The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  Poor child, I was thinking, poor girl. Who loved you? Who loves you?

  "Hang in there, Jeff," Abnesti said. "Verlaine! What do you think? Any vestige of romantic love in Jeff's Verbal Commentary?"

  "I'd say no," Verlaine said over the PA. "That's all just pretty much basic human feeling right there."

  "Excellent," Abnesti said. "Time remaining?"

  "Two minutes," Verlaine said.

  I found what happened next very hard to watch. Under the influence of the Verbaluce™, the VeriTalk™, and the ChatEase™, I also found it impossible not to narrate.

  In each Workroom was a couch, a desk, and a chair, all, by design, impossible to disassemble. Heather now began disassembling her impossible-to-disassemble chair. Her face was a mask of rage. She drove her head into the wall. Like a wrathful prodigy, Heather, beloved of someone, managed, in her great sadness-fueled rage, to disassemble the chair while continuing to drive her head into the wall.

  "Jesus," Verlaine said.

  "Verlaine, buck up," Abnesti said. "Jeff, stop crying. Contrary to what you might think, there's not much data in crying. Use your words. Don't make this in vain."

  I used my words. I spoke volumes, was precise. I described and redescribed what I was feeling as I watched Heather do what she now began doing, intently, almost beautifully, to her face/head with one of the chair legs.

  In his defense, Abnesti was not in such great shape himself: breathing hard, cheeks candy-red, as he tapped the screen of his iMac nonstop with a pen, something he did when stressed.

  "Time," he finally said, and cut the Darkenfloxx™ off with his remote. "Fuck. Get in there, Verlaine. Hustle it."

  Verlaine hustled into Small Workroom 2.

  "Talk to me, Sammy," Abnesti said.

  Verlaine felt for Heather's pulse, then raised his hands, palms up, so that he looked like Jesus, except shocked instead of beatific, and also he had his glasses up on top of his head.

  "Are you kidding me?" Abnesti said.

  "What now?" Verlaine said. "What do I—"

  "Are you fricking kidding me?" Abnesti said.

  Abnesti burst out of his chair, shoved me out of the way, and flew through the door into Small Workroom 2.

  VIII

  I returned to my Domain.

  At three, Verlaine came on the PA.

  "Jeff," he said. "Please return to the Spiderhead."

  I returned to the Spiderhead.

  "We're sorry you had to see that, Jeff," Abnesti said.

  "That was unexpected," Verlaine said.

  "Unexpected plus unfortunate," Abnesti said. "And sorry I shoved you."

  "Is she dead?" I said.

  "Well, she's not the best," Verlaine said.

  "Look, Jeff, these things happen," Abnesti said. "This is science. In science we explore the unknown. It was unknown what five minutes on Darkenfloxx™ would do to Heather. Now we know. The other thing we know, per Verlaine's assessment of your commentary, is that you really, for sure, do not harbor any residual romantic feelings for Heather. That's a big deal, Jeff. A beacon of hope at a sad time for all. Even as Heather was, so to speak, going down to the sea in her ship, you remained totally unwavering in terms of continuing to not romantically love her. My guess is ProtComm's going to be like, 'Wow, Utica's really leading the pack in terms of providing some mind-blowing new data on ED289/290.'"

  It was quiet in the Spiderhead.

  "Verlaine, go out," Abnesti said. "Go do your bit. Make things ready."

  Verlaine went out.

  "Do you think I liked that?" Abnesti said.

  "You didn't seem to," I said.

  "Well, I didn't," Abnesti said. "I hated it. I'm a person. I have feelings. Still, personal sadness aside, that was good. You did terrific overall. We all did terrific. Heather especially did terrific. I honor her. Let's just—let's see this thing through, shall we? Let's complete it. Complete the next portion of our Confirmation Trial."

  Into Small Workroom 4 came Rachel.

  IX

  "Are we going to Darkenfloxx™ Rachel now?" I said.

  "Think, Jeff," Abnesti said. "How can we know that you love neither Rachel nor Heather if we only have data regarding your reaction to what just now happened to Heather? Use your noggin. You are not a scientist, but Lord knows you work around scientists all day. Drip on?"

  I did not say "Acknowledge."

  "What's the problem, Jeff?" Abnesti said.

  "I don't want to kill Rachel," I said.

  "Well, who does?" Abnesti said. "Do I? Do you, Verlaine?"

  "No," Verlaine said over the PA.

  "Jeff, maybe you're overthinking this," Abnesti said. "Is it possible the Darkenfloxx™ will kill Rachel? Sure. We have the Heather precedent. On the other hand, Rachel may be stronger. She seems a little larger."

  "She's actually a little smaller," Verlaine said.

  "Well, maybe she's tougher," Abnesti said.

  "We're going to weight-adjust her dosage," Verlaine said. "So."

  "Thanks, Verlaine," Abnesti said. "Thanks for clearing that up."

  "Maybe show him the file," Verlaine said.

  Abnesti handed me Rachel's file.

  Verlaine came back in.

  "Read it and weep," he said.

  Per Rachel's file, she had stolen jewelry from her mother, a car from her father, cash from her sister, statues from their church. She'd gone to jail for drugs. After four times in jail for drugs, she'd gone to rehab for drugs, then to rehab for prostitution, then to what they call rehab-refresh, for people who've been in rehab so many times they are basically immune. But she must have been immune to the rehab-refresh too, because after that came her biggie: a triple murder—her dealer, the dealer's sister, the dealer's sister's boyfriend.

  Reading that made me feel a little funny that we'd fucked and I'd loved her.

  But I still didn't want to kill her.

  "Jeff," Abnesti said. "I know you've done a lot of work on this with Mrs. Lacey. On killing and so forth. But this is not you. This is us."

  "It's not even us," Verlaine said. "It's science."

  "The mandates of science," Abnesti said. "Plus the dictates."

  "Sometimes science sucks," Verlaine said.

  "On the one hand, Jeff," Abnesti said, "a few minutes of unpleasantness for Heather—"

  "Rachel," Verlaine said.

  "A few minutes of unpleasantness for Rachel," Abnesti said, "years of relief for literally tens of thousands of underloving or overloving folks."

  "Do the math, Jeff," Verlaine said.

  "Being good in small ways is easy," Abnesti said. "Doing the huge good things, that's harder."

  "Drip on?" Verlaine said. "Jeff?"

  I did not say "Acknowledge."

  "Fuck it, enough," Abnesti said. "Verlaine, what's the name of that one? The one where I give him an order and he obeys it?"

  "Docilryde™," Verlaine said.

  "Is there Docilryde™ in his MobiPak™?" Abnesti said.

  "There's Docilryde™ in every MobiPak™," Verlaine said.

  "Does he need to say 'Acknowledge'?" Abnesti said.

  "Docilryde™'s a Class C, so—" Verlaine said.

  "See, that, to me, makes zero sense," Abnesti said. "What good's an obedience drug if we need his permission to use it?"

  "We just need a waiver," Verlaine said.

  "How long does that shit take?" Abnesti said.

  "We fax Albany, they fax us back," Verlaine said.

  "Come on, come on, make haste," Abnesti said, and they went out, leaving me alone in the Spiderhead.

  X

  It was sad. It gave me a sad, defeated feeling to think that soon they'd be back and would Docilryde™ me, and I'd say "Acknowledge," smiling agreeably the way a person smiles on Docilryde™, and then the Darkenfloxx™ would flow, into Rachel, and I would begin describing, in that rapid, robotic way one describes on Verbaluce™/VeriTalk™/ChatEase™, the things Rachel would, at that time, begin doing to herself.

/>   It was like all I had to do to be a killer again was sit there and wait.

  Which was a hard pill to swallow, after my work with Mrs. Lacey.

  "Violence finished, anger no more," she'd make me say, over and over. Then she'd have me do a Detailed Remembering re my fateful night.

  I was nineteen. Mike Appel was seventeen. We were both wasto. All night he'd been giving me grief. He was smaller, younger, less popular. Then we were out front of Frizzy's, rolling around on the ground. He was quick. He was mean. I was losing. I couldn't believe it. I was bigger, older, yet losing? Around us, watching, was basically everybody we knew. Then he had me on my back. Someone laughed. Someone said, "Shit, poor Jeff." Nearby was a brick. I grabbed it, glanced Mike in the head with it. Then was on top of him.

  Mike gave. That is, there on his back, scalp bleeding, he gave, by shooting me a certain look, like, Dude, come on, we're not all that serious about this, are we?

  We were.

  I was.

  I don't even know why I did it.

  It was like, with the drinking and the being a kid and the nearly losing, I'd been put on a drip called, like, TemperBerst or something.

  InstaRaje.

  LifeRooner.

  "Hey, guys, hello!" Rachel said. "What are we up to today?"

  There was her fragile head, her undamaged face, one arm lifting a hand to scratch a cheek, legs bouncing with nerves, peasant skirt bouncing too, clogged feet crossed under the hem.

  Soon all that would be just a lump on the floor.

  I had to think.

  Why were they going to Darkenfloxx™ Rachel? So they could hear me describe it. If I wasn't here to describe it, they wouldn't do it. How could I make it so I wouldn't be here? I could leave. How could I leave? There was only one door out of the Spiderhead, which was autolocked, and on the other side was either Barry or Hans, with that electric wand called the DisciStick™. Could I wait until Abnesti came in, wonk him, try to race past Barry or Hans, make a break for the Main Door?

  Any weapons in the Spiderhead? No, just Abnesti's birthday mug, a pair of running shoes, a roll of breath mints, his remote.

  His remote?

  What a dope. That was supposed to be on his belt at all times. Otherwise one of us might help ourselves to whatever we found, via Inventory Directory, in our MobiPaks™: some Bonviv™, maybe, some BlissTyme™, some SpeedErUp™.

  Some Darkenfloxx™.

  Jesus. That was one way to leave.

  Scary, though.

  Just then, in Small Workroom 4, Rachel, I guess thinking the Spiderhead empty, got up and did this happy little shuffle, like she was some cheerful farmer chick who'd just stepped outside to find the hick she was in love with coming up the road with a calf under his arm or whatever.

  Why was she dancing? No reason.

  Just alive, I guess.

  Time was short.

  The remote was well labeled.

  Good old Verlaine.

  I used it, dropped it down the heat vent in case I changed my mind, then stood there like, I can't believe I just did that.

  My MobiPak™ whirred.

  The Darkenfloxx™ flowed.

  Then came the horror: worse than I'd ever imagined. Soon my arm was about a mile down the heat vent. Then I was staggering around the Spiderhead, looking for something, anything. In the end, here's how bad it got: I used a corner of the desk.

  What's death like?

  You're briefly unlimited.

  I sailed right out through the roof.

  And hovered above it, looking down. Here was Rogan, checking his neck in the mirror. Here was Keith, squat-thrusting in his underwear. Here was Ned Riley, here was B. Troper, here was Gail Orley, Stefan DeWitt, killers all, all bad, I guess, although, in that instant, I saw it differently. At birth, they'd been charged by God with the responsibility of growing into total fuckups. Had they chosen this? Was it their fault, as they tumbled out of the womb? Had they aspired, covered in placental blood, to grow into harmers, dark forces, life-enders? In that first holy instant of breath/awareness (tiny hands clutching and unclutching), had it been their fondest hope to render (via gun, knife, or brick) some innocent family bereft? No; and yet their crooked destinies had lain dormant within them, seeds awaiting water and light to bring forth the most violent, life-poisoning flowers, said water/light actually being the requisite combination of neurological tendency and environmental activation that would transform them (transform us!) into earth's offal, murderers, and foul us with the ultimate, unwashable transgression.

  Wow, I thought, was there some Verbaluce™ in that drip or what?

  But no.

  This was all me now.

  I got snagged, found myself stuck on a facility gutter, and squatted there like an airy gargoyle. I was there but was also everywhere. I could see it all: a clump of leaves in the gutter beneath my see-through foot; Mom, poor Mom, at home in Rochester, scrubbing the shower, trying to cheer herself via thin hopeful humming; a deer near the Dumpster, suddenly alert to my spectral presence; Mike Appel's mom, also in Rochester, a bony, distraught checkmark occupying a slender strip of Mike's bed; Rachel below in Small Workroom 4, drawn to the one-way mirror by the sounds of my death; Abnesti and Verlaine rushing into the Spiderhead; Verlaine kneeling to begin CPR.

  Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life-nectar, the life-nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squawking, others rapturous.

  From somewhere, something kind asked, Would you like to go back? It's completely up to you. Your body appears salvageable.

  No, I thought, no, thanks, I've had enough.

  My only regret was Mom. I hoped someday, in some better place, I'd get a chance to explain it to her, and maybe she'd be proud of me, one last time, after all these years.

  From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew among them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.

  The Hare's Mask

  Mark Slouka

  FROM Harper's Magazine

  ODD HOW I MISS HIS VOICE, and yet it's his silences I remember now: the deliberateness with which he moved, the way he'd listen, that particular smile, as if, having long ago given up expecting anything from the world, he continually found himself mugged by its beauty. Even as a kid I wanted to protect him, and because he saw the danger in this, he did what he could.

  By the time I was five I'd figured out—the way kids usually do, by putting pieces together and working them until they fit—that he'd lost his parents and sister during the war. That they'd been there one morning, like keys on a table, then gone. When I asked he said it had been so long ago that it seemed like another life, that many bad things had happened then, that these were different times, and then he messed up my hair and smiled and said, "None of us are going anywhere, trust me." When we went to the doctor he'd make funny faces and joke around while the doctor put a needle in his arm to show me it didn't hurt. And it came to me that everything he did—the way he'd turn the page of a book, or laugh with me at Krazy Kat, or call us all into the kitchen on Saturday evenings to see the trout he'd caught lying on the counter, their sticky skin flecked with bits of fern—was just the same.

  He used to tie his own trout flies. I'd come down late at night when we still lived in the old house, sneaking past the yellow bedroom where my sister slept in her crib, stepping over the creaking mines, and he'd be sitting there at the dining room table with just the one lamp, his hooks and feathers and fu
rs spread out on the wood around him, and when he saw me he'd sit me on his knee, my stockinged feet dangling around his calves, and show me things. "Couldn't sleep?" he'd say. "Look here, I'll show you something important." And he'd catch the bend of a hook in the long-nosed vise and let me pick the color of the thread, and I'd watch him do what he did, his thin, strong fingers winding the waxed strand back from the eye or stripping the webbing off a small feather or clipping a fingernail patch of short, downy fur from the cheek of a hare. He didn't explain and I didn't ask. He'd just work, now and then humming a few notes of whatever he'd been listening to—Debussy or Chopin, Mendelssohn or Satie—and it would appear, step by step, the slim, segmented thorax, the gossamer tail, the tiny, barred wings, and he'd say, "Nice, isn't it?" and then, "Is it done?" and I'd shake my head, because this was how it always went, and he'd say, "Okay, now watch," and his fingers would loop and settle the thread and draw it tight so quickly it seemed like one motion, then clip the loose end close to the eye with the surgical scissors. "Some things you can finish," he'd say.

  I don't know how old I was when I was first drawn to their faces on the mantelpiece—not old. Alone, I'd pull up a chair and stand on it and look at them: my grandfather, tall, slim, stooped, handsome, his hair in full retreat at thirty; my grandmother with her sad black eyes and her uncomfortable smile—almost a wince—somehow the stronger of the two; my aunt, a child of four, half turned toward her mother as if about to say something ... My father stood to the right, an awkward eight-year-old in a high-necked shirt and tie, a ghost from the future. I'd look at this photograph and imagine him taking it down when we weren't around, trying to understand how it was possible that they could be gone all this time and only him left behind. And from there, for some reason, I'd imagine him remembering himself as a boy. He'd be standing in the back of a train at night, the metal of the railing beneath his palms. Behind him, huddled together under the light as if on a cement raft, he'd see his family, falling away so quickly that already he had to strain to make out their features, his father's hat, his mother's hand against the black coat, his sister's face, small as a fingertip ... And holding on to the whitewashed mantelpiece, struggling to draw breath into my shrinking lungs, I'd quickly put the picture back as though it were something shameful. Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.