Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
Chapter 15. Nick

She thinks for a second. “Okay, there’s one part of Judaism I really like. Conceptually, I mean. It’s called tikkum olam.”

“Tikkum olam,” I repeat.

“Exactly. Basically it says the world has been broken into pieces. All this chaos, all this discord. And our job—everyone’s job—is to try to put the pieces back together. To make things whole again.”

“And you believe in that?” I ask. Not as a challenge. As a genuine question.

She shrugs, then negates the shrug with the thought in her eyes. “I guess I do. I mean, I don’t know how the world broke. And I don’t know if there’s a God who can help us fix it. But the fact that the world is broken—I absolutely believe that. Just look around us. Every minute—every single second—there are a million things you could be thinking about. A million things you could be worrying about. Our world—don’t you just feel we’re becoming more and more fragmented? I used to think that when I got older, the world would made so much more sense. But you know what? The older I get, the more confusing it is to me. The more complicated it is. Harder. You’d think we’d be getting better at it. But there’s just more chaos. The pieces—they’re everywhere. And nobody knows what to do about it. I find myself graspin, Nick. You know that feeling? That feeling when you just want the right thing to fall into the right place, not only because it’s right, but because it will mean that such a thing is still possible? I want to believe in that.”

“Do you really think it’s getting worse?” I ask. “I mean, aren’t we better off than we were twenty years ago? Or a hundred?”

“We’re better off. But I don’t know if the world’s better off. I don’t know if the two are the same thing.”

“You’re right,” I say.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘You’re right.’”

“But nobody every say, ‘You’re right.’ Just like that.”

“Really?”

Really.”

She leans into me a little then. Not accidental. But still somehow it feels like an accident—-us being here, this night. As is she’s reading my mind, she says, “I appreciate it.” Then her head falls to my shoulder, and all I can feel is her fitting there. I look up, trying to find the sky behind the building, close my eyes and try to conjure my own, glad that Norah’s not reading my mind just now, because I don’t know how I’d react if anyone knew me like that. As we sit in that city silence, which is not so much silence as light noise, my mind drifts a few minutes, thinking about what she said.

Then it hits me.

“Maybe we’re the pieces,” I say.

Norah’s head doesn’t move from my arm. “What?” she asks. I can tell from her voice that her eyes are still closed.

“Maybe that’s it,” I say gently. “With what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn’t that we’re supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we’re the pieces.”

She doesn’t reply just, but I can tell she’s listening very carefully. I feel like I’m understanding something for the first time, even if I’m not entirely sure what it is yet.

“Maybe,” I say, “what we’re supposed to do is come together. That’s how we stop the breaking.”

Tikkum olam.