Dave Eggers - How We Are Hungry

“What’s the hat?” Fish asks. It bears a minor-league team’s logo, a beaver holding a bat he’s apparently been chewing on.

“What are you doing here?” Adam asks. His eyes open a little more, catching the glare of a car’s headlights in the parking lot.

“Who gave it to you?” Fish says.

“One of the nurses. Ronnie.”

“Do you get to keep it, or is it just for here?”

“I don’t know. I think I can keep it. Did you drive down?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. Thanks, man.”

“That’s a bitch of a drive,” Fish says.

“I know ,” he says with what Fish considers an appropriate amount of awe and gratitude. “Sorry. Thanks.”

On his mobile table are remnants of dinner or lunch or both — uneaten tapioca and two tangelos, and beside them a little tilting pagoda of Tupperware. The lady with the brownie has finished with the brownie and is now cleaning her nails with a thumbtack. Fish nods to Adam and jerks his head toward her. She has a hospital I.D. tag clipped to her blouse.

“She sits here with me,” he says. “They’ve got someone in here all the time so I don’t do anything.” It’s clear that Adam is happy they think he’s such a serious customer, such a dangerous man. Fish looks over at the brownie woman to see if she’s listening, but she isn’t; she’s watching a movie on Adam’s TV — Fred Thompson is playing the president, and is wearing that dissatisfied look he uses. Fish stares out the window. In the parking lot, the cars are colored copper by the light from above, the lamps bent over them like tall thin saints over babies. He sees his rental and misses being inside it.

Adam is holding a little tube with a button on it.

“Is that for morphine?” Fish asks.

“Yeah,” Adam says.

“So you try to jump off a building, and they give you morphine — an unlimited amount?”

“No. I can only get a certain amount each hour. They’ve got it figured out.”

Fish knows it’s just a matter of time before Adam starts telling him why he jumped off the motel roof, but he doesn’t want to hear it. Oh, if only it were interesting! he thinks. But it never is. “I wanted to hurt myself,” he will say, “I don’t know why.” Nothing of any interest will get said by either of them. Adam will say, “I feel so dark sometimes” or “It’s like I see things sometimes… through a dark water.” Adam wants Fish to understand, but Fish isn’t interested, and, besides, he’ll call Adam on where he stole that dark-water part— The Executioner’s Song, Adam’s favorite book — and remind him of a hundred ways the two of them, Fish and Adam, are equal in this darkness . They’ve seen the same things, they have the same urges. Adam will concede this, and will begin apologizing for everything, and for too long. He’ll be too contrite, too docile, and Fish will want to step on him.

But at some point they’ll start making plans for when Adam is discharged. This is the only part that ever interests Fish: the steps from here on out. Fish will get inspired, laying out what will happen in the first few days, the weeks after, every move for years. First, a different apartment in a new city, away from the therapist-criminals in Bakersfield who keep prescribing drugs, every conceivable drug, for Adam. Then a menial job while doing some kind of night school, and finally a woman, older, hardened, wise, but warm — who will tie him to a pole in the basement when he needs it. Or what he really needs is a man. He needs a burly man, a hairy gay man who goes to bear bars. He’d give Adam love and respect but also be paternal, stern, watchful enough to save Adam from himself.

“So how’s Mary?” Adam asks.

“She’s good,” Fish says.

“Where’s she living now?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“She’s my cousin. You can’t tell me where she lives?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s got little kids, Adam, and you’re a guy who shoots himself and jumps off roofs. Fuck you.”

For a second Adam looks hurt, or pretends to look hurt, then he closes his eyes. Fish fears that he’s just made Adam feel more unique and menacing — precisely what Adam wants.

His chin is brown and tied together with black straight string, spiked along the suture, as if spiders had been sewn into his face.

“Ow. Don’t,” Adam says.

Fish is touching the stitches.

“Why not?”

“Stop it, prick.”

“How many?” It’s like a cactus or something. The stitches are amazing.

“Twelve. Get the fuck away.”

Fish gives him a look.

“Sorry,” Adam says. But he has no rights here. After five hours of driving, Fish is allowed to touch what he wants. Fish remembers the card and drops it on Adam’s chest. Adam tries to look down at it.

“You have to hold it up. I can’t see.”

Fish opens it and shows him the front. It’s an elephant surrounded by Hebrew letters, with “Happy Bat Mitzvah” written below.

“A Jewish elephant,” Adam says.

“I guess so,” Fish says.

Fish used to like hospitals. Waiting rooms in particular. When his last girlfriend, Annie, had her appendix out, he was at the hospital for thirty hours and had a pretty good time. He met people, learned things — there was some strange collegial vibe that night. Three of them played cards and Fish won a hundred and twenty-two dollars on a straight flush from a guy whose brother was getting a finger reattached. He’d been drilling a hole through his son’s wall, thought the kid was selling crystal meth and wanted to catch him. That had been a good night.

But with Adam he doesn’t want to stay. Fish looks at the clock. It says 8:40. He’ll leave at nine, he decides. Then he’ll call Annie to see if he can stay with her for the night. Annie follows local politics and has ridiculous lips, full like balloon animals, a voice lower than his. The last time Fish saw her she scratched his head so masterfully, in circles so convincing, that he thought he was rising, ascending. They talk often enough, and she lives in L.A., and he figures he’ll drive over after, not for sex or even romance, just for a place to rest where there’s breathing other than his own, where he won’t have to leave the TV on all night. If she’s not around he’ll drive back to San Jose tonight. He could do it. Through the night is easier.

“Does your mom know?” Fish asks. He knows that Adam’s mom doesn’t know, because Adam told Chuck that if she found out he’d do it for real next time.

“No. I don’t think so,” Adam says.

Adam’s father died a few years ago, a botched bypass, and now his mother lives in Australia. She went there with a man she’d met in a community-theater production of Fiorello! He played the lead, though he was six feet four and blond.

A nurse comes in. She’s Filipina, young. Her nametag says “Hope.” Fish feels an urge to say something about her name, in light of her working in a hospital and all, but then figures she hears that often enough.

“That’s a good name for a nurse,” he says. What the hell.

She takes Adam’s blood pressure. Fish watches, loving how quickly the armband fills with air, how tight it gets. That device always looks like something illegal.

“How’s your pain?” she asks Adam.

“Good,” Adam says.

The nurse takes the Bat Mitzvah card off Adam’s stomach and puts it on the side table, next to a jar of denim-colored tools, like lollipops but with foam starfish tops. Cleaning devices, maybe, for swabbing mouths or other wet orifices. Fish thinks briefly about taking one of the lollipops and stuffing it up Adam’s fat fucking nose. He almost laughs at the thought of it.

Fish leaves while Adam is drifting in and out, his face blank, almost beatific. During a brief moment when his eyes pull open, Fish tells him he’ll check in again tomorrow.