A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  This fucking guy.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  He just smiles. What am I doing here? I hate this guy.

  Or else he’s already done it.

  “Did you already do it?” I’m wired from the drive, the run up the stairs. “Did you already do it? Fuck you if you did, you fucking cocksucker.”

  There are pills on the table, loose, scattered on top of a batik tablecloth. I point to the pile, the pile just there like a little pill display, all spread out, like hard candy in a bowl.

  “What are these?” I ask, pointing. “What the fuck are these?”

  He shrugs.

  I scan the apartment. I’m like a cop. A police dog. A robot. I’m scanning for bad things—clues! I’ll save his life. I am his only chance.

  I go to the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet, dumping everything, more recklessly than I need to, throwing things. I knock over stuff in the shower even. It’s kind of fun. I come up with two prescription-looking bottles. Evidence! I stomp out and hover over him.

  “What are these?”

  He grins. That fucking smile.

  “What the fuck are these? Are these those?” I point to the table and back to the bottles. I read the labels. Zoloft. Ativan. Some other stuff. I know what Zoloft is, but have no idea what the Ativan is; it could be hemorrhoidal stuff—

  “All right, all right. Listen. You tell me right now what the fuck you took, dickwad, or I’m calling the cops.”

  Dickwad? Where did I get dickwad? I haven’t said dickwad for years. Need something more forceful—

  “I didn’t take anything,” he says, chuckling, amused by me. “Don’t sweat it. Don’t worry,” he says, with what seems to be exaggerated drunkenness. Asshole. “It’s cool. It’s mellow.” He’s really talking like this. I want to kick him in the head.

  “Then where are the rest of these?” I point to the pile of pills.

  He does a cute little shrug, his palms up and everything.

  “Fuck you, I’m calling the cops. They’ll figure it out.” I look for the phone. “Where’s your phone?”

  The phone’s on the wall. He’s always been neat. Even the empty wine bottles in his pantry are lined up in rows. I start dialing.

  “Don’t, don’t “ he says, excited suddenly, drawing out the second don’t. “I didn’t take anything. Ree-lax.”

  “Ree-lax?”

  “Yes, ree-laacks.”

  “Why are you talking like an asshole?”

  He does a gesture indicating drinking, the throwing back of a shot, the kind of gesture you make when you don’t have a drink in your hand. But because he does have a drink in his hand, he spills the wine, the whole glass, down his shirt.

  “Dumbshit.”

  I look at the bottle, almost empty. He’s alone and drinking Merlot in the afternoon. I have no idea who this person is. His shins are bruised, his hair bed-headed. What kind of person drinks wine by himself in the afternoon? And that swimsuit calendar! I’m calling anyway.

  “Aw, fuck you, I’m calling anyway. I’m not having your blood on my hands.” (Too.) I dial 911 and feel a little thrill—it’s my first time. A few rings and boom! an operator. I’m in charge! I have news! I have a situation! I tell the operator about this asshole—I give John the finger while telling her—who may or may not have taken pills. He probably took something, I add, to make sure she sends someone. I hang up and throw the phone at him.

  “They’re coming, stupid.”

  I pace around, looking for more clues. The kitchen. I bang open the cabinets, spill a clump of silverware into the sink. It crashes, a hundred cymbals.

  “Hey! What the fuck?” he says.

  “What the fuck?” I yell from the kitchen. “What the fuck? Fuck you, what the fuck.”

  I go back to the bathroom, look under the sink. Nothing. I throw the cabinet door closed. I am making as much noise as I can. I have the right. I’ll tear the place apart. I half expect to find anything now—guns, drugs, gold bullion. This is fiction now, it’s fucking fiction.

  I sit down on the floor in front of him, on the other side of his glass and chrome coffee table. A picture of his parents, a bad snapshot blown up too big.

  “They’re going to pump your stomach, dummy.”

  He does the cute shrug again, the little grin. I want to pop his skull like a grape.

  “What’s the problem? You broke up with someone?” I say, purposely not using Georgia’s name, driving the point home. “This is because you broke up with somebody? Don’t tell me this is because you stopped dating someone.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Fuck you, you don’t know what it’s like.”

  “What what’s like?” Suddenly it occurs to me that maybe this is our last conversation. He could be dying, the pills already drowning him, pulling him away. I should be nice. We should be talking about nice things. The drives in central Illinois, those miles, so straight, where you could drive eighty, ninety, the windows down, corn gone, just raw gray fields, where you felt like you were plowing through time itself, like you were a huge loud missile tearing the earth in half, leaving grateful ruin in your wake—but also knowing, we knew, we always knew, that really, at least seen from anyone else’s perspective, it was not that way. To cars going the other way we were a quick loud noise, a flash; seen from above—even a crop duster would have given you the perspective—we were nothing like that—not loud, not powerful, not affecting much at all, not leaving any ruin, not making any noise—we were just some little black thing puttering straight on the straight road, producing only the smallest buzzing sound, crawling through this flat, terrible grid.

  “So, what’s it like? I’ve had, you know, relationship problems,” I offer.

  “It’s not that. It’s this.” He points to his head.

  “What?”

  He lolls his head forward like it weighs a thousand pounds, He’s getting drunker every second.

  There is a dog barking outside. The dog is going nuts.

  “They’re dead,” John says.

  “Who?”

  He runs his hands through his hair. Oh the drama.

  “This is just stupid.”

  “So I’m not allowed—“

  “Right. You’re not.”

  “You could be getting raped on a Guatemalan hillside, you could—“

  “I could be getting what?”

  “Listen, all this—I mean, the drinking alone? The wine and pills and everything? You’re such a fucking cliche!”

  There’s a knock on the open door.

  “In here.”

  The cops are huge. They make the room tiny, filling it with black. There are two; they want to know what the problem is. But don’t they know? Didn’t the dispatcher—

  When I come to the part about how we don’t know what he took or when, I point to John with my thumb and then:

  Asshole does the cute shrug for the cops!

  But his eyes are starting to look nervous. Maybe he did take something. I almost feel for him now. Then I see him dead. In the emergency room, the doctors doing the thing with the electric things, the Clear! (thump) thing, his body thick and fishlike. Then I look at him. His hair looks best like this, long. The crew cut didn’t work. He’s almost pretty now, with his tan—

  Then dead again. It’s like one of those holographic cards, you turn and see one picture, turn back and see the other—

  He is telling them that there’s nothing to worry about, that he was just having some wine.

  “Don’t you two fellas have anything better to do?” John asks.

  But now I want something to happen. I want release. There has been this buildup, and now something has to happen.

  John reaches for the wine bottle, like he’s going to pour another glass, right here and now, have another nice glass of wine. One of the cops stops to watch, his pen in his mouth, looking so perplexed his eyes are almost crossed. John stops, puts the wine bottle back, and p
uts his hands in his lap.

  The other cop is writing things down in his pad. The pad is so small. His pen is really small, too. They seem too small, the pen and pad. Personally, I would want a bigger pad. Then again, with a bigger pad, where would I put it? You’d need a pad-holster, which might look cool but would make it even harder to run, especially if you have the flashlight attachment... I guess you need a small pad so it’ll fit on your utility belt— Oh, it would be so great if they called it a utility belt. Maybe I could ask. Not now, of course, but later.

  John is just sitting there, his hands clasped together, between his bony knees, as if waiting for a valentine. The cops’ walkie-talkies start fuzzing, talking, word comes that the paramedics are already on the way. We’re told John’ll be taken in either way, to be safe, and with that, it all becomes pretty mundane. The cops are casual. They have seen this kind of thing. I too am casual. I almost want to offer them food. I glance into John’s kitchen. There’s a plate of grapes. Could I offer you fellas some grapes?

  There’s a lunge and John grabs the pills on the table and swallows all of them.

  “What just happened?” one cop asks.

  There were about twenty-five. Incredible.

  “He just took the pills.”

  “What pills?”

  “The ones on the table.” What, are you people blind?

  “What the fuck is that?” I ask John. I want to open his mouth and pry the pills out, like with a cat who’s got a chipmunk—

  “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Now they’ll definitely pump your stomach!”

  He’s got his eyes closed now.

  “You dumbshit! Dumbshit!”

  The ambulance comes, another squad car. When we leave the apartment, John’s on a stretcher, it’s dark and the neighborhood is exploding with red and white, the lights, skipping along the surrounding buildings—flashlight tag.

  I follow in my car. I wonder which hospital they’ll go to. How do they decide? We are not headed toward the closest hospital. I have never been where this ambulance is going. The ambulance is going slower than an ambulance should be going. It means either that they are not too concerned about his situation, or that he’s already dead.

  I pull up to a light, next to a bunch of young black kids. Maybe they’ll shoot me. I’m in the zone of all probability. I cannot be surprised. Earthquakes, locusts, poison rain would not impress me. Visits from God, unicorns, bat-people with torches and scepters— it’s all plausible. If these kids happen to be bad kids, and have guns, and want to shoot someone for an initiation or whatever reason bad kids shoot people like me, it will be me, the glass will break and the bullet will come through and I will not be surprised. With the bullet in my head, I will drive my car into a tree, and as I am waiting to be pulled from the wreck, nearly dead, I will not panic or yell. I will think only: Weird, this is exactly what I expected.

  As we approach Ashby, I’m trying to remember that riddle, the one about the kid who’s sick, and the doctor can’t operate on him because the kid’s related to the doctor or it’s the doctor’s son and how can that be?— I can’t remember the fucking thing.

  I lose the ambulance at a light.

  When I get to the hospital, the doctor, a tired, ponytailed woman in her mid-thirties, comes to brief me, but is not sympathetic. “So you’re friends with the big actor?”

  I call Beth from the waiting room. She goes over to watch Toph. I have to stay until John’s stomach is empty.

  “How long will it take?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. An hour? Two?”

  I sit in the waiting room.

  And oh that Conan. That Conan is killing me. I’m watching the TV from across the waiting room, full of cheap chairs and loud with two children and their mother, a stout woman. They’re making so much noise I can’t hear Conan. Conan’s doing this Live Aid kind of thing, where he’s putting together a sort of benefit song, and he and Andy are arguing, because Conan’s being this huge prima donna, even though he can’t sing to save his life. I can barely hear over the shrieking of the kids. I move chairs so I’m closer. There. Now Sting gets into it—oh, that’s a nice touch, getting Sting in there—and he’s recording with Andy and Conan. Also that Springsteen drummer, the mailman-looking one with the frozen smile. I am chortling. It’s the funniest fucking thing—

  I start wishing I had a pen, some paper. Details of all this will be good. This will make some kind of short story or something. Or no. People have done stuff about suicides before. But I could twist it somehow, include random things, what I was thinking on the way to the hospital, about Indian summer, the doctor riddle, about watching Conan. That’s a good detail, the laughing while your friend is having his stomach pumped. People have done that, too. Probably on TV even, Picket Fences maybe. But I could take it further. I should take it further. I could be aware, for instance, in the text, of it having been done before, but that I have no choice but to do it again, it having actually happened that way. But then it will sound like one of those things where the narrator, having grown up media-saturated, can’t live through anything without it having echoes of similar experiences in television, movies, books, blah blah. Goddamn kids! The shrieking is the problem. It’s fine except for the fucking shrieking. So I’ll have to take it past that. I’ll convey that while I’m living things very similar to things I’ve seen happen before, I will be simultaneously recognizing the value in living through these things, as horrible as they are, because they will make great material later, especially if I take notes, either now, on my hand, with a pen borrowed from the ER receptionist, or when I get home.

  Maybe there’s one in my car.

  But getting it would be crass.

  So instead of lamenting the end of unmediated experience, I will celebrate it, revel in the simultaneous living of an experience and its dozen or so echoes in art and media, the echoes making the experience not cheaper but richer, aha! being that much more layered, the depth luxurious, not soul-sucking or numbing but edifying, ramifying. So there is first the experience, the friend and the threatened suicide, then there are the echoes from these things having been done before, then the awareness of echoes, the anger at the presence of echoes, then the acceptance, embracing of presence of echoes—as enrichment—and above all the recognition of the value of the friend threatening suicide and having stomach pumped, as both life experience and also as fodder for experimental short story or passage in novel, not to mention more reason to feel experien-tially superior to others one’s age, especially those who have not seen what I have seen, all the things I have seen. Another experience that can be checked off, like skydiving, backpacking through Europe, a menage a trois.

  Oh these fat kids. Look at these kids, these little porkers. Is that a genetic thing? Disgusting, the existence of fat kids.

  So I could be aware of the dangers of the self-consciousness, but at the same time, I’ll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can’t be articulated.

  Only caricatured.

  I go in to see him.

  He has a tube sticking out of his mouth, one out of his nose. The one in his mouth seems too thick, the setup almost lewd. His face is milky, drawn, as if the tube has drained more than his stomach, has taken everything, a sort of punishment. He’s asleep, sedated, morphine maybe, his head pointing up and to his left, in the direction of the respirator. It looks like his hands are tied to the bed.

  His hands are tied to the bed. The bindings are thick, black, Velcro. He must have resisted, or swung at someone.

  His legs are spread, his arms out, his left hand still looking tense, gripping something not there. Those little chicken legs of his, bruised up and down from bumping into furniture, drunk. And he’s barefoot—

  It’s too cold to be barefoot—

 
And the floor isn’t as clean as one would expect—

  Shouldn’t it be cleaner? They should clean—

  I could clean—

  I have seen this before, somehow, this room, I have been here, this room is the room my mom was brought to for the nosebleed, they brought her first to the emergency room, connected her, tran-fusions, pouring blood into her—

  But this room is much too big, too big and white. This huge room, separate from the rest of the ward, must have been built for more than one bed. As is, it is too dramatic, his bed centered in the floor, all this space.

  I am standing across the room, unsure whether I want to touch him, to get any closer. It won’t make a difference. He’ll never know. He’s asleep.

  You could put pictures up in a room like this. It would be nice to have some pictures up, like they have in a dentist’s office, something to look at while you’re being worked on. .

  But then you’d be dying, and the last thing you would see would be some LeRoy Neiman print from the 1983 Masters and that would be just too terrible, not that there could ever be any appropriate thing to see before you died—

  But if you really liked golf...

  They should leave the walls blank.

  I lean my shoulder against the wall then rest my head against it and watch for a while, palm on the white cinder block. He was such a skinny kid when he was little, always looked smaller, a few years younger because of it—but he was an amazing swimmer, just amazing, in the pool, in the ocean, a beautiful stroke. I try for a second, something to do, to time my breaths to his, watching his chest rise and fall, the rest of his body immobile, the hands in fists, the hands tied down, as the color continues to drain I watch the stupid fucking dickhead asshole sleep.

  Then he gets up. He is awake and he is standing, and pulling the tubes from his mouth, from his arms, the nodes and electrodes, barefoot. I jump.

  “Jesus fucking Christ. What are you doing?”

  “Fuck it.”

  “What do you mean, fuck it?”

  “I mean, fuck it, asshole. I’m leaving.”

  “What?”

  “Screw it, I’m not going to be a fucking anecdote in your stupid book.”