One More Thing Read online

  An extra minute could make the difference between life and death.

  He always arrived at the hospital minutes before any other driver.

  “Hey! Just so you know! It’s true what they say! You really are! The best! Ambulance driver! We’ve ever seen!” nurses would breathe at him as they swept his patients into the hospital and off to their surgeries.

  “Thank you,” he always remembered to say. “Means a lot. Really, thank you.”

  The ambulance driver knew he was the best ambulance driver. And he knew it was a great thing to be.

  That wasn’t it.

  One day the ambulance driver told his friend Dan, another ambulance driver, that he had a friend who wanted to be a singer.

  “What should my friend do?” asked the ambulance driver.

  “Is your friend good?” asked Dan.

  “He’ll never know till he tries, right?” said the ambulance driver. “Or she?”

  “That’s right,” said Dan.

  “So? Should he or she go all out and quit and go for his dream?”

  “I guess the only way your friend can find out is to go for it,” said Dan.

  “Well, as you probably figured out, I’m the friend,” said the ambulance driver with the bright, wide grin that the truly happy share with the truly stupid. “I’m the friend! I want to be a singer. But not just a singer, Dan. A singer-songwriter.”

  Dan’s face went as white as one of their passengers’.

  “Hey,” said Dan. “Hey, let’s think about this.”

  “I’ll never know till I try, right? You said that. When we were talking about my ‘friend’?”

  “Look—okay—you want honesty?” said Dan. “People generally don’t make it. I mean, I’m sorry, but that’s just how it goes! And even—let’s say you did. What you do now is so, so important! You’re an ambulance driver, and you’re the best at it! In all of Grant County, and probably beyond. There are statistics—it’s not even close. I mean, come on! The most important thing in the world, and you’re the best at it! How does that feel?”

  “That’s the thing, Dan. I know how it should feel—”

  “Hey. This isn’t a joke,” said Dan with an intensity that surprised the ambulance driver. “The universe tells you what it wants from you. You just need to listen. And the universe is telling you to drive that ambulance.”

  “Interesting, I’ll think about that,” said the ambulance driver.

  Since when did Dan speak for the universe?

  The next day the ambulance driver asked a different person what he should do. This woman was a friend who had gone to his high school and wasn’t an ambulance driver—he didn’t even know what she did, in fact—but for some reason she always gave the best advice. They met at a coffee shop.

  “What does your heart tell you?” she asked as she sipped her hot chocolate.

  He said he didn’t know: on one level, his heart believed that he should help as many people as possible, which was exactly what he was doing now. But another part of his heart really wanted to see where this music thing might go if he put everything he had into it. Couldn’t your heart tell you more than one thing? If you were truly confused about something, which he was right now, wouldn’t that mean your heart was, too?

  The ambulance driver’s friend lowered her head thirty degrees and then tilted it back up after two and a half seconds.

  “What does your gut tell you?” she asked.

  “You give the best advice,” said the ambulance driver.

  The ambulance driver quit his job the next day. Later that night, he was officially an amateur musician, singing to eleven people at a bar fifty miles away.

  His first song, “My Song for You,” got a lot of applause, though his second song got none, but that was probably because he didn’t know there was a one-song limit. “So sorry,” he said after that was explained to him.

  But as he apologized to the bar manager, something happened. A voice he had never heard before rose up from somewhere around the center of his body, skipped his mouth altogether on the way to his head, and then, once it was there, rattled around and echoed so loudly that it almost literally knocked him off his feet. “I’m not sorry at all!” shouted this voice, a voice that actually took him more than a moment to recognize as his own.

  It was the voice he always sang with from then on.

  The ambulance driver put out dozens of albums with hundreds of songs over the years, but none was as popular as the children’s song he wrote to amuse his young son at bedtime, “I Was Walking Along,” which he volunteered to perform at his son’s kindergarten class and which was such a hit that he was invited back to perform it there every subsequent spring.

  The song went like this:

  I was walking along (I was walking along)

  I was singing a song (I was singing a song)

  Got a hole in my shoe (Got a hole in my shoe)

  Stepped in a puddle too (Stepped in a puddle too)

  Had to roll up my sock (Had to roll up my sock)

  Rolled it up to my knee (Rolled it up to my knee)

  Rolled it up to my waist

  Rolled it up to my head

  And then I went to bed!

  Then the children screamed like this:

  “Again!”

  “Again!”

  “Again!”

  Do you know what it’s like to sing a song that started inside you to a room full of laughing, dancing children, who keep singing it even after you stop?

  It feels like the world is made of music, and you are the world.

  One or two more people died each year in Grant County than before, but it was always a number within the statistical margin of error.

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

  I had seen his picture enough and read about him enough to know that I loved Tony Robbins, or so I thought at the time.

  When he came to our town, I found out where he was staying, and I knew people who worked at the hotel, and I knew he was a man who appreciated bold gestures, so I went for it. I entered the room while he was in the shower, wearing what I thought of as my best first-impressions dress, and when he came out and saw me, he immediately asked me what I was doing there.

  “I’m here because I love you,” I said.

  “Your feet,” he said. “What are you doing? What is that?”

  “I’m walking on eggshells,” I said. “To impress you. Isn’t that your thing?”

  “No, my thing is hot coals,” he said. “Walking on hot coals.”

  “Oh,” I said, embarrassed to have gotten wrong something that was so fundamental about him—even though that’s often how it goes, I’ve realized since, that we overlook the few things we’re sure we already know. “Oh. I don’t think I could ever do that.”

  “Yes. YES YOU CAN,” he said, with the superhuman intensity that made me pursue him in the first place. God, he was like ten human beings compressed into one. “You can do anything you put your mind to,” said Tony Robbins. “Anything. You hear me? Anything. Anything. Anything.”

  “I want to fuck Tony Robbins,” I said. “That’s what I want to do. I want to fuck Tony Robbins and look in his eyes and see that he’s in love with me, too.”

  He looked at me for a while. His face looked very confused and humble, but I could tell by the way his eyes squinted especially hard at certain parts of my dress that he was also, secretly, checking me out.

  “No,” he said.

  “What do you mean ‘no’?”

  “It’s just not going to happen,” said Tony Robbins.

  “Yes it is,” I said, summoning and then faking more intensity than had ever been inside me before. “Yes, it is going to happen. Yes: I am going to fuck Tony Robbins!”

  “You are? You are?” Something about my intensity awakened something in him. The challenge fired him up in a way that my looks, so far, hadn’t.

  “Okay. But we gotta get serious,” he said, staring at me with those eyes
again. “We’re gonna get you in the gym six days a week, three hours a day, on a cross-training regimen. It’s going to be brutal—are you up to it?” Yes! I said. “We’re going to get you hair extensions and super-low-rise jeans and a little yellow tattoo of a lightning bolt on your hip, okay? Because that’s what turns me on. Are you ready to do that?” Yes! I said. “We’re going to get you …” reading this book, attending that seminar, learning these interesting topics to talk about. Yes, I said, yes!

  “Then it gets more difficult,” Tony Robbins said, and I could tell by the look in those steel-blue eyes that this next part was going to be hard for him, too. “You’re going to have to drive by my wife’s house, our house, while I’m on the road, and you’re going to have to leave things for me—gifts, cards … things that don’t make her feel her safety is threatened, but that definitely make her wonder if I’m having an affair. You’re going to sow the seeds of doubt so that the bedrock of trust that sustains my marriage will collapse. Are you ready to do that?” Yes! I said.

  I dedicated myself to the program like I’ve never dedicated myself to anything in my life. Once a week, on Fridays, I would check in with Tony so that he could monitor my progress. He would stare me up and down, sizing me up, determining if I was getting hot enough to interest him on a physical level; then we would talk casually for a lot longer, to see if I was becoming the kind of person Tony Robbins could fall in love with.

  “Don’t forget to surprise me sometimes,” he said in week two. “Learn all these things, do all these things; but it’s also important in a romantic relationship for both people to feel they are learning and growing from the other person.” This was especially good advice, and I added capoeira, guitar, and Italian films of the 1940s to my areas of expertise. He asked a lot of questions about them, more than you would ask just to be polite.

  Around the fifth or sixth week, I noticed something had changed about the way he looked at me. Tony Robbins, the motivator, the man I had fallen in love with, wasn’t the only person looking at me anymore; now there was another man starting to come out from behind those eyes that had always reminded me of locked steel gates. And it was exciting and scary, if those are even different things, to realize that I was on the verge of something so big with this new person I didn’t know, someone I might never know, something with no end date, no target, no limit.

  In week seven, I called it off.

  He was very surprised. “You’re so close! Let’s just finish the program! Come on! You can do it!”

  “I know I can,” I said. “But I don’t know if I want to do it anymore.”

  “You need to want it,” he said.

  “You need to want it,” I agreed.

  I told him I stopped because I realized I was turning love into an accomplishment, and he was turning accomplishment into love, and neither of those things would ever quite be the other. When I told him that, he seemed to both light up and flare out at the same time—like he knew this was the truth, but that it was also hard for him to let go of someone who would say something like that.

  But the truth was actually much simpler than that, more visceral. I just realized that I was never going to get over the feeling I had the first time I met him, like I was walking on eggshells.

  The Impatient Billionaire and the Mirror for Earth

  “If only the earth could hold up a mirror to itself …”

  Say no more, thought the impatient billionaire in the audience at the TED conference, who found the speaker’s voice as whiny and irritating as his ideas were inspiring and consciousness-shifting. He already knew the part of the speech that was going to stay with him: a mirror up to Earth—amazing, unbelievable. Tricky but doable. He got it. Let’s make it.

  “I want you to build a mirror for Earth,” he said to his engineers, who were used to things like this.

  “How big do you want the mirror to be?”

  “Full length.”

  “How big do you want Earth to look?”

  “Full size.”

  “Can’t be full size,” said the head engineer.

  “Yes it can be,” said the impatient billionaire. “And by the end of today, my head engineer is going to be somebody who tells me how it’s going to happen, not why it can’t.”

  “If it’s full size,” said the head engineer, “you’ll only see the reflection of what is in your field of vision up to your horizon point. That’s not what you want, is it? You’re picturing seeing, like, China, right?”

  “Yes,” said the impatient billionaire. “Exactly. Things like China.”

  “So let’s figure out how big,” said the engineer.

  “I want you to be able to look up with binoculars and literally wave at yourself,” said the impatient billionaire. “But you could also look at the White House, or your grandmother in Florida, or see two people on a date in Brazil. My God, do you realize what this is going to mean for humanity?”

  “You’re only going to be able to see one hemisphere at a time,” said the head engineer. “That means you won’t be able to see China and Brazil at the same time. Which one is more important to you?”

  “I don’t know. Same. Brazil,” said the impatient billionaire.

  The engineer took some notes with a little pencil.

  “Wait!” said the impatient billionaire. “Is this mirror going to burn up the whole planet? Don’t just ‘yes’ me on everything, really think about it: a mirror that big, reflecting the sun, facing us? I do not want to burn up the planet. I do not want to be ‘that guy.’ ”

  “No, that should be okay,” said the head engineer. “We should be able to come up with a material that reflects plenty of light but not a meaningful amount of heat. Let me talk with the team.”

  The engineers talked numbers and said they could probably have something up in eighteen months.

  “Why not six?” asked the impatient billionaire, trying to force into his eyes the rogue, intoxicating glimmer that he knew had served him well in life so far.

  Eighteen, said the engineering team.

  Fine, said the impatient billionaire. If you can really guarantee eighteen months, fine.

  We can, said the engineering team.

  Thirty-five months and two weeks later—more than a year late and seven hundred million dollars over budget—the Mirror for Earth finally went up into the sky.

  But nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end.

  And in the end, the mirror was magnificent.

  After a very short amount of time, the Mirror for Earth became one of those things that people couldn’t ever imagine not existing.

  When people caught sight of themselves in the mirror—individually and as a species—they thought twice about how they looked doing whatever they were doing. Crime disappeared. Wars evaporated. Meanness declined dramatically.

  The mirror changed everything, forever, for the better.

  Besides all that, the thing was, quite simply, beautiful.

  One summer night a few years later, the impatient billionaire couldn’t sleep. The air-conditioning in his master bedroom was broken, and even an impatient billionaire didn’t have a way to get an air conditioner fixed in the middle of the night without waking up a wife who was asleep in the same room.

  The impatient billionaire’s mind started running through all of the projects he had in the works, none of which was going as fast as it should be—you’d think the man who put up the Mirror for Earth would attract the best and brightest and most resourceful people, but apparently not, he thought to himself.

  Impatient for nothing in particular, the impatient billionaire wandered outside to his bedroom balcony and picked up a pair of binoculars that had been a gift from the head engineer, but that he had never actually used.

  After a couple of minutes spent searching and focusing, he found what he thought to be himself up in the sky and made some specific gestures with his arms to confirm that he really was staring at himself, and n
ot at one of his neighbors who might just happen to have a similar pair of pajamas and late-night impulse.

  Yes, that was him.

  That was him, waving widely. That was him, the little figure in red, jutting out into the endless black.

  And then, after the impatient billionaire had established that it was definitely, certainly him up there in the sky, he made a few more funny gestures anyway, just for fun.

  What a cool thing he had made.

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

  I was outside the Trader Joe’s at 21st and 6th at around 2:30 pm last Wednesday. I was wearing oversized sunglasses and a small straw fedora hat, light blue jeans, a black t-shirt-like top, and had freshly washed shoulder-length dirty blond hair with bangs. I’m 29 but people sometimes guess I’m anywhere from 28 to 30. I was carrying two paper grocery bags. You were walking by me in the opposite direction, carrying groceries, too, but only one bag. You asked if you could help and when I tried to explain that then your hands would be just as full as mine, I dropped a bottle of salsa, red, medium spicy Trader Joe’s brand (or Trader Jose’s, as you corrected me) but it didn’t shatter which we both found interesting. I told you my name was Lila (L-I-L-A) and you told me you had a cousin who pronounced it the same way but spelled it differently (L-E-I-L-A). It turned out we were both from the same area code in New Jersey (551) and we talked about our hometowns for a bit and that diner where everyone used to go after games in high school. Then you walked me home carrying one of my two bags even though I said it made no sense to, and you insisted on bringing them all the way inside for me, and then I made a pot of coffee even though I was only making one cup for you, and then you explained about French presses and Kerrig (sp?) machines. Then we both looked at the clock at the same time and realized we had somehow been talking about coffee for over an hour! You looked in my eyes and said it felt like we had somehow known each other for a long time and I said “I agree” and then we made out on my green quilted couch with a blue stain on the left armrest, and after our very first kiss you pulled away from me and caught your breath and just said the word “electric.” Then you kissed me again and we made out until we both looked at the clock at the same time again and realized we had been making out for three hours. Then we watched Iron Chef together and then Planet Earth, the African plains episode, and we both agreed how that was totally the jackpot Planet Earth, because so many are about jellyfish or algae but all anyone wants to really see are giraffes & monkeys & elephants, etc. I said I didn’t want you to leave and you said “me neither” and you slept over at my place in borrowed navy blue pajamas w/ yellow stripes and a hole in the left knee from when my brother visited me and we both said we weren’t cuddlers but we cuddled anyway for almost an hour, and then finally you slept on the left side of the bed which was perfect b/c I sleep on the right. I slept on my back which you said was pretentious and I said “what do you mean? That’s just how I sleep! How can it be pretentious?” and you said “like you think you’re a beautiful angel or something” and I said “maybe you’re just really into me” and we kissed again. Then you turned to sleep on your stomach w/ your head facing left and I said “doesn’t that hurt your neck?” and you said for some reason usually not, but sometimes yes, and that your fantasy when you were a kid was to get a bed with a hollowed out hole straight down from the pillow so you could sleep with your head face down and straight and I said, “Like a massage chair?” and it turned out you had never had a massage, so I said let’s go this weekend so you could check out if that was similar to what you had been thinking of as a kid, and if it’s how you want to sleep, it’d be weird, but hey, it’s your life, and you laughed and said “deal” twice. “Deal. Deal.” Like that. Then you realized your phone (a Motorola) had died and I didn’t have the right charger, and you said that’s probably a sign that you should get going anyway and take care of some stuff at home, and I said cool, and then we made a plan that you’d come over on Friday and I’d have to cook a dinner that included every single ingredient that I had in those Trader Joe’s bags, Iron Chef style. But then the next day, you didn’t come over or call to explain why, or reschedule it. I know that I gave you my number but now I realize that sometimes I write numbers in a scribble, especially when I’m excited, which I was, so maybe you haven’t been able to decode it or left a message for the wrong number. I know this sounds crazy to say after one encounter but I kind of fell for you pretty hard & it has been forever since I’ve connected to anyone like this & my heart is kind of broken in a million pieces. Hit me up if you think anything in this description matches anything you remember, and if so, maybe we can chill sometime? You were wearing a red t-shirt with a pocket.