One More Thing Page 9

  October 26th—Got all excited about the clock thing last night and built an early prototype! I did it in a hurry, though, and I wrote too big and ran out of space for numbers halfway through. Jane tried to be supportive. “Maybe you can just have every number count twice,” she said. Then how will they know which “six o’clock” it is, for instance? I asked. “They … they’d just have to know, I guess. From context?” she suggested. I really liked how supportive she was trying to be, but I knew this was too lazy to be a real solution. Alice would have known what to say.

  November 5th—Stuff with Jane getting a little tense. She keeps wanting to push the relationship forward. She says that we’ve been together “forever.” I said that maybe it feels that way, but that I kept track of it on the calendar and it’s actually been less than five months. She just stared at me. Then to change the subject I told her this new idea I was excited about: we’d choose a date in the future to make things official, and then every year after that, that day on the calendar would be like our own personal holiday—for just the two of us. Good idea, right? “You’d never remember it,” she said.

  November 6th—Things with Jane getting better. I think we’re going to work this out. I love Jane. That’s all that matters.

  November 11th—They sacrificed Jane today. Really happy for the Sun God.

  November 12th—Cold.

  November 13th—Dark.

  November 18th—Turns out those berries aren’t poison. So, now I’m the guy who discovered that.

  November 23rd—Alice came by and said she felt bad about the Jane stuff, and that I should hang out with her and her friends. Then it turned out her friends included this new guy she’s seeing who—get this—invented the diary. Anyway, to be the mature one, I said, “Oh, that’s great, I use that almost every day.” Guess what he says: “Oh, really? I invented that for girls.” What a dick. Then he said, “So, what else have you done?” and I said I have been totally distraught about Jane being sacrificed (I kind of exaggerated, but whatever) but that I plan on pulling it together soon and working on something new, maybe something with clocks. He said: “Well, you know what tomorrow is?” I said, yes, November 24th. He said, “No, tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.” And everyone said, “Awwww” and I was like Are you kidding me?! Do you know how long it took me to get people to stop talking like that?

  December 1st—I think the key to feeling better is to really just focus on work. Starting tomorrow, I am going to choose a new project to work on every day. It doesn’t have to be clocks; it just has to be something. Let’s go!!!!

  December 23rd—It seems like Alice and Diary Guy are really close this week. Really happy for them. Hard to see other people so happy this week for some reason. Ahhhh. Going to focus on work.

  December 25th—Why do I feel so lonely today?

  December 26th—Why am I so fat?

  December 30th—I told everyone I’m ending the year early. I know it was impulsive, but I just had to do it. I was ready for everyone to make fun of me, but it turned out people were way cooler about it than I thought they would be. “That’s great,” “About time,” “Just what I need.” It was actually the most praise I got since I invented the calendar in the first place.

  This year just got away from me somehow. Looking back, I realize how much I got sidetracked and how many months slipped by that I can’t even remember. The one nice thing is seeing how I used to be so worked up about Alice, and now I realize I really don’t care at all anymore. We’re going to be friends in the New Year, and I’m really looking forward to that. And the Jane thing ended the right way, I think—better than some long, drawn-out breakup.

  So this year wasn’t everything I hoped it would be, and I didn’t get all the months in that I wanted, but I know next year is going to be totally different. When the New Year starts, I’m going to wake up at dawn every day and get to work—see, I’d love to put a number on “dawn,” that’s why I think this new clock thing could be really big. I have so many ideas for it. For example: I either want seconds to be timed to a blink of an eye so people don’t have to say “in the blink of an eye”—they can just say “one second”—or I want to double the length of a second so people don’t always say, “Can you give me two seconds?!” They can just say “one second.” I have a lot of ideas like that.

  December 31st—So many parties going on tonight. On a Tuesday?! Not complaining, just saying.

  January 1st—Woke up at sun-past-mountain with a headache. So much for the “dawn” thing. But I still feel good.

  The Ghost of Mark Twain

  It was a dreary day in midtown Manhattan.

  A middle-school teacher had requested a meeting at the offices of an editor of Bantam Scholastic Classics politely and persistently for sixty consecutive days. The editor finally agreed to the meeting, even though the subject line in each email, “Regarding the Language in Huckleberry Finn,” gave him reason to assume the teacher’s agenda was to discuss what he considered to be the most tiresome topic in all of literature.

  “Hi. How are you? Please, have a seat.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Water?”

  “No thanks—actually, sure.”

  Both men were white and in their early thirties, with messy brown hair, mildly rumpled clothing, and a barely-but-always-burning glint of trouble in their eyes, like a pilot light. The minor mischief of the A-minus student was recognizable in each to the other as the two men nodded, smiled, and crossed one foot at a right angle over the opposite knee with a similarly delicate masculine casualness.

  “It’s about Huckleberry Finn.”

  “Yes!” said the editor. “What about it?”

  “First: it’s important for me to say that I truly believe Huckleberry Finn is an American classic.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I love it.”

  “As do I.”

  “Well, I’m here to propose you make some minor changes to the version you issue to schools. But first I want you to know that I’m no fan of censorship—”

  “Oh, but what you propose—‘minor changes,’ as you just put it—is actually far more destructive to a text than censorship,” said the editor, looking to ambush the teacher’s argument before it could assume its proper form. “In the face of censorship, a reader could hold out the hope of coming across the unaltered text at another point, through another means, and to experience it then with unbiased eyes. But when you change the material, and publish that as the material, you’re making it so that the material, in its true form, no longer has a chance to exist in any minds at all.”

  “That is a very compelling point,” replied the teacher. “Except there are circumstances in which a work has been made stronger by its evolution through the different cultural periods and forces, aren’t there? Take, for instance, The Arabian Nights, evolving through centuries of oral tradition. Or the works of Shakespeare: thanks to faulty memories, plagiarism, and regional preferences, we now have variations across numerous quartos and folios, and perhaps we’re the richer for it—who’s to say?”

  The editor smiled. This teacher seemed smarter than the usual Huck Finn controversialists, and was certainly the first one he had encountered who might be entitled to more than the simplest “please/no” exchange. Usually, the editor found those who sought him out to talk about Huckleberry Finn were the simplest-minded elitists who didn’t have the capacity to understand, let alone teach, historical context or irony—and yet who frowned sagaciously at him as though he were the literalist, the one who sadly just couldn’t get things like sensitivity and racial tensions and the way the world is today.

  “In any case,” the teacher continued, “there is one word in the book that has a power today that it did not have in the time of the book’s publication, and, for that reason, this one word merits, in my opinion, special attention.”

  “Are you talking about the word ‘nigger’?” said the editor, setting out again to shove his opponent of
f-balance by this blunt acknowledgment of the word his guest apparently considered so dangerous.

  “That is exactly the word I’m here to talk about!” said the teacher. “Good, you saved us some time. Now, again I bring this up because I really do love the book, and I see it as my personal obligation to preserve the intention of Twain’s spirit for future generations—”

  “As do I—”

  “And I’m not even asking you to take this word out!” pleaded the teacher. “It’s the number of times the word is used in the book that feels so wrong to me. Did you know that this epithet is used in Huckleberry Finn two hundred and nineteen times?”

  “Let me—please,” said the editor, pushing himself up from his chair to pace the room, upset at himself for having briefly gotten his hopes up for a less predictable discussion. “Let me end this conversation right now. There are uncomfortable words in Huckleberry Finn—no doubt. But it is our job to make sense of that. There is a well-earned cultural expectation that this book is not just a story of a boy and a raft but also a work that serves—in the way that only fiction can—as a truthful record, or at least a deeply truthful perspective, of the America of its time.”

  “Yes, but times have changed—”

  “Times always change! Our job is to make sense of this book in our own time. To try to wrestle with and understand the shades and meanings of its contrarianism, its ironies and ambiguities, its moral agenda and its amoral playfulness. For whatever reason they are there, the specific words of the text are inextricable from the spirit of the book, and my job,” announced the editor, surprised and a little moved to hear his purpose in life described in these terms, even by himself, “is to protect the spirit of Mark Twain. And so, while I am sorry that the word we are debating is such a tragic and loathsome and uncomfortable one, I refuse to publish an edition of Huckleberry Finn that takes the word out or even uses it any less.”

  “Oh, I don’t want you to use the word ‘nigger’ less,” said the teacher. “I want you to use it more!”

  “At this point—and you said it quite nicely yourself, in fact—there is a quote ‘well-earned cultural expectation’ surrounding Huckleberry Finn,” said the teacher, now beginning to pace the room himself.

  “And because of this, leaving the present number of the word’s appearances alone risks dooming the book to permanent irrelevance! Let me tell you why. In the case of Huckleberry Finn, the controversy so precedes the material itself that students are now delivered a book that is preloaded with two notions: on the one hand, it’s the most controversial book they’ll ever read in school—but on the other hand, it may well be our nation’s greatest masterpiece. These dual preconceptions have become so inextricably linked in the public’s mind that at this point to diminish one is to diminish the other. And the controversy over this word has escalated each year for as long as we’ve been alive—yet the number of times this word appears has not kept pace with the controversy! Therefore—to use a nautical metaphor we might both agree Sam Clemens would have smiled upon—the wake of expectations left by those who have rocked the boat has left us no choice but to add the word ‘nigger’ at least once or twice to every page.

  “And imagine how that will improve the book! White students, African American students, foreign students new to this country—when they’re handed this book, they’re all expecting something explosive, something controversial, something they’ll want to talk about long into the night afterward, not because they are told to do so by a teacher, but because they need to, because their heart beats quicker or slower depending on whether or not their friends agree with what they think. That’s the impact of the book that stays with you, isn’t it? It was Twain, after all, who said something to the effect of ‘Don’t let schooling get in the way of your education.’ Yes?”

  Yes, the editor indicated, nodding without moving his head.

  “Well! I would contend that nothing would make the reading of this great book feel less like schooling and more like a damn education than for students to discover the most charged word of our lifetime plastered all over the pages of the book they are handed in a classroom, to a degree that shocks even—no, especially!—the teachers who have handed the book out! Take a moment and imagine that! And in plenty of cases, there may be honest and enlightened teachers who have already confessed to having been not particularly offended the first time they read the book. Can you imagine their shock and shame at then finding a book absolutely packed to the margins with our most explosive and controversial epithet—page after page after page? Can you imagine the looks on those teachers’ faces—these teachers who had just moments earlier confessed to them that as they remembered it, the use of this word in this book wasn’t that big a deal? And, of course, the students will sense their teachers are off-balance—as students always have the uncanny ability to do—and will instinctively take that as their cue to lead the conversation—a conversation which rightfully belongs to them, wouldn’t you say?”

  Each man stared at the other, trying to figure out to whom he was talking.

  “I’m simply trying to protect the legacy of Mark Twain,” said the editor, scratching his face where a mustache would be.

  “So am I,” said the visitor, tapping his lips where a pipe would be.

  The Beautiful Girl in the Bookstore

  She loved the kind of books you could buy in stores that also sold things.

  Her favorite store, which was only two or three blocks away from where she and Sophie lived that year, depending on how you walked, was full of books, and it was also full of things.

  Sometimes in the afternoon, when she and her boyfriend ran out of things to talk about, which was often enough, they went to the bookstore.

  He looked at the books. She looked at everything.

  Some of the things that the store had: oversize fashion magazines from the 1940s and ’50s; vintage maps from back when states were just scraggly lines, just guesses; railroad spikes that had been made into bottle openers. There was a magnifying glass built out of a knotted clunk of iron with a foggy lens that magically made even the most serious face, her boyfriend’s face, for example, evaporate into a vague and bloated and goofy smile that never failed to make her laugh.

  Things like that.

  “How good does this book smell,” she said, pulling a paperback from a shelf. “Like dust on a bottle of vanilla.” She turned it to read the front. “Salinger! I love him. Four dollars. Perfect!”

  She always thought how much better the store would look if they arranged the books at least a little bit by color. She only brought this up once, the first time she thought it, because he hated that idea, a lot. But sometimes when no one was looking, she would shuffle one or two books in that direction. And she was right, it did look better that way.

  “You know what would make this store perfect?”

  He said he didn’t.

  “A photo booth!”

  He smiled but said that he didn’t agree.

  In the end, this one wasn’t for her. She waited until a morning fog of dishonesty settled over them one day, and she disappeared into it. She loved him, but she never quite got over the suspicion that she was just his favorite thing in the bookstore.

  MONSTER: The Roller Coaster

  The almost-legendary artist Christo was on the verge of completing a dream that he had held close through his entire career: to design an American roller coaster inspired by nothing less profound than life itself—life, the ultimate roller coaster.

  Today was an important one for Christo. It was the day that he and his financiers would observe the reactions of the most consequential people who would ever ride the ride: the twelve persons selected at random for a small focus group.

  Each member of the focus group took a seat on the wrong side of a wall of one-way glass. (Ah, or was it the right side, when their opinions mattered so!) They were seated along the safely rounded rim of a lacquered oval table, each behind a placard that identified him or her by a bo
ld capital number. (Did numbers have capitals? These certainly seemed to be!)

  To Christo, the twelve souls who convened in this dark room on this beautiful day appeared to be a thrillingly, even transcendently average-looking group. But he was careful, even in the privacy of his own mind, not to condescend to them in any way: these twelve were representatives of those whose approval he sought the most, and it would be an unfair and ultimately unsatisfying hedge on his hopes if he were to diminish them now. After all, who better than they to judge an amusement park roller coaster? Who better than they to judge life?

  “All right, everyone,” said Tom, the focus group leader. “What did people think?”

  “I didn’t like all the ups and downs,” said 1.

  “I wanted more ups and downs,” said 2.

  “Why did the family part at the beginning end so abruptly?” asked 3.

  “I hated the family part!” said 10.

  “Also, why were there two of them?” asked 4. “There was that track that took you out of the family at the beginning, and it was so exciting and sudden but it lasted like two seconds and led you right to another part that ended up almost exactly the same as the first one.”

  “It wasn’t exactly the same,” clarified 5. “But yeah, it had a lot of the same dynamics.”

  “I liked how we kept going in circles,” said 8.

  “I actually felt pretty sick from all those loops during the ride,” said 1.

  “Me too,” said 12. “But when you’re not right in the middle of it, and you just take in all the patterns, it looks really beautiful.”

  “Yeah,” said 10. “When you look back at the end, and you see all the people way back at the beginning, looking so small and everything, about to go on those same loops you just went on? That’s really cool. You forget that when you were on that part of the ride, you were actually throwing up all over the place.”

  “Did people like certain parts of the ride more than others?”