A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Metadata

• Author: [[Dave Eggers]]
• Full Title: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Category: #books

Highlights

• because being aware of and open about one’s motives at least means one is not lying, and no one, except an electorate, likes a liar. (Location 353)
• There are times when I am concerned about Toph’s expression when I’m really singing, with vibrato and all, singing the guitar parts and everything—an expression that to the untrained eye might look like abject terror, or revulsion—but I know well enough that it is awe. I understand his awe. I deserve his awe. I am an extraordinary singer. (Location 1349)
• As we hit our street, Spruce, and the ground flattens out, I inquire, as gently as I possibly can, about his hitting, or lack thereof. “So why do you suck so much at hitting?” (Location 1419)
• “Toph, I want to tell you something. I want to tell you about my nipples. I want to tell you about my nipples, and generally about the nipples of the men in our family. Because someday, son [I do this thing, and he does this thing, where I call him son and he calls me dad, when we are having funny father-son-type chats, mocking them in a way while also being secretly, deeply queasy about using these terms], someday my nipples will be your nipples. Someday you too will have nipples that protrude unnaturally far from your chest, and which will harden at the slightest provocation, preventing you from wearing anything but the heaviest cotton T-shirts.” (Location 1524)
• There is so much to do. I try not to think yet about everything coming soon, all the things we need to do when school starts and all this becomes real, but one thing—that Toph must see a doctor, must get a physical—breaks through and now my head floods, fuck— I have to get a résumé together, and we have to find a new place to live when the sublet ends, and how will Toph get to school if I get an early job? Will Beth pull her weight, will she be too busy, will we kill each other? How often will Bill come up from L.A.? How much should I/can I/will I burden Kirsten? Will she even be around? Will she mellow when she finds a job and a car? Should I lighten my hair? Does that whitening toothpaste really work? Toph needs health insurance. I need health insurance. Maybe I’m already sick. It’s already growing inside me. Something, anything. A tapeworm. AIDS. I have to get started, have to get started soon because I will die before thirty. It will be random, my death, even more random than theirs. I will fall somehow, will fall like she fell, when I found her. I was six and it was midnight, and I found her when she fell down the stairs and opened up her head on the black-slate floor. (Location 1539)
• There is a package of pretzels that has been opened by the one person in the house who can’t open bags properly and so cuts holes in the middle with steak knives. (Location 1681)
• I have just delivered a State of the Family Room Address, sweeping in scope, visionary in strategy, inspirational to one and all, and the issue has now moved to committee. And though the committee has been looking at it from many angles, addressing matters of both the provenance of the various elements of its unkemptness and matters of precisely who would be best suited to carry out the committee’s recommendations, we are stalemated, solution-wise. “But it’s mostly your stuff,” he says. He’s right. “Immaterial!” I say. Early in the negotiations, I, the senior committee member, had proposed a plan whereby the junior committee member, Toph, being young and in need of valuable life lessons and no doubt eager to prove his mettle to his peers, would clean the living room not only this time, but also on a regular basis, perhaps twice a week, in exchange for not only $2 a week in tax-free allowance, but also the guarantee that if all expressed duties are performed satisfactorily and on time, he will not be beaten senseless in his sleep by the senior committee member. The junior committee member, insolent and obviously lacking both good sense and any notion of bipartisanship, does not like this plan. He dismisses it out of hand. “No way” is what he said. (Location 1685)
• If we throw and miss the garbage can, the item, usually remnants of a fruit item, stays where it lands, until a few weeks later when someone, Beth or Kirsten, making a big show of how appalled they are, picks it up and throws it out. They worry for us. I worry for us. I worry that any minute someone—the police, a child welfare agency, a health inspector, someone—will burst in and arrest me, or maybe just make fun of me, shove me around, call me bad names, and then take Toph away, will bring him somewhere where the house is kept clean, where laundry is done properly and frequently, where the parental figure or figures can cook and do so regularly, where there is no running around the house poking each other with sticks from the backyard. (Location 1713)
• By mid-fall, we settle into something like a schedule. In the morning, a little after I go to bed, Toph wakes up at, say, 3 or 4 or 4:30 in the morning, so as to allow ten minutes to shower, ten minutes to dress, half an hour to make and eat breakfast and finish his homework, and at least three and a half, four hours for cartoons. At 8:45, he wakes me up. At 8:50 he wakes me up again. At 8:55 he wakes me up one more time and, while yelling at him because he’s late, I drive him to school. (Location 1724)
• But when someone has to be blamed, he allows me to finger him, and when he resists, I only need to look at him that certain way, that way that says “We are partners, here, little jerk, and yesterday, when I was exhausted, and sick with pinkeye, you wanted to get some of those Magic cards, absolutely had to have them for the next day, because everyone was bringing new cards in to show during lunch, and because I was afraid that you’d be unpopular and would be cast out for being a near-orphan and having funny ears and living in a rental and would grow up with an interest in guns and uniforms, or worse, I’ll find you under the covers reading Chicken Soup for the Prepubescent Soul and lamenting your poor lot, I got dressed and went to that comics store that’s open ’til eight, and we got two packs of cards and one of them had a hologram in it, and you were the envy of all, and your life continued on its recent course of ease, of convenience, of relative stardom, of charmed bliss”—and he relents. (Location 1739)
• In general, if, even with the observance of said rules, he does not like her, for whatever reason—he never says so but it becomes clear (he retreats to his room when she arrives)—then she is slowly faded away, unless of course she is extraordinarily good-looking, in which case it doesn’t matter what the little dickhead says. (Location 2123)
• tell her how funny it is we’re talking about all this because as it so happens I’m already working to change all this, am currently in the middle of putting together something that will address all these issues, that will inspire millions to greatness, that with some high school friends—Moodie and two others, Flagg and Marny—we’re putting something together that will smash all these misconceptions about us, how it’ll help us all to throw off the shackles of our supposed obligations, our fruitless career tracks, how we will force, at least urge, millions to live more exceptional lives, to [standing up for effect] do extraordinary things, to travel the world, to help people and start things and end things and build things . . . “And how will you do this?” she wants to know. “A political party? A march? A revolution? A coup?” “A magazine.” “Oh . . .Right.” (Location 2655)
• These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it. (Location 3586)
• Holding me responsible for keeping hidden this information is ridiculous. I was born into a town and a family and the town and my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone’s. It is shareware. I like it, I like having been a part of it, I would kill or die to protect those who are part of it, but I do not claim exclusivity. Have it. Take it from me. Do with it what you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff. (Location 3596)
• If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air. (Location 3603)
• Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it’s fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it. (Location 3606)
• We are wearing what we always wear, shorts and T-shirts, having decided, after thinking about what to wear and then remembering not to think about what to wear, to wear what we would have worn had we not been thinking about what to wear. We are happy with our shorts and T-shirts, one side tucked in, just an inch of it on the right side, showing some belt, the rest hanging out—this is our look—it having been arrived at in high school through careful consideration, through the eschewing of so many possible mistakes. We wear no tattoos, because we feel tattoos indicate too much attention paid to one’s look and anyway, though the trend is still on the upswing in 1994, we are sure that inside a year, maybe just only a few months, that whole boom will go bust. (How long, after all, could something like that last?) Same with dyed hair, piercings, brandings, creative headwear, neckwear, T-shirtwear, all other indications and accoutrements. We have opted out, taken the ultimate apathetic approach to looks and attire, have moved past the check-me-out look, past the look of rejecting-the-check-me-out-look-in-favor-of darkly-rebellious-look—have rejected both and have chosen a kind of elegance through refusal—the check-me-out-if-you-must look-but-you’ll-get-no-encouragement-from-me look—the look of absolutely no look at all. Which is not to say we wouldn’t mind looking good, Moodie and I, because it would be nice, since we’re bothering to slum on MTV and all, to at least be looking appealing, thus increasing our chances of sleeping with Charles Bronson’s daughter, or at least the girl from Caffe Centro, the one with the hair down to here, the legs up to there. (Location 3979)
• they clearly see through the whole thing, that we are using this to get exposure, to prove to all and ourselves that we are real, that we like everyone else simply want our lives on tape, proven, feel that what we are doing only becomes real once it has been entered into the record. (Location 4010)
• But as much as I want to encourage his mingling with his own age group, I fear that if he becomes too involved elsewhere, he won’t be ever-available for my own needs. What would one do if one did not have a Toph, sitting in his room, ready at a moment’s notice, always willing to run one’s errands, to be pushed against a wall and have his kidney punched, to be brought, as he is at the moment, to the Berkeley Marina, for the throwing back and forth of things? To not have Toph would be to not have a life. (Location 4119)
• You could put pictures up in a room like this. It would be nice to have some pictures up, like they have in a dentist’s office, something to look at while you’re being worked on. But then you’d be dying, and the last thing you would see would be some LeRoy Neiman print from the 1983 Masters and that would be just too terrible, not that there could ever be any appropriate thing to see before you died— But if you really liked golf . . . They should leave the walls blank. (Location 4382)
• And though I do not believe much of it, he does. I make myself sick saying it all, everything so obvious, the reasons to live not at all explainable in a few minutes on the edge of a psychiatric ward bed, but still he is roused, making me wonder even more about him, why a fudge-laden pep talk can convince him to live, why he insists on bringing us both down here, to this pedestrian level, how he cannot see how silly we both look, and when, exactly, it was that his head got so soft, when I lost track of him, how it is that I know and care about such a soft and pliant person, where was it again that I parked my car. (Location 4490)
• After a year and a half of on-again, off-again, Kirsten and I have finally broken up for good, which was mutually agreed-upon, acceptable to all concerned, but which quickly set off a chain reaction too horrible to even menti— So first we broke up, then Kirsten decided she’d move into San Francisco, which was wonderful with me, we needing distance, and so I would be less tempted to spy on her when curdled with sudden jealousy at one in the morning on a Saturday, convinced that she was at home, on her couch, with someone much more masculine than myself. And all was perfect until Beth, who has just finished her second year in law school, decided that, see, what she’d like to do is, well, she’d like to move, from Berkeley, from a few blocks from us, where she is always handy, within reach, able to provide whatever help we might need when we needed it, to the city, over the Bay, all that water, the bridge, all those miles away, to San Francisco, where she will live with . . .Kirsten! Kirsten even called. “Isn’t this great?” she asked. Then Beth called. “Isn’t this great?” she asked. (Location 4609)
• Addressing Toph’s presents is up to me, and the night before, I do everything I can to spruce up the task, to forge new ground. Some I address to fictitious recipients, or to other kids in the neighborhood. Many of Toph’s presents I address to myself. Those that actually bear his name are misspelled. Or else I do what I do when filling out school forms: I get his name wrong, writing “Terry” or “Penelope,” then cross it out and write his real name, smallish, below. I sign a few from “Us,” a few from “Santa,” but prefer this: FROM: God. He doesn’t know who to thank. He does not want to seem overly cavalier when reaping the booty, and we exploit his eagerness to please. A package of colored clay is opened. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank who?” “I don’t know. You?” “No, not me. Jesus.” “Thank you, Jesus?” “Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.” “He did?” I turn to Bill. Bill is staying out of it. “He did,” I say. “Beth, did he not?” “Indeed he did. Indeed he did.” (Location 4834)
• It’s a kidney stone. I wake up and am drugged. Kirsten is there. I haven’t seen Kirsten in weeks. Beth couldn’t get out of work, so called her. Kirsten takes me home. “I thought I was dying,” I say. “Of course you did,” she says. (Location 4915)
• “People are going to be pissed when they find out,” he says. “Well, we hope so. These are the people we want to upset. Anyone who cares about him in the first place, who would at all be moved by the death of someone they saw on TV, deserves to be duped. I mean, why should anyone pay attention? Why should some dramedy star moron loser be mourned by millions, when other people are not? When the average person, who lives a happy and maybe even in some ways heroic life, can only attract twenty or thirty people to a funeral, when— I mean, it’s unfair, it’s abominable, right?” (Location 5006)
• I grab him and say nothing until we get to the car, and inside the car with the windows rolled up—after he gives me his excuse, involving his thinking that I would be picking him up at the other door, a door other than the door at which I dropped him off, after I patiently listen, interesting . . .interesting . . .without swearing, trying not to yell— I do not want to do these things, these things are not what we’re about, no yelling, no swearing, that’s verboten, no anger, no outbursts, no threats of doing this or that, hitting him here or there—instead I calmly, slowly, softly, as if reading Chaucer to senior citizens, avail him of my way of seeing things— “Goddamn it, Toph! That makes no goddamn sense! The other door? Why the other door? Are you kidding me? Goddamn it! Goddamn it! Goddamn it! This shit cannot happen. Sorry pal. This cannot happen. I mean, please, Toph, please, this kind of thing is just ridiculous [raising voice, to his and my surprise] fucking ridiculous! I mean, this shit just cannot happen, there is no room for this kind of shit. [Pounding steering wheel] Goddamn it! Goddamn it! Goddamn it! I cannot be driving endlessly around the city looking for you, wondering when I’ll have to call the police, wondering what Dumpster they’ll find you in, molested and torn apart and— Goddamn it! Jesus fucking Christ, Toph, I had just about written you off, I went through that hotel ten fucking times, I was picturing you in a million pieces, that Polly Klaas killer guy giving me the finger at the trial, everything. Fuck this, man! There simply is [pounding steering wheel] no margin for error, here, my man. There is no margin for error! [Pounding steering wheel with each syllable] No! Mar-gin! For! Err-or! Listen, you know this, we know this, we’ve always known this, that the only way we can do this is with a certain amount of efficiency. We have to be thinking, we have to be on our toes! We have to be on the same page, have to be anticipating, thinking, we have to have presence of mind! Things are pulled taut, Toph, pulled taut! There is no give! No give! Everything is too tight, brother, everything is just right there, like that [clenching fists], see that? Tight, taut [jerking fists apart, miming the testing of a knot in a short piece of rope]! Everything is pulled taut!” “You just passed our street.” (Location 5212)
• Could he really be doing all this for attention? Could he really be milking his own past to solicit sympathy from a too-long indifferent public? No, no. He is not calculating enough, cynical enough. It would take some kind of monster, malformed and needy. Really, what sort of person would do that kind of thing? (Location 5427)
• How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can’t decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting. I want to be doing something beautiful, but am afraid that this is too small, too small, that this gesture, this end is too small— (Location 6076)
• But even if so, even if this is right and beautiful, and she is tearing up while watching, so proud—like what she said to me when I carried her, when she had the nosebleed and I carried her and she said that she was proud of me, that she did not think I could do it, that I would be able to lift her, carry her to the car, and from the car into the hospital, those words run through my head every day, have run through every day since, she did not think I could do it but of course I did it. I knew I would do it, and I know this, I know what I am doing now, that I am doing something both beautiful but gruesome because I am destroying its beauty by knowing that it might be beautiful, know that if I know I am doing something beautiful, that it’s no longer beautiful. I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it’s beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose—that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster. My poor mother. She would do this without the thinking, without the thinking about thinking— (Location 6081)
• Finally! “You can’t say A-hole, either.” “Okay.” “A-hole’s even worse.” “Fine. Dickhead.” “Dickhead’s fine.” (Location 6279)