A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  But tonight there is no going out. I went out on Wednesday, so now and for the rest of the week am staying in, holding the world together.

  “Time for bed.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Time for bed.”

  “Is it ten?”

  “Yes.” [Loud exhale.} “It’s past ten.” [Roll of eyes.} “I’ll meet you there in a second.”

  He gets into bed and under the covers. I sit next to him, my back against the headboard. Bill bought the headboard months ago—every time he’s in town we have to go furniture shopping, with him trying to stock the house with antique knockoffs from the warehouse near the highway—but the headboard didn’t fit Toph’s bedframe, so we’ve just set the thing, this big piece of wood, between his bed and the wall, for effect, a headboard playing the role of a headboard.

  I get our book from the floor. We read every night, sometimes for a while but usually for just fifteen minutes or so, the longest I can do it before falling asleep myself, but long enough to provide Toph with a degree of comfort, stability, of peace and well-being before drifting off to his child’s slumberland—

  We’re reading John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Oh sure, there’s all the horror, the indescribable suffering, the people’s skin coming off like cottage cheese, but, see, I have decided that as much as there will be fun and hilarity in this house, I am determined to also fill this place with sober and lasting learning. Sometimes during dinner, I open randomly and read from the encyclopedia, the massive one-volume thing we bought from the skinny kid selling them door to door. Before this was Maus. Before that was Catch-22, though we didn’t finish that—with the obscure (for him) references and all the characters, it was taking us an hour to get through each page. In Hiroshima, I skip over really horrific parts, and he listens with the utmost attentiveness because he is perfect—he is just as enthusiastic about our experiment as I am, wants to be the ideal, new-model boy as much as I want to be the ideal, new-model parent. And after I read, carefully explaining the significance of this and that, the historical context (all made up or approximated), it’s always nice just to lie for a minute, on his narrow twin bed, with him under the comforter and me over it, so nice and warm here—

  “Get out.”

  “Ehmp?”

  “Out.”

  “Noo.”

  “Wake up.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “Go to your own bed.”

  “Oh please, no. We can both fit.”

  “Out. Out. Please.”

  “Fine.”

  I roll over him, making myself as heavy as possible, then get up. I go into the bathroom and then return to his room while brushing my teeth, humming and doing a little softshoe. He gives me a fake thumbs-up. I go back to the sink and spit, and come back. I lean against his door.

  “So. Big day, huh?” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “I mean, a lot happened. A full day, this was.”

  “Yeah. The half day at school, then the basketball, and then dinner, and the open house, and then ice cream, and a movie— I mean, it was almost as if it was too much to happen in one day, as if a number of days had been spliced together to quickly paint a picture of an entire period of time, to create a whole-seeming idea of how we are living, without having to stoop (or rise) to actually pacing the story out.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “No, I think it’s good, it’s fine. Not entirely believable, but it works fine, in general. It’s fine.”

  “Listen, you, we’ve had plenty of days like this, and many that were much more complicated. Remember your big camp-out sleepover birthday party? The Lake Tahoe-with-your-large-headed-friend trip? Really, if anything, this is a much more pedestrian day than most. This is just a caricature, this, the skeleton of experience— I mean, you know this is just one slivery, wafer-thin slice. To adequately relate even five minutes of internal thought-making would take forever— It’s maddening, actually, when you sit down, as I will once I put you to bed, to try to render something like this, a time or place, and ending up with only this kind of feebleness— one, two dimensions of twenty.”

  “So you’re reduced to complaining about it. Or worse, doing little tricks, out of frustration.”

  “Right. Right.”

  “The gimmicks, bells, whistles. Diagrams. Here is a picture of a stapler, all that.”

  “Right.”

  “You know, to be honest, though, what I see is less a problem with form, all that garbage, and more a problem of conscience. You’re completely paralyzed with guilt about relating all this in the first place, especially the stuff earlier on. You feel somehow obligated to do it, but you also know that Mom and Dad would hate it, would crucify you—“

  “I know, I know.”

  “But then again, I should say, and Bill and Beth would say— well, probably not Bill, but definitely Beth—that your guilt, and their disapproval, is a very middlebrow, middle-class, midwestern sort of disapproval. It’s superstition as much as anything—like the primitives who fear the camera will take their soul. You struggle with a guilt both Catholic and unique to the home in which you were raised. Everything there was a secret—for instance, your father being in AA was not to be spoken of, ever, while he was in and after he stopped attending. You never told even your closest friends about anything that happened inside that house. And now you alternately rebel against and embrace that kind of suppression.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you think you’re so open about stuff now, you believe that you and me are the New Model, that because of our circumstances, you can toss away all the old rules, can make it up as we go along. But at the same time, so far you’ve been very priggish and controlling, and for all your bluster you end up maintaining most of their customs, the rules imposed by our parents. Especially the secrecy. For instance, you hardly ever let my friends come over, because you don’t want them to see how messy the house is, how we live.”

  “Well—“

  “I know. I understand. You fear the knock on the door from the child welfare agency, whatever. But then again, you’re not so afraid, and you know it. You’ve planned out what you’d say, excuses you’d make, how you’d break me out of a foster home if it came to that, where we’d flee, how we’d live, new identities, plastic surgery. But first of all, if any child welfare person, or any person at all, ever tries to move in on us, on this, what is now your turf, your project, you go absolutely ballistic, you lose your mind.”

  “I do not.”

  “Allow me to recount a scene from just last week, between you and one of your best friends:

  ‘So he was at Luke’s the whole time, but he hadn’t called. For about five hours. I had dinner ready, was waiting around, was going out of my brain. And he had just flaked. Drives me insane. He needs to learn the value of my time, that I cannot wait around all day for his call. I’m going to ground him.’

  ‘Oh, the poor thing. Don’t ground him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s sorry, I’m sure—‘

  ‘Are you telling me what to—‘

  ‘No, I just think that...’

  ‘See, that’s just such bullshit, that you think that you have a say in something like that, just because I’m young. I mean, you would never contradict some forty-year-old mother, would you?’

  ‘Well—‘

  ‘Well don’t. Because I am a forty-year-old mother. As far as you and everyone else is concerned, I am a forty-year-old mother. Don’t ever forget that.’

  “Poor Marny, one of your oldest friends. She meant nothing by it, just an innocent comment. She’s probably the last person in the world who would ever be insensitive, but see, you’re always ready to fight. You’ve got that single-parent rage, that black-single-mother defensiveness, combined with your own naturally ready-be-indignant/aggressive tendencies, inherited from our mom. I mean, tonight, when you finally go to bed, you’ll lie there and think of things you’d do to peop
le who would come in here and do me harm. You’ll picture all manner of murders in my defense. Your visions will be vivid and horrifically violent, mostly you and a baseball bat, with you taking out on whoever would invade our sanctuary the cumulative frustration you feel from all of this, our present situation, the walls and parameters set up already, the next ten, thirteen years laid out, more or less spoken for, and also the general anger you feel, have felt not just since Mom and Dad died—that would be convenient if it were true—but it began well before that, you know this, the anger coursing through the marrow of kids growing up in loud, semi-violent alcoholic households, where chaos is always... What is it? What’s funny?”

  “You have toothpaste on your chin.”

  “Where?”

  “Lower.”

  “Here?”

  “Lower.”

  “Still there?”

  “No, you got it.”

  “The point is, with me—“

  “It looked like a bird dropping.”

  “Fine. Ha ha. Anyway, with me you have this amazing chance to right the wrongs of your own upbringing, you have an opportunity to do everything better—to carry on those traditions that made sense and to jettison those that didn’t—which is something every parent has the chance to do, of course, to show up one’s own parents, do everything better, to upwardly evolve from them—but in this case, it’s even more heightened, means so much more, because you get to do this with me, their own progeny. It’s like finishing a project that someone else could not, gave up on, gave to you, the only one who could save the day Do I have it right so far, big man? And best of all, for you at least, you finally have the moral authority you’ve craved, and have often exercised, ever since you were very young—you used to go around the playground chastising the other kids for swearing. You didn’t drink alcohol until you were eighteen, never did drugs, because you had to be more pure, had to have something over the other people. And now your moral authority is doubled, tripled. And you use it any way you need to. That twenty-nine-year-old, for instance, you’ll break up with her after a month because she smokes—“

  “And the beret. The purple beret.”

  “That’s not the reason you’ll give her.”

  “Fine, but that’ll be justified. Please. For obvious reasons. It’s incredibly hard, hearing those sounds, smelling the smells, watching the kissing of that paper, the sucking from those tubes—“

  “Yes, but it’s the way you’ll tell her, the way you’ll sort of shame her, mentioning that not only did your parents die of cancer, your father of lung cancer, but that you don’t want the smoke around your little brother, blah blah, and it’s the way you’ll say it, you’ll want to make this poor woman feel like a leper, particularly because she rolls her own cigarettes, which even I admit is kind of doubly sad, but see, you want her to feel like a pariah, like a lower form of life, because that’s what, deep down, you feel she is, what you feel anyone tethered to any addiction is. And now you feel that you have the moral authority to pass judgment on these people, that because of your recent experiences, you can expound on anything, you can play the conquering victim, a role that gives you power drawn from sympathy and disadvantage—you can now play the dual role of product of privilege and disenfranchised Job. Because we get Social Security and live in a messy house with ants and holes in the floorboards you like to think of us as lower class, that now you know the struggles of the poor—how dare you!—but you like that stance, that underdog stance, because it increases your leverage with other people. You can shoot from behind bulletproof glass.”

  “All this energy from you! Were you drinking soda before bed?”

  “And poor Dad. Why not just leave him alone? I mean—“

  “God. Please. So I’m not allowed to talk about—“

  “I don’t know. I guess so. If you feel you have to.”

  “I do.”

  “Fine.”

  “I can’t see past it.”

  “Fine. So you’re going to stay up tonight, most of the night, like every night, staring at your screen—remember when you were a senior in college? You were in that creative writing class, and you were writing about these deaths, not two months afterward; you were writing about Mom’s last breaths even, one paragraph describing your mother’s last breaths, and the whole class kind of not knowing what the hell to do with you, they were like, ‘We-hell now...,’ didn’t know whether to talk about the story, all of them sitting there nervously with their Xerox copies of it, or to send you to counseling. But that did not deter you. You have been determined, then and since, to get this down, to render this time, to take that terrible winter and write with it what you hope will be some heartbreaking thing.”

  “Listen, I’m tired.”

  “Now you’re tired. You were the one who started talking. I’ve been ready to sleep for half an hour.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  “Night.”

  I kiss him on his smooth, tanned forehead. The smell of urine. He has a tan line, a U of pale skin where the fastener of his hat, worn backward, covers his forehead.

  “Do the thing,” he says.

  I do the thing where I rub his back quickly, through the comforter, to make the bed warm.

  “Thanks.”

  “Night.”

  I leave the light on, close his door halfway, and walk out to the family room. I straighten the rug, a frayed oriental we inherited. This rug, so faded and sorry, and the long thin one in the kitchen, are unraveling, thread by thread. Toph and I run on them, and when we do the threads grow, ooze out like tendrils. I don’t know what to do to keep them intact. I wonder about protecting them, having them restored, and know that I will not bother. I tuck a wormlike blue thread, seven or eight inches of it, underneath.

  I fix the cover on the couch. That couch was perfect and white in our living room in Chicago, but got so filthy so quickly here, streaked with black at the corners where we lean our bikes, the pillows yellowed and stained with grape juice, chocolate. We had rented an upholstery cleaner, but its effect was laughable. The couch will continue its decline, as will all the things we’ve been given. Maintenance is impossible. There is a pile of shoes near the door that I should straighten. The floor needs to be swept, but I’m discouraged before I begin—the dirt is intrinsic to this house, is in the molding and the grouting, in the nooks and the carpet and the flaws in the structure. There are holes in the floorboards, and the baseboards are crooked. I had tried a vacuum, borrowed one from the neighbors, and it had worked well, but the place was dusty, the floor covered with stuff the next day. Now I only sweep.

  I get one of Toph’s popsicles out of the freezer. There is noise next door. I step out onto the back porch. Robert and Benna, the neighbors to our left, are having a thing, maybe ten of them out there on the deck.

  “Hey there,” Robert says. He’s always friendly, always cheerful, thoughtful, caring. It’s unnerving.

  He’s a few years older and lives with Benna, who’s about thirty and runs a battered-women’s shelter. Their friends look like Berkeley grad students.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Come on over!” he says.

  “Yeah, come and have a drink,” says Benna.

  “No, I can’t,” I say. It’s warm, the moon is out.

  I talk about the work I have to do, Toph being in bed, etc. I lie about a phone call I’m waiting for because I don’t want to have to come over, meet their friends, explain our story, why we live here, the whole thing.

  “C’mon, just a drink,” says Robert. He’s always asking me to come over. As friendly as he and Benna are, radiating welcome, I feel more affinity with the black man/blond woman couple to our right, with their unmoving white curtains, their snugly closed door, the two Dobermans. They rarely talk to anyone, usually stay out of sight—it’s so much easier.

  I thank Robert and step back inside.

  I retreat into the living room, the room I have painted burgundy. The walls a
re cluttered with ancient pictures of our parents, grandparents, their parents, and their various diplomas, notices, portraits, needlepoints, etchings. I sit on the couch I found in the shed in back, a velvety thing, maroon, its springs broken, wood chipped. Most of the antiques we kept are here—the chairs, the end table, that beautiful cherry desk. It’s dark. I need to cut the bushes in front, because they’ve grown so high that almost no light comes through the front window, even during the day, making it so dim here, always, rubiate, the walls blood red. I haven’t found a lamp yet that will fit the room.

  So much suffered in the moves, from Chicago to the hills, from the hills down here. Picture frames broken, glass rattling in all the boxes. We’ve lost things. I’m almost sure there’s a rug missing, a whole rug. And so many books, our grandmother’s. I had been keeping them in the shed in back, in the boxes we packed them in, until I went in there, after four months or so, and found a leak in the roof; most of them were soaked, mildewed. I try not to think of the antiques—the mahogany bookshelf, scratched, or the circular end table with the nicks in it, the needlepoint-covered chair with the cracked leg. I want to save everything and preserve all this but also want it all gone—can’t decide what’s more romantic, preservation or decay. Wouldn’t it be something just to burn it all? Throw it all in the street? I resent having to be the one—why not Bill? Beth?—who has to lug all this stuff from place to place, all the boxes, the dozens of photo albums, the dishes and linens and furniture, our narrow closets and leaky shed overflowing with it all. I know I offered to keep it, insisted on it, wanted Toph to be able to live among it all, be reminded— Maybe we could store it until we have a real house. Or sell it and start over.