Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer Table of Contents Title Page Table of Contents ... ... ... ... ... ILLUSTRATIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENT ... WHAT THE? WHY I'M NOT WHERE YOU ARE 5/21/63 GOOGOLPLEX MY FEELINGS THE ONLY ANIMAL WHY I'M NOT WHERE YOU ARE 5/21/63 HEAVY BOOTS MY FEELINGS HAPPINESS, HAPPINESS WHY I'M NOT WHERE YOU ARE 4/12/78 THE SIXTH BOROUGH MY FEELINGS ALIVE AND ALONE WHY I'M NOT WHERE YOU ARE 9/11/03 A SIMPLE SOLUTION TO AN IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEM MY FEELINGS BEAUTIFUL AND TRUE Houghton Mifflin Company BOSTON NEW YORK 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Safran Foer All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com. Also visit www.theprojectmuseum.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 0-618-32970-6 Book design by Anne Chalmers Typeface: Janson Text Printed in the United States of America VB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ILLUSTRATIONS [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], copyright © 2005 by Debra Melzer; pages ii, [>], © Marianne Müller; [>], [>], copyright © 2005 by Christopher Moisan; [>], © The Scotsman / Corbis Sygma; [>], © Underwood & Underwood / Corbis; [>], © Stephen Waits; [>], © Peter Johnson / Corbis; [>], © Alison Wright / Corbis; [>], [>], [>], [>] (right-hand pages), photo illustration based on a photograph by Lyle Owersko © 2001 / Polaris; [>], [>], © David Ball / Corbis; [>], © Chang W. Lee / New York Times; [>], © Randy Faris / Corbis; [>], "Earliest Human Relatives (American Museum of Natural History)," © Hiroshi Sugimoto; [>], © ESA CNES Corbis Sygma; [>], © Alan Schein Photography / Corbis; [>], [>], © Kevin Fleming / Corbis; [>], © Palani Mohan / Corbis; [>], © Lester V. Bergman / Corbis; [>], © Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures Getty; [>], video grab courtesy of WNYW Television AFP Getty; [>], © James Leynse / Corbis; [>], © Mario Tama / Getty Images North America / Getty; [>], © Philip Harvey / Corbis; [>] copyright © 2005 by Anne Chalmers; [>], © Rob Matheson / Corbis. Letters attributed to real people in this novel are entirely fictitious, even if they seem real. ACKNOWLEDGMENT A major heartfelt thank you to everyone at Houghton Mifflin. You have encouraged me to be myself, even when that self would test a mother's patience. I feel lucky to be part of your family. For NICOLE, my idea of beautiful WHAT THE? What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad's voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of "Yellow Submarine," which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d'être, which is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I'd train it to say, "Wasn't me!" every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, "Ce n'étais pas moi!" What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war. And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt? Anyway. My first jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. Self-defense was something that I was extremely curious about, for obvious reasons, and Mom thought it would be good for me to have a physical activity besides tambourining, so my first jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. There were fourteen kids in the class, and we all had on neat white robes. We practiced bowing, and then we were all sitting down Native American style, and then Sensei Mark asked me to go over to him. "Kick my privates," he told me. That made me feel self-conscious. "Excusez-moi?" I told him. He spread his legs and told me, "I want you to kick my privates as hard as you can." He put his hands at his sides, and took a breath in, and closed his eyes, and that's how I knew that actually he meant business. "Jose," I told him, and inside I was thinking, What the? He told me, "Go on, guy. Destroy my privates." "Destroy your privates?" With his eyes still closed he cracked up a lot and said, "You couldn't destroy my privates if you tried. That's what's going on here. This is a demonstration of the well-trained body's ability to absorb a direct blow. Now destroy my privates." I told him, "I'm a pacifist," and since most people my age don't know what that means, I turned around and told the others, "I don't think it's right to destroy people's privates. Ever." Sensei Mark said, "Can I ask you something?" I turned back around and told him, "Can I ask you something?' is asking me something." He said, "Do you have dreams of becoming a jujitsu master?" "No," I told him, even though I don't have dreams of running the family jewelry business anymore. He said, "Do you want to know how a jujitsu student becomes a jujitsu master?" "I want to know everything," I told him, but that isn't true anymore either. He told me, "A jujitsu student becomes a jujitsu master by destroying his master's privates." I told him, "That's fascinating." My last jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now, because even after everything I'm still wearing heavy boots, and sometimes it helps to play a good beat. My most impressive song that I can play on my tambourine is "The Flight of the Bumblebee," by Nicolai Rimsky-Kor-sakov, which is also the ring tone I downloaded for the cell phone I got after Dad died. It's pretty amazing that I can play "The Flight of the Bumblebee," because you have to hit incredibly fast in parts, and that's extremely hard for me, because I don't really have wrists yet. Ron offered to buy me a five-piece drum set. Money can't buy me love, obviously, but I asked if it would have Zildjian cymbals. He said, "Whatever you want," and then he took my yo-yo off my desk and started to walk the dog with it. I know he just wanted to be friendly, but it made me incredibly angry. "Yo-yo moi!" I told him, grabbing it back. What I really wanted to tell him was "You're not my dad, and you never will be." Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore? For my ninth birthday last year, Grandma gave me a subscription to National Geographic, which she calls "the National Geographic." She also gave me a white blazer, because I only wear white clothes, and it's too big to wear so it will last me a long time. She also gave me Grandpa's camera, which I loved for two reasons. I asked why he didn't take it with him when he left her. She said, "Maybe he wanted you to have it." I said, "But I was negative-thirty years old." She said, "Still." Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls! So what about skyscrapers for dead people that were built down? They could be underneath the skyscrapers for living people that are built up. You could bury people one hundred floors down, and a whole dead world could be underneath the living one. Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were a skyscraper that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place. So if you wanted to go to the ninety-fifth floor, you'd just press the 95 button and the ninety-fifth floor would come to you. Also, that could be extremely useful, because if you're on the ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits below you, the building could take you to the ground, and everyone could be safe, even if you left your birdseed shirt at home that day. I've only been in a limousine twice ever. The first time was terrible, even though the limousine was wonderful. I'm not allowed to watch TV at home, and I'm not allowed to watch TV in limousines either, but it was still neat that there was a TV there. I asked if we could go by school, so Toothpaste and The Minch could see me in a limousine. Mom said that school wasn't on the way, and we couldn't be late to the cemetery. "Why not?" I asked, which I actually thought was a good question, because if you think about it, why not? Even though I'm not anymore, I used to be an atheist, which means I didn't believe in things that couldn't be observed. I believed that once you're dead, you're dead forever, and you don't feel anything, and you don't even dream. It's not that I believe in things that can't be observed now, because I don't. It's that I believe that things are extremely complicated. And anyway, it's not like we were actually burying him, anyway. Even though I was trying hard for it not to, it was annoying me how Grandma kept touching me, so I climbed into the front seat and poked the driver's shoulder until he gave me some attention. "What. Is. Your. Designation." I asked in Stephen Hawking voice. "Say what?" "He wants to know your name," Grandma said from the back seat. He handed me his card. GERALD THOMPSON Sunshine Limousine serving the five boroughs (212) 570-7249 I handed him my card and told him, "Greetings. Gerald. I. Am. Oskar." He asked me why I was talking like that. I told him, "Oskar's CPU is a neural-net