The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  Rachel just stared at him.

  “What you’re seeing is a very, very bright boy,” the doctor said.

  “Too smart to treat?” Martin asked.

  “I think family therapy would be productive. Very challenging, but worthwhile, in my opinion. I could get you a referral. What you’re upset about, in relation to your son, may not fall under the purview of medicine, though.”

  “The purview? Really?”

  “To be honest, I was on the fence about medication. Whatever is going on with Jonah, it does not present as depression. In my opinion, Jonah does not have a medical condition.”

  Martin stood up.

  “He’s not sick, he’s just an asshole, is what you’re saying?”

  “I think that’s a very dangerous way for a parent to feel,” the doctor said.

  “Yeah?” Martin said, standing over the doctor now. “You’re right. You got that one right. Because all of a parent’s feelings are dangerous, you motherfucker.”

  At home that night, Martin stuffed a chicken with lemon halves, drenched it in olive oil, scattered a handful of salt over it, and blasted it in the oven until it emerged deeply burnished, with skin as crisp as glass. Rachel poured drinks for the two of them, and they cooked in silence. To Martin, it was a harmless silence. He could trust it, and if he couldn’t, then to hell with it. He wasn’t going to chase down everything unsaid and shout it into their home, as if all important messages on the planet needed to be shared. He’d said enough, things he believed, things he didn’t. Quota achieved. Quota surpassed.

  Rachel looked small and tired. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure. He was more aware than ever, as she set the table and put out Lester’s cup and Jonah’s big-kid glass, how impossibly unknowable she would always be—what she thought, what she felt—how what was most special about her was the careful way she guarded it all.

  No matter their theories—about Jonah or each other or the larger world—their job was to watch over Jonah on his cold voyage. He had to come back. This kind of controlled solitude was unsustainable. No one could pull it off, especially not someone so young. Except that his reasoning on this, he knew, was wishful parental bullshit. Of course a child could do it. Who else but children to lead the fucking species into darkness? Which meant what for the old-timers left behind?

  Dinner was brief, destroyed by the savage appetite of Lester, who engulfed his meal before Rachel had even taken a bite, and begged, begged to be excused so that he could return to the platoon of small plastic men he’d deployed on the rug. According to Lester, his men were waiting to be told what to do. “I need to tell my guys who to kill!” he shouted. “I’m in charge!”

  At the height of this tantrum, Jonah, silent since they’d returned from the doctor’s office, leaned over to Lester, put a hand on his shoulder, and calmly told him not to whine.

  “Don’t use that tone of voice,” he said. “Mom and Dad will excuse you when they’re ready.”

  “Okay,” Lester said, looking up at his brother with a kind of awe, and for the rest of their wordless dinner he sat there waiting, as patiently as a boy his age ever could, his hands folded in his lap.

  At bedtime, Rachel asked Martin if he wouldn’t mind letting her sleep alone. She was just very tired. She didn’t think she could manage otherwise. She gave him a sort of smile, and he saw the effort behind it. She dragged her pillow and a blanket into a corner of the TV room and made herself a little nest there. He had the bedroom to himself. He crawled onto Rachel’s side of the mattress, which was higher, softer, less abused, and fell asleep.

  In the morning, Jonah did not say goodbye on his way to school, nor did he greet Martin upon his return home. When Martin asked after his day, Jonah, without looking up, said that it had been fine. Maybe that was all there was to say, and why, really, would you ever shit on such an answer?

  Jonah took up his spot on the couch and opened a book, reading quietly until dinner, while Lester played at his feet. Martin watched Jonah. Was that a grin or a grimace on the boy’s face? he wondered. And what, finally, was the difference? Why have a face at all if what was inside you was so perfectly hidden? The book Jonah was reading was nothing, some silliness. Make-believe and colorful and harmless. It looked like it belonged to a series, along with that book The Short. On the cover a boy, arms outspread, was gripping wires in each hand, and his whole body was glowing.

  CAILLE MILLNER

  The Politics of the Quotidian

  FROM ZYZZYVA

  THE COMMITTEE WANTS to have a word with her.

  The temperature is just below freezing on the morning of her exit interview. As soon as she wakes, winking into the cold, she grapples for the unseen knob of the radiator. It chugs to life as she swings her feet from the bed to the ground. The whitewashed floorboards groan awake beneath her weight.

  Shuddering, she scurries to her closet. She lives in a tiny railroad flat on the outer ring of the city’s public transit system. The closet stands in the path of the apartment’s sole window, where she lets the gray light tickle her back until she’s warm enough to think. Then she closes her eyes and breathes up the committee room behind the skin of her eyelids.

  Mikael Sbocniak (department chair) will take the seat in the middle. Tomas Ulrikson (selection committee head for her postdoc interview) will be on his left, with Ernst Lichtenberg (faculty mentor whom she’s met only once) on his right. She’ll sit on the other side of the table, facing them. A triptych of white beards, deep voices, cashmere sport coats. The same look from brewing for decades in the same stock of misanthropic contempt.

  Pity. The study of philosophy should have done something for them—made them kinder or more thoughtful—but she’s not sure what it’s done for her, either. Years ago, when she was just starting graduate school, she’d have loved to critique the power dynamics of a meeting like this one. She’d be spouting Hegel and Foucault. Now she no longer wants to say anything at all.

  Now she’s just relieved that her side of the table will be next to the committee room’s window. She’ll be able to feel the sun’s weak warmth while she’s telling lies.

  Chuckling, she pulls a pair of wool tights out of her closet and frog-leaps into them. They’ll ask her if she has any idea about the academic job market. They’ll nod at one another with satisfaction about there having been only three ethical philosophy positions in the country last year.

  After they’ve finished telling her what they think are hard truths, she’ll tell them that her metaphysics were misplaced and her ideals were out of proportion. She slips a dress over her head, considering. Maybe she had wildly optimistic expectations about a life of the mind, instead of managed calculations about debt and paperwork. Such tales would soothe them, would appeal to the kind of young men they’d once been. Perfect. Then she wouldn’t have to try and explain the kind of young woman she was now.

  Best to keep them away from that subject, she thought as she walked to her window. The truth of why she was leaving was that she could no longer hear what was being said in the rooms they all shared. Now she could listen only to the wind that blew around them, the rain that fell on the windowpanes, and the birds that floated above them. This shift had been a long time coming, but at last she’d embraced it. She’d had no other choice this fall.

  Among other classes, she’d taught an undergraduate seminar about the politics of the quotidian. She’d been talking about Kantian aesthetics, a subject that so many hated but that she loved because Kant had appreciated such ordinary things. Wallpaper and weather—things she could understand, even when she first read him as an eighteen-year-old college freshman. Kant didn’t care that she hadn’t grown up going to museums. It was a revelation to find one of the most important philosophers in history speaking a language she could recognize.

  Kant’s aesthetics had locked her into philosophy, but few of her undergraduates were having the same revelation. They seemed confused as usual, so she’d brought someone more accessible into her talk: Roland
Barthes. It was a digression, since Barthes wasn’t a proper philosopher. But Barthes was readable, so there was a chance some of the students might know him, and he made arguments about banal objects. As she began to talk about Barthes, the student interrupted her. He happened to believe that he knew more about Barthes than she ever would.

  “That’s not what he meant,” the student called out.

  He was loud and defiant and his voice was aggressive. All heads swiveled his way.

  “I read Mythologies,” he said.

  He said it with determination, as if it were the only book he’d ever read. Maybe it was.

  “He didn’t think any of these things were quotidian at all,” he shouted. His face was pinching and puckering now. “That was the whole point.”

  She pitched backward to regain her balance. Without thinking, she’d leaned toward his words.

  “No, the whole point was that we believe these things are quotidian, and they’re actually charged with significance,” she said.

  At least her voice was calm and strong. She uncurled her fingers from the table at which they were all sitting. She’d have preferred a lectern and rowed seating, but the university wanted to make classrooms feel less hierarchical. The result was disrespectful crap like this. “He’s quite clear about this, in the last long essay in the book—”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the student said. A slight gasp skipped around the room, a flutter of eyebrows and excitement. Folding his laptop closed, the student stood up and pointed at her. “You’ve never known what you were talking about since the beginning of this class.”

  “You don’t belong here right now,” she said, and he left.

  It was only a brief scene—a few noisy sounds as he gathered his laptop and his books and stomped out the door.

  But she felt its poison slide in. Now the other students would be asking themselves, Is he right? Does she know what she’s talking about? They’d wonder why he chose her to pick on, whether it was because she didn’t look like his other teachers, in which case he had no point, or whether it was because she was incompetent, which meant that he had a point.

  “Please excuse the interruption,” she said in a cold voice after the door slammed behind him.

  They were impressed by her decisiveness. She could see it from the way that their faces relaxed. Murmuring for a moment was okay—it wasn’t every day that they saw open confrontation—so she let them do that, and then she began to speak again. A magisterial tone was the right one for the rest of the class, she decided, in case anyone else got ideas.

  No one else got ideas. She kept it up until the class period ended and they all filed out. Only then did she collapse on her chair, arms quivering.

  She gulped in air and thought about the student. All she could envision was his smug face; his name wasn’t memorable. He had written a couple of short papers for her. They were full of scrawled thoughts, disordered footnotes, off-syllabus references. She needed to review his work and to reassure herself that he was dumber than she was.

  Until she started graduate school she’d been the smartest person in every room. No one, least of all her parents, knew where her gifts had come from. Her scores on standardized tests were hair-raising; her excellent grades had won her scholarships to boarding school and college. Her decision to become a philosophy professor made sense to her family only because they never understood what she was talking about anyway.

  Recent years had brought on her first niggling hints of self-doubt. In college, she’d gotten a mere magna cum laude distinction—not a big enough deal in an age of Ritalin and grade inflation. That had meant a graduate school of a slightly lower tier than she’d expected. After graduate school had come her current existence—endlessly postdoc, never tenure-track. Once again, not unusual these days, but not what she’d planned on either.

  Now there was this scene with the student. She hadn’t experienced this nasty sort of business since she was a new arrival at boarding school. She’d been patient with all of that foolishness then, choosing to bide her time. She looked different from the other kids, came from a different kind of family, didn’t have the money to go on their kinds of vacations. Fine. All she could do was what she did best—study—and sure enough, after the first semester’s results came in, all of the offensive behavior and snide comments fell away. The other students asked her for help with their papers, their notes, their test answers. She’d had a kind of power then. But she’d come to the end of her testing days.

  Looking at that student’s papers would make her feel better. She rolled her chair over to the classroom computer and shook the mouse like a maraca. Sighing, the screen bloomed alive. Widgets, lists, unfoldered documents—the desktop was such a mess that it took a while to find the proper application. Impatiently, she tore the mouse down its pad. The number of students in the course was at the top of her registration document: eleven.

  All semester long there had been twelve.

  Each student’s name was listed on the document. Galakov, Misha. O’Connor, Patricia. Their flat, unsmiling faces flashed before her eyes as she clicked down the list. This is how she remembers everything and this was how she’d remember the name of that awful student. When she came to the end of the list she felt a mild panic—his name had disappeared. Normally it took days, not minutes, to complete a registration withdrawal.

  Not this time. That day’s incident passed without so much as a digital ripple. It was as if he’d never taken her class at all.

  Confused, she turned her head to the window. Beyond the computer screen glowed the stained purple sky and ruined quads of late fall. The trees were balding and the leaves that still clung were pockmarked and thin. Most of the foliage stretched over the earth in a golden carpet. Rusted gold—mud-stained, sodden after days of rain. Soon the snow would come and bury them under the blackening land. In the spring they’d be reborn—black, silver, worn through. The torn strips of a resurrected body.

  She glanced at the jacket she’d thrown over the back of her chair. It’d be too light for the days and weeks ahead. Better to go home now, to pull out her winter clothes, and to have a glass of wine to take her mind off today’s humiliations.

  But when she got home she wound up drinking not one but three glasses of wine. As her weekday excesses went, this one was so rare and luxurious that it made her feel wild and irresponsible. By the third glass she was dancing in her underwear, all alone in her apartment. She exhausted her commute playlist, then queued up the old songs she’d loved in boarding school. They blasted through her cheap computer speakers. Singing along, chugging the wine, she felt comforted by the dull blue swell of the screen.

  It was only when she woke in the middle of the night, hair askew and mouth athrob, that she felt sheepish and ashamed. The overhead lights were still blazing. She could feel their pulse in her head.

  She fumbled into the bathroom. While she swabbed makeup remover over her eyelids, which were webbed shut by smeared mascara, she realized that she hadn’t unpacked her winter coats. Her fall jacket, worn and faded from the season, was still slung over the entryway chair by the front door. In the morning she wore it again, hunched and headachy from her pity party.

  She needed to talk to someone, but she wasn’t sure who that person might be. Her faculty mentor was always at a foreign conference or faraway archive. The philosophy department’s other instructors grunted at each other in gnomic phrases. When she stood up in meetings to give her class reports, they stared at her with bewilderment. The initial shock on their faces when she spoke wasn’t encouraging, nor was the fact that none of them could remember her name. She’d grown used to saying her missing mentor’s name as a way to identify herself.

  So she emailed Matt. (Or Mike? M. something.) They’d gone to graduate school together and now shared the same postdoc fellowship.

  In graduate school they’d taken the same first-year seminar and several second-year sections. He was studying the riskier conjunctio
n of philosophy and linguistics; she was trodding the well-worn path of ethics and political philosophy. She’d been told by their professors that her path was more employable, whatever that meant these days, but here they were at the same program.

  Maybe his enthusiasm had helped him in the interview. He was one of those young men with a Talmudic knowledge of not just semiotics but also ambient electronic music, manual camera lenses, and lots of other tiny cultural niches cramped by tribal adherents. She remembered—as soon as she hit “send” on the email—that their past interactions had made her feel tired. His idea of conversation was a circle jerk of references and small fights and even pettier victories. But then came his reply:

  “Hey, fantastic to hear from you! Of course we can get together to talk; it’s been way too long. I’ve been so busy hacking together MIDI controllers for my DJ sets that I haven’t seen anyone from our program in ages. Hit me back with some possible dates, and don’t let those idiots bother you.”

  It made her smile, though she wasn’t sure if he was flirting with her. She had no expectations, of course.

  They agreed to meet on an evening that arrived soggy with rain. Great gusts of water whipped around the streets. It felt like the last storm of fall—when the storm was over the trees would be stripped, and there would be nothing to do but greet winter.

  She’d finally unpacked her coats, and she was happy to wrap herself in one as the wind blew her into their meeting place. He’d picked the bar—a fashionable place downtown that was once frequented by the men who worked in the city’s factory. When the factory shut down, the men disappeared, but their traces remained. These were their pool cues, that was their coin-operated jukebox. The newcomers just added lighting and microbrews and shuffled the contemporary country songs off the playlist.

  Women came to this bar now too, and she studied them as she walked in. All of their clothing looked as if it was vintage, and expensive—not thrift. Though their hair was tousled for an appearance of effortlessness, their eyes were clouded with anxiety. They spoke to each other endlessly, probably about the source of that anxiety—nut allergies, or the books they weren’t reading, or the sexual encounters they were pretending to enjoy. She’s not one of these women and normally this doesn’t bother her, but for some reason she felt bothered when she saw them in the bar. They were the kinds of women that she imagined M. would date. Suddenly she felt foolish about asking him to meet her.