How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers Page B

things.
    Adam’s hope, Fish is sure, is to be the shape-shifting mystery spot in the life of his family and friends. The problem is that Fish has never had a fascination with people who try to kill themselves. Maybe if he took more of an interest in the concept, Adam wouldn’t keep trying to prove how intriguing it is. With the resources they required of everyone around him, Adam’s life and his attempts on it were a kind of vacuum, into which he pulled the good air around him, and everyone close to him—took their words and possibility for joy. And yet in most ways Adam is nowhere near as strange, for example, as the guy who delivers Fish’s mail, a man named Kojo.
    “Short for Kojak?” Fish asked when they met. It was a dusty day, windy, the sun like a planet of sand. The mailman laughed. He laughed for about ten minutes over that one. Fish was flattered, then he was scared. Kojo liked to laugh, laughing in a big, unconvincingly expansive way, but he didn’t like to wear the postal pants. He always wore the shorts, no matter how cold it got.
    He came into Fish’s house once for a beer, and he drank with his mouth all around the bottle, as if fellating it. Then he unrolled his sleeve and showed Fish a skin graft he’d got— just for the wack of it, he said. “Took some skin from my lower back and put it on my arm.” The pores in the new skin were smaller and the surface was smoother, less weathered. There are doctors, Kojo said, who’ll do anything for the right money.
    A week later Kojo brought Fish a collage, the kind junior-high girls assemble, with phrases cut from women’s magazines—“Only Best Friends Know!” “Quiz: Are His Pals the Real Deal?”—pasted over pictures, cut from books, of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet flying kites together, walking through the woods at night, among the trees with muscular trunks.
    Fish attracts these people. In high school there was an older guy, a senior when he was a sophomore, tall and bent backward. He had a huge, almost perfectly square head, and he wanted Fish to drive cross-country with him, though they’d talked only once, briefly, while they were watching the girls’ swim team practice.
    “I like butterfly,” the guy had said. His name was either Brendan or Brandon or Stuart.
    “Butterfly’s good,” Fish had said.
    That had been their conversation, all of it, and two months later a breathless Brandon appeared, grinning, forehead wet with concentration, when Fish was walking out to soccer practice. “Don’t say no, Fish. We’re gonna head out and fuck this fucking school and drive to Florida. Fuck this fucking fuck!”
    Fish, not wanting to say no, just said “Sorry,” and followed the rest of the team over the hill, to the upper field, rectangular but sloping on every side, like a freshly filled grave.
    When Kojo presented the collage to Fish, insisting that he open it there in the doorway, Fish didn’t know what to say. He shook his head in a kind of awe, then thanked Kojo and made plans to see him three weeks hence—they’d have a beer at the end of the month, just tear it up, yeah—then, the next morning, Fish got himself a post-office box.
    Fish is driving, slapping himself to stay alert, and he’s counting, to be sure it’s been seven times for Adam. One: the wrists (with an small saw on his thin, paper-white arms). Two: poison—he drank floor wax, first pouring it into a tall clear glass. Three: the gunshot to the stomach. Or the side of the stomach—the bullet grazed him and went through his window and into the Episcopal church next door. No one was killed or hurt, but Adam felt so bad about it that, four, he stabbed himself in the leg with a cleaver. Five: he tried bringing a hair dryer into the tub with him, but it was suicide-proof, apparently—it turned itself off, leaving Adam shivering, the water having gone cold while he’d got up the nerve. Six: what was six? A car driven into a tree? There was debate about whether that one