Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Then the triathlons began. Carl joined — he paid to be part of, spent Josie’s money to be part of — a group of men and women coached by a former marine. They ran, biked, climbed on fake walls indoors. Josie came to know all their names: Tim, Lindsay, Mercury, Warren, Jennifer. Wonderful to know so much about them. This training took him all over Ohio, and away most of every Saturday and most Sundays. Josie had arranged for the care of the kids during the workdays, but thought it helpful to have their father around on the weekends.

“I feel so good about this,” Carl said.

About the triathlons, not his children. Carl never ran in one. But he was gone every weekend, and Josie found herself shattered by the sameness. Alone with Ana and Paul, after breakfast she was determined to get the morning’s errands done by eleven. At eleven, the errands done, she would fight off the desire to nap. Paul went next door, to unhappily play with the hyperverbal only child who said cruel things to him. So it was Josie and Ana, and Ana didn’t really care what they did. Maybe they could watch a video on her phone. Then yes, a nap for twenty minutes, next to Ana — an attempt, anyway, for during those twenty minutes Josie would think of the sixty or seventy worst things she’d ever done, the stupidest things she’d ever said. She would open her eyes, scalded. She would put on her running shoes, then take them off. She would consider pouring herself a drink. Who would know? She’d pour a drink and immediately pour it back into its bottle. How would the hours pass?

Carl would come home in the afternoon, and after any workout or pretend-workout, he would be randy, and he would be unfussy about how the spilling of his seed happened — he was just as happy using his hand or hers, but somehow the manual labor always took longer and was twice as boring. Afterward, lying on their backs, the ceiling so white, they would share a moment, having accomplished something, but then again nothing. Then he’d click his tongue and get up. “Gotta go to the can,” he’d say.

Her memories of Carl involved either him shitting or lying, paralyzed by the heroes of Zuccotti. Oh wait. That was better than Disappointed: The Musical. Think of it: The Hero of Zuccotti. This would be about Carl, a man in Ohio, the son of a land baron who raped a thousand miles of Costa Rican forest to feed his cows. Now Carl was the Hero of Zuccotti. A child of wealth, dedicated to the cause of the poor, even though he did not technically ever go to Zuccotti, or do anything overtly to support the Occupiers. Maybe he was part of the 99 % because technically he had no income? Was that the connection? The show would center around him running — running at night with a headlamp! On a treadmill. Just running. His thoughts, his dreams, represented by video of various protests and marches, projected behind him as he ran, as he stretched out after running, as he rubbed his legs with Ben Gay after running, as he drank a cold beer after running, as he watched some women’s soccer on his phone after running, jerked off in the downstairs bathroom after running — here we could show Josie, upstairs and alone in bed — all the while, the rest of the world was happening on-screen behind him, the tents and placards and marches and altercations with cops, and every so often he would look up and nod meaningfully, as if one with the protesters, even while he was alone, his dick in his hand.

A few months after their split he’d gotten a job in Florida and was gone. His employment out of state, it seemed, gave him license to become a ghost. He found this logic unimpeachable. I can’t be in two places at once, he said. A college friend had given him a sales job, commission only, in a start-up. Could you call it a start-up if they sold roof racks for compact cars? Child support was never discussed or contemplated. For six months he wasn’t seen at all. But when he reappeared, he acted like he’d been there all the while. “Are you sure about this school they’re in?” he’d asked last fall, the last time he’d visited. “Are they being fully challenged?” When he said this, he was wearing shorts and sandals and a visor. These were beach clothes, Florida clothes, but he was in Ohio. He’d flown in for the weekend, rented a car, shown up at their house. Who was this man? Where had he found this visor? Josie actually asked him, she had to know.

“Where’d you get the visor?”

He told her that he’d bought it online. And thus! And thus in this world existed a man who ordered visors online and said things like Are they being fully challenged?

Josie had since met others in her position, single parents who had these ghost-appendage partners, people like Carl who did nothing, who were simply not there, not in any way part of their children’s lives — but who walked around perfectly confident that they were pulling their weight. Josie was sailing the ship of her children’s lives, hoisting the sails, turning the winches and bailing water, and Carl was not on that ship, Carl was sunning himself on some faraway unnamed island — wearing his visor! — but he believed he was on the ship. He believed he was on the ship! How can someone be on the ship when they are not in fact on the ship? When they are in fact on some faraway island? Carl had seen his children once in the last fourteen months, but in his mind he was tucking them into bed every night. What evolutionary mutation permitted this kind of self-deception?

All this could figure into the musical. All throughout, as Carl jogged, and stretched out, and jerked off, his family and Occupy would be going on around him, projected on the screen behind him, though he would confuse this with actually being there. And at the end of the show, during which the actor playing Carl had done nothing at all for anyone, he would arrive on stage and bow, and take curtain calls, and say Thank you, thank you, I thank you so very much .

Now all Josie wanted was to be left alone. She wanted to say to him: Do not reappear. Do not offer advice. Do not enter my home and comment on my housekeeping. Do not comment on the role of soy in my daughter’s entry into puberty. No, she would not send her children to Punta del Rey. She would not be party to his ploy. Was this small of her? Embittered? Ungenerous? Ridiculous to flee her home for Alaska, where she and her children could not be found for his photo-op? Yes, he, and Teresa, and her parents, and whoever the fuck else, wanted photos of him with his children — to show he was a real father. Look at him frolicking with his daughter and son! They wanted to frame this photo, these photos, and have them there on the bridal table, central to whatever display they would assemble for their godforsaken guests. Some descendant of Goebbels was now a wedding planner and had been hired by these jackals to produce this fiction.

“Mom, there’s a smell.”

It was Paul.

“What’s that? Did we have five minutes of quiet?”

Josie had lost track.

“It’s a really bad smell,” he said.

Josie inhaled deeply. It was both familiar and foreign — pungent, a mixture of organic and chemical.

“Spray some of that sunblock,” she said and Paul did, and the Chateau took on a creamy pineapple air. It didn’t last long. The previous smell was too strong. Josie opened her windows and looked around for fires, or firefighters, but saw nothing. Finally, up ahead she saw a stream of smoke leaving the chimney of an industrial building. “It’s probably that,” she said, pointing to it. She closed her window. They drove in silence for ten minutes, until they were far out of range of the building and its chimney.

The only legitimate man in her life since Carl, besides the man who wanted to smell his shit-covered finger, was Elias. She’d read about him in the local paper. He was a lawyer, and was assembling a class of plaintiffs to sue a nearby coal-burning plant over various environmental violations. The story made him out to be an everyday attorney who decided, on his own accord, to take on a billion-dollar company. There were thousands of homes within range of the plant, all subject to unknown dangers of particulates in the air, fly ash and unburned coal combustion byproducts settling onto lawns and roofs. He was asking anyone within a three-mile radius to come forward and hold GenPower accountable.