The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  I worried too that I did not care for books. Reading did not do to me what it did to my parents, agitating them or turning them into vague beings lost to time, who did not quite notice when I came and went. I read books only enough to satisfy them and to answer the kinds of unexpected questions that might come in the middle of a meal—What did I think of Pip? Had Ezeulu done the right thing? I sometimes felt like an interloper in our house. My bedroom had bookshelves, stacked with the overflow books that did not fit in the study and the corridor, and they made my stay feel transient, as though I were not quite where I was supposed to be. I sensed my parents’ disappointment in the way they glanced at each other when I spoke about a book, and I knew that what I had said was not incorrect but merely ordinary, uncharged with their brand of originality. Going to the staff club with them was an ordeal: I found badminton boring; the shuttlecock seemed to me an unfinished thing, as though whoever had invented the game had stopped halfway.

  What I loved was kung fu. I watched Enter the Dragon so often that I knew all the lines, and I longed to wake up and be Bruce Lee. I would kick and strike at the air, at imaginary enemies who had killed my imaginary family. I would pull my mattress onto the floor, stand on two thick books—usually hardcover copies of Black Beauty and The Water-Babies—and leap onto the mattress, screaming “Haaa!” like Bruce Lee. One day, in the middle of my practice, I looked up to see Raphael standing in the doorway, watching me. I expected a mild reprimand. He had made my bed that morning, and now the room was in disarray. Instead, he smiled, touched his chest, and brought his finger to his tongue, as though tasting his own blood. My favorite scene. I stared at Raphael with the pure thrill of unexpected pleasure. “I watched the film in the other house where I worked,” he said. “Look at this.”

  He pivoted slightly, leaped up, and kicked, his leg straight and high, his body all taut grace. I was twelve years old and had, until then, never felt that I recognized myself in another person.

  Raphael and I practiced in the backyard, leaping from the raised concrete soakaway and landing on the grass. Raphael told me to suck in my belly, to keep my legs straight and my fingers precise. He taught me to breathe. My previous attempts, in the enclosure of my room, had felt stillborn. Now, outside with Raphael, slicing the air with my arms, I could feel my practice become real, with soft grass below and high sky above, and the endless space mine to conquer. This was truly happening. I could become a black belt one day. Outside the kitchen door was a high open veranda, and I wanted to jump off its flight of six steps and try a flying kick. “No,” Raphael said. “That veranda is too high.”

  On weekends, if my parents went to the staff club without me, Raphael and I watched Bruce Lee videotapes, Raphael saying, “Watch it! Watch it!” Through his eyes, I saw the films anew; some moves that I had thought merely competent became luminous when he said, “Watch it!” Raphael knew what really mattered; his wisdom lay easy on his skin. He rewound the sections in which Bruce Lee used a nunchaku, and watched unblinking, gasping at the clean aggression of the metal-and-wood weapon.

  “I wish I had a nunchaku,” I said.

  “It is very difficult to use,” Raphael said firmly, and I felt almost sorry to have wanted one.

  Not long afterward, I came back from school one day and Raphael said, “See.” From the cupboard he took out a nunchaku—two pieces of wood, cut from an old cleaning mop and sanded down, held together by a spiral of metal springs. He must have been making it for at least a week, in his free time after his housework. He showed me how to use it. His moves seemed clumsy, nothing like Bruce Lee’s. I took the nunchaku and tried to swing it, but only ended up with a thump on my chest. Raphael laughed. “You think you can just start like that?” he said. “You have to practice for a long time.”

  At school, I sat through classes thinking of the wood’s smoothness in the palm of my hand. It was after school, with Raphael, that my real life began. My parents did not notice how close Raphael and I had become. All they saw was that I now happened to play outside, and Raphael was, of course, part of the landscape of outside: weeding the garden, washing pots at the water tank. One afternoon, Raphael finished plucking a chicken and interrupted my solo practice on the lawn. “Fight!” he said. A duel began, his hands bare, mine swinging my new weapon. He pushed me hard. One end hit him on the arm, and he looked surprised and then impressed, as if he had not thought me capable. I swung again and again. He feinted and dodged and kicked. Time collapsed. In the end, we were both panting and laughing. I remember, even now, very clearly, the smallness of his shorts that afternoon, and how the muscles ran wiry like ropes down his legs.

  On weekends, I ate lunch with my parents. I always ate quickly, dreaming of escape and hoping that they would not turn to me with one of their test questions. At one lunch, Raphael served white disks of boiled yam on a bed of greens, and then cubed pawpaw and pineapple.

  “The vegetable was too tough,” my mother said. “Are we grass-eating goats?” She glanced at him. “What is wrong with your eyes?”

  It took me a moment to realize that this was not her usual figurative lambasting—“What is that big object blocking your nose?” she would ask, if she noticed a smell in the kitchen that he had not. The whites of Raphael’s eyes were red. A painful, unnatural red. He mumbled that an insect had flown into them.

  “It looks like Apollo,” my father said.

  My mother pushed back her chair and examined Raphael’s face. “Ah-ah! Yes, it is. Go to your room and stay there.”

  Raphael hesitated, as though wanting to finish clearing the plates.

  “Go!” my father said. “Before you infect us all with this thing.”

  Raphael, looking confused, edged away from the table. My mother called him back. “Have you had this before?”

  “No, Madam.”

  “It’s an infection of your conjunctiva, the thing that covers your eyes,” she said. In the midst of her Igbo words, “conjunctiva” sounded sharp and dangerous. “We’re going to buy medicine for you. Use it three times a day and stay in your room. Don’t cook until it clears.” Turning to me, she said, “Okenwa, make sure you don’t go near him. Apollo is very infectious.” From her perfunctory tone, it was clear that she did not imagine I would have any reason to go near Raphael.

  Later, my parents drove to the pharmacy in town and came back with a bottle of eye drops, which my father took to Raphael’s room in the boys’ quarters, at the back of the house, with the air of someone going reluctantly into battle. That evening, I went with my parents to Obollo Road to buy akara for dinner; when we returned, it felt strange not to have Raphael open the front door, not to find him closing the living-room curtains and turning on the lights. In the quiet kitchen, our house seemed emptied of life. As soon as my parents were immersed in themselves, I went out to the boys’ quarters and knocked on Raphael’s door. It was ajar. He was lying on his back, his narrow bed pushed against the wall, and he turned when I came in, surprised, making as if to get up. I had never been in his room before. The exposed light bulb dangling from the ceiling cast somber shadows.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I came to see how you are.”

  He shrugged and settled back down on the bed. “I don’t know how I got this. Don’t come close.”

  But I went close.

  “I had Apollo in Primary 3,” I said. “It will go quickly, don’t worry. Have you used the eye drops this evening?”

  He shrugged and said nothing. The bottle of eye drops sat unopened on the table.

  “You haven’t used them at all?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  He avoided looking at me. “I cannot do it.”

  Raphael, who could disembowel a turkey and lift a full bag of rice, could not drip liquid medicine into his eyes. At first, I was astonished, then amused, and then moved. I looked around his room and was struck by how bare it was—the bed pushed against the wall, a spindly table, a gray metal box
in the corner, which I assumed contained all that he owned.

  “I will put the drops in for you,” I said. I took the bottle and twisted off the cap.

  “Don’t come close,” he said again.

  I was already close. I bent over him. He began a frantic blinking.

  “Breathe like in kung fu,” I said.

  I touched his face, gently pulled down his lower left eyelid, and dropped the liquid into his eye. The other lid I pulled more firmly, because he had shut his eyes tight.

  “Ndo,” I said. “Sorry.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at me, and on his face shone something wondrous. I had never felt myself the subject of admiration. It made me think of science class, of a new maize shoot growing greenly toward light. He touched my arm. I turned to go.

  “I’ll come before I go to school,” I said.

  In the morning, I slipped into his room, put in his eye drops, and slipped out and into my father’s car, to be dropped off at school.

  By the third day, Raphael’s room felt familiar to me, welcoming, uncluttered by objects. As I put in the drops, I discovered things about him that I guarded closely: the early darkening of hair above his upper lip, the ringworm patch in the hollow between his jaw and his neck. I sat on the edge of his bed and we talked about Snake in the Monkey’s Shadow. We had discussed the film many times, and we said things that we had said before, but in the quiet of his room they felt like secrets. Our voices were low, almost hushed. His body’s warmth cast warmth over me.

  He got up to demonstrate the snake style, and afterward, both of us laughing, he grasped my hand in his. Then he let go and moved slightly away from me.

  “This Apollo has gone,” he said.

  His eyes were clear. I wished he had not healed so quickly.

  I dreamed of being with Raphael and Bruce Lee in an open field, practicing for a fight. When I woke up, my eyes refused to open. I pried my lids apart. My eyes burned and itched. Each time I blinked, they seemed to produce more pale ugly fluid that coated my lashes. It felt as if heated grains of sand were under my eyelids. I feared that something inside me was thawing that was not supposed to thaw.

  My mother shouted at Raphael, “Why did you bring this thing to my house? Why?” It was as though by catching Apollo he had conspired to infect her son. Raphael did not respond. He never did when she shouted at him. She was standing at the top of the stairs, and Raphael was below her.

  “How did he manage to give you Apollo from his room?” my father asked me.

  “It wasn’t Raphael. I think I got it from somebody in my class,” I told my parents.

  “Who?” I should have known my mother would ask. At that moment, my mind erased all my classmates’ names.

  “Who?” she asked again.

  “Chidi Obi,” I said finally, the first name that came to me. He sat in front of me and smelled like old clothes.

  “Do you have a headache?” my mother asked.

  “Yes.”

  My father brought me Panadol. My mother telephoned Dr. Igbokwe. My parents were brisk. They stood by my door, watching me drink a cup of Milo that my father had made. I drank quickly. I hoped that they would not drag an armchair into my room, as they did every time I was sick with malaria, when I would wake up with a bitter tongue to find one parent inches from me, silently reading a book, and I would will myself to get well quickly, to free them.

  Dr. Igbokwe arrived and shined a torch in my eyes. His cologne was strong; I could smell it long after he’d gone, a heady scent close to alcohol that I imagined would worsen nausea. After he left, my parents created a patient’s altar by my bed—on a table covered with cloth, they put a bottle of orange Lucozade, a blue tin of glucose, and freshly peeled oranges on a plastic tray. They did not bring the armchair, but one of them was home throughout the week that I had Apollo. They took turns putting in my eye drops, my father more clumsily than my mother, leaving sticky liquid running down my face. They did not know how well I could put in the drops myself. Each time they raised the bottle above my face, I remembered the look in Raphael’s eyes that first evening in his room, and I felt haunted by happiness.

  My parents closed the curtains and kept my room dark. I was sick of lying down. I wanted to see Raphael, but my mother had banned him from my room, as though he could somehow make my condition worse. I wished that he would come and see me. Surely he could pretend to be putting away a bed sheet or bringing a bucket to the bathroom. Why didn’t he come? He had not even said sorry to me. I strained to hear his voice, but the kitchen was too far away and his voice, when he spoke to my mother, was too low.

  Once, after going to the toilet, I tried to sneak downstairs to the kitchen, but my father loomed at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Kedu?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

  “I want water,” I said.

  “I’ll bring it. Go and lie down.”

  Finally, my parents went out together. I had been sleeping, and woke up to sense the emptiness of the house. I hurried downstairs and to the kitchen. It too was empty. I wondered if Raphael was in the boys’ quarters; he was not supposed to go to his room during the day, but maybe he had, now that my parents were away. I went out to the open veranda. I heard Raphael’s voice before I saw him, standing near the tank, digging his foot into the sand, talking to Josephine, Professor Nwosu’s house help. Professor Nwosu sometimes sent eggs from his poultry and never let my parents pay for them. Had Josephine brought eggs? She was tall and plump; now she had the air of someone who had already said goodbye but was lingering. With her, Raphael was different—the slouch in his back, the agitated foot. He was shy. She was talking to him with a kind of playful power, as though she could see through him to things that amused her. My reason blurred.

  “Raphael!” I called out.

  He turned. “Oh. Okenwa. Are you allowed to come downstairs?”

  He spoke as though I were a child, as though we had not sat together in his dim room.

  “I’m hungry! Where is my food?” It was the first thing that came to me, but in trying to be imperious I sounded shrill.

  Josephine’s face puckered, as though she were about to break into slow, long laughter. Raphael said something that I could not hear, but it had the sound of betrayal. My parents drove up just then, and suddenly Josephine and Raphael were roused. Josephine hurried out of the compound, and Raphael came toward me. His shirt was stained in the front, orangish, like palm oil from soup. Had my parents not come back, he would have stayed there mumbling by the tank; my presence had changed nothing.

  “What do you want to eat?” he asked.

  “You didn’t come to see me.”

  “You know Madam said I should not go near you.”

  Why was he making it all so common and ordinary? I too had been asked not to go to his room, and yet I had gone, I had put in his eye drops every day.

  “After all, you gave me the Apollo,” I said.

  “Sorry.” He said it dully, his mind elsewhere.

  I could hear my mother’s voice. I was angry that they were back. My time with Raphael was shortened, and I felt the sensation of a widening crack.

  “Do you want plantain or yam?” Raphael asked, not to placate me but as if nothing serious had happened. My eyes were burning again. He came up the steps. I moved away from him, too quickly, to the edge of the veranda, and my rubber slippers shifted under me. Unbalanced, I fell. I landed on my hands and knees, startled by the force of my own weight, and I felt the tears coming before I could stop them. Stiff with humiliation, I did not move.

  My parents appeared.

  “Okenwa!” my father shouted.

  I stayed on the ground, a stone sunk in my knee. “Raphael pushed me.”

  “What?” My parents said it at the same time, in English. “What?”

  There was time. Before my father turned to Raphael, and before my mother lunged at him as if to slap him, and before she told him to go pack his things and leave immediately, there was time.
I could have spoken. I could have cut into that silence. I could have said that it was an accident. I could have taken back my lie and left my parents merely to wonder.

  MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI

  Ravalushan

  FROM Bomb

  1

  THE MUSIC WE heard on our radios that morning was nothing new to our ears; it was what the soldiers played whenever they make a coup. The brassy, instrumental military music had been playing since dawn, and every now and then a deep male voice interrupted with the same announcement: “Fellow countrymen and women. The New Ghana Proletariat Revolutionary Council, N.G.P.R.C., is now in full control of the Castle and the radio stations in all nine regional capitals. We advise everybody to remain calm and to stay tuned for a speech. By the Leader of the Revolution. At ten o’clock.”

  Revolution?

  It was the first time we had heard the word, and it sounded more serious than coup d’état, which we were used to. At five to ten, the music stopped abruptly. It was followed by what sounded like an argument or scuffle in the background. Everything and everybody—even the lizards that roamed the street’s crevices bobbing their heads wantonly—froze. “Good morning, comrades, countrymen and women.” The new leader’s voice, loud and hoarse, shook the tiny speakers of our transistor radios. “My name is Sergeant Francis Wilberforce. I am speaking on behalf of the New Ghana Proletariat Revolutionary Council.” We immediately noticed how different his tongue was from ours. He sounded like someone who had lived overseas for a long, long time. His blε, some even swore, was a true Englishman’s English.