One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

by B.J. Novak

Didn’t they realize how much interesting shit there was to see and do in this world if you just woke up at a normal fucking time like a normal fucking person?

It was a good thing they were already used to love, or they might have fainted from the size of the feeling.

Now he heard the clock tick. Were some ticks louder than others? How come you sometimes heard a clock tick? Shouldn’t it be always, or never? Why sometimes?

Couldn’t your heart tell you more than one thing? If you were truly confused about something, which he was right now, wouldn’t that mean your heart was, too?

Do you know what it’s like to sing a song that started inside you to a room full of laughing, dancing children, who keep singing it even after you stop? It feels like the world is made of music, and you are the world.

The first can hit me anywhere, though it’s most often when I am watching television or looking out the window of a train or subway, and it’s that there is a head resting on my shoulder that must have been there the whole time that I haven’t noticed until now, and in the fantasy, or because of the fantasy—it is hard to tell the difference—I suddenly feel this surge of something like the combination of safety and elation knowing that every sight I see, no matter how small, is now important, because it’s shared. I don’t need to look at the head on my shoulder, and I never do, because what’s so important to me is not what the person looks like, but that we are seeing the same thing.

a person of the caliber that can inspire and maintain the level of love and attention I intend to give once and forever—a woman true from every angle, beautiful and spontaneous and grounded and funny and wise, a person as worthy of my permanent admiration as a sunset or a song, a partner in crime at the beginning and a partner in punishment later, for the child with the crayons

But somehow—and if I could have traced exactly how, or when, then I wouldn’t have been lost—I had ended up on some other road, one that seemed to be moving smoothly but I sensed was taking me farther from love and was an inefficient route to anything else, when you added up the time and emotion wasted on all sides.

All the times you made me feel like your backup choice when it would have been so simple to just tell me I looked beautiful; all the times you made me feel like the girl you were just killing time with while you waited to find your true love, even though you knew I loved you;

The old man made a lot of sense, except for the cotton candy reference. What was that about? Could you really make a lot of money that way? Maybe he knew someone who made a lot of money in candy. Or maybe he was just old, and you just had to ignore a few of the things he said to get to the wisdom.

Being young was her thing, and she was the best at it. But every year, more and more girls came out of nowhere and tried to steal her thing. One of these days I’m going to have to get a new thing,

he seemed to be blazing outside the lines of his own body, as if he were drawn in crayon by an excited five-year-old;

Even though we lived in different places, we still saw ourselves as moving through life as a group. It would have been great to get to see each other more—that was, in fact, one of our most frequent topics of conversation—but for four people pursuing their dreams in different cities, our presence in each other’s lives really was quite substantial. We were more in touch with one another than with anyone else, including (if not especially) our families, and we gave one another as much advice and support as we ever had—more, even, because there was more to talk about, more decisions to make. We all still considered each other the closest people in each other’s lives.

Were we, in fact, really still friends—like we said we were, and thought we were, and which comforted us as we each staked out new lives in cities where we didn’t really know anyone at all? Or, I wondered, were we just slowly transforming into simpler and more easily digestible fictional characters to one another—in other words, becoming our profile pictures: cool, expressionless Dave, unfazed even at majestic Mount Fuji, his much-remarked-upon good looks defiantly hidden behind sunglasses; sweetheart Josh, playfully presenting a prom corsage in a cookbook-filled suburban kitchen to his overjoyed six-year-old sister, standing on a table, playing along; me, as a preposterously anti-Semitic cartoon depiction of Woody Allen at a typewriter, drawn of me at the insistence of my girlfriend, Sarah, by a caricature artist in Times Square who knew only that I wanted to be a writer and that I looked, apparently, extremely Jewish; and Willie, drinking simultaneously from a handle of vodka and a handle of Jack Daniel’s beneath a U-Haul at a tailgate party, surrounded by friends that didn’t include us, screaming at someone or something, the photo filtered to look like an image that belonged in any era.

Everyone agreed that Willie seemed to have wandered into some territory where “out of control” and “out of control!!!” both got by security with the same ID. But he seemed to be self-aware about this—we always learned about his embarrassments directly from him, after all—and we didn’t know what it was we would do about him, exactly, anyway. So it just became the same idea as always, but now sometimes with stars around it in our chats for emphasis—that one of these days, we were *really* going to have to do something about Willie.

It felt like no one had ever been our age before.

I swigged the beer and immediately coughed it all up onto the rug, exactly like a baby would if you gave a baby a beer.

he traveled by train among the optimistic and neatly dressed middle classes to San Francisco, a city so light in every way that he couldn’t quite believe his eyes. This must be what gave them the idea for Technicolor, he thought, looking out at it; it even made him chuckle out loud now and then, girlishly and by himself, at how pretty it was, yes, but more than anything else how light, its hills and its colors and bridges and water and attitudes and people and skies. It made him feel he might somehow float up out of his heavy black shoes into one of the many clouds sitting atop the sunny city, but not just any cloud, a cloud from a children’s drawing, puffed and friendly, right next to a sun wearing a movie star’s plastic sunglasses and smiling.

“Why do I prefer inflatable women?” asked the old man with a torn-throat chuckle, as if surprised, yet in a way not surprised, to have posed himself this question. “Why do I prefer inflatable women?” he asked again, this time with a shake of his head, as though he just couldn’t help being charmed by himself, despite his better wisdom, despite knowing himself all too well.

Admit it: you were excited for Anna Karenina to be his Interiors, his 1941, his Funny People or (depending on your point of view) This Is 40—basically, the one that finally gives you permission to stop waking up in a panic-sweat of misery in the middle of the night to cross-check his Wikipedia bio against your own life and obsess over exactly what they had accomplished by the age you are now.