The Parade

Chapter One

In the morning s platinum light he raised his leaden head. He was lying on a plastic mattress, in a converted shipping container, below a tiny fan that circulated the  room s tepid air.

He washed himself with packaged towelettes and put on his uniform, a black jumpsuit of synthetic fiber. Under a quickly rising sun he walked across the hotel s gravel courtyard to his partner s room. They had never met. He knocked on the corrugated steel door. There was no answer. He knocked louder.

After some shuffling from within, a lithesome man answered, naked but for a pair of white boxers. He had dark eyes, a cleft chin and a wide mouth ringed with full, womanly lips. A swirl of black hair rakishly obscured his left eye.

Pick a number.

Nine, the man at the door said, smiling slyly.

Okay. You know how the company handles names. I don t know yours, you don t know mine. For the next two weeks, you re Nine. Call me Four.

You re Four?

You will call me Four. I ll call you Nine. Got it?

For reasons of security, the company insisted on simple pseudonyms, usually numerical.

Got it, Nine said, and swept his hair from his face and threw it back.

They had arrived without passports. Passports were complications and liabilities in such a place, a nation recovering from years of civil war, riddled with corruption and burdened now by a new and lawless government. Four and Nine had been flown in under assumed names on a private charter. In the past, in other nations, the company s employees had been ransomed and killed. The kidnappers went first for their quarry s company, then family, then nation. But without passports or names, men like Four and Nine were anonymous and of little value. Their machine, the RS-80, was almost impossible to trace. It bore no company name, no serial number and had no national registry. No one but their clients, the north­ern government in the capital, would know anything about them, their

DAVE EGGERS is the author of many books, among them The Circle, The Eyes and the Impossible, The Monk of Mokha, A Hologram for the King, What Is the What, and The Museum of Rain. He is the cofounder of 826 Valencia, a youth writing and tutoring center which has inspired dozens of similar nonprofit organizations around the world, and the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publisher. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is the recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, and the American Book Award.

"The Parade is a heartbreaker and a mindbender.  It is a novel of ideas that packs an emotional punch that left me reeling. With clear, unadorned prose, Eggers lays bare the costs of war, and of peace." Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

"This is a tale for our time, an allegory about intervening in foreign lands without knowledge, and so a nightmare vision of our endless wars." Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco and Churchill and Orwell
 
"A parable of progress, as told by J.M. Coetzee to Philip K. Dick." Richard Flanagan, author of Gould s Book of Fish and The Narrow Road to the Deep North
 
"In The Parade, the anxiety grows with every page and every mile to reach an ending that turns everything upside down and sends us into the heart of darkness. A minimalistic, merciless novel. A powerful allegory and a painfully concrete contemporary story Eggers is a true virtuoso of that synthesis." Georgi Gospodinov, author of The Physics of Sorrow

"In an unnamed country, two unnamed employees of a foreign road-building corporation arrive for a 12-day assignment Readers, too, are shut out of any background information on either man, an authorial choice that generates a subtle tension throughout the novel Eggers differentiates between Four and Nine solely through their reactions to the post-civil-war devastation around them. How this setup reduces the two men to their willingness or refusal to see others is striking Parable-like The final scene of the novel contains such ferocity." Idra Novey, The New York Times Book Review

"In Dave Eggers s new novel, The Parade, two men go on a journey: flat, direct and more dangerous than either will admit The narrative is deliberately unbranded, unspecific. The enthusiastic, inexperienced partner goes by Nine. This pushes the narrative into an allegorical space, even as we are up close and personal with the two on their trip from south to north