The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  I thought I’d dreamed her, the father said.

  The next two columns in the paper were blank, as though the editors forgot to fill them with print, and the printers forgot to ask. The next day, there would be no new paper, nor the day after, nor the day after that.

  I was the only receptionist still coming to work, but more and more, patients were missing appointments. By then, they were mostly brought by motorists after traffic accidents. Slow days, when I did old crosswords to check my memory and sent Lili optimistic dispatches from my desk. We’re seeing fewer cases now; I think it may all be over soon. How are your preparations? Only one month to go!

  Outside, orphaned pets dug through the trash by the sides of the roads. Thieves walked calmly in and out of houses that owners had forgotten to lock. People wandered, staring into the sky. The mayor’s office reminded us to carry identification at all times, just in case. So that if we forgot where we belonged, we could be returned to our homes like lost books. A city van patrolled the streets, collecting the sick before they froze, depositing them in the closed high school, a makeshift human kennel. Grocery stores swept bare; no deliveries made since before Christmas. Official estimates: one half of all Vuzlevo had forgotten something of Importance.

  Twenty-nine days to launch.

  One night Baba and I watched a documentary about the rocket. It was called Sudba 1: Nova Bulgarska Nadejda. Inspirational swelling music, slow-panning shots of the construction, clipped interviews with the chosen cosmonauts talking about their hopes for our national future.

  Lili came up, first in uniform, a space helmet under her arm, and then just her voice, overlaid with photographs of us as children, pictures of her family, posing with her dog.

  What a nice-looking girl, Baba said. I wonder where she’s from.

  So you can see how sometimes, I could forget any of it was strange.

  The market emptied quickly. Someone left the heat lamps on. The thick plastic winter sheets obscured the stalls like ghosts in a mirror. Inside, some merchants had posted signs. For asparagus, visit this address. Thanks to forgetful thieves, cucumbers are available only at this house. Or, from the import farmers, Sorry, no oranges—roads closed. At the foot of one stall a caved-in cantaloupe rocked in the wind, leaking seeds and a line of black ants onto the concrete.

  Sudjuk for dinner! I told grandmother when I served her plate of cured meat and crackers, as though it were exciting. She was clearer that night. I told her I was scared and she patted my hand. We pressed our fingers into the plates to gather the crumbs.

  When the first case outside of Vuzlevo was reported, the cosmonauts were moved into a security complex somewhere underground, though they were still a hundred kilometers away. We watched mass panic in the streets. A man was beaten to death in Krivograd for asking directions after he lost his mobile phone. Everybody wore masks. Somehow we’d been so quiet in Vuzlevo, watching it unfold.

  It was nineteen days to launch. The news cut the footage from reruns, but the video was all over the Internet by then. A protester in Varna was giving a speech on the steps of city hall, a picket sign in one hand and a megaphone in the other. People cheered around him, waving banners made of bed sheets.

  Close-up on the man and his magnified voicebox: Forget your glory—the rest of us have to live here.

  And then he stopped, swayed, and gave a soft mechanical gurgle through the throat of the megaphone. His eyes lost focus and he lowered the horn. Cameras rolled on as he looked for someone to hand it to.

  Sorry, did you need this?

  The news mics caught the collective intake of breath from the crowd. People lifted scarves and shirts to cover their faces, stumbling back like pigeons, while the police stepped in closer, raising their batons.

  There’s a word I keep thinking of today, one that I can’t remember. Today it consumes me. Something for the brightness of the day, for the cold whiteness of sun without leaves on the trees. The pale wash of the concrete, color leached from the chipping ceramics of the roofs. I sit at my desk with a pen poised over paper, waiting for the word to come. Or waiting for the phone to ring or for the door to open, for there to be work today. Instead there is the buzzing of the lights overhead, the squinting grayness of the sky.

  You are going there, I think to Lili, through that shell. You’re going so soon.

  Sudba 1, they called the rocket. The name was announced last year, along with the names of those cosmonauts selected to go. Sudba—destiny. Calculated propaganda, Baba said cheerfully, on a day when she remembered her own childhood in this country. But remarkable, she agreed, looking up. Remarkable nonetheless.

  Sometimes I imagine that Baba will be the only one of us left with any memory at all. Walking down the street, I see more doors hanging open. The school windows glow in the dark. The roads are still blocked, though there hardly seems to be a point anymore. They have traced the Varna case to a man who wandered through the woods and onto an unguarded road, who was picked up by a driver heading north. The driver was the protester’s uncle. Later, from behind quarantine glass, the motorist told the press: I asked him where he was going and he asked where there was to go.

  Some days, Baba still remembers her life in sharp detail. Somewhere, she is intact. The rest of us are losing pieces once and for all. I imagine one day she will wake, lucid, to a town of empty people. She will bundle herself in a winter coat and step outside for the first time in months. She will walk among the ghosts and realize she is alone, and the only thing she will not know is where she’s been for the change.

  Before I go to sleep, I move the rest of our pantry into Baba’s room, within easy reach.

  One day to launch. Lili calls me and I can hear the smile straining her mouth over the phone.

  I can’t believe it, she says, over and over. I can’t believe it’s tomorrow. Is it bad to be so excited? So many things are happening here.

  I assure her that it isn’t.

  In case anything happens while I’m gone—

  Nothing will happen, I say. You’ll be back in a few weeks. Don’t worry.

  Okay. Okay. I have to go. I need to call Mama before I leave. I love you.

  I love you, too, I say. Have a good trip.

  We hang up. I can’t remember where she’s going, but I think it’s far.

  INARA VERZEMNIEKS

  Homer Dill’s Undead

  FROM The Iowa Review

  THAT HE LOVED THE BIRDS cannot be disputed. His notes, detailed, thorough, are deeply admiring of their habits, which he came to know over the course of six brief weeks when he lived in their company on a tiny coral-sand island. There are the shearwaters “moaning in their burrows, the little wingless rail skulking from one grass tussock to another, the saucy finch.” The white-breasted petrel, “a fearless, dove-like creature, quite amenable to petting and stroking.” And the albatross. When excited, it emits a sound “like the neighing of horses.” He has watched them closely, memorized their movements and mannerisms, recorded their particulars until he knows them by heart, all so that when he does what must come next—when, one by one, he catches them, and gently snuffs the life from them with his hands, then holds a blade to their warm feathered bellies and carefully slits the skin, pulling it away from the meat—he may one day bring them back to life.

  At one time, everyone seemed to know his name and what he had done. The National Audubon Society invited him to address its members at a New York convention. Ornithological journals solicited his writings on the mating and nesting habits of the albatross and the Fregata aquila. The local papers turned his work into headlines: “One of the greatest accomplishments of modern science!” Today, all that remains of him can be found on the fourth floor of Macbride Hall on the University of Iowa campus, where a vast natural history collection, first opened in 1858, is now preserved for public display: rooms of stuffed walruses and rhinoceroses, otter and egret, elk and wolves. But also: jars of snakes and crawfish and leeches kept behind bolted blast doors, should the alc
ohol that pickles them ever ignite; cupboards that when opened reveal a company of wild turkeys and a single albino raccoon; drawer after drawer stuffed with the skins of songbirds, their eyes stitched shut; and a polar bear, eyes open, shrouded in plastic sheeting, too big to fit in the building’s service elevator.

  His achievement is located between displays of cranes of the South Dakota prairie and the yellow-rumped warblers and song sparrows of Iowa, a mahogany-paneled alcove with lettering above the door that says “Laysan Island Cyclorama, 1914.” Walk through the narrow doorway, up the small ramp and onto a platform, where you’ll find yourself in the center of a rectangular-shaped enclosure. Glass walls surround all sides of you, save the way you entered, so that the effect is perhaps what it would feel like to stand inside the letter C, its back flattened straight.

  Behind the glass, a sandy beach filled with taxidermied birds. Dozens of birds—birds caught mid-wing, mid-preen, mid-skittering step. They stare down their beaks at you, challenge you with unblinking eyes. As you pace the edges of the platform, you are meant to feel as though you are tracing the shores of an island, a mural of waves crashing behind you, stuffed petrels peering out from the crags of cast rock. Before you is the suggestion of a massive rookery, nests balanced on tufts of bunch grass, awkward-looking albatross chicks, hunched, unfledged, the mural continuing its wrap-around illusion of hundreds, thousands more in the painted distance. Speakers above you play an endless loop of courting songs.

  This is so unlike all the other displays in the museum. It clearly wants you to enter a scene, not just observe it, but be a part of it, to feel as though you have been transported to this white-sand island. You can feel the ambition of it, even if it comes off a little sad by today’s standards: experience eviscerated, preserved, and staged behind glass, the birds’ feathers coated in a fine dust, the sand worn in patches, the mural peeling at its corners. Still, someone tried desperately here with all the skills they possessed to evoke a moment in time that people hundreds of years and hundreds of miles removed could enter again and again. There is something poignant about that impulse, but also something a little strange: what is it about this rendered scene that demanded such obsessive attention by its maker, made him so certain that this place begged our endless return?

  Homer Dill, says a sign.

  This is his creation. And this is also his legacy: this curious alcove full of forever birds, as obscure as it is enduring.

  What do we say when someone is beyond our grasp, a little peculiar? We call him an odd bird.

  And yet, odd birds are also cause for wonder.

  There is startlingly little to work with for a man who made immortality his business. One thin folder in the university archives containing only some correspondence regarding his appointments and promotions. A handful of files in the natural history museum’s collection, clippings mostly from a scrapbook maintained by his first wife, who died in 1934 (widower, it is noted in spidery hand in the university’s ancient personnel notes). The pages are as yellowed and brittle as dried leaves, and they crumble at the touch of a hand, each attempt to know him and what moved him to create that display of birds another assault on his fragile record.

  The file contains inexplicable things: poems on love and faith; a list of the seven wonders of the world, ancient and modern; advice on how to kill flies; a black-and-white photograph of an open window snipped from the newspaper. But gradually, among the articles and old photocopied speeches and letters and papers (“Mounting Large Animals Without Opening Cuts in the Legs”), the spine of a story emerges.

  And it begins on Laysan, a small isolated island in the Hawaiian archipelago, and one of the world’s largest bird colonies.

  In 1902, a ship called the U.S.S. Albatross drops anchor offshore, in an official government expedition. Among those on board is the curator of Iowa’s natural history museum, a man named Charles Nutting, who is serving temporarily as a member of the ship’s civilian scientific staff. Nutting is a bold man, a dreamer, who has big ambitions for his museum back in Iowa, which, like so many natural history museums around the world, has come of age in the late nineteenth century as the full inheritance of the Industrial Revolution becomes clear. People look for places to rest black lungs and imagine greener spaces, to commune with the furred, the fanged, the fragile and mysterious. They had been told that they would find wonder in the machine, but instead, at least on their days off, they crave a world without spinning jennies or blast furnaces or steam engines. The natural history museums, with their collections of strange, stuffed beasts, give them permission, however briefly, to imagine themselves in another, wilder, reality.

  Nutting wants to lure these crowds because, smart man that he is, he knows that the higher the museum’s profile, the more support for its research. He launches expeditions to such far-flung locations as the Arctic, the Dry Tortugas, and the Bay of Fundy in search of new marvels.

  Then he arrives on Laysan. And although he has travelled around the world, from the rain forests of Costa Rica to the beaches of the Bahamas, he has never been so struck as he is when he steps off onto Laysan’s shore and finds himself surrounded by eight million birds—birds covering every inch of the island’s three-and-a-half square miles, the air so thick with their wings that the sky above him is nearly blotted out. “Try as we may; this scene can not be described,” Nutting writes in the alumni magazine upon his return to Iowa. “And as day after day the wonder of it grew and deepened, the writer found [himself] constantly recurring and intensifying the great desire to have it reproduced as a masterpiece of art for the benefit of the . . . University and the people of Iowa.”

  He becomes possessed by this memory, imagines that if only he could find a way to re-create the brush of wings that he experienced on Laysan in an exhibit, he just might secure his university’s place as home to one of the finest natural history museums in the world.

  He carries the idea with him for years, until one day he hears of a concept kicking around the museum world: the cyclorama. Or, as Nutting describes it, in an appeal for money from Iowa alums and students, an exhibit “where the observer gazes upon hundreds of thousands of men and miles of space, a veritable miracle of vast numbers in intense action, the actual figures in the foreground so skillfully joined to the painted background as to deceive the very elect.”

  Actually, the cyclorama is a space—a room, an enclosure—designed so that those who enter experience a 360-degree panoramic view. A landscape perhaps, an epic historical moment. It is the invention of an Irishman named Robert Barker, who is said to have climbed a hill in Edinburgh in the late 1700s, gazed out over the city all around him, and decided to re-create the sensation through painted murals hung in the round. Barker’s fairly simple idea takes hold, and around the world, people craft cycloramas of battle scenes and waterfalls and trans-Siberian railroads, grand, exotic moments and places that people might imagine being teleported to for a time.

  But as far as Iowa’s curator knows, no one has tried to build a cyclorama using taxidermies of animals. This is how he will bring Laysan to Iowa. This is how he will make his museum among the world’s most famous. He sends letters to the U.S. government asking for access to the island, now a federal wildlife refuge. He tells the student paper that the cyclorama will make Iowa “the mecca of scientific men for years to come.” And he seems to genuinely believe it. All he needs is a man capable of carrying out his vision.

  Homer Dill. Did you think we had forgotten about him?

  Without Homer Dill, there could be no story.

  From the yellowed newspaper clippings we learn that he arrived in Iowa in 1906, hired by the museum “after winning a high reputation in the East.” Dill is a naturalist who also happens to be a highly trained taxidermist; a skilled observer who understands each species, its behaviors and movements and physiology, but also, master of a skill that falls somewhere between butcher, tanner, upholsterer, artist, and resurrectionist—a man able to wield a gun and a knife, gut and sk
in, administer the proper potions, capture the still life, sew the perfect, binding stitch. Dill does not stuff animals. He transforms them.

  Shall we transform him, then, back into a child, roaming the docks of Gardiner, Maine, where ships from ports around the world anchored then, and trading those ships’ sailors “snitched cookies, boiled eggs, and apples for lizard skins, feathers, and whales’ teeth.” When he is about ten, a friend lends him a copy of Practical Taxidermy and Home Decoration; Together with Practical Information for Sportsmen by Joseph H. Batty. As he recalls years later, “From then on, I mounted everything I could get my hands on.”

  His first is a bird: a saw-whet owl, a tiny, downy thing with piercing, saucer-shaped eyes.

  Local hunters approach him to preserve their kills, and before long, he has built a flourishing taxidermy business while still a teenager. He goes through the motions in high school, but can “think of nothing else but taxidermy.” We can only imagine what his classmates must have thought of him, this brooding boy, his own saucer eyes hidden behind spectacles, always hurrying away as soon as the bell rang to spend his free time forearm-deep in the belly of an elk, dropping guts in buckets. His parents, for their part, are “concerned,” beg him to consider engineering.

  Instead he writes to William Temple Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park and one of the most famous naturalist-taxidermists of his generation. Hornaday is clearly impressed because he invites the teenager to come apprentice with him in New York. For the next two years, Dill spends his days making plaster casts of dead jaguars, monkeys, and manatees. At night, he studies drawing at the Pratt Institute of Art. When Hornaday needs someone to mount his own personal collection of animals, or the big-game trophies of his famous friends, such as Teddy Roosevelt, he turns to Dill, Dill who will later give his first son the middle name of Hornaday, in honor of his mentor.