How We Are Hungry

by Dave Eggers

  “Sure,” Fish said, “but isn’t that what the goddamned board is for, so you don’t have to tell everyone about it?” Fish wanted a look at that office. “Jesus,” he added. “That’s really fucked.”

  “Well, I am sorry,” new guy said.

  “I have a friend in the hospital, motherfucker.” Fish was surprised; he hadn’t contemplated that sentence. He realized that this was one of those moments when one’s impatience— or was the word rage?—was being misdirected. All the same, he thought he’d very much like to beat the new guy till he whispered.

  New guy told Fish someone would come get him soon, and then hung up. Fish went into the tiny yellow yard in front of his house and took the croquet wickets out of the grass. They’d been sitting there for three months, since Mary’s kids had been over. They couldn’t play to save their lives, those kids. They didn’t care about the rules, either. They just hit the balls like monkeys, squawking and swinging and running into the street.

  Now it’s seven o’clock, with two hours to go. This drive mocks our conceptions of time. This drive could kill anyone.

  Adam’s mouth curves too much. He’s never been able to smile without smirking, or listen without sneering. It isn’t his fault, really. He just has too many muscles there, in that area around his mouth. Most people are born handicapped.

  He moved away, to Baltimore, just before high school, so Fish didn’t see him much, but one summer, right after Adam’s parents separated and he and Fish were too old for camp, Adam stayed with Fish’s family in Galena. At first he slept in the basement, next to the dartboard and under the tiny window half-full of soil. When he complained about the ticking and groaning of the water heater, he was moved to Fish’s bedroom. It was a small room with a single window, over Fish’s bed, painted shut, the lower corners covered in stickers with holograms and google eyes.

  That summer, when Adam played football with Fish’s friends every Sunday at the muddy round park at the end of the frontage road, he tackled too hard and argued too much. Fish apologized for him. Everyone figured he was just intense, had something to prove, like the kids who’d tried out for the team but missed the last cut. Adam, though, was different, less in control, less focused on the outcome of the game.

  He broke a guy’s leg once. The weekend was warm; there were about twenty playing. One guy had borrowed cones from his construction job, and they figured they could have a proper game, with a kickoff even. So they split into sides and booted the ball. They started running like madmen at each other, and a boy named Catanese, older but spindly, everywhere elbows and knees, caught the kickoff, the ball delivering a thump to his concave chest.

  He was running for the sideline, when Adam burst through the pack unblocked and just flew, for a frozen second almost perfectly horizontal, and finally spearing him, his shoulders plowing into Catanese’s legs. There was a crack like a broken bat, and everyone cheered because Catanese was barely out of the end zone and his team would be screwed for field position. But then Catanese went red, blood swimming in his face, and he was holding his leg, one hand on either side, gently, like it was too hot to touch. He recoiled from it, screaming, out of his mind, feral.

  The leg, the tibia, was snapped in two. It was a battlefield kind of gore, the bone poking through his corduroys like a stick through a garbage bag.

  “You see that, what I did?” Adam said. Fish had found him up the hill, by the new playground, hiding in a chute. He thought Adam was going to brag about hitting Catanese so hard, but instead he said, “Why the hell would I break some kid’s leg? What the hell is wrong with me?”

  Fish told him that it was an accident, it wasn’t his fault, it was football, a violent game, so what. Now Adam was pulling on the skin under his chin, grabbing it and pinching it. “I shouldn’t play tackle,” he said, pulling harder on his chin. “The craziest thing is that I’ve thought about something like this happening, you know?” Here he adopted a meaningful whisper. “I knew this would come to pass. When I get hold of someone I just get too… I feel like I want to tear them in half, know what I’m saying? Like I want to run through and get a bunch of people near me and then explode.”

  Fish nodded. Adam seemed to be horrified and proud and enthralled all at once. He had an aura that wasn’t right, the wild glow of a scientist who’d discovered a formula that could kill millions.

  The ambulance was loading Catanese now, and had pulled right up onto the field, which everyone thought was great; that had never happened before. Fish walked with Adam across the grass, now black and wet, without saying much. The light was almost gone, so they headed home, afraid of the night that would soon bring Monday. Into the house, through the mud-room, past Fish’s parents playing Pong and up the stairs, Fish quiet, now running his fingers over each baluster, while Adam talked, sighed, touching nothing.

  Fish finds a parking space under a wide wall of the hospital, pink-bricked and bisected by the kind of steel ladder you see on water towers—a fire escape, maybe. The grounds are lavish, or seem so in the dark—cobblestone paths winding around willows and palmettos, sprinklers hissing. As Fish is walking in, a man in institutional blue holds the door for him.

  “I assume you’re a visitant?” he says.

  “I don’t know,” Fish says.

  “Of course you are. You have that radiant look.”

  The man giggles and Fish says thank you, unsure whether or not to encourage him. He says thank you, tells the man, an aide of some kind, where he’s headed, and the aide, in his scrubs and with plastic bags around his shoes, walks Fish all the way to the Nursing/Trauma Unit. “I’d just confuse you otherwise,” he says. Fish isn’t sure if that’s an insult or what.

  Adam is in Room 318, on the far side of the building. Fish hopes he doesn’t have a roommate, because the roommates in hospitals are always deformed and either too sick or not sick enough to be there in the first place. They listen to conversations and make judgments. But when he gets to the room there’s no roommate, just a twig of a woman, owlish and sallow, sitting on a chair near Adam, eating a brownie.

  Fish waves hello to the brownie woman and walks around to Adam. He lies flat, with a neck brace on, staring at the ceiling. Fish puts his face in Adam’s line of vision.

  “Hey,” Adam says, surprised.

  Fish grunts.

  Adam doesn’t look forty. He looks twelve. He’s wearing a baseball cap, and his face isn’t wrinkly or strung out or gaunt. With his freckles and the cap, he has the aura of a kid who’s just had his tonsils out.

  “What’s the hat?” Fish asks. It bears a minor-league team’s logo, a beaver holding a bat he’s apparently been chewing on.

  “What are you doing here?” Adam asks. His eyes open a little more, catching the glare of a car’s headlights in the parking lot.

  “Who gave it to you?” Fish says.

  “One of the nurses. Ronnie.”

  “Do you get to keep it, or is it just for here?”

  “I don’t know. I think I can keep it. Did you drive down?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. Thanks, man.”

  “That’s a bitch of a drive,” Fish says.

  “I know,” he says with what Fish considers an appropriate amount of awe and gratitude. “Sorry. Thanks.”

  On his mobile table are remnants of dinner or lunch or both—uneaten tapioca and two tangelos, and beside them a little tilting pagoda of Tupperware. The lady with the brownie has finished with the brownie and is now cleaning her nails with a thumbtack. Fish nods to Adam and jerks his head toward her. She has a hospital I.D. tag clipped to her blouse.

  “She sits here with me,” he says. “They’ve got someone in here all the time so I don’t do anything.” It’s clear that Adam is happy they think he’s such a serious customer, such a dangerous man. Fish looks over at the brownie woman to see if she’s listening, but she isn’t; she’s watching a movie on Adam’s TV—Fred Thompson is playing the president, and is wearing that dissatisfied look he uses. Fish
stares out the window. In the parking lot, the cars are colored copper by the light from above, the lamps bent over them like tall thin saints over babies. He sees his rental and misses being inside it.

  Adam is holding a little tube with a button on it.

  “Is that for morphine?” Fish asks.

  “Yeah,” Adam says.

  “So you try to jump off a building, and they give you morphine—an unlimited amount?”

  “No. I can only get a certain amount each hour. They’ve got it figured out.”

  Fish knows it’s just a matter of time before Adam starts telling him why he jumped off the motel roof, but he doesn’t want to hear it. Oh, if only it were interesting! he thinks. But it never is. “I wanted to hurt myself,” he will say, “I don’t know why.” Nothing of any interest will get said by either of them. Adam will say, “I feel so dark sometimes” or “It’s like I see things sometimes… through a dark water.” Adam wants Fish to understand, but Fish isn’t interested, and, besides, he’ll call Adam on where he stole that dark-water part—The Executioner’s Song, Adam’s favorite book—and remind him of a hundred ways the two of them, Fish and Adam, are equal in this darkness. They’ve seen the same things, they have the same urges. Adam will concede this, and will begin apologizing for everything, and for too long. He’ll be too contrite, too docile, and Fish will want to step on him.

  But at some point they’ll start making plans for when Adam is discharged. This is the only part that ever interests Fish: the steps from here on out. Fish will get inspired, laying out what will happen in the first few days, the weeks after, every move for years. First, a different apartment in a new city, away from the therapist-criminals in Bakersfield who keep prescribing drugs, every conceivable drug, for Adam. Then a menial job while doing some kind of night school, and finally a woman, older, hardened, wise, but warm—who will tie him to a pole in the basement when he needs it. Or what he really needs is a man. He needs a burly man, a hairy gay man who goes to bear bars. He’d give Adam love and respect but also be paternal, stern, watchful enough to save Adam from himself.

  “So how’s Mary?” Adam asks.

  “She’s good,” Fish says.

  “Where’s she living now?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “She’s my cousin. You can’t tell me where she lives?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s got little kids, Adam, and you’re a guy who shoots himself and jumps off roofs. Fuck you.”

  For a second Adam looks hurt, or pretends to look hurt, then he closes his eyes. Fish fears that he’s just made Adam feel more unique and menacing—precisely what Adam wants.

  His chin is brown and tied together with black straight string, spiked along the suture, as if spiders had been sewn into his face.

  “Ow. Don’t,” Adam says.

  Fish is touching the stitches.

  “Why not?”

  “Stop it, prick.”

  “How many?” It’s like a cactus or something. The stitches are amazing.

  “Twelve. Get the fuck away.”

  Fish gives him a look.

  “Sorry,” Adam says. But he has no rights here. After five hours of driving, Fish is allowed to touch what he wants. Fish remembers the card and drops it on Adam’s chest. Adam tries to look down at it.

  “You have to hold it up. I can’t see.”

  Fish opens it and shows him the front. It’s an elephant surrounded by Hebrew letters, with “Happy Bat Mitzvah” written below.

  “A Jewish elephant,” Adam says.

  “I guess so,” Fish says.

  Fish used to like hospitals. Waiting rooms in particular. When his last girlfriend, Annie, had her appendix out, he was at the hospital for thirty hours and had a pretty good time. He met people, learned things—there was some strange collegial vibe that night. Three of them played cards and Fish won a hundred and twenty-two dollars on a straight flush from a guy whose brother was getting a finger reattached. He’d been drilling a hole through his son’s wall, thought the kid was selling crystal meth and wanted to catch him. That had been a good night.

  But with Adam he doesn’t want to stay. Fish looks at the clock. It says 8:40. He’ll leave at nine, he decides. Then he’ll call Annie to see if he can stay with her for the night. Annie follows local politics and has ridiculous lips, full like balloon animals, a voice lower than his. The last time Fish saw her she scratched his head so masterfully, in circles so convincing, that he thought he was rising, ascending. They talk often enough, and she lives in L.A., and he figures he’ll drive over after, not for sex or even romance, just for a place to rest where there’s breathing other than his own, where he won’t have to leave the TV on all night. If she’s not around he’ll drive back to San Jose tonight. He could do it. Through the night is easier.

  “Does your mom know?” Fish asks. He knows that Adam’s mom doesn’t know, because Adam told Chuck that if she found out he’d do it for real next time.

  “No. I don’t think so,” Adam says.

  Adam’s father died a few years ago, a botched bypass, and now his mother lives in Australia. She went there with a man she’d met in a community-theater production of Fiorello! He played the lead, though he was six feet four and blond.

  A nurse comes in. She’s Filipina, young. Her nametag says “Hope.” Fish feels an urge to say something about her name, in light of her working in a hospital and all, but then figures she hears that often enough.

  “That’s a good name for a nurse,” he says. What the hell.

  She takes Adam’s blood pressure. Fish watches, loving how quickly the armband fills with air, how tight it gets. That device always looks like something illegal.

  “How’s your pain?” she asks Adam.

  “Good,” Adam says.

  The nurse takes the Bat Mitzvah card off Adam’s stomach and puts it on the side table, next to a jar of denim-colored tools, like lollipops but with foam starfish tops. Cleaning devices, maybe, for swabbing mouths or other wet orifices. Fish thinks briefly about taking one of the lollipops and stuffing it up Adam’s fat fucking nose. He almost laughs at the thought of it.

  Fish leaves while Adam is drifting in and out, his face blank, almost beatific. During a brief moment when his eyes pull open, Fish tells him he’ll check in again tomorrow.

  The night is sharp, all the lights crisp, and Fish drives to the motel where Chuck said Adam had been staying. He’s supposed to pick up Adam’s things—four bags’ worth. Adam had been living there for a month, after he was asked to leave his halfway house for skinning a chicken in his room. That’s what Chuck said, at least. If Adam did indeed skin a chicken, he did it only to say he’d done it. “Ask for Mr. Ali,” Chuck said. Chuck handled logistics. He was Adam’s attorney, benefactor, medical historian. Fish was someone who could drive down and pick up bags.

  When he gets to the motel, a women’s volleyball team is checking in. He waits for twenty minutes while they decide who will sleep in whose rooms, and which duffels will stay in the minibus. Fish reads every brochure the lobby offers, and makes a tentative plan to see the Museum of Irrigation.

  When it’s his turn Fish asks for Mr. Ali, but the woman at the counter, heavy-lidded and wearing a maize-colored sari, says he’s gone. “I am Mrs. Ali. Yes please?” Fish shows her the letter that Chuck faxed, asking for Adam’s stuff. Chuck insisted on ending the letter with “I trust that this matter will not present a problem.” Every legal letter Chuck writes ends this way. He loses half of his cases.

  Fish can see the bags just behind her, in a narrow hallway with a cement floor. Two clear plastic bags sit there, alert, and two tennis bags, one covered in mud. Mrs. Ali reads the note, then looks up at Fish. It’s then that he almost cries. Water seems to fill his forehead; his eyes are just portals that show he’s drowning. What is she looking at? How much does she know? She must know. The ambulance picked Adam up here, and she or her husband surely packed and stored his belongi
ngs. She knew Adam as a flailer, as a leaper, and now knows Fish as someone lesser, someone who picks up the bags of people like Adam. Fish is now among the people who live in motels and jump off motel roofs. There’s a highway just above the motel, and on it people are passing this place at eighty miles an hour, wondering what happens in the filthy world below.

  “I have to call Mr. Ali,” she says, and does so, using a receiver larger than her face. She gets off the phone with Mr. Ali and lets Fish into the hallway behind the desk.

  “Thanks,” he says on the way out.

  “All right,” she says, opening the door for him. “Good!” she adds, and after he’s gone throws the bolt, right to left.

  Fish loads the bags into his trunk, and then remembers what he wanted to investigate. He has forgotten to look until now, and is suddenly thrilled. He walks over to the courtyard area to see where Adam jumped. But he can’t find a part of the motel complex that has four stories. There is just the one two-story building, in an L shape around the pool, and its roof is only about eighteen feet high. Dumbshit! Fish has figured it out. Of course! Forty feet isn’t Adam’s way, after all, but eighteen feet is. He jumped from this. Dumbshit! Coward! Pissfuck! Who jumps eighteen feet? Who does this? This is so wrong. There are too many things wrong everywhere for this kind of thing, this jumping from eighteen-foot roofs. Adam must have known that eighteen feet wasn’t far enough to kill himself, just far enough to break bones. And the only thing sadder than an eighteen-foot motel roof is the guy staring at it.

  He goes back to the car and opens the trunk. He reaches inside one of the plastic bags, looking for something solid. Most of its contents are soft, clothes, and here and there moist, but he soon finds a trophy, a small one with a tennis player on top and someone else’s name engraved on it. Elsewhere between the folds of shirts and socks there is some deodorant, a handful of tapes, which Fish pulls out for the drive home, and a bottle of cologne called Together, which makes him laugh. Adam is the only guy Fish knows who wears cologne. The only other items of note are five belts, wound as one like a rattlesnake, and a ten-pound container of baby powder.