The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  I didn’t know Ted before, but he and I are Facebook friends now. He travels all over the world; I have no idea how or why. It looks adventurous and fun, and he often has a beer in hand. That makes me pretty sure the meal in the photo is lunch and the drinks are strawberry iced teas. There’s a basket of pita on the table, too, so it’s Middle Eastern. Michigan has kick-ass Middle Eastern. You’re probably waiting for the hummus.

  Ted must have asked the waitress to take the photo. In the twenty-five years I’ve known you, I can’t remember your ever taking a picture or asking someone to take a picture of you. Ted, though, has lots of photos on his Facebook wall. He’s probably used to asking waitresses to take them because of all his travels. You’re sitting opposite in a booth, wearing shorts and a checked shirt, with that relaxed look one feels with a childhood friend who’s known you from the time your mom dressed you in a red turtleneck and plaid pants. There’s a bond you feel with kids from elementary school, maybe because you share some of your earliest memories, like for example, if your third-grade teacher came back from the bathroom with her panty hose tucked into her skirt. You both remember the embarrassment hanging over the classroom and how relieved everyone was when the smart girl—the one who was a violin prodigy—whispered the truth into the teacher’s ear.

  Maybe you and Ted both remember it and laugh over your strawberry lemonades until your ribs hurt and you can’t breathe. Maybe you both realize you learned a valuable lesson that day: that it’s always kind to tell someone when their butt is showing so they can fix the problem. Who knows—maybe you both spent the rest of childhood worrying your moms might come out of the bathroom in the same predicament. Can you imagine?

  Since the photo in the restaurant is just you and Ted, I imagine your wife stayed home with the boys while you spent time with your elementary school friend. The reason I know you aren’t visiting Ted is that, after he and I became Facebook friends, I saw other photos from the weekend.

  You probably experience that familiar guilt or sense of failure while you eat lunch. Despite having a great time with Ted and feeling like a kid again, you know your wife hates what you do and how you do it. If you don’t bring the boys to lunch, she’ll say you are an uninvolved dad. If you bring the boys, she’ll be angry you let them eat too much bread and permitted them Cokes and dessert. Since she’ll be unhappy when you get home, you tell yourself you’ll make up for it by playing with the boys later. You and Ted can set up a game of backyard ball like when you were kids.

  In the backyard photo, the boys wear only bathing suits so it must be summer. An inflatable children’s pool sits within the frame of the shot. The boys have a white plastic ball and a yellow plastic bat. You stand close to the batter, supervising. Your hands are on your hips and, though it’s a long-distance shot, it seems like you’re smiling. I spot your little dog Scout nearby, which really hurts now. If there was one thing in your note you made clear, you did not want Scout living with HER. I imagine you probably thought she’d kick Scout or mistreat her. After all that’s happened, I worry you’re right. It’s good Scout is with your parents.

  Ted stands deep on the lawn to get the backyard shot. From all his travel photos, he seems to be single with no kids. I imagine he’s thinking how lucky you are to be married to a tall, pretty redhead. You live in a nice house in the suburbs with your three redheaded boys and Scout. You have a wood deck and an inflatable swimming pool for the kids. I don’t see any drinks or beers on the patio table, but there is a pile of towels. The hanging pot of begonias is a flash of bright pink in full bloom. Your wife keeps a nice house and waters the flower baskets like the other neighbors.

  I don’t really know Ted aside from his travel photos, but his interest in capturing the backyard scene is obvious. Even if he’s out there just to man the outfield, he took the time to get a picture so he’d remember the day. I’ll bet he’s glad he did. Like the photo in the restaurant, the photo in the yard holds a quality of authenticity. No one is posing or posturing to look good or prove he’s a certain kind of successful husband and father. The kids are fully immersed in the game. I imagine Ted is watching through the lens, comparing his life to yours. Not better or worse, only different.

  Maybe you and Ted played baseball in elementary school. The game in your yard might feel like reliving the past, something neither one of you ever expected to do. How strange to stand there and see your friend in the outfield; only he’s not a kid anymore—he’s a grown man with features you couldn’t have predicted when you were young. Now you get to see him all grown up. What a treat. And even though you don’t play baseball with the boys all that often (your wife is usually in charge), the photo is a permanent reminder you were that kind of dad.

  The backyard photo reminds me you’re a big guy, well over six feet tall. Even though you’re not an affectionate person, you look like a teddy bear. You’re handsome. The hair near your temples has turned gray. You’re wearing a white T-shirt and khaki shorts. Scout is by your side. The boys are playing baseball, happy. Though the grass is long, I see your Birkenstocks. I know they’re the same ones. You’re the kind of guy who wears his Birkenstocks until the soles are worn out. It takes a long time, especially in Michigan where you can only wear them half the year. Maybe they’re even the same Birkenstocks from college, where we met.

  It was fall when you jumped, the end of September. Such an unusually warm season for Michigan. The only reason you wore the Birkenstocks that day was that it still felt like summer. It was like eighty degrees. The clothes you wore the last time anyone saw you were just like the clothes you’re wearing in the photos with Ted. Including the Birkenstocks. They found one on the bridge, near the car. I think a lot about the other one, where it went. Did they find it? Did you wear one shoe when you did it? Such a stupid detail, there’s no way I can ask.

  You probably weren’t thinking about Ted when you jumped. So much has gone wrong with your wife. You’re distraught she wants to keep you from your kids. She’s gone crazy about it, even had you arrested for assaulting her. I know you didn’t do it and not just because your note says so. She had her sister take a video. It takes four minutes before you finally swat the camera phone from her sister’s hand. You never even raise your voice as your wife badgers you about drinking.

  Scout is in the video, too. She likes to lie on the back of the couch while you sit in the basement watching TV. It’s cozy down there, which is good since you’ve been banished. It happened over time as your wife grew more and more disappointed in her husband, and you grew more and more unwilling to argue. No, it wasn’t the best move. I know you regretted it; you confided in my husband that you wanted to be a family again. He suggested you write your wife a letter, which you did. You stopped drinking. You spent more time with the boys. But your wife was done, which was okay until she tried to get full custody and the house, and wanted enough child support to keep a part-time work schedule.

  Scout is your dog, everyone knows. I’m sure Ted noticed when he was there. She looks so cute, in the video, on the back of the couch. She can tell there’s a situation, so she stays flat on her belly and watches. Your wife says the boys came down to play with you earlier. Lucky, their last time. Not so lucky because your wife thinks the play was too wild and that you’ve been drinking. Thus the video. Thus the demand for a breath test, the four minutes of “no’s” from you, Scout on the back of the couch, your wife’s growing intensity and frustration, your swatting away of the phone. I actually laugh when you mutter “psycho” as she narrates how she’s being pushed around. It is not a funny video.

  Your lawyer warned you about this. He said some women become so unhinged during divorce proceedings they literally throw themselves down the stairs and blame the estranged husband for injuries. It’s a tactic, a ploy, to get a judge’s sympathy. You know this as you are handcuffed in front of the neighbors and hauled away to jail. You spend three days there because you don’t bother to call your lawyer.

  What happened to you in
there?

  She will not rest, you say. She will not rest until you cannot see your boys at all. You write this down after the police escort you to your house to pack up some belongings. They say you can’t go back home. You’re not allowed to see your boys unless you go to Detroit. Even then, it will be supervised. I can see how, after jail and police escorts and more filed motions, it seemed she would not rest. Obviously you believed it or you wouldn’t have jumped.

  Where is the other Birkenstock? My god, did it hurt when you landed? Wasn’t it freezing there, up north on the Mackinac Bridge, compared to the lower part of the state? Weren’t you cold? Did you think about Ted and the day you played baseball in the yard with your boys, and Scout, and the white ball and yellow bat? Maybe the memory passed through your mind, a comfort to have seen the adult face of a childhood friend, your boys immersed in the game, your dog Scout by your side on a summer’s day.

  My husband called me on a Tuesday to say the police found your car on the bridge. Your note was inside. The lone Birkenstock was nearby. You must have jumped; they think you are dead. We debate it for a few minutes; I mean, you weren’t the suicidal type, maybe you parked on the bridge and walked off.

  Or not.

  My husband remembers Ted a few hours later. He says Ted was your childhood friend and he’s sure no one’s told him. Ted was important to you. He needs to know what happened. I check your Facebook wall to figure out Ted’s last name. I send him a message to please call my husband and his phone number. Ted calls within the hour. I feel terrible we have to share such news. You probably never pictured any of us having to do that.

  I send Ted a message later telling him how sorry I am. I ask if I can send him a friend request on Facebook. A friend of yours, after all, should be a friend of mine. When he accepts, I find the photos of the restaurant and the backyard, and I stare at them, trying to figure something—anything—out. I can tell Ted mourns you by the things he posts. He informs your school friends because, of course, they would want to know. It’s been years, but they all feel terrible. You were always a nice guy, a good friend. I imagine that Ted, like me, thinks about you all the time. He revisits the photos at the restaurant and in the yard. Maybe, like me, he pokes around my Facebook photos looking for you.

  When I post on your wall about Michigan State’s victory over Michigan, Ted comments, too. We wonder if you had something to do with the botched snap that led to our final touchdown to win the game. The Ohio State game, too. It’s been a hell of a season. Maybe you saw to it so your boys would feel closer to you. They’re big Spartan fans.

  Did you ever think Ted and I would remember you every time we watch a Spartan game? That Ted would reach out to your elementary school friends? That Ted and I would become Facebook friends? That I’d study the pictures of the two of you hoping to gain something back that was lost?

  And this is just me and Ted. We’re on the periphery. If you knew I’d take the time to write all this down, would you have considered not jumping? Would it have jolted you to the realization Jerry Garcia wasn’t kidding when he sang about a ripple in still water. Me and Ted, we’re on the outer rim of the ripple. If it’s this bad for me and Ted, just imagine how bad it feels to those close to the center of the circle.

  Your boys are with your wife. Your parents took Scout like you wanted. The weather turned cold. Christmas passed. Your body has still not been recovered. I wonder if the boys know you jumped? If you can see me writing this now? If knowing all this makes you wish you hadn’t jumped? Could I have stopped you?

  I imagine what would have happened had you not jumped. I picture you and Ted on a trip somewhere in the world having a beer, talking about playing backyard baseball with the boys and when you can do it again. Ted might tell you he never would have guessed things would go so wrong with your pretty, redheaded wife. You say it’s for the best. Everyone is much happier now. You’re so glad all that is over. Ted is glad, too.

  I wouldn’t know Ted if it had gone this way. That would be better. I’m positive Ted thinks so, too.

  Heidi Julavits

  The Art at the End of the World

  from The New York Times Magazine

  We were taking an airplane, I told our children, to see what I dramatically billed as “the end of the world.”

  “Can’t we go to a beach?” they asked. It was February. They were sick of the cold.

  I promised them sand and plenty of water, but unless things went terribly wrong, we would probably not be swimming in it.

  “Where are we going?” they asked.

  We were flying 2,000 miles to see more than 6,000 tons of black basalt rocks extending 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake in the shape of a counterclockwise vortex, designed by the most famous practitioner of ’70s land art, Robert Smithson.

  “It’s called the ‘Spiral Jetty,’” I told them.

  I showed them pictures. I admitted that maybe “the end of the world” wasn’t the best way to advertise what I hoped we would experience, even though previous visitors had described the landscape as hauntingly spare, as resembling how our planet might appear following a nuclear holocaust. Smithson’s gallerist, Virginia Dwan, said the jetty “was something otherworldly, but I hesitate to say hell, because I don’t mean everybody being tortured and so forth, but the feeling of aloneness, and of it being in a place that was unsafe, and something devilish, something devilish there.”

  Adding to the excitement I presumed we now shared: The road conditions near the jetty were highly variable, which was to say not always roads. The lake’s water levels, too, needed to be below 4,195 feet for us to see it, and those levels were partly dependent on snowfall (this winter there was lots) and how much of that snow, by the time we arrived, had melted and sluiced down the mountains—water that also, en route to the lake, could turn the sixteen miles of unpaved roads into impassable mush.

  Where we were headed, in other words, we might not be able to reach. And even if we were, what we traveled so far to see might not be visible.

  “Will there be internet?” they asked.

  I appealed, finally, to their desire to see me happy, a strategy that, thus far in our lives, had failed 100 percent of the time. I told them that, for more than a decade, I’d wanted to visit “Spiral Jetty,” as though these years of compressed desire had become a diamond that I could flash in their faces, my little crows.

  This ploy worked as well as it ever had. They grudgingly accepted their fate. I accepted mine. You cannot sell others on a pilgrimage. You cannot drum desire out of nothing. Unlike me, the crows had not once held a piece of the jetty in their hands. It was 2004. I was in Los Angeles. My friend, Christopher James, an artist and Smithson admirer, had been tracking the water levels around the jetty for years. Because, for almost three decades—roughly since the death of its creator, at age thirty-five, in a plane crash—the jetty, except for a few brief reappearances, was submerged. Around 1999, the lake’s water started to recede (because of drought) so that by 2002 the jetty could, again, be seen; people, again, could walk it. People like James could get in their trucks and drive thousands of highway miles and then through the cow fields and out to the Great Salt Lake, where the coastline “reverberated out to the horizons,” according to Smithson, “only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake.”

  James arrived to find that the jetty’s black rocks, following their lengthy submersion, had become coated in pinkish-white salt formations like barnacles affixed to the hull of a sunken ship. He took one of the salt formations—cracked free from the rock to which it had been affixed—home as a souvenir. This was how I came to hold not a piece of the jetty, exactly, so much as a commemoration—the material accrual—of its disappearance. “Time turns metaphors into things,” Smithson wrote. The salt formation was the size of my fist and weighty, warm and damp. “It’s half the size that it used to be,” I remember James saying. Exposed to the air, and possibly to the dryness of Californi
a, he guessed, the salt formation was evaporating. Within a few months, the time in my hand would finish changing states, conclude its vanishing act and disappear.

  We landed in Salt Lake City. We rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle because my husband, calling ahead to a ranger at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, where the asphalt ends and the dirt begins, had been warned that the road to the jetty was “pretty bad.” We received a similarly grim prognosis from the rental agent, who, on learning our destination, asked us whether we had checked the water levels. “I don’t think you’ll be able to see it,” he said.

  We did not panic. Instead we rejoiced. The natural obstacles on and around which the jetty was built, along with Smithson’s prolific writings, suggest he designed the jetty to be both difficult to reach and difficult to see. He constructed it during a drought in 1970; he knew the water would someday rise. While in Rome, in 1961, surrounded by art tourists, he wrote in a letter to Nancy Holt (who would later become his wife): “People want to stare with aggressive eagerness or they feel they must stare in order to grant approval. There is something indecent about such staring.”

  An underwater artwork is the perfect remedy for indecency.

  On the highway, mountains surrounded us. The crows had never witnessed a landscape like this; save once when tiny, they had never been west of the East. I urged them to look out the car windows rather than at their phones, and confirm that they were totally undone by the awesomeness. I demanded their indecent staring. But the crows are predominantly city creatures. Nature didn’t interest them as much as civilization and its inhabitants did. We passed an abandoned amusement park, the roller coaster coiling like a train track yanked skyward by a tornado. We passed defunct factories that, with their silos and peaks, resembled the Mormon churches we could see in the distance, isolated and chalk-white against the brown mountainsides in which they were embedded. The billboards advertised Bibles and services you could pay for to deal with local plagues (fire water mold storm). At regular intervals we drove beneath a digital sign that read zero highway fatalities. The smaller print told a slightly less cheerful story: 26 out of 47 days. The landscape thrummed with vastness; other than the highway’s thin river of commerce, the world outside our car was unmarked and uncontained (and un-time-stamped) by buildings and sidewalks and people.