The photograph was taken by someone I will never see again, and it shows me as a young man, so young that some people, to my annoyance, were still calling me a boy, sitting against the tree, my shoes resting on the gravel. You can see the bench in the background, where Sylvia and Terry were sitting, and indeed there are two people sitting on the bench in the photograph, although I don’t know who they were, so of course I do not know where those people are now, or if the goats in the photograph were the same goats I was watching in the meadow. It seemed unlikely. It was a long time ago. The meadow was the same, and it was still right there in the park with me, but I did not know where anyone else from the photograph was. Sometimes when I look at the photograph, I think that moment was perhaps my finest hour, so long ago, and that I missed it, because I did not know it then. I don’t look very happy in the photograph, although it was a happy day. Perhaps the person holding the camera just caught me at a moment where I was not displaying my happiness, or perhaps I did not quite know I was happy. You do not always know you are happy when you are happy. Sometimes you can’t really tell when you are happy until it is over and you are thinking about it later. Next to me, in the photograph, is a young woman.

  It is time here to say something about kissing, and remember you have been warned. There are some kisses that ought to come with warnings. I don’t mean the sort of kissing that is done in families, where a child might get a kiss on the top of the head or the cheek with “good night.” I don’t mean a kiss blown into the air, toward an applauding crowd or a departing boat, or the kiss you might give an object, if it is important and you dropped it and it didn’t break, or if it is just cold and smooth and feels good against your lips. You likely know the kind of kissing I mean, and you know how it is done, even if you have not done it yourself. It is done with two mouths, pressed together so that neither person can talk. It is a different kind of communication, this sort of kissing, than language, and although it is very important—practically nobody would be in the world if it weren’t for kissing—it cannot last forever. Eventually you must take your mouth off the other person’s mouth, and something is lost, when the kissing has to stop. The kissers become two people talking.

  It does not matter, the story of what happened at the base of that tree. It has nothing to do with philosophy or with my poisoned breakfast, so I will leave it out. Like kissing, it is perhaps too powerful for words, even one “O” or a person’s name. It can be very powerful to write the name of a person you have kissed or even just someone you wish you had kissed, on a scrap of paper where no one can see, or carved into the trunk of a tree where everyone can. It is even powerful just to write it down in your mind when you are alone, but it still does not matter, I thought to myself, because now I was alone there at the tree. When you are kissing someone, you feel perhaps that you will never be alone, but of course everyone is alone sometimes. It is lonely, sometimes, to be alone, but some people are good at being lonely. I am one of them. I am a loneliness savant, a word which here means that loneliness comes naturally to me, so I am quite good at loneliness, if I do say so myself. I like to think about lonely things, poems and philosophy and sad songs I admire, and places and people I do not know, or will never see again. It is said in a song I admire, by another associate of mine, that the loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you’re never going to see again, and this is the sort of thing I like to think about: lonely thoughts and lonely language, and lonely things that happened, a long lonely time ago, things that you tell yourself, walking on the gravelly ground under a tree that has been there for a long time, do not matter. Telling yourself that something does not matter is one of the loneliest things you can do, because you only say it, of course, about things that matter very much. But often, and this is the lonely part, they only matter to you.

  SYLVIA: O!

  TERRY: What happened?

  SYLVIA: I think that man, while thinking about lonely things that only matter to him, tripped and fell into the gravel.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I lay face down under the tree, wondering if I was dead, or at least dying, of poison. If I had to die—and of course, I did, either right then or some other time—it was not a bad place for it. I thought it could even be a pleasant place for a funeral, and perhaps I could even be buried underneath the ground underneath the tree where I was apparently dying. I did not want to die, of course, but it seemed useless to worry about it happening now that it was happening. “Why oh why didn’t I treat Lemony Snicket better?” I could almost hear someone wailing, at my elegant funeral.

  But after a few moments I could tell that I wasn’t dead, not right then. My body did not feel poisoned. It was not shaking or shivering or heaving like a malfunctioning washing machine. I could feel, here and there, some nasty scrapes from my fall, but I could tell I had no serious injuries, no broken bones or major sprains or a concussion, a word for the alarming things that happen if you hit your head too hard. I hadn’t. I wasn’t dead and I wasn’t seriously injured. I was just sore and embarrassed, which is something that often happens when you are clumsy.

  If you are a clumsy person, you will bang some part of your body, or get it caught and pinched in something, or have something twisted around the wrong way because you have done the wrong thing because you are clumsy. It will hurt, so you will be sore, and it is likely someone will be looking at you, wondering how on earth you managed to bang or catch or pinch or twist yourself doing something that everyone else does all the time without incident, so you will be embarrassed. A peculiar thing about being embarrassed is that once you have decided you are embarrassed, you become less embarrassed, so I just lay there, knowing I was embarrassed and deciding not to be embarrassed about being embarrassed and getting less and less embarrassed as I lay there with my face in the little rocks.

  There is another thing that happens if you are clumsy, which is more interesting than being sore or embarrassed, and that is you get to see things most people don’t. Being clumsy treats you to views of the world of which graceful people never get a glimpse. If you are in an art gallery, for instance, and scrape your leg against something that everyone else has managed to walk around, you will get to see the gallery’s back room, where they store strange sculptures and bandages. If you drop a rolling pin in someone’s kitchen, you will see an interestingly shaped smudge of butter and flour most people never see, not to mention the drawer where rags are kept, and if you drop the rag you will see what it looks like bunched up under the kitchen table, and when you bang your head on the kitchen table you will get a close-up view of a towel with ice inside of it as you hold it against your head to reduce swelling.

  I was appreciating a close-up view of gravel, which graceful people walk on all the time without ever knowing what it looks like pressed up against their faces. It was an interesting sight, fragments of limestone and basalt, which were the kinds of tiny rocks looming in front of my eyes like boulders, and then I turned over and lay on my back looking straight up at the tree. That was a much more interesting view, if a little dizzying, with the branches and leaves hanging over me like drifting thoughts, and I was grateful for my clumsiness which showed me something I had never noticed about the tree, after years of walking past it, something that made me think I might be closer to learning more about the mysterious and menacing message in my pocket. I looked at what I was seeing, and then I had to blink again, because my view was blocked by a man leaning over to ask me what happened.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “At first I thought I was dying,” I said, “but it was just that a fragment of either limestone or basalt rolled under my foot as I stepped on it, which made my left foot slide slightly. I tried to move my right foot in the proper direction to regain my balance, but additional fragments of limestone and basalt interfered by rolling further. By then, my arms were splaying out like the wings of an airplane, in an attempt to distract the force of gravity from catching me in its claws, but I miscalculated and fell into a heap under this tree.”

  “In other words,” the man translated, “you are clumsy.”

  He extended his hand and I took it, and he helped me to my feet. “That is an elegant translation of what I just said,” I told him, brushing gravel off my clothing. Off in the distance I could see Sylvia and Terry, who were not, of course, Sylvia and Terry, sitting on their bench, and the goats wandering the meadow. The man talking to me was wearing a suit the color of a day threatening rain, though his smile was quite sunny. “It’s funny you should say that,” he told me. “I’m a translator by trade.”

  “A translator?” I said in surprise.

  “Yes, I take pieces of writing in one language, and rewrite them in another,” he said, “so that more people can read them.”

  “Translation is noble work,” I said. “What sort of writing do you translate?”

  The man looked at me and his smile got sunnier, and then he said one of my favorite words in the world. It is a word that comes from Latin, an ancient language nobody speaks anymore unless they are trying to show off, which means someone translated it, long ago, so that I could have this word in my life. It is a little difficult to say why this word is so important to me. It is just a word for books and writing, but it is a word which conveys respect and admiration and hope. The respect is for the words themselves and the power that even a simple word—the word “poison” for example—can carry. The admiration is for how the authors put words together, in books you love the most. And the hope is that these sorts of words and these sorts of authors will continue to be read as time goes by. They will not always be the same words and the same authors, but they will stay with us, we hope, the way the meadow will have different goats, and the tree will have different fruit on its branches, but the park will still be there and people will still be there to see it. When you say the word, you are giving books and writing all this respect and admiration and hope, and so it is like calling your favorite books by a special name. It is a word that raises books and writing closer to the sky, and it raises all of us that way just to say it. It was almost a shame, I thought, that this wasn’t the moment of my death, because if there had to be a word that was my last—and there did, either right then or some other time—it wasn’t a bad one.

  “Literature,” is what he said.

  “Literature,” I repeated.

  “Literature,” the translator agreed. “In fact, I was just walking here with an author whose books I have translated from another language into the one we are speaking now. We were telling each other stories when we saw you fall into the gravel. If you’re a fan of literature, perhaps you’d like to meet him.”

  “I would be delighted,” I said, and the translator led me down the path to where the author was waiting, dressed in colorful and old-fashioned clothing. I do not speak the author’s language and the author did not speak mine, but the translator, naturally, spoke both languages, and conveyed our greetings in the language we could each speak. You might think that it would feel clumsy, having a conversation in which only one person understood every word and had to keep repeating each sentence in two different languages, but the translator did it very gracefully and our talk went quite smoothly.

  “I always enjoy having conversations with authors I am translating,” said the translator, translating as he went, “because reading a book makes me feel as if I am in conversation with the author.”

  “I often feel the same way when I am reading,” I agreed.

  “So when you read a book which has been translated from another language,” the author said, with the translator helping me understand it, “it is a conversation like this one, with the translator helping you along.”

  “Quite so,” the translator said. “I’m happy to be of assistance in literature or in life.”

  “Well then,” I said, “perhaps you can assist me with this,” and I reached into my pocket and took out the note—

  You had poison for breakfast

  —and waited while the translator read it and told the author what it said. I do not know why I showed them the note, when I hadn’t shown it to my neighbor or the beekeeper or anyone at the supermarket, but perhaps it was the word “literature” which gave me the courage to share such a strange piece of writing. The author listened to the translator’s words and then raised his eyebrows and replied.

  “This note follows the two rules of writing a book,” the translator translated.

  “I thought there were three rules,” I said.

  The author shook his head when he had understood what I’d said, and raised two fingers, a gesture which the translator left in its original language.

  “The first rule is to include the element of surprise,” I said, “and the second is to leave things out.”

  “Those are the same thing,” the author explained, with the translator’s help. “A surprise becomes unsurprising if you have an explanation, so a writer must leave certain things out to keep the surprise surprising. If a book begins, The girl walked toward a door behind which a monster was hiding, the author would have already spoiled the surprise. If you leave out the monster, and begin with merely The girl walked toward a door, then the reader will be as surprised as the girl when the monster appears. Your two rules are really two translations of the same single rule.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” I said. “So the first rule is simply, be surprising.”

  “Excuse me,” the translator said, “but I’m not sure surprising is really the right word. As a translator, I think something more dramatic and complicated is in order.”

  Thinking up the right word, of course, is part of an author’s job, and both authors tried to be of assistance.

  “Startling?” I suggested.

  “Startling seems too jumpy,” the translator said, in one language and then another.

  “Stunning?” the author suggested. “Stunning seems too happy,” the translator said.

  “Astonishing?”

  “Confounding?”

  “Flooring?”

  “Stupefying?”

  “Staggering?”

  “Flabbergasting?”

  The author and I kept suggesting words in both our native languages, but none of them seemed quite right to the translator, until one of us supplied a word that this book, as I’ve said, is really about.

  “Bewildering,” someone said, and everyone else grinned in agreement.

  “The first rule is about bewilderment,” the author said, although of course he was referring to the word in his language rather than mine, “and of course nobody knows what the second rule is.”

  “I certainly don’t,” I said, “and I don’t know much about this note, either, although I’ve spent the whole morning trying.”

  “Just the word poison is powerful,” the translator said, looking at the note again, “although poisons themselves aren’t necessarily powerful either. Let me tell you a story. Some years ago I treated myself to a cactus at a cactus shop in my neighborhood. I kept it in my office where the afternoon sun shines very brightly through my windows, and the cactus grew very tall and prickly. I was quite proud of it. But one day, I damaged my cactus.”

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “I was putting a dictionary back on a high bookshelf,” the translator said, “when my thumb slipped and knocked a little brass tiger off the neighboring shelf. I reached down to try to catch the little tiger, which I had treated myself to at a garage sale some years previous, but my shoulder bumped up against another shelf where a fascinating twelve-volume diary had been arranged rather carelessly, so volume seven fell on my toe, causing me to drop the dictionary onto the cactus which bent suddenly and horribly toward the ground.”

  “In other words,” I translated, “you are clumsy.”

  The translator smiled ruefully, a word which here means “wishing he didn’t have to agree.” “I’m clumsy,” he agreed, “and the cactus was quite banged up. There was a large hole in its main cladode, which was leaking fluid onto the floor.”

  The author said what turned out to be the equivalent of “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Immediately, I picked up the cactus,” the translator said, “and left my office to hurry toward the cactus shop. The cactus was in a pot, of course, but I had to hold the plant itself so it wouldn’t bend any further and break in half. The fluid was spreading on my hands and some of the spines of the cactus pricked me, so I occasionally put a finger or thumb into my mouth to numb the pain. I could taste the fluid of the cactus, which was sweet and warm.”

  “I’ve eaten cactus myself,” the author said in his own language, “in an omelet with a woman who wouldn’t stop crying.”

  “The cactus merchant was practically crying when she saw my wounded plant,” the translator said. “She said she would try to save it as best she could, but that it would probably die. But then she looked at my prick-led fingers and asked me in a worried tone if any of the cactus fluid had gotten on my hands or in my mouth, and I said of course it had. After all, I had carried the wounded cactus for several blocks. She sighed sadly and told me that it was a poisonous cactus.”

  The author and I both gasped, which did not need translation.

  “I asked the cactus merchant what I should do about it,” the translator said, “and she said there was no antidote to the poison. She told me that even if I went to the best nearby hospital there was nothing anyone could do. I told her there must be something, and she said there was no hope whatsoever. ‘The poison,’ she said, ‘must run its course. For the next hour or so, your hands and mouth will itch slightly and then it will be over.’”