The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 Read online

  Hiroshi’s hair had fallen out, and the top of his head was hard and smooth as a helmet. Deep creases scalloped the length of his forehead, a permanent ridge of worry. Scales ringed his body like ruffles of armor.

  Yoshi laughed at the news of Masaru. “You know,” Yoshi said, “that his wife used to never touch his burned arm? Now she lives high off his deformity.”

  “We’ve had offers too,” Hiroshi said. “They will fly us to America.”

  “Haven’t the Americans done enough?” Yoshi said. He raised his arms, as if surrendering. “You know what people call us? They say we are ningyo. Mermaids! Already some of the villagers think that if they eat our flesh, they will live forever.” He rapped his knuckles against the carapace on his chest. “Maybe they will break their teeth on me.”

  “Ningyo are omens,” Hiroshi said. “To catch one is to invite misfortune.”

  “It’s too late to throw us back,” Yoshi said. He lifted a scale on his arm. The flesh underneath was gray and bumpy, like lizard skin. “What do you think I taste like? There’s enough of me to feed the village for a week.”

  “You? You’re as stringy as week-old beef. And if you taste the way you smell, no one would be able to stomach you.”

  “We could be a boon to this village,” Yoshi said. “Remember the story of Happyaku Bikuni? One bite of me and everyone would have eternal life. They would hail us as heroes.” Yoshi flexed his hands, the webbing as translucent as kelp. “Or maybe our flesh will poison the village folk, and they will know what our pain is like.”

  “Why do you say these things?” Hiroshi said. “Why can you not be at peace?”

  “Look at us,” Yoshi said. “Better to have died in Cowra all those years ago than to live like this today.” He exhaled—a wheeze, a gasp. “You should have shot me,” Yoshi said. “You should have pulled the trigger.”

  VI.

  Yoshi hanged himself. Hiroshi found him—maybe Yoshi had meant for Hiroshi alone to serve as witness to his bravery, but the truth was that no one ever visited him. He had fastened one end of his obi to the pine beam bracing the ceiling and looped the other end beneath the scales on his neck, where the skin was still soft. A green forked tongue lolled out of his mouth, and his eyes were yellow, glassy, streaked with red.

  Hiroshi did not cry out when he saw Yoshi’s body dangling there, nor did he cry as he tried to cut his friend down. But his webbed hand could not hold a knife; his fingers were too stiff and clumsy. He slashed at the cloth with his talons until it frayed and snapped. Yoshi’s body crashed onto the ground, and Hiroshi cradled his friend, scales scratching against scales. Hiroshi’s eyelids had atrophied, but his nictitating membrane flicked ceaselessly to keep his eyes moist.

  Soon, people gathered outside Yoshi’s door, looking in, hiding their words behind their hands. The crowd grew as news spread, and it seemed as if the whole village were looking in. Hiroshi didn’t move. Let them look. They had wished us dead—let them look at the result. He no longer had ears, but he heard them whispering, If it’s dead, we should have the body. He heard Miho gasp. How could you say that, she said. That’s his friend. That’s Yoshi.

  Monster’s whore, they replied.

  Enough. Hiroshi lifted Yoshi’s body and walked outside. The villagers trailed him, holding aloft torches. Miho was among them. He smelled the detergent she used to purify herself. Here they were: a procession of monsters.

  The villagers shouted, Give us his body. Give him to us.

  If you want him, Hiroshi said, come take him from me. He gouged a nearby tree with his claws, and none of the villagers dared pass the patch of splinters he had made.

  Hiroshi did not know if Yoshi’s body would burn, as leathery and resilient as it was. And it would be impossible to bury his body in secret. What if it tainted the land where it lay? Hiroshi walked to the beach with Yoshi in his arms. Miho stopped at the sand. She placed his sandals at the start of the path back to the village, as she used to do when he went swimming. The water is too cold for me, she used to say. But you go on.

  Hiroshi stood at the ocean’s edge, the water sluicing onto his feet. He thought once again of Sugiro, the commander who had committed hara-kiri. Perhaps it had been the brave thing, the honorable thing. But Hiroshi had seen a new world blossom, a world born of light and fire, and this world no longer had a place for the proud, the defeated, the disgraced. The old world held onto its illusion of bravery, like the cowardly men up on the hill brandishing their torches, as if they had driven him toward the sea themselves. But all Hiroshi had to do was turn and open his mouth—his square teeth had fallen out weeks ago, replaced with triangular shards—and the men ran off like curs.

  He no longer felt the cold. Even waist-deep in water, he felt no unease. Indeed, it seemed comforting. The tide pulled at his body, urging him forward. Yoshi’s body was buoyant, and the sea lifted him out of Hiroshi’s arms. But there could not be even the remote possibility of Yoshi floating back onto land. A ningyo washing up on shore was an omen of war, and they had both seen their fill of calamity. Hiroshi ventured further, deeper, until the light from the stars vanished.

  He sensed the thrumming of fish around him: the mackerel low on the ocean floor, a squid curling its tentacles around an unlucky clam, and a school of tuna bustling about, mouths open and hungry. He breathed and exhaled through the slits in his neck. He propelled himself, undulating his torso, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, vast forests of seaweed unfurled before him. Fish darted out of his path. He released Yoshi’s body. He swam forth, examining the endlessness of the new world, and Yoshi followed in the pattern Hiroshi cut through the water, almost as if he were himself swimming. Yoshi, Hiroshi wanted to call out, where are you? Don’t leave me alone. And Yoshi, now given to the ebb and flow of currents, replied, Keep going. I’m right behind you.

  KIMA JONES

  ■

  Homegoing, AD

  FROM The Fire This Time

  Here’s the down south story we didn’t tell you: sixteen hours in and Jack can’t feel her feet but we never stop. Our uncle asleep at the wheel and we that closer to death with each mile. Turned around again and again, before GPS, we learned North Carolina is a long state: tobacco taller than us, the fields and fields of it, no washing it out of our clothes, the air so wet and thick of it, choking us.

  Jack won’t fly. Full grown with a dead granddaddy and still she won’t fly, she tells us I-95 has always been the way back home so we gun it. Straight through, no stopping, sixteen hours and Jack doesn’t care how bad we need to pee, she says, Hold it. Sixteen hours till we saw the palmetto trees and smelled the paper mill and knew Savage Road was in sight.

  Georgie ’n’ em got Grandaddy laid out in the front room like a piece of furniture and ushers fanning the top of Grandmama’s head. We couldn’t find our place in the business of departing: hams out the oven, lemon cake iced, organ tuned, tea made, napkins folded, the children’s black patent leather shoes set out for the dirt road come morning.

  Here’s the down south story we didn’t tell you: Leroy barking at us from the grill because when did everybody stop eating pork and why he got separate meat and when all the women become Nefertiti bangles and headwraps and all us named like Muslims. Our cousins who couldn’t make it because he died on the wrong Friday, wadn’t payday, and our cousins who did and their many children tearing up the front yard. Our decision to sneak into the woods with red cups, black and milds, Jim Beam, a blue lighter plucked from the card table, and Toya’s gold cap kept in her change purse. The pot of greens we brought out with us and the mosquitoes keeping company like we wasn’t down in the swamps to bury our dead.

  Our cousins know the dark and the heat, but we haven’t been home in so long. Our back sweating and this old bra sticky so more and more from the red cup. Our cousin say, Lemme top it off for youse, so we oblige and when he said pull, we pulled and when he said blow, we blew smoke over our shoulder and then into his open mouth, giggling. Our cousin say, You know th
ey found him in the bed, right? And we nod cuz sleep don’t come easy no how. He say, Just like that. And our cousin clap when he say that and we think of Grandaddy setting his glasses down on the nightstand one last time. Our cousin say, You missed me? And we smile cuz his hand is on our hip and it’s hot out and he smell good and it’s the darkest Charleston has ever been. The dead of night is forgiving when you’re kin. Grandaddy gone and we sitting up in the woods with brown liquor, necking, our cousin hard on our thigh. Toya say, Keep watch for them copperheads, but copperheads ain’t never kill nobody—we got our eyes trained for gators.

  We think we can still outrun ’em.

  Who threw that rock at the gator?

  Don’t know Where Toya?

  Ya’ll there?

  We here.

  Gator comin, boy, run

  Don’t see no gator, cuh Well, Gator see us, nigga

  Runnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

  so we run

  fast

  cuz gator made for water but children born for land.

  MASHA GESSEN

  ■

  Autocracy: Rules for Survival

  FROM The New York Review of Books

  “Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

  That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,

  We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.

  Hours later, President Barack Obama was even more conciliatory:

  We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world . . . We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team.

  The president added, “The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” As if Donald Trump had not conned his way into hours of free press coverage, as though he had released (and paid) his taxes, or not brazenly denigrated our system of government, from the courts and Congress, to the election process itself—as if, in other words, he had not won the election precisely by acting in bad faith.

  Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give President Trump a chance.” Even the politicians who have in the past appealed to the less-establishment part of the Democratic electorate sounded the conciliatory note. Senator Elizabeth Warren promised to “put aside our differences.” Senator Bernie Sanders was only slightly more cautious, vowing to try to find the good in Trump: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”

  However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.

  More dangerously, Clinton’s and Obama’s very civil passages, which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to his minority victory. (It was hard not to be reminded of Neville Chamberlain’s statement, that “We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.”) Both Clinton’s and Obama’s phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton’s speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.

  The second falsehood is the pretense that America is starting from scratch and its president-elect is a tabula rasa. Or we are: “we owe him an open mind.” It was as though Donald Trump had not, in the course of his campaign, promised to deport U.S. citizens, promised to create a system of surveillance targeted specifically at Muslim Americans, promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, advocated war crimes, endorsed torture, and repeatedly threatened to jail Hillary Clinton herself. It was as though those statements and many more could be written off as so much campaign hyperbole and now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.

  But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.

  I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:

  Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, the New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.

  He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word.
If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.

  To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture members of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.