by Dave Eggers
No one is noticing. Have I been shot? I have not been shot. There was no shot. But what if it was one of those silencers? It could have been a silen— I have not been shot. But I am dying. Surely, surely. I am dying. Finally.
I can’t talk. I try to eke out words—Help. Me.—but all I produce are little pants, dog breaths, my words taken by some ghost as they leave my—
I am dying, finally. Fuck I knew it. I deserve it. You know this, everyone knows this. It’s AIDS and I had it coming, what with that One Time When the Condom Broke with the Woman Who Had Been Around. I get a vivid picture of the where—a crooked-walled little third-floor apartment overlooking south San Francisco, the dawn coming while I stood by the bed, her on her hands and knees—and the who, yes of course, I know, it all comes to me in flashes, Goddamn I should have been checking that rubber as we were going along but oh we were plastered, we barely knew what we were doing, had gotten a ride from a mutual friend, who dropped us off, he knowing what was about to happen—we had run, run down the block to her place—
Fuck, Toph, I am so sorry. Will I even have time to call you? Who will take you? Beth? Alone? No— Fuck, Bill’ll have to move up—fuck, where will he work? There’s that one think tank, where Flagg works, but— What if he wants to move Toph to L.A.? Oh I’ll have to make sure that doesn’t— But Toph likes L.A., actually, so— Oh look at how those clouds are moving, through the window, up there, all white, with a little gray, as if lightly bruised and—
Fuck! The pain! I’m giving birth!
Why are these people not noticing? Why is it not considered unusual that I’m writhing on the floor? Have I writhed on this carpet before? I try to think of when that might have happened—
Someone from next door, the Chronicle, notices first, through the glass, and comes over; then it’s people everywhere. I am helped to the couch to rest there, then the asking of questions about where and how bad and why. Maybe I am kidding.
“Are you kidding?” asks Paul.
“Fuck you.”
I refrain from saying I’m dying. I’m only about 95 percent sure that I’m dying, and don’t want to alarm anyone. But soon I will know. I say hospital, hospital.
“I’ll take you,” says Shalini.
“Thank you yes,” I say.
I stumble to the elevator, scraping along the wall, leaning on Shalini. Shalini smells so nice, oh you smell nice Shalini. I’m dying, Shal, dying. Jesus I’m hunched over, I can’t even walk. I need someone to carry me. Shal can’t carry me. Goddamn it! / have to tell— He should know— At the elevator I almost want to turn around and tell someone to call Toph’s school, to have him meet me at the hospital but I can’t walk all the way back maybe I can tell the guard in the lobby, and he’ll call up to the office, and then someone can call Toph’s school— Oh but the fucking message’ll get butchered fuck fuck— No, Toph shouldn’t know, I don’t want him to see me die— I’ll slip away like Dad, during the day, sly-like, that’ll be the way, we’ve had our time, we don’t need a goodbye fuck this elevator is fucking slow Shalini you smell so good.
In the car I am almost crying, because the pain is ten times what it was when it knocked me to the floor. But I am tough, I am army tough. But this is fucking breaking me in half, this is acid all over me, acid being kicked into my side with steel-tipped shoes by a hundred little Nazi fuckers, all inside me—fuck! Can AIDS kill like this? Yes, yes. No, no, no. Maybe. Oh I knew it when that happened, that condom broke, I knew it was wrong from the beginning, that sex and with her and my life and guilty guilty. And Toph! All squandered!
Oh this is worse than the time when we went rafting, when the American River was way too high, when we went, all of us, and then we hit those rapids, plunged down, all fell from the raft, and I was in the froth, quickly swallowed a gallon, couldn’t get straight, couldn’t stay above water, trying to look, to see where Toph was, if he had fallen, but couldn’t see, was mostly underwater, and thought about how ridiculous this would be, how stupid to be drowning on some little rafting trip, what a pathetic way to go, and helpless to save Toph, wherever he was. But when the river turned and slowed, I found my balance, scanned the river, now flat, and there he was, Toph, alone on that huge raft, the only one who had not fallen out. He was grinning like crazy.
It’s too sudden for AIDS. Something has burst. It’s my appendix. Is that fatal? Of course! Always! No, no. Then what? What is it? I must be dying. Internal bleeding. A tumor! A bleeding tumor!
“I’m dying, Shal.”
“You’re not dying, hon.”
“Then what the hell is this? What if I’m dying?”
“You’re not dying.”
Shalini is driving too bumpily. She is driving on all the bumpy streets. Carelessly. She is stopping too often, and braking too suddenly, because she’s so careless. Goddammit, Shal.
“Shal, can you drive...more mellowly?”
“I’m trying, hon.”
“Hold my hand,” I beg. I want to rest my head on her right thigh. I want to sleep. Then I’m struck, for a second, by a kind of exhilaration. I don’t have to be at work. Moodie’ll have to finish the stuff that’s due tomorrow. I’m doing something important, something that is more crucial than anything else I could possibly be doing—oh what relief, not having to choose, not having to feel guilt about wasting time, idling, doing this when I should be doing that—no decisions here, only survival—
So easy, so simple!
How can the pain be getting worse? It’s shooting now—planets explode inside me. Vve been hit, Vve been hit! The sky is blue like always, this perfect San Francisco sky maybe I will die before I even get there— Oh Shal, why are you wearing that tight ribbed shirt today, the day that I’m dying? Why didn’t we ever date, Shal? Before seat belts—not before seat belts but before everyone wore seat belts—my mother used to whip her arm hard against our chests when she stopped short, as if her arm could do anything, would do anything when we hit, her arm so flimsy and I am so flimsy, there for a few years, protection for a few years, sorry Toph, sorry, sorry, I am weak and am being taken, as I expected to be taken— I will not be buried: I want my ashes, or my whole body, dropped from a cliff; a helicopter, a volcano, into the ocean...Oh but which ocean?
Which ocean?
Which ocean?
In the waiting room they first ask me about insurance, which I do not have. I had had insurance for a few months a few years ago, but then they stopped sending bills, I think— But I can pay, I will pay, I swear I can pay, here are credit cards, please take this thing out of me. Please I cannot stand up I will sit here, just over here and answer the questions no actually maybe I will lie here, across these chairs, my head on Shalini’s thigh, actually maybe I will go into that next room where I can lie down on the floor and
MOTHERFUCKER! MOTHERFUCKER! I can yell. MOTHER-FUCKERMOTHERFUCK!
It’s a kidney stone. I wake up and am drugged. Kirsten is there. I haven’t seen Kirsten in weeks. Beth couldn’t get out of work, so called her. Kirsten takes me home.
“I thought I was dying,” I say.
“Of course you did,” she says.
I lie down on the couch. Kirsten leaves.
Toph stands above me. Hey, 1 say.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Okay, enough.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“So. What about dinner?”
“What do you want?”
“Tacos.”
“Can you deal? I don’t think I can move.”
“Do we have stuff?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do we have cash?”
“No. Take the ATM card.”
He walks to the ATM and gets money and then to the grocery store and gets beef, spaghetti sauce, tortillas and milk. While he’s gone I doze for a minute, dreaming of persecution. I wake up suddenly, knowing this is not good, this lying on the couch, incapacitated. I will sit up
straight, nonchalant. No one’s dying. Does he think I’m dying? Maybe he think’s I’m dying. He thinks I may be dying but am not telling him. No, no. He does not think this. He is not me.
He comes in with the groceries, walks past me, into the kitchen. “You want me to cook?”
“Yeah, can you?”
“You want fruit, too?”
“What do we have?”
“Oranges, half a cantaloupe.”
“Yeah, yeah. Thanks.”
I doze off to the sound of the beef crackling in the pan, and when I wake up he is clearing off the coffee table, putting the piles of papers and magazines and his math homework underneath, in stacks corresponding to their former places on top of the table. Then he goes back to the kitchen. He comes out with two plates, fully arranged, with the piles of just-burnt-enough beef, the tortillas folded on the sides of each plate, a bowl with the fruit cut into manageable portions, oranges and cantaloupe, all wet and orange. He goes back to the kitchen and comes back with the milk.
“Napkins.”
He goes back and gets the roll of paper towels.
We eat. I doze again. I wake up at one point to the tapping of fingers on the Playstation. The next time I open my eyes it’s dark; he’s gone.
I walk to his room. He’s asleep, in a sort of crash position, arms splayed out, mouth wide open. His forehead is hot, like things inside are burning.
Robert Urich says no. We were so close. It would have been so perfect. His publicist seemed to like the idea, she was going along with us and it, laughed a little at the idea—at the very least she found it diverting. Urich was just the kind of person we needed: a star (or, at the time, near-former star), a household name who for whatever reason had fallen off the national radar, someone whom everyone knew and maybe even cared about at one time or another, but who hadn’t been seen for some time. We needed a celebrity who the public, the press, not to mention the hard-to-fool Internet community, would believe had indeed died, but whose passing did not make national news. The celebrity, therefore, couldn’t be so big that it would be implausible that his death was first reported by a small, mediocre San Francisco bimonthly.
But who? Urich was our first choice, because a) we, like everyone, had been huge fans of Vega$; b) we knew he had some sort of sense of humor, at least as evidenced by a few self-deprecating comments made on this or that talk show with regard to his role in the seminal Turk 182!’, also starring Timothy Hutton; and c) he was slated to star in an upcoming series called Lazarus Man.
Lazarus Man. Too perfect.
“It’s just not right for us,” his agent said.
Then Belinda Carlisle. We decide that Belinda Carlisle, too, would be perfect.
uShe lives in France,” says her publicist.
We run through other possibilities—Judge Reinhold, Juliana Hatfield, Bob Geldof, Laura Branigan, Lori Singer, C. Thomas Howell, Ed Begley, Jr. We consider Franklin Cover, the actor who played Tom Willis in “The Jeffersons,” but then don’t bother calling him, remembering that we cast him in what could have been considered a negative, or at least kind of pathetic, light, in an interview a year earlier. An exchange:
Is there anything else you’d like to say to our readers? Well, no, I have nothing to say, except help me get a job teaching somewhere! If anybody knows of any position at a college that needs an acting teacher, let me know.
Then genius strikes. There is one man from the world of entertainment who might have thought of this himself, one man with a brand-new middle name, Hellion, one man who tours with a multimedia show featuring slides of dwarfs and retarded people.
Crispin Glover.
He’s perfect. So perfect.
Marty McFly.
We call the agent. The agent has no idea what we’re talking about. We fax the letter, altered to include flattering comments about all of Glover’s work, including his invented nickname. Then we wait.
A day later the phone rings.
I pick up the receiver and put it to my ear, in the way customary to those answering phones.
“Hello,” I say.
“This is Crispin Glover.”
He is calling from Tennessee, where he’s filming a movie with Milos Forman. Crispin Glover’s on the phone!
He has read the proposal and he loves the idea. He has, as a matter of fact, been wanting to do something like this. He wants to do it, and he wants to do it whole hog—wants to really fake it, wants pictures, proof, and wants then to go underground, to set up a system where no one close to him will give it away, wants to leave it be for months, have the funeral, the eulogies, the comments from other actors, all that, the whole nine yards, and to then come back alive, triumphant! It’ll be great. This will be the thing that’ll put us over the top. I am on the phone looking over the center of San Francisco, the park and the giant SFMOMA humidifier and a sliver of the bridge and hills, and I am weak from the excitement.
“This’ll be great!” I say.
“Yeah, yeah,” he agrees. “So what kind of timeline are you on?”
He can’t do it. He can’t see why we can’t just push the thing back a little bit, or do it next issue... but he doesn’t see, he doesn’t see that all six of our advertisers cannot be kept waiting, and our hundreds of subscribers cannot be kept waiting. We’ll call back if either of our schedules changes.
“You know who,” I say.
“No,” says Moodie.
“He’s our only hope.”
“No way.”
“We have no choice.”
“Oh man.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“Fuck. Okay.”
Adam Rich.
Nicholas from Eight Is Enough.
We already sort of know him. One of our contributors, Tanya Pampalone, had gone to grade school with him, and they had kept in touch. With her entree, we had worked with him twice previously. First, we had run a short interview with him, in which he talked to Tanya about his shoes and an umbrella he planned on buying. An excerpt:
tanya: How many pairs of shoes do you have?
adam rich: Ten, I’d say ten. I have one umbrella. I just bought this umbrella. When I bought this umbrella, it had stopped raining and I thought that I had better buy an umbrella and it won’t rain anymore and I’ll have it for the next time. But it has continued to rain and it has rained continuously since I bought this umbrella.
tanya: Do you think it’s because you can predict the future?
adam rich: No, it’s probably because I bought the umbrella.
We call Adam at his L.A. condo and explain the concept to him. He listens. We explain that it’ll be this elaborate hoax, that it’ll be serving a higher purpose, that of satirizing the media’s interest in celebrity death, parodying their eulogies, that this will make national news, and that outside of the feeling good he’ll be able to do as a result of his role in providing this educational service to a needy America, everyone will think he’s bleeding edge for even associating with us.
You’ll be in on every step, we say. You’ll have full approval on everything. “It’ll be great,” I say, believing it will be great. I have in my heart the firm belief that if he plays this right, it will mean not only the final breakthrough for us, but, perhaps more important, the certain revival of the career of Adam Rich.
I picture him sitting in a small and dingy Hollywood condominium, surrounded by junior Emmys or whatever, his hands on a Nintendo, a fridge full of yogurt and ice cream sandwiches, his days spent gardening, watching satellite TV.
He agrees.
“This is going to be great,” I tell Toph. We’re in the bathroom. He’s sitting on the toilet; I’m cutting his hair.
“He agreed to this?”
“Yeah, yeah, totally. Put your chin up.”
“And what’s the point of this again?”
“You have to get your chin up.”
“Okay, so...”
“The point is, we’re making fun of these celebrity eulogies you see in magaz
ines, where—“
“What’s a eulogy?”
“Like a tribute. These eulogies where, when celebrities die, suddenly everyone cares, they’re given these massive funerals, people cry, people weep even though they’ve only known the guy on TV, some character he’s played, lines he’s read...”
“Huh. And people will believe this?’
“Yeah. People are dumb.”
I turn his head toward the mirror, comb his hair straight down, comparing the left side and right. I have again done a masterful job. He still looks like a prepubescent heartthrob—the nose upturned, the hair long in the front—even though it’s starting to thicken, darken, curl and kink like mine. I do not like seeing myself next to him. Next to him I am a monster. The facial hair I am cultivating is ridiculous, grotesque. My sideburns do not meet my hair, and are so sparse that they look less like facial hair, and more like leg hair. Worst of all, the goatee I’m working on is failing miserably, because I can’t even grow hair on the sides of my mouth, giving me a perpetually in-progress, fourteen-year-old’s look. I am wrinkled, bloated, with deeply carved laugh lines, and my eyes are too close together, and too small, squinty, mean. And my nose is shapeless, too big. Next to his face, his twelve-year-old face, smooth, proportionate, soft, harmonious, I look distorted, as if digitally manipulated, my skin pulled the wrong ways, everything stretched or compressed, grotesque.
“People are going to be pissed when they find out,” he says.
“Well, we hope so. These are the people we want to upset. Anyone who cares about him in the first place, who would at all be moved by the death of someone they saw on TV, deserves to be duped. I mean, why should anyone pay attention? Why should some dramedy star moron loser be mourned by millions, when other people are not? When the average person, who lives a happy and maybe even in some ways heroic life, can only attract twenty or thirty people to a funeral, when— I mean, it’s unfair, it’s abominable, right?”
“Huh. Well, to tell you the truth, I think it’s kind of sick.”