The Best American Short Stories 2013

ELIZABETH TALLENT The Wilderness

HER STUDENTS ARE the devotees and tenders of machines. Some of the machines are tiny and some of the machines are big. Nobody wrote down the law that students must have a machine with them at all times, yet this law is rarely broken, and when it is, the breaker suffers from deprivation and anxiety. Machines are sometimes lost, sometimes damaged, and this loss, this damage deranges existence until, mouseclick by mouseclick, chaos can be fended off with a new machine, existence regains confidence, harmony, interest, order, connectedness. Sleeping, certain machines display a dreamily pulsing heartbeat-like white light meaning this machine is not dead. Human voices, fragments of text: even in a silent room the machines are continually storing these up. The students never advance into a day or even an hour without the certainty of voices waiting for them, without the expectation of signals and signs. Rendered visible, the embrace of hyperconnectivity would float around their heads like gold-leaf halos. During class the machines grow restless and seek students’ attention. Certain machines purr, certain machines tremble; certain machines imitate birdsong. Whoever invented the software that causes the machine to sing like a bird must have foreseen not only bewilderment like the professor’s but also the pleasure her mistake, if visible (it is: flushed from her lecture notes, her gaze swerves around the room), gives to those in the know—that is, her students. For the fraction of an instant that either makes or breaks her authority (she would say she is not interested in authority)—the fraction when pure exhilarated hard-wired startlement tips into that very different laughter-inviting cognitive slough, bewilderment—the professor can’t make the correct attribution. The realistic sequence of ascending trills is, for her and her alone among the two hundred and forty-three listeners in the lecture hall, “bird.” To see the lift of her brows is to know that a bird flits through the wilderness of her brain, to understand that in the professor’s life there have been far more instances of birdsong from birds than from machines. To her students this is endearing: she can’t help letting it show that she belongs to the world that preceded theirs.

Her face gives her trouble as a teacher. Irony has inscribed certain lines—insincerity, others. The insincerity is estranging—estranging her from herself, that is, for she feels, inwardly, like the most honest person on the planet. Inwardly she is plain and kind—emotionally Amish. But outwardly, no. Outwardly she is a professor. With a mocking lift of her brows, she has more than once accidentally silenced a student and been stunned that it happened so fast. Now she strives, facially, for serenity. As a child in the depths of a great museum she was struck mute by the impersonally eloquent eyes painted onto the linen wrapped over the real face of the mummy—no detachment, no trace of aversion, rushed to defend her huge, vulnerable heart from the perfect painted face tenderly laid against the true hidden visage whose corruption seduced the imagination into graphic detail. That was going on right below an oval face whose uncanniness told her I was alive, whose individuality, almost completely submerged in stylization, was more poignant for having barely made it through. For the first time she understood death for what it was—once, a real person had spoken through those lips, a person had looked out from those eyes pointed at both ends. That was why they took children to museums—she had been meant to understand this great thing they all understood, whose inevitability they could somehow (she did not see how) bear, which they expected her to spend the rest of her life knowing: death, first recognized in the depths of the museum, would be alive for her now her whole life long, and could never be un-seen. Nothing had been offered in the way of preparation or protection, and this treachery of theirs, this cold willingness to let her see what she saw, could not be explained. Inconceivable, the demented precision of this blow aimed at her by forces pretending to be benign. Hours later, in the backseat of the station wagon trundling south on the highway leading away from the city, she had fallen asleep. When she woke, she was looking out of eyes pointed on each end.

Once another professor, a handsome old charmer and taunter, asked her by way of flirtation what she wanted on her gravestone. For years, long after losing touch with the other professor, who had left for a university on the opposite coast, she thought about this question. She wrote and rewrote her gravestone, always with him in mind, recalling that particular moment at the party when he had come up to her and with two fingers touched the inside of her wrist, exposed because of the way she was holding her glass, and then, as if his somewhat intrusive but tolerated touch required its counterweight in charm, he had smiled a beautiful male smile within a dark beard and asked what she wanted on her gravestone, and she has been answering him ever since, though he died years ago.

Her by now experienced soul (but her heart is no bigger than it was when she was a child) gazes out through pointed eyes at students whose great museum is all of literature. Her corner of the museum is in English, which she has always loved—which she will love to her dying breath. Here come students. Why do they love it? What do they want? Is the end of such love inevitable—will there be a last English major? Will he be eyebrow-pierced and tattooed, awkward as any culture’s newest young hunter, a prowling, scanning searcher-boy invoking the name DeLillo; could she be that Raggedy Ann–haired anorexic cross-legged in the last chair in the line of four chairs in the hallway outside the professor’s door, this girl with tattered paperback upheld? They come. They are enthralled. The professor likes how enthralled they are. It is an old thing, a deep thing, to be enthralled. While enthralled they are beautiful. She could swear that an enthralled reader nineteen years old is the most beautiful animal on earth—at least, she’s seen one or two who were in their spellbound moment the incarnation of extremest human beauty. They were not themselves. Literature looked back at her from their eyes and told her certain things she was sure they ought not to have understood at their age. They had gotten it from books—books with their intricacies and the things they wanted you to know about love and death that you could have gone a long time not knowing if you had not been a reader, and which, even when you were a reader, you saw as universal truths that did not apply to you.

When the professor sees that a student loves a certain sentence, her heart lifts as if she’s been told great news! You will never die! Why does it feel like this? That book in that student’s hand has nothing to do with her. It’s just luck she’s in the same room.

In the center of a roundabout, a paved orbit around a central island whose pale gravel is set with concentric circles of a kind of agave she happens to know are called foxtail after the slender oblong upheld sleekness of their array of pointed leaves, the professor watches while bicycles skim and veer past within arm’s reach, hundreds of bicycles. If she stands here long enough she could easily witness the whirling transit of a thousand bicycles with her as their still center. Either extinction or a drastic diminution of population worldwide is inevitable within their lifetimes, according to research well known by the students. Here we can make some really big, really simple connections—we can cease to care, for a moment, how it looks to make big simple connections instead of subtle small ones. So. The same world that warns them of extinction bestows toys for them to carry, to key, to rub with their thumbs in swift ovals, to insert into those aperatures called in Hamlet “the porch of the ear,” natural distance between brain and music annihilated, the cacophony nudged deep, close, too close to the species’ most exquisite bones, incalculably tiny, the miracle housed within each ridiculous naked human ear. That is the point of the ten thousand toys. They are not about strangeness and newness at all. They seek innateness, sensual invisibility, the body’s quality of being not-there to itself. In their insinuated proximity they elude the soul’s attempt to differentiate between soul and soulless. Which is basically all that literature has ever cared about, and why it will never cease to be loved. Sure, tell that to yourself, the professor tells herself. The strap of the professor’s heavy leather messenger bag rests on her left shoulder, crosses her chest, and fits below her right armpit, an arrangement completed with inevitable creasing of her jacket, which is black or any of the dozen soft shades of gray in her closet; not much variation there, not much risk; the bag itself is revolved until it rests snugly against her back, a trick learned from students in the nick of time, just before her neck acquired a permanent ache from one-shouldered weight-carrying. Calculate it sometime: the weight of the books you have carried in your life, would it equal that of a horse, a boat, a house? Bicycles rush at her from nineteen directions. No one hits anyone. Just how this is accomplished—by what unerring divination of one another’s intentions and how many hundreds of swift corrections—she wants to know, to see, or if she can’t see it, if she’s not quick enough to perceive the glance that averts disaster, and she’s not, then she wants at least to be close to it, she needs to know it happens, it goes on and on happening.

Her heart has always been the same size as it was that long-ago Sunday when she first saw those eyes pointed at both ends, and she has always felt the same to herself. Secretly, because people are supposed to go through enormous changes and to mature, she wonders if there is something wrong with her, to feel such consistency between who she is now and who she was when she looked down into those alive-dead eyes. Is something wrong with still being who she was as a child, or is she fine? What book can answer that? A great number of them seem to the professor to intuit the existence of this question from her, however far away she is in time from the writer of the book, however remote, and in this context the right adverb to modify remote is impossibly. A great many of the books she loves most hold this question. It’s in there somewhere, the question, if not the answers, and why is it enough, in reading, why is it beautiful simply to find your own questions?

Long ago, when she was a new professor with a new professor’s keen motivation, she took the trouble to think of really good answers to certain questions students asked, and the trouble she took then has paid off ever since, because the answers can be revised according to the times, some needing more revision than others, but her original responses continue to strike her as sufficient, and form a sort of core around which revision can take place, and the questions haven’t changed. Really there are only twelve or so, at least in her life. Twelve or so main ones. Around those, a haze or shimmer of worries and intimations that can’t quite materialize into questions. Anxieties like droplets lacking the particles of dust or grit they need to coalesce into clouds. Things they fear. Questions she could not answer anyway.

In her mind she answers the professor who asked the question, who is no longer alive to hear what she wants on her gravestone, not that she plans to have a gravestone because she wants to be cremated and despite her fear of death is consoled by the notion of ending up as ashes—why, she’s not sure: their lightness and vulnerability to dispersion suit her, as does their incorruptibility, the fact that nothing further can be done to ashes, that in their lack of ambition regarding immortality ashes are the opposite of those eyes she gazed into in the museum. In her mind he touches her wrist and asks his question, which for all she knows he’s in the habit of asking as a disconcerting, cut-to-the-chase, what are you really like? refinement of flirtation, whose bad-boy contempt for the usual niceties at least some women would respond to. She had responded to the professor, not in the way he wanted, not with equal and opposite impudence, but with the awkwardness of needing to think before talking, an awkwardness despised at her university, which she mostly hid, but not that evening and not with him, and he hadn’t liked that, and hadn’t liked her answer, so they parted and not long after that lost touch and she was left answering him in her mind, saying yes, there was something she’d like, just one word, on her gravestone. Reader. And in her mind he loves this answer.

For instance, a student will ask whether reading critically and interpreting—by beginning to study literature—will cause the student to stop loving reading, because the student thinks there’s a risk of this, and that is what the student never ever wants to happen, and what is the answer, is it right to reassure the student when after all the professor doesn’t know how it will go for that student, she only knows how it went for her? Well, she says, in my experience, she says, the more someone learns about an intricate thing, like, say, the human heart—the more a surgeon knows about that heart, right?, the deeper in, the more beautiful the thing seems, and by thing I mean a heart or a book, either one. Then the student says thank you and goes away. But the professor does not know any heart surgeons and has never asked a heart surgeon if what is felt is wonder. She made that up.

Only when she is well away from that roundabout, safely settled into her favorite corner of the couch in her office—when a new student plunks down in that corner, it’s a problem—only in this quiet, narrowing her pointed eyes in pleasure in an interval of aloneness she has no right to, because they should be here, the students, they’ve said they’re going to come by and one of them will knock on the door at any second, meaning the value of this interval, the preface to losing oneself in a book, is heightened by her awareness of its likely end—only in the particular space created by unexpected liberty (in which thinking her own thoughts has a stolen or illegitimate savor, really fun) does she intuit the real reason for her love of standing absolutely still in the bicycle onslaught, in the student whirlwind. As usual the real reason has been expertly swaddled in and obscured by false, lesser reasons, very attractive in and of themselves. Oh yes there is pleasure in being unmoved in the midst of an every-which-way assault. But also, this is like her life. They come at her from every direction! They never touch her! No. That’s not it, not the bottommost layer, not the meaning revealed only when other meanings are peeled away, whose existence you only ever discover if peeling is a habit, if you love this deft quiet work of lifting away length of gauze after length of gauze to find the true face. Down down down down down and down. They mean something, these almost-winged cyclists, in their seriousness and lightness, their concentration, in their searchingness that must discern every tiny signal or else, in their absorption. This is reading. No wonder she loves standing there: in the middle of a steady cascade of virtuoso reading on which everything depends.

It could be, the professor tells herself, that apart from your work and your teaching you do not have enough going for you, that you need to get out more, that due to your aloneness, which we’re not going to call loneliness because it’s not that—it’s a deliberate, cultured, desirable, nonnegotiable state, absolutely necessary if you want to get work done, intelligent aloneness, good aloneness; it has a point!—because you are alone, conceivably your students matter too much. At least you have to ask yourself once in a while, you have to check in regarding whether or not it is wrong, what you feel for them, the students. Without fail you need to recognize that the easiest transition love ever makes is into coercion, and that your most useful trait as far as students are concerned is disinterestedness. You’ve said often enough that you love teaching, but you have never said the truer thing, which is that you love your students, because it would only worry everyone to hear it, it would worry even you, and it might not even be true, because there is, remember, the risk that aloneness has exaggerated what you feel for them. Which may not be love, but some minor, teacherly emotion that nobody ever bothered to give a name. Who were they, the people who figured out what the emotions were, and how many of them would be recognized and named, and which sad little shadings or gradations could safely be ignored—who were they, these feeling-namers and numberers, and what did they have against shades of gray?

The students rarely embark on a difficult or painful subject without some sort of rhetorical exit strategy. There is almost no sorrow they can’t disown with an immediate laugh. In that case—in the case of a quick student laugh—the professor is not supposed to know that she has been permitted to glimpse serious emotion. After many years as a professor it still strikes her as unnatural that students, that people fear what she might think: who the fuck is she? But they watch her eyes for what she’s thinking. Will she say something actually useful to them, or something they in their desperation (because sometimes it is desperation) can twist into usefulness, which will be more useful for seeming to have come from her, the professor? What can she tell them about what comes next?

In the corner of the couch with a light titanium-sheathed machine balanced partly on the arm of the couch and partly on one raised knee, the professor clicks through the forests and clearings of a few contested acres. Mild and unevocative except for being somewhat forlorn, these acres, sad in the way of woods that don’t thrive, lacking the cannons, the plaques, the bronze generals on horseback that tell you blood was shed here. The Wilderness, this battlefield is called, capital T, capital W. Walmart wants this particular scrap of The Wilderness for a supercenter whose aisles will be lined with toys for the children of tourists drawn to other already-protected acres of battlefield. There is no telling from these unphotogenic scantily wooded fawn-colored hills that her great-great-grandfather almost died here. If he had died he would have been one among thirty thousand, and she, of course, would never have existed. He lived: the War Department records his new status as prisoner of war, sent by train to Camp Delaware, also known as Pea Patch Island. The professor both likes and hates the irony, the sunny potager promised by the name Pea Patch Island and the reality of filth and exposure and fever and starvation, tainted water and maggoty flour, befalling him at nineteen. Was he as alive to himself as she is to herself, did he feel as real—if he stretched out his hand and flexed its fingers and turned it to study the lines intersecting and diverging in the palm, did he marvel? The deepest despair, the blackest pitch of disillusion about humankind: those are what she imagines, imagining his emotions, but these conjectures could be wrong. He is remote in time and culture. He could have done improbably well, inwardly—could have come through with all his F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S intact. Consolations that seem to her the most childish lies and self-deceptions might have been his salvation. Not books, but Book. He might, if time were transcended and he could know her and what she thinks and what she teaches her students and her preference for ambiguity over conviction and her godlessness, turn his savage Civil War eyes on her, his billy-goat beard, his cavalryman’s uprightness, his gaunt authority renouncing her, his distant child. A cousin sent the professor the only known photograph of him, a slouch-hatted elderly figure astride a sorrel horse, and even in this photo, no bigger than a matchbook, and even in extreme old age, he is clearly someone to reckon with. So, she thinks, love me. Want me to come into existence. From the year 2012 she gazes into the pixels that comprise his gaze. Back to the homepage of the historical trust fighting Walmart, and with several clicks of the mouse, she buys an acre of these woods where he lay wounded, and her inbox dings with instant thanks from a computer in the trust’s distant offices. It’s his thanks she wants to come dinging in. She is amused at herself, though there are tears in her eyes. Through mouseclicks she had hoped to connect to that long-ago, unknowable, very likely hostile old man. Who she’s somehow as lonely for as if she had once been a child cradled in his arms, as if, leaning his head down so his mouth was close to her ear, he had said her name, and then said listen, and then told her the story that was the story within all the other stories of her life, the oldest and most beautiful and farthest back, the one that would elude death forever and ever and ever amen.

Me. Say you lived at least partly for me.

This is the story that must exist somewhere; this is what she can’t find to read.