Free How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers Page B

lollipops but with foam starfish tops. Cleaning devices, maybe, for swabbing mouths or other wet orifices. Fish thinks briefly about taking one of the lollipops and stuffing it up Adam’s fat fucking nose. He almost laughs at the thought of it.
    Fish leaves while Adam is drifting in and out, his face blank, almost beatific. During a brief moment when his eyes pull open, Fish tells him he’ll check in again tomorrow.
    The night is sharp, all the lights crisp, and Fish drives to the motel where Chuck said Adam had been staying. He’s supposed to pick up Adam’s things—four bags’ worth. Adam had been living there for a month, after he was asked to leave his halfway house for skinning a chicken in his room. That’s what Chuck said, at least. If Adam did indeed skin a chicken, he did it only to say he’d done it. “Ask for Mr. Ali,” Chuck said. Chuck handled logistics. He was Adam’s attorney, benefactor, medical historian. Fish was someone who could drive down and pick up bags.
    When he gets to the motel, a women’s volleyball team is checking in. He waits for twenty minutes while they decide who will sleep in whose rooms, and which duffels will stay in the minibus. Fish reads every brochure the lobby offers, and makes a tentative plan to see the Museum of Irrigation.
    When it’s his turn Fish asks for Mr. Ali, but the woman at the counter, heavy-lidded and wearing a maize-colored sari, says he’s gone. “I am Mrs. Ali. Yes please?” Fish shows her the letter that Chuck faxed, asking for Adam’s stuff. Chuck insisted on ending the letter with “I trust that this matter will not present a problem.” Every legal letter Chuck writes ends this way. He loses half of his cases.
    Fish can see the bags just behind her, in a narrow hallway with a cement floor. Two clear plastic bags sit there, alert, and two tennis bags, one covered in mud. Mrs. Ali reads the note, then looks up at Fish. It’s then that he almost cries. Water seems to fill his forehead; his eyes are just portals that show he’s drowning. What is she looking at? How much does she know? She must know. The ambulance picked Adam up here, and she or her husband surely packed and stored his belongings. She knew Adam as a flailer, as a leaper, and now knows Fish as someone lesser, someone who picks up the bags of people like Adam. Fish is now among the people who live in motels and jump off motel roofs. There’s a highway just above the motel, and on it people are passing this place at eighty miles an hour, wondering what happens in the filthy world below.
    “I have to call Mr. Ali,” she says, and does so, using a receiver larger than her face. She gets off the phone with Mr. Ali and lets Fish into the hallway behind the desk.
    “Thanks,” he says on the way out.
    “All right,” she says, opening the door for him. “Good!” she adds, and after he’s gone throws the bolt, right to left.
    Fish loads the bags into his trunk, and then remembers what he wanted to investigate. He has forgotten to look until now, and is suddenly thrilled. He walks over to the courtyard area to see where Adam jumped. But he can’t find a part of the motel complex that has four stories. There is just the one two-story building, in an L shape around the pool, and its roof is only about eighteen feet high. Dumbshit! Fish has figured it out. Of course! Forty feet isn’t Adam’s way, after all, but eighteen feet is. He jumped from this. Dumbshit! Coward! Pissfuck! Who jumps eighteen feet? Who does this? This is so wrong. There are too many things wrong everywhere for this kind of thing, this jumping from eighteen-foot roofs. Adam must have known that eighteen feet wasn’t far enough to kill himself, just far enough to break bones. And the only thing sadder than an eighteen-foot motel roof is the guy staring at it.
    He goes back to the car and opens the trunk. He reaches inside one of the plastic bags, looking for something solid. Most of its contents are soft, clothes,