Emporium Read online

  Praise for Emporium

  “Adam Johnson’s funny-sad-bizarre stories take place in a world located somewhere between Kurt Vonnegut’s sci-fi empire and that wild and crazy land of weirdos limned in T. Coraghessan Boyle’s stories. It’s a place where strange things happen and stranger things threaten to occur; a place recognizable, in its lineaments, from our present-day reality, but exaggerated, italicized or stretched out to the point of distortion like Silly Putty. Mr. Johnson uses his keen sense of the absurd and his magpie’s feel for language to create some wonderfully antic black comedy. But running through his tales is also a melancholy of longing and loss: a Salingeresque sense of adolescent alienation and confusion, combined with an acute awareness of the randomness of life and the difficulty of making and sustaining connections. Mr. Johnson delineates these lives with a mixture of wry amusement and genuine sym-pathy, satiric glee and elegiac compassion, seemingly contradictory attitudes that combine to create an idiosyncratic and compelling voice.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Masterful . . . beautifully crafted . . . achingly poignant . . . cleverly funny. . . . All the wildly inventive stories in the collection are told in fist-person narratives so evocative that we slide effortlessly under each individual skin. ‘Teen Sniper’ . . . [a] paradoxically tender coming-of-age story most clearly displays Johnson’s skill with representing unforgettable voices. Johnson often blends the past, present and future to create a searing juxtaposition between scientific progress and its futility in the face of mortality. With pulsating energy and seemingly endless imagination, this collection pushes that irony to its exciting limits.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “[A] striking debut collection . . . the stories are filled with feeling but retain an eccentric satiric edge. The terrific first story establishes Johnson’s distinctive blend of futuristic fantasy, cultural parody, and emotional depth. What makes so many of these stories resonate is their tenderness.”

  —Daniel Mendelsohn, New York

  “Like a squall moving in on a dead-muggy day, Adam Johnson’s audacious work blows the covers off the short story and leaves the genre newly invigorated. The nine stories in his debut collection, Emporium—some of them filling fewer than 20 pages—triumph on scales small and large. All of the virtues of the short story at its conventional best belong to them: the deft, economical sketching of character, the planting of resonant little epiphanies among the minutiae of everyday life. But these stories go even further, whipping up a whole askew fictional universe that exerts an unrelenting centripetal force on the reader.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Johnson roams a fictional terrain where reality is ramped up to near absurdity. His characters, groping toward understanding and sympathy for each other, then trump that absurdity. His settings, as a commentary on America, are intellectually thrilling. But his characters are fully realized human beings, not props as they often are in satires. The settings are not the point; it’s how people deal with them. Throughout these stories there’s plenty of that all-purpose human defense mechanism—humor. The stories here are straightforward and chronological, yet laced with dazzling prose and metaphors.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  “Adam Johnson unleashes a big, thrilling and fully realized talent in Emporium. These richly atmospheric stories quiver with humor, danger and complete authenticity as their protagonists—a discredited pilot, an angst-ridden zookeeper, salesmen of bulletproof vests—struggle to steady themselves in a landscape of ex-urban sprawl and mysterious beauty. For all the irony and sophistication of these tales, an undertow of sadness and menace sucks at them from someplace very deep, lending them urgency and gravitas that are rare in contemporary fiction and impossible to forget.”

  —Jennifer Egan

  “A wildly imagined first collection that manages to be simultaneously terrifying and good-hearted. Emporium overflows with intelligence, wit, and a kindness-in-the-face-of-disaster that suddenly seems very relevant.”

  —George Saunders

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  EMPORIUM

  Adam Johnson is the author of four works of fiction: the short story collection Fortune Smiles (2015), winner of the National Book Award and The Story Prize; the novel The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; the novel Parasites Like Us (2003); and the short story collection Emporium (2002). John- son’s other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship. Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco with his wife and children.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

  Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads,

  Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2002

  Published in Penguin Book 2003

  Copyright © Adam Johnson, 2002

  All rights reserved

  Acknowledgments to the original publishers of some of these stories appear on page 245.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Johnson, Adam.

  Emporium : stories / Adam Johnson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66586-2

  I. Title.

  PS3610.O3 E47 2001

  813’.54—dc21 2001026804

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Cover design: Matt Vee

  Cover illustration: Matt Taylor

  Version_2

  to the boxy loop of youth

  CONTENTS

  TEEN SNIPER

  YOUR OWN BACKYARD

  THE DEATH-DEALING CASSINI SATELLITE

  TRAUMA PLATE

  CLIFF GODS OF ACAPULCO

  THE JUGHEAD OF BERLIN

  THE HISTORY OF CANCER

  THE CANADANAUT

  THE EIGHTH SEA

  Acknowledgments

  TEEN SNIPER

  When I reach the rooftop, I pull the dustcovers off my rifle scope and head for a folding chair leaned up against an air-conditioning unit—right where I left it the last time I was up here. Sitting down, I have a clear view across a courtyard of lawns and fountains to Hewlett Packard. I line up a couple breakfast burritos on the parapet wall, in case this is a long one, and I crack a can of Nix. Most of u
s drink Nix because of how other sodas make you twitchy. I dial in my optics by focusing on flowers in the distance, impatiens and pansies, mostly, and I’m tuning the rangefinder when I get the go-ahead from Lt. Kim.

  “Blackbird,” Lt. Kim says over the radio, “at your leisure,” which is code for the fact that the hostage negotiations are failing and it’s time to get to work. There’s a tone in her voice, though, that kind of sounds like my mom when she gets on my case to join the private sector, where the “real money” is. I’ll admit I sometimes daydream on the job, but I’m trying to better the community, so it’s like, get off my back already.

  I sweep my scope along the flowers a little longer—there’s a giant H formed from orange poppies and a P of velvety petunias. One of the perks of being a police sniper in Palo Alto, aside from the satisfaction you get from serving the public, is the serious commitment these software companies show toward floral displays, toward making the world a more beautiful place. I shoot over flowers every day.

  I fix the bipod of my Kruger Mark VI and chamber a round. The Kruger’s an old South African rifle, made in the gravy days of long-bore ballistics, but the scope is state of the art, a fully digital Raytheon with cellular live-feed, so that it’s a camera, phone, and radio, all in one. That means Lt. Kim can see and hear everything on a bank of screens in her command van down the street, but it’s my shoulder she’s usually looking over. I’m one of the best shots in the world—I mean, I have the gift. I’ve been lead sniper for over a year, but Lt. Kim can’t get past the fact that I’m only fifteen.

  The target is a Pakistani guy over in HP’s think tank. He’s wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt that says “Cherry Garcia,” and he’s pacing back and forth in a cubicle decorated only with an Aladdin movie poster. The guy’s pretty worked up, yelling into the phone, probably to Gupta, our communications officer. In the poster, Aladdin’s hauling ass on his magic carpet with his little monkey friend, and there’s an evil genie hot on his tail.

  There’s no hostages that I can see, only about 475 meters of open courtyard between me and Cherry G. The shot will be a tricky one: the bullet will become wobbly and transient as it moves through different temperature zones—bucking in the heat waves above the hot parking lot, diving as it crosses cool, shady lawn, and finally tumbling through the rising humidity of a man-made lake.

  To the west, Cedric and Henry are dragging their heavy, water-cooled magnum into position atop a Jamba Juice, while across the way, Twan climbs a cellular tower, a sleek rifle equipped with satellite-assisted targeting dangling behind him on a rope. The satellite rifle is essential when the fog rolls in, and Twan is just the man to operate it—he’s got the cool, the confidence, to fire on faith into a blanket of white. That dude is smooth, and it has nothing to do with the color of his skin. Lt. Kim tends to only hire African Americans for my team. I think it’s because they had it bad for a long time, and we need to make it up to them. Snipers in general take pride in not discriminating.

  I’m calculating the crosswind when Lt. Kim calls back.

  “Tell me how you’re feeling about the shot,” she says.

  I don’t answer right away. I can hear her sipping tea in the command van, waiting for a response, while in the background, Gupta is negotiating his ass off in Urdu, though I do make out the word pizza.

  “Maybe let’s talk about it later,” I tell her. I know the guys are listening, and I’m gonna get some razzing about “my feelings” in the locker room.

  “Do you want to try a few visualizations?” she asks.

  “Just leave me alone, all right?” I radio in, trying not to let my voice crack, which is a problem lately.

  Lt. Kim’s one of those sniper commanders who also has an MSW, so she’s always all over my emotions. I’ve been having some dreams, I’ll admit, and we’ve been working on replacing bad images with good ones. Flowers are supposed to be my replacement images.

  I ease my eye back into the scope. Even when Cherry G’s standing still, his figure warps like a mirage at this distance, and the crosshairs, flinching with my pulse, skip across his body. The only way to get closer to him would be to belly crawl through a hundred meters of flowers, but I don’t think I could handle sneaking through bed after bed of what’s supposed to be my positive imagery.

  “Yo, homies,” I say into my scope. “Who’s calling the shot?”

  I try to talk cool to the guys, you know, to work on our unity.

  From his perch on the tower, Twan just grunts.

  Henry is huffing and puffing when he calls in. “We’ve got a decent shot,” he says, running out of breath. “Probably seventy percent.” He’s working the foot pedals of the huge twenty-millimeter magnum while Cedric aims.

  Like me, Cedric and Henry came out of the target-match circuit, with Cedric riding a full sniper scholarship to BYU and Henry touring Asia for Team Adidas. But Twan is different. He’s self-taught, on the rooftops of Oakland, and like they say, the Lord looks out for left-handed snipers. Twan’s an ayatollah with a rifle, completely composed, but he’s touch-and-go as a police officer because he refuses to shoot women.

  Any of us could probably make the shot, but I don’t want to look like a puss in front of the guys. Besides, not that I’m stuck up or anything, but I’m the one with the gift. I won the Disney Classic at age eleven, scored a perfect one thousand at the North Hollywood Open, and took gold in the summer Sniptathalon in Bonn, all before thirteen.

  I flip down my clip-on shades and take aim. Sometimes, when I look through my scope, I am overwhelmed by the illusion that I know this stranger in the crosshairs in an essential way, like we’re old friends, like you can see their soul. This effect is known as “flash empathy.” The LAPD has conducted a lot of field studies and found that “flash empathy” is a leftover from the reptilian part of our brain and can’t be avoided. You just got to turn a cold shoulder to it. Luckily, we have these new Raytheon scopes, which make it so you’re not actually looking at the dude—it’s just a video image. Sunglasses help.

  “Blackbird has the shot,” I announce and begin my positive visualization, which Lt. Kim says gives my mind a newer, more optimistic vocabulary for violence. A slug to the chest resembles a dwarf rose blossom, for example, so I would try to think of that. The head produces a pink mist of baby’s breath. If you’ve ever seen the maroonish-green bloom of a chocolate beauty, then you’ll know when you clip the liver. Exit wounds in general are trailing vines of red, kind of tangled and groping, like the new chutes of a spring hibiscus.

  Finally, I do the math. At this distance, the slug will drop thirty centimeters, and the way the poppies are leaning suggests a slight breeze. So, I’ll need to train my crosshairs above Cherry G and to the right, making it look like my target is really the skinny monkey with the fez on the Aladdin poster.

  Then it hits me, this feeling that I really know this guy. In the rinsed color of my video scope, I study the tinsely lines of sweat coming from his brow, the flush of anguish in his skin. In a flash, I see a guy who left his culture and traveled around the world, only to become a hopeless outcast. His words are always a little off, and maybe the people make fun of him because he looks different and can’t dress so good. Forget about the girls. It’s like, because of your job, you have to leave your old friends behind, and then your new friends are always saying things to keep you down. You work side by side with them, and you’re really trying, but it’s like you’re not even there. They never ask you to lunch or anything. Sometimes you eat alone at a restaurant and spot one of them, but they don’t even see you. You overhear them talking about some new movie, and it’s a movie you want to see, and—I stop myself, try to get a grip. Like the LAPD says, this isn’t real.

  I shift my aim toward the little monkey, and start my countdown.

  Here’s where the gift comes in: the secret to being a world-class sniper is knowing how to stop your heart. I exhale, my chest goes quiet, and there’s a ghostly feeling of serenity in my limbs. The rifle seems to ju
st settle into its purpose, and things feel clear and flat in the scope. There’s a hollow crack, and for a second, the time it takes for the spent shell to spring and glint to the ground, Cherry G and I will both be lifeless.

  Duck, you fool, I can’t help whispering.

  The slug goes, connects—a neck shot, my trademark, the wound lapping like the tongues of orchid petals. The target’s knees go out, and he falls from view, dropping into the beige of his cubicle.

  “Morning has broken,” I radio in.

  “Copy that, people,” Lt. Kim announces. “Blackbird has spoken.”

  * * *

  Back at the police station, I slip in through the side door and take the back way, around the squash courts, toward the locker room. I’m supposed to debrief with Lt. Kim after every assignment, but I’m just not into talking about it today. She’s been worried about my “problems with intimacy,” which she always drags back to the fact that my mother’s a classic “sniper mom” who shuttled me around to every child firearms contest there was. And I’d be on psych leave for a zillion years if I ever told Lt. Kim about the shrine my dad built out of all his second-place shooting trophies.

  I run into my team in the hallway. They’re standing next to a soda machine, working on some song lyrics. They’ve got a band but they don’t get many gigs because they all play bass. Eyes closed, Cedric holds two fingers to his ear while Henry and Twan sing backup, snapping their fingers. It’s an old love ballad.

  “Pardon, mon cheri,” Cedric sings. Snap. Snap. “Why you rebukin’ me?”

  Twan jumps in with the chorus; he’s a large man with a booming voice.

  “Ce soir, ce soir,” Twan sings. “Girl, you’re having me.”

  I never thought much of French, but it sounds tough coming from these guys.

  “Word up,” I say.

  Twan stops mid-snap when I say this.