A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  We were caught unprepared. We assumed that they would take our word for it. {Well, if an obscure, error-filled magazine in San Francisco says so, then it must be true...) We didn’t think the makers of Hard Copy were sticklers for things like facts. A few minutes later, the producer called again.

  “The LAPD has no record of the murder.”

  “Oh. Well—“

  “Not that they would have to, but—“

  They wanted to believe it as much as we wanted them to.

  “Well,” we say. “Urn...”

  Twenty minutes later, he called again:

  “There’s no record of it anywhere in Southern California. Is that where it happened?”

  “Well. Urn. Yeah. We think.”

  “Do you have any more information? What day was it again?”

  “Urn... [Flipping wildly through the magazine for the article]. If I., .remember correctly... it was... you know, you really should talk to Mr. Pelham-Fence. Of course, he’s in Bucharest at the moment...and it’s what, three a.m. over there by now, and—“

  We hung up and strategized. We tried to get Paul or Zev to be Pelham-Fence. They both refused.

  “No way.”

  “I can’t do a British accent.”

  The producer called again.

  “No one’s heard anything about this. We called his manager, and he says it’s news to him.”

  Within an hour of the fax, the jig was up.

  “Listen, guys, what’s going on here?” the producer wanted to know.

  We told him. A hoax. Funny.

  He was unamused. He was angry. He hung up.

  It was over.

  Or not. Not for Adam, for the machinery had been set in motion, and it would be a few weeks before it would slow. An AP reporter, apparently slow on the uptake, tracked down Eight Is Enough dad Dick Van Patten, in rural Missouri, wanting a comment on the untimely death of his TV son. He was beside himself. He reportedly sobbed. It was all over the Internet. People debated it in chatrooms; most of those who knew it was fake were furious. Most people weren’t sure. Adam’s friends and ex-girlfriends spent days in shock, believing he was gone. One girlfriend, assuming he was dead, called his home number, just to hear his voice on the answering machine one last time. Adam picked up. She swooned. He called us, in a panic.

  “Listen you guys. This is way out of control. My relatives are fucking freaking out.”

  We sent out another press release, this one explaining our big ha ha, asserting that its phoniness should have been obvious to all (knowing that it was not), that the humor was self-evident (but of course). The notice is complete with a short note from Adam, telling everyone, at our urging, to “lighten the fuck up.”

  But then came the backlash. They tore Adam to pieces. There was a piece in the Enquirer, segments on American Journal, E!, mentions in dozens of AP papers, a spread in the New York Post. Most of the stories, given an excuse and a motive, dredged up his past, a semi-sordid melange of drug abuse and petty larceny, with very unflattering results. And almost to the last, they accused him of using this stunt, this fake death—this egregious manipulation of public sentiment—as a cheap way of getting his name in the papers.

  The next morning, I pick him up at the Best Western, for the first of two radio interviews.

  “So what are you working on these days?” asks Peter Finch, the compassionate disc jockey at KFOG.

  “Well, I’m putting together a period piece. A costume drama.”

  “Great. Wow. And you’ll be...”

  “Producing and directing.”

  Adam is amazing. I expected disaster, expected that callers would tear into him, that the DJs would make fun, but everything stays above-board, and Adam is composed, assured, well-spoken— still a performer, still in control.

  Afterward, he comes back to the office, signs copies of the issue, his signature confident, full of strong lines, grand loops, one of which, a short while later, Zev and I bring to Shalini.

  She has been moved to a new hospital, down the street from Toph and me, in a bright room with a view of Nob Hill. She is cognizant, has had ten or twelve or thirty operations on her head so far, will have a hundred and fifty thousand more. We entertain her and her mom, reading her letters aloud, and filling her in on office goings-on. Her short-term memory is shot, so she doesn’t really remember Zev too well, and has to be reminded of many of the people we’re talking about.

  “Oh, you know who’s in town?” we say. “You’ll love this.”

  “Who?”

  “Adam Rich!”

  “Oh. My. God! Why?”

  “Well, we did this issue, we did this story where we pretended that he was dead and—“

  I am thinking this is a great story, but in the middle of the story I glance at her mom, and her mom is not liking the story. This story is perhaps not appropriate. Of course it’s not appropriate. Her mom, so small, has been by Shalini’s side for months, through countless edge-of-oblivion situations, the all-nights wondering and listening to breaths, everything I know, and still I come in and say these things—

  I’m an idiot. I look to Zev for help, but he hasn’t seen the look from Shal’s mom. I change the subject.

  We stay for a while. They’ve moved most of the stuff from the old room to this one. The pictures of her family, friends, the big black and white ones of her, the stuffed animals, flowers, her portable CD player, books. I didn’t plan to look for it, but then it occurs to me and I can’t help but look around. It is no longer wedged between her arm and torso. It is not on the sidetable, or on the windowsill. I casually step around the room, eyes scanning, thinking that maybe it’s here, but in a place of honor. It could be in a glass case somewhere.

  But there is no glass case.

  The bear is gone.

  I don’t know what it means that the bear is gone. The bear’s eyes were my mother’s eyes and I put the bear on Shal’s bed so that she would be healed and now the bear is gone and everything is still uncertain.

  The only sure thing is that I can’t be trusted with anything.

  The party for Adam is awkward. We have spread magazines all over the club, and all the attendees are walking around with them, leafing through, Adam’s face staring out, glassy-eyed, already a phantom. And so when I walk around with Adam, introducing him to people, everyone is confused. They look from their magazines to Adam and back. They do not know what to make of him. He is both a 70s icon, a fragment of their childhoods, and a purportedly dead person. Both facts preclude him from walking among them, trying to get a few of the more diminutive women at the party to come back to the Best Western to swim in the pool. “I think Adam Rich just hit on me,” one friend says. “Is that really him?” they ask. “What’s he doing here?” Even when he gets up on the small stage to speak, people still do not understand. But it says, right here, in this satirical magazine, that he’s dead. How could— Those who catch on are still unimpressed. The fact that he is at this party, thrown by an obscure magazine at a mediocre club, means that he, by being here, by association, is himself unimpressive. To have him walking around, in this small nightclub, all crushed velvet and rounded bars, would mean that he would be desperate enough to fly up from L.A., to work this crowd, to slum in San Francisco, reminding everyone of what he once was, what he might be again— It was freakish. Or sad. Could he really be doing all this for attention? Could he really be milking his own past to solicit sympathy from a too-long indifferent public?

  No, no. He is not calculating enough, cynical enough. It would take some kind of monster, malformed and needy. Really, what sort of person would do that kind of thing?

  X.

  Of course it’s cold. I knew it would be cold. I would have to have known it would be cold—why wouldn’t it be cold, in late December, good god of course it’s cold in Chicago in late December. I had lived here for a hundred years, knew the cold. I had loved the cold, embraced and mastered the cold, had raced with Pete to the lake when it was frozen, had
studied the massive icicles, ice walls, waves frozen in mid-curl. I had objected when clumsy or cruel kids would break the formations, to hear the sound, to see them fall. I had brought my Walkman down, headphones under hat, piously learning the lessons of Echo and the Bunny men while throwing rocks across the lake’s ice, watching, listening to the beedlebeddlebeedlebeddle of the rocks hopping across the dull smoked glass, extending, the ice but not the rocks, endlessly, indistinguishable from the sky, the horizon vague, like a line erased or smudged. I knew the snow, the difference between pack and powder, how if you added some water to powder you could pack it, that if you packed a snowball and ran the hose over it and let it sit for a minute you’d have not a snowball but an ice-ball that if thrown accurately—all too accurately—would create a massive gash in the cheek of your brother Bill. I knew about the walls of my nose feeling like the hard frozen walls of a cave in a mountain in the arctic, toes frozen into pebbles, only dimly related to me, in my shoes, the sting of the wind against my legs, through my papery jeans. I knew all this.

  So why why why didn’t I bring a fucking coat? Sadder still, I didn’t even think about bringing a coat. I did not forget, no, no. I never thought about it, not once.

  I feel the cold when walking off the plane, and worse while thumping through that little hallway between airplane and terminal. Nothing can keep the cold away. I am cold already. I no longer have much use for the cold, will not be sledding this trip, and it hasn’t even snowed. Its only use is as a forced and obvious metaphor, as foreshadowing. But I half-wish it were just raining. It is freezing and gray and night in Chicago, and I am wearing a pullover made of cellophane.

  Toph is in L.A. with Bill and I am in Chicago. I will rent a car at the airport and will go back to my hometown, and will look up Sarah Mulhern, whose bed I ended up in one night a few weeks after I heard my mother would die, and will visit my father’s friends, and the bar where my father (on the sly) used to go, and will maybe go to his office, and will go to the funeral home, and will go to my old house, ghosts in pocket, and will see my parents’ oncologist, and will see worried friends, and go to the beach to remember what winter looks like there, and I will look and see if I can find their bodies.

  No, no, I know I won’t find their bodies—they were cremated, of course, eventually—but I have long dreamed, because I am misshapen and think it might be an interesting story to tell, of coming closer to finding them, at least seeing the building where they were brought, the medical school—you know what I really want to see? I want to see the face of the doctor or doctoral student or nurse or whoever it was who used my parents as cadavers. I have pictures of them, not real pictures but images in my mind of them, in a great, armory-sized room, its floors shiny, dotted with stainless steel tables, all with tools, small machines for picking and drilling and extracting, with long thin cords, and there are medical students, five to a table, the tables spread out in a way that is perhaps too spread out, not cozy but overly spacious, gridlike, eerie by way of rigidity. God knows what they do with two cancer-ridden bodies like that—if they’re used as tumor case studies or examined for their parts, like rusted cars on blocks, stripped, their colonized areas ignored in favor of their comparatively benign legs, arms, hands—oh God, my dad used to do a trick at Halloween, with a hand. We had a realistic-looking rubber hand, had had it for ten years, it was always around, and at Halloween he would scrinch his own arm into his sleeve, then put the rubber hand where his own hand should be. When a trick-or-treater would come to the door, he would open the child’s sack and drop first candy, and then the hand, into the bag. It was great.

  Oh my gosh! he would bellow, waving around his handless arm. Oh my gosh! The child would be terrified, speechless. Then my dad would compose himself, and calmly reach into the bag. Let me get that...

  So I plan to find out which medical school received them, and then I will go to the medical school, and will find the teacher who at the time was in charge of the use of cadavers, and I will knock on his door. I will. I have no courage for such things but in this case I will, I will surmount my— This is what I will say, brightly, when he opens the door, the doctor, when he cracks his door to see who has knocked:

  I don’t know what I’ll say. Something scary. But I won’t be angry about it. I want only to take a look at the man. Offer greetings. I want him to be shorter than me, in his late thirties, forties, fifties, frail, bald, with glasses. He will be dumbstruck by my introduction, afraid for his life, my shadow darkening him, and then I will close in on him, all casual confidence, and will ask something, something like:

  “So tell me. What did it look like?”

  “Excuse me?” he’ll say.

  “Was it like caviar? Was it like a little city, with one big gleaming eye? A thousand little eyes? Or was it empty, like a dried gourd? See, I have a feeling it might have been like a dried gourd, empty and light, because when I carried her, she was so light, much lighter than I expected. When you’re carrying a person, I just thought of this, when you’re carrying a person, why is it easier to carry them when they hold tight around your neck? Like, you’re supporting their full weight no matter what, correct? But then they grab you around the neck and suddenly it’s easier, like they’re pulling up on you, but either way you’re still carrying them, right? Why should it make a difference that they’re holding you, too— The point is that at the time, before when I was carrying her, when she was reclining on the couch and watching TV, in general I was kind of thinking that the thing in her stomach might be terribly heavy. And then I lifted her, and the weird thing was that she was so light! Which would mean that it was something hollow maybe, not the writhing nest of worms, the churning caviar, but just something dry, empty. So which was it? Was it the dried gourd, or the festering cabal of tiny gleaming pods?”

  “Well—“

  “I have been wondering for many years.”

  He will tell me. And I will know.

  And then I will be at peace.

  Oh I’m kidding. I kid you. About being at peace. This trip is about the fact that things have been much too calm in San Francisco— I am making enough money, Toph is doing well at school—and thus completely intolerable. I will return home and look for ugly things and chaos. I want to be shot at, want to fall into a hole, want to be dragged from my car and beaten. Also, I have a wedding to go to.

  I stay in Lincoln Park with two grade-school friends, Eric and Grant. The night I get in we go to the place on the corner.

  Grant is still working at his father’s halogen light factory, in the shipping department. We talk about when his dad, who we think is perhaps unnecessarily holding him down, will promote him. He is not sure. Eric, our high school valedictorian, is a management consultant. His last assignment involved a month at a pig farm in Kentucky.

  “What do you know about pig farming?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he says.

  He makes gobs of money. He owns the condominium they live in; Grant pays rent for a room in the hideous red brick thing, imposing and square, three stories.

  I note how ugly their building is.

  “Yeah,” Eric says, “but look at it this way: If you’ve got the ugliest house on the street, you never have to look at it.”

  Eric is good at these sayings. It’s unclear where he gets them, but he and Grant now talk like this, full of salty wisdom, the lessons of the Plains. Grant, for a long time our only friend whose parents were divorced, has long been sage-like, the old soul among us. His walk was slow; he sighed before he spoke. He grew up in the apartment complex near the high school, and when we’d drop him off he’d say, “Roll up the windows, lock the doors—we’re entering the ghetto.” And this made us laugh.

  We play pool. After updates on Moodie, et al., the usual subjects are touched upon:

  1) Vince Vaughn, who we’ve all known since fifth grade, who everyone from home now watches closely, vicariously, fingers crossed, second-guessing his career choices from afar.

  “Yo
u see him in The Lost World?”

  “Yeah, he was okay.”

  “They didn’t give him much to do.”

  “No.”

  “He needs another Swingers”

  “Right. Something ha-ha.”

  2) Their hair: They both have interesting hair news. Grant continues to lose his, unabated, and Eric has finally abandoned the hairspray he’d been using since high school that made him, though fully coiffed, look like he was wearing a hairpiece.

  “It’s nice,” I say, looking at it.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  “No, really, the way it’s kind of feathered like that, all natural, kind of floaty. It’s nice.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  They are also going to the wedding, the next day, the wedding of Marny’s sister Polly, who is marrying someone we do not know. We have all been invited, about fifteen of us, the friends of Polly’s sister, and so we’re using the wedding as a sort of reunion. Everyone will be there; most are coming tomorrow, the day after. Grant and Eric are curious why I am here for five days, and I tell them enough so that they understand but not so much that they will worry.

  We leave the lights off when we get home. They have moved the weight bench to make room for a futon for me.

  “Thanks,” I say, getting under the comforter.

  I am afraid Grant will tuck me in.

  “Good to have you,” he says, and pats my head.

  In the dark I hear Grant in the next room, his dresser drawer squeaking, and Eric upstairs, in the bathroom, water running.

  I sleep like I have not slept in years.

  In the morning I begin. I have borrowed a coat from Grant, and have brought along a tape recorder, a notebook, and a list of things I want to do while here. The list consists of about fifty items, was typed out and laser printed and then added to on the plane. The list starts with the things mentioned above:

  Wenban [the funeral home}

  924 [the street address of my old house]

  Stuart [my father’s friend]

  Haid [Dr. Haid, their oncologist]