The Best American Magazine Writing 2016

by Sid Holt

  I found myself locked in a battle against a swelling horde of electronic opponents. When I discouraged Nicole from something—when I took away her car keys or access to our accounts or certain visiting hours—she would go to online cancer forums and write posts about my choices. Those forums are populated by people in similar awful situations who go online to hear yes in a world that is suddenly telling them no, and these people—this faceless mass of online handles—always told Nicole to keep fighting, that she could beat this, to just ignore my negativity.

  Death is an invisible thing that can’t be cursed at, or ignored, or denigrated. Each night, though, I lay down beside her, she would tear into me for hours, propelled by anger and fear and Dilaudid.

  I started avoiding bedtime. I see now that, after fifteen years of marriage, this was my first step down a path that diverged from hers: hers toward death, mine toward a life afterward.

  Dane and I stayed up late watching television every night. Without understanding why, we both became obsessed with zombie shows and movies. We spent every night—every night for an entire summer—watching the living dead shuffling eternally into frame just before being dispatched to the afterlife by some hero.

  Afterward, we would sit in the dark for hours, sometimes in silence, but usually discussing the day’s interactions with Nicole. I confessed to him one night that a dark fantasy had flickered through my mind earlier involving a spoon and mayonnaise.

  He laughed. Nothing tasted right to Nicole anymore except mayonnaise. She ate so much of it that when Dane and I went to the grocery store, we would buy two jars at a time. She had a jar-a-day habit. On this particular day, she had asked me to make her a turkey sandwich, which I did and then brought into the bedroom. She took one bite and handed it back.

  “Less turkey, more mayo,” she said.

  I remade it, spooning on double the mayonnaise.

  “No,” she said again, disgusted. “More mayo.”

  I heaped the stuff on this time. Great mounds of it.

  When I handed it to her, she shook her head. “So you’re trying to starve me,” she said. “I guess I’m not dying fast enough.”

  Since the day of her diagnosis, everything in my life had revolved around this frail figure before me. Decisions and depression. Hopes and heartbreak. And now, for a sliver of a second, I pictured myself prying open her mouth and pouring a whole jar of mayonnaise down her throat.

  When visitors came, Nicole could draw herself up and present a model of grace and fearlessness—the same for online forums and Facebook. Those sentiments were true—she carried herself with courage, and love, and poise—but when we were alone, she cut me without mercy.

  In just a few words, Dane saved me.

  He said, “She lashes out at you because she knows you’ll stay.”

  And when I would deny her yet another delirious fantasy—of going someplace exotic when the bathroom would forevermore be the extent of her travels—he had a simple clarity that I assumed I had lost for good.

  “Just tell her yes,” he said.

  • • •

  A sort of delirium set in.

  Dane had lived with us for almost a year now, lived in the shadow of death, and he and I found ourselves cracking jokes so dark, so morbid, that they defied explanation.

  We made a pact: If he married someday or if I remarried and one of our wives was diagnosed with cancer, the other would show up at the hospital and slip a knife between his ribs. A mercy killing. We cried laughing, imagining the puzzlement of witnesses on the scene: “This guy just walked in and stabbed him. And what’s really weird? The dead guy told him ‘thank you.’”

  We told stories about how we would both be old men, drooling and incontinent, and Nicole would shuffle in to demand a mayonnaise sandwich.

  We laughed at our inept drug smuggling. I had heard weed could help counter the nausea from chemo, but medical marijuana is illegal in Alabama. So some friends offered to get us some. I told them to just leave it in their mailbox, where I could pick it up. “Just make sure to pick it up before noon,” my friend said. “That’s when the mailman comes.” The next morning, I found the brick of weed in the right spot, wrapped in clear plastic, and on top of it, the day’s mail.

  Later, when we had to take away Nicole’s phone—probably the most difficult decision of the entire ordeal—she started leaving us venomous, drug-addled handwritten notes. They were heartbreaking. But her creativity and determination in delivering them took on an artistry. We couldn’t figure out how she was doing it.

  “I got this on my pillow,” Dane said one night. A crayon scrawl.

  I showed him mine, a loopy screed about needing her phone. “I found it in the bathroom,” I told him, “stuck on the wall opposite the toilet, at eye level when sitting.”

  In our heartache and exhaustion, we both started to giggle. “You know what she’s doing, right?” Dane said.

  “What?”

  “She’s texting us.”

  It got to where I started hiding from Nicole, unable to face the rage. Too cowardly to sit and bear it, I would curl in the fetal position on our porch swing, where she could not find me. Or I would retreat to one of the girls’ bedrooms upstairs, where she could not follow. I stopped eating and drinking.

  Dane appeared there one night with a plate of food and a bottle of water. He admonished me with profound compassion. “I’m going to let you stay like this for one more day,” he said. “After that, you’ll have to get up.”

  As he walked out the door, he stopped to complete his argument. “For your girls,” he said.

  Even in my spiral I could see that our daughters had fallen in love with Dane. They sensed in him a strength that I no longer had, and they confided in him.

  Each night, he would sit alone on our porch after Nicole and I went to bed. He would read or call his friends back in New Orleans or count raccoons crossing under a streetlight. A few times Molly got up and went out to join him.

  I watched them through a window. He would sit with her, rocking on the swing, and listen while she talked about bad dreams.

  • • •

  The dressing on Nicole’s abdomen became a massive, complex thing that required specialist nurses to come in every couple days and assemble it as a team. Its purpose now was to keep her abdomen from coming apart altogether.

  One day, immediately after the nurses left, Nicole started pulling apart the bandages. “I think I’d like to have myself a shower,” she said.

  I watched, speechless, as she pulled off the last of the gauze and made her way to the shower, dribbling stool and acid onto the floor as she walked. I just lay on the bed, unable to move.

  A long while later she returned and lay beside me. She requested tape and gauze.

  “Let me call the nurses,” I said.

  “No. I can do this myself.”

  As she unwound the tape, it stuck to her hands, to itself, to her belly. Her stomach belched up a geyser of yellow crap, which flowed down her sides onto the bed. Her hands stopped, and I looked up to her face. She had passed out.

  I touched her cheek and her eyes fluttered open. She smiled. She seemed puzzled to find herself covered in hot excrement and tried with her bare hands to contain it. It smeared all over her torso, up her arms to her elbows, and all over the bed. I reached to help and she pushed me away.

  Something in me broke. The remaining thread of the last fiber of the final cable holding me together just snapped, and I rolled off the bed. I didn’t want her to see. I crawled into the bathroom and curled around the base of the toilet, shaking and weeping.

  From the bedroom, I heard her call out, “Dane…” Her voice was diaphanous, like she was calling through silk. I heard Dane come to the door, and she told him I needed help. She had called him for me.

  Dane opened the bathroom door and I cried out, “It’s just shit everywhere, Dane.” With vast discretion, he didn’t try to pick me up from the floor this time. He just closed the door.

&n
bsp; The nurses came and replaced Nicole’s dressing. I don’t remember how long I lay in the bathroom, but the light through the windows had shifted when I emerged.

  Later, Nicole’s lead nurse, Faith, sat down with me. “I see it now,” she said. “She needs antipsychotics.”

  • • •

  Haldol was designed as an antischizophrenic drug in the 1950s, at the peak of the mental-institution boom in America. It’s a knockout drug. “Hound dog,” the nurses called it.

  According to Alabama law, licensed practical nurses, who were now staying at the house and watching Nicole around the clock, were not allowed to administer it. Registered nurses could, but they could come by only once a day.

  There was a loophole in the law, though, they said: Someone else could administer it.

  Me.

  So while the nurses watched and advised me, I started giving my wife the injections that would, in a sense, finish her life. She drifted away on Haldol, an ocean measured in milliliters, no longer calling for food or water, which meant the volcano of her stomach stopped erupting. Her face relaxed. Her jaw drooped.

  Her breathing slowed, and over the next few days it grew louder—loud enough to hear throughout the house. It sounded like someone slowly dragging a cello bow across her vocal cords. I realized then that the last honest person to describe death may be whoever came up with “croaking.”

  The way dying looks, or so I expected, was like this: A small group of friends and family gather around the patient, watching as she draws and releases her final breath. People hold hands and exchange glances to acknowledge how profound the moment is just before a doctor checks for a pulse and announces, “It’s done.”

  The way it actually happened was like this: There was medical equipment blocking the way to our bathroom, so on the morning of September 9, 2014, I went upstairs to shower. I had a head full of shampoo when I heard Dane call from the foot of the stairs. I couldn’t make out what he said, so I rinsed off and stepped out of the shower. A few seconds later, as I tried to towel off, he called again: “Hurry.”

  I tried to pull jeans onto my wet legs as I stumbled down the stairs, and just before I made it to the bedroom I heard Nicole’s rasping breath. I think I did, at least; I was trying to zip up my pants before entering the room, where Dane stood with two nurses. They stood looking at Nicole.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “That may have been the last one,” Faith said. “Maybe. They’re coming slow.”

  Nicole’s pulse had faded days ago, to the point where no one could feel it. So we stood watching her for a couple minutes. She simply didn’t breathe again. No spiritual release. No change in complexion. No shift in facial features. She just stopped.

  It was a routine death in every sense. It was ordinary. Common. The only remarkable element was Dane. I had married into this situation, but how had he gotten here? Love is not a big-enough word. He stood and faced the reality of death for my sake. He is my friend.

  • • •

  The months after Nicole died stretched and shrank and stretched again, like taffy.

  Grief hollowed me out, and I expected that. But underneath it I also felt a deep sense of relief, and even joy. For the first time in two years, I felt hope. I kept that a secret, though. People would stop me on the street to express their sorrow, and I would find myself stooping to match their emotional tone. “Oh, yes, it is so difficult, but we will make it somehow.”

  The truth was that, after two years of suffering, Nicole finally felt no more pain. After two years of horror, the girls and I felt like we had escaped something. Molly told me that, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she didn’t dread hearing me call from the foot of the stairs because she knew I had no more bad news to deliver.

  Dane helped the girls adjust to an endless life without their mother, but the days without Nicole were empty, and he wanted to find work. I told him there was no need. He could just live with us, and I would split my income with him. Forever if he wanted. We had survived an endless winter and entered into an existential springtime.

  But Dane quietly descended into a depression of his own. He felt restless and started spending more time in his room. At one point, he visited a pet shop with a friend, and she alternated between picking up the puppies and kittens. “Don’t you want to hold one?” she asked him.

  “Nah,” he said. He couldn’t explain it, but he knew that if he held a small animal he would burst into tears.

  In January of this year, four months after Nicole died, fourteen months after he abruptly left behind every single thing that makes up an adult life to put himself at the service of Nicole and me, he decided that he needed to move back to New Orleans and reclaim his own life.

  In a most unexpected way, Dane’s leaving hit me harder than Nicole’s because I wasn’t prepared for it. He didn’t know how to tell me that he was leaving, so he just started packing up. He left one day when the girls were at school. On that day, he stopped as he climbed into his car. “I’ll be back in a couple of weeks,” he said. “It’ll be weird, though, because you’ll be married by then.”

  We both laughed. He pulled out of the driveway, and I just stood there in the yard for a long time, wondering what to do, my eyes all wet. Then, after a while, I turned and went back inside my empty house.

  Poetry

  FINALIST—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  This essay was the centerpiece of a Poetry issue that focused on…well, let Tavi Gevinson explain (if you don’t know who Gevinson is, she’s the founder and editor of Rookie, and if you don’t know what Rookie is, you’re no seventeen-year-old). So this is what Gevinson, who edited this special portfolio, said about it: “What you have here are poems, artwork, and essays…[about] the fear so many of us have of writing and reading poetry, which is really a fear of seeming like an angsty teen.” And this is what the Ellie judges said about “How It Feels”: “elegantly structured…combines confessional memoir, art criticism, literary analysis…explores dark and disquieting emotions.” Got it now?

  Jenny Zhang

  How It Feels

  There was a girl in my middle school no one really liked. She told everyone her uncle had sexually abused her and that she had an older boyfriend who was a freshman at Yale, and yes, they did more than kiss. People said terrible things about her—that she was lying about her uncle, that she just wanted the attention, that her boyfriend was made up, that she had never seen a penis in her life, that the reason why she so frequently stared into space with her mouth hanging open was so she could remind everyone what her “blowjob face” looked like.

  At the end of the year, she didn’t come to school for a few days in a row. The rumor was that she tried to kill herself with a plastic spoon (the especially cruel said it was a plastic spork she got from the lunchroom). It was officially (unofficially?) the most hilarious and pathetic attempt at suicide anyone had ever heard of. I didn’t find it funny, but I did rush home after hearing about it, grabbed a spoon from the kitchen, locked myself in my bedroom, and there, sitting on my bed, I pretended to slit my wrists with the spoon, pushing it against my vein. Is this at all meaningful? I wondered.

  Remember in the teen flick Heathers, when Shannen Doherty’s character, Heather 2.0, informs Winona Ryder’s character, Veronica, that the school’s numero uno loser Martha Dump-truck attempted suicide and failed? When even one’s failure to live is a failure…is there anything more poetic?

  In the movie, Heather rushes into Veronica’s living room during “pâté hour” and announces gleefully, “Veronica, have you heard? We were doing Chinese at the food fair when it comes over the radio that Martha Dumptruck tried to buy the farm. She bellyflopped in front of a car wearing a suicide note.”

  “Is she dead?” Veronica asks, horrified.

  “No, that’s the punchline. She’s alive and in stable condition. Just another case of a geek trying to imitate the popular people in the school and failing miserably.”

  •
• •

  Do popular kids write poetry? The popular kids in my high school were the cliché teen-movie jocks and cheerleaders who bitched and moaned through every poetry segment we did in English class. “This is just weird and makes no sense,” was a constant refrain.

  Or: “Yo, this person needs to chill out. It’s just a tree/bird/ building/urn/body of water. Like it’s really not that big of a deal.”

  • • •

  Darkness is acceptable and even attractive so long as there is a threshold that is not crossed. But most people I know who suffer, suffer relentlessly and unendingly no matter what sort of future is proposed (“it’ll get better / it won’t always be like this / you will start to heal / I know it’s such a cliché but you really will come out of this stronger in the end”).

  • • •

  Why is it so humiliating to go on and on about something that means a lot to you only to be told, “Wow, you spend a lot of time thinking about stuff, don’t you?”

  Or: “So, you’re one of those people who analyzes everything, huh?”

  Or: “That’s kind of dark.”

  Or worse: “Um…OK.”

  • • •

  My school’s Martha Dumptruck frequently submitted poems to our literary journal, of which I was on the editorial board. I thought her poetry was terrible. I was so embarrassed for her. What I knew about poetry in high school was that it was both hard to understand and completely open to interpretation. I was told that a poem could really mean anything. Poems could have grammatical mistakes, they could give a fuck about narrative or the space-time continuum or reality as we knew it. Poetry was an attempt to dig into the buried stuff inside a person’s psyche. It used dream logic instead of the logic of our waking lives. Poems were sputtered by demons not sprung out of morality. In other words, poems were deep shit, and they were also anything at all (this became clearer the further I strayed from my high school’s poetry curriculum): a single word (lighght), symbols and signs (Hannah Weiner’s code poems), phrases that a child learning to speak might say (a rose is a rose is a rose), words that have been uttered a zillion times (I love thee/you), a blank page, a collage, an erasure, a Google spam filter, whatever. But if that was the case, if poems could be anything at all, then why is the default to cringe whenever someone writes a poem about their feelings? Even worse if that someone is a teenager? Even worse if that someone is no longer a teenager but nonetheless thinks about themselves with the kind of intensity that is only acceptable between the ages of thirteen and nineteen?