A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

  THIS WAS UNCALLED FOR.

  HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS.

  BY DAVE EGGERS

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION: February 2001

  Copyright © 2000, 2001 David (“Dave”) K. Eggers All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,

  New York. Random House is owned in toto by an absolutely huge German company called Bertelsmann A.G. which owns too many things to count or track. That said, no matter how big such companies are, and how many things they own, or how much money they have or make or control, their influence over the daily lives and hearts of individuals, and thus, like 99 percent of what is done by official people in cities like Washington, or Moscow, or Sao Paulo or Auckland, their effect on the short, fraught lives of human beings who limp around and sleep and dream of flying through bloodstreams, who love the smell of rubber cement and think of space travel while having intercourse, is very very small, and so hardly worth worrying about.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

  00-043832

  ISBN 0-375-72578-4

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  13579 10 8642

  Height: 5’11”; Weight: 175; Eyes: blue; Hair: brown; Hands: chubbier than one would expect; Allergies: only to dander; Place on the sexual-orientation scale, with 1 being perfectly straight, and 10 being perfectly gay:

  note: This is a work of fiction, only in that in many cases, the author could not remember the exact words said by certain people, and exact descriptions of certain things, so had to fill in gaps as best he could. Otherwise, all characters and incidents and dialogue are real, are not products of the author’s imagination, because at the time of this writing, the author had no imagination whatsoever for those sorts of things, and could not conceive of making up a story or characters—it felt like driving a car in a clown suit—especially when there was so much to say about his own, true, sorry and inspirational story, the actual people that he has known, and of course the many twists and turns of his own thrilling and complex mind. Any resemblance to persons living or dead should be plainly apparent to them and those who know them, especially if the author has been kind enough to have provided their real names and, in some cases, their phone numbers. All events described herein actually happened, though on occasion the author has taken certain, very small, liberties with chronology, because that is his right as an American.

  First of all:

  I am tired. I am true of heart!

  And also:

  You are tired. You are true of heart!

  RULES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR ENJOYMENT OF THIS BOOK:

  1. There is no overwhelming need to read the preface. Really. It exists mostly for the author, and those who, after finishing the rest of the book, have for some reason found themselves stuck with nothing else to read. If you have already read the preface, and wish you had not, we apologize. We should have told you sooner.

  2. There is also no overarching need to read the acknowledgments section. Many early readers of this book (see p. xlv) suggested its curtailment or removal, but they were defied. Still, it is not necessary to the plot in any major way, so, as with the preface, if you have already read the acknowledgments section, and wish you had not, again, we apologize. We should have said something.

  3. You can also skip the table of contents, if you’re short of time.

  4. Actually, many of you might want to skip much of the middle, namely pages 239—351, which concern the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time.

  5. Matter of fact, the first three or four chapters are all some of you might want to bother with. That gets you to page 123 or so, which is a nice length, a nice novella sort of length. Those first four chapters stick to one general subject, something manageable, which is more than what can be said for the book thereafter.

  6. The book thereafter is kind of uneven.

  PREFACE TO THIS EDITION

  For all the author’s bluster elsewhere, this is not, actually, a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, for various purposes.

  Dialogue: This has of course been almost entirely reconstructed. The dialogue, though all essentially true—except that which is obviously not true, as when people break out of their narrative time-space continuum to cloyingly talk about the book itself—has been written from memory, and reflects both the author’s memory’s limitations and his imagination’s nudgings. All the individual words and sentences have been run through a conveyor, manufactured like so: 1) they are remembered; 2) they are written; 3) they are rewritten, to sound more accurate; 4) they are edited to fit within the narrative (though keeping with their essential truth); 5) they are rewritten again, to spare the author and the other characters the shame of sounding as inarticulate as they invariably do, or would, if their sentences, almost invariably begun with the word “Dude”—as in, for example, “Dude, she died”— were merely transcribed. It should be noted, however, that what’s remarkable is that the book’s most surreal dialogue, like that with the Latino teenagers and that with the beleaguered Jenna, is that which is most true to life.

  Characters, and Their Characteristics: The author, though he was loath to do it, had to change a few names, and further disguise these name-changed characters. The primary example is the character named John, whose real-life name is not actually John, because John’s real-life counterpart justifiably did not want some of the dark portions of his life chronicled—though after reading the manuscript, he did not object to his deeds and words being spoken by another. Especially if the character were less a direct facsimile, and more of an amalgam. Which he is, in fact. Now, to make John work, and create a manageable narrative, his alteration had a sort of domino effect, making necessary a few other fictions. Among them: In real life, Meredith Weiss, who is real, does not know John all that well. The person who in real life acted as intermediary was not Meredith, but another person, whose presence would give away the connection, indeed, would give away poor John, and we could not have that. Thus, the author called Meredith:

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “So, do you mind doing [such and such] and saying [such and such], which in real life you did not actually do and say?”

  “No, not at all.”

  So that was that. It should be noted, though, that Meredith’s main scene, in Chapter V, contains no fabrications. You can ask her. She lives in Southern California.

  Otherwise, name changes are addressed in the body of the text. Moving on:

  Locations and Time: First, there have been a few instances of location-switching. In Chapter V, there were two in particular. The conversation with Jenna, wherein the narrator tells her that Toph has fired a gun at his school and then disappeared, did not happen that night in that location, but instead happened in the backseat of a car, traveling from one party to the next, on New Year’s Eve, 1996. Later in the same chapter, the narrator, with the same Meredith mentioned above, encounters some youths on a San Francisco beach. This episode, though otherwise entirely factual, actually occurred in Los Angeles. Also, in this chapter, as in a few other chapters, there has been compression of time. It is, for the most part, referenced in the text, but we will reiterate here that in the latter third of the book, much happens in what seems to be a short period of time. Though most of the events rendered did in fact happen wi
thin a very close span of time, a few did not. It should be noted, however, that the following chapters feature no time-compression: I, II, IV, VII.

  A Note About Columbine: This book was written, and the dialogue it recounts was spoken, many years before the horrific events at that school and elsewhere. No levity is being attached to such things, intentionally or not.

  Omissions: Some really great sex scenes were omitted, at the request of those who are now married or involved. Also removed was a fantastic scene—100 percent true—featuring most of the book’s primary characters, and a whale. Further, this edition reflects the omission of a number of sentences, paragraphs, and passages. Among them:

  p. 38: As we lie on the bed, there are only a few long hours when Beth is asleep and Toph is asleep and my mother is asleep. I am awake for much of that time. I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it’s hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so— this has always been my dream—so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while the children sleep.

  As I lie, drenched in the amber room, I wonder if I will nap in the morning. I think I can, believe I can sleep from maybe five until ten, before the nurses start coming in, adjusting and wiping, and so am content to stay up.

  But this hideabed is killing me, the flimsiness of the mattress, the way that bar is digging into my back, bisecting my spine, grinding into it. Toph turning, kicking. And on the other side of the room, her uneven breathing.

  p. 126: How do you handle this? Bill is up visiting, and he and Toph and I are driving over the Bay Bridge, and we are talking about stockbrokering. We are talking about how, after Toph spent a weekend in Manhattan Beach with Bill and Bill’s two stockbroker roommates, Toph now wants to be a stockbroker, too. Bill is so excited about it all he can hardly stand it, wants to buy him a pair of suspenders, a starter-sized ticker...

  “We were thinking that, with Toph so good with numbers and all, that something like that would be a perfect career—“

  I almost drive the car off the bridge.

  p. 197: Why the scaffolding?

  See, I like the scaffolding. I like the scaffolding as much as I like the building. Especially if that scaffolding is beautiful, in its way.

  p. 207: Alcoholism and death make you omnivorous, both reckless & afraid, amoral, desperate.

  Do you really believe that?

  Sometimes. Sure. No. Yes.

  p. 217: ... But see, in high school, I did a series of paintings of members of my family. The first was of Toph, from a photograph I had taken. Because for the assignment we were required to grid the picture out for accuracy, the painting, in tempera, was dead-on; it looked just like him. Not so with the rest of them, without aid of a picture under a grid. I did one of Bill, but his face came out too rigid, his eyes too dark, and his hair looked matted, Caesar-like, which was not at all the case in real life. The painting of Beth, from a photograph of her dressed for the prom, was off, too, all bloodred flesh under pink taffeta—I abandoned it right away. The one of my mom and dad, from an old slide, showed them on a boat together on a gray day. My mother takes up most of the frame, facing the camera, while my dad is over her shoulder, at the front of the boat, looking off to the side, unaware a picture is being taken, or feigning same. I screwed that one up, too—couldn’t get the likenesses. Any time one of them would see one of the paintings, they hated them. Bill was incensed when the one of him was shown at the public library. “Is that legal?” he demanded of my father, the lawyer. “Can he even do that? I look like a monster!” And he was right. He did. So during my junior year, when Ricky Storr asked me to do a portrait of his father, I hesitated, because I had been so repeatedly frustrated by my limits, by my inability to render someone without distorting them, clumsily, horribly. But to Ricky I said yes, out of respect, thrilled in a way that he had bestowed the honor on me with the painting of a memorial for his father. So Ricky provided a formal black-and-white photograph, and I worked at it for weeks, with tiny brushes. When I was done, the likeness, to me, was unassailable. I told Ricky to come to the school’s art room, that it was ready. He finished his lunch early one day and came down. I turned it around, with a flourish, with great pride, ready for us both to glow in its presence.

  There was quiet. Then he said:

  “Oh. Oh. That’s not what I expected. That’s not ... what I expected.”

  Then he left the room, and the painting with me.

  p. 217: When we would drive past a cemetery we would click our tongues and marvel, unbelieving. Especially the big ones, the crowded one, obscene places, so few trees, all that gray, like some sort of monstrous ashtray. When we went by Toph could not look, and I looked only to know, to reconfirm my own promise, that I would never be in such a place, would never bury anyone in such a place—who were these graves for? Who did they comfort?— would never allow myself to be buried in such a place, that I would either disappear completely—

  I have visions of my demise: When I know I have only so much more time left—for example if I do in fact have AIDS as I believe I probably do, if anyone does, it’s me, why not—when the time comes, I will just leave, say goodbye and leave, and then throw myself into a volcano.

  Not that there seems to be any appropriate place to bury someone, but these municipal cemeteries, or any cemetery at all for that matter, like the ones by the highway, or the ones in the middle of town, with all these bodies with their corresponding rocks—oh it’s just too primitive and vulgar, isn’t it? The hole, and the box, and the rock on the grass? And we glamorize this process, feel it fitting and dramatic, austerely beautiful, standing there by the hole as we lower the box. It’s incredible. Barbaric and base.

  Though I should say I once saw a place that seemed fitting. I was walking—I would say “hiking,” if we were doing anything but walking, but since we were just walking, I will not use the word “hiking,” which everyone feels compelled to use anytime they’re outside and there’s a slight incline—in a forest above the Carapa, a tributary of the Amazon. I was on a junket, with a few other journalists—two from Reptile magazine—and a group of herpetologists, a bunch of chubby American snake experts with cameras, and we had been brought through this forest, on an upward-meandering path, looking for boa constrictors and lizards. After maybe forty-five minutes under this dappled dark forest, suddenly the trees broke, and we were at the top of the trail, in a clearing, over the river, and at that point you could see for honestly a hundred miles. The sun was setting, and in that huge Amazonian sky there were washes of blue and orange, thick swashes of each, mixed loosely, like paint pushed with fingers. The river was moving slowly below, the color of caramel, and beyond it was the forest, the jungle, green broccoli chaos as far as you could see. And immediately before us there were about twenty simple white crosses, without anything in the way of markings. A burial ground for local villagers.

  And it occurred to me that I could stay there, that if I had to be buried, my rotting corpse heaped on with dirt, I could stand to have it done there. With the view and all.

  It was odd timing, too, because earlier that day, I was almost sure I was leaving this world, via piranha.

  We had anchored our boat, a three-story riverboat, in a small river cul-de-sac, and the guides had begun fishing for piranha, using only sticks and string, chicken as bait.

  The piranhas took to it immediately. It was a cinch—they were jumping onto the boat, flopping around with their furious little faces.

  And then, on the other side of the boat, our American guide, a bearded Bill, was swimming. The water, like tea, made his underwater limbs appear red, making all the more disconcerting the fact that he was swimming amid a school of piranhas.

  “Come in!” he said.

  Oh God no way.

  Then everyone else was in
, the chubby herpetologists were in, all their limbs in the bloodred tea. I had been told that piranha attacks were extremely rare (though not unheard of), that there was nothing to fear, and so soon enough I jumped from the boat and was swimming, too, relatively content that, even if there was some feeding frenzy, at least my odds were better than if I were in the water alone^while the fish were gorging on someone else, I’d have time to swim to safety. I actually did the math, the math of how long it would take the fish to eat the other four people vis-a-vis how long I’d have to get to the riverbank. After about three or four minutes, each one panic-stricken, trying not to touch my feet to the muddy ground, keeping my movements minimal so as not to attract attention, I got out.

  Later, I tried out one of the guides’ dugout canoes. After a few of the herpetologists had failed to stay afloat in it, I was convinced that I, being so very agile, could paddle and keep it afloat. I got in the tiny canoe, steadied myself, and paddled away. And for a while I did it. I set off from the main boat, downriver, alternating sides with the small paddle, the very picture of skill and grace.

  But about two hundred yards down the river, the canoe began to sink. I was too heavy. It was taking in water.

  I looked back to the boat. The Peruvian guides were all watching, were hysterical. I was sinking into the brown water, the current taking me farther downstream, and they were laughing, doubled over. They were loving it.

  The canoe tipped, and I fell in, at this point in the middle of the river, where it was much deeper, a darker shade of brown. I could not see my limbs. I climbed onto the capsized canoe, desperate.

  I was sure I was gone. Yes, the piranhas over there by the main boat had not touched us, but how could you be sure that out here, that they wouldn’t take a nip from a finger? They often nipped fingers and toes, and that would draw blood and from there...

  Oh God Toph.

  I was there, and the canoe was sinking again, capsized but sinking under my weight, and soon I would be wholly in this river again, the river infested with piranhas, and my thrashing would draw them to me—I was trying, trying to keep it to a minimum, just kicking my legs, staying afloat—and then I would be picked at slowly, chunks from my calves and stomach, then, once the flesh was torn, and blood ribboning out, there would be the flurry, a hundred at once, I would look down and see my extremities overcome by a terrible blur of teeth and blood, and I would be picked clean, to the bone, and why? Because I had to show the entourage that I could do whatever any Peruvian river guide could do—