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Fiction • Vintage Canada
• Trade Paperback, 224 pages• October 2005
• $19.95 • 0-676-97780-4
This short story appears
in the new collection How We Are Hungry by
Dave Eggers, who also wrote A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius and You
Shall Know Our Velocity.
Your
Mother and I
I told you about that, didn't I? About when your
mother and I moved the world to solar energy and windpower,
to hydro, all that? I never told you that? Can you
hand me that cheese? No, the other one, the cheddar,
right. I really thought I told you about that. What
is happening to my head?
Well, we have to take the credit, your mother and
I, for reducing our dependence on oil and for beginning
the Age of Wind and Sun. That was pretty awesome.
That name wasn't ours, though. Your uncle Frank came
up with that. He always wanted to be in a band and
call it that, the Age of Wind and Sun, but he never
learned guitar and couldn't sing. When he sang he
enunciated too much, you know? He sang like he was
trying to teach English to Turkish children. Turkish
children with learning disabilities. It was really
odd, his singing.
You're already done? Okay, here's the Monterey Jack.
Just dump it in the bowl. All of it, right. It was
all pretty simple, converting most of the nation's
electricity. At a certain point everyone knew that
we had to just suck it up and pay the money —
because holy crap, it really was expensive at first!
— to set up the cities to make their own power.
All those solar panels and windmills on the city buildings?
They weren't always there, you know. No, they weren't.
Look at some pictures, honey. They just weren't. The
roofs of these millions of buildings weren't being
used in any real way, so I said, Hey, let's have the
buildings themselves generate some or all of the power
they use, and it might look pretty good, to boot —
everyone loves windmills, right? Windmills are awesome.
So we started in Salt Lake City and went from there.
back to top
Oh hey, can you grate that one? Just take half of
that block of Muenster. Here's a bowl. Thanks. Then
we do the cheddar. Cheddar has to be next. After the
cheddar, pecorino. Never the other way around. Stay
with me, hon. Jack, Muenster, cheddar, pecorino. It
is. The only way.
Right after that was a period of much activity. Your
mother and I tended to do a big project like the power
conversion, and then follow it with a bunch of smaller,
quicker things. So we made all the roads red. You
wouldn't remember this — you weren't even born.
We were all into roads then, so we had most of them
painted red, most of them, especially the highways
— a leathery red that looked good with just
about everything, with green things and blue skies
and woods of cedar and golden swamps and sugar-colored
beaches. I think we were right. You like them, right?
They used to be grey, the roads. Insane, right? Your
mom thinks yellow would have been good, too, an ochre
but sweeter. Anyway, in the same week, we got rid
of school funding tied to local property taxes —
can you believe they used to pull that crap? —
banned bicycle shorts for everyone but professionals,
and made everyone's hair shinier. That was us. Your
mother and I.
That was right after our work with the lobbyists —
I never told you that, either? I must be losing my
mind. I never mentioned the lobbyists, about when
we had them all deported? That part of it, the deportation,
was your mother's idea. All I'd said was, Hey, why
not ban all lobbying? Or at least ban all donations
from lobbyists, and make them wear cowbells so everyone
would know they were coming? And then your dear mom,
who was, I think, a little tipsy at the time —
we were at a bar where they had a Zima special, and
you know how your mom loves her Zima — she said,
How about, to make sure those bastards don't come
back to Washington, have them all sent to Greenland?
And wow, the idea just took off. People loved it,
and Greenland welcomed them warmly; they'd apparently
been looking for ways to boost their tourism. They
set up some cages and a viewing area and it was a
big hit.
So then we were all pumped up, to be honest. Wow,
this kind of thing, the lobbyists thing especially,
boy, it really made your mother horny. Matter of fact,
I think you were conceived around that time. She was
like some kind of tsunam—
back to top
Oh don't give me that face. What? Did I cross some
line? Don't you want to know when your seed was planted?
I would think you'd want to know that kind of thing.
Well then.
I stand corrected.
Anyway, we were on a roll, so we got rid of genocide.
The main idea was to create and maintain a military
force of about 20,000 troops, under the auspices of
the U.N., which could be deployed quickly to any part
of the world within about thirty-six hours. This wouldn't
be the usual blue helmets, watching the slaughter.
These guys would be badass. We were sick of the civilized
world sort of twiddling their thumbs while hundreds
of thousands of people killed each other in Rwanda,
Bosnia, way back in Armenia, on and on. Then the U.N.
would send twelve Belgian soldiers. Nice guys, but
really, you have a genocide raging in Rwanda, 800,000
dead in a month and you send twelve Belgians?
So we made this proposal, the U.N. went for it, and
within a year the force was up and running. And man
oh man, your mother was randy again. That's when your
fecundation happened, and why we called you Johnna.
I remember it now — I was wrong before. Your
mother and I were actually caught in the U.N. bathroom,
after the vote went our way. The place, all marble
and brass, was full of people, and at the worst possible
moment, Kofi himself walked in. He sure was surprised
to see us in there, on the sink, but I have to say,
he was pretty cool about it. He actually seemed to
enjoy it, even watched for a minute, because there
was no way we were gonna stop in the middle—
Fine. I won't do that again. It's just that it's part
of the story, honey. Everything we did started with
love, and ended with lust—
But you're right. That was inappropriate.
We went on a tear right after genocide, very busy.
I attribute it partly to the vitamins we were on —
very intense program of herbs and vitamins and protein
shakes. We'd shoot out of bed and bounce around like
bunnies. So that's when we covered Cleveland in ivy.
You've seen pictures. We did that. Just said, Hey
Cleveland, what if you were covered in ivy, all the
buildings? Wouldn't that look cool, and be a big tourist
attraction? And they said, "Sure." Not right away,
though. You know who helped with that? Dennis Kucinich.
I used to call him "Sparky," because he was such a
feisty fella. Your mom, she called him "The Kooch."
We're gonna need all three kinds of salsa, hon. Yeah,
use the small bowls. Just pour it right up to the
edge. Right. Your brother likes to mix it up. Me,
I'm a fan of the mild.
Right after Cleveland and the ivy we made all the
kids memorize poetry again. We hadn't memorized any
growing up — this was the seventies and eighties,
and people hadn't taught that for years — and
we really found we missed it. The girls were fine
with the idea, and the boys caught on when they realized
it would help them get older women into bed. Around
that time we banned wearing fur outside of arctic
regions, flooded the market with diamonds and gold
and silver to the point where none had any value,
fixed the ozone hole — I could show you that;
we've got it on video — and then we did the
thing with the llamas. What are you doing? Sour cream
in the salsa? No, no. That's just wrong, sweetie.
My god.
back to top
So yeah, we put llamas everywhere. That was us. We
just liked looking at them, so we bred about six million
and spread them around. They weren't there before,
honey. No, they weren't. Oh man, there's one now,
in the backyard. Isn't it a handsome thing? Now they're
as common as squirrels or deer, and you have your
mom and pop to thank for that.
It's jalapeño time. Use the smaller knife.
You're gonna cut the crap out of your hand. You don't
want one of these. You see this scar on my thumb?
Looks like a scythe, right? I got that when we were
negotiating the removal of the nation's billboards.
I was climbing one of them, in Kentucky actually,
to start a hunger strike kind of thing, sort of silly
I guess, and cut the shipdoodle out of that left thumb.
Why the billboards? Have you even see one? In books?
Well, I guess I just never really liked the look of
them — they just seemed so ugly and such an
intrusion on the collective involuntary consciousness,
a blight on the land. Vermont had outlawed them and
boy, what a difference that made. So your mother and
I revived Lady Bird Johnson's campaign against them,
and of course 98 percent of the public was with us,
so the whole thing happened pretty quickly. We had
most of the billboards down within a year. Right after
that, your brother Sid was conceived, and it was about
time I had my tubes tied.
Give me some of that cobbler, hon. We're gonna have
the peach cobbler after the main event. I just wanna
get the Cool Whip on it, then stick it in the freezer
for a minute. That's Frank's trick. Frank's come up
with a lot of good ideas for improving frozen and
refrigerated desserts. No, that's not his job, honey.
Frank doesn't have a job, per se.
I guess a lot of what we did — what made so
much of this possible — was eliminate the bipolar
nature of so much of what passed for debate in those
days. So often the media would take even the most
logical idea, like private funding for all sports
stadiums or having all colleges require forty hours
of community service to graduate, and make it seem
like there were two equally powerful sides to the
argument, which was so rarely the case. A logical
fallacy, is what that is. So we just got them to keep
things in perspective a bit, not make everyone so
crazy, polarizing every last debate. I mean, there
was a time when you couldn't get a lightbulb replaced
because the press would find a way to quote the sole
lunatic in the world who didn't want that lightbulb
replaced. So we sat them all down, all the members
of the media, and we said, "Listen, we all want to
have progress, we all want a world for the grandkids
and all. We know we're gonna need better gas mileage
on the cars, and that all the toddlers are gonna need
Head Start, and we're gonna need weekly parades through
every town and city to keep morale up, and we'll have
to get rid of Three Strikes and mandatory minimums
and the execution of retarded prisoners — and
that it all has to happen sooner or later, so don't
go blowing opposition to any of it out of proportion.
Don't go getting everyone inflamed." Honestly, when
lynchings were originally outlawed, you can bet the
newspapers made it seem like there was some real validity
to the pro-lynching side of things. You can be sure
that the third paragraph of any article would have
said "Not everyone is happy about the anti-lynching
legislation. We spoke to a local resident who is not
at all happy about it . . ." Anyway,
we sat everyone down, served some carrots and onion
dip and in a couple hours your mother and I straightened
all that out.
back to top
About then we had a real productive period. In about
six months, we established a global minimum wage,
we made it so smoke detectors could be turned off
without having to rip them from the ceiling, and we
got Soros to buy the Amazon, to preserve it. That
was fun — he took us on his jet, beautiful thing,
appointed in the smoothest cherry and teak, and they
had the soda where you add the colored syrup yourself.
You ever have that kind? So good, but you can't overdo
it — too much syrup and you feel bloated for
a week. Well, then we came home, rested up for a few
days, and then we found a cure for Parkinson's. We
did so, honey. Yes that was us. Don't you ever look
through the nice scrapbook we made? You should. It's
in the garage with your Uncle Frank. Are you sure
he's asleep? No, don't wake him up. Hell, I guess
you have to wake him up anyway, because he won't want
to miss the comida grande.
After Parkinson's, we fixed AIDS pretty well. We didn't
cure it, but we made the inhibiting drugs available
worldwide, for free, as a condition of the drug companies
being allowed to operate in the U.S. Their profit
margins were insane at the time, so they relented,
made amends, and it worked out fine. That was about
when we made all buildings curvier, and all cars boxier.
After AIDS and the curves, we did some work on elections.
First we made them no more than two months long, publicly
funded, and forced the networks to give two hours
a night to the campaigns. Around when you were born,
the candidates were spending about $200 million each
on TV ads, because the news wasn't covering the elections
for more than 90 seconds a day. It was nuts! So we
fixed that, and then we perfected online and phone
voting. Man, participation went through the roof.
Everyone thought there was just all this apathy, when
the main problem was finding your damned polling place!
And all the red tape — register now, vote then,
come to this elementary school — but skip work
to do it — on and on. Voting on a Tuesday? Good
lord. But the online voting, the voting over the phone-man
that was great, suddenly participation exploded, from
about, what, 40 percent, to 88. We did that over Columbus
Day weekend, I think. I remember I'd just had my hair
cut very short. Yeah, like in the picture in the hallway.
We called that style the Timberlake.
And that's about when your mom got all kinky again.
She went out, bought this one device, it was kind
of like a swing, where there was this harness and—
Fine. You don't need to know that. But the harness
figures in, because that's when your mother had the
idea — some of her best ideas happened when
she was lying down — to make it illegal to have
more than one president from the same immediate family.
That was just a personal gripe she had. We'd had the
Adamses and Bushes and we were about to have the Clintons
and your mother just got pissed. What the fuck? she
said. Are we gonna have a monarchy here or what? Are
we that stupid, that we have to go to the same well
every time? This isn't an Aaron Spelling casting call,
this is the damned presidency! I said What about the
Kennedys? And she said Screw 'em! Or maybe she didn't
say that, but that was the spirit of it. She's a fiery
one, your mom, a fiery furnace of—
back to top
Ahem. So yeah, she pushed that through, a constitutional
amendment.
That led to another busy period. One week, we made
all the cars electric and put waterslides in every
elementary school. We increased average life expectancy
to 164, made it illegal to manufacture or wear Cosby
sweaters, and made penises better looking —
more streamlined, better coloring, less hair. People,
you know, were real appreciative about that. And the
last thing we did, which I know I've told you about,
was the program where everyone can redo one year of
their childhood. For $580, you could go back to the
year of your choice, and do that one again. You're
not allowed to change anything, do anything differently,
but you get to be there again, live the whole year,
with what you know now. Oh man, that was a good idea.
Everyone loved it, and it made up for all the people
who were pissed when we painted Kansas purple, every
last inch of it. I did the period between ten-and-a-half
and eleven-and-a-half. Fifth grade. Wow, that was
sweet.
Speaking of ten-year-olds, here comes your brother.
And Uncle Frank! We didn't have to wake you up! Hola
hermano, tios! Esta la noche de los nachos! Si, si.
And here's your mother, descending the stairs. With
her hair up. This I was particularly proud of, when
I convinced your mother to wear her hair up more often.
When she first did it, a week before our wedding,
I was breathless, I was lifted, I felt as if I'd met
her twin, and oh how I was confused. Was I cheating
on my beloved with this version of her, with that
long neck exposed, the hair falling in helixes, kissing
her clavicles? She assured me that I was not, and
that's how we got married, with her hair up-that's
how we did the walk with the music and the fanfare,
everything yellow and white, side by side, long even
strides, she and me, your mother and I.
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