One of Our Thursdays Is Missing Read online

  “Why only a Post-it?” asked Carmine. “Why not a real bowl of fruit?”

  “For economic reasons,” I replied. “Every novel has only as much description as is necessary. In years past, each book was carefully crafted to an infinitely fine degree, but that was in the days of limited reader sophistication. Today, with the plethora of experience through increased media exposure, most books are finished by the readers themselves.”

  “The Feedback Loop?”

  “Precisely. As soon as the readers get going, the Feedback Loop will start backwashing some of their interpretations into the book itself. Not that long ago, books could be stripped bare by overreading, but since the invention of the loop, not only do books suffer little internal wear but readers often add detail by their own interpretations. Was that a goblin?”

  I had just seen a small creature with pixie ears and sharp teeth staring at us from behind a chair.

  “Looks like it.”

  I sighed. Pickwick would have something new to complain about.

  “What is Thursday like?” asked Carmine.

  I got asked this a lot. “You’ve heard the stories?”

  She nodded. Most people had. For over fifteen years, Thursday Next had worked at Jurisfiction, tirelessly patrolling the BookWorld like a narrative knight-errant, bringing peace and justice to the very edge of acceptable prose. She was head and shoulders above the other agents—giants like Commander Bradshaw, Emperor Zhark, Mrs. Tiggy-winkle or even the Drunk Vicar.

  “Did she really take Hamlet into the RealWorld?” asked Carmine, excited by my mentor’s audaciousness.

  “Among others.”

  “And defeat Yorrick Kaine?”

  “That, too.”

  “What about the Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco? Did they really have to delete two weeks of his diary to make everything okay?”

  “That was the least of her worries. Even Thursday had occasional failures—it’s inevitable if you’re at the top of your game. Mind you,” I added, unconsciously defending my famous namesake, “if Samuel Pepys hadn’t set Deb up in a pied-à-terre in the backstory of Sons and Lovers with Iago coming in for halfcosts on alternate weekdays, it would never have escalated into the disaster it became. They could have lost the entire diaries and, as a consequence, anything in Nonfiction that used the journal as a primary source. It was only by changing the historical record to include a ‘Great Fire of London’ that never actually happened that Thursday managed to pull anything from the debacle. History wouldn’t speak to the council for months, but Sir Christopher Wren was delighted.”

  We walked back out into the courtyard. The king and queen invited us around for a “pre-reading party” that evening, and I responded by inviting them around for tea and cakes the following day. Thus suitably introduced, we made our way out to the street again.

  “So how do you want me to play you?” asked Carmine.

  “You’re not playing me, you’re playing her. There’s a big difference. Although I’ve been Thursday for so long that sometimes I think I am her, I’m not. I’m just the written her. But in answer to your question, I try to play her dignified. I took over from the other written Thursday—long story, don’t ask—soon after the Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco was deleted—even longer story, still don’t ask—and the previous Thursday played her a little disrespectfully, so I’m trying to redress that.”

  “I heard that the violent and gratuitous-sex Thursday had a lot more readers.”

  I glared at Carmine, but she simply stared back at me with big innocent eyes. She was making a statement of fact, not criticism.

  “We’ll get the readers back somehow,” I replied, although I wasn’t wholly convinced.

  “Can I meet the real Thursday?” asked Carmine in a hopeful tone of voice. “For research purposes, naturally.”

  “She’s very busy, and I don’t like to bother her.”

  I was exaggerating my influence. Despite overseeing my creation, the real Thursday didn’t like me much, possibly for the very same reasons she thought she might be improved. I think it was a RealWorld thing: the gulf between the person you want to be and the person you are.

  “Look,” I said, “just play her dignified—the individual interpretation is up to you. Until you get into the swing of it, play her subtly different on alternate readings. Hamlet’s been doing it for years. Of course, he has twenty-six different ways of playing himself, but then he’s had a lot of practice. In fact, I don’t think even he knows his motivation anymore—unless you count confusing readers and giving useful employment to Shakespearean scholars.”

  “You’ve met Hamlet?”

  “No, but I saw the back of his head at last year’s BookWorld Conference.”

  “What was it like?” asked Carmine, who seemed to enjoy celebrity tittle-tattle.

  “The back of his head? Hairy,” I replied cautiously, “and it might not have been him. In any event, keep your interpretation loose, and don’t telegraph. Let the readers do the work. If you’re going to explain everything, then we might as well give up and tell everyone to stick to television and movies.”

  “Were there any goblins?” asked Pickwick as soon as we walked back in.

  “I didn’t see any. Did you, Miss O’Kipper?”

  “No, no, not a single one.”

  “Mrs. Malaprop,” I said, “we’ll be having royalty for tea tomorrow. Better bake some silver and have the buns cleaned.”

  “Very good, Mizzen Exe.”

  “Here,” I said to Carmine, handing her the complete script for my part. “I have to go out for an hour. I’ll test you on it when I get back.”

  She suddenly looked nervous. “What if someone starts to read us while you’re away?”

  “They won’t,” I replied, “and if they do, Mrs. Malaprop will point you in the right dictation. Just take it smooth and easy. The rest of the cast will help you along.”

  “What do I do with Skimmers?” she asked with a faint tinge of panic in her voice. All rookies feared Dippers, Skimmers and Last-Chapter-Firsters.

  “There’s no hard-and-fast rule. Skimmers move in a generally forward direction, and with experience you’ll figure out where they’re going to land next. But the main thing is not to waste time with the nuisance reader—in a word, prioritize. Find the stable, methodical, bread-and-butter readers and give them your best. Leave the Skimmers and Dippers high and dry if there’s a crisis. When things die down later, you can pick them up then.”

  “And students?”

  “A breeze. They’ll pause at the end of each sentence to think quasi-intellectual deep thoughts, so as soon as a full stop looms, you can be off dealing with someone else. When you get back, they’ll still be pondering about intertextuality, inferred narratives and the scandalously high price of the subsidized beer in the student union.”

  She was quiet and attentive, so I carried on.

  “You should show no discrimination with readers. Treat the lip movers as you would the New York Times critic. You might not be able to distinguish between the two at first, but you soon will. Yossarian said that you can get to know individual readers by the way they read you. Mind you, he’s been doing it a long time, and Catch-22 gets reread a lot.”

  “You’ve met Yossarian?”

  “He was just leaving the room after giving a talk. I saw his foot.”

  “Left or right?”

  “Left.”

  “I met someone who was beaten about the head boy Sir John Falstaff,” remarked Mrs. Malaprop in an attempt to show that she, too, hobnobbed with celebrities.

  “I talked to someone who held Pollyanna’s hat for three whole pages,” added Carmine.

  “Small fry,” remarked Pickwick, eager to outdo us all. “Sam Spade himself actually spoke to me.”

  There was silence. This was impressive.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Get that stupid bird out of my way.’”

  “Well, pretend to be a soldier and elope with my w
ard,” remarked Mrs. Malaprop, her word choice rendered clean and clear by the sarcasm. “You can dine out on that one for years.”

  “It’s better than your dumb Falstaff story.”

  “The thing to remember,” I remarked, to stop the argument before it got to the next few stages, which were insults, crockery throwing and punches, “is that the more readers there are, the easier it becomes. If you relax, it actually becomes a great deal of fun. The words spring naturally to your lips, and you can concentrate on not just giving the best possible performance but also dealing with any readers who are having problems—or indeed any readers who are trying to cause trouble for you and change the book. You’ll be surprised by how strong the power of reader suggestion can get, and if you let readers get the upper hand, it’ll be Smilla’s Sense of Snow all over again.”

  Carmine looked thoughtful. The Sea Worms incident was a sobering lesson for everyone, and something that no one wanted to repeat.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said, preparing to leave. “I have to meet with Commander Herring. Mrs. Malaprop, will you show Carmine around the series and do the introductions? Start with the Gravitube and the Diatryma. After that it’s all fairly benign.”

  4.

  The Red-Haired Gentleman

  Despite the remaking of the BookWorld, some books remained tantalizingly out of reach. The entire Sherlock Holmes canon was the most obvious example. It was entirely possible that they didn’t know there was a BookWorld and still thought they were real. A fantastic notion, until you consider that up until 11:06 A.M. of April 12, 1948, everyone else had thought the same. Old-timers still speak of “the Great Realization” in hushed tones and refer to the glory days when the possibility of being imaginary was only for the philosophers.

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (4th edition)

  I stepped out of the front door and walked the eight blocks to the corner of Adams and Colfer. A bus arrived in a couple of minutes—they always do—and after showing my pass to the driver, who looked suspiciously like a Dr. Seuss character on furlough, I took a seat between a Viking and a nun.

  “I’m on my way to a pillage,” said the Viking as he attempted to find some common ground on which to converse, “and we’re a bit lean in the ‘beating people to death with large hammers’ department. Would you like to join us?”

  “That’s most kind, but it’s really not my thing.”

  “Oh, go on, you might rather like it.”

  “No thank you.”

  “I see,” said the Viking in a huffy tone. “Please yourself, then.” And he lapsed into silence.

  It was the nun’s turn to speak.

  “I’m collecting,” she said with a warm smile, “for the St. Nancy’s Home for Fallen Women.”

  “Fallen in what respect?”

  “Fallen readership. Those poor unfortunate wretches who, through no fault of their own, now find themselves in the ignominious status of the less well read. Are you interested?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well,” said the nun, “how completely selfish of you. How would you like to be hardly read at all?”

  “I am hardly read at all,” I told her, mustering as much dignity as I could. There was an unfair stigma attached to those characters who weren’t read, and making us into victims in need of saving didn’t really help, to be honest.

  The Viking looked at me scornfully, then got up and went to the front of the bus to pretend to talk to someone. The nun joined him without another word, and I saw them glance in my direction and shake their heads sadly.

  I took the bus across the Fantasy/Human Drama border, then changed to a tram at Hemingway Central. In the six months since the BookWorld had been remade, its citizens had learned much about their new surroundings. It was easier to understand; we had usable maps, a chain of outrageously expensive coffee shops in which to be seen, known as Stubbs, and most important, a network of road, rail and river to get from one place to another. We now had buses, trams, taxis, cars and even paddlewheel steamers. Bicycles might have been useful, but for some reason they didn’t work inside the BookWorld—no matter what anyone did, they just wouldn’t stay up. Jumping directly from book to book had rapidly become unfashionable and was looked upon as hopelessly Pulp. If you really wanted to be taken seriously and display a sense of cool unhurried insouciance, you walked.

  “So what do you think?” asked a red-haired, jowly gentleman who had sat next to me. He was dressed in a double-breasted blue suit with a dark tie secured by a pearl tiepin. His hair was long but combed straight, and there seemed rather a lot of it. So much, in fact, that he had gathered the bright red locks that grew from his cheeks into fine plaits, each bound with a blue ribbon. Aside from that, his deep-set eyes had a kindly look, and I felt immediately at ease in his company.

  “What do I think about what?”

  “This,” he said, waving a hairy hand in the direction of the new BookWorld.

  “Not enough pianos,” I said after a moment’s reflection, “and we could do with some more ducks—and fewer baobabs.”

  “I’d prefer it to be more like the RealWorld,” said the red-haired gentleman with a sigh. “Our existence in here is very much life at second hand. I’d love to know what a mistral felt like, how the swing and drift of fabric might look and what precisely it is about a sunset or the Humming Chorus that makes them so astonishing.”

  This was a sentiment I could agree with.

  “For me it would be to hear the rattle of rain on a tin roof or see the vapor rise from a warm lake in the chill morning air.”

  We fell silent for a moment as the tram rumbled on. I didn’t tell him what I yearned for above all, the most underappreciated luxury of the human race: free will. My life was by definition preordained. I had to do what I was written to do, say what I was written to say, without variance, all day every day, whenever someone read me. Despite conversations like this, where I could think philosophically rather than narratively, I could never shrug off the peculiar feeling that someone was controlling my movements and eavesdropping on my every thought.

  “I’m sure it’s not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats,” I said by way of balance.

  “Oh, I agree,” replied the red-haired gentleman, who had, I noticed, nut-brown hands with fingers that were folded tight along the knuckle. “For all its boundless color, depth, boldness, passion and humor, the RealWorld doesn’t appear to have any clearly discernible function.”

  “Not that better minds than ours haven’t tried to find one.”

  The jury had been out on this matter for some time. Some felt that the RealWorld was there only to give life to us, while others insisted that it did have a function, to which no one was yet party. There was a small group who suggested that the RealWorld was not real at all and was just another book in an even bigger library. Not to be outdone, the nihilists over in Philosophy insisted that reality was as utterly meaningless as it appeared.

  “What is without dispute,” said my friend once we had discussed these points, “is that the readers need us just as much as we need them—to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else.”

  “Who are you?” I asked, unused to hearing such matters discussed on a Number 23 tram.

  “Someone who cannot be saved, Miss Next. I have done terrible things.”

  I started at the mention of my name and was suddenly suspicious. Our chance meeting was no chance meeting. In fiction they rarely are. But then again, he might have thought I was the other Thursday Next.

  “Sir, I’m not her.”

  He looked at me and smiled. “You’re more alike than you suppose.”

  “Physically, perhaps,” I replied, “but I flunked my Jurisfiction training.”

  “On occasion, people of talent are kept in reserve at times of crisis.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I don’t have much time. I think
they saw us talking. Heed this and heed it well: One of our Thursdays is missing!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This: Trust no one but yourself.”

  “Which ‘yourself’? I have several. Me, the real me and Carmine who is being me when I’m not me.”

  He didn’t get to answer. The tram lurched, and with a sharp squeal of the emergency brakes we ground to a halt. The reason we had stopped was that two highly distinctive 1949 Buick Roadmaster automobiles were blocking the road, and four men were waiting for us. The cars and their occupants were among the more iniquitous features of the remaking. The Council of Genres, worried about increased security issues with the freedom of movement, had added another tier of law enforcement to the BookWorld. Shadowy men and women who were accountable only to the council and seemed to know no fear or restraint: the Men in Plaid.

  The doors of the tram hissed open, and one of the agents climbed inside. He wore a well-tailored suit of light green plaid with a handkerchief neatly folded in his top pocket.

  I turned to the red-haired gentleman to say something, but he had moved across the aisle to the seat opposite. The Man in Plaid’s eye fell upon my new friend, and he quickly strode up and placed a pistol to his head.

  “Don’t make any sudden movements, Kiki,” ordered the Man in Plaid. “What are you doing so far outside Crime?”

  “I came to Fantasy to look at the view.”

  “The view is the same as anywhere else.”

  “I was misinformed.”

  The red-haired gentleman was soon handcuffed. With a dramatic flourish, the Man in Plaid pulled out a bloodstained straight razor from the red-haired gentleman’s pocket. A gasp went up from the occupants of the tram.

  “This lunatic has been AWOL from his short story for twenty-four hours,” announced the agent. “You are fortunate to have survived.”