Me too, I signed.
“A few days ago, this song came on the radio. It’s by Leonard Cohen. I forget the name—something about a raincoat?”
“ ‘Famous Blue Raincoat,’ ” Dr. Milton said.
“Yeah, that one. There’s a line in it, um . . .” She hummed a little bit, then found the thread of the melody. “‘Thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes. I thought it was there for good, so I never tried.’ You know that one, Parker?” I shook my head. “It’s so beautiful. Anyway, that’s how I feel about Zelda. She took the trouble, you know?”
Sounds like a good song, I signed.
• • •
In the weeks after Zelda jumped, I spent a lot of time at this café down by the water, writing in my journal or else cobbling together some pathetic excuse of a history paper at the last minute. When I was done, I’d walk to the beach, then north along the shoreline, to where the waves slammed into the rocks below Cliff House, sending up columns of spume like the spray from a whale’s blowhole.
One afternoon I ran into Alana up there. Though I passed her in the halls at school all the time, we hadn’t had an actual conversation since the day of the multiplex brawl. I’d been avoiding her, to be honest. I guess seeing her reminded me of that weekend, which reminded me of Zelda.
She was sitting on the beach, reading some textbook. She hadn’t noticed me, so I still would have had time to turn around and go back the other way, if I’d wanted to.
She didn’t look up when I sat down next to her.
“Hi,” I said.
That got her attention.
“Did you just say hi?”
I got out my cell phone. It’s the only word I know, I typed.
I’d been doing that humming exercise for an hour a day for the last month, and so far the total payoff was just that one word—“hi”—which is barely more than a hum anyway.
“Well, it’s a good one,” she said. “It reminds me of a joke. You wanna hear it?”
I nodded.
“So a guy brings a dog into the auditions for America’s Got Talent. And one of the judges is like, ‘So what’s your act?’ And the guy says, ‘My dog can talk.’ The judges all look at each other, pretty skeptical, obviously. ‘Let’s see it,’ says the first judge. So the guy turns to his dog and he says, ‘Hey, Fido, what do you call the thing on top of a house?’ And the dog goes, ‘Ruff!’ And then the guy says, ‘That’s right, Fido. And remind me, what’s the opposite of smooth again?’ And the dog goes, ‘Ruff!’ And then the guy goes, ‘Good boy! And now, why don’t you tell me how masochists like to be treated in the bedroom.’ And the dog goes, ‘Ruff!’ By now, the judges are waving their hands for this guy to stop. ‘Get the hell out of here,’ they say. ‘You and your dog are full of shit.’ So the guy and the dog leave the room, and once they’re outside, the dog goes, ‘On second thought, do you think I should have said “like the dirty little bitches they are”?’ ”
I laughed. Before I’d met Zelda, I’d hated to laugh in front of people. But somewhere along the line, I’d stopped caring whether I looked weird when I did it.
“What I’m thinking is that maybe we can make this work for you, too, Parker. Like, check it—how do you feel after you take a big bong hit?”
I raised an eyebrow. What was she getting at?
“Just say the one word you know, okay? How do you feel after you take a big bong hit?”
“Hi,” I said.
“Interesting. And what kind of school did you go to after middle school?”
“High,” I said, finally getting the joke.
“Correct again. And Thom Yorke of Radiohead definitely doesn’t want to be left dry. Remind me, what else doesn’t he want to be left?”
“High,” I said.
Then we were both laughing, though the only sound was Alana’s laughter, dying out beneath the smashing of the waves and the cawing of the gulls. Those birds always made me think of Finding Nemo, where it turns out the only thing that seagulls are ever saying is Mine!, over and over again. That’s one of the things I’ve learned, living without speech for so long. No matter what someone actually says, all they’re ever really saying is this: Me! Me! Pay attention to me! I exist! I matter!
“That’s what I always liked about you, Parker,” Alana said. “You know when to shut up. I could really learn something from you. So let’s just sit here and shut up together, yeah? I’d really like that.”
And so we did. Eventually we lay back on the sand, staring up at the sun, wordless, side by side.
STORY #4: ACCEPTANCE
I HAVE NOT, AS OF the typing of this sentence, ended up with Alana. Later that same day, she told me she’d met someone new a couple of weeks earlier. At a chess tournament, if you can believe that.
“He’s just as big a nerd as me,” she said proudly.
So this is not a story of love triumphing over all, or one where the boy gets the girl. In fact, it’s not really a story at all. But you know that already, don’t you?
Whatever decision you make, I’d love to know if this is the longest response to an essay question you’ve ever received. I figured that with my one recommendation, my terrible grades, and my criminal record, I’d have to go above and beyond somehow. So I chose to go exactly 60,209 words above and beyond. The good news is we’re almost done. Bear with me for just a couple more pages.
It’s funny. When I started working on this essay, sitting in front of a computer in the library computer lab while my friends tried to distract me with Call of Duty, I felt a weird sort of disappointment. How could anything in my life ever measure up to what I’d just been through? I mean, meeting Zelda was magic, wasn’t it? And not just your typical “Oh I’m so in love oh my God isn’t it fucking AMAZING?” magic. This was real magic. And now there was just the real left, for the rest of my life probably.
But now that I’ve written it all down, I’ve gotten a little bit of perspective on all the dots, and I’m starting to connect them. I think maybe the closest thing we mortals get to magic is just change. Alana getting a nerdy boyfriend. My mom coming to therapy. Me humming my way into “hi.” And I really do understand why Zelda did what she did. We all spend our lives as the rope in a game of tug-of-war. On one side, you’ve got the weight of the unchangeable past pulling at you, and on the other, you’ve got the unpredictable future. If you’re lucky, you stay balanced right in the middle. But if you’re unlucky (and I think most of us are, some of the time anyway), you end up falling over one way or the other. Zelda had more past pulling at her than anyone, but I think it was the future that finally killed her. A future that stretched out in front of her forever, no matter which way she turned, like the view from the center of the Sahara. No doy mas. Ya basta. Still life. When change loses its magic, then there really isn’t anything left to live for. So that’s my new mantra. Keep changing. I’ve stopped hanging out in hotels. They’re all the same, anyway. I’m trying to spend more time with other human beings. It isn’t always easy. Like Zelda said, people can be so stupid, it’s a wonder they manage to keep breathing. But if I can just get them to shut up, to lie back on a beach with me for five measly minutes, I think I can keep it together.
And I wouldn’t blame you for thinking this whole story has been a bunch of BS—just another fairy tale, like all the others. Maybe I’ve never met someone named Zelda, but I thought a good yarn might distract you from how unqualified I am to attend your illustrious institution. Or maybe I met a girl who was magical in a more traditional, not-actually-magical way, and so I used the power of fiction to transform her into something bigger and more profound. Or maybe I met a girl who claimed to have lived for two hundred and forty-six years, and though I never actually believed her, I went along with it because she was hot.
But you have to allow for the possibility, however tiny, that I really did meet a girl who was born in 1770 in Kassel, Germany, and over the course of a weekend she transformed my life, even though I didn’t manage to tran
sform hers, and I’ve set down the story here because it’s the truth. And if you don’t believe it, well, that’s your own business, because in the end, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other. You don’t have to decide whether the story I’ve told you is true. You only have one decision to make, don’t you?
I’ll be awaiting your reply. Take your time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Christian, Justin, Lizzy, Chrissy, Katy, Jenica, Chava, and the whole team at Simon & Schuster . . .
To John and everyone at Folio and Greenhouse . . .
To Mom, Seth, Bobby D., Tallie, Casey, Giulio, Sean, and all the friends and family who have put up with me . . .
To the staff of the MacDowell Colony, where this book was finished, then rewritten from scratch . . .
To the many authors I’ve gotten to know over the last year, who have so kindly inducted me into this brave new world . . .
And to the many readers who have reached out and said hello (or just tattooed an asteroid on their wrist) . . .
Thanks for the trouble.
© TALLIE MAUGHAN
TOMMY WALLACH is a Brooklyn-based musician and novelist. His first novel, We All Looked Up, has been translated into a dozen languages and was optioned for film by Paramount. His fiction and nonfiction works have appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Wired, Salon, and other magazines. As a musician, he has put out an EP with Decca Records as well as two independent releases, including We All Looked Up: The Album, a companion record to his first novel. He is a recent MacDowell Fellow. Grok more at tommywallach.com.
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Also by Tommy Wallach
WE ALL LOOKED UP
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 by Tommy Wallach
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wallach, Tommy.
Thanks for the trouble / Tommy Wallach. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “Parker hasn’t spoken since he watched his father die five years ago. He communicates through writing on slips of paper and keeps track of his thoughts by journaling. A loner, Parker has little interest in school, his classmates, or his future. But everything changes when he meets Zelda, a mysterious young woman with an unusual request: ‘treat me like a teenager’ ”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4814-1880-5 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4814-1882-9 (eBook)
[1. Selective mutism—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Love—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W158855Th 2016
[Fic]—dc23
2015013388
“My Love, If I Die and You Don’t”: From 100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott, copyright © Pablo Neruda 1959 and Fundacion Pablo Neruda, copyright © 1986 by the University of Texas Press. By permission of the University of Texas Press.
Tommy Wallach, Thanks for the Trouble
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