A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  “But you know,” she’s saying, “it could take five, ten years to get anything like that together. And it’ll cost so much money... I mean, even if I started right now... it’s the waiting that’s the killer—the waiting to be wherever you plan to be. The groping through the days, the temping or postproduction on Flipper—“

  “Everything takes forever.”

  “Right. To know exactly what you want to be doing, to know exactly what you’d make, given the means, given some time, all the projects lined up, the body of work, have it all mapped out— who will be involved, what the office will look like, where the desks will go, couches, hot tub...”

  “It should be easier.”

  “It should be automatic.”

  “Instantaneous.”

  “Every day a world-clearing sort of revolution, a bloodless one, one more interested in regeneration than any sort of destruction. Every day we start with a fresh world—or, better yet, each day we start with this world, the one we know, and by nine, ten a.m., we’ve destroyed it.”

  “You just—“

  “I know. I just contradicted myself. So okay, there would be a certain amount of destruction, but it wouldn’t be at anyone’s expense, or against anyone’s will.”

  “Right, right, and...?”

  “Let’s say that every day, every morning, millions of people, on cue, take the whole stupid thing apart, all the cities and towns, with hammers and saws and rocks and bulldozers and tanks—whatever. Shake the Etch-A-Sketch. We just converge on the buildings like ants, then wire the things and knock them down, knock everything down, every day, so the world, by noon or so, is flat again, wiped clean of buildings and bridges and towers.”

  “I have dreams like this, where we move things.”

  “Yeah, yeah. And after the taking apart, when the canvas is blank—“

  “Then we start over. But not start over in the Rome-wasn’t-built-in-a-day sort of way. Not even in the rebuilding-Germany sort of way. I mean, we wake up, tear the world down to its foundations, or below that even, and then, by three in the afternoon, we’ve got a new world.”

  “By three?”

  “Yeah, two or three, depending on whether it was winter or summer—we’d have to have enough daylight to enjoy it. I mean, I think we could do something there. Like, imagine, if a hundred million people, or more, way more—I mean, worldwide, there’s gotta be two billion people like us, right?”

  “Two bil—“

  “Yeah, so you take all these people, and you spread the word that from now on, every day we create everything from scratch.”

  “You mean, like a more just and equal—“

  “Yeah, sure, more justice and everything, but as much as that, all the political and economic reasons to do it, I mean, beyond that, really, is the feeling of—I mean, imagine walking among the ruins, you know? Wouldn’t that be phenomenal? Not ruins like dead people everywhere or anything; I mean, just ruins, like things disassembled, cleared away, so every day you’d be left with just a bare, pure landscape—you’d have to have lots of trucks and trains to haul it away, up to Canada or something—“

  “And every day you’d start from scratch, and everyone’d get together and say, Hey, let’s put some buildings there, and, um, over there, let’s have a five-hundred-foot stuffed hippo, and there, in front of that mountain, a huge fucking, uh, something else.”

  “Sure, sure. But you’d have to be able to accelerate everything, have everything be a bit easier than it currently is, in terms of construction and everything; you’d need, like, huge robots or something.”

  “Sure, robots, of course.”

  “I’m dead serious about all this.”

  “I am too. I’m with you.”

  “We can do this.”

  “Sure.”

  “We have to get people interested.”

  “Everyone we know.”

  “Even the flakes.”

  “John.”

  “Right. Good luck.”

  “I know. You know what he was talking about tonight?”

  “You saw him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I owe him a call.”

  “He was talking about how he had just taken some test, an aptitude test, to tell him what kind of job he should have, so he could be told what to do with his life—“

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s brutal.”

  “We need to change him.”

  “Inspire him.”

  “Him, everyone.”

  “Get everyone together.”

  “All these people.”

  “No more waiting.”

  “Means through mass.”

  “It’s criminal to pause.”

  “To wallow.”

  A.H.W.O.S.G.

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  “To complain.”

  “We have to be happy.”

  “To not be happy would be difficult.”

  “We would have to try to not be happy.”

  “We have an obligation.”

  “We’ve had advantages.”

  “We have a platform from which to risk.”

  “A cushion to fail back on.”

  “This is abundance.”

  “A luxury of place and time.”

  “Something rare and wonderful.”

  “It’s almost historically unprecedented.”

  “We must do extraordinary things.”

  “We have to.”

  “It would be obscene not to.”

  “We will take what we’ve been given and unite people.”

  “And we’ll try not to sound so irritating.”

  “Right. From now on.”

  I tell her how funny it is we’re talking about all this because as it so happens I’m already working to change all this, am currently in the middle of putting together something that will address all these issues, that will inspire millions to greatness, that with some high school friends—Moodie and two others, Flagg and Marny— we’re putting something together that will smash all these misconceptions about us, how it’ll help us all to throw off the shackles of our supposed obligations, our fruitless career tracks, how we will force, at least urge, millions to live more exceptional lives, to {standing up for effect} do extraordinary things, to travel the world, to help people and start things and end things and build things...

  “And how will you do this?” she wants to know. “A political party? A march? A revolution? A coup?”

  “A magazine.”

  “Oh... right.”

  “Yeah,” I say, looking out to the ocean, basking in its applause. “It’s going to be huge—we’ll have a big house somewhere, or a loft, and there’ll be an art gallery, and maybe a dorm—“

  “Like the Factory!”

  “Yeah, but without the drugs, the cross-dressers.”

  “Right. A collective.”

  “A movement.”

  “An army.”

  “All-inclusive.”

  “Raceless.”

  “Genderless.”

  “Youth.”

  “Strength.”

  “Potential.”

  “Rebirth.”

  “Oceans.”

  “Fire.”

  “Sex.”

  Our mouths are all over each other. All the talk of plans and new worlds... We sit upright as we kiss, and at first we kiss like friends, with our eyes open, almost laughing. But as our hands start moving, we begin to believe, and our eyes close, and our heads turn this way and that, we’re kissing each other but so much more, kissing like warriors saving the world, at the end of the movie, the last two, the only two who can save everything—and because we are too post-drunk tired to keep our heads upright with our eyes shut, we recline, and soon the towel underneath Meredith is just a crooked snakeskin and we have taken off our pants, the air cool where we are now bare. And sex, inevitable, will make us more powerful. A manifesto consummated under this great sky, the approval of the pounding sea—

  There’s noise
down the shore. I squint and can see a group of people coming our way, loud, emitting bursts of noise, shrieks of laughter. I set myself on my elbow to watch, squinting harder. A group of maybe six, seven, are fully dressed, with dark pants, shoes, hats. We move the towel from under Meredith’s head to over our naked lower halves. We will act casual. We fall back into an embrace, so they’ll leave us alone, not that they would ever bother us in the first place.

  The voices get louder, and closer.

  “Just wait until they go by,” I whisper into Meredith’s lips.

  “How far awa—“

  “Shhh.”

  Then louder and the scratching footsteps audible and then, instead of passing by, they are suddenly upon us. Legs everywhere. I look up. One has taken my pants and is rifling through them. He throws them toward the ocean. They are Mexican, Mexican American, teenagers. Four boys and three girls. Five boys, two girls. Men, women. Ages unclear.

  “What was you two doing?” a voice asks.

  “Naughty naughty!” says another.

  “Where’s your pants, stud?”

  Only female voices so far, strong accents. Naked from the waist down, we can’t even move. I hold the towel around both of us, disbelieving— What is this? This is the beginning of something very bad— The end?

  I look for my boxer shorts. They’re in the pants, by the water. I take the other towel, the one underneath us, pull it out, wrap it around my waist and stand up.

  “What the fuck are you d— Fuck!” Someone’s thrown sand in my eyes. My eyes are full of sand. I blink wildly, epiieptically. I stagger then sit down.

  “What the fuck—“ The sand is under my eyelids. I can’t open them. I’ll be blind.

  The girls are on Meredith.

  “Hey honey!”

  “Hey baby!”

  “Fuck you,” says Meredith. She is still sitting down, head in her knees. One of the girls shoves her.

  / am blind. I blink frantically, swatting the sand out of my eyes. while wondering if I am blind and if we’ll both be dead soon. What a stupid way to go. Is this how people die? Can we outrun them? I refuse to have these people kill us. Do they have weapons? No weapons yet. Toph, Toph. Blinking, tearing madly, I clear one eye out. I stand up again, get the towel back on, holding it around my waist like I’ve just gotten out of the shower.

  They are all around us, almost perfectly spaced, almost perfectly boy-girl-boy. Strange—

  One of the girls has come behind me and is trying to take the towel from my waist. It’s unclear what they want. I’m assuming already that the guy who went through my pants took my wallet. Now what?

  “Get the fuck away!” I want to swing at the girl. I scan the ground for my boxers. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “We don’t want nothing,” says a male voice.

  “Hey, you got any money?” says a girl.

  “You’re not taking any of our fucking money,” I say.

  Who are these people? One is smiling at me. A small guy with a fedora. I’m pushed from behind, trip on the towel and fall to the sand. Meredith is holding her knees. They’ve done something with her pants, too.

  They stand above us, grinning. There are laughs. There are six of them. Did one leave? Is Meredith crying? Three guys, three girls. The lights from the headlights behind them give everyone three, four shadows. Where did the other one go? There’s the one tall guy, a medium-sized guy, and a small guy, the fedora guy, who looks older. The girls wear skirts and black leather jackets.

  “Why don’t you just leave us the fuck alone?” says Meredith.

  The question loiters for a minute, lamely. Stupid question. This has just begun, surely—

  “Okay, let’s go,” says the short one.

  They start to—Jesus—walk away. All we had to do was ask? This is unbelievable.

  The short one, the oldest of the group, turns to us.

  “Hey listen, man, we was just goofing around. Sorry.”

  Then he jogs down the shore to catch up with the rest of them.

  It’s over.

  They are gone and I am soaring. Those motherfuckers! My head is clear and muscular and filled with blood. Something has happened. We’re alive, we’ve won! Powerful us! They were scared. We scared them off. They feared us. We won. We told them to go away and they did. I am the president. I am the Olympics.

  I find my boxers in the sand, cold, put them on. Then my pants. Meredith is putting on hers. I feel my pockets.

  “Fuck.”

  “Your wallet?”

  “Yeah.”

  They’re walking back the way they came, a hundred yards away now. I am barefoot and running feels good—my legs feel strong, light. My head is clear and straight. Are they armed? Toph, Toph. Will it get worse now? No, no. I am huge, I am Captain America. Halfway there I start yelling.

  “Hey!”

  Nothing. They are oblivious, disbelieving even.

  “Hey! Wait, goddammit!”

  A few stop and turn around.

  “Hold on!” I say.

  They all stop. They wait, watching me run toward them.

  Twenty feet before them, I stop, hands on my waist, breathing hard.

  “Okay, who took my wallet?”

  A beat. They look at each other.

  “No one took your wallet,” the fedora one says. He looks about thirty. He turns to his friends. “Did anyone take his wallet?” They shake their heads. These fucking people.

  “Listen,” I say, “what the fuck did you think you were doing? There’s going to be hell to pay if we don’t fix this shit up. “

  No one says anything. I nod to the short, older one:

  “Should I be talking to you about this? Are you the man?”

  The words come before I know them. Are you the man? I just said that. It sounded so good. That’s how people talk. But should I have dropped the Are in the question? You the man?—

  He nods. He is, apparently, the man.

  I motion for us to take a few steps aside, to talk. Come here. He complies. This is what one does. He is shorter close up. I look down to him, his face stiff and tan.

  “Listen, man, I don’t know why you guys were fucking with us, but now my fucking wallet’s gone.”

  “We didn’t take the wallet, amigo,” he says.

  Did he just say amigo? That’s so weird, so 21 Jump Street, that he’d actually say amigo —

  “Listen,” I continue, “I’ve seen all of you. I can identify you, every single one of you guys, and you’ll be in deep fucking shit if you’re caught.”

  He considers this for a second. My eyes burrow. / am the man!

  “So, what do you want?”

  “I want you to give me the fucking wallet back is what I want.”

  “But we don’t have the wallet.”

  The tall one hears him. “We didn’t take the fucking wallet.”

  “Well,” I say to all of them now, loudly, “before you came and started fucking with us, I had a fucking wallet. Then you come and start fucking with us, and now I don’t have a fucking wallet. And that’s all the fucking cops need to know.”

  The cops. My cops.

  The short one looks at me. “C’mon, we don’t have the wallet. I swear. What do you want us to do?”

  “I guess you guys are gonna have to come back and help me find the thing, because if you don’t, I’m gonna call the cops, and the fucking cops’ll pick you all up, and they’ll figure out where the fucking wallet went.”

  The small one looks at me from under the brim of his hat and then turns to his friends.

  “C’mon,” he says.

  And then they are following me.

  We walk back, me walking to the side to prevent any funny business, ambushes, to the spot where we had been. Meredith is standing, dressed and with a towel in hand. She doesn’t know what to make of this. They’re back?

  “All right, you better start looking. I hope you find it...” I pause as one of the girls throws me a disgusted look. “Beca
use otherwise you’re fucked.”

  They spread out and start looking, pushing sand around with their feet. I stand to the side, where I can see all of them at once, my hands on my waist, overseeing. I am the foreman, I am the boss. They lift and shake the towel we were lying on. Each one does it at least twice, the shaking of that towel. They shuffle around, picking up sticks, throwing them toward the water.

  “Fuck this!” says one of the girls. “We don’t have the fucking thing. We didn’t do nothing.”

  “Fuck you you didn’t do anything! That was assault, idiot! I mean, who do you think the cops are gonna believe? Two regular people sitting on the beach, or you people? I mean, sorry, but that’s the fucking truth. You guys’ll be fucked “

  I am the cop, a friendly but stern cop. I am helping them. I assume one of them still has the thing, that they’re just stalling. I have to figure out a way to scare them, to get the thing back. Then I—should I?—/ shouldn’t say that—okay, sure:

  “I mean, I don’t know what your status is with green cards and everything, but this could get really fucking ugly, you guys.”

  There is no visible reaction.

  They keep searching. Meredith starts looking, too, but I take her arm. “Don’t. Let them do it.”

  One of the girls sits down, sullen.

  “I sure hope you guys find the fucking thing,” I say, thinking that it’s best that I be talking the whole time. I decide to throw out my last ace. “This was my goddamn dad’s wallet you stole.” I’m not sure how much to tell them but because I want the wallet back at all costs—

  “And my dad just died,” I say. “It’s all I have of his.”

  And it is. He had so few things, personal things, and we sold the clothes, the suits—the wallet was the one thing I kept, outside of a small box of papers, some business cards, paperweights from his office.

  They keep looking. I look at their pants pockets, scanning for bulges. I briefly wonder if they’ll let me frisk them.

  “Listen man,” the short one says. “We didn’t fucking take it. What do you want?”

  I know the answer: I want the wallet, and then I want them in jail, and I want them miserable. I want them, all seven of them, or five of them, all of them, to be wearing gray uniforms that itch and chafe them as they sleep fitfully, on cots, their stupid heads full of regret, their cheeks wet with their weeping for forgiveness, forgiveness not so much from their simple God or jailer, but from me. They will be so sorry. Their tiny heads will implode with guilt and remorse. My dead father’s beautiful, frayed, soft leather wallet—