by Dave Eggers
Basil becomes attached to the idea that he will walk into the stadium, if it’s indeed a stadium. For the purpose of argument, let’s say it’s a stadium, and Basil begins to feel that he shouldn’t be wheeled in or driven in on an ambulance or on a golf cart. That, instead, he should walk in, and then assume a position on a couch. Not a bed. A divan would be best, Helen says.
When they go to get permissions from owners, administrators, councilmen, vendors and the like, some people immediately understand it, and others are aghast. This part could involve the police, and an injunction, and some religious organization that doesn’t approve and tries to stop the entire thing. Then again, this shouldn’t be that kind of story. We’ll suspend our disbelief a bit, have it all go smoother than it might in real life. We only have eight thousand words.
In the end, he is in an unplanned place. There is a break in the story, and instead of the stadium we’ve pictured the entire time, it’s something different—a riverside amphitheater for example. Or in the middle of a NASCAR track. He is spirited through a crowd, who all touch him. He feels the burn of every hand. Or he’s parachuted into the venue, attached to a professional jumper. He dies on the way down. No. Back to the original idea: he walks in, in a procession, much like the Olympic athletes when they walk in during the opening ceremonies.
People applaud. The day has come. There are about four thousand there. It’s the minor-league ballpark in the middle of Memphis. Helen has arranged to have all the advertisements covered in white cloth. Actually, everything is covered in white. She’s gotten the local housepainters union to loan all of their unsplattered dropcloths. The ballpark is white like heaven. Basil is stunned.
He walks in and everyone cheers. He waves. He is with his son Derek. His daughters have come, but are in the stands, drinking heavily so the details, whatever elements might be unpleasant when recollected later, are less clear. The scene is stirring; goodwill is everywhere. Who are these people? Some have traveled from very far, out of curiosity. Most are from the area. Basil has delivered many babies in his life, thousands, and many hundreds of those babies are here now, grown up and wishing Basil well.
He sits on the divan; he is tired from the walk, the excitement. The music plays; the Russian conductor has been convinced, as has most of his orchestra, though absent are the woodwinds. They play a mixture of Brahms, Mozart, Lizst, Ellington, the Commodores, Sam Cooke. They play the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark, a favorite of Basil’s. The sun is fading. It takes almost two hours before he settles down, becomes accustomed to all the people around him. He sees individual faces, eyes and heads and little arms and hands that he can take with him. There is a teenaged girl, entirely clad in denim, who is nodding intensely, twisting her hips to a rhythm of her own. She is wearing makeup everywhere, and her flesh spills from below her shirt, and her large painted eyes close for long periods of time, when she is alive to music made by troubled people, and she is here to say goodbye to Basil.
There are periods when they all sing along to a given song, like “You Send Me.” Helen, Basil’s most true love, sits beside him and watches his contented face. She worries that he will not want to leave now. What have we done? she wonders. He is staring now at a group of men and women who have brought their babies. He loves babies and he’ll want to stay forever now; this is bliss, how can he pass from this? She begins to see the point in dying alone, in cold spare rooms in hospitals in suburbs—these rooms would not be missed, making the transition so much easier…
But Helen’s fears are unfounded. As she watches Basil, and Derek watches his father, and thousands watch the man who appears to be closing his eyes with pleasure, Basil finds himself reverberating from this world to the next, passing into sleep. He hears the music the people are making, their voices everywhere, talking about nothing, laughing at nothing, and he is ready.
ABOUT THE MAN WHO BEGAN FLYING AFTER MEETING HER
WHEN HE MET HER and they liked each other a great deal, he heard things better, and in his eyes the lines of the physical world were sharper than before. He was smarter, he was more aware, and he thought of new things to do with his days. He considered activities which before had been vaguely intriguing but which now seemed urgent, and which must, he thought, be done with his new companion. He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her. He had always been intrigued by gliders, parachutes, ultralights and hangliders, and now he felt that this would be a facet of their new life: that they would be a couple that flew around on weekends and on vacations, in small aircraft. They would learn the terminology. They would join clubs. They would have a trailer of some kind, or a large van, in which to hold their new machines and supple wings folded, and they would drive to new places to see from above. The kind of flying that interested him was close to the ground—less than a thousand feet above Earth. He wanted to see things moving quickly below him, wanted to be able to wave to people below, to see wildebeest run and to count dolphins streaming away from shore. He hoped this was the kind of flying she’d want to do, too. He became so attached to the idea of this person and this flying and this life entwined that he was not sure what he would do if it did not become actual. It was odd, though, he thought, that while the notion of this flying was his, and he would be the driving force behind the carrying out of this plan, he needed another person, this new person in his world, to enable him to do it. He didn’t want to do this flying alone; he would rather not do it than do it without her. But if he asked her to fly with him, and she expressed reservations, or was not inspired, would he stay with her? Could he? He decides that he would not. If she does not drive in the van with the wings carefully folded, he will have to leave, smile and leave, and then he will look again. But when and if he finds another companion, he knows his plan will not be for flying. It will be another plan with another person, because if he goes flying close to the Earth it will be with her.
UP THE MOUNTAIN COMING DOWN SLOWLY
SHE LIES, SHE LIES, Rita lies on the bed, looking up, in the room that is so loud so early in Tanzania. She is in Moshi. She arrived the night before, in a Jeep driven by a man named Godwill. It is so bright this morning but was so madly, impossibly dark last night.
Her flight had arrived late, and customs was slow. There was a young American couple trying to clear a large box of soccer balls. For an orphanage, they said. The customs agent, in khaki head to toe, removed and bounced each ball on the clean reflective floor, as if inspecting the viability of each. Finally the American man was taken to a side room, and in a few minutes returned, rolling his eyes to his wife, rubbing his forefinger and thumb together in a way meaning money. The soccer balls were cleared, and the couple went on their way. Outside it was not humid, it was open and clear, the air cool and light, and Rita was greeted soundlessly by an old man, white-haired and thin and neat in shirtsleeves and a brown tie. He was Godwill, and he had been sent by the hotel to pick her up. It was midnight and she was very awake as they drove and they had driven, on the British side of the road, in silence through rural Tanzania, just their headlights and the occasional jacaranda, and the constant long grass lining the way.
At the hotel she wanted a drink. She went to the hotel bar alone, something she’d never done, and sat on a stool next to a stenographer from Brussels. The stenographer, whose name she did not catch and couldn’t ask for again, wore a short inky bob of black coarse hair and was wringing her napkin into tortured shapes, tiny twisted mummies. The stenographer: face curvy and shapeless like a child’s, voice melodious, accent soothing. They talked about capital punishment, the stenographer comparing the stonings common to some Muslim regions with America’s lethal injections and electric chairs. Somehow the conversation was cheerful and relaxed. They had both seen the same documentary about people who had witnessed executions, and had been amazed at how little it had seemed to affect any of them, the watchers; they were sullen and unmoved.
To witness a death! Rita could never do it. Even if they made her sit there, behind the
partition, she would close her eyes and hum songs about candy.
Rita was tipsy and warm when she said good night to the Brussels stenographer, who held her hand too long with her cold slender fingers. Through the French doors and Rita was outside, walking past the pool toward her mud hut, one of twelve behind the hotel. She passed a man in a plain and green uniform with a gun strapped to his back, an automatic rifle of some kind, the barrel poking over his shoulder and in the dim light seeming aimed at the base of his skull. She didn’t know why the man was there, and didn’t know if he would shoot her in the back when she walked past him, but she did, she walked past him, because she trusted him, trusted this country and the hotel—that together they would know why it was necessary to have a heavily armed guard standing alone by the pool, still and clean, the surface dotted with leaves. She smiled at him and he did not smile back and she only felt safe again when she had closed the hut’s door and closed the door to the tiny bathroom inside and was sitting on the cool toilet with her hands caressing her toes.
Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole. Rita is staring at the concentric circles of bamboo that comprise the hut’s conical roof. She is lying still, hands crossed on her chest—she woke up that way—and through the mosquito net, too tight, terrifying, suffocating in a small way when she thinks too much about it, she can see the concentric circles of the roof above and the circles are twenty-two in number, because she has counted and recounted. She counted while lying awake, listening to someone, outside the hut, fill bucket after bucket with water.
Her name is Rita. Her hair is red like a Romanian’s and her hands are large. Eyes large and mouth lipless and she hates, has always hated, her lipless mouth. As a girl she waited for her lips to appear, to fill out, but it never happened. Every year since her sixteenth birthday her lips have not grown but receded. The circles make up the roof but the circles never touch. Her father had been a pastor.
Last night she thought, intermittently, she knew why she was in Tanzania, in Moshi, at the base of Kilimanjaro. But this morning she has no clue. She knows she is supposed to begin hiking up the mountain today, in two hours, but now that she has come here, through Amsterdam and through the cool night from the airport, sitting silently alone the whole drive, an hour or so at midnight, next to Godwill—really his name was Godwill, an old man who was sent by the hotel to pick her up, and it made her so happy because Godwill was such a… Tanzanian-sounding name—now that she has come here and is awake she can not find the reason why she is here. She cannot recall the source of her motivation to spend four days hiking up this mountain, so blindingly white at the top—a hike some had told her was brutalizing and often fatal and others had claimed was actually just a walk in the park. She was not sure she was fit enough, and was not sure she would not be bored to insanity. She was most concerned about the altitude sickness. The young were more susceptible, she’d heard, and at thirty-eight she was not sure she was that anymore—young—but she felt that for some reason she in particular was always susceptible and she would have to know when to turn back. If the pressure in her head became too great, she would have to turn back. The mountain was almost twenty thousand feet high and every month someone died of a cerebral edema and there were ways to prevent this. Breathing deeply would bring more oxygen into the blood, into the brain, and if that didn’t work and the pain persisted, there was Diamox, which thinned the blood and accomplished the same objective but more quickly. But she hated to take pills and had vowed not to use them, to simply go down if the pain grew intolerable—but how would she know when to go down? What were the phases before death? She might at some point realize that it was time to turn and walk down the mountain, but what if it was already too late? It was possible that she would decide to leave, be ready to live at a lower level again, but by then the mountain would have had its way and there, on a path or in a tent, she would die.
She could stay in the hut. She could go to Zanzibar and drink in the sun. She liked nothing better than to drink in the sun. With strangers. To drink in the sun! To feel the numbing of her tongue and limbs while her skin cooked slowly, and her feet dug deeper into the powdery sand! Drunk in the sun she felt communion with all people and knew they wished her the best.
Her hands are still crossed on her chest, and the filling of the buckets continues outside her hut, so loud, so constant. Is someone taking the water meant for her shower? At home, in St. Louis, her landlord with the beaver-fur coat was always taking her water—so why shouldn’t it be the same here, in a hut in Moshi, with a gecko, almost translucent, darting across her conical ceiling, its ever-smaller circles never interlocking?
She has bought new boots, expensive, and has borrowed a backpack, huge, and a Therm-a-rest, and sleeping bag, and cup, and a dozen other things. Everything made of plastic and Gore-Tex. The items were light individually but together very heavy and all of it is packed in a large tall purple pack in the corner of the round hut and she doesn’t want to carry the pack and wonders why she’s come. She is not a mountain climber, and not an avid hiker, and not someone who needs to prove her fitness by hiking mountains and afterward casually mentioning it to friends and colleagues. She likes racquetball.
She has come because her younger sister, Gwen, had wanted to come, and they had bought the tickets together, thinking it would be the perfect trip to take before Gwen began making a family with her husband, Brad. But Gwen had gone ahead and gotten pregnant anyway, early, six months ahead of schedule and now she could not make the climb. She could not make the climb but that did not preclude—Gwen used the word liberally and randomly, like some use curry—her, Rita, from going. The trip was not refundable, so why not go?
Rita slides her hands from her chest to her thighs and holds them, her thin thighs, as if to steady them. Who is filling the bucket? She imagines it’s someone from the shanty behind the hotel, stealing the hot water from the heater. She’d seen a bunch of teenage boys back there. Maybe they’re stealing Rita’s shower water. This country is so poor. Poorer than any place she’s been. Is it poorer than Jamaica? She is not sure. Jamaica she expected to be like Florida, a healthy place benefiting from generations of heavy tourism and the constant and irrational flow of American money. But Jamaica was desperately poor almost everywhere and she understood nothing.
Maybe Tanzania is less poor. Around her hotel are shanties and also well-built homes with gardens and gates. There is a law here, Godwill had said in strained English, that all the men are required to have jobs. Maybe people chose to live in spartan simplicity. She doesn’t know enough to judge one way or the other. The unemployed go to jail! Godwill had said, and seemed to like this law. He said this and then laughed and laughed.
In the morning widening quickly the sun is as clear and forthright as a spotlight and Rita wants to avoid walking past the men. She has already walked past the men twice and she has nothing to say to them. Soon the bus will come to take her and the others to the base of the mountain, and since finally leaving her bed she has been doing the necessary things—eating, packing, calling Gwen—and for each task she has had to walk from her hut to the hotel, has had to walk past the men sitting and standing along the steps into the lobby. Eight to ten of them, young men, sitting, waiting without speaking. Godwill had talked about this, that the men list their occupations as guide, porter, salesperson, anything that will satisfy their government and didn’t require them to be accounted for in one constant place, because there really wasn’t much work at all. She had seen two of the men scuffle briefly over another American’s bag, for a one dollar tip. When Rita walked past them she tried to smile faintly, without looking too friendly, or rich, or sexy, or happy, or vulnerable, or guilty, or proud, or contented, or healthy, or interested—she did not want them to think she was any of those things. She walked by almost cross-eyed with casual concentration.
Rita’s face is wide and almost square, her jaw just short of masculine. People have said she looks like a Kennedy, one of the female Kennedys, t
he one on TV. But she is not beautiful like that woman; she is instead almost plain, with or without makeup, plain in any light. This she knows, though her friends and Gwen tell her otherwise. She is unmarried and was for a time a foster parent to siblings, a girl of nine and boy of seven, malnourished by their birth mother, and Rita had contemplated adopting them herself—had thought her life through, every year she imagined and planned with those kids, she could definitely do it—but then Rita’s mother and father had beaten her to it. Her parents loved those kids, too, and had oceans of time and plenty of room in their home, and there were discussions and it had quickly been settled. There was a long weekend they all spent together in the house where Rita and Gwen were raised, Rita and her parents there with J.J. and Frederick, the kids arranging their trophies in their new rooms, and on Sunday evening, Rita said goodbye, and the kids stayed there. It was easy and painless for everyone, and Rita spent a week of vacation time in bed shaking.
Now, when she works two Saturdays a month and can’t see them as often, Rita misses the two of them in a way that’s too visceral. She misses having them both in her bed, the two little people, seven and nine years old, when the crickets were too loud and they were scared of them growing, the crickets, and of them together carrying away the house to devour it and everyone inside. This is a story they had heard, about the giant crickets carrying away the house, from their birth mother.
Rita is asleep on the bus but wakes up when the road inclines. The vehicle, white and square with rounded edges—it reminds her vaguely of something that would descend, backward, from a rocket ship and onto the moon—whinnies and shakes over the potholes of the muddy road and good Christ it’s raining!—raining steadily on the way to the gate of Kilimanjaro. Godwill is driving and he’s driving much too fast, and is not slowing down around tight curves, or for pedestrians carrying possessions on their heads, or for school-children, who seem to be everywhere, in uniforms of white above and blue below. Disaster at every moment seems probable, but Rita is so tired she can’t imagine raising an objection if the bus were sailing over a cliff.