“And so, even after being told the story of the old man, we don’t know the real story. We know he endures, that he suffers, but no one really knows why this all happened. We still don’t get it. Even the old man doesn’t get it.”

“That’s correct. Sophomores, as Hemingway says, this story is all about what a man can do and what a man endures. And what does it mean to endure?” Oglesby flipped to a dog-eared page. “‘The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now the old man was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.’ Every time it’s a new telling, and every time, Hemingway realized, doesn’t quite tell it completely, or come close to explaining why we must suffer and endure. Very good. All right, gentlemen, time to turn in your journals.”

Dan winced. Sticky turned around for him to pass his journal forward. Dan shook his head, then, seized with regret, reached into his backpack. He had his journal with him; he just couldn’t bring himself to turn it in.

This predicament had started the night his father made Uncle Jack storm out on dinner. Miserable and overheated, Dan holed up in his room, turned on “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” and just wrote. The journal assignment was “1001 Things to Do with a White Elephant” and Dan let a furious, sad, and absurd part of his brain take over. After preambling about all the things he thought were possible white elephants—the Spruce Goose, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude—he actually began writing out one thousand things to do.

#154 Tear Saran wrap with only one hand.

#155 Speak pig Latin to a Latin pig.

#156 Shut the doors to the palace of wisdom behind us.

And as Dan sat propped up on bed pillows, he kept writing every thought that came into his head. As Dylan jangled on about Captain Arab, with visions of desolate rows and sad-eyed ladies, and forgetting about today until tomorrow, something took over, and what he was writing wasn’t coming in drips of thought but was flowing, and flowing fast.

#467 Steal Philoctetes’s bow and leave him some Lotrimin foot spray.

#468 Go from catatonic to paranoid.

#469 Quit licking wounds and feed the dogs of Asclepius Alpo.

Dan started scribbling in his journal faster and faster. His hand cramped somewhere in the six hundreds but he kept going, the flow flowing, the Dylan tape popping at the end of each side, which Dan stretched across the mattress to flip. Around eleven p.m., he heard the footsteps of his father and his mother going to bed in separate rooms.

#832 Tell the truth when things are not fine.

#833 Leave this harbor of bad feelings.

#834 Accept when your father’s sick and your mother’s depressed.

#835 Don’t despair. Don’t suffer.