What The?
What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the
steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty
melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a
teakettle that reads in Dad"s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of
kettles that sings the chorus of "Yellow Submarine," which is a song by the
Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d"être, which
is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train
my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I"d train it
to say, "Wasn"t me!" every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever
made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles,
which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would
say, "Ce n"étais pas moi!"
What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them,
and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could
be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at
night you could hear everyone"s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of
like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone"s hearts would start to
beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their
menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don"t really
want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the
hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a
houseboat, because the babies wouldn"t have had time to match up their
heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City
Marathon it would sound like war.
And also, there are so many times when you need to make a
quick escape, but humans don"t have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so
what about a birdseed shirt?
Anyway.
My first jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. Self-
defense was something that I was extremely curious about, for obvious
reasons, and Mom thought it would be good for me to have a physical activity
besides tambourining, so my first jujitsu class was three and a half months
ago. There were fourteen kids in the class, and we all had on neat white
robes. We practiced bowing, and then we were all sitting down Native
American style, and then Sensei Mark asked me to go over to him. "Kick my
privates," he told me. That made me feel self-conscious. "Excusez-moi?" I
told him. He spread his legs and told me, "I want you to kick my privates as
hard as you can." He put his hands at his sides, and took a breath in, and
closed his eyes, and that"s how I knew that actually he meant
business. "Jose," I told him, and inside I was thinking, What the? He told
me, "Go on, guy. Destroy my privates." "Destroy your privates?" With his
eyes still closed he cracked up a lot and said, "You couldn"t destroy my
privates if you tried. That"s what"s going on here. This is a demonstration of
the well-trained body"s ability to absorb a direct blow. Now destroy my
privates." I told him, "I"m a pacifist," and since most people my age don"t
know what that means, I turned around and told the others, "I don"t think it"s
right to destroy people"s privates. Ever." Sensei Mark said, "Can I ask you
something?" I turned back around and told him, " "Can I ask you something?"
is asking me something." He said, "Do you have dreams of becoming a
jujitsu master?" "No," I told him, even though I don"t have dreams of running
the family jewelry business anymore. He said, "Do you want to know how a
jujitsu student becomes a jujitsu master?" "I want to know everything," I told
him, but that isn"t true anymore either. He told me, "A jujitsu student
becomes a jujitsu master by destroying his master"s privates." I told
him, "That"s fascinating." My last jujitsu class was three and a half months
ago.
I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now, because
even after everything I"m still wearing heavy boots, and sometimes it helps to
play a good beat. My most impressive song that I can play on my tambourine
is "The Flight of the Bumblebee," by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, which is also
the ring tone I downloaded for the cell phone I got after Dad died. It"s pretty
amazing that I can play "The Flight of the Bumblebee," because you have to
hit incredibly fast in parts, and that"s extremely hard for me, because I don"t
really have wrists yet. Ron offered to buy me a five-piece drum set. Money
can"t buy me love, obviously, but I asked if it would have Zildjian cymbals. He
said, "Whatever you want," and then he took my yo-yo off my desk and
started to walk the dog with it. I know he just wanted to be friendly, but it
made me incredibly angry. "Yo-yo moi!" I told him, grabbing it back. What I
really wanted to tell him was "You"re not my dad, and you never will be."
Isn"t it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even
though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn"t going to be
room to bury anyone anymore? For my ninth birthday last year, Grandma
gave me a subscription to National Geographic, which she calls "the National
Geographic." She also gave me a white blazer, because I only wear white
clothes, and it"s too big to wear so it will last me a long time. She also gave
me Grandpa"s camera, which I loved for two reasons. I asked why he didn"t
take it with him when he left her. She said, "Maybe he wanted you to have it."
I said, "But I was negative-thirty years old." She said, "Still." Anyway, the
fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more
people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if
everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn"t, because there aren"t
enough skulls!
So what about skyscrapers for dead people that were built down?
They could be underneath the skyscrapers for living people that are built up.
You could bury people one hundred floors down, and a whole dead world
could be underneath the living one. Sometimes I think it would be weird if
there were a skyscraper that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in
place. So if you wanted to go to the ninety-fifth floor, you"d just press the 95
button and the ninety-fifth floor would come to you. Also, that could be
extremely useful, because if you"re on the ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits
below you, the building could take you to the ground, and everyone could be
safe, even if you left your birdseed shirt at home that day.
I"ve only been in a limousine twice ever. The first time was terrible,
even though the limousine was wonderful. I"m not allowed to watch TV at
home, and I"m not allowed to watch TV in limousines either, but it was still
neat that there was a TV there. I asked if we could go by school, so
Toothpaste and The Minch could see me in a limousine. Mom said that
school wasn"t on the way, and we couldn"t be late to the cemetery. "Why
not?" I asked, which I actually thought was a good question, because if you
think about it, why not? Even though I"m not anymore, I used to be an
atheist, which means I didn"t believe in things that couldn"t be observed. I
believed that once you"re dead, you"re dead forever, and you don"t feel
anything, and you don"t even dream. It"s not that I believe in things that can"t
be observed now, because I don"t. It"s that I believe that things are extremely
complicated. And anyway, it"s not like we were actually burying him, anyway.
Even though I was trying hard for it not to, it was annoying me
how Grandma kept touching me, so I climbed into the front seat and poked
the driver"s shoulder until he gave me some attention. "What. Is. Your.
Designation." I asked in Stephen Hawking voice. "Say what?" "He wants to
know your name," Grandma said from the back seat. He handed me his card.
GERALD THOMPSON
Sunshine Limousine
serving the five boroughs
(212) 570-7249
I handed him my card and told him, "Greetings. Gerald. I. Am.
Oskar." He asked me why I was talking like that. I told him, "Oskar"s CPU is
a neural-net processor. A learning computer. The more contact he has with
humans, the more he learns." Gerald said, "O" and then he said "K." I
couldn"t tell if he liked me or not, so I told him, "Your sunglasses are one
hundred dollars." He said, "One seventy-five." "Do you know a lot of curse
words?" "I know a couple." "I"m not allowed to use curse
words." "Bummer." "What"s "bummer"? " "It"s a bad thing." "Do you
know "shit"?" "That"s a curse, isn"t it?" "Not if you say "shiitake." " "Guess
not." "Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake." Gerald shook his head and
cracked up a little, but not in the bad way, which is at me. "I can"t even
say "hair pie," " I told him, "unless I"m talking about an actual pie made out of
rabbits. Cool driving gloves." "Thanks." And then I thought of something, so I
said it. "Actually, if limousines were extremely long, they wouldn"t need
drivers. You could just get in the back seat, walk through the limousine, and
then get out of the front seat, which would be where you wanted to go. So in
this situation, the front seat would be at the cemetery." "And I would be
watching the game right now." I patted his shoulder and told him, "When you
look up "hilarious" in the dictionary, there"s a picture of you."
In the back seat, Mom was holding something in her purse. I
could tell that she was squeezing it, because I could see her arm muscles.
Grandma was knitting white mittens, so I knew they were for me, even
though it wasn"t cold out. I wanted to ask Mom what she was squeezing and
why she had to keep it hidden. I remember thinking that even if I were
suffering hypothermia, I would never, ever put on those mittens.
"Now that I"m thinking about it," I told Gerald, "they could make an
incredibly long limousine that had its back seat at your mom"s VJ and its
front seat at your mausoleum, and it would be as long as your life." Gerald
said, "Yeah, but if everyone lived like that, no one would ever meet anyone,
right?" I said, "So?"
Mom squeezed, and Grandma knitted, and I told Gerald, "I kicked
a French chicken in the stomach once," because I wanted to make him
crack up, because if I could make him crack up, my boots could be a little
lighter. He didn"t say anything, probably because he didn"t hear me, so I
said, "I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once." "Huh?" "It
said, "Oeuf." " "What is that?" "It"s a joke. Do you want to hear another, or
have you already had un oeuf?" He looked at Grandma in the mirror and
said, "What"s he saying?" She said, "His grandfather loved animals more than
he loved people." I said, "Get it? Oeuf?"
I crawled back, because it"s dangerous to drive and talk at the
same time, especially on the highway, which is what we were on. Grandma
started touching me again, which was annoying, even though I didn"t want it
to be. Mom said, "Honey," and I said, "Oui," and she said, "Did you give a
copy of our apartment key to the mailman?" I thought it was so weird that
she would mention that then, because it didn"t have to do with anything, but I
think she was looking for something to talk about that wasn"t the obvious
thing. I said, "The mailperson is a mailwoman." She nodded, but not exactly
at me, and she asked if I"d given the mailwoman a key. I nodded yes,
because I never used to lie to her before everything happened. I didn"t have a
reason to. "Why did you do that?" she asked. So I told her, "Stan—" And she
said, "Who?" And I said, "Stan the doorman. Sometimes he runs around the
corner for coffee, and I want to be sure all of my packages get to me, so I
thought, if Alicia —" "Who?" "The mailwoman. If she had a key, she could
leave things inside our door." "But you can"t give a key to a
stranger." "Fortunately Alicia isn"t a stranger." "We have lots of valuable
things in our apartment." "I know. We have really great things." "Sometimes
people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped,
you know? What if she had stolen your things?" "She wouldn"t." "But what
if?" "But she wouldn"t." "Well, did she give you a key to her apartment?" She
was obviously mad at me, but I didn"t know why. I hadn"t done anything
wrong. Or if I had, I didn"t know what it was. And I definitely didn"t mean to do
it.
I moved over to Grandma"s side of the limousine and told
Mom, "Why would I need a key to her apartment?" She could tell that I was
zipping up the sleeping bag of myself, and I could tell that she didn"t really
love me. I knew the truth, which was that if she could have chosen, it would
have been my funeral we were driving to. I looked up at the limousine"s
sunroof, and I imagined the world before there were ceilings, which made me
wonder: Does a cave have no ceiling, or is a cave all ceiling? "Maybe you
could check with me next time, OK?" "Don"t be mad at me," I said, and I
reached over Grandma and opened and closed the door"s lock a couple of
times. "I"m not mad at you," she said. "Not even a little?" "No." "Do you still
love me?" It didn"t seem like the perfect time to mention that I had already
made copies of the key for the deliverer from Pizza Hut, and the UPS person,
and also the nice guys from Greenpeace, so they could leave me articles on
manatees and other animals that are going extinct when Stan is getting
coffee. "I"ve never loved you more."
"Mom?" "Yes?" "I have a question." "OK." "What are you
squeezing in your purse?" She pulled out her hand and opened it, and it was
empty. "Just squeezing," she said.
Even though it was an incredibly sad day, she looked so, so
beautiful. I kept trying to figure out a way to tell her that, but all of the ways I
thought of were weird and wrong. She was wearing the bracelet that I made
for her, and that made me feel like one hundred dollars. I love making jewelry
for her, because it makes her happy, and making her happy is another one of
my raisons d"être.
It isn"t anymore, but for a really long time it was my dream to take
over the family jewelry business. Dad constantly used to tell me I was too
smart for retail. That never made sense to me, because he was smarter than
me, so if I was too smart for retail, then he really must have been too smart
for retail. I told him that. "First of all," he told me, "I"m not smarter than you,
I"m more knowledgeable than you, and that"s only because I"m older than
you. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and
children are always smarter than their parents." "Unless the child is a mental
retard," I told him. He didn"t have anything to say about that. "You said "first
of all," so what"s second of all?" "Second of all, if I"m so smart, then why am I
in retail?" "That"s true," I said. And then I thought of something: "But wait a
minute, it won"t be the family jewelry business if no one in the family is
running it." He told me, "Sure it will. It"ll just be someone else"s family." I
asked, "Well, what about our family? Will we open a new business?" He
said, "We"ll open something." I thought about that my second time in a
limousine, when the renter and I were on our way to dig up Dad"s empty
coffin.
A great game that Dad and I would sometimes play on Sundays
was Reconnaissance Expedition. Sometimes the Reconnaissance
Expeditions were extremely simple, like when he told me to bring back
something from every decade in the twentieth century—I was clever and
brought back a rock—and sometimes they were incredibly complicated and
would go on for a couple of weeks. For the last one we ever did, which never
finished, he gave me a map of Central Park. I said, "And?" And he said, "And
what?" I said, "What are the clues?" He said, "Who said there had to be
clues?" "There are always clues." "That doesn"t, in itself, suggest
anything." "Not a single clue?" He said, "Unless no clues is a clue." "Is no
clues a clue?" He shrugged his shoulders, like he had no idea what I was
talking about. I loved that.
I spent all day walking around the park, looking for something that
might tell me something, but the problem was that I didn"t know what I was
looking for. I went up to people and asked if they knew anything that I should
know, because sometimes Dad would design Reconnaissance Expeditions
so I would have to talk to people. But everyone I went up to was just like,
What the? I looked for clues around the reservoir. I read every poster on every
lamppost and tree. I inspected the descriptions of the animals at the zoo. I
even made kite-fliers reel in their kites so I could examine them, although I
knew it was improbable. But that"s how tricky Dad could be. There was
nothing, which would have been unfortunate, unless nothing was a clue. Was
nothing a clue?
That night we ordered General Tso"s Gluten for dinner and I
noticed that Dad was using a fork, even though he was perfect with
chopsticks. "Wait a minute!" I said, and stood up. I pointed at his fork. "Is
that fork a clue?" He shrugged his shoulders, which to me meant it was a
major clue. I thought: Fork, fork. I ran to my laboratory and got my metal
detector out of its box in the closet. Because I"m not allowed to be in the
park alone at night, Grandma went with me. I started at the Eighty-sixth
Street entrance and walked in extremely precise lines, like I was one of the
Mexican guys who mow the lawn, so I wouldn"t miss anything. I knew the
insects were loud because it was summer, but I didn"t hear them because
my earphones covered my ears. It was just me and the metal underground.
Every time the beeps would get close together, I"d tell Grandma to
shine the flashlight on the spot. Then I"d put on my white gloves, take the
hand shovel from my kit, and dig extremely gently. When I saw something, I
used a paintbrush to get rid of the dirt, just like a real archeologist. Even
though I only searched a small area of the park that night, I dug up a quarter,
and a handful of paper clips, and what I thought was the chain from a lamp
that you pull to make the light go on, and a refrigerator magnet for sushi,
which I know about, but wish I didn"t. I put all of the evidence in a bag and
marked on a map where I found it.
When I got home, I examined the evidence in my laboratory under
my microscope, one piece at a time: a bent spoon, some screws, a pair of
rusty scissors, a toy car, a pen, a key ring, broken glasses for someone with
incredibly bad eyes . . .
I brought them to Dad, who was reading the New York Times at
the kitchen table, marking the mistakes with his red pen. "Here"s what I"ve
found," I said, pushing my pussy off the table with the tray of evidence. Dad
looked at it and nodded. I asked, "So?" He shrugged his shoulders like he
had no idea what I was talking about, and he went back to the paper. "Can"t
you even tell me if I"m on the right track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad
shrugged his shoulders again. "But if you don"t tell me anything, how can I
ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of
looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?"
He got up to get a drink of water, and I examined what he"d circled
on the page, because that"s how tricky he could be. It was in an article about
the girl who had disappeared, and how everyone thought the congressman
who was humping her had killed her. A few months later they found her body
in Rock Creek Park, which is in Washington, D.C., but by then everything
was different, and no one cared anymore, except for her parents.
statement, read to the hundreds of gathered press from a makeshift media
center off the back of the family home, Levy"s father adamantly restated his
confidence that his daughter would be found. "We will not stop looking until
we are given a definitive reason to stop looking, namely, Chandra"s return."
During the brief question and answer period that followed, a reporter from El
Pais asked Mr. Levy if by "return" he meant "safe return." Overcome with
emotion, Mr. Levy was unable to speak, and his lawyer took the
microphone. "We continue to hope and pray for Chandra"s safety, and will do
everything within
It wasn"t a mistake! It was a message to me!
I went back to the park every night for the next three nights. I dug
up a hair clip, and a roll of pennies, and a thumbtack, and a coat hanger, and
a 9V battery, and a Swiss Army knife, and a tiny picture frame, and a tag for
a dog named Turbo, and a square of aluminum foil, and a ring, and a razor,
and an extremely old pocket watch that was stopped at 5:37, although I
didn"t know if it was a.m. or p.m. But I still couldn"t figure out what it all
meant. The more I found, the less I understood.
I spread the map out on the dining room table, and I held down the
corners with cans of V8. The dots from where I"d found things looked like the
stars in the universe. I connected them, like an astrologer, and if you
squinted your eyes like a Chinese person, it kind of looked like the
word "fragile." Fragile. What was fragile? Was Central Park fragile? Was
nature fragile? Were the things I found fragile? A thumbtack isn"t fragile. Is a
bent spoon fragile? I erased, and connected the dots in a different way, to
make "door." Fragile? Door? Then I thought of porte, which is French for door,
obviously. I erased and connected the dots to make "porte." I had the
revelation that I could connect the dots to make "cyborg," and "platypus,"
and "boobs," and even "Oskar," if you were extremely Chinese. I could
connect them to make almost anything I wanted, which meant I wasn"t
getting closer to anything. And now I"ll never know what I was supposed to
find. And that"s another reason I can"t sleep.
Anyway.
I"m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent
documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My
favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven"t actually finished
it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn"t good at helping me.
One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen
Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how
the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever.
Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, "What you
have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back
of a giant tortoise." So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing
on. And she said, "But it"s turtles all the way down!"
I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be.
And also because I love tortoises.
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I
don"t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
One weird thing is that instead of using normal stamps, I used stamps from
my collection, including valuable ones, which sometimes made me wonder if
what I was really doing was trying to get rid of things. The first letter I wrote
was to Stephen Hawking. I used a stamp of Alexander Graham Bell.
Dear Stephen Hawking,
Can I please be your protégé?
Thanks,
Oskar Schell
I thought he wasn"t going to respond, because he was such an
amazing person and I was so normal. But then one day I came home from
school and Stan handed me an envelope and said, "You"ve got mail!" in the
AOL voice I taught him. I ran up the 105 stairs to our apartment, and ran to
my laboratory, and went into my closet, and turned on my flashlight, and
opened it. The letter inside was typed, obviously, because Stephen Hawking
can"t use his hands, because he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which I
know about, unfortunately.
Thank you for your letter. Because of the large volume of mail I receive, I am
unable to write personal responses. Nevertheless, know that I read and save
every letter, with the hope of one day being able to give each the proper
response it deserves. Until that day,
Most sincerely,
Stephen Hawking
I called Mom"s cell. "Oskar?" "You picked up before it rang." "Is
everything OK?" "I"m gonna need a laminator." "A laminator?" "There"s
something incredibly wonderful that I want to preserve."
Dad always used to tuck me in, and he"d tell the greatest stories,
and we"d read the New York Times together, and sometimes he"d whistle "I
Am the Walrus," because that was his favorite song, even though he couldn"t
explain what it meant, which frustrated me. One thing that was so great was
how he could find a mistake in every single article we looked at. Sometimes
they were grammar mistakes, sometimes they were mistakes with
geography or facts, and sometimes the article just didn"t tell the whole story.
I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved
how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how
he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him
made my brain quiet. I didn"t have to invent a thing.
When Dad was tucking me in that night, the night before the worst
day, I asked if the world was a flat plate supported on the back of a giant
tortoise. "Excuse me?" "It"s just that why does the earth stay in place instead
of falling through the universe?" "Is this Oskar I"m tucking in? Has an alien
stolen his brain for experimentation?" I said, "We don"t believe in aliens." He
said, "The earth does fall through the universe. You know that, buddy. It"s
constantly falling toward the sun. That"s what it means to orbit." So I
said, "Obviously, but why is there gravity?" He said, "What do you mean why
is there gravity?" "What"s the reason?" "Who said there had to be a
reason?" "No one did, exactly." "My question was rhetorical." "What"s that
mean?" "It means I wasn"t asking it for an answer, but to make a
point." "What point?" "That there doesn"t have to be a reason." "But if there
isn"t a reason, then why does the universe exist at all?" "Because of
sympathetic conditions." "So then why am I your son?" "Because Mom and I
made love, and one of my sperm fertilized one of her eggs." "Excuse me
while I regurgitate." "Don"t act your age." "Well, what I don"t get is why do we
exist? I don"t mean how, but why." I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit
his head. He said, "We exist because we exist." "What the?" "We could
imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that
happened."
I understood what he meant, and I didn"t disagree with him, but I
didn"t agree with him either. Just because you"re an atheist, that doesn"t
mean you wouldn"t love for things to have reasons for why they are.
I turned on my shortwave radio, and with Dad"s help I was able to
pick up someone speaking Greek, which was nice. We couldn"t understand
what he was saying, but we lay there, looking at the glow-in-the-dark
constellations on my ceiling, and listened for a while. "Your grandfather
spoke Greek," he said. "You mean he speaks Greek," I said. "That"s right. He
just doesn"t speak it here." "Maybe that"s him we"re listening to." The front
page was spread over us like a blanket. There was a picture of a tennis
player on his back, who I guess was the winner, but I couldn"t really tell if he
was happy or sad.
"Dad?" "Yeah?" "Could you tell me a story?" "Sure." "A good
one?" "As opposed to all the boring ones I tell." "Right." I tucked my body
incredibly close into his, so my nose pushed into his armpit. "And you won"t
interrupt me?" "I"ll try not to." "Because it makes it hard to tell a story." "And
it"s annoying." "And it"s annoying."
The moment before he started was my favorite moment.
"Once upon a time, New York City had a sixth borough." "What"s
a borough?" "That"s what I call an interruption." "I know, but the story won"t
make any sense to me if I don"t know what a borough is." "It"s like a
neighborhood. Or a collection of neighborhoods." "So if there was once a
sixth borough, then what are the five boroughs?" "Manhattan, obviously,
Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx." "Have I ever been to any of
the other boroughs?" "Here we go." "I just want to know." "We went to the
Bronx Zoo once, a few years ago. Remember that?" "No." "And we"ve been to
Brooklyn to see the roses at the Botanic Garden." "Have I been to
Queens?" "I don"t think so." "Have I been to Staten Island?" "No." "Was there
really a sixth borough?" "I"ve been trying to tell you." "No more interruptions. I
promise."
When the story finished, we turned the radio back on and found
someone speaking French. That was especially nice, because it reminded
me of the vacation we just came back from, which I wish never ended. After a
while, Dad asked me if I was awake. I told him no, because I knew that he
didn"t like to leave until I had fallen asleep, and I didn"t want him to be tired for
work in the morning. He kissed my forehead and said good night, and then
he was at the door.
"Dad?" "Yeah, buddy?" "Nothing."
The next time I heard his voice was when I came home from
school the next day. We were let out early, because of what happened. I
wasn"t even a little bit panicky, because both Mom and Dad worked in
midtown, and Grandma didn"t work, obviously, so everyone I loved was safe.
I know that it was 10:18 when I got home, because I look at my
watch a lot. The apartment was so empty and so quiet. As I walked to the
kitchen, I invented a lever that could be on the front door, which would trigger
a huge spoked wheel in the living room to turn against metal teeth that would
hang down from the ceiling, so that it would play beautiful music, like
maybe "Fixing a Hole" or "I Want to Tell You," and the apartment would be
one huge music box.
After I petted Buckminster for a few seconds, to show him I loved
him, I checked the phone messages. I didn"t have a cell phone yet, and when
we were leaving school, Toothpaste told me he"d call to let me know whether
I was going to watch him attempt skateboarding tricks in the park, or if we
were going to go look at Playboy magazines in the drugstore with the aisles
where no one can see what you"re looking at, which I didn"t feel like doing,
but still.
Message one. Tuesday, 8:52 a.m. Is anybody there? Hello? It"s Dad. If you"re
there, pick up. I just tried the office, but no one was picking up. Listen,
something"s happened. I"m OK. They"re telling us to stay where we are and
wait for the firemen. I"m sure it"s fine. I"ll give you another call when I have a
better idea of what"s going on. Just wanted to let you know that I"m OK, and
not to worry. I"ll call again soon.
There were four more messages from him: one at 9:12, one at
9:31, one at 9:46, and one at 10:04. I listened to them, and listened to them
again, and then before I had time to figure out what to do, or even what to
think or feel, the phone started ringing.
It was 10:22:27.
I looked at the caller ID and saw that it was him.
Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Safran Foer. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Continues...
Excerpted from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Safran Foer. Excerpted by permission.
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