A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  “Hey,” he yells from his room.

  “What?”

  “Did you lock the front door?”

  He usually locks the front door.

  “I will.”

  I walk to the front door and turn the bolt.

  V.(WHERE IS YOUR BROTHER?)

  Outside it’s blue-black and getting darker. There is a man walking up the steps. He is unshaven and is wearing sandals and a poncho made from, one can be almost sure, hemp. I do not want to talk to this man. I have talked to the man from the California Public Interest Research Group (CalPIRG). I have donated to the couple from the women’s shelter, and to that little boy from the youth group, to the woman from the Green Party, the kids from the Boys Club, the pair of solemn teenagers from SANE/FREEZE. The Berkeley-ness of Berkeley, so charming at first, is getting old.

  The bell rings.

  “You get it,” I say. “I’m not here.”

  “You’re right next to it.”

  “So?”

  “So?”

  “Topber.”

  He gets up, sock-footed. I am given a look.

  “Tell them you’re home alone,” I say. “You’re an orphan.”

  He opens the door and says something to the man and suddenly the man is in our living room. What did I just say—

  Oh. The baby-sitter. Stephen.

  Stephen is a grad student at Berkeley, from England or Scotland. Or Ireland. He is quiet, bores Toph to tears, and rides a bicycle with a huge wicker basket attached to the front. Beth found him at school; he had posted a flyer.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hello,” he says.

  He brings his bicycle into the living room.

  I go to my room to change. I come out, tell him that I’ll be back by midnight—

  “Actually, can you stay until one?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Good. Then let’s say one.”

  “Fine.”

  “But I might be early.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Depends on what happens.”

  and I tell him that Toph should be in bed by eleven.

  This is our third time with Stephen, who is replacing Nicole, who we liked a great deal—Toph liking her almost as much as I was hoping to like her—but who graduated a few months ago and had the temerity to move away. There was also Janie, the Berkeley student who insisted on having Toph come to her Telegraph Avenue apartment, and who was fine until one night, after she and Toph had been playing soccer in her hallway with a balloon—he usually came home drenched with sweat—she had joked, “You know, Toph, you’re fun to hang out with. We should go out sometime, get a few beers...”

  Thus Stephen.

  I kiss Toph on the head, which is covered by a baseball hat, worn backward. The hat smells like urine.

  “Your hat smells like urine,” I say.

  “It does not,” Toph says.

  It does.

  “It does.”

  “How could it smell like urine?”

  “Maybe you peed on it.”

  He sighs, takes my hands off his shoulders.

  “I didn’t pee on it.”

  “Maybe by accident.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up. I’ve told you that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Stephen,” I ask, “will you smell this hat and tell me if it smells like urine?”

  Stephen does not think the question is a serious one. He smiles nervously, but does not make a move to smell the hat.

  “Well then,” I say. “We’ll see you later. Toph, we’ll...well, I guess we’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Then out the door, down the steps and into the car and as I’m backing out of the driveway there is the usual euphoria—

  Free!

  which pretty much overtakes me. Often I laugh out loud, giggle, bang the steering wheel a few times, grinning, put the right tape in the stereo—

  This time it lasts for ten, twelve seconds.

  Then, at the moment that I am turning the corner, I become convinced, in a flash of pure truth-seeing—it happens every time I leave him anywhere—that Toph will be killed. Of course. The baby-sitter was acting peculiar, was too quiet, too unassuming. His eyes had plans. Of course. So obvious from the beginning. I ignored the signals. Toph had told me Stephen was weird, repeatedly had mentioned his scary laugh, the veggie food he brought and cooked, and I just shrugged it all off. If something happens it’ll be my fault. He will try bad things on Toph. He will try to molest Toph. While Toph is sleeping he will do something with wax and rope. The possibilities snap through my head like pedophilia flashcards—handcuffs, floorboards, clown suits, leather, videotape, duct tape, knives, bathtubs, refrigerators—

  Toph will never wake up.

  I should turn around. This is stupid. We don’t need this kind of risk. I don’t need to do this, don’t need to go out. It’s silly, juvenile, inconsequential. I need to go back.

  But I have to do this. There is no risk.

  But there is risk.

  But the risk is worth it.

  I’m so, so evil.

  I open the window, turn up the volume. I pass two cars at once and get on the highway and speed toward the Bay Bridge, doing 70 in the left lane, along the water.

  Through the toll, the light, onto the ramp, onto the bridge. Now I can’t turn back. The Oakland shipyards to the left, a billboard encouraging the saving of water.

  I will come home and the door will be open, wide. The babysitter will be gone and there will be silence. And at once I will know. There will be the smell of everything being perfectly wrong. At the steps up to Toph’s room there will be blood. Blood on the walls, handprints soaked in blood. A note to me, from Stephen, taunting; maybe a videotape of everyth— I will be to blame. His little body, bent, blue— The baby-sitter was standing there and he had already known what he would do—as they stood there, I felt something wrong, knew something was off, I knew it was wrong... and still I left. What does that say? What kind of monster— Everyone will know. I will know, I will not fight. There will be a hearing, a trial, a show trial—

  How did you come to meet this man, this baby-sitter?

  We found a posting, on a bulletin board.

  And how long did your interview of him take?

  Ten, twenty minutes.

  And that was enough?

  Yes. I guess so.

  You didn’t really know anything about this man, did you?

  I knew he was Scottish. Or English.

  Or Irish.

  Could have been.

  And you left your brother to go where?

  Out. To bars.

  To bars. And what was at these bars?

  Friends, people, beer.

  Beer.

  There was a special, I think.

  A special.

  On the beer. Certain kinds.

  Oh, you know, I just wanted to be out. I didn’t care much what we did. You have to understand that at that point I was getting out once a week, tops, maybe once every ten days, and so when I could get a baby-sitter on a night when anything was happening I threw myself at it, would leave early so I could be out for a while, would have the baby-sitter come at six, seven, whatever, and I’d race into the city, to eat there with whoever was eating—maybe they’d just be sitting around, at Moodie’s usually, watching cable, getting ready, and I would be there, on the couch, with a beer from the fridge, savoring every minute, not knowing when it would come again, and they would be casual, having no idea what it meant to me, even when I’d be a little manic about it all, a little overeager, laughing too much, drinking too quickly, getting another from the fridge, no problem, okay, hoping for something to happen, hoping we’d go somewhere good, anything to make the night count, make it worth it, justify the constant red/black worry, the visions—I felt so detached sometimes, went for weeks at a time without really being around people my age, like living in a country where no one understands your
words—

  Over the bridge, the crosscutting wind floods in. I turn the volume up. Far to the left, down and half a mile south, tankers float in the black bay, waiting to touch Oakland.

  Is it bravery to stay?

  Or bravery to go?

  A betrayal. There will already be ambulances there. There will be lights. The neighborhood will pop and glow like a carnival— But quiet. Just the lights, the whispering. Everyone asking where I am. Where are the boy’s parents? They what? Well, where is the boy’s brother? He what?

  To the right there is Treasure Island, then Alcatraz, then the inlet, the ocean. Through the tunnel we are spaceships, the cars changing lanes, hungry, searching, shooting through the barrel, quick and lateral like water bugs—and after the tunnel there is the city, the thousands of Lite Brite tubes stuck through the night’s paper black.

  There will be a small casket. I’ll be at the service but everyone will know. They’ll try me and convict me and I’ll be killed in a chair. Or hanged; I’ll be hanged because I’ll want the pain, slow, the veins burning, bursting—

  Oh but that embarrassing erection at the end—

  In the brown light of the cavernous bar, Brent is still trying to name his band. At the moment they’re called The Gods Hate Kansas, after a ‘60s science fiction novel, but that name has been held for almost six months, and it’s time for moving on. He is straw-polling the alternatives, which he has scribbled on a long, thin piece of paper, like a little scroll:

  Scott Beowolf

  Van Gogh Dog Go

  Jon & Pontius Pilate

  Jerry Louis Farrakhan

  Pat Buchanitar

  Kajagoogubernatorial Process

  Spike Lee Major Tom Dick and Harry Connick, Jr. Mints

  Most of the names are like this, the melding of two or more cultural elements, ideally one high and one low, the smugly clever, utterly meaningless result. There are other, mostly local, bands that have planted their flag in this territory—JFKFC; Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments; Prince Charles Nelson Reilly.

  Brent and I, and everyone else, are standing on the bar’s second level, looking down upon the heads of the hundred or so below us, while drinking beer that has been brewed on the premises. We know that the beer has been brewed on the premises because, right there, behind the bar, are three huge copper vats, with tubes coming out of them. That is how beer is made.

  Everyone is here: Brent, Moodie, Jessica, K.C., Pete, Eric, Flagg, John—all these people from high school, from before high school, from grade school, earlier, all from Chicago, all just out of school, all living out here—it’s the manifestation of an inexplicable sort of mass migration, about fifteen of us out here, with more of us landing in San Francisco every month, all for different reasons, for no particular reason. Certainly no one has come to take advantage of this job market, which is anything but enticing. For now, we’re all scraping by with temping, with anything. Jessica is nannying in Santa Rosa; K.C. teaches sixth grade at a Catholic girls’ school; Eric’s in grad school at Stanford; and Pete, as part of some dubious Jesuit volunteer corps (cult?), is living with a half-dozen other conscripts in Sacramento, where he works for the Prisoners’ Rights Union, editing a popular periodical called The California Prisoner.

  The presence of all these people is both surreal and immeasurably comforting. They constitute the only ties Toph and I still have to home, because already, less than a year since we left Chicago, we have lost touch with each and every one of our parents’ friends, even our mother’s friends. Which was odd, Beth and I felt—we expected our progress to be more closely followed, to be checked up on. But it’s just as well. Those conversations and epistolary exchanges, when they happened, early on, were always awkward, fraught, their worry for us palpable, poorly hidden, their distrust (we thought) implicit.

  These people, though, these friends, they create for us and for Toph a willy-nilly world of faux-cousins, -aunts, -uncles. They eat with us, do the beach with us; the girls, K.C. and Jessica, buy kitchen implements for us, come over to casually straighten up, make beds, clear the dishes from the sink and the bedrooms, are available at any time for questions regarding the boiling of corn, the unthawing of frozen beef. And all have known Toph since he was born, held him when he was bald, and so do not question his presence at movies, barbecues, at any social gathering. And he knows them, too, can discern their voices on the phone, their cars in the driveway, remembers most of the words to our high school talent show act, the one we all rehearsed in the basement for months. At that point Toph was maybe four, five years old, but he was there every time, would beg our mother to stay for every minute, watching us from the stairs, giggling wildly. He knew every word.

  And so I try to entice these people out to Berkeley as often as possible, want them around, as much for my own amusement as for continuity, to step in as extended family, to play roles: the aunt who cooks, the aunt who sings, the uncle who can do the trick where he puts the stack of quarters on his bent elbow and catches them in his palm, a snap of the arm. And they do come out, stay out, as much by choice as not. Moodie, for one, is over all the time, lately has been sleeping on the couch at least three nights a week. We have been close since high school, when we shared foot odor powder, compared acne remedies—we were both abused by it— and drank Miller Genuine Draft in his basement— bedroom—supra-pad. Picking up from our highly successful high school fake I.D. business—we were the first in town to utilize the then-new Macintosh technology, obliterating the competition, those still using Polaroids and posterboard—and from my back room we’ve begun a tiny graphic design operation, complete with laser-printed letterhead and raised-shiny-ink business cards ($39-99 for 500), catering to clients, much like our fake I.D. patrons, who want things done quickly, cheaply, and don’t mind so much if they’re riddled with errors and—

  “Thank you.”

  John has gotten me a beer.

  John is broken and I’ve known him forever.

  He’s got a nice tan, as usual. He always liked to be tan.

  He grew up in the neighborhood, and our parents were close. I’ve known him since I knew anyone. There are pictures of us under the kitchen table eating popsicles, of me in their backyard, drinking out of the bird feeder with a straw. Together, at nine, ten years old, we would painstakingly write letters to the makers of Lego, suggesting design improvements and offering ideas for future products. Enfield, Connecticut is where the Lego headquarters sit—I still remember. And I was as much his parents’ child as he was ours, and even in junior high and on, when we had less and less to say to each other, we were still inextricably tied, were stuck with each other, our closets full of the other’s borrowed clothes.

  His parents are gone, too. His mother, tall, blond, loud, had done cancer our second year in high school, a huge mess, bringing him even more snugly into our family. Five years later, after a year at Penn, he transferred to Illinois, to be closer to his father, who was not doing well, had had a stroke, had been treated for depression— And a year later, he went too, an aneurysm, such a fucking mess we were—it was only a few months after my own father, that whole year cloudy for both of us; we didn’t even see each other that much—it just made it worse, the sight of each other reminding us only of what we had in common, and the wondering if we needed to ask how the other was doing but ending only in mumbling, hands-over-mouths, nervous sniffing—

  After his dad’s funeral, John had missed only a few days of school, was back on Wednesday.

  “You’re back,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  He had nowhere else to go.

  “What’s with the knuckles?” They were cut, scabbed.

  “Oh I broke a window. You know.”

  I said I did know. Did I know?

  And now he’s out here, living in Oakland for now. After graduating he tried Chicago first, but tired of constantly running into people from Champaign. They were all there, the whole school— so few make it out of the state. To mos
t, Chicago was Oz, anything beyond it was China, the moon.

  “So. How’s Toph?” he says.

  “Fine,” I say.

  Pliers, handcuffs—

  “Where is he?” he asks.

  Paint thinner, vaseline—

  “He’s home. Baby-sitter.”

  Other stuff—stuff he brought from Scotland!—

  “Oh.”

  I change the subject.

  “How’s the job search going?”

  “I don’t know. Good maybe. I just saw a job counselor.”

  “A what?”

  “A job counselor.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s a guy who helps you figure out—“

  “Okay, I know, but how does it work, exactly?”

  “You talk to him about your interests, he gives you a test—“

  “Like, a multiple-choice test?”

  “Yeah. It took about three hours.”

  “He gives you a test to find out what kind of job you want?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Why would I be kidding?”

  We watch the crowd below. They are wearing clothes they bought secondhand in the Mission or, for twice the price, in the Haight. They have unbuttoned the first two buttons of their tight synthetic-fibered shirts, worn over T-shirts with logos for nonexistent companies. They have shaved heads or carefully messy Westerberg hair. There are young men up from Stanford in light blue oxfords with shortshorn, shiny heads, hard with gel. There are small women in big shoes, with snug, ribbed shirts.

  Everyone is talking. People have come with friends and are talking with the friends they’ve come with. They’re out with people from work. They are looking into the faces they see every day and are saying things they’ve said a hundred times. Like us, they have in their hands beer that has been brewed on the premises.

  “Should we order some food?” we/they say.