The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

by Dave Eggers

  "Why didn't you say}"

  "You'd already cooked it."

  "You could have called home."

  "John," I said, meeting his hurt and angry gaze. "I don't know you. You moved in this morning. Why would I expect you to cook dinner for me?"

  He waved his hand in front of his face, sweeping the question away. "We're roommates," he said. "We have to show one another a little bit of respect."

  I should have kicked him out right then and there. But I didn't. How could I? You don't kick a man out of his home for making you dinner. And I had already cashed the check.

  "All right," I said. "I'm sorry." And I picked up my knife and fork and went to work.

  The apartment building in question stood, or rather lay, at the bottom of a mountain. It was a one-story strip of six units, with four arranged in a row and two more at an angle, to accommodate a rock outcropping in the back. Our apartment was one of the ones on the angle, and our back windows looked out at the outcropping. We didn't get a single ray of sunlight until one in the afternoon.

  The mountain was called Mount Peak—a terrible name for a mountain. It didn't even have a peak: it was rounded on top. It was part of the western foothills of the Rockies, and though this all sounds very bracing and natural, the fact is that Mount Peak was, in almost every sense, a thoroughly shitty mountain. The southern third had been completely chopped off to make way for a highway, its western face had been logged and stood bare and weedy, and an abandoned housing project jutted out to the north like a tumor. In addition, about a hundred feet above our apartment, the local high school had spelled out the name of its team, BEAVERS, in white-painted stones, and a few of these would roll down each week and thump against our back wall. Sometimes one of them would ricochet off a tree stump and crash through a window.

  Even the wildlife looked scraggly and sick. Mangy elk could often be found mornings, standing around in the parking lot looking confused. You would have to honk at them in order to leave, if you were lucky enough to own a car. We once found a dead bighorn sheep lying on our front stoop, and another time we had to cancel a dinner date because a scrawny, insane-looking mountain lion was standing outside our door, growling.

  By "we" I don't mean John Weber and me; I mean Ruperta and me. Ruperta was my girlfriend. She left me because we had sex problems—specifically, the not having of it. It was my fault. I didn't want to do it anymore. All I wanted to do was read and reread from my library of books about trains. It was my interest in trains that caused me to rent this place, with Ruperta, five years before; if you hiked to the south end of the mountain you got a great view of the tracks down below. But a few months after we moved in, the only freight company that used the tracks went out of business, and they fell into disrepair.

  Honestly, I don't know what was wrong with me. I felt like I was slowing down. I had moved to this town to go to graduate school in environmental and land use law. I read a lot of thick, boring books, and went on a field trip to see how various ranches diverted creek water. Then, one day, while inspecting a barbed-wire fence as part of a summer internship, I fell into a ravine and broke my arm. When I got out of the hospital, I had lost all interest in returning to school, and I started begging off when Ruperta wanted to get it on. She put up with that for a very long time, and this reasonableness caused me to lose all respect for her, a respect I regained the moment she left. I missed her terribly.

  Since quitting school, I had worked for eight dollars an hour editing the newsletter of a hunting and conservation outfit. The work took about three hours each week, so I spent the rest of the time pretending to do it and posting on Internet message boards under a variety of names. I chatted all day long about knitting, veganism, soccer, scrapbooking, and dog grooming, none of which I knew anything about, nor cared to learn. I was thoroughly debased, and at thirty-two felt like I'd been an old man for a long time. I saw no way of escaping the life I'd made for myself, save for the mountain falling down and crushing me.

  Weber was also probably around thirty, but his girlfriend, Sandy, looked closer to forty. Forty-two, if I had to make a precise guess. She came twice a week to spend the night in Weber's room, where some kind of new age harp CD was cued up and left to repeat all night long. I asked Weber if he could turn the music off after midnight, and he laughed. "Of course not!" he said.

  "Why not? It's hard to sleep."

  "Well, Sandy can't sleep without it."

  "But Sandy doesn't live here. I live here."

  "Sandy is a guest." He shook his head. "I'm disappointed in you. You don't know how to treat a guest, do you. You should be ashamed of yourself."

  I spent a fair amount of time alone with Sandy, since Weber liked to sleep in on the mornings after her visits—he was still in school, studying I don't know what—and she, like me, was an early riser. We sat across from one another at the table, me with the paper, she with nothing, drinking from a gigantic mug of coffee. She made cryptic little pronouncements in a withered, weary voice.

  "John doesn't like coffee."

  "There's a nuclear missile near here, I bet you didn't know that."

  "John used to race bicycles competitively."

  "It's possible to get certain diseases from fish, you know."

  One morning in late autumn she said, incredibly, "John is a genius, you know."

  I could not resist. "He is?"

  Beneath its hay-like skirt of hair, her chin seemed to nod very slightly.

  "What's he a genius of?"

  "Art," she replied.

  "Art?"

  "Sculpture. He's a sculpturist."

  "I would never have guessed."

  It was hard to see what her eyes were up to under there, but I had the feeling they were glaring at me. We drank our coffees.

  "Don't be an asshole," Sandy said.

  It was another week before I found out exactly what type of sculpturism Weber was getting up to in his room. He had invited me in there more than once, usually to hear one or another horrible song that he was grooving on.

  "Hey, come listen to this!"

  "I can hear it from out here," I would reply from the living room.

  "No, you can't. You need to get the full audio spectrum."

  "John, I can hear enough out here to know I don't want to come in there and hear it better."

  A moment of silence that suggested deep puzzlement, and then he would emerge wearing a pained expression. "You mean you don't like it?"

  "No."

  "How can you not like this?" Gesturing back toward the room.

  "By hearing it, and then considering my feelings about it, and then deciding I don't like it."

  "You know," he said on one of these occasions, "it really hurts my feelings when you won't listen to my music."

  At which point I set down Small-Gauge Railways of the American Northeast, carefully marking the page with a magazine subscription card, and said, "One, it isn't your music, John. You didn't compose it or perform it. It's somebody else's music that you happen to like. And two, we don't have to like the same things. Do I keep asking you to look at pictures of trains?"

  "No, and maybe you should." He crossed his freckled arms over his scrawny chest. "Trains are cool. I like trains. Why don't you show me your stuff more often?"

  "I don't want to."

  "Right! There's the problem! Sometimes I think we should see a counselor or something."

  "A roommate counselor?"

  "A relationship counselor."

  "We're not in a relationship."

  "We're in a roommate relationship."

  In this manner I had managed to avoid being lured into the dark heart of Weber's personal space, which in my opinion had, in the form of his incessant demand for attention and approval, encroached upon the rest of the apartment enough already. But then, apparently dissatisfied by my resistance to his overtures, he began to borrow my books. I came home from work one night, ate—I had managed to get him to stop serving me meals, though not to stop deman
ding grocery money for the meals he would continue to offer to make me—showered, put on my pajamas, and got into bed with a good heavy train book. Then John Weber walked in.

  "Hey dude."

  "What do you want, John."

  He came and sat on the edge of my futon, which lay on the floor in the corner as it had ever since Ruperta took our bed. I scootched my legs over and pulled up the covers to my chest.

  "I wanted to return your book," he said, and handed me New Innovations in Rail Travel 1982–1992.

  "Where did you get this?"

  "I borrowed it."

  "From where?" I demanded.

  "Right there, man." He pointed to one of the enormous sagging homemade bookshelves that lined the walls of my room.

  "You came in here and took my book?"

  "Not took. Borrowed. There's a difference."

  I wanted very badly to debate the precise difference between taking and borrowing, and establish definitively which of the two he had done. But the more I argued, the longer John Weber would remain sitting on my futon. I capitulated. "Thank you," I said, and stared daggers at him until he left.

  But the next night, when he was at Sandy's place, I couldn't find a particular hobo oral history I was looking for, and I became convinced that Weber had taken it away to his inner sanctum. And so, without hesitation, I threw open his door and plunged in, expertly flipping the oddly placed switch—it was two feet from the doorjamb and about nine inches too high—that I remembered clearly from the days when Ruperta used the room as an office. At which time I saw that Weber was not, in fact, at Sandy's—he was right there in his room. Except he was a uniform medium-gray color and his body was missing below the neck.

  Of course I screamed. You, too, would have screamed. I want to scream today, remembering it. Weber's head. It sat on top of—appeared, in fact, to be growing out of—a miniature chest of drawers in the corner of his room. It was made of modeling clay. John Weber, sculpturist. The head was life-size; it rested upon a sturdy neck, which thickened into what should have been shoulders, but in fact was merely a broad smearing of clay that covered the top of the bureau and extended partway down the sides. This head was extraordinarily, horrifyingly realistic. The flared nostrils, the slightly uneven ears, the chinless chin—they were all perfect. The head was so fabulously accomplished that it brought out details I didn't know I'd noticed on the real John Weber—the lines around the eyes, the pockmarks on the forehead, the crookedness of the teeth. He even had the smile down right—that awful half-smirk, simultaneously innocent and calculating, relaxed and desperate, brilliant and moronic.

  How was it possible that John Weber could see himself so clearly? He was the most obstinately unobservant person I had ever met. Of course, there was his epic, heroic narcissism; that probably explained it. To one side of the head, attached to the wall, was a foot-square mirror where, no doubt, he studied his face as he worked. This, I surmised, must have been the real reason he invited me into his room. The music was a ruse. He wanted me to see—to admire—the head.

  When he came home late the next morning, I watched him more closely than usual, hoping to learn how I had missed this hidden talent. He seemed to appreciate the extra attention and became voluble.

  "Have a good night?" he asked me.

  It gave me a bit of a shock. Did he know, somehow, that I had gone into his room? I was feeling bad about it, as I had later found the hobo book hidden by a corner of my futon. "Fine," I said, cautiously. "And you?"

  "Oh," he said, with a smarmy touch of wistfulness. "I guess so."

  "Is something wrong?"

  He exhaled loudly, pretended to consider before speaking. "Let me ask you something."

  "Okay..."

  "What do you think of Sandy?"

  "Ahh ... she seems ... very nice."

  "Well, of course she's nice. She's very nice. What I mean is ... I'm afraid maybe we're a bad match."

  "How so?"

  I'd been alone on the couch, and now Weber flopped down next to me, and swung one leg over the other. He wore a thick fleece zippered sweatshirt and, like Sandy, an unseasonable pair of many-pocketed khaki hiking shorts.

  "Well, there's the age difference, for one thing."

  I shrugged. "She's not that much older."

  "You mean younger. I'm not that much older, you mean. That's it, though, I kind of am. I mean, I think she thinks of me as being like a mentor or something. You know? I'm so much more talented and mature than her, it's like I'm like her father. Or really I'm nothing like her father, I'm like another father."

  "How old is she, exactly?"

  "She's nineteen."

  I could only stare blankly.

  "I know, I know, robbing the cradle, right?" He stood up now and began to pace. "Her parents totally hate me. They think I'm corrupting her or something. Which is totally crazy since I don't even believe in sex before marriage."

  "You don't?" I said.

  John Weber laughed. "No, of course not, are you nuts? That's a recipe for disaster. And don't tell her I told you because this is totally private and secret but Sandy is not a virgin at all, and her parents don't know obviously, and that's what's crazy, I'm keeping her on the straight and narrow, not corrupting her!"

  "Wow."

  "And I am very cool with that. With her having sex, like, in her past. I mean, I still respect her and all. But I dunno, I mean, she wants to have sex and kiss and all that, because she's used to it I guess, but at this point if I did that stuff it would be like doing it to my daughter or something, on account of this being-like-her-father thing. Not like her father," he self-corrected, "like a second father."

  "You don't kiss?"

  "On the cheek." He blushed. "Sort of neck, too."

  That was enough for me. I stood up. "I have to go to work," I said.

  "No you don't. It's only ten-thirty."

  "There are errands I need to do."

  "The next bus won't be here for half an hour."

  "I am going to walk to town."

  His raised his eyebrows. "You are? That's so cool. I am coming with you." He went to the coat rack and shrugged on his jacket. "I have to get some fresh air and straighten all this out in my head."

  Did he say "my head" with special, slightly fey, significance? I believed that he did. I did not want to walk the two miles to town, let alone with John Weber, but that's what I ended up doing, and in retrospect it was a good thing because I bumped into Ruperta. In order to get away from Weber as quickly as possible, I pretended to need something at the first retail business we passed, which was a fishing and hunting supply store at the edge of town.

  "What do you need here?"

  "Some very strong filament. Fishing line. For hanging something."

  Weber seemed to recoil. "Well, I'm not going in there with you."

  "Okay," I said, perhaps too readily.

  "I don't believe in killing animals," he went on. "That place is basically an animal-murdering supply store."

  I couldn't help myself. "But ... don't you eat meat?"

  He snorted. "Well, yeah, but that's different. That's meat animals. This is wildlife."

  The discussion might have gone on all day. I said goodbye and left him to his cognitive dissonance. From inside, I watched his hunched back as he slouched toward town. When I turned around, I saw Ruperta behind the counter.

  "What are you doing here?" she said.

  "What are you doing here?"

  She shrugged. "Bernice fired me." Bernice was her old boss, the owner of a catering company that Ruperta had been the manager of. "For no reason! She said I was spying on her through her windows at night. Which obviously I wasn't. She's fired half the staff. She'll be out of business by New Year's and in the loony bin by Groundhog Day. Who's the big guy?"

  I explained as best I could about Weber and told her about the head. She nodded, smiling wryly. I was in love with her. And here I thought I had made so much progress.

  "Still on those train books?"


  "No," I said, "I've kind of lost interest."

  "Huh," she said. "Well. Goodbye."

  I hadn't intended to leave. But I said goodbye and walked the rest of the way into town.

  For the next two weeks, I hoped daily that Weber would spend the night at the home of his immoral, withered teen sex addict so that I could go snoop in his bedroom. When he did, I explored every corner, digging through his stuff carefully at first, and later with desperate abandon. The room produced more fascinating artifacts than I would have imagined—love letters from various adolescent girls (boringly, they seem to have been written when Weber, too, was an adolescent); photographs of Weber and some other people at a party, in which only Weber appeared sober; several books on sculptural technique (which, oddly, didn't appear ever to have been opened); and, inside a special little carved Indian-looking hinged box lined with crushed velvet, a single, foil-wrapped, six-months-expired, spermicidally lubricated condom. I could not help but let out a little bark of laughter when I saw it. But then I remembered that it was Weber who was the object of a woman's desire, not me, and I licked my lips in bitter humiliation.

  The head, meanwhile, had improved. It had become even creepier; it had a life force. Weber had turned it, so that now it faced the window and gazed at Mount Peak with admiration, respect, and not a little irony, as if it and the mountain had made a pact. The freckles and blotches that populated the real John Weber's face had been reproduced here, somehow, as slight depressions or perhaps microscopically thin plateaus; their monochrome relief gave them a quality of terrible realness, and I could not refrain from touching them. Then, in the harsh glare from Weber's daylight-corrected lamp, I saw that my fingerprints had marred, subtly, the surface of the head, and mixed with Weber's own. I thought of Ruperta and emitted a small whimper.

  Have I described her? I don't think that I have. Ruperta was an arrangement of pleasing roundnesses, all balls stuck to balls, a snowman of flesh. Wide round eyes nestled in wide round glasses, surrounded by black parentheses of hair set atop a full, pink melon head. She was my type—indeed, the perfect expression of it. I walked to town every day now, in order to pass by the animal-murdering supply store, where she allowed me to speak to her briefly each day, to construct the elaborate illusion that I was leading a respectable and appealing life. She told me that she had learned to fire a rifle and to tie trout flies, and that she liked these things a great deal, and what did I think of that? I liked that very much, I said, and as I said it, it became true. I felt the possibility of reinvention, of reconciliation. Some days I wept as I walked the rest of the way to work.