A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  Sarah [in whose bed I woke up all those years ago]

  Bar [the bar, in the next town, I know where it is but not its name, which my dad frequented]

  Beach [a sandy area abutting Lake Michigan, where people gather to meet, sunbathe, play in the water]

  The list goes on. The idea, I suppose, is the emotional equivalent of a drug binge, the tossing together of as much disparate and presumably incompatible stimuli as possible, in a short span, five days, together constituting a sort of socio-familial archaeological bender, to see what comes of it, how much can be dredged up, brought back, remembered, exploited, excused, pitied, made known, made permanent. In the interest of overload, I’ve continued, on the plane, in bed, to add to the list, tangential or random things—phone calls and unexpected visits to people I haven’t seen in five, ten years, people I never talk to—wanting to throw anything potentially provocative or brutal into the mess. For instance, handwritten in the margin there is:

  Wooden [a grade school friend who was sent to military school for reasons unexplained to me, but who wrote a very nice condolence note that winter of ours, though we hadn’t spoken in easily seven years; I’m thinking I’ll maybe pop by his house, because I never wrote back to him, and would like to see what he looks like, how he talks, maybe say hello to his mother, who, one night when I slept over and could not sleep because we had watched Grizzly—sort of like Jaws with fur—had heated milk in a pan for me, had whispered kindnesses in the kitchen}; Aunt Jane [who lives in Cape Cod; a phone call?}; Fox [Jim Fox, of Abramson & Fox, my dad’s old pinstriped boss, a bent-over and sour man, who, as Beth and I were cleaning out our father’s desk a few weeks after, came into the office and said this, in an unkind way, the way one would talk about a child who was found masturbating too often: “Well, we all knew he was dying”}; Donation place [organization that picks up and then distributes cadavers to medical schools}; Medical school [the one most likely to have used the cadavers}

  The list continues. Other friends, friends of my parents, the few college friends who made it to either funeral; grade school and high school teachers; the park at the end of our street, with the tiny frozen lake; Mrs. Iwert, whose lawn I used to cut and whose gardening I used to do (to see if she’s still alive); my mother’s friends, coworkers, on and on.

  And: On the side of the page, the page with the list, is this

  word, written in large letters, crooked though, scrawled left-handed.

  It stands large, in all caps, next to the computer printout portion

  and all the handwritten additions. I added it at a pay phone at

  O’Hare, while talking to Toph in L.A. right after my flight landed.

  The word is:

  DRUNK?

  Which is my question to myself regarding just what state I would best be in while doing this business in and around Chicago. As I was talking to Toph about what he and Bill were doing in L.A.— that day they had gone to a batting cage and seen a movie (Bill gets to be the fun one)—it occurred to me, with great clarity, that I should be drunk the entire time. The drunkenness, I guessed, would add to the whole endeavor a haze of mystery, not to mention a romantic fluidity that I could not otherwise count on. I should be desperate, raggedy, semi-coherent, stumbling from place to place. It seemed much more fitting than being calculating and sober, would strip things to their core, would eliminate a layer or two of self-conscious white noise, would allow me to do more asinine things.

  On the other hand, though, it would be hell on the documentation. Could I really take appropriate notes and make comprehensible recordings...while tanked?

  I get my rental car and while driving to Lake Forest I have not yet ruled out the drunk-all-the-time notion. Though I’ve never been intoxicated more than three hours in a row without falling asleep, and have rarely been drunk more than once a week, I leave the option open, resolving to decide at the wedding, where I will surely be soused—at that point, I can choose, if the mood seems right, to continue the binge, stock up, have some with me at all times, in a thermos maybe—

  The driving though. The driving would be hard.

  I head north to Lake Forest. The highway, 41, in late December, and the entire Chicago area, looks as mothy and sad as it’s supposed to. No snow, just silvery cold and exhaust, black slush.

  In twenty minutes I’m outside my old house and I feel nothing. I’m in Lake Forest, on my block, across the street from my house. I’m in the car, listening to a college rock station, and the thing that’s occupying me most of all is the state of the neighbors’ yard. Something is different. Have they cut down trees? It seems as if they have cut down trees.

  The car is getting foggy inside, and I am not crying. As I wound up my street, I was sure that I would do something emotional when I saw the house—a part of me hoped briefly that it would not be there, that it had been removed, carried off by a tornado. Or that the new owners had razed it, built from scratch. But then, at the bend of the road, it was clear that it was still there, is still here. They have painted blue the wood that we had left gray, but otherwise it looks the same. The shrubs I planted in front, to discourage the toddler-Toph from running into the street, are still there, have not grown.

  I rip a piece of paper from my notebook and write a note—

  Dear resident of 924 Waveland,

  I used to live here, most of my life. I would love to come inside and look around, but didn’t want to arrive announced. If

  you’re amenable to the idea, please call me at 312-------. I’ll be

  here until Saturday.

  and put it in the mailbox. I do not expect much from it, because in their position I am not sure I would invite me in. Maybe I would pretend to be on vacation, would lose the letter.

  I go to the train station in town to use the pay phone. It’s freezing. I am looking for Sarah, whose number I don’t have. I don’t know where she lives—last I saw her she lived at home, with her parents—or if she still lives in the area, or in the state. I try a Sarah Mulhern in Chicago.

  “Is this Sarah?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sarah Mulhern?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sarah Mulhern from Lake Forest?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Sorry.”

  I hang up, blow hot air into my hands. I’m a moron. Someone will see me here, back in town for the first time since I left, using the phone outside the train station. No one uses this phone. Then again, no one will be surprised. They will have expected something like this, from me—they know what happened, will assume that I’ve finally hit bottom, that I’m homeless and on crack. Did I ever belong in this town? Another wrong number and then:

  “Sarah?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sarah Mulhern?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sarah Mulhern from Lake Forest?”

  A pause and then, slowly, “Yeah...”

  It has been four years. But she’s warm, right away she’s warm. We talk about the last time we saw each other, when we had to sneak out of her house in the morning so she could drive me home, how her dad would have killed me.

  “He died last year, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t, actually. I’m so sorry.”

  Jesus. I’m not sure what I say at that point, but soon enough I ask if she’s going to Polly’s wedding; they were in the same class. She is not. I ask her if she has time for lunch, coffee in the next couple days.

  She says any night is fine.

  The wedding is wonderfully normal. I had wanted desperately to be at an unsurprising wedding, as rigid and traditional as possible. The idea of them frightened me enough to begin with, but deviation from rote made weddings somehow more absurd. I could not shake the memory of Beth’s ceremony, six months earlier. The groom was a nice young man named James, baby-faced and blond, and the whole affair took place on a deck in a cluster of cottages near Santa Cruz, high above the Pacific.

  Beth had long dreamed of having the wedding on the beach
, to be barefoot, to be in white, on the sand, windblown, all of us itv front of the shushing waves, at sunset. But the permit was impossible to get, so she settled for this group of little houses, beach or no a wonderful setting, all buttery green and white-white— though Toph and I barely made it.

  We were already late, had gone to get Toph some pants, and were driving through San Francisco in our little red car, up Franklin’s rolling thoroughfare, toward home to get changed.

  We stopped at a light at the top of the hill. Then a thump, a jump forward, a crash of glass. We had been hit from behind by some kind of truck, something huge.

  It was a woman, mid-forties, in a Jeep Grand something. A huge car. In the woman’s car was a family, two teenaged daughters, the husband, all tall, well dressed, normal. They looked down from their truck with mild concern. The sun was right overhead, and I stood under it for a minute, in the road, the shattered glass flickering on the road. Toph and I walked to the sidewalk and I sat down, dazed. He stood over me.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Move over. I can’t see you in the sun.

  “That’s better. No, I’m fine.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We have to go. We’re already late.”

  We had an hour. Our car had been halved. There was no back bumper, no back window, the hatchback’s door was twisted, shattered, unhatchable. We exchanged names and information, and the woman offered to call a tow truck, but there was no time, and when I tried it, the car started, so we left. Back home, changed and then back in the car, back down the hill, onto the highway, the wind screaming through the car’s naked frame, south to San Jose, where we picked up Bill at the airport—who thought the car situation very funny, sitting in back, the wind pouring in—even while I feared with all my soul that the gas tank had been damaged, that we were leaking fuel, that the fumes would spark and we would all explode en route, that it was all too fitting—

  We rolled in, rumbling and pathetic. The grounds were white with fog, the green was gray, the ocean invisible. Toph and I had nothing approximating formal clothing, were wearing wrinkled white shirts and my fathers frayed ties. Everyone knew who we were, that we were them.

  We met the minister, a lesbian agnostic named Reverend Jennifer Lovejoy, with the flowing robe and wild, steely hair. We said hello to our family’s representatives. First, our cousin Susie, out from rural Massachusetts, who had been shopping in the small beach town earlier, and was wearing a thrift-store hat she bought, straw, eight inches tall, with four woven birds perched on it. And then Aunt Connie, my father’s sister, a synthesizer composer (her music is called Sacred Space Music), who had come down from Marin, at the last moment, a surprise, though without the talking parrot or cockatoo usually perched on her shoulder. Before long she had cornered me and John—who showed up just beforehand, had been drinking tall boys on the way—and had for fifteen minutes debated with us the likelihood that the government was hiding knowledge of alien visits from the public. She of course knew firsthand of the coverup, having been receiving, for some time, messages from outer space through her computer. I asked how she knew the messages were from outer space and not from, say, AOL. She looked at me with pity, in a way that said, “If you have to ask.

  Bill and I were supposed to walk down the aisle with Beth, to give her away. She had asked, and we had said yes, of course, that it would be nice, an honor—but then, as Bill and I waited outside in the clearing fog, she decided that, come to think of it, she did not want to be “given away,” did not like the patriarchal implications of the custom, that she would walk down the aisle alone, under her own power. And so Bill and I sat in the front row and waited, as Connie complained about the quality of the pre-wedding music (Mark Isham, she guessed, with a sniff).

  But the music would change soon enough. When Beth and James came walking down the aisle, under a sky that had cleared and was now immaculate, the first notes wafted toward us, piped through two speakers on the deck—it was not the wedding march. Or Pachelbel. It was—I was panicked, scanning the crowd for a reaction because I was almost sure that this song was—oh, now it was unmistakable, this song—

  This song was “Beth,” by KISS.

  Not an instrumental version. The original recording.

  And she was barefoot.

  Did she think this was funny? Surely she couldn’t—

  There was a cliff only thirty yards away, and I wondered if I would be noticed, if I could just slip away quietly, as they were all watching the entrance, and fling myself over.

  For Pollys wedding, my first since Beth’s, I am clinging to the hope for simple, tradition-bound Protestant solidity. It is at a church, First Presbyterian in Lake Forest, which is a good start, and they’ve asked us to wear tuxes, which is just fine. The reception is at Shore Acres, the country club in the next town where Bill spent a summer waiting tables. A nice place. Completely respectable.

  At the reception, what everyone wants to talk about is the English teacher’s sex change operation. One of the high school’s teachers, and my former (intrepid, spirited) J.V. soccer coach, has announced that after a spring regimen of hormones, and a surgical procedure over the summer, he will be returning, in the fall, as a woman. We cannot believe it’s happening. It’s the best thing we’ve had since Mr. T

  When the subject is exhausted, there is the inevitable:

  “How’s Toph?” from Megann.

  “Still limping.”

  “How old is he now?” from Kathy.

  “I forget.”

  “Where is he?” from Amy.

  “Funny you should ask. He’s been hitchhiking...”

  Conversation dissolves and we stare at each other. They know I am not them. I am something else. I am deformed, am a hundred years old. I will spend the next day looking for the remains of my parents.

  “How’s that magazine going?” Barb asks.

  “Probably not for long.”

  “Why?”

  I explain. We’re all exhausted, tired of having other jobs, that we’ll either get some funding soon and move it to New York, or fold. It’s the last thing I want to talk about, think about. I don’t want to talk about my failures, or theirs. Maybe we’re all stunted. Is anything happening for any of us? The celebrity of the night is the date of a girl Marny went to college with. He’s the host of a children’s television show in Chicago, and has just starred, with one line, in Space Jam, not to mention an even larger role in a recent Jack in the Box commercial. He performs for us—jokes, does imitations of other guests. We adore him.

  Half of us are talking about moving. Flagg has already left for New York, for grad school, and I’m vaguely thinking about moving, too. But what I really want is to just swim around in a warm baby pool of these friends, jump in their dry leaf pile—to rub them all over myself, without words and clothes.

  But we are all sitting, needing to talk, to catch up. There is a band. They are playing ‘50s hits. There are three female singers with bouffants. They are going all out, these people. Older couples start dancing. I do not like the older couples, who dominate this wedding of two young people, these older couples everywhere, dancing in a jittery way, each either too slow or much much too fast, like that one woman, in gold lame, doing some kind of Latin maneuver, as the band plays the Beach Boys, like she’s trying to crush ants with her high heels. She wears, as they all wear, an expression that says Oh yeah! or All right! or—

  I want to jump through the plate-glass window and into the club’s backyard, and then run to the cliff and jump down, into Lake Michigan. Or at least go outside and walk around. But it’s too cold. And I don’t have the shoes. I can go upstairs. I can grab everyone and we can leave. I want us all to be in one big bed, naked. Maybe not naked—

  The bride and groom leave, and the old people leave, and the guy who shook my hand in the bathroom, insisted on it as we stood at neighboring urinals, is thrown out for getting into a kind of physical sort of fight with his girlfriend,
and then everyone is gone and we are the last ones, all of us sitting around, the sweat dried on us, debating where to go, someone’s house, a bar, it’s only midnight, and we end up at Megann’s, eating cookies in her kitchen, looking at the pictures on her refrigerator, as we had a hundred times before, keeping quiet because her parents were asleep upstairs.

  We had all taken spots in the various empty beds, so I wake up in Megann’s brother’s room. He’s at college, and the room is dark, thickly carpeted, full of mahogany furniture and hockey trophies, team pictures. A stick signed by Denis Savard.

  I drive Marny home.

  Then back to work.

  An hour or so later I’m walking across the yard of my old house. There’s a new mailbox. They’ve fixed that broken post, repainted the front door.

  Already I feel bad for these people. These poor people. They’ve made a mistake letting me in. What will happen when this happens? They should not have invited me. I would have understood if they had not invited me. But the father called and said I could come and here I am. This will be bad. Things will happen. I will slip and tell them things they don’t want to hear.

  No, no. I will be good. This will be fine.

  The door opens and they are all there. Do they always answer the door together? There are three young children, all under seven, two boys and a girl, the father with a sweater and a mustache, the mother with a bobbed haircut, the children hiding behind them, peeking behind their legs. I shake the man’s hand. They let me in their house.

  It makes no sense for them to let me into their house. The only thing they know about me is that I once lived here. I wonder if they know what happened there. I assume they do. The parents at least. Not these perfect little children. I will not tell.

  We walk straight into the kitchen and the light! The place is filled with light. I look around quickly, trying to find the source of all this light. The walls have been repainted. The wood paneling is gone. Other walls are missing. They’ve knocked down walls! Cabinets are gone or moved and replaced. There’s a new window, or the window is bigger. I can’t tell. I can’t tell what’s different. It all looks different. And small. It looks like a house for small people. But these people are regular height.