Read Online How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers - Free Book Online

had been intentional.
    This time, two nights ago, Adam, half drunk—he was always impaired when he tried these things—jumped off a motel roof. At least that’s what Chuck heard from the paramedic who found Adam, unconscious in the parking lot, splayed like a buck on the hood of a truck. It was about forty feet down, Chuck said.
    Adam could have jumped into a dry gorge a few blocks from the motel and he would have died for sure—the dropoff there was about a hundred feet. Instead, he fell four stories, into the courtyard, broke his collarbone, cracked his left leg, bent his spine.
    The road is quiet. I-5 is split, a narrow valley between the comers and the goers, so Fish, his brain marshy and his eyes glazed, can see only the cars that are heading in his own direction. Fish likes to see the faces of people going the other way, to construct stories about them, wish them well or ill, but this is nothing, this drive—this is sorrow. It makes you want to freeze the world and shatter it with an ax.
    This morning Fish’s pillow was soaked and his blanket was halfway out the window; he woke up hearing machine guns and screams. Not unusual, but this time he was on the plane, not watching it. It hadn’t taken off yet. There was something wrong, the air of the world had shrunk in on itself and then the men burst in. They pulled guns from a compartment and started shooting, endlessly, from the front to back, everything moving too slowly. Fish was in one of the last rows, listening to the shrieking, constant but undulating, and he was planning, clenching and unclenching his fists, looking around, between seats behind and in front of him, for a couple of people to come with him and help him end this. The fact that he was alive to hear the suffering meant that he was meant to stop it.
    Through breakfast Fish was still operating under the blurry assumption the attack had been real, but CNN said nothing about it. Still, he was down, foggy, feeling remorse. He was crushing aluminum cans in the driveway, distracted, nerves shot, when Chuck called from Charlotte and described what Adam had done.
    “I’m not going this time,” Fish said.
    “I can get there four days from now,” Chuck said. “Do one day before I come. Make sure he’s not paralyzed. Check that they have him in a real room and everything.” Two years ago, after No. 3, Chuck arranged insurance for Adam, an expensive plan, and was frequently checking to make sure he was getting his money’s worth.
    Chuck doesn’t know Adam as well as he pretends, and thus his benevolence can be less complicated than Fish’s. He never shared a bedroom with Adam. He never found Adam’s crusty tissues stuffed, like brains displayed in a jar, in a curvy blue bottle he’d won at a carnival. He never caught Adam rubbing down Mary’s legs after track, his hands wrapped like tentacles around her calves.
    Fish is driving a rental car. He called the place where they pick you up in a sedan wrapped in brown paper. He called at about noon and they said they’d send the car over at two. Between twelve and two, he waited in his house. He watched baseball on TV. He put in a videotape of him and his father running in a Chicago marathon. His dad was wearing the brace he wore during those years, and he has a mustache. When he sees the camera, he turns around and runs backward. Then Fish’s mom drops the camera and the tape ends. Adam was no athlete. There was a game Fish played with him—it was Adam’s only good toy—where tiny metal football players move around on a field vibrating below them. It was a strange device, because you couldn’t really control the little bastards—you just watched as the field sent them jerking around, crowding together or falling alone.
    Fish watched some of the national aerobics championship. He closed all the cabinets in his house and, using his new drill, tightened all the hinges. He walked to the stationery shop to see if he could buy Adam anything. They