The Book of Other People

Theo by Dave Eggers

Long had the poets pointed to the steep green hills around the village, noting in prose and song that with their irrational curves, their ridges rising and falling just so, the low mountains resembled the shapes of sleeping men and women. Most practical people thought the poets were pushing it a bit too far, poets being poets, but then something new happened one morning, just after most of the humans, about five or so hundred in that village at that time, were finishing their breakfast and dressing their children.

The land shook. Homes, all of them built with stone and barley, trembled and soon collapsed. Animals stampeded, birds dropped from the sky, and in the midst of the chaos, the first giant emerged. The soft green rolls of the hillside gave way to a pale shoulder, an arm of twisted muscle, a waist, a hip. In minutes the hill had become a man, a colossal man everywhere striped with dirt and grass, rubbing his eyes. He sat up, his legs akimbo before him, and he began chuck-ling. He wiped the grass from his bald head and his shoulders, swept the dirt from his stomach, and, while he did so, he laughed softly, nodding to himself as if something long mysterious was finally clear.

His name was Soren.

Soon after, a mile or so away, the ground rattled again. The villagers looked south and saw another hillside rise. It was a range that the poet Eythor had called The Woman, and all the humans who watched the giant emerge from it thought, Too bad Eythor is dead, he would have loved to see this. This hill became a woman, as tall as Soren, and she rose from the earth covered in oil and soot, hair long and wild. Like Soren, she was greatly amused and only somewhat surprised by her awakening. She wiped her eyes clean and picked stones from between her aristocratic toes.

This was Magdelena.

By the time Theo, the last giant, arose from the hill closest to the human settlements, his arrival caused little notice. He was shorter than the other two giants, with a ruddy complexion and wide-set eyes. While Soren and Magdelena were tall, of noble and sinewy form, Theo had long arms but short legs, a flat face and narrow shoulders. But no one noticed the differences between them, at least not on that day. Already four people were dead, crushed under falling debris. There were tears, prayers, wails of men and women. Already the landscape had been broken, recast. Already the sky was brown with dust, and it was into this day, full of misery and regret and rebirth, that Theo awakened.

In those first days, Theo could only sit, dazed from thousands of years of sleep, and watch Magdelena. Yes, Magdelena. At first she was nothing much to see. Her hair gray with ash, her body covered in mica and sandstone, she barely looked female. But then, after some hours sitting, blinking and grinning, she rose and walked to the ocean, dove from the chalky cliffs into the surf below, and emerged a woman. A woman of many enticements.

Theo was not the only one who noticed. The tinies below seemed endlessly fascinated by her. Groups of young men gathered on the mountain called Toto-Hesker, at the level of her chest, and watched her wash herself in the waterfall; they were willing to watch her do anything. Most important to them was that a 200-foot woman had 35-foot breasts, ten-foot-tall lips, legs eighty feet high.

Where had she come from? Theo wondered. She was not awake the last time he was conscious. Or perhaps she had been. He knew that his memory was not good. His memory of this land bore little resemblance to what lay around him now. Hadn’t it been colder before? Had there not been a glacier between those peaks? He had no great faith in his memory, and yet he was almost certain that this region had changed. The villagers called it Northland now, and the name seemed apt enough. They were not far from the top of the earth, and during the summer, the days stretched elliptically, morning meeting morning. That much had not changed.

But certain variations were beyond debate. When he last roamed this land, there had not been the tiny people – built like himself but so very small. They had almost certainly appeared in the intervening epochs. Once they knew that the giants meant them no harm, as he lay down to sleep and his ears were close to earth, they asked Theo about other nearby mountains, foothills. Are they all like you? Will they awaken? Theo tried to reassure them, but he could not lie. He didn’t know who was a mountain and who was not a mountain. So much was unfamiliar to him. There had not been so many deer, so many moose and bears. He remembered being very hungry when he last walked these hills; he had been forced to eat trees, turtles, whales. Now there was plenty of delicious food, easily caught. Soren and Magdelena could eat whole forests of animals at any meal, carelessly tossing the bones on rooftops. Theo could get by on a few deer, maybe a few dozen rabbits, eating everything whole, leaving no mess. Afterward he would enjoy a long drink from the white-cold runoff of the snow-capped peak to the west.

Magdelena could be mine, Theo thought, foolishly, in the first hours and days. After all, the three of them spoke together, ate together. There was equanimity, he thought. Those first days were good days. Theo and Soren and Magdelena chased herds of buffalo off the cliffs, ate what they needed and stored the rest in nets they hung from the tallest trees. They made fires and slept well in the valley where the bobcats chased the antelope.

Because it was he who made Magdelena laugh, Theo presumed she would be his. There were so many things that only he and Magdelena shared. Only he knew how to swim and so swam with Magdelena for hours while Soren dug massive holes for no apparent reason. Only he had a sense of rhythm, so when the villagers played their mandolin jigs he danced with Magdelena. She did so while looking at her feet and placing the fallen strands of her hair behind her ears. Theo moved with light feet, trying not to upset the buildings below, but Magdelena had no such control. She jumped, she shuffled, and stood on her hands. And though the church’s roof caved when she did, no one minded. The music continued and the men above and below watched, unbreathing.

Soren did not mind. He watched Magdelena dance with Theo, and watched her swim with Theo, and never did he appear jealous. Theo almost felt bad for him. When there are two men and one woman, the math was cruel. What was the third to do? Theo did not want to think about the plight of poor Soren.

It was on the ninth day of consciousness that Theo saw them, Soren and Magdelena, standing shin-deep in a fjord where the villagers lured whales and sea lions. They were standing, talking quietly, facing each other. There was a low rolling fog that day, woolen and colorless, and it eclipsed their bodies below the waist. Still, Theo could see that below the waves of white rolling through them, their hands were touching. Her knee was bent slightly, leaning in to kiss his.

Theo was not a confrontational man. He simply took this information and walked away. While Soren and Magdelena roared and laughed and sang tuneless songs, Theo sat silently near the chalky cliffs of Toto-Mootn, eating bears, lost in thought. There he spent most of his days, alone, talking to the sea, watching the whales, waiting for the days when the moon was visible across the sky from the sun.

Soren and Magdelena came to him often, asking if he was alright, if he wanted to swim, if he wanted to dig or run or eat buffalo. He smiled to them politely and declined. I’m trying to remember this land when we were last awake, he told them, and they accepted this explanation. They wanted to know his findings when he found them, they said. They considered him a serious man and respected his privacy.

Still, there was pleasure in certain parts of a day. The first break of sun through the oval-shaped stand of pines in the flatlands to the east. A swim in the cold ocean in the afternoon. Laying on the bald peak, letting the warm rock dry his front while the sun dried his back. And yet, he did not know why he should live, why he should keep his eyes open. After a few days of near-joy, he had settled into something between life and sleep. He had seen so much. He was tired. He remained, weeks after awakening, in that period of early-morning consciousness that allows easy re-entry to dreaming. His limbs still tingled with the residue of sleep, and most days he wanted badly to allow it to overtake him again.

He decided he would leave. He thought it best to go north, to another place, to see if there were others like him, others like Magdelena. And so he rose early one morning and left, walking as quietly as he could. After all the weeks with the giants, the tinies below had learned to live with the rumbling of the earth caused when any of them moved about. He rose and woke no one, certainly not Soren and Magdelena, who by then slept side by side, unmoveable, their bodies connected in a dozen ruthless ways.

He walked north, the sun a rising friend at his side, and found that the trees dwindled as he strode. The further north he walked, the more the grass shrank away, the earth paled. Soon there was only ice, and he was cold, and he missed being near Magdelena, taken or not. After some time, each step away from her caused him ache. First a cramp in his abdomen, then a stiffness in his legs, then a headache that radiated with fervor and rhythm.

So he returned, and for a few weeks he tried to find a balance. Soren and Magdelena were happy to see him, and he enjoyed his time with her, with Soren, together and alone. Magdelena still swam with him, and they laughed as they had before, and they danced, Magdelena smiling at her shuffling feet. Making her laugh gave him something like pleasure, though in the moments of quiet he felt he was on the moon, frozen and dark. Soren, so confident, allowed it all, was sincere in his friendship with Theo, who to him posed no threat.

So this is how they lived. For some time Theo, like a tree living in the shadow of taller trees, found a way to live off reflected light.

He had found a sort of equilibrium, but equilibrium is temporary and fickle. One day he discovered that he was not satisfied. He wanted the full attention of love.

So again he walked. He knew that to walk too far would cause him more pain than he could bear, so he limned the perimeter within which he could journey each day – far enough to be alone but not so far that he was lonely. He walked over glaciers and through unknown craters, he bathed in cold black lakes, and he caught flocks of birds from the sky and ate them with something like hunger.

One day, while traveling west, through an ocher-colored canyon, he saw something ahead, something odd. There was a low mountain range rising from a flat tundra. It was a solitary thing, without foothills, without reason. All around was plain flat earth and so he felt himself drawn to it. He jogged through the canyon, his eyes set upon it. He crawled up from the canyon and ran to this exceptional mountain laying in the middle of the level dusty land.

He walked around the range, examining it from every angle. This was something very strange. He knew enough about his own kind to know that a giant hibernating here in the middle of nowhere was unlikely, but not impossible. He lay next to it, and it was about as long as he was. There was a rise that could be a shoulder, a dip where a waist might be, a bundle at the end that could be ankles crossed. His pulse raced, his breath shortened. He stood up, walking around the outcropping, guessing at legs, toes, a head.

It could be, he thought.

He sat with the mountain for a day and a night, examining it closely, to be sure that the form of a giant – a woman – could be waiting below its rough surface of rock and snow.

Feeling foolish at first, he began to talk to her. When did you go to sleep? he asked. There was no answer. He asked more questions, thinking that she might awaken if the right query struck her as demanding an answer. He asked her name, and began to guess. Marketa? Dora? Siobhan? He settled on Amaranth, and began his sentences with Oh, Amaranth! and he surprised himself by growing comfortable hearing his own voice. He talked to her in verse, in song. He wondered, he speculated, he named clouds for her. He confided in her, telling her the best ways to eat bears, and about Magdelena and Soren, referring to them only as friends, a couple that he knew some other place, some other time.

After a few weeks or months he wondered if he should return to them, to tell them where he had gone, whom he had met. But when he stood to do so, he found it harder, so much harder than before, when leaving Magdelena’s perimeter. To be more than a few steps away from Amaranth caused him vertigo. His legs were not what they once were, and leaving her seemed a foolish act. There was doubt here, yes, for he could not be certain that Amaranth was a woman and not a mountain. But he would gladly trade this uncertainty – small, he thought, for he was sure she was she – for what he had left with Magdelena and Soren – the certainty of pain.

He sat again and decided that he would perhaps visit the others another day.

Sleep came like the lightest rain. He felt it on his skin, something like a mist, numbing his legs, his arms. He could not recall how the last long sleep had begun, but what was happening now to him seemed familiar and right. A sigh escaped him as he lay next to Amaranth, Amaranth so warm, the contour of his side echoing hers, a valley forming between them. His eyes grew heavy and could no longer stay open to the world. When he closed them, though, he still saw her shape. Her constancy kept him strong and allowed him rest.