Dave Eggers - Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

— We had plenty of pictures of you.

— Do you know what kinds of pictures we have of me?

— I do know, because I broke my back reassembling those photo albums.

— Stop. Stop there. I knew the rest of the story, but now I can fill in the beginning. What you did was this. First you date a man named Jimmy, who I believe was a former taxi dispatcher from Salinas and was unemployed when you met him. A man on the way up in society. Then you bring Jimmy into our home and he pretends he’s my dad and mentor. He takes me for drives where the windows are closed and he smokes and tells me about how hot his sister is. He says he’ll set me up with her even though I was thirteen and she was twenty-eight. Then somehow you and Jimmy have a falling out. Next thing I know I come home and you’re making phone calls on the floor of an empty house. The kitchen plates are gone. The clothes in the closets are gone. My schoolbooks are gone. I go into my room and there’s nothing left, nothing but an empty aquarium. You tell me that we were robbed, but somehow I don’t believe you. Something seems wrong about that. All our photo albums are gone, so you call up your friends and my friends’ parents, and your sisters and cousins and ask everyone to send any pictures they have of me or us.

— I spent weeks on that. Why was that a bad thing to do?

— The result was an album with exactly ten pictures in it. And in every picture, I’m on the side, I’m in the background. These are pictures of my cousins or my friends and I’m incidental. I’m blurry and half my head is cut out.

— I thought I was doing something nice.

— That was my birthday present that year!

— You liked it.

— Oh shit.

— Thomas, I was there when you went to bed and when you woke up. I got you to school. I fed you. Beyond that, you’re quibbling.

— Quibbling? See, I guess the one thing I never gave you credit for was how entertaining you are. The things you say are just unprecedented. No one talks like you. Do you remember bringing me to your boyfriend’s apartment in New Mexico?

— Of course. He got you a bike.

— He gave me the bike his son left when his wife and kid fled him.

— It was a fine bike, and he bought it for you.

— No he didn’t. It had this kid’s name on it. Robin.

— Well, we can disagree about that.

— And why take me to Albuquerque in the first place? Why not just leave me with someone?

— You had fun on that trip.

— Your boyfriend hit me.

— Well, you two didn’t always see eye to eye.

— I was fifteen. Seeing eye to eye?

— How many times do I need to say sorry for that? It was twenty-five years ago.

— It was less than that.

— So what, Thomas? So what?

— So Mr. Hansen targeted me, knowing I had an addict for a mom. That’s how he could get away with it. He needed kids who had some kind of inadequate parental situation. Me, Don.

— Did he touch you, Thomas?

— Who?

— Mr. Hansen.

— He says he didn’t.

— Well then.

—“Well then”? “Well then”? You push me onto a highway, or off a bridge, and then if I come back alive, you say, Well then .

— Thomas, why don’t you unlock me and we can talk about straightening all this out? I can help you get out of here. I’m happy to take the blame for all this. I can tell the police it was my idea, that you weren’t here at all.

— That would be the most self-sacrificing thing you’ve ever done.

— Thomas, we have many more years together. We don’t have anyone else. We should look forward. You’re always looking backward, blaming and dissecting, and it’s hampered your ability to move ahead. You need to choose to look to the light.

— Listen to yourself! “Look to the light”? You’ve always had this bizarre mix — you’re so nasty, but then you spout these New Ageisms. Don’t give me advice.

— I want to be supportive. That’s all I want now. You know I’m better than I used to be. We can be partners.

— We won’t be partners. I don’t like you.

— We’re stuck with each other, Thomas.

— I’m not stuck with you. And you’re still using.

— It’s under control.

— That’s not possible.

— Thomas, I’ve had the same job for four years. Could I be doing that if I was out of control?

— You’re screwing the owner. I hear that you come into work twice a week.

— That is patently untrue.

— You always had situations like that, didn’t you? You’d screw some guy who could provide you with some kind of financial assistance or some kind of vague job on someone’s payroll. You did that at the hospital supply company.

— That was a legitimate job. I worked my ass off there. I hated that job but I did it.

— For a while you did. Maybe six months. Then you were on severance for a year.

— Is it my fault they gave me severance?

— A year’s severance for a half year’s work? Was that company policy?

— I have no idea.

— And still you dated that guy. Dalton. I can’t believe you brought a grown man named Dalton into our house.

— He took you to SeaWorld.

— You have an answer for every one of these guys. You act like every one of them was such a gift to my life.

— You were a lonely boy.

— I was a lonely boy? That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that. What does that mean?

— It means there was only so much I could do with you. You came out of the womb a certain way. You were always diffident. I tried to have you play with other kids but there was always some reason they didn’t appeal to you. You went off by yourself and then complained that you had no friends.

— You’re making this up.

— I’m trying to tell it to you straight. You want to blame me for everything, fine, but you were always a certain way. On your fourth birthday, you hid in the garage. At your eighth-grade graduation, you stayed in the parking lot, in the car, so I went alone. You never joined the big group activities. I would buy you tickets to everything, sign you up for everything, and you would stay home. How is that my fault? I put you in a position to be happy and you chose to be alone.

— I didn’t want to be alone.

— You drove people away. You tried to drive me away.

— I wish I’d been better at it.

— Then why didn’t you leave?

— Why didn’t I leave?

— Thomas, you lived at home till you were twenty-five.

— You lie. I left when I was twenty-two.

— For eight months. Then you came back.

— For a year.

— No, you came back for two years and eight months. You were twenty-five when you moved out for good. If I was so terrible why come back? Why stay with me so long?

—

— And you couldn’t keep a job. You know how easy it is for a white man to make money in this country? It’s like falling off a log. For so long I blamed myself for what happened to us. But all along I had a feeling there was something strange about you. And I know I’m right. You were born with certain tendencies, and I really don’t think I could have done anything to prevent them. I had a feeling something like this would happen.

— Of course you did.

— You had extreme tendencies. People thought you were gentle and lonely and harmless but I knew a different side of you. When you were seven you choked me. You remember that?

— I didn’t choke you.

— You did. This was just after your father left. It was at that rich kid’s house. His family had a lot of money. You remember this kid?

— How would I remember something like that?

— I don’t know where they got their money, something fishy, but they were sweet to you. He used to have you over to play after school, and he had a playroom and a million toys. They knew I was alone and working so they said you could come over anytime. You don’t remember this? They lived on the lake.