Lev Grossman - The Map of Tiny Perfect Things

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ISBN: 978-0-316-28122-5

E3-20210121-JV-NF-ORI

For Sophie

It was August 4th, and I guess it already had been for a while. To be totally honest I didnt even notice the change at first. My life was already serving up these big fat sweltery summer days anyway, one after the other, each one pretty much exactly the same as the one before it probably a more powerfully alert and observant person would have picked up on the change sooner.

What can I say, it was summer. It was hot. Anyway, heres what was going on: Time had stopped.

Or it hadnt stopped, exactly, but it got stuck in a loop.

Please believe me when I say that this is not a metaphor. Im not trying to tell you that I was really bored and it seemed like summer would never end or something like that. What Im saying is, the summer after my freshman year of high school, the calendar got to August 4th and gave up: Literally every single day after that was also August 4th. I went to bed on the night of August 4th. I woke up, it was the morning of August 4th.

The chain had slipped off the wheel of the cosmos. The great iTunes of the heavens was set on Repeat One.

As supernatural predicaments go it wasnt even that original, given that this exact same thing happened to Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. In fact one of the first things I did was watch that movie about eight times, and while I appreciate its wry yet tender take on the emotional challenges of romantic love, let me tell you, as a practical guide to extricating yourself from a state of chronological stasis it leaves a lot to be desired.

And yes, I watched Edge of Tomorrow too. So if I ran into an Omega Mimic, believe me, I knew exactly what to do. But I never did.

If there was a major difference between my deal and Groundhog Day, it was probably that unlike Bill Murray I didnt really mind it all that much, at least at first. It wasnt freezing cold. I didnt have to go to work. Im kind of a loner anyway, so I mostly took it as an opportunity to read a lot of books and play an ungodly amount of video games.

The only real downside was that nobody else knew what was happening, so I had nobody to talk to about it. Everybody around me thought they were living today for the first time ever. I had to put a lot of effort into pretending not to see things coming and acting surprised when they came.

And also it was boiling hot. Seriously, it was like all the air in the world had been sucked away and replaced by this hot, clear, viscous syrup. Most days I sweated through my shirt by the time I finished breakfast. This was in Lexington, Massachusetts, by the way, where I was already stuck in space as well as time, because my parents didnt want to pony up for the second session of summer camp, and my temp job at my moms accounting firm wouldnt start till next week. So I was already killing time, even as it was.

Only now, when I killed time, it didnt stay dead. It rose from the grave and lived again. I was on zombie time.

Lexington is a suburb of Boston, and as such is composed of a lot of smooth gray asphalt, a lot of green lawns, a lot of pine trees, a bunch of faux-colonial McMansions, and some cute, decorous downtown shoppes. And some Historick LandmarksLexington played a memorable though tactically meaningless role in the Revolutionary War, so theres a lot of historical authenticity going on here, as is clearly indicated by a lot of helpful informational plaques.

After the first week or so I had a pretty solid routine going. In the morning I slept through my mom leaving for work; on her way she would drop my impressively but slightly disturbingly athletic little sister at soccer camp, leaving me completely alone. I had Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, which youd think would get boring fast, but actually I found myself enjoying them more and more as time went by. Theres a great deal of subtlety in your Honey Nut Cheerio. A lot of layers to uncover.

I learned when to make myself scarce. I found ways to absent myself from the house from 5:17 p.m. to 6:03 p.m., which is when my sister muffed the tricky fast bit in the third movement of Vivaldis Violin Concerto in A Minor seventeen times straight. I generally skipped out after dinner while my parentsthey got divorced a couple of years ago, but my dad was over for some reason, probably to talk about moneyhad a nastier-than-usual fight about whether or not my mom should take her car into the shop because the muffler rattled when you went over bumps.

It put things in perspective. Note to self: Do not waste entire life being angry about stupid things.

As for the rest of the day, my strategies for occupying myself for all eternity were mostly (a) going to the library, and (b) going to the pool.

Generally I chose option (a). The library was probably the place in Lexington where I felt the most at home, and thats not excluding my actual home, the one where I slept at night. It was quiet at the library. It was air-conditioned. It was calm. Books dont practice violin. Or fight about mufflers.

Plus they smell really good. This is why Im not much of a supporter of the glorious e-book revolution. E-books dont smell like anything.

With an apparently infinite amount of time at my disposal, I could afford to think big, and I did: I decided to read through the entire fantasy and science fiction section, book by book, in alphabetical order. At the time, that was pretty much my definition of happiness. (That definition was about to change, in a big way, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.) At the point where this story starts it had been August 4th for I would say approximately a month, give or take, and I was up to Flatland, which is by a guy named, no kidding, Edwin Abbott Abbott.

Flatland was published in 1884, and its about the adventures of a Square and a Sphere. The idea is that the Square is a flat, two-dimensional shape, and the Sphere is a round, three-dimensional shape, so when they meet the Sphere has to explain to this flat Square what the third dimension is. Like what it means to have height in addition to length and width. His whole life, the Square has lived on one plane and never looked up, and now he does for the first time and, needless to say, his flat little mind is pretty much blown.