Everything Happens Today Read Online Free

their moral failure. He needed to start from the beginning.
    To say that Friday had dawned full of hope would have been an exaggeration, but there had certainly been nothing to suggest that it would be a day out of the ordinary. He had an advisory with Mrs. Fielding at 7:50, so all his usual morning chores had to be done twenty minutes earlier, but that wasn’t difficult for Wes. Unlike almost everyone he knew, he was an early morning person, able to leap from bed in the dark, his mind fully logged on, his thoughts warmed up and flexible before his feet hit the floor. Morning was when Wes did his best thinking, and whenever he found himself gnawing late at night on an instransigeant bone of homework, he knew enough to leave it for the morning, when it would seem more digestible. Sometimes, when he was particularly enjoying a book, he would put it down at midnight, close his eyes, then pick it up again at four as if it were five minutes later. His father had told him once, with his usual wistful bitterness, that you never again read books with the passion and intensity you bring to them as a teenager, and that was easy to believe. And it wasn’t only that Wes’s mind worked well early in the morning; he also felt better—cleaner, stronger, more moral, the quivering arrow of a powerful compass. He loved to be awake alone in the world, to walk the dog on quiet streets that had not yet been invaded by the trying multitudes, where he could pretend that tourists and bankers and real estate brokers were harmless abstractions. When he was even younger, the sense of a day’s untapped potential had been almost physical, it had been so delicious and irresistible Wes had wanted to throw himself into the day as if from a high dive. Now, he still felt that sense of possibility, he still jumped into the day feet first, but there was less passion behind it, it was more like the feeling you get when you climb into a bed made up with freshly laundered sheets, crisp and bleachy. Unpolluted and not yet soiled.
    That was what Friday morning at 5:30 a.m. had felt like. Wes had to walk the dog, shower, wake Nora, feed her and see that she was clean and properly dressed. Narita would have done it, but Wes didn’t trust Nora’s welfare to anyone but himself. Then, if there was still time, he would eat and read the paper and be out of the house by 7.15. These were all things he looked forward to doing, or at least that gave him no sense of being oppressed or put upon. And the feeling only increased later in the week as the
Times
crossword puzzle grew progressively more difficult, until by Friday he sometimes had trouble completing it. Because of his appointment, he would have to put the crossword off until the evening. And there was almost always some fact to look up on Wikipedia that had come to mind in the middle of the night and disturbed his sleep. It had been one such string of searches that had first led him to
The Manual
.
    He’d gone about his morning tasks on Friday with the usual bustle. He’d had an argument with his best friend James the day before about the percentage of water in the human body. James had said it was ninety percent, Wes had argued that it was much lower. He’d forgotten about it until that morning, when it took less than fifteen seconds on Google to prove Wes right: sixty percent, give or take. It was not much of a victory, but it had set the right tone for the day. On his crosstown walk to the subway at Union Square, he’d rewarded himself by listening to Belle & Sebastian’s “If You’re Feeling Sinister” on the iPhone. It wasn’t new but it was his favorite album of the moment, and he rationed his listening so as not to wear out its pleasures too quickly.
    By the time he reached school he’d all but forgotten to wonder why Mrs. Fielding had asked him in early. Wes was quite fond of Mrs. Fielding, but he was generally fond of all his teachers, having