by Dave Eggers
The bird departed and Erin led me through a short cut. Under a marble archway and through an outdoor mall we walked. I dipped my fingers into a small fountain, the water too warm. We passed a Cartier shop on the right as the sounds of the protest became louder, somewhere above our heads. Before us were a set of polished steps and to our left the park. I followed her.
There was something experimental about her, I thought, physically. She didn’t seem to have a left arm. We walked down the steps, and I was on her right side, so I wasn’t in a position to know more.
I leaned forward and confirmed that there was no left arm swinging, no left hand at her side. I was growing more certain that she had only one arm. A large black minivan stopped in front of us, and in the window I saw her reflection clearly. Four cops or agents in riot gear stepped out, hulking, sullen, and Erin was missing an arm. The effect wasn’t something ruined or feeble, though, was somehow harmonious—not a handicap but just a viable variation. Instead of allowing her one sleeve to dangle, she’d sewn it at the shoulder. Or the manufacturer had. It was seamless. She saw me looking. She turned and walked.
Did people look at Erin strangely? It depended on their angle, first of all. Those who could grasp and be certain that she was missing a limb might cock their heads or pause briefly. Not out of revulsion. It was more like simple surprise, as when you see identical twins, adults, dressed alike, or a cat on a leash. I wanted to be closer to her because she seemed like the future to me, like a new sort of person, a new species. When I was thirteen I’d had a friend, half French and half Vietnamese, who had given me the same feeling of satisfaction—bridging the gap between my world and the one I thought was new.
On the peripheries of the protest was a smattering of TV cameras, trolling. We watched while demonstrators wandered into and out of the plaza. It wasn’t clear if the protest was beginning or ending or in full swing. The energy was mild. The ratio of protesters to those documenting them was roughly one to one.
“You don’t seem very happy,” she said to me.
This made me happy. I smiled. I felt like a bird that had landed on her shoulder. She was unspoiled land on which I could settle. I could bring everything I had.
I asked her if she worried about losing her job, if she was caught on film. I put my knuckle to my lips.
“Not really,” she said. “There are lots of jobs. There are so many things to do. Too damned many, really. It might be time to move anyway. This town is choking me.”
She laughed with her eyes closed. I laughed and watched her. I knew then that I would get her a job where I worked, that she and I would become closer, that I would know the things I wanted to know about her.
We sat on the curb.
Near us a bearded man’s sign said “Friend of the Earth.”
Erin pointed to him. “He’s a friend of the Earth,” she said.
A couple walked by, young and holding hands, wearing black handkerchiefs over their faces. Erin’s face darkened. “I have to get out of this country for a while,” she said.
That was more than two years ago. Now, in our small plastic-smelling car we skittered around Edinburgh’s glowering black fortress. Up the hill and through the castle’s parking lot running and squealing in the rain and once within the thick stone walls we took a tour elucidating the history of the country’s crown jewels. We made very, very funny jokes about these crown jewels, and the role of the peasant women in protecting and hiding them. We watched footage of Scottish soldiers from WWII, maybe it was WWI, though most of the film involved the soldiers standing around smoking pipes. The old speedy film made them seem nervous, their movements bird-like. There was a long stretch of the soldiers in kilts, dancing two by two, arms hooked, on an outdoor stage, presumably to entertain their colleagues. Spinning, twirling, sometimes with one hand above their heads, sometimes one over their bellies— it’s hard to explain.
“They don’t teach soldiers to dance like they used to,” Erin said.
Every man in the film was dead by now. When I was very young I couldn’t watch anything black and white on TV because I knew the people moving were now dust. I hugged Erin from behind, and she stared at my hands linked, loosely, over around her waist.
I knew that she had not been content since moving to London. Her worries, though, came from home. She was getting news from her family and felt helpless. Her favorite cousin, a marine, was in Kabul. Her parents were still married but were seeing other people; her mother was dating a retired man who held the Stop sign at a school crosswalk. He sat on a lawn chair when between trips across the road.
“I always assumed he wasn’t all there,” Erin said, about the man, whose name was Jedediah. “Not retarded, you know…” She made a face that looked like a zombie’s. She scratched her temples and crossed her eyes. Now the man was sleeping in her mother’s bed.
I’d never been interested in someone like Erin before. She had an MBA, which I didn’t understand—MBAs generally or the fact that she’d wanted one. She knew menus and cheeses and Caribbean islands named after saints. But she was very strong and even reckless. She had quit her job in D.C. and now she was here.
She wanted to start an ex-pat community in London, or Scotland or Ireland. Or Norway. She hadn’t made up her mind, and was auditioning possible locations—somewhere, she said, “where all the churches aren’t covered in scaffolding.” Skye was among the candidates. She’d just been to Montenegro and was disappointed. “I expected more mustaches,” she said. “Mustaches and fedoras.”
I had the feeling that she’d overromanticized the idea of living elsewhere, but I didn’t tell her this. We stepped through the castle museum, so many old things behind new glass. She complained that she was losing friends to substances and babies, that she was fighting, over the phone, with everyone she knew in the U.S. She was convinced she was right each time, but still, she wanted to know if she seemed insane. I told her she was perfect.
“I’m always on your side,” I said.
“Fine. You stay close, and together we’ll systematically remove all the crazies from my life.”
The car didn’t have a CD player but Erin had an adapter that connected her portable disc player to the tape deck. While she drove us down the hill and into the town, I hooked everything up, only to find that the wires wouldn’t stay connected without some kind of adhesive.
“Hold on,” she said.
She stopped the car at a small market on the back end of the castle and ran in. It was the first time we’d been apart since the airport, and it was too soon. I put my hand on the leather where she’d been sitting. I wanted it to be warmer.
She jogged back to the car grinning like she’d stolen something The door opened, rain and wind scrambled in loudly, and she came inside. The door closed behind her with a clump.
“Guess what I just bought?” she asked.
I guessed: “Tape.”
“Riiiiight…” She was twirling her index finger in the air, pulling more words from my mouth, like winding a yo-yo. It drove me half-mad with desire.
“Special tape?” I ventured, wanting to take her face and squeeze it and lick it.
“Not just tape. Scotch tape.”
“Right.”
“Get it, Scotch tape?”
“Oh.”
The rain pattered.
She pulled it out of the white paper bag with a flourish. I widened my eyes, trying to seem impressed.
The tape was yellowed, an amber sort of color. It looked like the tape we’d used in grade school, before they invented good tape.
“It looks old,” I said.
“No, no, this is the best. They invented it, these people! Probably up there, in that castle. A bunch of monks, took them centuries.” She was desperately trying to get some tape from the roll but it wasn’t attached to any standard tape dispensing device. I wanted to help but knew she’d ask me if she felt she needed it. That was the rule.
In a few seconds she was done assembling, wrapping the tap
e around the adapter and the walkman. But the tape wasn’t sticking. It fell off immediately. It was like paper. It was not tape. It had no adhesive qualities whatsoever.
I laughed and then stopped. She was angry. She peeled off another strip and tested its stickiness against her fingers.
“It’s not even sticky,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
She started the car and pulled out.
“This is Scotch tape, right?” she said. “God damn it.”
Up through the highlands at dusk. Throughout the electric-green hills were great white stones flung like teeth.
“I see this and I think glory,” I said to Erin, loving the sound of the word glory, and hoping it would impress her in some way. I was driving now, and soon realized that driving on the wrong side wasn’t very difficult.
“I’d love to live here,” I said, trying to sound dreamy.
“You can’t live here,” she said. “There’s nothing here. No work.”
“I could telecommute.”
Silence from Erin.
“If you were here,” I started, then dropped the thought.
She gave me a fake smile. I soaked up every ounce of it.
When I met Erin I was working at a statistics-processing firm, a small shop founded by a one-time major league pitcher named Dean Denny. He was a side-armer, goofy and mustachioed. After retiring at thirty-two, he’d run for office, lost, spent ten years as a lobbyist for everyone from Exxon to Greenpeace, then started the American Institute for Statistical Studies. The firm was located in a converted Victorian in Alexandria, catering to the nonprofits in D.C., some federal agencies, and those who wanted influence at either or both. The other two staff members were Michael and Derek, Michael being Dean’s son and Derek being Michael’s old friend and the former personal assistant to Alan Simpson, senator of Wyoming.
Two months after meeting Erin I secured a job for her at the AISS. I was afraid she’d hate Michael and Derek, that they would drive her away. For their own amusement, they had recently removed one letter from the firm’s name and had made business cards with A.S.S. on them. They were chucklers, they were assholes. They called me The Turtle.
Then Turtle-man.
Then Yertle.
Then Yentl. Then Lentil.
Finally they went back to Turtle.
They were funny and loyal. They laughed about Dockers but then wore pants shockingly close to Dockers. Sometimes they’d wear baseball caps to work, the bill carefully bent in an upside-down grin, the edges frayed. Their footwear was always perfect—old Nike hiker’s low-tops in earth tones, or white bucks flawlessly faded and scuffed. They dressed the way certain Cape Coddish catalogs tried to dress their models, but these two were better at it, effortless about it, tucking one side of their shirts in just so, their clothes worn in but never threadbare—
It sounds as though I was paying attention to their wardrobe but I don’t remember it that way. You know these men. They’re fine people, they know right from wrong. I had a strong feeling that, in a pinch, they would do more for me than I would for them. It was more in their blood; they were not people who would think twice.
The American Institute for Statistical Studies was the only one of its kind on the East Coast and therefore we were the best at what we did. We were the people who took the statistics— how many people injured on the job each year, how many boys fondled by priests every decade, how many cats declawed in urban areas every week, anything—and, among other services, extrapolated those numbers into the frequency per day, per hour, minute, whatever seemed most grievous. We knew all the pertinent figures—525,600 minutes in a year, 31,536,000 seconds—and so could always figure out how to make whatever issue or trend seem as menacing as possible. Three million squirrels poisoned by processed food a year is one thing, but if the public knows that one such squirrel dies every twelve seconds, well then, the reasoning goes, you have a populace motivated to act.
Given our physical proximity, the four of us knew an inordinate amount about each other. We could hear, if we chose to listen, every word spoken by any of the others, on the phone or otherwise. We quickly became protective of one another but especially of Erin, who we pretended needed our shielding. She had been raised as an only child outside of Asheville—she had the faintest accent—and now she felt, she often said, as if she’d inherited three brothers. When she first said that, after we’d been working together for a few months, we three coveted it, being thought of as her brothers—it prompted Derek, at least, to start lifting weights. But it made anyone’s romantic pursuit of Erin seem against nature or God. We’d all had, before that point, intentions of varying severity. My feelings for Erin were confused. I loved her.
She noticed things about me. When I sat across from her, at any meal, she would find a time, after looking at me for a few seconds, to make a declaration. “You have minnow-shaped eyes,” she said. “You smell clean. Like a little boy,” she said. It didn’t matter what she said, I was always grateful. “You have something below you,” she said to me, eating a hoagie one day, prying open my every pore and reading my every memory. “Like a bunch of teeth waiting to come through.”
I wanted to love her heroically, selflessly—to honor her and defend her, and punish people who looked at her stump in a way that displeased her. But soon I realized that she had more than enough suitors, and at least a few of them would be better for her. They all seemed to be quiet, uncomplicated men, who were usually older and who invariably looked older than they were, and wore wool. But occasionally we glimpsed an “old friend” or an acquaintance from this gym or that band—she went to a lot of shows—and these men caused us concern. These men were thinner, unshaven, wore boots.
She spread her attention between the three of us with maddening equability. We usually all ate together, but occasionally, in a casual but calculated rotation, we ate with her alone. For a time, Michael and Derek stepped into an area where they were permitted to make ribald jokes about her missing arm. I never followed, nor did Dean. Derek she allowed to call her Lefty, but at some point Michael lost his license to kid her about the arm, I don’t know how. I rejoiced.
Michael, Derek, and I, each unsure of the others’ intentions and of our own, agreed, drunkenly one night, never to touch her, not even in a state like the one in which we currently found ourselves. Everyone had their intimacies, though. Derek took her on motorcycle rides, Michael taught her how to roast a pig. I was the one—either because she loved me more or because I was the least virile—she told about her men.
She claimed never to want to talk much about them, but she did, with little provocation. Hearing their names, or the nicknames she gave them—Fingers, Señor con Queso, Mr. Robinson—made me uneasy; it was clear that many of them were still lurking nearby, and that she was not adept at or willing to cut them loose. She lamented the fact that she seemed to attract men who wanted to extract something from her. She used this word, extract, often, when talking about these unnamed men. I considered her flawless, though I wished she were more careful, or better able to keep herself out of the path of these bad men. The bad men, I told her, were not always obvious at first, though I wasn’t sure that was true.
“I can’t worry about the intentions of everyone I know,” she said.
“Wrong,” I said. “You have to worry about their intentions. Within three minutes of meeting any man, his intentions toward you are decided, completely.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said.
Stopped at an outcropping, a mist swirled around us as if it were going to leave a genie in its wake, and when it lifted, I hugged Erin, my front to her back. I buried my head in her neck. She accepted this, and turned to face me, and then held me with a quick intensity—and let go. She knew I was weak and stupid. But when she released me, I pulled her into me again, and indicated with the tenacity of my embrace that I’d like to hold her for at least a full minute or two, binge on her now, and thus be left sated. I was overcome: I coveted her and t
he world in that order.
I kept a close eye on the side of her head, to see if she would turn her face toward mine. If that were to happen I would kiss her for a short time and then stop, and then laugh it off, pretend that we were just being dopes. I would kiss her long enough to satisfy my curiosity about kissing her but briefly enough that I could dismiss the kiss—ha ha what a riot, couldn’t matter less.
But it would always matter! I would always think of this time, of these hugs, of a kiss, should it come. I would catalog it and reference it frequently, and I hoped that in the short term gorging on this kind of platonic affection would prevent me from doing something more drastic later. Faced with a radiance like here, a clear air of rightness, it took so much work to avoid doing something wrong. We held each other for three minutes and then pulled away and I kissed her head while she stared into my neck.
We got back in the car.
It was 8 o’clock and underwater blue when we rolled over the bridge to the Isle of Skye. There was fog, a hazy condensation that cast everything in gray. We had a map, but it was much too vague and soon we were lost. There was a profound sort of quiet to the island, and I wanted nothing more than a small warm inn, with only one room left, no doubles, sorry—so we’d have to share a bed.
We stopped at a small bed and breakfast, with a sign saying “Mrs. MacIlvane’s”, to ask about a room. There were luminaria guiding visitors to the door, a huge and scarlet door, with a knocker in the center fashioned from antlers. A large pale woman, who looked so much like Terry Jones in drag that I almost laughed, opened the door. I wanted her to speak in a chirpy falsetto but her voice was surprisingly nuanced, smoky even.
Erin asked if she had any rooms, and I saw that the woman hadn’t noticed Erin’s missing arm. Erin had a way of standing, which she’d used—she told me later—the first time I’d met her. It was an undetectable three-quarter stance, giving people a bit more of her right shoulder than was customary.
While the woman was telling us her son was home and occupying the one available room, the man of the house, round and with a leftward brush of gray hair, came up behind her and kicked the back of her knee, throwing her balance off. She turned, slapped his shoulder and they both grinned, bashful and proud, at Erin and me.