A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  “That was a nice note you faxed.”

  “Thanks.” Relief. It’s done. The eagle has—

  “But we’re really looking for a gay couple.”

  It’s unbelievable. With the San Francisco rental market tightening to an all-time high—driven, in large part, by the endless flow of Real Wof/^/-worshiping postcollegiates—we are treated like vermin. We are below gay couples. We are below married couples, unmarried couples, female roommates, male roommates. Landlords do not answer our calls. We see one place, a light-filled two-bedroom in just the right neighborhood, which we know we are the first to see—we are always the first—and though the pudgy landlord is himself a single parent, and though we hand him all our bank documents proving our net worth and ability to pay this rent, he gives the apartment to—

  “Who?”

  “A doctor.”

  We are appalled. We are shocked, shocked that in this day and age two such as we would be discriminated against, solely because one of us is twenty-five, dubiously self-employed, makes only $22,000 a year, and lives with his twelve-year-old brother, who, it says on paper, pays almost half the rent—

  Oh, rental stories are not interesting.

  But suffice it to say we had to debase ourselves thoroughly to get this place, in a quiet neighborhood, close to his new school, close to a movie theater, close to a grocery store from whence we can walk the whole way home, carrying our bags without car or cart. Like men. In the apartment is a huge west-facing window for Toph and a retirement-community-facing window for me, which is depressing but fitting if you really think about it, and I relish the sacrifice I have have made, giving him the bigger room, the light-filled room with the bay window. And we gorge ourselves on San Francisco. We’re suddenly a five-minute bike ride from the beach, Baker Beach, rolling with dunes, the Pacific on the left and the Golden Gate on the right, and we’re a few blocks from the Presidio, choked with pine and eucalyptus, recently decommissioned and all but abandoned. We bike through it, a ghost town of white stucco and wood set against lawns of parrot green, everything sprawled loosely, casually, on some of the most ridiculously valuable property in the world. There is no sense to the Presidio, its areas of raw forest, unkempt baseball diamonds near million-dollar homes, but of course there is no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It’s the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons. Why not pink, purple, rainbow, gold? What color for a biker bar on 16th, near the highway? Plum. Plum. The light that is so strong and right that corners are clear, crisp, all glass is blinding—stilts and buttresses and turrets—the remains of various highways—rainbow windsocks— a sexual sort of lushness to the foliage. Only intermittently does it seem like an actual place of residence and commerce, with functional roads and sensible buildings. All other times it’s just whimsy and faith. Just driving to and from Marny’s, in the Castro, is epic, this hill and that hill—oh, the sorrow of flat, straight Illinois!—this vista and that, always the hills, the curves, the maybe our brakes will fail, the maybe someone else’s brakes will fail—it’s always a kind of adventure in faded Technicolor, starring a vast cast of brightly dressed losers. Always there is something San Franciscan reinforcing all everyone has come to think about the city, The City, they say—the homeless people wear bathing suits and do handstands on the sidewalk, and shamelessly defecate, unmolested, on busy street corners. Activists throw bagels at police in riot gear, bicyclists are allowed to choke Market Street traffic but are arrested for trying to ride over the Bay Bridge. The first time we visit Haight Street a man staggers past us, bleeding profusely from the head, followed ten seconds later by another man, also bleeding from the head, yelling, apparently at the first bleeding man. He is holding a tennis racket. There are the endless signs of the concerns of its residents, the different things considered objectionable, grapes and granulated sugar among them, to cars in the city, skateboards downtown, tunnels through Marin. Street signs are amended:

  STOP

  DRIVING

  STOP

  MUMIA’S EXECUTION

  The buses are attached to strings or wires or something, and driving behind them requires often waiting, having reading material on hand, for these buses do not for long stay attached to the strings or wires—suddenly there will be a spark, and the bus will stop and the driver will get out, walk to the back of the bus, and yank on the string or wire, smiling cheerfully, oh ha ha, because here there really isn’t all that much of a hurry, for anyone, anywhere, least of all for those who take buses. There are eighty-year-old twins who haunt Union Square, and the alleys breathe urine, and teenagers slum in the Mission, the Haight—“Brotherman! How ‘bout a slice of that pizza?”—and the wind tunnels off the Pacific, speeding down Geary, through the Richmond, attacking Toph’s west-facing bedroom window.

  And at the new apartment, the sliding is good. The layout is long and narrow, and there is a hallway connecting all the rooms, and because the hallway is wood-floored, and about thirty-five feet long, we can, with the door to the building’s stairway open, pick up three or four feet in momentum, so, with those three feet and another sixteen or seventeen needed to build sufficient speed, it still allows for a good twenty feet or so of superior sliding, even more if Toph’s door is kept open and the chair at his desk moved.

  But Toph is the only one in his new school who lives in an apartment. Many classmates live nearby, but all own their homes, huge perfect houses in Presidio Heights, with maid’s quarters, driveways, garages. When I see the school roster, and see that “#4” after our address, I hate it. I want to call the school and have them remove it. He’s started seventh grade and, outside of the one teacher, a kind man who feels it necessary to ask him once a day how he feels, all is well and normal and he has immediately become unbearably popular. Within a month there were three bar and bat mitzvahs, two birthday parties, various other social events, and I am relieved, enormously relieved despite the endless driving involved, for this activity, the popularity, buffering the shock of the move.

  I drive him to a get-together at the house of a girl in his class. When, three hours later, I pick him up from the party, he is shaken, bewildered.

  There has been Spin the Bottle.

  “Really?” I say. “Spin the Bottle? I had no idea that still existed. I mean, I don’t think / even played that, ever.

  He had been surrounded. It had been only him, one other boy, and six girls. He had been trapped, set up. He was the new boy and they were fighting for dibs.

  “So did you kiss anyone?”

  “No.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because I hardly knew them.”

  “Well, sure, but...”

  “I didn’t feel like it.”

  I don’t know what to say. Most of me, the vast majority of my being, wants to spend the next few weeks talking only about this, not only siphoning every possible detail out of him, drunk as I am with vicarious curiosity, but also overwhelmed with the need to rattle him for being such a pussy. I weigh my options carefully and, because I am a master of strategy, decide that the only way to get any information at all is to add as little as possible in the way of, say, ridicule to the conversation. I am careful also not to project my own regrets on him, the opportunities missed, the girls never kissed, the junior high dances I missed—the fact that I do not want him to have these regrets, any regrets. We discuss the subtleties of the evening all the way home, and at home on the couch, long past his bedtime, while watching Saturday Night Live, and after that.

  “Were they cute?”

  “I guess. A few. I don’t know. A couple weren’t from my school.”

  I am enthralled, hoping not to jinx it, his openness with regard to the girls, because it’s one of the first times he’s talked to me about it, given that I usually giggle and snicker, and so, accordingly, he usually chooses to share these matters with Beth.

  But Beth, as a first-year associa
te, has lately been too busy. We are seeing her less and less, which is a problem, but not as much of a problem as it would have been even a year ago. Toph is at the age where I feel like I can leave him for a few hours, and because we are only twelve blocks from his new school, he can walk. I do drive him the first few times, and when he’s too late to get there himself, but otherwise, because I have been up until three at the computer, changing the very face of the world, I sleep through his morning. He wakes up and makes his lunch, his breakfast, ingests it with the cartoons and then, when he’s leaving, I often, easily once a week, raise my head from the pillow long enough for:

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Good.”

  “You better get going, you’re almost late.”

  “I know.”

  “What’d you eat?”

  “Waffles.”

  “You eat any fruit?”

  “An apple.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How you getting there?”

  “Bike.”

  “Your chain still broken?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wear the helmet.”

  “Bye.”

  “Wear it!”

  Because his chain has been stuck, or broken, for weeks—we’ve gotten it fixed twice but it quickly reverts to its useless, congealed form—he has been doing what amounts to a coasting sort of thing to school, where, without sitting on the seat, he has one foot on one pedal, and pushes off with the other, using the bike like a skateboard, or scooter. He had described it to me, but I had not seen the routine until one day, when, after he left, I was walking to the bathroom to pee before going back to bed, when I noticed his lunch was still on the kitchen table. I ran out after him, and he was gone so I drove to the school, not expecting to see him en route but there he was, heading toward the first traffic light, at California and Masonic. It was unbelievable. He was doing the thing with the pedals and the pushing off, like riding the bike sidesaddle—it looked like he was joking. No normal child would ride a bike like that. And of course he wasn’t wearing his helmet. I honked and stopped him at the corner.

  “Your lunch.”

  “Oh.”

  I was too tired to say anything about the helmet.

  I feel wretched with guilt much of the time, know in my heart that because I do not make him breakfast and drive him to school, he will grow up to skin rabbits and recreate with crossbows and paint guns— But then again, in comparison to some of the other parents, I’m Dr. Spock. There is, for example, the case of the one divorced mother of a kid in Toph’s class. About fifteen of us, parents, are out in the Marin Headlands one afternoon, standing by our cars in the parking lot, waiting to pick up the kids, all of whom have been on a two-day camping trip. The mother, tanned and leathery, with long blond hair and pink lipstick, wearing a long rugby jersey over white stretch pants, is talking, blithely and while gesturing extensively, about how she deals with pot in her home, vis-a-vis her other son, a sophomore in high school:

  “I figure if he’s gonna smoke, he’s gonna smoke.” She shrugs elaborately. “So I let him fire up at home. At least I know where he is, what he’s doing, that he’s not driving around or something.”

  Though she is talking to another parent, she is glancing my way. I have the feeling she expects me, because I am closer to her high schooler’s age than she is, and, because I have creative facial hair, to be sympathetic to her point of view.

  But I’m too stunned to speak. She should be jailed. And I should raise her children. Maybe I’m the only one qualified to raise all these kids—so many of these parents are too old, dusty. Worse are those like her, who dress like their children and use their expressions. But “fire up”? Who says “fire up”?

  I tell Beth the story, and she is entertained, as always, by the inadequacies of our fellow parents. She and I are collaborating peacefully, tag-teaming, doing the parent-teacher conferences together. We are a circus family, a trapeze family, with perfect timing, great showmanship, tight green outfits.

  We decide holidays on a case-by-case basis. Church is out completely, as are most of the related holidays. Thanksgiving is observed halfheartedly, since neither Toph nor I care much for turkey, and don’t eat stuffing and that cranberry-Jell-O-in-a-can job. But Christmas we do. Bill, Beth, and I get copies of Toph’s list and split it up. Beth handles the stocking and the clothes. Bill handles a few things from the list, but otherwise takes the opportunity to buy for Toph books he finds vital to the development of any budding libertarian—one year bringing both William Bennett’s Book of Virtues and the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.

  A few days before, Bill comes up from L.A., and we try as best as we can to set up the presents in the way our mother did. At Christmas, as with all holidays we still bother with, we celebrate it in a way that’s at once an homage to our parents and their way of going about things, but more often a vicious sort of parody.

  Our mother was a Christmas extremist. Weeks of eight-hour shopping days, lists tendered and revised and revised again, presents pushing outward from the tree, almost to the foyer—a relentless effort to top previous years, to make it look not just joyous or extravagant, but obscene. My father, a fan but a less outwardly enthusiastic one, had a ritual, wherein he, because he was the father goddammit, and had been up half the night putting the goddamn presents together, would rise late, and would come down, at oh maybe ten or so, not to watch us open our presents, but to make for himself and eat a full breakfast. Coffee, danish, bacon, orange juice, grapefruit, newspaper, everything—and at the most leisurely of paces. As we waited, cross-eyed with anticipation, kids from the neighborhood, most of whom had been up since four or five, would frolic outside our windows with new sleds, taunting us, riding by on their Green Machines, pushing the pedals with new moon boots, shining in the winter sun, utterly fabulous.

  This Christmas we’re dying because Beth and I have been doing the routine. Bill has been sitting, disapproving but still laughing, arms crossed, shaking silently. The routine, which begins after we’ve woken up and before Toph has started unwrapping, goes like this:

  beth: Okay, you can open them now.

  me: No, actually, wait. {Picking lint from shirt, then slowly, slowly untying and then tying shoes) Okay...now.

  beth: Actually, hold on. I have to use the bathroom. {Sounds of water from the faucet. Then silence. Then flushing. More water. Then tooth-brushing)

  beth: {Reappearing from the bathroom, refreshed, straightening sweater) Okay, I’m ready. Go ahead.

  me: Wait a sec, wait a sec. You know what would be delicious about now? Grapefruit.

  BETH: Mmm. Grapefruit.

  me: Let’s have some grapefruit, then you know what? We could all take a nice walk.

  beth: That would be so nice.

  me: Fresh air, some exercise...

  beth: And closer to God...

  ME: And closer to God.

  beth: We can have Christmas tomorrow!

  beth: ^Thinking, clicking tongue) Oooh. Tomorrow’s no good. Thursday?

  me: Thursday’s bad. And the weekend’s tight. Monday?

  At this point Beth and I are choking, crying, contorted, looking to furniture for support. We knock ourselves out.

  Toph is waiting, unimpressed. He’s seen the routine before.

  Addressing Toph’s presents is up to me, and the night before, I do everything I can to spruce up the task, to forge new ground. Some I address to fictitious recipients, or to other kids in the neighborhood. Many of Toph’s presents I address to myself. Those that actually bear his name are misspelled. Or else I do what I do when filling out school forms: I get his name wrong, writing “Terry” or “Penelope,” then cross it out and write his real name, smallish, below. I sign a few from “Us,” a few from “Santa,” but prefer this:

  from: God.

  He doesn’t know who to thank. He does not want to seem overly cavalier wh
en reaping the booty, and we exploit his eagerness to please. A package of colored clay is opened.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  “Thank who?”

  “I don’t know. You?”

  “No, not me. Jesus”

  “Thank you, Jesus?”

  “Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.”

  “He did?”

  I turn to Bill. Bill is staying out of it.

  “He did,” I say. “Beth, did he not?”

  “Indeed he did. Indeed he did.”

  Work becomes ever more depressing, routine, improved only by the occasional near-death experience. To wit: It is any day at all when I am at my desk, working on a spread debunking raves, one in a long line of contrarian articles pointing out the falsity of most things the world believes in, holds dear. We have debunked a version of the Bible written for black kids. We have debunked the student loan program. We debunk the idea of college in general, and work in general, and marriage, and makeup, and the Grateful Dead—it is our job to point out all this artifice, everywhere, and the work is rewarding, bringing truth to an unsuspecting—

  I am kicked from inside. A kick with metal-tipped shoes. I am at my desk. It’s like a cramp, but more like a spoon poking from my insides out, jammed from inside, a spoon trying to get out of me, fuck. I am used to odd pains, usually caused by too much caffeine with too little sustenance, but usually not during the day— they come in the morning, or late, late, when I stare at the screen and think of that winter—

  I continue to work. But when the pain should be subsiding as pain always subsides it does not; it grows, the pain, and thinking it might have something to do with my bowel movements or lack recently thereof, I stand to walk to the bathroom and just as my eyes see the hall to the bathroom the picture is jarred and then the landscape is tilted, and then I see the office from a Batman camera angle—that’s new!—and then everything is blue— The carpet. I’m on the floor. Now there are five spoons, smaller spoons in the same place, kind of twisting and digging, clumsy people in there, dancing with pointy shoes, stomping even, my right side the dance floor. I come to the realization that I am...I am writhing on the carpet. I look up at the couch, maybe three feet away, and must make it to the couch. The couch is my home, the couch is the answer. If only I can... reach... the... couch...