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By Root 1395 0

a little while thinking about Bizarro World. Bizarro World was a planet that featured in some issues of Superman comics. The inhabitants of Bizarro World did everything in reverse—walked backward, drove backward, switched televisions off when they wanted to watch and on when they didn’t, drove through red lights but stopped at green ones, and so on. Bizarro World bothered me enormously because it was so impossibly inconsistent. The people didn’t actually speak backward, but just talked in a kind of primitive caveman “me no like him” type of English, which was not the same thing at all. Anyway, living backward simply couldn’t be made to work. At the gas station they would have to take fuel out of their cars rather than put it in, so how would they make their cars go? Eating would mean sucking poo up through their anus, sending it through the body and ejecting it in mouth-sized lumps onto forks and spoons. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all.

When I had exhausted that topic, I might devote a good stretch of time to “what if” questions—what I would do if I could make myself invisible (go to Mary O’Leary’s house about bath time), or if time stopped and I was the only thing on earth left moving (take a lot of money from a bank and then go to Mary O’Leary’s house), or if I could hypnotize everyone in the world (ditto), or found a magic lamp and was granted two wishes (ditto), or anything at all really. All fantasies led ultimately to Mary O’Leary.

Then I might move on to imponderables. How could we be sure that we all saw the same colors? Maybe what I see as green you see as blue. Who could actually say? And when scientists say that dogs and cats are color-blind (or not—I could never remember which it was), how do they know? What dog is going to tell them? And how do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone? And when you see two ants going in opposite directions pause to check each other out, what information exactly are they exchanging?—“Hey, nice feelers!” “Don’t panic, but that kid that’s watching us has got matches and lighter fluid”—and how do they know to do whatever they are doing? Something is telling them to go off and bring home a leaf or a granule of sand—but who and how?

And then suddenly I would realize that I couldn’t remember, hadn’t actually consciously experienced, any of the last forty-seven properties I had visited, and didn’t know if I had left a paper or just walked up to the door, stood for a moment like an underfunctioning automaton, and turned around and walked away again.

It is not easy to describe the sense of self-disappointment that comes with reaching the end of your route and finding that there are sixteen undelivered papers in your bag and you don’t have the least idea—not the least idea—to whom they should have gone. I spent much of my prepubescent years first walking an enormous newspaper route, then revisiting large parts of it. Sometimes twice.

As if delivering papers seven days a week weren’t enough, you also had to collect the subscription money. So at least three evenings a week, when you might instead have had your feet up and be watching Combat! or The Outer Limits, you had to turn out again and try to coax some money out of your ungrateful customers. That was easily the worst part. And the worst part of the worst part was collecting from Mrs. Vandermeister.

Mrs. Vandermeister was seven hundred years old, possibly eight hundred, and permanently attached to an aluminum walker. She was stooped, very small, forgetful, glacially slow, interestingly malodorous, practically deaf. She emerged from her house once a day to drive to the supermarket, in a car about the size of an aircraft carrier. It took her two hours to get out of her house and into the car and then another two hours to get the car out of the driveway and up the alley. Partly this was because Mrs. Vandermeister could never find a gear she liked and partly because when shunting she never moved forward or backward more than a quarter of an inch at a time, and seemed only barely in