Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France

by Bryan Hurt

  SEE YOU AGAIN

  By the time the fourth man arrived at the emergency room, his father had passed away. The fourth man was told that his father held on longer than anyone had expected, that he insisted on seeing his son before saying his final goodbye. But this was just like the fourth man’s father. He always insisted on saying a proper goodbye to everyone, because, he said, a proper goodbye always implied its corollary. Whenever the fourth man stood at the top of the driveway and waved goodbye to his father, his father would lean out the window of his Cruiser, honk the horn, and yell, “I’ll see you again.”

  SELF-PORTRAIT

  There are two astronauts on the moon tossing a football. One of the astronauts is the father and the other, obviously, is the son. In the picture, the son is holding the football and wants to toss it to the father who’s running away from him, sprinting toward a crater. If you look closely, through the son’s visor, you’ll see that his mouth is open and that he’s shouting something. If you could hear him, you’d hear that he’s shouting. “Turn around,” he says. “Look at me. I’m here. I’m here.”

  GOOD WITH WORDS

  “Give me more,” she says.

  “More?” I say. My voice breaks a little, a whine. “But I don’t have more. I’ve given you what I’ve given you. It’s all I’ve got.”

  “I need more,” she says. “Fifty thousand. Fifty thousand is the bare minimum. If you don’t have fifty thousand you don’t have anything at all.”

  “Nothing?” I say.

  My publisher shakes her head. “Nothing. No book.”

  I jam my hands into my pockets and poke around. I’ve got some lint in there, a quarter and some pennies, my car keys, my wallet with my driver’s license and a couple of credit cards, a screw that I’d found lying on my son’s bookshelf. What had a screw been doing on his bookshelf? I don’t know. But he’s one year old and I thought I’d better put it in my pocket before he found it and put it in his mouth.

  What I don’t have is more words.

  No conjunctions, no prepositions. Not even a common noun, cow. I certainly don’t have any good words. Not a limpid, for example. My favorite word because it sounds so dirty, the opposite of what it means.

  Not, of course, that I expected to find words in my pockets anyway. I’m not an idiot. Not really. But it’s not like I have all these extra words in my head.

  The waitress comes back with our check. My publisher signs for our coffee and omelettes. She sighs. “Look,” she says. “Give me forty-five thousand. That’s only five thousand more than you’ve already got.”

  But the words I already have, those forty thousand? Aren’t they good words? Good enough? I mean I think they’re okay. I chose them carefully, thought about them kind of hard, and put them into a deliberate order. I bet if you read them they’d do something to you. Make you feel something. Maybe you’d laugh a little or feel sort of sad. I bet you’d feel something at least half a dozen times. And six feelings from forty thousand words is actually pretty good alchemy. Ask anyone else who writes.

  Not that anyone understands this. It’s not just my publisher. My sister’s like that too. She wants me to write something to say at her wedding, a speech. “I don’t know about what,” she says from Ohio on the phone to me here in California. “Something about love,” she says. “How hard can it be? You’re a writer. You’re good with words.”

  I’m not that good with words, actually. My son has two words, maybe two and a half. He’s got mama and papa and sometimes it sounds like he’s saying hi. He’s way better with his words than I am with mine. Each time he uses his words he makes me feel something. One hundred percent of the time.

  “Tell me something about love,” I say when it’s just the two of us. My wife’s at yoga and the dog is napping and we’ve played with all his toys and I don’t want to turn on Sesame Street.

  He says, “Mama.”

  “That’s good,” I say. “Wow you nailed it. Now tell me something else. Something funny, something that makes you laugh.”

  He says, “Papa.”

  I tickle him and kiss his head.

  “Great,” I say. “Now tell me what you want. What do you want more than anything in the world? Sky’s the limit. Name it and it’s yours.”

  He lifts his arms up for me to hold him.

  He says, “Hi.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No book is a solitary effort and so I must thank all of my brilliant friends and colleagues who helped me along the way. My thanks to Sean Bernard, Josh Bernstein, Stephan Clarke, Emily Fridlund, Alexis Landau, Lisa Locascio, Josie Sigler, Cody Todd, and most of all to Bonnie Nadzam, whose friendship and readership improved every one of these stories. To my teachers, Lee K. Abbott, Emily Anderson, Aimee Bender, T.C. Boyle, Michelle Herman, Dana Johnson, Erin McGraw, and Jim Shepard, for the heroic amount of time, faith, and effort they’ve given me over the years. To Kate Johnson, my agent, who has been a tireless champion of my work. To all of the editors who first published these stories in magazines and literary journals. To Alissa Nutting for awarding this book the Starcherone Prize. To Kate, Mark, and everyone at Red Hen.

  Most of all, my thanks to my family: my grandparents, Michael and Lois Polk; my aunts and uncles; my parents, Jeanne and John Hurt; my sister, Emily Hurt; and my son, Ezra Hurt. Without your unconditional love, support, and optimism, none of these stories would exist.

  Finally, I want to single out, praise, and celebrate Marielle Henault, my first, last, and best reader, whose faith in me exceeds reason, and who is the best person in my life. Thank you for every single day of our wonderful life together.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The stories in this book were much improved by and so owe much to the following sources: Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men; Maria Edgeworth’s Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq.; Anna Seward’s Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin; Elaine Sciolino’s “Magic Measured in a Pile of Salt”; Tom Vanderbilt’s “Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here”; Burkhard Bilger’s “Auto Correct: Has the Self-Driving Car at Last Arrived?”; Joe Palca’s “The Scientist Who Makes Stars On Earth”; Alec Wilkinson’s The Ice Balloon: S.A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration; Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World; Anthony Brandt’s The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage; Chauncey Loomis’s Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer; Ken McGoogan’s Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Time Forgot; John Robert Christianson’s On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe, Science, and Culture in the Sixteenth Century; Kitty Ferguson’s Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens; Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder’s Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind of One of History’s Greatest Scientific Discoveries; Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon; Alan Bean’s My Life as an Astronaut; and, of course, Wikipedia.

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  Bryan Hurt is the editor of Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest. His stories and essays have appeared in The American Reader, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, TriQuarterly, and many other publications. He is an assistant professor of English at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, where he lives with his family.