Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Finally, through some intermediaries — well, the same intermediary, Carl’s mom, who liked Josie more than Carl — finally Josie got the full picture: The wedding was in the fall, but there were those among Teresa’s family opposed to the union, thinking or knowing Carl for what he was — a deadbeat father, an abdicator, a man born without a spine — so Carl (and Teresa? It was unclear how much she knew) had concocted this plan to show them he was close to his progeny, that he was part of their lives. And Josie thought, you know what, goddamn you to hell. You’re in Florida? I’ll be in Alaska.

But she did not tell him this.

“Are we going back to the red house?” Ana asked from the depths of the Chateau. She’d unbuckled her seatbelt and was standing near the bathroom.

“Sit down and put your seatbelt on,” Josie said.

“Paulie said I didn’t have to,” Ana said.

“Paul, you’re on probation,” Josie said.

“Thank you,” he said.

What the hell was happening? Paul now knew sarcasm. Ana sat down again and buckled herself in.

“Of course we are,” she said, answering Ana’s question. Their house was not red, it was grey, but the trim was maroon, so Ana had taken to calling it the red house, and Paul and Josie had never corrected her.

Had she told Ana that they wouldn’t be going back? Or if they did go back, it would only be to move out? Josie’s feelings about the house were a barbed, snarling thing. She and Carl had thought buying a house a sensible thing, an objective not often debated in the civilized world. They had seen houses, and debated their merits, and finally bought one, a home needing work. Carl said he would do the work, would at least oversee the work, and do some of it himself (he had no idea how to do any such work) and she thought it would keep him busy and focused, even if he were just watching others labor. So they got themselves a loan, and bought the house at its asking price, and it was all very simple, and while they remained in their rental, Carl undertook (oversaw) (occasionally dropped in on) the first basic renovations, three months’ worth, until they could move in. Which they did, they moved in, the kids gleeful, really, they couldn’t get enough of the new bedroom they’d share, their unusually big closet, a strangely small and terrifying basement, and then, after a week of sleeping in this house, which was a fine solid house priced at the average price for the homes in their town, Carl began to lose his mind.

“This is wrong,” he said. “This is decadent.” He was standing in their bedroom, looking around like they’d entered the Vanderbilts’ Newport spread. “Look at this!”

Josie looked around the room, and saw only a mattress, an unassembled bed and a small window with a view of a lopsided apple tree. Josie was stunned, but not quite as stunned as she would have been had Carl been someone sane or stable. “What? Why? We just moved in.”

It turned out Carl was conflicted, torn, shredded, by the juxtaposition — was it a paradox? What was it? he wondered, What is it? he wailed aloud — of having just bought a house, and being in the middle of renovations. He said the word renovations like it was some filthy thing, as if they’d been burning money at the feet of orphans — all while the Occupy movement was trying valiantly to alter the foundations of our financial system. How could they, Carl and Josie, be debating what kind of wood floors to use? History was being made elsewhere, everywhere, and they were choosing paint colors and whether their lamps should have nickel or copper finishes. At the hardware store one day, when they were supposed to choose a cabinet for under their bathroom sink, he couldn’t get out of the car.

“I can’t do this,” he said.

“The door handle is just there, below the window. Pull on it,” Josie said. She already knew his state of mind. Carl was mercurial and surprising but he never surprised in his shape-shifting. He was inconsistent in all things but his cowardice. His unreliability could be counted on. Should she point out his impossible hypocrisy? The fact that he was the son of a cattle rancher who’d decimated some untold miles of Central America to feed cows that would feed Americans and Japanese? And that he’d never had a job? And that to have him judge her, their life, the life she paid for—

It was impossible. There was nowhere to start, nothing to say.

“No! No. You go,” he said. “I’ll stay here.”

Were they really about to spend six hundred dollars on a cabinet? he wanted to know. Did they really spend five hundred and fifty dollars on beds for the kids?

“Otherwise the kids sleep on what?” she asked. She thought he might really have an alternative.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think we need to start asking these questions.”

She laughed out loud. It was not planned.

He couldn’t participate in the spending of money like this, he said. Money he had no hand in making anyway. When they’d met, Carl had been fired from a vague position at an ad agency; he’d never held a job more than a year. Had she really allowed him to drift? Was it her fault? Had she actually told him to — had she said the words pursue your passion ? Lord. Carl had no conception of how to earn money for his children or himself, had no sense of the steps involved between waking up one day and sometime later being paid for work done. He knew how to wake up, and knew how to cash a check, but everything in between was a muddle. All his bosses had been ogres and psychopaths — chiefly, it seemed, because they’d tried to tell him what to do. That itself was some high crime.

All those months of Occupy were disastrous. He was paralyzed. She found him in bed, lying on his back, on their capitalist mattress, a towel on his face. She found him on the floor of the children’s room, splayed like he’d fallen in a ditch. He said he had migraines. He said he couldn’t go through with it. He called off the renovations, sent the workers away, leaving the house full of plastic sheeting, billowing loudly from the open windows.

“Now these guys don’t get paid,” Josie said. “Don’t they need work, too?”

“That’s not the point,” he said, but his eyes showed some recognition that it might be part of the point. Carl had never been one to see the connection between any of his own actions and the running of the finances of their household or town or world.

All he really wanted was to be in Zuccotti Park, not in Ohio. That was the point. The average age of the Occupy campers was about twenty-four, Josie said. There are no parents of small children there. There are no children there. And if there are children, they’re living in squalor. He agreed, but he was catatonic. He couldn’t live day to day. He went on fifteen-mile runs, then got drunk. He slept half the day then looked at graduate school applications. He searched for places to live in Bali. Looked up international schools for the kids in Brazil. Then he went on a twenty-mile run and got drunker.

“Why are we here?” he asked.

“On Earth?” Josie asked. She was joking but he was not.

“How did we get so far away from everything?” he asked, and Josie realized he really meant this. He had somehow come to confuse himself with some Weather Underground revolutionary who had lately gone soft. Josie couldn’t conjure anything vaguely revolutionary that Carl had ever done. She knew he’d once voted for the Green Party. Maybe that was it. Now he pined for his Occupy brethren as if Josie had personally come to steal him from his place at the barricades. But aha, the day the protesters left Zuccotti Park, Carl’s mood brightened. The activists went back to their homes, and Carl, it seemed, was ready to live in a house himself.