The Wild Things - By Dave Eggers Page 0,23

had been fun, and then frightening, and then fun, and finally, thankfully, it was over. He’d slept all twelve hours home in the car.

He loosened a nail on the boat’s bench and removed it. He used it to count the hours (as close as he could approximate) as they passed, marking them as a prisoner would. On the outer rim of the boat he carved his name as big as he could, so any fish or whales or passing ships would know who commanded this vessel: MAX, it said, in a way both tidy and slightly menacing.

He tried to draw a map of the world on the boat floor, then drew kodiak bears — all he could draw was a kodiak bear; his father, a decent draftsman, had taught him this one skill — and while he was drawing his third kodiak bear, this one eating his own paw, Max decided to calculate exactly how long it had been since his father left.

The timeline was becoming blurry in his mind. Was it three years ago? That was what he’d been saying when people asked, but had he been saying it so long that it was now four years ago? The order of events was unclear.

He had memories of his father and Gary together. But was that even possible? No, that was impossible. And the man before Gary, the white-haired man named Peter. When did he come and go? Would it have been possible that all these men knew each other?

Now Max was getting confused. Of course it wasn’t possible for them to all know each other. There had been a linear sequence of events. First there was his father. Then his father was gone for a business trip — one month, then two, then it wasn’t a business trip anymore. He was simply gone, and soon had gotten the place in the city. Then there was quiet. Then he was back for that one loud week, then gone again. Then quiet again, for what seemed like a year. Then the white-haired Peter. Who was he again? He was too old. He once brought Max a plant, a fern, for a present. Max put it on the window sill and later made sure it “fell” into the garden below. Then Peter was gone … though he came back that one late night and woke everyone up with his singing and begging. Right? That was Peter.

Then came Gary. But what about the other-other man, the man who came to the door a few times last year? His mother had gone with him in his car, a small convertible the color of ash … Max had asked Claire about that man, but she told Max he was only someone from his mother’s work; they had to go to a working dinner, she told him. Max was sure there was more to it than that, but there were secrets between Claire and his mother. Too many.

Max sailed in and out of days and nights. He endured blustery winds, cruel winds, chattering winds, and warm blanketing breezes. There were waves like dragons and waves like sparrows. There was rain but mostly there was sun, the terribly unimaginative sun, doing the same things day in and day out. There were occasional sightings of birds and fish and flies, but nothing Max could reach or much less eat. He had not had a morsel of anything in what seemed like weeks and it was causing a churning ache within him that felt as if his organs were feeding on each other for sustenance.

CHAPTER XV

But one day he saw something. A green blot on the horizon, no bigger than a caterpillar. Half-crazed and untrusting of his eyes, he thought little of it. He went to sleep again.

When he awoke, the caterpillar had become an island. It towered above him — a rocky beach beneath massive cliffs, green hills above. The island seemed strangely alive everywhere, vibrating with color and sound.

By the time he reached the shore, it was night and the island had gone black. It was a good deal less welcoming now, as a silhouette against a gunmetal sky, but there was something high in the hills that beckoned him. An orange glow between the trees high above the shore.

As soon as he felt he was able, Max jumped out and into the water. He thought it would be at least waist-deep, but it was far deeper than that. His feet could not reach the floor and