Dave Eggers - How We Are Hungry

OH I’M A FAST DOG. I’m fast-fast. It’s true and I love being fast I admit it I love it. You know fast dogs. Dogs that just run by and you say, Damn! That’s a fast dog! Well that’s me. A fast dog. I’m a fast fast dog. Hoooooooo! Hooooooooooooo!

You should watch me sometime. Just watch how fast I go when I’m going my fastest, when I’ve really got to move for something, when I’m really on my way — man do I get going sometimes, weaving like a missile, weaving like a missile between trees and around bushes and then pop! I can go over a fence or a baby or a rock or anything because I’m a fast fast dog and I can jump like a fucking gazelle.

Hoooooooo ! Man, oh man.

I love it I love it. I run to feel the cool air cool through my fur. I run to feel the cold water come from my eyes. I run to feel my jaw slacken and my tongue come loose and flap from the side of my mouth and I go and go and go my name is Steven.

I can eat pizza. I can eat chicken. I can eat yogurt and rye bread with caraway seeds. It really doesn’t matter. They say No, no, don’t eat that stuff, you, that stuff isn’t for you, it’s for us, for people! And I eat it anyway, I eat it with gusto, I eat the food and I feel good and I live on and run and run and look at the people and hear their stupid conversations coming from their slits for mouths and terrible eyes.

I see in the windows. I see what happens. I see the calm held-together moments and also the treachery and I run and run. You tell me it matters, what they all say. I have listened and long ago I stopped. Just tell me it matters and I will listen to you and I will want to be convinced. You tell me that what is said is making a difference, that those words are worthwhile words and mean something. I see what happens. I live with people who are German. They collect steins. They are good people. Their son is dead. I see what happens.

When I run I can turn like I’m magic or something. I can turn like there wasn’t even a turn. I turn and I’m going so fast it’s like I was still going straight. Through the trees like a missile, through the trees I love to run with my claws reaching and grabbing so quickly like I’m taking everything.

Damn, I’m so in love with all of this.

I was once in a river. I was thrown in a river when I was small. You just cannot know. I was swimming, trying to know why I had been thrown in the river. I was six months old, and my eyes were burning, the water was bad. I paddled and it was like begging. The land on either side was a black stripe, indifferent. I saw the gray water and then the darker water below and then my legs wouldn’t work, were stuck in some kind of seaweed or spiderweb and then I was in the air.

I opened my burning eyes and saw him in yellow. The fisherman. I was lifted from the water, the water was below me. Then shivering on their white plastic boat bottom and they looked at me with their mustaches.

I dried in the sun. They brought me to the place with the cages and I yelled for days. Others were yelling too. Everyone was crazy. Then people and a car and I was new at home. Ate and slept and it was dry, walls of wood. Two people and two girls, thin twins who sleep in the next room, with a dollhouse between them.

When I go outside I run. I run from the cement past the places and then to where the places end and then to the woods. In the woods are the other dogs.

I am the fastest. Since Thomas left I am the fastest. I jump the farthest too. I don’t have to yell anymore. I can go past the buildings where the people complain and then to the woods where I can’t hear them and just run with these dogs. Hoooooooooooooooo! I feel good here, feel strong. Sometimes I am a machine, moving so fast, a machine with everything working perfectly, my claws grabbing at the earth like I’m the one making it turn. Damn, yeah.

Every day on the street I pass the same people. There are the men, two of them, selling burritos from the steel van. They are happy men; their music is loud and jangles like a bracelet. There are the women from the drugstore outside on their break, smoking and laughing, shoulders shaking. There is the man who sleeps on the ground with the hole in his pants where his ass shows raw and barnacled and brown-blue. One arm extended, reaching toward the door of the building. He sleeps so much.

Every night I walk from the neighborhood and head to the woods and meet the others. It’s shadowy out, the clouds low. I see the blues jumping inside the windows. I want all these people gone from the buildings and moved to the desert so we can fill the buildings with water. It’s an idea I have. The buildings would be good if filled with water, or under water. Something to clean them, anything. How long would it take to clean those buildings? Lord, no one knows any of this. So many of the sounds I hear I just can’t stand. These people.

The only ones I like are the kids. I come to the kids and lick the kids. I run to them and push my nose into their stomachs. I don’t want them to work. I want them to stay as they are and run with me, even though they’re slow, so so slow. I run around them and around again as they run forward. They’re slow but they are perfect things, almost perfect.

I pass the buildings. Inside, the women are putting strands of hair behind their ears, and their older children are standing before the mirror for hours, moving tentatively to their music. Their fathers are playing chess with their uncles who are staying with them for a month or so. They are happy that they are with each other, and I pass, my claws ticking on the sandpaper cement, past the man laying down with his arm reaching, and past the steel van with the music, and I see the light behind the rooftops.

I haven’t been on a rooftop but was once in a plane and wondered why no one had told me. That clouds were more ravishing from above.

Where the buildings clear I sometimes see the train slip through the sharp black trees, all the green windows and the people inside in white shirts. I watch from the woods, the dirt in my nails so soft. I just cannot tell you how much I love all this, this train, these woods, the dirt, the smell of dogs nearby waiting to run.

In the woods we have races and we jump. We run from the entrance to the woods, where the trail starts, through the black-dark interior and out to the meadow and across the meadow and into the next woods, over the creek and then along the creek until the highway.

Tonight is cool, almost cold. There are no stars or clouds. We’re all impotent but there is running. I jog down the trail and see the others. Six of them tonight — Edward, Franklin, Susan, Mary, Robert, and Victoria. When I see them I want to be in love with all of them at once. I want us all to be together; I feel so good to be near them. Some sort of marriage. We talk about it getting cooler. We talk about it being warm in these woods when we’re close together. I know all these dogs but a few.

Tonight I race Edward. Edward is a bull terrier and he is fast and strong but his eyes want to win too much; he scares us. We don’t know him well and he laughs too loud and only at his own jokes. He doesn’t listen; he waits.

The course is a simple one. We run from the entrance through the black-dark interior and out to the meadow and across the meadow and into the next woods, along the creek, then the over the gap over the drainpipe and then along the creek until the highway.

The jump over the drainpipe is the hard part. We run along the creek and then the riverbank above it rises so we’re ten, fifteen feet above the creek and then almost twenty. Then the bank is interrupted by a drainpipe, about four feet high, so the bank at eighteen feet has a twelve-foot gap and we have to run and jump to clear it. We have to feel strong to make it.