Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

– Your father started this.

– Let's wipe these fuckers away.

– Who?

– These pigs. From Oconomowoc. They have eclipsed all my years. I've tried too long to grow again into the world and now I'm being sent back. I don't want to remove myself again. I spent so long away and finally rejoined the world and now I can't be here. It's too much to walk around with this skin and this blood – it all hisses at me. I sink into my blood and it hisses at me.

– Stop.

– You remember how I was.

– We called you Robotman. You withdrew. It didn't make sense. Your dad had left so long before.

– This was unrelated.

– This is when your heart went offbeat.

– Irregular. I'd been passing out, and at first the doctors called it something else, something common in teenagers – you stand up quickly, you black out, a byproduct of quick growth – but it was happening too often, I was finding myself on the laundry room floor with broken recyclables under my back, a shard of Schweppes stuck three inches into my shoulderblade.

– I remember that.

– Six stitches. It was that time at the emergency room, when we did the first tests with a tall beautiful doctor, Dr. Milliard, who reinvented me, gave birth to the me with Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, a very specific heart irregularity condition involving electricity and valves, or the dysfunction of these valves and their electricity, dubbed WPW. Most of the people who get it, she said, are -

"Wrestlers," my mom said, wanting to make the doctor laugh. Milliard sat down and covered the basics of the condition, an arrhythmia that was not common but not rare. But I didn't want all the details. I wanted to know what I could and couldn't physically do, what I could and couldn't eat – dry foods? wet foods? only soup? – and leave it at that. Dr. Milliard – she was something, her steady unblinking eyes, the serene but determined face of an Egyptian sarcophagus – told us that almost no one died of WPW, but some did – some did, she said while looking up from my knee, which she was squeezing like a grapefruit. Almost everyone with WPW, she said, led normal lives, outside of the occasional attack, spell, fainting or minor stroke. It concerned me in a distant way; at the very least, it would provide some suspense. There were certain cures, open heart surgery, a way to get through the obstruction – ablation, they called the procedure – but it was only necessary in the most extreme of cases. Mine was not one. Until recently, my spells were twice a year and minor, and easy to work around. But this past year has been one of slow tightening, and shock, of flash floods and mudslides -

– I remember when they told you about the WPW. You got so weird for a while. Your dad had left again -

– I decided at age twelve, after first getting the whole thing explained to me, that I would no longer express or be party to any human emotion. I watched the TV news and wanted to disassociate myself. I renounced my membership. I would be a better human by stripping myself of human weaknesses. I would be a better human by not raising my voice, by not crying, by not being angry, or sad, or annoyed, or excited. I was tired of staying up at nights waiting for dawn, wondering what would happen if I slept, who would come to kill me.

– I remember you sleeping in school.

– The idea was to solve the problems of the world via removal, withdrawal, starting with me. There was no order in the world but there would be order in how I moved through the world. I wanted to remove those elements of human behavior that led to trouble – the trouble I had seen with Mr. Einhorn, who I had known as the guy who ran the pool over the summer but who had recently been courting and touching my mother, his two fat hands on her shoulders in the kitchen in a way that did not look gentle.

– I can't believe she dated him.

– Twice.

– You had evolved over the rest of us.

– It was easy to become a better human. First, I spoke in a monotone. I could not be excited and could not be upset. I was a visitor from elsewhere, Russia maybe, and found everything amusing, interesting, but only slightly and even then, solely from an anthropological standpoint. I was not sullen; I was predictable. I walked at a normal human pace. I rode my bicycle at an optimum speed, a practical speed, without standing up on the pedals, because to do so would imply urgency. At school events I would clap when others would clap but I would not cheer or yell. My phone calls were brief and to the point. I set the receiver down gently; I walked the stairs not quickly, not slowly; I brushed my teeth for fifteen minutes because that was what my dentist, who I admit now was not sane, suggested; I kept my head level because tilting seemed to imply too much interest; I did not pass gas or pick my nose; I washed myself thoroughly in the morning and at night. I thought of the least emotional walk I could engineer, and decided that it required minimal arm movement and long even strides.

– Are you sure this wasn't all after the thing when your dad fell on your mom?

– That happened after.

– But it did happen, right?

– I know that I was in the middle of the living room. The carpet was shag, yellow or white. He looked like he was sleeping when he fell. I was sitting there, or standing there, and it was night. I know it was night because I saw my reflection in the black window. I looked like me, only my eyes seemed more hollow, my flesh papery.

– And?

– And then he fell on her. She was standing under the mini-balcony in the middle of the room, holding a bowl of apples. I think she was asking if anyone wanted them because they were old and bruised. And then she was under him. He fell from the balcony and landed on her. His drink crashed on the carpet and splashed. She started wailing.

– How was that possible? In the house on Oak?

– No, the house before that. There was a railing at the top of the stairs. The balcony was about nine feet up. It was a split-level house, and he was at the top of the stairs, at the railing, looking down at us both, and then he was falling down and landing on her. She shrieked and then wailed. They were a tangle on the floor. He seemed so heavy while falling.

– I still don't understand how a man can land on a woman without breaking every bone in her body.

– She wasn't hurt much at all, outside of a hairline fracture on her wrist. She had a cast on her arm for a little while, a cast I still have. She doesn't know this.

– It's amazing he didn't kill her.

– Yes.

– And how long after that were they divorced?

– They were already divorced. They'd been divorced for years.

– How did that work? I don't get it.

– I don't either. I just know they were already divorced. But I don't know why he was there.

– They were back together.

– I felt nothing when he left again. "Oh," I said when she told me. To display emotion would be a betrayal of my new species. I half-closed my eyes. I watched her weep on the kitchen floor. I watched the drool come down her chin. Tommy was in Alaska at the cannery so it was us. She came at me and hugged me and I let my arms drop to my sides. She could hold me if she wanted because she was that type, a loose weak human chaos of emotion, and from that I had graduated. She was sweating. I watched her cry again each time she told a different friend, on the phone sitting at the kitchen table, hand spiked through her matted hair. I watched as she breathed like people birthing babies breathe, in narrow streams with wide eyes. I watched as if watching an animal in a clinic. I was observing. She cried again when she was throwing out all his food, from the fridge and pantry, his frozen waffles and apricots and venison still marinating.