This Modern Writer: M. Bartley Seigel, Dreams

I am invited by hand delivered letter to visit the McSweeney’s office. Re: Urgent. I don’t know why. It’s a big surprise. I didn’t know they knew me. How could, why would they?

I am standing outside an unmarked office door in a long hallway of unmarked office doors. I enter and am greeted by a prim secretary in a dark pants suit. She invites me to wait in the conference room.

“May I take your jacket?” she asks.

“I’m not wearing a jacket.”

The conference room is monolithic, Brutalist, stark fluorescent lighting, heavily seasonscaped in poinsettia. A large fake Christmas tree buried under silver tinsel stands in one corner. Dominating the center of the room, a long concrete conference table is surrounded by empty chairs, save one high backed executive’s chair, at the head, clearly occupied, but turned with its back to the room.

“Mr. Eggers will see you in a moment,” the secretary says. She closes the door.

The instant the door clicks shut, the chair at the head of the table swivels round. A young Dave Eggers, a Dave Eggers in his twenties, is standing in the chair. He is two feet tall. I sense, from where I stand, that he smells very, very good. Cardamom. I breath him in. I am extremely nervous.

“I. See. You,” Little Eggers says. “Look. McSweeney’s is launching a new magazine, a kind of Fortune 500 money magazine, but McSweeney’s-style. It’s going to be big. This big.” Little Eggers holds his hands straight above his head and stretches them out and around until they come full circle and are pressed in prayer at his chest. “We thought immediately of you.”

“Why me?”

“We actually drew your name from a hat.”

“How did anyone ever think to put my name in a hat?”

“No time. Focus!”

Little Eggers holds forth a blue child’s lunch box, plastic, with a white handle. He slides it the length of the table.

“What you will need is there,” he says, pointing at the lunch box, then returns his hands to prayer position.

I open the box after some difficulty. Inside is one pair of men’s XXXL white cotton underpants, a gallon size zip lock bag filled with heavily used child’s crayons, a battered copy of US Weekly, and a neatly looped length of yellow nylon rope.

“One last thing before you go,” Little Eggers says. “You must give me $70.”

“All I have is my debit card.”

“Sorry, cash only.”