One More Thing (24 page)

“I’m hungry,” said Confucius to a nearby servant. “Is there any food around? Some noodles, maybe?”

“CONFUCIUS SAY: BRING NOODLES!” shouted the servant to the cook.

“Hey, hey, please calm down,” said Confucius. “It’s just a question. Only if it’s convenient.”

“CONFUCIUS SAY: CALM DOWN!” shouted the servant to the rest of the household.

“Stop it, okay?” snapped Confucius. “Not everything is a
thing
.”

“CONFUCIUS SAY: NOT EVERYTHING IS A THING.”

Dammit, thought Confucius, and he was about to interrupt him again—but didn’t. That one sounded pretty good, he had to admit. And the one before wasn’t so bad, either, if interpreted in the right way.

“You get those last two?” Confucius whispered to his scribe, who was sitting in the corner. “ ‘Calm down,’ and the other one?”

The scribe nodded.

“I don’t know, maybe.” Confucius shrugged. “Not the noodles one, obviously.”

But if the scribe wanted to write those other two down … well, Confucius wasn’t going to stop him.

War

The two children began a game of war.

This is a good idea
, thought both children.
Soon, I will win. Then the game will be over, I will be happy, and we can both go do other things
.

But no matter how many times they played war, they always forgot how tedious, how tiresome, how emotionally debilitating, how devoid of reward, and how maddeningly left to chance the game was; and how they always regretted having started the contest well before the time it was over.

In that way, it wasn’t too unlike the game of bridge.

If You Love Something

If you love something, let it go.

If you don’t love something, definitely let it go.

Basically, just drop everything, who cares.

Just an Idea

When the couple won the $18 millon Powerball jackpot, they found out they had two options. They could accept the state’s default payout structure, which would come to $600,000 a year over thirty years; or they could let a company buy the ticket from them for a single upfront payment of ten million dollars.

Both options sounded good.

And they didn’t have to decide right away, anyway.

They spent the weekend celebrating in secret with lots of champagne and side dishes.

Rich, forever.

On Monday morning, as they walked up the steps of the Ohio Lottery Commission headquarters, a woman in a business suit intercepted them and presented them with a third option.

An artist named Damien Hirst was in the market for a lottery ticket just like this one, the woman explained. Would they be interested in selling the ticket to him, through her, right now, for the flat fee of twelve million dollars?

“What’s he going to do with it?” asked the husband.

“He’s going to stamp the word
VOID
on it and sell it for fifty million dollars.”

The wife didn’t get that at all, but the husband said he kind of did, maybe.

“We’ll talk about it,” said the husband. “We’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

That night they looked up the artist online.

“It’s the idea of it,” explained the husband. “See? All this stuff. It’s the idea.”

The next morning they called the woman and told her they’d do it.

“Excellent!” she said.

They signed some paperwork and handed her the ticket, and she handed them a certified check for twelve million dollars.

And even better: nobody had to know they won. They could tell anyone they wanted, or no one if they wanted. No security concerns, no privacy concerns. No sob stories or television cameras or suspicious relatives they’d never heard of.

Just the two of them and the millions and millions of dollars.

The night before they were going to deposit the certified check, the husband awoke so startled by an idea that he had to wake up his wife to run it by her, too.

What if we called the woman back and offered to sell them the twelve-million-dollar check for fifteen million dollars? He could stamp
VOID
on the check, too!

“I like it,” she said.

The next day they called the woman with their proposal that Damien Hirst could buy back their undeposited certified check for fifteen million dollars.

“Why would he do that?” asked the woman.

“Well, he could do whatever he wants with it,” said the husband. “For example: he could stamp
VOID
on the check and then sell that for seventy million dollars.”

“Sell what for seventy million dollars?”

“The voided check to us.”

The woman sounded perplexed. “I’m sorry, could you explain more … what you mean, exactly?”

“You buy the twelve-million-dollar certified check made out to us, George and Cynthia Clark, from Hirst LLC. Okay? You give it to Damien Hirst. He writes
VOID
or
CANCELED
on it, or stamps or stencils it or however he wants to do it—he can decide that part.”

“Maybe he could paint it in red paint,” chimed in Cynthia.

“Shh,” said George. “Then you take that, you frame that—he frames that—whoever frames that—doesn’t matter—the voided check—that he voided, or an assistant voided, or however he does it—then one of you takes that to a gallery, and you sell it for sixty-five, seventy, a hundred million dollars!”

“I don’t think that would sell,” the woman finally said.

“Sure it would! It’s almost exactly like the first idea, but better!”

“
What
is?”

“The voided check to us! That we gave to him! And he voided! For the lottery ticket that we gave to him! That he voided!”

“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “I think I just don’t get it.”

“That’s okay,” said the husband.

Just an idea.

Heyyyyy, Rabbits

One morning I looked out my window, and I saw a rabbit hop across my back patio.

Just hopping through.

It entered from one side, then it hopped around a little, then it left out the other side.

That was it.

I loved it.

I wanted it to happen again and again and again.

I thought about buying a rabbit as a pet and putting it on the patio. But I didn’t want to have to lock it up in a cage. And I didn’t want to let it just roam free, knowing that at any time, anything could happen to it.

I would feel so terrible if something happened to it.

Or if it felt all caged up.

So I put a bowl of carrots out on my back patio.

Heyyyyy, rabbits.

The Best Thing in the World Awards

Many of the nominees were returning: love, Jesus Christ, Julia Louis-Dreyfus on
Seinfeld
, losing gracefully (which never won but was always nominated), sunrises, peace (which was often a finalist during times of war but was otherwise not nominated), summer evenings, the score to
West Side Story
, laughter, Christmas, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

Others were new: internet on planes, spicy tuna on crispy rice.

Beauty had never been nominated. People lived their lives as if it were the best thing in the world, but perhaps in their hearts they knew it wasn’t. The same was true for money. Same for honesty.

A lot of people said they thought that Jesus Christ was going to come close one of these days, but it was generally nonreligious people who said that. Believers tended to vote for love, and the more casual believers voted for Christmas, and that split the vote.

Love always won. Everyone knew that and watched anyway. Perhaps even more eagerly, the way that people are more willing to get caught up in a certain type of movie when they have a
sense deep down that, of course, love is going to win in the end. The fun isn’t whether love is going to win; the fun is in seeing how.

“Welcome to the Best Thing in the World Awards!” announced the host, Neil Patrick Harris. He had been the host for the past four years and he was terrific at it. (“When are
you
going to be nominated?” he was asked each year as he walked the red carpet on the way in, and he’d laugh it off. And so would the viewers at home. “Let’s all calm down” was the general reaction whenever anyone would ask Neil Patrick Harris when he was going to be nominated. He was a fundamentally great host, there was no doubt about that; but it said a lot about how seriously people took the awards that he wouldn’t be nominated, at least not for a long, long time. An awards-show host? No, sorry.
We love him
, was the unspoken collective answer to this question,
but we’re talking about the
best thing in the world
here
.)

“Your votes—you, the viewers at home—are taken into account along with our confidential panel of experts and judges, all to determine the best of the best of the best …”

Most people skipped or only half watched the first ninety minutes of the show, which consisted of video segments and live performances celebrating the nominees, all of which had been previously announced. There were dance troupes, some subtitled singing. A man named Louie performed some standup comedy, but there wasn’t too much he could say on network television. Pixar debuted a ninety-second short film that was, everyone agreed, maybe just average for them but great for anyone else. Oprah Winfrey came out and explained in a smart and accessible way why some of the more-boring-seeming nominees—mostly those involving third world health—were actually really exciting to have on the list.