Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

They went back to the museum on her birthday. Her parents asked, ‘Is it possible, you know, to get a model of that fan?’

The museum people said, ‘Oh, well, I’m sure we can have a model made.’ The owner of the museum was really really nice.

Her parents said, ‘Yes, but we don’t have much money.’

And the museum man said, ‘Oh well, it’s only fifteen dollars.’

Colander heard that and said, ‘Wait, I have fifteen dollars, I’ve been saving my allowance to get the real one, but now that you say it’s only fifteen dollars, I happen to have fifteen dollars!’

‘No, no, that was your allowance,’ her parents said.

‘No, I want to,’ Colander said, ‘I’ll get the money.’

So she paid the museum the fifteen dollars.

But her parents said, ‘No, no, no, little child, you shouldn’t be spending your own money, it’s your birthday present, we should get it for you as a birthday present.’

‘You can get me other things,’ said Colander, ‘but I’ll pay for this.’ Because she knew that her parents really didn’t have very very much money. She had tried to save up fifteen dollars for ages. She was only given about a nickel each time she completed her work, a nickel or two.

Anyway, Colander forked him the fifteen dollars the next day, and he — the museum owner — said, ‘Oh thank you very much, but you should have this. I can see that this is well-earned money. You should have it. I’ll give the fan to you free as grass, for your good work.’

Colander said, ‘Oh no, you shouldn’t. Keep it, keep it.’

Finally, after a lot of persuading, the museum man got Colander to keep the fifteen dollars. So he was actually giving her this wonderful thing free. ‘I’ll give it as my own birthday present for you,’ he said. And so he had a duplicate fan made, in a factory in Bombay, and it was to some people even more beautiful than the first. It was so gorgeous you wouldn’t believe it.

The museum owner was exceptionally rich. He was very, very rich. So this was nothing to him. ‘Pshaw. Oh, just a thousand dollars, pshaw.’ So he spent a ton of money making this one tiny little fan. He put it in a box, wrapped it up, very very nicely, and wrote ‘For Colander, from Mr. Harvonsay.’ And on her birthday Mr. Harvonsay looked in the phone book and found their address, and said, ‘Is this little Miss Colander’s house?’

Colander said, ‘Yes it is.’

So he gave her the little box.

‘Oh, great,’ she said. ‘Oh, thank you.’

She opened all her parents’ presents, and they were excited to see what was in the little box wrapped so neatly, so her mother said, ‘Now open the little box.’

Everything she’d gotten up till then was a fan to put in her collection. In the box from Mr. Harvonsay was the fan. Everyone gasped out loud, it was so superb. Then her parents said, ‘Oh, and one more present for you.’ In her room there was a glass case and little stands to put fans in. She had a whole little mini fan collection of her own.

She was very happy, but the glass case had to be very low, or she’d have to tell her parents where to put everything in it, because she was short. Her parents were relatively short, but they weren’t as short as she was. And so, the end.

As for the Bishop’s Palace garden, across the street from the Cathedral, it was definitely not owned by a Bishop in the Catholic Religion. Nory was a Catholic because her mother was a Catholic, and Nory’s mother was a Catholic because her father was a Catholic, and her father was a Catholic because his mother was a Catholic, or had been. They only went to church on rare times, but they said grace every single night. If it had been a Bishop in the Catholic Religion — which was one of the most popular religions of the world, though Christianity was probably slightly more popular — there wouldn’t be a huge garden hidden out of sight, because Catholic bishops would devote all their money to the church and pray the day away, and care for the poor, and wash the poor’s wounds with hot rags. No huge grand house, and no greedy high brick wall for a Catholic Bishop.

The way you make bricks is by baking them like brownies in an oven, or pouring the mixture into thousands of small molds and drying the shapes in the sun if you don’t expect it to rain terribly much where you live. If it does rain and you haven’t baked your bricks, you may end up with drooping walls. The bricks that are used to build a brick oven must get so totally baked into brickness that they almost can’t bear it another minute, since they heat up, on one side, that is, every time they bake the bricks inside, hundreds of times over, like a drip of black cheese in the microwave.

Brick is a good word for bricks because it has the sound of the sharp, crunchy edge in it, pulling across. They were looking into Force and Friction in Nory’s science class at the Junior School, and finding out that a brick creates a ton of friction. Ricki Ticki Tavi, the mongoose who saved the little boy, got his name from the rick-ticking sounds he made. Near the end, when Ricki Ticki disappears down the hole with Nagaina, the Queen Cobra, with ‘his little white teeth clenched into her tail’—animals often had surprisingly white teeth — you’re supposed to think that he might be dead. Usually with a story there is a moment at which you’re supposed to think some person or animal has died or some other really sad failure has happened — and if you don’t know that that’s how stories are supposed to work you can become quite upset and have to run out of the room to escape the squeezing feeling in your chest, like at the end of Lady and the Tramp , when the movie tries its hardest to make you think the old dog who couldn’t smell very well anymore had gotten run over by a carriage-wheel and died.

But the time of worrying that Rikki Tikki is dead didn’t last quite long enough, in Nory’s opinion. It could have lasted a little longer, and since they’re supposed to be having a terrible battle down in the hole you need some sign that something’s going on down there, like little faint struggling sounds, or every so often a whiffle of dirt flying out of the hole.

The other small problem with the story — not that there are any real problems with the story, it’s a good story by a man who lived in Africa for many years, not an African American man but just a man who lived there, or somewhere like Africa — but it’s sad to think of such a likable mongoose eating holes in the baby cobra eggs. The baby cobras hadn’t killed anything or frightened anyone. They would when they hatched out, because that’s what cobra snakes are designed to do naturally. But a story should not have a small, tiny, curled-up barely alive animal be killed unless it has done a terrible thing, which it can’t have done because it hasn’t even uncurled itself from the egg. And the story isn’t about what cobras do naturally, anyway, since it has the cobras speaking. In real life they don’t speak, at least in English. A cobra couldn’t call itself ‘Nag’ or ‘Nagaina’ because the cobra’s tongue is so thin it couldn’t make an N sound. A cobra would probably just call itself ‘Lah,’ if anything.

The swans on the river made a pretty frightening sound when Nory fed them. They came up out of the water and started walking toward her, shrugging up their wings, and no matter how many pieces of bread she threw their way, they kept coming towards her, because they wanted the bigger piece of bread in her hand. When Nory said, ‘Hold your horses, back up, back up!’ they opened their beaks and made a nasty sound, like a hissing cat. Their necks were like cobra necks, somewhat. Nory’s father was alarmed and didn’t want to feed them anymore and was shooing them away with his briefcase, but it wasn’t fair, Nory thought, that just because a bird was somewhat alarming he should not be fed, whereas the ducks, which weren’t alarming, should be fed. There was a group of ducks that were so cute, a mother and about fifteen babies, each with a dear fluff of brown on its head. They crossed the street, just like in Make Way for Ducklings , which was the first book Nory ever read. Nory gave them some crackers. A girl at the Junior School, Kira, who was turning out to be a nice friend, said that her parents didn’t let her feed the birds any bread, because it wasn’t what they would normally eat if they were wild. Nory told her that she fed the birds sesame crackers, at least sometimes, and sesames are seeds and birds eat seeds. But both the ducks and the swans ate grass. There was a lot of grass-eating, which wasn’t very natural either, because there didn’t used to be so much grass in the world.