Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Josie was surprised to find she was within range of the plant — it was only two miles away — so she sent him a letter, and he called her, and she found herself driving into the city to see him. She expected him to work in some warren of legal offices, papers stacked neatly on the floors, boxes of documents being carried by aides. But he worked alone, and his office was tidy, spare, no papers anywhere.

There was relief in this. Since she’d written to him she’d felt strange, watched, treasonous. If Elias had operated out of some shadowy basement office, Josie would have ascended from worried to paranoid. But he was young and open-faced and smiled easily as he shook her hand. He had great teeth. They walked to a café nearby and he asked if she would join the class action. In an irrational burst driven by his unblemished skin and bright eyes, she said yes. She asked about the possibility that his lawsuit might provoke retribution from the company, that they might countersue or do something less legal and more nefarious. She’d read about these things. “Could be,” he said, but didn’t seem the least bit concerned. He filed the lawsuit, now with her name among the lead plaintiffs. She took pride in this — her standing in the community, he said, made her a prize.

A few weeks later Elias came over to update Josie on the case, and she showed him the white van that had been parked on her block for a month, and they walked around the van together, laughing at themselves, but still wondering why a nondescript van like that would be parked in front of her house, exactly the same spot each time, never down the street — never even across the street — and with the back window covered.

“I dare you to knock on the side,” she said. She was fourteen again, her heart leaping, bursting. “See if anyone’s in there with headphones.” Elias did knock. She gasped.

“You’re the one who lives here,” he said, and they laughed as they rushed from the van and back inside her house.

Josie had fallen a little bit in love with Elias, though his eyes told her he felt he was too young (or more meaningfully, she was too old). He was no more than thirty, and looked younger. When they rushed inside, and closed the door, gasping and laughing, she thought it at least possible that they would fall into each other, kissing and groping. But he said he had to use the bathroom. All the men in her life preferred to be alone in the bathroom rather than be alone with her.

After the bathroom, Elias brought out from his bag the actual lawsuit, the two hundred pages of it, with its standard and utilitarian but strangely beautiful cover page. She thrilled at seeing her name on it. What did it mean? Having her name above theirs, GenPower, as if her place above them codified her moral superiority. Then the word versus, a display of defiance and aggression. I sue you. I am versus you. I challenge you. I hold you accountable. I name you, I name me.

As she and Elias were looking at the lawsuit, and their shoulders were touching, innocent but not entirely innocent — Josie could feel the heat of him through his bright white shirt and she felt her own high heat as a result — there was a knock on the door and then Carl’s face re-entered her life.

Josie could not prove that this was when Carl decided to marry his then-girlfriend Teresa with an alacrity new to him, but it would not be improbable. He entered before she invited him, and then he registered the two of them, Josie next to this handsome lawyer with his clean white shirt. Josie and Elias were bent over the papers, and Elias’s full size and height was obscured, and so Carl rushed forward, thinking he would confront, in his way, in some way, this new man standing in the house he used to own — or at least lived in — but as he got closer, Elias straightened himself and revealed his full size, six two or so, and Josie’s heart almost burst. She loved to remember it now, watching Carl take in tall and handsome Elias. She recalled watching Carl as he slowed, reassessed, and as he stretched out his hand to shake Elias’s, no longer confrontational, now deferent, feigning friendliness — it was delicious.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Carl said.

“I should go,” Elias said.

“No, don’t,” Josie said. But soon Elias was gone and Carl was in a state of ecstatic agony and confusion and rage suppressed. Who was this other man, this tall man in his clean shirt, his shiny shoes? In the same kitchen, a moment of intellectual intimacy she’d shared with Elias devolved into an idiotic spat with an idiot.

“What are you looking for?” Josie asked.

Carl was pacing around the kitchen, looking on every surface, opening drawers like a monkey new to the complex interior of a human home. He was wearing a hoodie and huge colorful sneakers, which in contrast to the younger Elias in his minimal palette made Carl look even more childish and lost.

“A key to the storage unit,” Carl said, lying.

“You took it with you. I know you did,” Josie said, though she had no idea what the key looked like or if he’d taken it.

“Dishes stacked in the sink…” Carl now said — he seemed to have given up the pretense of the key — and he made a tsk sound, like some grandmother from the fifties. And why are the dishes in the sink the universal emblem of domestic squalor and parental failure? Is it the stacking? Dishes shouldn’t be stacked — was that the conclusion? Or is it that they’re in the sink? It’s okay that they’re stacked, but not in the sink? Should they be stacked elsewhere? In a closet, on the bed?

“Your key isn’t here. You should leave,” Josie told him.

“The kids are home from school soon,” Carl said, looking at his watch, seeing it was only one o’clock, when he knew (or did he? He didn’t know! He didn’t know!) that they didn’t finish until two. “I was hoping to see them.”

“You can’t wait for an hour,” Josie said. “Not here.”

“Wait. Ana’s in preschool till two? That’s a long day.”

Josie saw a knife on the counter, and thought how easily she could end all this. Now he was looking at the window over the sink, from an angle, examining it for cleanliness. It was not clean. Was he taking mental notes for some later lawsuit? He was.

“Did I interrupt some tryst you were about to have?” he asked, bringing his tiny green eyes to her. Who is this man? Josie thought. Was he always this ludicrous? And afterward came — it had come so many times after their split — the crashing realization that she had been with this ferret-man for eight years, that she had two children by this low scavenging mammal, that she would never escape him. After he left — he did leave, and perhaps had saved his life, the knife in her hand felt so right — she had to go for a brisk walk to try to clear her mind of the cycle of self-recrimination. She would not say the words, or think the words, I wasted my youth on, but of course she had. Or not her youth — she’d wasted her middle thirties, a time of blooming for her, when she had grown professionally comfortable, had taken full control of her body, had brought Paul and Ana into the world and was ready to look out and build. She’d wasted so much time with Carl. Eight years. Eight years with invertebrate Carl, jobless Carl, confused Carl, and now she was forty, and she was too late for Elias, anyone like Elias. Anyone with courage. Now she was in a state surrounded by firefighters. Would that yield options?

—

“The smell’s worse now,” Paul said, and Josie knew this was true. It was an acrid smell, something like the burning of garbage.

This time, before Josie knew that he’d unbuckled himself, Paul had gotten up to check the stove and reported that all the knobs were as they should be.