A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  So why are you here?

  I want you to share my suffering.

  You don’t seem to be suffering. I don’t?

  You seem happy.

  Well, sure. But not always. Sometimes it’s hard. Yeah. Sometimes it’s so hard. I mean, you can’t always suffer. It’s hard to suffer all the time. But I suffer enough. I suffer sometimes.

  Why do you want to share your suffering? By sharing it I will dilute it.

  But it seems like it might be just the opposite—by sharing it you might be

  amplifying it.

  How do you mean?

  Well, by telling everyone about it, you purge yourself, but then, because everyone knows this thing about you, everyone knows your story, won’t you be constantly reminded of it, unable to escape it?

  Maybe. But look at it this way: stomach cancer is genetic, passed more down the female side of our family than otherwise, but because according to Beth and me my mother was done in by dyspepsia, the dyspepsia caused by swallowing too much of our tumult and cruelty, we are determined not to swallow anything, to not keep anything putrefying down there, soaking in its juices, bile eating bile... we are purgers, Beth and I. I don’t hold on to anything anymore. Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It’s just not my thing anymore.

  But if the information is in the eyes of everyone you meet... Then there’s that much more sympathy coming back at us.

  But if 11 get old.

  Then I’ll move to Namibia.

  Hmm.

  I am an orphan of America.

  What?

  Nothing. Someone else said that, years ago.

  So about the dilution...

  This is where the lattice comes in.

  The lattice.

  The lattice that we are either a part of or apart from. The lattice is the connective tissue. The lattice is everyone else, the lattice is my people, collective youth, people like me, hearts ripe, brains aglow. The lattice is everyone I have ever known, mostly those my age or thereabouts—I know little else, know only six or seven people over forty, know nothing to say to them—but my people, we are still there, still able, if we start right now— I see us as one, as a vast matrix, an army, a whole, each one of us responsible to one another, because no one else is. I mean, every person that walks through the door to help with Might becomes part of our lattice: Matt Ness, Nancy Miller, Larry Smith, Shelley Smith (no relation), Jason Adams, Trevor Macarewich, John Nunes, on and on, all these people, the people who come to us or we come to, the subscribers, our friends, their friends, their friends, who knows who knows who, people who have everything in common no matter where they’re from, all these people know all the same things and truly hope for the same things, it’s undeniable that they do, and if we can bring everyone to grab a part of the other, like an arm at the socket, everyone holding another’s arm at the socket, and if we can get everyone to, instead of ripping this arm from the socket, instead hold to it, tight, and thus strengthening— Then, urn—Like a human ocean moving as one, the undulating, the wave-making—

  Ahem.

  Or like a snowshoe.

  A snowshoe.

  You wear snowshoes when the snow is deep and porous. The latticework within the snowshoe’s oval distributes the wearer’s weight over a wider area, in order to keep him or her from falling through the snow. So people, the connections between people, the people you know, become a sort of lattice, and the more people, good people, they must be good people, who know that they are here to help, the more of these people you know, and that know you, and know your situation and your story and your troubles or whatnot, the wider and stronger the lattice, and the less likely you are to—

  Fall through the snow. Right.

  That is a mediocre metaphor. Yes. I’m working on it.

  You have no problem being inside a fishbowl. I feel like I’m already inside a fishbowl.

  Why?

  I feel like I’m being watched at all times.

  By whom?

  I have no idea. I’ve always felt like people were watching me, and knew about what I’d been doing. I imagine it started with my mom, and the way she had of.. .she had amazing eyes, these small sharp eyes, always narrowing to a squint and tearing into you; she never missed anything, whether she was there seeing it or halfway around the world. She missed nothing. That’s why, for instance, I like bathrooms. I like bathrooms because usually while inside, I can be almost sure, at least more sure, that no one is watching me. I take great comfort in places where people cannot watch me— windowless rooms, basements, small rooms. I have a pretty good hunch that people are always watching me, or thinking of watching me. Not all the time, probably very rarely are they actually watching me, but the point is, the important thing, is that it could be anytime. That’s the crucial part, that at any time, someone could be watching me. I know this.

  How do you know this?

  Because I’m always watching people. When I watch people I too look through them. I learned that from my mother. To glance is not enough; eyes and brains together, acting like a flock of ravenous birds, flapping, tearing, poking...I know everything about people when I look at them for only a moment. I can tell from their clothes, their walks, their hair and hands, I know all the bad things that they’ve done. I know how they’ve failed and how they will fail and how miserable they are.

  And people are doing the same to you? Maybe.

  So what do you do?

  Stay inside. Bedrooms are safe sometimes, if the door is closed and the blinds are down, but if the watchers are in trees, they can see certain things. Windows are fine to look out but harrowing to stand in front of. Even if you check and find that there are no people watching, the people watching can be somewhere not immediately visible. They can be beyond the reach of the naked eye. People use telescopes, binoculars. I have used telescopes, binoculars. People can be in closets. Closets should be checked. Large cabinets should be checked—it only takes a second. And large trunks. Open doors are to be avoided. Bathrooms are good. The only problem with bathrooms is the possibility of one-way mirrors. Years ago I checked all the mirrors in our house, to make sure that there were no windows behind them, with people watching. There were none.

  You’re exaggerating.

  Okay, you want to hear a sad story? Last night I was home, listening to an album. A favorite song came on, and I was singing aloud, loud enough for it to matter but not loud enough to wake up Toph, sleeping in his bedroom adjacent, and as I was singing, I was moving my hands through my hair in a weird obsessive sort of way, like a slow-motion shampooing maneuver—it’s something I do with my hair when I am alone and enjoying music—and as I was singing and doing the slo-mo hands-in-hair maneuver, I messed up the words to the song I was singing, and though it was two fifty-one in the morning, I became quickly, deeply embarrassed about my singing gaffe, convinced that there was a very good chance that someone could see me—through the window, across the dark, across the street. I was sure, saw vividly that someone— or more likely a someone and his friends—over there was having a hearty laugh at my expense.

  That must drive you insa—

  Oh please. What would a brain do if not these sorts of exercises? I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind.

  Heh. Heh. Heh. Are you sure you want to be telling me all this? All what?

  About your parents, the paranoia...

  What am I giving you? I am giving you nothing. I am giving you things that God knows, everyone knows. They are famous in their deaths. This will be my memorial to them. I give you all these things, I tell you about his legs and her wigs—I do so later in this section—and relate my wondering if I should be having sex with my girlfriend in front of their closet the night of my father’s service, but after all that, what, in the end, have I given you? It seems like you know something, but you still know nothing. I tell you and it evaporates. I don’t care—how could I care? I tell you
how many people I have slept with (thirty-two), or how my parents left this world, and what have I really given you? Nothing. I can tell you the names of my friends, their phone numbers, but what do you have? You have nothing. They all granted permission. Why is that? Because you have nothing, you have some phone numbers. It seems precious for one, two seconds. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me. I give you virtually everything I have. I give you all of the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls I can show them to you without diminishing them. I can afford to give you everything. We gasp at the wretches on afternoon shows who reveal their hideous secrets in front of millions of similarly wretched viewers, and yet.. .what have we taken from them, what have they given us? Nothing. We know that Janine had sex with her daughter’s boyfriend, but...then what? We will die and we will have pro tec ted... what? Protected from all the world that, what, we do this or that, that our arms have made these movements and our mouths these sounds? Please. We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, like, say, masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more—more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.

  And you’re the snake?

  Sure. I’m the snake. So, should the snake bring it with him, this

  skin, should he tuck it under his arm? Should he?

  No?

  No, of course not! He’s got no fucking arms! How the fuck would a snake carry a skin? Please. But like the snake, I have no arms— metaphorically speaking—to carry these things with. Besides, these things aren’t even mine. None of this is mine. My father is not mine—not in that way. His death and what he’s done are not mine. Nor are my upbringing nor my town nor its tragedies. How can these things be mine? Holding me responsible for keeping hidden this information is ridiculous. I was born into a town and a family and the town and my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone’s. It is shareware. I like it, I like having been a part of it, I would kill or die to protect those who are part of it, but I do not claim exclusivity. Have it. Take it from me. Do with it what you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff.

  But what about privacy?

  Cheap, overabundant, easily gotten, lost, regained, bought, sold.

  But what about exploitation? Exhibitionism? Are you Catholic?

  No.

  Then why are you talking about exhibitionism? It’s a ridiculous term. Someone wants to celebrate their existence and you call it exhibitionism. It’s niggardly. If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.

  What about dignity?

  You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it. It’s never dignified, always brutal. What’s dignified about dying? It’s never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it’s fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.

  So it’s all fodder?

  As my mom was dying in the family room, I would periodically go into the living room, which, oddly enough, got most all the light the house received, and, sitting on the white couch there, amid all of her dolls, I would write what I would say at her service. I had the piece of paper hidden under the couch, a scrap of folded notebook paper. I would go there, fish it out from under the couch, and consider what I would write.

  And your mother was in the family room?

  Yes. She was there, at this point half-gone with the morphine. My sister and I expected her to go at any point, really, and so every morning—or anytime we had left her alone for more than half an hour—would race into the room wondering if she’d already be gone. Actually, we wouldn’t race into the room, not wanting to alarm her, annoy her, because she would immediately know what we were doing, so we would race to the family room and then we would stand, peeking into the room, watching her chest, fixating on her sternum, until it moved and we knew she was breathing. Sometimes it was an excruciatingly long wait, and other times, if she had a blanket over her or something, we would have to go further, would have to lean close and search her face for movement—that went on for weeks. But after a while, particularly when she had lost all consciousness, it was just her breathing, and we started wondering about timing.

  How do you mean?

  Well, you can’t help start wondering about timing things as well as possible. Like, everyone was home from college for Christmas break, and we really wanted it all to end before everyone went back. I wanted everyone there, had pictured it a hundred times, all my friends, in their suits and dresses, filing in, heads down, sitting as a massive group, in the middle. And as matter of fact, that winter break they were thinking the same way. They were hoping she’d go while they were home.

  But...

  But she just kept going and going. Beth started calling her the

  Terminator, which I thought was kind of tacky, but—

  You know, as we’re talking, I can see my reflection in the camera’s glass. And I can tell I don’t look right. I am sneering involuntarily. My lips curl, my forehead furrows. Jesus, I am not telegenic. That’s going to be a problem, isn’t it?

  So about the speech...

  Yeah, so I’d be there, writing the speech, on the couch, while my mother was in the other room. Because the couch was white, and I was always dropping my pens, I was writing in pencil, putting it in my mouth, revising, starting again. I wasn’t sure what angle to take. I didn’t know where to start. At her childhood? Should it be a biography of her? A few telling anecdotes? I began again and again. But what I settled on was more about what / felt about her death, and where it left me.

  Interesting.

  Yeah, at the time I figured it would be best that way. I let Bill talk a little about her life, about what a good mother she was, some specifics of her personality. He went off on one of his tangents, about how she always supported our collecting habits, how he had collected trains, I had collected bears, Beth dolls— Of course it seemed radically insufficient—I mean, how can that work, a life summed up in—so I was sitting there, and as Bill was talking, I was staring at Father Mike, our priest, to whom I was supposed to give a sign, a sign to indicate that I actually wanted to get up and speak, because in the days before the service I could not decide. But I had prepared a speech, had finished my bit the night before, late, in the dark, in the living room. And so as Bill was talking, I looked at Father Mike, and caught his eye, and even as I was giving him the nod to indicate that I did have something to say, and wanted to share it with the assembled, I immediately wanted to back out again and simply let the whole thing be over, so we could jump into the car, my father’s Nissan, it being packed and in the parking lot, and just drive to Florida, be at least halfway by midnight. B
ut then Father Mike was introducing me and I got up and...

  What? You just jumped.

  Nothing. Something just occurred tome. Anyway, when I spoke I filled everyone in on exactly how cheated we felt, / felt. But I was merciful. I said something to the effect that, you know, I could stand here and grouse about how she’ll never see my children, about how unfair it all was, her being taken a month after my father, about how hard it all was for us. But then I said, my voice getting shakier, that we shouldn’t think such sad thoughts, that we should just pick a bright star in the black sky and think of her, and then, to find another, close by, and think of my dad.

  Umm...

  Yeah, I know, I know. It’s horrible, it’s cheap and small. And

  worse, I drew a picture of her on her deathbed.

  But what does that—

  She was at that point long gone, in terms of consciousness. She mumbled every so often, sometimes sat up with a start, saying something, but otherwise it was just breathing, gurgling, the candles, her hot skin. And waiting, really. We sat there, day and night, trading places, Beth and I, with Toph downstairs usually, Beth and I sitting, watching, holding her hot hand, sleeping there, sometimes draped over her, waiting for the near-end, so we could gather and then wait for the end-end. And during it all, in the dark one night, sitting on a chair to her left, I felt compelled to draw a picture of her, with a red grease pencil on large drawing paper. I sketched it out first, lightly relating the rough shapes, making sure it all would fit on the page, making adjustments. It seemed like I would run out of room on the left. I moved her head farther to the right, so I could fit the whole pillow in the frame. I roughed out the loose shape of the bed, the metal frame. And then I started with her face, actually—I usually don’t start with the face, because if you can’t find a likeness it corrupts the rest of the drawing, I find—but her face this time was easy, it having a kind of simple geometry in profile, sunken as it was, just barely rising from her pillows, flat from whatever process it was that was making her face sink and flatten, shiny from the jaundice and the excretions coming through her skin, the excretions that would have been exiting her body elsewhere had the necessary systems been working. Then I drew the tubes, the IV, the bed’s aluminum railing, the blankets. When it was done, it was fairly accurate, a nice picture, with a good deal of detail in the middle, less as it reached the paper’s edges. I still have it, though it’s frayed on its sides... I’ve never been good about preserving drawings; I keep them, but abuse them. This drawing, for example, of maybe ten thousand I’ve done in classes or otherwise, could easily be the most important one I’ve ever done or will ever do, but I just looked for it and found it sticking halfway out of an old portfolio, torn at its corner. How can I be so careless with this memory of my mother? And why did I even draw it in the first place? I mean, what does that mean?