Sorry Please Thank You (21 page)
Read Sorry Please Thank You Online
Authors: Charles Yu
10 A man named Chang Hsueh-liang
has possessed the book seventy-three times. No other individual has owned it more than six times.
7 Why
7.1 Why
would someone ever give this book away?
8 A man
8.1 Looking for what was there
8.1.1 Trying to name it
8.1.1.1 Naming being one way
to locate something not quite lost, and not quite found
8.1.1.1.1 A name also seeming
to be a necessary AND sufficient condition to possession of an idea, a name being a kind of idea-cage.
10.1 Little is known about Chang, a general in the Chinese army, except that he is believed to have lost a child, a newborn daughter, in a freak accident while on a brief holiday with his family.
9 Something else you need to realize about the book
9.1 Is that
The sheer number of pages in the book is such
that ordinary human fingers cannot turn the pages in a reliably repeatable fashion. Simply breathing in the same room as the book will cause the book’s pages to flail about wildly. Even the Brownian motion of particles has been known to move several hundred pages at a time.
9.2 If you ever lose your place in the book
it is unlikely that you will ever be able to return to the same page again in your lifetime.
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6.1.1 One reason
why someone would give this book away: at some point, whether out of frustration or a sense of completion, or a desire to impose such a system on others, a possessor will pass the book on to another user, by excising his or her name from the To: line on the
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5.2.1 Each possessor of the book
The various possessors of the book can be traced, from which
4
10.1.1 The incident
Onlookers who witnessed the incident say there were no words in their language to describe what occurred, only that “the water took her” and that although “nothing impossible happened,” it was, statistically speaking, a “once-in-a-universe event.”
10.2 It is unclear whether Chang
was repeatedly seeking out the book, or it kept finding its way back to him.
10.3 A medal of some sort, and two insects,
are believed to have been placed inside the book by Chang.
10.3.1 The general problem of categorization
Although it is worth noting that the location of these objects is unstable, due to a phenomenon particular to The Book of Categories known as “wobbling,” which can result from stored conceptual potential energy escaping through the frame of The Inner Book and resonating with The Outer Book.
10.5 It is clear from certain sites in the book
that Chang remained obsessed with naming what had happened to his child.
10.5.1 Chang’s last entry
is a clump of (A)CTE paper consisting of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of blank pages, known as The Chang Region. On each page of The Chang Region of the book is written what appears to be an ancient form of a Chinese character. Scholars disagree as to the identity of the character.
11 Eventually, a possessor of the book comes to realize
how hard it is to find any given page, lost among the pages. Trying to find that slice, to cut through it on either side, before the page has been lost.
8.1.1.1.1.1 A name actually being
a memorial to the site where an idea once rested, momentarily, before moving on.
8.1.1.1.1.1.1 If you listen carefully,
you can hear it in there, but when you look inside, the
idea-cage is always empty, and in its place, the concrete, the particular, something formerly alive, now dead and smashed.
10.1.1.1 Chang’s daughter
was five weeks old when she died. For reasons unknown, she had yet to be named.
1
Which itself is listed in The Book of Books of Categories, Volume III, p. 21573, Row K, Column FF.
2
And counting.
3
The Intended Purpose is unknown, so this is basically just a wild-assed guess.
4
Thackery T. Lambshead himself has been the caretaker of the book on two separate occasions, each time receiving it from Bertrand Russell, and each time passing it to Alfred North Whitehead.
Murray chooses The Brad™ and right away feels he’s made a mistake.
“Let me ask you something,” the sales guy says. “Do you feel you’re making a mistake?”
It’s like he’s in my head,
Murray thinks, but he tries not to show any indication either way because this guy’s good and he knows it, and Murray knows it, and the guy knows Murray knows it. The sales guy’s name is Rick, which strikes Murray as an appropriately false name for an unusually false person. Rick says something rehearsed about how you should try to do at least one thing each and every day that scares the living crap out of you, or some similar scrap of wisdom from a daily inspirational calendar. The truth is, though, that Murray does want to be scared or, if not exactly scared, then perhaps just a little out of control, or a lot out of control, that feeling of not knowing what is going to happen next but also, on top of that, or maybe underneath that, or wrapped all around it, a feeling that the danger is temporary and all part of a larger scheme, toward his ultimate triumph or redemption or at least escape to safety. His whole life Murray has always felt
like something was just about to happen, but never quite seems to, as if any moment now, his life is about to start, the day is approaching, when all of it starts to come together or fall apart for the purpose of later coming back together, the feeling that every little detail, from the coffee he spilled on his shirt this morning to the song he heard on the radio in his car on the way here, the time he spends staring in his bathroom mirror wondering what is so unlovable about his face, Murray wants to feel that all of it, all of
this
is leading toward something big, wants to feel anything, as long as it is real.
The sales guy puts the paper in front of him and shows him where to sign and Murray is confused:
this is a real estate contract?
The sales guy looks like he has gotten this question a million times and smiles a smile that Murray thinks is probably meant to communicate,
hey,
nothing to worry about,
you’re in good hands here,
or something like that, but the gesture, a kind of practiced sincerity, is having the opposite effect.
“It’s a 2BR/2BA lifestyle,” Rick says.
“It’s a condo.”
“We prefer to call it a managed experiential product,” Rick says.
It’s warm in the room, and Murray has been sitting here, his complimentary iced lime-passion-fruit green tea sweating onto the salesman’s desk, for close to an hour, going back and forth between The Brad™ and The Jake™. How the heck is he supposed to make a choice like this? Just like this? Right here and now, locking himself in forever?
No, no,
the sales guy reassures him, Murray has seven days to change his mind, no questions asked. In fact,
it’s actually state law,
Rick says, as if he had just remembered it, but it sounds to Murray like just one more part of the pitch, like a line, as if Rick is just reciting from a script, verbatim, right out of a playbook, right down to the word “actually,” which Murray realizes should make him feel icky, like a customer, but actually the
actually,
the idea that there might be a script, that this sales guy whose real name may or may not be Rick, the possibility that this Rick or “Rick” sitting across from him might not really be talking to Murray but in some sense performing, that is
actually
what finally gets Murray, not so much the performance by Rick (or maybe the performance by “Rick”) itself but what that would imply, the prospect of a structured interaction, of
going through something,
what Murray has always thought of as the stuff of life, the chance that, for once, he might get to be tangled in that stuff, a bit of drama for an old guy like Murray who all his life has never really been able to afford much in the way of drama. What does he have to look back on, to look forward to? He is retired now, after forty years, with a small pension, small but enough. A widower, with a few friends, and a son who doesn’t call him enough.
Maybe I am making a mistake,
Murray thinks,
but maybe that’s what’s been missing
. Mistakes. Risk. The chance of something going right. The willingness to look like a fool in the hope that he might actually get to feel something again.
So Murray signs.
Rick congratulates him on his decision, and right
away the air-conditioning kicks in. Murray feels a little bit tricked, realizing they’d been keeping it warm all that time, but before he can think too hard, Rick is moving Murray along.
“What is that?” Murray says.
“That’s your sound track,” Rick tells him.
“Who picked it?”
“It comes with The Brad.”
“Does it seem kind of loud to you?” Murray asks.
“You’ll get used to it,” Rick says. “People can get used to anything.”
Murray has a hard time believing it. “Seems kind of loud.”
“Come on,” Rick says. “Let me show you to your new life.”
Then he flicks open a hidden compartment on the side of the desk and touches a button and the walls fall away. They’re still sitting at the desk but now the desk is outside, they are outside, in the middle of a very large, very dark green lawn, the grass mown immaculately, smelling so much like grass that Murray almost wonders if what he is smelling is actual grass or a laboratory-synthesized version of the odor of grass that smells even more like grass than grass itself.
“What’s your favorite season?” Rick asks Murray.
“I don’t know,” Murray says. “Fall, I guess.”
Rick hits another button and all of the leaves on the trees begin to float down from the branches, great flat
blankets, canopies of yellow and orange and ocher and now the air smells different.
“I’ve always loved Autumn®,” Rick explains. “It has the best music.”
Murray can smell a mixture of things: the wafting perfumed air that hits you when you walk into a fancy department store. A little bit of that new car smell. The smell of paper and high-quality ink from a mailbox full of glossy brochures, catalogs for expensive home appliances. A leafy, windy smell. The smell of cold itself, the smell of wanting to be indoors, shaking off your coat, the smell of the season of roasting things and sipping things and buying things.
“The Brad is our most popular offering in Adult Contemporary,” Rick says. Murray looks down and realizes they are on some kind of path indicated by a painted golden line, subtly blended into the landscaping, but clearly demarcating their course. Rick pulls a gleaming key from his pocket and hands it to Murray with a bit of a flourish. Murray puts the key into the keyhole and turns it. With a heavy click of the tumblers, the faux-mahogany door opens and they are both hit by a wave of new-house smell, the chemical-tinged perfume of clean carpets, a swirled-together mixture, aromas of wood and leather and fresh paint.
Murray stands there inside his new The Brad™ taking it all in. On a flat-screen television in his entryway there is a listing of today’s lifestyle events.
“There’s tai chi by the duck pond at two thirty today,”
Murray says, reading from the schedule. “Followed by an ice cream social on the lanai.”
“Yes, yes, there is that. And so much more,” Rick says. He tells Murray that it’s a series of emotional flavors, designer moods, a Palazzo-level recreational narrative.
“Timeshare,” Murray mumbles. “You sold me a timeshare.”
“Yeah,” Rick admits, breaking character. “I did, didn’t I?” Rick allows himself a slight grin, a little internal high-five for another sales job well done.
“I still have seven days to change my mind.”
“This is true,” Rick says. “But you won’t.”
“How do you know?”
Rick takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and is silent for a long five seconds. Then he puts his hands firmly but warmly on Murray’s shoulders and looks him in the eye.
“Murray, I have to tell you something. You made a huge mistake. You should have trusted your gut instinct.”
“What?” Murray says, with more than a hint of panic. “What are you talking about?”
“You have cancer, Murray,” Rick says with a heavy, insincere sigh. “I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t understand,” Murray says. “How could I have cancer?”
Rick hands Murray a nine-by-twelve manila envelope. Murray’s name and Social Security number are printed on a label in the upper right-hand corner. Murray takes it, and it feels stiff and surprisingly weighty, as if there might be a thick sheaf of lab results in there, or X‑rays, or some other
grim document laying out his future as a set of probabilities or regions of fuzzy dark gray, darkness and grayness that are growing by the day.
