Everything Happens Today Read online

  “I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in and stops my mind from wandering.” When he was little, Wes had never understood this line. Why would a hole stop his mind from wandering? Surely, his mind required a hole to escape through into the outside world. But now that he was older, and had a crack in the ceiling of his own, he thought he understood better. His crack did not let any rain get in, but it had a way of focusing the mind that was not helpful or conducive to unfettered daydreaming. If it should also let rain in, that would be particularly focusing and unhelpful. What a mind needed, if it was to roam freely, and especially if it was to roam productively, was a sealed space in which it was safe, contained and undistracted. That is why Wes had always thought it a mistake for Paul McCartney to paint his room in a colorful way as an encouragement to his wandering mind, because surely plain white walls were a better inducement? Maybe it was a generational thing with color. One thing that Wes and the Beatles had in common, however, was their agreement that his room was right where he belonged. Wes felt that he could live here forever and never grow bored, no matter how faithless and shallow he might be.

  Wes thought about his dream; it was not like any other he could remember, and he didn’t understand anything about it. It was true that Prince André had been much on his mind lately, but it would be a challenge to figure out how he or any of the rest of it related to Wes’s current circumstances. He tried to break it down to its references. Barack Obama—okay, he was on everyone’s minds these days. Facebook—same. He’d spent a good deal of time in the Rose Reading Room, maybe his favorite place in the world, so that was explainable. But light bulbs, calligraphy? And what did the airplane mean? Why should a perfectly curious and enigmatic dream suddenly become a nightmare?

  Wes had had a genuine nightmare not long before. An atomic war had broken out, and a bomb exploded over New York. Wes found himself in some sort of bleak, cinderblock dormitory, and he knew that he had died and gone to hell. It was explained to the newcomers that they were free to roam the city, but that they absolutely must be back at the dorm by six. The punishment for non-compliance was left to their imagination. Wes didn’t remember much of the dream after that, except that his new home was a small rust-belt city under a perpetually overcast sky the color of liver, and that at some point he had found himself on a bus, looking at his watch. It was ten to six, and he had suddenly realized that he was on the wrong bus, had no idea where he was, and that it would be impossible to reach the dorm by six. Wes had woken up with a start, his heart racing. The point, he had figured out later, is that there’s a very fine line between real life and hell, just the matter of a missed deadline, and you won’t know you’ve crossed it until it’s too late. All you have to do is make one mistake, and for all eternity you will be wandering aimlessly in a desolate landscape, friendless and desperate. Now that was a message he could understand.

  And then he remembered that, in his dream this morning, the Rose Reading Room had been not at all like it is in real life; its distant vaulted ceilings with their multiple chandeliers seemed to leap on forever and in all directions above the gleaming tables. It had been a little like the Library of Babel in the short story. That was an interesting twist. Borges described the Library as infinite, which meant it contained not only every book ever written, but every book that could be written, past and future. Wes thought this was interesting because it meant that infinity was a concept where the difference between space and time becomes meaningless. There is no difference between something that is infinitely big and something that is infinitely old, and no difference between something that had existed forever and something that would exist forever. Wes had often daydreamed about walking through the Library, which was made up of an infinite number of hexagonal units, connected horizontally by corridors and vertically by open shafts. In each corridor there was a spiral staircase leading up and down to the adjacent level, and a bathroom facility for the “librarians,” who seemed to be simply the Library’s inhabitants, since there was no mention of patrons who might borrow or study the books, which would then require reshelving by the “librarians.” Borges didn’t say anything about what the librarians ate or where they slept or their other physical needs. Presumably they were able to wash their clothes in the bathrooms, and hang them out to dry on the railings lining the shafts, but one would imagine that there were considerable winds in the shafts—maybe even entire weather systems—so the librarians would need clothes pegs to secure their laundry, not to mention soap to wash it, and where did those things come from? Some librarians seemed to be territorial, while others were nomadic, spending their entire lives searching for a particular book. How did they replace their shoes when they wore out? Were there male and female librarians, and if so, did they have sex with each other when they met? Did they mate for life, or just hook up? What happened when the lady librarians got pregnant? Were the male librarians steadfast and faithful, or were they weak and unprincipled, and easily led to betray the ones they loved? Borges said nothing about baby librarians, or librarian obstetricians, or about librarian schools. Wes knew this was silly speculation, but it irritated him that Borges had thought to provide the librarians with toilets in every corridor, but with nothing else they would need to get by in their infinite time-space continuum.

  Wes had spent a lot of time thinking about the story since he had first read it three years earlier. He had read it many times since and had not tired of it yet. He had always suspected that the endless library was a metaphor for the imagination, for the mind’s infinite creative and intuitive power. The story was probably where Wes had first got the idea of his own mind as an infinite—or almost infinite—source of ideas and understanding. The mind was its own ecosystem, creating its own internal weather, like the library, and since it was the exclusive creator of all problems and all solutions, it was very possible that it had, in fact, created the universe itself. And that was precisely why it made no difference at all where it was located in the “real” world—in a sealed room all by itself, in a vast library with infinite chambers and corridors, it all came to the same thing. Wes had always imagined that he could be very happy as a monk. He almost never felt lonely.

  But how could any of this help him today? This was a real problem, maybe even a tragedy, not some pseudo-mystical sci-fi conundrum. Wes had betrayed the woman he loved by sleeping with someone he didn’t care about or even like very much. Wes’s mind hadn’t created this problem; it was not something he’d stumbled upon in his wanderings through the labyrinth of his imagination; it was not a metaphysical exercise. It was real—real real, as opposed to fixing-a-hole real. What did that mean? It meant it involved other people and their feelings. It meant it involved actions that could not be revoked. It meant consequences that could not be evaded by shaking the world like a Magic Eight Ball until it gave you the answer you wanted. No matter how much you might want it, life is not a Library of Babel—you can’t just wander off down a hallway in search of some elusive intellectual prize. You’ve got to find somewhere to do your laundry, to repair the holes in your shoes. That was what his father had been doing for decades, and what he had sworn to himself that he would never do. It was what Wes had to look forward to for the rest of his life. Never, ever again—not when he went off to college, not when he figured out how to make a living, not when he wrote the novels he was destined to write, not if he got married and had children of his own—would he be able to say to himself that at least he was better than what his father had been.

  Wes shook his head, trying to clear it of all these extraneous thoughts and tangents that were preventing him from examining the problem at hand. He didn’t need to be thinking about dreams or libraries, and he especially did not need to be thinking about his father right now. He needed to figure out how he had gotten himself into this terrible situation and what, if anything, he could do about it. He decided that he needed to go over it methodically, step by step, try to remember exactly how it had all gone down, where he had gone wron
g, what were the insuperable character flaws that had allowed him to make such an awful mistake. It was too late to take any of it back, and he doubted that he would ever find a way to forgive himself, but he had a vague idea that the fallen can be ennobled, in a pathetic sort of way, by the effort to salvage some trinket of redemption from the wreckage of their moral failure. He needed to start from the beginning.

  To say that Friday had dawned full of hope would have been an exaggeration, but there had certainly been nothing to suggest that it would be a day out of the ordinary. He had an advisory with Mrs. Fielding at 7:50, so all his usual morning chores had to be done twenty minutes earlier, but that wasn’t difficult for Wes. Unlike almost everyone he knew, he was an early morning person, able to leap from bed in the dark, his mind fully logged on, his thoughts warmed up and flexible before his feet hit the floor. Morning was when Wes did his best thinking, and whenever he found himself gnawing late at night on an instransigeant bone of homework, he knew enough to leave it for the morning, when it would seem more digestible. Sometimes, when he was particularly enjoying a book, he would put it down at midnight, close his eyes, then pick it up again at four as if it were five minutes later. His father had told him once, with his usual wistful bitterness, that you never again read books with the passion and intensity you bring to them as a teenager, and that was easy to believe. And it wasn’t only that Wes’s mind worked well early in the morning; he also felt better—cleaner, stronger, more moral, the quivering arrow of a powerful compass. He loved to be awake alone in the world, to walk the dog on quiet streets that had not yet been invaded by the trying multitudes, where he could pretend that tourists and bankers and real estate brokers were harmless abstractions. When he was even younger, the sense of a day’s untapped potential had been almost physical, it had been so delicious and irresistible Wes had wanted to throw himself into the day as if from a high dive. Now, he still felt that sense of possibility, he still jumped into the day feet first, but there was less passion behind it, it was more like the feeling you get when you climb into a bed made up with freshly laundered sheets, crisp and bleachy. Unpolluted and not yet soiled.

  That was what Friday morning at 5:30 a.m. had felt like. Wes had to walk the dog, shower, wake Nora, feed her and see that she was clean and properly dressed. Narita would have done it, but Wes didn’t trust Nora’s welfare to anyone but himself. Then, if there was still time, he would eat and read the paper and be out of the house by 7.15. These were all things he looked forward to doing, or at least that gave him no sense of being oppressed or put upon. And the feeling only increased later in the week as the Times crossword puzzle grew progressively more difficult, until by Friday he sometimes had trouble completing it. Because of his appointment, he would have to put the crossword off until the evening. And there was almost always some fact to look up on Wikipedia that had come to mind in the middle of the night and disturbed his sleep. It had been one such string of searches that had first led him to The Manual.

  He’d gone about his morning tasks on Friday with the usual bustle. He’d had an argument with his best friend James the day before about the percentage of water in the human body. James had said it was ninety percent, Wes had argued that it was much lower. He’d forgotten about it until that morning, when it took less than fifteen seconds on Google to prove Wes right: sixty percent, give or take. It was not much of a victory, but it had set the right tone for the day. On his crosstown walk to the subway at Union Square, he’d rewarded himself by listening to Belle & Sebastian’s “If You’re Feeling Sinister” on the iPhone. It wasn’t new but it was his favorite album of the moment, and he rationed his listening so as not to wear out its pleasures too quickly.

  By the time he reached school he’d all but forgotten to wonder why Mrs. Fielding had asked him in early. Wes was quite fond of Mrs. Fielding, but he was generally fond of all his teachers, having found that the unpleasant but necessary parts of school, such as science classes, were far easier to get through if you thought with pity and compassion of those teachers whom you might otherwise dislike. Wes had figured out long before that people who were mean or impatient were almost always unhappy, maybe even in direct proportion to their meanness, and he had trained himself to feel sorry for the teachers who liked him less because he was not good at the subject they taught. That was true for all the sciences and math, and increasingly so for soccer. It was not, however, even remotely true for English, a subject in which he knew himself to be widely acknowledged as one of the best in school, although Wes himself did not feel that way. He was a lover of books, certainly, and knew himself to be a charming, fluid writer, occasionally glib. The piece he had composed for Mrs. Fielding was definitely in that mold—he’d written the entire thing in bed, in one sitting. But he also knew something about himself that his facility generally concealed from all but the most astute teacher—that he was a lazy and undisciplined thinker who too often relied on the shining surface of words to mask his disdain for academic pieties. Mrs. Fielding had been showing signs of late that she was on to him. It was unlikely that she’d called him in to heap praise on his latest effort.

  On Friday morning, she had been waiting for him behind her desk in room 405. She had a kindly face framed in pale blond bangs that the mean girls in class insisted was the handiwork of a superior and very expensive colorist. Wes didn’t know anything about that and didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, remarks about a teacher’s personal appearance were simply attempts to dehumanize a person who did a very difficult job for not much money, and usually—at least at Dalton—did it very well. Wes appreciated his teachers, even when they didn’t get it, but he was also aware of the difference between not deliberately giving someone a hard time and fawning. Wes thought he was reasonably adept at treading that line. Students who pandered were viewed with distaste by their peers and faculty alike, and generally received no reward for their efforts. But this situation with Mrs. Fielding had been unknown territory. Wes was not used to causing or getting in trouble at school, and wasn’t quite sure about the protocol. Mrs. Fielding had smiled at him, openly enough; there had been a smear of pink lipstick on her front tooth and Wes had immediately looked away, only to find his eyes alight on another pink, lip-shaped stain on the rim of her coffee cup, cerulean blue with white Hellenic motifs. The paper he had handed in two days earlier sat on the desktop beside the cup, and it was ominously free of red ink. When he raised his eyes again, Mrs. Fielding had stopped smiling, though in all fairness she could hardly have been said to be frowning, either.

  “Good morning, Wes,” she had said, motioning to the chair across from her. “Thanks for coming in early.”

  Wes had sat down beside her, not certain where to rest his gaze.

  Mrs. Fielding had seemed to be waiting for him to say something—he always had something to say—but when he remained silent she had reached across the desk for his paper and placed it delicately in the space between them.

  “I imagine you already know why I asked you to come talk to me.”

  “Is there something wrong with my essay?”

  Mrs. Fielding had snorted, delicately, then perhaps sensing that it was a disproportionate response, she had sighed.

  “Not really, no,” she had begun tentatively. “It’s well-written, dili­gently proofread, properly formatted, thoughtful and provoca­tive in places. But it’s not the assignment, and you know it.”

  Again, Wes had found himself at a loss for words.

  “Will you read the assignment topic for me please, Wes?”

  Wes had pulled the paper forward and leaned into it, as if by earnestly focusing on the immediate task he could prove the sincerity of his intentions and thereby mitigate his sin. He had cleared his throat and in a soft, serious tone read out the assignment at the top of the first page.

  “‘The authors of Candide, Pride and Prejudice and The Nose all emphasize their social and psychological themes as much through the use of language and narrative trope as they do throu
gh plot and characterization. Discuss, using any work of literature of your choice and all the critical tools at your disposal.’”

  There had been a long pause, apparently not at all uncomfortable to Mrs. Fielding.

  “Get it now?”

  Wes had got it—he’d gotten it, of course, before he’d sat down to write the paper, but had assumed he would get away with it—yet for form’s sake he’d felt he ought to put up some semblance of defense.

  “It says ‘any work,’” he’d muttered lamely.

  “‘Any work of literature,’ Wes. This is a class of literature.”

  Wes had chosen deliberately to misunderstand her. “I know it’s not European, but . . . ”

  “I don’t care if it’s European or not. If I’d cared I’d have said ‘any work of European literature of your choice.’ But I did say ‘literature,’ and you did not choose to write about a work of literature. Therefore you have not fulfilled the assignment.”

  “I’d say it’s a work of literature.”

  Mrs. Fielding had smacked the edge of the desk with the tips of all ten fingers, as Wes had seen her do a thousand times when a student failed to see the obvious. “Come on, Wes. How many classes have you and I had together over the years? Conflict, resolution, growth, self-understanding, hubris, submission, Iliad, Romeo and Juliet, The Quiet American. You know me better than that. You know better than that.”

  “I thought . . . a break with convention . . . ”

  “No, you were being smug and clever and lazy. You thought I’d be so dazzled by your iconoclasm and wit that I wouldn’t notice that you’d barely gotten out of bed to write this. And that’s why I’m making you write the paper again. Not because the US Army’s M16 Operator’s Manual is an unfit subject for an honor’s class in European literature, although it is, but because you tried to get away with something that is unworthy of you.”