In the early evenings, after we finish for the day, I walk around the hot dusty uneven streets of Kathmandu, lined with crippled beggars and mounds of trash, and I take pictures with my me-machine of goats’ heads with charred horns and leering smiles. They’re for sale right on the street, arrayed on vendors’ tables like the skulls of executed criminals. I pass whole families dwelling in doorways, trekkers and seekers and sightseers, men on bicycle rickshaws, mangy dogs. All the buildings look condemned, their windows either bare or boarded. There’s advertising everywhere.
On our last day there in 2014, on a solo walk before dinner, I found the one thing I’d never bought in all my years on earth. I’m not talking something exotic and rare, an animal horn or a handicraft found only in the birthplace of the Buddha. I mean something straight off Main Street USA, made in China, and sold throughout the world. I had purchased something like it, but that particular thing I never would have considered right for me. The minute I did, the minute I realized I could buy it and put it on—that I was free, in some intoxicatingly existential way, to make such a radical move, bound no more by superstition and tribalism, by perverse inbred loyalty—I felt an exquisite little shudder run down my back. The object in question, a sun-beaten Chicago Cubs hat, was sitting on quiet display in a smeared window of a shop catering to trekkers not far from the Garden of Dreams. Above the bill, swimming in a sea of blue, the big red C synonymous with bungling and loss. The Cubs had not won the World Series in 105 years. That was not only the longest championship drought in major-league baseball; it was the longest such drought of any professional team in American sports. Imagine it! Joining in the preseason to pray for a good year, watching their performance with genuine suspense, and feeling again the crushing heartbreak that only the perennial, tantalizing possibility of true redemption can provoke. My God! The world new again! Something to desperately want! I went inside, and when I came back out, it was on my head, where my Red Sox hat had been for years. It didn’t fit perfectly; it would take some breaking in. I let a Toyota lorry stacked tall with sacks of rice trundle past, and then I stepped out into the crowd.
“Mista mista!”
A boy in a Fila jersey and grubby jeans was suddenly at my side. I was used to kids crowding me, begging for rupees.
“Want to hit?”
“What?”
He was smiling at me, some kind of wooden plank in his hand. I had a closer look at him. Suddenly I crouched down and took hold of his arms. He was a dark Nepali kid, fat cheeks and a chicken-thin neck. But it was his smile. It was what’s called God given. His teeth were big and white. His gums were pink and full.
“Who’s your dentist?” I asked him.
“You.”
“Me?”
“You the dentist,” he said.
“This is my work?”
“Go ahhh. Open up. Now spit.”
He turned and spat in the street, and all the other kids laughed.
“This is good work,” I said.
“Now you hit. Okay?”
The plank in his hand, I realized, was an improvised cricket bat. I got to my feet.
“I don’t know how,” I said.
“It’s okay! I show you.”
He handed me the bat. The other kids scattered to take up their positions. Behind me, a little urchin made three stacks of dented beer cans. Wickets, or whatever they’re called. I’ve never understood the first thing about cricket.
The kid ran out to pitch. His arms pushed everyone back, back. I was in a Cubs cap; they expected great things from me.
“What’s my goal here?” I called out to the kid.
“Like baseball. You hit.”
“Just hit it?”
“Just hit, just hit.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Ready, steady, go,” he said.
And with that he did a strange and elaborate windup, putting his whole body into it. His arm pinwheeled furiously as he raced forward. The ball came at me fast and low. What the hell, I thought, what the hell, and without any expectation or understanding, doubtful of any hope of success, I swung, one eye on the ball, and one eye on heaven.
About the Author
Joshua Ferris is the author of two previous novels, Then We Came to the End and The Unnamed. Then We Came to the End received the 2007 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages. In 2010, Ferris was chosen for The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of fiction writers. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York City.
joshuaferris.com
ALSO BY JOSHUA FERRIS
Then We Came to the End
The Unnamed
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
The Son of a Stranger Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Ersatz Israel Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Joshua Ferris
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2014 by Joshua Ferris
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover hand-lettering by Joel Holland
Cover © 2014 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: May 2014
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ISBN 978-0-316-32913-2
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