Just fine, Mrs. Baldwin, Amy said. I burped. I know it’s an unladylike thing to do, but I couldn’t help it. Sorry.
EVERYONE HAD ALWAYS told Ferguson that life resembled a book, a story that began on page 1 and pushed forward until the hero died on page 204 or 926, but now that the future he had imagined for himself was changing, his understanding of time was changing as well. Time moved both forward and backward, he realized, and because the stories in books could only move forward, the book metaphor made no sense. If anything, life was more akin to the structure of a tabloid newspaper, with big events such as the outbreak of a war or a gangland killing on the front page and less important news on the pages that followed, but the back page bore a headline as well, the day’s top story from the trivial but compelling world of sports, and the sports articles were nearly always read backward as you turned the pages from left to right instead of from right to left as you did with the articles in the front, going in reverse as if plowing through a text in Hebrew or Japanese, steadily working your way toward the middle of the paper, and once you hit the no-man’s-land of the classifieds, which were not worth reading unless you were in the market for trombone lessons or a used bicycle, you would jump over those pages until you wound up in the central territory of movie ads, theater reviews, Ann Landers’s advice column, and the editorials, from which point, if you had started reading from the back (as Ferguson, the sports enthusiast, usually did) you could keep going all the way to the front. Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past, and even though Ferguson had not yet turned fifteen, he had accumulated enough memories to know that the world around him was continually being shaped by the world within him, just as everyone else’s experience of the world was shaped by his own memories, and while all people were bound together by the common space they shared, their journeys through time were all different, which meant that each person lived in a slightly different world from everyone else. The question was: What world did Ferguson inhabit now, and how had that world changed for him?
For one thing, he wasn’t going to be a doctor anymore. He had spent the past two years dwelling in a far-off future of noble self-sacrifice and unstinting good works, a man utterly unlike his own father, working not for money and the acquisition of lime-green Cadillacs but for the benefit of humanity, a doctor who would treat the poor and the downtrodden by setting up free clinics in the worst urban slums, who would travel to Africa to work in tent hospitals during cholera epidemics and murderous civil wars, a heroic figure to the many who depended on him, a man of honor, a saint of compassion and courage, but then clear-eyed Noah Marx came along to tear down the scenery of those outlandish hallucinations, which in fact were the stuff of cornball Hollywood doctor movies and weak-minded, sentimental doctor novels, an appropriated vision of a future calling that Ferguson had not found within himself but had always seen from the outside, as if watching an actor in a black-and-white film from the 1930s, with a comely nurse-companion-wife hovering at the edge of the frame and soulful music playing in the background, never the real Ferguson with his complex and tormented inner life but a mechanical toy hero born out of a desire to forge a heroic destiny for himself, which would prove that he, the one and only, was better than any other man on this earth, and now that Noah had shown him how badly deluded he was, Ferguson felt ashamed of himself for having squandered so much energy on those childish dreams.
At the same time, Noah was wrong to think he had any interest in becoming a writer. It was true that reading novels was one of the fundamental pleasures life had to offer, and it was also true that someone had to write those novels in order to give people the chance to experience that pleasure, but as far as Ferguson was concerned, neither reading nor writing could be construed as a heroic activity, and at that point in his journey toward adulthood Ferguson’s sole ambition for the future was, as his number one author had put it, to become the hero of his own life. Ferguson had read his second Dickens novel by then, all 814 pages of that long, circuitous slog through the fictional life of the author’s favorite child, consumed in its entirety during the two-week Christmas break, and now that his marathon reading jag had come to an end, Ferguson found himself at odds with his phantom companion from the previous year, Holden Caulfield, who had bad-mouthed Dickens with his comment about all that David Copperfield kind of crap on the first page of The Catcher in the Rye, for books were beginning to talk to books in Ferguson’s head now, and good as J. D. Salinger might have been, he wasn’t fit to shine Charles Dickens’s shoes, least of all if the old master were decked out in a pair of brogans named Hank and Frank. No, there would never be any question about it: reading fiction was great fun, and writing fiction was great fun as well (fun mixed with anguish, struggle, and frustration, but fun for all that, since the pleasure of writing a good sentence — especially when it started out as a bad one and slowly improved after being rewritten four times — was unsurpassed in the annals of human fulfillment), and anything that was so much fun and caused so much pleasure could not, by definition, be looked upon as heroic. Forget the saintly doctor routine, but there were countless heroic alternatives Ferguson could imagine for himself, among them a career in the law, for instance, and given that daydreaming was the talent he continued to excel at above all others, in particular daydreaming about the future, he spent the next several weeks projecting himself into courtrooms where his eloquence would save wrongly accused men from going to the electric chair and cause every member of the jury to break down and weep after each one of his closing arguments.
Then he turned fifteen, and at the birthday dinner held in his honor at the Waverly Inn in Manhattan, a celebration that included his parents, his grandparents, Aunt Mildred, Uncle Don, and Noah, Ferguson was given a present or presents by each of the families in his family, a check for a hundred dollars from his mother and father, another check for a hundred dollars from his grandmother and grandfather, and three separate packages from the Marx contingent, a boxed set of Beethoven’s late string quartets from Aunt Mildred, a hardcover book from Noah entitled The Funniest Jokes in the World, and four paperback books by nineteenth-century Russian authors from Uncle Don, works that Ferguson knew by reputation but had not yet taken the trouble to read: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, Dead Souls by Gogol, Three Novellas by Tolstoy (Master and Man, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Death of Ivan Ilyich), and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. It was the last of those titles that put a stop to Ferguson’s crude fantasies about becoming the next Clarence Darrow, for reading Crime and Punishment changed him, Crime and Punishment was the thunderbolt that crashed down from heaven and cracked him into a hundred pieces, and by the time he put himself together again, Ferguson was no longer in doubt about the future, for if this was what a book could be, if this was what a novel could do to a person’s heart and mind and innermost feelings about the world, then writing novels was surely the best thing a person could do in life, for Dostoyevsky had taught him that made-up stories could go far beyond mere fun and diversion, they could turn you inside out and take off the top of your head, they could scald you and freeze you and strip you naked and thrust you out into the blasting winds of the universe, and from that day forward, after flailing about for his entire boyhood, lost in an ever-thickening miasma of bewilderment, Ferguson finally knew where he was going, or at least knew where he wanted to go, and not once in all the years that followed did he ever go back on his decision, not even in the hardest years, when it looked as though he might fall off the edge of the earth. He was just fifteen years old, but already he had married himself to an idea, and for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, young Ferguson meant to pledge his troth to that idea until the end of his born days.