Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel Read online

  I didn't know why he was asking, because I'd brought Buckminster to school for a demonstration only a couple of weeks before, and dropped him from the roof to show how cats reach terminal velocity by making themselves into little parachutes, and that cats actually have a better chance of surviving a fall from the twentieth floor than the eighth floor, because it takes them about eight floors to realize what's going on, and relax and correct themselves. I said, "Buckminster is my pussy."

  Jimmy pointed at me and said, "Ha ha!" The kids cracked up in the bad way. I didn't get what was so hilarious. Mr. Keegan got angry and said, "Jimmy!" Jimmy said, "What? What did I do?" I could tell that inside, Mr. Keegan was cracking up, too.

  "What I was saying was, they found a piece of paper, about half a kilometer from the hypocenter, and the letters, which they call characters, were neatly burned out. I became extremely curious about what that would look like, so first I tried to cut out letters on my own, but my hands weren't good enough to do it, so I did some research, and I found a printer on Spring Street who specializes in die-cutting, and he said he could do it for two hundred fifty dollars. I asked him if that included tax. He said no, but I still thought it was worth the money, so I took my mom's credit card, and anyway, here it is." I held up the sheet of paper, with the first page of A Brief History of Time in Japanese, which I got the translation of from Amazon.co.jp. I looked at the class through the story of the turtles.

  That was Wednesday.

  I spent Thursday's recess in the library, reading the new issue of

  American Drummer, which Librarian Higgins orders especially for me. It was boring. I went to the science lab, to see if Mr. Powers would do some experiments with me. He said he actually had plans to eat lunch with some other teachers, and he couldn't let me be in the lab alone. So I made some jewelry in the art studio, which you are allowed to be in alone.

  Friday, Jimmy Snyder called me from across the playground, and then he came up to me with a bunch of his friends. He said, "Hey, Oskar, would you rather have a handjob or a blowjob from Emma Watson?" I told him I didn't know who Emma Watson was. Matt Colber said, "Hermione, retard." I said, "Who's Hermione? And I'm not mentally retarded." Dave Mallon said, "In Harry Potter, fag boy." Steve Wicker said, "She has sweet tits now." Jake Riley said, "Handjob or blowjob?" I said, "I've never even met her."

  I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don't know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don't have anyone to ask. For example, I know that you give someone a blowjob by putting your penis in their mouth. I also know that dick is penis, and that cock is penis, too. And monster cock, obviously. I know that VJs get wet when a woman is having sex, although I don't know what they get wet with. I know that VJ is cunt, and also ass. I know what dildos are, I think, but I don't know what cum is, exactly. I know that anal sex is humping in the anus, but I wish I didn't.

  Jimmy Snyder pushed my shoulder and said, "Say your mom's a whore." I said, "Your mom's a whore." He said, "Say your mom's a whore." I said, "Your mom's a whore." "Say 'My' 'mom' 'is a whore.'" "Your mom is a whore." Matt and Dave and Steve and Jake were cracking up, but Jimmy was getting really, really angry. He raised a fist and said, "Prepare to die." I looked around for a teacher, but I didn't see any. "My mom's a whore," I said. I went inside and read a few more sentences of A Brief History of Time. Then I broke a mechanical pencil. When I came home, Stan said, "You've got mail!"

  Dear Oskar,

  Thanks for mailing me the $76.50 you

  owed me. To tell you the truth, I never thought

  I'd see that money. Now I will believe everyone.

  (cab driver) Marty Mahaltra

  P.S. No tip?

  I counted off seven minutes that night, and then fourteen minutes, and then thirty. I knew I'd never be able to fall asleep, because I was so excited that the next day I'd be able to search for the lock. I started inventing like a beaver. I thought about how in one hundred years every name in the 2003 Yellow Pages will be for someone who's dead, and how once when I was at The Minch's I saw a TV show where someone ripped a phone book in half with his hands. I thought about how I wouldn't want someone to rip a 2003 Yellow Pages in half in one hundred years, because even though everyone will be dead, it still felt like it should make a difference. So I invented a Black Box Yellow Pages, which is a phone book that's made out of the material that they make the black boxes on airplanes out of. I still couldn't sleep.

  I invented a postage stamp where the back tastes like crème brûlée.

  I still couldn't sleep.

  What if you trained Seeing Eye dogs to be bomb-sniffing dogs, so that they'd be Sniffing Eye Seeing Bomb dogs? That way, blind people could get paid for being led around, and could be contributing members of our society, and we'd all be safer, too. I was getting further and further from sleep.

  When I woke up it was Saturday.

  I went upstairs to pick up Mr. Black, and he was waiting in front of his door, snapping his fingers next to his ear. "What's this?" he asked when I handed him the present I made for him. I shrugged my shoulders, just like Dad used to. "What am I supposed to do with it?" I told him, "Open it, obviously." But I couldn't keep my happiness in, and before he got the paper off the box I said, "It's a necklace I made for you with a compass pendant so you can know where you are in relation to the bed!" He kept opening it and said, "How nice of you!" "Yeah," I said, taking the box from him because I could open it faster. "It probably won't work outside your apartment, because the magnetic field of the bed gets smaller the farther you get from it, but still." I handed him the necklace and he put it on. It said that the bed was north.

  "So where to?" he asked. "The Bronx," I said. "The IRT?" "The what?" "The IRT train." "There isn't an IRT train, and I don't take public transportation." "Why not?" "It's an obvious target." "So how do you plan on us getting there?" "We'll walk." "That's got to be about twenty miles from here," he said. "And have you seen me walk?" "That's true." "Let's take the IRT." "There is no IRT." "Whatever there is, let's take it."

  On our way out, I said, "Stan, this is Mr. Black. Mr. Black, this is Stan." Mr. Black stuck out his hand, and Stan shook it. I told Stan, "Mr. Black lives in 6A." Stan took his hand back, but I don't think Mr. Black was offended.

  Almost the whole ride to the Bronx was underground, which made me incredibly panicky, but once we got to the poor parts, it went above-ground, which I preferred. A lot of the buildings in the Bronx were empty, which I could tell because they didn't have windows, and you could see right through them, even at high speeds. We got off the train and went down to the street. Mr. Black had me hold his hand as we looked for the address. I asked him if he was racist. He said poverty made him nervous, not people. Just as a joke I asked him if he was gay. He said, "I suppose so." "Really?" I asked, but I didn't take back my hand, because I'm not homophobic.

  The building's buzzer was broken, so the door was held open with a brick. Agnes Black's apartment was on the third floor, and there was no elevator. Mr. Black said he'd wait for me, because the stairs at the subway were enough stairs for him for one day. So I went up alone. The floor of the hallway was sticky, and for some reason all of the peepholes had black paint over them. Someone was singing from behind one of the doors, and I heard TVs behind a bunch of others. I tried my key in Agnes's lock, but it didn't work, so I knocked.

  A little woman answered who was in a wheelchair. She was Mexican, I think. Or Brazilian, or something. "Excuse me, is your name Agnes Black?" She said, "No espeaka Inglesh." "What?" "No espeaka Inglesh." "I'm sorry," I said, "but I don't understand you. Could you please repeat yourself and enunciate a little bit better." "No espeaka Inglesh," she said. I pointed a finger in the air, which is the universal sign for hold on, and then I called down to Mr. Black from the stairwell, "I don't think she speaks English!" "Well, what does she speak?" "What do you speak?" I asked her, and then I realized how dumb my question was, so I tried a different ap
proach: "Parlez-vous français?" "Español," she said. "Español," I hollered down. "Terrific!" he hollered back. "I picked up a little Español along the way!" So I brought her wheelchair to the stairwell, and they hollered to each other, which was kind of weird, because their voices were traveling back and forth but they couldn't see each other's faces. They cracked up together, and their laughter ran up and down the stairs. Then Mr. Black hollered, "Oskar!" And I hollered, "That's my name, don't wear it out!" And he hollered, "Come on down!"

  When I got back to the lobby, Mr. Black explained that the person we were looking for had been a waitress at Windows on the World. "What the?" "The woman I just spoke with, Feliz, didn't know her personally. She was told about her when she moved in." "Really?" "I wouldn't make that up." We went out to the street and started walking. A car drove by that was playing music extremely loudly, and it vibrated my heart. I looked up, and there were strings connecting a lot of the windows with clothes hanging on them. I asked Mr. Black if that's what people meant when they said "clotheslines." He said, "That's what they mean." I said, "That's what I thought." We walked some more. Kids were kicking rocks in the street and cracking up in the good way. Mr. Black picked up one of the rocks and put it in his pocket. He looked at the street sign, and then at his watch. A couple of old men were sitting in chairs in front of a store. They were smoking cigars and watching the world like it was TV.

  "That's so weird to think about," I said. "What is?" "That she worked there. Maybe she knew my dad. Or not knew him, but maybe she served him that morning. He was there, in the restaurant. He had a meeting. Maybe she refilled his coffee or something." "It's possible." "Maybe they died together." I know he didn't know what to say to that, because of course they died together. The real question was how they died together, like whether they were on different ends of the restaurant, or next to each other, or something else. Maybe they had gone up to the roof together. You saw in some of the pictures that people jumped together and held hands. So maybe they did that. Or maybe they just talked to each other until the building fell. What would they have talked about? They were obviously so different. Maybe he told her about me. I wonder what he told her. I couldn't tell how it made me feel to think of him holding someone's hand.

  "Did she have any kids?" I asked. "I don't know." "Ask her." "Ask who?" "Let's go back and ask the woman who's living there now. I bet she knows if Agnes had any kids." He didn't ask me why that question was important, or tell me she already told us everything she knew. We walked back three blocks, and I went up the stairs and brought her wheelchair back to the stairwell, and they talked up and down the stairs for a while. Then Mr. Black hollered, "She didn't!" But I wondered if he was lying to me, because even though I don't speak Spanish, I could hear that she said a lot more than just no.

  As we were walking back to the subway, I had a revelation, and then I got angry. "Wait a minute," I said. "What were you cracking up about before?" "Before?" "When you were talking to that woman the first time, you were cracking up. Both of you." "I don't know," he said. "You don't know?" "I don't remember." "Try to remember." He thought for a minute. "I can't remember." Lie #77.

  We bought some tamales that a woman was selling by the subway from a huge pot in a grocery cart. Normally I don't like food that isn't individually wrapped or prepared by Mom, but we sat on the curb and ate our tamales. Mr. Black said, "If anything, I'm invigorated." "What's 'invigorated'?" "Energized. Refreshed." "I'm invigorated, too." He put his arm around me and said, "Good." "These are vegan, right?" I shook my tambourine as we walked up the stairs to the subway, and held my breath when the train went underground.

  Albert Black came from Montana. He wanted to be an actor, but he didn't want to go to California, because it was too close to home, and the whole point of being an actor was to be someone else.

  Alice Black was incredibly nervous, because she lived in a building that was supposed to be for industrial purposes, so people weren't supposed to live there. Before she opened the door, she made us promise that we weren't from the Housing Authority. I said, "I suggest you take a look at us through the peephole." She did, and then she said, "Oh, you," which I thought was weird, and she let us in. Her hands were covered with charcoal, and I saw drawings everywhere, and they were all of the same man. "Are you forty?" "I'm twenty-one." "I'm nine." "I'm one hundred and three." I asked her if she was the one who made the drawings. "Yes." "All of them?" "Yes." I didn't ask who the man in the drawings was, because I was afraid the answer would give me heavy boots. You wouldn't draw someone that much unless you loved him and missed him. I told her, "You're extremely beautiful." "Thanks." "Can we kiss?" Mr. Black stuck his elbow in my side and asked her, "Do you know anything about this key?"

  Dear Oskar Schell,

  I am responding on behalf of Dr. Kaley, who is currently in the Congo on a research expedition. She asked that I pass on her appreciation for your enthusiasm about her work with elephants. Given that I am already her assistant—and budget limitations being what they are, as I'm sure you've experienced—she isn't now able to take on anyone else. But she did want me to tell you that should your interest and availability remain, there might be a project next fall in Sudan that she will need help with. (The grant proposals are just now going through.)

  Please forward us your résumé, including previous research experience, graduate and postgraduate transcripts, and two letters of recommendation.

  Best,

  Gary Franklin

  Allen Black lived on the Lower East Side and was a doorman for a building on Central Park South, which was where we found him. He said he hated being a doorman, because he had been an engineer in Russia, and now his brain was dying. He showed us a little portable TV that he kept in his pocket. "It plays DVDs," he said, "and if I had an email account, I could check it on this, too." I told him I could set up an e-mail account for him if he wanted. He said, "Yeah?" I took his device, which I wasn't familiar with, but figured out pretty quickly, and set everything up. I said, "What do you want for a user name?" I suggested "Allen," or "AllenBlack," or a nickname. "Or 'Engineer.' That could be cool." He put his finger on his mustache and thought about it. I asked if he had any kids. He said, "A son. Soon he's going to be taller than me. Taller and smarter. He'll be a great doctor. A brain surgeon. Or lawyer for the Supreme Court." "Well, you could make it your son's name, although I guess that might be confusing." He said, "Doorman." "What?" "Make it 'Doorman.'" "You can make it anything you want." "Doorman." I made it "Doorman215," because there were already 214 doormen. As we were leaving, he said, "Good luck, Oskar." I said, "How did you know my name was Oskar?" Mr. Black said, "You told him." When I got home that afternoon I sent him an e-mail: "It's too bad you didn't know anything about the key, but it was still nice to meet you."

  Dear Oskar,

  While you certainly express yourself like an intelligent young man, without ever having met you, and knowing nothing of your experience with scientific research, Yd have a hard time writing a recommendation.

  Thanks for the kind words about my work, and best of luck with your explorations, scientific and otherwise.

  Most sincerely,

  Jane Goodall

  Arnold Black got right to the point: "I just can't help. Sorry." I said, "But we haven't even told you what we need help with." He started getting teary and he said, "I'm sorry," and closed the door. Mr. Black said, "Onward ho." I nodded, and inside I thought, Weird.

  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

  The week was incredibly boring, except for when I remembered the key. Even though I knew that there were 161,999,999 locks in New York that it didn't open, I still
felt like it opened everything. Sometimes I liked to touch it just to know that it was there, like the pepper spray I kept in my pocket. Or the opposite of that. I adjusted the string so the keys—one to the apartment, one to I-didn't-know-what—rested against my heart, which was nice, except the only thing was that it felt too cold sometimes, so I put a Band-Aid on that part of my chest, and the keys rested on that.

  Monday was boring.

  On Tuesday afternoon I had to go to Dr. Fein. I didn't understand why I needed help, because it seemed to me that you should wear heavy boots when your dad dies, and if you aren't wearing heavy boots, then you need help. But I went anyway, because the raise in my allowance depended on it.

  "Hey, buddy." "Actually, I'm not your buddy." "Right. Well. It's great weather today, don't you think? If you want, we could go outside and toss a ball." "Yes to thinking it's great weather. No to wanting to toss a ball." "You sure?" "Sports aren't fascinating." "What do you find fascinating?" "What kind of answer are you looking for?" "What makes you think I'm looking for something?" "What makes you think I'm a huge moron?" "I don't think you're a huge moron. I don't think you're any kind of moron." "Thanks." "Why do you think you're here, Oskar?" "I'm here, Dr. Fein, because it upsets my mom that I'm having an impossible time with my life." "Should it upset her?" "Not really. Life is impossible." "When you say that you're having an impossible time, what do you mean?" "I'm constantly emotional." "Are you emotional right now?" "I'm extremely emotional right now." "What emotions are you feeling?" "All of them." "Like..." "Right now I'm feeling sadness, happiness, anger, love, guilt, joy, shame, and a little bit of humor, because part of my brain is remembering something hilarious that Toothpaste once did that I can't talk about." "Sounds like you're feeling an awful lot." "He put Ex-Lax in the pain au chocolat we sold at the French Club bake sale." "That is funny." "I'm feeling everything." "This emotionalness of yours, does it affect your daily life?" "Well, to answer your question, I don't think that's a real word you used. Emotionalness. But I understand what you were trying to say, and yes. I end up crying a lot, usually in private. It's extremely hard for me to go to school. I also can't sleep over at friends' apartments, because I get panicky about being away from Mom. I'm not very good with people." "What do you think is going on?" "I feel too much. That's what's going on." "Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?" "My insides don't match up with my out-sides." "Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside." "But it's worse for me." "I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him." "Probably. But it really is worse for me."