A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker Read Free Book Online

When my grandmother broke her back and was in bed wondering whether to call the ambulance, my grandfather retreated downstairs to perform Chopin’s E-minor prelude several times. As the rest of his mind closed up shop, the musical node carried on.
    Once when I was fourteen I arrived at my grandparents’ house after twelve hours on a bus. We sat down to dinner. I politely asked my grandfather how his medical work was coming along. “I’m considering whether I should embark on a new research program,” he said. “It seems to me that an effective cure for the facial lesions of adolescence would be a contribution tohumanity. I notice for instance that you have a number of acne pustules there on your forehead, and on your nose, and I wonder whether you think this disease might yield a fruitful program of research.” I said, “Well, yes.” Then came the dear, nervous laugh from my grandmother.

13
    Good morning, it’s 5:36 a.m. I’m finding that a flat slab of junk mail dropped in the mail-slot created by two hot logs can sometimes get an unwilling fire to take the next step. Or try one of those enclosures for lightbulbs—slide that easy flammability into the spot where you wish the fire to move. This morning when I woke up I peed and then, inexplicably, I got back in bed and lay there for a while thinking about driving a speedboat off the watery edge of the world. It seemed to me, as I lay there awake, that the world was indeed flat, and as I reached the edge of it and saw the enormous glossy curve of ocean turn the corner and fall away I sped up. It was like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. My boat began falling, and as it fell it turned, but I held on to the steering wheel so as notto become separated from it. I fell towards a region of mists that I thought was the bottom, and I prepared to be dashed to pieces on the rocks, but no, I had fallen off the edge of the flat world, and the world was fairly thick: I was passing through the mists in a region that smelled like a salty shower, where the ocean began to pour past the inner molten earth-sandwich. The steam dried away finally and I tumbled past a cross-section of semi-plastic moltenness, and then, as I kept falling, I blew through the mists again, which cooled my hull, and I rose up past another waterfall that mirrored the one over which I had fallen; and then the bow of my boat, its progress slowing, reached a turning point about twenty feet in the air and I fell down with a slap on the gray, choppy ocean on the other side of the earth. Fighting the waters there that wanted to push me back off, I drove the boat to shore. Everything was more or less normal, and I ate at a Bickford’s and left a generous tip, but I wanted to go home to the “real” side of the earth, the side I was born on, and the phone system on the underside, where I was, didn’t reach through to the other side: so after a night in a motel I drove my boat back out to the edge of the ocean and hurled myself and my boat back out into the void, farenough that, with the stars at my back, I had a good view of the cataract falling off into the lava layers, and then, like an adept skateboarder, I flipped up the stern of my boat at the point of highest rising and slap landed neatly back in our ocean. I was home in a few hours.
    That’s what I lay there thinking about. Then I got up and came down here and made the coffee. Sometimes when I imagine driving off the end of the earth—it isn’t a subject I take up every day but it does recur—I consider what it would be like to go out for a little stroll in the direction of the setting sun and then trip on a rock, and, oh, heavens, I’ve fallen off a cliff. And then as I fall I look around—wait, this is not just any cliff, I seem to have fallen off the edge of the flat earth. In my descent I try to keep my wits about me and look downward, where I’m falling, and there I see, coming towards me, a huge burning dome of fusion: the sun. Yes