Devoir de Philosophie

mention," I stirred my coffee.

Publié le 06/01/2014

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mention," I stirred my coffee. "But I hear it's supposed to get crummy tonight. Or that's what the man on the radio said, nyway," I shrugged, I didn't know what "crummy" meant, "I was gonna go buy some tuna fish at the A&P. I clipped some oupons from the Post this morning. They're five cans for the price of three. What a deal! I don't even like tuna fish. It ives me stomachaches, to be frank. But you can't beat that price," she was trying to make me laugh, but I shrugged my houlders and stirred my coffee, "I don't know anymore," she said. "The weather is one hundred dollars, and the man on he radio says it's gonna get crummy tonight, so maybe I should go to the park instead, even if I burn easily. And anyway, t's not like I'm gonna eat the tuna fish tonight, right? Or ever, if I'm being frank. It gives me stomachaches, to be perfectly rank. So there's no rush in that department. But the weather, now that won't stick around. Or at least it never has. And I should tell you also that my doctor says getting out is good for me. My eyes are crummy, and he says I don't get out nearly enough, and that if I got out a little more, if I were a little less afraid..." She was extending a hand that I didn't know ow to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence, she said, "You don't want to talk to me, do you?" I took my daybook out of my knapsack and found the next blank page, the second to last. "I don't speak," I wrote. "I'm sorry." She looked at he piece of paper, then at me, then back at the piece of paper, she covered her eyes with her hands and cried, tears seeped between her fingers and collected in the little webs, she cried and cried and cried, there weren't any napkins nearby, so I ripped the page from the book--"I don't speak. I'm sorry."--and used it to dry her cheeks, my explanation nd apology ran down her face like mascara, she took my pen from me and wrote on the next blank page of my daybook, he final one: Please marry me flipped back and pointed at, "Ha ha ha!" She flipped forward and pointed at, "Please marry me." I flipped back and ointed at, "I'm sorry, this is the smallest I've got." She flipped forward and pointed at, "Please marry me." I flipped back nd pointed at, "I'm not sure, but it's late." She flipped forward and pointed at, "Please marry me," and this time put her finger on "Please," as if to hold down the page and end the conversation, or as if she were trying to push through the word and into what she really wanted to say. I thought about life, about my life, the embarrassments, the little coincidences, the shadows of alarm clocks on bedside tables. I thought about my small victories and everything I'd seen destroyed, I'd swum through mink coats on my parents' bed while they hosted downstairs, I'd lost the only person I could have spent my only life with, I'd left behind a thousand tons of marble, I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself. I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless. None of my pets know their own names, what kind of person am I? I lifted her finger like a record needle and flipped back, one page at a time: Help GOOGOLPLEX   As for the bracelet Mom wore to the funeral, what I did was I converted Dad's last voice message into Morse code, and I used sky-blue beads for silence, maroon beads for breaks between letters, violet beads for breaks between words, and ong and short pieces of string between the beads for long and short beeps, which are actually called blips, I think, or omething. Dad would have known. It took me nine hours to make, and I had thought about giving it to Sonny, the omeless person who I sometimes see standing outside the Alliance Française, because he puts me in heavy boots, or aybe to Lindy, the neat old woman who volunteers to give tours at the Museum of Natural History, so I could be something special to her, or even just to someone in a wheelchair. But instead I gave it to Mom. She said it was the best gift she'd ever received. I asked her if it was better than the Edible Tsunami, from when I was interested in edible eteorological events. She said, "Different." I asked her if she was in love with Ron. She said, "Ron is a great person," hich was an answer to a question I didn't ask. So I asked again. "True or false: you are in love with Ron." She put her hand with the ring on it in her hair and said, "Oskar, Ron is my friend." I was going to ask her if she was humping her riend, and if she had said yes, I would have run away, and if she had said no, I would have asked if they heavy-petted ach other, which I know about. I wanted to tell her she shouldn't be playing Scrabble yet. Or looking in the mirror. Or turning the stereo any louder than what you needed just to hear it. It wasn't fair to Dad, and it wasn't fair to me. But I uried it all inside me. I made her other Morse code jewelry with Dad's messages--a necklace, an anklet, some dangly earrings, a tiara--but the bracelet was definitely the most beautiful, probably because it was the last, which made it the most precious. "Mom?" "Yes?" "Nothing." Even after a year, I still had an extremely difficult time doing certain things, like taking showers, for some reason, and getting into elevators, obviously. There was a lot of stuff that made me panicky, like suspension bridges, germs, airplanes, fireworks, Arab people on the subway (even though I'm not racist), Arab people in restaurants and coffee shops and other public places, scaffolding, sewers and subway grates, bags without owners, shoes, people with mustaches, smoke, knots, tall buildings, turbans. A lot of the time I'd get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way. It's just that everything was incredibly far away from me. It was worst at night. I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was. One night, after what felt like a googolplex inventions, I went to Dad's closet. We used to Greco-Roman wrestle on the floor in there, and tell hilarious jokes, and once we hung a pendulum from the ceiling and put a circle of dominoes on the floor to prove that the earth rotated. But I hadn't gone back in since he died. Mom was with Ron in the living room, listening to music too loud and playing board games. She wasn't missing Dad. I held the doorknob for a while before I turned it. Even though Dad's coffin was empty, his closet was full. And even after more than a year, it still smelled like shaving. I touched all of his white T-shirts. I touched his fancy watch that he never wore and the extra laces for his sneakers that would never run around the reservoir again. I put my hands into the pockets of all of his jackets (I found a receipt for a cab, a wrapper from a miniature Krackle, and the business card of a diamond supplier). I put my feet into his slippers. I looked at myself in his metal shoehorn. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes, but I couldn't sleep, not after hours, and it made my boots lighter to be around his things, and to touch stuff that he had touched, and to make the hangers hang a little straighter, even though I knew it didn't matter. His tuxedo was over the chair he used to sit on when he tied his shoes, and I thought, Weird. Why wasn't it hung up with his suits? Had he come from a fancy party the night before he died? But then why would he have taken off his tuxedo without hanging it up? Maybe it needed to be cleaned? But I didn't remember a fancy party. I remembered him tucking me in, and us listening to a person speaking Greek on the shortwave radio, and him telling me a story about New York's ixth borough. If I hadn't noticed anything else weird, I wouldn't have thought about the tuxedo again. But I started oticing a lot. here was a pretty blue vase on the highest shelf. What was a pretty blue vase doing way up there? I couldn't reach it, bviously, so I moved over the chair with the tuxedo still on it, and then I went to my room to get the Collected Shakespeare set that Grandma bought for me when she found out that I was going to be Yorick, and I brought those over, our tragedies at a time, until I had a stack that was tall enough. I stood on all of that and it worked for a second. But then had the tips of my fingers on the vase, and the tragedies started to wobble, and the tuxedo was incredibly distracting, and the next thing was that everything was on the floor, including me, and including the vase, which had shattered. "I didn't do it!" I hollered, but they didn't even hear me, because they were playing music too loud and cracking up too much. I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up. Even though I knew I shouldn't, I gave myself a bruise. I started to clean everything up, and that was when I noticed something else weird. In the middle of all of that glass was a little envelope, about the size of a wireless Internet card. What the? I opened it up, and inside there was a key. What the, what the? It was a weird-looking key, obviously to something extremely important, because it was fatter and shorter than a normal key. I couldn't explain it: a fat and short key, in a little envelope, in a blue vase, on the highest shelf in his loset. he first thing I did was the logical thing, which was to be very secretive and try the key in all of the locks in the partment. Even without trying I knew it wasn't for the front door, because it didn't match up with the key that I wear on string around my neck to let myself in when nobody's home. I tiptoed so I wouldn't be noticed, and I tried the key in the oor to the bathroom, and the different bedroom doors, and the drawers in Mom's dresser. I tried it in the desk in the itchen where Dad used to pay the bills, and in the closet next to the linen closet where I sometimes hid when we played ide and seek, and in Mom's jewelry box. But it wasn't for any of them. n bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the eservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the eatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New ork was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened--like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack--an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the eservoir. nyway. he next morning I told Mom that I couldn't go to school, because I was too sick. It was the first lie that I had to tell. She put her hand on my forehead and said, "You do feel a bit hot." I said, "I took my temperature and it's one hundred point even degrees." That was the second lie. She turned around and asked me to zip up the back of her dress, which she ould have done herself, but she knew that I loved to do it. She said, "I'll be in and out of meetings all day, but Grandma can come by if you need anything, and I'll call to check on you every hour." I told her, "If I don't answer, I'm probably sleeping or going to the bathroom." She said, "Answer." nce she left for work, I put on my clothes and went downstairs. Stan was sweeping up in front of the building. I tried to get past him without him noticing, but he noticed. "You don't look sick," he said, brushing a bunch of leaves into the street. I told him, "I feel sick." He asked, "Where's Mr. Feeling Sick going?" I told him, "To the drugstore on Eighty-fourth to get some cough drops." Lie #3. Where I actually went was the locksmith's store, which is Frazer and Sons, on Seventyninth. "Need some more copies?" Walt asked. I gave him a high-five, and I showed him the key that I had found, and asked him what he could tell me about it. "It's for some kind of lockbox," he said, holding it up to his face and looking at it over his glasses. "A safe, I'm guessing. You can tell it's for a lockbox by its build." He showed me a rack that had a ton of keys on it. "See, it's not like any of these. It's much thicker. Harder to break." I touched all the keys that I could reach, and that made me feel OK, for some reason. "But it's not for a fixed safe, I don't think. Nothing too big. Maybe something portable. Could be a safe-deposit box, actually. An old one. Or some kind of fire-retardant cabinet." That made me crack up a little, even though I know there's nothing funny about being a mental retard. "It's an old key," he said. "Could be twenty, thirty years old." "How can you tell?" "Keys are what I know." "You're cool." "And not many lockboxes use keys anymore." "They don't?" "Well, hardly anyone uses keys anymore." "I use keys," I told him, and I showed him my apartment key. "I know you do," he said. "But people like you are a dying breed. It's all electronic these days. Keypads. Thumbprint recognition." "That's so awesome." "I like keys." I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots. "Well, if people like me are a dying breed, then what's going to happen to your business?" "We'll become specialized," he said, "like a typewriter shop. We're useful now, but soon we'll be interesting." "Maybe you need a new business." "I like this business." I said, "I have a question that I was just wondering." He said, "Shoot." "Shoot?" "Shoot. Go ahead. Ask." "Are you Frazer, or are you Son?" "I'm Grandson, actually. My grandfather started the shop." "Cool." "But I suppose I'm also Son, since my ad ran things when he was alive. I guess I'm Frazer, too, since my son works here during the summers." said, "I have another question." "Shoot." "Do you think I could find the company that made this key?" "Anyone could've ade it." "Well then, what I want to know is how can I find the lock that it opens?" "I'm afraid I can't help you with that, ny more than telling you to try it in every lock you come across. I could always make you a copy, if you'd like." "I could ave a googolplex keys." "Googolplex?" "A googol to the googol power." "Googol?" "That's a one with one hundred eroes after it." He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "You need the lock." I reached up real high and put my hand on his shoulder and said, "Yeah." As I was leaving he asked, "Shouldn't you be in school?" I thought fast and told him, "It's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day." ie #4. "I thought that was in January." "It used to be." Lie #5. hen I got back to the apartment, Stan said, "You've got mail!" Dear Osk, Hello, lad! Thanks for your glorious letter and the bulletproof drumsticks, which I hope I'll never have to use! I have to

« GOOGOLPLEX   As for the bracelet Momworetothe funeral, whatIdid was Iconverted Dad'slastvoice message intoMorse code,andI used sky-blue beadsforsilence, maroon beadsforbreaks between letters,violetbeads forbreaks between words,and long andshort pieces ofstring between thebeads forlong andshort beeps, whichareactually calledblips,Ithink, or something.

Dadwould haveknown.

Ittook menine hours tomake, andIhad thought aboutgivingitto Sonny, the homeless personwhoIsometimes seestanding outsidetheAlliance Française, becauseheputs meinheavy boots, or maybe toLindy, theneat oldwoman whovolunteers togive tours atthe Museum ofNatural History, soIcould be something specialtoher, oreven justtosomeone inawheelchair.

Butinstead Igave itto Mom.

Shesaid itwas thebest gift she'd everreceived.

Iasked herifit was better thantheEdible Tsunami, fromwhen Iwas interested inedible meteorological events.Shesaid, "Different." Iasked herifshe was inlove with Ron.

Shesaid, "Ron isagreat person," which wasananswer toaquestion Ididn't ask.SoIasked again.

"Trueorfalse: youareinlove with Ron." Sheputher hand withthering onitin her hair andsaid, "Oskar, Ronismy friend.

" Iwas going toask her ifshe was humping her friend, andifshe had said yes,Iwould haverunaway, andifshe had said no,Iwould haveasked ifthey heavy-petted each other, whichIknow about.

Iwanted totell her she shouldn't beplaying Scrabble yet.Orlooking inthe mirror.

Or turning thestereo anylouder thanwhat youneeded justtohear it.Itwasn't fairtoDad, anditwasn't fairtome.

ButI buried itall inside me.Imade herother Morse codejewelry withDad's messages—a necklace,ananklet, somedangly earrings, atiara—but thebracelet wasdefinitely themost beautiful, probablybecauseitwas thelast, which madeitthe most precious.

"Mom?""Yes?""Nothing." Even after ayear, Istill had anextremely difficulttimedoing certain things,liketaking showers, forsome reason, and getting intoelevators, obviously.

Therewasalot ofstuff thatmade mepanicky, likesuspension bridges,germs,airplanes, fireworks, Arabpeople onthe subway (eventhough I'mnot racist), Arabpeople inrestaurants andcoffee shopsandother public places, scaffolding, sewersandsubway grates,bagswithout owners, shoes,people withmustaches, smoke,knots, tall buildings, turbans.Alot ofthe time I'dget that feeling likeIwas inthe middle ofahuge black ocean, orindeep space, but not inthe fascinating way.It'sjust that everything wasincredibly faraway fromme.Itwas worst atnight.

Istarted inventing things,andthen Icouldn't stop,likebeavers, whichIknow about.

People thinktheycutdown treessothey can build dams, butinreality it'sbecause theirteeth never stopgrowing, andifthey didn't constantly filethem down by cutting through allofthose trees, theirteeth would starttogrow intotheir ownfaces, which would killthem.

That's how my brain was. One night, afterwhat feltlike agoogolplex inventions, Iwent toDad's closet.

Weused toGreco-Roman wrestleonthe floor inthere, andtellhilarious jokes,andonce wehung apendulum fromtheceiling andputacircle ofdominoes onthe floor toprove thattheearth rotated.

ButIhadn't gonebackinsince hedied.

Mom waswith Roninthe living room, listening tomusic tooloud andplaying boardgames.

Shewasn't missing Dad.Iheld thedoorknob forawhile before I turned it. Even though Dad'scoffin wasempty, hiscloset wasfull.And even aftermore thanayear, itstill smelled likeshaving.

I touched allofhis white T-shirts.

Itouched hisfancy watch thathenever woreandtheextra lacesforhissneakers that would neverrunaround thereservoir again.Iput myhands intothepockets ofall ofhis jackets (Ifound areceipt fora cab, awrapper fromaminiature Krackle,andthebusiness cardofadiamond supplier).

Iput myfeet intohisslippers.

I looked atmyself inhis metal shoehorn.

Theaverage personfallsasleep inseven minutes, butIcouldn't sleep,notafter hours, anditmade myboots lighter tobe around histhings, andtotouch stuffthathehad touched, andtomake the hangers hangalittle straighter, eventhough Iknew itdidn't matter. His tuxedo wasover thechair heused tosit on when hetied hisshoes, andIthought, Weird.

Why wasn't ithung upwith his suits? Hadhecome fromafancy partythenight before hedied? Butthen whywould hehave taken offhis tuxedo without hanging itup? Maybe itneeded tobe cleaned? ButIdidn't remember afancy party.

Iremembered himtucking me in,and uslistening toaperson speaking Greekonthe shortwave radio,andhim telling meastory about NewYork's sixth borough.

IfIhadn't noticed anything elseweird, Iwouldn't havethought aboutthetuxedo again.ButIstarted noticing alot. There wasapretty bluevase onthe highest shelf.What wasapretty bluevase doing wayupthere? Icouldn't reachit, obviously, soImoved overthechair withthetuxedo stillonit,and then Iwent tomy room toget the Collected Shakespeare set that Grandma boughtforme when shefound outthat Iwas going tobe Yorick, andIbrought thoseover, four tragedies atatime, untilIhad astack thatwastallenough.

Istood onallofthat anditworked forasecond.

Butthen I had thetips ofmy fingers onthe vase, andthetragedies startedtowobble, andthetuxedo wasincredibly distracting, and thenext thing wasthat everything wasonthe floor, including me,andincluding thevase, which hadshattered.

"I didn't doit!" Ihollered, butthey didn't evenhearme,because theywere playing musictooloud andcracking uptoo much.

Izipped myselfallthe way intothesleeping bagofmyself, notbecause Iwas hurt, andnotbecause Ihad broken. »

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