The Map of Tiny Perfect Things Read online

  The Map of Tiny Perfect Things

  Lev Grossman

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Cozy Horse Limited

  Author’s Note copyright © 2021 by Cozy Horse Limited

  Line art copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: February 2021

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  ISBN: 978-0-316-28122-5

  E3-20210121-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  Author’s Note

  Discover More

  About the Author

  For Sophie

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  It was August 4th, and I guess it already had been for a while. To be totally honest I didn’t even notice the change at first. My life was already serving up these big fat sweltery summer days anyway, one after the other, each one pretty much exactly the same as the one before it… probably a more powerfully alert and observant person would have picked up on the change sooner.

  What can I say, it was summer. It was hot. Anyway, here’s what was going on: Time had stopped.

  Or it hadn’t stopped, exactly, but it got stuck in a loop.

  Please believe me when I say that this is not a metaphor. I’m not trying to tell you that I was really bored and it seemed like summer would never end or something like that. What I’m saying is, the summer after my freshman year of high school, the calendar got to August 4th and gave up: Literally every single day after that was also August 4th. I went to bed on the night of August 4th. I woke up, it was the morning of August 4th.

  The chain had slipped off the wheel of the cosmos. The great iTunes of the heavens was set on Repeat One.

  As supernatural predicaments go it wasn’t even that original, given that this exact same thing happened to Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. In fact one of the first things I did was watch that movie about eight times, and while I appreciate its wry yet tender take on the emotional challenges of romantic love, let me tell you, as a practical guide to extricating yourself from a state of chronological stasis it leaves a lot to be desired.

  And yes, I watched Edge of Tomorrow too. So if I ran into an Omega Mimic, believe me, I knew exactly what to do. But I never did.

  If there was a major difference between my deal and Groundhog Day, it was probably that unlike Bill Murray I didn’t really mind it all that much, at least at first. It wasn’t freezing cold. I didn’t have to go to work. I’m kind of a loner anyway, so I mostly took it as an opportunity to read a lot of books and play an ungodly amount of video games.

  The only real downside was that nobody else knew what was happening, so I had nobody to talk to about it. Everybody around me thought they were living today for the first time ever. I had to put a lot of effort into pretending not to see things coming and acting surprised when they came.

  And also it was boiling hot. Seriously, it was like all the air in the world had been sucked away and replaced by this hot, clear, viscous syrup. Most days I sweated through my shirt by the time I finished breakfast. This was in Lexington, Massachusetts, by the way, where I was already stuck in space as well as time, because my parents didn’t want to pony up for the second session of summer camp, and my temp job at my mom’s accounting firm wouldn’t start till next week. So I was already killing time, even as it was.

  Only now, when I killed time, it didn’t stay dead. It rose from the grave and lived again. I was on zombie time.

  Lexington is a suburb of Boston, and as such is composed of a lot of smooth gray asphalt, a lot of green lawns, a lot of pine trees, a bunch of faux-colonial McMansions, and some cute, decorous downtown shoppes. And some Historick Landmarks—Lexington played a memorable though tactically meaningless role in the Revolutionary War, so there’s a lot of historical authenticity going on here, as is clearly indicated by a lot of helpful informational plaques.

  After the first week or so I had a pretty solid routine going. In the morning I slept through my mom leaving for work; on her way she would drop my impressively but slightly disturbingly athletic little sister at soccer camp, leaving me completely alone. I had Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, which you’d think would get boring fast, but actually I found myself enjoying them more and more as time went by. There’s a great deal of subtlety in your Honey Nut Cheerio. A lot of layers to uncover.

  I learned when to make myself scarce. I found ways to absent myself from the house from 5:17 p.m. to 6:03 p.m., which is when my sister muffed the tricky fast bit in the third movement of Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in A Minor seventeen times straight. I generally skipped out after dinner while my parents—they got divorced a couple of years ago, but my dad was over for some reason, probably to talk about money—had a nastier-than-usual fight about whether or not my mom should take her car into the shop because the muffler rattled when you went over bumps.

  It put things in perspective. Note to self: Do not waste entire life being angry about stupid things.

  As for the rest of the day, my strategies for occupying myself for all eternity were mostly (a) going to the library, and (b) going to the pool.

  Generally I chose option (a). The library was probably the place in Lexington where I felt the most at home, and that’s not excluding my actual home, the one where I slept at night. It was quiet at the library. It was air-conditioned. It was calm. Books don’t practice violin. Or fight about mufflers.

  Plus they smell really good. This is why I’m not much of a supporter of the glorious e-book revolution. E-books don’t smell like anything.

  With an apparently infinite amount of time at my disposal, I could afford to think big, and I did: I decided to read through the entire fantasy and science fiction section, book by book, in alphabetical order. At the time, that was pretty much my definition of happiness. (That definition was about to change, in a big way, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) At the point where this story starts it had been August 4th for I would say approximately a month, give or take, and I was up to Flatland, which is by a guy named, no kidding, Edwin Abbott Abbott.

  Flatland was published in 1884, and it’s about the adventures of a Square and a Sphere. The idea is that the Square is a flat, two-dimensional shape, and the Sphere is a round, three-dimensional shape, so when they meet the Sphere has to explain to this flat Square what the third dimension is. Like what it means to have height in additio
n to length and width. His whole life, the Square has lived on one plane and never looked up, and now he does for the first time and, needless to say, his flat little mind is pretty much blown.

  Then the Sphere and the Square hit the road together and visit a one-dimensional world, where everybody is a near-infinitely thin Line, and then a zero-dimensional world, which is inhabited by a single infinitely small Point who sits there singing to himself forever. He has no idea anybody or anything else exists.

  After that they try to figure out what the fourth dimension would be like, at which point my brain broke and I decided to go to the pool instead.

  You might jump in at this point and say: Hey. Guy. (It’s Mark.) Okay, Mark. If the same day is repeating over and over again, if every morning it just goes back to the beginning automatically, with everything exactly the way it was, then you could basically do whatever you want, am I right? I mean, sure, you could go to the library, but you could go to the library naked and it wouldn’t even matter, because it would all be erased the next day like a shaken Etch A Sketch. You could, I don’t know, rob a bank or hop a freight train or tell everybody what you really think of them. You could do anything you wanted.

  Which was, yes, theoretically true. But honestly, in this heat, who has the energy? What I wanted was to sit on my ass somewhere air-conditioned and read books.

  Plus, you know, there was always the super-slight chance that that one time it wouldn’t work, that the spell would go away as suddenly and mysteriously as it had arrived, and I would wake up on August 5th and have to deal with the consequences of whatever crazy thing I just did.

  I mean, for the time being I was living without consequences. But you can’t hold back consequences forever.

  Like I was saying, I went to the pool. This is important because it’s where I met Margaret, and that’s important because after I met her everything changed.

  Our neighborhood pool is called Paint Rock Pool. It has a lap area and a kids’ area and a waterslide that sometimes actually works and a whole lot of deck chairs where the parents lie around sunning themselves like beached walruses. (Or walri. Why not walri? These were the kinds of things I had time to think about.) The pool itself is made out of this incredibly rough old concrete that, I’m not kidding, will take your whole skin off if you fall on it.

  Seriously. I grew up here and have fallen down on it several thousand times. That shit will flay you.

  The whole place is sheltered by huge pine trees, and therefore is sprinkled with pine needles and a very fine dust of canary-yellow pine pollen, which if you think about it is pine trees having sex. I try not to think about it.

  I noticed Margaret because she was out of place.

  I mean, first I noticed her because she didn’t look like anybody else. Most of the people who go to Paint Rock Pool are regulars from the neighborhood, but I’d never seen her before. She was tall, tall as me, five-foot-ten maybe, skinny and very pale, with a long neck and a small round face and lots of kinky black hair. She wasn’t conventionally pretty, I guess, in the sense that you would never see anybody who looked like her on TV or in a movie. But you know how there’s a certain kind of person—and it’s different for everyone—but suddenly when you see them your eye just snags on them, you get caught and you can’t look away, and you’re ten times more awake than you were a moment ago, and it’s like you’re a harp string and somebody just plucked you?

  For me, Margaret was that kind of person.

  And there was something else, too, even beyond that, which was that she was out of place.

  Rule number one of the time loop was that everybody behaved exactly the same way every day unless I interacted with them and affected their behavior. Everybody made exactly the same choices and said and did exactly the same things. This went for inanimate objects too: Every ball bounced, every drop splashed, every coin flipped exactly the same. This probably breaks some fundamental law of quantum randomness, but hey, you can’t argue with results.

  So every time I showed up at the pool at, say, two o’clock, I could count on everybody being in exactly the same place, doing exactly the same thing, every time. It was reassuring in a way. No surprises. It actually made me feel kind of powerful: I literally knew the future. I, god-emperor of the kingdom of August 4th, knew exactly what everybody was going to do before they did it!

  Which was why I would have noticed Margaret anyway, even if she hadn’t been Margaret: She’d never been there before. She was a new element. Actually, the first time I saw her I couldn’t quite believe it. I thought maybe something I’d done earlier that day had set off some kind of butterfly-wing chain of events that caused this person to come to the pool when she never had before, but I couldn’t think what. I couldn’t decide whether or not to say anything to her, and by the time I decided I should, she’d already left. She wasn’t there the next day. Or the next.

  After a while I let it go. I mean, I had my own life to live. Things to do. I had a lot of ice cream to eat and not get fat from. Also I had this idea that, with an infinite amount of time to play with, maybe I could find a cure for cancer, though after a few days on that I started to think maybe I didn’t have sufficient resources to cure cancer, even given an infinity of time.

  Also I’m not smart enough by a factor of like a hundred. Anyway I could always come back to that one.

  But when Margaret came back a second time, I wasn’t going to let her get away. By this time I’d seen the same day play out at the pool about twenty times, and it was getting a little monotonous. Heavy lies the head that wears the god-emperor’s crown. I was ready for something unexpected. Talking to strange beautiful girls is not something I excel at particularly, but this seemed important.

  Anyway, if I said something stupid she’d just forget about it tomorrow.

  I watched her for a while first. One of the evergreen features of August 4th at Paint Rock Pool was that every day at 2:37 one of the kids playing catch with a tennis ball massively overthrew it, so that it was not only uncatchable but also cleared the fence at the back of the pool, at which point it was essentially unrecoverable, because beyond that fence was a perilously steep and rocky gully, and then beyond that was Route 128. Nothing that went over that fence ever came back.

  But not today, because along came Margaret—just casually; I would even say she was sauntering—wearing a bikini top and denim shorts and a straw sun hat, and when the kid threw she reached up on her tiptoes—flashing her even paler shaved underarm—and snagged the ball out of the air with one long skinny arm. She didn’t even look at it, just pulled it down, flipped it back into the pool, and kept walking.

  It was almost like she knew what was coming too. The kid watched her go.

  “Thank you,” he said, in a weirdly accurate impression of Apu from The Simpsons. “Come again!”

  I saw her lips move as she walked: She said it too—“Thank you, come again”—right along with him. It was like she was reading it off the same script. She plopped down on a deck chair and reclined it all the way back, then changed her mind and hiked it back up a notch. I went over and sat down on the deck chair next to hers. Because I’m smooth like that.

  “Hi.”

  She turned her head, shading her eyes against the sun. Up close she was even prettier and more string-plucking than I’d thought, with a spray of freckles splashed across the bridge of her nose.

  “Hi?” she said.

  “Hi. I’m Mark.”

  “Okay.”

  Like she was granting me the point: Yes, fair enough, your name might well be Mark.

  “Look, I don’t know how to put this exactly,” I said, “but would you happen to be trapped in a temporal anomaly? Like right now? Like there’s something wrong with time?”

  “I know what a temporal anomaly is.”

  Sunlight flashed off sapphire pool water. People yelled.

  “What I mean is—”

  “I know what you mean. Yes, it’s happening to me too. The thing with the r
epeating days. Day.”

  “Oh. Oh my God!” A massive wave of relief broke over me. I didn’t see it coming. I fell back on my deck chair and closed my eyes for a second. I think I actually laughed. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  I think up until that moment I hadn’t even understood how deeply freaked out I was, and how alone with that feeling I’d been. I mean, I was having a perfectly fine time, but I was also really starting to think that I was going to be stuck forever in August 4th and that no one but me would ever know it. No one would ever believe it. Now at least somebody else would know.

  Though she didn’t seem nearly as excited about it as I did. I would almost say she was a little blasé.

  I bounced back up.

  “I’m Mark,” I said again, forgetting that I’d already said it.

  “Margaret.”

  I actually shook her hand.

  “It’s crazy, right? I mean, at first I couldn’t believe it. I mean can you seriously believe it?” I was babbling. “How messed up is this? Right? It’s like magic or something! Like it seriously doesn’t make any sense!”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Have you met anybody else who knows?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you have any idea why this is happening?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know! Sorry, just a little giddy here. I’m just so, so glad you’re in this too. I mean not that I’m glad you’re trapped in time or anything, but Jesus, I thought I was the only one! Sorry. It’s going to take me a second.” Deep breath. “So what have you been doing with yourself this whole time? Besides going to the pool?”

  “Watching movies, mostly. And I’m teaching myself to drive. I figure it doesn’t matter if I mess up the car because it’ll just be fixed in the morning.”

  I found her hard to read. It was weird. Granted, I was hysterical, but she was the opposite. Strangely calm. It was almost like she’d been expecting me.