McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [70]
It was a cold night, and the rain still spat occasional drizzle. I shivered, but only because I was cold.
“Those cages you mentioned,” he said. “By the driveway. I haven’t thought of them in fifty years. When we were bad he’d lock us up in them. We must have been bad a great deal, eh? Very naughty, naughty boys.”
He was looking up and down the Tottenham Court Road, as if he were looking for something. Then he said, “Douglas killed himself, of course. Ten years ago. When I was still in the bin. So my memory’s not as good. Not as good as it was. But that was Jamie all right, to the life. He’d never let us forget that he was the oldest. And you know, we weren’t ever allowed in the playhouse. Father didn’t build it for us.” His voice quavered, and for a moment I could imagine this pale old man as a boy again. “Father had his own games.”
And then he waved his arm and called “Taxi!” and a taxi pulled over to the curb. “Brown’s Hotel,” said the man, and he got in. He did not say good night to any of us. He pulled shut the door of the cab.
And in the closing of the cab door I could hear too many other doors closing. Doors in the past, which are gone now, and cannot be reopened.
Otherwise Pandemonium
By NICK HORNBY
It was just a lousy secondhand VCR—but it brought him to the
very brink of love and desolation!
Mom always sings this crappy old song when I’m in a bad mood. She does it to make me laugh, but I never do laugh, because I’m in a bad mood. (Sometimes I sort of smile later, when I’m in a better mood, and I think about her singing and dancing and making the dorky black-and-white-movie face—eyes wide, all her teeth showing—she always makes when she sings the song. But I never tell her she makes me smile. It would only encourage her to sing more often.) This song is called “Ac-cent-chu-ate the Positive,” and I have to listen to it whenever she tells me we’re going to Dayton to see Grandma, or when she won’t give me the money for something I need, like CDs or even clothes, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, today I’m going to do what the song says. I’m going to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. Otherwise, according to the song and to my mom, pandemonium’s liable to walk upon the scene.
OK. Well, here is the accentuated positive: I got to have sex. That’s the upside of it. I know that’s probably a strange way of looking at things, considering the circumstances, but it’s definitely the major event of the week so far. It won’t be the major event of the year, I know that—Jesus, do I know that—but it’s still a headline news item: I just turned fifteen, and I’m no longer a virgin. How cool is that? The target I’d set for myself was sixteen, which means I’m a whole year ahead of schedule. Nearly two years, in fact, because I’ll still be sixteen in twenty-two months’ time. So let’s say this is the story of how I ended up getting laid—a story with a beginning, and a weird middle, and a happy ending. Otherwise I’d have to tell you a Stephen King–type story, with a beginning and a weird middle and a really fucking scary ending, and I don’t want to do that. It wouldn’t help me right now.
So. You probably think you need to know who I am, and what kind of car my brother drives, and all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap, but you really don’t, and not just because I haven’t got a brother, or even a cute little sister. It’s not one of those stories. Insights into my personality and all that stuff aren’t going to help you or me one bit, because this shit is real. I don’t want you to get to the end of this and start thinking about whether I’d have acted different if my parents had stayed together, or whether I’m a typical product of our