A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker Read Free Book Online Page B

them back in their tracks with fresh, pale grease. Ah, what a keen pleasure it is to glide ticking down a leafy street with fresh grease onone’s wheel bearings. But I’ve never taken the next step and begun tinkering with cars.
    Come to think of it, the bicycle was the beginning of my end-of-the-earth thoughts: I’d be on a trip down a long straight road, and the road would become steeper and steeper until finally it was plunging vertically down and the stars would come out around me, and I’d fall past the strata, and then somewhere along the way a road would form on the side of the cliff and I would land on it and begin bicycling as hard as I could up what became a very steep hill, and when I finally crested the top of the hill I would be in the underworld.

14
    Good morning, it’s 5:25 a.m.—once I told a doctor from France that I was able to wake myself up at a preset time with the help of nightmares, and he said that his father had been a soldier who had taught him that if you want to wake up at, say, five in the morning, you simply bang your head five times on the pillow before you close your eyes, and you will wake up at five. “But how do you manage five-thirty?” I asked the doctor with a crafty look. He said that in order to wake at five-thirty you just had to do something else with your head, like jut your chin a little, to signify the added fraction, and your sleeping self would do the math for you. I’ve tried it and it works except that it’s much harder to go to sleep because your head has just been hit repeatedly against the pillow.
    Incredible: I’m forty-four years old. What’s incredible about it is that my children are eight and fourteen years old, still here living with us. I’m driving Phoebe to her school every morning, after she irons her blue jeans. Only a few months ago I realized that when my father was the age I am now he had already lost me—that is, I’d already gone off to college and moved away. My parents were twenty-three when I was born, which would mean that my father drove down with me to college and bought me my first typewriter when he was only forty-one. What did it feel like to lose me? Maybe not so bad. Maybe by the time it happens you’re used to the idea.
    The Olivetti electric typewriter that my father bought me was designed—this was in the seventies—in the high-Italian way, like a Bugatti from that era, very clean, no sharp corners but no unnecessary aerodynamicism either. It made a fine swatting sound when one of its keys hit the paper. A week after I got it, I masked over all the letters with black electrician’s tape, and that was how I learned to type. I took it with me to France and typed French papers there with it. Six years later it was stolen from Claire’s apartment, when thievescame in through the fire escape. They stole her miniature TV and her roommate’s speakers, too. I find it remarkable that my father was buying me a farewell typewriter when he was younger than I am now.
    Last night I washed my son’s hair, thinking what I always think: How many years will be left before I have no child young enough to wash his or her hair? Phoebe takes long showers now and of course washes her own hair. The loss is enough to make you lose composure—I’m not kidding. The dawn sky is now visible: the snow is a very light blue rather than grey. Yes, grey with an
e
—that’s one of those English spellings that I accept
(aeroplane
isn’t bad either), and not just because I learned to read it on the boxes of Earl Grey tea that my mother had. When spelled with an
e, grey
half hides the wide, crude sound of the
a
behind the obscuring mists of the
e
. It’s rare for a one-syllable word to have so much going on.
    I once saw the earl of Grey on
The Merv Griffin Show
, an afternoon program hosted by the always cheerful and always tanned Merv Griffin. The earl of Grey had three things to say: one, that you can’t make good tea in a microwave; two, that the