Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

Sometimes a movie isn’t frightening at all, except for in one pacific spot, when you don’t dream of expecting it, like that very good movie about a kid who’s being flown over Canada in a plane, but the man who’s flying him has a heart attack, so they crash, and the heroine has to survive by himself in the wild until he’s rescued. All that is just fine. But nobody warned Nory that there was a scene in the movie in which the kid has to swim out to the plane, which is in the middle of the pond, to get something he needs, and dive under the water, and the dead man’s horrible light purple staring face suddenly floats into the picture, with fear-music. Oh! It should say on the box, THIS MOVIE IS REALLY GOOD EXCEPT FOR ONE SCENE THAT WILL SCARE YOU OUT OF YOUR SHOES FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY TO KEEP FROM THINKING ABOUT IT. (ALSO ONE SCENE THAT IS DISGUSTING BECAUSE YOU SEE HIM EAT A GRUB.) The movie came back to her much less often nowadays, though. When you spend time in another country like England, there is so much new stuff coming pouring in that it even changes your nightmares. There was another movie about a boy who goes on a dogsled race. Everything’s going along just fine, until for some reason the movie gets it into its head to have a corpse slide down on a dogsled at night. The corpse hits a bump and sits up, and there’s his blank dead face, sheet-white, staring backwards at you.

Probably one thing that some kids do is that they watch the particular movie over and over until they go kind of numb and it doesn’t scare them, because you’re not supposed to be scared. Your brain toughens up, like the knees of the camels. But you have to stop at a point being tough, because there is definitely such a thing as being much too tough. There are other things you can do to help the situation, though. If you have a bad dream, and you wake up really frightened, and it’s still dark, don’t just lie there unhappy. You can finish the dream off in a good way. You tell yourself, ‘This is my dream, it came from my own brain, I control it, and I have a chance now that I’m awake to make a few small, shall we say, adjustments to it.’ Nory told this tip to Joe, who was Ruth the baby-sitter’s son, when Joe told her a bad nightmare he’d had. Joe was Ethiopian, from the country of Africa, where he spoke a completely different African-American language, or rather African-African language, and he had learned to speak English quite well in only one short year in Palo Alto. His bad dream was that he and his dad were walking along, when a man jumped down from a tree and said ‘Mfoya, mfoya!’—something like that — which means, ‘Dead, dead!’ The man pointed to some bones. Joe’s dad thought the man was just Joe’s friend, or just being kind of friendly. Then when his dad turned away the man bit Joe deep in the neck. Joe said ‘Gah!’ His dad turned around in surprise, and then he and the man fought, and his dad finally killed the guy by strangling him and hitting his head on a rock. But the guy’s wife came out and she was very very angry. They were carnibels, or they seemed to be, anyway. The guy’s wife ate Joe, finished him up, tooth and nail. So in the end Joe was only bones in the grass by the roadside.

Nory said to Joe, ‘Okay, that’s scary, I admit, but now you can finish it. Try this. Your dad sees your bones and thinks, “Gosh, I have to act fast, I have to get Joe to a hospital.” He puts the bones in a bag and goes off. “Please could you help him get better?” your dad asks.’

Joe said: ‘At the hospital they’re going to say, “Sure, we’ll do it, but you have to give us two thousand dollars.” ’

‘Right,’ said Nory, ‘and your father just won the lottery, so he pulls out his wallet and he says, “This is your lucky day!” ’

‘And they put me in a machine that sticks all my parts back on me, arms, legs, a built-in heart, a built-in liver,’ said Joe. ‘And I wake up and I see my dad, and I say, “Dad? Dad? What happened?” ’

That was back at the Palo Alto house, while Nory’s parents were out for dinner and Ruth was there babysitting. Later on that night, Nory asked Joe if they had fake food in Africa, fake Japanese food, the beautiful kind that was in the window of Japanese restaurants, and he said they didn’t. Japan wasn’t important in Africa. Nory asked Joe if he liked fake Japanese food. He said he did. Nory told him her idea for a museum of fake food from all different lands. She would take very beautiful china plates, and place the food on them. It would be a small one-room museum, full of glass cupboards. She would go to all the Japanese restaurants, and call all the toy stores. There would be a children’s area and a gift shop. And she would sell fake foods, for good prices, if she had duplicates, because thousands of toy stores would be sending her fake food at the same time. There would mostly be fruits and vegetables, and Japanese food, such as the one of seaweed shaped in a cornucopia, with rice tucked into it and crabmeat sprinkled over the rice. The children’s area would have plastic plates, but beautifully painted also. ‘Does that sound like a good idea for a museum?’ Nory asked.

‘Sure, yeah,’ said Joe. He said a lady came into his school to do a nutrition demonstration, and she had tons of fake food. The chocolate chip cookie looked so real, Joe thought it was real at first. The meat was cool also, he said. It was red, but you could see light coming through it.

‘Ah, the meat was translucent,’ said Nory. ‘Transparent is when you can see clearly through it, but translucent is when you can only see the glow of light but nothing in particular.’ Joe nodded. It was amazing how much English he knew. You couldn’t even tell he had ever not known English. Joe knew a huge amount more English than Nory knew Chinese, and she’d been studying it for four years. But they both had the same trouble with the multiplication table. Nory’s parents gave their little red car to Ruth when they moved to England, and Ruth wrote a letter telling them that the car was running very well except for the fact that it needed a new engine.

So at night you could read Garfield or think about something happy-making, like a plan of having a fake-food museum, and arranging the fake loaves of bread on tiny plates, in order to try to be sure not to have a bad dream. But still they sometimes happened, and there was nothing you could do. Clang! Bad image. Fright. Run, wake up, lie in bed, panting. Nory’s latest bad dream came after they went for a walk one day and saw hundreds of rabbits poking their heads out of holes. How could you get a bad dream out of something nice like that? And also, why would you want to? It had to do with the place that was just grass now, near the Cathedral, that said ‘Monk’s Burial Ground’ on the map. So the monks were probably still under there even though their gravestones were totally and completely gone. In the dream she was a monk at first, who went out every day to feed the rabbits, wearing her hood. She fed them celery from a big white barrel. They were quite happy. But then a disease hit the rabbit families, a bilbonic plague with sores around their eyes. They started dying, even though Nory tried to care for them. She found the antidote, some yellow flowers in the forest, but then she died and was buried as a monk, in the monk’s cemetery, under the grass. The rabbits got better and grew back after some time and they started digging tunnels. Nory was a rabbit in this part of the dream, nibbling her way through the ground. All of a sudden she came to a different kind of thing she nibbled through. What is this white crumbly stuff? Ugh! Bone is what it was. The earth trickled away and she was in a humongous underground tomb, where she saw that she’d just nibbled straight through the chest bones of a dead body that turned out to be the corpse of the monk. They had to cover over the corpse, because it was shrunken and awful to the eye. Plus it was starting to shiver or tremble. Then Nory was flying overhead in an airplane, but the airplane ran out of gas, and she couldn’t find northeast. It went into a spiral, and she jumped out in a parachute and fell and was knocked out. The rabbits saw the parachute spread itself out on the ground and thought, ‘Aha! Perfect material for covering the corpse of the dead monk!’ So they took hold of the parachute in their teeth and started pulling it down, down, which of course dragged Nory down, too, into the hole, since all the parachute strings were still harnessed to her, and she woke up underground, with rabbits all bustled around her and with something lumpy and unnerving next to her hidden under her parachute. She pulled the parachute away and there was a dead shrivelly face whose eyes and mouth immediately opened, all together, and a tongue popped out that was totally black. That was where she woke up in real life.