One More Thing Read online

  “I thought the first half was more fun, but the second half was more interesting,” said 9.

  “Yeah,” said 12. “Somehow, in the second half, it felt like I was actually driving the car I was in. Even though of course we were just along for the ride, same as always.”

  “Exactly,” said 9.

  Exactly! thought Christo.

  “It got really boring for a long time,” said 1, 2, 8, and 10.

  “Should it be shorter?”

  “No!” shouted 2, 6, 7, 8, 10, 3, 4, 11, and 12.

  “A lot of the time I thought, ‘This should be moving a lot faster,’ ” said 11. “But then at the end I realized, ‘Wow, I can’t believe how fast that was!’ ”

  “Yeah, great job, man!” said 7.

  “I didn’t design the ride,” Tom reminded the group. “I am from an independently hired research company.”

  Thank you, mouthed Christo.

  “I thought about jumping off when it got scary,” said 1—softly, but to be heard.

  “That’s crazy,” said 8, turning to 1. “Why would you ever do such a thing?”

  “Yeah,” agreed 2. “It’s going to end soon enough anyway. Why not just try to enjoy it?”

  “Because it was pointless, and I didn’t like it. So why not?”

  “What about the other people in the car with you?” asked 9. “We’re supposed to be doing this ride together or it’s not as much fun.”

  “ ‘Supposed to’?” exploded 1. “Were there rules to this ride that I missed? What do I owe to any of you? Sorry, but I never asked to be on a ride with you. I just showed up and you were here. Who says I have to like it? You liked it, and that’s great. But I didn’t. So what? Can’t you respect that?”

  None of them understood this attitude, except 6, who understood but kept it to himself.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said 6.

  “Can we see a picture of the ride?” asked 2, and Tom handed them each the result of a bright flash they all remembered vaguely now that they were reminded of it, and more vividly each second as the photograph carved its lines into the blur of their memories.

  The photograph was from the last moment of the first part of the ride, right when the fear of what was about to happen was inseparable from the wonder of what would come next. Everyone who worked on roller coasters knew that this was the part of the ride where all the best pictures are taken, where everyone looks most foolish and beautiful and fearful and true, and where no one, no matter how brave or wise or vain or camera-conscious, can hide a look that reveals that they truly don’t know what’s going to happen next.

  “See,” said 2. “Look. You enjoyed it. Look at your face!”

  Tears gathered in the corners of 1’s eyes as he stared at the picture.

  “That was so long ago,” said 1. “So much happened after that.”

  “What should we call this roller coaster?” asked Tom.

  “Life,” said 2.

  Everyone got quiet.

  “Yeah. Life,” said 8.

  “Life,” agreed 1.

  “Life,” said 6.

  People nodded in silence.

  Christo, watching behind the glass, nodded.

  “ ‘Monster,’ ” said 5.

  “ ‘Monster’?” asked the focus group leader.

  “Yeah. Monster!”

  “How about The Monster?” suggested 10.

  “No,” said 5. “All caps. MONSTER: The Roller Coaster.”

  “ ‘Monster’ sounds cool,” said 4.

  No! thought Christo.

  “I like The Monster,” repeated 10.

  “Me too,” said 11.

  No, no, no! thought Christo.

  “I still like Life,” said 2. “Always will.”

  “Let’s take a vote,” said the focus group leader.

  Five people raised their hands for MONSTER, three for Life, four for The Monster, and one person (1) said he didn’t have a preference.

  “ ‘MONSTER’ it is. Thanks again, and everyone be sure you fill out your paperwork before you leave. Oh, and did everyone get their refreshment-discount coupons to the park?”

  Christo was angry almost beyond the borders of the much-surveyed powers of his own comprehension.

  MONSTER?!

  He did not spend the last nineteen years of his career dreaming that one day he might be remembered primarily as the designer of an amusement park roller-coaster ride called “MONSTER”! Or “The Monster”! Or whatever the hell they were going to call it now.

  But his dream was dead now, murdered by idiot whims, and there was nothing he could do about it anymore.

  Oh well, thought Christo. That’s life.

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

  It wasn’t like this boy to throw a tantrum in the cereal aisle of the supermarket, and it wasn’t like his mother to give in to one, but here they were, for some reason, both making an exception.

  “Okay,” she said, and threw the box deep into the far corner of the main part of the shopping cart. “Okay. Don’t let your father see it.”

  The family never bought sugar cereals and never bought name-brand cereals, so this split-second sight of his mother’s wrist flicking an official name-brand sugar cereal into the cart was something he had to keep replaying in his head for the next several minutes until he was literally dizzy on the image of the impossible. The sensation of seeing and reseeing that wrist snap was something he couldn’t make sense of, something that would be best described by words he didn’t know yet: surreal, pornographic.

  The boy kept an even pace with the white-dirt-frosted black wheels so he could stare uninterrupted at the creature that he and his mother had captured. Yes: there in the cart, after all these years, was Tony the Tiger, caged at last. And Tony the Tiger promised even more fun ahead: in a bright blast of words spilling from his sportive expression, Tony the Tiger explained that the box on which he was emblazoned contained not just name-brand sugar cereal—as if that weren’t enough—but also a miniature treasure chest, and—as if that weren’t enough—inside the treasure chest was a secret code, and—as if that weren’t enough!—the code could possibly lead to a cash prize of one hundred thousand dollars.

  (When the boy looked closer, as the box rode across the checkout belt toward the outside world, on the way to the arguably more humane captivity of a kitchen cabinet, he noticed that Tony and the text were technically separate, with no speech bubble connecting them: Tony the Tiger wasn’t saying that; he was just next to those words. Somehow, this felt like it gave the promise a touch less credibility, even though, when the boy thought about it years later, it would occur to him that this should probably have given it more. It didn’t matter, though: everything, even this late-breaking potential scandal, rang with the drama of a new name-brand world he knew he never wanted to leave.)

  Usually, when the boy got home from grocery shopping, he helped his mother unpack the bags in the kitchen, mainly by reveling in how rich their family seemed to be for this one moment each week and wondering which item he would honor by opening it first. But this time, the boy ran right to his room with the cereal box so that he could keep his word to hide it from his father, who found both the boy and the box only minutes later, drawn by the sobs to his bedroom, where the boy was discovered crying over a torn-apart box of Frosted Flakes.

  “I thought we didn’t buy this kind of cereal,” said the boy’s father, crouching down to look directly at Tony the Tiger, eyeing him as one would an enemy and an equal.

  “If you have the right secret code in the box in the treasure chest,” explained the boy, swallowing mucus, “you win a hundred thousand dollars. We’d be rich.”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” said the boy’s father.

  The boy’s father stood up and pulled a hardcover dictionary from the shelf above the boy’s bed, the frayed sweater he always wore on non-teaching days riding up as he reached.

  “If you can guess the
word I’m thinking of on this page, I will give you a hundred thousand dollars.”

  The boy stopped crying and guessed.

  He guessed wrong.

  This time the boy was too confused by this whole whatever-it-was to cry.

  “What would you have done if I got it right?”

  “I have no idea,” said his father, with a smile-like expression the boy had never seen before. “But you didn’t.”

  The boy didn’t quite understand how this lesson had worked—he didn’t have the words for this yet, either. There was something odd and cool about his father’s introduction of this consolation contest, something that he would later be able to describe as something like wryness; some offbeat calm about this presentation of a paradoxical idea, the promise of a possibility that couldn’t possibly be kept. For now, while the boy didn’t yet have the words to explain the feeling, he could feel it, and he liked it, and he wanted to be a part of it. So he accepted this as the conclusion of the story of the cereal-box contest.

  But not for long.

  The next day the boy ran to the supermarket with all the money he had the second the school bell rang; bought five boxes of Frosted Flakes and another three of Corn Flakes with the same prize offer on the box; and ran back to school in time to catch his bus.

  He felt especially grown-up to be riding the bus with grocery bags and desperately hoped that someone would ask him why.

  “Why are you carrying grocery bags?” one girl finally asked.

  “None of your business.”

  The boy got home and started ripping up the boxes, starting with Corn Flakes, so that the Frosted Flakes, which he actually liked, would stay fresher a few seconds longer.

  On the first box of Corn Flakes, he lost. On the second box of Corn Flakes, he won the $100,000 prize.

  The boy checked the other boxes just in case he won anything else. He didn’t. That was fine. One $100,000 prize was still a good day’s work.

  The boy called a family meeting, his first.

  “First, I have a confession to make,” said the boy. “I know we don’t buy sugar cereals or brand-name cereals. But I went to the grocery store by myself today, and I bought more boxes of Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes so I could enter that contest again. So I broke two rules. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you,” said the boy’s mother.

  “We understand,” said the boy’s father, with something calm and ironic in his tone again. What was that? Wryness, again? “Thank you for your honesty.”

  “Okay, good,” said the boy. “Now the good news: I won the contest. We’re rich!”

  This story is about to take a more personal turn, and I am starting to feel less comfortable that I am telling it the way that I am. So let me come clean on a couple of things: I am the boy in the story, and this is the story of how I found out my father was not my father.

  “Let me see the box,” he said quietly.

  I handed it to him. He looked at it.

  “Now let me see another box,” he said. “A losing box.”

  “Which losing box?”

  “Any of them.”

  “There are seven—”

  “Any fucking box,” he said quietly. “Any box. All of them, just one—any of them.”

  I walked over with all the boxes. He looked at two and then put the rest back down.

  “Go to your room for a few minutes. Your mother and I are going to discuss this.”

  “There are values,” my father said an hour later to begin the unprecedented second family meeting of the day, “that some people have—that many people have—that most people have. That we understand—that we respect, definitely—that are the prevailing values of the day, even, and we respect that, too, on its own terms, but. But. Respecting a value doesn’t necessarily mean sharing that value—often, but not always—only sometimes, anyway. For your mother and I … We in this household … That’s what we believe.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. My mother looked like she knew what he was supposed to be talking about, but not why he was saying it the way he was.

  “We are not going to claim the prize,” said my mother.

  Now I understood why my father had answered in such a nonsensical way: what he was trying to say made no sense.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s based on actions that we don’t allow in this household,” my mother said. “It’s the result of broken rules.”

  “But I already broke the rule, and you forgave me,” I said.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” said my mother.

  “Why don’t you punish me for that,” I said, “something fair, like grounding me, and then I’ll keep the hundred thousand dollars. You wouldn’t fine me a hundred thousand dollars just for going to the store when I wasn’t allowed to, right? You’d ground me, right? So just ground me. Okay?”

  “But everything that would follow would be based on breaking that rule,” said my father. “So any change in our lives—and there would be a great many—would be following from a corrupt core, from a foundation of values we didn’t believe in. Do you understand?”

  “This is a test, in a way,” said my mother. “A test of fate.”

  “Yes, except there’s no such thing as fate, there are only consequences of previous actions, and coincidences, which are the consequences of factors and decisions which are too many and too minute to be aware of—”

  “Okay,” said my mother. “Okay, stop. In any case, it’s a test of our values.”

  “How about this,” I offered. “You put all the money in a college fund for me. I’m not even allowed to touch it until I get to college. And then, it’s only to pay for college.”

  I stared at them, daring them to turn down a prospect as joyless as this one. If I won a hundred thousand dollars and it all went into a college fund, would it still be the greatest single letdown of my life? Yes. I had no interest in college; I planned to be a professional wrestler. But at this point I just needed to find out if this free-falling disappointment even had a floor.

  “No,” said my mother.

  “That would still be basing everything on something that isn’t our value system,” said my father. “In terms of college, if you work hard, there are still plenty of ways to earn scholarships or find alternative paths toward a good education without a lot of money.”

  “I thought you said all of higher education was corrupt and based only on money,” I said.

  My mother looked at my father.

  “I said that in a heated moment, in the midst of a stressful tenure … No, there … there are definitely ways …”

  I no longer understood my parents.

  “Can I at least keep the sugar cereals?” I asked.

  They looked at each other.

  “Yes,” said my mother.

  “All of them?”

  They smiled, relieved to have this conversation end on the word “yes.”

  “Yes,” they said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  It wasn’t okay at all, and looking back, I think that question represented the birth—forced under high pressure at the age when a moment like this is bound to be born anyway—of my first pulse of truly sophisticated manipulation.

  In that instant, it had suddenly come to me that if I were to ask that adorably missing-the-point question, I would appear to them like the fifth grader who would leave it at that, who would trust that his parents were always right, instead of the fifth grader who now knew, with certainty and for the first time, that his parents were wrong and that it was his destiny to use all the powers he had, including a calculated flash of the belovedly unpredictable kid logic of their only child, to set things right.

  Tom Salzberg was a fifth grader who was old for our grade and acted it. We weren’t exactly friends, but I considered us respectful acquaintances, and I had a sense he would know what to do with this information. I found him at his locker in the three minutes between homeroom and library and quickly told him e
verything.

  “Mm-hmm,” he said. As if this happening were one of many things like this he had to balance today. As if it had happened before. “Mm-hmm. Do you know where the ticket is?”

  I told him as we walked into library that I was pretty sure I knew where it was in the house and that in any event I could find it. To show him how much I meant business I rushed through a recap of how I had hidden my motives behind the “can I keep the sugar cereal” story, which I thought would at least amuse him, but even this abridged version he seemed to find uninteresting, and by now he was sitting at the one library computer terminal that had internet, which I knew meant I was about to lose his attention for good. “If you can get it by Thursday,” he said, eyes fixed on the computer monitor, “we have a half day then for teacher meetings. We’ll be out at eleven-thirty. Battle Creek, Michigan, is an hour and a half away. That’s where Kellogg’s headquarters is.” He tilted the screen toward me and revealed a picture of an immense, futuristic, fortress of a building—the last wholesome fantasy of a middle-school boy. “Tell your parents you have a soccer game after school and my parents are giving you a ride home after dinner. Tell them that we’re having pizza.” I didn’t play soccer or eat pizza, but I accepted this story unedited, and so did my mother when I got home from school that afternoon.

  There was then, in our house, an unused staircase behind the kitchen that my mother had long ago decided was too steep to be safe. Instead, it had been repurposed as a mostly empty diagonal closet where my parents kept things like tax returns and unwrapped presents. It was closed off by an unlocked door on both sides, and while I had glanced quickly inside a handful of times over the years whenever one of the doors had somehow slightly opened, I had never actually personally opened the door, for fear of accidentally ruining my own birthday or the still-ambiguous-by-mutual-agreement myth of Santa Claus.

  Separately, I had, two years earlier, toward the beginning of third grade, realized in an epiphany over an inspiringly decadent breakfast-for-dinner that midnight was not actually the middle of the night: if the night was something that started at 8:00 p.m. and ended at 7:00 a.m., as I knew it to be, then the middle of the night was actually 1:30 a.m. My parents happily confirmed this for me. Although my bedtimes had shifted in the years since, I still believed with stubborn auto-loyalty that 1:30 remained the official unofficial middle of the night.