Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

The child read her mind once again. ‘You are my mother now,’ she said. ‘My parents have died.’ Wisely she said this, not as a three-year-old, not as an old person, but as Mariana’s own mother would have said it. Mariana remembered the Australian look of her mother now. Long beautiful black hair, and now she also noticed something else about the child. She, too, was an Australian. Mariana hugged the child tight now, with the child upright in her arms, as she had seen women in Australian doing.

Finally she came to the wooden house. The sight of it was miracly happy-making for her. She lay the child down on the couch on the front porch. Her mother and her father hugged her. Then she fell, her knees bending. They gently took her to her bed. She slept a gentle sleep. It felt like it lasted twenty days and twenty nights. In later years, she raised the child, with her parents’ help, and the two of them became best friends.

And that was only one of the stories of the amazing, everlasting Life of Mariana.

The idea of everlasting life came partly from the kinds of things you say in Cathedral, and partly from a movie called The Neverending Story , which was an extremely good movie in many ways, one of which was that it was unusually rare to have a two-part movie and have the second part be just as interesting as the first, basically. ‘Neverending’ and ‘everlasting’ were good words for the job because they last and last when you say them, like ‘forevermore.’

Nory had saved up a few stories from the Everlasting Life of Mariana, and she was wondering how in the world she would remember them, since they were too long to write down. Some were definitely a touch on the gruesome side, but that was what you might expect since if it’s a gruesomeness that comes from your own private brain when you’re awake it’s not the least bit the same as the kind of gruesomeness that somebody else might offer you in a book or a movie. On the other hand, the scary things your brain decides to show you at night are totally different, they can be very bothersome, definitely, but the things that you think up on purpose are usually not as bad, because they were just teetering at the exact limit of frighteningness that you wanted them at, and you didn’t have to worry that they were going to slip over the limit.

You really need something to fail in a story, because then when it fails it has to get better. The way Nory thought of the burning rain story was that she once noticed that sometimes rain, when it was falling very lightly, would give you pins and needles on your face. Very very light rain, ting, ting, ting , could hurt surprisingly. Just tiny, tiny drops of sharp rain, coming down very quickly because they’re so small they slide right past the bigger softer raindrops.

Another time, on the way back from Blickling Hall, Nory told a story to her very small Felicity doll. It ended up being about a little brother because her own brother, Littleguy, was right next to her in his car seat, transfixed in his sleep. The story was gruesome, but not as gruesome as the story about the burning rain, which was probably the most gruesome one she’d ever told.

There was a little girl named Era. She lived in a beautiful cottage near Blickling Hall with her brother. It was so lovely, everything was perfect. Her mother and father were perfect, they never were angry, and always were nice to them. Era was walking in one day, after playing outside in her favorite place to play. But, ooh, she fell into horrible mud.

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I have just spoiled my lovely dress. Oh no.’ And she began to cry. She got up out of the ditch and walked over to her mother.

‘Oh dear,’ said her mother, ‘your favorite dress, too. Well, I’ll just have to make you a new one, and patch up that one.’

‘Thank you, Mother,’ Era said, and bowed politely, or curtsied, as you might say. She walked along, putting her school things away in the proper places. ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘is Father out of the hospital yet?’

‘Yes, he is, he’s in the breakfast room, if you go in there, you’ll see him.’

Era walked in, and there was her father. He smiled brightly at her. She played games all morning. But her dress getting mud on it was not the only tragedy of that day. She was walking on the street with her brother, who was eight, coming back from the market with all the goods. She put her brother down, and she, being a thirteen-year-old, went off to do some homework, or prep.

Her mother was making dinner, and went off in another room to get her laundry, and her father stayed in the breakfast room, unable to walk still, because of his injury about a month ago. She walked happily through the living room as she went to her room. There was her brother, taking out the matches slowly one by one.

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘Help, no!’ And she grabbed the matches away from him. But just as she grabbed it away, the match in his hand flung against the matchbox, and a fire started. She dropped the matchbox and called out. But her mother could not hear her. She was covered in laundry from head to toe, bringing it into the kitchen.

‘Fire!’ screamed Era, pulling her brother out with her. But they tripped over her matchbox and he burned his legs badly. She carried him out, quickly, but she tripped again, falling on him, then picked him up and ran out with him screaming in pain, from fire. She had stepped on a knife that had cut through the back of her shoe. Oh, she was scared, running. It was horrible. They had tripped on the thing where you scrape your shoes, when the snow and dung had been there. ‘Oh no,’ she thought, ‘my poor brother, my mother, my father.’

Her father, unable to walk, and her mother, unable to hear, sadly died in the fire. It was awful, she wiped tears from her face and sobbed. Her brother was bleeding terribly now. She picked him up and got out. He was screaming with pain again. Oh, she could almost feel the pain herself. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘brother, don’t cry, don’t cry.’ And she wiped his tears. She could see the pain in his face, but he was very obedient, he did whatever his sister would ever wish him to do. He quietly was carried by her. She could see the pain in his face, easily. She could see that he was struggling.

‘Oh, brother, you may cry.’ She saw a small tear drip across his face, which was wiped back by his shaking hand. He could not resist that tear, she knew, there was no way of helping it.

‘Oh, sister, I can walk,’ he said.

‘You will fall,’ she said, because he could only barely walk with his injuries, and tumble over himself. She brought him carefully to the hospital, with blood stained all over her white and now brown dress.

‘Oh, no,’ she cried, going in the revolving door. She walked slowly over to the desk, carrying her lovable brother. ‘Oh, no.’ She wiped her tears away and tried to fix her hair, which was horrible now. The curl was coming out, the one that was in the back. It hung almost straight down now. She was scared. Her hair always hung straight down when she was scared. Maybe it was the sweat that pulled it down by getting it wet, dripping. Her brother was horrified. The doctors took him.

And for a while after that you never got to see her clean white prim dress or her nice hairdo, but you saw blood and mud and things like that on her dress. She became very poor, without the tiniest bit of money. She walked to a stone. In the stone, she carved her mother’s name, sadly. She couldn’t do it, but the stone was covered with mud, so she tried scratching a message in the mud. She walked along, four days she spent without her brother. Finally she went over to the hospital and picked him up. Fortunately he was better. Soon he was well enough to be picking berries and peeling oranges again, and they had lovely suppers together.