But that’s not really even the difficult part of the question. Achilles is definitely killed by a poison arrow. Mr. Pears stressed that they had to remember that it was a poison arrow. The arrow goes into the mortal part of him, his heel, making a nasty puncture wound. But if the poison killed only his heel, he would survive just fine, since you can survive losing your whole foot or even your whole leg. If your head dies, you die. If your heart dies, you die. If your liver dies, even, you die. But if your ankle dies? It would hurt, no question about that, it would not be a comfortable or cozy experience at all, at all, because you would probably have to have your foot chopped off above the ankle so there wouldn’t be any gangrene. Gangrene was a situation that Nory knew about from Debbie, who said mountain climbers usually got it. Debbie made up a pretty funny joke about it. When you had gangrene, the doctors all crowded around your foot, if it was your foot that had it, and shook their heads and said, ‘It’s green, gang,’ and then, chop, off goes the foot, in the trash, two points. Debbie had a tape of an expedition to climb a very difficult-to-climb mountain, Mount Everlast. One guy fell and his foot broke so that it bent back against his leg in not a natural way, and it got badly infested, because the bone was projecting out, and they ran out of antibiotics, so they had to put plastic tubes all through the injury at his ankle, so water was pouring through his ankle every second. But he was all right once he got back to civilization.
So Achilles would not be able to kill as many people after they had to cut off his foot, since he would have to fight hopping to and fro, or rolling around in a wheelchair, or a wheelchariot, going ‘Charge! Rip, slash, stab, rip,’ at people and then frantically pushing the wheels. But he wouldn’t die. He would not die and be buried underground because the immortality wouldn’t let him. So you have to assume that it’s the poison spreading that does it. But this can’t be exactly correct because remember, if you’re Achilles, every cell in the rest of your body is immortal. Totally immortal. If you looked through an electronic microscope on the highest power, each molecule of the poison would be there with a little sword of stabbing chemicals pointing harshly at each cell, and each cell would be fighting harshly back, and you could see the sparks for millimeters around, but each cell would win each fight. The cells wouldn’t die. And then you have to think of this as welclass="underline" in real life, your cells do die, and you get a whole new crop of cells every year, or every five years. The old cells get dissolved and get sent down by your blood to your bladder, and your bladder takes it from there. If you were Achilles, no cell would die, so you would get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, since your bones would be adding cells on, and no cells would be leaving, and your muscles, same thing, and your skin, same thing, every part of you would be growing in size and expanding like the expanding universe so after a little while you would be this absolutely huge monstrous thing just because you were immortal.
34. Things to Rem
So those were the basic questions that Nory wanted to ask Mr. Pears but couldn’t, and instead of asking them, she finished her book about the hen who wouldn’t give up. She wrote down on her Readathon sheet that she’d finished the book, and she saw her plain old ruler in her pencil case, which was made of plain clear and red plastic, and she listed through all the fancy rulers she had back in Palo Alto. She had a whole collection — two Lisa Frank rulers, a Pompeii ruler, a Little Mermaid ruler, a ruler that had liquid in it that fishes slowly swam through, and the Hello Kitty rulers from the Sanrio store in Japan Center, and on and on, maybe twenty feet worth of rulers, and all of that was plus a whole separate collection of erasers. Maybe this wasn’t quite as good as having a collection of fake food but it was something that Nory thought she should really be more pleased about. She kept her erasers in a blue icecube tray, not in the freezer of course, but it was a way of keeping them neatly in place, one eraser per ice place.
One time she was trying to earn some money to buy Underwater Barbie. Underwater Barbie, as many may know, kicked her legs in the bathtub. It was pretty good when she got it although the problem with it was that its motor made a massive amount of noise, so you couldn’t tell a story about something that happened to Underwater Barbie while you had her kicking gently along under the water, which was what ahead of time Nory expected she would be doing. But she was really desperate for Underwater Barbie, and she had almost enough, and to earn the last bit of money she did a lot of different things. One of them was to set up a poster-making store with different styles of lettering for sale and different kinds of pictures to go along with them, but the customers, who were of course Nory’s mother and father, mainly, chose what they wanted it to be a poster of. Nory’s father asked for a poster of five important sayings or mottoes, which could be sayings or mottoes that other people had said or sayings that Nory herself said. So Nory wrote a poster titled ‘Things to Rem.’ She ran out of space for the rest of Remember so she made a thought-cloud and had the Rem remembering the ember part as if it was a contented memory. She only charged for ten headline letters because of that mess-up — three cents for each letter. The sayings were:
A Home Made Gift is Worth More than a Pot of Gold
Things May Not Be How You Rember Them
Things That You Take for Granted others May Treasure
Some Thing That you Think is Good
Another pearson Will think is bad
She only did four sayings, not five, because she was almost out of room and couldn’t think of any more, but Nory’s father liked the poster and wanted to pay extra for the border design but Nory said that was included free, and the total was 84 cents for the sayings at 2 cents per word and 30 cents for the headline, which came to $1.14. The saying Nory liked best was ‘Things That You Take for Granted others May Treasure’ because that might be true of something like her eraser collection or her ruler collection, especially her ruler collection, which even she took for granted up to now and didn’t even bother to think of as a collection except that now at the Junior School she only had this one plain red ruler that said, ‘Helix.’ Rulers were useful for drawing the cubicles of a cartoon properly.
Nory drew a face on her fingernail and then smeared it away, trying to figure out how you would draw a cartoon picture of a girl thinking about clouds. You’d have to draw the thought-cloud with the usual three puffs leading promptly down from it to the girl’s head, and then in the cloud you’d draw a cloud, and you’d have to shade the background of the thought-cloud with a different color, maybe, to draw the clear distinction between it and the real cloud that the girl was thinking about — but anything’s possible with a pencil and paper, just about. Nory had in general two favorite types of clouds. One was the low flat steamy gray ones that you can walk right up to, and the other kind was the fat puffy ones that seem to have no end.
35. Break
Then the bell rang and Classics was over and Nory went to her break. She had been spending a lot of breaks with Kira, so to balance things out this break she spent with Pamela, who gave her some prawn chips which have a very dry feeling on your tongue, as if they’re pulling out all the water from the tastebobs completely, but being infinitely delicious at the same time. They didn’t have that awful glittery added-salt taste. Kira stopped by where they were sitting, under a conker tree, and said to Nory, ‘Come on, let’s go.’