The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  Some men were thumbing their ears shut. Some had braced themselves in the doorframes, as they teach the children of the West to do during earthquakes. I resisted the urge to cover my own ears as she bansheed back at the shocked ghosts:

  “Two years ago, there was an avalanche at your construction site. It was terrible, a tragedy. We were all so sorry . . .”

  She took a breath.

  “You are dead.”

  Her voice grew gentle, almost maternal—it was like watching the wind drop out of the world, flattening a full sail. Her shoulders fell, her palms turned out.

  “You were all buried with this lodge.”

  Their eyes turned to us, incredulous. Hard and yellow, dozens of spiny armadillos. After a second, the C.C.C. company burst out laughing. Some men cried tears, they were howling so hard at Clara. Lee was among them, and he looked much changed, his face as smooth and flexibly white as an eel’s belly.

  These men—they didn’t believe her!

  And why should we ever have expected them to believe us, two female nobodies, two intruders? For these were the master carpenters, the master stonemasons and weavers, the master self-deceivers, the ghosts.

  “Dead,” one sad man said, as if testing the word out.

  “Dead. Dead. Dead,” his friends repeated, quizzically.

  But the sound was a shallow production, as if each man were scratching at topsoil with the point of a shovel. Aware, perhaps, that if he dug with a little more dedication he would find his body lying breathless under this world’s surface.

  “Dead.” “Dead.”

  “Dead.”

  “Dead.”

  “Dead.”

  “Dead.”

  They croaked like pond frogs, all across the ballroom. “Dead” was a foreign word that the boys could pronounce perfectly, soberly, and matter-of-factly, without comprehending its meaning.

  One or two of them, however, exchanged a glance; I saw a burly blacksmith cut eyes at the ruby-cheeked trumpet player. It was a guileful look, a what-can-be-done look.

  So they knew; or they almost knew; or they’d buried the knowledge of their deaths, and we had exhumed it. Who can say what the dead do or do not know? Perhaps the knowledge of one’s death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost. They burned that knowledge up like whale fat and continued to shine on.

  But then a quaking began to ripple across the ballroom floor. A chandelier, in its handsome zigzag frame, burst into a spray of glass above us. One of the pillars, three feet wide, cracked in two. Outside, from all corners, we heard a rumbling, as if the world were gathering its breath.

  “Oh, God,” I heard one of them groan. “It’s happening again.”

  My eyes met Clara’s, as they always do at parties. She did not have to tell me: Run.

  On our race through the lodge, in all that chaos and din, Clara somehow heard another sound. A bright chirping. A sound like gold coins being tossed up, caught, and fisted. It stopped her cold. The entire building was shaking on its foundations, but through the tremors she spotted a domed cage, hanging in the foyer. On a tiny stirrup, a yellow bird was swinging. The cage was a wrought-iron skeleton, the handiwork of phantoms, but the bird, we both knew instantly, was real. It was agitating its wings in the polar air, as alive as we were. Its shadow was denser than anything in that ice palace. Its song split our eardrums. Its feathers burned into our retinas, rich with solar color, and its small body was stuffed with life.

  At the Evergreen Lodge, on the opposite side of the mountain, two twelve-foot doors, designed and built by the C.C.C., stand sentry against the outside air—seven hundred pounds of hand-cut ponderosa pine, from Oregon’s primeval woods. Inside the Emerald Lodge, we found their phantom twins, the dream originals. Those doors still worked, thank God. We pushed them open. Bright light, real daylight, shot onto our faces.

  The sun was rising. The chairlift, visible across a pillowcase of fresh snow, was running.

  We sprinted for it. Golden sunlight painted the steel cables. We raced across the platform, jumping for the chairs, and I will never know how fast or how far we flew to get back to earth. In all our years of prospecting in the West, this was our greatest heist. Clara opened her satchel and lifted the yellow bird onto her lap, and I heard it shrieking the whole way down the mountain.

  YUKO SAKATA

  On This Side

  FROM Iowa Review

  TORU FOUND A GIRL sitting on the stairs in the midsummer heat when he came home from an early shift. Even from half a block away, she stood out against his decrepit apartment building. She sat, hugging her bare knees, in white cotton shorts, her long dark hair draped forward over both shoulders. The sleeves of her unseasonable denim jacket were rolled up to just below her elbows. There was a large canvas bag next to her, blocking the staircase. Through the afternoon heat everything shimmered uncertainly, and for a second Toru wondered if she wasn’t an apparition. The insistent buzz of the cicadas created a kind of thick silence, numbing his senses.

  Upon noticing him, the girl looked up with a hopefulness that made Toru feel apologetic. Suddenly he could smell his own body. He had come from making the rounds restocking vending machines and hadn’t bothered to shower at the office when he’d changed out of the uniform. With his eyes to the ground, he tried to squeeze past her.

  “Toru-kun.” The girl stood up. Her voice sounded oddly thick.

  For a moment they stood awkwardly together on the stairs. A mixture of soap and sweat wafted from her. Up close, Toru saw that her face was meticulously made up, her skin carefully primed, and her expectant eyes accentuated with clean black lines. He was slow to recognize what was underneath. But then he felt his heart skip a beat.

  “Masato?” he said.

  “Hello.” As though in relief, she held out her hand, and Toru shook it automatically. Her fingers were bony but solid in his palm. “I go by Saki now.”

  “Saki?”

  More than ten years ago, in junior high school, she had been a boy.

  Toru tentatively invited her, or him, or whatever Saki was now, into his one-room apartment on the second floor. He didn’t want to be seen with her on the stairs. His neighbors were mostly single men of meager means like himself, and with only thin walls between them, everyone did his best to keep to himself.

  Saki took off her sandals and walked in, not minding the dusty tatami floor bleached from years of sunlight. Her toenails were painted the color of pomegranate. Next to the entrance were a metal sink, a two-burner stove, and an antiquated fridge that constituted Toru’s kitchen. The opposite wall had a closet with sliding paper doors where he kept his clothes and bedding. There was a toilet in each apartment, but the bath was shared. A small, tilting bookshelf and a folding coffee table were the only pieces of furniture, and the white canvas bag Saki flopped down in the corner became the third-largest item in the room.

  Saki opened and closed the bathroom door and walked around the room once, as though giving it a quick inspection. She then went to the sink and tried the faucet. The air in the small room felt even more stagnant than usual. Toru considered offering her something cold to drink, but he didn’t want this unexpected visit to draw out.

  “Sorry I don’t even have AC,” he said.

  “Oh, this is just fine,” Saki said, and bent down to turn on the fan next to the coffee table. “I don’t like AC anyway.”

  Toru glanced at the back of her shapely calves and noted a long-healed scar forming a startling trench on the side of her right knee. The first thing he had felt on the staircase was a knot forming in his stomach, a forgotten seed of guilt he didn’t care to inspect, and now it was threatening to grow. He hadn’t thought of his classmate in years. But the longer he looked at her, this Saki, the more he realized that he wasn’t as baffled as he might have been by the transformation. He remembered the slight neck that seemed to reach perpetually forward and the dense, long eyelashes that used to cast melancholy shadows over the eyes. She was, and had
been, pretty.

  “So.” Toru cleared his throat. He had been staring. “How did you find me?”

  “Oh, I just looked you up,” Saki said. “There are ways. It’s not that hard. Can I stay with you for a while?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I need a place to stay. Just for a while.”

  Toru looked at her blankly. He was still in his shoes, standing just inside the door. “You mean here?” he said. “Why? What do you mean?”

  “I’m in this predicament. A relationship problem, so to speak.”

  Toru felt the knot in his stomach become denser as he watched Saki drift to the open window. The only view he had was a narrow slice of southern sky between the walls of the adjacent buildings and the corrugated rooftop of a warehouse, but Saki gazed out as though at a refreshing country vista. Above her head hung boxers and socks and a thin, worn towel that Toru had hand-washed that morning.

  “Well,” Toru said. “I’m very sorry to hear that. I do feel sorry. But I wasn’t expecting—I’m sure this isn’t your best option. I mean, look at this place. There’s barely room for myself.”

  “Oh, this is totally fine. I’m not particular.”

  Toru sighed. “Look, you don’t understand. I’m afraid it’s not fine,” he said. “I have my own problems. For one thing, I have a girlfriend.”

  “That’s a problem?” Saki tilted her head. “She’s a jealous type?”

  “No, no.” Toru flinched. “That’s not how I meant it. See, you don’t even know me at this point. I’m barely managing day to day here. I’m surely not the best person to turn to in your situation.”

  “You don’t know my situation yet. You haven’t asked.”

  Although Saki’s tone was matter-of-fact, simply pointing out his mistake, Toru was taken back by the truth of this.

  “I don’t want to pry,” he said.

  “It’s really just for a while,” Saki said, as though patiently reassuring a child. “I’ll of course cook and clean.”

  “Don’t you have other friends?” Toru said. “Does your family know you are here?”

  Saki frowned at him. “If I had a family who cared where I was, don’t you think I would go stay with them?”

  When Toru failed to respond, Saki let out a small sigh and dropped her gaze to the floor.

  “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I just got out of the hospital and I’m broke. I need a little time to sort things out.”

  “What, are you sick?” Toru said. “What happened?”

  Saki bounced on her heels for a moment, fiddling with the hem of her shorts. “I was injured. Stabbed, actually, by my boyfriend.” She paused, searching for something on his face. “He didn’t know. That I was, you know. So.”

  Toru blinked. Then he blinked again.

  “If you want, I can show you the wound.” Saki grabbed the bottom of her shirt.

  “Wait.” Before he could think, Toru found himself across the room, still in his shoes, and seizing her wrists. Whatever was behind the fabric, he wasn’t ready to see.

  Saki was a horrible cook. When Toru came home the next day, she had prepared some curry, but it was straight out of a package. The vegetables were undercooked, the onion still tangy. She had added too little water, and the paste was not evenly dissolved. The rice was dry, even though she had used the same rice cooker Toru used every day. He was baffled that anyone could mess up the simplest of dishes.

  “You shouldn’t worry about cooking,” Toru said, eating out of politeness and dripping with sweat. “You’re—a guest, I suppose.”

  “Oh, it’s no trouble.” Saki had eaten less than a third of her bowl and was poking the vegetables around while Toru tediously worked on his. “It’s the least I can do.”

  “No, really,” Toru said. “Look, I’ll prepare something simple after I come home. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Saki said. “If you insist.”

  Saki hadn’t left the apartment all day. When Toru asked, she said she had mostly slept, read some, and listened to the radio. She then added, brightly, “You can’t imagine how much I appreciate this. This is exactly what I needed.”

  The night before, he had conceded his thin futon to Saki and slept on top of his old sleeping bag. He couldn’t bring himself to kick her out. Whatever sort of life Saki had lived since Toru had last known her he didn’t feel inclined to imagine, but he couldn’t help suspecting he’d had a hand in it. That life now all seemed to fit into her plain canvas bag. Everything that came out of it went back into it. If he were to pick up the bag and take it out like the trash, there would be no trace of her left behind.

  For a few months at the beginning of eighth grade, Toru’s life had revolved around Masato. Before his childhood friend Kyoko had singled out Masato as her crush a few weeks into school, Toru hadn’t even taken note of him. Masato had been a quiet, fragile-looking boy who seemed to prefer solitude. Toru could only now surmise that he might have tickled maternal instinct in some girls. (“Don’t you think he’s adorable?” Kyoko had said. Toru had to search his mind to vaguely picture Masato’s face.)

  Earlier that spring, Toru had watched with bewilderment as Kyoko blossomed into something mysterious and fragrant next to him. He was desperately hoping that she would see a similar transformation in him and realize that he was no longer the silly neighborhood kid she could boss around. But Toru was her best friend. It had been to him that she confided her feelings for Masato. It had been he who had to help her get close to this taciturn classmate. He was enlisted to create many awkward coincidences for her to bump into Masato. He had to ask him to lunch, where Kyoko would casually join; find out his birthday and shoe size; and walk home with him so Kyoko would know which route he took.

  For those few months, Toru hated Masato.

  “What is your girlfriend like?” Saki said now, as they sat drinking beer after dinner. “Is she a good cook?”

  Once in a while, Toru got to take home canned drinks that had passed the sell-by dates. If the timing was right, he got to pick a box of beer. It was one of the very few perks of his job.

  “I actually don’t know,” Toru said. “She’s never cooked for me. We never meet at either of our places.”

  “Why not?”

  Toru didn’t own a TV and was playing a movie on his old laptop, to have something when the conversation lulled. It was a black-and-white Kurosawa, something his girlfriend had lent him.

  “Well, obviously this is not a place to bring a woman for a date,” he said. He turned the beer can in his hands several times. “And she has a family.”

  There was a pause. “She’s married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Children?”

  “Two. Boys, I think.” Toru sneaked a look at Saki’s face to gauge her reaction. She had her eyes on the computer screen, though he couldn’t tell if she was watching. “So we meet at a hotel. Just a couple of times a month,” he said.

  “And eat at restaurants,” she said.

  He nodded. And he willed the conversation to cease there. His older girlfriend paid for meals and rooms most of the time, with her husband’s money. He was not proud of it.

  The evening air outside the open window smelled vibrant, as though the intensity of the heat had been skimmed off its surface and all the living things underneath were finally allowed to breathe. Occasionally trains went by just a few blocks away, but they sounded strangely muted and distant.

  “Speaking of restaurants,” Saki said, three beers later, “I have this recurring dream.”

  “About a restaurant?” Toru glanced at her. Having given up on the movie, she was leaning on the low windowsill, her elbow sticking outside and her cheek resting on the back of her hand. “A nightmare, no doubt.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a nightmare, quite. But I’ve had it for years. I’m in this crowded restaurant, with or without other people, the details always change. I place an order, but after waiting for a long time, I realize I’m not getting the food. So I go look for my
server and find the kitchen closed in the back. I return to a different, dark room, and my food is on the table with plastic wrap over it, and there’s a note stuck on it. Like a Post-it note. This makes me very sad, and the next moment I find myself in an empty house.”

  Toru waited. “And then? What happens in the empty house?”

  “That’s it,” she said. “That’s the end.”

  “Saki.” Toru tapped her shoulder, but she didn’t budge. While he finished the movie, she had fallen asleep on the floor. Her long hair hid most of her face, but he could see that her cheek was flushed and her mouth was open.

  Toru moved the coffee table to make room for the futon next to her and rolled her over onto the sheet. She was alarmingly light. He observed her shoulder move up and down almost imperceptibly with her breathing, and noticed the imprint left on her temple from the floor.

  The bottom of her shirt had ridden up a little. Toru was tempted for a moment to peek, to confirm the stab wound and, more importantly, to see how the subtle but unmistakable roundness of her breasts worked. Whether they were real.

  Once, after walking home together, Toru had asked to use the bathroom at Masato’s house. No one was home, and Masato invited him to stay for a snack. While Masato went to get things from the kitchen, Toru used the bathroom and poked around, just so he could report back to Kyoko. Masato’s room, which he found down the hallway, was dim, with the curtains mostly drawn, and surprisingly messy. Strewn clothes covered most of the available surfaces, with textbooks and magazines and candy wrappers entangled in them, while the cream-colored walls remained strangely unadorned. There was something odd about the room, though Toru couldn’t immediately put a finger on it. And then he saw what it was. Among the formless piles of clothes were several pairs of girls’ underwear.

  Saki twitched her fingers in her sleep. Toru stood up, picked up the empty cans, and turned the lights off.

  “Don’t you want to get out a bit?” Toru said to Saki a few days later. They had finished breakfast, and he was rinsing the plates. “Walk around or something? I guess you’re still recovering, but I’m sure it’d feel better than sitting in this dingy room all day.”