The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  “Peter Nikoničić.” His voice, when it comes, is barely intelligible. “Peter Peter Peter Peter Nikoničić! Estimable sir, your lordship, Peter Nikoničić.”

  His tongue, that trained slug, as yet incompletely thawed, lurches to form the words.

  “Forgive my intrusion, but I have come to, to, to—”

  The doctor is not a drunk, but it occurs to him that he might become one, in the count’s future testimony of this encounter.

  “I do not belong here. That is true.” A whirl of disordered feeling threatens to pitch him over the ledge. “You people let me fly to the roof of a cave and no farther. You have blocked my ascent to the true sky. You call me the Moor, Peter Nikoničić, although my family has lived on Black Corfu for as long as your family.”

  Giggles escape him, seeming to originate not from his mouth but from the crinkling corners of his red eyes, and evaporating into the night. He gapes up, for a moment confusing the rising hysteria with the falling snow.

  “Oh, you people should have hobbled me long ago! You must have guessed that I would one day climb your hills. But I imagined a different kind of advancement, Peter Nikoničić—a promotion!”

  The joke of his life seizes him once more, and he vibrates with silent mirth. “Ah, look,” he murmurs. “We have an audience.”

  Blue light floods through one of the upstairs windows; this would be Jure, the doctor is somehow certain. Jure in his guest room, looking down on them. Looking down is the boy’s sole talent, isn’t it? Quite a feat, for an inbred adolescent.

  With great effort, the doctor regains himself, grasping the count’s wrists.

  “That boy in your house is a liar. To protect himself, he has hidden the body somewhere. But the surgery was routine, and your daughter is no vukodlak.” He leans in until their clammy foreheads touch. “Peter Nikoničić, I never harmed her. You must believe me.”

  Loosening his grip on the doctor, the count steps back. Both men are breathing heavily. He lowers his lantern. Now only a slice of him is visible, caught in the light: his wide, flaring nostrils, his quivering mustache. Still, it is enough to reveal the grief of Peter Nikoničić. The doctor is prepared for rage. He is prepared for blows. He is unprepared for the horsey bellows of the big man’s sorrow in the dark. He quiets, recognizing the rhythm of his own despair, for which he’s found no cure.

  “She is gone.” Peter Nikoničić’s face has passed into blackness. “And now you must go, too.”

  On his return descent, retracing his steps through the forest, the doctor notices two sets of prints in the drifts.

  “Who is following me?” he cries.

  Something is moving in the thicketed darkness, agitating the branches. An almost human whimpering, unbearably familiar.

  “Nediljka?” he whispers.

  His middle daughter steps from the shadows.

  “Papa!” Her voice flutters in the frigid air.

  How lost must I be, he wonders, to have no awareness of this little girl at my heels?

  “I am very cold, Papa.”

  She slips into his arms, and it’s an agony to feel her slight frame trembling, to have no further protection to offer. He walks as fast as she can manage, and when the snow deepens he carries her. They move through a ravine of solid moonlight. In this lunar meadowland, they are not alone. His daughter sights the creature first, and screams.

  The thing rears on its hind legs, its coppery hair matted to its heaving sides. The doctor’s mind, grasping for a name for the humanoid storm cloud, can find only monster. It is his daughter who roars back, “Bear!”

  For an instant, the doctor experiences a surge of elation, thinking: I can explain everything to them and repair my reputation. But of course that’s not true. The boy’s story has moved into the tower of fact, of history. It will not be evicted.

  From her perch on his shoulders, his daughter is eye level with the bear, whose snout falls open. He sees black teeth. A levitating, slate tongue. Great, shaggy arms thick as oak boughs, and whetted claws that rend the very air. A deafening sound erupts from the chasm beyond its flashing jaws, shaking the island to its bedrock; and inside that sound, a miracle happens. The three animals surrender to some spell of mutual hypnosis. Life beholds itself, a radiance ricocheting off three mirrors, multiplying; and from their conjoined attention, a fourth mind surfaces, vast enough to encompass them all—an anonymous, ephemeral intelligence. Before its collapse, each creature glimpses itself through the eyes of another. The girl sees herself small as a blossom atop the shoulders of her father, who is, after all, only a man; the doctor recognizes himself in the bear’s awareness, a nameless silhouette in the landscape, cleansed of every accusation; as for the bear, the nature of her realization floats outside the net of human language. Dropping to her paws, she disappears into the pines.

  The doctor is left with only a fleck of the knowledge that engulfed them a moment ago: there is another country in which he exists, running parallel to this one.

  Just before sunrise, they reach another clearing, now a plain of fresh snow. Birds throb into the sky, startled from their feeding. Their cries are like thunder flattened by a rolling pin, silvery and faraway. Even skimming the earth, they echo remotely.

  “Why do they sound like that, Papa—both here and not here?”

  “They are dead and alive,” he replies.

  His daughter’s skin has a blue cast, and her eyes are half-lidded. Her slender hands swim inside his gloves, her shivering body in his robe. The cold has invaded her.

  Before them, along the apron of the harbor, warming floes split and sink into the sea. Ships loom like alien beasts, their gunwales transformed by icicles into slick gums with violet fangs. They will lose a thousand teeth before noon, thinks the doctor. His daughter stirs, nuzzling her face into his hair.

  In the doctor’s home, the freeze is only beginning. With a shriek to silence the morning gulls, his wife falls upon him.

  “Where have you been? How could you take her out into this weather?”

  She wrenches their daughter from his grasp, enveloping the child in her warmth.

  “She followed me,” he says weakly. He touches the girl’s cheek. “Tell your mother what you saw.”

  She blinks at him and coughs.

  “Tell her,” he urges.

  “Nothing.”

  “Get out,” says his wife. She looks at him as if he were a stranger.

  The doctor sighs, feeling an almost hallucinatory unburdening.

  “You did love me.”

  That night, the doctor sleeps on a pallet in one of the sailors’ brothels, where even the seven-foot proprietor is afraid to place a hand on him. He wakes at dawn and wanders the herringbone maze of the walled city, watching impassively as his neighbors wince away from him.

  The close of day is a violent spectacle on the island of Korčula. The sun falls from the sky as if shot, collapsing into the horizon as light ribbons away from the moored ships. He sits on toothy rocks, in the spray of unending waves. The wind has chased everyone else inside. Once the moon has risen fully, he stands and turns toward the forest, toward the Other Man. Twin crescents of a lunar powder mar the seat of his trousers. The ordinarily meticulous doctor has not visited the barber in a fortnight. Scalpel in hand, he starts up the hill.

  “I can be trusted with any patient.”

  He speaks aloud to the watchful rabbit. Her pink nostrils swell and fall, and he feels a rush of love for her, for her immunity to the swirling lies of man.

  As he descends to the theater to prepare for a final surgery, the rabbit remains on her beetle-bored log, peering after him, down the throat of the cave to where the shadows jump.

  From the doctor’s final, undated entry in his log:

  I am coming to see this plan as the only means by which I might exonerate myself of the charges brought against me and vanquish my ubiquitous, invisible adversary. With a steady hand, I will sever my hamstrings. I will complete this procedure perfectly, and so mark
my first and last operation on a living body. After hobbling myself, I will cut my throat, thus proving to my faithless family and fellow citizens that neither nerves nor emotion could ever compromise my dexterity, or vitiate my efforts on behalf of our dead.

  The complete exculpation and defense runs to nearly forty pages.

  It whistles out of the cave—not stumbling, not lurching, but running nimbly down the hillside, between the pines. On steady legs, it stalls beside two yellow-mossed boulders. Thoughtfully, it pops a finger into its mouth—as cold and as dry as this clear winter’s night, devoid of even a drop of fluid. Undergrowth lisps up and around in the salty breeze, dark vines pocked with turbulent blossoms. It bends a knee and genuflects, staring up at the towering canopy. Arid incisions split the backs of its thighs. It caresses these wonderingly, bewitched by the supple angle of its leg unbending. Has the surgery been a failure, then? For here it stands.

  “Perhaps,” the doctor’s vukodlak admits softly to the thousand whispering trees of Black Corfu, “I have made a mistake.”

  SAïD SAYRAFIEZADEH

  Audition

  from The New Yorker

  The first time I smoked crack cocaine was the spring I worked construction for my father on his new subdivision in Moonlight Heights. My original plan had been to go to college, specifically for the arts, specifically for acting, where I’d envisioned strolling shoeless around campus with a notepad, jotting down details about the people I observed so that I would later be able to replicate the human condition onscreen with nuance and veracity. Instead, I was unmatriculated and nineteen, working six days a week, making eight dollars an hour, no more or less than what the other general laborers were being paid, and which is what passed, at least for my self-made father, as fairness. Occasionally, I would be cast in a community-theater production of Neil Simon or The Mystery of Edwin Drood, popular but uncomplicated fare, which we would rehearse for a month before performing in front of an audience of fifteen. “You have to pay your dues,” the older actors would tell me, sensing, I suppose, my disappointment and impatience. “How long is that going to take?” I’d ask them, as if they spoke from high atop the pinnacle of show business. In lieu of an answer, they offered a tautology. “It takes as long as it takes,” they’d say.

  It was spring, it was rainy, it was the early nineties, meaning that Seinfeld was all the rage, and so was Michael Jordan, and so was crack cocaine, the latter of which, at this point, I had no firsthand knowledge. As for Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Jordan, I knew them well. Each evening, having spent my day carrying sixty-pound drywall across damp pavement and up bannisterless staircases in one of the state-of-the-art family residences being prewired for the internet—whatever that was—in a cul-de-sac eventually to be named Placid Village Circle, I would drive to my apartment and watch one or the other, Seinfeld or Jordan, since one or the other always happened to be on. They were famous, they were artists, they were exalted. I watched them and dreamed of my own fame and art and exalt. The more I dreamed, the more vivid the dream seemed to be, until it was no longer some faint dot situated on an improbable time line but, rather, my destiny. And all I needed to turn this destiny into reality was to make it out of my midsized city—not worth specifying—and move to LA, where, of course, an actor needed to be if he was to have any chance at that thing called success. But, from my perspective of a thousand miles, LA appeared immense, incensed, inscrutable, impenetrable, and every time I thought I had enough resolve to uproot myself and rent a U-Haul I would quickly retreat into the soft, downy repetitiveness of my hometown, with its low stakes, high livability, and steady paycheck from my father.

  The general laborers came and went that spring, working for a few weeks and then quitting without notice, eight dollars apparently not being enough to compensate even the most unskilled. No matter. For every man who quit, there were five more waiting in line to take his place, eight dollars apparently being enough to fill any vacancy. I was responsible for showing the new recruits around on their first day, which took about twenty minutes and got me out of carrying drywall. Here’s the Porta-Potty. Here’s the foreman’s office. Here’s the paper to sign. They wanted to know what the job was like. They wanted to know if there were health benefits. They spoke quietly and conspiratorially, as if what they asked might be perceived as treasonous. They wanted to know if they might have the opportunity to learn some plumbing or carpentry. “You’ll have to talk to the boss about that,” I’d tell them, but the answer was no. What they should have been asking me was if there was a union.

  No one knew that I was the boss’s son. About once a week my dad would show up in his powder-blue Mercedes and walk around inspecting the progress, displeased and concerned, finding everything urgent and subpar, showing neither love nor special dispensation toward me, nor did I show any toward him. This seemed to come easily to the two of us. I was just another workingman in wet overalls and he was just another big shot in a three-piece suit and a safety vest. The roles we played were generic, superficial, and true. Later, he’d tell me, “I’m doing this for you, not for me.” What “this” was was not entirely clear. “One day all of this will be yours,” he’d say. “This” was three subdivisions and a ten-story office building downtown. “This” was the powder-blue Mercedes. According to my father, he wanted me to learn the meaning of hard work up close and personal so that I would know what life was really like, but also because he wanted me to experience what he had gone through growing up on the outskirts of town with six siblings, odd jobs, and no help from the government. In short, I was living a version of his life, albeit in reverse.

  From time to time, I would be paired up with a guy named Duncan Dioguardi, who was my age but looked ten years older, and who liked to order me around—put this here, put that there. He enjoyed the power, while I enjoyed the cold comfort of knowing that I could burst his bubble by telling him who my dad was, but a good actor never breaks character. Clearly, I was a novice and not very good at hard work, as Duncan and my father had already surmised. I got winded fast. I got apathetic fast. I cut corners when I could. I waited for opportunities to go to the Porta-Potty. I waited for opportunities to smoke cigarettes. The cigarettes got me winded faster. “You need to get into shape,” Duncan would tell me. “Why don’t you use your next paycheck to buy yourself a ThighMaster?” This was a joke for him. He would walk around in short-sleeved shirts, impervious to the chill, a tattoo of a snake coiling around his bicep and crawling up toward his neck, en route to devour his face, a dramatic and striking image if ever there was one, doubly so against his pale skin, slick with drizzle. In the meantime, I slouched beneath drywall, imagining LA in the spring, waiting for lunchtime, quite proficient at not being the boss’s son, and all the while reassuring myself that one day in the future I would be performing some version of this role with nuance and veracity, out of shape or not. What did you draw from to create the character? the critics would ask me. Why, from real life, I would say.

  When lunchtime arrived, I’d sit around with the other general laborers, thirty of us on upturned crates in an unfinished living room with a spring breeze blowing through the glassless windows, eating roast-beef sandwiches and talking about money problems, home problems, work problems. My problems were not their problems, but I wished they were. Their problems were immediate, distinct, and resolvable; mine were long-term, existential, and impossible. When I spoke, I tried to approximate the speech patterns of my coworkers—the softened consonants and the dropped articles—lest I reveal myself for the outsider that I was. No hard k’s, x’s, or f’s. The irony was that my father’s specified plan of self-improvement for me dovetailed with my own: experience real life up close and personal.

  The other general laborers knew one another from high school or the neighborhood or the previous work site, which had paid ten dollars an hour. They hoped that the subdivision wouldn’t be finished until fall, maybe even winter. They didn’t mind working forever. They were still counting on a chance to learn
a trade—but half of them would be gone in two weeks. As for me, I’d grown up in Timpani Hills, where none of these men would have had any reason to visit unless they’d come to do some roofing. I’d gone to the best schools and had the cushiest upbringing, including a pool in the backyard and weekend acting classes, where my dad would watch me perform on parents’ night, misty and proud in the front row, his boorishness temporarily abated, supportive of his son’s passion and talent until he realized that his son was intending to pursue acting as something more than a hobby. Now all that history was inconsequential, pulsed inside the blender of collective toil. No one would have been able to tell me apart from any of the other general laborers I sat with on my lunch break, smoking cigarettes amid exposed crossbeams. Just as no one would have been able to tell that I was the boss’s son. To the latecomer entering the theater, I was indistinguishable from the whole.

  Just as no one would have been able to tell that I didn’t really want to give Duncan Dioguardi a lift to his house after work, but his car had broken down—yet one more item to be added to the list of immediate problems. What I wanted to say was Why don’t you ride home on a ThighMaster? But what I actually said was “Sure, jump in!” I could hear the sprightliness in my voice, all false. It was Saturday. It was four o’clock. The foreman was letting us off early because the drywall hadn’t been delivered on time. The new recruits wondered if they would still be paid for a full day. Theirs was an argument that made sense only on paper. “Go enjoy the weather,” the foreman said, as if he were bestowing the good weather upon us. Indeed, the sun was high and there was no rain. When the breeze blew, it blew with promise. I should have been savoring the first official nice day of spring; instead, I was driving an hour out of my way down Route 15. The traffic was slow-going. We stopped and started. We stopped again. Duncan Dioguardi apologized for the traffic. Inside the car he was surprisingly thoughtful and courteous. He had his seat belt on and his hands were folded in his lap. “Setting is everything,” my dear old acting teacher had once told me, and then we had done exercises to illustrate this concept: forest, beach, prison cell.