One More Thing Read online

  “So, as I’ve said, I can’t offer you the prize. But I can offer you something else.”

  A part of me wondered if he was going to pull a dictionary down from the wall.

  “You can be my son.”

  He handed me a business card.

  “Think it over. Think about who you are and how you see yourself going forward. And if it makes sense to you, give me a call. Don’t let your mother see this, of course.”

  He shook my hand again, just as hard.

  Tom leapt up off the couch when he saw me cross back into the lobby.

  “What happened? How did it go?”

  “It’s called the Promotions Department, idiot,” I said. “Not the Prize Department.”

  On the bus ride back to Grand Rapids, I stared out the window for the hour and a half.

  I imagined what Michigan would look like—or what it would feel like to look out at Michigan—if I were the kid of the executive, and then if I were just the kid of my family.

  The two feelings felt very different.

  I liked them both.

  I liked the feeling of being able to switch back and forth in my mind, too.

  I wished the bus ride were longer.

  “How was Tom’s? How was pizza?”

  I forgot all about the lie I had told my mother, that I was having pizza at Tom’s. It seemed quaint, and cozy, and sad.

  “It was good.”

  “What kind did you get?”

  “Pineapple.”

  “Yum! You have room for dessert?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Why?”

  “What do you mean, ‘why’?” my mother laughed. “In case you want to have dessert with us!” I looked over into the kitchen and saw my dad in his sweater, making a pot of mint tea the way he always did after dinner.

  I loved my parents so much.

  “Go upstairs and put your things away,” said my mother. “It’ll be ready in about five. Ice cream sundaes.”

  I went up to my room and took the business card out of my pocket. I noticed that it was now completely crumpled from how tightly I must have held it on the bus ride back.

  I put the business card in the dictionary and came down for dessert.

  My father set out three teacups and three ice-cream bowls.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes, please,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “It’ll go well with the ice cream,” said my mother. “Hot and cold.”

  I noticed a tub of frozen yogurt on the table.

  “Is there ice cream?”

  “This is the ice cream,” said my father about the yogurt. “You put whipped cream and sauce on this, and all buried in a sundae, you don’t know the difference.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Except there’s no whipped cream,” said my mother.

  “Then why did you say it?” I asked.

  “Hypothetically,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Can you pass the chocolate sauce?”

  He handed me a fragile-looking glass bottle.

  “We don’t have chocolate sauce. This is agave syrup.”

  “I met my real father today,” I said.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t love my parents after that. I did, and I still do. We’re still in touch.

  But while I loved my family, I also knew that it wasn’t who I was anymore. If it ever even had been.

  I was a name-brand kid, and I was meant to have a name-brand life.

  Sometimes I wish I had learned everything earlier and that my real life could have started sooner. Other times, I’m glad that the first part of my life lasted as long as it did. It doesn’t really matter, though. None of it could have been any different.

  As for fate—or not-fate—I’m still not sure about it, but it’s not something that keeps me up at night. I’ve lived it, and the people who still wonder about that kind of thing can call it whatever they want.

  The Man Who Posted Pictures of Everything He Ate

  Once there was a man who posted pictures online of most of the things he ate. He put up pictures of most of his meals and some of his snacks with little captions.

  Yum!!

  I made this myself!

  Hits the spot.

  Saaaaalty!

  I’m gonna regret this tomorrow!!!

  Yum!!

  And plenty of times—most of the time—he simply let the pictures speak for themselves.

  The sixteen, then fifteen, then sixteen, then fourteen people who followed him made fun of him for it mercilessly.

  Why do you post pictures of your food?!

  We don’t give a **** what u ate!!

  The more they teased him, the more he did it, and the more he did it, the more they teased him.

  why do u always post pics of ur food!?

  He did it because it made him feel like he was eating his meals with more people.

  It was the same reason he liked the teasing.

  Closure

  “I want closure.”

  “There’s no such thing as closure.”

  “Please. I have to see you. Please. Please.”

  “No.”

  “One last time.”

  “No.”

  “Real quick. Ten minutes. Five minutes. One minute.”

  “Annette, we have nothing to talk about. You know I love you. But I’m at this point—”

  “I know, I know! I can’t hear all this again! Please! I just need closure.”

  “There’s no such thing as closure.”

  “I just need closure. I know I can get closure. Ten minutes. Please!”

  “Okay. When?”

  “Let’s meet at the bench by the river. Right now. Where we had our first kiss.”

  “Now? The bench by … At eleven at night? Come on, Annette. Can you … can you just come over?”

  “Come over?”

  “I mean, just, it’s late, and if it’s so important for this to be right now—”

  “That’s not what this is about!”

  “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “I need closure, David. I just need closure.”

  David met Annette by the river.

  “Wow. You look really amazing.”

  “Thank you,” said Annette with a two-blinks-and-you’d-miss-it half curtsey at once feminine and mean.

  For the first time in her life, Annette looked exactly the way she wanted to look. Her hair was mostly neat, mostly down; she wore a simple dress that was the exact medium shade of red of all the shades of red in the world. It wasn’t even that hard to look this way, she noted as she caught a last look at herself in the mirror on her way out; it just took some effort and thought and luck—a reasonable but attainable amount more of each than usual. A good lesson to learn for the future, she thought; a future that could begin tonight, right after she got closure.

  “I want to say something.”

  “Okay.”

  “Everything is okay.”

  She smiled. He smiled back.

  “Everything in the past,” continued Annette, “is in the past. The cheating—the cheating you admit to, and the cheating you still can’t bring yourself to admit to—”

  “Wait, Annette—”

  “And the lies about the cheating—the stories you made up that you eventually felt more loyal to than you did to the relationship—”

  “Annette—”

  “It’s all okay! I’m saying it’s all okay! All the times you made me feel like your backup choice when it would have been so simple to just tell me I looked beautiful; all the times you made me feel like the girl you were just killing time with while you waited to find your true love, even though you knew I loved you; or the times you made me feel like your stupid little sister, or your employee—”

  “Annette—”

  “No, I forgive all of it. You don’t have to admit it or even accept it. I choose to let it go. I don’t want to carry it around in my heart anymore.”

  “Okay �
�� Well, Annette—”

  He paused, then rushed to make up for whatever the pause had cost him.

  “Annette, just because I’m accepting this doesn’t mean I’m conceding anything you say is true—”

  “You don’t have to,” she smiled. “It’s all in the past. It’s all over.”

  “Okay, well, that’s good. Some of what you’re saying is unnecessary and implies, I think, an excessive level of … I mean, I understand, as a thought exercise, for the sake of—”

  “Now I want to kiss you.”

  “Annette …”

  “A goodbye kiss. Just one. For closure.”

  Annette took a step toward him.

  Closure, so close.

  “Annette … I want to … But I don’t think … God, you look beautiful, trust me, it’s not … But this is, I’m kind of seeing someone, and—”

  “One kiss! You don’t even have to kiss back. I just need to kiss you goodbye. For closure. One last time. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Open your mouth and close your eyes,” said Annette, coyly.

  “I thought you said I didn’t have to kiss back,” said David, coyly.

  “Well, then you can keep your mouth closed, if you want,” said Annette, coyly.

  David half opened his mouth and closed his eyes.

  Annette kissed him.

  While she held the kiss she pictured everything she could remember from the relationship, in chronological order, from the first email to the last text message, and every kiss and laugh and fight in between. When she had pictured absolutely everything she could bring herself to remember, which was everything, she visualized herself literally kissing the block letters of the word GOODBYE.

  As the E started to fade in her mind, and her real lips stayed on his real mouth, she held out her left hand and snapped her thumb and index finger together—the softer and more difficult version of the snap—and eight men masked in black descended swiftly toward her ex-boyfriend, quiet enough for all their footsteps to be flattened by the squish of her kiss.

  The first man injected David’s neck with a clear liquid that knocked him unconscious. A second man pulled David’s phone out of his front pocket, right where Annette had told him it would be. Two men wheeled out a cement box from behind a parked truck and removed two sacks of beach sand, and then a fifth masked man joined them to lift the unconscious body into the box, then split open the sacks of sand and fill the rest of the box to the top. A sixth man fastened a cement lid to the top of the box on a preset row of hinges and then, together with the third and fourth men, carried the box to the edge of the river and tilted it in, while the seventh man swept up all the miscellaneous bits of debris that had accumulated into an opaque plastic bag. The second man, still holding the phone of the man in the box, showed what he had been typing into the phone to the eighth masked man, who had been simply watching everything as it unfolded and nodding, and who now nodded more as he read:

  To everyone I love (and a few who just got on this list off my spam folder, haha!): I’m writing because I needed you to know that after a lot of soul-searching I’ve decided I need to “drop out” for a while (as it were). A lot of you know that I was having a lot of anxiety about things, esp. with my most recent relationship(s), and I decided I need to kind of take some time off and really just *think* and *be myself* for a while with no distractions and no influence—just for a while!!—from the people who have made me, well … me. I’ll be getting some much needed rest & solitude. Maybe I’ll finally take that motorcycle trip across Central America that I’m always talking about—although I guess first I’ll have to get a motorcycle license (and learn how to change a tire!). Ha. Also, my plan is to watch all five seasons of The Wire while I’m away, so when I am back, at least I’ll finally have something to talk to you all about! Anyway, I love you all so, so much, and thank you for respecting this need of mine right now. And, again, do not worry about me just because I’m out of contact. This really is the best thing that could happen to me. Have fun, I love you all and miss you already. Love you and thanks for understanding this.

  Sent from my Phone—forgiive tha typoooes&&1*&☺.

  The eighth man showed the phone to Annette, who nodded, and then handed the phone back to the second man, who pressed a button that sent the email to every contact in the phone.

  Then the second man plugged a new program into the phone. It was an application called Closure, and according to the people on the since-deleted message board who had recommended this team, it was what meant the difference between being the best at this and being only one of the best.

  The program, using data that Annette had provided to them in advance, was said to be able to infiltrate every record-keeping website and database that had ever recorded the existence of her ex-boyfriend and erase all written and photographic evidence of him that was labeled by any of the four most common spellings of his full name. The program was guaranteed to work in under ten minutes. It finished in six and a half, and when it was done, the second man threw the phone into the river, where it, too, died instantly and anonymously.

  That was it.

  Annette approached the eighth man, pulled fifty one-hundred-dollar bills from her purse; handed them to him in a roll; and then impulsively kissed him on the side of the mask, making him blush, or so she imagined.

  “Congratulations,” said the eighth man. “The first person to truly achieve closure.”

  “Am I really the first?”

  “Well, if you weren’t, I guess I couldn’t tell you, could I?”

  The eight men walked away and got back in their surprisingly domestic-looking minivan and drove off, leaving Annette, heart racing, all alone.

  There was a beaded line of sweat across her forehead, which she wiped off, and her lipstick was smeared a bit, which she corrected; now she looked close to perfect, which, she had always suspected, was actually a little hotter than perfect.

  She walked alone to her favorite bar, ordered her favorite drink, and stirred it as she waited for the rest of her life to approach.

  Kindness Among Cakes

  CHILD: “Why does carrot cake have the best icing?”

  MOTHER: “Because it needs the best icing.”

  Quantum Nonlocality and the Death of Elvis Presley

  You may remember a time when the most common headline to see on a tabloid newspaper in the checkout aisle of the supermarket was that Elvis Presley had been seen alive. And you may remember that sometime around 1994, all these newspapers stopped saying that around the same time.

  The papers had been making it all up. None of the pictures were real, and none of the details had anything to do with anything.

  But they were right, too.

  “People just can’t accept the fact that the King is dead,” one woman sighed to her son when he pointed to such a headline in a Kroger checkout aisle in 1986, back when children were confused by newspapers that contradicted other newspapers.

  Behind them in line stood the dead king himself, holding Wonder Bread, peanut butter, Tylenol, and a magazine about something else entirely.

  It had in fact been Elvis who couldn’t accept that he was alive, who at a certain specific point could no longer understand on any level how this fat and tired man in Memphis, this man who combed his thinning hair and slept in his freckled skin, could possibly share the same name and memories as the most mythical creature that the world in his day had known.

  It wasn’t simply that he had gained weight, or gained years, or transformed in any natural human way that would have made sad but rational sense to anyone. It was something deeper inside, something that told him that, as strange as it sounded, there wasn’t any true, unbroken line anymore directly connecting the man in whom he stood and Elvis.

  Elvis.

  Elvis!

  ELVIS!

  Who, really, could be Elvis?

  He could trace it only as far back as a particular Monday morning when he poured himself a bowl of
cereal as he did every day, turned on the television, sat down on his sofa, and then found himself suddenly overcome by a loud, hollow echo of a feeling—starting, somehow, in his ears—that told him that the old feeling had been gone for some time.

  He spent the next few days waiting for this new feeling to fade away, but as the hours and moods came and went, the feeling didn’t.

  He wandered the hallways of his Elvis-themed home, squinting into the framed photographs on the walls. The black-and-white photographs looked like Elvis, but not like him. The color photographs looked like him, but not like Elvis.

  He looked in the mirror, and the person he saw looked like him, and it looked like Elvis. But it didn’t look like he was Elvis.

  He wrote down his name on a pad of paper and stared at it: ELVIS. It looked like the Roman numerals for a made-up number, a number of a jumbled, indecipherable value, which was at least closer to how he felt than anything else so far.

  It was strange to think that he wasn’t Elvis anymore, but it was even stranger to think that he ever had been.

  After a few months of worrying a lot and trying not to worry, Elvis started to wonder seriously if the feeling that he definitely was who he had once been would ever come back at all, except in out-of-focus flashes after a lot of pills.

  It didn’t make any sense, thought Elvis; but somehow, the line that makes someone the same person from day to day must have snapped inside him when he wasn’t paying attention, which had been, he admitted to himself with a shameful shudder, a lot of the time. A knot had untied, a hinge had popped; he didn’t know the exact intricacies of the mechanics of the soul, he was simply a singer—or Elvis was, anyway; or had been—but in any case, however it had happened, the man he was now had just kept on going, unaware and untethered to whatever had once made him Elvis, and by the time he had realized it and turned back around, the real Elvis had somehow left the building.