Emily smiled, her lips a bit crooked. “You know everything about the fastest coconut tree climber and the biggest broccoli, but you don’t know the first thing about love.” She wiped a tear from her ocean-colored eyes. “That’s the only kind of greatness that counts, and I hope you find it someday.”
Had he loved her? Had she loved him? He left that day for Finland and the annual World Wife-Carrying Championships. As Imre Ambros of Estonia triumphed, dragging Annela Ojaste over the 771-foot obstacle course in 1 minute 4½ seconds, J.J. began to question the nature of love entirely. The days passed and, like a creeping frost, a numbness spread through his whole body.
“Three more minutes,” a woman shouted. The huge Swatch digital chronometer flashed 30:42:01. The exhausted kissers held each other up, limbs shaking from exertion. An official passed them Evian with two straws. The woman sipped from the corner of her mouth, then threw the bottle on the ground, where it shattered on cobblestones.
This was crunch time, when the record would stand or fall. Three more minutes. With victory, there would be newspaper headlines, saturation television coverage, and J.J. would win a reprieve at headquarters. He was long overdue for a record. The last few verification trips hadn’t gone well. In Germany last month, a yodeler achieved 21 tones in one second, but alas, the record was 22. And before that, an Australian podiatrist with a breathing disorder registered snoring levels of 92 decibels, but the world record was 93. Both failures were hardly his fault, but that wasn’t the way the boss kept score.
If these two could keep it together for 90 more seconds, he would go home triumphant and relax for a while, catch up on paperwork, and read submissions. He would help crank out the next edition by June, then spend the last hot summer nights in the cheap seats at Yankee Stadium. Soon enough, fall would arrive, and before he knew it, Christmas. The years and seasons rushed by this way, marked by little else than the volumes of The Book on his shelf. Fourteen editions, fourteen years.
With 60 seconds left, the first ominous sign. The kissing couple began to sway. The man’s legs wobbled, then his eyes rolled back in his head. His knees buckled. The woman strained to hold him up, her lips locked to his mouth. She clung desperately to his belt, as his body seemed to want to slide right through his pant legs onto the street. His head fell to one side, jaw slackened.
Sweaty and trembling, the woman readjusted, pressing her lips harder against his limp and flabby face. With one bloodshot eye, she checked the chronometer. Just 10 seconds to go. She kissed him furiously. Her body shook, and suddenly, her strength failed. He slithered through her arms to the ground, and she threw herself down on him. She squished her mouth against his, face contorted, kissing with all her might.
Ten feet away, J.J. reluctantly pressed the red button in front of him. The chronometer froze:
30:44:56.
He rose to his feet, an ache in his stomach, and announced: “No record.”
The crowd gasped.
It was close, a mere 4 seconds, but rules were rules. He felt awful for the two kissers, crumpled in a heap. He couldn’t bear to look them in the eyes. There was no wiggle room when it came to world records. Too much was at stake.
“Impossible!” a spectator screamed. Doctors rushed forward to treat the toppled man. One medic pressed an oxygen mask to his face; another listened for the murmuring of his heart. The woman stood over her partner, weeping, as cameramen angled for pictures.
J.J. closed his rule book, slipped it in his well-worn calfskin briefcase. His limbs cracked as he stood; it had been a long 31 hours. He straightened his blazer and grabbed his roll-on from under the table. Careful to avoid contact with the losers, he tried to slip into the crowd.
“Just a few questions,” a journalist said, two steps behind.
“I’m sorry,” J.J. said. “My limousine is waiting. I’m late for my plane.”
“When will you hold another kissing competition?”
“Please contact headquarters. The Review Committee will answer you.”
He turned the corner and disappeared down the Rue Saint-Louis en l’Ile. He walked quickly, the roll-on bumping wildly behind him. He wanted to get away from the failure, fast. The kissers with no record. The reporters with no story. What would he tell his boss? Another defeat. After several blocks, when he was sure no one was in pursuit, he hailed a taxi. Headquarters didn’t pay for limousines.
“Charles de Gaulle, please,” he said to the driver. “Flight leaves in 40 minutes.”
“Oui, monsieur. No problem.” The driver pulled into traffic. He checked out his passenger in the rearview mirror, with a look of puzzlement in his eyes. “You are from The Book of Records, yes? I saw you last night on television at the kissing competition.”
J.J. smiled. It happened now and then; with all the TV appearances, someone recognized him in the street. And, inevitably, the first question …
“What is the longest taxi ride ever?” the man asked.
“Roundtrip from London to Capetown, South Africa,” J.J. said. “Broke the meter. 21,691 miles. Cost $62,908.”
“I should be so lucky.”
They zipped along the Rue de la Paix in light traffic.
“Where are you from?” the driver asked.
“New York,” J.J. said. “Greatest place on earth.”
The driver scoffed. “Incorrect. Paris is the greatest. The food, women, life.”
“Yeah, yeah, everyone says that. But New York is the greatest.”
“No, monsieur,” the driver said. “In New York, everyone lives on top of other people. How do you say? Like the sardines?”
“Oh, no. We have beautiful homes with lots of space.”
The driver made a small sound of protest—pffff—then turned up the radio.
J.J. closed his eyes. New York or Paris? He regretted the argument. Everywhere, always, people wanted to debate the world’s best and worst, especially when they recognized his blue blazer with the gold insignia.
Yes, he had considered spending the weekend in Paris. He knew a divorcée named Hélène who ran a bistro on the Rue de Buci. She fed him exquisite meals and offered her warm back against his at night. She whispered in his ear that she needed nothing in return, but the look in her eyes, the farewell hugs that lasted too long, left him feeling hopelessly sad.
Now he just wanted to get home.
He thought again of Emily’s indictment a few years ago, that he knew nothing about love. He took it as a challenge. He was a relentless researcher and set out to learn everything about the subject. He read classics and pulp romances, crammed Shakespeare and Shelley, studied Mars and Venus, memorized the complete works of Deepak Chopra, delved into anthropology, biochemistry, and psychology from Freud to Dr. Ruth.
He dated too, giving and receiving a fair share of pleasure and disappointment. In the end, true love seemed as remote as Messier 31, a rotating spiral nebula in the Great Galaxy in Andromeda, the farthest object visible to the naked eye, 2.31 million light-years from earth.
But J.J. had learned one thing from experience, repeatedly and for sure. Casual intimacies on the road always ended with someone hurting. So this time, he did not call Hélène.
Sticking around in Paris for the weekend also meant consoling the losers in the kissing contest. He knew that grim scene all too well. By now the crowds were long gone, the bright banners rolled up, and the street sweepers had cleaned the last litter from the road. Under the shadow of the drooping bridge, the doctors had finished ministering to the man still lying doubled up on the ground. The chronometer was frozen in time.
30:44:56
The crumpled man and weeping woman were four seconds shy of the world record. Four seconds from global recognition in one of the best-selling books of all time. Four seconds from history.
Over the years, he had comforted thousands of the defeated, men and women who spent long nights muttering “what if?” In The Book, winning was everything. Second place was oblivion. The worst was the inconsolable Pakis
tani Air Force pilot who desperately wanted recognition for the longest fall without a parachute. Sucked out of his cockpit in a freak midair decompression, he had plummeted 33,301 feet, landed in a lake, and somehow survived. J.J. traveled to Islamabad where the aviator, mummified in bandages, was bedridden with 37 broken bones. Upon careful investigation, though, there was no new record. The pilot had come close—within 30 feet—but the place in history still belonged to Vesna Vulovic, a Yugoslavian flight attendant who fell 33,330 feet when her DC-9 exploded over Czechoslovakia. Learning of his defeat, the Pakistani pilot wept so hard on J.J.’s shoulder that his prized blue blazer was soaked through.
No, there was no point hanging around, or even looking back for that matter. He had gotten involved too many times, stayed too long, cared too much. He learned the hard way. In the end, there was nothing he could do. He was simply there to authenticate. Sentiment only slowed him down; there was always another record somewhere up ahead.
“Monsieur, what airline are you flying?” the driver asked.
J.J. checked his ticket. Headquarters pinched every penny.
“Dollar Jet,” he said. He was seven long hours from home.
Charlie St. Cloud is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
2010 Bantam Books Trade Paperback Movie Tie-in Edition
Originally published as The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud
Copyright © 2004 by Ben Sherwood
Image of author with Zac Efron copyright © 2010 Universal Studios Licensing LLLP. The movie Charlie St. Cloud © Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
This book contains an excerpt from the novel The Man Who Ate the 747, copyright © 2000 by Ben Sherwood.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2004.
The lines from “dive for dreams” copyright © 1952, 1980, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sherwood, Ben.
Charlie St. Cloud / Ben Sherwood.
p. cm.
Originally published under title: The death and life of Charlie St. Cloud, Bantam Books, 2004
eISBN: 978-0-345-52717-2
1. Cemetery managers—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Death—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Marblehead (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.H453D43 2004
813′.6—dc22 2003057802
www.bantamdell.com
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Ben Sherwood, Charlie St. Cloud
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