“Exactly the same time. 4:22 and thirty seconds. I’ve watched it three times already.”
“It almost makes being stuck in time worthwhile.”
“Almost.” Then she thought of something and her smile faded a little. “It almost does.”
* * *
Margaret dropped me off at the library—I’d left my bike there—and that was that. I didn’t ask her out or anything. I figured it was quite enough that she was trapped in time with me. It’s not like we could avoid each other. We were like two castaways, except instead of being stranded on a desert island we were stranded in a day.
Because I am a person of uncommon strength of will, I didn’t text her again till two days later.
Found another one. Back stairs of library—the ones in the parking lot—11:37:12.
Another what?
One. Come.
She didn’t answer, but I waited for her anyway, just in case. I didn’t have anything better to do. And she came, the boatlike station wagon heeling into the parking lot at 11:30. She parked in the shade.
“What is it?” she said. “Like another hawk?”
“Keep your voice down, I don’t want to screw it up.”
“Screw what up?”
I pointed.
The rear entrance of the library had concrete stairs leading down to the parking lot. There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the stairs, but they had that mysterious Pythagorean quality that attracts fourteen-year-old skateboarders like a magnet attracts iron filings. They flocked to it like vultures to a carcass. They probably showed up the second the concrete was dry.
“That’s the thing?” she said. “Skate rats are the thing?”
“Just watch.”
Each kid took his or her turn going down the steps, one after the other, did his or her thing, then walked back up the wheelchair ramp and got back in line. It never stopped.
“Okay,” I said. “So what do you notice about these skate rats?”
“What do you mean?” Margaret was visibly unintrigued.
“What do they all have in common?”
“That ironically, despite the fact that skateboarding defines their very identity, they all suck at it?”
“Exactly!” I said. “The iron law of skate rats the world over is that they never, ever land that one trick they’re always trying to land. Now look.”
A skateboarder rolled toward the top of the steps, knees bent, jumped, and his skateboard went clattering off at a random angle without him. Cue next skater. And the next. And the next.
I checked my watch. 11:35.
“Two more minutes,” I said. “Sorry, I figured you’d be late. How’s everything else?”
“Not bad.”
“How’s the driving?”
“Great. I need a new challenge. It’s between juggling and electrical engineering.”
“Gotta be practical. Juggling’s the future.”
“It’s the sensible choice.”
A skater went down, a potentially ugly fall, but she rolled out of it and came up fine. The next one chickened out before he even got to the top of the steps.
“Okay, two more.” Miss. “One more.” Miss. “Okay. Showtime!”
The next turn belonged to a round-faced, thick-bodied kid with a dark hair-helmet under his real helmet, whom we’d already seen muff a few tricks. His face was set and determined. He pushed off, found his balance, set his feet, crouched down, hit the steps, and jumped.
His board flipped once, then came down hard on the railing in a perfect grind. Seriously, it was like in a video game—this was like X Games–level shit. The kid grinded all the way down the rail, ten feet in one long second, arms out wide. The first time I saw it I figured that was it. He’d nailed the trick, that was enough; his name would live in song and story forever. But no, it wasn’t enough. He had to go for all the glory: a full 360 flip out of the grind.
With an athleticism that seemed to have nothing to do with his pale, doughy physique, he popped off the rail and into the air, levitating while his board spun wildly along both axes. Then wham!—he stomped down on it, both feet. And he stuck it.
He stuck it! The board bowed so deeply it looked like it was going to snap, but he kept his feet, and as he straightened up … his face! He couldn’t believe it! He made the happiest face that it is anatomically possible for a human to make.
“Oh my God!” He held up both fists. “Oh my fucking God!”
The rats came pouring down the steps. They mobbed him. It was, and might quite possibly always be, the greatest moment of his life.
“Tell me that wasn’t worth it,” I said.
Margaret nodded solemnly. She was looking at me differently than she had before. She seemed to be seeing me, really paying attention to me, for the first time.
“It was worth it. You were right. It was a perfect thing.”
“Like the hawk.”
“Like the hawk. Come on, let’s go get something expensive and bad for us for lunch.”
We got the most brutally fattening thing we could find, which was bacon cheeseburgers—extra bacon, extra cheese. That was the day we came up with the idea for the map of tiny perfect things.
* * *
It’s tough getting through daily life, finding stuff that doesn’t suck to take pleasure in—and that’s in normal life, where every twenty-four hours you get a whole fresh new day to work with. We were in a tougher situation, because we had to make do with the same day every single day, and that day was getting worn pretty thin.
So we got serious about it. The hawk and the skate rat were just the beginning. Our goal was to find every single moment of beauty, every tiny perfect thing, that this particular August 4th had to offer. There had to be more: Moments when, for just a few seconds, the dull coal of reality was compressed by random chance into a glittering diamond of awesomeness. If we were going to stay sane, we were going to have to find them all. We were going to have to mine August 4th for every bit of perfection it had.
“We have to be super-observant,” Margaret said. “Stay in the moment. We can’t just be alive, we have to be super-alive.”
In addition to being super-alive we were going to be organized. We bought a snazzy fountain pen and a big foldy survey map of Lexington and spread it out on a table in the library. Margaret found the spot on the Wachusett Reservoir and wrote “HAWK” and “16:32:30” on it in snazzy purple ink. (Military time made it seem that much more official.) On the spot marking the rear steps of the library, I wrote “11:37:12” and “SKATE RAT.”
We stepped back to admire our work. It was a start. We were a team: Mark and Margaret against the world.
“You realize that when the world resets in the morning the whole map’s going to be erased,” she said.
“We’ll have to remember it. Draw it again from scratch every day.”
“How do you think we should go looking for them? The perfect things?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just keep our eyes open, I guess.”
“Live in the now.”
“Just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“Maybe we can work in sectors,” she said. “Like divide the town into a grid, then divide the squares of the grid between the two of us, then make sure we’ve observed each square at every moment in the twenty-four-hour cycle, so we don’t miss anything.”
“Or we could just walk around.”
“That’s good too.”
“You know what this reminds me of?” I said. “That map in Time Bandits.”
“Okay. I have no idea what that means.”
“Oh my God! If the universe stopped just so I could make you watch Time Bandits, then I think it’s all worth it.”
Then I started trying to explain to her what it said in Flatland about the fourth dimension, but it turned out I was totally mansplaining, because not only had she already read Flatland but also, unlike me, she actually understood it. So she explained it to me.