympathized. Our boys don’t adapt well here. Something doesn’t translate. We don’t worry much about the girls because they’re beautiful and smart and quick to assimilate. Like Armineh’s daughter, Sona, who’s at Berkeley now, a good enough reason to leave her mother alone with a finicky husband all year long. Or Sofia, Ruzan’s oldest. We hear she’s married and has a kid, a beachfront house in San Diego, a white husband. We don’t have many success stories here that star our boys.