The Map of Tiny Perfect Things Read online

  I took both Margaret’s hands in mine.

  “Is it time? Is this the last day?”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “It’s the last one. The last August 4th. I mean, till next year anyway.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks again, but she smiled through them. “I’m ready now. It’s time.”

  The sun cracked the edge of the world and began to rise.

  “You know what’s funny though?” she said. “I keep waiting for the thing to happen. You know, the perfect thing, the last one. The way it’s supposed to on the map. But maybe we missed it while we were talking.”

  “I don’t think we missed it.”

  I kissed her. You can spend your life waiting and watching for perfect moments, but sometimes you have to make one happen.

  After a few seconds, the best seconds of my life so far, Margaret pulled away.

  “Hang on,” she said. “I don’t think that was it.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “It wasn’t perfect. I had a hair in my mouth.”

  She swept her hair to one side.

  “Okay, kiss me again.”

  I did. And this time it was perfect.

  Author’s Note

  There’s a scene in Edge of Tomorrow—that high-concept science-fiction time-loop thriller starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt—where the Cruise character and the Blunt character battle their way through a whole lot of alien armies and have a chase scene in a minivan and finally arrive at a peaceful and tastefully decorated farmhouse that for some reason has a helicopter under a tarp in the backyard. (You can imagine the Airbnb reviews.)

  Blunt—and also the audience—thinks this is the first time they’ve been to the tasteful farmhouse. But Cruise knows they’ve actually been there many, many times before, and furthermore that the scene always ends the same way, with their deaths at the hands and pointy teeth of yet more aliens. The scene doesn’t really make sense—why would Cruise keep taking them back to that one particular farmhouse of death when he knows they’ll just get killed there?—but I still find it incredibly moving: Cruise knowing what has happened, and what’s going to happen, and trying to pretend he doesn’t know, and knowing that he has to tell her, and that telling her will change nothing. It also felt strangely familiar, even though nothing remotely like that has ever actually happened to me. (As far as I know. It’s always possible I’m stuck in a time loop too.)

  I found it so moving, and so weirdly recognizable, that it made me want to write a time-loop story myself. So I went off and wrote a short story called “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things.”

  Nothing remotely like any of that happens in “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” either, but there is a time loop in it, and there is, hopefully, something of that special melancholy feeling that comes with all good time-loop stories. There’s no such thing as time loops in reality—unless there’s something about theoretical physics that I’m seriously misunderstanding, which is admittedly possible—but there’s something about them that feels very real to me. I feel like I make the exact same mistake twice. I feel like I’m always the one who gets stuck emptying the cat litter. I always hit that one damn shot into the net. I get off at the same subway stop every single day. And so on. (True story: Before I was a full-time writer I worked at the same job, in the same building, at the same subway stop, for fifteen years. One day as I was getting to work they were putting up new signs in the subway, and the old ones were just sitting there, and I straight-up stole one. Put it in my briefcase and kept walking. It’s hanging on my wall to remind me to keep writing so that I won’t have to go back to that job ever again.)

  Sometimes those moments of repetition are awful, because if you do something too many times it gets less and less meaningful and bearable every time—you’re like Sisyphus changing that cat litter. And then sometimes it works the other way: Those moments become special, because they enable you to see yourself in a special way. Your present self can get a good look at the past self who you were the last time this happened, and you get to think about how much you’ve changed, and how little the world has.

  I should be clear that I didn’t go off and write “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” just like that. I’m not one of those authors who gets things right on the first try, or the second, or the twentieth. My first try wasn’t even a story at all; it was a failed pitch for a TV show (working title: Again). On the show a bunch of people would all be caught in a time loop together, and they would be trying to figure out what started it, which would lead them to discover this byzantine international conspiracy which they then have to unravel and defeat. One of the people would be a woman who’s serving a life sentence in prison, who escapes every day only to end up back where she started the next morning. There would also be a cop who solves crimes that would come unsolved again the next day. And so on. I still think it’s a good idea!

  But nobody else did, and the idea fared particularly badly among one very important demographic, namely TV network executives. You do not truly know chagrin till you’ve seen your TV pitch die in an HBO conference room. After a while I got so tired of trying and failing to explain it that I thought I would write it as a short story instead, in case I was better at that than at TV pitches. I figured there should be a love story somewhere in there. The writer Stephanie Perkins was getting together a young adult anthology, so I made the characters teenagers. Then I got more interested in the love story than the byzantine international conspiracy. And that’s how we got to “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things.”

  It’s set in Lexington, Massachusetts, which is the town where I grew up. Lexington itself is trapped in its own kind of time loop: It was the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War, in 1775, and almost nothing has happened there since, so large swaths of it are preserved intact from the colonial era, and in fact the battle that made it famous (which we lost) is frequently reenacted there. The story was meant to evoke the kind of summer days I had a lot of as a teenager, where I had so little to do that I was driven to extreme lengths to try to amuse myself. Like Mark I rode my bike a lot and played a lot of video games and was bad at skateboarding and had hopeless crushes on people. Paint Rock Pool is a real place—you can google it—as is the library where Mark hangs out and reads The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I hung out, and was bored, in both those places.

  I never met Margaret, though. Sadly she is completely fictional.

  But like Mark I was sunk deep in the sunny narcissism that is so much a part of being a teenager, especially a teenage boy, where it never occurs to you that reality isn’t just a pageant staged for your personal entertainment. Other people’s interior lives just don’t feel as real to you as they should. But then Mark meets Margaret, and he falls in love, so hard that he’s wrenched right out of his narcissistic trance and forced to realize for the first time that the world is so much more than just an endless gag reel. It’s a place full of beauty, and people with feelings that are as real and important as his.

  Margaret is no narcissist. In that sense she begins her story in a more evolved place than Mark does. But she’s just as stuck, and the trap she’s caught in is even stronger than Mark’s. She’s caught in a loop of her own making, because she is losing something, and the thing she is losing feels like it’s so much a part of her that she will not survive the separation. She will literally cease to exist. The grief will be too much.

  Mark is nobody’s idea of a spiritual guide, or even a manic pixie dream boy, but in surfacing from his narcissistic daze he grasps something true, and he can help Margaret grasp it too: the idea that loss and change are not optional. They are part of time, and without them life, and love, are impossible. Time is a disaster that leaves no survivors; love is our pathetic, heroic human attempt to make up for it.

  What I really wanted to do was tell a story like Groundhog Day but with something different at the heart of it. Not a callow goof self-actualizing to the point where he can connect romantically with another human bein
g—or actually that, but not just that. I wanted to add something real and sad, that gets at whatever it is that time does to us, giving to us and taking away at the same time in this weird tragic bargain that we never get the chance to refuse. Except—what if we did?

  Oddly enough, people didn’t seem to have any trouble understanding the short-story version of the idea. Usually I have to beg Hollywood people to listen to me, but with The Map of Tiny Perfect Things Hollywood actually came knocking on my door. All of a sudden movie directors that I had actually heard of were cold-calling me during dinner.

  At the time I was very keen on getting into screenwriting. I’d been writing novels and magazine articles for twenty-five years or so, and I was ready to try something new. So I made it a condition that whoever bought the rights to the story had to let me write the script. This took care of the problem of people calling me during dinner, and in fact at any other time. Nobody wanted to have to teach me how to write a movie, which is understandable, and I thought I’d overplayed my hand—but one producer refused to be scared off.

  That was Akiva Goldsman, a producer who is also a screenwriter—he won an Oscar for writing A Beautiful Mind. I flew to Los Angeles, where Akiva and his people introduced me to the universal Hollywood practice of writing bits of a story on index cards and rearranging them on the wall till they make sense. We did quite a lot of that. (The thing that really impressed me wasn’t so much how well it worked but the fact that they had an assistant who did the cards for them.) After about six months of card-arranging Akiva connected us with FilmNation, the production company that made The Big Sick and The King’s Speech, and just like that we were up and running. Time to make a movie!

  Though first I had to stop rearranging cards and write the actual script. I thought turning my story into a movie would consist mostly of cutting and pasting the dialogue into a screenplay template, and then maybe fleshing out a few of the slow bits with musical montages, and also coming up with a shorter title. But of course there turned out to be more to it than that.

  Part of the problem was that in the movie I couldn’t just tell the audience what Mark was thinking and feeling, the way I do in the story. The producers wouldn’t let me do a voiceover, or have Mark talk directly to the screen, Ferris Bueller style, so my solution was to give Mark a friend named Henry who he could talk to while they played a made-up video game called War Fight! (Video games are useful metaphors for time loops, as anybody who’s ever been stuck on a level knows.) But of course because Mark is a teenage boy he still wouldn’t explain his thoughts and feelings, to Henry or to anybody else, because teenage boys don’t do that. It turns out that the art of writing movies, as opposed to stories, is about arranging things so the audience can infer what’s going on in the characters’ heads from the way they say things. Which is a lot harder than just saying it.

  We also needed more story, because there wasn’t enough to fill up an hour and forty minutes—the tragedy of all literary adaptations is that novels have too much story for a movie and short stories not quite enough. Plus the story we had was shaped wrong: In a short story you can get away with revealing the whole mystery at the very end, at which point the story is over, but in a movie people want you to reveal the mystery at the three-quarters mark, and then the rest of the story is about people dealing with the fallout from the big reveal. So more stuff had to happen.

  At this point I still could’ve walked away. Nobody ever went to jail for not turning their short story into a movie. But the idea wouldn’t let me alone. I wanted to see it on-screen. I wanted to see the hawk catch the fish. I wanted to see the map. Movies have always had a huge amount of power over me—teen flicks like Risky Business and The Breakfast Club were massively formative for me, and even as an adult I once cried so hard watching a movie on a plane (it was The Queen, starring Helen Mirren) that they practically had to do an emergency landing. It wasn’t a money thing—to be crass for a second, I make much more from books and probably always will—but movies go places books don’t. I wanted to see a story of mine go to those places.

  And it’s very tricky to get a movie made. A lot of stars have to align. This was probably going to be my only chance to write a Hollywood movie, and that just felt like a good thing to do before I died.

  So what would you do if you were a teenage boy trapped in a time loop, if you knew exactly what was coming and nothing you did had any consequences? And which was not already done by Bill Murray in Groundhog Day? And which did not get you an R rating from the MPAA? I spent months of my life racking my brain over this question, and I came up with a lot of answers, most of which didn’t end up in the movie. For example: I thought of a lot of ways of humiliating bullies. (This was ruled a cliché.) I thought there should be a little girl who accidentally lets go of a helium balloon, which Mark then saves—this actually stayed in the script but turned out to be too hard to do on film. (You can still see the girl with the balloon in the background of the finished movie.) I thought Mark should go to a pet store and buy all the birds there and let them go. I was also dead set on having Mark catch a rare high-value Pokémon in Pokémon GO, because let’s face it, that’s what I would do. But none of the movie’s producers played Pokémon GO.

  In various drafts of the script—and in the end I wrote around thirty of them—Mark ate a whole drugstore display of candy, and got sick, and drank the entire contents of his parents’ liquor cabinet, and got sick again. He went to the airport and rode around the baggage carousel. He dominated a poker game by knowing everybody’s cards in advance (this wouldn’t actually work, if you think about it, but it seemed like it should work). He climbed a flagpole and took a selfie at the top and then got arrested. He drove a car over a “severe tire damage” barrier just to see what would happen. (The tires got severely damaged.) He dropped valuable objects off the roof of a building, Letterman style. He went to a baseball game and caught all the home-run balls. (In some drafts he dragged Margaret to the game. She was bored.)

  None of these ideas made it into the final script, but there’s enough of them to make several more movies. Mark and Margaret broke into a museum and drank beer sitting on top of a T. rex skeleton. They sold Margaret’s car and used the proceeds to bribe an ice-rink attendant to let them joyride in a Zamboni. They repeatedly tried and failed to drive to Niagara Falls (then when the day ends they finally succeed—the first twenty or so drafts of the script ended with them kissing in front of the thundering torrent). In one version the trick with the airplane actually works, and Mark flies to Tokyo and eats sushi and escapes from the time loop without Margaret. Then he discovers that Margaret is missing from the future, so he has to find his way back into the time loop so they can leave together.

  Of all the alternate realities that Mark and Margaret lived in these drafts, the one I gave up on most reluctantly was probably the scene where they randomly spot a celebrity—I wanted Sean Bean, mostly because he was in one of my all-time favorite movies, Ronin. Sadly Mr. Bean was not available for a cameo in The Map of Tiny Perfect Things. Nor were any other celebrities. (In my favorite version Sean Bean would then come back in the last scene of the movie wearing a fireman’s uniform as an homage to the late Sean Connery in Time Bandits.)

  Movies are much more specific than stories: In stories you can gesture vaguely at things, allude to them in passing and let the reader fill in the details, but in movies the audience has to actually see them. That meant we couldn’t just mention the perfect things, we had to physically stage each one. One of the inspirations for the perfect things actually came from a movie in the first place, American Beauty, in which a character films a plastic bag blowing in the wind—just that, but somehow when he points his camera at it, it becomes wonderful and special. We had to find eight or ten plastic-bag moments like that. And none of them could involve an actual plastic bag.

  For inspiration I spent approximately a thousand hours on Reddit and YouTube scrolling through lists of “everyday moments of beauty” and “the mo
st incredible coincidence that ever happened to you” and “the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen” (and also “hilarious home stunt fails”). There is actual footage of a moment when somebody chucked a plastic water bottle out of a car, and a woman walked over to the bottle and kicked it, and it flew right back in through the window of the moving car. Instant karma.

  I thought that was pretty perfect… but nobody else did. I also wanted to use one where a kid jumps out of a tree and lands on a skateboard which is sitting on top of a trampoline, and the skateboard squirts out from under him, flies across the yard, and breaks a plate-glass window. Hilarious home stunt fail! No one else thought it was hilarious. (And in case you’re curious about what the most beautiful things people have ever seen are, I can tell you that there are very, very long Reddit threads devoted to this question, and 95 percent of the answers fall into one of three categories: their newborn children, the face of their spouse on their wedding day, and random objects they’ve seen while on acid.)

  I had budgeted six weeks to write the script of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things. In reality it took three years. Many, many times I wanted to give up and cut my losses, but I could never quite bring myself to let it go, even as the possibility of it ever becoming a movie seemed to get more and more remote, and my faith in my fledgling career as a screenwriter asymptotically approached zero, and I watched both Happy Death Day and then Happy Death Day 2U come and go from the theaters. For a long time Disney flirted with financing Tiny Perfect Things, which meant that we had to take out all the swear words, plus the scene with the liquor cabinet, an entire subplot in which Mark’s mother has an affair, and a sex scene in which Mark ponders the profound question of whether he’ll technically be a virgin again when the day resets itself. Disney finally passed on the movie (or to be more accurate they just stopped taking our calls one day), and we put some of the swear words back in. But not the liquor cabinet, or the affair, or the sex scene.