One More Thing Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by B. J. Novak

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Selected stories first appeared in The New Yorker (November 2013), Nautilus (December 2013), Zoetrope: All-Story (Winter 2013/2014), and in Playboy (January/February 2014).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Novak, B. J., date.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  One more thing : stories and other stories / B. J. Novak.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-35183-6 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-385-35184-3 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3614.O9255A6 2014

  813′.6—dc23 2013044121

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket design by Hum Creative

  v3.1

  To the Reader

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Rematch

  Dark Matter

  No One Goes to Heaven to See Dan Fogelberg

  Romance, Chapter One

  Julie and the Warlord

  The Something by John Grisham

  The Girl Who Gave Great Advice

  All You Have to Do

  ’Rithmetic

  The Ambulance Driver

  Walking on Eggshells (or: When I Loved Tony Robbins)

  The Impatient Billionaire and the Mirror for Earth

  Missed Connection: Grocery spill at 21st and 6th 2:30 pm on Wednesday

  I Never Want to Walk on the Moon

  Sophia

  The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela

  They Kept Driving Faster and Outran the Rain

  The Man Who Invented the Calendar

  The Ghost of Mark Twain

  The Beautiful Girl in the Bookstore

  MONSTER: The Roller Coaster

  Kellogg’s (or: The Last Wholesome Fantasy of the Middle-School Boy)

  The Man Who Posted Pictures of Everything He Ate

  Closure

  Kindness Among Cakes

  Quantum Nonlocality and the Death of Elvis Presley

  If I Had a Nickel

  A Good Problem to Have

  Johnny Depp, Fate, and the Double-Decker Hollywood Tour Bus

  Being Young Was Her Thing

  Angel Echeverria, Comediante Superpopular

  The Market Was Down

  The Vague Restaurant Critic

  One of These Days, We Have to Do Something About Willie

  Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Missing Bicycle

  Regret Is Just Perfectionism Plus Time

  Chris Hansen at the Justin Bieber Concert

  Great Writers Steal

  Confucius at Home

  War

  If You Love Something

  Just an Idea

  Heyyyyy, Rabbits

  The Best Thing in the World Awards

  Bingo

  Marie’s Stupid Boyfriend

  Pick a Lane

  “Everyone Was Singing the Same Song”: The Duke of Earl Recalls His Trip to America in June of 1962

  The Pleasure of Being Right

  Strange News

  Never Fall in Love

  The World’s Biggest Rip-Off

  The Walk to School on the Day After Labor Day

  Kate Moss

  Welcome to Camp Fantastic for Gifted Teens

  There Is a Fine Line Between Why and Why Not

  The Man Who Told Us About Inflatable Women

  A New Hitler

  Constructive Criticism

  The Bravest Thing I Ever Did

  Rome

  The Literalist’s Love Poem

  J. C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  The Rematch

  In the aftermath of an athletic humiliation on an unprecedented scale—a loss to a tortoise in a footrace so staggering that, his tormenters teased, it would not only live on in the record books, but would transcend sport itself, and be taught to children around the world in textbooks and bedtime stories for centuries; that hundreds of years from now, children who had never heard of a “tortoise” would learn that it was basically a fancy type of turtle from hearing about this very race—the hare retreated, understandably, into a substantial period of depression and self-doubt.

  The hare gained weight, then lost weight; turned to religion, then another less specific religion. The hare got into yoga; shut himself indoors on a self-imposed program to read all the world’s great novels; then traveled the world; then did some volunteer work. Everything helped a little bit, at first; but nothing really helped. After a while, the hare realized what the simplest part of him had known from the beginning: he was going to have to rematch the tortoise.

  “No,” came the word from the tortoise’s spokesperson. “The tortoise prefers to focus on the future, not relive the past. The tortoise is focused full-time on inspiring a new generation with the lessons of dedication and persistence through his popular speaking tours and his charitable work with the Slow and Steady Foundation.”

  The smugness and sanctimony of the tortoise’s response infuriated the hare. “The lessons of dedication and persistence”? Had everyone forgotten that the hare had taken six naps throughout the race (!)—unequivocally guaranteeing victory to anyone—a horse, a dog, a worm, a leaf, depending on the wind—anyone lucky enough to be matched against the hare at this reckless, perspectiveless, and now-forever-lost peak phase of his career, an offensive period of his own life that he had obsessed about and tried in vain to forgive himself for ever since? How could anyone think the tortoise was relevant to any of this? A minor detail of the race, known to few but obsessives (of which there were still plenty), was that there had been a gnat clinging to the leg of the tortoise throughout the entire contest: was this gnat, too, worthy of being celebrated as a hero, full of counterlogical lessons and nonsensical insight like “Right place, right time takes down talent in its prime”? Or “Hang on to a tortoise’s leg, who knows where it will lead”?

  No—the lesson of this story has nothing to do with the tortoise, thought the hare, and everything to do with the hare. How he had let himself become so intoxicated with the aspects of his talent that were rare that he had neglected the much more common aspects of his character that also, it so happened, were more important—things like always doing your best, and never taking success for granted, and keeping enough pride burning inside to fuel your success but not so much to burn it down. Now, the hare knew these things. Now. Now that it was too late.

  Or was it? What was that lesson again? Slow and steady?

  The hare started running again, every day, even though there was no race planned. He ran a mile every morning, then two, then ten.

  Before long, he added an afternoon run to his training routine—a slower one, with a different goal in mind. On this run, he made a point to start a conversation with everyone he came across. “Boy, I sure would love to race that tortoise again someday. You think anyone would want to watch it, though?” Then he would shrug it off and jog along to the next stranger. “Hey, what do you think would happen if I raced that tortoise ag
ain? Ya think I’d win this time? Or do you think pride would get the better of me all over again?” Then he’d shrug and run off again, at a provocatively medium pace.

  Slowly, steadily, anticipation built for a tortoise-hare rematch. After a while it became all that anyone could talk about, and eventually, the questions made their way to the tortoise.

  “No,” said the tortoise, but this time his “no” just led to more questions. “No” now, or “no” ever? Would he ever rematch the hare? If so, when, and under what conditions? If not, why? Could he at least say “maybe”?

  No, said the tortoise again; never. They kept asking, and he kept saying no, until eventually, everyone gave up and stopped asking. And that’s when the tortoise, sad and dizzy at having all this attention given to him and then taken away, impulsively said, Yes, okay, I bet I can beat this hare again. Yes.

  I’m undefeated against the hare, thought the tortoise. Actually, I’m 1–0—I’m undefeated in my entire racing career! How do you win a race? Slow and steady, that’s what they say, right? Well, I invented slow and steady. This is good. This will be good. One time could have been a fluke. Twice, there’ll be no question.

  The race was set in ten days’ time. The tortoise set out to replicate what seemed to have worked the first time, which was nothing in particular: simple diet, some walking around. A little of this, a little of that. He didn’t want to overthink it. He was going to mainly just focus on being slow and steady.

  The hare trained like no one had ever trained for anything. He ran fifteen miles every morning and fifteen every afternoon. He watched tapes of his old races. He slept eight hours every night, which is practically unheard of for a hare, and he did it all under a wall taped full of the mean, vicious things everyone had said about him in all the years since the legendary race that had ruined his life.

  On the day of the race, the tortoise and hare met for the first time in five years at the starting line, and shared a brief, private conversation as their whole world watched.

  “Good luck, hare,” said the tortoise, as casual as ever. “Whoa! You know what’s funny—do that again—huh, from this angle you look like a duck. Now you look like a hare again. Funny. Anyway, good luck, hare!”

  “And good luck to you, tortoise,” whispered the hare, leaning in close. “And just so you know—nobody knows this, and if you tell anyone I said it, I’ll deny it—but I’m not really a hare. I’m a rabbit.”

  This wasn’t true—the hare just said it to fuck with him.

  “On your mark, get set, GO!”

  There was a loud bang, and the tortoise and hare both took off from the starting line.

  Never, in the history of competition—athletic or otherwise, human or otherwise, mythical or otherwise—has anyone ever kicked anyone’s ass by the order of magnitude that the hare kicked the ass of that goddamn fucking tortoise that afternoon.

  Within seconds, the hare was in the lead by hundreds of yards. Within minutes, the hare had taken the lead by more than a mile. The tortoise crawled on, slow and steady, but as he became anxious at having lost sight of his competitor and panicked over what he seemed to have done to his legacy, he started speeding up: less slow, less steady. But it hardly mattered. Before long—less than twenty minutes after the seven-mile race had begun—word worked its way back to the beginning of the race that the hare had not only won the contest, and had not only recorded a time that was a personal best, but had also set world records not only for all hares but also for leporids and indeed for all mammals under twenty pounds. When news reached the tortoise, still essentially under the banner of the starting line, he fainted. “Oh, now he’s napping?! Isn’t that rich,” heckled a nearby goat, drunk on radish wine.

  Those who didn’t know the context—who hadn’t heard about the first race—never realized what was so important about this one. “A tortoise raced a hare, and the hare won? Okay.” They didn’t understand the story, so they didn’t repeat it, and it never became known. But those who were there for both contests knew what was so special about what they had witnessed: slow and steady wins the race, till truth and talent claim their place.

  Dark Matter

  “And that’s the puzzling thing about dark matter,” said the scientist at the end of our planetarium tour. “It makes up over ninety percent of the universe, and yet nobody knows what it is!”

  People on the tour chuckled politely, like Wow, isn’t that a fun fact?

  But I looked closer at the scientist, and I could tell something from the smirky little smile on his fat smug face:

  This motherfucker knew exactly what dark matter was.

  “So as you look up at the skies tonight, I hope you have a little more perspective, knowing more about what we know—and don’t know—about our vast and magical …” etcetera etcetera.

  Everyone clapped and the tour guide smiled that smug smile I mentioned before and waved goodbye without opening his fingers like the huge fat nerd that he was. Everyone else on the tour headed back to their cars, but I kind of sidled up to the scientist with quite a little fake smile of my own.

  Two can play this game, fatso.

  “Pretty interesting tour you gave there,” I said. “Lotta interesting facts.”

  “I’m glad you had a good time!” he said with that smug smile again.

  “Oh, I did, I did,” I lied. “In fact, I’d like to ask you something about Saturn.” I gestured to a dark corner of the hallway.

  “Sure,” he said, still smiling at me and ignoring my pointing. “What would you like to know?”

  “Over there, over there,” I said to the fat fuck, pointing to the dark corner. “Past by where the coats are. There’s a diorama of Saturn that I think is all fucked up. The rings and stuff. Come here. I want your expert opinion.”

  “I can’t imagine they would have gotten the rings of Saturn wrong,” he said. “Oh, unless maybe you mean the mural at the entrance? The one for tots?”

  “Yeah, that,” I said.

  We walked toward the corner and when we got there I grabbed the string of the tour badge around his neck and twisted it and choked him hard.

  “What is dark matter?” I said. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he coughed. “Nobody knows.”

  I pulled the cord tighter.

  “We can measure its effects,” he said. “We only know what it isn’t.”

  “Well, work backwards, bitch! You know what it isn’t, so what is it?”

  I pulled the cord tighter, and with my other hand I started pinching him in cutesy, creepy ways. Nothing that hurt, just things to scare him and make him think, Jesus, who is this guy? What else would he do?

  “All right,” he whispered. “All right. I know what it is.”

  That was more like it. I eased up on the cord a bit.

  “If this is a trap, I swear to God, I will come back and kill you,” I said.

  I was just bluffing. I didn’t want to kill this guy and go to jail for the rest of my life. I was curious about this one thing, but not that curious. Plus, if I killed him I’d never get to know what dark matter was, and it was kind of driving me crazy. Ninety percent of the universe, and we have no idea what it is? How are we supposed to sleep at night? Actually, maybe I was that curious!

  “Come to my office,” he said. “I have a little desk upstairs where I’m working it out for my Ph.D. I haven’t told anyone yet because I don’t want anyone to steal my work.”

  I promised I wouldn’t steal anything at all, and he walked over to a door with a little dull-gold knob off the main hallway. “Follow me upstairs,” he said. I followed him, even though I wouldn’t really call it upstairs—it was just a few stairs, like the number they put at the entrance to a library to make it look fancy. Maybe to this guy it felt like a full-size staircase.

  At the top of the stairs was a small room with no windows and no decorations or anything, not even a poster of the moon: just a couple of desks with computers, some papers, empty cups and crumpl
ed wrappers. At first I was disappointed. But then I realized that’s how you know it’s a serious place—just for scientists, and guys like me.

  “This one is my coworker’s desk,” he said, pointing to the one at the other end of the room. “He’s not coming in today, though. He’s working on cosmic interference. He’s on a dead end but doesn’t know it yet, ha.”

  The scientist closed the door behind us. I noticed he didn’t look scared anymore. Now he seemed kind of happy, or something. His eyes darted around the room, and he started pacing in little back-and-forth steps, like halfway between pacing and just shifting his weight from foot to foot. It was actually kind of cute. I could imagine being his mom and loving him a lot, if that makes sense.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. We only know what dark matter is from the gravitational field around other objects, right? Okay. We know that certain galaxies have different weights with regard to the light they emit. And people have tried to measure the light with different … Okay. Wait. Let me start another different way. We all know what black holes are, right? Actually, that’s not the best … Wait. Maybe … Okay.”

  The way he kept starting and stopping made it hard to know when I should pay very close attention and when I should just let him ramble on and rest up my brain for the important parts. And then, right in the middle of a part that did sound important, my phone started buzzing in my pocket.

  “One second,” I said.

  “Go ahead,” he said quickly.

  “I’ll just pick it up to put it on silent,” I said. “I won’t even look at who it is.”

  I went to turn the ringer off, but it’s basically impossible to pick up your phone when it’s buzzing and literally not even look at who it is, and also I knew if I didn’t look, it would probably just distract me even more, since I’d be wondering who it was the whole time, and I needed to focus all my concentration on the scientist. So I looked.

  Well, wouldn’t you know it: all the friends I had asked earlier if they wanted to come to the planetarium with me—oh, now they’re interested. “You still going?” “Hey, man, just got up.” “Sounds fun, when?” Lazy fucks! Too late, I’ve been here for over an hour! I really couldn’t believe these guys. Didn’t they realize how much interesting shit there was to see and do in this world if you just woke up at a normal fucking time like a normal fucking person?