The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (46 page)

She shrugs and smoothes the sheet around her mother's legs.

Because otherwise we would have to be very careful. Things could get awkward.

Is that a threat?

Of course not. It's an assessment. I'm not going anywhere until you say the word.

Well, then, she says, you don't have anything to worry about.

He's moved his bed to the far end of the room, away from the radiator, from the hot water pipes, underneath the window permanently propped open two inches with an old paperback copy of
The Fountainhead.
Never could sleep in heat of any kind. In the desert, when he was assigned the night shift and had to sleep in the glowing heat of the tent under the midday sun, he tore the liner out of his sleeping bag and soaked it with water out of his own precious supply. Like sleeping covered with wet paper towels. He's thought about moving his bed onto the roof, but not in Red Hook, not with six connected buildings on one block, and kids moving across them at all hours of the night with guns and yayo. On a good winter night the slipstream of cold air from the window keeps him happily underneath a pile of blankets. He's so far away he barely hears the phone ringing on the most distant wall of the kitchen next to the stove. A railroad apartment, a run-to-the-phone apartment. His cell turned off and charging on his bedside table.

It's too late to call, Hyunjee says. What time is it, anyway? Her voice is shaky, her breathing careless. I
knew
it was too late to call.

Hang up, he says. I'll see you tomorrow.

Oh, come on, she says. Don't sulk. I've been rehearsing this apology all night.

He lowers himself into a chair and props his bare feet on the table next to a dirty juice glass. In the sallow wash of the streetlights they look pale and knobby, angular. A starving man's feet. A runner's feet.

Listen, she says, those things I said, which I'm not going to repeat—

I remember them.

I was working something out. I was trying on a different frame of mind, and I'm sorry you had to be there to witness it. Sometimes I have to be the one person in the room who says what everybody else is thinking. Okay, okay, that's too presumptuous. What some people
might
be thinking. We're all so easily insulted these days, you know? Just quivering, waiting for someone to slip up so we can all take offense. It's just as tribal and parochial and dimwitted as the creationists in Kansas. Believe me, I should know. Offensive behavior is sending my kids to college.

Hyunjee, he says, you know what your problem is? You're too good at this game. You know you can talk your way out of anything.

So what, then? What's your solution? You were the one with all the questions the other night.

I'm just saying there are some problems talking can't solve.

Oh, she says. That old conundrum. Language is the sickness and the cure.

No, he's thinking, that's not how I would have put it. And then he has the impulse to say, to fire right back, Love is the sickness and the cure. Shoot me now, he thinks, I've turned into a Hallmark card. And the worst of it is he's never believed any such thing. He would have said it without meaning it, to be clever, or provocative, to try it on for size. That's what you do around these people, he tells himself, you spatter words around like fingerpaint and call that a conversation, you say horrible things and take them back and say, that's a relationship, that's what I always wanted.

Hyunjee, he says, I accept your apology.

And just like that everything's back to normal?

No, he thinks, isn't that the point? Nothing was, nothing
is
ever normal. I'll see you tomorrow, he says, and lifts the heavy receiver away from his ear, holding her protesting voice between thumb and index finger for a moment before dropping it, clattering, onto the cradle.

She's popped an infection
, the night nurse said on the phone.
Fever one-oh-two. They think it's the stent. Should I call her ?
And he said, Ten minutes ago. Licking the dust of sleep off his lips. You know how she is. Get off and do it right now. Tell her I'm coming.
But it's four-thirty—don't I still get the rest of my shift?
Do it now! he shouts. Do it! And then clear out. Consider your ass fired.

Sorry, he keeps saying to Hyunjee, on the way back from the coffee machine, sorry, sorry. Should never have hired her. Should never have even looked at her twice.

Would you shut up?

Her skin, under the fluorescent lights, is shockingly gray.
Corpse-like.
Raw-lipped, bare-eyed, in red Harvard sweatpants and a hooded sweater. She backs into the wall of the elevator and closes her eyes.

I mean, it looks like they've got it under control, right? The drug's working. I shouldn't bring the girls in to say goodbye, right?

She'll still be here in the morning.

Then go home. I'll stay.

Is that really what you want?

I don't think you should work for me any longer, she says, opening her eyes and staring past him at the wall. I mean, I'll pay you. I'll keep paying you. What, a month's severance, two months, is that fair?

He laughs, the dazed, punch-drunk laugh all nurses have at the end of the graveyard shift. He can't help himself. Hyunjee, he says, you think that'll make it better? A golden handshake?

I made a mistake, okay? Distractedly she undoes the haphazard knot holding her hair in place, and lets it fall across her forehead, the streak of gray curving like a nautilus shell. I needed someone to be objective, she says, flicking the hair back with her thumb. Not that I thought I wasn't a good daughter. Not that I felt guilty. But she deserves more than that, you know? Everybody deserves more than one. It wasn't her fault that they didn't know what endometriosis was back in those days. It's not that she wanted a son. She just wanted a second try. And she was right, goddamn it! Nobody should ever be so fucking alone that they have to hire strangers to be family. I'm sorry. I can't help myself. Here, hold this.

She holds out her coffee cup to him, and zips her sweater up to the neck, and begins to cry, dropping her hands in front of her like a rag doll, and when he embraces her, when he covers her face with his chest, does not raise them, does not wrap them around his waist, but shrinks into him, into herself, like a dried-out stem, he thinks, like a twig, clasping his awkward paws around her with a Styrofoam cup of hot liquid in each, like urine samples, or blood vials, anything vital, anything carrying the body's warmth away.

This is the way to tell the story. When the grandchildren ask, how was it that they met, those two, a Portuguese sailor and an ex-nun from Estonia, or, how did they communicate, if he didn't speak Finnish and she didn't speak Taiwanese, you don't say, he was already drunk when they met in the airport bar. Or, they were locked in the basement accidentally for three hours before the manager let them out. You say, in this case there was no other way. The world is made choice after choice after choice. The body makes logic, not the other way around.

And then they ask, is it fair, is it just, to reduce it to that? Isn't it the height of selfishness, these willy-nilly associations, this refusal to plan, this projecting the future from the momentary bubble of your own ego?

Well, you say, which is it better to be seduced by: the future in the form of a woman with hair the color of streaming silver, or the future in the form of an organizing principle?

Samantha, she says, when he backs open the door in the morning, his arms full of new bedding. Samantha. Pearl. Turn around. I want you to say hi to Kevin.

They turn away from the bed awkwardly, darting looks at one another:
It's just the nurse. It's just the nurse, right?
Hi, the older one says, flipping her bangs back. Tiny bright green eyes. Um, thanks for taking such good care of Grandma.

I'm Pearl, the little one says. Yeah, thanks.

Kevin's coming out to lunch with us. Aren't you?

There's no one to take over. I'd have to make a call.

It's all right. Just an hour.

Aren't you kids supposed to be in school?

In-service. Pearl sucks a lollipop, knocking it against her teeth. Professional development day.

Something is sticking in his throat, a crooked knuckle, a little jagged stone. He can't look at them straight on. Little suns, he thinks, little flames of the future. Their shifting brown limbs, their twitching fingers. Outrageous, the claims they make on us! Outrageous, the way they judge us from thirty years hence!

So, Hyunjee asks, interrupting his reverie. Are you coming or not?

It makes a kind of tableau, he thinks, a frieze, these women's faces, women and soon-to-be women, waiting to see what he'll do next. As if in some obscure way that's what he's always wanted.
The measure of a man.
Behind the girls, Mrs. Kang stirs, wraps her blue fingers around the rail, and pulls her face a few inches up from the pillow.

I never had a son, she says.
Nahantaenen adeul op da!
I don't know who you are.

FROM
The New Yorker

"D
RIP ON?
" Abnesti said over the PA.

"What's in it?" I said.

"Hilarious," he said.

"Acknowledge," I said.

Abnesti used his remote. My Mobi-Pak™ whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.

I said out loud, as I was supposed to, what I was feeling.

"Garden looks nice," I said. "Super-clear."

Abnesti said, "Jeff, how about we pep up those language centers?"

"Sure," I said.

"Drip on?" he said.

"Acknowledge," I said.

He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. The garden still looked nice. It was like the bushes were so tight-seeming and the sun made everything stand out? It was like any moment you expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea. It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams forever intrinsic to human consciousness. It was as if I could suddenly discern, in this contemporary vignette, the ancient corollary through which Plato and some of his contemporaries might have strolled; to wit, I was sensing the eternal in the ephemeral.

I sat, pleasantly engaged in these thoughts, until the Verbaluce™ began to wane. At which point the garden just looked nice again. It was something about the bushes and whatnot? It made you just want to lay out there and catch rays and think your happy thoughts. If you get what I mean.

Then whatever else was in the drip wore off, and I didn't feel much about the garden one way or the other. My mouth was dry, though, and my gut had that post-Verbaluce™ feel to it.

"What's going to be cool about that one?" Abnesti said. "Is, say a guy has to stay up late guarding a perimeter. Or is at school waiting for his kid and gets bored. But there's some nature nearby? Or say a park ranger has to work a double shift?"

"That will be cool," I said.

"That's ED763," he said. "We're thinking of calling it NatuGlide. Or maybe ErthAdmire."

"Those are both good," I said.

"Thanks for your help, Jeff," he said.

Which was what he always said.

"Only a million years to go," I said.

Which was what I always said.

Then he said, "Exit the Interior Garden now, Jeff, head over to Small Workroom 2."

Into Small Workroom 2 they sent this pale tall girl.

"What do you think?" Abnesti said over the PA.

"Me?" I said. "Or her?"

"Both," Abnesti said.

"Pretty good," I said.

"Fine, you know," she said. "Normal."

Abnesti asked us to rate each other more quantifiably, as per pretty, as per sexy.

It appeared we liked each other about average, i.e., no big attraction or revulsion either way.

Abnesti said, "Jeff, drip on?"

"Acknowledge," I said.

"Heather, drip on?" he said.

"Acknowledge," Heather said.

Then we looked at each other like, What happens next?

What happened next was, Heather soon looked super-good. And I could tell she thought the same of me. It came on so sudden we were like laughing. How could we not have seen it, how cute the other one was? Luckily there was a couch in the Workroom. It felt like our drip had, in addition to whatever they were testing, some ED556 in it, which lowers your shame level to like nil. Because soon, there on the couch, off we went. It was super-hot between us. And not merely in a horndog way. Hot, yes, but also just right. Like if you'd dreamed of a certain girl all your life and all of a sudden there she was, in your Domain.

"Jeff," Abnesti said. "I'd like your permission to pep up your language centers."

"Go for it," I said, under her now.

"Drip on?" he said.

"Acknowledge," I said.

"Me too?" Heather said.

"You got it," Abnesti said, with a laugh. "Drip on?"

"Acknowledge," she said, all breathless.

Soon, experiencing the benefits of the flowing Verbaluce™ in our drips, we were not only fucking really well but also talking pretty great. Like, instead of just saying the sex-type things we had been saying (such as "wow" and "oh God" and "hell yes" and so forth), we now began freestyling re our sensations and thoughts, in elevated diction, with eighty percent increased vocab, our well-articulated thoughts being recorded for later analysis.

For me, the feeling was, approximately: Astonishment at the dawning realization that this woman was being created in real time, directly from my own mind, per my deepest longings. Finally, after all these years (was my thought), I had found the precise arrangement of body/face/mind that personified all that was desirable. The taste of her mouth, the look of that halo of blondish hair spread out around her cherubic yet naughty-looking face (she was beneath me now, legs way up), even (not to be crude or dishonor the exalted feelings I was experiencing) the sensations her vagina was producing along the length of my thrusting penis were precisely those I had always hungered for, though I had never, before this instant, realized that I so ardently hungered for them.