Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

He cut her off, “Oh Yasmine, hush!” he said. “It was potluck dinner. I call for another reason: Did you go online today?”

She breathed out, relief kneading every syllable. “Of course I did. It’s my job.”

“Will you go to a page that I say? I give you address if you have pen.”

“Don’t need a pen.” He could hear the fast clicks of her keyboard. “Go ahead.”

He recited from memory the addresses of the three websites, the ones the Internet had granted to his former career. She was silent, and he didn’t ask if she had finished typing. “Lately these appear on Internet,” he said. “I want to tell you, I think they are good. Of highest creative quality. Maybe later I post them on Facebook.”

“Oh yeah?” she said. She cleared her throat, as if responding would cost her something. Where had she inherited this pride? From the elder ustad Sokouti, perhaps.

“Well?” he said. “I’m famous. Aren’t you impressed?” She laughed and said that she was. He wanted to tell her that he knew more about the Internet than she thought. Maybe not the codes and formulas and shortcuts, but he knew its spirit, its sweeping reach. This entity that granted a measure of justice— Trust the universe, he had always told Yasmine—it had circled the air above them, coloring their relationship from the time she was a student. He wanted to say, Yas, I know the Internet isn’t some deity. I know it’s made up of people trying to inscribe the void, to mark the very ether with what they’ve lived and what they know. Thank you for etching me a corner in that vast, unfathomable place. He wanted to tell his daughter that he knew she respected him, or some former, more essential version of him. But enough had been said for one phone call. “I find it very artistic, Yasi joon, ” he said. “It captures the years.”

All through the bus ride home, Wyatt sat silently, his head slumped against the window. Rahad was glad for the quiet, unsure of what to expect the next time his friend opened his mouth. Did it matter? When had he ever anticipated anyone’s next syllable? His daughter’s, least of all. Maybe such harmony wasn’t needed to enjoy a drink with someone. Maybe the earth wouldn’t collapse on itself if a person you love didn’t cosign your every move, or you theirs. “A big true,” he said to himself and chuckled.

The two men walked from the station back to their rooms at the YMCA. They parted ways in the corridor, each saying a few words about the next day’s plans, the possibility of a warm naan from a pizza oven, the other residents who might join them in a song or two, the whereabouts of that reedy Vietnamese voice they had come to enjoy. Rahad dug into his pocket for his keys, and when he pulled his fingers out they were covered in a white dusting of baking soda. He glanced back at Wyatt entering his own room, hunched from fatigue, looking a decade older, an accustomed sort of quiet surrounding his steps. In their short friendship, Rahad had overlooked so much that had been hidden in the artificial cracks of this man’s speech. And yet Wyatt had knocked on Rahad’s door every day, hoping that, after enough afternoons together, Rahad—a true and verified musician of Tehran, a traveler and student of the world’s many strange rhythms—might say, Stop pretending now, my brother. I know your sound.

But Rahad hadn’t heard; maybe he was no master at all.

He unlocked his own door and turned on the lights. In all these years, what other voices had he only half heard? Maybe he still needed a more practiced ear. He sat on his bed, looked out onto the parking lot, and listened: to the low roar of a passing car, to stoned men talking in the corridor, to the mattress creaking under his weight. He thought of his wife with her glorious unwashed hair, the artful websites their daughter had made, and Baba with his students on the veranda, all their idle talk of sitar songs and why one should never touch a Western guitar, of how to listen for music amid the human noise.

One evening almost thirty years later, a call from an unknown number. The ringing brings your husband out of the kitchen, ladle still in hand. This is the prelude to the only scenario that keeps him up at night: some stranger, a kelp-rig medic perhaps, interrupting dinner to notify you that your son has been killed, washed overboard somewhere off the coast of Cambria amid the gray roil and boom of the Pacific.

To flaunt your immunity to these catastrophic fantasies, you let the phone ring and ring.

Tom’s smiling, but he doesn’t find it funny. “Pick up, Syl.” Then, after a moment: “Fine. Why don’t I just cancel our anniversary picnic and volunteer us for roadside cleanup instead? I know how you love scraping those possums off the freeway.”

When you finally lift the phone to your ear to deliver the usual greeting—“Rayles-Brennan residence, home of the Arbor Cottages in scenic Grey’s County!”—you get the wind knocked out of you. It’s not a medic. Not a telemarketer. Not the Mammalian Gene Bank of the Rocky Mountains inquiring if you’d like to increase your annual donation.

It’s Wade. Your Wade. So long-lost that his name overcomes you as first a sensation and then a smell before finally taking lettered form. Wade Dufrane. Calling from some other lifetime, his voice as familiar as your own, saying: “Syl?” And then: “I knew you’d sound exactly the same.”

In a minute, it will hit you that of course you sound the same. But for now—for this particular second—there’s just that one-note whiff of Fell Gulch in January, of pine and woodsmoke, of you at twenty, assisting your father up the narrow stairs to the office of Serenity Pods overlooking Main Street. Through his coat sleeve, Dad’s elbow feels like a bag of bolts. Somewhere outside, the Rendezvous Trio is fiddling an overzealous two-step for the benefit of the tourists.

Serenity Pods occupies the attic above the Well Digger’s Wallet Saloon, where your childhood friend Kenny Kostic tends bar. In the six years you’ve been helping him oust inebriates, you’ve never thought to investigate where the back stairwell leads.

Dad’s monstrous shirt hides the black threads of more than a dozen mole excisions. Six foot three and down to 140 pounds, he’s taken pale frailty to another level. And now here’s Wade Dufrane, tall and ginger-stubbled, good-looking in the way of people who don’t know it, manning the front desk in a white linen getup.

The place looks like a celestial break-room. Everything hums: the bare bulbs, the sleek computer panel, the wall painted up like a field of tree-brindled snow. At its center stands a thick black elm. Its roots twist around a subterranean teardrop, in which a glyphic body lies folded.

Wade maneuvers you both to the sofa with pamphlets and rank gray tea, then carefully sits between you.

“So—which of you is looking forward to reabsorption?”

While Wade talks your father through the marketing collateral, you try to smother your irritation. Let Dad get the reassurance he needs: that he’s doing the right thing, that pod burial restores soil nutrients, that you just don’t get this kind of solace from a coffin.

“Something about committing to reabsorption just gives folks a sense of peace,” Wade says. “I know it did for me.”

Conveniently, Wade’s own father had signed the entire family up for pod burial back when the process was still new. “Not to mention far more expensive,” Wade says, skirting around the price, “but I figured: if it could offset some of my parents’ debts to our world, worth every penny.”