Cloud Atlas
I’m perhaps 1/3 of the way through David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas right now. It reminds me in some ways of If on a winter’s night a traveler, in the “truncated stories inside other truncated stories” sense. If Mitchell runs far enough with this, rather than keeping it a clever gimmick like it is so far, it’s going to knock me on my ass with knock-on-ass goodness. Gimmick or otherwise, the truncated stories are all good and getting better. And I assume eventually they’ll tie together in some way that will make me knock my own ass. (Yes yes.)
However, I did just stumble on the funniest paragraph in recent memory. Here ‘tis, with the previous paragraphs added to establish context:
[The ten-year-old] wrinkled his face at me. “Are you Grandma Ursula’s friend?”
“Once upon a time, yes, I was.”
“What have you come to the party as? Where’s your costume?”
Time to leave. I edged back into the evergreen. “This is my costume.”
He picked his nose. “A dead man digged up from the churchyard?”
“Charmed, but no. I’ve come as the Ghost of Christmas Past.” “But it’s Halloween, not Christmas.” “No!” I slapped my forehead. “Really?” “Yeah . . . ” “Then I’m ten months late! This is terrible! I’d better get back before my absence is noticed — and remarked upon!”
The boy did a cartoon kung-fu pose and waved his chain saw at me. “Not so fast, Green Goblin! You’re a trespasser! I’m telling the police of you!”
War. “Tell-tale-tit, are you? Two can play at that game. If you tell on me, I’ll tell my friend the Ghost of Christmas Future where your house is, and do you know what he’ll do to you?”
The wide-eyed shitletto shook his head, shaken and stirred.
“When your family is all tucked up asleep in your snug little beds, he’ll slide into your house through the crack under the door and eat—your—puppy!” The venom in my bile duct pumped fast. “He’ll leave its curly little tail under your pillow and you’ll get blamed. Your little friends will all scream, ‘Puppy slayer!’ whenever they see you coming. You’ll grow old and friendless and die, alone, miserably, on Christmas morning half a century from now. So if I were you, I wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone about seeing me.”
I pushed myself through the hedge before he could take it all in. As I was heading back to the station along the pavement, the wind carried his sob: “But I don’t even have a puppy . . . ”
Beautiful. In that evil sort of way. Reminds me of David Sedaris’s classic Santaland Diaries, in which he recounts his (presumably true, but I’m never sure how much Sedaris is embellishing) experiences working as a mall elf. Here’s my favorite scene from that essay:
This afternoon I worked as an Exit Elf, telling people in a loud voice, “this way out of santaland.” A woman was standing at one of the cash registers paying for her idea of a picture, while her son lay beneath her kicking and heaving, having a tantrum.
The woman said, “Riley, if you don’t start behaving yourself, Santa’s not going to bring you any of those toys you asked for.”
The child said, “He is too going to bring me toys, liar, he already told me.”
The woman grabbed my arm and said, “You there, Elf, tell Riley here that if he doesn’t start behaving immediately, then Santa’s going to change his mind and bring him coal for Christmas.”
I said that Santa no longer traffics in coal. Instead, if you’re bad he comes to your house and steals things. I told Riley that if he didn’t behave himself, Santa was going to take away his TV and all his electrical appliances and leave him in the dark. “All your appliances, including the refrigerator. Your food is going to spoil and smell bad. It’s going to be so cold and dark where you are. Man, Riley, are you ever going to suffer. You’re going to wish you never heard the name Santa.”
The woman got a worried look on her face and said, “All right, that’s enough.”
I said, “He’s going to take your car and your furniture and all the towels and blankets and leave you with nothing.”
The mother said, “No, that’s enough, really.”
Maybe I just have a sick tormenting-children fetish.