by Dave Eggers
“There’s a little girl with him,” Hand said.
“Where?”
“Look.”
“I can’t. The road’s icy,” I said.
“They’re perfect. Turn around.”
“Really?”
“We should. You’ll see.”
I turned around and parked on the gravel shoulder.
Hand got out and talked to the man, asking directions to Pärnu, a smaller city on the way to Riga. The little girl, about six, was in a pink snowsuit and dragged a sled, plastic and also pink, up to Hand and the man. Hand held a stack of bills to the man. The man looked at the money and then led Hand over to a pile of sticks near the road. Hand examined the sticks for a second and then seemed to register the man’s intent. The sticks were for sale, and the man was offering them to Hand. Hand waved them off, smiling, and shoved the money into the man’s palm. Then Hand walked back to the car. The man stood, unmoving, watching him get in. I waved. He waved back.
“Hmm,” Hand said, buckling his seat belt.
“What?”
“I really hope that little girl was his granddaughter.”
“Oh—”
“Otherwise we just bought a pedophile a new dungeon.”
“How much was it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I gave him what you gave me.”
“About 3,000 kroon, I think.”
“Enough for the dungeon and a pool, too.”
“She’s fine,” I said, wanting to believe it. “She looked happy. She was smiling in a pink snowsuit. With a sled. She’s fine.”
“I guess. But that guy was in bad shape.”
—Every story, Hand, is sadder than ours.
—Every last one.
We were both tired of talking. We drove in silence for miles. The road was barren. The ground was white and the treeline was low. Estonia could look like Nebraska and Nebraska could look like Kansas. Kansas like Morocco. Morocco like Arles. On and on. Growing up I thought all countries looked, were required to look, completely different—Congo was all jungle, robust and wet and green, Germany was all black forests, Russia was white, all of it Siberian. But every country now seemed to offer a little of every other country, and every given landscape, I finally realized, existed somewhere in the U.S.
Which took some of the fun out of it. It made little sense to leave one’s country if all you’re looking for is scenery and poor people, just as it wouldn’t make sense, really, to cheat on someone you’re cheating with. Hell. What were we doing here? It felt like we’d been gone for months, as if we’d been in Estonia for weeks. But it felt so strange. To travel is selfish—that money could be used for hungry stomachs and you’re using it for your hungry eyes, and the needs of the former must trump the latter, right? And are there individual needs? How much disbelief, collectively, must be suspended, to allow for tourism?
Hand lunged for the radio dial and turned it up.
“Hear this?” he said. It was “Up Where We Belong,” the Joe Cocker song. “This was the main Champagne Snowcone song. Remember that?”
“Snowball. Champagne Snowball.”
“What did I say?”
“Snowcone.”
“Man, I have never stopped thinking about those fucking dances. That was junior high, right? Junior high dances and that’s like my favorite time on Earth. I’ve never reached that level of bliss again.”
We had a feature at our junior high dances called Champagne Snowball. Champagne Snowball happened first at the dances sponsored by the local recreation center, and these dances everyone came to; we weren’t yet too jaded to enjoy that kind of thing sober. We would all go, everyone would go, to these dances in the gym of the Rec Center. We’d get a ride from our parents, or (much better) our older siblings, and from eight to ten o’clock in that square huge gym, chaos reigned. I don’t remember ever seeing a chaperone, or really any representative of the Center, or anyone in any position of oversight or restraint. It was just three hundred of us and the deejay—
“What was the deejay’s name again?” Hand asked.
“B.J. McGriff.”
“Right. Exactly! Holy shit.”
—and no one knew if that was his real name, or if he had changed it for hopeful but misdirected professional reasons. B.J. was in high school, but not at the one in town. And he didn’t look like someone from our town. He was a New Wave kind of guy far before our town got cable. His hair was short and dyed orange, he wore small sturdy gold hoops in both ears, and had his velour pants tucked into the neat and curvy boots of a delicate man.
We were in seventh grade, and it was 8:15 when Hand, Jack and I got in Jack’s family’s red wood-paneled Grand Caravan, driven by his sister Molly. Eight minutes later, when we pulled into the Rec Center driveway and as we scooted across the backseat for the car door, she turned to us.
“Dances are for assmunchers,” she said.
“What’s an assmuncher?” I asked. Even at thirteen, I could tell she had just heard the word and didn’t know what it meant.
“You should know,” she said, and laughed in a big, fake way. She was such a bitch.
We opened the doors. I had an idea.
“See ya, assmuncher,” I said, and we ran off laughing. For about two years that would be the biggest burn I’d ever pulled off.
Even though Molly was not so cool at the high school, we looked good getting out of the old beater. She peeled away while flicking us off, as the other kids were standing at their parents’ passenger windows, leaning in, nodding as their fathers gave them instructions for when and where, outlining issues of money and caution and restraint.
“Molly—she was so troubled,” I said.
“I remember,” said Hand, as the song ended and Starship followed. This was an 80s station in Estonia. “Molly. Wow.”
We walked from the car to the light. Inside the gym was pandemonium. Rough-surfaced red kickballs were thrown at newcomers dumb enough to enter through the gym’s main double-door. The lights were out save a few small spotlights on B.J., which he apparently brought himself. Otherwise the only illumination came from the open doors at the gym’s four corners. The whole social portion of the school was there, as were the kids who wanted in. There was Meredith Shannon in her tight blue pants with the words DO NOT BEND printed and stretched across her rear. She wore those every Tuesday. There was sneering Terri Glenn, who had just acquired, and managed to use, the word omnipresent in every fourth or fifth sentence. And Larry and Dan, the two huge round boys, not twins or brothers and thus scarier, who everyone liked but who came to dances wearing helmets. We walked through the dark human garble, looking for people we liked and people we wanted to tongue, because that was the improbable and glorious thing: here you could not only tongue people, but here the tonguing of your classmates was sanctioned, was commanded.
“I can’t believe they let us do that,” Hand said, rolling down his window and throwing out an apple core.
This is the way of Champagne Snowball: First, a slow song. “Open Arms,” “(Here I Am) The One That You Love,” anything by Spandau Ballet. You scope, you choose, you find someone, you say these words: “Will you dance?” and then lead them to a spot crowded enough where you won’t be easily seen. Put your skinny worthless arms, arms you’ve vowed to work on, around her waist, while she puts her arms around your wet neck. Everyone is already soaked from the fast songs, from Dean and Hand initiating an elaborate group-dance routine to the 5-4-3-2-1 Major Tom song, so expect your partner’s back will be moist. She will smell of Sea Breeze. Her temples will drip onto your shoulder. Feel the heat of her chest against yours. Feel the heave. You will never know heaving like that again so soak in that heave. Put that heave into a small velcro pocket in the parachute pants of your soul. If she’s as tall as you, and she probably is, move closer and set your face upon her hot cheek. When it gets too hot switch cheeks. Hope she won’t ask you if you have a pen in your pocket while knowing it’s not a pencil. Hope you don’t pee. Why would
you pee? You don’t know. She will blow her face cool with her lower lip outstretched, her bangs floating briefly upward like banners tied to balconies. Know her hot chin on your hot shoulder, know her chest breathing into your chest. Wonder if she likes you in a making-out way. Wonder if you should (sexy!) or shouldn’t (queer!) rub your woody against her inner thigh. Wonder where your friends are. Wonder what time it is. How much time is left—you needed more time! See Jack dancing with Annmarie and roll your eyes. Watch him act offended and start to fakecry. Laugh and when your partner asks what’s funny say “Oh, the comedy of life.” Feel the cooling of the sweat on your partner’s back. Let your hands drop a little. Wonder if she’ll be a good kisser. Finally, a minute or so into the song, it will come, the B.J.’s decree:
“Champaaaaagne.”
He will say it in a sultry and drawn-out sort of way, doing his seventeen-year-old best to simulate a baritone by wrapping his lips around the cold black dimpled microphone. And with this word, you are mandated to kiss your partner.
“Can you turn the stereo down?” Hand asked.
I did. Hand was curled toward his door.
“I could never sleep after those dances,” said Hand. He activated the car’s windshield defrost.
And after the dance, at home and on my bed, bent toward the wall and trying to sleep but completely unable, we knew we had been given this, a point on the sun where it burst for us—
“But I’m so tired now,” Hand said. “I just got hit by it.”
“You’re gonna sleep now?”
“I just have to close my eyes for a second.”
“Okay,” I said.
Maybe ten seconds after the uttering of “Champaaaaaagne,” as we were just starting to know the shape of the partner’s mouth, would come “Snooooowwball,” at which point we were supposed to switch dance partners, mid-song, giving us a chance to meet and enjoy the next partner. But we only really had to trade if it suited us, if our current partner no longer held appeal or if there was someone better, freer. Did B.J. enforce the partner-switching suggestion? He did not. And almost half the night’s songs were slow songs, meaning that if you wanted to, and I did, some did, most did, all did, you could dance with twelve different people, kissing each for two, two and a half minutes—and more if one of the songs was “Stairway to Heaven,” in which case, though, hell, you’d have to kind of try to dance again when it got fast at the end. No one knew just how to dance to “Stairway to Heaven.” Some continued to hobble slowly, ignoring the quickened pace, the sudden urgency, all that screaming, while most people started bouncing a little, jumping in place, maybe a little air guitar, anything. It’s just the wrong song for dancing; that’s the lesson there.
But when the word Champagne arrived, we pulled our heads off each others’ shoulders, same height we were, and her mouth was upon me, a black hole approaching. Our teeth clicked at each other, and she breathed into me. There was so much moisture! I found myself flying quickly around her mouth, a bat scanning the walls. As food stuck between molars makes explorers of tongues, the tongue becoming topographer and every canker sore a ridge of saw-toothed mountains, so did my tongue become the mapmaking conquistador of Mary-Kate’s dark wet mouth. I knew its crevices, its stalactites and stalagmites, the smooth runs of the tops of her flat back teeth. I fought for dominion with her tongue, which probed my mouth while guarding her own. After thirty seconds, having explored her mouth’s offered worlds, I went farther and soon could feel the extremities of her brain, could tickle its smooth underside. I scuttled around the back of her skull, was rushing through her, pinballing between cartilage and capillary, then up again, devouring and searching, her eyes like marbles in my mouth. That reminded me: I opened my lids to see if hers were open too but they were not, they were closed but just barely, lips resting softly atop mine, and so I closed my lids too and went farther into her, into her center, and there, finally, I found her landscape. It was dark where she was and I could see almost nothing, doubted what I knew, but I did make out her winding river, a thin and clear one, warm from the day’s sun, and then her cluster of a dozen or so small hills, and at their base was her tall white home, clean and fair in the spotlight of a three-quarter moon, illuminated within by a hundred tall thin candles.
I opened my eyes and Jack was watching me. He was there, arms around Jenny Erdmann, watching me, smiling his old man’s wise and benevolent smile. It was this time, more than any other, that I noticed how far his ears stuck out. He really was a jug-eared bastard. I gave him the finger.
“Hand.”
He slept.
“Hand.”
After the dance we waited for Molly but not very long. We knew she wouldn’t pick us up, after I called her an assmuncher. Shirts wet with sweat now cooling in the night, we started home. It was 2.2 miles to our neighborhood; we knew this because Hand had made his father measure it with their car’s odometer.
We walked through the woods first, behind the rec center, then across two fairways of the county golf course. There was a new berm built between the highway and the new housing development, so we climbed that and walked atop its rounded ridge, only half-sodded then, past the pond the developers had made into a lake.
Hand wanted to stay out and I wanted to stay out. We stood on the top of the berm, the highway busy below, the air cooling, the wind gusting. Jack wanted to go home.
“Why?” we asked. The electrical wires howled.
Jack looked perplexed. Because we have to go home, he said. Because we lived at home and we had curfews.
We argued for a while, though Jack didn’t really know the terms of debate. He didn’t understand exactly what would be gained by staying out. What would we do? he asked. We’ll be tired all day tomorrow, he said.
We couldn’t think of anything to do. But it felt good to be out on the berm, above the new lake.
—Hand, we shouldn’t have brought him with us.
—He was fine.
“Hand, we shouldn’t have.”
Hand continued to sleep.
—He didn’t want to come. He never really wanted to come. He wanted to be with us but he never saw the point in the things we decided to do.
—He wanted to come.
—I have had visions of that cow for ten years now, twelve. I see its eye, I see it just burning and its eye seemed awake, alive for so long. That black liquid eye.
—Stop.
—Hand, it’s what we did to that cow.
—Will. It’s not the cow.
—Hand we burned that cow alive.
—The cow was dying.
—We poured gasoline on that cow and we burned it.
—We were young. We don’t talk about the cow.
—We knew this was an affront to the world.
—The cow would be eaten. We were thirteen and we had to react violently to the world. We’d seen its rules and the demons it allows to live among us. We killed the cow to express our outrage.
—Jack didn’t want to do it but didn’t want to leave us.
—He stayed because he wanted to.
—We walked from the dance through the golf course and into that one small farm with the six cows. We went into the shed by the barn and we found gasoline and we burned that cow. We didn’t doubt what we were doing, not for a second. We didn’t doubt it for so many years afterward, right? It felt right at the time, to pour gasoline on a cow and set it aflame.
—We’re allowed to grow up.
—We are not allowed this reaction. Only some are allowed to pollute the world. We were sober and we planned it. We hated that cow. We three rode by that cow every weekend on our bikes and we planned to kill it. I had a vision of a cow on fire and we decided we had to make that vision real. We had no right.
—Doesn’t matter.
—The cow didn’t move as we doused it. Then it felt the burn as the gasoline soaked into its hide. It rolled on the ground. And then we threw the match. We had no right.
—We did it and it was don
e.
—We had no right. This was the same year we first wanted to kiss all the girls. We were darkhearted boys. We should have been jailed or drugged or killed. I remember watching that cow burn with total detachment. It barely made a sound, that cow. It was all so quiet, and the night was so bright, so clear and the stars were in brilliant clumps, and we stood by the fence, leaning on it afterward, watching, the flames blue and red, and the body beneath darkening from white to grey to black.
—Fucking stop it. Now you’re just dredging for the sake of dredging. There’s no point.
—This is my head, asshole! This is how it works. It jumps from one wretched episode to the next.
—Leave me out of it.
—We polluted Jack, Hand. All the bad ideas were our ideas. And we had no right. We were given things others have not been given. We had a clean 7-Eleven within walking distance—we had—this is the reason they took Jack. And why my face is mangled. This is simple and deserved retribution.
—From whom?
—I don’t know.
—From God?
—From whomever settles scores. Someone settles scores. Someone keeps the balance.
—No one keeps the balance, Will.
—Balance is at the foundation of the world.
—If there was balance, Will, we wouldn’t be here. If there’s balance, there’s logic, and if there’s logic, you’re not on a lightbulb package and we’re not here.
—There’s balance enough.
—Don’t flatter yourself to think this is your doing. Your problem is that you think things have happened for the first time to you, and that you’re the fulcrum from which all people and the current world pivot.
