IGMS Issue 36 Page 8

  Agnes was loath to talk about her father - loath to talk about anything, really. She came to my house because refugee relatives kept showing up at all hours with luggage and squalling children until she could call in enough favors to rehome them. My kitchen was her sanctuary, where wine flowed and talk ceased.

  Still, tidbits leaked out.

  "Oy, the bookcases," Agnes told me one night, when a pair of unexpected niece pregnancies had led to a two-bottle night. "Dad told Mom his desk job was making him fat. 'So take up a hobby,' Mom said. 'Do something with your hands.'

  "'I like that,' Dad said - though he didn't smile. You know him - he never smiles." Neither do you, I thought. Other people in the Olizsewski family came pre-installed with foolish grins, the happy smiles of people unaware of the impending consequences of their poor decisions - but Pawel and his daughter carried themselves with the grimness of an IRS agent about to conduct an audit.

  "So he signed up for the Spring Woodcrafting 101 course at Norwalk Community College, made a bookshelf, and set up shop."

  "Why bookcases?" I asked, watching Pawel sand identical planks of white oak. "Why so many?"

  "He says woodworking takes his mind off his job," Agnes shrugged. "Though I've never heard him complain about work. I think it's just his way of escaping his sisters."

  "But why bookcases?"

  "Who knows? When I ask him to make me a table, he gives me this look like -- well, it sounds weird, but it's the same look he gave me when he told me our baby brother had died. A little sad, but inexorable. Like you can't question the bookcase, you know?"

  I thought of the way Pawel had told me, "I made this." The same way you'd talk of the sea and the sky. Unchanging. Unquestionable.

  "Yes," I said. "I know."

  We moved on to a game of Parcheesi.

  The official biography will tell you Pawel knew exactly what magic he was fashioning, his work a premeditated ritual.

  I will tell you Agnes is a surprisingly canny businesswoman. Just that little twist, that intent, might sabotage all your efforts. But I'll know the trick soon enough, won't I? I'll tell you how Myra Turnbull's purses conjure money and Jeb Guhr's plastic fighter jets leak oil. That's a thing I can promise.

  Are you interested now?

  My fellow reporters ticked off the seasons based on the annual news: the high school football games in the autumn, then the Christmas shopping reports, followed by the inevitable January town council battles over tax hikes. But I was condemned to endlessly regurgitating the accomplishments of dead veterans, with the occasional suicidal teen to spice things up.

  I marked the seasons watching Pawel assemble bookcases. He grew fatter, then thinner as the cancer set in.

  I tried to help Pawel. He waved me away. "I do this," he told me. His refusal held a light concern for my judgment, as though I might be drunk. He would stagger out to his shop to work for half an hour, then expend great efforts to clean up before slumping onto Agnes' shoulder.

  The irony was, now we felt morally obliged to take what would turn out to be Pawel's most valuable bookcases. The one thing that Pawel's bookcases were, we all agreed, was tragically sturdy. You could fault the stiff-looking shelves, you could fault the ghostly shade of white oak he chose - but even as Pawel grew frailer, his bookcases remained solid as mountains. Yet no one in the neighborhood any longer had the heart to put them out on the treelawn for the garbagemen.

  Every one of my neighbor's basements had at least a couple of Oliszewski bookcases stashed away like refugees, too ugly to put upstairs, too well-fashioned to rot. People aimed rambunctious grandchildren at them, rested brass statues on those thick shelves in the wan hopes of breaking something.

  Still, Pawel clung to life for three more years, never complaining. I did what I could to help Agnes; bought groceries, picked up Pawel's medications. Usually, I was shoved aside by parades of relatives, a strangely heartening thought; they had been a drain on Agnes' resources, but now repaid her as best they could with pots of soup.

  Still, no matter how ill he was, Pawel saved all his strength for his bookcases. He died in his garage, on August 31st, sandpaper in his hand.

  That information never made it into his obituary, of course. I didn't think to include it.

  Are you interested now?

  Are you interested now?

  Are you interested now?

  Are you intere--

  After the funeral, I went over to help Agnes clear out the house. Only then did it occur to me she had never invited me inside. Now I knew why. It was a wooden mouse maze, the hallways jammed wall-to-wall with bookcases, narrowing the house to a series of chokepoints.

  "It's like my mother's owls," I sighed.

  Agnes eyed the maze as if she intended to stride into it and kill a Minotaur. "Unwanted and poorly made?"

  "Precisely. Mother made the mistake of keeping a couple of owl knick-knacks on the mantelpiece. And so one friend got her an owl statue for Christmas, and another friend brought her a glass owl from Bermuda, and it snowballed. By the time she died, she had shelves of the things. An embarrassment."

  "And yet, years later, they remain your prime decoration."

  "Once Mom died . . ." I gestured around at the bookcases. "It was all I had left of her. That's why they're still there, gray with dust, glaring down at me; sad memories bound in cheap trinkets. You'll find it hard to get rid of them."

  Agnes turned to answer the doorbell. "That'll be the Goodwill truck."

  The Goodwill driver was supposed to help, but he stole out back to sneak a smoke, and came back in reeking of what even an aging reporter could recognize as skunkweed. I helped wheel the bookcases onto the truck.

  Our stoned Goodwill driver immediately plowed through the red light at the end of the block. A UPS truck T-boned it, the driver's cabin vanishing into the side, metal and glass spraying high into the air.

  I sprang into action, getting the names of both drivers, hoping to make the front page. Yet while I collected facts, Agnes caught the story:

  The UPS truck had shoved the bookcases in every direction - sticking out through the metal side panels, punched through the driveshaft - but there was no splintered wood.

  "They're perfectly intact," said Agnes.

  "Not quite," I replied. Several bookcases bore deep scratches. But of the thirty-three bookcases we had crammed into the back, every last one was still in usable condition.

  "What a freak accident," I said.

  "Well, they are sturdy," mused Agnes. She stroked a newly-scarred bookcase top with something approaching reverence . . . And elbowed aside a paramedic to pry the first of thirty-three bookcases from the truck's carcass.

  Further research, paid via Pawel Oliszewski's life insurance policy, showed Pawel's bookcases were more than sturdy. The strongest ones could support over 50,000 pounds per square foot, making them more load-bearing than a twenty-inch thick I-beam. In fact, they could not find a weight that would cause the strongest bookcases to sag.

  "You could build a skyscraper on those bookcases, ma'am," said a researcher, his face flush with excitement.

  "There will be questions," she asked me. "You're mostly a reporter, right?" And so I became The Olizsewski Foundation's first PR manager.

  I decided not to make a public announcement until we had figured out the secret - which was, I was told later, a mistake. People love a mystery. But we were too busy trying to figure out why the bookcases varied so wildly.

  Some of the bookcases collapsed under a mere load of 8,000 pounds; most were flameproof, but a handful charred when placed in a blast furnace. And though most were resistant to all damage, diamond-tipped saws could scrape a sliver off the surface of a few.

  At first, I theorized Rowayton Hardware had sold Pawel some mutant breed of white ash -- but a quick questioning of Rowayton Hardware showed they switched lumber suppliers constantly. In any case, as Agnes pointed out, nothing would explain how Pawel had been able to cut the wood into planks.

&nbs
p; A team of investigative scientists used Pawel's tools to make copies of Pawel's bookcases; the resulting furniture collapsed, burned, and splintered properly.

  I hunted down some woodcrafting experts, who found nothing unorthodox about Pawel's joinery; simple dovetails and dado joints that were, nevertheless, locked together with such force that trailer trucks could not pull them apart.

  But we analyzed wood from the bookcases that could be cut with diamond-tipped saws: in each case, the wood was at least seventeen years old.

  "This means," Agnes mused, flipping through a report that had cost seven thousand dollars, "the newest ones are strongest."

  It was true. The newer the bookcase, the harder it became to extract a sample -- until roughly around the seventeenth year of Pawel's woodworking career, they hardened to a shape that could not be changed by any force known on earth.

  It also explained why nobody had noticed the incredible strength of Pawel's bookcases; for the first decade, they had been durable but within earthly engineering tolerances. Some had broken, or been scratched -- and given the sheer number of seemingly identical bookcases so freely available, who would have noticed which bookcase had cracked?

  And so I made my first PR announcement, faxed out to every news outlet I could think of: "Antique Bookcases Of Polish Accountant Discovered To Have Surplus Strength!"

  Not one magazine printed the story.

  It didn't matter. As it turns out, there had been rumors about us for months, but no one was sure where to find us. I should have created a Twitter account.

  And I - not Agnes, as that "official" biography states - had a theory.

  "It was your father's tedium," I said. Agnes frowned, a bad sign: Agnes's grant money paid my salary, and she was furious at my failed press release. I clarified. "I think Pawel repeated the same task for so long, so diligently, that he wore a groove in reality. So let's find people like your father. Some boring man must have similar results."

  "Takes one to know one," Agnes said, and with a wave of her hand she released me from my PR job.

  To make up for my shortcomings, I threw myself into my new job: finding people like Pawel. I found many who did repetitive things - but few who wanted to. There were any number of factory-line assemblers who had bolted together ten thousand car doors, but their minds were on that first beer after work.

  Then I discovered Myra Turnbull at a Fort Payne, Alabama, art fair. She'd been smoking a lot more cigarettes these days, though she had no idea why.

  Myra, an elderly black woman, crocheted purple purses - always the same purse, using the same Afghan stitch. "It calms my mind," she claimed. "I don't want to think; I just want to stitch and watch the soaps." It was clear she didn't craft for customers; each was absurdly deep, like a purple elephant's trunk.

  There was also always money in the bottom of each one.

  A few pennies, in the case of her early purses - but as time went by, you could reach into any one of Myra Turnbull's unsold monstrosities and find a wadded-up cluster of bills. And like that, Myra understood why she could always afford smokes.

  As a test, we had her knit a purse with a popcorn stitch. Nothing. In fact, all her future purses were sadly cash-free.

  In Chicago, I found an autistic boy who had been assembling the exact same plane kit - a Revell 1/32 F-16C Fighting Falcon - once a day for over eight years. His mother had rented a storage unit to hold cases of unassembled kits, terrified how her son might react if they discontinued the line.

  But look closely: his planes, assembled from nothing more than plastic and model glue, leaked oil. Tiny bits of engine fuel sloshed in their engines, hydraulic fuel dripped from microscopic brakes.

  The more I mage-hunted for Agnes, the more I found bizarre examples of monotony creating odd ripples in physics -- but critically, an oddness replicable in laboratories. Thanks to the new PR firm, Pawel's bookcases made worldwide headlines, and Pawel became the harbinger of a new breed of physics: Tediosity.

  Are you interested now? Oh, now there's no trick to it. Everyone pays attention now.

  But I'll keep writing, all the same.

  I was on the verge of discovering a sixth tediomancer when I discovered Agnes had contracted someone else to write Pawel's official biography.

  "I was there," I protested. "I figured out how this worked. I should write that bestseller."

  "I'm sorry," Agnes said. She fishmouthed, trying to follow up with something that wouldn't offend me. After decades of casual insults, her distant gentility shoved an icicle through my heart.

  I quit, of course.

  Though tediomancy was filling every news channel, my self-published chapbook The Strange (Book)Case of Pawel Olizsewski sold poorly, thanks to negative reviews. "Watch this man spin gold into straw!"

  People expressed disappointment I hadn't written a bestseller; they noted my shabby clothes, assumed I needed the money. But wealth was easily at hand; there were plenty of buyers for Pawel's bookcases, and I owned seven of them.

  What I wanted was - is - to be interesting.

  Pawel's bookcases told me how.

  Oh, they didn't speak or anything crazy like that. Tediosity tends to be sedate, overlooked. But I had filled Pawel's seven identical bookcases with 865 slim copies of my unsold memoir. Eight hundred and sixty-five stories, printed, unwanted.

  But unlike Pawel, I had mass-produced them.

  What if, I asked, I wrote the same story a thousand times? A hundred thousand times? Until I wore my own hole in reality?

  It took Pawel thirty years. I am sixty-seven, only eleven years younger than Pawel was when he died. Which, honestly, means I have time to write one final tale.

  Then again, I do specialize in obituaries.

  And fortunately, I never did tell Agnes about that sixth tediomancer. In South Carolina, there is a grandmother who's been serving up the same huge pot of oatmeal to her family every morning for the past sixteen years. The oatmeal, despite containing nothing more than rolled oats, cinnamon, honey, milk, and raisins, nevertheless contained more than 250% of every FDA nutrient in a single cupful. More relevant to my interests: not one person who's eaten the oatmeal regularly has suffered from medical inconvenience for the past seven years. Not one cold, not one case of hemorrhoids.

  So I've sold my bookcases. I'll be moving in with my nameless Southern grandmother, paying a quite sizeable fee to eat her life-giving oatmeal three times a day.

  What you're reading now are precisely the same words I wrote on my first day of arrival. At my elbow are six cartons of Sanford Uni-Ball pens, twenty cases of blank legal pads. When I complete this tale, I'm going to eat a bowl of oatmeal, crack open a new pad, then write the same words on the same pages in the same way.

  Then another bowl, another copy. Another bowl, another copy.

  Will all work and no play make Jack an interesting boy? Or will I die before Pawel's enchantments take root? Or will the magic I wring from these manuscripts be as useless, as boring, as a toy airplane's crankcase fluid?

  Yet what else have I to do? Without something to change me, I will pass from this earth like so much junk mail. I can't remember inspiring a single smile; all my life, I've inhaled facts and shat dust.

  Please let this become a story.

  Please let me become worthy of the tale.

  So: is this my first draft you're reading? Or my fiftieth? Or the scrawled manuscript they found by my deathbed?

  Tell me: are you interested now?

  At the Picture Show: Extended Cut

  by Chris Bellamy

  * * *

  BREAKING: Christmas heroes join forces in multi-franchise cinematic universe

  Sources confirm that George Bailey will be back on the big screen - this time with a legendary miser as his new foe

  LOS ANGELES - Move over, Marvel. There's a new monster franchise in town.

  Eyebrows were raised this week when it was announced that a sequel to the holiday classic It's a Wonderful Life was in the works,
set to pick up decades after the original left off and follow the presumably inspirational exploits of George Bailey's descendants. As it turns out, however, the sequel is merely the tip of the iceberg, just a small element among much grander plans for the continuation of the Bailey saga. Sources close to IGMS have confirmed that a full reboot is on its way that will open the door for a variety of spinoffs, sequels, prequels and an "exciting expansion" of the Bailey universe.

  From visionary director/producer J.J. Abrams, visionary writer/producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci and - oh what the hell - executive producer Christopher Nolan comes a "dark, gritty reimagining" of the classic story, because if there's anything a movie about a shattered, suicidal idealist who confronts a world in which he never existed needs, it's a dark and gritty sense of realism.

  "We are thrilled to be bringing the time-honored tale of George Bailey to an entire new generation of moviegoers," the visionary Kurtzman said in a statement. "Much like the characters in Bedford Falls made a run on the bank, we believe audiences will be making a run on the box office."

  The new version will reimagine George Bailey - a role rumored to be tipped for Channing Tatum or Shia LaBeouf - as a young, down-on-his-luck alcoholic whose life and family have fallen apart ever since he took over the Building and Loan. Now separated from his high-school sweetheart Mary Hatch (Eva Mendes), George puts a double-barreled shotgun to his mouth - a darker, grittier suicide ritual - before being stopped at the last moment by everyone's favorite guardian angel, Clarence (Morgan Freeman).

  However, those expecting an entirely faithful remake will be in for a few surprises. Most notably, Mr. Potter - the legendary antagonist from Frank Capra's 1946 original - has been replaced in the villain role by none other than Ebenezer Scrooge, surely one of the proposed remake's most exciting developments.

  "This is one of the film's most exciting developments," the visionary Orci confirmed. "Combining It's a Wonderful Life with the legendary antihero of A Christmas Carol not only provides our George Bailey with a more formidable opponent, but opens up a whole host of narrative possibilities for the future of both franchises."