A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  “This is what we’ve got,” he says.

  In the folder are pages recording that Wenban Funeral Home received both bodies, had held a service for my father, and had overseen the donations.

  The forms and records for my fathers service are signed by my mother; those for my mother are signed by my sister. I like these papers. They are proof, the only proof we have.

  “So this is everything?” I ask.

  “That’s it,” Chad says.

  I ask if he can make copies of the papers. He says he doesn’t see why not. He’ll go downstairs; it’ll just take a sec.

  The stairs are cut out of the middle of the foyer. I watch him walk down.

  On the wall behind me is a display of headstone offerings. Sizes, materials, choices in style of type and order of information. The options are many—you can have the name first, the dates first, no dates at all. Or, before the name, a slogan—“Beloved,” “Eternal.” I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost.

  Chad walks up the stairs. He has a small brown box. He puts the small brown box on the table in front of me.

  “This is weird,” he says. “But I was just down there, by the copier. Just for the heck of it I looked on the shelves, and saw this.”

  The label on the cardboard box, handwritten:

  Heidi Eggers

  “You mean this is...”

  “Yeah, this must be the cremains. They must have been sent to us at some point. I’m not sure why they hadn’t been sent to you...”

  I touch the box.

  Good God.

  Chad stands. “I’ll go back down and make those copies.”

  He leaves again.

  Fuck. God. Fuck.

  The box is about a foot long in each direction, and is closed with clear packing tape. It’s simple, brown, square—as it must have looked when it was mailed. The label indicates it was sent from the Anatomical Gift Association in Chicago. How long has it been here? I can’t make out the postmark.

  I have to call Beth. I will not call Bill. Bill won’t want to hear this. But Beth—

  I won’t call Beth, either. Beth will be upset.

  Chad returns with the copies.

  I thank him and collect the papers, put them into a folder in my backpack, and stand up. I pick up the box and—

  I have no idea what I thought it would weigh, but it’s heavy. Ten pounds or more.

  I wander outside.

  The cold is startling. I turn my back to the wind, protecting the box. I walk to the car sideways, open the passenger door and put the box on the seat. I walk around the car, tiptoeing on the ice, open the door and get in.

  I turn to the box.

  The box is my mother, only smaller.

  The box is not my mother.

  Is the box my mother?

  No.

  But then I see her face on the box. My sick head makes me see the face on the box. My sick head wants to make this worse. My head wants this to be scary and unbearable. I try to fight back, to know that this is normal, all this is normal, but I know that I am a monster, that I should not have come here, that because I am looking for bad things they are being given to me and I should not have asked for this in the first place, that because I have been asking for this and more it will get worse and more brutal. My eyes blur. I shake. I want to put the box somewhere else—in the trunk maybe—but know that I can’t put the box in the trunk. The box which is not my mother cannot go in the trunk because she would be livid if I put her in the trunk. She would fucking kill me.

  Late that night, I get back to Grant and Eric’s, and they are watching a movie where Al Pacino is blind. Al Pacino is angry and talks with an unplaceable accent. He is maybe Canadian. We are all sitting in different parts of the room—Eric in a comfortable chair, Grant in a comfortable chair, me on the couch between.

  We are watching TV, drinking beer from bottles. We are completely normal. With Grant and Eric, in their condo in Lincoln Park, in Chicago, we are regular, I am regular. We are kicking back. I can kick back. I am kicking back.

  I am trying not to think about the box. About how, forty feet away, in my rental car, on the floor of the passenger side, is the box. I could not bring the box inside, and I have not and will not tell Eric and Grant about the box, and, fearing that someone, perhaps one of them, might pass by the car and see the box and know what it is and be horrified and think me a monster, I have covered it with a towel.

  Al Pacino is wearing an elaborate military uniform, and is yelling at a high school-aged guy in a school uniform. I have come to the movie late, so it’s unclear why he is yelling at the guy in the uniform. They are in some kind of swank hotel room.

  “Why is he yelling?” I ask.

  “Shh!” says Grant.

  “Is he blind?”

  “Shut up. It’s almost over.”

  The phone rings. Eric answers, tosses it in my lap.

  “You.”

  “Who?”

  “Meredith.”

  It’s Meredith, panicky.

  “Is it John?”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “Is he—“

  “No, no. He’s okay, but he’s threatening again. He sounds drunk.”

  I take the phone upstairs and into the bathroom.

  “Does he have pills? What?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Maybe he’ll do his wrists.”

  “Did he say anything like that?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know. I can’t remember. But you have to call him. I’ve been on the phone with him for an hour and I’m losing my fucking mind. He says he tried to call you but you weren’t home.”

  “I’m in Chicago.”

  “I know that. I called you, stupid.”

  I call John.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing? Why am I calling you?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you calling me?”

  “Meredith said you wanted me to call.”

  “I tried to call you.”

  “I know. I’m in Chicago.”

  “What for?”

  “A wedding.”

  “Get off!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I was talking to the cat.”

  “You’re talking to the fucking cat? Listen, I don’t have time for—“

  “Fine. Sorry I’m such a bother.”

  “Okay. So. What’s the problem? What is it? Are you threatening?”

  “I’ve just had a rough couple of days.”

  “Now you sound drunk. At first you didn’t sound drunk. Are you drunk or not? Give me some parameters.”

  “No, it’s just this medicine.”

  “Wait. What medicine? What does that mean? Did you already take something? What is this? Is this it?”

  “Is what what?”

  “Did you already—“

  “No. Jesus. I’m just sleepy. I had a beer.”

  “You’re supposed to be sober. You can’t drink on the antidepressants, stupid. You were sober the last time we talked, right? You’re supposed to be sober. How long did that last?”

  “It’s one beer. Don’t sweat it, my man.”

  I hear Eric and Grant walking up the stairs, going to bed. Under the door I can see the lights in the apartment go out.

  Part of me is bracing for the gunshot. John has been planning it all along, is lulling me into thinking things are fine, and any second he’ll do it, to make sure I hear it, to make sure I know it was my fault. I will have a dead friend.

  Then again, this is kind of lucky. The timing, that John would be threatening suicide the same day I have been given the box, during the week when I have been looking for gruesome things— What are the odds? Fantastic.

  There’s a knock on the bathroom door.

  “Yeah?”

  “You okay?” It’s Grant
.

  “Yeah. On the phone.”

  “All right, son. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Night.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Grant. Now...”

  “I ran through the crackhouse again,” he says.

  “What crackhouse?”

  “The one off San Pablo, near Emeryville. I ran through barefoot this time.”

  He has done this before, has told me about the running through the crackhouse. He wants me to be impressed. If it is true, which I doubt, I am impressed. I can’t let him know this.

  “And why?” I ask. I know why.

  “I was feeling weird. I wanted to see what would happen.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. People just looked at me. Someone said Tuck, dude.’ That was it.”

  “Huh. So what’s the issue this time?” I want to know why we have to do this again. I want to know if he’s going to make me give him the talk again. I will refuse.

  “I don’t know. I went out, and I—I don’t know, when I got home, I just felt all black, tarry. I don’t know. That makes no sense, I guess, I just felt like I was under this net or something, I mean, sometimes I get into these holes—shit, I don’t know, I’m just so tired of it, it’s so—fuck, you wouldn’t understand—“

  “I wouldn’t what?”

  “I just don’t—“

  “I can’t believe you’d say that. You know me. I wouldn’t understand? Do you know what I’ve been doing today? Where I’ve been tonight? Do you know what’s on the floor of my car?”

  I tell him about the funeral home, the box.

  “Jesus,” he says.

  He likes that. He is suddenly sober-sounding, animated.

  This is what he wants, I can tell. Already he is sounding more animated, sober. He wants to share stories, wants to be reassured that however sick he feels, and scared, and ashamed of the contents of his head he is, that I am far worse off. As always, I oblige. I tell him about how, after the funeral home, I spent the night driving around the frozen, broken South Side of Chicago, looking for something to happen. I was talking into my tape recorder, staring at groups of kids in their huge jackets, wanting again and again to get out, throw myself at them—“Hey guys! What’s up?”—to maybe get punched or hit over the head with something, or chased—that’s what I really wanted, maybe, to be chased—but it was so cold. I tell him that whenever I stopped at a light I expected a car to pull up in the next lane and that, without turning around, I would know. There would be a crash of glass and a pounding deep into my grassy childhood, and I would see my own blood all over the window. Or I would be at the light and someone would slimjim the side door—no, not someone—a black man in an army jacket, the man I always picture when imagining being killed in such a way, always an army jacket—and he would jump in next to me—I’d have to move the box—where would I put the box? Backseat. And then he’d make me drive to the lake, out by the aquarium. He’d have me get out, and would walk me over to the edge of the parking lot, facing the water. He’d tell me to kneel, and I would, and then without a word, he would shoot me twice in the back of the head—

  “That’s weird,” he says. “I always see it in my own house. I’m tied to a chair, and my mouth is taped, and when I see his gun raised toward me, I can’t move, scream, all I can do is try to stop the bullet, with my eyes. I always have some weird sense that I can maybe stop the bullet with my eyes.”

  “You know what’s funny,” I say, “the thing I was most worried about when I was down there, in the South Side, driving around and talking into the tape recorder? I was worried that after I was shot near the lake, that the murderer, who really only wanted the car, would for some reason find and play the tape, the one where I’m describing my imagining someone like him killing me, and all this stuff about finding the box, and that this murderer would think I’m this racist weirdo—“

  “Jesus.”

  “That’s what I was worried about! I was worried about what the guy who killed me would think of me. Then I worried that the cops, who would eventually find the car in Gary or Muncie or wherever, would find my tape recorder and the tape inside, and would play the tape, looking for clues or whatever, and they’d be horrified too, would be horrified and would also laugh, would make copies and give them to friends—“

  “No.” At this point I’m no longer worried about John’s vague threats. I no longer expect the gunshot. It has worked before, always works—by now he’s more worried about me than himself.

  “So what happens tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow I see Sarah.”

  “Oh man. You have to tell me how it goes.”

  “I will.”

  I expected her to meet me on her building’s doorstep, in her coat, maybe pulling on her coat, saying Hi how are you, warily. But she has come to the door, without a coat, and has let me in.

  Sarah Mulhern. I have come to pick her up. We are going to dinner. I am inside her home and she is glowing.

  We sit on her couch. I move a pillow.

  “You want a drink?” she asks, getting up.

  “Sure.”

  “A beer?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  She goes to the kitchen. Her apartment is immaculate. She has the lights turned down.

  She comes back, puts on an album by a guy we went to high school with. The guy, my older brother’s age, plays piano at the Deerpath Inn, the one hotel in town, and has named the album Deerpath. We talk about how the guy should maybe get out of the town for a little while, get some perspective. We talk about her teaching (seventh grade, in a western suburb of Chicago), the career of Vince Vaughn.

  We go to dinner, drink during dinner, run through my eating habits, ha ha, and stay late. We talk about the swim team we were both on, how lame I was and how incredible she was, how her name, when it was spoken over the scratchy loudspeaker, to the rest of us meant grace and power, how she never lost a race, how that fueled my long-standing crush, and about the time her little brother caught me in the club’s locker room just after I had stepped in someone’s feces.

  “I never heard about that.”

  “He thought it was mine, though.”

  “The feces.”

  “Yeah, from then on, to him I was the guy who shat himself at the club. And there was no way to explain it. Telling him that I had walked into the stall and hadn’t noticed the excrement all over the floor...”

  “That would have been harder, probably.”

  “Right.”

  I briefly consider telling her about the picture of her I ran into at the beach. I decide against it. It’s weird enough as it is.

  We go to a bar and run into people we know, all of whom are clearly confused by seeing us together. We have never been seen together, are two years apart, and I haven’t been back to Chicago for years and years. I see Steve Fox, who I’ve known since kindergarten, this grown person whose eight-year-old smiling face I have in albums, pictures from Cub Scout birthday parties. We talk for a minute—where to start? Should we have hugged? Has he gained weight?—but Sarah is uncomfortable. In Lincoln Park, there are too many people we know; it’s overload. We leave, find a small ugly bar, drink until we both feel like we can do what we are both expecting to do, and walk back to her apartment.

  As we are on her couch, she suddenly pushes me up and back, her hands on my chest, arms extended and she looks at me in a wild-eyed sort of way—eyes so round-seeming in the dark here, those whites so white!—that at first I interpret it as a sign that my superior kissing technique has her overwhelmed. She looks at me for a second.

  “You look older,” she says.

  Right away, I think: symbolism. / look older. It’s also symbolic that, as we sit on the couch, in the dark, the light through her large windows, the weak yellow light from the streetlamp, brings her father into her face. I had only met him a few times, and never saw that strong a resemblance but now— Now her eyes are darker. It occurs to me that her smoking, as she did
when we were at the last bar, is also symbolic. That must mean something, that she says I look older, that she looks like her dead father, that she is smoking like my dead father, that we are opening our mouths on each other even though, outside of having lived similar lives, walked the same path from the parking lot to the pool at the Lake Forest Club, swum the same laps at dawn, we barely know each other. All this means something. What does this mean?—

  After a few seconds we are again riddling our tongues around in each other’s mouths, turning our faces left and right. But why that weird look she was giving me? Every time I open my eyes, her eyes are open. It’s unsettling. Maybe she’s unsettled. She is. I know why.

  She knows I have my mother’s box in the rental car.

  That’s it. She can tell. She can tell that I’ve been driving around with it, right there on the passenger seat, sometimes on the floor, next to Burger King bags, apple juice bottles, like we were on some kind of road trip together— And she can tell that last night I was talking to my maybe-suicidal friend, and that I wondered if I wanted him to do it, and she knows that yesterday, I paused when driving by Ricky’s family’s house, and she knows that not an hour later, while I was at the library in town I actually ran into Ricky’s mom, who I had forgotten worked there, and Ricky’s mom had given me a hug, and we talked about Rick, whom he was dating, all that, and I said nothing about anything much, because if I talked too long she would know too, and would know that I wanted to tell the world about her husband, and she would know as Sarah no doubt knows that as I was driving through the cemetery in Lake Forest, the one by the beach, all the gravestones with puddles around them, thin puddles frozen, that I was listening to the Danny Bonaduce radio show, the Partridge Family guy, which was bad enough while driving through a cemetery, but then on the show was a familiar voice, someone talking about sex, who was that?— And it was Sari Locker, Sari Locker was on the Danny Bonaduce Show, on the radio, in the cemetery, talking about how you can put condoms on with your mouth. I was so shocked that I stopped the car to indicate my shock, to punctuate it to myself, to anyone who might be watching, even though I wasn’t actually so shocked that I needed to stop the car. And Sari said something mean to him, something about his recently canceled TV show, and after she was off the air, he ripped into her, calling her names, and by that time I was on my way to that bar in Highwood, the one my father stopped at on his way home every night—that’s why he always came home at seven-twenty, on the dot, no matter the traffic, Sarah knows that when I was at the bar, in the afternoon, freezing out, mothy gray, I sat at the bar and ordered a Sprite, and then sat, having no idea what I was doing there, what I was looking for at the bar that my father went to. Maybe I expected pictures of him somewhere, his name still on the chalkboard by the pool table. I didn’t know. Such great handwriting he had— I looked at the pictures of the bowling teams, somehow expecting him to be among the— I mean, of course, he never bowled much—