The Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

Pope’s: Man, like the gen’rous vine, supported lives; The strength he gains is from th’embrace he gives.

And then she would advance the rubber belt of the date-stamper by a single digit, a performance that by now probably began the day for her, as her first office act—just as my turning ahead my Page-A-Day calendar, with its two hoops of metal over which you guided the holes of the postcard-sized page, to the next day (which I always did last thing the night before, because I found it deflating to confront yesterday’s appointments and “to do’s” first thing in the morning) had become the escapement on which my own life ratcheted forward.

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I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed.

As I jaywalked across several streets in the direction of the CVS, trailing the inevitable two or three particles from each handful that exceeded the mouth’s capacity, moving between cars whose lacquer looked hot to the touch and pedestrians in white blouses and white pinpoint oxford shirts, I felt somewhat like an exploding popcorn myself: a dried bicuspid of American grain dropped into a lucid gold liquid pressed from less fortunate brother kernels, subjected to heat, and suddenly allowed to flourish outward in an instantaneous detonation of weightless reversal; an asteroid of Styrofoam, much larger but seemingly of less mass than before, composed of exfoliations that in bursting beyond their outer carapace were nonetheless guided into paisleys and baobabs and related white Fibonaccia by its disappearing, back-arching browned petals (which later found their way into the space between molars and gums), shapes which seemed quite Brazilian and intemperate for so North American a seed, and which seemed, despite the abrupt assumption of their final state, the convulsive, launching “pop,” slowly arrived at, like risen dough or cave mushrooms.

on eating popcorn

Theoretically, I suppose there is a point, too, at which the combined volume of all the miniature histories of miscellanea that have been collecting in parallel in my memory, covering a number of the different aisles of CVS and even some of the handiwork of civilization at large, will reach some critical point and leave me saturated, listless, unable to entertain a single new enthusiasm;

For now, though, the CVS pharmacy is closer to the center of life than, say, Crate & Barrel or Pier 1, or restaurants, national parks, airports, research triangles, the lobbies of office buildings, or banks. Those places are the novels of the period, while CVS is its diary.

I ate a vendor’s hot dog with sauerkraut (a combination whose tastiness still makes me tremble), walking fast in order to save as much of the twenty minutes of my lunch hour I had left for reading.

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