A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  I open the window.

  I have nothing to say to him.

  “There’s a part of me,” I say, “that wants to let you out of the car right now, on the fucking bridge.”

  A minute or so of silence.

  I turn up the radio.

  “Then let me out.”

  “I want to let you out, asshole/’

  “Then let me out.”

  “I mean, are you trying to break some record? Like, right now, you’re sitting here, seemingly normal, with your hands in your lap and everything—but then, when do you put on the freak suit? When does that happen? I mean—“

  He is rhythmically clicking and unclicking the knob to the glove compartment.

  “Don’t.”

  He stops.

  “I mean, why can’t you just fucking...” I want to say chill. But that would sound wrong.

  “...chill? Why can’t you just fucking chill?”

  He’s with the glove compartment again.

  “Stop it.”

  He stops.

  “I mean, all this is getting so fucking boring.”

  “It’s really fucking boring. For a little while it was kind of fun, having you do all this made-for-TV shit, but not anymore. It’s been boring for a while now.”

  “Sorry dude. Sorry I bore you.”

  “You do. All this unbelievable whining, uncertainty, the wallowing—“

  “Please. Look who’s talking. You’re one to talk about dwelling on this shit, your family shit. You’re the one who—“

  “We’re not talking about me.”

  “Yes we are, of course we are. We always are. In one way or another, we always are. Isn’t that obvious?”

  “Listen, fuck you. I didn’t need to come out here.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have.”

  “I’m going to toss you out that fucking window.”

  “Then do it. Do it.”

  “I should.”

  “I mean, how much do you really care about me, outside of my usefulness as some kind of cautionary tale, a stand-in for someone else, for your dad, for these people who disappoint you—“

  “You are so like him.”

  “Fuck you. I am not him.”

  “But you are.”

  “Let me out.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not this. I can’t be reduced to this.”

  “You did it yourself.”

  “I am more than this.”

  “Are you?”

  “I cannot be used to get back at your dad. Your dad is not a lesson. I am not a lesson. You are not a teacher.”

  “You wanted this. You wanted the attention.”

  “Whatever. I’m just another one of the people whose tragedies you felt fit into the overall message. You don’t really care so much about the people who just get along and do fine, do you? Those people don’t make it into the story, do they?”

  There’s a truck next to us, three kids in the bed. It will roll.

  “All to help make some point. I mean, isn’t it odd that someone like Shalini, for example, who really wasn’t one of your closest friends, is suddenly this major presence? And why? Because your other friends had the misfortune not to be misfortunate. The only people who get speaking parts are those whose lives are grabbed by chaos—“

  “I am allowed.”

  “No.”

  “I am allowed—“

  “No. And poor Toph. I wonder how much say he had in this whole process. You’ll claim that he had full approval, thought it was great, hilarious, etc., and maybe he did, but how happy do you think he is about all this? It’s disgusting, the whole enterprise.”

  “It’s too big for you to understand. You know nothing about us.”

  “Oh God.”

  “It’s enlightenment, inspiration. Proof.”

  “No. You know what it is? It’s entertainment. If you back up far enough, it all becomes a sort of show. You grew up with comforts, without danger, and now you have to seek it out, manufacture it, or, worse, use the misfortunes of friends and acquaintances to add drama to your own life. But see, you cannot move real people around like this, twist their arms and legs, position them, dress them, make them talk—“

  “I am allowed.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I am owed.”

  “You’re not. See— You’re just not. You’re like a.. .a cannibal or something. Don’t you see how this is just flesh-eating? You’re.. .making lampshades from human sk—“

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “Let me out.”

  “I can’t let you out here.”

  “Let me out. I’ll walk. And I don’t want to be your fuel, your food.”

  “I would do it for you.”

  “Right.”

  “I would feed myself to you.”

  “I don’t want you to feed yourself to me. And I don’t want to devour you. I don’t want to use you as fuel. I don’t want anything from you. You think that because you had things taken from you, that you can just take and take—everything. But you know, not everyone wants to eat each other all the time, not everyone wants to—“

  “We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. That’s what we do, as people.”

  “For you it’s all blood and revenge, but you know, there is more, or rather less, to all this than that. Not everyone is so angry, and so desperate, and hungry—“

  “You can have me.”

  “Ick. No.”

  “I’ll make you stronger.”

  “I’m done with you.”

  “You are not. You will be back. You will always need. You’ll always need someone to bleed on. You’re incomplete, John—“

  “You just missed the exit.”

  Shalini’s party was huge. It had been a year since her fall, and she was out of the hospital, had gone home to L.A., to live with her mom and sister. She was improving daily, could do just about everything again, though her short-term memory was still jumbled, unreliable. Everything from a year ago forward was gone. She could often not remember what had happened the day before, the hour before. She had to be told about the accident almost daily, and each and every time the story was told she was floored. “Wow,” she would say, as if the story were not about her at all. But her memory, she was working on it, had flashcards, had a tutor, a diary where she kept notes, the events of the day, a paper memory of things that had happened. She had come so far, and the prognosis was good, so for her twenty-sixth birthday, her family had planned a huge party at their house, all kinds of food, a DJ, dancing, torches around the pool, a hundred people, more.

  Toph and I drove down. I didn’t know what to bring as a present, so did what I had been doing regularly at that point: I asked Toph to make her something. He had been making a series of Jesus figurines from colored bakeable clay—Jesus in a tuxedo and cane, mouth open (“Showtunes Jesus”), Jesus with a blond wig and pink woman’s suit (“Hillary Jesus”), and Jesus in a white sleeping bag with a red cross atop it (“Sleepover Jesus”) complete with a tiny can of itching powder. They were dead-on renderings, and were always appreciated by their recipients, but he claimed he didn’t have time anymore to make things for my friends. And my second idea was shot when he refused to give up the Book of Mormon he had ordered though a 1-800 number. Well.

  When we got to L.A., I dropped him off with Bill in Manhattan Beach and drove on to Shalini’s, stopping at the mall on the way, where I bought a cat calendar, a book about Menudo, some paperweights—$54 for a few seconds of laughs. I found her house, high on a hill, on a wide dark street. There were cars everywhere, both sides of the road; I had to park blocks away. You could hear the music from five hundred yards, could see the lights in the backyard. I was terrified. I hadn’t seen Shal in months, did not know what to expect.

  I knocked on the huge door and when I was let in there were people everywhere, presents stacked on the table, on the floor, huge beautiful p
resents, there were people in the living room, and the family room, and back there in the dining room a whole crowd doing something, and then maybe fifty more in the back, on the patio, around the pool, surrounded by torches, the backyard bathed in fiery light. Her mother said Shalini was upstairs, resting. I walked up the carpeted stairs and followed the voices down the hallway. In a bedroom overlooking the pool there she was, sitting on her bed, looking bright and sparkly, completely the same.

  “Hello dahling!” she said.

  We hugged. She was dressed up, a silk blouse, a miniskirt.

  I told her about how my car broke down on the way to L.A.— it had—how I borrowed and drove Bill’s to her house, how great the party seemed to be going, all the torches in the backyard, all the people, the pool—

  She looked out her window, down at the pool, glowing like a sky, the people silhouetted against it.

  “Yeah, but what’s it all for?” she asked.

  She didn’t know why everyone was here. You could see her searching her memory for a reason, finding nothing.

  “It’s your birthday,” I said.

  Her sister, Anuja, and I explained the birthday party.

  “But why the big deal? I mean, I know I’m pretty popular and everything, but really!” She laughed a little laugh.

  Anuja and I sketched it out as vaguely as possible, mentioned a fall and a coma, an incredible recovery. And as always, when we were done with the story, Shalini was utterly amazed.

  “That is inrra/ible,” she said.

  “Yeah,” we said. “You were lucky.” No one mentions her friend who died, the one she came with.

  “I mean, thank you, GW,” she said, in her Valley way, rolling her eyes. God sounded like Gawd.

  Eventually she came downstairs, and she danced for a while, on the parquet floor they’d assembled by the pool. They did the presents, and there was a dinner, and Carla and Mark were there, and everyone else from all those hospital days. The view, and the warm winds coming up from the ocean, made it as euphoric as it was meant to be. People walked around with tears in their eyes, especially Shalini’s mother, who I had seen no other way, for as long as I had known her. As things wound down, and Shalini was upstairs resting, I walked with her mother to the door.

  “You know, I went looking for the landlord,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The landlord, the one who owned the building.” I tell her how I followed the trial in the papers, the trial of the landlord responsible for the faulty deck, how I went to the courthouse half a dozen times, looking for him, wanting to sit in on the hearings, wanting to see the man. I planned what I would do to him if given a moment alone—that, if I found myself in a dark vacant place with him, I would shove my fist through his head.

  “Did you see the trial?” she asked.

  “No, I kept going to the wrong room, or they would have rescheduled it. They were always rescheduling it. I kept sitting in empty courtrooms, waiting—

  “Tell Shal I had to take off.”

  I left knowing that I might not be back. I said I would be back—maybe next Thanksgiving—but I knew that we were leaving California, Toph and I, we were exhausted and felt hunted—

  Everyone else was leaving or was gone. Flagg had moved to New York for grad school, then Moodie moved there for a job, and then Zev, and Kirsten went to Harvard with her new boyfriend—he was in law school, she was after an MBA, a nice couple, an untroubled couple, and I surprised myself by being endlessly happy for her— and we’re going, too, because going to work every day is starting to tear me into little pieces, that stupid drive every day, the same roads, hills, and because I still don’t have health insurance, and we’re sick of that tiny, loud apartment, and living next to all those horrible people who don’t understand, who should be like us and understand but they don’t yet understand anything at all, and I’m tired of living across from that senior citizens’ home, having to wake up and see them, puttering on their porches, getting dressed up to walk down to the community center, to put on their rubber caps and swim so slowly in that pool—

  There are too many stupid echoes here, everywhere. Even a beach like Black Sands brings her back, how in her last half-year, she would watch from the car. At Toph’s flag football games, Beth and I would sit on the sidelines, cheering, making unkind remarks about the coach, while she stayed in the car, parked in the lot high above the field. We could see her, leaning over the steering wheel, squinting to see the action.

  We would wave. Hi Mom!

  She would wave back.

  She couldn’t make the walk down to the field, couldn’t make the trip down to the beach the last time we were out here, when Beth graduated and I flew out, when after the ceremony she, Beth and Toph and I drove down the coast, through Monterey, and when we got to the beach in Carmel we told her we’d be back and ran down the high dune, ran down to the water, Toph only seven then, his first time in California. Beth and I pretended that we were throwing him in the ocean. We hit each other with long stretches of brown, rubbery seaweed. We looked up at the car and we waved.

  She waved back, high above the beach, overlooking. And after we rolled around more, and poured sand on Toph’s hair and made Beth kiss a dead jellyfish, we walked back up, knowing our mother had seen everything, was so proud of us all, watching from above.

  But when we climbed the dune and were closer to the car it almost looked like she was asleep.

  She was asleep. Her hands in her lap.

  She had not waved.

  So today the wind is perfect. There’s hardly any at all. This beach, Black Sands, usually has some kind of wind coming from the water, which fucks things up, sending the frisbee deep into that frigid water, forcing me to wade in in my shorts stiff-legged to retrieve it. But today there is no wind, and there is almost no one else here, which means we have most of the beach, or at least our part of it, to ourselves, which is really something, even if for an hour.

  We’ve gotten so much better. I mean, we started out really good, when he was smaller, when we first came out here—he was years ahead of anyone his age, would dominate games of Ultimate at his summer camp, they worshiped him, the other kids—you should have seen the younger kids crowd around him, oh and when he would take off his baseball hat and let his long blond hair fall forward—this one time a boy was awestruck: “You shouldn’t wear a hat,” he said, “your hair is amazing.” This little boy, I was right there, it was Parents’ Day. But so throwing-wise Toph didn’t used to have the range he does now, and the tricks, he can do tricks— and I’ve always had the tricks I can do, like the one where I run up to the frisbee as it’s coming at about chest level, and when I’m almost there I jump at it, do kind of a 180 in the air—it’s probably a 360, actually, when you think of it, because I— Yeah, so I spin around in midair, coming at the frisbee as it’s coming toward me and when I’m perfectly— When I have my back to the frisbee in midspin, that’s when I catch it, so it’s like a behind-the-back catch, in midair, but ideally, with the spinning and all, I land— get this—facing Toph. A 360. That’s a pretty cool trick when you can get it to work, which is only so often, for me, even though I’m really fucking good— So the point is that Toph does that one now, and he’s way more consistently good at it than I am. He still fucks it up a lot of the time, bats the frisbee away, which makes me cringe because we break our frisbees every couple months, and it’s always something like that, a batting of the frisbee that cracks the thing right in half, always happens right when we get to the beach, or wherever. It’s thick plastic, too, of course—we use only the really heavy frisbees—

  But so he does that trick, which is a cool one to watch, but he also does, almost prefers, all these stupid tricks, really stupid fucking tricks, tricks that aren’t really tricks at all, they’re just stupid things, because he’s always been more interested in doing goofy stupid shit than doing things normally, keeping score, that sort of thing— So he’s got one trick where, when the frisbee’s
coming, he’ll just lay down on his stomach for as long as he can, and then, at the last possible moment, he’ll stand up and then...take a few steps and go catch the frisbee. That’s it. It’s a pretty stupid fucking trick, right? I mean, it makes no sense at all, when you think about it, it’s the most unspectacular thing in the world. But he cracks himself up with that one, truly. Laughing like an idiot—

  The morphine was taking her under, but her breathing was still strong. It was erratic, but you should have heard the breathing—when it came, it was strong, forceful, it was a yanking of air. Her limbs weren’t moving anymore, now she was still, her head back, and just the breathing, like a sort of uneven snoring. More and more like snoring, the grinding, the gasping. We stayed up all day and night because you did not know. We moved chairs close, curled in them and slept, held her hand, and soon the tide came in. It started with a different sound in the snoring. Something rounder, more liquid. Then almost a gurgling. Her breaths became more strained, pulling both air and also these bubbles—what was that sound?—and Beth and I were there, on either side, and the breaths were pulling, yanking at something like a boat still tied to a dock, the motor revving but something holding, holding. The breaths were pulling more and more. And the gurgling, the bubbles became more prominent in the breathing, she was pulling at a tub of water, or fluid, then a lake, a sea, an ocean, pulling at it— The fluid kept coming, the tide inside her rising, rising, her breaths shorter, like someone being filled as the water climbs and there is no longer anywhere to— But there was intelligence in that breathing, and passion in that breathing, everything there, we could take that breathing and hold its hand, sit on its lap while watching TV, the breaths were quicker and shorter and quicker and shorter and then shallow, shallow and that’s when I loved her as much as any other time, when I knew her as I thought I knew her—oh she was out, she was gone, a week into the morphine maybe, and she could go any minute, her systems were falling apart or gone, no one had any idea what was keeping her going but she was sucking in that air, she was breathing so erratically, weakly, but she was doing it so desperately, each breath taking all that she had, her small person, with her beautiful tanned skin shiny, Beth and I draped over her, not knowing when— But she would just breathe, and breathe, suddenly, anxiously, unyielding— And I only hope it wasn’t regret, that there wasn’t regret there, in those breaths, though I know there was, I dream there was, when I hear the breaths, I can hear the anger— She could not fucking believe this was actually happening. Even while sleeping under the morphine and when we were only waiting, expecting, she would snap back, would rise suddenly and say something, cry out, a nightmare— furious about this bullshit, that something like this was actually happening, that she was leaving all of us, Toph— She was not ready, not even close, was not resolved, resigned, was not ready— And while we’re throwing there’s a naked man walking, I first see him as he walks right past me, between me and the water. He’s about my height, skinny, pale, bony butt, and he walks past me, down the shore toward Toph. At first I’m worried about Toph having to see this man, not just his butt but his whole frontal action happening, this man, walking toward Toph, unabashed, proud even, and for a while, for fifty yards at least, as he approaches, I watch Toph, watch him to see if he looks, or laughs, or is disgusted at this human nakedness, all pale and unadorned, pathetic and silly and maybe desperate, maybe needing something, needing to be looked at by strangers—and God knows what kind of freaky looks the naked guy’ll be giving him, the kinds of freaky looks naked guys are always giving— But then I’m watching Toph’s face, and he doesn’t even look at the man. He does his best to avoid him, overconcentrating on his throws, looking serious, like this throw is so insurmountably important that he could never be bothered by this naked man—it’s funny, actually, impressive, really—and then the man is past him, is gone, walking on toward the end of the shore, toward that spooky cliff jutting into the breaking waves, and Toph will never have to see the naked man again—