The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  Well, so far, nothing about ‘Stop, Drop, and Roll’ at Threll Junior School, not a hint of it, which was a relief. Because really how much use would it be to know that rhyme in a fire? It depended on the kinds of clothes you were wearing whether that would be a good safety tip or not. For instance, say you were trying to dash across some burning piece of wood to escape through the front door, and the hem of your nightgown caught fire. It wouldn’t be a good idea to throw yourself on the floor and start rolling around, because the floor might be burning, and if you had on a stretchy soft nightgown, you could pull it off and scamper out of it through the hole in the neck, when if you rolled around with it on, your legs would surely get burned.

  They had had two fire drills already at the Junior School—one on purpose, and one by mistake. In a fire, the whole class was supposed to line up in a double row and the person at the front of the line called out the name of each child and checked it off on a piece of paper to make sure they were in line. The problem was that some kids would make a run for it, and the person calling out the names would wonder if those kids were hurt back in the back of the class and couldn’t call out, when actually they were already outside, flopped out on the Astroturf gasping in that farm-fresh air. What if there was terrible smoke, would they all line up lying down, and have their names called that way?

  Drama class was turning out to be very good at the Junior School. In drama class they were paired off, a boy and a girl together, and they were learning to die in various ways. One person poured boiling oil on the other and the other had to act out what it was like to have boiling oil poured on him. Then they switched off. The drama teacher was very, very good. The first week they learned how to die by being shot, and they practiced fake falls. The teacher said, in a very sweet voice, ‘Oh dear, a sad, sad, thing happened to me today. So sad. I forgot my popgun. So I’ll just have to shoot you without it, like this.’ And she pointed her finger at each kid and said ‘Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!’ Everybody pretended to get shot and died. To do a fake fall, you begin standing up—of course—and you slide one of your knees down, down, almost touching the ground, then turn your head, and fall on the side, slide your whole arm down, then go still and dead. It’s easy to do it slowly, but to do it quickly, as if you’re really dropping dead, is not such an easy project. That was why it was so important to learn how in drama class.

  In drama they also did a little skit where two people go to a pub, which is a bar, and one asks the other if he or she would like a drink, and then tells him to look somewhere off—‘Oh, look at that interesting menu over there, how fascinatingly interesting’—and then, plip, poisons the person’s drink by dropping a little tiny red pill into it. Nory poisoned Stefan’s drink first, and he writhed around on the floor until she thought he was going to sprain something. (A sprain is worse than a strain—they are two totally different things. A lot of kids didn’t realize that.) Then, when it was Nory’s turn to be poisoned, she acted the part of a princess who drinks the drink, realizes that it’s poison, because so many evildoers are wanting to steal the kingdom from her family, feels the stabbing of pain in her stomach, knows she is going to die within a manner of minutes, puts her hands together in a quiet adjustment on her lap, stretches out on the floor, and dies with the barest flutter of her eyelids.

  In drama they never did act out one of Nory’s secret ideas of a terrible disaster, though, which was, What would it feel like to be caught in a burning rain? That was just as well, because Nory had already put that idea in one of her Mariana stories. She had become totally emerged in telling it to herself on the way home from Oxburgh Hall, which was more of a Stately Castle than a Stately Home.

  15. The Story of the Deadly Rain

  When Mariana was only about eight or nine years old, she experienced something that one out of twenty people in India would have experienced. It was The Deadly Rain.

  She had gone on trips to the Sahara deserts before, for she went on many different trips, and this was one of them. She had built a shack there for her summer house, or her father and mother had.

  But what she had not heard, or that was not known among the people, was that the rain was going to be so hot, so very hot, that with the first touch of it, your finger would be burned black or blackish purple. If she had known this she would have picked a different time to come for sure. But she did not.

  She got off a little horrible airplane and stepped with her first step into the orangish yellow sand of the Sahara deserts. The first thing she noticed was the tremendous amount of snakes, lizards, and different animals. She dropped and rolled over in the soft, comfortable sand. And she looked around. It was five minutes after that that the rain started. It rained solidly all night. It was horrible. Burning rain.

  The next day, when it was still raining, she wandered, wandered, walking for home, home, all she could think about was getting to her home, out of the Sahara. Now what you may not notice about this, is that she could not just go into her house, or stand under the shade of a tree. She was alone in the desert, with only the wild snakes to accompany her. She stepped into the sand, each step making a mark that would soon vanish because of the heavy marks of the rain. It was not really raining from the sky very hot, but what happened was that the heat wave was so much hotter than the coldness of the rain that when the rain got down to a certain point, it started to boil, sizzling, poppling—sizzling, poppling. Animals scurrying here and there underground. Oh, how she wished she could go underground with them, be sheltered with them. She was too big.

  Her slow walk now turned into a fast run. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her hot face began to sting even worse than it had before. She was noticing that the rain was turning into balls of hot ice.

  ‘But wait,’ she thought, she stopped for a moment to look up at the sky. The heat wave was stopping, and huge pieces of hail were coming down from the sky. This made her happy. So she lay down and fell asleep, predicting that the next morning would be just as bad as the first, and took this chance to sleep.

  ‘It might be my only chance,’ she thought, lying down on the soft sand once again, this time happily. But just as she was about to shut her eyes, she noticed something—something that she’d never seen before.

  It was a little girl, about the age of four. Of course she’d seen many little girls before, but this one was tired and hungry and dirty and blinded by the hot rain and hail. She was stumbling, bumping into sharp cactuses, there was nothing she could do. Mariana thought, ‘How could I let her stay here? I’ve been that sick, I’ve been that lonely, but I’ve never been blinded in a hot rain and now hail like this. And, boy, would I have liked somebody to come and help me. I must go and save her,’ she thought. ‘I must carry her back to my house. I must.’

  She got up and picked up the child. The child’s heart stopped beating so fast. She calmed down. Her eyes for the first time opened. She looked up at Mariana with such happy eyes, sparkling eyes of pure glee, as if to say, ‘You have saved me, Mariana, you have done well.’

  Mariana looked back at her, as if to say, ‘I’ve only done what people should have done for me.’ She started walking. Each footstep she took now felt heavier and more uncomfortable. But the child was not the burden to her. The only thing that made her upset was the child’s tears. The child was crying, not out of pain, but out of happiness. But Mariana had no idea that a child so young could be happy in the midst of something so horrible.

  The next day, as she predicted, it was hot rain again. But this time not just boiling like the first, but so hot half of it was turning to steam. Steam only meant hot drips covered her face—both of their faces, rather. Their steps were heavier. The girl was crying, crying with pain, not from herself, but from looking into a face that had so much pain.

  But now Mariana had come to a part of the desert where she was not alone. Many other people like herself were suffering, adults. She tried dragging one of them along, but it would not help. She was not strong enough to carry a three-yea
r-old and a sixty-year-old. She found a shawl on a cactus. She took it off and wrapped it around the little girl. The little girl smiled. Then she took another shawl and wrapped it around herself this time. She thought she could walk faster if she had something to protect her from this awful rain, but it seeped through. She thought that this should be her punishment, to suffer this horrible rain, and to carry this heavy little girl, her punishment for being so selfish and taking the best spot she could pick in the year and taking the plane instead of walking.

  She knew that she could, of course, because she had done it before. She had walked through places so full of trees and sticks carrying heavy buckets of hard metal for the princess Malina, in India. Finally she tried sticking a hollow stick into one of the cactuses, by cutting with her pocket knife a hole in it. She sucked and it burnt her mouth terribly. For an animal had died, a black-skinned animal, on the cactus, where she had struck in her stick. It was then that she decided that there was no way of getting water, she was stuck, she had to go home.

  The little girl spoke for the first time. ‘Do not carry me,’ she said. ‘You have to take care of me and find a place for me when you get home.’ And as if she had read Mariana’s mind, she said, ‘A cactus would be a better burden for you. It would punish you even more, because of the spikes. And you could easily saw one off and carry it home, and then you wouldn’t have an extra punishment of taking care of me when you get home.’

  But the girl had begun to love her, Mariana, that is, and Mariana was not apt to let the girl go away and die. For she knew she would. She walked on, quicker, quicker now, the hot rain got hotter and hotter. Her face started bubbling it was so hot. Her sweat turned red with blood. The girl cried blood in looking at a face that seemed to have so much pain again. Mariana spoke softly to the girl. ‘Do not cry, dear, do not cry, it takes blood from your precious body.’ The girl wiped her tears. Mariana, seeing the girl wiping her tears, remembered her own face, and how much it hurt. She touched it. It felt more pain, and what the little girl saw is what you should see in your mind. She saw pain: the face was very swollen and she touched it. The air-filled skin broke, very thin now, because it was full of air, and blood gushed out. It was painful-looking and definitely was painful for Mariana.

  She was almost at home now. Of course she couldn’t see it, but she had gone two quarters of the way. Only ten miles to go, but her feet were so sore. Her hair was dyed almost red. Walking farther and farther and farther and farther, tired to beat the band. The girl looked up again, like she had done the first time Mariana had picked her up. Now with swollen cheeks but a happier face. She looked wise. ‘We are almost home now,’ she whispered, ‘I can tell by that cactus.’ She pointed to the tallest cactus Mariana had ever seen. Mariana stepped back. She forgot about her pain, the heavy child she was holding, and all the hot rain. It reminded her of when she was a baby. She was born under a tall, tall sequoia tree. The tree had been cut down to build a nice beautiful house, but in her mind it was not cut down, but was still standing there, in Australia. The sand was getting more shallow now. It would have hurt more now for me or you but to her it meant home. It meant getting the little child safe, finding her new parents, or finding the old parents, if they had not died, and getting home to her own mother and father out there. In the bottom of her heart she thought they might have died, but I can tell you now that they hadn’t. But in her heart she also thought something else. She thought, ‘I can adopt her. She can be my own child, I can take care of her.’

  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.

  16. Something Needs to Fail

  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.

  17. A Story About a Girl Named Era and Her Brother

  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 st
ill, 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.