Excerpt of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
(Page 2 of 8)
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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-Korsakov, 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.
From Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,
pages 1-15. Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Safran
Foer. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.
