by Dave Eggers
And now a woman is walking across the lot toward Fish. Every part of her is moving—her ankles, unsteady in heels; her arms swinging; her head, which jitters with each step, as if it, too, played a part in her propulsion. Her features are mismatched—small chin, wide nose, the icy, almost clear eyes of a wolf. She’s wearing jeans and a denim jacket, with pointy blue velveteen boots and the streamlined, utilitarian body of a tomboy teenager.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” Fish says.
“What’re you doing?” she asks. “Coming or going?”
She reminds him of the South somehow. He thinks of Kentucky and doesn’t know why. Is she nineteen or thirty? Fish can’t tell.
“I’m packing this stuff up,” he says.
“Then?”
“Then I’m driving down to see a friend.” It’s after ten and he hasn’t called Annie yet. If he calls too late she won’t let him come over.
“Can you give me a ride?” the woman says. “I’m trying to get to San Diego.”
“Oh. Yeah. See, I’m not going that far.”
Behind them, a truck parks and sighs.
“I can get out wherever you stop.”
He looks at her to see if she has a gun or a crowbar. He wants to help, but more than this, he wants to leave. Not long ago, at a gas station in Daly City, a tall man in a straw hat told Fish that he didn’t have any cash, and could Fish spot him twenty dollars—he’d give Fish a personal check in exchange. Fish figured he’d be less than human if he said no, so he said yes. The man had a car, after all, and was wearing a sports coat, so this was just a small transaction between solvent citizens. The guy put his home phone number on the check and everything. But the check bounced.
Fish had only wanted to help the man. He spent that first day thinking he had helped him, believing in the community of souls, in Daly City or anywhere. And then that man took it away. He reached inside Fish and took that from him.
Fish gets in the car and unlocks the passenger side. He moves a Jack in the Box bag and a milk carton and now the woman is sitting in the passenger seat, a few inches from him. She picks up the map from the floor, folds it quickly, expertly, and puts it in the side compartment.
“Thanks for this. You’re sweet,” she says, giving him her hand in a royal way. “What’s your name?”
“Eddie,” he says. Her hand is cold. He doesn’t know if he should kiss it or shake it. He doesn’t do either, just holds it for a few seconds and lets it drop.
“That’s weird,” she says. “My brother’s name is Eddie. Was.”
Now Fish considers giving her his real name. Instead, he says, “He changed his name?”
“No, he died.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“No worries,” she says.
Fish pulls out of the parking lot and onto the frontage road. No worries. He wants to tell her how much he hates that expression, but doesn’t. “Don’t worry” makes sense, is a pat on the arm, a reassurance from one person to another, but “No worries” implies there aren’t any worries anywhere in the world, and that’s just not true.
They get on the highway. Fish asks her name. Her name is Wendy.
“Where’re you going?” she asks.
“Redondo Beach, I think.” That’s where Annie lives. Near the beach, with a futon, in a cave of an apartment next to the garage of a family of five. Her place is full of small glass figurines of mythical animals, ears pinched while the glass was molten— hippogriffs, hydras, satyrs, a tiny sphinx the color of cantaloupe.
“My ex lives in Redondo,” Wendy says. “He’s married now. She had four kids. Two of them Downies.”
“Huh,” Fish says. She is staring at him. He wonders how he looks in profile.
“So what were you doing at the motel?”
“Nothing. Getting stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Just some stuff. Friend’s stuff.” Somehow that sounds shady. But he lets it go. She seems impressed.
Wendy pushes the radio scan button a few times, and finds the “Oooh-oooh, Jackie Blue” song.
“I love this song,” she says, and slaps her lap loudly. She leaves her hands there, grabbing her thighs as if to keep them in place.
“So do you party?” she asks.
“What?”
“Do. You. Party.”
“In general? I don’t—”
“You know. Party.”
He’s lost. He gives her a pleading look.
“You and me, party, handsome. We should go party somewhere. We could stop and get a drink and stuff. Or a room. Get some weed. Whatever.”
Fish finally knows. Shit. Normal women don’t call men “handsome”—only waitresses and prostitutes do that. It’s a shame, though. “Handsome” is such a beautiful word.
Fish gives her offer some thought. Her thighs have his head lunging. But it would cost too much, right, spending time with a woman like this? He doesn’t know. How did I get to my age without knowing how much things like this cost? But he can’t. He never takes off his shirt with people he doesn’t know. She’d see the hair on his shoulders and his hernia scar, much more sinister than it needed to be and she’d think he was a bad package, that the hair and the crooked smiling scar were proof he needed to pay for the kind of company she could offer.
“Nah, I gotta get down to Redondo,” he says, as if deciding whether or not to see an afternoon movie. “My friend’s waiting for me. And his wife and my mom and everyone. Cousins.” His mouth is adding family members quicker than his head can count. “They’re probably all waiting up.”
“We can be quick, if you want,” she says.
Another orange-and-black bird appears, shooting across the road low and fast. Fish wants to ask Wendy if she knows what they’re called—thrushes? finches? Not that it would make any difference, knowing their name. A name is a diagnosis, and neither makes a bit of difference. He glances over at her; her shoulders are squared to him now, her chin lowered. “I’m not expensive,” she says.
Fish pulls off the highway and under a gas-station canopy; it’s bright like daylight and he thinks of Reno. Wendy has asked to use the bathroom, and here her skin looks blue, translucent, as if lit from within, and the humidity has lifted. Instead of using the bathroom, though, she heads straight to the pay phone, and while she’s on the phone she waves Fish away like he’s her father dropping her off at a concert. He leaves.
By the time he gets to a phone to call Annie, it’s too late. He wakes her up, or she pretends to have been asleep. Her first syllable is full of scorn, and he wonders if Wendy is still at the gas station where he left her, a few miles back. “You have to start thinking of other people, honey,” Annie says, now without anger, without anything, and hangs up.
He is back at the hospital twenty minutes later. It’s well after midnight, and he has no hope of getting up to Adam’s room through the doors. He parks his car in the same spot and calculates which window is his. He knows that Adam is on the third floor, and the two possible windows are on either side of the steel ladder. So he runs under the willows and through the palmettos and starts up.
It’s the left window. He can see Adam in the light of the TV. His twelve-year-old’s face is facing Fish now, eyes closed. The brownie woman has gone.
As Fish is about to tap on the glass, Adam opens his eyes. When he sees Fish, he’s disbelieving. He closes one eye, as if looking through a telescope, to be sure. Fish waves, and Adam, with his fingers only, waves back.
Fish hasn’t thought any further than this. If he had a specific message for Adam, he could mime it through the glass, but he doesn’t have that kind of message.
Adam mouths the word “How?” and points to Fish. Fish is about to mime climbing a ladder but realizes he can’t do this without taking both hands off the rungs. He tries it with one hand, but it looks more like he’s shopping, like he’s doing the shopping-cart dance. Adam doesn’t get it.
Fish shakes his head, wiping the board clean.
He decides he’ll pry the window open and tumble in and talk. But the window frame is flush to the building. It will not give.
Fish knocks his head on the glass, twice. Adam smiles. Fish does it a few more times, just to entertain him. Adam pretends to be laughing a lot. It isn’t as great as either of them makes it out to be, but there isn’t anything else to do. Soon Adam yawns. Fish yawns. Adam’s eyes are flickering, so Fish gestures that he’ll see him tomorrow, rolling his hand like he’s creating a wave, the wave meaning tomorrow, rolling and rolling.
Fish drives to Redondo and checks into a Red Roof by the highway. He figures he’ll call Annie in the morning and then see Adam again on his way back north, and do something with all the bags after he’s gone through them and dumped the pills and anything else he doesn’t want Adam to have. He resolves to get him a real suitcase or two, something with a hard shell, sturdy. He can do that tomorrow.
Tomorrow!
Tomorrow he can put Adam’s stuff in the sturdy suitcases and take them to him, put them in the hospital room, lined up by the door so they’re there when he’s ready to leave. Adam can be a promising young man with neat sturdy suitcases. Fish will repack everything, put it all in two rows, pants on one side and shirts on the other, with the second suitcase holding the other things—socks and underwear and toiletries and belts, baby powder. Tomorrow he can do these things better than he did today. Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
Fish’s Red Roof room is dark and he knows he’s being stupid. The walls smell like people, and he doesn’t deserve this, to be tricked like this again. He had made so many promises to himself that he would never waste himself, never again hand a pure intention, so much like a newborn, to someone so careless. He is done being fooled. Why would that Daly City man jack him on a bad check? It was such violence. He will not be the sucker. He doesn’t want to be a part of the world under the highway. No. Today was tomorrow and tomorrow was always the same. No, he’ll skip Annie and Adam and just get a shotgun now and go to that farm on I-5 and shoot a bunch of stupid cows. Ha ha! They wouldn’t make it, anyway—so many animals are built to die. Maybe cut off their heads and hollow them out and wear one as a mask. Yes! Just for fun. Just to do it. The humidity inside one of those big heavy heads—he’d love to see what it’s like in there for a second. His clean hair would be covered in blood, his face wet, filthy from the stuff he didn’t scoop out before he put the fucking thing on.
SHE WAITS, SEETHING, BLOOMING
SHE IS A SINGLE MOTHER and has no interest in any men but her son, who is fifteen and has not called. It is 2:33 am and he hasn’t phoned since 5:40 that evening, when he said he’d be eating dinner out. And now she is watching Elimidate, drinking red wine spiked with gin, and is picturing hitting her only son with a golf club. She is picturing slapping him flat and hard across his face and is thinking that the sound it would make would almost make up for her worry, her inability to sleep, the many hundreds of dire thoughts that have torched her mind these past hours. Where is he? She doesn’t even know where he would go, or with whom. He’s a loner, he’s an eccentric. He is, she thinks, the sort of teenager who gets involved with deviants on the Internet. And yet somehow she knows that he is safe, that he is fine but has for whatever reason been unable to call, or has not even given it much thought. He is testing his boundaries, perhaps, and she will remind him of the consequences of such thoughtlessness. And when she thinks of what she will say to him and how loudly she will say it, she feels a strange kind of pleasure. The pleasure is like that enjoyed by the passionate scratching of a body overwhelmed with irritation. Giving oneself up to that scratching, everywhere and furious—which she did only a month earlier when she’d contracted poison oak—that was the most profound pleasure she had ever known. And now, waiting for her son and knowing how righteous will be her indignation, how richly justified will be anything she yells into his irresponsible face, she finds herself awaiting his arrival in the way the ravenous might await a meal. She is nodding her head. She is tapping a pen against her dry lips. She tries to order her thoughts, to decide where to start with him. How general should her criticisms be? Should they be specific only to this night, or should this be the door through which they pass in order to talk about all of his failings? The possibilities! She will have license to go anywhere, to say anything. She pours more gin into her tumbler of merlot, and when she looks up, at 2:47, his headlights are drawing chalk across the front window. This will be divine, she thinks. This will be superb. It will be florid, glorious; she will scratch and scratch and bloom. She runs to the door. She can’t wait for it to begin.
QUIET
THE LAST TIME I told this story, I ended it with a conversation I had with the nickly shimmer of the moon on a black lake on the Isle of Skye. It went like this:
“You are a lucky one, Tom, to have Erin and others like Erin.” The voice of the nickly reflection of the moon was not as deep as you might expect. It was a singer’s voice, though, a tenor, one that loved itself without reservation.
“Thank you,” I said. “I feel blessed.”
“I often think of coming down to live among you, to make a big mess of it all,” he said. “It always looks so messy, and I think I might like that.”
“It is messy, I guess.”
“It looks awfully messy. It looks almost impossible to survive, to tell you the truth. The pain of it all.”
“It’s not all that painful,” I said.
“But Tom,” it said, “the swinging of your pendulums! Everyone’s pendulums swinging, to and fro, and always you’re getting hit by someone else’s swinging pendulum. You’re minding your business, but someone else’s pendulum is swinging around, and pow! you get it in the head.”
“That happens, yes.”
“I saw you and Erin by the shed.”
“Oh.”
“I was there.”
“That makes sense. I saw you, too.”
“I watch you often, Tom. I have time on my hands. Time is different to me than it is to you.”
I was still thinking about what the nickly shimmer had seen. He, however, was warming to the sound of his thoughts.
“I feel time like you dream. Your dreams are jumbled. You can’t remember the order of your dreams, and when you recall them, the memories bend. Faces change. It’s all in puddles and ripples. That’s what time is for me.”
Three days earlier, at the airport, I was stunned that Erin had actually shown up. That she’d really come. That she had a car. “And you can drive on the other side? Do they do that up here, too?” “They do. I do.” She looked good. Pale. She had a long nose, bent a bit, seeming almost broken, working in perfect concert with her exquisitely thick chocolate hair, hair like it had been brushed a thousand times by magic elves.
I have always been the good friend. I have been harmless, listening, waiting.
“You look so much better,” she said to me.
“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what she meant.
I had flown out for a long weekend, and she and I planned to drive to the Isle of Skye. We hugged and I groaned into her sweater, pulled back and looked at her more. Her eyes still the blue of oceans on maps. She still had dark freckles, almost spots, really, round and discrete, sprayed over and around her nose and cheeks. I depended on those, and loved her old coffee-colored jeans, flared a little, faded over her bold, assertive backside—she’d been in a college production of a play about Robert Crumb’s women. Such a triumph she was—and so how had I, with my shapeless torso and oily neck, been allowed to get so close? I stood and bounced on my toes and tried not to sweat or scream or lift her and carry her around on my shoulder.
Edinburgh was raining and dark at noon. I was baffled that Erin—Erin Mahatma Fullerton—was so confident here, when she’d left me and D.C. only a year before. That she could drive on the wrong side of the road with such confidence.
“You’re incredible,” I said, about her driving. “How do you not mess it up? How are we not dead?”
; “I guess I’m just used to being good at everything.”
She was good at everything. I couldn’t remember anything she couldn’t do well. I wasn’t jealous about this. I was not threatened. I should be able to just make a statement like that without being judged.
She drove with her hand on the wheel, not really gripping it, her wrist resting on top. I reached over and squeezed her knee.
“This is so weird,” she said, then laughed by throwing her head all the way forward. It was the first time I’d seen her do that.
“I know,” I said. “But good, right?”
“Yeah, good. It’s good.” She laughed again the same way. Each time she did this she almost hit her face on the steering wheel. It was a new and fake habit—at what age do we stop acquiring affectations like that? I hoped she wouldn’t do it again, because if she did I would have to ask her to stop.
We’d met at a protest, or on the way to one, a confused and desperate event. It was supposed to be an anti-IMF/World Bank march, but had been fashioned into an action against the potential bombing of Afghanistan. This was in September.
Blocks away I first caught sight of her pants, violet-blue, and followed her quickly and asked if she were heading to Freedom Plaza. She said yes. She was friendly enough, accepting my companionship for the walk there. She said she was curious only, didn’t want to get too close to the demonstration, being an employee of the Treasury and all.
I laughed. Was she serious? She was. What was her area of work? She worked as a liaison between Treasury and the IMF. I laughed again. I’d never met anyone from Treasury.
“Hold on,” she said. She stood, her knuckle on her lips.
I stared at the knuckle on her lips. Something happened then that should not have been possible: a tiny bird alighted on her shoulder. Erin was unsurprised.
“Well zippety-do-da!” she said to the bird. “Isn’t that strange?” she said to me.