Quotes of the Day

Dave Eggers grew up in Illinois, and Valentino Achak Deng grew up in southern Sudan, but they have something in common: they both, in different ways, lost their parents. Eggers wrote about his parents' death from cancer in his celebrated memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Deng was separated from his father and mother during the civil war that overtook Sudan when he was a child. He became one of Sudan's Lost Boys, a group of refugee children who trekked hundreds of miles overland in search of safety. He did not see his parents again for 17 years.

Deng eventually made his way to the United States, where he and Eggers met and became friends. Their conversations together are the basis for Eggers' remarkable new novel What Is the What (McSweeney's Books; available Oct. 25), which takes the form of a fictionalized version of Deng's life story. In this exclusive excerpt, Deng silently addresses a young boy who is helping to burglarize his apartment. How do you make another human understand that you were a child of war? "Picture your neighborhood," Deng thinks, "and now see the women screaming, the babies tossed into wells. Watch your brothers explode. I want you there with me." Our excerpt follows:

Michael's phone is ringing again.

The boy slowly rouses himself and jogs over to the kitchen to answer it. I can't hear much of the conversation, but I do hear him say, "You said ten," followed by a series of similar protestations.

The call is over in less than a minute and now I must try again to reason with the boy. Perhaps he is comfortable enough with me now, with my unmoving presence, that he will not fear my voice. And it's evident that he is upset with his accomplices. Perhaps I can forge an alliance, for I still harbor hope that he'll see that he and I are more alike than are he and those who have placed him here.

"Young man," I say.

He is standing between the kitchen and the living room; he had been deciding whether to return to the couch to sleep, or to turn the TV on again. I have his attention for a moment. He looks at me briefly and then away.

"I don't want to scare you. I know this is not your idea to be here with me."

He looks at the phone book now, but it seems that because it's resting against my temple, to retrieve it he would have to get too close to me. He walks past me and disappears down the hall, headed for the bedrooms. My throat goes dry with the thought that he very well might return with the unabridged dictionary after all.

"Young man!" I say, projecting my voice down the hall. "Please don't drop anything on me! I will be quiet if that's what you want."

Now he is above me, and for the first time, he is looking into my eyes. He is hold-ing my geometry textbook in one hand and a towel in the other. I'm not immediately sure which poses the greater threat. The towel — would he suffocate me?

"Do you want me to be quiet? I will stay quiet if you'll stop dropping things on me."

He nods to me, then takes his foot and gently steps on my mouth, pushing the tape back into place. To have this boy pushing my mouth closed with his foot — it is too much to accept.

He disappears from my view but is not finished. When he returns, he begins a construction project in my living room.

He first pushes the coffee table closer to the entertainment center, reducing the space between the three objects: me, the table, and the shelving. Now he drags a chair from the kitchen. He places this near my head. From the couch he brings one of the three large cushions that sit upright. He stands the cushion up against the seat of the chair. Bringing another chair from the kitchen, he places it, with a couch cushion soon resting against it, at my feet. He has effectively eliminated me from his view. My view is now limited to the ceiling above me, and the little I can see between the windows of the coffee table. I lie, finding myself impressed with his architectural vision, until he surprises me with the blanket. The bedspread from my room is carefully spread over the couch cushions until it forms a tent over me, and this is too much. Michael, I have little patience left for you. I am finished with you, and wish you could have seen what I saw. Be grateful, TV Boy. Have respect. Have you seen the beginning of a war? Picture your neighborhood, and now see the women screaming, the babies tossed into wells. Watch your brothers explode. I want you there with me.

I was sitting with my mother, helping her boil water. I had found kindling and was feeding the fire, and she was approving of the help I was providing. It was unusual for a boy of any age to be as helpful as I was. There is an intimacy between mother and son, a son of six or seven. At that age a boy can still be a boy, can be weak and melt into his mother's arms. For me, though, this is the last time, for tomorrow I will not be a boy. I will be something else — an animal desperate only to survive. I know I cannot turn back and so I savor these days, these moments when I can be small, can do small favors, can crawl beneath my mother and blow on the dinner fire. I like to think I was luxuriating in the final moment of childhood when the sound came.

It was like the sound of the planes that flew over occasionally, but this was louder, more dissonant. The sound seemed to be dividing itself, again and again. Chaka-chakka. Chaka-chakka. I stopped and listened. What was that sound? Chaka-chakka. It was like the noise an old lorry might make, but it was coming from above, was spreading itself wide across the sky.

My mother sat still, listening. I went to the door of the hut.

—Achak, come and sit, she said.

Through the doorway I saw a kind of airplane, coming low over the village. It was a fascinating kind of plane, black everywhere and dull, unreflective. The planes I had seen before resembled birds in a rudimentary way, with noses and wings and chests, but this machine looked like nothing so much as a cricket. I watched it as it flew over the village. The sound was rich and black, louder than anything I had ever known, the vibrations shaking my ribs, pulling me apart.

—Achak, come here! I heard my mother's words, though her voice was like a memory. What was happening now was utterly new. Now there were five or more of these new machines, great black crickets in every direction. I walked out of the hut and into the center of the compound, transfixed. I saw other boys in the village staring up as I was, some of them jumping, laughing and pointing to the crickets with the chopping sound.

But it was strange. Adults were running from the machines, falling, screaming. I looked at the people running, though I was too dazed to move. The volume of the machines held me still. I felt tired in some new way, as I watched mothers grab their young sons and bring them back into their huts. I watched men run into the high grass and throw themselves to the ground. I watched as one of the crickets flew over the soccer field, flying lower than the other machines; I watched as the twenty young men playing on the field ran toward the school, screaming. Then a new sound pumped through the air. It was like the cutting and dividing of the machine, but it was not that.

The men running to the school began to fall. They fell while facing me, as if they were running to my home, to me. Ten men in seconds, their arms reaching skyward. The machine that had shot them came toward me now, and I stood watching as the black cricket grew larger and louder. I could see the turning of the guns, two men sitting in the machine, wearing helmets and sunglasses like my father's. I was unable to move as the machine drew closer, the sound filling my head.

—Achak!

My mother's hands were around my waist, and she pulled me with great force into darkness. I found myself inside the hut with her. The sound roared over us, thumping, chopping, dividing itself.

—You fool! They'll kill you!

—Who? Who are they?

—The army. The helicopters. Oh, Achak, I'm worried. Please pray for us.

I prayed. I flattened myself under her bed and prayed. My mother sat up, rigid, trembling. The machines flew overhead then away and back again, the sound retreating and filling my head once more.

I lay next to my mother, wondering about the fate of my brothers, my sister and stepsisters, my father and friends. I knew that when the helicopters were gone, life would have changed irreversibly in our village. But would it be over? Would the crickets leave? I did not know. My mother did not know. It was the beginning of the end of knowing that life would continue. Do you have a feeling, Michael, that you will wake up tomorrow? That you will eat tomorrow? That the world will not end tomorrow?

It was over in an hour. The helicopters were gone. The men and women of Marial Bai slowly left their homes and walked again under the noon sun. They tended to the wounded and counted the dead.

Thirty had been killed. Twenty men, most of the victims those who had been playing soccer. Eight women and two children, younger than me.

—Stay inside, my mother said. —You don't need to see this.

The next morning, the army's trucks returned. The trucks that had left with the government's soldiers weeks before now returned, again carrying soldiers. They were accompanied by three tanks and ten Land Rovers, which surrounded the town in the early morning. Once there was enough light to function efficiently, the soldiers jumped from the trucks and went about methodically burning down the town of Marial Bai. They started a great fire in the middle of the market, and from this fire they took burning logs and torches, and these they threw onto the roofs of most of the homes within a one-mile radius. The few men who resisted were shot. This was effectively the end of any kind of life in Marial Bai for some time. Again, the rebels for whom this was retribution were nowhere to be found.

From WHAT IS THE WHAT: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF VALENTINO ACHAK DENG , by Dave Eggers. Copyright 2006 by Dave Eggers; to be published by McSweeney's.