The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (51 page)

Then he gave the signal, and the produce salesmen passed baskets of fruit throughout the crowd, and the fur salesmen launched the fireworks from the roof of the Beirut. Skyrockets and Roman candles and enormous fire fountains that sprayed thirty feet into the air. I took a tangerine in my mouth, and then a nectarine, and bit, and tasted their cold juices. A massive Catherine wheel, powered by a hundred fuse-lit explosives, spun blue wires of sparks in circles that many later claimed could be seen from space. Certainly they could be seen throughout the city and beyond, from the low-lying slums of La Saline and Cité Soleil to the high places at the edge of the mountains north, south, and east.

We joined hands, and the
mizik rasin
band began with the drums and the guitars and the horns and the singers. It seemed to me that all the world was being emptied of its ugliness. In the streets people began to dance, and I was dancing, and even a few days later, when it was discovered that we had been marching and weeping and dancing in the service of an elaborate lie, I still could taste the nectarine in my mouth, the brown wet ridges of the pit on my tongue.

Around the Baptist school at Koulèv-Ville, some of the teachers say Samir Nasser pushed his daughter too hard. Unlike almost every other Nasser father, he wanted her to go away and stay gone. He tutored her in math until the math got beyond him, around the trigonometry stage, which she had reached by the second semester of the ninth grade, and he tutored her in science until the science got away from him, which was around the first semester of the tenth. His idea was that she’d become a brain surgeon, and every morning before school he lectured her about the entrance test for medical school, the MCAT, which wasn’t as far away, he reminded her, as she might think. He believed that the finest undergraduate education in the world could be found only in Providence, Rhode Island, at Brown University, where, as he had read in a business magazine, Ted Turner had come into the maverick genius that had enabled him to invent cable television and buy up half the available grazing land in the American West. Let me tell you how long life is, Samir told Anna, and then he’d blink or snap his fingers. He demanded straight A’s; he hired tutors from among the Baptist school faculty and from the university. He punished her severely for any A-minus or B-plus: No cell phone. No occasional beering. No dancing with friends at the teen club. He didn’t hit her, but she’d rather have been hit. Some say she got enjoyment from being hit in other ways, but that’s not for me to say.

They never let me into the teen club, but many times I have imagined it. Bodies glistening and glitter and crepe paper and the thumping that travels from the speakers to the floor to the blood your heart hustles. Flushed flesh and eye makeup, even on the boys, a phenomenon you shouldn’t pillory until you’ve tried wearing it around town after a
Diwali
party. You walk into a drugstore in Lincoln, Nebraska, at two in the morning, and you’re dangerous, a feeling worth chasing, and surely Anna Nasser had it in her same as you and me, that seeking after shadows, that dark desire. I want to make an argument on behalf of prurience. Go home tonight and pick up a book or turn on your television when nobody’s watching you. What are you watching? If it’s a cooking show, imagine something goes wrong. The chef burns himself, and it’s live TV, and there’s a brown streak the length of his forearm, and now there’s the cameramen you usually never see, running into the frame, carrying buckets of ice or salves or whatever in advance of the medical people. Or maybe there’s a fire. Maybe it’s a NASCAR race, and you’re waiting for the crash. Maybe it’s a documentary on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe it’s a
loup-garou
, fur and fangs, or spirits, ghosts, vampires, rabid hoot owls, children raised by wolves, women without faces. Your attention is perked up, and mine is too. Forget bearing witness, forget concern for the pain of others, forget every noble justification. Mortality is in view, families might soon be splintered, bodies are fragile, the king lives in a castle on the hill and commands a sizable army, the president can call down drone planes to strike tent cities like lightning from the sky.

So she’s there. It’s a Friday night. She’s dancing. She likes to grind, and so do the boys, and so do the other girls. It’s an international scene, beyond bourgeois; some of these kids will one day sit on a couch in the White House and negotiate treaties that put navy bases ten miles from their greatest port cities. The linguae francae are English, French, and Spanish, but there’s a fair amount of fashionable slumming in Kreyòl, especially when it comes to the Dutch and the Germans. Her father’s threat hangs like a guillotine over her head, and if that sounds dramatic, try to remember your veins full of the chemicals of adolescence. As it happens, there is a crucial calculus exam the next morning that she’s hidden from her father, the AP Calculus BC exam, which will demonstrate to the bigots at Brown that she’s not just some girl from a Third World backwater, that she can hang with the kids from prep schools or Paris. There was a time she knew this stuff cold, but because of her advanced standing, it’s been a while. It’s been busy at the Beirut—otherwise, her father would be on top of the dates the way he has been most of her life. All she needs is a few hours to brush up on parametric equations, polar and vector functions, plus maybe a little jogging of the mind where polynomial approximations and series are concerned, especially Taylor series, Maclaurin, all that
nonsense.

She has to get home, but there’s this beautiful boy from Miami. At first she thinks he’s Haitian, but he says no, his father is an attorney and a representative in the Florida statehouse, and his mother is a chemistry professor at St. Thomas. He’s not Haitian, only his grandmother is, and he’s here with her and his mother, visiting ignorant relatives. It’s a drag. Under other circumstances she’d push back against this kind of talk, but he’s older, he’s built, he’s got teeth like Denzel Washington. Then he says he’s a med student. University of Miami. He tells her about the cadaver work, and he likes it when she doesn’t recoil. You’re real cool, he says, and she likes this too, more than she could have imagined. I have to get home, she says. She tells him about the calculus exam, and he says, What? Integrals? Derivatives? That’s nothing. I could get you there in an hour. He talks smart for five minutes about antidifferentiation, and she has never met a boy like this. Providence, Rhode Island, is probably crawling with them, but who’s to say? Come home with me, he says, so she calls her mother and tells her she’s staying at a girlfriend’s house, and she makes all the necessary arrangements of deception with the girlfriend, like she’s done plenty of times before.

Then they’re off. He drives a rented Mercedes with bulletproof windows. He’s got the Wyclef Jean suite at the Hôtel Montana. The rest of his family is in his great-aunt’s gingerbread house, but he refuses to stay there, and his mother indulges him. She says he’s selfish and small-minded, but secretly she’s proud she’s raised such an American. She wishes him the distance from here to the moon, and the money to get the liquid fuel and build the steel cylinder.

In the suite he kisses her face and kisses her neck and kisses her collarbone, and he says, Do you want to? and she says yes, and she’s done it before, but not like this, not with someone who knows what he’s doing. She’s just beginning to know her own body too, that’s important, and because she hardly knows him, she can run her own show. He’s a version of himself he will never be for another person in the sixty years he has left to live. Idealized and utmost. The sum total of the available love and lust in the Northern Hemisphere. She fixates on his one cracked fingernail.

It’s not yet morning when they’re good and exhausted, and she’s complaining: I can’t keep my eyes open. I can barely lift my pencil hand. She kisses his chest and says, The bad people sent you to keep me from Brown. She kisses his forehead and says, I hate you. She kisses his mouth and says, You’ve ruined everything.

He reaches into a bag beside the bed. He props himself up on one elbow. He unscrews a plastic safety lid. I’m not the bad people, he says. He takes a strand of her hair between his fingers.

Try this, he says.

I have taken a few 30-milligram slugs of amphetamine salts in my time. They arrive in yellow pharmaceutical capsules dosed at 60 milligrams. You take a sheet of wax paper and cut two three-inch squares, open the capsule, and pour it out onto one of the squares. Then you take a razor blade and separate the salts into two piles of equal size. Then you put one of the wax paper sheets under the other one and push one of the piles onto the lower sheet. Carefully, so you can avoid wasting any of the precious salts. Then you chew the head off a Gummi Bear, fold the wax paper into a kind of funnel, channel the salts into one side of the yellow capsule, and cap it with the Gummi Bear head. That’s supply enough for two days. Then you pour a big glass of water and swallow one of the half-capsules. Then you wait half an hour. Then the angel of bliss and joy and every earthly pleasure pierces your crown with the tip of her wing. Right there in the center of your brain—a place where you don’t otherwise feel anything—you can feel the squirt of a cold pleasant liquid. It fills your head and then you can feel a lifting throughout your body, and there is no touch, no kiss, no orgasm in the world to rival it. You are flying, but you are clearheaded. Sleep is no longer at issue. You deeply love whoever is imprinted on you by the fact of their presence. For twelve or fifteen hours you can contemplate a fixed point fifteen feet in front of you, or you can become the most productive person in the history of human beings.

The high is directly proportional to the complexity of the brain work you bring to it. More than once I’ve filed for Reuters or IPS this way, and I’ve tried other things—composing on the piano, reading Proust, playing chess with Ben Fountain—but imagine her synapses on speed and calculus. Lit up like the Main Street Electrical Parade, Pete’s Dragon, and twelve Mary Poppins chimney sweeps in tight black shirts, dancing to Kraftwerk, a pharmacological miracle that ends in a wooden desk chair in a concrete kindergarten in Port-au-Prince, under the stern eye of a Jamaican proctor named Madame Roosevelt, who wears her glasses on a chain around her neck and watches Anna Nasser’s pencil fly through graph analyses, asymptotic and unbounded behavior, every near-quantification of infinity.

She’d been awake for thirty hours when she went back for more of the salts and more of the boy, and when they swam in the pool this was love, she’d do anything, forget Providence, she’d never seen snow and there was no reason she ever needed to see snow. They both opened their eyes underwater. Their noses were less than an inch apart, and when they surfaced, he said, I’ve never met anyone like you, in all my life, swear to God, and it felt so good to believe him. Her body had become a magical forest, and somewhere in the center there was a wizened old lady with a stove and a lantern, and later, in the bathtub, he said he liked those stories too, anything creaky with yellow pages and British diction, anything partially in Elvish.

He flew home, but he flew back. He studied on the airplane. He cut classes here and there to squeeze out two-day visits in the Wyclef suite, three or four a month. In the hotel, he studied, and she studied alongside him. All they did was sex and swim and study, and there was no way of knowing which was better. She told her parents she’d joined a ballet class, strictly amateur stuff, but as fitness goes it was better than tennis or cross-country. She got bold, showed her mother how toned her glutes had become. She was taking the cut capsules all the time now, and though her energy was extraordinary, she found that she needed very little food. Her face became angular in a way that almost everyone attributed to good health. At the late spring parent-teacher conference, all the American schoolmarms raved. She imagined them in their sad, thin blouses and frumpy haircuts, waving the Anna flag, and then she imagined what such a flag would look like. It would be the periodic table of elements on a lipstick-red field the shape of a swallowtail, fixed above the mainsail of a luxury yacht. Yes, her father told her teachers. We are very proud of our Anna.

The third week of April, he said, Do you love me? Yes, she said. How much do you love me? The most. What if I told you I was in trouble? Anything, she said. Would you punch a hundred priests in the face? Anything, she said, I’d kick my grandmother in the knees. He quoted two French psychoanalysts, both dead, on the subject of bicycle horns and how it’s the triangle’s job to vibrate, to resonate, under the pressure of what it retains as much as what it thrusts aside. He spoke of the orchid and the wasp, the lateral spread of bamboo and other grasses through subterranean rhizomes. He said he’d lost a lot of money at a cockfight at the edge of the Everglades, and though he’d had a lot of money, it was mostly gone now. The people he owed had made threats, not only against his neck and knees, but also against his mother’s and his father’s. My father wants to be a congressman one day, he said.