A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Read Free Page A

agile, could paddle and keep it afloat. I got in the tiny canoe, steadied myself, and paddled away. And for a while I did it. I set off from the main boat, downriver, alternating sides with the small paddle, the very picture of skill and grace.
    But about two hundred yards down the river, the canoe began to sink. I was too heavy. It was taking in water.
    I looked back to the boat. The Peruvian guides were all watching, were hysterical. I was sinking into the brown water, the current taking me farther downstream, and they were laughing, doubled over. They were loving it.
    The canoe tipped, and I fell in, at this point in the middle of the river, where it was much deeper, a darker shade of brown. I could not see my limbs. I climbed onto the capsized canoe, desperate.
    I was sure I was gone. Yes, the piranhas over there by the main boat had not touched us, but how could you be sure that out here, that they wouldn ’ t take a nip from a finger? They often nipped fingers and toes, and that would draw blood and from there...
    Oh God Toph.
    I was there, and the canoe was sinking again, capsized but sinking under my weight, and soon I would be wholly in this river again, the river infested with piranhas, and my thrashing would draw them to me—I was trying, trying to keep it to a minimum, just kicking my legs, staying afloat—and then I would be picked at slowly, chunks from my calves and stomach, then, once the flesh was torn, and blood ribboning out, there would be the flurry, a hundred at once, I would look down and see my extremities overcome by a terrible blur of teeth and blood, and I would be picked clean, to the bone, and why? Because I had to show the entourage that I could do whatever any Peruvian river guide could do—
    And I thought of poor Toph, this poor boy, three thousand miles away, staying with my sister—
    How could I leave him?
    p. 218: [M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn ’ t. I didn ’ t want to encourage her. I couldn ’ t touch my father ’ s cigarettes, couldn ’ t look at the Pall Mall cartons in the pantry. I was the sort of child who couldn ’ t even watch commercials for horror movies—the ad for Magic, the movie where the marionette kills people, sent me into a six-month nightmare frenzy. So I couldn ’ t look at her books, would turn them over so their covers wouldn ’ t show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood—especially the V. C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue.
    p. 414: Bill and Beth and Toph and I are watching the news. There is a small item about George Bush ’ s grandmother. It is apparently her birthday.
    We debate about how old the grandmother of a man in his late sixties must be. It seems impossible that she ’ s still breathing.
    Beth changes the channel.
    “ That ’ s disgusting, ” she says.
    p. 427: [S]he was living in a sort of perpetual present. Always she had to be told of her context, what brought her here, the origins and parameters of her current situation. Dozens of times each day she had to be told everything again—What made me? Whose fault am I? How did I get here? Who are these people?—the accident recounted, sketched in broad strokes, her continuously reminded but always forgetting—
    Not forgetting. Having, actually, no capacity to grip the information—
    But who does? Fuck it, she was alive and she knew it. Her voice sang the same way it always did, her eyes bulged with amazement over the smallest things, anything, my haircut. Yes, she still knew and had access to those things that had been with her for years—that part of her memory was there, intact—and while I wanted to punish those responsible, would relish it and presumed that I would never tire of it, being with her, so close to