Dave Eggers: How We Are Hungry

It began to melt, so he ate it in gulps.

He returned home, thinking maybe he should wait another day, or even two. The sooner he got there, really, the sooner Adam would feel well enough to leave the hospital, and the sooner he’d try it again. The longer Adam was in the hospital, probably restrained in some effective way, the better. He was content, Fish was sure. Adam was always content in a hospital.

At two-thirty, Fish called the rental place and they said they were on their way and could he give them his address again. He did, and waited.

At three o’clock, he called the place again and it was a new guy on the phone. New guy said he had no record of Fish’s reservation. “You know,” Fish said, “that’s messed up. I’ve been waiting forever and I have to get down to goddamned Bakersfield.” New guy sighed and said he’d look again. Then he got back on the phone and said that he was sorry, that he’d found the reservation posted on the bulletin board.

“ Someone, ” he said, “put it up on the board without telling anyone else.” He was directing this to some nameless offscreen coworker.

“Sure,” Fish said, “but isn’t that what the goddamned board is for, so you don’t have to tell everyone about it?” Fish wanted a look at that office. “Jesus,” he added. “That’s really fucked.”

“Well, I am sorry,” new guy said.

“I have a friend in the hospital, motherfucker.” Fish was surprised; he hadn’t contemplated that sentence. He realized that this was one of those moments when one’s impatience— or was the word rage ? — was being misdirected. All the same, he thought he’d very much like to beat the new guy till he whispered.

New guy told Fish someone would come get him soon, and then hung up. Fish went into the tiny yellow yard in front of his house and took the croquet wickets out of the grass. They’d been sitting there for three months, since Mary’s kids had been over. They couldn’t play to save their lives, those kids. They didn’t care about the rules, either. They just hit the balls like monkeys, squawking and swinging and running into the street.

Now it’s seven o’clock, with two hours to go. This drive mocks our conceptions of time. This drive could kill anyone.

Adam’s mouth curves too much. He’s never been able to smile without smirking, or listen without sneering. It isn’t his fault, really. He just has too many muscles there, in that area around his mouth. Most people are born handicapped.

He moved away, to Baltimore, just before high school, so Fish didn’t see him much, but one summer, right after Adam’s parents separated and he and Fish were too old for camp, Adam stayed with Fish’s family in Galena. At first he slept in the basement, next to the dartboard and under the tiny window half-full of soil. When he complained about the ticking and groaning of the water heater, he was moved to Fish’s bedroom. It was a small room with a single window, over Fish’s bed, painted shut, the lower corners covered in stickers with holograms and google eyes.

That summer, when Adam played football with Fish’s friends every Sunday at the muddy round park at the end of the frontage road, he tackled too hard and argued too much. Fish apologized for him. Everyone figured he was just intense, had something to prove, like the kids who’d tried out for the team but missed the last cut. Adam, though, was different, less in control, less focused on the outcome of the game.

He broke a guy’s leg once. The weekend was warm; there were about twenty playing. One guy had borrowed cones from his construction job, and they figured they could have a proper game, with a kickoff even. So they split into sides and booted the ball. They started running like madmen at each other, and a boy named Catanese, older but spindly, everywhere elbows and knees, caught the kickoff, the ball delivering a thump to his concave chest.

He was running for the sideline, when Adam burst through the pack unblocked and just flew, for a frozen second almost perfectly horizontal, and finally spearing him, his shoulders plowing into Catanese’s legs. There was a crack like a broken bat, and everyone cheered because Catanese was barely out of the end zone and his team would be screwed for field position. But then Catanese went red, blood swimming in his face, and he was holding his leg, one hand on either side, gently, like it was too hot to touch. He recoiled from it, screaming, out of his mind, feral.

The leg, the tibia, was snapped in two. It was a battlefield kind of gore, the bone poking through his corduroys like a stick through a garbage bag.

“You see that, what I did?” Adam said. Fish had found him up the hill, by the new playground, hiding in a chute. He thought Adam was going to brag about hitting Catanese so hard, but instead he said, “Why the hell would I break some kid’s leg? What the hell is wrong with me?”

Fish told him that it was an accident, it wasn’t his fault, it was football, a violent game, so what. Now Adam was pulling on the skin under his chin, grabbing it and pinching it. “I shouldn’t play tackle,” he said, pulling harder on his chin. “The craziest thing is that I’ve thought about something like this happening, you know?” Here he adopted a meaningful whisper. “I knew this would come to pass. When I get hold of someone I just get too… I feel like I want to tear them in half, know what I’m saying? Like I want to run through and get a bunch of people near me and then explode.”

Fish nodded. Adam seemed to be horrified and proud and enthralled all at once. He had an aura that wasn’t right, the wild glow of a scientist who’d discovered a formula that could kill millions.

The ambulance was loading Catanese now, and had pulled right up onto the field, which everyone thought was great; that had never happened before. Fish walked with Adam across the grass, now black and wet, without saying much. The light was almost gone, so they headed home, afraid of the night that would soon bring Monday. Into the house, through the mud-room, past Fish’s parents playing Pong and up the stairs, Fish quiet, now running his fingers over each baluster, while Adam talked, sighed, touching nothing.

Fish finds a parking space under a wide wall of the hospital, pink-bricked and bisected by the kind of steel ladder you see on water towers — a fire escape, maybe. The grounds are lavish, or seem so in the dark — cobblestone paths winding around willows and palmettos, sprinklers hissing. As Fish is walking in, a man in institutional blue holds the door for him.

“I assume you’re a visitant?” he says.

“I don’t know,” Fish says.

“Of course you are. You have that radiant look.”

The man giggles and Fish says thank you, unsure whether or not to encourage him. He says thank you, tells the man, an aide of some kind, where he’s headed, and the aide, in his scrubs and with plastic bags around his shoes, walks Fish all the way to the Nursing/Trauma Unit. “I’d just confuse you otherwise,” he says. Fish isn’t sure if that’s an insult or what.

Adam is in Room 318, on the far side of the building. Fish hopes he doesn’t have a roommate, because the roommates in hospitals are always deformed and either too sick or not sick enough to be there in the first place. They listen to conversations and make judgments. But when he gets to the room there’s no roommate, just a twig of a woman, owlish and sallow, sitting on a chair near Adam, eating a brownie.

Fish waves hello to the brownie woman and walks around to Adam. He lies flat, with a neck brace on, staring at the ceiling. Fish puts his face in Adam’s line of vision.

“Hey,” Adam says, surprised.

Fish grunts.

Adam doesn’t look forty. He looks twelve. He’s wearing a baseball cap, and his face isn’t wrinkly or strung out or gaunt. With his freckles and the cap, he has the aura of a kid who’s just had his tonsils out.