Did Best American Short Stories 2022 move me?

I never went beyond getting my M.A. in English, but I was a serious student of literature long enough that some of the ethos of the profession has stuck with me. It still seems strange to me to talk about literature from a personal standpoint. It's fine to talk about what literature means, but not so much about what literature means to me. 

As I've been considering how to wrap up my read-through of Best American Short Stories 2022, it occurred to me that maybe I'd ignore the impulse to repress my personal feelings. To use a Bible-reading metaphor I've employed before, this is more of a "devotional" reading--meaning one in which I read to find out what the text tells me about my life--than a hermeneutical reading. 

Isn't what literature does to us internally why we read literature in the first place? A scholarly approach is useful because it deepens what happens to us internally, but ultimately, reading happens alone, completely within our minds, and we read because we are hoping something will happen there inside us that will--what? Make us smarter? More resilient? More philosophical? Less judgmental? Give us smart things to say at parties? Give us useful things to say to loved ones who are struggling with life? All of these? 

For me, a story has succeeded when there is something that happens in my life after I've read it and I'm reminded of the story. The story somehow seems to inform the way I think about whatever it is I'm facing. It might offer a solution. It might simply frame the problem in words like I never would have been able to. It might make me more aware of something that had never gone beyond the level of unconscious acceptance before. 

Will any of these stories come to mind later in my life?

I guess the only way to tell if a story is a "personal classic"--meaning a story that frequently comes to mind later in life--is to live your life and find out. But you can kind of tell right away sometimes. I knew when I read "The Breeze" by Joshua Ferris that I would keep thinking about that story forever, and also with "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken. Those are probably the two modern stories I think about the most. They join older stories like "Bartleby the Scrivener," "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and a handful of Borges shorts--just to limit it to short stories--as frequently used furniture in my brain. Will anything from 2022 do the same?

I did think that the 2022 collection was one of the better ones I've read in the now ten years I've been reading BASS. I liked nearly all the stories. Even the ones I didn't like, I mostly recognize that I can see why someone would have thought they were good. 

Yet as good as these stories were, I think it's highly unlikely I'll think again much about more than a few of them. The ones likely to stick in my brain are: "The Little Widow from the Capital" by Yohanca Delgado, "Sugar Island" by Claire Luchette, "The Souvenir Museum" by Elizabeth McCracken, "Bears Among the Living' by Kevin Moffett, and "The Beyoglu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra" by Kenan Orhan. So six. And in reality, I doubt it will be that many. (This list doesn't mean I necessarily thought those were the six best, but more that they will be the most memorable.) 

Honestly, I had a hard time remembering some of the stories two weeks after I blogged about them. Karen Carlson was a little behind me this year, and when her posts would come out on the same story I'd already blogged about, I sometimes had to think really hard to even recall what story she was talking about.

What does that say about literature? These are twenty stories that cleared enormous hurdles, both in their original publication and in their selection for a best-of anthology. They're all top-notch from a craft perspective, and many of them have the feel of being truly felt in their creation, not just cynical works that meet the expectations of literary fiction readership. But I won't remember most of them, and that's after having spent the time to read them all twice and think enough about them to write posts others would read. Most people likely won't spend nearly that much time on them. Does that mean most literature, even good literature, has a very short shelf life and a very small cultural impact? 

Clearly, literature has been a big part of making me who I am. Anytime I'm alone and thinking about my life and my place in the universe, thoughts that have their origin in literature make up a big part of the noise in my head. It's largely a useful noise, one that is a little bit clearer and more beautiful than some of the other sounds--the ones made up of how much I hated public school or how much the Marine Corps messed with my head or how bad I think I am at being a grown up. But reading literary fiction isn't, maybe, a very efficient method for culling useful information. If I'm only going to remember at best 30% of the stories I read a year after I've read them, and if maybe less that 2% are going to have any lasting impact on who I am and how I think about the world, then that means I'm kind of wasting a lot of my time when I'm reading fiction. 

Sure, I might be changing unconsciously from stuff I don't remember, but I think the real change comes from the stuff you're constantly chewing over. If even the best of what's being put out doesn't mostly make its way deep into the psyche, then what am I really accomplishing with all the reading of stuff that doesn't knock me off my feet?

It's not the fault of the writing, I think

I often run into people who spin some version of, "all the writing today is shit." I don't think that's true. By any measure of what makes good literature, most of what's in BASS is good. Every year, I pick out one or two that I think don't belong, but mostly, it's not that the quality is bad. Maybe that's just the way literature is. Maybe for people who read a lot, the impact of each story tends to be less. When I was a kid, I thought Wendy's was the best food in the universe. Now that I'm grown and I've eaten other things, I realize it's not good at all. A more refined palate can be harder to please. Maybe that's why every survey of "the best five novels" always tends to lean toward the kinds of novels people read in junior high or high school. As we grow, it becomes more difficult for literature to affect us deeply, so when we are groping for a novel that really moved us, we have to go back to a time when we could still be easily moved. 

I suppose there might still be some value in reading stories that others might value. If I'm not an unusual reader, and most readers who take reading seriously will only remember a small percentage of what they've read more than a few months after reading it, then I can probably also assume that the stories others will remember are likely to differ from mine. Maybe someone else will long treasure "The Wind" by Laruen Groff or "Foster" by Bryan Washington. Is it valuable to me, as means to understanding others, to at least be exposed to what might move someone else, even if it doesn't move me?

I'm sure it has some value, but I don't know if the value justifies the input of effort and time. Literary Twitter and the literary community tend to talk often as if everything they read is devastating and leads to eternal psychic wounds from which the reader will never recover. I think that's unlikely. I can't believe everything everyone reads is really that unforgettable. Which is pretty humbling. It's a pretty natural tendency for writers to write because they want to be remembered. But given the churn of stories that are out there, writing might actually be a really bad way for most people to be remembered. 

I don't deny that among the reasons I have for writing, the desire to be remembered is among them. It's very sad to me to think of it one day being like I never existed. It makes me wonder what the point of even living is if I can't leave something behind that will outlast me. I guess most people think of having kids as their legacy, but I think of whatever my kids do in their lives as their own legacy. I want something more. And it's enormously frustrating to me that I haven't done more to increase the readers I would need for the kind of legacy I want. I write the stories I want to read, assuming that what I love others will love, but I'm constantly disappointed to find there aren't many others who love what I love. Still, I've kept going, because if I wanted to be remembered, what, really, was my alternative? 

But thinking about BASS 2022, I'm maybe left with the feeling that leaving a legacy as a writer is even harder than I've thought it was. Getting into BASS is very, very hard. Even if I personally hate the story, nobody gets in there by accident. But even if I did keep persevering enough to one day accomplish that milestone, would it even matter? I recently was reading about the "bad art friend" controversy, and the article mentioned that one of the people embroiled in it had been published in BASS several years ago. When I read that, I couldn't place the story at all. I had to go back and look at it again. When I read it again, it was like reading it for the first time. I'll remember her more now for the stupid controversy than her story. 

What this all means for me for next year

I know I keep promising I'm quitting writing or quitting literary fiction or quitting whatever, and then I keep going back on my word. I'm the kind of guy who needs a purpose in life, and when I ditch the one I've got, it ends up being so frightening looking for a new one, I quickly end up right back where I was, sure it'll be different this time. But thinking about it in the cool, objective light of day, maybe the concern I've always had for whether literature is good for you is in some ways justified. So I'm at least going to start 2023 doing other things. If this is terrifying to me from a raison d'etre standpoint, I can look at it as diversification from my main goal, rather than outright abandonment of it. 

What I maybe walked away from BASS this year with more than anything was the feeling that although many people can write a good short story, only the greatest of a generation can write an unforgettable one. Elizabeth McCracken can write a story I'll never forget, but I'm no Elizabeth McCracken. For most people, that wouldn't be a reason to give up. For me, though, I'm not sure. I think I need a little more time away. I need to do things other than literature so the effect of literature has time to become new to me again. 

Something there is that loves a wall: "Foster" by Bryan Washington

There are some stories that wear their themes on their sleeves. They're not trying to hide what they're about in any way. In fact, they're screaming out to the reader, "This is what the story's about!" "Foster" by Bryan Washington is that kind of story. It's about a guy who puts up walls in his relationship so he doesn't get hurt. His friend at work even tells him that, and when the protagonist snarks that this isn't exactly a profound observation, his friend says that this is true, but there are really only so many reasons why a person does what they do, and this is the protagonist's reason. 

So why does he eventually let in his boyfriend, Owen? Because of a cat, essentially. And here's where I have to ask: am I the only one who's going to draw a comparison between "Foster" and Breakfast at Tiffany's? I'm not saying the story is derivative or anything. I'm just saying that this is a story about someone who doesn't want to be a part of a family or to belong to anyone because of his own painful family history, and because of that he's reluctant to even name a cat he's taking care of. There's even an important supporting character who is Japanese, although thankfully not a horribly racist caricature. I thought of Breakfast at Tiffany's almost immediately. I figured it's something everyone would say about it, but so far, I'm the first person who's talked about this story on the Internet who's drawn the comparison. 

Because the story essentially does its own detective work for us, there's not much for me to say here. A character has had a past that makes him mistrust family, so when his partner, although a good person, suggests they form their own type of family, he resists his partner. The cat pushes through his emotional walls the way he pushes through bathroom doors and makes him decide to care. Draw the curtain. 

And so we've come to the end of BASS 2022. I might eventually do a wrap-up, although I think I need some time to reflect before I do. I know I've terribly half-assed some of the analysis I did this year. My heart wasn't in it. I feel pretty certain now that the literary fiction world doesn't have any room in it for me, so that makes creating my own little part of the community less appealing. I'm going to go spend a few months doing totally non-literary things. 

Now with 33% more "what"!: "Elephant Seals" by Meghan Louise Wagner

As intricate as a story as "Elephant Seals" is, I actually don't have that much to say about it. I suspect most writers who read this story will immediately be reminded, as I was, of Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings." Atwood's short story is taught in almost every "introduction to the short story" class, not just because it's a good story, but because it has a lot to say about plot. Like "Elephant Seals," it's got alternate story lines and multiple possible endings. It's famous for the line dismissing plot, calling it a "what and a what and a what." "Elephant Seals," by committing to the idea for much longer than "Happy Endings" does, might be thought of as a "what and a what and a what and a what." 

One interesting thing about "Elephant Seals" is that it frequently refers to "versions," but it doesn't actually call them "versions of the story." The opening line has it that "Most versions of Paul and Diana stop to see the elephant seals on their way to California." Not "most versions of the story of Paul and Diana." Are we dealing with a multiple dimensions story, like when interdimensional cable television on an episode of "Rick and Morty" lets everyone see their alternate lives in other universes? 

This seems more likely than it being "multiple versions of a story that I created." If so, what's striking is that there is so much consistency from universe to universe. If there are infinite universes, there ought to be infinite universes in which Paul and Diana never meet at all. There ought to be infinite universes in which they never even existed. Instead, they seem to meet in most universes. There are some in which Paul is killed along with his parents at age fifteen when their store is robbed, but in most versions, we are told, Paul and Diana do end up meeting each other. 

That's kind of a key to the whole story. Multiverse theory can be very disorienting. It's the defining character trait of Rick on "Rick and Morty" to feel overwhelmed by ennui because his interdimensional portal gun allows him to see just how pointless we all are in a multiverse that has infinite versions of us. For Rick, what sliver of meaning that exists comes from him being the best version of all the Ricks, the "Rickest Rick."

There was a time when I would have worried about what letting people know I like this show would do to my reputation, but I don't think my reputation could get any worse, so I might as well run with it.

In "Elephant Seals," there's less of a focus on which version of a person is the best than on which version is the most authentic. Although there's only one version of Paul that "gets it right," it's not really about this version being the best; it's about this version being the most "Paul." 

That's the point of the touching closing:

"They travel between eleven and thirteen thousand miles each migration cycle, farther than any pinniped....They eat fish and squid and creatures that only dwell in the deepest, darkest ocean floors. They go out in the world and explore, but they always return to the same spots, the same beaches, year after year. They don't forget where they come from. They don't forget where they really live."

What orients people in "Elephant Seals," even in a cosmos where a multitude of cosmoses is possible, is that there is some authentic us that continues to crop up over and over again. There's some "home," even in the infinite multiverse, that we find ourselves constantly coming back to. That's how "most versions" of us can end up doing the same things, even though in an infinity of choices, there shouldn't be a "most" anything. There should be infinite universes in which we all don't exist. Instead, most universes, perhaps because even the multiverse has some basic true character to which most universes tend, will create the same people doing more or less similar things. 

I don't know if I believe in the multiverse. I don't know if, assuming the multiverse exists, this is a particularly soothing vision of it. It's possible that it really all does mean nothing. I might be the shittiest version of me that exists. Lately, I've certainly been thinking that might be the case. Nonetheless, I do like the story for having a point about life in the multiverse that I can at least understand. 

Two kinds of replacing: "The Sins of Others" by Hector Tobar

This is one of those stories where you can get to the end, think for all the world that you understood what happened, and still feel a little lost what the story was supposed to be about. Sometimes, it can be helpful to recount the bare facts, simplified from how they were relayed in the original narrative. While this can kill some of the organic joy that comes from the livelier telling, the more objective look at the raw materials of the story can sometimes help clue a reader into the meaning. The basics of the plot are:

1)  A man named Karl Segerstrom has hit his wife with a pickup truck, apparently in some kind of jealous rage.

2) However, there is a law, called the "Replacement Law," which allows him to find someone else to serve his sentence for the crime in his place.

3) The person he selects is Juan Ignacio Hernandez Perez, with whom he once worked in an auto mechanic's shop.

4) The provisions of the law are unclear, but it seems like they allow a citizen of the United States to nominate an illegal immigrant to serve the punishment for a crime in his or her place. Since Juan came to the U.S. illegally in 1996, he works for Karl.

5) Juan is not able to appeal this based on his productive life in the United States. However, since the government seems to be very half-assed about its enforcement, leaving most replacement convicts to wander around an old hotel that serves as a prison, Juan is able to escape fairly easily.

6) While escaped, he goes back to his old life, and he soon learns that charges against Karl were dropped, which means Juan is free to go.

7) However, Karl later attacks the man his wife had been sleeping with, earning him another charge, one that Juan again has to serve out.

8) Juan serves it out until Karl, beside himself that his wife has left him for real, kills himself. Juan is now free to go, as long as he keeps his nose clean and nobody else grabs him as a replacement for their crime.

9) While going on walks in his free-again life, he worries about the graffiti he sees on the wall, which includes a tag for one "Weedwolf." He worries that Weedwolf will get into some kind of trouble and make Juan pay for the crime. He thinks that if this happens, he will escape from prison, get a gun, and kill Weedwolf. 

That's the plot, more or less. I left out some stuff about his dead wife and kids, and there are some people along the way who treat him with unexpected kindness, but that's the essence of what happens. It's not too hard to follow, once you figure out what's going on, but a reader might wonder if there's some hidden layer to the story. If it's in Best American Short Stories, after all, shouldn't it have some brilliant second layer beneath the main layer? 

Different kinds of replacements

If there is a deeper layer, I think it's hidden in the many meanings of "replacement." On the one hand, there's the obvious meaning of one person doing something in place of another. Human history actually has a long track record of allowing one person to do something unpleasant in place of another. The rich have been able to bribe others to serve their sentences for crimes or to go to war in their place. "The Sins of Others," though, doesn't seem to be a story that's criticizing how the wealthy get away with things by exploiting the poor. If anything, Juan seems better off than Karl.

There's a more recent connotation to "replacement," though, and it's infusing this story with a hint of another kind of meaning. The "Great Replacement Theory," the notion that white people in America are intentionally being replaced by other races in order to subvert the political order, gained attention recently because it apparently motivated the shooter at a mass murder in a Buffalo grocery store. It had already been in circulation long before that event, though.

When I was first starting the story, I thought that maybe the "Replacement Law" had to do with this second meaning. I thought the law would be something like, "Every time a white person is taken out of society, a minority has to be taken out, too, in order to balance it out." That led to a whole different dystopian story in my head, which didn't turn out to be the actual story, but this second meaning of replacement never went away for me.

The Great Replacement Theory is an offshoot of something else that's been going on as long as there have been discriminated classes of minorities in the world. Scapegoating is where we take the evils of society and place the blame onto the discriminated class. It's yet another kind of replacement in which the minority group takes the blame by proxy for something that isn't really their fault. In America, immigrants are often blamed for crime or for high unemployment or other evils. 

The replacement that's operating in "The Sins of Others" is close to this kind of replacement. It's the old game of blaming the minority taken a step further. It's large-scale social scapegoating brought down to the individual level. The story dramatizes the effect of all kinds of conspiracy theories surrounding immigrants by taking it out of the abstract and social and moving it down to one person taking on the punishment of the sins of one other.

The ending is about to get a little bit strange.

Weedwolf

If that's how the story is working, then how to make sense of the enigmatic ending? What the hell is "Weedwolf" all about? If I'm to assume it wasn't meant to be a reference to the 2011 schlock horror film about a werewolf who kills stoners in a Texas town (which now I'm really interested in watching), then we as readers must be left to our own devices to try to understand what's going on here. I see two possible readings.

First, although Juan is paranoid about whether Weedwolf is out to get him by doing something unthinkable and then making Juan pay the penalty for it, perhaps Juan is himself Weedwolf. "Weedwolf" is awfully close to "werewolf," a sort of bugbear or bogeyman the community fears but which isn't real. How like the threats from immigrants in conspiracy theories! Especially when we mix in drugs with the werewolf. Juan is thinking he needs to destroy this imaginary foe, but in reality, the town is already preparing to destroy him, because it views him as the monster. This is why Juan imagines Weedwolf as being "about his age." He's imagining the version of himself that the community sees.

The second option is a little more depressing. Juan, tired of being the scapegoat for others, is now inventing a bogeyman of his own, a shadowy, sinister threat in the dark plotting evil. Juan has adapted well to society in America. He's living the American Dream, minus his short stint in prison. Has he, now, handed down the scapegoating to someone else? Is he now so protective of his own, hard-won place in the community that he is willing to join the majority in finding others to blame for what's wrong?

There have been a few stories in BASS this year that re-look at this age-old motif of the community and how it polices outcasts through informal enforcement of community codes. "The Little Widow from the Capital" did it, as did "Soon the Light," "Mbiu Dash," and, to a lesser degree, "Bears Among the Living." There must be something about this horror-adjacent theme that people find illustrative of current popular discourse. There's a reason Jordan Peele keeps cranking out horror movies as a way to talk about race in America.

The way you read the ending will determine which type of horror this is. If it's the first reading, then the real terror is that there is no reconciliation possible for the monster. Once someone is outside society, they will forever remain there, meaning their only choice is to become progressively more monstrous. If it's the second reading, then there is a chance for reconciliation, but only by joining the mob as it acts more monstrous than the bogeyman it fears. 

The First Rule of Quasi-Affair Club: "Ten Year Affair" by Erin Somers

A friend asked me out of the blue the other day whether I had a lot of "platonic friendships." Depending on how rigorously one reads Plato, that could mean several things, but I had a feeling he meant it in the more generally used sense of being friends with a woman but not romantically involved with her.* 

"You mean," do I have a lot of female friends?" I asked to be sure.

When he said that was, in fact, what he meant, I said that I did have a few, and I was even close with some of them, but that I tried to be careful of those relationships. I always feel at least some level of attraction to female friends, so I have to be honest with myself what my intentions are with some of the interactions I have. 

That doesn't mean that I eschew all female companionship other than Mrs. Heretic just because I feel some level of attraction to these friends. On the contrary, I fully believe in the life-affirming value of a low-key, unspoken-but-felt attraction between two people that is "platonic" on one level but might, in the world of the imagination, be not only non-platonic, but outright filthy. I think a healthy and happy marriage can endure many of these relationships from both spouses over the years, but only if they follow the rules.

"But what rules, Jake?" you say. I'm glad you asked. For I am not only an expert semi-skilled literary critic, but also a six-sigma blackbelt in the art of the quasi-affair. For years, I've kept the rules of conducting these relationships to myself, but today, for the low-low price of nothing, I am giving them away. 

What makes a quasi-affair, or quasi-romance? You've probably had them as far back as middle school. There's someone of the opposite sex (again, please see my disclaimer at the bottom) you interact with, and you feel some attraction, but maybe she's dating someone else or you are or it's just not strong enough to pursue or your mom won't let you date girls yet or whatever. So you more or less flirt. It's fun. Occasionally, it might be more serious than that. Maybe you share some real trouble you're going through, and you have an actual deep discussion. Both of you meet emotional needs for one another, and the fact that it remains uncomplicated makes it easier to keep meeting those needs.

If done right, the quasi-affair or "emotional affair" will never leave you like this person, inexplicably taking the time to button his shirt instead of just leaving quickly and buttoning it outside.

As adults, one of the most common ways to find a quasi-romance partner is through work. There's an opposite sex (read the note at the bottom) co-worker, and you interact a lot, and you get along and find a lot to like about each other. But she's married and so are you, so it never goes beyond being friendly at work. 

Well, it kind of does. There are a million small cues you can give each other to let the other person know there's some level of attraction there. Depending on how strong these signals are, the relationship might become strong enough to be an "emotional affair," or an affair that's got everything in it but the fucking. 

It's not even necessary that both parties are attached otherwise. If one person is married and the other isn't, this is still a good place for a quasi-romance to bloom. What's important is that both parties are getting something emotional out of it. For the married person, they are confirming that they've "still got it" without needing to undo the family unit. They gain confidence. For the unmarried person, they also gain a feeling of satisfaction from being attractive enough that even a married person would be willing to flirt with danger with them. Through a million unspoken and daily interactions, both are confirming for the other that, "Yes, you are an attractive person." 

In a happy marriage, the satisfaction comes from going deep into a relationship. It's very fulfilling, and it's worth the work, but it also frustrates a human impulse in which romance is more about breadth than depth. We want to know that a lot of people find us attractive, even if we don't want to have relationships with them. We want to know we aren't stuck with this person out of necessity, even if we wish to remain stuck with them out of commitment. 

If both parties in a quasi-romance do it right, they can satisfy one another's emotional needs for years, even decades. Because the romance never turns sexual, the fantasies never get old. There is always potential energy in the relationship that never gets turned to kinetic, never wears out or gets used up, and that helps preserve one's energy in general. 

I recently told Mrs. Heretic that the only reason I ever did anything remotely grown-up in my twenties and thirties was because I thought I would get laid for it. As we go deep in our real romances, this motivation wanes, but a quasi-romance can shame us into exercise or motivate us to work hard so we look good at work. There are a lot of plusses to a quasi-romance, but you have to follow the rules.

Okay, I've teased the rules a lot now, so what are they? There aren't a lot.

1. The first rule of Quasi-Affair Club is that you don't talk about the quasi-affair with the quasi-affair partner. 

2. That is also the second rule. 

Yeah, I Fight Clubbed my rules. 

What makes a quasi-romance so great is its endless potential to be anything. It's a very delicate thing, though. Ask too much of it, and it will quickly fall apart. You can't send a drunk text to the quasi-romance partner asking, "Hey, what are we doing here, really?" You can't even say, "I wish we could be romantically involved, even though I realize we can't." That ruins it.

The point of these relationships is to allow each other to live a separate life, one that's full of quotidian, bullshit responsibilities that have nothing to do with the quasi-romance itself. It's a symbiotic relationship in which both parties restore the self-esteem of the other without requiring anything permanent. Through words and gestures, one person tells the other that they are attractive and that maybe, in a different universe, there might have been something there. And that needs to be enough for both.

There are three things that can happen when you bring the latent feelings out in the open. One is that the other party will tell you they don't feel the same way, in which case, you've lost all the good feelings you had. The second option is that the they tell you they do feel the same way and they want to be with you, and now you have to make a choice. Everything just got real in a relationship where the whole value was in its fantasy quality. The third choice is that you both acknowledge your feelings but decide to not do anything about them for family reasons. This preserves the status quo in the real-world relationship, but the fantasy relationship will never be the same. 

Note that the rules of Quasi-Affair Club to do apply to people who are in unhappy relationships and who therefore want to have real affairs. That's a different thing, and we'll look at whether Cora or Sam really should have been in Real Affair Club instead of Quasi-Affair Club below.

Do you see what Cora did wrong, class?

"Ten Year Affair" by Erin Somers understands the value of a quasi-affair. When Sam, the long-term quasi-romance of Cora, finally decides to leave his wife and ask Cora to run off with him, Cora is actually kind of put out. He asks what she is thinking, and she responds, "None of your business." She's right when she thinks, "Really, it had almost nothing to do with him."

The reasons she's right to think this is that in a correctly run quasi-romance, the internal imagination of each party, or what it means to them, isn't the business of the other party. Whatever it's meant to her for the ten years they were together, it's none of Sam's business. He was something she needed to get her though whatever emotional shit she was going through, and she was the same to him. But there's no need to explain what that something was. If she wants to tell another girlfriend about it, that's fine, but Sam can never know. 

The problem, though, is that Cora openly admitted early on what her feelings for Sam were. She kind of harassed him a bit, actually. It's easy to understand why. Cora is used to being told she has a great personality, but she isn't much of a sex symbol. She wants, for once, to be objectified. She wants to get fucked "into the astral plane" and forget about her life for a while. That's all very understandable and valid, but saying it out loud is a violation of the rules of Quasi-Affair Club. 

As I said above, the rules of Quasi-Affair Club only apply to people who are more or less happily married and looking to remain so. The quasi-affair is an outlet meant to prevent a real affair. Cora, although she seems mostly happy in her marriage, also really wants an affair. I think Cora has pursued the wrong thing. If what she wants is to feel desired, then maybe what she wanted was a consensual, no-strings sexual relationship, maybe one she could have told her husband about. If he wasn't okay with that, there are other options, like swinging. Cora wanted more than just to feel attractive, she wanted to feel smolderingly attractive. So she brought the rules from the Real Affair Club into the Quasi-Affair Club, which is why the thing was ultimately doomed. Unfortunately for Sam, it seems like he's the one who's going to suffer for it. 

Why does Sam, who seems to only want an emotional affair, eventually succumb to wanting a real one? And why, when he does, does he take it so much further than Cora wanted to? We can only guess. Maybe it has something to do with how capable his wife, Jules, is. Maybe over time, he's begun to think that Jules doesn't think much of him, because he's the weak half in their relationship. Cora has never wanted anything but to have torrid sex with him, so it may have eventually seemed to him that his emotional needs would have been met better with her.

After Cora has been imagining a real affair with Sam for years while also managing her real life, we get a sneak peak into what Sam's imagination has been doing with the relationship. To Cora's surprise, in Sam's fantasy, she is reading poetry instead of doing mom stuff. She's almost offended by it. This is why the first rule of Quasi-Affair Club is that you don't talk about the quasi-affair with the person you're having the quasi-affair with. You'll likely to find out that you're getting different things out of it and that you're being put into the imaginary life of the other person in a very different way from what you'd hope. Which is fine as long as nobody ever reveals this to the other person.

Sam's feelings for Cora were more "platonic," and therefore, perhaps, a little deeper. The danger of Cora's feelings for Sam was that if her fantasy ever came true, it might end up in a tryst they'd have to keep hidden. The danger of Sam's feelings for Cora was that if his fantasy ever came true, he'd leave his wife and wreck a couple of homes.

There was nothing wrong with the way either Sam or Cora felt. Human psychology is strange and often doesn't make any sense. We need to feel desired sometimes by people we cannot begin to fulfill. A sensitive person will understand this need in others and fill it, having their own needs met in return, and neither couple ever needs to acknowledge it. "Ten Year Affair" is incredibly perceptive in understanding these rules, and the way it shows its understanding is by observing what happens from breaching them.

*Throughout this post, I'm going to be casually talking about male-female relationships in a way that I acknowledge may come across as "heteronormative," meaning it might seem to suggest that heterosexual attraction is the assumed sexual orientation. I don't mean to do that, but it ended up being very cumbersome to keep qualifying everything with "in heterosexual relationships" or a similar caveat. Please read this entire post as though it were in brackets. Around those brackets are all the other sexual ways of being in the world that aren't heterosexual and more or less nuclear-family-centric. These other ways aren't "abnormal," even if they're not in the majority. I'm equating relationships in this post to heterosexual relationships because writing it the other way wasn't pretty. 

The opposite of history: "Mr. Ashok's Monument" by Sanjena Sathian

Every year when I blog on Best American Short Stories, I end up pointing out at least a few times about how unusual it is to be reading a book celebrating our national literature that requires the reader to know so much about other parts of the world. Call it the literary consequences of being a superpower. Korean short story collections are mostly written by ethnically Korean people about ethnically Korean people, and nobody in Korea thinks twice about this. Ethiopian literature is written by people from Ethiopia, mostly about Ethiopians. That's the point of having Ethiopian literary anthologies: to encourage the development of native literature. 

Things are a little different in America. When you're a superpower, your country is made up of people from every corner of the globe. They come here and they bring their experiences with them. It makes for a pretty interesting literary tapestry, in much the same way the restaurant choices in most American cities are a lot more interesting than they might be in less cosmopolitan in other parts of the world. It also, however, creates challenges for an American reader, as some stories require an ability to adapt to new cultural contexts in ways that the native reader of an anthology of, say, Kenyan literature would not. 

In "Mr. Ashrok's Monument" by Sanjena Sathian, the story gets kind of deep into the reality of Indian life. There's a ton of satire going on, and while the story itself provides most of the keys a reader needs to at least know what the joke is supposed to be, I gather it's not as funny to me as it would be to someone who's actually been directly a part of Prime Minister Modi's historical and cultural flim-flam. 

My approach to "World Lit as American Lit" is to trust the story to tell me what I need to know. I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching what I come across in the story. If the story thinks I need to know more, it will tell me. If it doesn't, either I should have known it (in the estimation of the author), or it's not that important. So much like I did with Kenan Orhan two stories ago, I'm going to kind of go in with only the little bit I know about the country the story is set in.

The public and the personal in parallel

It's pretty common in a story that's so obviously skewering political leadership as "Mr. Ashok's Monument" is to put the public or political in conflict with the private or personal. That's what I thought this story was doing at first. I thought Mr. Ashok, caught up in the government's fervor to create a conveniently nationalist view of history, was getting his personal aims squashed by the political aims of the government, personified by the very funny Department of Symbolic Meaning. After reading to the end, though, and then reading through again, I think this story takes the more unusual approach of putting the public and the personal more or less on the same course such that they mirror rather than oppose each other.

The government is attempting to sell a particular version of history to the public. This version is build around "ITIHAS," or "glorious history," and involves the aggressive campaigning of a giant bureaucracy (the Ministry of Culture, National Identity, and Historical Interpretation). It is the job of this bureaucracy, which includes the Department of Symbolic Meaning in which the narrator works, to determine how to make history edifying for the public. Of course, any time you try to make history be edifying instead of just be what it is, you end up perverting it, and that's very much what the department does. Even though the narrator's boss is named "Satya" or "Truth," there is very little truth going on. Their version of truth is more about what can make the people feel they are part of a glorious destiny--a destiny the current administration is leading them on--than it is about dealing with the real complexity of history. 

One of the government's chief tools in its campaign is preservation. The main campaign of the department is called an "ITIHAS-Preservation Campaign," a term rife with both capital letters and bluster. One of the things they seek to preserve are monuments. Monuments, if well preserved enough, do not change. In a sense, this is the opposite of history, because history is always ongoing and therefore always changing. It is also always changing because scholarship is always helping us to rethink the past. With a monument, though, the point is to create a version of the past and ensure that it never changes. History is complicated. At one point, the narrator lists off a number of questions that history presents him with, questions that he feels so certain are not appropriate for someone in his job, he had to repress them during his patriotic polygraph. Monuments often erase complexity.

With this campaign going on in the background, Mr. Ashok, a wife-beating, confused, would-be upwardly climbing tour guide, turns to stone one day. We are led to believe that his turning to stone is his "comeuppance," as one journalists suggests. His wife has told him he is made of stone, so it seems an appropriate punishment. There's maybe more to it than that, though. Mr. Ashok is, if the bits of news can be believed that a Westerner like me who doesn't follow India with any particular intent hears, sort of a throwback. He is kind of a living monument to a type of man in India who time will hopefully one day soon leave behind.

The ITIHAS campaign talks a lot about how the West has stolen from India, but Mr. Ashok's wife has also learned from a Western NGO that she no longer has to have sex with her husband when he wants or put up with him hitting her. There is a giant generational battle being waged now in India to end rape culture in India, and Mr. Ashok is part of it. He is, in fact, part of the complicated evolution of history.

All of him has turned to stone except his "member." He's a particularly lascivious man, so that might be the one part of him that is most resisting being turned into a monument, a relic of the past. He doesn't want to change and stay within the complicated movement of history. He'd rather turn to stone than learn a new way of dealing with the world, especially after working so hard to get ahead in this one. He thought he'd done the right things to succeed in the world as it was, so changing now requires more of him than he can bear. 

Eventually, he decides to fully indulge his lust, and this is when the last bit of him turns to stone, and he is no longer able to move, but rather becomes a statue in the very caves in which he used to give tours. There's a double critique going on at the end. On the one hand, it's critiquing the government for trying to lionize a version of the past. By seeking to preserve, it has actually killed the thing it seeks to make use of. On the other hand, it's critiquing a version of Indian male identity that no longer has a role in the future and needs, frankly, to become "the opposite of history," or which is something preserved in the past and no longer a part of the present narrative.

There is a layered ossification at the end. The government's attempt to "preserve" the version of history most advantageous to it ends up killing history, and the personal attempt to ward off the march of time ends up doing nothing more but condemning oneself to no longer being able to change. 

I may have butchered this reading, because I don't really follow Indian issues and there are certainly all kinds of inside jokes I don't get. I can kind of guess at them, but there is certainly a lot more going on that someone in India would get. On another level, though, it's not hard at all for a contemporary American reader to comprehend the attempt to create a mythical nation that once was, call it "great," and call on others to return to that greatness that never was. It's not hard at all to imagine the result of refusing to change as becoming the very monuments that false preservationists wish to preserve.

More lamenting than preventing: "The Ghost Birds" by Karen Russell

You know how sometimes, if someone talks up a movie like it's the greatest thing since Citizen Kane, they can end up creating such high expectations that you end up not liking a movie everyone else likes? That's always been Karen Russell for me. I've read Swamplandia! and a few of her short stories that have shown up in Best American Short Stories or Pushcart, and they've never really moved me that greatly. 

So maybe I'm actually doing a favor to the readers of BASS 2022 when I talk down Russell's "The Ghost Birds" a bit. It's possible I'll create such low expectations that readers will be pleasantly surprised, wondering what I was talking about. If that's you, you're welcome.

The shortcomings of the story are the same ones I see in a lot of sci-fi short fiction, especially the kind that occasionally shows up in BASS. There's a narrator at some point in humanity's future, and he's got this whole novel worth of world to build in a short space, so some of it gets crammed in there in sort of ham-fisted exposition. Here's such a passage in "The Ghost Birds"

Once the sky became deeded property, Surveillers started patrolling the hazy air above the lonely scrublands and evaporated lakes. Their employers are paranoid in proportion to the suffering that surrounds them; they seem to feel that anyone who casts a shadow in a Red Zone is an “ecoterrorist.” We joke that they must want to keep the escape routes to the moon clear....

My daughter mercifully missed the land grabs and the water wars fought above the rasping aquifers. The sky is what has been colonized in her lifetime—a private highway system branching out of Earth’s shallows into outer space, its imaginary lines conjured into legal reality and policed with blood-red force. A single human being now claims to own all the sky that lifts from the Andes to Mars.

When I read passages like this, where the narrator is more or less reciting fictional history in the middle of a narrative, I wonder who the narrator is telling this history to. In a novel, it might be possible to meet the Surveillers and get a sense of who they are and when they started doing what they do through interaction with them or through dialogue or through, I don't know, a character watching a holo-reel (in the parlance of the story) that tells them the past. In a short story, even a 7700-word short story like this one, there's not much room to do more than just blurt it all out. I know, because I've tried to write a futuristic short story, and it was very hard for me to come up with a better technique that wouldn't add way too much content.

It might be forgivable, except that so much of the world-building exposition of "The Ghost Birds" is not needed for the story. The Surveillers never show up. We never need to know about the colonization of space. There's something in there about selling your blood to the Surveillers, but it's never explained. I'm wondering if this story is part of a collection of connected short stories in which the Surveillers do matter. If so, that would help explain the seemingly needless digression of the narrator, but it doesn't make it a stronger story when it appears as a standalone in The New Yorker.

There are also occasional references to the "inner eye," the "dreaming eye," or the "conjuring eye," all of which play some unexplained role in viewing the ghosts of extinct birds.

Oh yeah, that's what the story's about. It took me a while to get there. Jasper is a ghost bird enthusiast taking his daughter Starling on a bird-watching expedition to the ruins of Chapman Elementary School near Portland, where in our current, non-fictional world, people gather every year to watch Vaux's swifts stop off in the chimney during their migration. Jasper hasn't told Starling's mother, from whom he is recently divorced, about this trip, because she'd never allow it.

Although all kinds of danger are teased, the only real danger they face--other than the every-day ecological threat of living in the year 2081--is the kind you'd get from any sort of excursion into unpopulated lands. They make a small mistake going through the school and get trapped, then Jasper slips while trying to climb the ladder out of the chimney. He's hurt, and they suddenly have to scramble to get help.

I'm kind of with Starling's mom on her reluctance to let Jasper take their 14-year-old daughter with him. Bringing her was a dumb thing to do, from what I can tell about the world. 

So why did he do it? And why is he interested in the ghost birds, anyway? Those are the real questions of the story. The answer to the latter question is that the ghost birds have something to teach us: "How to pierce the smoke wall of our dulled senses and lift into the unknown. How to navigate the world to come." Jasper is obsessed with this kind of quasi-mystical view of the ghosts birds, and I can't exactly blame his ex-wife for being skeptical about it. Jasper's belief in the ghost birds borders on credulity. At one point, his daughter asks if they might have missed the birds, and thinks to himself: "It was possible, of course. Backlit ghosts don’t show up in my scope, and the sunset had seemed to follow me and my spectrograph to every new angle. Could eleven thousand ghosts hide from us? What a silly question. How many billions are hiding from us now?"

I don't know, man. Like, zero billions? Ghosts aren't real. 

I'll stop being an asshole

Okay, I know that ghosts being real isn't the point. Ghosts are a symbol of something. Of what? Well, the answer to that is sort of the answer to the "Why did you bring your daughter out here?" question. When the trip goes wrong and Starling asks him this very thing, he doesn't say what he wants to say, which is, "You are growing up numb to the universe, numb even to your numbness. You don’t know the difference between a screen and a portal. Your eyes cannot distinguish between a digital hallucination and a real ghost. A critical window is closing, Starling. I am trying to hold it open for you, so that you can enter the night."

Ghost birds represent what actual birds do for us: the possibility of a different type of existence and a different meaning to existence. Hanging on to their ghosts, which is to say to their memory, is a way of keeping alive all the things birds meant to the world. It's "Ode to a Skylark" and "Ode to a Nightengale."

I've sometimes looked at stories before in terms of what their main function is. Is it to educate, to advocate, to entertain, to move, to illustrate? In this case, I think the main function of this story is to eulogize. It's not so much to try to convince us to save the world that is--the attitude of the story seems to be that this end is kind of inevitable--but to eulogize a world that will soon be no more, or at least that the story assumes will soon be no more. 

It's not without its emotional punch. When we finally get to the last scenes, and the money shot of the ghost birds flying up the chimney you knew was coming finally arrives, I felt something. It wasn't as strong as when I read Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence," which was also about an extinction of birds in the near future, nor as strong as reading Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, which is written by the last human ghost in the future after humanity has evolved into a new species. There was something there, though. The story has its moments, and for what it is, it isn't bad. If only her stories would quit being hailed as these really breakthrough moments in American literature, I might even like them a little bit. 

Dueling infinities: "The Beyoglu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra" by Kenan Orhan

Disclaimer

One thing I'm not going to do with this post is pretend I know about Turkey. I'm not going to go Google a bunch of for-foreigner articles about what's going on there and make like I understand its political realities. I'm going to go with my current understanding and what's in the story itself and maybe a simple lookup or two just to make sure I know what the story is talking about. I hate when reviewers with no particular expertise in the area a story is set in gush about how authentically or unapologetically native the story is, as if they would know. 

What I know about Turkey off the top of my head: often thought of as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East; Istanbul was Constantinople; President is named Erdogan but pronounced Erdowan even though Donald Trump didn't know that; it's been thought to be more progressive and open than other majority-Muslim countries, but that seems to be changing, and now our government doesn't know how much of an ally they will be from here on out; doesn't like Iran, for which reason the U.S. still kind of gets along with them, etc. 

This story appears in a Best American Short Story anthology, and so I'm going into it thinking it's written by an author from Turkey who now lives in either the U.S. or Canada and that's all I need to know going in. 

Folding inwards

When something in nature is running out of room, one of its options is to fold inwards on itself to make more room to grow. That's what the RNA in our body does. Fatima the garbage collector doesn't have much room in the world. She lives in a tiny top-floor apartment of a building that dates back to the Ottoman era. Citizens of Istanbul are running out of room, too, as every day the government builds something new. Moreover, the government also keeps taking things away from Turks. There are continual new proclamations about things that are now banned, and people have no choice but to forget that they ever had such things. Even their memories are shrinking. 

The town sort of accommodates this shrinking by folding in on itself. The route that Fatima has to navigate as a garbage collector is "the thinnest alleys of Beyoglu," which she compares to a "maze." The streets of the town, squeezed by development, are starting to weave and twist in on themselves. Fatima is worried they may one day squeeze her into a block. 

Fatima thinks that there is more room to take advantage of than people are using. The garbage bins she collects from are overflowing, but not really full, she says, because, "People are very bad at the economy of space." Fatima will prove to be much better at space economy than her customers.

She eventually starts collecting musical instruments a composer has been throwing out, even though she's been warned not to take anything from the trash. If she starts, she'll soon end up a hoarder, which one of her colleagues defines as "an attachment at all to an object." The government seems to share this view, which is why it keeps outlawing one object after another, wanting people to "have no choice but to throw away half their lives."

Why is the government so opposed to people's things? Because the President wants to project a strong image, and things tend to show how weak humans are. After all, things have a tendency to end up in the trash, just like old people have a tendency to die. Things "remind us of the mortality of our own legacies." Things become trash, and  trash "announces decay and decay is the product of time, and time is the fear of all living things." Fatima wonders at one point if eyeglasses have been banned because "they made people look old, weak, the opposite of what a Turk should be."

Whatever space restrictions are going on in the country, Fatima seems to find a loophole. She discovers she has an attic with enough space to keep the musical instruments she finds. Later, the attic, which seemed tiny when she first discovered it, seems to have an infinite ability to keep expanding. She can not only put instruments in there, but musicians, whom the government has outlawed and--in a wonderful bit of satire--had thrown out in the trash. 

A king of infinite space

It's not much of a stretch to see the attic as a metaphor for the mind, what with the attic being at the top of the house and all. The attic is a place where you can store the memories of all the things that have been outlawed. The attic is the place where you can still have music and art and literature even when these things have been removed from the rest of the world. And there's almost infinite room in it to put new things. What is like that in the real world if not the mind?

There are some schools of thought that would have us believe that it's not events that make us unhappy; it's us that makes us unhappy. Happiness is in the mind, and we control the space of our minds. Even if we are beset with problems, those problems aren't what make us happy or sad, it's our minds that do this. The most extreme--and frankly, stupid--example of a story that pushes this idea was the 1997 movie Life is Beautiful, in which an Italian Jew managed to help his child survive a concentration camp by convincing him it's all a big game they must win. I know people loved this movie, and it won a lot of awards, but it's really an example of how a generally sound notion--the we have some agency over our own happiness--can become ridiculous when taken to extremes. You can't think your way through a concentration camp. You can't get through torture with a positive attitude, although there's a funny Key and Peele sketch about it.

"Waste Management Orchestra" isn't really dealing with the idea that we can think ourselves into happiness, but a near-cousin of this idea. It's the idea that when all possible political opposition to authority is taken away, there is still resistance possible within the landscape of our own minds. When everything in the political order is ugly and false, any kind of hanging on to beauty and truth is a form of resistance.

Fatima does seem to somewhat effectively counter the state through making more and more room for beauty and truth in her mind. She is continually amazed to find that, although the space seemed small, it never seems to fill up, and she fits more and more instruments and people into it. Moreover, the state's surveillance doesn't seem able to penetrate the attic. 

The state expands in return

But the state has a trick up its sleeve. It can expand nearly infinitely, too. It arrests Fatima for taking a tube of paint from the trash. The government doesn't know it's for the artists in the attic, but it doesn't matter. The paint is banned no matter what it's for. She gets sentenced to two years of prison. Now it doesn't matter how much beauty is going on in the attic, because she's not with the attic anymore.

The state simply kept expanding the number of things that were contraband until it came up with something to put her in prison for. Along the way, the number of things it outlawed became so huge, the police were eventually arresting (hilariously) the trees that lined the street. By the end, not only the people who hold onto the banned objects are in prison, but the objects, too. The state is able to expand so much, it is even imprisoning itself, as one guard puts the other in jail, then waits for another to jail her, on and on ad infinitum.  

I have no idea how good a send-up this story is of the Turkish government. I'm not even sure, as I go through the story, whether the Turkish government that's being satirized is more guilty of domestic surveillance run amok or for an ill-advised development program that erases the nation's history. It's probably both. Whatever the story is lampooning in the real world, it's criticizing the notion that intellectualized resistance can be effective. That's not to say that there isn't an intellectual component to resistance. It's not all barricades in the streets, but there has to be some real-world relationship between our intellectual resistance and the state. Fatima admits at one point that she's "not very cognizant of the goings-on" in her country, and while she does resist in small ways, she's complicit in forgetting everything the government has banned along the way. Her detachment from the real world is why the things in her attic stay in her attic.

The thing about infinity is that not infinities are equal. Some are more infinite than others. In the case of the state against the individual, the infinity of the creative mind is less infinite, less able to continue to sprawl into space, than the infinity of the state's ever-increasing power.  

That's how they getcha: "The Meeting" by Alex Olhin

"The Meeting" by Alex Olhin is about three ways capitalism can kill you. The first is slow and figurative, the second slow and literal, and the final immediate, literal, and terrifying.

Death number one in the story is announced at the eponymous meeting that gives the story its name. The small company run by James Halladay--what does it do? Health care or something?--is being bought out by a media conglomerate. Almost everyone is losing their job, meaning they've been putting up with the buzzwords and the boredom for nothing. Bryan just put money down on a condo and now he's stuck with it. Mallory has some kind of illness that's very serious, and she could barely afford it with health insurance, let alone without it. But there are margaritas to wash the pain down with, and since they're all alienated labor anyway, they'll probably find something else and not care much in the long run. The first way capitalism kills you, then, is small and petty and kind of a death by a thousand paper cuts. It mostly just kills your soul. This part of the story is familiar and probably part of every office-based story in the last 25 years. 

The next two ways it kills you are a little less well trodden. Both Mallory and James have serious illnesses. James got his when his mother, a social activist in Peru, carried him through a forest fire as a baby. His lungs have never been right, he coughs all the time, and he'll eventually need a new lung. Mallory as a child played in a river downstream from a paper factory, and she wonders if that's the reason she's got the problems she has now. Capitalism kills our souls slowly, but it also kills our bodies slowly by damaging the environment. Ironic, then, that they both work for a company whose brand has something to do with wellness. 

Finally, capitalism can kill us quickly and brutally. James and Mallory go to California to meet the CEO of the company that bought them out. During their trip, they run into a forest fire that kills them. This is the second forest fire in James' life, and this one finally did him in. Instead of one soulless job killing an office of a few people inside, now the combination of all soulless jobs had cooked the planet until it is killing all of us. 

"The Meeting" is a darker entry in American office-based fiction of the last generation.

Two kinds of CEO

The story contrasts two CEOs. There's James Halliday and there's Arthur McClellan. James is--there's no way to see it any other way--a good person. He was raised by charitable parents and he continues to be charitable as an adult. He is courteous. He gives away umbrellas to old ladies in the rain when nobody is watching. He keeps Mallory on during the transition because he senses she is sick and needs the job. He's earnest and he cares. Most of all, he thinks he's part of the solution, not the problem: "He believed it wasn't too late to change the world."

There are a lot of people like James among the CEOs of the world. I recently did a year and a half at one of the biggest corporations in the world, and I can tell you that the top executives in that company really believe what they're saying when they say the company is going to make the world a better place. A lot of CEOs are still philanthropic in a not completely cynical, for-photo-op-only way. That's James.

But James, in spite of having good looks and charisma that make people naturally want to follow him, ultimately loses control of his company to Arthur. Arthur is just evil. He's the stereotypical weird corporate magnate, full of idiosyncrasies and weird habits and phobias. He's probably brilliant, which is why his company is succeeding so much, but he's evil enough that when Mallory arrives at his headquarters, it reminds her of nothing so much as a supervillain's secret lair. 

Maybe the asshole is destined to triumph over the enlightened capitalist/philanthropist. Maybe Jeff Bezos conquers Bill Gates. Or evil Elon Musk takes over good Elon Musk. Mallory wonders at the end if James' charm, rather than being "integral to his success," is instead "a detriment; or, what seemed somehow sadder, an irrelevance." 

Lack of options

So what's a struggling worker to do to escape the bad options? Not much, it seems. The only real plan out of the hapless schlobs in the story are to become a lawyer and make a lot of money so you can buy land to live on when the apocalypse comes. That, and drink watermelon margaritas at Nacho Mamacitas to dull the pain. One plan is probably an "Of Mice and Men" kind of plan that will never work out, and the other is just another way to die slowly.

In last year's Best American Short Stories, we also had a wildfire story, "Paradise" by Yxta Maya Murray. That one also ended with people finding each other in the chaos, although in Paradise, they only lose their belongings, not their lives. "The Meeting" has several meetings in it: the opening meeting, the meeting with the new company, and then Mallory and James holding a final meeting of two as the flames engulf them. Perhaps one can say that the soul of "Paradise" was, like James, to think the world could still be saved, but "The Meeting" holds no such hope. 

All I had was myself: "Mbiu Dash" by Okwiri Oduor

For a story that's all about absences, "Mbiu Dash" by Okwiri Oduor sure begins with a lot of presence. "We were all there that day Mr. Man came to town, driving that blister-colored tin car." With those words, the narrator, Mbiu Dash, seems to be fully a part of a community. We're about to find out how isolated Mbiu Dash actually is, but for the moment, Mbiu seems to suffer from an embarrassment of riches, socially speaking. It's a lively scene. It's "Epitaph Day" in Mapeli Town, Kenya, a day of remembrance for the dead. The townsfolk (the "we") are drinking mead, getting drunk and happy, dancing, and telling stories about departed people they miss. Mbiu Dash isn't just around a lot of people; as a "we" narrator, she's part of them. This is the second story in Best American Short Stories so far that's had a first-person plural (we) point of view. At least at the start, anyhow.

The old saw comes to mind about there being only two stories, one about a hero going on a quest and the other about a stranger coming to town, but the story doesn't follow the path it teases early on. Although Mbiu thinks that "we" thought to ourselves, "A man like this must have a good story lodged beneath his tongue" and so "we" wanted to get it out of him, that's not what the bulk of the story is. This isn't the Ancient Mariner telling his tale of woe. We do eventually get to what Mr. Man has to say, but for most of the middle acts, Mbiu Dash is going to steal the show.

Mbiu steals it so much, in fact, that the "we" disappears. She shatters the second person plural when she switches abruptly at the beginning of a section first-person singular. Mbiu Dash wants to go out with the townspeople to dance the chini-kwa-chini with them, but the townspeople refused, telling her, without explaining why, that she had "best sit here and keep our guest company." Thus rejected by the town, the narrative switches from "we" to "I/me." "Me, I always thought of my mama on Epitaph Day." She gets both the object and subject form of the first-person singular in right from the start, as if to emphasize how much she's on her own. 

There are a dizzying number of songs out there that appear to be named "Chini Kwa Chini." This one is obviously from way after the time period of the story. The Swahili "china kwa chini," if the Internet can be believed, means "incognito," something that perfectly describes how Mbiu Dash is getting through life.

As soon as Mbiu Dash switches to "I/me," we start to get a whole different view of the town. It's a place where so many abandoned teens wander the street, nobody bothers to keep track of them. It's a place where men shove their fists down the mouths of teen girls they are raping, presumably so the girls can't scream. 

Mbiu Dash became one of these orphans when her mother robbed a bank and was killed by the police afterwards. It was something of a Robin Hood robbery--she threw the money to the townspeople--but the police killed her anyway. They kind of had no choice, since she was pointing a Kalashnikov rifle at them. 

How did the mother come to have this rifle? She'd studied in Moscow. This was common for a number of African countries back during the time of Soviet-U.S. global competition. What was also common was that the African nation would change sides in the global competition. That's what happened in Kenya, and Mbiu Dash's mother went from being lucky to have studied and become a dentist to being suspected of communist sympathies. Her life was spent under police watch, and she eventually snapped and went on her one-day bank robbing spree.

Absence

Mbiu Dash is obsessed with things that aren't there. Her surname, Dash, is self-given. It stands for a surname that used to be hers but that she didn't feel fit her after her mother died. Now, only the dash stands in its place, a glyph for what isn't there anymore. She wanders through the town after her mother's death, looking into windows. She needs reassurance that the whole town hasn't disappeared. Looking into the empty houses on Epitaph Day, she thinks to herself that "absence was just as meaningful to observe as presence." The story itself, taking place on Epitaph Day, is surrounded by absences that are making themselves felt.

In a way, Mbiu's mother kind of set her up to think of absences. Although a dentist, her mother didn't worry about Mbiu eating sweets that would give her cavities. Instead, she "never once made me brush my teeth before bed. We had an understanding: I could ruin my teeth, perforate them with holes big enough to lose five-shilling coins inside, and she would patch them up for me with silver amalgam someday." In other words, Mama has taught Mbiu that her absences will be filled. No wonder Mbiu cannot move on from her mother's dead body, riddled with bullet holes. No wonder she is still living in the "bullet-riddled Volkswagen that my mama had laughed her way out of this world in."

I imagine some readers would look at this preoccupation with absence and immediately read French philosopher Jacques Derrida into it. Derrida kind of had a thing with messing around with absence and presence. Derrida's interest in absence, though, was primarily linguistic, whereas Mbiu's is existential. For Mbiu, the absences in her life are like when the power goes out and you find yourself hours later still stupidly flipping switches every time you walk into a room and find it dark. The absences only make her more acutely aware of the thing that isn't there anymore. If you want to do a reading a la Derrida, go ahead, but I always found it like jerking off with sandpaper, somehow both onanistic and painful at once. 

Me, myself, and I

So Mbiu is truly all alone. Well, is she? She has her "darling," another teenage girl without parents. Her darling's name is "Ayosa Atarxis Brown." Atarxis is an interesting middle name, meaning something like "the absence of stress or worry." Ayosa might seem like someone who could make Mbiu feel less alone, but even her solace is a solace of lack--absence of pain and suffering, which is mostly what the whole town associates death with.

Mbiu and Ayosa don't talk to each other. They're soulmates, so they don't have to. They're not the only soulmates in the story. Turns out, when Mr. Man finally catches up to Mbiu, who's been running from him since Act One, thinking he was another rapist trying to stick his hand in her mouth, we learn that he was the soulmate of her mother since they studied in Moscow together. They weren't lovers, just soulmates. 

And speaking of souls, Mr. Man is lugging one around with him. It's his son Magnanimous. In Mr. Man's case, when the government came for him, they shot his son instead, and Mr. Man can't let his son go, so much that his son's soul is a tangible presence about him others can see. You could say that where Mbiu Dash is all absence, Mr. Man has too much presence. Mbiu thinks she is all alone, while Mr. Man can literally never be alone. Maybe this is why Mbiu lives in a still-shot up Volkswagen, while Mr. Man has pieced together a car from scraps. The departed don't leave Mr. Man. 

There are some telling symmetries between Mr. Man and Mbiu. Obviously, they are both linked by Mbiu's mother. Morever, with Ayosa, Mbiu has also put together a Frankenstein vehicle, in their case, a bicycle. But the symmetries are offset by the differences. 

One wonders if in a sense, Mr. Man is supposed to continue his role as the mother's soulmate by providing companionship to Mbiu. It briefly seems like it might happen. Where the town has refused to give Mbiu mead, Mr. Man makes her a sweet tea from lemongrass. It seems like he might be able to offer her something, but for the moment at least, Mbiu is unwilling to let Mr. Man any closer. 

Mbiu is both obsessed with absence and also longing for connection. After the "we" disappears, it briefly returns again at one point. She can't extinguish her longing for connection, to be filled, but when Mr. Man seems to offer a kind of connection, she refuses him, at least for the time being. What might be most interesting about the story is how it refuses to come to a resolution. Maybe this is because is Mbiu's world, the only real resolution is death. 

When the O bolt won't go in: "Soon the Light" by Gina Ochsner

We've had to buy a lot of crappy, assemble-it-yourself furniture over the years. That's what the budget allowed. I'm not the handiest guy to begin with, but I think most assembly guides that come with this kind of furniture are intentionally meant to confuse even competent self-assemblers. It's a sort of middle finger from the manufacturer to everyone too cheap to buy better furniture, like we deserve this hell for not being richer. 

The thing about assembling Ikea or similar is that even though I tend to assume the problem is me, it's not always me. Sometimes, the manufacturer actually didn't include everything it was supposed to in the bag. Sometimes, the pre-fab holes really don't line up in a way that allows you to get the bolt through. Because I kind of suck at understanding directions, it's usually my fault when something isn't working out right. It isn't always my fault, but because it usually is, the hell of assembling furniture is that I can never be totally sure. I end up wondering if the manufacturer knew it could gaslight me like this.

There are some movies and stories that seem to me like Ikea furniture. They've got a lot of parts that sure look like they were meant to go together to make something aesthetically pleasing and functional. Parts of it I can get together, and maybe looking at the pictures in the book, I can get a sense of what I'm supposed to do, but damned if I can get the O-bolt to go into the G-slot. And is that really an O-bolt? I assume it is, because it's the only thing that makes sense, but what's in my bag doesn't look quite like the picture...

Let's lay it all out on the floor

"Soon the Light" by Gina Ochsner is one of those stories where I can't quite get everything to fit together. I'm going to use the same strategy I would use with shit from Ikea. I'm going to dump everything out on the floor, look at the picture of the finished product, and try to work backwards from what it's supposed to look like at the end to get a better sense of what each step is trying to accomplish.

The main pieces:

Furniture assembly books start with a page that shows you all the parts you're supposed to have. There are generally big pieces--the things getting stuck together--and fasteners--the things that hold those pieces together. The fasteners are either bolts and nuts or screws. There's also usually a tool to turn the fasteners.  

In "Soon the Light," or really in any story worth thinking about after the second it's over, the main pieces, the matter that forms the backbone of the whole thing, is the plot. In the story, siblings Jaska and Kaari are double immigrants. Their parents first left Finland for the United States, then the siblings left again together when they were grown from Minnesota to Oregon. They now live in Astoria, where the Colombia River empties into the Pacific. Jaska used to fish in boats, but he's lately taken to fishing in a weir, a sort of walled fish trap that takes advantage of the tides. Kaari used to cook in a logging camp, where she once took up with a logger named Bucky who got her pregnant and then left her. The baby died a day after it was born. Kaari now works in a store. Both siblings are single and in their fifties now.

I found this photo of a weir at nautil.us. I really didn't know what one looked like. Jaska's seems a lot simpler than this and includes nets. 

They live sort of like a married couple. Kaari cleans, cooks, and gives advice. When someone makes fun of Jaska for doing "women's work" and asks how he can live with himself, he says he doesn't live with himself, he lives with his sister. It's an intentional misreading of the putdown, but it also shows that Jaska looks at his relationship with his sister as the thing that shows he has value, the way many people look to marriage and children as the thing that justifies their existence.

The siblings take in a child Jaska found abandoned to die in his weir. At first, the child seems sweet, perhaps even a blessing. Kaari and Jaska both recover their physical health when he is around, suggesting the boy is some kind of angel. But then unexplained tragedies start happening all over, and the child shows an uncanny knack for finding it all funny. As the story goes on, the possibility that the boy is more demon than angel emerges, and the couple struggles to decide what they should do about him.

The bolts

So those are the armrests, the back, the legs, and the seat of this chair we're trying to put together. The success of an assembly project, though, comes down to whether you can get it to stick together. What are the fasteners of this story, the nuts and bolts? 

One bolt is mythology. In fact, there might be two different sizes of mythological bolts here. One is the Clatsop myth that opens the story. The Clatsop are a branch of Chinook. In the myth, God made mountains from mud and bloodied his hands in the process. That's why working the harvest is so hard. The other mythological bolt type comes from Christian mythology. Jaska reads Bible stories to the boy. Since the Clatsop myth opens the story and gets much longer treatment, one would have to assume it's going to carry more weight and assume a larger role in holding the story together than the Christian stories, but both play a part. 

Another bolt is "mother." Both siblings still send and receive letters with their mother. The letters they receive include a strange mix of advice, typical motherly inquiries, humorous anecdotes, and occasionally overbearing prescience. There is something of a Psycho/Norman vibe to their relationship with mother. It wouldn't be too surprising to find that "mother" has actually been dead in Minnesota for decades and that the siblings murdered her before they left, and they've actually been answering one another's letters to "mother" ever since. Mother's letters are occasionally whimsical, wondering why the ballet dancers in Minneapolis aren't taller so they don't have to keep rising up on their toes, and occasionally dark and Calvinist, warning of an "excess of cheer" and noting that suffering is the reward for hard work. Both children often wonder how they will tell mother about things that happen to them, meaning to some extent that they have never left childhood behind.

Various images form fasteners to the meaning of the story as well. The most obvious images are the light/dark references. The narrative alters between Kaari and Jaska's perspective. Both get alone time with the boy, and both interpret him differently. Kaari's portions of the story are invariably tied to darkness. Only a few lines into her first POV section, we find, "The darkness brewed within them--that was her meat, her milk. Her music. Darkness, she wrote, made a clean heart in her." Jaska, meanwhile, seems to dwell on the light. In one letter to mother, he writes of "how at low tide sunrise pooled in the litter of clam shells glowing wet and pinks...He wrote of the freckled globes of the violet foxglove, how they held an interior light of their own." 

The title of the story is "Soon the Light," which seems a clue--the way the picture on the box of an Ikea chair is a clue--that light is critical to assembling the story correctly. In addition to the depictions of light and dark in nature, there is the question of light and dark in the boy himself. The boy is unquestionably light, almost unnervingly white. Jaska thinks of the prophet Jonah, bleached white from three days in the whale, when he first sees the boy. He sees the boy's whiteness as a sign the boy is from God, but Kaari, who is tied to darkness, sees it differently. 

Kaari is influenced by "Indian Jennie." Kaari looks out for Indian Jennie, even though Indian Jennie is the woman Bucky left Kaari for. Kaari can't help herself. Jennie's mental faculties have declined, and she is "so simple these days, childlike and forgetful, and it seems wrong to hate a child." Jennie still wanders around looking for Bucky, although Bucky died long ago in an accident. 

In a sense, Kaari and Jaska each has a child to take care of. Jaska's is a child of the light and Kaari's of the darkness. Jennie sees the boy and immediately thinks he is evil. "The devil is white, white," she says. This will, of course, immediately make many readers think of some strands of black nationalism that believe the "white man is the devil" or something like that. That might be what's on Jennie's mind, but I think there's more to it than that. Whiteness holds more than modern political overtones for Jennie. Whiteness is tied to light, and while Western civilization has been nearly unanimous in preferring light to darkness ("And the light shines in the darkness, and darkness has not overcome it"), Kaari and Jennie seem to mistrust light. 

One final nut to try to use to hold this all together is the image of the bear. When Kaari tells Jennie that Jaska thinks the boy is a prophet, Jennie says she has met prophets before. They always come back telling stories about bears, because Heaven is full of bears. This is an interesting observation, as nothing in the story is as reminiscent of a bear as the boy himself. The boy is irreformably wild, for one thing, refusing baths and shoes. One scene all but calls the boy a bear:

The boy, naked and dripping wet, now sat at the kitchen table stroking the shiny scales of a salmon Jaska had been keeping alive in the kitchen sink. Spellbound, they watched his hands. Flick. Flick. His long fingernails, sharp as knives, flashed. Scales flew through the air. They could not take their eyes off him, even as he boiled the fish, its body jackknifed in the water and the head sticking out of the pot. He ate it like that, one half of the fish cooked, the head still alive.

Eventually, whatever evil is plaguing the town kills Jennie as well. Kaari, convinced the boy at the very least does not belong with them, convinces Jaska to take him to drop him off at an orphanage. But the boy runs off and is playing in the water near the weir when the tide is coming in. Jaska tries to rescue the boy, who keeps dashing off. Kaari makes a decision to rescue Jaska and let the boy drown. 

This chair is still kind of wobbly

I've used up all the parts, but the chair still isn't sturdy. I must have done something wrong, or the thing is defective. This is where I go back into the box to make sure I'm not missing something. And sure enough, there's a piece that's so weird, I mistook it at the beginning for packaging, but maybe it's actually important? It's all this stuff about Bolsheviks and a strike at the cannery and hints that World War II is on the way. It seemed irrelevant at the time, like when you occasionally just get an extra bolt that doesn't go anywhere, but maybe it actually does matter. 

I think everything I ever put together from Ikea has at least one piece that's smashed from where I rage stabbed it.

Kaari and her "child," Jennie, are both tied to the past. Jennie still thinks Bucky, who died in a logging accident, is coming back. Kaari might have decided to care for Jennie because Jennie, as a sort of child herself, reminds her of the child she lost. Kaari had to move on from Bucky, but because Jennie can't move on from Bucky and keeps looking for him, Jennie allows Kaari to hold onto the past vicariously. The darkness with which Kaari allies herself is the world as it was. 

The boy and the light that comes with him represents change. It represents a world that is coming. He burns letters from mother, their link to the old world. Twice, Kaari laments that "we are changing," once in a letter to mother and another time when the boy is burning the letters. It's not a good change for her. Although the light of the new world brings some good things with it (like curing of physical ailments), it also will erase things that will never come again. Light means destruction along with creation. 

Jaska also senses that the boy means change. He dreams of the town shaking "loose from its moorings." He dreams of its canneries, houses and docks all sliding into the muddy water. For Jaska, though, the change isn't as terrifying. His particular interpretation of his Christian background allows him to assume these changes could be for good. He has something of an "If God sent it, it must have a purpose" mentality.

The title is "Soon the Light," which only raises the question, "Soon the light what?" The story doesn't say, but one can perhaps assume that the natural continuation is that "soon the light will rise" or "soon the light will shine" or something like that. The light of change is coming, and it can't be held back any more than the dawn. With it comes the end of many things. The future is never without loss. We think of the march toward a more civilized world, but the future is at least half a wild animal, eating its prey half-cooked and half-raw. 

Kaari sees what the light destroys, and this is why she choses to stay behind in the darkness with her brother for as long as they can. Is the boy, who brings with him light and the future, evil? That's an open question. The future does bring in problems not dreamed of before, but Kaari is perhaps overly enamored of the darkness of her past and therefore unable to see what good it might bring with it. It's not clear whether the boy is evil or Kaari's own attachment to the past is.

Not a chair, after all

So we've used up everything we had, and we've tried putting it together in as many ways as we can. What we have seems better than our first try, but it's still not totally solid. Maybe that's because it wasn't a chair, after all. It's more like a hammock. It's supposed to rock. This story is Gothic. It's horror. The identity of good and evil in it is supposed to be a bit unstable. What seemed its weakness might be its strength, and the ambiguity is intentional. "Soon the light what?" isn't a riddle to be solved. The open-endedness of what comes after is actually the whole point.