Dave Eggers: How We Are Hungry

“Why are there no campfires?”

It’s the first thing Mike has said at dinner.

“Honey collectors,” Frank says. “Burned half the mountain.”

Mike looks confused.

“They try to smoke out the bees to get the honey,” Frank explains, “but it gets out of control. That’s the theory anyway. Might have been a lot of things, but the mountain burned and now they won’t allow fires.”

“Also the firewood,” Patrick says.

“Right, right,” Frank says, nodding into his soup. “The porters were cutting down the trees for firewood. They were supposed to bring the firewood from below, but then they’d run out and start cutting whatever was handy. You’re right, Patrick. I forgot about that. Now they’re not even allowed to have firewood on the mountain. Illegal.”

“So how do clothes get dry?” This from Jerry, who in the candlelight looks younger, and, Rita suddenly thinks, like a man who would be cast in a soap opera, as the patriarch of a powerful family. His hair is white and full, straight and smooth, riding away from his forehead like the back of a cresting wave.

“If there’s sun tomorrow, they get dry,” Frank says. “If there’s no sun, they stay wet,” he says, then sits back and waits for someone to complain. No one does, so he softens. “Put the wet clothes in your sleeping bag. Somewhere where you don’t have to feel ’em. The heat in there will dry ’em out, usually. Otherwise work around the wet clothes till we get some sun.”

“This is why those porters dropped out,” Jerry says, with certainty.

“Listen,” Frank says, “porters drop out all the time. Some of them are superstitious. Some just don’t like rain. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

Rita cannot grip how this will work. She doesn’t see how they can continue up the mountain, facing more rain, as it also becomes colder, the air thinner, and without their having any chance of drying the clothes that are surely too wet to wear. Is this not how people get sick or die? By getting wet and cold and staying wet and cold? Her concern, though, is a dull and almost distant one, because almost immediately after the plates are taken away, she feels exhausted beyond all measure. Her vision is blurry and her limbs tingle.

“I guess we’re bunking together,” Shelly says, suddenly behind her, above her. Everyone is standing up. Rita rises and follows Shelly outside, where it is still drizzling the coldest rain. The hikers all say goodnight, Mike and Jerry heading toward the toilet tent, just assembled — a triangular structure, three poles with a tarp wrapped around, a zipper for entry, and a three-foot hole dug below. Father and son are each carrying a small roll of toilet paper, protecting it from the rain with their plastic baggies containing their toothbrushes and paste. Their silhouettes are smudges scratched by the gray lines of the cold rain.

Shelly and Rita’s tent is small and quickly becomes warm. Inside they crawl around, arranging their things, using their headlamps — a pair of miners looking for a lost contact lens.

“One day down,” Shelly says.

Rita grunts her assent.

“Not much fun so far,” Shelly says.

“No, not yet.”

“But it’s not supposed to be, I suppose. The point is getting up, right?”

“I guess.”

“At all costs, right?”

“Right,” Rita says, though she has no idea what Shelly is talking about.

Shelly soon settles into her sleeping bag, and turns toward Rita, closing her eyes. Shelly is asleep in seconds, and her breathing is loud. She breathes in through her nose and out through her nose, the exhalations in quick effortful bursts. Shelly is a yoga person and while Rita thought this was interesting an hour ago, now she hates yoga and everyone who might foster its dissemination.

The rain continues, tattering all night, almost rhythmic but not rhythmic enough, and Rita is awake for an hour, listening to Shelly’s breathing and the rain, which comes in bursts, as if deposited by planes sweeping overhead. She worries that she will never sleep, and that she will be too tired tomorrow, that this will weaken her system and she will succumb to the cerebral edema that is ready, she knows, to leap. She sees the aneurysm in the form of a huge red troll, like a kewpie doll, the hair aflame, though with a pair of enormous scissors, like those used to open malls and car dealerships— that the troll will jump from the mountain and with its great circus scissors sever Rita’s medulla oblongata and her ties to this world.

Gwen is to blame. Gwen had wanted to help Rita do something great. Gwen had been ruthlessly supportive for decades now, sending money, making phone calls on Rita’s behalf, setting her up with job interviews and divorced men who on the first date wanted to hold hands and their hands were rough and fat always, and Rita wanted no more of Gwen’s help. Rita loved Gwen in an objective way, in an admiring way totally separate from her obligations to sibling affection. Gwen was so tall, so narrow, could not wear heels without looking like some kind of heron in black leggings, but her laugh was round and rolling, and it came out of her, as everything did, with its arms wide and embracing. She could be president if she’d wanted that job, but she hadn’t— she’d chosen instead to torment Rita with her thoughtfulness. Baskets of cheese, thank-you notes, that long weekend in San Miguel when they’d rented the convertible Beetle. She even bought Rita a new mailbox and installed it, with cement and a shovel, when the old one was stolen in the night. This is what Gwen did, she did this and she humored Brad, and awaited her baby, and ran a small business, as fruitful as she could hope, that provided closet reorganization plans to very wealthy people in Santa Fe.

Rita knows she can’t ask Shelly to share her sleeping bag but she wants a body close to her. She hasn’t slept well since J.J. and Frederick went away because she has not been warm. No one ever said so but they didn’t think it appropriate that the kids slept in her bed. Gwen had found it odd when Rita had bought a larger bed, but Rita knew that having those two bodies near her, never touching anywhere but a calf or ankle, her body calming their fears, was the only indispensible experience of her life or anyone else’s.

As her heart blinks rapidly, Rita promises herself that the next day will be less punishing, less severe. The morning will be clear and dry and when the fog burns off, it will be so warm, maybe even hot, with the sun coming all over and drying their wet things. They will walk upward in the morning wearing shorts and sunglasses, upward toward the sun.

The morning is wet and foggy and there is no sun and everything that was wet the night before is now wetter. Rita’s mood is a slashing despair; she does not want to leave her sleeping bag or her tent, she wants all these filthy people gone, wants her things dry and clean. She wants to be alone, for a few minutes at least. She knows she can’t, because outside the tent are the other hikers, and there are twenty porters, and now a small group of German hikers and at the far side of the camp, three Canadians and a crew of twelve — they must have arrived after dark. Everyone is waking up. She hears the pouring of water, the rattle of pots, the thrufting of tents. Rita is so tired and so awake she comes close to crying. She wants to be in this sleeping bag, not awake but still sleeping, for two and a half hours more. In two and a half hours she could regather her strength, all of it. She would have a running start at this day, and could then leap past anyone.

There is conversation from the next tent. The voices are not whispering, not even attempting to whisper.

“You’re kidding me,” one voice says. “You know how much we paid for these tickets? How long did we plan to come here, how long did I save?”