I Am the Messenger (35 page)

As calmly as I can, I walk inside. My front door was open.

On my couch there sits a young man who pats the Doorman very quietly and happily.

“Who are—”

“Hi, Ed,” he says. “I’m glad to finally meet you.”

“Are you—”

He nods.

“You sent—”

He nods again.

When he stands up, he says, “I came to this town a year ago, Ed.” He has fairly short brown hair, stands a bit smaller than medium height, and wears a shirt, black jeans, and blue athletic shoes. As each minute passes he looks more like a boy than a man, although when he speaks, his voice is not a boy’s at all.

“Yeah, it was about a year ago, and I saw your father buried. I saw you and your card games and your dog and your ma. I just kept coming back, watching, the same way you did at all those addresses….” He turns away for a moment, almost ashamed. “I killed your father, Ed. I organized the bungled bank robbery for a time when you were there. I instructed that man to brutalize his wife. I made Daryl and Keith do all those things to you, and your mate who took you to the stones….” He looks down, then up. “I did it all to you. I
made
you a less-than-competent taxi driver and got you to do all those things you thought you couldn’t.” We stand now, staring. Waiting for more words. “And why?” He pauses, but he doesn’t move back. “I did it because
you
are the epitome of ordinariness, Ed.” He looks at me seriously. “And if a guy like you can stand up and do what you did for all those people, well, maybe everyone can. Maybe everyone can live beyond what they’re capable of.” He becomes intense now. Emotional. This is everything. “Maybe even
I
can….”

He sits back down on the couch.

I recall the sensation of the town feeling painted around me and of feeling invented. Is this happening?

It is, and the young man sits there rinsing his hand through his hair.

Quietly, he stands up and looks back at the couch. There’s a faded yellow folder sitting on a cushion. “It’s all in there,” he says. “Everything. Everything I wrote for you. Every idea I scratched around with. Every person you helped, hurt, or ran into.”

“But”—my words feel smeared—“how?”

“Even
this,
” he answers, “is in there—this discussion.”

Shocked, amazed, dumbfounded, I stand.

Eventually, I manage to speak again. “Am I real?”

He barely even thinks about it. He doesn’t need to. “Look in the folder,” he says. “At the end. See it?”

In large scrawled letters on the blank side of a cardboard beer coaster, it’s written. His answer is written there in black ink. It says,
Of course you’re real—like any thought or any story. It’s real when you’re in it.

He says, “I’d better go now. You probably want to go through that folder and check for consistency. It’s all there.”

For a moment, I panic. It’s that feeling of falling when you know without question that you’ve lost control of your car or made a mistake that’s beyond repair.

“What do I do now?” I ask desperately. “Tell me! What do I do now?”

He remains calm.

He looks at me closely and says, “Keep living, Ed…. It’s only the pages that stop here.”

He stays for perhaps another ten minutes, probably due to the trauma that has strapped itself to me. I remain standing, trying to contemplate and recover from what’s just transpired.

“I really think I’d better go,” he says again, this time with more finality.

With difficulty, I walk him to the door.

We say goodbye on the front porch, and he walks back up the street.

I wonder about his name, but I’m sure I’ll learn it soon enough.

He’s written about this, I’m sure, the bastard. All of it.

As he walks up the street he pulls a small notebook from his pocket and writes a few things down.

It makes me think that maybe I should write about all this myself. After all, I’m the one who did all the work.

I’d start with the bank robbery.

Something like, “The gunman is useless.”

The odds are, however, that he’s beaten me to it already.

It’ll be his name on the cover of all these words, not mine.

He’ll get all the credit.

Or the crap, if he does a shit job.

But just remember that I was the one—not him—who gave life to these pages. I was the one who—

I tell me to stop.

It’s an inner voice and it’s loud.

All day, I think about many things, though I try not to. I look through the folder and find everything as he said. All the ideas are written in and people are sketched. Scratchy excerpts are stapled together. Beginnings and endings merge and bend.

Hours wander past.

Days follow them.

I don’t leave the shack, and I don’t answer the phone. I barely even eat. The Doorman sits with me as the minutes pass by.

For a long time, I wonder what I’m waiting for, but I understand it’s just like he said.

I guess it’s for life beyond these pages.

One afternoon, I hear what feels like the last knock at my door, and standing there, on my cracked front porch, is Audrey.

Her eyes dangle for a moment, and she asks to come in.

In the hallway, she falls back against the door and says, “Can I stay, Ed?”

I go to her. “Of course you can stay the night.” But she shakes her head and her dangling eyes finally fall. Audrey walks forward and reaches into me.

“Not for tonight,” she says. “For good.”

We sink to the floor of my hallway and Audrey kisses me. Her lips join up with mine, and I taste her breath and swallow and feel and lunge for it. It streaks me inside with streams of her beauty. I hold her yellow hair. I touch the smooth skin of her neck, and she keeps kissing me. She wants to.

When we finish, the Doorman walks to us and settles down at my side.

“Hey, Doorman,” Audrey says, and again her eyes stream. She looks happy.

The Doorman looks at both of us. He is the sage. He is the wisdom. He says,
About bloody time, you two
.

We stay in the hall for close to an hour and I tell Audrey everything. She listens intently as she pats the Doorman, and she believes me. I realize that Audrey has always believed me.

I’m about to relax completely when a final question slips inside me. It tries to get up but slips over again.

“The folder,” I say.

I get up and walk hurriedly to the lounge room. On my knees, I go through the folder incessantly. I sit there and comb through it. I rummage and plow among the loose papers.

“What are you doing?” Audrey asks. She’s come in and stands behind me.

I turn and look up at her.

“I’m looking for
this,
” I tell her. I wave my hand at both of us. “I’m looking for you and me, together.”

And Audrey only crouches down. She kneels with me and places her hand on mine to make me drop the papers.

“I don’t think it’s in there.” She says it softly. “I think, Ed…” Her hands hold me now gently on my face. The orange light of late afternoon is attached to her. “I think this belongs to us.”

It’s evening now, and Audrey and I share a coffee with the Doorman on the front porch. He smiles at me when he’s finished and falls into his normal gentle sleep by the door. Caffeine doesn’t affect him anymore.

Audrey’s fingers hold on to mine, the light remains a few moments longer, and I hear the words again from this morning.

If a guy like you can stand up and do what you did, then maybe everyone can. Maybe everyone can live beyond what they’re capable of.

And that’s when I realize.

In a sweet, cruel, beautiful moment of clarity, I smile, watch a crack in the cement, and speak to Audrey and the sleeping Doorman. I tell them what I’m telling you:

I’m not the messenger at all.

I’m the message.

MARKUS ZUSAK
received the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year Award for
I Am the Messenger
(published in Australia as
The Messenger
). His previous books for young adults include
Fighting Ruben Wolfe,
an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, and
Getting the Girl.

Markus Zusak began to write during high school, where he led a “pretty internal existence…. I always had stories in my head. So I started writing them.” He lives in Sydney, where he writes, occasionally works a real job, and plays on a soccer team that never wins.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

This 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.

Text copyright © 2002 by Markus Zusak

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Australia in 2002 as
The Messenger
by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty. Limited.

Published in hardcover as a Borzoi Book by Alfred A. Knopf in 2005.

KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS
, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/teens

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
www.randomhouse.com/teachers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zusak, Markus.

[Messenger]

I am the messenger / by Markus Zusak.

p.   cm.

SUMMARY
: After capturing a bank robber, nineteen-year-old cabdriver Ed Kennedy begins receiving mysterious messages that direct him to addresses where people need help, and he begins getting over his lifelong feeling of worthlessness.

eISBN: 978-0-307-43348-0

[1. Self-esteem—Fiction. 2. Heroes—Fiction. 3. Taxicab drivers—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.Z837Iae 2005

[Fic]—dc22

2003027388

v1.0