A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  Everything weirder, the extremes more pronounced, the contrasts too strong.

  Toph and I keep going up the hill because you have to go up to get to Black Sands, first straight up the hill, the road winding in and out, past all the tourists stopped for the view, looking down on the Golden Gate, and every time we double back toward the bridge, the view, biblical, presents itself, the view where one sees Treasure Island, and Alcatraz, then (1-r) all of Richmond, El Cerrito, Berkeley, and Oakland and then the Bay Bridge, then the white jagged seashells of downtown, the Golden Gate, blood red, then the rest of the city, the Presidio, the avenues—

  But we keep going, and as the road continues, winding up, the cars thin out, and at the very top of the hill/mountain, there are only a few sightseers left, and they are turning around to go back down, three-point turning right at that WWII-era tunnel at the top, because it certainly seems like the road ends, right there, at the top of that hill—

  But then the road continues, and there is a gate, a flimsy metal gate, right there, and it is open, it’s probably always open. We keep going, not slowing, and as Toph and I continue through the parking area and descend through the gate, two young tourists, Dutch fellows with the customary dark socks and shorts, are gawking, not knowing what we’re doing—we are some kind of fantastic superhero team in a space-age vehicle, not bound by laws of country or physics.

  The road, now a one-way, heads straight for the water, and it looks for about twenty yards like we’re going to go straight over, it really does for a few seconds there—and if we did we would be ready, of course, would do the thing where we get out of the car at the same time, one door each, then the timed perfect dives—so we go slow, then the road starts bending right, and then down, and in a second we’re driving parallel to the water, a few hundred feet up of course, for a while without even a visible cliffside to the left, just a sheer drop—and then suddenly we see the Headlands whole, green and mohair hills, ocher velour, the sleeping lions, the lighthouse far to the left, unbelievable given we’re ten minutes from the city, this vast bumpy land, could be Ireland or Scotland or the Falklands or wherever, and we snake down, with the road bending back and forth along the cliffside, and Toph, as always, keeping his eyes away from the edge, understandable, not appreciating when I drive no-handed, using only my knees, for a little while, lookee here, ha ha, look at this!

  “Don’t, asshole.”

  “What?”

  “Use your hands.”

  “You can’t call me that.”

  “Fine. A-hole.”

  And as distressing as this, his first curse, is—the first I’ve heard, at least—it’s also kind of thrilling. Wonderfully so. To hear anger from him is a great relief. I had worried about his lack of anger, had worried that he and I had been too harmonious, that I hadn’t given him enough friction. He needed friction, I had begun insisting to myself. After all the years of normalcy and coddling, it was time to give the boy something to be pissed about. How else would he succeed? Where would he find his motivation, if not from the desire to tread over me? Always there had been just mutual devotion, and compliance, and his kind eyes and young pure wisdom— But now this! I’m an asshole. Such a relief. A breakthrough, the truth finally clear and unavoidable! I should have noticed the signs earlier. While wrestling lately, on the floor, and that one time on the tennis court, when I gave him the wedgie, did he not fight back with more conviction than ever before? Did he not achieve a nice, effective sort of headlock and hold it, with startling tenacity, for much longer than comfortable? Did his body not tense up, his grip tighten, his eyes have in them a certain abandon, betray some rage from some distant place? Yes, yes! Now we are omnipotent.

  Finally!

  “You can’t say A-hole, either.”

  “Okay.”

  “A-hole’s even worse.”

  “Fine. Dickhead.”

  “Dickhead’s fine.”

  At Might there had been an endless succession of fruitless lunches with various people who Lance had found, people with money who expressed some interest in helping us. It was always someone in their early thirties who for whatever reason had come into enough wealth to spread it around. “All right,” Lance would say, his hands as parentheses, “this girl is heir to the double-stick masking tape fortune, and she...” or “Okay, this guy cashed out of Microsoft and has about three hundred mil he’s putting into progressive media...” We would meet them for drinks or lunch, in the back of Infusion 555, or at a picnic table in South Park, and we would talk, explaining our plans, vaguely conveying our hopes, doing the best we could to articulate the fact that we wanted to be successful without being seen as successful-successful, wanted to keep doing what we were doing, with the option of opting out if we ever got bored, wanted to conquer the world in a way that no one would be able to tell that that’s what we wanted, trying not to let on how tired we all were, how unsure we were that we really wanted to do any of this anymore, actually—

  And midway through the meetings the prospective benefactor would, as she or he pushed the ice around with their straw, explain how they’d have to talk anything over with their parents, or their lawyers and advisors and—

  It was just as well. We hated the meetings, hated each other half the time, hated coming in every day, wondered why we were still doing this stuff—

  We had been given a month’s notice on our lease. We had already been extending our stay, every month begging for one more, asserting that we were so close to getting some kind of funding, that we needed some money so we could arrange for a place to move to, first, or maybe we’d move in with whatever company agreed to help us out— So Lance went to New York as a last-ditch thing, meeting with people much too small and much too big to help. He called back every day, with news of no news. He was staying with Skye, just as we all did when we were all in New York. We had had a big party out there, and Skye organized the whole thing, free drinks, a DJ, and had slept at her boyfriend’s so we could all stay on her floor, four of us in her bedroom, sleeping bags and throw pillows, and at the party, when the police had come to shut it down, it was Skye, and her mom of all people, in town from Nebraska, who had begged the police to let us go on, because, her mom said, “These are just good kids, and they’ve worked so hard for this,” something to that effect, Skye sad-eyed, batting her lashes, and the police let us go on.

  Lance called from Skye’s the day he was supposed to come back because he was staying an extra day. Skye was sick, was in the hospital with a fever, food poisoning maybe.

  “A viral thing,” he said.

  Moodie and I met with the founders of Wired, went in to pitch the notion of their taking us under their wing, the perfectness of us with them despite how many times we had made fun of their magazine, we expected the meeting to be casual, easy, short on details and long on broad strokes. And of course we were wrong. We were woefully unprepared. What we wanted was just enough money to get this next one out, and some kind of office arrangement, a corner of their floor maybe, we had a few weeks to get out of our place, anywhere would do, really—

  They wanted numbers and plans. Sitting around their gleaming black table, we fumbled and joked and did our best to sound confident, ambitious still, disguising our exhaustion, gesturing to each other—

  No you go ahead, finish—

  No you were saying—

  and we said that yes, of course there will be a new design team and better proofreading, and yes, we would stop making fun of advertisers and that yes, we are in it for the duration, that our projections this and our plans that and TV shows and a Web site of course, of course, and some concessions on the covers, some familiar faces maybe, celebrities even, if they’re the right kind, done the right way, sure, some profiles, we’ll tinker to make the thing available to a broader audience, operate with a small staff, same as always, we’ll stay here, move in with you guys, or move to New York, whichever, it’ll be so great—

  After handshakes we walked out, past all the wor
kstations, the rows and rows, the heat of all the computers operating at once, the tangles of wires, past the kitchenette and the reception area painted neon orange, the girl at the desk dressed just so, and in the elevator down to Third Street we recapped—

  You think it went well?

  Yeah, yeah, they love us—

  but we both knew it was over, and the great, oddly wonderful thing was that neither of us really cared anymore—oh we cared, yes, but we were ready. I wanted it to be over and Moodie did even more so, and Marny was more than tired of it all, Paul, too. Zev and Lance were still pushing to continue, still felt there was reason, but they also knew—we had long prepared them—that the floor could give out any day, that the floor had been built to give way. And so there we were, knowing that three, four years, all these hundreds of thousands of hours, were going to end without our having saved anyone—

  What was conquered?

  Who was changed?

  with no spot on the Space Shuttle, that all this—what had it all been? It had been something to do, some small, small point to make, and the point was made, in a small way, and so fine— Moodie and I walked through South Park on a flawless July day, the park full of new people, all of them beautiful and brilliant and young, and we were tired and walked through them and back to the office. It was fine. Finally, the strange comfort of knowing the end, its parameters and terms. We had two weeks to finish the now-final issue before we had to be out of the office, so we took the stuff we had already planned—cover story: “Are Black People Cooler Than White People?”—and added, throughout, countless references to the end of the magazine, to death, to defeat.

  The first-page essay:

  Death, like so many great movies, is sad.

  The young fancy themselves immune to death. And why shouldn’t they? At times life can seem endless, filled with belly laughs and butterflies, passion and joy, and good, cold beer.

  Of course, with age comes the solemn understanding that forever is but a word. Seasons change, love withers, the good die young. These are hard truths, painful truths—inescapable but, we are told, necessary. Winter begets spring, night ushers in the dawn, and loss sows the seeds of renewal. It is, of course, easy to say these things, just as it is easy to, say, watch a lot of television.

  But, easy or not, we rely on such sentiment. To do otherwise would be to jump without hope into a black and endless abyss, falling through an all-enveloping void for all eternity. Really, what’s to gain from saying that the night only grows darker and that hope lies crushed under the jackboots of the wicked? What answers do we have when we arrive at the irreducible realization that there is no salvation in life, that sooner or later, despite our best hopes and most ardent dreams, no matter how good our deeds and truest virtues, no matter how much we work toward our varied ideals of immortality, inevitably the seas will boil, evil will run roughshod over the earth, and the planet will be left a playground in ruins, fit only for cockroaches and vermin.

  There is a saying favored by clergymen and aging ballplayers: Pray for rain. But why pray for rain when it’s raining hot, poisoned blood?

  And then, a few days later, we looked again at it, hoped it didn’t sound glib, callous—Zev wrote it and he was still so young—because Lance had just came back from New York, from all the running around, he and Skye, looking for money, any sign at all. We wanted to know how everything went—it was all academic by now but we were curious anyway, morbidly maybe— wanted to hear funny rejection stories, tales of indifference—and I don’t remember why we were all there in the office, all at once in the middle of the day, but Lance came in and dropped his backpack on his chair, and sat down, slumped in his chair. Then he stood up. He paced for a minute. He stood by the filing cabinet, next to Marny’s desk. He had a look on his face, an almost-smiling look, his mouth sort of smiling but also kind of quivering, his eyes focusing on something small on the floor between us. He had his hand in front of his mouth, to hide whatever his mouth was doing. Was he smiling? He was smiling. His head was tilted. Something was funny. This was going to be good.

  “Skye died.”

  “What?” someone said.

  “She died” he said.

  “What do you mean? Who?” We were all talking at him.

  “She died.”

  “Who?”

  “Skye.”

  “No.”

  “Fuck you, dickhead. Why is that funny?”

  “He’s serious. Are you serious?” “That’s not funny.” “No, listen, she died. She died” “No.”

  “What does that mean?” “How?”

  “It was a virus and it attacked her heart. She was there just for a few days. They couldn’t—“ “No.”

  “Holy shit.” “Jesus.” “No.”

  Marny and I drove out, just over the Golden Gate, not far from where you have to turn up to get to Black Sands, to get a picture for the last issue’s last page. We wanted something that would articulate everything, one image, and had chosen the tunnel on Route 1 that leads to Sausalito, carved through the mohair Headlands. It was a simple tunnel, a half-circle, dark, its end not visible, with the entrance framed by a thin rainbow painted on long ago. We had parked and then walked along the highway, and Marny had watched for cars while I stood in the highway’s middle lane and took the picture, which in the end didn’t really come out all that great, the rainbow faded and unclear, the tunnel not dark enough.

  But that was it, the final image. It was either that or the letter Paul had opened a few days before, as we were already packing up, from Ed McMahon. In large bold black type:

  MIGHT MAGAZINE

  HAS DEFINITELY WON

  FROM $1,000,000.00 TO

  $11,000,000.00 cash!

  We dedicated the issue to her, to Skye, of course. Our sad little gesture. Man, we said, you should have seen Skye. Actually, you still can. Go rent that movie, Dangerous Minds. She’s there, walking around, talking. She didn’t write the lines she said, and was probably only nineteen or twenty at the time, but there she is, forever, walking and talking, snapping gum. Oh she was something.

  The walk down to Black Sands is long, steep, but the view, all wildflowers and ocean, is astounding. As Toph and I stomp down, men are walking up, in pairs, sweating, stopping to rest—the walk up is a thousand times what it is going down. As we walk down together I become conscious of our proximity, mine and Toph’s, and am preoccupied with making sure no one gets the wrong idea. He’s almost as tall as me now, and has that boy-toy look that with us together, at this beach in particular, could easily be taken as a NAMBLA kind of thing, and if the wrong person saw us, surely they would report us, and then the child welfare people would come, and then he’d be in a foster home, and I’d have to bust him out—we’d be fugitives, underground, and the food would be terrible—

  It feels like some place very far away, this beach. The patrons of Black Sands are primarily naked gay men, some straight naked men, some straight naked women, with the rest a mixture of clothed people like us, and the occasional Chinese fisherman. We drop our stuff in the middle, where the families, when they dare come down, set up and sit. We take off our shoes and shirts, scan the beach, left and right. Toph has an idea.

  “You know what I think?”

  “Yes. No.”

  “I think everyone should be able, just once, to make an inanimate object come to life and be his pal.”

  I have to pause. Should he be encouraged?

  “Like what?” I ask, nervously.

  “Like an orange.”

  He scratches his chin, something he actually does when thinking these kinds of thoughts.

  “Or a hammer.”

  John was slithering, crawling, breaking up. He was in rehab, then left and for a while was living in Santa Cruz with a woman, forty-five at least, who he met in NA. I had stopped keeping track, did not ask why he was in NA in the first place, was not aware that he had a problem that would necessitate NA—it was accelerating with him, he was trying to do
all the problems he could do in the shortest possible amount of time. I wondered if that was the plan, some sort of experiment or performance art—if it was I would have respected that, that would have been cool but it was not, actually, that way, that calculated. We went to see a counselor, I brought him in after a while, talking to us, she called me an “enabler,” and so we left that counselor and he slept on the couch and then he was better— He would disappear for weeks, then resurface, calling from a library, from Oregon, had run through everything he had inherited, now needed two hundred dollars for the room he’d been living in, the Red Roof people were losing their fucking shit—and then, finally, after getting punched in the head one night at the Covered Wagon by a guy he knew, he wanted to go back into rehab.

  Meredith and I split the cost of a private place, three weeks’ worth, because he had no insurance, and would not go into the county one, if he had to go into the county one he might do something—he would not be able to handle that kind of shit, man— and so a few days before the private place I picked him up, from some place in the Oakland hills, the house of another woman he was seeing, two kids in the window—

  “Dude, thank you so much for putting up the money. I really want to tell you how much I appreciate that. It makes all the difference in the world. The county place was full of druggies and hookers. I could not handle that, I swear, would not have made it.”