The Map of Tiny Perfect Things Read online

  “Have you?” I said. “Messed up the car?”

  “Yes, actually. And our mailbox. I still suck at reverse. My mom was pretty pissed off about it, but then the entire universe reset itself that night and she forgot, So. What about you?”

  “Reading mostly.”

  I told her about my project at the library. And about the curing cancer thing.

  “Wow, I didn’t even think of that. I guess I’ve been thinking small.”

  “I didn’t get very far with it.”

  “Still. Points for trying.”

  “Maybe I should scale it down and just go after athlete’s foot or something.”

  “Or pinkeye maybe.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  We sat in silence for a minute. Here we were, the last boy and girl on earth, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I kept getting distracted by her long legs in those shorts. Her fingernails were plain, but she’d painted her toenails black.

  “So you’re new, right?” I said. “Did you just move here or something?”

  “Couple of months ago. We’re in that new development on Tidd Road, across the highway. Technically I think we’re not even eligible to come here, but my dad fudged it. Look, I gotta go.”

  She stood up. I stood up. That was a thing I would learn about Margaret: Even with an infinity of time available, she always seemed to have to go.

  “Can I have your number?” I said. “I mean, I know you don’t know me, but I feel like we should probably, you know, stay in touch. Maybe try to figure this thing out. It might go away all by itself. But then again, maybe it won’t.”

  She thought about that.

  “Okay. Give me your number.”

  I did. She texted me back so I’d have hers. The text said it’s me.

  I didn’t text Margaret for a few days. I got the impression that she liked her personal space, and that she wasn’t necessarily overjoyed at the prospect of spending forever with a person of my undeniable dorkiness. I’m not one of your self-hating nerds or anything; I’m comfortable with my place in the social universe. But I get that I’m not everybody’s idea of the perfect guy to spend an infinite amount of time with.

  I lasted till four in the afternoon on day five A.M. (After Margaret).

  Four o’clock was about when the repetitiveness of it all started to get to me. At the library, I watched the same old guy clump up to the circulation desk with his walker. I heard the same library flunky walk by with the same squeaky cart. The same woman with hay fever disputed a late fee while having a sneezing fit. The same four-year-old had an operatic meltdown and got dragged out of the building.

  The problem was that it was all starting to seem less and less real—the endless repetition was kind of leaching the realness out of everything. Things were mattering less. It was fun to just do whatever I wanted all the time, with no responsibilities, but the thing was, the people around me were starting to seem slightly less like people with actual thoughts and feelings, which I knew they were, and slightly more like extremely lifelike robots.

  So I texted Margaret. Margaret wasn’t a robot. She was real, like me. An awake person in a world of sleepwalkers.

  Hey! It’s Mark. How’s it going?

  It was about five minutes before she got back to me; by then I’d gone back to reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams.

  Can’t complain.

  Getting dangerously bored here. You at the pool?

  I was driving. Jumped the curb. Hit another mailbox.

  Ow. Good thing time is busted.

  Good thing.

  I thought that brought things to a nice, rounded conclusion, and I wasn’t expecting anything more, but after another minute I got the three burbling dots that meant she was typing again.

  You at the library?

  Yup.

  I’ll swing by. 10 mins.

  Needless to say, this outcome greatly exceeded my expectations. I waited for her out on the front steps. She drove up in a silver VW station wagon with a scrape of orange paint on the passenger-side door.

  I was so glad to see her I wanted to hug her. It took me by surprise again. It was just such a relief not to have to pretend anymore—that I didn’t know what was coming next, that it hadn’t all happened before, that I wasn’t clinging to a sense that things mattered by my absolute fingernails. Probably falling in love is always a little like that: You discover that one other person who understands what no one else seems to, which is that the world is broken and can never, ever be fixed. You can stop pretending, at least for a little while. You can both admit it, if only to each other.

  Or maybe it’s not always like that. I don’t know. I’ve only done it once. Margaret got out and sat down next to me.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “So. Read any good books lately?”

  “As it happens I have, but hang on. Wait. Watch this.”

  The collision happened every day, right here on this spot. I’d seen it at least five times. Guy staring at his phone versus other guy staring at his phone and walking his dog, a little dachshund. The leash catches the first guy right in the ankles and he has to windmill his arms and do a little hopping dance to keep from falling over, which gets him even more wrapped up in the leash. The dog goes nuts.

  It went perfectly, the way it always did. Margaret snorted with laughter. It was the first time I’d seen her laugh.

  “Does he ever actually fall over?”

  “I’ve never seen it happen. Once I yelled at them—like, Watch out! Sausage dog! Incoming! And the guy looked at me like, Come on, of course I saw the guy with the dog. That would never happen in a million years. So now I just let them do it. Besides, I think the dog enjoys it.”

  We watched the traffic.

  “Wanna drive around for a while?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I played hard to get. Because I’m smooth like that. “You don’t make it sound like the world’s safest activity.”

  “What can I tell you? Life’s full of surprises.” Margaret was already walking to the car. “I mean, not our lives. But life generally.”

  We got into the station wagon. It smelled like Margaret, only more so. We cruised past the many olde-timey shops of Lexington Center.

  “Anyway,” she said, “if we die in a heap of hot screaming metal, we’ll probably just be reincarnated in the morning.”

  “Probably. See, it’s the probably part that worries me.”

  “Actually I’ve been thinking about that, and I’m pretty sure we’d come back. Other people do. I mean, think about how many people in the world die every day. If they didn’t all come back, then all those people would turn up dead in the morning when the world reset. Or they’d be vanished or Raptured or something. Either way, somebody would have noticed by now. Ergo, they must get resurrected.”

  “And then die again. Jesus, people must be having to die over and over again. I wonder how many.”

  “One hundred fifty thousand,” she said. “I looked it up. That’s how many people die every day, on average.”

  I tried to picture them. A thousand people standing in a line, all marching off a cliff. And then a hundred fifty of those lines.

  “God, imagine if you had a really painful death,” I said. “Or even just a really shitty day, like you’re sick and suffering. Or you get fired. Or somebody dumps you. You’d get dumped over and over again. That would be horrible. Seriously, we have to fix this.”

  She didn’t seem interested in pursuing this line of inquiry. In fact, she went stone-faced when I said it, and it occurred to me for the first time to wonder whether August 4th might be not as simple a day for her as it was for me.

  “Sorry, that was getting a little depressing,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Probably lots of good things are happening over and over again, too.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  We’d reached the edge of town. It’s not a big
town. Margaret took an on-ramp onto Route 2.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Nowhere special.”

  It was, as always, a blazing hot afternoon, and the highway was clogged with rush hour traffic.

  “I used to listen to the radio,” she said, “but I’m already sick of all the songs.”

  “I wonder how far this thing goes. Like, is it just Lexington that’s in the time loop, or is it the entire planet that’s stuck like this? Or is it the entire universe? Wouldn’t it have to be the entire universe? Black holes and quasars and exoplanets, all resetting themselves every day, with us in the middle of it? And we’re the only beings in the whole universe who know about it?”

  “That’s kinda egocentric, don’t you think?” she said. “Probably there are a couple of aliens out there who know about it too.”

  “Probably.”

  “Actually I was thinking, if it is just a local thing, maybe if we went far enough we’d get outside the field or zone or whatever it is and time would go forward again.”

  “It’s worth a try,” I said. “Like, just get in the station wagon and floor it and see what happens.”

  “I was more thinking of getting on an airplane.”

  “Right.”

  Though to be honest at that moment I was enjoying just riding in Margaret’s car so much that I wasn’t sure I wanted time to start working again quite yet. I would’ve been happy to repeat these five minutes a few hundred times. She turned off the highway.

  “I lied before. About where we’re going. I want to show you something.”

  She turned into a sandy parking lot. Gravel crackled under the tires. I knew where we were: It was the parking lot for the Wachusett Reservoir. My dad took me here all the time when I was little and he was teaching me how to fish. It’s stocked with zillions of pumpkinseed sunfish. Though once I passed puberty I developed empathy with the fish and refused to do it anymore.

  Margaret checked her watch.

  “Shit. Come on, we’re going to miss it.”

  She actually took off running through the thin pine woods around the reservoir. She was fast—those long legs—and I didn’t catch up with her till she stopped suddenly a few yards short of the brown sandy beach. She put a hand on my arm. It was the first time she ever touched me. I remember what she was wearing: a T-shirt, orange washed to a pale sherbet peach, with an old summer camp logo on it. Her fingers were unexpectedly cool.

  “Look.”

  The water was glittering with beads of molten gold in the late afternoon. The air was still, though you could hear the drone of the highway in the background.

  “I don’t—”

  “Wait. Here it comes.”

  It came. A hawk swooped down out of the air, a dense, dangerous bundle of dark feathers. It hit the water hard, back-winged frantically for a second, spraying jeweled droplets everywhere, then beat furiously back into the sky with a flashing, wriggly pumpkinseed sunfish twisting in its claws and was gone.

  The hot, dusty afternoon was as still and empty as before. The whole thing had taken maybe twenty seconds. It was the kind of thing that reminded you that a day you’d already lived through fifty times could still surprise you. Margaret turned to me.

  “Well?”

  “Well? That was amazing!”

  “Wasn’t it?” Her smile could have stopped time all on its own. “I saw it just by chance the other day. I mean today, but you know. The other today.”

  “Thank you for showing it to me. It happens every time?”

  “Exactly the same time. 4:22 and thirty seconds. I’ve watched it three times already.”

  “It almost makes being stuck in time worthwhile.”

  “Almost.” Then she thought of something and her smile faded a little. “It almost does.”

  Margaret dropped me off at the library—I’d left my bike there—and that was that. I didn’t ask her out or anything. I figured it was quite enough that she was trapped in time with me. It’s not like we could avoid each other. We were like two castaways, except instead of being stranded on a desert island we were stranded in a day.

  Because I am a person of uncommon strength of will, I didn’t text her again till two days later.

  Found another one. Back stairs of library—the ones in the parking lot—11:37:12.

  Another what?

  One. Come.

  She didn’t answer, but I waited for her anyway, just in case. I didn’t have anything better to do. And she came, the boatlike station wagon heeling into the parking lot at 11:30. She parked in the shade.

  “What is it?” she said. “Like another hawk?”

  “Keep your voice down, I don’t want to screw it up.”

  “Screw what up?”

  I pointed.

  The rear entrance of the library had concrete stairs leading down to the parking lot. There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the stairs, but they had that mysterious Pythagorean quality that attracts fourteen-year-old skateboarders like a magnet attracts iron filings. They flocked to it like vultures to a carcass. They probably showed up the second the concrete was dry.

  “That’s the thing?” she said. “Skate rats are the thing?”

  “Just watch.”

  Each kid took his or her turn going down the steps, one after the other, did his or her thing, then walked back up the wheelchair ramp and got back in line. It never stopped.

  “Okay,” I said. “So what do you notice about these skate rats?”

  “What do you mean?” Margaret was visibly unintrigued.

  “What do they all have in common?”

  “That ironically, despite the fact that skateboarding defines their very identity, they all suck at it?”

  “Exactly!” I said. “The iron law of skate rats the world over is that they never, ever land that one trick they’re always trying to land. Now look.”

  A skateboarder rolled toward the top of the steps, knees bent, jumped, and his skateboard went clattering off at a random angle without him. Cue next skater. And the next. And the next.

  I checked my watch. 11:35.

  “Two more minutes,” I said. “Sorry, I figured you’d be late. How’s everything else?”

  “Not bad.”

  “How’s the driving?”

  “Great. I need a new challenge. It’s between juggling and electrical engineering.”

  “Gotta be practical. Juggling’s the future.”

  “It’s the sensible choice.”

  A skater went down, a potentially ugly fall, but she rolled out of it and came up fine. The next one chickened out before he even got to the top of the steps.

  “Okay, two more.” Miss. “One more.” Miss. “Okay. Showtime!”

  The next turn belonged to a round-faced, thick-bodied kid with a dark hair-helmet under his real helmet, whom we’d already seen muff a few tricks. His face was set and determined. He pushed off, found his balance, set his feet, crouched down, hit the steps, and jumped.

  His board flipped once, then came down hard on the railing in a perfect grind. Seriously, it was like in a video game—this was like X Games–level shit. The kid grinded all the way down the rail, ten feet in one long second, arms out wide. The first time I saw it I figured that was it. He’d nailed the trick, that was enough; his name would live in song and story forever. But no, it wasn’t enough. He had to go for all the glory: a full 360 flip out of the grind.

  With an athleticism that seemed to have nothing to do with his pale, doughy physique, he popped off the rail and into the air, levitating while his board spun wildly along both axes. Then wham!—he stomped down on it, both feet. And he stuck it.

  He stuck it! The board bowed so deeply it looked like it was going to snap, but he kept his feet, and as he straightened up… his face! He couldn’t believe it! He made the happiest face that it is anatomically possible for a human to make.

  “Oh my God!” He held up both fists. “Oh my fucking God!”

  The rats came
pouring down the steps. They mobbed him. It was, and might quite possibly always be, the greatest moment of his life.

  “Tell me that wasn’t worth it,” I said.

  Margaret nodded solemnly. She was looking at me differently than she had before. She seemed to be seeing me, really paying attention to me, for the first time.

  “It was worth it. You were right. It was a perfect thing.”

  “Like the hawk.”

  “Like the hawk. Come on, let’s go get something expensive and bad for us for lunch.”

  We got the most brutally fattening thing we could find, which was bacon cheeseburgers—extra bacon, extra cheese. That was the day we came up with the idea for the map of tiny perfect things.

  It’s tough getting through daily life, finding stuff that doesn’t suck to take pleasure in—and that’s in normal life, where every twenty-four hours you get a whole fresh new day to work with. We were in a tougher situation, because we had to make do with the same day every single day, and that day was getting worn pretty thin.

  So we got serious about it. The hawk and the skate rat were just the beginning. Our goal was to find every single moment of beauty, every tiny perfect thing, that this particular August 4th had to offer. There had to be more: Moments when, for just a few seconds, the dull coal of reality was compressed by random chance into a glittering diamond of awesomeness. If we were going to stay sane, we were going to have to find them all. We were going to have to mine August 4th for every bit of perfection it had.

  “We have to be super-observant,” Margaret said. “Stay in the moment. We can’t just be alive, we have to be super-alive.”

  In addition to being super-alive we were going to be organized. We bought a snazzy fountain pen and a big foldy survey map of Lexington and spread it out on a table in the library. Margaret found the spot on the Wachusett Reservoir and wrote “HAWK” and “16:32:30” on it in snazzy purple ink. (Military time made it seem that much more official.) On the spot marking the rear steps of the library, I wrote “11:37:12” and “SKATE RAT.”

  We stepped back to admire our work. It was a start. We were a team: Mark and Margaret against the world.