The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  The second time I smoked crack cocaine was the spring I worked construction for my father on his new subdivision in Moonlight Heights. By this point, the electricians had finished prewiring for the internet, whatever that was, the floors had been poured, the windows had been installed, and the general laborers had come and gone, eight dollars an hour not being enough. I would show the new recruits around, bathroom, foreman, paper to sign, and then I would go carry drywall in the sunshine. I was aware that I had been waiting for Duncan Dioguardi to invite me to party again, but no invitation had been forthcoming, and to broach it myself seemed as though it would traverse an essential but unstated boundary.

  This time it was a Thursday evening, after our shift, around six o’clock. Duncan’s car had broken down again. “Sure,” I said, “jump in.” I could hear the sprightliness in my voice, now authentic. The traffic was just as bad as ever and we crawled forward with our windows rolled down, the spring breeze blowing in, the cigarette smoke blowing out, dusk all around us. “I’m sorry about the traffic,” Duncan said, as he had said before. “I don’t mind,” I said. We talked about the subdivision for a while, and then we were quiet, mulling over I know not what, and then I broke the silence with the fantastic news that I’d been cast in a play, and that the way I saw things it was only a matter of time before I would be renting the U-Haul and making my move.

  Duncan was happy for me. He shook my hand. He slapped me on the back. “Whatever you set your mind to,” he said. I told him that I’d get him a free ticket for opening night. He told me, “I’ll be able to tell people I knew you when.” I was not used to such expansiveness. I could feel myself blushing. “Not many lines,” I told him. Obviously, the truth was that there were no lines. But I thought it was important to at least try to keep things in some perspective. Humility first, fame second.

  “Lines don’t matter,” Duncan said. Success was what mattered, and success called for celebration.

  “Aw,” I said, “I sure appreciate that.” But it was a work night, after all.

  No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t even seven o’clock. It would be a shame to let such good news go to waste. “Let’s celebrate,” Duncan Dioguardi said.

  I knew that, in this context, celebrate was another word for party, which was, of course, itself another word.

  The traffic was gone and I was driving fast. If I had had an ability to observe myself, I might have questioned why I needed to get where I was going in such a hurry. Under the overpass I went, fifteen miles above the speed limit. Turn, turn, turn. Duncan Dioguardi didn’t need to tell me where to turn. He wanted to know if I had forty dollars to chip in. For forty dollars I’d have to stop at the ATM. The ATM was in the convenience store, where people were shopping for dinner. At the ATM, I noted with satisfaction that my savings were considerable—eight dollars an hour adds up.

  His mother was home when we got there. “Meet my friend,” Duncan Dioguardi said. The word friend was not a euphemism. His mother was sitting in the living room watching Seinfeld. She said, “You’re welcome here anytime.” She was being warm. She was being hospitable. She was laughing at what was happening on TV, and a few moments later Duncan and I were in the basement, also laughing at what was happening on TV. Jerry was saying something logical, and George was frustrated, and Elaine was rolling her eyes, and here came Kramer bursting through the front door. When Duncan opened his hand, I imagined for a moment that, instead of the insignificant chips off the drywall, he was holding a palmful of giant chunks, the size of golf balls, one pound each.

  “You do the math,” Duncan said.

  Beneath his bed was the Chore Boy, but its symbolism had gone the way of the euphemism. Now when we smoked, we used, of all things, a broken car antenna, which, according to Duncan, he had found lying on the sidewalk. This was a neighborhood where car antennas lay on the sidewalk. The smoke came out of Duncan’s mouth in the same white puff that lingered in the air of the basement theater. “Not bad,” he said, again. And when it was my turn I also said, “Not bad,” but I meant it this time. I was the passenger on the cruise ship who has become acquainted with the island. The same warm feeling of friendship for Duncan engulfed me, followed by an unexpected but welcome sense of optimism concerning my prospects—extraordinarily promising they were, weren’t they, beginning with those three acts I was going to have onstage and heading toward a career. It was eight o’clock. Another episode of Seinfeld was just getting underway, the back-to-back shows courtesy of NBC, the interweaving story lines being established in that first minute: someone determined, someone displeased, the fatal flaw introduced, followed, thirty minutes later, by the abrupt resolution, and all of it funny, until all of it suddenly was not funny.

  Suddenly I was in possession of that thing called clarity. I was watching the most vapid show in the history of television—it had always been vapid and we, the viewers, had always been duped. I could see straight through it now—solipsistic, narcissistic, false reality, easy tropes, barely amusing. The clarity that I thought I’d had moments earlier had not been clarity at all but, rather, its opposite, delusion, which was now being usurped by an all-encompassing awareness, horrible and heavy, through which I understood at once that I was not talented, had never been talented, that my life as a general laborer was proof of this lack of talent, and that being cast in a role with zero lines was not a step toward fame but a step into obscurity in a midsized city. Who but a fool agrees to move through space for three acts without saying a word?

  The car antenna was coming back my way. It was nine o’clock. I had entered a strange dimension of time—it was progressing both slowly and quickly, as marked by the ticking of that basement boiler. Nine was early for night. It would be night for many more hours to come. I was nineteen. Nineteen was young. I would be young for many more years to come. What exactly had I been so troubled by a few minutes before? Light and airy clarity descended upon me. Ah, this was clarity, and the other, delusion. I had reversed things, silly, overstated them, compounded them, turned delight into cynicism. I was going to be onstage for three acts, moving through space, another credential to have on my résumé when I arrived in LA. It was ten o’clock. Was ten o’clock early for night? Was night moving slowly or fast? Was Jerry funny or stupid? We were driving back to the ATM now. I knew I was traversing some essential but unstated boundary, but I traversed it anyway. I wondered if Duncan Dioguardi had ever had a broken-down car or if he had smoked the car, its antenna being the last piece remaining. I wondered if he’d smoked LA. I wondered if he’d one day smoke his Magnavox TV. This is the last time I’m doing this, I said to myself, even as I knew that saying so implied its inverse. At the ATM, I took out another forty dollars. I noted my balance. My savings account was still large. It was midnight. Midnight was still young.

  ALEXIS SCHAITKIN

  Natural Disasters

  from Ecotone

  We were living in Oklahoma ironically. Obviously it is not possible to live in a place ironically, but we were twenty-four and freshly married, so it was not obvious to us. It would not become obvious to me for a very long time; by then, by now, this clarity would be pointless, the thinly exhilarating aha! of a riddle solved at a cocktail party.

  Three months before we relocated to the Sooner State, Steven had come home from work with the news that he’d been offered a promotion and a significant raise for a position in his company’s Oklahoma City office. He shared this information tentatively. He was always tentative with me, always eager for my approval and watchful for the barbs of my scorn, and this was another thing that should have been obvious to me but wasn’t. The company had 130 active oil wells in the state pumping out 120,000 barrels a day. Steven was a chemical engineer; he would monitor and, if necessary, modify the desalting process in the crude oil distillation unit at a refinery on the I-240 corridor. I don’t mean to suggest that I understood any of this. I didn’t, nor did I try to. I delighted in letting the particulars of Steven’s work—all that science, all those n
umbers—sail over my head. I suppose I thought my mind too pure to be sullied by such things.

  This would be Steven’s first post away from corporate headquarters. We were living on First Avenue at the time, in a studio apartment the most notable features of which were its odor of mice decaying in the walls and its location across from the UN. The odor inculcated in us a sense of the small realities of our life, while the UN, with its sweep of flags snapping in the wind, its kaftaned and suited and dashikied diplomats eating hot dogs and shawarma on the plaza before the glittering glass and marble of Niemeyer’s Secretariat building, reminded us of its spacious potentials.

  In New York we were broke, but this was OK, even fun, because we assumed that someday soon we would be comfortable, and would look back on these days with a tender longing that was not the same as actually wishing to relive something. Our faith in this narrative made it possible to enjoy things that were not, in themselves, enjoyable. I made a pot of chili con carne and fed us for a week on six dollars. Steven discovered a bookstore near the World Trade Center devoted exclusively to ornithology, where for five dollars apiece the owner would let you sit all day in the air-conditioning. Perhaps our faith in this narrative is what allowed us to delight even in our frequent arguments, and to misapprehend them as markers of our marriage’s durability rather than its fragility.

  It was the notion of spacious potentials that Steven’s job offer awakened in me. I remember the moment clearly. It was July of 1990, one of those callously hot New York nights when the urban winds seem lifted from the surface of Venus. In the face of this, our stalwart air conditioner may as well have been made of putty. I was in the lightest thing I owned, a slip I’d bought to wear beneath an unfortunate bridesmaid dress. Steven had just arrived home from work, and was dressed uncomplainingly in a suit. We were sitting on the corduroy couch in our tiny living area. (“You could sit on the couch and touch the stove with your toes,” I had told our future children a hundred times in my head.) The origin of the corduroy couch was a story we liked to tell. We had salvaged it from the sidewalk on a drizzly summer day, and it took weeks for it to dry out in our apartment. I can still smell it, like some colossal, sodden basset hound returned from a hunt. The couch, the mice, bodies underground on the 6, wine souring in an open bottle on the coffee table . . . We lived a life of manageably unpleasant odors. In my fantasies, our future was scentless as water.

  As soon as Steven told me about the job offer, I saw us on a blanket in the prairie beneath a sky as solid and ardent as a conversion. I saw an old Indian in a headdress of magnificent tail feathers, his face canyoned with wrinkles, his eyes black and sad and weary. (Years later I would visit a museum exhibit of the Indian portrait photography of Edward S. Curtis and realize that this mental image was not even mine; it was Chief Three Horses, Dakota Territory, 1905. But at the time, I confess, the image in my head seemed to me a thing I had conjured from some deep well of empathy within myself.) I saw a faceless woman in red cowboy boots and knew that she was me. The woman glanced at me through time and space with immense knowingness. Yes, I thought. We would go. Oklahoma would become part of the story of my life. As I sat beside Steven on the couch in the heat, with the pink night peering in at us through the window, I was also sitting on the edge of a small white bed, tucking in my children with a story about Mommy and Daddy’s time in Oklahoma.

  You see, I lived then guided by the unconscious notion that the story of my life as I was meant to live it was already written in a secret, locked-away text. At the end, I would finally be able to open it and read the story that had been written there all along—its arc, its twists and turns, its motifs and themes, its most evocative lines. For a moment before death, I would know what the world had intended for me and whether I had gotten it right or gone terribly astray.

  In September, we loaded our first car with our scant possessions and said goodbye to the mice and the diplomats.

  In Oklahoma, we moved into a house in a suburban development off I-40 called Amber Ridge. The neighboring development was Willow Canyon. There was neither a ridge nor a canyon as far as the eye could see, and we got a real kick out of this. We got a kick out of the house, too. It was brand-new, crisp as a toy yanked from the packaging, with an unseemly number of gables cramming the roofline and a potpourri of arched, circular, and Georgian windows on the facade—a jangling, architecturally screwy pastiche. The house was five times the size of the apartment we had left behind. It was a silly amount of space, more than two people could possibly fill. We had arrived in a place where space was completely unprecious, and this notion was as astonishing to me as if the same thing were to be true of time.

  On our first night in the house, after Steven fell asleep, I wandered from room to room. Night in New York had trembled with residual light; here it was pure black, so that I could not even make out the walls, the edges of what was ours.

  The next morning, one of Steven’s new colleagues pulled up in a Ram pickup to give us “the grand tour.” His name was Ward and he wore a bolo tie with a turquoise pendant. I stored this detail away. In the days and months that followed I collected many more like it: a church billboard that read, IF YOU THINK OKLAHOMA IS HOT . . . !; an octogenarian with a handlebar mustache and a bald eagle tattoo on his withered bicep; a gaggle of drunk, big-haired women stumbling out of a honkytonk. I tended my little collection with the vigor of an avid hobbyist, savoring the delicious irony of a place that conformed exactly to my hackneyed expectations. Another misapprehension: I believed that I could nail this place by triangulating among its details, that these typifying images converged upon a deeper truth.

  As we sped west on 41, away from the suburban sprawl and out into the prairie, Ward told us that the region had no native trees. “Any tree you see was brought in one time or other,” he said, waving generally at the landscape. To this day, I’m not sure if what he said is true, but the idea stuck with me. For the entirety of our brief time in the state, what few trees there were seemed to me to have a wavering, shimmering quality, as if they were projections you could slide your hand through. In lofty moments I think I saw my own presence there the same way. I loved Oklahoma because it had nothing to do with me. Ward, I learned later, was from Annapolis.

  I said our house was cluttered with gables and Georgian windows, but when we moved in I didn’t know what a gable or a Georgian window was. These were terms I learned through the part-time job I found six months after our move, working as a copywriter for a realtor named Bethany Parkhurst. Whether it took me so long to find work because I was depressed, or whether I was depressed because it took me so long to find work, I am no longer sure. I do know that in our first months in Oklahoma, despite my outward pleasure in our circumstances, I was depressed for the first time in my life, and maybe that is part of what I mean when I say that it is not possible to live in a place ironically. I was lonely in Oklahoma, the particular loneliness of an unemployed wife who knows no one but her husband for a thousand miles. Often I stayed in bed until noon. I ran errands in a sweatshirt with no bra underneath because why not? One afternoon I went to the supermarket planning on lamb chops for dinner, but they were out, and this seemed absolutely personal; I abandoned my cart, already loaded with cereal and juice and the cocktail nuts Steven liked, and rushed out of the store.

  The next morning, I woke to find that I could not move my right index finger. I stared at it, willing it, but I could not bring myself to lift it. Then the phone rang and I got up to answer it and that was that. This kind of thing began happening regularly. I would be standing beside the car at the gas pump and suddenly I could not raise my left foot. At dinner with Steven’s boss and his wife, it was my neck that separated from my control. These incidents ended only with some external interruption: a car honking for its turn at the pump; Steven’s boss punching me playfully but hard on the shoulder and saying, “Right? Right?”

  I spent a lot of time during this period driving through the prairie. I’d tell myself I needed t
o get out, that it would do me good to see some nature. The truth is that on these drives I stoked my growing terror of this place, of the on and on and on of it. Sometimes as I drove, the clouds above me would seem to coalesce around a brown center and then, suddenly, drop. Sometimes the thing I was driving past—a mailbox, a swimming pool—would suddenly be coated in black, glossy oil. I had developed a twinned obsession with tornadoes, on the one hand, and oil, on the other. They seemed to me to be part of a unified system, connected by some mystical-sinister energy. The tornadoes funneled destructive force down from the sky, the oil wells pulled it up from the ground, and I was living where these forces met, on the perilous surface of the earth.

  In March, my best friend Kristin and her husband Rich, who were moving from New York to Los Angeles (where it was assumed Rich’s screenwriting career would take off), stopped to visit on their journey across the country. I’d been counting down the days to their arrival, and when Kristin stepped out of the car I hugged her so tightly I frightened myself a little. We took them line dancing, and I watched with local smugness as they costumed themselves for this activity in western shirts and boots and jubilantly chucked the g’s from the ends of their gerunds. “Steven’s company has wells all over the area. Ponca City, Enid, Waynoka, Fort Supply,” I told them breathlessly, willing my utterance of these strange names to sound authoritative.