The Best American Short Stories 2014 (3 page)

Of course, there's a long relationship between literary innovation and seismic cultural change: the modernists absorbed the impact of Freud, a world war, and the popularization of film (James Joyce managed a Dublin movie theater); the postmodernists reacted to television, structural theory, and the counterculture. Personally, I could do without any further “isms” (is anyone actually
drawn
to fiction called “postmodern”?), but I'm stirred by the question of how novels and short stories will evolve to accommodate and represent our ongoing cultural transformation. Prose fiction was invented as a means of flexible, eclectic storytelling, after all; from the very start, fiction writers have greedily absorbed whatever forms were around and bent them to their will.
Pamela
, one of the first novels written in English, is epistolary, and
Tristram Shandy
and
Robinson Crusoe
include legal documents, fake autobiography, and (in Sterne's case) weird graphics. It would be uncharacteristic if our literary production
didn't
seek out new ways to embody the novelties of twenty-first-century life: the commingling of online with actual experience; the disappearance of a certain kind of solitude; the illusion of safety that goes along with being in touch; surveillance as a fact of everyday life; the gulf between those who are technologically connected and those still isolated. To name just a few.

All of this brings me back to fiction's relevance to the cultural conversation. Will people continue to read short stories and novels, now that virtually every alternative that exists can fit more easily into our pocket than a paperback? People have been asking this question for a long time now—through the arrival of movies, TV, the Walkman, video games, cable, VCRs, personal computers, the Internet, and smartphones. By the time this introduction is printed (the very word outmoded), there may be some new threat. And while I do occasionally cower before the question, I also know that the answer is finally simple: people will keep reading fiction as long as it provides an experience of pleasure and insight they can't find anywhere else. The twenty stories in this collection did exactly that—for me. Now I cordially invite you to agree, object, call me crazy, and begin the conversation.

J
ENNIFER
E
GAN

FROM
McSweeney's

 

1

 

H
E HAD FALLEN
into bad trouble. He had worked in Ethiopia for a year—teaching in a school and lending a hand at a medical clinic. He had eaten all the local foods and been stung by the many airborne insects. When he'd returned to the States, he'd brought back an infection—the inflammation in his knees and his back and his shoulders was so bad that sometimes he could hardly stand up. Probably a viral arthritis, his doctor said. It happens. Here: have some painkillers.

Borrowing a car, he drove from Minneapolis down to the Mayo Clinic, where after two days of tests the doctors informed him that they would have no firm diagnosis for the next month or so. Back in Minneapolis, through a friend of a friend, he visited a wildcat homeopathy treatment center known for traumatic-pain-relief treatments. The center, in a strip mall storefront claiming to be a weight-loss clinic (
WEIGHT NO MORE
), gave him megadoses of meadowsweet, a compound chemically related to aspirin. After two months without health insurance or prescription coverage, he had emptied his bank account, and he gazed at the future with shy dread.

Through another friend of a friend, he managed to get his hands on a few superb prescription painkillers, the big ones, gifts from heaven. With the aid of these pills, he felt like himself again. He blessed his own life. He cooked some decent meals; he called his boyfriend in Seattle; he went around town looking for a job; he made plans to get himself to the Pacific Northwest. When the drugs ran out and the pain returned, worse this time, like being stabbed in his elbows and shoulders, along with the novelty of addiction's chills and fevers, the friend of a friend told him that if he wanted more pills at the going street rate, he had better go see Black Bird. He could find Black Bird at the bar of a club, the Inner Circle, on Hennepin Avenue. “He's always there,” the friend of a friend said. “He's there now. He reads. The guy sits there studying Shakespeare. Used to be a scholar or something. Pretends to be a Native American, one of those imposter types. Very easy to spot. I'll tell him you're coming.”

The next Wednesday, he found Black Bird at the end of the Inner Circle bar near the broken jukebox and the sign for the men's room. The club's walls had been built from limestone and rust-red brick and sported no decorative motifs of any kind. If you needed decorations around you when you drank, you went somewhere else. The peculiar orange lighting was so dim that Quinn couldn't figure out how Black Bird could read at all.

Quinn approached him gingerly. Black Bird's hair went down to his shoulders. The gray in it looked as if it had been applied with chalk. He wore bifocals and moved his finger down the page as he read. Nearby was a half-consumed bottle of 7 Up.

“Excuse me. Are you Black Bird?”

Without looking up, the man said, “Why do you ask?”

“I'm Quinn.” He held out his hand. Black Bird did not take it. “My friend Morrow told me about you.”

“Ah huh,” Black Bird said. He glanced up with an impatient expression before returning to his book. Quinn examined the text. Black Bird was reading
Othello
, the third act.

“Morrow said I should come see you. There's something I need.”

Black Bird said nothing.

“I need it pretty bad,” Quinn said, his hand trembling inside his pocket. He wasn't used to talking to people like this. When Black Bird didn't respond, Quinn said, “You're reading
Othello
.” Quinn had acquired a liberal arts degree from a college in Iowa, where he had majored in global political solutions, and he felt that he had to assert himself. “The handkerchief. And Iago, right?”

Black Bird nodded. “This isn't
College Bowl
,” he said dismissively. With his finger stopped on the page, he said, “What do you want from me?”

Quinn whispered the name of the drug that made him feel human.

“What a surprise,” said Black Bird. “Well, well. How do I know that you're not a cop? You a cop, Mr. Quinn?”

“No.”

“Because I don't know what you're asking me or what you're talking about. I'm a peaceful man sitting here reading this book and drinking this 7 Up.”

“Yes,” Quinn said.

“You could always come back in four days,” Black Bird said. “You could always bring some money.” He mentioned a price for a certain number of painkillers. “I have to get the ducks in a row.”

“That's a lot of cash,” Quinn said. Then, after thinking it over, he said, “All right.” He did not feel that he had many options these days.

Black Bird looked up at him with an expression devoid of interest or curiosity.

“Do you read, Mr. Quinn?” he asked. “Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist.” Black Bird spoke these words in a bland monotone.

“I don't know what to read,” Quinn told him, his legs shaking.

“Too bad,” Black Bird said. “Next time you come here, bring a book. I need proof you exist. The Minneapolis Public Library is two blocks away. But if you come back, bring the money. Otherwise, there's no show.”

 

Quinn was living very temporarily in a friend's basement in Northeast Minneapolis. His parents, in a traditional Old World gesture, had disowned him after he had come out, so he couldn't call on them for support. They had uttered several unforgettable verdicts about his character, sworn they would never see him again, and that was that.

He had a sister who lived in Des Moines with her husband and two children. She did not like what she called Quinn's “sexual preferences” and had a tendency to hang up on him. None of his friends from high school had any money he could borrow; the acquaintance in whose basement he was staying was behind on his rent. His student debt had been taken up by a collection agency, which was calling him three times a day.

Quinn's boyfriend in Seattle, a field rep for a medical supply company, had a thing about people borrowing money. He might break up with Quinn if Quinn asked him for a loan. He could be prickly, the boyfriend, and the two of them were still on a trial basis anyway. They had met in Africa and had fallen in love over there. The love might not travel if Quinn brought up the subject of debts or his viral arthritis and inflammation or the drug habit he had recently acquired.

Now that the painkillers had run out, a kind of groggy unfocused physical discomfort had become Quinn's companion day and night. He lived in the house that the pain had designed for him. The Mayo Clinic had not called him back, and the meadowsweet's effect was like a cup of water dropped on a house fire. Sometimes the pain started in Quinn's knees and circled around Quinn's back until it located itself in his shoulders, like exploratory surgery performed using a Swiss Army knife. He had acquired the jitters and a runny nose and a swollen tongue and cramps. He couldn't sleep and had diarrhea. He was a mess, and the knowledge of the mess he had become made the mess worse. The necessity of opiates became a supreme idea that forced out all the other ideas until only one thought occupied Quinn's mind:
Get those painkillers
. He didn't think he was a goner yet, though.

He could no longer tell his dreams from his waking life. The things around him began to take on the appearance of stage props made from cardboard. Other people—pedestrians—looked like shadow creatures giving off a stinky perfume.

In the basement room where he slept, there was, leaning against the wall, a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger, and one night after dark, in a dreamlike hallucinatory fever, he took it across the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to a park along the Mississippi, where he hid hotly shivering behind a tree until the right sort of prosperous person walked by. Quinn felt as if he were under orders to do what he was about to do. The man he chose wore a T-shirt and jeans and seemed fit but not so strong as to be dangerous, and after rushing out from the shadows, Quinn hit him with the baseball bat in the back of his legs. He had aimed for the back of the legs so he wouldn't shatter the guy's kneecaps. When Quinn's victim fell down, Quinn reached into the man's trouser pocket and pulled out his wallet and ran away with it, dropping the Slugger into the river as he crossed the bridge.

Back in his friend's basement, Quinn examined the wallet's contents. His hands were trembling again, and he couldn't see properly, and he wasn't sure he was awake, but he could make out that the name on the driver's license was Benjamin Takemitsu. The man didn't look Japanese in the driver's license photo, but Quinn didn't think much about it until he'd finished counting the cash, which amounted to $321, an adequate sum for a few days' relief. At that point he gazed more closely at the photo and saw that Takemitsu appeared to be intelligently thoughtful. What had he done to this man? Familiar pain flared behind Quinn's knees and in his neck, punishment he recognized that he deserved, and the pain pushed out everything else.

He called his boyfriend in Seattle. In a panic he told him that he had robbed someone named Benny Takemitsu, that he had used a baseball bat. The boyfriend said, “You've had a bad dream, Matty. That didn't happen. You would never do such a thing. Go back to sleep, sweetheart, and I'll call you tomorrow.”

After that he lay awake wondering what had become of the person he had once been, the one who had gone to Africa. To the ceiling he said, “I am no longer myself.” He did not know who this new person was, the man whom he had become, but when he finally fell asleep, he saw in his dream one of those shabby castoffs with whom you wouldn't want to have any encounters, any business at all, someone who belonged on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign that read
HELP ME
. The man was crouched behind a tree in the dark, peering out with feverish eyes. His own face was the face of the castoff.

Somehow he would have to make it up to Benny Takemitsu.

 

In the Inner Circle, when Quinn entered, Black Bird did not look up. He was seated in his usual place, and once again his finger was traveling down the page.
Cymbeline
, this time, a play that Quinn had never read.

“It's you,” Black Bird said.

“Yes,” Quinn said.

“Did you bring a book of your own?”

“No.”

“All right,” Black Bird said. “I can't say I'm surprised.”

He then issued elaborate instructions to Quinn about where in the men's room to put the money, and when he, Black Bird, would retrieve it. The entire exchange took over half an hour, though the procedure hardly seemed secret or designed to fool anyone. When Quinn finally returned to his basement room, he had already gulped down two of the pills, and his relief soon grew to a great size. He felt his humanity restored until his mottled face appeared before him in the bathroom mirror, and then he realized belatedly what terrible trouble he was in.

Two days later he disappeared.

 

2

 

That was as far as I got whenever I tried to compose an account of what happened to Matty Quinn—my boyfriend, my soulmate, my future life—the man who mistakenly thought I was a tightwad. I
was
very thrifty in Ethiopia, convinced that Americans should not spend large sums in front of people who owned next to nothing. But to Matty I would have given anything. Upon his return to Minneapolis he had called me up and texted and e-mailed me with these small clues about the medical ordeal he was going through, and I had not understood; then he had called to say that he had robbed this Takemitsu, and I had not believed him. Then he disappeared from the world, from his existence and mine.