Free How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers Page A

to a pole in the basement when he needs it. Or what he really needs is a man. He needs a burly man, a hairy gay man who goes to bear bars. He’d give Adam love and respect but also be paternal, stern, watchful enough to save Adam from himself.
    “So how’s Mary?” Adam asks.
    “She’s good,” Fish says.
    “Where’s she living now?”
    “I can’t tell you.”
    “She’s my cousin. You can’t tell me where she lives?”
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    “Because she’s got little kids, Adam, and you’re a guy who shoots himself and jumps off roofs. Fuck you.”
    For a second Adam looks hurt, or pretends to look hurt, then he closes his eyes. Fish fears that he’s just made Adam feel more unique and menacing—precisely what Adam wants.
    His chin is brown and tied together with black straight string, spiked along the suture, as if spiders had been sewn into his face.
    “Ow. Don’t,” Adam says.
    Fish is touching the stitches.
    “Why not?”
    “Stop it, prick.”
    “How many?” It’s like a cactus or something. The stitches are amazing.
    “Twelve. Get the fuck away.”
    Fish gives him a look.
    “Sorry,” Adam says. But he has no rights here. After five hours of driving, Fish is allowed to touch what he wants. Fish remembers the card and drops it on Adam’s chest. Adam tries to look down at it.
    “You have to hold it up. I can’t see.”
    Fish opens it and shows him the front. It’s an elephant surrounded by Hebrew letters, with “Happy Bat Mitzvah” written below.
    “A Jewish elephant,” Adam says.
    “I guess so,” Fish says.
    Fish used to like hospitals. Waiting rooms in particular. When his last girlfriend, Annie, had her appendix out, he was at the hospital for thirty hours and had a pretty good time. He met people, learned things—there was some strange collegial vibe that night. Three of them played cards and Fish won a hundred and twenty-two dollars on a straight flush from a guy whose brother was getting a finger reattached. He’d been drilling a hole through his son’s wall, thought the kid was selling crystal meth and wanted to catch him. That had been a good night.
    But with Adam he doesn’t want to stay. Fish looks at the clock. It says 8:40. He’ll leave at nine, he decides. Then he’ll call Annie to see if he can stay with her for the night. Annie follows local politics and has ridiculous lips, full like balloon animals, a voice lower than his. The last time Fish saw her she scratched his head so masterfully, in circles so convincing, that he thought he was rising, ascending. They talk often enough, and she lives in L.A., and he figures he’ll drive over after, not for sex or even romance, just for a place to rest where there’s breathing other than his own, where he won’t have to leave the TV on all night. If she’s not around he’ll drive back to San Jose tonight. He could do it. Through the night is easier.
    “Does your mom know?” Fish asks. He knows that Adam’s mom doesn’t know, because Adam told Chuck that if she found out he’d do it for real next time.
    “No. I don’t think so,” Adam says.
    Adam’s father died a few years ago, a botched bypass, and now his mother lives in Australia. She went there with a man she’d met in a community-theater production of Fiorello! He played the lead, though he was six feet four and blond.
    A nurse comes in. She’s Filipina, young. Her nametag says “Hope.” Fish feels an urge to say something about her name, in light of her working in a hospital and all, but then figures she hears that often enough.
    “That’s a good name for a nurse,” he says. What the hell.
    She takes Adam’s blood pressure. Fish watches, loving how quickly the armband fills with air, how tight it gets. That device always looks like something illegal.
    “How’s your pain?” she asks Adam.
    “Good,” Adam says.
    The nurse takes the Bat Mitzvah card off Adam’s stomach and puts it on the side table, next to a jar of denim-colored tools, like