by Dave Eggers
Max, tired of thinking, decided to think on paper, and so retrieved his journal from under the bed. His father had given him the journal shortly after he left, and had, in white-out, written the words WANT JOURNAL on the cover. In this book, his father had written as inscription and directive, write what you want. Every day, or as often as you can, write what you want. That way, whenever you’re confused or rudderless, you can look to this book, and be reminded where you want to go and what you’re looking for. His father had written, by hand, three beginnings on every page. Every page started with:
I WANT
I WANT
I WANT
And so Max had periodically written his wants, and he’d written many other things, too. But tonight he wanted to write some more wants, so he found a pen and began.
I WANT Gary to fall into some kind of bottomless hole.
I WANT Claire to get her foot caught in a beartrap.
I WANT Claire’s friends to die by flesh-eating tapeworms.
Then he stopped. His father had reminded him that the journal was for positive wants, not negative wants. When you wanted something negative, it didn’t count, he said. A want should be positive, his father had said. A want should improve your life while improving the world, even if just a little bit.
So Max began again:
I WANT to get out of here.
I WANT to go to the moon or some other planet.
I WANT to find some unicorn DNA and then grow a bunch of them and teach them to stick their horns through Claire’s friends.
Oh well. He could erase it later. For now just writing it and thinking it felt good. But now he was sick of writing. He wanted to make something. But he didn’t want to set up some whole thing with glue and wood. He didn’t want to have to use tools at all. What did he want to do? This was the central question of this day and most days.
Max wondered how he might actually build a ship. He had designed many dozens of ships on paper over the past year, and now he wondered if it was time for him to build a real one and sail away. His father had taken him sailing five times the previous summer, and had taught him the basics of piloting a small boat. “You’re a natural!” his father had said, even though Max was afraid of the open water, of rogue waves and orcas.
Then Max caught sight of his wolf suit, hanging on the back of the closet door. He hadn’t worn it in weeks. He’d gotten it for Christmas three years before, the last one with both his parents, and he’d immediately put it on, and kept it on for the rest of school break. It had been too big then, but his mom had pinned it and taped it to make it work until he grew into it.
Now he and it were the perfect size and he wore it when he knew he would be alone in the house, and when he could wrestle the dog or jump and growl without anyone watching. And though the house was full, as Max stared at the wolf suit it seemed to be calling to him. It’s time, it was saying to Max. He wasn’t sure this was actually the right time to put it on, but then again he’d never disobeyed the suit before. Should he really wear it tonight? He usually felt better when he put on the wolf suit. He felt faster, sleeker, more powerful.
On the other hand, he could stay in bed. He could stay in the fort, the red blanket casting a red light on everything inside. He had stayed inside one whole weekend a few months ago. He couldn’t remember why he’d done this. Or maybe he could remember. Maybe it had to do with Claire and Meika and how they laughed when he had gone into the bathroom with his hand down his pants. They were sitting on Claire’s bed, and it was the morning, and in the morning he had been in the habit of having his hand down his pajama pants. So he had walked into the bathroom to pee and they had laughed for what seemed like hours. And he hadn’t put his hand down his pants since then.
Anyway, he had hid in his bedroom fort for two days after that. Mom had brought his meals to him there and he had played Stratego against himself, and cards against himself, and had pitted his animals and soldiers against each other, and had read two books about medieval wars.
Now he wondered if he wanted to just spend another weekend in his fort. It seemed a good enough idea. He had some thinking to do, about this news about the sun expiring and the resulting void inhaling the earth, and he wanted to steer clear of Claire, who might yet want retribution, and he was angry at his mom, who seemed to forget for hours at a time that he existed. And any time he spent in his room ensured that he didn’t have to talk to Gary.
So he had a choice. Would he stay behind the curtain and think about things, marinate in his own confusion, or would he put on his white fur suit and howl and scratch and make it known who was boss of this house and all of the world known and unknown?
CHAPTER XI
“Arooooooo!”
The howling was a good start. Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence. Max, standing in his white wolf suit, stood at the top of the stairs and, using a rolled-up piece of construction paper as a megaphone, howled again, as loud as he could.
“ARRROOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
When he was done, there was a long silence.
“Uh oh,” Gary finally said.
Ha! Max thought. Let Gary worry. Let everyone worry.
Max pounded down the stairs, triumphant. “Who wants to get eaten?” he asked the house and the world.
“Not me,” Claire said.
Aha! Max decided. That only puts her higher on the menu!
He strode into the TV room, where Claire was pretending to do her homework. He lifted his claws up, growled and sniffed at the air. He wanted to make sure that Claire and everyone knew this terrible fact: There was a bloodthirsty, brilliant, borderline-insane wolf in their midst.
Claire didn’t look up.
At least she’d spoken to him. It was a window to reconciliation, so Max had an idea. He removed a wooden dowel from a nearby curtain. It was about three feet long and bore magic marker lines across its width. Claire, seeing Max approach with the dowel, rolled her eyes.
“You want to play Wolf and Master?” Max asked.
Claire had already gone back to her book, strenuously ignoring him. She didn’t even need to say No. She could say No a thousand ways without ever uttering the word.
“Why not?” Max said to the back of her head.
“Maybe because your wolf suit smells like butt?”
Max quickly sniffed himself. She was correct. But he was a wolf. What else would a wolf smell like?
“You want me to kill something for you?” he asked.
Claire thought a moment, tapping her pencil against her lower teeth. Finally she looked at Max, her eyes bright. “Yeah,” she said, “go kill the little man in the living room.”
This idea had a certain appeal. Max smiled at Claire’s description of Gary as a “little man.”
“Yeah,” Max said, getting excited. “We’ll cut his brains out and make him eat ’em! He’ll have to think from his stomach!”
Claire gave Max a look she might give a three-headed cat. “Yeah, you go do that,” she said.
Max walked around the corner and found Gary lying on the couch in his work clothes, his frog-eyes closed, his chin entirely receded into his neck. Max gritted his teeth and let out a low, simmering growl.
Gary opened his eyes and rubbed them.
“Uhh, hey Max. I’m baggin’ a few after-work Zs. How goes it?”
Max looked at the floor. This was one of Gary’s typical questions: Another day, huh? How goes it? No play for the playa, right? None of his questions had answers. Gary never seemed to say anything that meant anything at all.
“Cool suit,” Gary said. “Maybe I’ll get me one of those. What are you, like a rabbit or something?”
Max was about to leap upon Gary, to show him just what kind of animal he was — a wolf capable of tearing flesh from bone with a shake of his jaws — when Max’s mom came into the room. She was carrying two glasses of blood-colored wine, and she handed one to Gary. Gary sat up, smiled his powerless smile, and clinked his glass against hers. It
was a disgusting display, and became more so when Gary raised his glass to Max.
“Cheers, little rabbit-dude,” he said.
His mom smiled at Max and then at Gary, thinking it was a wonderfully clever thing that Gary had just said.
“Cheers, Maxie,” she said, then growled playfully at him.
She picked up a dirty plate and hurried back toward the kitchen. “Claire!” she yelled, “I asked you to get your stuff off the table. It’s almost dinner.”
Max entered the kitchen with his arms crossed, marching purposefully, like a general inspecting his troops. He sniffed loudly, assessing the kitchen’s smells and waiting to be noticed.
His mother said nothing, so he brought a chair near the stove and stood on it. Now they were eye to eye.
“What is that? Is that food?” he asked, pointing down to something beige bubbling in a pan.
He got no answer.
“Mom, what is that?” he asked, now grabbing her arm.
“Pâté,” she said finally.
Max rolled his eyes and moved on. Pâté was a regrettable name for an unfortunate food. It seemed to Max a good idea to get up from the chair and to leap onto the counter. Which he presently did.
Standing on the counter, he towered over everything and everyone. He was eleven feet tall.
“Oh god,” Max’s mom said.
Max squatted down to inspect a package of frozen corn. “Frozen corn? What’s wrong with real corn?” he demanded. He dropped the package loudly on the counter, where it made a wonderful clatter.
“Frozen corn is real,” Max’s mom said, barely taking notice. “Now get off the counter. And go tell your sister to get her stuff off the dining room table.”
Max didn’t move. “CLAIRE GET YOUR STUFF OFF THE DINING ROOM TABLE!” he yelled, more or less into his mom’s face.
“Don’t yell in my face!” she hissed. “And get off the counter.”
Instead of getting off the counter, Max howled. The acoustics where he was, so close to the ceiling, were not great.
His mom stared at him like he was crazy. Which he was, because wolves are part crazy. “You know what,” she said, “you’re too old to be on the counter, and you’re too old to be wearing that costume.”
Max crossed his arms and stared down at her. “You’re too old to be so short! And your makeup’s smeared!”
“Get DOWN from there!” she demanded.
The sting of what she had said about him being too old to wear his wolf suit was just hitting him. He felt his anger focusing. There was a weakness in her voice and he decided to seize on it.
“Woman, feed me!” he yelled. He didn’t know where he’d come up with that phrase, but he liked it immediately.
“Get off the counter, Max!”
Max just stared at her. She was so small!
“I’ll eat you up!” he growled, raising his arms.
“MAX! GET DOWN!” she yelled. She could be very loud when she wanted to be. For a second he thought he should get off the counter, take off his suit, and eat his dinner quietly, because the truth was he was very hungry. But then he thought better of it, and howled again.
“Arooooooooo!”
At that, Max’s mom lunged for him, but Max, sidestepping, was able to elude her grasp. He leaped over the sink and then back down onto the chair. She lunged again and missed. Max cackled. He really was fast! She grabbed at him again, but he was already gone. He jumped down, landed on the floor, and executed a perfect shoulder-roll. Then he got up and fled from the kitchen altogether, laughing hysterically.
When he turned around, though, he found that his mom was still chasing him. That was new. She rarely chased him this far. When they raced through the living room, Gary took notice of the escalating volume and urgency. He put down his glass of wine and got ready to intervene.
Then, in the front hall, a surprising and awful thing happened: Max’s mom caught him.
“Max!” she gasped.
She had his arm firmly in her hand. She had long fingers, deceptively strong, and they dug into Max’s bicep. In her hand all his muscle and sinew turned to soup and he didn’t like it.
“What’s wrong with you?” she screamed. “You see what you’re doing to me?” Her voice was shrill, corkscrewed.
“No, you’re doing things!” he countered, sounding meeker than he’d intended. To offset this sign of weakness he thrashed around in her grip. He kicked and squirmed and in the process, he knocked everything off the bench — the change, the mail, and his delicate blue bird, the one he’d made in art class. It broke and like quail the pieces darted to every corner of the foyer.
This gave them both pause.
They stared at the broken bird.
“See that? You’re out of control!” she said. “There’s no way you’re eating dinner with us. Animal.”
Now, because he was angry at breaking his bird, and angry at having Gary in the house, and angry at having to eat pâté and frozen corn and angry about having a witch for a sister, he growled and squirmed and — the idea flooded him so quickly he couldn’t resist — leaned down and bit his mom’s arm as hard as he could.
She screamed and dropped him to the floor. She stepped back, still holding her arm. She wailed like a beast, her eyes alive with fear and fury.
Max had never bitten her before. He was scared. His mom was scared. They saw each other anew.
Max turned to see Gary entering the foyer. He was clearly unsure what he was supposed to do.
“Connie, are you okay?” he asked.
“He bit me!” she hissed.
Gary’s eyes bulged. He had no idea what to do or say. The sheer number of things happening was overwhelming him. He opened his mouth and did the best he could: “You can’t let him treat you that way!” he said.
Max’s mom gave him a bewildered look.
“What are you talking about? This is about me? What do you want me to do?”
“Something! Something needs to be done!” Gary said, taking a few quick strides toward Max.
“He’s not allowed to talk here!” Max yelled, pointing to the frog-eyed man.
Claire stormed into the hall at that second, and seeing Claire and Gary and his mom, everyone looking at him like he was the problem — it sent Max tumbling over the edge. He screamed as loud as he could — a sound between a howl and a battle cry.
“Why are you doing this to me?” his mom wailed. “This house is chaos with you in it!”
That was it. Max did not have to stand for this, any of this, all of this. He threw open the door and leapt down the porch and into the night.
CHAPTER XII
The air! The moon!
Both opened to him immediately. He felt pulled as if by an outgoing tide. The air and moon together sang a furious and wonderful song: Come with us, wolf-boy! Let us drink the blood of the earth and gargle it with great aplomb! Max tore down the street, feeling free, knowing he was part of the wind. Come, Max! Come to the water and see! No one could tell that he was crying — he was running too fast. He left the yard and took to the street.
“Max!”
Stupid Gary was following him, trying to run, huffing mightily. Max ran faster, almost flying, his hands grabbing at the air as he passed all the homes being rebuilt from scratch, the mess of them all. When he looked over his shoulder, he saw that Gary was losing ground. A moment later, the freckled little man had pulled up lame — he was doubled over, holding his leg. Max kept running, and though his face was wet with tears, he grinned maniacally. He had won. He ran to the cul-de-sac, where the road ended and the trees began.
Max was free of home and mother and Gary and Claire, he had outwitted and outrun them all, but he was not ready to rest. He ran to his lean-to, and sat inside for a few seconds, but was too alive to sit still. He got up and howled. Something about the wind and the configuration of the trees and outcroppings gave his voice more volume; his howl twisted and multiplied in the sky in the most satisfying way. He howled more.
> He grabbed the biggest stick he could find and commenced hitting everything he could with it. He swung it around, he stabbed trees and rocks, he whacked branches and relieved them of their snowy burden.
This, he thought, was the only way he wanted to live. He would live from now on here in the woods. All he needed to do, sometime soon, would be to sneak back into the house and get more of his things — his knives, some matches, some blankets and glue and rope. Then he would build a forest home, high in the trees, and become one with the woods and the animals, learn their languages and with them plot an overthrow of his home, beginning with the decapitation and devouring of Gary.
As he planned his new life, he heard a sound. It wasn’t the wind and it wasn’t the trees. It was a scraping, yearning sound. He paused, his nose and ears pricking up. Again he heard it. It was like bone against bone, though there was a rhythm to it. He followed it toward the water, a hundred yards away. He jogged down the ravine and met the stream that led to the shore. He jumped from rock to rock until he saw the bay’s black glass, cut through the middle by the reflection of the moon.
At the water’s edge, amid the reeds and the softly lapping waves, he saw the source of the noise: a wooden sailboat of average size and painted white. It was tied to a tree and was rubbing against a half-submerged rock.
Max looked around to see if anyone was close. It seemed strange that a boat like this, a sturdy, viable boat, would be unoccupied. He had been coming to this bay for years and had never seen a boat like this, alone and without an owner. There was no sign of anyone near. The boat was his if he wanted it.
CHAPTER XIII
He stepped in. There was just a bit of water on the floor, and when he checked the rudder and sail and boom, everything seemed to be in working order.
