The Basic Eight

by Daniel Handler

  The Basic Eight

  Daniel Handler

  The author wishes to acknowledge the following people:

  Lisa Brown; Louis and Sandra Handler;

  Rebecca Handler;

  Kit Reed and Joseph W. Reed;

  Charlotte Sheedy and Neeti Madan;

  Ron Bernstein and Angela Cheng;

  and Melissa Jacobs.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Begin Reading

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Daniel Handler

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  I, Flannery Culp, am playing solitaire even as I finish this. Gifted children have always been good at doing two things at a time, and where I am I’ve played solitaire so much it’s practically a biorhythm. It helps me think. When I can’t tell which of two sentence arrangements sounds better, I just look over at the top of my neatly made bed where I’ve laid out the game and see something: red seven on the black eight. Why didn’t I see it before?

  Don’t think I’m not aware of the metaphor (or of the double negative–in spite of all the hoopla, I did get a diploma). I’m alone here, sitting at this typewriter with my journal propped up to my left and a pile of typewritten papers to my right. I am a woman with a room of her own, just like what’s-her-name, the writer. I am rereading my journal and typing my life here onto stark white paper. If I make a mistake, I just type back a few letters and write over it. It’s one of those typewriters with white erasing tape, so whatever I write wrong, I can erase, except for some faint imprints which will be completely obliterated when I have this copied. Those shreds of misplaced facts and typographical errors will fade and vanish as I ready this to send to publishers. That’s metaphorical too.

  Can I just say something? (A rhetorical question.) Somebody down the hall is listening loudly to the radio and it is just driving me crazy. It’s “the station that plays the hits of the nation,” which are essentially greeting cards with guitar solos. I hate it. It’s so inconsiderate of whoever-it-is, too. When I play music–and I mostly listen to classical music, like Bach–I play it softly, because I’m considerate of other people. I just had to get that off my chest.

  Right now I have the suspicion that the ace of diamonds is trapped forever, face down, beneath the king of diamonds, which is sneering at me like Juror Number Five, and my whole life feels like a similar misshuffle. One more flick of the wrist and it could have been my math teacher who had been targeted, or some other teacher: Johnny Hand, or Millie. The Grand Opera Breakfast Club could have become the “important aspect” of the Basic Eight, and Flora Habstat could have ended up on the Winnie Moprah Show saying that we were some club of mad opera lovers rather than babbling about Satanism the way she did, though I guess in a slightly different set of circumstances Flora Habstat could have been one of us and actually known what she was talking about. With a slight shuffle there could have been somebody else sniffling into a handkerchief on the talk show, with a cult investigation citizens action group named after her child, and Mrs. State could have just shook her head as she watched the show, instead of participating in it, and then reached over to telephone her son Adam and his new fiancée: me. Things would be a different way. While at a bookstore, Adam would tell me to get lost while he bought me a present. I would wander down the uninteresting aisles: Gardening, Pets, Travel and finally, True Crime. I might glance at some slightly different book, there in this slightly different world, where my love for Adam worked out instead of ending in tragedy: The Basic Six, The Basic Seven.

  But this is not some true-crime tell-all. This is my actual journal, with everything I wrote at the time, edited by me. The revisions are minor; I only changed things when I felt that I wasn’t really thinking something that I wrote at the time, and probably would have thought something else. After all, I was only eighteen then. I’m almost twenty now. I learned lots about narrative structure in my Honors English classes so I know what I’m doing. Everyone’s names are real, and so are their various nicknames. The radio was just turned up a notch, if you can believe it.

  By process of elimination (too small, too big, won’t stay up with regulation Scotch tape) I have only one picture of the Mislabeled Murderers, by which I mean my friends or, I’ll just say it, the Basic Eight, that is on my wall. It faces me, and in a rare synchronous moment, everybody is looking at the camera, so everyone is looking right at me. Kate, leaning on an armrest rather than sitting on the couch like a normal human being, placing herself (symbolically, in retrospect) above us and looking a little smug, serving out a four-year sentence at Yale. Right next to her is V__, fingering her pearls. V__ must have snuck into the bathroom sometime that evening to redo her makeup, because she looks better than anyone else, better than Natasha even, and that’s saying a lot. Lily and Douglas, snug on the couch. Lily between Douglas and me as always. Douglas looking impatiently at the camera, waiting to continue whatever it was he was saying. Gabriel, his black hands stark against the white apron, squashed into the end of the couch and looking quite uncomfortable. And there’s beautiful Jennifer Rose Milton standing at the couch in a pose that would look awkward for anyone else who wasn’t as beautiful. And stretched out luxuriously beneath us all, Natasha, one long finger between her lips and batting her eyes at me. I mean the me sitting here typing, not the one in the picture, who’s looking right at me, too. That’s also symbolic. Most of those people won’t meet my eyes, now, but I’m not one of them. Every morning I get up, and while brushing my teeth, look at my showered self, calmly foaming at the mouth. Take out the photograph now. (I hope you can, reader. I want to arrange with the publishers to have a copy of it tucked into each copy of the book, for use as a visual aid and as a bookmark. Isn’t that a good idea?) Look into each of our eyes and try to picture us as people rather than the bloodthirsty mythological figures you’ve seen on those tacky television shows about bloodthirsty events. Come on, you know you watch them.

  Will anyone read this introduction? When this is published (with all proceeds, by law, going to charity), my own introduction will probably be buried among other prefaces and forewords by noted adolescent psychologists, legal authorities, high school principals and witchcraft experts, all of which will be ignored as readers cut to the chase. There is no getting around it: this is going to be marketed as a trashy book. Most readers will flip through these first pages, half reading as the flight attendants give the safety lecture, and by the time we’re all airborne they will have forgotten them in favor of the actual journal, the real beginning. Perhaps they’ll look at my name under the introduction with disdain, expecting apologies or pleas for pity. I have none here.

  Perhaps, though, people will read the quote that opens the journal. I chose it from the limited library here, to reveal the dim-wittedness of the pop-psych gurus who look at people like me. Of course I’m neither fish nor fowl. I’m a real person, like you are. This journal is real. It is the reality of the photograph you’re using to mark your place, a photograph that nobody ever got ahold of. It’s more real than all those pictures the magazines used. Those were our school pictures, pictures taken of us when we were wearing appropriate outfits, smiling for our out-of-state relatives to whom our parents would mail them. What sort of image is that? This journal is the truth, the real truth. This book is as real as it gets. As real as–let me think–as real as the red queen I just overturned, or the black king I smothered with it.

  Vocabulary:

  HOOPLA

  NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

  METAPHORICAL

  ADOLESCENT

  RHETORICAL

  DISDAIN

  ATROCITIES

  Study Questions:

 
; 1. What do you already know about the Basic Eight? How will it affect what you read here? Discuss.

  2. Most people who keep diaries want to keep them secret. Why do you think this is?

  3. If you were to reveal your diary to the general public, would you edit it first? Why or why not? (Note: If you do not keep a diary, pretend that you do.)

  4. It is often said that high school is the best time of one’s life. If you have already graduated, was high school the best time of your life? Why or why not? If you have yet to go to high school, how do you think you can prepare yourself to make it the best time in your life? Be specific.

  Begin Reading

  One of the reasons the teenage years are so agonizing is that in most societies, particularly ours, the adolescent is emotionally neither fish nor fowl.

  -Dr. Herbert Strean and Lucy Freeman,

  Our Wish to Kill: The Murder in All Our Hearts

  One may as well begin with my letters to one Adam State.

  August 25, Verona

  Dear Adam,

  Well, you were right–the only way to really look at Italy is to stop gaping at all the Catholicism and just sit down and have some coffee. For the past couple of hours I’ve just been sitting and sipping. It’s our last day in Verona, and my parents of course want to visit one hundred thousand more art galleries so they can come home with a painting to point at, but I’m content to just sit in a square and watch people in gorgeous shoes walk by. It’s an outdoor cafe, of course.

  The sun is just radiant. If it weren’t for my sunglasses I’d be squinting. I tried to write a poem the other day called “Italian Light” but it wasn’t turning out so well and I wrote it on the hotel stationery so the maid threw it out by mistake. I wonder if Dante was ever suppressed by his cleaning lady. So in any case after much argument with my parents over whether I appreciated them and Italy and all my opportunities or not, I was granted permission–thank you, O Mighty Exalted Ones–to sit in a cafe while they chased down various objets d’art. I was just reading and people-watching for a while, but eventually I figured I’d better catch up on my correspondence. With all the caffeine in me it was either that or jump in the fountain like a Fellini movie I saw with Natasha once. You know Natasha, right, Natasha Hyatt? Long hair, dyed jet-black, sort of vampy-looking?

  I stumbled upon an appropriate metaphor as I looked for reading material in the hotel bookstore. Scarcely more than a magazine stand, actually–as always, I brought a generous handful of books with me to Italy thinking it would be more than enough to read, and as always, I finished two of them on the plane and the rest of them within the first week. So there I was looking through the bare assortment of English-language paperback pulp for anything of value. I was just about to add, if you can believe it, a Stephen Queen horror novel to my meager stack of mysteries, when it hit me: Is this what next year will be like? Do I have enough around me of interest, or will I find myself with nothing to do in a country that doesn’t speak my language? I don’t mean to sound like Salinger’s phony-hating phony or anything, but at times at Roewer it seems that everybody’s phony and brain-dead and that if it weren’t for my friends and the few other interesting people I’d go crazy for nothing to do. To me, you’re one of the “few other interesting people.” I know we don’t know each other very well and that you probably find it strange that I’m writing to you, if you’re even reading this, but I really enjoyed the conversations we had toward the end of the year–you know, about how stupid school was, and about some books, and about your own trip to Italy. You were one of the non-brain-dead non-phonies around that place. I felt–I don’t know–a connection or something. Well, luckily I’m running out of room on this aerogram, which is probably a good thing, but I’ll seal this before I change my mind.

  Yours,

  Flannery Culp

  P.S. Sorry about the espresso stain. All the waiters here are gorgeous, but clumsy and probably gay.

  September 1, Florence

  Dear Adam,

  If writing one letter to you was presumptuous, what is two letters? It’s just that I feel you’d be the only one who’d understand what I’m thinking right now, and besides I’ve already written everybody else too many letters and I have all this caffeinated energy on my hands, as I said last time.

  But in any case, the only person who’d really get what I want to say is you, because this relates to the hotel bookstore metaphor I told you about before. Yesterday, when viewing Michelangelo’s David I had the exact opposite metaphorical experience. I mean, I had of course seen the image of David 18 million times, so I wasn’t expecting much–sort of like when I saw the Mona Lisa last summer. I stood in line, took a look, and thought, Yep, that’s the Mona Lisa all right.

  It was huge. From head to toe he was simply enormous, and I don’t just mean statuesque (rim shot!) but enormous like a sunset, or like an idea you can at best only half comprehend. It simply took my breath away. I walked around and around it, not because I felt I had to, but because I felt like it deserved that much attention from me. I found myself looking at each individual part closely, rather than the entire thing, because if I looked at the entire thing it would be like staring at the sun. It was such an unblinking portrayal of a person that it rose above any hackneyed hype about it. It flicked away all my cynicism about Seeing Art without flinching and just made me look. I walked out of there thinking, Now I am older.

  But it wasn’t until I finished one of my hotel-lobby mysteries that night that I thought of my experience metaphorically. Unlike bringing books to Italy, I went to see David anticipating an empty, manufactured experience; instead I found a real experience, and a new one. I didn’t think I’d have any new experiences left, once sobriety and virginity took flight. Perhaps that is what next year will hold for me. Not sobriety and virginity, but real new experiences. Maybe in writing to you, a new person in my life, I will embark on something new, as well. David has filled me with hope. And another biblical name fills me with hope as well: yours. Out of room again.

  Bye,

  Flan

  And a postcard, written September 3rd, postmarked September 4th.

  On the back:

  Listen what my letters have been trying to tell you is that I love you and I mean real love that can surpass all the dreariness of high school we both hate, I get back from Italy late on the night of Saturday the 4th call me Sunday. This isn’t just the wine talking.

  F.

  On the front:

  A picture of the statue of David. Cancellation ink from a winking postmarker across the groin.

  Vocabulary:

  VAMPY

  SOBRIETY

  PRESUMPTUOUS

  VIRGINITY

  FAUX

  POSTMARKED

  HACKNEYED

  Study Questions:

  1. A Chinese proverb reads: “Never write a letter when you are angry.” Are there other states of mind in which one should not write letters?

  2. Most postal laws state that after one has given one’s letters to the post office to mail one cannot retrieve them. Do you think this is a fair law? Think before answering.

  3. Taking jet lag into account, how long would you wait to call someone who had just gotten back from another continent? If you had just gotten back from another continent yourself and were expecting a phone call, what would be the appropriate amount of time to wait before you could assume the phone call wasn’t coming? Assume that you kept the line available as much as possible by keeping all other phone calls short.

  Monday September 6th

  Jet lag finally wore off today, so it seemed time to start my brand-new-expensive-black-Italian-leather-bound journal. Historians will note that my bargaining skills were not yet sharpened when I made this purchase, which is why I’m trying to write costly sentences to justify my expenditure (i.e., “Historians will note…”). For the past couple of days since I got back I haven’t been doing anything much, anyway; only sitting around my room trying to call my friends. My b
edroom became a perfect decompression chamber between the European and American civilizations: I spent all my time talking to machines and was thus soon acclimated back to my motherland.

  No one was home. I was sorry to miss them but glad to keep my phone time brief. I’m keeping the line open for Adam. He hasn’t called. I’d like to think that he’s on vacation, but school starts tomorrow so his parents must have brought him home by now to give him time to shop for new khakis.

  Just when I was going over each of my letters in my head, Natasha called. “You know Natasha, right, Natasha Hyatt? Long hair, dyed jet-black, sort of vampy-looking?” What stupid things to write! I picked up on the third ring, but before I could speak I heard her breathy voice.

  “Flan, are you waiting for some guy to call?” Reader, note here that she pronounces my nickname not as the first syllable in my name is regularly pronounced, but as “a pastry or tart made with a filling of sweet rennet cheese, or, usually, custard.”

  I put down The Salem Slot, the last of my hotel bookstore acquisitions. Once I’ve started something, I have to finish it, no matter how bad it is. “Hi, Natasha. How did you know?”

  Natasha sighed, reluctant to explain the obvious. “You just got back from your European jaunt. You’ve left ‘Hi-I’m-home’ messages on everybody’s machines, so you haven’t gone out. You are therefore sitting on your bed reading or writing something. You can reach the phone without moving, but you waited until the third ring. Now, Watson, we need school supplies, ja? Let’s meet for coffee and go buy cute notebooks.”

  “Cute notebooks?” I said. “I don’t know. I sort of have to–”

  “Yes, cute notebooks. We’re going to be seniors, Flan. We have to play it to the hilt. If we can find pencils with our school colors on them, we’re buying them. But of course we’ll need coffee first. I’ll meet you at Well-Kept Grounds, OK?”