Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

When Nory closed her eyes she saw the little red and yellow and orange dots that spread out on the computer screen to show that you’ve crashed the plane in I.T. If you forgot that they were the sign of a massive crash, the dots were as pretty as a screensaver. She lay there for a while, thinking about little snibbets of the day, I.T., playing with the conkers with Kira, then Kira helping her clean off the bird leisure, which had been very nice of her, and her smelling her hand, also very nice. But she didn’t want to think about the day very much because in some ways it was such a dirty-clothes-heap of a day, all twisted around and garbled and wrinkled. She wanted to close her eyes peacefully and be told an unexpected story, but since she’d already been read to that wasn’t much of a possibility, so she picked up the small Chinese doll on her bedside and looked at its eyes. They were painted with different colors than they used to paint Barbie’s eyes, which are blue and purple. Then she imagined that maybe she could tell herself a story — maybe a short emotional story of the kind that Mariana, the girl who had been in the burning rain, would tell herself. So she did.

In ancient days, even before there were hot and cold faucets that can offer something of a problem in England because the hot comes storming out of one faucet and the cold comes freezing out of the other one that is about a foot and a half away from the hot, and they don’t mix, and the hot is screamingly hot, hot enough to boil tea, so that if you want to wash your hands you have to move back and forth very fast, hot-cold-hot-cold-hot-cold-hot-cold, to imitate the sensation that it’s warm water, which is by the way how the art of claymation works — you move one tiny pinch of clay and then walk over to the camera and take a picture and move another tiny movement, move-click-move-click-move-click — but long before there was any of that kind of advanced modern technology, there was a girl. Her name was Amnezia. Amnezia’s mother told her when she was only very little that the Dragon of the Fourth Continent would come. There were seven huge pieces of land in those days, and are now, distributed around the world, and the Fourth Continent was good old Asia. The Seventh Continent is Antarctica, which is a landmass with a huge thing floating underneath it called Magnetic South which is made up of magnets and tons and tons of anonymous rock.

So the Dragon of the Fourth Continent would come, Amnezia’s mother told her. ‘Only to very special people like yourself,’ whispered her mother, who was herself from the Western region of China a thousand miles from the Great Wall. This was when the child was two, one night, and she asked to be told a story. The story turned out to be true and about her own life in the future. ‘We’ll have to defeat the dragon,’ her mother said. ‘The dragon will try and come to get you. He will try and eat you. But you are strong, dear child, he cannot win.’

Then the mother whispered, even more quietly, ‘I have experienced it, just like your grandmother, and her mother and her grandmother, and back and back.’

But there was one thing that the mother did not know: that her daughter would have to meet the dragon two times .

Many years later, when the child was about eight, it happened. Now she was a very pretty child. Her black hair was shinier than ever, and very, very long. It could almost touch her ankles. The experience happened at nighttime. She was doing her studying, she was learning what is now known as botany. It was very late at night and there were no sounds at all except the rustle of the dried plants she was looking at through what is now known as a microscope, but then was known as a Chenker-Pah and made of jade and mother-of-pearl. (A grain of sand is an orphan-of-pearl, because think about it: a pearl is made from a grain of sand held in the loving home of an oyster, and if it never gets a loving home, it will never get the mucousy stuff to harden around it and will never become a pearl.) Amnezia was sitting on her bed, writing on the little table on which she kept her face towel and the equipment she used for her late night studying. She stopped to dip her pen in the ink, for this was long before the days of cartridges, but just as she was about to take it out of the ink, everything changed.

Her bedside table disappeared, her room vanished. Her house, everything. She was on a black ground with millions of people, including her own parents and her. A huge dragon was coming. She touched her shoulder and fell back on her bed. Then in a split second she realized it was coming. All these grownups had come to watch her defeat the dragon. They were all holding candles, beautiful caramel-colored candles. She looked at her mother with pure fear, but her mother smiled at her, as if to say, ‘Everything’s all right.’ It was then that she remembered the time when her mother said, ‘It will happen, the dragon will come, but you will defeat him.’

She clutched her shoulder even harder. She thought to herself hard, ‘Amnezia, gain up all your courage, just like your mother told you!’ Now she could feel dust and hot air brushing against her face from the steps of the monster, it blew in every direction, but all the adults didn’t seem to care one whiff. Now his hand was almost grabbing her. He grabbed tightly now, without her even being able to do as much as take a breath.

She was very smart. She decided she would scoot out from his hand. But it was not as easy as she thought it was. He clutched hard, and what would have been his thumb if he was a human had a very sharp nail. It was an inch away from her arm. She knew it would scrape her if she slithered down. But then she thought, ‘No, it’s better to be alive than not to have a long scrape across you.’

So she began to squirm. She bit the monster, she kicked and punched. But he did not move, he was looking around curiously at everyone else. And foolishly enough he was very preoccupied. She squirmed and squirmed. She managed to slither out. But now she started to turn this way and that. His thumb scraped her all the way down her chest to her hip. Finally only her head was caught in his hands. She pushed off his hands as hard as she could, and fell. It seemed like only five minutes that she fell, and then everything blacked out.

The next day, she woke up. Her mother came in. She spoke softly, just in the same voice she did when Amnezia was only two. ‘You did it, you did it, Amnezia,’ said her mother. She seemed very pleased. Amnezia was glad. She had been scared of that moment for ages.

Then she went off to a boarding school. She went there for five years. She came back when she was thirteen, a very learned girl now. She was ready to become what she had dreamed of for months, years, and what seemed like a decade to her. She was ready to be a professor. The day she came back, it happened again. She was thirteen now, and still just as pretty as she was when she was eight.

She stood taller than ever, her mother’s eyes shined when she came back. She had never seen her mother look so happy in all her life. That night, she was washing, helping her mother wash, when it happened again. The basket in her hand did not disappear this time. She found herself in the black place she had been in before, kneeling down on the same flat blue pillow, holding a basket of clothes. There was her bed, behind her. She sat back on it, scared. But not as scared as the first time. Now many people were there. Thousands of them, not all adults, but also children. There was a woman holding a baby. Holding her tight. Amnezia had a shock. ‘The baby is the only one here who is also supposed to defeat the dragon,’ she thought to herself. ‘The mother is scared. How could a baby do it?’