Everything Happens Today Read online

  “Okay.”

  “Stretch, Wes. Stretch. You’re too young and too smart to take the easy way out. If you sit on your laurels now, at your age, you may never get up.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. F. I appreciate it. I really do. When do you need this by?”

  She had turned to him in mock, wide-eyed astonishment and held out her hands, palms upward in the universal expression of powerlessness. Wes had thought, rather, that the palms, angled both towards each other and towards him, were reflecting mirrors, or the dishes of a radio telescope, concentrating upon him beams of energy summoned from across the universe. With her neatly plucked eyebrows raised, and her mouth open in a cannon’s pucker, she’d been sending him some alien message across the generations. It was ostensibly couched in a language he understood, spoken by an intergalactic traveler who appears in human form so as not to cause panic. “I can’t believe that’s all you have to say to me after all this,” he was supposed to read the message as saying. In fact, Wes had known that she was actually saying “Please be a good person, be as kind as you can possibly be, because I will be dead so soon, so soon.” Wes had heard the message loud and clear, and had instantly regretted that his reaction to Mrs. Fielding’s critique had been less than generous and grateful. Message relayed, she had lowered her eyebrows, closed her mouth and turned away.

  “Monday morning will be fine, Wes.”

  And now it was Saturday morning, and despite the fact that the entire world had changed in the intervening twenty-four hours, Wes still had a whole paper to write from scratch. Not entirely from scratch, as he already had copious notes for War and Peace, but still. It wasn’t precisely that Wes felt himself ill used, or that Mrs. Fielding had been unfair in her judgment of his efforts, but it now seemed kind of dismal and petty in the light of events, this quibbling over intent and mere words. If she only knew how damaged and debased Wes was feeling at the moment, he was convinced that Mrs. F. could muster the compassion and empathy to let him off the hook. But no one would ever know, or care. If only they knew the love and generosity, the open-heartedness and pity, with which he thought of them, they would consider him the greatest person in the world. But it’s not something you can tell people.

  Wes rolled over and retrieved his backpack from beneath the bed. From among the dog-eared sheaves of paper, heavy textbooks and loose implements he pulled the offending manual, which he had taken to carrying with him as incidental reading at moments of leisure. Wes had found the Manual online, following a link from the Wikipedia entry on the M16, which he’d stumbled upon at the end of a string of links that had begun with a query about the breakup of the B-52’s, following a drunken boast by Wes’s father that he had danced all night to “Rock Lobster” and “Private Idaho” when he was in college. It was a simple PDF file available for download and evidently photocopied directly from a yellowing copy of the 1985 edition, including a worn and fraying spine. The original had been slim and palm-sized, presumably to fit into a soldier’s breast or back pocket, but Wes’s printout of the file ran to almost 150 pages and was quite substantial. Wes wistfully riffled through the pages, many marked up with yellow highlighter, as if through a sheaf of old love letters or college rejections, artifacts of some earlier, more innocent interval in a life gone bitterly wrong. He stopped at his favorite passages, knowing that he was probably reading them for the last time.

  The first dozen pages or so were devoted to addenda and corrigenda to earlier editions, then came a radiation hazard warning about the tritium gas sealed into the front sight post. The M16A1 weighed six and a half pounds, was 39 inches long. The only difference between the M16 and the M16A1 was that the A1 was equipped with a forward assist assembly. The manual described it as “lightweight, air cooled, gas operated, magazine fed and shoulder fired,” a classic rock-and-roll song about a favorite car. Its purpose was “to provide personnel an offensive/defensive capability to engage targets in the field.” Wes read it as if it were poetry—what mysterious mind had had the courage to jump the ontological chasm between “shooting at strangers” to “engaging targets in the field?” Wes felt an almost ecstatic intellectual communion with his fellow writer, very probably dead now since the M16 had entered into service in the 1960s. Even though Wes suspected that, in fact, there had never been any such person, the Manual having surely been written by committee, in his paper he had speculated about him at length, as one might about the writer of some ancient epic, the Bible or Gilgamesh, inventing a self-conscious mind behind a text accreted over centuries of oral precedent. And in creating a writer for the Manual, Wes had grown to love him for his lonely struggle with a resistant, intransigent vocabulary. All this he had expatiated upon at length, in keeping with the theme of language and narrative trope. He’d thought, he was sure, that he was passionate and sincere about his subject.

  “When round reaches approximate end of barrel, expanding gases from burning propellant pass out through gas port and into gas tube. Gas goes into bolt carrier assembly, ejects old cartridge, and chambers a new round.” “One click of elevation of windage is equal to one block change in elevation or windage.” “Throw away the white gloves for rifle inspections.” “Overnight while the Teflon has been forming a film for lubrication, the cleaning solvents in the CLP have been at work in the nooks and crannies (actually in the pores of the metal) seeking out carbon and firing residue.” The language, Wes could not help feeling, was pure and musical, a triumph of minimalist compression on a par with anything from Carver or Beckett. Just look at the ambiguity in the use of the word “actually.” It could simply mean “to be precise,” as if the writer were saying under his breath: “The M16A1 is not an English muffin; it does not in fact have nooks and crannies, but microscopic pores that can be clogged with dirt and oil.” Or it could be an expression of suppressed excitement, as if to suggest that an exhausted soldier could expect his dreams to be suffused with awe and wonder at the tireless industry of the lubricant that actively seeks out and never sleeps. Of course, a correct and sensitive parsing of the sentence would allow for both interpretations simultaneously, because that is what gives the sentence its resonance, as the author surely intended. Wes worshipped him for that, and the Manual was inseminated with such gems. In its way, the prose of the operator’s manual was perfect and irresistible, and had the distinct advantage over War and Peace of being profusely illustrated. If the author of the operator’s manual and Tolstoy were locked in a room together, and ordered to exchange writing philosophies, Wes doubted that the latter would have much to teach the former, except perhaps in the use of serial commas and in beginning sentences with conjunctions. Wes felt like a scholar who had stumbled upon a lost masterpiece and whose task was to reintroduce it to the world—gently, persuasively, lest its power be put to the wrong use or devastate precisely those whom it might, judiciously wielded, most benefit.

  But War and Peace it would have to be. War and Peace had been Wes’s original subject for the paper until it had fallen to him to discover the Manual, but he had found himself profoundly irritated by it. There it was, sitting on his desk beneath the thesaurus; where yesterday it had looked lumpen and forlorn, it now exuded an aura of smug vindication. It did not deserve, had not earned the passion that Wes had lavished on the Manual, but he could write that paper in his sleep. Mrs. Fielding would give him no more than a B+ for it because it would lack conviction and transcendence, but there was nothing Wes could do about that. It occurred to him that he might just be able to place “Language, Poetry and Narrative Trope in Operator’s Manual for Rifle, 5.56-MM, M16 (1005-00-856-6885) Rifle, 5.56-MM, M16A1 (1005-00-073-9421)” in some literary magazine, which could well compensate for the damage done by a B+ to his college prospects. His dad would know the right publication to submit it to, but as Wes could not stomach the idea of turning to his father for a favor he would have to figure it out for himself. How hard could it be? Paris Review, Granta—they all had their own websites.

  The iPhone chimed daintily from som
e pocket in one of the pieces of clothing discarded on the pile by the bedside. It was only a text message, hardly worth getting up to retrieve, but the timing was odd. Almost everyone Wes knew had been at Lucy’s party, and Wes was the only freak in his acquaintance who could stay up most of the night, fall asleep half-drunk for a couple of hours, then get up and leave while it was still dark and walk home across half the city. The rest of them would sleep until way past noon. Who could possibly be texting him at this hour? Wes wondered what the time was, but he didn’t own a watch and the only clock was on the iPhone. He supposed he ought to check in with his mother, but since Nora had already brought her breakfast there was no immediate hurry. The iPhone chimed again, as it would every minute until Wes read or responded to the text, but since he had chosen the tone precisely for its soothing effect—a thin metal blade being struck twice against an expensive crystal wine glass—rather than to spark any sense of urgency, as other tones seemed designed to do, he continued to stare at the ceiling.

  Wes heard Nora coming up the stairs, her pace light and skipping, a large mouse. She knew he heard her; like him, she had learned from necessity how to climb the stairs in complete silence, and this was her way of announcing herself. Instead of knocking, she would stand outside his door and count to three, giving him the time to tell her not to come in if he did not wish to see her, which was rare but occasionally necessary. And here she was.

  Dressed in green capris and a white, short-sleeved polo with her school crest, she flounced in and dropped herself beside him on the bed. She took his free hand in both of hers and stroked the tips of his fingers.

  “I’m bored.”

  “Why are you wearing your school uniform?”

  “I couldn’t find anything else clean.”

  “I’ll do the laundry later. Call a friend. I’ll walk you over.”

  “Nobody’s around. They’re all at their country houses. In Connecticut.” She pronounced it “connect-i-cut” on purpose.

  “All of them?”

  “I was supposed to have a playdate with Claire, but she’s grounded.”

  “Why is she grounded?”

  “She took a picture of herself in her underwear with her cell phone and sent it to Leo.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She likes him.”

  “That’s disgusting. How old is she?”

  “Eleven. Leo texted her back and said he hates her and told her to fuck off, and now no one will talk to him, but I’m sure it was Katrina who told him to do it.”

  “Who’s Katrina?”

  “His sister. You know her. Do you want to see Bobby?”

  “No.”

  “Will you play Mastermind with me?”

  “I can’t. I’m writing a paper.”

  “You’re lying in bed.”

  “I’m writing it in my head. Where’s dad?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Find dad. He’ll play with you.”

  “Whatever, dipstick.” She got up and walked out in a huff, but she closed the door behind her so gently that it didn’t even click.

  He hated it when she said “whatever.” On the one hand, she was quite right—dad would never play Mastermind with her, even if she could find him, and it had been a little cruel of Wes even to suggest something so ridiculous. On the other hand, until recently it would not have occurred to her to use an expression like “whatever.” She was growing up; any day now she would be a teenager, no longer the sweet thoughtful child who always worried about everyone’s feelings and never sulked, who was able to put an optimistic spin on any unpleasant circumstance. She would stop coming to share his bed when she couldn’t sleep at night, or he would have to find a reason to send her away because she was growing boobs. Wes had always felt that she was the best part of him, that he could always find something good about himself when he looked at her, and if she stopped being that he wouldn’t know where to go looking for it. She reminded him of that incredibly sad section in Mary Poppins where the twins outgrow their ability, shared by all babies, to speak the intimate language of nature and to communicate with all animals and even with inanimate things like the wind. Wes had read the book the previous year with the idea of writing a comparative study about childrearing in fiction, intending to match it with Oliver Twist and Less Than Zero, but he had so embarrassed himself crying inconsolably over the fate of the twins that he’d dropped the whole idea. Now he thought that maybe he should play Mastermind with Nora, and do the laundry, and check in on his mother, before it was all too late. He began counting, and when nothing happened he started again from zero. This time, when he reached sixteen, he got up.

  He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands clasped between his knees and his head hanging down, just because it seemed like a cool position and if someone interesting should happen to walk into the room at that very moment it would make him look extremely philosophical and deep. He remembered Katrina, or at least he remembered her hands because he’d spent much of the eighth grade staring at them. They were very pale and her fingers were unusually long and slim, the nails often lacquered. She was said to have given someone a handjob in the jungle gym in the playground, but no one could say precisely who it was or when the blessed event had occurred. Wes didn’t remember anything else about her—not the color of her hair or her last name—or where she’d gone to high school, even though almost everyone who attended a private high school on the East Side knew each other and a girl who gave handjobs was sure to be popular. The phone chimed again, and since the pile of clothes in which it was hidden lay right between his feet he was able to justify the effort needed to locate it. The text was from Lucy. It said “Hey you.”

  Wes lowered the phone to the floor, nesting it among the crumpled clothing as if it were an egg or a bomb that might explode. The text window was still open, and he stared at the message. Hey you. Instead of looking up his number, she had added her message to the string of their broken conversations from the night before, her texts in white balloons, his in yellow. It was an entire history of their evening in shorthand, more terse and expressive even than the Manual.

  Oct 31, 2008 8:16 p.m.

  Yellow: “What’s ur address?”

  White: “623 park 11a”

  Oct 31, 2008 10:16 p.m.

  White: “can we talk”

  Yellow: “Where r u?”

  White: “behand u”

  Oct 31, 2008 11:49 p.m.

  White: “want 2 dance?”

  Yellow: “bnkdl”

  Nov 1, 2008 12:02 a.m.

  Yellow: “Where r u?”

  White: “bdrm”

  Yellow: “Too many. Which?”

  White: “find me”

  Nov 1, 2008 9:28 a.m.

  White: “Hey you”

  As he stared at the screen, Wes was struck by the fact that he had dutifully punctuated all his texts, whereas Lucy did not even seem to know where to find the punctuation keys on her Blackberry. It somehow seemed to carry a special significance that Wes did not care to parse. Wes felt sick to his stomach and panicky at the same time, and the iPhone screen went black. He stared at it a while longer, willing his mind to go blank the way he did in restaurants when he didn’t know what to order, trusting his instincts to make the right decision for him. When the nausea and panic subsided a little, he picked the phone up and turned it on. The wallpaper was a photo of Wes and Nora in a swimming pool, clinging to the edge and smiling up at the camera, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders. It had been taken six years earlier in Tuscany, on their last family vacation. People Wes’s age who had seen the photo made fun of him for it, but he didn’t care. It always made him happy to look at it, but not this time. In fact, it made him feel infinitely sad, which was better than panicky, but not much. Wes unlocked the phone and pressed the text button.

  “Tell Bobby 2 come c me,” he typed. The “send” bar had barely filled when the response came back. “K.” Wes slipped back under the covers. Twenty sec
onds later Nora was at his door, her upper lip pulled back against her teeth in Bobby’s signature grin.

  “You called?” Bobby said hopefully, his voice distorted by Nora’s effort to keep the lip in position while talking.

  “Tell me a story, Bobby.”

  “‘Kay. Did you know I got married again?”

  “Tell me.”

  Wes lost the thread of the story almost as soon as it began, but it didn’t matter. The sound of Bobby’s voice, rasping and slurred at the same time, was the point. Bobby the bisexual mouse-boy was Nora’s most popular and fully-developed character, with an entire life history behind him that included being thrown out of his parents’ house at the age of three because of an incurable addiction to cheese, a stint (Wes seemed to recall) as a streetwalker in mid-town, where he met his first boyfriend Lee, a hustler who had died of AIDS, and then marriage to a cricket named Raquel; Bobby and Raquel had had several children, whose names Wes could never keep straight and who had grown up to have children of their own. When Raquel died of breast cancer, Bobby had hit the road and become involved in a series of adventures with any number of itinerant characters, which was more or less where his life’s story had led him up to the present day. Wes could not remember Bobby’s origins, either; he had seemed to spring to life fully formed a couple of years earlier, just as their mother’s illness was beginning to bite. At first, Bobby happily monopolized entire family meals, keeping them in tears of hilarity while the food turned cold on their plates. He was always funny, always cheerful in the face of the terrible tragedies for which he seemed destined, and you never knew when to expect an appearance. But as their collective meals had gradually fallen apart and eventually disintegrated entirely, and everyone had retreated to the privacy of their own rooms, Bobby had taken on the role of family therapist, summoned whenever needed for solace and his peculiar philosophical perspective. Wes knew he wasn’t the only one who relied on Bobby’s advice; he could sometimes hear Bobby’s patient, irreverent voice lecturing their mother in her room directly beneath his own. In fact, Nora was almost always Bobby with mom these days. Wes wasn’t sure if his father ever turned to Bobby, as his moments of greatest need often coincided with his moments of greatest incoherence, but he did know that Bobby was not shy about sharing his opinions uninvited—often at times when they might be most unwelcome. In earlier days there had been other creatures, includ­ing Wes’s own Enochs the spitting monster, and Enochs’s best friend Sunny, a boy who lived in the Sun and who had pressed on for a while, pale and sickly, even after Wes had put aside such games. Bobby had eclipsed them all, Yahweh to their Olympus, but Wes supposed they might still be alive somewhere, waiting with pathetic and forlorn hope for their religion to be revived.