Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

The fatal flaw was quite similar in what it means to the last straw, and the last straw was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The last straw was NOT, REPEAT NOT the last straw in the machine at a restaurant that when it was taken meant the machine was empty and you would have to drink your milkshake sadly without a straw. Kids find out rather quickly that it is less fun to drink the normal way, with your mouth, because with a straw it’s as if you have magical powers and are telling telling the drink, ‘Kazam, kazaw, now climb the straw!’

Nory suspected that the straw that broke that camel’s back was an unsensible idea anyway, because first of all, stop and think of that poor camel. How could it happen? Doesn’t he have something to say about the situation? Also, camels’ backs are pretty strong things. If you’ve ridden on them, you know that they can support at least two people, if not three. And if they are able to support two or three people, they should be able to support a lot, a lot, a lot of hay, because hay doesn’t weigh very much at all, and some people weigh quite a bit. One single straw might weigh a thousandth of a gram, so two straws would weigh two thousandths of a gram, and three straws three thousandths of a gram, and so on, and so on. If they got enough straws together to weigh a very large amount of pounds, a massive knob of straw or a rectangle of straw like the ones that are out in the middle of the fields you see when you drive for what seems like hours and hours to Stately Homes, the huge shape would plop off before they got it all strapped on. Just stuffing the last straw under the strap of rope that was tying it all together, ever so gently, would make the huge heaviness start to tilt, and the straps under the camel’s stomach would slip, which might give him an Indian burn, and the whole thing would thump to the side on the ground, unless they somehow had a machine that condensed every single bit of straw together into tiny blocks the size of sugar cubes that were so heavy you could barely lift them without a pulley and you put them all over the camel’s back somehow. But that would be quite unusual.

And the other main point was, a camel is a mammal and a mammal is a sensible animal. He’s not just going to freeze in place there. As soon as the load felt like it was getting uncontrollably heavy, he would fold his knees under him the way they do. He wouldn’t stand there and have a major injury. When camels get cross they do something about it. They squirt large amounts of spit from their mouths, for one thing. That happened to Captain Haddock in Tintin one time. He was tickling the camel under the chin, and then suddenly, pshooo, his head is gone and a huge splash of camel saliva is in its place. So if you are the one in charge of putting the last straw on the camel’s back, watch out for that risk. And also, if Nory was anywhere near by, watch out for Nory, too, because she had seen the camels at the zoo, which had hurt-looking gray places on their knees from having kneeled down on rough gravel all the time rather than soft sand, and she had cut her knee on a rock once while she was swimming, and then the cut had opened again and bled, leaving a bigger scar than she had expected, so she knew what it was like to have sore knees. She had enough empathy for camels that if she saw a camel in the desert that was being loaded up so much that its back might be broken she would walk out in front of the people who were doing it and she would just say, ‘Stop, there is a fatal flaw in what you’re doing. You’re going to hurt the camel.’

Fatal flaw indeed! How dare Ms. Beryl say that? She was definitely a little chatty from time to time, but she had been chatty at every school she had ever been to, it was in her deepest nature to be chatty, and other kids were tons chattier, they actually shouted or threw things, and she was only eight at that time, eight going on nine. In Chinese class in the morning she did not have nearly so much of a problem with the ‘fatal flaw,’ but there too she sometimes did forget herself and talk a little to Bernice or Debbie. The Chinese teacher was much more strict, and a few times she got furious at Bernice and shouted in Chinese, because Bernice made fun of her sometimes by saying slangy things very softly in English that the teacher couldn’t understand, but Bai Lao Shi was much calmer than Ms. Beryl. Every morning the kids stood on the field next to the school and did Chinese exercises, shouting out the numbers — yi, er, san — while Bai Lao Shi blew puffs on a silver whistle. Sometimes she held the whistle in her teeth. She had one silver tooth.

Nory’s parents were not completely happy about Ms. Beryl as a teacher, especially after she wrote them the note about the fatal flaw, and at the dinner table they had discussion after discussion after discussion about what they should do for the next year. The result of the discussions was they rented over their house, and presto, ‘We don’t mind if we do go to England!’ The good thing about being in England was that there were lots of teachers at the Threll Junior School, and each one had things they did well and things they did less well. So you never got that feeling of too much Ms. Beryl. Each morning Nory’s mother would take her and Littleguy to the school, Littleguy in his miniature uniform, which was very cute, and Nory in her jacket and tie and gray skirt and backpack, and each afternoon Nory’s father or mother would pick her up and take her to tea at the tea place near the cathedral, where she had peppermint tea and a piece of chocolate cake with a little dopple of whipped cream next to it, while Littleguy slept in his stroller if they were lucky. Sometimes they read and sometimes they talked about the subject of the day, whatever it was.

Each person contributes something in this world. Some people make bricks, for example, and some make chocolate cakes. Some invent a new kind of powerful glue or maybe a marionette that works by magnets. Or they put the little ball bearings inside whistles that twirl around. Of course some people contribute more than others. Nory’s contribution was going to be that she would be a dentist and help people with their teeth. Nory’s mother’s contribution was teaching Nory and Littleguy about everything, and how it’s important to be honest and not hurt people’s feelings. Nory’s father’s contribution was writing books that help people go to sleep. The books that Nory read to help her go to sleep were: Garfield comics, Tintin books, and sometimes a chapter book like The Wreck of the Zanzibar , although there was a description in that book of a cow lying on his back with his feet and arms extended in the air, cold and dead because it had been drowned in the water, that was not too pleasant. When she was just dozing off she liked something cheerful, with hand-lettered words, in capitals, nothing scary. Tin tin was very popular in England, Garfield not quite as popular as in America. There was a Garfield cartoon in which Garfield has amnesia. He’s talking about how he’s upset that he’s lost his memory, and how John is upset, and Garfield lies back on the table and turns his head back and puts his hand over like he’s swimming backwards, just one hand, and he puts his finger up, and he takes a bit of the frosting of the cake off and says, ‘Well, I remember being hungry.’ Or no, maybe it was, ‘Do I remember being hungry?’

You needed to give yourself the best chance of not having a bad dream by dozing off reading something cartoonish and happy, basically. But even then a bad dream can launch itself off in your head. It could just be something from a movie you saw. In Palo Alto, there was a girl in Girl Scouts whose mother was very big on letting kids see grownup scary movies. There was one movie about a mother who turns out to be evil, with yellow fangs and eyes with nothing but white. Nory had to be very careful not even to think about not thinking about that movie, because it could clamp onto her and she then would not be able to help thinking about it, and the only way to escape thinking about it would be to tempt herself by thinking up something even scarier, and the only way to escape from that was to think about sometime even scarier than that, until you were swamped with scariness and couldn’t escape until morning.