by Dave Eggers
She stirs and her eyes open slightly.
I get out of the bed and it squeaks. The floor is cold. It is 4:40 a.m. Toph rolls into the spot on the bed I have been occupying. I step over to my mother. She is looking at me. I lean over her bed and touch her arm. Her arm is hot.
“Happy birthday,” I whisper.
She is not looking at me. Her eyes are not open. They were open a slit, but are not now open. I am not sure if they were seeing me. I walk to the window and close the curtains. Outside, the trees are bare and black, quickly sketched. I sit in the taut pleather chair in the corner and watch her and the light-blue suction machine. The light-blue suction machine, working rhythmically, seems fake, a stage prop. I sink into the chair and lean back. The ceiling is swimming. It is milky, stuccoed in sweeping half-circles, and the half-circles are moving, turning slowly, the ceiling shifting like water. The ceiling has depth or—the ceiling is moving forward and back. Or the walls are not solid. The room is maybe not real. I am on a set. There are not enough flowers in the room. The room should be full of flowers. Where are the flowers? When does the gift shop open? Six? Eight? I bet myself. I bet it is six. All right, it’s a bet. I consider how many flowers I can buy. I do not know what they cost; I have never bought flowers. I will see what they cost and then buy all the flowers that they have that I can afford, move them from the gift shop to this room. Fireworks.
She will wake up and see them.
“What a waste,” she will say.
She stirs and opens her eyes. She looks at me. I get up off the chair and stand by the bed. I touch her arm. It is hot.
“Happy birthday,” I whisper, smiling, looking down into her.
She does not answer. She is not looking at me. She is not awake.
I sit down again.
Toph is on his back, his arms splayed. He sweats when he sleeps, regardless of the room’s temperature. When he sleeps, he moves and turns around and around, like the hand of a clock. His breathing is audible. His eyelashes are long. His hand hangs over the foldout bed. As I am looking at him, he wakes up. He gets up and comes to me as I am sitting in the chair and I take his hand and we go through the window and fly up and over the quickly sketched trees and then to California.
Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above us, in, say, a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car hurtles, low to the ground, straining on the slow upward trajectory but still at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless, sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1. Look at us, goddammit, the two of us slingshotted from the back side of the moon, greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed. Every day we are collecting on what’s coming to us, each day we’re being paid back for what is owed, what we deserve, with interest, with some extra motherfucking consideration—we are owed, goddammit—and so we are expecting everything, everything. We get to take what we want, one of each, anything in the store, a three-hour shopping spree, the color of our choice, any make, any color, as much as we want, when we want, whatever we want. Today we have nowhere to be so we’re on our way to Montara, a beach about thirty-five minutes south of San Francisco, and right now we are singing:
She was alone!
She never knew!
{Something something something!}
When we touched!
When we {rhymes with “same”}!
All (something something} !
All night!
All night!
All I every night!
So hold tight!
Hoo-ld tight
Baby hold tight!
Any way you want it!
That’s the way you need it!
Any way you want it!
Toph does not know the words, and I know few of the words, but you cannot fucking stop us from singing. I’m trying to get him to do the second All night part, with me doing the first part, like:
ME: All night! (higher)
HIM: All-ll night! (slightly lower)
I point to him when his part comes but he just looks at me blankly. I point to the radio, then to him, then to his mouth, but he’s still confused, and it’s hard doing any of this while trying not to careen off the road and into the Pacific and I guess in a way the gestures look like I want him to eat the radio. But Jesus, he should be able to figure this out. He isn’t cooperating. Or he could be dumb. Is he dumb?
Fuck it—I go solo. I hit the Steve Perry notes, I do the Steve Perry vibrato. I can do these things because I am an extraordinary singer.
“Can I sing or what?” I yell.
“What?” he yells.
The windows are open, too.
“I said, ‘Can I sing or what?’”
He shakes his head.
“What do you mean?” I yell. “I can sing, g^dammit.”
He rolls up his window.
“What did you say? I didn’t hear you,” he says.
“I said, can I sing or what?”
“No.” He smiles hugely. “You can’t sing at all.”
I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant—children so seldom know what is good for them—I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time—Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy—and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me. He is mine, and you cannot stop me, cannot stop us. Try to stop us, you pussy! You can’t stop us from singing, and you can’t stop us from making fart sounds, from putting our hands out the window to test the aerodynamics of different hand formations, from wiping the contents of our noses under the front of our seats. You cannot stop me from having Toph, who is eight, steer, on a straightaway, while I take off my sweatshirt because suddenly it’s gotten really fucking hot. You cannot stop us from throwing our beef jerky wrappers on the floor, or leaving our unfolded laundry in the trunk for, fuck, eight days now, because we have been busy. You cannot stop Toph from leaving a half-full cardboard orange juice container under the seat, where it will rot and ferment and make the smell in the car intolerable, with that smell’s provenance remaining elusive for weeks, during which the windows must be kept open at all times, until finally it is found and Toph is buried to his neck in the backyard and covered in honey—or should have been—for his role in the debacle. We cannot be stopped from looking with pity upon all the world’s sorry inhabitants, they unblessed by our charms, unchallenged by our trials, unscarred and thus weak, gelatinous. You cannot stop me from telling Toph to make comments about and faces at the people in the next lane.
ME: Look at this loser.
HE: What a spaz
me: Look at this one.
he: Oh my God.
ME: A dollar to wave at this guy.
HE: How much?
me: A buck.
HE: That’s not enough.
ME: Okay, five bucks to give this guy a thumbs up.
he: Why a thumbs up?
ME: Cause he’s got it goin’ on!
HE: Okay. Okay.
ME: Why didn’t you do it?
HE: I just couldn’t.
It’s unfair. The matchups, Us v. Them (or you) are unfair. We are dangerous. We are daring and immortal. Fog whips up from under the cliffs and billows over the highway. Blue breaks from beyond the fog and sun suddenly screams from the blue.
To our right is the Pacific, and because we are hundreds of feet above the ocean, often with nothing in the way of a guardrail between us and it, there is sky not only above us but below us, too. Toph does not like the cliff, is not looking down, but we are driving in the sky, with clouds whipping over the road, the sun flickering th
rough, the sky and ocean below. Only up here does the earth look round, only up here does the horizon dip at its ends, only up here can you see the bend of the planet at the edges of your peripheries. Only here are you almost sure that you are careening on top of a big shiny globe, blurrily spinning—you are never aware of these things in Chicago, it being so flat, so straight—and and and we have been chosen, you see, chosen, and have been given this, it being owed to us, earned by us, all of this—the sky is blue for us, the sun makes passing cars twinkle like toys for us, the ocean undulates and churns for us, murmurs and coos to us. We are owed, see, this is ours, see. We are in California, living in Berkeley, and the sky out here is bigger than anything we’ve ever seen—it goes on forever, is visible from every other hilltop—hilltops!— every turn on the roads of Berkeley, of San Francisco— We have a house, a sublet for the summer, that overlooks the world, up in the Berkeley hills; it’s owned by people, Scandinavians, Beth says, who must have some money, because it’s all the way up there, and it’s all windows and light and decks, and up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman’s North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco... and at night the whole fucking area is a thousand airstrips, Alcatraz blinking, the flood of halogen down the Bay Bridge, oozing to and fro, a string of Christmas lights being pulled slowly, steadily, and of course the blimps—so many blimps this summer—and stars, not too many visible, with the cities and all, but still some, a hundred maybe, enough, how many do you need, after all? From our windows, from our deck it’s a lobotomizing view, which negates the need for movement or thought—it is all there, it can all be kept track of without a turn of the head. The mornings are filmstrip white and we eat breakfast on the deck, and later we eat lunch there, we eat dinner there, we read there, play cards, always with the whole thing, the postcard tableau, just there, all those little people, too much view to seem real, but then again, then again, nothing really is all that real anymore, we must remember, of course, of course. (Or is it just the opposite? Is everything more real? Aha.) Behind our house, not too far, is Tilden Park, an endless expanse of lakes and trees and hills, mohair hills touched by patches of shrubs—as in, mohair hill, mohair hill, mohair hill, then an armpit of dark green, then the mohair hills that go on and on, like sleeping lions, as far as— Especially when you’re on your bike, starting from Inspiration Point, pedaling into the wind on your way in and with the wind on the way back, the hills going on until Richmond, miles away, where the factories and power plants and big tanks full of deadly or life-giving things are, and the bike path goes the whole way there, all the while with the Bay visible in the distance to the left, the hills on and on to the right, until Mount Diablo, the biggest of all of them, king of the mohair hills, twenty miles east, northeast, whatever. The paths are paralleled with and per-pendiculared by wood and wire fences that hold cows, and sometimes sheep, and all this is minutes away, all there, from our house, our house behind which there’s even a hiking trail that reaches, just about reaches, the huge rock, Grotto Rock, that juts out twenty feet beyond our back deck, and on some days, when Toph and I are eating our breakfast out on the porch, with the sun crazy and happy for us, smiling and teary-eyed with pride, there will suddenly appear hikers, male and female, always coupled, in their khaki shorts and brown shoes and hats on backward, who will step up from below the rock, and then be atop it, and then be there, holding their backpack straps with their thumbs, at eye level with us, as we eat our breakfast on our redwood deck, twenty feet away.
“Hello!” we say, Toph and I, with compact waves.
“Hello,” they say, surprised to see us there, eating our breakfast, at eye level.
It is nice, this moment. Then it’s awkward, because they are at the top, the end, of their hike, and want only to sit down for a while and admire the view, but can’t help be conscious of these two people, impossibly handsome people, Toph and I, who are sitting not twenty feet behind them, eating Apple Jacks from the box.
We drive past Half Moon Bay and Pacifica and Seaside, the condos on the left and the surfers on the right, the ocean exploding pink. We pass through cheering eucalyptus and waving pines, cars reflect wildly as they come at us, they seem to come right for us, and I look through their windshields for the faces of those coming at us, for a sign, for their understanding, for their trust, and I find their trust and they go by. Our car thrums loudly and I turn up the radio because I can. I drum the steering wheel with open palms, then fists, because I can. Toph looks at me. I nod gravely. In this world, in our new world, there will be rocking. We will pay tribute to musicmakers like Journey, particularly if this is Two-for-Tuesday, which means inevitably that one of the songs will be: Just a small-town girl...
There are times when I am concerned about Toph’s expression when I’m really singing, with vibrato and all, singing the guitar parts—his expression one that to the untrained eye might look like abject terror, or revulsion—but I know well enough that it is awe. I understand his awe. I deserve his awe. I am an extraordinary singer.
We have found a school for Toph, a peculiar little private school called Black Pine Circle, which has given him what amounts to a full scholarship, even though we could pretty comfortably pay for the tuition. We have some money, from the house, from the insurance policy our father took out shortly before his death. Things have been taken care of. But because we are owed, we take the free ride. It’s largely Beth’s doing, Beth being as much or more owed than Toph and I, and she being gloriously adept at wringing money from our situation. It worked for her law school tuition, which, considering her (stated) status as a single parent, was waived. Even if it wasn’t free, Beth would still be, as she is, half delirious with joy about getting back onto campus in the fall, a few months hence, slipping back into that world and letting it overtake her, flushing out the everything about last year. She is giddy, hyper, and we are both blowing the summer, because we are owed. I am doing nothing much. Toph and I are playing frisbee, are going to the beach. I am taking a class in furniture-painting, and I am taking the class very seriously. I am spending a good deal of time painting furniture in the backyard, and while I am applying my twelve years of art education to the painting of furniture, I am wondering what I will do, in a more general, futuristic sense, what exactly I will do. My furniture is good, I think—I am taking thrift-store furniture, end tables mostly, sanding them down, arid then painting on them pictures of fat men’s faces, blue goats, and lost socks. I have it in my head that I will sell these tables, will find a boutique somewhere in town and will sell them for, say, $ 1,000 per, and when I am hard at work on one of my tables, deep “inside” one, you might say, solving the unique problems of a new piece— is this rendering of a severed foot too facile, too commercial?—it seems that what I am doing is noble, meaningful, and will all too likely make me celebrated and wealthy. I come inside in the afternoon, remove my thick rubber gloves, and on the deck, as the sun sets I permit my own bright glow to subside for the evening. Maybe I will have to get a job at some point, but for the time being, for the summer at least, I am allowing us time to enjoy this, this lack of anything, this lack of humidity, this time to look around. Toph is going to summer camp on the Berkeley campus, run by the university’s athletes, and his skills at everything from lacrosse to football to baseball and frisbee make it obvious that soon enough he will be a three-sport (at least) professional athlete and will marry an actress. We assume more scholarships, more gifts spread before us by the embarrassed and sorry world. Beth and I take turns driving him to and fro, down the hill and up again and otherwise we lose weeks like buttons, like pencils.
&nbs
p; The cars flash around the turns of Highway 1, jump out from cliffs, all glass and light. Each one could kill us. All could kill us. The possibilities leap into my head—we could be driven off the cliff and down and into the ocean. But fuck, we’d make it, Toph and I, given our cunning, our agility, our presence of mind. Yes, yes. If we collided with a car at sixty miles per hour on Highway 1, we could jump out in time. Yes, Toph and I could do that. We’re quick-thinking, this is known, yes, yes. See, after the collision, as our red Civic arced through the sky, we would quickly plan out— no, no, we would instantly know the plan—what to do, the plan of course being obvious, so obvious: as the car arced downward, we would each, simultaneously, open our doors, car still descending, then each make our way to the outside of the car, car still descending, each on one side of the car, and then we would we would we would stand on the car’s frame for a second, car still descending, each holding on to the open car door or the car roof, and then, ever so briefly, as the car was now only thirty feet or so above the water, seconds until impact, we would look at each other knowingly—“You know what to do”; “Roger that” (we wouldn’t actually say these words, wouldn’t need to)—and then we’d both, again simultaneously of course, push off the car, so as to allow the appropriate amount of space between our impact and the car’s once we all landed, and then, as the Civic crashed into the ocean’s mulchy glass, we would, too, though in impeccable divers’ form, having changed our trajectory mid-flight, positioning our hands first, forward and cupped properly, our bodies perpendicular to the water, our toes pointed—perfect! We’d plunge under, half-circle back to the surface and then break through, into the sun, whip our heads to shake the water from our hair and then swim to each other, as the car with bubbles quickly drowned.