The Best American Essays 2013 (26 page)

“I will take you,” he said. “Just put your suitcase in the back seat. We will have to drop off my father-in-law in Millbrae. Do you mind?”

“No,” I said. “Thank you.”

The driver and his father-in-law spoke Mandarin all the way to Millbrae, the driver politely interpreting for me so that I wouldn’t be left out of the conversation. “My father-in-law thinks you must be badly injured,” the driver said. “I told him that you said you were fine.” Thanks to this gentleman, I arrived at the San Francisco Airport in time for my flight. My ribs hurt, and my back hurt, and I gave off an odd panic-stricken body odor, but all I wanted to do was to get home. At the same time, I was still disoriented. Near the entrance to Terminal One, I noticed, was a sign with a name on it:
NOSMO KING
. It appeared to me as graffiti on behalf of a deposed potentate. Who was this oddly named Nosmo King? King of what? We were in northern California! No kings here! Not until I was seated on the airplane did I calm down and realize that I had misread the sign and that, like other public places, the San Francisco Airport did not tolerate lighting up or puffing on cigarettes.

My back still hurts sometimes, especially on long flights. Niazi called me at home a few days later and left a message on my answering machine. His voice was expressive of deep despair combined with physical pain. “Mr. Baxter, sir, I am worried about you. I am . . . I am not all right, but I am lying down, recovering. Would you please call me?”

No. I would not call him, and I did not. I still haven’t. I heard from someone else that he had broken his back. Guiltily, shamefully, I left him uncalled, and my inability to dial his number and to ask him how he was recovering surely serves as a sign of a human failing, a personalized grudge that will not be appeased. But all I could think of then and now was,
That expert on Hell almost got me killed
.

The insurance company has promised to send me $500 to compensate me for my pain and suffering.

In another version of the accident, the one I sometimes told myself compulsively, I sit silently while Niazi screams and the car rolls over down the hill. But I didn’t just tell myself this story; I told everybody. The accident turned me into a tiresome raconteur. A repetition compulsion had me in its tight narrative grip. I had become like a character in one of my own stories, the sort of madcap who buttonholes an innocent bystander to relieve himself of an obsession. Some stories present themselves as a gift, to be handed on to others as a second gift. But some more dire stories have a certain difficult-to-define taint. They give off an odd smell. They have infected the person who possesses them, and that person peevishly passes on the infection to others. In the story in which I am the victim, I am not an artist, but a garrulous ancient mariner who has come ashore long after his boat has been set adrift and long after his rescue, which does not feel like a rescue but an abandonment.

From the airport I called my wife, from whom I was—and remain—separated, to give her the news. She met me at the airport, and we hugged each other for the first time in months. Near-death trumps marital discord but does not heal it. Then she took me back to my apartment, where she dropped me off.

I sat alone in the apartment for a few days, trying to read, but mostly writing e-mails. At night I would fall asleep to the remembered sound of Niazi’s screams. I announced my accident on Facebook, curious whether any of my FB friends would press the “like” button. A few did. I picked up the phone and started calling people. “Let me tell you what happened to me,” I would say. I had become strangely interesting to myself. One friend has called my compulsion to talk about the accident a form of “vocational imperialism,” though I think he means
avocational
imperialism. After all, I am a mere tourist in the landscape of Islam. As an unsteady humanist, I don’t believe in much, and the virtues that I do believe in—goodness, charity, bravery—abandoned me in the moments after that accident.

All I thought as we tumbled down that hill, as I have said, was the hope that this awfulness would be over soon. We die alone, even if someone else is dying beside us. And—this was my fleeting wish in the back seat of that violently rotating Lincoln Town Car, in the wondrously dark clarity of thought produced by the unexpected, as the plastic bottles of water were flying around my head and my cell phone twirled in the air in front of me—I prayed that the car would land right side up or, if this was to be the moment of my death, by fire as the gas tank exploded, that it be quick.

ANDER MONSON

FROM
The Normal School

A
COUPLE OF YEARS AGO
, I asked friends and family to make me a mix CD for my birthday, hoping to get thirty-three mix CDs, one per year I’d lived. I got fifty-nine, including some, pleasingly, from strangers. Somewhat predictably, though not unpleasantly, there were a number of Jesus-Year-themed mixes, though fewer Jesus-themed songs. I also put out the call to friends to pass it to anyone they thought might be interested in sending a mix CD. I made it a project to listen actively to each of these mix CDs and to respond by annotating, riffing on, and responding to the selections, and sending a note with my response to the mix-maker, or I suppose we should call her an arranger, since therein is the art of the mix.

The idea I had about this was that the collective mix CDs would somehow represent the network of friends and family I was in close contact with—or close enough. I thought I’d be able to divine something about myself from how others viewed me, what they thought the best approach was to making the mix, whether they used the mix as an opportunity to impress, to educate, to colonize, to woo, to irritate, to posture, to stake out some emotional territory between us. I’d done all these things in the past, usually with an emphasis on woo. I’d made hundreds, I’d guess, maybe a thousand, though I’m not obsessive enough to have kept track of all of them—their recipients, the occasion for the mix, the strategies I employed, if any, and the track lists over the years. Whether an individual mix meant anything was hard to say, but it would be tough to avoid making some conclusions about the first third (I hope) of my life from the aggregate information contained on these compact discs.

One disc arrived cracked, so only the first few tracks were playable. Another mix, this one pie-themed, arrived so broken that only the track list was readable. Another was virtual, a ghost mix, a list of the worst thirty-three songs in her iTunes library without any actual music to inflict said songs on me. One was all songs written and recorded when the artist in question was thirty-three. One, also impressively, was only songs released in 1933. The length of one disc added up to exactly thirty-three minutes and thirty-three seconds. My brother sent me, in lieu of a mix, a box set of Americana from Rhino, which says quite a bit about our relationship. Another mix consisted of songs that I had never heard before. One, maybe the most meaningful in the way mixes can be, collected songs by bands that the mixer and I had seen in concert together. Perhaps in a bid to piss me off, several featured “Sweet Home Alabama.” More than one included a Bon Jovi song. I am not sure why.

Then one mix CD was not a CD at all. It arrived in a regular business-sized envelope. It was a microcassette without a case. Sent in an unpadded envelope, it too arrived broken. I filed it on my shelf with the others. It did not fit in the box with the others because the box was designed for CDs. The envelope it arrived in was a plain business envelope, you know the sort, designed for holding a letter-sized sheet of paper folded in three parts. It had no return address. Addressed to me with a barely readable postmark from Nebraska City, Nebraska, the tape was an enigma. Did it have anything to do with the mix CD project? I did not know. It was broken and unplayable. As I listened to the other mix CDs and wrote about them, or in response to them, I thought more about what might be on the broken tape. I filled the room with thought. I paid attention to the songs on the listenable discs and tried to correlate them with my relationship with the person who made the mix. My head was elsewhere as I contemplated the moonlit limbs of the sumacs visible from my office window, the invisible network of roots converging at the base of the trees, and waited for snow to come.

Nebraska City, Nebraska, is the official home of Arbor Day, the last Friday in April (in most states—sometimes differing climates lead to different dates), a “day to celebrate trees,” according to the Arbor Day Foundation website. You’ve heard of it. Maybe you’ve celebrated it. I’d guess that only a few of us, though, have revered it. Founded in 1872 by Julius Sterling Morton, a journalist and politician originally from Michigan, Arbor Day is surely the least sexy national holiday. (It is a postal holiday, but only in Nebraska.) While it’s odd to think about the burned, windswept prairie of Nebraska as the birth of the day of tree celebration, Nebraska Citians are pretty serious about Arbor Day.

From what I can see of it (which, thanks to the Internet and Google Earth, is extensive in a way that would not have been possible even a decade ago), Nebraska City, Nebraska, appears undistinguished. Just south of I-29’s intersection with I-80, it has the usual stuff of American towns: golf courses, churches, monuments, Super 8 motels, a hospital, townhomes, Buick LeSabres, football, insurance agents, a sewing store, a mostly abandoned downtown, quilts, sadness, pretty girls, fields and fields, a factory outlet store, one or two Chinese restaurants, a Mexican restaurant with wack burritos, the smell of farms, a Friends of Faith Thrift Shop, scattered signs of both doom and joy. When you start to look at what distinguishes cities from each other, particularly in the American Midwest, it’s pretty easy to despair of our culture for its portability, its replicability, its easy genericism.

Nebraska City, Nebraska, is one of those State Name City cities that feel peculiarly American and complicate schoolchildren’s memorization of the states and their capitals: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, may be the capital city of Oklahoma, but Iowa City is no longer the capital city of Iowa (as of 1857). You’ve probably never even heard of Ohio City, Ohio, or Minnesota City, Minnesota, for good reason. I’d reckon about half the states have a State Name City, and a few have cities named after other states, often straddling state lines. As such, Nebraska City, Nebraska, could be—though it is not, except maybe in a few lonely dreams—the center of the center of the country.

The Midwest is an odd place when you look at it closely enough, though it gets caricatured as Norman Rockwellville, a place of the safe and boring, hard work, religion, football, “family values”—whatever they are. My experience with the Midwest belies these broad brushstrokes: most of the Midwest is much stranger, darker, more hollow, anger- and treasure-filled. You find serious evidence of weirdness in the abandoned factory steam towers and knockoff Dairy Queen—called Kastle Kreme—in Galesburg, Illinois (they’ll make a blizzard out of anything you bring in, including salted pork), or the closed Blue Bird School Bus assembly plant in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. Zeeland, Michigan, has the highest incest rate in the state. You find the World’s Biggest Ball of Twine in a small town: Darwin, Minnesota. Another contender for the crown is in Cawker City, Kansas, with at least one more in Wisconsin and inevitably one in the weirdest town in the greater Midwest: Branson, Missouri. Looking closer at Nebraska City, you learn that it is the oldest incorporated city in Nebraska and has the only Underground Railroad site in the state. Then there’s the legacy of Morton’s Arbor Day—thousands of trees lining the streets of Nebraska City, thousands of saplings in kids’ hands about to be planted; or maybe those are metaphors: the hands, the kids, the trees, Nebraska City.

Strange enough on the ground, then, but from the air it must seem like the least identifiable city in one of the least identifiable states, identifiable only in its display of absence, the sort of place where someone mysterious might hide and send out strange microcassettes or bombs.

Every move across the country, and every visit, if it’s a good one, if you pay attention: these force you to recalibrate your sense of place and what you thought the place might be or mean. When I moved to Tucson, Arizona, a couple years later, I was surprised by just how green it was, belying the broad brushstrokes that “Tucson, Arizona,” brings to mind. My vision/version of the place was of the flat, swaled infinity that you might see in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where I lived briefly as a teenager, or in the Sahara, where much of my consciousness of what
desert
means was born. Not much grew in the desert around Riyadh. But the part of the Sonoran Desert surrounding Tucson (a valley city, surrounded by mountain ranges) is comparatively speaking a celebration of the tree, particularly the Martian green–skinned palo verde, Arizona’s unreal and prickly state tree. And Tucson isn’t technically in a desert at all: the area gets enough rain (twelve inches a year most years, though a little less in the last decade’s ongoing drought) to be considered only semiarid. Landscapes are filled with the famous saguaro cacti that only grow in the Sonora, the green spray of blooming ocotillos, a dozen different palms, yuccas, mesquites, and thousands of fruit trees bushing out of backyards throughout the city, to say nothing of the other hundred succulents and varieties of cacti, though like many of Tucson’s denizens, both flora and fauna, many are hardly native to the region.

I found the fruit trees particularly fascinating, since the orange trees spectacularly line the Third Street Bike Path that dead-ends into the campus of the university where I teach. Being from Michigan, and spending much of my life in the cold realms, I fetishized fruit trees, fetishized cacti, images from vacation postcards, television, and deep winter dreams. Fruit trees especially were tied directly into the myths of California and Florida, Disneyland and Disney World, twin visions of escape from the endless snowbound heart of Upper Michigan.