PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017

by Kelly Link

  Sorry to keep you waiting, he says, looking directly at me.

  I lower my gaze and say, Don’t worry.

  But then I decide that it is silly of me to come all the way here to not look at him in the face. This is Omar! The one I think fondly of every day.

  I bring my eyes level with his. It’s so nice to see you. When was the last time?

  He leans back in his chair and thinks for a moment. I don’t know!

  As we sit in awe, marveling over the fact that we are both in Amman together (this is what I’m thinking, at least), silence creeps between us. We begin to look around, chasing each other’s gaze.

  After some time, I sigh and say, Wow, this place is really beautiful.

  You like it? he asks.

  Yes, very much so. Do you come here often?

  No, he says. I’ve never been here before. I don’t usually leave the area near the university. I asked a friend to suggest a place where we should meet.

  I wonder, Did Omar tell his friend about me?

  It is so beautiful here, I say again. We have nothing like this in Mafrag.

  To which he laughs. There are many things here that you do not have in Mafrag.

  The waiter brings our drinks in etched goblets with long straws.

  So lovely! I say, and take a sip. It is syrupy and thick and gets caught in my throat as I try to swallow. I cough for what seems like several moments, and Omar looks at me with concern. His stare makes it even more difficult for me to catch my breath.

  Finally, I calm down, and he lightly touches my arm. Are you okay?

  I nod my head yes, and try to prevent the tears that have pooled in my eyes from running down my cheeks.

  There must be bones in there, he says.

  I look at him with confusion. Bones?

  He smiles. It’s something my father used to say when we were little. You’ve never heard it before?

  No, I say.

  Omar pulls a package of cigarettes from his pocket and begins to smoke. I watch his hands, notice the way he holds the cigarette between his third and fourth fingers as opposed to the second and third. When he cups his hand around the flame of the lighter, I see that his fingernails have been chewed to the quick. He is the gentle and bright boy I remember from my childhood, I think, but something is different about him. When he smiles, his eyes no longer pinch at the sides. Strands of gray streak his otherwise black hair. It is then I realize that we’ve forgotten how to be ourselves around each other. It has been too many years, I think, for us to even speak.

  But why was it so much easier on Facebook? That felt natural and real.

  Can we speak in English? I ask, hoping to lighten the mood, to bring us back to a time when we were close.

  He hesitates in Arabic. Amal, I—

  Oh, please! Like we did when we were young.

  We never spoke, he said. Just passed notes.

  Well, let’s speak. I have no one to practice with at home. You must get to speak English all the time here.

  Not really, he says, and lights another cigarette. Really, I can’t. I am too embarrassed of my accent.

  But, if you want to be a doctor in England, you’ll—

  I know, I know, he interrupts me. Please, it is difficult for me now. English makes my brain even more tired than it already is.

  I nod and drink more honeydew—this time, slowly. I then concentrate on my own hands in my lap. On the tiny lines crisscrossing the tops of my knuckles.

  I’m sorry, he says. Please don’t be upset.

  I try not to be, but my vision blurs, and tiny droplets of tears fall onto my lap, darkening the fabric of my jilbab in a kind of constellation. I didn’t expect it to be like this.

  And it is then I hear Omar say to me, in English: How are you, Miss Amal?

  I wipe the tears from my face and smile. His accent is atrocious. I am very well, Mister Omar. And yourself?

  I am tired.

  I tilt my head to the side. Tired? Are you not happy to see me?

  Oh, I am happy to see you. But I am also very tired.

  You study too much.

  Not enough.

  How not enough? You are always studying!

  Trust me, he says. Then, Did you find your book?

  My book? I ask, nearly forgetting the lie I had written him. Alas, no. The bookseller didn’t have it.

  And you came all this way? What a shame!

  I shrug. Does he really think it’s a shame?

  I am sad when it is time for Omar to return to the university, and me to the bus station. Not because I am going back to Mafrag and will not see him for some time, though that is certainly part of it, but because I am realizing that shared memories aren’t quite enough. I never would have imagined, after all these years, that this person whom I’ve felt so connected to (without as much as exchanging a word!) could be so distant, so lost. I am sorry that I pushed him to speak English, that I held on to this tiny nugget from our childhood for so long. I am sorry that I wasn’t prepared for him to have grown or changed in a way that diverged from my imaginings of him, and that I didn’t know how to

  respond to it.

  I don’t tell him any of this, of course. And so we shake hands and walk our separate ways.

  Why do you think we’ve been put on this Earth?

  What is it you want most out of life?

  Amal, what makes you cry?

  Back at our house, my father lies in bed while my mother makes tea. I curl my legs under myself on the couch and light a cigarette.

  Amal, habibiti, are you all right?

  My mother sets a glass in my hands and sits down beside me. My dear, please say something.

  I look at her, but I don’t know anything I could possibly say.

  She leans her head into mine, grabs the back of my neck. We sit like this for some minutes, and I feel her tears mixing with mine.

  I’m here, Amal. I’m here when you need me.

  After my mother and father go to bed, I log on to Facebook.

  I have sixteen messages: three from Nour, six from Sousan, seven from Aliya. These I leave in my inbox, unopened, as I search for Omar’s page. After a minute or so, it loads, looks the same as it usually does. There aren’t any new comments, any new posts on his wall, any evidence of activity at all. I can’t say that I expected there to be, but it saddens me all the same.

  There was a time when I didn’t know if Omar remembered me, when I didn’t know if he and I would ever write letters to each other again. I try to go back, to imagine that he and I hadn’t yet become Facebook friends, that I hadn’t found that picture of us when we were children.

  Sousan and Ahmed are smiling, sitting nervously in the guest room.

  My mother is bumbling around the kitchen, clanking spoons against aluminum pots, preparing coffee for us all.

  I click through Omar’s pics for the first time.

  Omar in front of the gates of the university, wearing sunglasses and making a backwards peace sign.

  A Barcelona football jersey.

  Omar in a red keffiyeh.

  It was such a beautiful feeling, to have that kind of hope in another person.

  ______________

  Emily Chammah is an assistant editor at American Short Fiction, where she co-organizes the Insider Prize, a contest for incarcerated writers in Texas. She is the creator of the online travel guide Weird and Wonderful Cairo and works as an immigration paralegal in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

  Editor’s Note

  Katherine Magyarody’s “Goldhawk,” which was the winner of the fiction category in The Malahat Review’s 2016 Open Season Awards, is a subtle story about twenty-first-century office environments. Dinara, an immigrant, from a former totalitarian state, is the only woman on her team at an IT company. (I imagine it to be located in the 9
05 calling area, the band of edge cities girdling Toronto.) Her much younger male peers, most of whom have “student loans to repay, mortgages, children to raise,” resent that she’s survived repeated downsizings, attributing this not to the quality of her work but to her gender.

  The sighting of a gold-colored hawk in the trees unifies the team—Dinara included—as they watch it in awe from a wall of sun-drenched windows. This “fellow” feeling, however, is short-lived.

  I love this story because it captures the light-flooded sterility of today’s workplace, which conditions employees to pay lip service to equity while sequestering themselves in sublimated misogyny and xenophobia. This is not the Canada that our apparent openness to others promulgates, and Magyarody is to be congratulated for showing how such forces continue to undermine the social praxis of everyday life. The symbolism of the hawk sits lightly on her story, as lightly and as elusively as Dinara herself, who evinces a protective self-determination in not allowing herself to be too well understood. “Goldhawk” causes us to reflect on the intractable, fallible nature of our assumptions and freedoms.

  John Barton, editor

  The Malahat Review

  Goldhawk

  Katherine Magyarody

  Dinara Akhmatova survived the purges. First the company laid off the lazy and the incompetent. Dinara, with a row of programming manuals and her cut-glass award for ten years of service the only ornaments in her cubicle, was not even looked at by management. Or rather, their eyes passed over her while the fingertips of one hand flew across the keyboard and the other cradled the newest prototype. When the company still hemorrhaged money, they began cutting entire projects. The aspirational ventures, the innovations that had made their name. Dinara, slight of body and flexible of mind, refocused all her attention onto product development. Once the mandarin class of employees had been cut loose, the company went through each remaining team and discarded one in three. She came in early and stayed later than anyone. She survived.

  Her colleagues did not like her for it.

  “It’s because she’s a woman,” Sergei muttered. “It looks good for the diversity profile.”

  “She’s gotta be . . . old,” Leroy said. He worked a few cubicles down from her. He was not sure how old Dinara was, but surely the young needed jobs more than someone his mother’s age. He and his team had student loans to repay, mortgages, children to raise. Dinara had . . . well, beyond the silver Toyota Camry she drove to work, he was not sure what she had.

  “It’s because she’s a . . .” a student intern began. He was just beginning to learn the habits of the company and wanted badly to contribute his first gossip “around the water cooler,” a phenomenon described in the books on business culture he had pored over. Instead of finishing, he rolled his eyes. He could not find the words. But the others nodded, because what Dinara was precisely was hard to tell.

  She was, indeed, a woman. That was easy. In a company of computer programmers and product testers who wore scrubby polo shirts and khakis to work, Dinara wore long gauzy skirts and soft, pastel cardigans that emphasized her birdlike figure. She wore dangling silver earrings below her short dark hair. She was soft-

  spoken and her voice was high. The single time she had been known to make a joke was at a meeting where a new employee named Nureyev was introduced. “Will you develop superior techniques so beautifully and then defect?” she asked; her impish smile narrowly survived the awkward silence. She then added, “You share your name with a kak eta . . . wondrous man of dance.” The men had laughed for her benefit; even though they resented her, they could not bear to see her softness damaged in public.

  How old was she? It was difficult to guess. Her hair was as black as her eyes. If someone looked closely—which no one bothered to do—they might have seen fine lines around her eyes, across her forehead, connecting the corners of her nostrils to the tips of her smiling lips. Where she was from was equally difficult to tell. She spoke quietly, quickly, and not long enough for the others to catch her accent. Her name looked a little Russian, with its -ova another testament to her femininity, but she looked not at all Russian, with her olive skin and low broad cheekbones. Nor did she possess any motherly rapport with the gang of young Russian product testers. Indeed, she seemed to avoid them, to cling to the shadows and corners when they walked by bragging loudly and unselfconsciously about their computers, their cars.

  Had anyone asked Dinara what she was, she would have said, “Oh, darling, I am so tired.”

  Or perhaps she would remain silent, because admitting to fatigue might insinuate her inability to make the quota. She had chosen this country; this was the end point of her third and final migration. She was determined to prove that the evaporation of her savings in immigration fees and the melting away of her untranslatable credentials, as she passed through the atmosphere of another language and culture, had been worthwhile.

  She had, once upon a time, studied the stars at a national institute. She loved the sky. But penetrating the unknown of the universe was small compensation. Each of her choices was monitored, analyzed, cataloged, and stripped of mystery. Now, having escaped, she took pleasure in knowing that her work contributed to protecting privacy, a privilege she had grown up without. Now she protected the privacy of unknown others even as she protected her own.

  There were other benefits to her work. The building was beige and putty colored inside, but every morning when Dinara drove to the office she watched the sun stain the broad sky as it rose. As the light built in intensity from purplish blue to green, pink, orange, gold, she would see the silhouettes of the trees emerge from the uniform darkness. Where she had grown up, there was only village and wilderness, city and wilderness, crop field and wilderness. The wilderness was where the land was too tough for cultivation, where people threw their empty bottles and cigarette butts. The government had sternly encouraged reproduction, so there was only occasionally a distended condom, translucent and miraculous.

  In this country, she had a sense that even the pines and the sumac and the tall grass along the corridor of the highway were imbued with love. It was with wonder that one morning in early spring she spotted a group of orange-outfitted men picking up trash from the median. She thought of calling her mother and telling her, but her mother, a kerchiefed lady rooted to her particular patch of land and no other, would have simply shaken her head at the insanity of the West.

  And truly, Dinara thought as she waited for her code to run, in comparison to her mother’s years loading and unloading bread from trucks, selling bread and eating it, there was something insane about a room of people who spent their days staring at small boxes. About people who spent their days in silence punctuated by the tap of plastic keys.

  “Hawk!” someone cried.

  “Whoa! Hawk!” Another took up the cry. Around her, the men were leaping from their chairs and running.

  Dinara paused at her typing, her heart beating hard. Was this some sort of North American engineering term? She looked up at her row of programming-language manuals. No, she wouldn’t find the answer in her reference guides. She stood up and began walking toward the windows, where a crowd was forming. Hawk, she was sure, was some slang a boy genius had invented to keep some people from understanding. She hugged her elbows and moved slowly, to give herself time to think, to plan.

  But her pace quickened as she saw that the others were not in a circle, facing inward, but in a cluster facing the cruelly bright sky.

  “Hawk,” Samy said quietly, he whom Dinara often overheard unabashedly discussing the pliancy of women’s bodies over the phone in pungent Hebrew. Perhaps he thought no one understood him. Perhaps he didn’t care. Now, Samy’s face was almost reverent. He pointed.

  Dinara quickly put on her glasses, her secret vanity conceding to her desire for knowledge.

  And she saw.

  There, on the Norway pine, ten feet from the wall of the buildin
g, perched a great golden bird.

  “Hawk,” Dinara breathed.

  Someone—Mo, the babyish university intern—tapped the glass. The bird’s head turned instantly, locating the source of the sound. And then it swooped down at the winter-pale faces. A hushed gasp rose and a few at the front of the crowd stumbled backward, dreading the sharp smack of flesh against glass, of bones breaking. Dinara stepped forward to see better.

  In the last moment, the bird swerved away to the right. It soared high, wheeled in a circle, and dove again. This time, it pulled itself directly upward. Gold plumes flashed as it rose, wings churning as it turned.

  “That thing is going to smash itself into the window,” Samy said, stepping away.

  “She will not,” Dinara said. “She is . . . too smart.”

  Sergei shrugged, turned. “You see it, sometimes, in the parking lot. The birds break their necks against the glass. It’ll happen either now or later.”

  The others watched in silence as the raptor ducked to the left and continued to circle, flexing its talons. Rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.

  Reginald Tau reminded them of the client meeting. “Sixteen hours, people,” he said.

  They peeled away from the window, returned to the fluorescent depths of the building. Dinara was the last to retreat. For the rest of the afternoon, she could see people surreptitiously tipping their chairs back to check whether the bird was still there.

  But the hawk seemed to have lost interest and vanished.

  The hands on the wall clock ticked past five o’clock, then six o’clock in the evening. The creature had not reappeared.

  “Is it a goldhawk?” she asked Leroy as the rest started to trickle homeward. She noticed he had a Wikipedia page on raptors nestled discreetly beside his work email. Dinara didn’t know many animal names, but Goldhawk was the name of a street in her neighborhood.

  “No such thing,” he said, pulling up the page. He looked smug, because he had figured something out before her. “What we saw was a red-tailed hawk. They’re actually not supposed to be this far south and west.”