The eyes and the impossi.., p.15
The Eyes and the Impossible,
p.15
I ran to the rock. I thought if I got to the top of the rock I could roar to him, I could howl to him and ask him to stop. I could tell him he didn’t have to do this.
I knew that this was the kind of drama, kind of theater, that he loved so much. He would see this as heroic.
I raced to the beach and there I saw the usual line of gulls on the shore, watching Bertrand in their usual solemn manner. A few of them glanced at me as I passed, closing their eyes to me in acknowledgment of my friendship with Bertrand, who would soon be dead in this most honorable way.
I flew across the beach and instantly I was upon the rock and scaled it in three bounds and at its peak I joined Helene and Yolanda and Sonja. They were watching with tears soaking their feathers and fur. “Oh Johannes, I can’t look,” Helene said. “Is this really something you all do here? It’s awful.”
“Bertrand!” I yelled to the sky.
“It’s no use,” Yolanda said. “It’s custom. You know this is their idea of honor. We can’t change it.”
“Bertrand!” I roared again to the sky.
The crooked-flying bird that was Bertrand made no indication he had heard. He was rising higher and higher and higher, and this meant he would soon let go. This was what the end-end was like—a theatrical flying in ever-rising gyres until finally the gull lets go, they cease their fighting to stay aloft, and they fall. Finally they fall, fall, fall, until they crash to the sea and are gone.
“Bertrand!” I howled again, and this time Bertrand’s faraway silhouette seemed to falter. “Come down here!” I yelled.
But the faltering was just prelude to falling. The magnificent bird that was Bertrand began to drop from the sky.
“Stop!” I yelled.
He plummeted like a ragged mess of bone and feather.
“Please!” I roared.
I summoned the earth. I summoned the clouds. I summoned the Sun. “Bertrand,” I yelled. “There is more!”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Just before he struck the hard line of the sea, he spread his wings, stopped his downward fall, and managed, in his depleted state, to steady himself. Then, with a few more uncertain flaps, he rose and grew stronger. In seconds he had flown all the way to us, and landed on our high rock. He seemed very put out.
“What were you yelling about?” he asked. “I was in the middle of something.”
“I noticed,” I said.
He straightened himself out and tried to look dignified and even casual, even though he was a bit of a mess.
“Okay, what is it?” he asked.
“How about,” I said, “you don’t die? Come with me.”
“Where? Back to the park? You know I can’t. A bird of my species has his pride, you know. We have our customs. I can’t—”
“No,” I said. “Leave. Go over the ocean, with me. On this ship. The Bison aren’t going, but we can.”
Helene was standing next to me, and she nodded, though she had not envisioned this scenario, where both a coyote-dog and a broken-down gull would be joining them. But how hard could it be?
“You have more to see and do,” I said to Bertrand.
“Go with you? On that?” he asked, nodding to the ship. The idea of not dying, of instead coming with me, was a distant thing to him, but it was growing closer. I could tell its contours and shape were becoming clear to him.
“You’re not old,” I said. “You’re only changed. Before, you could fly, and now, you can walk. Hold on to me as we run together and see. See the sea, see the main-land. See everything that can be seen.”
“So I’d ride on your back?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes you can walk.”
An impish smile overtook him. “That would be pretty slow,” he said, and I laughed.
“To be honest, I wasn’t so crazy about dying,” he said. “I mean, I was going to make it look spectacular and all.”
“Of course,” I said.
“But I was also thinking it would be pretty good not to die.”
“So come,” I said.
“When?” he asked.
“Now,” Helene said. “We have to go now.”
There were about ten goats left near us, and Helene urged us to sneak in among them as they made their way down the hill.
“Stand on my back,” I told Bertrand, and he did. He weighed so little! All this time, for a thousand years, he’d flown merrily above me, and all this time I hadn’t known how light he was. I could have been carrying him all this time!
“This doesn’t mean I’m going,” he said. “I’m just thinking on your way to the ship.”
Hiding a dog and a bird was no great feat for the goats. We were so much smaller than the Bison, so we made our way down the hill without any fear of detection. And soon we were at the bottom of the hill, where the land met the dock, and were approaching—fast—the ramp to the ship.
“What will we eat?” Bertrand asked.
I laughed, and he laughed, because we both knew that anything we usually ate would be in infinite supply where we were going. It was such a silly question.
“Will we ever come back to this place?” he asked, and though I assumed the answer was no, Helene surprised us both.
“Maybe,” she said. “Who knows? We got here once. Maybe we get here again.”
We looked up the hill, and I hoped to see the Bison again, to tell them what we were doing, but they were gone—they’d disappeared down the other side of the boulder. The only one of my friends still on the peak was Sonja. She waved. She was grinning, waving, crying, so many things all at once, and now she would be the Eyes. That was obvious to me and to her and would be obvious to all. The Eye? Is that what they’d call her, given she only had the one? I laughed for it was so fitting and right. I was happier for her than I’d ever felt for myself. She would be so good.
And soon the herd was herding us up the metallic incline, and Bertrand and I were among them, and I felt the steel under my paws, and felt the tension of a ramp over water, and then we were inside. Inside the belly of the ship.
The smell was strong. The light was gone.
“We did it,” Helene said.
LAST CHAPTER
Helene told us to sleep and we slept. With all the planning and escaping, I had not slept in ages. We slept among a thousand goats in a cramped dark space, the smell outrageous, but when I woke, I saw that Bertrand was just waking, too, and he smiled at me, and I smiled, too.
“What in God’s name are we doing?” he asked.
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t believe we had done what we did. I was sure that we were already a million miles from the park, from all that we’d ever known. There was one small window in the hold, and I squeezed my way through the goats to this porthole, dusted with sea salt, and saw only blue—blue sky, blue water without end.
“I really thought I’d be dead,” Bertrand said when I returned to him. “Now I’m on a ship among goats. And they smell so bad!”
I shushed him, not wanting to offend our hosts, who were sleeping all around us.
“You didn’t have to die,” I said to him.
“And you didn’t have to stay there,” he said to me. “All this time, you thought you needed to stay in the park, but then you left. And now you’re here, and soon we’ll be somewhere else.”
When he said that, I panicked, ever so briefly. I thought about all I loved in the home we’d left. Our friends there. Freya, Meredith, Samuel. The trees, the flowers, the children, the music. And for a moment I wanted to leap. To jump and swim home.
But I couldn’t. I knew this. You know this.
What kind of coyote-dog would I be if I were not out in the world running? What kind of Eyes would I be if I were not out in the world seeing?
Heroes go forth.
To be alive is to go forth.
So we went forth.
A NOTE ABOUT THE ART
The paintings in this book are classical landscapes by artists long departed. Shawn Harris, the frequent collaborator of this book’s author, added Johannes to each landscape but otherwise left the paintings as they were.
1. Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël, Landscape near Abcoude, 1860–1870
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2. Jacob van Ruisdael, The Forest Stream, ca.1660
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
3. Berndt Lindholm, Forest Interior, 1878
Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland
4. Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña, In the Forest, 1874
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
5. Gustave Courbet, La Bretonnerie in the Department of Indre, 1856
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
6. Fanny Churberg, Inside the Forest, 1871–1872
Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland
7. André Giroux, Forest Interior with a Waterfall, Papigno, 1825–1830
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
8. Ferdinand von Wright, Forest Landscape from Haminalahti, 1880
Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland
9. William Trost Richards, Quiet Seascape, 1883
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
Cover & Endpapers
in the McSweeney’s edition: Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël, Landscape near Abcoude, 1860–1870
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
in the Knopf edition: Berndt Lindholm, Forest Interior, 1878
Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to these invaluable early readers: Em-J Staples, Sarah Stewart Taylor, Heather Rader and her students, and of course VV, BV, and AV. Thank you to Shawn Harris, Justin Carder, Claire Astrow, Caroline Sun, and Sunra Thompson. This book would be nowhere without its tireless champions: Amanda Uhle, Amy Sumerton, Melanie Nolan, Andrew Wylie, Luke Ingram, and the editor of editors, Taylor Norman.
Thank you also to members of the Young Editors Project (www.youngeditorsproject.org), which allows young readers to see books in manuscript form, and become part of the publishing process. Students who lent me their time and expertise include: Sandra Jobson-Aue of Berkeley, California; Vi and Abe DePasquale, and Clara Herbert of Ann Arbor; Alba Villacis, Callahan Damon, Cheehan Ma, Elena Popov, and Kailey Gallagher from Northfield, Illinois; Cara Sanderson from Doncaster, England; Corinne Licardo from New York, New York; Elena Garcia Sheridan from Wollongong, Australia; Emmett Jackson from Fayetteville, Arkansas; Henry Martin from Elsah, Illinois; Noah Dimond from Yorkshire, England; Orla Tangeman from Southport, England; Sydnee Faria from Richmond, British Columbia; and the following sharp minds from Ottawa, Ontario: Catherine, Penelope, Emma, Ismail, Mia, Ana, Naila, Lillian, Jennifer, Jackson, Theo, Katherine, Haadyah, Luca, Christopher, Madilyn, Norah, Caryss, Nicolas, Marlon, Richard, Henry, Chris, Kate, Kaedence, Santiago, Mateaus, Ajim, Tina, Adnan, Asher, Cameron, Aaron, Lexi, Jayden, Anthony, Oscar, Zara, Ana, Ahmed, Will, Tilly, Amelia, Alex, Emma, Ramona, Theo, Olivia, Koki, Avery, and Arya.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVE EGGERS is the author of numerous books for adults, including The Every, The Circle, and A Hologram for the King, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also written multiple books for young readers, among them The Lifters, Her Right Foot, and What Can a Citizen Do?, the latter two illustrated by Shawn Harris. Dave is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company, and the cofounder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers. Dave lives in Northern California with his family.
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Dave Eggers, The Eyes and the Impossible
