A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  He is looking through the drawers.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Clothes, fuckface. I’m getting out of here.”

  “You can’t just leave. You’re drugged and everything.”

  “Oh please. I can do what I want. I’m going home.”

  “I’m telling the nurse. You’re— You’re supposed to stay overnight. And then I stay here until three a.m. or so, when they say that you’re safe and sleeping fine, and then with heavy heart I finally go home, to Toph, to more obligation. Then I come in tomorrow and visit you in the psychiatric ward, and then—“

  “Listen, dipshit, screw it. This is such fucking garbage. I’m just supposed to lie there with my bruised shins and everything, while you get to play the dutiful friend, always there for me, ooh, ooh, all responsible, while I’m lost and worthless... Listen, fuck it. I want no part of that. Find someone else to be symbolic of, you know, youth wasted or whatever.”

  “Listen, John—“

  “Who’s John?”

  “You’re John.”

  “I’m John?”

  “Yeah. I changed your name.”

  “Oh. Right. Now, why John again?”

  “That was my dad’s name.”

  “Jesus! So I’m your dad, too. Fuck, man, this is just too much. You are such a freak!”

  “I’m a freak? I’m a freak? Fuck you I’m a freak.”

  “Okay, Vm the freak, Vm the freak. Whatever. But I didn’t ask you to broadcast all this—“

  “What the fuck are you talking about? You’re the one who put yourself in here in the first place! You’re telling me you took a handful of pills in front of me and two cops and you didn’t want attention? Fuck you.”

  “But that doesn’t mean—“

  “Yeah it does.”

  “It does not.”

  “Listen, I give you the attention you want, and have been giving it to you for years, listening to you ramble about every fucking up and down you have, about how they wouldn’t let you join that one gym, and about this breakup and that, fights with Meredith and whoever else... I mean, it’s not really interesting stuff, I have to tell you, but I’ve been listening, all along. I mean, I know you have your therapist convinced that you’ve had the worst life of all time—and I can’t believe you really told her you had been abused as a child, you fucking liar!—but you know, your current crop of problems, and this new drinking thing—it’s all just boredom. Emphasis on the bore part. It’s bor-‘mg. You’re bored. You’re lazy. I mean, every single thing is so boring—alcohol, pills, suicide. I mean, no one will even believe this shit, it’s so fucking boring.”

  “So leave it out then.”

  “It’s not that boring.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “Whatever. This is mine. You’ve given it to me. We’re trading. I gave you the attention you wanted, I bail you out, when you spend three days in the psych ward, and say how you’re still thinking of doing it, I’m the one who comes in and sits on your bed and gives you the big pep talk—anyway, the point is that because of all that, all the shit I put in for you—now I get this, this is mine also, and you, because you’ve done it yourself, made yourself the thespian, you have to fulfill that contract, play the dates, go on the road. Now you’re the metaphor.”

  He’s quiet. He has a pair of scrubs in his hand that he found in a cabinet. He tosses them onto the counter.

  “Fine. Put me in the fucking book.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not just doing this for me?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not really.”

  “Whatever. I’ll get back onto the bed, lie down and everything. You’ll have to tie me down again.”

  “I will.”

  “And give me more of that morphine, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure. Sure. Listen, I really appreciate this.”

  “I know. Get me that tube.”

  “Here.”

  “Thanks. Now fix the blanket.”

  “Here.”

  “Okay.”

  “This is going to be great. You’ll see.”

  John has to spend three days in a psychiatric ward. He calls me, and I call back. The phone rings twelve or thirteen times. An older man answers.

  “Hello?”

  He whispers it.

  “Hi. Is John there?”

  “Who?”

  “A guy named John. Tallish guy, blondish hair.”

  “Oh, no, no. No one’s available at the moment.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, everyone’s in group. They’ll be in group for an hour at least. I had to leave group to answer the phone. They asked me to leave and answer the phone.”

  It dawns on me that I’m talking to a patient.

  “Well, can you take a message?”

  Long pause. “I’m not sure if I’m allowed to. Wait.”

  The phone is dropped loudly; I can hear it swinging from its cord. After a full minute or so, he picks it up, breathing heavily.

  “Okay, I think I can risk it.”

  I ask him to tell John I called.

  “Okay, John called.”

  “No, Vm calling John.”

  “Oh. Oh.” He is fretting. “You’re calling John. Does he know you? Are you a relative?”

  “No.”

  “Are you his father?”

  “No.”

  “Well you can’t call if—“

  “Okay, I’m his dad.”

  “No you’re not. You just said—“

  “Listen. I’ll call back. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Oh, thank you!”

  I come by later in the afternoon.

  I am led to the door, and sign the registry. Down the hall is a common room, with blue carpet, a few couches, and a butcher-block table. It looks a little like a seventh-grade classroom. John is through the first door on the left, lying on his side, hands between his legs, on a bed in a dark room. A blanket covers his feet.

  I sit on the bed opposite.

  “So?”

  “Do you smell it?” he asks.

  “Smell what?”

  “Can’t you smell it?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “The other guy couldn’t find the toilet last night.”

  “What other guy?”

  “My roommate, the old black guy out there.”

  “Oh.”

  “All last night, on and on. He was moaning, tapping on the window, crying. He was saying, ‘I’m dying, somebody please help me, I’m dying.’ It was unbelievable.”

  “Was he dying?”

  “No, he wasn’t dying. He was taking a dump!”

  “I thought you said he was by the window.”

  “He was. He couldn’t find the bathroom, so he let ‘er go out right there, standing by the window.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then he got all quiet, and in the morning, there was shit everywhere. It had gone down his leg, and onto his shoe, and during the night he had walked around—“

  “Okay, fine.”

  “There were shit footprints in the room, in the hallway.”

  “Okay. So...”

  “They moved me to another room for a while. Then they cleaned the floor and moved me back.”

  “I can’t smell anything.”

  “Yeah, they sprayed or something.”

  “It actually smells nice.”

  “They tied me to the bed.”

  “When?”

  “For most of the next day, after I came in.”

  “Huh.” He wants me to be outraged, or impressed. I am not sure which. “Is that standard?”

  “It drove me fucking crazy. Look at my arms.”

  He shows me his wrists, rubbed raw, bluish.

  “And look.”

  He shows me his ankles, red and splotchy.

  “I mean, have you ever been tied up?”

  “Let me think.” I think of a few tre
nchant things I could say. “No, I’ve never been tied up.” Then:

  “But I’ve also never pretended to commit suicide.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “No, fuck you.”

  “You think that was an act? You and that fucking nurse. She was such a fucking bitch. She called me ‘Martin Sheen.’”

  “You don’t look like Martin Sheen.”

  “She meant it like acting. Like I was acting. Apocalypse Now.”

  “Oh. I’ve never seen that.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “Not all the way through. Not the part she’s talking about.”

  I look at him for a second.

  “You look more like Emilio.”

  He gets up on his elbows to look at me.

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “I know.”

  “They tied me up because they thought I might do it again.”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “Because I said I would.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  The feces man walks in. His skin is purple and gray. He waves. He sits for a minute on his bed, smoothing the sheet with his palm. Then he gets up and shuffles out.

  John leans toward me, whispers.

  “See how he walks? They all do that. The Thorazine shuffle.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know I’m locked in.”

  “I figured.”

  “As in, I can’t leave, even if I want to.”

  “Yeah, well...”

  “I mean, that’s weird, right, that these people, who I don’t even know, can prevent me from leaving? It’s weird, just on a philosophical level, right?”

  I agree that it is weird.

  “I’m so tired,” he says.

  “Me too,” I say, perhaps too quickly. “We’re all tired.”

  He brings his knees to his chest.

  “No, I’m really tired,” he says.

  He rolls onto his side, his back to me.

  He wants to be encouraged.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. I can’t believe he’s going to make me give him the speech. I am livid that he’s going to make me give him the speech. I do it, piecing it together from times I’ve seen it done on TV and in movies. I tell him that there are many people who love him and would be crushed if he were to kill himself, while wondering, distantly, if that is the truth. I tell him that he has so much potential, that he has so many things to do, while most of me believes that he will never put his body and brain to much use at all. I tell him that we all have dark periods, while becoming ever more angry at him, the theatrics, the self-pity, all this, when he has everything. He has a complete sort of freedom, with no parents and no dependents, with money and no immediate threats of pain or calamity. He is the 99.9th percentile, as I am. He has no real obligations, can go anywhere at any moment, sleep anywhere, move at will, and still he is wasting everyone’s time with this. But I hold that back—I will save that for later—and instead say nothing but the most rapturous and positive things. And though I do not believe much of it, he does. I make myself sick saying it all, everything so obvious, the reasons to live not at all explainable in a few minutes on the edge of a psychiatric ward bed, but still he is roused, making me wonder even more about him, why a fudge-laden pep talk can convince him to live, why he insists on bringing us both down here, to this pedestrian level, how he cannot see how silly we both look, and when, exactly, it was that his head got so soft, when I lost track of him, how it is that I know and care about such a soft and pliant person, where was it again that I parked my car.

  VIII.

  We can’t do anything about the excrement on the floor. At the Might office, we are having a problem with the excrement on the floor. The fecal matter has been coming over the toilet’s porcelain lip and onto the tile, then under the door, and there is now a peninsula of brownish sewage in our main work area, which we would complain about, and have something done about, if we were still paying rent. But we can’t call anyone to fix anything because the landlord condemned the building four months ago, when it was deemed needy of seismic retrofitting, and no one, especially him or her, knows we’re still here. All the other tenants have moved out, but because no one ever formally told us the plan, or issued any sort of official letter, and because Randy Stickrod is out of town—we have not seen Randy Stickrod for a while—we are squatting.

  We’re still not paying contributors, or part-time staffers, much less ourselves. And even though we are able to use the magazine as a vehicle to answer some long-held questions—Can you drink your own urine? Which butterflies can be safely eaten?—the perks are not justifying the work, and it’s all kind of depressing. We are beat.

  We are weak. Marny’s nose has been running for two years now. Moodie, who seems to have a perpetual case of mono, keeps a disconcertingly large jug of vitamin C on his desk. We are kept alive only by a constant influx of volunteers and interns, a half dozen at a time. We meet and recruit someone named Lance Crapo (long a), apparently an heir to one of the biggest potato-farming families in Idaho. Because he tucks in his shirts and is willing to handle the magazine’s business aspects, from advertising to the ever-wondered-about business plan, within a month he’s our vice president and acting publisher. And soon we get something named Zev Borow, just out of Syracuse University, who has moved from New York to San Francisco to work, for free, for us.

  Like most of the new young help, Zev has more energy than we know what to do with. We send him on errands, we have him file things. We run out of things for him to file, until Paul bets us that he can get Zev to file a gigantic box of record company publicity photos—hundreds of them, none of which we’ll ever need, much less in alphabetical order.

  It takes him almost a week, but he does it, entertaining us all and for a time distracting us from the fact that in many ways we’re starting to hate each other—our frustrations about our stagnancy spilling over into the way we talk to each other—“No, I bet that’ll get done real soon, sport”—our self-loathing turned against each other.

  Appropriately enough, Zev, largely oblivious and still optimistic, comes up with the next cover story: The Future.

  The opening essay:

  The Future: Is It Coming?

  It’s fun to wonder about the kinds of things that will happen in the future. Who will do what? What will happen? Those are big questions that are really hard to think about. But try something smaller, like food in The Future: What will we be eating? Will food taste the same, or will it taste different? Will it still be chewy? What about clothes? Will they be tighter, or looser?

  We ask a variety of experts what they foresee happening in 1995, and beyond:

  The future of window cleaning

  by Richard Fabry, publisher, American Window Cleaner:

  “More and more people will notice professional window cleaning

  tools...after all, they are pretty. Many are made out of brass and

  have a nice 3-D sculptured look to them—almost as if they deserve

  to be shown off in a museum.”

  The future of beverages

  Susan Sherwood, editor, Arizona Beverage Analyst:

  “Overall, people will be drinking less, but drinking better in ‘95.”

  Zev writes to William T. Vollmann, soliciting his predictions for the year. Vollmann writes back, in crayon, on the other side of the letter, indicating that he’d like to contribute, but would like to be compensated. Because we have never paid anyone for anything, and have less money now than ever before, we ask if there’s anything nonmonetary we can do. He says okay, this is what he wants: a) One box of .45-caliber Gold Saber bullets; b) Two hours, in a warm, well-lit room, with two naked women, to paint them, in watercolor.

  Zev runs to the gun shop on Second Street, and one of our part-time assistants, a bartender named Michelle, says she’ll model and will bring al
ong a friend. Vollmann drives down from Sacramento with a friend, who sits with Moodie in his kitchen as Vollmann paints Michelle and friend in the living room.

  We wait until after the session to hand over the bullets.

  The issue’s gravamen is “Twenty in their 20s,” a ha-ha both on ourselves and on a recent New York Times Magazine spread heralding “Thirty Under Thirty,” a list that included no one we had heard of, or imagined we would ever hear from again. Most important, it did not include us, and that was perturbing. Our intro:

  Slack this: Might presents twenty young movers, shakers and money-makers who can’t even spell “slack.” Twenty of the hottest, hippest, hard-rockin’est twentysomethings ever to throw on a pair of used jeans and Doc Martens. Twenty who earned their inheritances. Twenty who know that being young, having fun and drinking Pepsi is more than just a slogan. Twenty who’d like to buy the world a Coke, and are already lining up at the counter. Your twenty, my twenty, our twenty.. .Might’s twenty.

  In our spread, all of those to watch are famous, rich, attractive, well dressed, and more often than not, the progeny of the already famous, rich, attractive, and well dressed. Brent, Moodie’s roommate, dresses as Lt. Sanders, jet-set son of the Colonel. Our newest intern, Nancy, poses as Juliette Tork, rock-star-hopeful daughter of the Monkees’ Peter. There is of course a Kennedy (we call him Tad; he has had run-ins), a surname-less model, a black filmmaker (“I want to make fairy tales for black folk”), a Hasidic rave organizer (Schlomo “Cinnamon” Meyer), and a rapper from the Upper East Side (hit single: “Double-Parking Bitch”). For no good reason at all, we send another Scud in the direction of poor Wendy Kopp:

  Cindy Kahn, 25, Founder, Streets for America Streets for America, an idea born from Kahn’s senior thesis at Harvard, is now a multibillion dollar nonprofit corporation. Placing recent college grads on the streets of America’s most dangerous cities, the program’s purpose is to reinvigorate the country’s police force with fresh faces, open minds and good breeding. “All the regular cops seemed to be so stupid and ugly,” says Kahn. “It was time to bring some class to law enforcement. You can bet hardened criminals will sit up and take notice if the person who’s cuffing them is well-dressed and, say, has a master’s from Yale.”

  And of course we take a swipe at Lead or Leave: