The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  Explanation #5

  Some argue that all towns have phantoms, but that only we are able to see them. This way of thinking is especially attractive to those who cannot understand why our town should have phantoms and other towns none; why our town, in short, should be an exception. An objection to this explanation is that it accomplishes nothing but a shift of attention from the town itself to the people of our town: it's our ability to perceive phantoms that is now the riddle, instead of the phantoms themselves. A second objection, which some find decisive, is that the explanation relies entirely on an assumed world of invisible beings, whose existence can be neither proved nor disproved.

  Case Study #5

  Every afternoon after lunch, before I return to work in the upstairs study, I like to take a stroll along the familiar sidewalks of my neighborhood. Thoughts rise up in me, take odd turns, vanish like bits of smoke. At the same time I'm wide open to striking impressions—that ladder leaning against the side of a house, with its shadow hard and clean against the white shingles, which project a little, so that the shingle bottoms break the straight shadow-lines into slight zigzags; that brilliant red umbrella lying at an angle in the recycling container on a front porch next to the door; that jogger with shaved head, black nylon shorts, and an orange sweatshirt that reads, in three lines of black capital letters: EAT WELL / KEEP FIT / DIE ANYWAY. A single blade of grass sticks up from a crack in a driveway. I come to a sprawling old house at the corner, not far from the sidewalk. Its dark red paint could use a little touching up. Under the high front porch, on both sides of the steps, are those crisscross lattice panels, painted white. Through the diamond-shaped openings come pricker branches and the tips of ferns. From the sidewalk I can see the handle of an old hand mower, back there among the dark weeds. I can see something else: a slight movement. I step up to the porch, bend to peer through the lattice: I see three of them, seated on the ground. They turn their heads toward me and look away, begin to rise. In an instant they're gone. My arms are rippling as I return to the sidewalk and continue on my way. They interest me, these creatures who are always vanishing. This time I was able to glimpse a man of about fifty and two younger women. One woman wore her hair up; the other had a sprig of small blue wildflowers in her hair. The man had a long straight nose and a long mouth. They rose slowly but without hesitation and stepped back into the dark. Even as a child I accepted phantoms as part of things, like spiders and rainbows. I saw them in the vacant lot on the other side of the backyard hedge, or behind garages and toolsheds. Once I saw one in the kitchen. I observe them carefully whenever I can; I try to see their faces. I want nothing from them. It's a sunny day in early September. As I continue my walk, I look about me with interest. At the side of a driveway, next to a stucco house, the yellow nozzle of a hose rests on top of a dark green garbage can. Farther back, I can see part of a swing set. A cushion is sitting on the grass beside a three-pronged weeder with a red handle.

  The Disbelievers

  The disbelievers insist that every encounter is false. When I bend over and peer through the openings in the lattice, I see a slight movement, caused by a chipmunk or mouse in the dark weeds, and instantly my imagination is set in motion: I seem to see a man and two women, a long nose, the rising, the disappearance. The few details are suspiciously precise. How is it that the faces are difficult to remember, while the sprig of wildflowers stands out clearly? Such criticisms, even when delivered with a touch of disdain, never offend me. The reasoning is sound, the intention commendable: to establish the truth, to distinguish the real from the unreal. I try to experience it their way: the movement of a chipmunk behind the sunlit lattice, the dim figures conjured from the dark leaves. It isn't impossible. I exercise my full powers of imagination: I take their side against me. There is nothing there, behind the lattice. It's all an illusion. Excellent! I defeat myself. I abolish myself. I rejoice in such exercise.

  You

  You who have no phantoms in your town, you who mock or scorn our reports: are you not deluding yourselves? For say you are driving out to the mall, some pleasant afternoon. All of a sudden—it's always sudden—you remember your dead father, sitting in the living room in the house of your childhood. He's reading a newspaper in the armchair next to the lamp table. You can see his frown of concentration, the fold of the paper, the moccasin slipper half hanging from his foot. The steering wheel is warm in the sun. Tomorrow you're going to dinner at a friend's house—you should take a bottle of wine. You see your friend laughing at the table, his wife lifting something from the stove. The shadows of telephone wires lie in long curves on the street. Your mother lies in the nursing home, her eyes always closed. Her photograph on your bookcase: a young woman smiling under a tree. You are lying in bed with a cold, and she's reading to you from a book you know by heart. Now she herself is a child and you read to her while she lies there. Your sister will be coming up for a visit in two weeks. Your daughter playing in the backyard, your wife at the window. Phantoms of memory, phantoms of desire. You pass through a world so thick with phantoms that there is barely enough room for anything else. The sun shines on a hydrant, casting a long shadow.

  Explanation #6

  One explanation says that we ourselves are phantoms. Arguments drawn from cognitive science claim that our bodies are nothing but artificial constructs of our brains: we are the dream creations of electrically charged neurons. The world itself is a great seeming. One virtue of this explanation is that it accounts for the behavior of our phantoms: they turn from us because they cannot bear to witness our self-delusion.

  Forgetfulness

  There are times when we forget our phantoms. On summer afternoons, the telephone wires glow in the sun like fire. Shadows of tree branches lie against our white shingles. Children shout in the street. The air is warm, the grass is green, we will never die. Then an uneasiness comes, in the blue air. Between shouts, we hear a silence. It's as though something is about to happen, which we ought to know, if only we could remember.

  How Things Are

  For most of us, the phantoms are simply there. We don't think about them continually, at times we forget them entirely, but when we encounter them we feel that something momentous has taken place, before we drift back into forgetfulness. Someone once said that our phantoms are like thoughts of death: they are always there, but appear only now and then. It's difficult to know exactly what we feel about our phantoms, but I think it is fair to say that in the moment we see them, before we're seized by a familiar emotion like fear, or anger, or curiosity, we are struck by a sense of strangeness, as if we've suddenly entered a room we have never seen before, a room that nevertheless feels familiar. Then the world shifts back into place and we continue on our way. For though we have our phantoms, our town is like your town: sun shines on the house fronts, we wake in the night with troubled hearts, cars back out of driveways and turn up the street. It's true that a question runs through our town, because of the phantoms, but we don't believe we are the only ones who live with unanswered questions. Most of us would say we're no different from anyone else. When you come to think about us, from time to time, you'll see we really are just like you.

  Dog Bites

  Ricardo Nuila

  FROM McSweeney's

  WE TALKED ABOUT IT explicitly. There wasn't a brochure he handed to me in his office ("Do you have any questions?") or a turn-off-the-TV chat over dinner. It just popped into his mind.

  "You might have Syndrome X," he'd say to me, sitting on his La-Z-Boy, reading his journals, whatever X was that month. Dad had diagnosed me with Asperger's, a mild case of Rett ("extremely mild"), Münchausen, lead poisoning, and congenital neurosyphilis, to name a few. There was never any treatment. "Which is all right," he'd reassure me.

  Dad was explicit about everything growing up. I was treated like an adult from as far back as I remember. For instance, I knew exactly what happened to Mom.

  "Your mother works as a nurse in Rwanda. There was a genocide there and she
felt herself morally obligated to help out," he told me. "To this day she continues her work there."

  This when I was in second grade.

  "Do you understand?"

  "What's a genocide?" I said.

  "A genocide is the mass execution of a people based on ethnicity. Race. Like the Holocaust."

  "Okay."

  Being a doctor, Dad was in the advice business. "I'm a truth provider" is how he described it—he didn't believe in the "Hands / touching hands / reaching out" healer mumbo jumbo. It was a sentiment even more present in his private life, in how I was raised. As he himself had been kept in the dark, he made it a point to keep me out.

  His mother had censored all the books he read and looked through his journals to make sure no evil contacted his brain. She was Basque. When he was in medical school in San Antonio, one of his classmates placed a flap of cadaver skin inside a notebook (an old joke). Grandmama found it and the two had a fight that ended with Dad moving in with an uncle in Switzerland, where he learned a whole new way of being. He was on Lake Constance, the breeding ground for Calvinism, lying out on a manmade beach amid naked Germans and Frenchmen, the fathers uncircumcised, the mothers sun-damaged, the children shoveling sand into where there shouldn't be sand. Things we consider abominable. But this, Dad decided, was life, the truth, the way. This shamelessness—what else was there? He threw off his swimming trunks and in the very cold sea swam with the naked children as if they were a school of dolphins. That same afternoon he met my mother, the two of them standing naked on a sandbar. He told her how his primary goal in life was family, real family, no secrets, no shame. They were married, and life (licensing, visas, etc.) brought them back across the pond, me baking in the oven. And so I am Fabriqué in Confoederatio Helvetica. This I learned when I was six.

  Every Saturday morning after baseball, Dad held "Professor Rounds" at IHOP. My questions ("Ask me anything") were addressed first, and then Dad asked me questions, about my friends and teachers and the shows I watched on TV (very difficult to talk about childhood without talking about TV). He made "teaching points." It was during Professor Rounds that I learned that my best friend Billy Rod's dad was an alcoholic and that his wife had left him for another man she was second cousins with.

  "Do you know what second cousins are?" Dad said.

  Dad was inclined toward the mathematical aspect of medicine, which he manifested in his graphs. The man had a graph for everything: number of daily smiles versus life expectancy (upward-sloping), life expectancy versus alcohol consumption (bell-shaped), salary versus happiness (steep slope until the ordinate of Whatever You Decide Is Right for You, then flat as the desert). He kept a whiteboard in the trunk of his car and wore only shirts with pockets for the colored markers he kept on his person, tip down ("Gravity, son"). People gathered around when he taught, sometimes to laugh, sometimes to learn, but always they'd interject, volunteer, when Dad erased the board with his hand. "No, here," they'd say, and hand him something to wipe with—a spit-tipped napkin, a receipt— cringing when he rubbed away the Magic Marker himself, oblivious to their pleas. Because all Dad was thinking about was his next graph, what were his axes, what was his scale.

  Dad explained second cousins to me the best way he knew how:

  Problems were one thing; how you represented them was another. His main example of this was Billy Rod's father (see above), who stopped drinking when his son and I were in fifth grade. Before then, Billy's dad showed up at all the baseball practices but none of the games, always in his long-sleeved shirt with red and white horizontal stripes and white deckboard pants, his hair tucked into a loose ponytail. He yelled "Ricky Rags" whenever I got a hit, which made me feel accomplished, so much so that I doubted the alcoholism business.

  "Think about it," Dad said. "What father has time to go to the practices?"

  Dad said if you looked at Billy Rod's dad's liver, you'd see one huge scar, and he rubbed the ones on my elbows and knees. He said if he kept it up he'd turn yellow one day and grow breasts. I didn't tell Billy any of this.

  When Billy's dad cut his hair and started coming to the games, Dad said he was "cautiously optimistic." And when we were invited to Billy's birthday party up at the lake, Dad said that it was as much a celebration of sobriety as it was of Billy's twelfth birthday.

  On the drive to the lake, Dad asked what boys would be there, what their dads did, etc. When Billy's dad came up, Dad expressed the greatest admiration for him. As far as Billy's mom, Dad said she got what she deserved.

  "It's like the animal kingdom," he said.

  We were speeding down the highway, the two of us, me looking out for cops down the straight, flat road, something I was good at.

  "Disgraced members of a pack pick up and leave," Dad said.

  "Where do they go?" I said.

  "Anywhere. They're eschewed. You know what that means?"

  "No."

  "Cast off. It's like the mountain gorillas. Have you seen them on channel eight?"

  "No."

  "The big boss is the silverback. Nature selects him, and the silver-hair genes along his spine are turned on."

  I had a pretty good understanding of genes and pedigrees. I could go on and on about them, which I did, for hours at a time. Genes, pedigrees, and baseball stats. Dad listened to every word I had to say about these things.

  I said, "Does the silverback's son also become a silverback?"

  Right then we slowed down. It wasn't uncommon for Dad to get up to a hundred, meaning that when he stepped off the gas in the presence of "ringers," those refurbished cop cars people buy at auction, you'd feel like you'd been caught looking at a changeup.

  But this was no ringer. It was a cop—a sheriff, no less. He was idled perpendicularly in the shadow of an overpass on the median, the red dot of his radar pointed at us the entire way. Dad said the worst thing you could do was brake in these situations (has to do with the Doppler effect, per Dad), and in the moment of truth he didn't, he idled all the way through the speed trap like we were hovercrafting. I turned my head to see if the cop would follow us, but Dad pinned me to the seat.

  "Come on, Ricky," he said. "We're supposed to be a team."

  That's when it happened. Nothing made Dad suffer more than my syndrome being triggered. I'd stop looking people in the eye and become detached, spacy. If there was something to chew on I'd chew on it, didn't matter if it was my nails or the drawstring from the hood of my sweatshirt. Sometimes I tasted blood, I chewed so much, or if it wasn't blood, something salty. What really got Dad was my silence, how I could go days, weeks, as long as two whole months without a word. Dad was so garrulous he didn't know what to do.

  "Come on, Ricky," he said again. He grabbed my thigh. "Did you know that all cops are former criminals? They become cops to legitimize a tendency toward violence."

  I didn't budge.

  "Come on, Ricky. Tell me how many at bats Candy Maldonado had his rookie season." And when that didn't do it, "Tell me how many hemophiliac great-granddaughters Queen Victoria had." (Nobody enjoyed a good trick question like Dad.)

  When all else failed, he tried scaring me into talking. "You wanna drive?" He let go of the steering wheel and threw his hands in the air. "Steering wheel's yours. Go for it."

  Dad often let me drive home from IHOP, me seated on his lap, his hands on mine. I remember my hands trembling the first time I gripped the steering wheel and thinking it was part of my syndrome, but when Dad's hands came over mine the tremors disappeared and my hand sweat evaporated. I squeezed his wrist when I wanted to brake.

  Neither of us grabbed the wheel. We drifted into the right lane ("You sure you want to do this, son?") and then onto the shoulder. He turned off the ignition (I didn't know you could do that) and we rolled to a stop.

  Dad couldn't even look at me. He started the car only after I stopped chewing.

  For a hundred miles the only words that passed between us were Dad asking, "Can you please pick up my markers?" In throwing up his han
ds he'd knocked them clear out of his pocket.

  We stopped at a scenic view (Dad stopped at every scenic view) and I went to the bathroom alone, the markers still in my hand. I didn't have any pockets and there wasn't any place for me to put them, so I stood in the bathroom waiting for I'm not sure what, maybe for the markers to be magically lifted off me, or for the dirty floor to be cleaned so I could set them down. A man dressed like a park ranger said something to me and I left the bathroom still wanting to go, the Magic Markers in my hand.

  Sitting on a picnic table, his sunglasses on, the whiteboard on his lap, Dad gave the Professor Rounds of his life. "Gimme those," he said, taking the markers. He drew a Cartesian plane, and when assigning the axes, he paused as if to consider the scale. Then he looked at our surroundings and put the whiteboard down.

  "Will you look at that?" He took me on his lap and pointed at the landscape. "Mesas. These are badlands, son."

  As soon as I got home I looked it up in the encyclopedia, badlands.