The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  Jan. 27: Wonderful day, cloudless and still. The fliers are often in the sky . . .

  March 20: Truckloads of furniture get taken away. Feb 8, Feb 13, April 13: boys from the Pre come for candy. March 14 Lady comes in a car . . . More furniture gets shipped off . . . Two sisters go to the airport; 10 busloads of children come to see the airplanes . . . June 22: Rest a while and go over to the airport. Pay $10 of my own money to go up in the airship . . . July 4: Go to airport to see the highest flier come down—19,900 feet high. Aug. 29: Two men come to talk about buying 200 acres for a golf course . . . Thanksgiving: A fine chicken dinner. Eldress Anna, Caroline, Ella and myself go to see The Golddiggers at the Madison Theater in Albany.

  Utopian dreams, socialist values, sand. The stock market crashes. The kids from the Pre collect pennies. Gold Diggers. The celibate sisters see a movie about sex.

  The film is a play within a play where showgirls search for men and money, neither of which tally with Shaker values. There’s drinking and dancing on tables. Girls sleep with married men. The story hinges on one dancer’s failure to say: “I am the spirit of the ages and the progress of civilization.”

  Sister Lucy’s diary ends on Thanksgiving. She never says if she likes the movie. Its hit song is “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine.” In it the singer promises to chase away sadness and depression, to keep emotional clouds at bay with a forced gaiety. The Shakers and their socialist dreams are nearly extinct, and all that remains of the movie are the last twenty minutes. The rest has disappeared.

  Part III. Clouds

  I stand in the shadow of a mountain. It’s early autumn; asters and goldenrod bob their heads. The mountain is fenced in, and the top is flat. On it a tanker spews water. The truck is so high and distant it looks like a toy. The mountain, though, is not a mountain; it is the Albany landfill, nearly two hundred acres of trash, 360,000 tons deposited a year. I’m here with a biologist. He first came twenty years ago to volunteer on the controlled fires set each summer that preserve the sand and butterflies, scrub oak and pines.

  We cross a sandy track so fine and golden we could be at the beach. A few feet away, the ground turns gray. A tire tread is hardened into it. The biologist tells me it’s clay like glaciers deposit today. They melt, leaving areas that pond and pool where the clay filters out. Same here, he says, just millennia ago. He’s showing me a glacier in this shadow of the dump, a shadow of trash filled with what we’ve discarded. The dump is a shadow, too, or will be soon. It will close in 2020 to be returned to sand and scrub and Nabokov’s butterflies, those blue clouds of snow.

  The biologist waves across this meadow. Five years ago, he says, there were streets, sidewalks, and septic systems here. The stream, the pond, and nodding flowers are all new. Even the sand has been brought in. In the background, the incessant beeping of reversing trucks blends with waves of cars on the interstate.

  At home, I zoom in on this spot with Google Earth. Shadowy lines appear onscreen over the sand and scrub. These shadows were roads. Hovering over them with a mouse, their names appear: Fox Run Lane, Brier Fox Boulevard, Tally Ho Drive, Fox Hound Avenue, Hunters Glen Avenue . . . They conjure British landed gentry, the sort who’d wear red tailcoats and jodhpurs, and ride to hounds, as if that could ever exist behind the landfill. What did were a hundred trailer homes. Google Street View shows images of them from 2007: a paneled home with an SUV outside, next door a sedan, and yellow siding on the house. Some lots just appear as grass and foundation. The street is already crumbling into tarmac. The county bought it up to transform it back into pine sands, which will burn regularly.

  I do find a ghost at the Shaker site: Rebecca Cox Jackson. She dreamt of clouds and the atmosphere. She was African American, became celibate, left her husband, and traveled the East Coast preaching a vision of salvation before joining the Shakers. She’d been illiterate but discovered she could read. It was a blessing. It was God. She picked up a Bible and the words were alive. “Eldress,” she became a leader, and in 1843, just after her first visit to Watervliet, she dreamed of rain and flowers.

  Sunday, 12th of March, after midnight, I laid down, fell asleep and . . . looked up into the air, saw wonderful strange colored clouds coming from the east . . . It began to rain, as if it were cotton, until the earth was covered . . . All the house, trees, and everything else disappeared. And then the rain changed from cotton to sweet-smelling flowers . . . I stepped to the door, picked some up, tasted them. Their taste was sweet just like the smell. I then put some in my bosom, but I am not able to tell what they smelt like. The whole air was perfumed with their odor, yea, with their heavenly smell . . . In that storm came streams of light. And they came in the form of hoops, white as snow, bright as silver, passing through the shower of flowers. They went like the lightning.

  At the end of her vision she began ministering to people. “I comforted them with the words that was given to me for them. They were all colored people, and they heard me gladly . . . I, Rebecca Jackson, was two-score and eight years and twenty-six days old, when in 1843, I dreamed about my people . . .”

  In her dreams there are strange clouds and cotton rain. “Sparks of light shower down like silver.” She also writes about how the Shakers are too self-absorbed in their isolation. “How will the world be saved if the Shakers are the only people of God on earth, and they seemed so busy in their own concerns?”

  I think of her in the shadow of the dump. How do we stop being so busy in our own concerns?

  She cries. She loves a woman, Rebecca Perot. Together they join the community at Watervliet. “The two Rebeccas,” the Shakers call them. Their relationship is hard to understand from our distance of 175 years. The Rebeccas don’t fit into our time, maybe not even into theirs. Were they mother and surrogate daughter? Friends? Lovers? Companions? The two Rebeccas: inseparable, inscrutable.

  I don’t find either of their graves. The other Rebecca, Rebecca Perot, took Jackson’s name when she died in 1871. She became the second Eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson. Together they established an urban ministry, mostly for women, mostly African American women. Most of them worked as domestic help in Philadelphia.

  I find a single drawing of Eldress Rebecca Jackson online. Her head juts out, as if she’s trying to fix on something in the distance. She wears a white Shaker cap and shawl, and holds a pen in one hand. Her two fingers are raised like Christ giving a benediction in some ancient icon. Two books are by her side, but I can read nothing into her. I see no rain, no hoops white as snow. I want to see her and the other Rebecca. I walk across the Shaker site past the two cop cars. The three men watch me warily. Or I am wary. I feel their watching. I try not to drift into their gaze. I try to look as if I know where I am going.

  The picture turns out not to be Jackson at all but another woman, as if any black woman in modest garb might be her.

  Jackson wakes up on January 14, 1848, dreaming that she was in Philadelphia in bed with the other Rebecca. “I thought someone might come in while we slept. And I said, ‘Rebecca, go and get three forks, and fasten the doors.’ . . . Rebecca rose immediately, and as she put the fork over the latch, a man rushed against the door . . .”

  Soon a Shaker brethren appeared outside, so did a well and a tub, and intimations of violence. He threw watermelons. The earth shook. She “saw a river of ice . . . and three ice rocks in it, and three men upon the rocks . . . The shaking of the earth caused the river, the rocks and the men to move up and down, and the men moved their hands like a person shooting.” They transformed into “one transparent brightness—white as snow and bright as silver . . . rays of light . . . a brilliant circle. And in my heart the sight was magnificent.”

  In my heart the site was magnificent. But I stand in the rain, sodden.

  That afternoon in the shadow of the mountain when the goldenrod bloomed and nodded, I ask the biologist why the tanker is spraying water.

  “Water?” he says puzzled.

  “Up there,” I point, “for the grasses, right?
” I assume native grasses have been planted on the dump’s plateau.

  He laughs. “It’s not water. It’s air freshener . . . Febreze.” Indeed, the smell wafts over us. It has a green chemical scent like dryer sheets. He and I stand on these spectral streets, the air filled with clouds of water, of rain—and of chemicals sprayed to mask the smell of trash. Jackson’s flowers fell in bunches after the rain. I put some in my bosom, but I am not able to tell what they smelt like. The whole air was perfumed with their odor, yea, with their heavenly smell . . .

  I’ve come to the dump to find the future and the past. Both haunt me in this place once named for a dream of England that must have seemed distant living here in a doublewide, near roads that memorialize a disappearing wilderness.

  The biologist tells me Nabokov’s endangered butterflies probably won’t survive. They can’t even fly across a four-lane road let alone a highway, and the issue, he explains, isn’t protecting one species but all species and their habitat. It is not one thing but all things. They’re interdependent. How will the world be saved? Jackson wrote.

  The butterflies rise like snowflakes. Rockefeller throws sand. It lifts like a cloud. Rain falls like cotton. Hoops white as snow, bright as silver, pass like lightning. I’m painting the clouds just like the song.

  Online, looking at the landfill and lost streets and lanes, I think about relicts and widows, Eldress Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot. I think too about the internet and our lives. Google’s data centers use nearly three hundred million watts of energy a year. The internet consumes around 5 percent of all energy usage. Stream music, TV, movies, shop online, subscribe online, pay bills online—or read this essay online. All of this life—our lives—happens online—in clouds, in the cloud, the cloud that is run by farms, server farms. All of this needs energy. The quaintly named cloud, which can seem as ethereal as the air and the sky, uses thirty billion watts of energy worldwide. A third of this is eaten up by data centers in the United States—and that statistic is out of date, that was in 2012. One data center takes more power than most towns in the US, and our energy usage has only increased despite attempts to stave off global warming. By 2020 the number of connected devices drawing on data and energy will more than triple, and by 2030, information technologies in the internet of things could account for as much as 20 percent of total energy use.

  This is what haunts me. The Gulf Stream is weakening; the climate will warm or cool precipitously, maybe even both in turn. The catastrophic changes that brought the sand to Albany happened in a timescale inscrutable to us, taking place over millennia instead of decades. In a human timeframe the dump will close. It will be planted with prairie grasses. Every year is the warmest on record, and glaciers melt. The Karner blue lives less than a week.

  The butterfly depends on fire and smoke to survive. The Shakers got their start here in smoke and clouds. It was the Dark Day. At noon in mid-May 1780 the depth of night spread from Maine to New Jersey. The Revolutionary War languished. Many saw it as the end times. The Shakers decided it was time to proselytize. The darkness wasn’t God, though, or the end—just a forest fire. The smoke had drifted east. As the ranks of Shakers grew, they cleared the land. An airport followed. They lent their tools to build it and the sisters fed the workers. Then a golf course, a dump, a university, the interstate, and climate change. That’s the prophecy I find.

  Lucy Bowers dies in 1935. The last three Shaker sisters leave Albany in 1938. In a newspaper interview, they say what they miss most are the airport’s planes and floodlights.

  When I’m blue, the song goes, all I have to do is paint the clouds . . . Shopping, self-creation, reinvention, reincarnation, faith . . . Longing has shaped this landscape. Or maybe this place has shaped them. They’ve all taken root here in the sand—airport, strip mall, suburbs. I find them in the wake of our dreams of progress. Throw something out and start over. Trash, sand, and highways, flight, clouds, silver orbs, and socialism’s most successful experiment.

  In a letter as Marx was dying, Friedrich Engels wrote, “Remember the Shakers!” He wanted to remind Marx that it had taken the Shakers years to build their community. This was the last thing Engels said to him, Remember . . .

  Ann Lee died on September 8, 1784. She was forty-eight. During her life, she was forced to strip to prove she was a woman, dragged behind a horse, imprisoned for treason because as a pacifist she couldn’t support a war. She didn’t believe in the legitimacy of the state or even Christmas. She was exhumed in 1835, and it was clear her skull had been fractured before she died. I find her grave. The stone is new and white like bone. The day feels like spring. It is February. At the edge of the cemetery, a tree hides broken markers. So many shattered graves, the violence is inescapable.

  Christ’s second coming, she preached that celibacy would create equality and the community of believers destroyed the traditional family structure. One hundred years after her death, Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that the family was a tool of capitalism and women’s oppression. Rebecca Jackson saw herself as a second Ann Lee. Illiterate, they both left their husbands for faith and wanted to rebuild society.

  By the time you read this, an ice shelf the size of Delaware will have broken off from Antarctica. As glaciers melt, fresh water is released into the oceans, slowing currents. The flood thirteen thousand years ago looks like prologue or prophecy. Touch the sand, drive the roads, go to the mall. Cotton rain falls in the shadow of the dump.

  Suki Kim

  Land of Darkness

  from Lapham’s Quarterly

  I am the only writer ever, as far as we know, to have lived undercover in North Korea, immersed within the system to investigate the place. In 2011 I took my fifth trip into Pyongyang, where, under the guise of being a missionary and an ESL teacher, I lived for six months with 270 North Korean males in a military compound. For this act, I am often described as “fearless.” People call me brave. But even if it sounds illogical, I consider myself to be a very fearful person. Even more, I believe my fearfulness is the only way I can begin to explain my time undercover in the gulag nation.

  North Korea is perhaps the darkest place in the world. The country lacks electricity; everything is gray and monotone, and the only meaning is given to the Great Leader, an authoritarian, godlike persona now worn for the third generation by thirty-three-year-old Kim Jong Un, who is considered the sun, though that sun exudes no warmth for its people. No other contemporary country is so entirely devoid of light.

  I have always been afraid of the dark. I rarely dream, and I used to sleepwalk as a child to escape the pitch-blackness of being asleep. Even now, I cannot turn the light off at night. This is a dreary habit since artificial light is so disruptive that I almost never sleep well. But my fear of the dark is overpowering; I would rather forsake good sleep if it means keeping the darkness at bay.

  Morning brings no relief. I often wake with a sinking feeling, then spend many early hours staring at unopened emails with dread, ill at ease with facing a shared territory of interaction. I have even been avoiding emails about this essay, which I’ve been afraid to start for weeks. I disabled the calendar app on my phone so that I would not be reminded of the approaching deadline. I recently had to fly from New York to Seoul, and the reasons for that trip became secondary to the flight itself, which suggested to me a fourteen-hour-long refuge when no one would be able to reach me or expect me to reciprocate.

  I experience the world, that is, as a map of fears to navigate, its coordinates all shattering bits coming at uneven speeds. This feeling has dogged me for as long as I can remember, and the map operates as a knot growing more tangled within me each day. Parts of it—the toughest paths to fathom—have been there for as long as I can recall. One of these paths leads back to North Korea, which often seems to me the dark night from which I have run all my life.

  My family was separated by the Korean War, and I was born and raised in South Korea. When I was twelve, my fat
her, who had been a millionaire, suddenly went bankrupt. In the middle of the night, I was awakened and shoved into a car and driven off to a city far away, to a relative’s house, where I waited for my parents to join me. Because bankruptcy is punishable there by jail, my parents had gone into hiding. I was a child and didn’t understand, so I waited, every day expecting their return. But I didn’t see them again until a year later, at John F. Kennedy Airport, in New York, after our family had fled Korea.

  Predictably, I don’t remember much of that year of waiting; that time remains in my mind as a hollow darkness from which the only sensation I recall is that of a thirst, the huge, bottomless kind that cannot be quenched. The darkness did not lift even when I immigrated to America and became reunited with my parents, now penniless. I did not speak a word of English. Everything I knew simply vanished in one instant, and I got stuck, I think, in the shadowy nook where I hid as a girl, aged twelve.

  Perhaps because of all this, I am good at waiting. I can wait for days and years, through rain and storm—even through darkness—and hardly ever ask questions. Somewhere deep in my mind, I must imagine that if I am quiet and good, my parents will come back. I could have made, I suppose, a very good wife to a very conservative man. But instead I became a writer in the English language despite, or maybe because of, the fact that English, which I adopted as a teen, was another road on my map of fear.

  As I write this, I’m reminded of a well near my childhood home. It was a deep, old-fashioned, cylindrical well made of stone, and the neighborhood kids played around it, throwing things and shouting into its vault to hear the echo. I was always terrified of it and never went near. Later in life I became briefly fixated with the work of Haruki Murakami because he kept using wells as symbols in his novels. But eventually I got bored of reading him; I realized that it wasn’t Murakami’s writing that haunted me but the well from my childhood. My passion for his work was just the flip side of a stronger fear.