The Best American Short Stories 2012

  It was some time before they found the Elixir of Ice. This was a blue potion that poured from the mouth of a gargoyle who looked like Alicia, but with horns and healthy wings. The Elixir of Ice made crystals in her blood and other body fluids so she couldn’t run as fast as she used to, or swing her sword as well, or draw her gun as quickly. Joshua could move the same way if he tensed all his muscles painfully.

  Once they were up until two in the morning, exploring the dark caves in the bottom-right corner of the map, which were riddled with hungry purple mole-men and waxy stalactites dripping fat drops of poisonous water. The boss of this area was a worm with sticky skin, which collected various enemies and hazards—spikes, mole-men. Joshua could not kill the worm because without Alicia’s wings it was difficult to leap over the many differently shaped obstacles that clung to it. Joshua’s father pulled him into his lap, took the controller from his hands, and finished the fight with her sword. In the next room there was only darkness and a large blue stone. They thought they would have to leave their sword there, a gift for King Arthur. When Joshua’s father pressed B, Alicia struck the stone instead, which shattered the sword, leaving only a small length of blade and the hilt. The exploded fragments hung twisting in the air like stars or a junkyard mobile.

  “How will we kill the enemies?” said Joshua.

  “We still have the gun,” said his father, chest rumbling against Joshua’s back, voice low and wooden in his ear.

  “We’ll lose that too,” said Joshua.

  “Then we’ll run away,” said his father. Joshua saw he was losing his hair. His skin was waxy like the stalactites.

  They tried to cook together. They made meatloaf with 73/27 beef and Great Value saltines. They stirred the raw beef and the rest with their bare hands, then wiped them with paper towels and washed away the pink sticky residue, Joshua feeling all this time like the worm. The ketchup and brown-sugar glaze scorched and made a black, brittle shell on the meatloaf.

  They made stir-fry with bits of egg and too much soy sauce, too much salt. They made macaroni casserole and forced themselves to eat the cheddar scabs. They made pizza bagels: marinara, mozzarella, pepperoni slices. Three days in a row it was peanut butter jellies. Joshua took to sleeping on the couch while his father mapped the game. They were searching for the dirt clod.

  “What do you think she’ll do with it?” said Joshua.

  “I don’t know,” said his father. “She could eat it.”

  “Why would it matter if she ate it?”

  “You ever eaten dirt, Joshie?”

  Joshua shook his head no.

  “It could make her sick, for one,” said his father. “That’s just for a start.”

  “I think she’ll cover her eyes with it,” said Joshua. “Or maybe she’ll put it in her mouth, but she’ll hold it there, and plug her nose with it, so she can’t scream, and she tastes it all the time.” He imagined his mouth packed full.

  “Like being buried alive,” said his father. He patted Joshua’s head. “You feeling okay, buddy?”

  “Sure,” said Joshua. “You want me to draw this room into the map?”

  His father said yes.

  His father said, “We’ve got seventy percent of the game mapped, but we still don’t have half the items.”

  His father fell asleep on the couch. The TV screen was reflected in his glasses, and the game’s movement made him seem awake. Joshua sat down in his lap, took over. He found the dirt clod beneath a false floor in the Chamber of Commerce, where dollars and coins flew at Alicia from all sides and clung to her body, briefly rebuilding her wings in their own green image. The dirt clod was on the floor, among several other dirt clods that looked identical, but smaller. “Wake up,” said Joshua to his father. His father opened his eyes.

  “You found it.”

  Here is what she did with the dirt clod:

  She dirtied herself, browning and smearing her clothes, removing their luster. Clouds of filth hovered around her.

  “Huh,” said his father. He fell back asleep.

  Joshua examined their clothes—his father’s, his own. Both were crusted with cheese-puff dust and stained with cranberry juice cocktail. It had been nearly a month since they’d done the laundry. Joshua did not like folding the clothes, but he didn’t like it when people looked at him either, at school or anywhere. His jeans were wearing thin in the knees and the groin, and the cuffs were already ragged. He paused the game and went to the kitchen for something to eat.

  The sink was full of dishes slick with grime. The table was piled with pop cans, some empty, some half-full. There were coupons on the table for Gold’s Gym and LA Fitness, fanned out like playing cards. The cupboard was empty except for macaroni and pumpkin pie filling.

  The phone rang twice before Joshua could get to it. He thought he had known it would ring before it did ring, which was why—he thought—he looked at the phone when he did.

  “Hello?” said Joshua.

  “I’m sorry,” said a woman’s voice. “I have the wrong number.”

  “Who was that?” said his father, awake again.

  “Some lady,” said Joshua. “Wrong number.”

  “Crazy bitch,” said his father. He closed his eyes.

  Joshua would stay up for the next hour, trying to find the old answering machine tape, or something else with his mother’s voice, to see if it sounded the same.

  The next morning they ate off-brand Cap’n Crunch for breakfast. Joshua’s father spilled droplets of milk on the gym coupons. They wrinkled and turned gray. They would stick to the table like glue. Holes would open in the paper. His father said, “We’re going to move into a smaller apartment.”

  Joshua nodded.

  His father said, “Lower rent.”

  Joshua nodded.

  His father said, “More money to play with.”

  In the concert hall at the top left of the map they found the oozing earplugs inside the conductor’s podium, which they broke open after killing the orchestra. When Alicia put in the earplugs, the game went quiet. Her footsteps and the footsteps of her enemies made no sound. The music was no music. Joshua fired her gun. The shots did not burble as they used to.

  “Do you think it’s going to stay this way?” said Joshua.

  “Yes,” said his father.

  They moved into the new apartment. None of his father’s friends could make it to help. They shared a jug of blue Gatorade as they unloaded the borrowed pickup truck. First thing, Joshua’s father taped their map over the sliding glass door that was their western wall, or most of it. The map was growing. It cast a dark, faintly colored shadow on the blank carpet, like a bruise. Then it draped the couch, which they pushed against the southern wall. They set the TV up opposite, and loaded the refrigerator with everything left from the old one. A jar of mayonnaise. Several pickles. Lipton tea, still soaking the bags. A bag of potatoes. White bread. His father said, “Do you want the couch or the bedroom?”

  Joshua searched his father’s face for the answer. It wasn’t there. It was possible there was no answer. It was possible he could say what he wanted. He said, “I’ll take the couch.”

  His father said, “Okay.”

  They moved his father’s weights into the bedroom, his still-boxed ab roller, his clothes, and several shoeboxes, all duct-taped shut.

  They plugged in their game as the sun set. It shone brightly through the map, casting a grid over the kitchen and their faces, and in that grid a brighter bruise, or a fog, like melted crayons. Joshua’s father was blue and yellow in the face, from water and poisonous acid. Joshua’s hands were green and brown from the plant zone. The throne room was cast on the refrigerator’s side.

  They guided Alicia from the throne room’s exit, down through one of the gateways opened by the dirt on her clothes, and then others unlocked by other infirmities. Joshua wanted to open some chips, but his father said they should save them for later. Soon they found the chamber of the orange cork. Joshua’s father pressed
the B button and Alicia took the cork. She drew her gun, solemn as pixels can. She fitted the cork inside the gun, pushing hard until it stuck out only a little—a flare at the end.

  “Now it won’t fire?” said Joshua.

  His father shook his head.

  “She’s defenseless.”

  His father nodded.

  Their game became one of evasion. Alicia could still duck, could still jump. They spent the rest of the night running from enemies, seeking alternate routes—climbing previously neglected ladders, ducking behind rocks. When they could not duck the monsters, they ran into them head-on, took the hit, and then used the brief invulnerability this granted to escape into the next room, where they would do it again. Joshua’s father paused often. He offered the controller to his son, who refused it every time. They were both sweating.

  Some hours later Joshua woke up. He wiped his drool from the knee of his father’s home pants.

  “You’re up,” said his father. “Look what I found.”

  “She’s on the floor,” said Joshua.

  “I found the lead belt. You see?” It was a narrow band of pixels on Alicia’s waist. She was propped up on her elbows, and her legs were bent at the knees. The belt’s buckle (unseen, but Joshua knew it from the manual and the attract mode) was pressed firmly to the floor. This was the weight that held her down. “This is all that happens when I try to attack,” said his father, and she pushed her arm up feebly, the blunted remains of her sword outstretched. It seemed less an assault than an offering. “And she can crawl.” He made her crawl.

  “We are so screwed,” said Joshua. “Dad, we’re never going to get anywhere like this, and we still need the sunglasses.”

  “Maybe we can’t win,” said his father. “That’s life too, I guess.”

  It was not clear how they could leave the chamber.

  After some crawling around on the floor, they discovered there were bricks in the wall, low bricks that could be destroyed with her blunted sword. The world of their game was riddled and undermined all over with tunnels just large enough for crawling. These tunnels were sometimes visible to the players, but often not. Often they were obscured by rock or tree roots, or a lava flow, or water. The only way to know she still moved was the slow scrolling of the screen. Joshua said, “Where do you think the tunnels came from?”

  “I bet the sticky worm made them,” said his father.

  Trees rolled by, and their stumps. Ever-burning candles. Caverns and rock formations. They saw what they had seen before from new angles. Joshua drew the tunnels onto the map, which now filled most of the graph paper. They were black lines, spiraling toward the center of the map as his father made his way. But there were many dead ends in the tunnels. Father and son knew they had hit a dead end when the scrolling stopped. Then they turned back.

  When Joshua woke again, he was alone on the couch. His legs were tangled in his lone wolf blanket, his shoes and socks removed. He wiped the drool from his chin and nose. The arm of the couch was crusted with his snot. He went to the bathroom. The previous tenant had left a framed picture of Greta Garbo, smoking, on the wall. There was a small peacock feather in her hat. She looked happy.

  Joshua’s father talked about places they could go for vacation. Santa Claus, Indiana, was a top contender. They had Holiday World, which was also a water park now. “World’s biggest wooden roller coaster,” said his father.

  “No kidding,” said Joshua.

  It turned out having “money to play with” meant paying the utilities on time.

  Father and son experimented with a mostly vegetarian diet. Peanut butter jellies were the same, and so were chips, but no hamburgers and no fish sticks, except on Friday, which was Hardee’s night. They could afford to rent two videos a week at Blockbuster. One was always a Dad movie, rated R. One was a Joshua movie, rated PG-13 or lower. The Dad movie was usually new, from the shelves that lined the walls and circled the rest. The Joshua movie came from the inside shelves.

  Sometimes Joshua’s father called relatives and talked about Joshua’s mother, though he tried not to let on. He thought he was speaking in code. “The Queen,” he would call her. “The Duchess.” Joshua listened carefully for clues as to where she was, what she was doing. “(Something something) pay phones,” said his father. “(Something something) Atlanta.”

  Atlanta was the capital of Georgia. It was a big city. This was not nearly enough. Joshua couldn’t even find his own way through Legend of Silence.

  Their map was almost complete. The sun cast it on their coffee table, on their shoes, and on the clothing they scattered on the floor. Soon they would be done with their game. His father connected the NES through the VCR and bought a blank tape so they could record the game’s ending.

  His father offered wisdom at strange times. Joshua was on the toilet when his father knocked on the door. “It’s busy,” he said.

  His father said, “Never settle for less than you deserve. But whatever you can get, understand that you’ll have to give it all up someday. Prepare yourself for that, as much as you can.”

  “Okay,” said Joshua.

  “Okay,” said his father. “Do you think you should have an allowance?”

  “I don’t think you can afford to give me one.”

  “Okay.”

  They were near the center of the map, just above the throne room, when they found the sunglasses. This was the last thing they needed. Joshua’s father pulled him onto his lap. He put the controller in Joshua’s hands. Joshua pressed B. Alicia put on the glasses. The screen dimmed. She crawled farther toward the center of the map. As she crawled, the colors faded to black. She passed through a gate, which she unlocked with how nothing she was, how faded, how silent, how crawling. She fell through a hatch into what had been the throne room. It was no longer the throne room.

  “It’s changed,” said his father. “I’ll have to change the map.”

  He would use the black Sharpie. The screen was black now.

  A white, blinking cursor at the screen’s center, as in a word processor. After a moment’s hesitation, it made blocky white text on the screen.

  You are in Nirvana, it said. You are not in Nirvana.

  You have come here to destroy your enemy. Your enemy has been waiting for you in Nirvana. Is your enemy in Nirvana? Yes or No.

  “No,” said Joshua’s father. Joshua chose no.

  No, said the game. Your enemy is not in Nirvana, and neither are you. There is no you.

  “What’s happening,” said Joshua.

  His father held him close. He rubbed Joshua’s tummy through his Ninja Turtles shirt.

  You might pursue your enemy, said the game. Do you want to pursue your enemy? Yes or No.

  “What do you think?” said Joshua’s father.

  “No,” said Joshua. “We should not pursue our enemy.”

  “Good,” said Joshua’s father. Joshua chose no.

  No, said the game. You have no enemy. You have no you. The labyrinth is gone. The weight falls from your body. Your body falls from your soul. Your soul falls from your absence. The absence is not yours. Do you fear? Yes or No.

  “Are we afraid?” said his father.

  “Yes,” said Joshua.

  You will forget fear. Do you love?

  “Yes,” said his father.

  “Yes,” said Joshua.

  You will forget love.

  Congratulations. You win.

  “Game over?” said Joshua.

  “I guess so.”

  His father squeezed him tight. Joshua wondered what they would do now. The need he felt was like when he stepped on the sliver of glass, and his mother pulled at the skin with her tweezers, and pushed them inside, until she found the glass. It was like when she told him to get ready, to squeeze his father’s hand. Clenching his teeth, closing his eyes, waiting.

  STEVEN MILLHAUSER

  Miracle Polish

  FROM The New Yorker

  I SHOULD HAVE said no to the stranger at th
e door, with his skinny throat and his black sample case that pulled him a little to the side, so that one of his jacket cuffs was higher than the other, a polite no would have done the trick, no thanks, I’m afraid not, not today, then the closing of the door and the heavy click of the latch, but I’d seen the lines of dirt in the black shoe creases, the worn-down heels, the shine on the jacket sleeves, the glint of desperation in his eyes. All the more reason, I said to myself, to send him on his way, as I stepped aside and watched him move into my living room. He looked quickly around before setting his case down on the small table next to the couch. I’d made up my mind to buy something from him, anything, a hairbrush, the Brooklyn Bridge, buy it and get him out of there, I had better things to do with my time, but there was no hurrying him as he slowly undid each clasp with his bony fingers and explained in a mournful voice that this was my lucky day. In the suddenly opened case I saw six rows of identical dark-brown glass bottles, each a bit smaller than a bottle of cough medicine. Two things struck me: the case must have been very heavy, and he must not have sold anything in a long time. The product was called Miracle Polish. It cleaned mirrors with one easy flick of the wrist. He seemed surprised, even suspicious, when I said I’d take one, as if he had wandered the earth for years with the same case filled to bursting with unsold bottles. I tried not to imagine what would drive a man to go from house to house in a neighborhood like this one, with porches and old maples and kids playing basketball in driveways, a neighborhood where Girl Scouts sold you cookies and the woman across the street asked you to contribute to the leukemia drive, but no strangers with broken-down shoes and desperate eyes came tramping from door to door lugging heavy cases full of brown bottles called Miracle Polish. The name exasperated me, a child could have done better than that, though there was something to be said for the way it sat there flaunting its fraudulence. “Don’t trust me!” it shouted for all to hear. “Don’t be a fool!”