Dear Mr. President, I am writing from the tram. My shoes are wet again. This is not a metaphor. Oslo has decided it is October and therefore the rain is simply hanging in the air, judging everyone who walks under it, and I have once more failed the rain's inspection. There is a half-eaten kanelbull in my pocket that someone's wife sent to the meeting. It has put cinnamon sugar on my coat. I will not explain this further. We met this morning. Five of us. Coffee. The portraits. Mandela looking as if he already knows how the day will go. The one we do not discuss still hanging there, 1973, bombs still falling, two predecessors having resigned, Tom Lehrer having declared political satire obsolete. We leave him up. Every family has the uncle who once did something, after which everyone simply agreed to keep passing the potatoes. You will be pleased to hear that your name came up. Not because anyone nominated you in a way that counted, those had to be in by the 31st of January, which is to say before you had, by your own arithmetic, finished ending the wars, but because several people kept phoning and posting and then announcing that they had phoned and posted. Israel's prime minister put it on the internet. The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced their nominations as though the announcing were part of the scoring. Iran, as usual, was both on the list and not on the list, depending on which day the fish was measured. A man flew around the world collecting endorsements the way one collects signatures against a noisy dog. We watched. Norwegians are good at watching. We have long winters and very little else. The number of wars, we noticed, kept increasing. Eight, then more. Like a fish. Every time someone said the number, the fish had grown an inch. Sometimes Iran was the extra one; sometimes it was already finished and also still ongoing. We did not weigh the fish. We do not grade homework. "He made peace" is not a sentence that ends in a medal, no matter how loudly it is said or how many heads of state are asked to say it into a phone. The will of a dead Swede who invented dynamite and spent his final years trying to launder the phrase "merchant of death" does not, it turns out, contain a clause about volume. So we gave it to an eighty-five-year-old woman who was, at the hour we told the world, sitting in courtroom 600 in Nuremberg. The actual room. The one where the law once stared down the precise kind of man who believes wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his. She did not phone us. She did not post. No one flew anywhere on her behalf. She wanted the work and not the medal. The medal found her anyway. This is not a rule we wrote down. It is simply the only pattern that has survived a hundred years of our mistakes. Which brings me to the purpose of this note. Since the calendar already closed the window, and since the prize itself has a well-documented allergy to anyone who explains, in public, at length, why he deserves it, I have decided to send you the one form of recognition that can actually be purchased. A $9 participation trophy. Eight for the wars. Plus one for Iran, which refused to stay counted and therefore, we felt, deserved its own line. Not a medal. Not a portrait on a wall. Not even a cinnamon bun. Just the ordinary, honest kind of prize, the kind that does not flee the moment you reach for it. I have marked the memo "Nobel condolences," which is the closest thing to the real article your campaign will accept by card. Think of it as the uncle's contribution. Or the rain's. Or the fish's, including the Iranian one that would not hold still long enough to be weighed. We are only five damp people in a room with wet shoes and a long table and a plate of buns that is always, somehow, already empty. We have been wrong before. Kissinger is still on the wall. We may be wrong again; a future committee may one day hang a portrait of this very morning and decline, forever, to explain why. But not this year. This year the old woman in Nuremberg got a phone call she did not ask for, and you get nine dollars and a note from a man whose shoes are wet. Takk for the eight wars. And the extra dollar, for Iran. The number is no longer our problem. Kristin said "well" an hour ago. I have to change trams.