by Dave Eggers
Well, what happened to us, to Will and me? Everyone asks that. You know he died, and that much is true. But there’s much more you don’t know, or that he fibbed about, for reasons justifiable and otherwise. This is our task, to untangle the cords. But right now I need sleep, because I’ve had a bottle and a half of Pinot Grigio and it was bad stuff, too dry, with the finish of a day-old salmon dinner, and I’m going upstairs now, to do better tomorrow.
WEDNESDAY, TO WORK AT LAST
Day Six here, Day Three of my attempt at correction, and still I haven’t begun. I will soon begin. But let me tell you first that it’s rained without interruption for nearly my entire time here, all of the godforsaken hours since I last saw you, and the air in this rented house is humid with my own stench. A man has smells, I’m told, and though I’m not usually sensitive to them myself, or even cognizant of them, by this point, I am acknowledging that the place smells of me and my habits and my food and my habits with my food. There has been no time for the air to replace itself, to wipe itself clean. The rain comes from the sky and is crushing us slowly. On the TV they show images of people paddling to work, and someone’s house has floated away, to sea. Elsewhere, in a small burg where the streets leaving town were closed, a young childless woman stabbed her husband out of rage born of confinement (my theory, not that of the authorities).
And the black shape on the beach is still there.
It’s been there two full days now, and I haven’t had the interest, or inclination, or maybe courage, to go see what it is. I suppose I know it’s a body and I just don’t want to be the one to find it, to name it. Normally I’d be running out there to see it, poke and prod it, but there’s something about this shape that’s unsettling. Its size maybe. It’s most definitely a person, but because it’s a very large person, I’m held back from investigating. From here it seems to be about eight feet tall, which would make it almost as big as Robert Pershing Wadlow, the tallest man ever, born in Alton, Illinois—I knew a guy from Alton at UW-Lacrosse, named Denny Catfish, honest to God—and grew to be almost nine feet. But this body is rounder, blacker. Why is no one else finding it? The beach, on this remote bay on the North Island, is not crowded, ever, and has been desolate during this downpour, but still I wonder why no one else has claimed this body. It’s so obvious there, and it needs to be removed.
And it’s moved up the beach. It’s farther into the sand today, closer to the house. Before it was on the break of the shore, pushed inches to and fro by the surf, which was gentle despite the rain and the winds. But now it’s closer. It’s moved fifteen feet inland, and now the water only kisses its black shape with its most far-reaching waves. If I were a superstitious man I’d think the shape was heading for me, slowly, to bring me some kind of message. But I choose instead to believe that the ocean will retake the body while I sleep.
There are so many things that are not true in Will’s account of this trip, but his death is not among them. He is gone, almost three years now, I guess, and it’s a stupid thing. No one should find it romantic, because there’s never any romance in death. There would have to be at least commensurate romance in life, and there isn’t—it can be beautiful but it’s plodding—so in death there can only be a succession of ever-quieting minor notes. Anyone who’s witnessed a death knows how unromantic it is. The man who falls on his sword bleeds for hours, and still ends up choking on his own blood. Will, I suspect, died in an unspeakably horrific way, surrounded by underwater screams. That it was plastered on the cover—written by a ghostwriter, if you’ll forgive that dual-sided pun—is a disgrace. (I’ll get to that ghostwriter soon enough, and will explain how it is that a dead man seems to be writing from the grave.)
But first, I need to give you a better picture of Will at this point. Maybe you don’t want to trust me because he’s been dead so long and I’ve been open about the fact that I’m losing my mind, but I don’t see the point in your reading too much about this story when you know next to nothing about the man. He didn’t describe his looks, but they’re easy: he resembled very closely a young Martin Landau, though I’m not sure how helpful that is. Will was a handsome enough guy, with a large mouth area, but maybe too long in the head—he always looked more adult than the rest of us. There were those in high school who called him Munster, because there was a distant resemblance to Herman, but the nickname was too cruel, and he made it clear it pained him to hear it. Besides, the guy was handsome enough; his looks were not an aid, but they were rarely an impediment. His hair was black and his nose Roman. He did okay romantically, though it’s telling that you don’t yet know anything about how much he used to masturbate. Which was a lot, holy shit it was. It’s hard to imagine just how often he was doing it as a teenager, when he discovered the idea, when we were seventeen, late in our junior year. Before that, as often as the rest of us would mention it or joke about jerking off in one way or another, Will—honest to God—didn’t think it was possible. He thought, and this is so hard to prove but you must believe me that it’s true, that it was some kind of urban myth, like queifing or the existence of women possessing three nipples or men with three testicles. I don’t know how he kept himself so ignorant of so many things. But someone must have walked him through the process at some point, because Will comes to school one Monday with this new and desperate look on his face, like the second he gets to school he can’t wait to get home. Peter Moorehouse had the same look for a month or so, when his cousin Annette came from Norway for a month and used to sunbathe topless in the backyard drinking white wine. Will was pretty average in a lot of ways, in the ways you glance at—he didn’t stand out in a group of strangers. But he had a haunted thing about him that everyone recognized, and some thought affected, but all wondered about, and it was something, contrary to the implications of the account he’s written, that he’s always had. He was always the sort who you’d expect to be having long and vicious arguments with his head, or with others, inside his head. You’d almost find him, occasionally but demonstrably, moving his lips while walking alone; still far from a self-talker or a screamer of obscenities on the city sidewalk, but nevertheless someone who wasn’t moving through our world with a brain unequipped with the appropriate shock-absorbing equipment.
Which brings us to his imagination. He always dabbled in writing, as a lot of us did and do—I have three screenplays at the ready, if you’re interested. Their titles:
“Humiliation Nation”
“A War Between the People of the Future and Today’s Smallest Fears”
“The Less-Known Life of Louis Pasteur”
—but I have to say that I was impressed, perhaps most of all, by Will’s account of the beating in Oconomowoc, which is pretty realistic for being completely fabricated. In terms of dispelling the largest and most unjustifiable fictions, it’s good to start here. Will wasn’t beaten by anyone, ever. The kid was never in a fight in his life. Nothing like that at least. I did some fighting in junior high, but Will was never that way. He was an athletic enough kid, but he really didn’t have the outward-facing rage you need to fight; you just plain need some rage, some simmering zig-zag blood somewhere in there, blood that’s either constantly at a boil or is prone to boiling, and Will had neither. You couldn’t get the kid mad—outwardly—about anything, really, unless you took his hat off and threw it into the river. I did that once and he punched me in the stomach. I admit that he did that, and that it hurt, a lot, and that I was impressed by how hard he could hit. I took off the hat for no reason, and meant it to be—well, I didn’t think much about it either way. I saw the hat and was convinced that it needed to be removed and thrown into the river. And looking back, I still get a chuckle out of it—the hat! in the river! oh lord the comedy!—but Will was afraid the girls would see his bed-head, I think, and that he’d always be called Bed-Head, and thus he’d never have love, so he punched me in the stomach, tears in his eyes. The kid was frustrated, and he hit me hard.
When I first read this part, about getting h
is ass handed to him in Oconomowoc, I was deeply confused, and at first thought there was something I didn’t know. Had this really happened? I forget things every so often, and so wondered if…. The scene is so vivid, so I asked around, to other people who knew him, and no dice. No one beat up Will; Will went to Africa with a face as clear as could be, while still bearing a distant resemblance to Herman Munster.
Thus, this beating nonsense is one of two major devices he’s used—the other one concerning Jack—to, I guess, thicken the plot a bit, to give it some kind of pseudo-emotional gravitas. But why would he find it necessary to have himself, the narrator, get beaten up? And by three men in Wisconsin, no less. It makes no sense. I’ve been thinking about this, and a few times in the last year I’ve understood why he might do this, why he’d have himself beaten up, traveling the world with a face showing pain in the most obvious way, all bruises and scabs.
I read Will’s account of his trip to the storage unit shortly before I had to do the very same thing—only in this case, I was retrieving Will’s stuff, after his own death. I had never done that kind of thing before, but there was no one else to do it. Will was an only child, and his dad was never around, and with his mom gone, too, it fell to me. (Another piece of news I have to unceremoniously dump in your lap, for lack of time and suspense: Will has no brother named Tommy. The name was likely taken from a mutual friend of ours, Tommy Wells, a year older, who we’d both liked but who moved away just before sixth grade. Will always wanted a brother, though, and envied those with larger families, and I suppose then it’s natural that he, when creating this semi-fictional backdrop, would throw in—unnecessarily, I think—an older brother, a Tommy, a guy who likes cars and mustaches. It wasn’t the only wishful fabrication in the book.)
It was up to me to clear out Will’s things, most of which had been there for a long while, though he updated its contents once or twice a year. I did the drive, which I’d done of course a thousand times before, on a good day, clear and bracing. It was March. I got there to find that the place does sit between Wall and Industrial streets, a fact I’m sure Will relished mentioning in a book in part about economic disparity (for it was, aha!, an area in great need of repair). The place was really just a decrepit parking lot cut by three parallel buildings set into the uneven pavement. I pulled in, my tires licked puddles and then gravel, and I stopped next to the Citgo.
When the door of No. 503 rolled upward, I saw boxes. They were crooked, all of them, because Will was organized but never neat. I’ve never seen so many bent boxes, leaning every way, for some reason evoking a forest of mushrooms. There was moisture in there, and the cardboard was soft. I thought of graham crackers left outside, at a picnic, half-spoiled, chewy.
Will never expressed to me any sort of idea that when he was leaving for South America—I think he started in Guatemala—that he would not be coming back. And his storing of his possessions leaves the question open. On the one hand, I know that before he left, he did give up his apartment. On the other hand, the range of things he decided to store, and the recent visit he’d obviously made to the unit, would indicate that he was storing things not for my probing afterward, but for safekeeping until he could get back and better edit his belongings. I knew that I couldn’t leave anything in this unit. I stood before everything Will had left, knowing I couldn’t leave until this steel container was empty. I was hoping that there was enough that could be remorselessly thrown away, and that the rest would fit in my car. I went to work, though my heart had moved up eight inches and was thrumming against my chest. This was sorrow.
There is a sensation when you’re looking at the physical remnants of a person’s memory when you are sure that you shouldn’t be there. I’m of the opinion that secrets kept in life should be honored in death, that nothing changes simply because you’re not there to defend yourself. So I decided quickly that I would not read or open anything looking private—would only sort between those things I should dispose of, and those I would bring back to Chicago with me, to be stored in my basement. I wasn’t thinking far ahead, really, though I vaguely recognized how strange it would be to be keeping his possessions, and to be storing them in my own place, and had no idea what would eventually become of them—the best I could hope for them, I acknowledged, was that they would be kept safe and dry for a few more years, but that when next I moved, I would dispose of a few more boxes, until eventually there was very little left of his things, and that someday, far in the future, they would either be confused with my own things by my own decedents, or be sold at estate sales or thrown away by strangers. There is no dignity to these things, and their destiny is invariably grotesque. Memory, perhaps, should have no physical shape.
Thankfully, the first boxes I opened were the easiest—anonymous and disposable. There was a dumpster beside the building, and I knew great satisfaction in heaving boxes over the green steel wall and inside the empty container, where they thumped or clattered.
There were three boxes of coat-hangers. Clatter.
There was a box of blankets. Thump.
A box of very old and unusable sheets and pillowcases. Thump.
There was a box of plates and glasses and cutlery. Clatter.
I should stop here and tell you that everything, absolutely everything, was covered in mouse droppings. I assume that’s what they were, though I saw no mice. I thought for a second that the tiny hard pellets, smooth like Tic-Tacs but black, could be the result of bats, but then remembered guano, and guano doesn’t come in pellet form.
Every box I picked up, to move or inspect, rattled. Sometimes there were thousands of pellets in one box. I knew there was no food in any of the boxes, so I was baffled as to why the mice not only chewed their way into each and every one of forty-one boxes in that storage unit, but why they stayed there, perhaps lived there. There was nothing to live on in that room.
But let me back up. Opening the door to the storage unit gave me that immediate acidic taste on my tongue—I last got it when I saw a man on Navy Pier kick another man in the head; it appeared in the nanosecond between when I knew the fight was getting out of control and when I knew the victor was going to throw his foot into the back of the man’s skull. The door was padlocked, and fittingly enough, the guy on duty had to break it open; the metaphorical clarity of the action didn’t escape me. Immediately after the broken lock dropped to the floor, the door rose up, rolling into the roof of the room, and I cried immediately and didn’t stop for five minutes. What a strange fucker he was. There was a box full of bathroom and shower things—shampoo, conditioner, scrub brushes, a loofa, a six-pack of Dove soap, more shampoo, two empty bottles of some kind of body wash. In the same box, combs, a pair of brushes, an electric razor, a bunch of brand-new hand towels. Three boxes of books, paperbacks mostly, some legal textbooks, from when he thought he could pass the bar without law school. His few college textbooks. Mattresses, a bedframe, end tables, lamps, posters, and yes, a giant cardboard cutout of Jack Sikma. An antique globe, before Israel, with a lightbulb inside.
I began throwing the clothes into garbage bags I’d brought. For some lucky reason I didn’t recognize a lot of them, and this made it easier; I didn’t need to stop. But every so often, something would come up, a CB jacket or a woven belt, and for a second Will would inhabit that thing. His old backpack, still with the word FLAMER written and crossed out in Sharpie, sat flattened at the bottom of one soft brown box, and when I took it up I could see it moving on his shoulders, could see it sitting under his desk, could see him throwing it into the backseat of my car, could see his strange grimacing smile and his dark eyes, his dark lashes. He had scars all over his knuckles. Did he ever mention that?
I was trying to get the task done, but was fighting too many fronts. I was all too aware of the strangeness of actually doing something that Will had described, fictionally, in the book about us, and it was scaring me. I felt like I was being watched, like it was all too neat and circular to be happening randomly, unplanned. And
he’d gotten it right, in the strangest way, that feeling of being attacked by shadows, on every side, of breathlessness, of being beaten. I stuffed the clothes in four black garbage bags, and tossed the books, but I took a number of breaks, walking over to the Citgo for snacks, hiking around the area, up to the National Guard building, which indeed exists, just where he said it did.
There was a small box of maps and tickets and money from our trip, and I kept that.
There was a bass guitar, with no strings strung.
There was a box of puppets, all of them ancient, certainly something he’d inherited himself. Their heads were large, the size of a cat’s, and their clothes were made of silk, harlequinned but filthy. I’d never seen them or heard anything about them. I put them in my car, the box of them.
I was there for three and a half hours, but I don’t know why. There wasn’t any reason for me to stay, really. I came to the conclusion that this was just punishment, that no good was being accomplished. I had my memories of Will already—I had a hundred pictures, easily, and a thousand objects that brought him back—and this was just unnecessary. I should have left everything there, should have allowed the owners of the storage facility to empty the room; no one could have objected. My going up there was doing nothing for anyone; it was a suffocating afternoon for me, when I felt the air become thinner, the breathing more difficult; I didn’t trust my hands, and wanted to become an animal. I didn’t like being a human, and thinking this was something humans should do, and though part of me had wrapped this up somehow in the idea of fairness and rightness and dignity, it was more correct to see this as the opposite, as playing in the slop of a dead man’s past. Dignity would be to incinerate this stuff without a look, and to then rely on my own memories to do Will justice. I just hate all this work in the physical—the funerals, the clothes, the caskets and makeup and pulling of flesh! The writing of checks to those who handle the dead! I refuse. I will not do it again.
