Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

He put down the bloody cricket bat. I stared at it while I waited. A few moments later he returned, holding a half-gallon jar filled with the brown packets of powder. “Dis what dat man come for? He bring it in the breadfruit?” He laughed to himself and shook his head. “Dem think of everything.”

The sound of McWilliams’s police car siren was slowly getting louder as it made its way up the hill.

“One more favor, Tubby,” I asked, looking up at him. I still couldn’t move from where I was.

He put the jar on the bar next to the split breadfruits and looked at me, waiting to see what it was I wanted.

“Make me one of those rum punches of yours.”

A small smile began to form on his face. “‘One parts sour, two parts sweet,” he rhymed. “Three parts weak… and four parts… strong.”

I was able to finally smile.

He kept his eyes on me and continued the rhyme as he went behind the bar and ducked under to grab a bottle of rum. “Drink it all…” He stood back up and pulled a glass from the drainer. “…and you’ll know that you belong.”

I drank it all.

In the words of the New York Times, Louis Bayard“reinvigorates historical fiction,” rendering the past “as if he’d witnessed it firsthand.” Bayard’s affinity for bygone eras can be felt in both his recent young adult novel, the highly praised Lucky Strikes (named one of Amazon’s top 2017 titles), and his string of critically acclaimed adult historical thrillers: Roosevelt’s Beast, The School of Night, The Black Tower, The Pale Blue Eye, and Mr. Timothy.

A New York Times Notable author, he has been nominated for both the Edgar and the Dagger Award. He is also a nationally recognized essayist and critic whose articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Salon. An instructor at George Washington University, he is on the faculty of the Yale Writers’ Conference and was the author of the popular Downton Abbey recaps for the New York Times.

• How did I go from writing about history to writing about the imminent future? It goes back to the day my mother asked me about my father.

By then Dad had been dead for three years, and my own memories of him were colored by the Alzheimer’s that in his final days had swallowed him whole. Mom’s dementia, by contrast, was gentler and more incremental, and if she sometimes blanked on the names of her grandchildren or forgot something that had happened to us when we were kids, she was able to find some other memory to cling to, even create new ones here and there.

So when she began quizzing me about my dad, I took it at first for minor fact-checking. But then the questions began to run deeper. What did he do for a living? What did he look like? What did he sound like? What was he like? The man with whom she’d spent half a century, the man she’d grieved for so wantonly three years earlier, had simply vanished.

From that realization, a new kind of grief—and, perhaps by way of understanding, a pair of thought experiments.

#1: Imagine learning on unimpeachable authority that from here on out your life will be a continuous cognitive decline. You will go from forgetting people’s names to forgetting people. The smiles and faces dearest to you in the world will, sooner or later, be utterly lost to you, and there will be no reversal, no appeal, no reprieve. Do you get out now? While the going’s good? I suspect most of us wouldn’t. Living is a hard habit to kick, after all, so we would probably muddle along, congratulating ourselves on what we were still able to recall, and by the time the shadows had well and truly descended, it would be too late. We would no longer even be able to mourn our losses, because we would have no memory of what we’d lost.

#2: Now imagine that someone offers to make the call for you—gauge the exact moment when you have slipped into oblivion and afford you the release you no longer have the capacity or awareness to effect for yourself. Do you take them up on it? Knowing that you won’t recall having made the transaction? If so, what will your criterion be? The point beyond which you will not suffer yourself to slip?

Those are the end-of-life questions that haunt “Banana Triangle Six.” It goes without saying that they haunt me too.

Andrew Bourelleis the author of the novel Heavy Metal and coauthor with James Patterson of Texas Ranger. His short stories have been published widely in literary journals and fiction anthologies. This is his second story selected for inclusion in a volume of The Best American Mystery Stories. Bourelle lives in Albuquerque with his wife, Tiffany, and two children, Ben and Aubrey. He teaches writing at the University of New Mexico.

• Rhonda Parrish asked me to contribute to an anthology she was editing titled D Is for Dinosaur. Each author was assigned a letter of the alphabet and was asked to write a story about dinosaurs using that letter. I looked up dinosaurs whose names began with Y and came across the Yangchuanosaurus, otherwise known as the Yangchuan Lizard. I kicked around some ideas for a few months, but I couldn’t think of anything that I was in love with. Then, as the deadline loomed, I had a strange dream that provided the premise for the story. I can’t remember much of the original dream. It certainly wasn’t as coherent as the story turned out to be. But the dream gave me my idea: a drug made of dinosaur bones. I wrote the first draft in a rush. It was one of those magical writing experiences where you have just the seed of an idea and the rest of the story grows during the act of writing.

I’m indebted to Rhonda Parrish for publishing the story and for her helpful edits. And thanks to Otto Penzler and Louise Penny for including “Y Is for Yangchuan Lizard” in this volume of The Best American Mystery Stories.

T. C. Boyleis the author of twenty-eight books of fiction, including, most recently, The Relive Box and Other Stories (2017), The Terranauts (2016), and the forthcoming novel Outside Looking In. He has published his collected stories in two volumes, T. C. Boyle Stories (1998) and T. C. Boyle Stories II (2013), and was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award in Short Fiction in 1999 and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2014. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• Over the course of my career I’ve taken it as a challenge to inhabit the points of view of characters of diverse ethnicity, gender, and age, attempting, like most artists, to examine the human condition from every angle possible. Early on, when I wasn’t nearly so close in age as I am now to Mason Alimonti, I got a letter from my grad-school mentor praising me for my insight into the worldview of the elderly in my stories and novels, and that praise meant as much to me as any prize or blue ribbon. I figured I must have been doing something right, because he was old and I was young, and if anybody knew how the elderly perceive things, he certainly did. But then for me, for all of us, it’s an act of imaginative projection to enter that limbic world of the aged—barring accident or disease we will all someday get there, and when we do there will be predators like Graham Shovelin awaiting us.

I received a letter very similar to the one Mason did—in fact, I even lifted certain phrases from it for the sake of authenticity. It was so obviously a fraud I was amazed that anyone could be taken in by it, but then the news is chock-full of stories about people who have been. I didn’t have to look too far. A friend of mine fell for a similar scheme, which cost him everything he had—his business, his family, his friends—and no amount of evidence or reasoning could ever persuade him that he’d been taken. Once you invest—financially, yes, but emotionally, in the deepest repository of hope and expectation—you’re hooked. And once you’re hooked, you’re going to be landed, just like Mason.