One More Thing Page 18

  It was an upbeat song: lovely, happy, sincere, full of joy and life. It was an unmistakably American song. It seemed to be mostly gibberish sounds and melodic repetitions, but there were a few phrases he could make out when people got carried away. “Yes, I …” “Oh I’m gonna love you …” “Oh oh …” “Nothing can stop me now …” “ ’Cause I’m …”

  “What’s that song?” he would ask, and the Americans would always immediately snap out of it. “Oh, I didn’t realize …” they would say, very often blushing. They had never even noticed they had been singing. “Just this silly song, I guess.”

  “Well, I like it,” the Duke of Earl would say. “I like that silly song.”

  After three weeks, the Duke of Earl returned home. He never went back to America, but he never stopped thinking about it, never stopped talking about it. He had a responsibility, of course, to love and serve the people of Earl above all else, and that he would do—that of course he would do. But in his heart at night, always baffling and delighting him, was America, the vast and varied land where everyone was singing the same song.

  The Pleasure of Being Right

  “I’ll never get over it.”

  You will, everyone told him.

  “I’ll never be happy again. It’s over, it’s all over!”

  Of course you will be, they said. Happier, even! You just can’t see it now.

  But they were wrong, and he was right. He was miserable for forty years, and then he found out it was time to die.

  What had they known, after all? They were just saying all that. They didn’t have any information that he didn’t.

  In fact, they’d had considerably less information than he had. They just knew what they thought they were supposed to say, so they said it.

  In his final half hour, as he lay in his hospital bed, alone except for a dreadlocked attendant in blue who spoke a different language, now at the end of a life that was indeed defined by despair and meaninglessness—just as he had insisted it would be—his spirits first sank and then lifted as he felt himself slip into a deep and private joy, recognized by all who feel it but known only by a few: the pleasure of being right in the end.

  Strange News

  Man Returns to Bank He Robbed for Smaller Bills

  BISMARCK, ND—A North Dakota man who had robbed a local bank was arrested after he returned to the same bank window two days later and attempted to exchange his hundred-dollar bills for smaller denominations. “If he wanted twenties, he should have just asked for them the first time,” said bank manager William Long, who recognized the suspect’s voice from the robbery. “Or just stuck with what he had—I’d say a bag of hundreds can get you pretty far in today’s economy!”

  Indeed, the world’s economy is based entirely upon the collectively held assumption that numbered pieces of paper issued by governments correspond to specific, tangible, and transferable real-world values. These presumed values fluctuate every second in relation to the perceived value of numbered pieces of paper printed in other countries, and also to pieces of metal (see Regular News).

  Moose Interrupts Town Meeting on Wildlife Protection

  WECK, ID—A town council meeting on whether to vote to extend wildlife protection in a local park got a surprise visitor on Friday: a moose!

  Officials say the animal, an adult bull moose, wandered in through an open loading-dock door and interrupted council business for nearly an hour as animal-control workers untangled the antlers from a string of seasonal holiday lights. “I’m a devoted hunter, and I can say I’ve never seen antlers that big,” said Councilman Thomas Ross. “Those were some major antlers.”

  Scientists have determined that antlers are a result of an imperceptibly incremental evolutionary adaptation over the course of millions of years, a process that began with one single-celled carbon-based life form which traces its own origin to an infinitely small dot of arguably infinite energy that exploded 13.7 billion years ago due to reasons that are thought to be best understood by a man in a wheelchair who speaks through a computerized voice box (see Regular News).

  World’s Largest Tomato to Become Tomato Sauce

  NAPOLI, ITALY—A tomato declared by Guinness World Records to be the world’s largest tomato will now become tomato sauce, says the farmer who grew it. “We already have the record, now let us celebrate!” said Elio Bianchi III, 52. “What is the point of watching it rot, with so many hungry people out there smacking their lips for delicious pasta?”

  Indeed, worldwide totals of food production and of people living in poverty simultaneously hit all-time highs this year (see Regular News).

  Man Sues Brother over Glass of Flat Beer

  WIKOSHA, WI—A man took his brother to small claims court to demand compensation for the “annoyance and emotional distress” caused when Saver’s Pub, the bar owned by his brother, allegedly served him a glass of flat beer. The man is suing for $160, claiming that the experience “ruined [his] whole night” and that his brother’s offer of unlimited Coca-Cola in its stead was “designed to humiliate” the man and “to show everyone that I’m still just his little brother, still drinking Coca-Cola even though I’m a grown adult at a bar.”

  Coca-Cola, a beverage that was originally designed for the purposes of recreational cocaine use and subsequently adapted as a concoction of uniquely flavored and sweetened carbonated water devoid of nutritional content, spent the past year as the world’s most popular and profitable product brand (see Regular News).

  Man Finds Coat Button After Twenty-Two Years

  KASHMIR—A soldier in the disputed region of Kashmir found a missing button to a coat he was wearing—after twenty-two years!

  The button had been lost while his late father, a soldier in the same conflict, took refuge one night in a cave on the battlefield. The son, sleeping in the same cave, and wearing the same coat twenty-two years later, came across the button as he brewed tea.

  “It fit perfectly,” said the soldier, Kanhaiya Makhan, 23. “The coat looks much better now.”

  Endless war over minor ideological differences remains one of the most defining aspects of human life well into the 21st century (see Regular News).

  Man Receives Text Message from Deceased Relative

  INDIANAPOLIS, IN—A 36-year-old man received a text message from his mother reminding him to “stay warm this weekend”—six hours after he had paid his respects at her funeral.

  The cell phone provider apologized, citing a rolling power outage at a cellular broadcast tower that led to delayed delivery of some messages for up to three days.

  The company offered the customer its apologies as well as a free phone with a year’s worth of unlimited data, but the man says he may not take them up on it. “I kind of feel like the message was from her, in a way,” said Alex Rossini, 36. “Plus, it’s just a phone and a data plan. I think I’m set in that department.”

  Indeed, most human beings in the developed world already carry a device that can instantaneously access essentially all of the recorded information in history, and the average price of such devices recently hit an all-time low (see Regular News). Nobody knows what happens after death (see Opinions).

  Never Fall in Love

  The day she started as a secret agent, her boss told her one very important rule.

  “Never fall in love.”

  But she did fall in love, almost immediately. Within a month, she was hopelessly and endlessly in love with another secret agent, a kind, warm man named Bob. He had big hands and a lot of brothers and sisters, and there was no falling out of love with Bob.

  She went to her boss’s office and handed him a letter of resignation.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I met someone,” she said. “I’ve fallen in love.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Bob.”

  “I love Bob!” he said, lighting up. “Oh, what a great guy. That’s a perfect match, you and Bob! I’m so happy for you.”

  He then remember
ed the issue at hand.

  “But why are you resigning?”

  “I broke the one and only rule you told me,” she said. “ ‘Never fall in love.’ I fell in love.”

  “Oh, honey,” he laughed. “That’s not a real rule! I just knew you’d never find love if you were looking for it.”

  The World’s Biggest Rip-Off

  Here’s a story with a happy ending.

  I am a thirty-eight-year-old married father of two. A couple of summers ago, I took our family on our first-ever family vacation.

  The plan was to drive from our home in New Hampshire to my wife’s parents’ lake house in Canada. On the way there, we would stop for a night at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Then a week at the lake house. Then on the drive back we would spend a couple of days at Niagara Falls.

  The Baseball Hall of Fame was a disaster. My son hated it, and we had stopped there only for him. Basically, he spent the whole time asking if his favorite players would ever end up in the Hall of Fame, and I told him the truth, which was no, because of steroids. Maybe I should have lied.

  The lake house was a disaster, too. My kids somehow got it in their heads that they wanted to watch the movie The Hangover. Of course I wasn’t going to let them watch The Hangover—they were eight and ten years old—but they decided to make the whole week a fight about whether or not they could watch it. My wife’s parents thought this whole thing was my fault, because they didn’t know what The Hangover was and they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let two young children watch it.

  Niagara Falls was a disaster. My eight-year-old daughter was the one who had begged to see it because a couple from a television show she watched got married there. But when I pointed it out to her from the car window on the drive to our hotel—“Look, Niagara Falls!”—she said it looked different than she thought it would and went back to her book. Great, I thought. We have two days here, and that’s all there is to do, and she’s the only one who wanted to see it, and she’s already bored by it. And that was all we did. And it was boring.

  As we started the drive back home, we passed a sign on the highway for the Guinness World Records Museum, and my kids said they wanted to go. It was the first thing they had wanted the whole trip that I could conceivably let them have, so even though we were already over our budget for the trip, I said okay, let’s check it out, and pulled off the highway.

  But the museum was a disaster, too. The lines were long, and nothing impressed my kids. Not the World’s Largest Watermelon, not the World’s Hairiest Woman, not the World’s Fastest Toilet. Not the fingernails guy. Nothing.

  I was about to call it a day when I saw a small hand-drawn sign above a curtain in a corner:

  WORLD’S BIGGEST RIP-OFF. $100 PER PERSON.

  I waved my wife over.

  “No, no. Absolutely not.” She said tickets to the museum had already taken us way over budget for the trip, and we weren’t paying a hundred dollars a person for something else now, especially something that the sign said right there was a ripoff. “No, no, no. No way.”

  Something about it really intrigued me, though. I asked the guy in front of the door, who wasn’t wearing official museum gear—just black pants and a black T-shirt—if there was at least a children’s rate.

  “One hundred dollars a person. No discounts. No refunds. Cash only.”

  This only made me more intrigued. What the hell was in there? I had to know. But the more interested I got, the more skeptical my wife became. “You know what?” she said. “Fine. Just go in yourself and take a look if you need to know what’s in there so bad. We’ll wait.” But this was a family vacation, I said. Whatever I was about to experience, I wanted to experience with my family.

  I told my wife to wait with the kids and I ran out to an ATM down the block. It only let me withdraw up to a $200 limit, so then I ran back and begged my wife to let me borrow her card and tell me her PIN so I could withdraw two hundred dollars more.

  At this point, my wife was understandably starting to lose her cool a bit. She said I was acting like a fool and a sucker and some other harsher things that I’d rather not make the effort to remember right now. I’m not going to lie: it was a tense moment in our marriage. Finally, she told me that I was no longer the type of person she could trust with her ATM password, but that if it was this important to me, I could wait in the museum with the kids while she went across the street herself to withdraw two hundred dollars from her card, but that she needed me to know she would “never, ever forget what happened today.” I said yes, thank you, it was indeed this important to me.

  Fortunately, as I said, this story has a happy ending. Inside the secret room was a mind-blowingly elaborate, incredibly well-executed interactive holographic exhibit on the Bernie Madoff hedge fund scam of 2009. It was beyond amazing—just jaw-droppingly intricate and detailed and smart and interesting and well designed. The holograms actually interacted with you, putting you in the mindset of the people who got ripped off, and very compellingly conveyed the scope of the scam he pulled—did you know the numbers involved? Staggering.

  Anyway, all of us were absolutely fascinated. And it kicked off a whole bunch of questions, too. I mean, really, how often do kids ask you questions about how stocks work, how bonds work, what’s a manageable risk for an investment, what our investment values are—stuff like that? And it was actually really good for me and my wife, too, to get on the same page. (Especially after what we had gone through that day.)

  So anyway: they learned, we learned, we connected, we had fun, and it was a unique experience that we all got to share together and that stayed with all of us. To this day, two years later, I still catch the kids looking over my shoulder while I check the financial news online. And whenever we talk about the trip, which is often, everyone always smiles, and someone inevitably does an imitation of the funny hologram of Bernie that greeted us on the way in, making a really funny, evil-smirky face. “Inveeessst with meeeeee!”

  You thought my wife was going to be right on this one, didn’t you? Everybody always does when I start to tell them this story. That’s okay. She’s usually the one who’s right about this kind of thing. About everything, actually—I married well. But this time, luckily, I was the one who was right.

  The Walk to School on the Day After Labor Day

  I was sad that summer was over.

  But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.

  Kate Moss

  When I was sixteen, I would come home from school every day and stare at pictures of Kate Moss for hours.

  Then one day, on a school trip to New York, I saw Kate Moss. I went up to her and pulled her coat.

  “Are you Kate Moss?” I said.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “How did you become Kate Moss?”

  She moved her face close to mine and smiled and whispered.

  “Every day,” she said, “when I came home from school, I would stare at pictures of Kate Moss for hours, until one day, I was Kate Moss.”

  “How many hours?”

  “Four.”

  When I went back home, I tried staring at photos of Kate Moss for four hours a day.

  Now I’m Kate Moss.

  Welcome to Camp Fantastic for Gifted Teens

  Dear Gifted Teen:

  Picture, if you will, the heartbreakingly temporary canvas of a summer night. Each moment evaporates into the mist of memory as fast as it can be felt. The muggy scent of summer’s stillness is pierced only by the trivial phosphorescence of a mindless firefly. Dead stars linger on in the sky as a sick joke—absence itself masquerading as a panoply of permanence.

  This is a typical summer evening for a gifted teen. The pleasures of youth are smothered in the mind’s crib by the much-praised pillow of your own awareness. Activities are to be mastered, friends are to be impressed, and life is to be learned, not lived.

  Rest assured: there is an escape from what makes you special—and it begins right here.

  Camp Fa
ntastic is a place for teens to have sex, do drugs, and stay out of trouble.

  Things you can do at Camp Fantastic include …

  Read

  Sex

  Play games that you make up

  Drink / Do drugs

  Sleep in bunk beds

  Go Fish

  Go Fish (card game)

  Comic books

  War (card game only)

  Conversation

  Unstructured Free Time

  Horseshoes (coming in 2016)

  Friendships

  Unforgettable memories

  At this point, you may be a bit curious about the person writing you this letter. I am a former gifted teen myself. Years of neglect from loved ones about the peculiar challenges of my predicament—particularly with regard to maintaining the delicate and necessary self-restorative cycle of mindfulness and mindlessness that comes much more naturally to those whose inner cerebral acrobatics are not permanently set to emergency-high levels of attention-demand—led to a series of emotional breakdowns over the course of my life that have spangled my generally extraordinary intellect with the welcome-textured scars of impulsive thinking and counterproductive endeavors, as well as flash-bouts of radically unfiltered and unnecessary honesty, some of them on display in this very letter.

  After many long and unprofitable years acquiring bottle cap collections and selling them for scrap metal (long story—it’s not quite as stupid as it sounds, but essentially the sentimental and historical interest affixed to the bottle caps forced me to buy them at a considerable premium over the value of the metal itself), I found myself facing a brutal foreclosure on my house in the Hamptons. In the ensuing panic, I founded Camp Fantastic, primarily as a tax dodge but also as a way of changing lives for the better.