A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

One night, a man wearing a poncho and sandals rings Eggers’s doorbell, and although Eggers is closer to the door, he makes Toph answer. “I’m not here,” he instructs his little brother, thinking that the man must be petitioning the neighborhood or trying to collect donations. When Toph opens the door, though, Eggers remembers that the man is Stephen, Toph’s new babysitter. A Berkeley student from England, Scotland, or Ireland—Eggers can’t remember—Stephen is a quiet man who “bores Toph to tears.” Nonetheless, Eggers is excited for a night of freedom, and tells Stephen he’ll be home by one in the morning, though he could be earlier. “Depends on what happens,” he says.

Just as Eggers is driving around the corner, his excitement about going out turns into terror. “I become convinced, in a flash of pure truth-seeing—it happens every time I leave him anywhere—that Toph will be killed,” he writes. In his head, he runs through all the signs that Stephen is a sick, twisted murderer. “If something happens it’ll be my fault,” he notes. “The possibilities snap through my head like pedophilia flashcards—handcuffs, floorboards, clown suits, leather, videotape, duct tape, knives, bathtubs, refrigerators.” He contemplates turning around, but then he feels as if he has to keep going, thinking that “the risk is worth it.”

Eggers thinks about being held accountable for leaving Toph with a murder. He imagines the questions he’d be asked in trial, providing a prospective transcript in which a questioner asks things like, “How did you come to meet this man, this baby-sitter?” and, “How long did your interview of him take?” He envisions himself saying, “Oh, you know, I just wanted to be out. I didn’t care much what we did. You have to understand that at that point I was getting out once a week, tops, maybe once every ten days.” He explains to the imagined jury his eagerness to hang out with friends, saying that normally the night would start at his friend Moodie’s apartment, where he would sit on the couch “savoring every minute, not knowing when it would come again.” Meanwhile, his friends would have “no idea what it meant to [him]” to be out.

At the bar Eggers sits with his friends, most of whom he’s known since high school. More and more of his friends move to San Francisco each month, everyone wanting to be in the city “for no particular reason.” Eggers likes that his friends are here, since they are the “only ties” he and Toph—whom they’ve all known for a long time—have to Illinois. As such, Eggers tries to get them to come out to his house in Berkeley as often as possible, and many of them actually do visit quite frequently. Moodie, for example, sleeps on his couch roughly three nights per week. He and Eggers have been best friends since high school, having run a successful fake ID company. These days, they’ve started a freelance graphic design company in one of the rooms in Eggers’s house.

Eggers’s friend John gets him a beer. “John is broken and I’ve known him forever,” Eggers writes. Their parents were friends in Illinois, which is why they’ve always been close. But there’s also something else that ties them together: John’s parents are also dead. His mother died of cancer when he was in high school, and his father died when he was in college. Since then, John has been depressed. Now, in the bar, he asks Eggers how Toph is doing. “Fine,” Eggers replies, thinking of “pliers” and “handcuffs” and other terrifying possibilities. “Where is he?” John asks, and Eggers explains that he’s at home with Stephen. After this conversation, Eggers begins to feel disappointed in the night, thinking, “I’ve risked everything for this?”

Eggers wants something “huge” to happen, thinking, “We should all be armed and taking over small countries. Or rioting. Or no: an orgy. There should be an orgy.” This, he thinks, would make the night “worthwhile.” Instead, though, everyone just stands around, which Eggers finds “obscene.” As he thinks this, another friend approaches and asks him about Toph, saying, “Where is he, anyway?” Eggers wonders why he has been asked this question twice in the same night. It has, he realizes, become “a sort of required question, but with no internal logic.” Why, he wonders, do his friends want to ask him about where his brother is when he’s “out trying to drink and incite orgies”?

To escape his friend’s annoying question, Eggers goes to the bathroom, where he shuts himself in a stall to avoid a man who’s peeing in the sink. He then finds himself staring at a sticker he made, which has been pasted to the stall’s door: “SCREW THOSE IDIOTS” it says at the top. Underneath this line, it reads: “MIGHT MAGAZINE.” Moodie and Eggers designed these stickers and gave them to their friends last month as a way of promoting their new magazine. Now, though, Eggers realizes the phrasing makes it seem like the sticker is instructing people to “screw” Might magazine itself. Eggers is mortified—they’ve already printed 500 of these stickers.

When Eggers returns from the bathroom, another friend approaches him and asks about Toph. This friend doesn’t know Toph quite as well, asking what his name is and then—predictably—asking where he is. Fed up, Eggers tells her he hasn’t seen Toph “in weeks” because he “took off one day” to hitchhike “around the country.” His friend is shocked. “Yeah, it’s fucked up,” Eggers says. “It’s partly my fault, I guess,” he adds, going on to say that he shouldn’t have let Toph bring a gun to school. He says that he told Toph he could play with his gun in the house and in the neighborhood, but that he couldn’t bring it to school. “Wait,” his friend interrupts. “He has a gun?” “Of course, sure,” Eggers replies, pushing on to tell her that Toph shot another kid.

“Naturally I took away Toph’s gun privileges,” Eggers continues, “and of course beat him within an inch of his life, so zealously that something snapped in his leg somewhere, a tendon maybe, and he fell to the floor, squealed like a pig, couldn’t get up, had to be taken to the emergency room.” He tells his friend that the police arrived and questioned him about Toph’s leg, and as she listens with wide eyes, he says, “You wouldn’t believe what people will believe once they know our story. They’re ready for anything, basically—will believe anything, because they’ve been thrown off-balance, are still wondering if any of this is true, our story in general, but aren’t sure and are terrified of offending us.” His friend doesn’t pick up on what he’s saying, so he concludes his story, saying that Toph took off as soon as he got off crutches.

Finding the bar boring, Eggers drives to a friend’s house, hoping she’ll invite him in. When he arrives, though, her house is dark, so he drives to a bar where another female friend works, but he doesn’t have his ID so the bouncer doesn’t let him in. As such, he calls his friend Meredith and asks if she wants to meet up. She accepts his invitation and they go to a club where they drink heavily and dance, eventually feeling attracted to one another even though they’ve always just been friends.

Leaving the club, Eggers and Meredith go to the beach, where they sit in the sand and talk about their ambitions. Meredith works in film production and wants to be “making movies” and “producing more and better” material. Her excitement about her job inspires Eggers to talk about Might magazine, which he frames as something that will “tear the world down to its foundations” and then build it up again. They both speak with great enthusiasm about making the world more “just and equal.” Eggers claims that Might will “inspire millions to greatness,” and they both start describing the ideal project, using words like “raceless,” “genderless,” “youth,” “strength,” “rebirth,” “oceans,” “fire,” “sex,” and then—all at once—they’re kissing and leaning backward onto the cold sand, feeling that sex will make them “more powerful.” 

As Eggers and Meredith start having sex, a group of teenagers approaches them. “Because I’m stupid I assume they’re from Mexico,” Eggers notes. Surrounded, he can’t tell how many people are in this group. “Where’s your pants, stud?” one says. Wrapping himself in a towel, Eggers stands, but someone whips a handful of sand in his eyes. As he stumbles, several girls push Meredith as she sits there trying to cover up her body. “Get the fuck away!” Eggers yells. The group laughs, but then Meredith says, “Why don’t you just leave us the fuck alone?” After a pause, one of them says, “Okay, let’s go.” As the group retreats, one of them—a short guy who seems to be the leader of the group—turns around and says, “Hey listen, man, we was just goofing around. Sorry.”

The teenagers walk away, but Eggers can’t find his wallet, so he chases them and accuses them of stealing. They insist they didn’t rob him, but he says, “Before you came and started fucking with us, I had a fucking wallet. Then you come and start fucking with us, and now I don’t have a fucking wallet. And that’s all the fucking cops need to know.” There’s a pause, and Eggers thinks, “The cops. My cops.” He then forces the teenagers to come back and help him look in the sand for his wallet. As they do so, the short one says again that they didn’t do anything. “Who do you think the cops are gonna believe?” Eggers asks. “Two regular people sitting on the beach, or you people?” He adds: “I don’t know what your status is with green cards and everything, but this could get really fucking ugly.”

Finally, Eggers decides to “throw out [his] last ace,” saying, “This was my goddamn dad’s wallet you stole. And my dad just died. It’s all I have of his.” This, Eggers notes, is true. Even so, the teenagers don’t find the wallet, and the short one reiterates that they didn’t take it. As such, Eggers marches them back to the parking lot to what he thinks is a payphone, though he discovers it’s only a box on a telephone pole. He tells the teenagers to follow him as they cross the highway and walk until they find a phone, but suddenly they surround him. They take swings at him, but he dodges them until one of them kicks him in the crotch and he falls to the ground while they run away, jumping into two cars and speeding away while he tries to memorize their license plates.

Eggers and Meredith find a pay phone and call the police, who come and listen to Eggers’s repeat what he thinks has happened. He emphasizes that the teenagers were Mexican and that they took his wallet. Within four minutes, the police officer tells them that another officer has stopped a car that might belong to the suspects. He drives Eggers and Meredith to identify the driver and passengers, but they aren’t even remotely similar to the teenagers. Not only is their car not the same, but they don’t look at all like the teens. “I’m positive they were Mexican. This’s definitely not the right car,” Eggers says.

Meredith and Eggers are relatively silent on the way home. Eggers drops her off and then makes his way back to Berkeley, nodding off several times as he drives and thinking about how much he wants to take revenge on the group of teenagers. As he approaches his house, he thinks again about all the terrible things Stephen has probably done to Toph. Inside, though, he finds Toph asleep on the couch. After he sends Stephen home, Eggers goes into his bedroom and finds his wallet sitting on the dresser.