Dave Eggers

Mr. Criche cocked his head a bit, confirmed the answer, and a wave of validation swept over me. I hadn’t known, until that moment, how badly I’d wanted his approval. I was going through some rough times at school and at home — my face and back were covered in acne, my chest was concave, my last name sounded like food — but in that class, I felt I had worth. After that, I took it upon myself to impress him. Though William Faulkner wasn’t assigned reading, for weeks I brought “As I Lay Dying” to class, stacked neatly upon my other books, hoping he’d notice. (He didn’t.)

He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took particular notice of me. There were other, smarter kids in the class, and soon I fell back into my usual position — of thinking I was just a little over average in most things. But near the end of the semester, we read “Macbeth.” Believe me, this is not an easy play to connect to the lives of suburban high schoolers, but somehow he made the play seem electric, dangerous, relevant. After procrastinating till the night before it was due, I wrote a paper about the play — the first paper I typed on a typewriter — and turned it in the next day.

I got a good grade on it, and below the grade Mr. Criche wrote, “Sure hope you become a writer.” That was it. Just those six words, written in his signature handwriting — a bit shaky, but with a very steady baseline. It was the first time he or anyone had indicated in any way that writing was a career option for me. We’d never had any writers in our family line, and we didn’t know any writers personally, even distantly, so writing for a living didn’t seem something available to me. But then, just like that, it was as if he’d ripped off the ceiling and shown me the sky.

Over the next 10 years, I thought often about Mr. Criche’s six words. Whenever I felt discouraged, and this was often, it was those six words that came back to me and gave me strength. When a few instructors in college gently and not-so-gently tried to tell me I had no talent, I held Mr. Criche’s words before me like a shield. I didn’t care what anyone else thought. Mr. Criche, head of the whole damned English department at Lake Forest High, said I could be a writer. So I put my head down and trudged forward.

Mr. Criche was part of a powerhouse English department at Lake Forest High School, a school that, I believe, knew then and knows now how to treat its teachers. Nationwide, almost half of our teachers quit before their fifth year, driven away by poor conditions and low pay, but in Lake Forest, the teachers were and are able to make careers and lives out of the profession. Most of my other English teachers from 1984 to 1988 — Mr. Ferry, Mr. Hawkins, Ms. Pese, Mrs. Silber, Mrs. Lowey — taught there for decades, most of them in the same classrooms, all of them master educators. Imagine the benefit the students there received, from getting pretty much a college-level education in high school from educators who have honed their craft for decades. Every kid in this country deserves the same thing.

I don’t want to make this remembrance about the state of teachers in America, but Mr. Criche’s passing came just when teachers are at their most vulnerable, at a time when they’re fighting to assert and retain the dignity and artistry of their work. I don’t remember Mr. Criche teaching us how to take standardized tests, but when we took them, we did well. I don’t remember Mr. Criche gearing his lesson plans toward any state-regulated curricula, but we did pretty well on any and every scale. Why? Because he made us curious. He was curious, so we were curious. He was hungry for learning, so we were hungry, too. He made us want to impress him with the contents of our brains. He taught us how to think and why.

I miss him, but he won’t be forgotten, not by me or the scores of students who sat before him. Teachers live on in a thousand hearts and minds, right? They’re stuck with us. We follow them everywhere and always.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few writers in this guide that I can be sure that everyone has already read (unless “everyone” includes people who cannot read, or do not read, or are very young, or speak a language into which his work as not been translated). So. Vonnegut is a science fiction aficionado, WWII vet, lover of women, pitier of the poor, cranky luddite, fun-loving doomsayer, sometime postmodernist. His books — very personal novels disguised as allegories disguised as science fiction — nearly always take the entire world (or more) as their canvas. Usually there is a world war, or some catastrophic event, or often genocide, or a scientific or political innovation that threatens to, or has succeeded in, destroying all that we hold dear.

Because of this, Vonnegut could be dismissed as a cranky pessimist. Because his prose is frank and uncomplicated and often very funny, he could be passed off as a “humorist.” Gore Vidal once called him “America’s worst writer.” But despite Vidal (did you know he’s related to Al Gore? And the Kennedys?) and other critics, for some inexplicable reason, Vonnegut is taken seriously (by many at least), and he is loved by millions — even the superintellectuals like yourself.

He has written many books. Following are inadequate plot summaries of each, sometimes accompanied by trenchant commentary. After each there are notations indicating:

WWII = indicates presence of WWII facts, imagery, themes

V = book touches on senselessness of violence

P = presence of prejudice, and its deleterious effects

A = presence of apocalypse (actual), or apocalyptic imagery

SF = heavy science fiction element

$ = emphasis on issues of economic disparity

-F = loss or threatened sense of family, heritage, community

T = complaints about pervasiveness/soullessness of technology

Ar = one or more of the characters is an artist

S = presence of sex scenes

Oh, and for the readers who like a good joke now and again:

VF = book is very funny

F = book is funny

NSF = book is not so funny

Player Piano: What one man does to force change in an America lost in the wheels of progress. (Did I just write that?) A/SF/-F/T/$ — VF

The Sirens of Titan: Establishes soon-familiar themes of the essential brutality of man and the futility of attempting change. A/V/SF/T — VF

Mother Night: A former Nazi radio propagandist and his life of depressed exile in New York’s Greenwich Village. Perhaps Vonnegut’s most straightforwardly told novel. P/S/F — NSF

Cat’s Cradle: One of his most successful and effectively apocalyptic books — not to give away the ending — about a substance that freezes, in a death-inducing sort of way, anything containing water. A/SF/T — F

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: About a man who gives millions to poor and pathetic people, this book is not that funny and disappointingly slight. Also contains a vicious portrayal of a gay man, for no discernible reason. A/$/-F — NSF

Welcome to the Monkey House: A collection of short stories. WWII/P/A/SF/-F/$T/Ar/S — F, VF, NSF (depending on the story)

Slaughterhouse Five: Vonnegut’s most famous book and usually the starting point for Vonnegut inductees, and rightfully so. It crystallizes the author’s passions and fears and addresses the pivotal moment in his life: as a WWII POW in Dresden, he witnessed the merciless, earth-leveling Allied bombing of the city. The protagonist is also abducted by aliens and forced to breed with a gorgeous starlet. WWII/V/P/A/SF/S — VF

Breakfast of Champions: Vonnegut’s version of a writer writing about writing, incorporating a number of his alter egos — Kilgore Trout, et al. Big fun for fans of Vonnegut-as-clown-faced deconstructionist. A/SF/$/T — VF

Slapstick: An homage to Vonnegut’s late sister (whose three sons he raised) about two exceptional siblings. The book posits that Americans suffer from the erosion of the extended family. P/A/SF/-F/$/T — VF

Jailbird: In which the world’s power and wealth resides with an old woman who chooses to be homeless. A/$/T/-F — F

Deadeye Dick: About a boy who inadvertently kills a pregnant woman while playing with a gun. A treatise on violence, heritage, prejudice. WWII/A/V/-F/P/$/Ar — F

Galápagos: Speculates that if man were stranded on those islands, he might evolve in a way that would mean less pain for humanity and planet. As pessimistic as Vonnegut gets. V/A/SF — NSF

Bluebeard: Largely a complaint about the absurdity and impersonality of modern art — particularly targeting Abstract Expressionism. WWII/P/V/$/AR — F

Hocus Pocus: A biblical-scale apocalypse takes place in 2001: more realistic than most of his work and very dark. V/A/SF/T — NSF

Timequake: A rambling essay-cum-novel about not finishing a book, featuring familiar anecdotes, complaints, and visits from old characters like Kilgore Trout. Satisfying for fans, though unsettling, for in it, he claims that it will be his last book. WWII/V/P/A/SF/$/T — VF

So, Vonnegut is good. If you like books, and like to read them even if they are easy to read and frequently funny, you will like the work of Kurt Vonnegut, a writer.

Also: He has a mustache.

“My car broke down on the street,” she says. Behind her, it is nearly night. I have been studying most of the afternoon. “Can you let me use your phone to call the police?” she asks.

I do not know why she wants to call the police for a car in need of repair, but I consent. She steps inside. I begin to close the door but she holds it open. “I’ll just be a second,” she says. It does not make sense to me to leave the door open but I do so because she desires it. This is her country and not yet mine.

“Where’s the phone?” she asks.

I tell her my cell phone is in my bedroom. Before I finish the sentence, she has rushed past me and down the hall, a hulk of swishing nylon. The door to my room closes, then clicks. She has locked herself in my bedroom. I start to follow her when I hear a voice behind me.

“Stay here, Africa.”

I turn and see a man, African-American, wearing a vast powder-blue baseball jacket and jeans. His face is not discernible beneath his baseball hat but he has his hand on something near his waist, as if needing to hold up his pants.

“Are you with that woman?” I ask him. I don’t understand anything yet and am angry.

“Just sit down, Africa,” he says, nodding to my couch.

I stand. “What is she doing in my bedroom?”

“Just sit your ass down,” he says, now with venom.

I sit and now he shows me the handle of the gun. He has been holding it all along, and I was supposed to know. But I know nothing; I never know the things I am supposed to know. I do know, now, that I am being robbed, and that I want to be elsewhere.

It is a strange thing, I realize, but what I think at this moment is that I want to be back in Kakuma. In Kakuma there was no rain, the winds blew nine months a year, and eighty thousand war refugees from Sudan and elsewhere lived on one meal a day. But at this moment, when the woman is in my bedroom and the man is guarding me with his gun, I want to be in Kakuma, where I lived in a hut of plastic and sandbags and owned one pair of pants. I am not sure there was evil of this kind in the Kakuma refugee camp, and I want to return. Or even Pinyudo, the Ethiopian camp I lived in before Kakuma; there was nothing there, only one or two meals a day, but it had its small pleasures; I was a boy then and could forget that I was a malnourished refugee a thousand miles from home. In any case, if this is punishment for the hubris of wanting to leave Africa, of harboring dreams of college and solvency in America, I am now chastened and I apologize. I will return with bowed head. Why did I smile at this woman? I smile reflexively and it is a habit I need to break. It invites retribution. I have been humbled so many times since arriving that I am beginning to think someone is trying desperately to send me a message, and that message is “Leave this place.”

As soon as I settle on this position of regret and retreat, it is replaced by one of protest. This new posture has me standing up and speaking to the man in the powder blue coat. “I want you two to leave this place,” I say.

The powder man is instantly enraged. I have upset the balance here, have thrown an obstacle, my voice, in the way of their errand.

“Are you telling me what do, motherfucker?”

I stare into his small eyes.

“Tell me that, Africa, are you telling me what to do, motherfucker?”

The woman hears our voices and calls from the bedroom: “Will you take care of him?” She is exasperated with her partner, and he with me.

Powder tilts his head to me and raises his eyebrows. He takes a step toward me and again gestures toward the gun in his belt. He seems about to use it, but suddenly his shoulders slacken, and he drops his head. He stares at his shoes and breathes slowly, collecting himself. When he raises his eyes again, he has regained himself.

“You’re from Africa, right?” I nod.

“All right then. That means we’re brothers.”

I am unwilling to agree.

“And because we’re brothers and all, I’ll teach you a lesson. Don’t you know you shouldn’t open your door to strangers?”

The question causes me to wince. The simple robbery had been, in a way, acceptable. I have seen robberies, have been robbed, on scales much smaller than this. Until I arrived in the United States, my most valuable possession was the mattress I slept on, and so the thefts were far smaller: a disposable camera, a pair of sandals, a ream of white typing paper. All of these were valuable, yes, but now I own a television, a VCR, a microwave, an alarm clock, many other conveniences, all provided by the Peachtree United Methodist Church here in Atlanta. Some of the things were used, most were new, and all had been given anonymously. To look at them, to use them daily, provoked in me a shudder — a strange but genuine physical expression of gratitude. And now I assume all of these gifts will be taken in the next few minutes. I stand before Powder and my memory is searching for the time when I last felt this betrayed, when I last felt in the presence of evil so careless.

At the very moment Rob Jones began to form a prayer that the chest-face lacked the power of speech, the chest-face spoke.

“Hey buddy, good to see you here,” it said. The voice was Rob Jones’ own, but it was just a bit more fratty, more ingratiating — at once deeper, more mellifluous, chirpier and more teetering on cheerful laughter.

“I’m glad to see you,” the chest-face said, and winked at Rob Jones in the mirror. “Not too hot out for ya? Great day, huh? Great event! Just great. So happy to be here.”

Assuming that he was dreaming (he was a prodigious dreamer) and that his last night’s ingestions (three Manhattans and a fajita plate) had provoked some bad-dream synapses, Rob Jones went back to sleep, skipping a morning phone interview with a blogger of some kind. He’d been told bloggers were not to be ignored, were the key to this election, much as, say, Arsenio had been in ’92.

After an hour more of slumber, Rob Jones woke to what sounded like an escalating argument happening in close proximity to his face. He looked quickly at the television, thinking he had left it on. It was not on. He closed his eyes again but the sound persisted, and now the dialogue became clear. Two voices were having an intense whispered discussion, both parties seemingly aware that Rob Jones was trying to sleep and thinking he couldn’t hear them.

“You kidding me?” one said.

“Am I kidding you? You should hope I’m kidding you,” said the other.

Rob Jones did not want to look down at his chest, for he feared the result. He knew, now, that he was awake and that this was real. Without glancing downward, which he would not do for another few minutes, he knew quite certainly that there were two faces, one on each of his breasts, and they were arguing. Overnight he had grown two small heads, both of them having sprouted from his nipples, thus explaining the dreams he had had — very pleasant ones, he had to admit — of having given birth to twins, and the pleasures of nursing thereafter.

When he finally steeled himself and looked down at the second head, he regretted it. This head grimaced at him. It was a pained grimace, one full of regret, an expression of total mental constipation. It was Rob Jones’ face, again, but grotesque and pained — the face Rob Jones might project if he had been required, out of love of country and necessity (if not expedience), to bury a litter of rabbits, while still alive and squealing, in his backyard, with his hands.

This face, noticing Rob Jones notice it, said this:

“Pragmatism — it’ll do in a pinch.” Then the second face again oozed into the most unsettling closed-mouth smile, completely without mirth, projecting only resignation.

Rob Jones sat up as the two heads remained quiet. As he rubbed his eyes and scratched the back of his head, the two faces rotated themselves to face outward — they apparently had the ability to turn 360 degrees. Now, like two dogs barking at the door, expecting to go walkies, they were looking forward, ready for the world.

It really was the worst thing that could have happened so close to the primaries.

Debbie Delaware found a place across the room and behind a loveseat. She crouched down and spoke as if she were the loveseat, as if the loveseat could speak. And she did so in a Chinese accent, for this cracked Junior up and made the bad news go down easier.

“Sah?”

“Yes, Debbie-san?”

He was already chuckling.

“I have-a some-a in-fo-ma-shun about duh campaign.”

“Oh?” His voice had already been drained of some of his mirth.

“It-uh, not so good, sah.”

“Really?”

“No-suh. Not so good at all, sah.”

“Why? Do we know?”

“Welr, ah…”

“You can talk normally, Debbie. I feel strong today.”

Debbie got up from behind the loveseat and walked over to the president and sat on a chair. Her knees ached.

“Our information indicates that there’s a perception–”

“Oh no. Don’t tell me.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I hate perceptions! They’re so hard to put your finger on.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I need something concrete.”

“OK, there are some polls–”

“Nope. Nope. You know how I feel about polls.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well?”

“I got the information … in a letter from a constituent?”

“And?”

“Well, you’re apparently falling behind because some people, Mr. President, see you as a Washington insider.”

“But I hate Washington insiders!”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Why would I be lumped in with those guys?”

“I can find that out.”

Debbie Delaware went to back to her desk, made some calls, typed some keys on her computer, and returned a few minutes later with the information.

“Sir, it has something to do with the idea of your meeting with members of Congress, with foreign dignitaries, with your instigating policy–”

“But I never do any of that stuff!”

“Yes, sir. It does seem unfair.”

“It’s so unfair!”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s retarded.”

He kicked the coffee table, spilling his fruit punch.

“This sucks! So just because I’m the president, I’m some kind Beltway insider or whatever? That’s so prejudiced.”

“Yes sir.”

“Doesn’t prejudice make you mad? You’re black.”

“Yes sir.”

“I mean, that’s why I hired you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Gah! I’m so mad! What can we do about this?”

“If I may address that, sir?” It was Bill Daniel. He’d opened the door to a nearby cabinet and was speaking from his place inside it. Bill Daniel, the vice president, was a man of very small stature, only 31 inches at the shoulder, and thus he fit comfortably into Junior’s desk and lectern and in the cabinets of the White House. Each of the places where Junior spent time was equipped with a cubby and door for Bill Daniel. Between the rooms of the House ran innumerable passageways, much like a hamster’s, through which Daniel could travel without being seen. This afforded Daniel the chance to listen, unobserved, to the goings-on, while also giving him the opportunity to jump into discussions quickly when necessary.

“Yes, Bill?”

“Just because you’re in the White House doesn’t mean you can’t run as an outsider.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No, sir. On some maps, the White House isn’t, in fact, in Washington.”

“Then where is it? Where are we?”

“Well, it might as well be Maryland.”

“Maryland seems very much like outside Washington. It seems very far away.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes, sir.”

“Good! Then it’s settled.”

“Wait a sec. Let’s do that one better.”

“Is that possible?”

“What if I said I was thinking about riverboat casinos?”

“I’d say that sounds fun. You wanna go? I have a chopper.”

“Sir, many cities and states permit gambling if it takes place off the actual land that the cities or states occupy. They put the casinos on the rivers, where technically they could be construed as passing through, and not subject to the laws of the land, as it were.”

“What does that mean? ‘As it were.’”

“I’m not sure, sir.”

“It sounds good, though. I want to use it myself, but I’m never sure where to use it.”

“At the end of a sentence.”

“OK.”

“So the riverboat casinos might be near a city, or like in St. Louis, where they’re actually right there in the middle of the city, but somehow the city doesn’t get pegged as a gambling kind of city.”

“I like that. So we’re gonna allow gambling in the White House? We’ll be rich!”

“No, sir, I was talking about the river part.”

“Oh. We’re going to move the White House to St. Louis?”

“Why don’t I draw up some plans and get back to you?”

“Sounds good, as it were,” said the president, glowing.

And with that, Bill Daniel retreated back into his cubby in the cabinet, and then traveled via hidden Habitrail-like hallways to his study, which was located in the Oval Office, in the president’s desk, where the middle-left drawer would have otherwise been.

He got on his phone, which was like a regular phone but designed for a 31-inch man, and called Luis Latino, who worked in the White House and was Latino.

“You’re going to run the president as an outsider?” Luis asked.

“Yes, Luis,” Daniel said, for that was his name.

“Oh god.”

“It’ll work.”

“I know,” said Luis Latino, whose voice betrayed his simultaneous astonishment, glee and dismay. “I know it will. I know I know I know.”

“And while I have you: I need anything you can get about Tunica, Mississippi.”

Within the week, Bill Daniel had convinced the nation that the White House was, like the landlocked casinos of Tunica, not technically on the land of Washington, D.C. — “I had a feeling about that!” the good people of America said — and just after that, he’d conjured a new campaign slogan:

TAKE BACK THE WHITE HOUSE
REELECT J. JUNIOR INFERIOR JR.

The polls jumped by eight points.