some screws, a pair of rusty scissors, a toy car, a pen, a key ring, broken glasses for someone with incredibly bad eyes.

some screws, a pair of rusty scissors, a toy car, a pen, a key ring, broken glasses for someone with incredibly bad eyes... I brought them to Dad, who was reading the New York Times at the kitchen table, marking the mistakes with his red pen. Here's what I've found," I said, pushing my pussy off the table with the tray of evidence. Dad looked at it and nodded. I sked, "So?" He shrugged his shoulders like he had no idea what I was talking about, and he went back to the paper. Can't you even tell me if I'm on the right track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. "But if you on't tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?" e got up to get a drink of water, and I examined what he'd circled on the page, because that's how tricky he could be. It as in an article about the girl who had disappeared, and how everyone thought the congressman who was humping her ad killed her. A few months later they found her body in Rock Creek Park, which is in Washington, D.C., but by then verything was different, and no one cared anymore, except for her parents. It wasn't a mistake! It was a message to me! I went back to the park every night for the next three nights. I dug up a hair clip, and a roll of pennies, and a thumbtack, and a coat hanger, and a 9V battery, and a Swiss Army knife, and a tiny picture frame, and a tag for a dog named Turbo, and a square of aluminum foil, and a ring, and a razor, and an extremely old pocket watch that was stopped at 5:37, although I didn't know if it was A.M. or P.M. But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found, the less I understood. I spread the map out on the dining room table, and I held down the corners with cans of V8. The dots from where I'd found things looked like the stars in the universe. I connected them, like an astrologer, and if you squinted your eyes like a Chinese person, it kind of looked like the word "fragile." Fragile. What was fragile? Was Central Park fragile? Was nature fragile? Were the things I found fragile? A thumbtack isn't fragile. Is a bent spoon fragile? I erased, and connected the dots in a different way, to make "door." Fragile? Door? Then I thought of porte, which is French for door, obviously. I rased and connected the dots to make "porte." I had the revelation that I could connect the dots to make "cyborg," and platypus," and "boobs," and even "Oskar," if you were extremely Chinese. I could connect them to make almost anything wanted, which meant I wasn't getting closer to anything. And now I'll never know what I was supposed to find. And hat's another reason I can't sleep. nyway. 'm not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven't actually finished it, because the math s incredibly hard and Mom isn't good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, "What you have old us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, "But it's turtles all the way down!" love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises. A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter. One weird thing is that instead of using normal stamps, I used stamps from my collection, ncluding valuable ones, which sometimes made me wonder if what I was really doing was trying to get rid of things. The irst letter I wrote was to Stephen Hawking. I used a stamp of Alexander Graham Bell. Dear Stephen Hawking, Can I please be your protégé? Thanks, Oskar Schell I thought he wasn't going to respond, because he was such an amazing person and I was so normal. But then one day I ame home from school and Stan handed me an envelope and said, "You've got mail!" in the AOL voice I taught him. I ran p the 105 stairs to our apartment, and ran to my laboratory, and went into my closet, and turned on my flashlight, and pened it. The letter inside was typed, obviously, because Stephen Hawking can't use his hands, because he has myotrophic lateral sclerosis, which I know about, unfortunately. Thank you for your letter. Because of the large volume of mail I receive, I am unable to write personal responses. Nevertheless, know that I read and save every letter, with the hope of one day being able to give each the proper response it deserves. Until that day, Most sincerely, Stephen Hawking I called Mom's cell. "Oskar?" "You picked up before it rang." "Is everything OK?" "I'm gonna need a laminator." "A laminator?" "There's something incredibly wonderful that I want to preserve." Dad always used to tuck me in, and he'd tell the greatest stories, and we'd read the New York Times together, and sometimes he'd whistle "I Am the Walrus," because that was his favorite song, even though he couldn't explain what it meant, which frustrated me. One thing that was so great was how he could find a mistake in every single article we looked at. Sometimes they were grammar mistakes, sometimes they were mistakes with geography or facts, and sometimes the article just didn't tell the whole story. I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing. When Dad was tucking me in that night, the night before the worst day, I asked if the world was a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. "Excuse me?" "It's just that why does the earth stay in place instead of falling through the niverse?" "Is this Oskar I'm tucking in? Has an alien stolen his brain for experimentation?" I said, "We don't believe in liens." He said, "The earth does fall through the universe. You know that, buddy. It's constantly falling toward the sun. That's what it means to orbit." So I said, "Obviously, but why is there gravity?" He said, "What do you mean why is there ravity?" "What's the reason?" "Who said there had to be a reason?" "No one did, exactly." "My question was rhetorical." "What's that mean?" "It means I wasn't asking it for an answer, but to make a point." "What point?" "That there doesn't have to be a reason." "But if there isn't a reason, then why does the universe exist at all?" "Because of sympathetic conditions." "So then why am I your son?" "Because Mom and I made love, and one of my sperm fertilized one of her eggs." "Excuse me while I regurgitate." "Don't act your age." "Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why." I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, "We exist because we exist." "What the?" "We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened." I understood what he meant, and I didn't disagree with him, but I didn't agree with him either. Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are. I turned on my shortwave radio, and with Dad's help I was able to pick up someone speaking Greek, which was nice. We couldn't understand what he was saying, but we lay there, looking at the glow-in-the-dark constellations on my ceiling, and listened for a while. "Your grandfather spoke Greek," he said. "You mean he speaks Greek," I said. "That's right. He just doesn't speak it here." "Maybe that's him we're listening to." The front page was spread over us like a blanket. There was a picture of a tennis player on his back, who I guess was the winner, but I couldn't really tell if he was happy or sad. "Dad?" "Yeah?" "Could you tell me a story?" "Sure." "A good one?" "As opposed to all the boring ones I tell." "Right." I ucked my body incredibly close into his, so my nose pushed into his armpit. "And you won't interrupt me?" "I'll try not to." "Because it makes it hard to tell a story." "And it's annoying." "And it's annoying." The moment before he started was my favorite moment. "Once upon a time, New York City had a sixth borough." "What's a borough?" "That's what I call an interruption." "I know, but the story won't make any sense to me if I don't know what a borough is." "It's like a neighborhood. Or a collection of eighborhoods." "So if there was once a sixth borough, then what are the five boroughs?" "Manhattan, obviously, rooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx." "Have I ever been to any of the other boroughs?" "Here we go." "I just ant to know." "We went to the Bronx Zoo once, a few years ago. Remember that?" "No." "And we've been to Brooklyn o see the roses at the Botanic Garden." "Have I been to Queens?" "I don't think so." "Have I been to Staten Island?" No." "Was there really a sixth borough?" "I've been trying to tell you." "No more interruptions. I promise." When the story finished, we turned the radio back on and found someone speaking French. That was especially nice, because it reminded me of the vacation we just came back from, which I wish never ended. After a while, Dad asked me if I was awake. I told him no, because I knew that he didn't like to leave until I had fallen asleep, and I didn't want him to be ired for work in the morning. He kissed my forehead and said good night, and then he was at the door. Dad?" "Yeah, buddy?" "Nothing." he next time I heard his voice was when I came home from school the next day. We were let out early, because of what appened. I wasn't even a little bit panicky, because both Mom and Dad worked in midtown, and Grandma didn't work, bviously, so everyone I loved was safe. know that it was 10:18 when I got home, because I look at my watch a lot. The apartment was so empty and so quiet. As walked to the kitchen, I invented a lever that could be on the front door, which would trigger a huge spoked wheel in the iving room to turn against metal teeth that would hang down from the ceiling, so that it would play beautiful music, like aybe "Fixing a Hole" or "I Want to Tell You," and the apartment would be one huge music box. fter I petted Buckminster for a few seconds, to show him I loved him, I checked the phone messages. I didn't have a cell hone yet, and when we were leaving school, Toothpaste told me he'd call to let me know whether I was going to watch im attempt skateboarding tricks in the park, or if we were going to go look at Playboy magazines in the drugstore with he aisles where no one can see what you're looking at, which I didn't feel like doing, but still. Message one. Tuesday, 8:52 A.M. Is anybody there? Hello? It's Dad. If you're there, pick up. I just tried the office, but no one was picking up. Listen, something's happened. I'm OK. They're telling us to stay where we are and wait for the firemen. I'm sure it's fine. I'll give you another call when I have a better idea of what's going on. Just wanted to let you know that I'm OK, and not to worry. I'll call again soon. There were four more messages from him: one at 9:12, one at 9:31, one at 9:46, and one at 10:04. I listened to them, and listened to them again, and then before I had time to figure out what to do, or even what to think or feel, the phone started ringing. It was 10:22:27. I looked at the caller ID and saw that it was him.