One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(52)

She started to cry.

Dammit, thought Chris Hansen. I shouldn’t have used that tone. She’s just a kid who wanted to go to a concert. I didn’t have to make it all about me. Also, I didn’t need to exaggerate my hours. It’s more like four hours a day, four days a week.

“You know what,” he said, “I’ll wear a hat or something. It’ll be fine.”

“You look stupid in hats,” she said.

“Hey. That hurt my feelings,” he said.


In the end, he took her to the Justin Bieber concert. It wasn’t as much fun as she thought it was going to be, and it wasn’t as bad as he said it was going to be. The concert was okay, and so were they.





Great Writers Steal





“What if they have an alarm?”

“I told you. We’re going to get out too fast for that to matter.”

“I don’t know. Something feels off.”

“Hey! Nothing’s off, okay? It’s what we’re doing. Remember what the book said?”

“ ‘Good writers borrow, great writers steal.’ ”

“You want to be a great writer?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure? Because you don’t sound sure.”

“I want to be a great writer!”

“You want to be a great writer?”

“Yes! I want to be a great writer! I want to be a legend!”

“Damn right. We’re both going to be legends. Kerouac, Burroughs, Bukowski—they probably stole all kinds of stuff.”

“Bret Easton Ellis probably still robs places.”

“Liquor stores, probably.”

“Who knows! Probably. I pictured maybe banks. The point is, we never hear about any of it.”

“Right. Right.”

“Right?!”

“Right!”

“Ready?!”

“Let’s do it!!!”


Neither of them ever got anything published. In fact, those who read their writing went so far as to say that they misunderstood literature on an unusually fundamental level.

But after a few years, they got to be pretty good thieves.





Confucius at Home





“I’m hungry,” said Confucius to a nearby servant. “Is there any food around? Some noodles, maybe?”

“CONFUCIUS SAY: BRING NOODLES!” shouted the servant to the cook.

“Hey, hey, please calm down,” said Confucius. “It’s just a question. Only if it’s convenient.”

“CONFUCIUS SAY: CALM DOWN!” shouted the servant to the rest of the household.

“Stop it, okay?” snapped Confucius. “Not everything is a thing.”

“CONFUCIUS SAY: NOT EVERYTHING IS A THING.”

Dammit, thought Confucius, and he was about to interrupt him again—but didn’t. That one sounded pretty good, he had to admit. And the one before wasn’t so bad, either, if interpreted in the right way.

“You get those last two?” Confucius whispered to his scribe, who was sitting in the corner. “ ‘Calm down,’ and the other one?”

The scribe nodded.

“I don’t know, maybe.” Confucius shrugged. “Not the noodles one, obviously.”

But if the scribe wanted to write those other two down … well, Confucius wasn’t going to stop him.





War





The two children began a game of war.

This is a good idea, thought both children. Soon, I will win. Then the game will be over, I will be happy, and we can both go do other things.

But no matter how many times they played war, they always forgot how tedious, how tiresome, how emotionally debilitating, how devoid of reward, and how maddeningly left to chance the game was; and how they always regretted having started the contest well before the time it was over.

In that way, it wasn’t too unlike the game of bridge.





If You Love Something





If you love something, let it go.

If you don’t love something, definitely let it go.

Basically, just drop everything, who cares.





Just an Idea





When the couple won the $18 millon Powerball jackpot, they found out they had two options. They could accept the state’s default payout structure, which would come to $600,000 a year over thirty years; or they could let a company buy the ticket from them for a single upfront payment of ten million dollars.

Both options sounded good.

And they didn’t have to decide right away, anyway.

They spent the weekend celebrating in secret with lots of champagne and side dishes.

Rich, forever.


On Monday morning, as they walked up the steps of the Ohio Lottery Commission headquarters, a woman in a business suit intercepted them and presented them with a third option.

An artist named Damien Hirst was in the market for a lottery ticket just like this one, the woman explained. Would they be interested in selling the ticket to him, through her, right now, for the flat fee of twelve million dollars?

“What’s he going to do with it?” asked the husband.