Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

The fact of Ana’s existence, and her will to live and run and break things and conquer, was all attributable to her birth. After living for a month in a plastic box, and spending her first two years looking like a withered old man, she shed her preemie skin like Lady Lazarus and became a world-ender. Carl had long before abdicated any responsibility. When they first brought Ana home from the hospital, Carl thought it a good time to start training for his triathlon — there was suddenly such urgency to it — and Josie soon gleaned he was not likely to be instrumental in Ana’s care. So she deputized Paul. Your sister is very small and not strong, she told him. When she comes home she’ll need your help. They talked about Ana’s homecoming every night and every night Paul seemed to take his impending responsibilities more and more seriously. One night she found him on the floor with a hand vacuum, cleaning the room waiting for Ana. He was three. Another time he’d found an old greeting card, a burst of balloons on the cover, and dropped it into her empty crib. Josie’s intent was to be sure that Paul, a sensitive boy but nevertheless a boy, would be careful not to accidentally smother tiny Ana, or break tiny Ana’s bird bones, but instead she created this boy who came to understand his role as something akin to caretaker of the world’s most delicate orchid. He slept in her room, on a mattress next to, and then under, her crib. By the time Ana was three months old he knew how to feed her and swaddle her. When Josie or Carl did either he sat nearby, adding frequent notes and corrections.

Ana grew stronger, and by two she was running without fear or limit, though she was still Pinocchio-thin and her eyes were circled in pale blue shadow — temporary evidence, Josie hoped, of her traumatic journey thus far. As she grew in confidence and awareness of her power of ambulation and self-determination, as she became more aware of herself and the world, she became less aware of Paul. He sensed it and felt betrayed. There was a time when she was two and Paul five, when he came to Josie, anguished. “She won’t let me hold her,” he wailed. He was on the verge of tears, while Ana barely knew he lived in the same house. Reaching full strength, she had no interest in anyone, really, least of all him. She wanted to see things, to roam, to climb and plummet. She was attracted to the shiny, the moving, the blinking, the rustling, the fur-covered. Paul was none of those things so he held no interest.

But something happened when she turned three, and after that Paul was known. Now when she did something, usually something dangerous, she wanted Paul — Paulie — to watch. Paulie, Paul-ee. Paul! Eee! Watch. Watch. Watch-watch-watch. Paul acted aggrieved by Ana’s demands but satisfying them was his life’s calling. He loved her. He brushed her hair. He clipped her toenails. She still wore a diaper at night and she preferred that he put it on. When Josie would wrap a towel around her after a bath, Paul would rewrap it, tighter, more carefully, patting it down just so, and Ana had come to expect this.

Now, as they stood on the deck stained in pink fish blood, an older man was suddenly too close and was talking to them.

“You kids like magic?” the man asked. He seemed to be leering. These lonely old men, Josie thought, with their wet lips and small eyes, their necks barely holding up their heavy heads full of their many mistakes and funerals of friends. Everything these men said sounded hideous and they didn’t even know it.

Josie nudged Paul. “Answer the nice man.”

“I guess,” Paul said to the mountains beyond the man.

Now the old man was delighted. His face came alive, he dropped twenty years, forgot all the funerals. “Well, I happen to know that there’s a magic show tonight on our ship.”

The man owned a ship? Josie asked for clarity.

“I’m just a passenger. I’m Charlie,” he said, and extended his hand, a pink and purple tangle of bones and veins. “Haven’t you seen the Princess docked here? It’s hard to miss.”

Josie came to realize that this stranger was inviting them, herself and her two kids, the three of them unknown to this man, onto the cruise ship docked at Seward, where, that evening, there would be an elaborate magic show featuring a half-dozen acts including, the old man was thrilled to convey, a magician from Luxembourg. “ Luxembourg, ” he said, “can you imagine ?”

“I want to go!” Ana said. Josie didn’t think it mattered much that Ana wanted to go — she had no intention of following this man onto a magic-show ship — but when Ana said those words, “I want to go!” Charlie’s face took on a glow so powerful Josie thought he might ignite. Josie didn’t want to disappoint this man and her daughter, who continued to talk about the show, what tricks a man from so far away might be capable of, but was she really about to follow this old man onto a cruise ship in Seward, Alaska, to see a Luxembourgian magic show? She couldn’t deprive them, she knew. They had only one grandparent, Luisa, who was spectacular but who was too far away, so Josie frequently succumbed to these grandparent manqués, who bought her children balloons and gave them candy at inappropriate times.

“We’re allowed to have guests, I think,” the man said as they walked the gangplank. The kids were astounded, stepping slowly, carefully, holding the ropes on either side. But now their host, this man in his seventies or eighties, was suddenly unsure he could have friends over. So Josie stopped and her kids peered down into the black water between the dock and the gleaming white ship. Josie watched as Charlie approached some man in a uniform. A few dozen elderly passengers went around them in their windbreakers, small bags of Seward souvenirs dangling from their arms.

“Let me talk to this man,” Charlie said, and motioned them to hang a few yards back from the door. Charlie and the man turned around a few times to inspect and gesture at Josie and her children, and finally Charlie swung around, telling them to come aboard.

The ship was garish and loud, and crowded, full of glass and screens — the décor was casino crossed with Red Lobster crossed with the court of Louis XVI. The kids were loving it. Ana was running everywhere, touching delicate things, bumping into people, making elderly women and men gasp and reach for walls.

“I think it starts in twenty minutes,” Charlie said, and then again looked lost. “Let me see if we need tickets.” He wandered off, and Josie knew she was a fool. Parenting was chiefly about keeping one’s children away from unnecessary dangers, avoidable traumas and disappointments, and here she had dragged them to Alaska, and had driven them around unchosen parts of the state, and then to Seward, where no one had recommended they go, and now she had them following a lonely man onto a ship designed, it seemed, by the insane. All to see magic. Luxembourgian magic. Josie paged through the years of her life, trying to remember a decision she had made and was proud of, and she found nothing.

Finally Charlie returned, holding the tickets in his hand like a bouquet. “Are we ready?”

There was an escalator, an escalator inside a ship. Charlie was ahead of them, and rode upward while looking back at them, smiling but nervous, as if worried they might flee.

The auditorium seated at least five hundred and all within was burgundy — like being inside someone’s liver. They sat in a half-moon booth near the back, Paul next to Charlie. A waitress in bright red hurried by and Charlie made no move to order anything. Josie asked for a lemonade for the kids and a glass of pinot noir for herself. The drinks arrived and the lights went down. Her glass was the size of a crystal ball, and was nearly full, and Josie felt kissed by the anonymous and irrational generosity of humankind. She relaxed, anticipating a few hours of not having to do anything but sit and watch in silence, getting harmlessly plowed.