Each session lasted three hours. Children had to be sent out to play.
He had delusions of grandeur. A sushi train presumably costs less than incarceration. Might the device serve as a preventive to juvenile delinquency?
He saw presently that one might place small tables, each seating 8, perpendicular to the belt. With a little judicious tinkering it was then possible to seat 160! Each table was supervised, you see, by a member of the entourage. It was really very light work.
A love of pet projects ≠ talent for dealing with government ministers.
When a child misbehaved it was expelled never to return.
When asked he stated that he was studying the role of chocolate in academic performance.
Was chocolate more efficacious than ice cream? Might some children respond better to one, others to the other?
He had once read a book by Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. Being of necessity something of an autodidact he had taken the book to heart. Patterson claimed that in the days of the Romans slaves often preferred the latifundia, plantations where slaves performed backbreaking labor but lived otherwise without surveillance, to the easier life of the household slave. Who cannot understand this? And who cannot understand that a child might be happier, in many ways, earning its keep than living the life of a pampered pet?
The children earned points for spelling čokoláda and cioccolata.
The Josh session could not have come at a better time.
If one is going to do the thing properly, one wants Borges read by an Argentinian, Vargas Llosa by a Peruvian, García Márquez by a Colombian. And so on. Sometimes, though, one doesn’t want to clutter up the mind. It was simpler, he realized, to settle on a single, easily memorable name for the Hispanophone contingent. He chose Julio. Within a short time he had Julio Argentino, Julio Chileno, Julio Boliviano, Julio Peruano, Julio Venezolano, Julio Colombiano, Julio Salvadoreño, Julio Mexicano (and so, of course, on) at his disposal. Similarly, one wants an Egyptian, of course, to read Mahfuz and el-Ghitani, a Syrian for Adonis, and so naturally on, but an entrepreneur needs to prioritize, it was simplest, he found, to recruit a cohort of Hassans. Who could then be distinguished as Hassan al-syriani, Hassan al-libnani, Hassan al-maghribi, and what have you.
Every once in a while a squabble would blow up among the Julios or the Hassans, but he now had an entourage manager (thank heavens!) to pour oil on troubled waters.
He devised ever more ingenious challenges, coupling them with ever more elaborate incentives.
Let us suppose a menu of possible tasks and rewards. A possible task is the performance of problems in algebra presented in Hungarian. The reward is a 5-tier wedding cake. (As an incentive, it beats a pootling little marshmallow into a cocked hat.)
He saw presently that it would be a mistake to try to establish a chain of schools. One is subject to so much unwelcome supervision. What was wanted, surely, was a chain of child-oriented restaurants. The sort of place where a parent could leave a child at any time day or night. Everyone cannot afford the fees for a private school. One might be able to afford a session or two a week at an educational restaurant. One might be able to send a child full-time to the restaurant while flush, then fall back on the public school system when funds ran short.
He threw himself headlong into development of the chain, which he envisaged as a crossbreed, uniting the best features of Dunkin’ Donuts, Baskin-Robbins and YO! Sushi. Within 2 years he had franchises in New York, Washington, Miami, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Chicago, Kansas City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis/St. Paul. The Josh-only sessions proved surprisingly popular. (It was, as it turned out, possible to fill a 160-seater with Joshes.)
Rich people don’t care what happens to you.
One day he discovered, by a happy accident, that he could streamline the entourage.
He had happened to purchase a DVD of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in Barcelona. One could watch the film, it emerged, dubbed into French, German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Italian, Brazilian and “Portugal” Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Greek, Hungarian, Turkish, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Bulgarian, Romanian! Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic! Croatian! Mandarin! Japanese, Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, Urdu.
He sat curled up on the sofa in his hotel suite.
It’s much simpler, obviously, if each suitcase does not have to be supervised by a native speaker of the language contained in its books: one can then have, as it might be, three suitcases per person. One can manage quite nicely, for instance, with a complement of Julios and Hassans.
He put a Josh in charge of the restaurant chain. The boy had won 1,597 individually wrapped Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, 326 chocolate oranges, 861 Eskimo Pies, 119 pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, 200 5-lb bars of Hershey’s Chocolate, and 21 5-tier wedding cakes. One would hardly look to find a better qualified candidate through more conventional means of recruitment.
Publisher’s note
Readers will notice that American and British usage vary in Some Trick. Stories set in the UK follow British usage; stories set in the USA mostly follow American. However, when America is viewed through British eyes (for example, in “My Heart Belongs to Bertie”), British usage will be found.
In “Famous Last Words,” some readers might find that the use of X and x causes some confusion. The author’s unpublished novella Paper Pool makes all clear:
I never show my story to Simon. I show my story to Nick [not his real name], who says:
‘Is this about you? Who’s X, one of your boyfriends?’
‘Of course not,’ I say. ‘It’s a variable.’
‘It’s a natural thing to think.’
‘It is not a natural thing to think,’ I say. ‘The whole point is that it could be anybody. It works like a pronoun, only it gives less information, we don’t even know if the character’s M or F.’
‘Of course he’s a guy,’ says Nick. ‘It says so.’
‘It does not say so,’ I say. ‘It says X.’
‘But he’s obviously a guy. All that talk about politics.’
‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘So we see how far the reader goes beyond what’s actually there, you know how much is constructed, so that specifying corporeal properties seems to tell us something we already know.’ It occurs to me that this is a trick with all the conceptual sophistication and avant-gardist chic of The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
‘I still maintain he’s a guy,’ says Nick. ‘And how come he changes from a capital X to a small x at the end? You have to admit that’s deliberately obscure.’
‘It’s not obscure, it’s a totally different variable,’ I say. ‘You might as well say it was confusing to have a character named David and another one called Dave. And you see we never do know what little x is. The dark blue trousers are just trousers — what a great line. And so true.’
‘Hmmm,’ says Nick.
(And the equation featured in “Famous Last Words” has been drawn from Mathematical Analysis: A Special Course, by G. Ye. Shilov, translated by J. D. David, and edited by D.A.R. Wallace (Pergamon Press, Oxford).)
Rachel’s SUDO MAKE ME A SANDWICH t-shirt in “Climbers” quotes xkcd #149, “Sandwich,” with permission of Randall Munroe. Readers who would like to own this excellent t-shirt can find it at https://store.xkcd.com/collections/apparel/products/sudo.