by Dan Chaon
“Fine!” he hissed. “Let’s go home to your mommy, you little crybaby. I swear to God, I’m never taking you with me anywhere again.” And he gave DJ a little shake. “Jesus, what’s wrong with you? Lookit, people are laughing at you. See? They’re saying, ‘Look at that big boy, bawling like a girl.’ ”
This memory comes to him out of the blue. He had forgotten all about it, but now it comes to him over and over. Those screams were not unlike the sounds Frankie makes in the middle of the night, and they pass repeatedly through the membrane of his thoughts, without warning. The next day, he finds himself recalling it again, the memory of the scream impressing on his mind with such force that he actually has to pull his UPS truck off to the side of the road and put his face in his hands: Awful! Awful! He must have seemed like a monster to the child.
Sitting there in his van, he wishes he could find a way to contact them—Mandy and DJ. He wishes that he could tell them how sorry he is, and send them money. He puts his fingertips against his forehead, as cars drive past on the street, as an old man parts the curtains and peers out of the house Gene is parked in front of, hopeful that Gene might have a package for him.
Where are they? Gene wonders. He tries to picture a town, a house, but there is only a blank. Surely, Mandy being Mandy, she would have hunted him down by now to demand child support. She would have relished treating him like a deadbeat dad, she would have hired some company who would garnish his wages.
Now, sitting at the roadside, it occurs to him suddenly that they are dead. He recalls the car wreck that he was in, just outside Des Moines, and if he had been killed they would have never known. He recalls waking up in the hospital, and the elderly nurse who had said, “You’re very lucky, young man. You should be dead.”
Maybe they are dead, he thinks. Mandy and DJ. The idea strikes him a glancing blow, because of course it would make sense. The reason they’ve never contacted him. Of course.
He doesn’t know what to do with such anxieties. They are ridiculous, they are self-pitying, they are paranoid, but especially now, with the concerns about Frankie, he is at the mercy of his fears. He comes home from work and Karen stares at him heavily.
“What’s the matter?” she says, and he shrugs. “You look terrible,” she says.
“It’s nothing,” he says, but she continues to look at him skeptically. She shakes her head.
“I took Frankie to the doctor again today,” she says after a moment, and Gene sits down at the table with her, where she is spread out with her textbooks and notepaper.
“I suppose you’ll think I’m being a neurotic mom,” she says. “I think I’m too immersed in disease—that’s the problem.”
Gene shakes his head. “No, no,” he says. His throat feels dry. “You’re right. Better safe than sorry.”
“Mmm,” she says thoughtfully. “I think Dr. Banerjee is starting to hate me.”
“Naw,” Gene says. “No one could hate you.” With effort, he smiles gently. A good husband, he kisses her palm, her wrist. “Try not to worry,” he says, though his own nerves are fluttering. He can hear Frankie in the backyard, shouting orders to someone.
“Who’s he talking to?” Gene says, and Karen doesn’t look up.
“Oh,” she says. “It’s probably just Bubba.” Bubba is Frankie’s imaginary playmate.
Gene nods. He goes to the window and looks out. Frankie is pretending to shoot at something, his thumb and forefinger cocked into a gun. “Get him! Get him!” Frankie shouts, and Gene stares out as Frankie dodges behind a tree. Frankie looks nothing like DJ, but when he pokes his head from behind the hanging foliage of the willow, Gene feels a little shudder—a flicker, something. He clenches his jaw.
“This class is really driving me crazy,” Karen says. “Every time I read about a worst-case scenario, I start to worry. It’s strange. The more you know, the less sure you are of anything.”
“What did the doctor say this time?” Gene says. He shifts uncomfortably, still staring out at Frankie, and it seems as if dark specks circle and bob at the corner of the yard. “He seems okay?”
Karen shrugs. “As far as they can tell.” She looks down at her textbook, shaking her head. “He seems healthy.” He puts his hand gently on the back of her neck and she lolls her head back and forth against his fingers. “I’ve never believed that anything really terrible could happen to me,” she once told him, early in their marriage, and it had scared him. “Don’t say that,” he’d whispered, and she laughed.
“You’re superstitious,” she said. “That’s cute.”
He can’t sleep. The strange presentiment that Mandy and DJ are dead has lodged heavily in his mind, and he rubs his feet together underneath the covers, trying to find a comfortable posture. He can hear the soft ticks of the old electric typewriter as Karen finishes her paper for school, words rattling out in bursts that remind him of some sort of insect language. He closes his eyes, pretending to be asleep when Karen finally comes to bed, but his mind is ticking with small, scuttling images: his former wife and son, flashes of the photographs he doesn’t own, hasn’t kept. They’re dead, a firm voice in his mind says, very distinctly. They were in a fire. And they burned up. It is not quite his own voice that speaks to him, and abruptly he can picture the burning house. It’s a trailer, somewhere on the outskirts of a small town, and the black smoke is pouring out the open door. The plastic window frames have warped and begun to melt, and the smoke billows from the trailer into the sky in a way that reminds him of an old locomotive. He can’t see inside, except for crackling bursts of deep-orange flames, but he’s aware that they’re in there. For a second he can see DJ’s face, flickering, peering steadily from the window of the burning trailer, his mouth open in a unnatural circle, as if he’s singing.
He opens his eyes. Karen’s breathing has steadied, she’s sound asleep, and he carefully gets out of bed, padding restlessly through the house in his pajamas. They’re not dead, he tries to tell himself, and stands in front of the refrigerator, pouring milk from the carton into his mouth. It’s an old comfort, from back in the days when he was drying out, when the thick taste of milk would slightly calm his craving for a drink. But it doesn’t help him now. The dream, the vision, has frightened him badly, and he sits on the couch with an afghan over his shoulders, staring at some science program on television. On the program, a lady scientist is examining a mummy. A child. The thing is bald—almost a skull but not quite. A membrane of ancient skin is pulled taut over the eye sockets. The lips are stretched back, and there are small, chipped, rodentlike teeth. Looking at the thing, he can’t help but think of DJ again, and he looks over his shoulder, quickly, the way he used to.
The last year that he was together with Mandy, there used to be times when DJ would actually give him the creeps—spook him. DJ had been an unusually skinny child, with a head like a baby bird and long, bony feet, with toes that seemed strangely extended, as if they were meant for gripping. He can remember the way the child would slip barefoot through rooms, slinking, sneaking, watching, Gene had thought, always watching him.
It is a memory that he has almost succeeded in forgetting, a memory he hates and mistrusts. He was drinking heavily at the time, and he knows that alcohol grotesquely distorted his perceptions. But now that it has been dislodged, that old feeling moves through him like a breath of smoke. Back then, it had seemed to him that Mandy had turned DJ against him, that DJ had in some strange way almost physically transformed into something that wasn’t Gene’s real son. Gene can remember how, sometimes, he would be sitting on the couch, watching TV, and he’d get a funny feeling. He’d turn his head and DJ would be at the edge of the room, with his bony spine hunched and his long neck craned, staring with those strangely oversize eyes. Other times, Gene and Mandy would be arguing and DJ would suddenly slide into the room, creeping up to Mandy and resting his head on her chest, right in the middle of some important talk. “I’m thirsty,” he would say, in imitation baby-talk. Though he was five years old
, he would playact this little toddler voice. “Mama,” he would say. “I is firsty.” And DJ’s eyes would rest on Gene for a moment, cold and full of calculating hatred.
Of course, Gene knows now that this was not the reality of it. He knows: He was a drunk, and DJ was just a sad, scared little kid, trying to deal with a rotten situation. Later, when he was in detox, these memories of his son made him actually shudder with shame, and it was not something he could bring himself to talk about even when he was deep into his twelve steps. How could he say how repulsed he’d been by the child, how actually frightened he was. Jesus Christ—DJ was a poor wretched five-year-old kid! But in Gene’s memory there was something malevolent about him, resting his head pettishly on his mother’s chest, talking in that singsong, lisping voice, staring hard and unblinking at Gene with a little smile. Gene remembers catching DJ by the back of the neck. “If you’re going to talk, talk normal,” Gene had whispered through his teeth, and tightened his fingers. “You’re not a baby. You’re not fooling anybody.” And DJ had actually bared his teeth, making a thin, hissing whine.
He wakes and he can’t breathe. There is a swimming, suffocating sensation of being stared at, being watched by something that hates him, and he gasps, choking for air. A lady is bending over him, and for a moment he expects her to say: “You’re very lucky, young man. You should be dead.”
But it’s Karen. “What are you doing?” she says. It’s morning, and he struggles to orient himself—he’s on the living room floor, and the television is still going.
“Jesus,” he says, and coughs. “Oh, Jesus.” He is sweating, his face feels hot, but he tries to calm himself in the face of Karen’s horrified stare. “A bad dream,” he says, trying to control his panting breaths. “Jesus,” he says, and shakes his head, trying to smile reassuringly for her. “I got up last night and I couldn’t sleep. I must have passed out while I was watching TV.”
But Karen just gazes at him, her expression frightened and uncertain, as if something about him is transforming. “Gene,” she says. “Are you all right?”
“Sure,” he says hoarsely, and a shudder passes over him involuntarily. “Of course.” And then he realizes that he is naked. He sits up, covering his crotch self-consciously with his hands, and glances around. He doesn’t see his underwear or his pajama bottoms anywhere nearby. He doesn’t even see the afghan, which he’d had draped over him on the couch while he was watching the mummies on TV. He starts to stand up, awkwardly, and he notices that Frankie is standing there in the archway between the kitchen and the living room, watching him, his arms at his sides like a cowboy who is ready to draw his holstered guns.
“Mom?” Frankie says. “I’m thirsty.”
He drives through his deliveries in a daze. The bees, he thinks. He remembers what Frankie said a few mornings before, about bees inside his head, buzzing and bumping against the inside of his forehead like a windowpane they were tapping against. That’s the feeling he has now. All the things that he doesn’t quite remember are circling and alighting, vibrating their cellophane wings insistently. He sees himself striking Mandy across the face with the flat of his hand, knocking her off her chair; he sees his grip tightening around the back of DJ’s thin five-year-old neck, shaking him as he grimaced and wept; and he is aware that there are other things, perhaps even worse, if he thought about it hard enough. All the things he’s prayed that Karen would never know about him.
He was very drunk on the day that he left them, so drunk that he can barely remember. It is hard to believe that he made it all the way to Des Moines on the interstate before he went off the road, tumbling end over end, into darkness. He was laughing, he thinks, as the car crumpled around him, and he has to pull his van over to the side of the road, out of fear, as the tickling in his head intensifies. There is an image of Mandy, sitting on the couch as he stormed out, with DJ cradled in her arms, one of DJ’s eyes swollen shut and puffy. There is an image of him in the kitchen, throwing glasses and beer bottles onto the floor, listening to them shatter.
And whether they are dead or not, he knows that they don’t wish him well. They would not want him to be happy—in love with his wife and child. His normal, undeserved life.
When he gets home that night, he feels exhausted. He doesn’t want to think anymore, and for a moment, it seems that he will be allowed a small reprieve. Frankie is in the yard, playing contentedly. Karen is in the kitchen, making hamburgers and corn on the cob, and everything seems okay. But when he sits down to take off his boots, she gives him an angry look.
“Don’t do that in the kitchen,” she says icily. “Please. I’ve asked you before.”
He looks down at his feet: one shoe unlaced, half off. “Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”
But when he retreats to the living room, to his recliner, she follows him. She leans against the door frame, her arms folded, watching as he releases his tired feet from the boots and rubs his hand over the bottoms of his socks. She frowns heavily.
“What?” he says, and tries on an uncertain smile.
She sighs. “We need to talk about last night,” she says. “I need to know what’s going on.”
“Nothing,” he says, but the stern way she examines him activates his anxieties all over again. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went out to the living room to watch TV. That’s all.”
She stares at him. “Gene,” she says after a moment. “People don’t usually wake up naked on their living room floor, and not know how they got there. That’s just weird, don’t you think?” Oh, please, he thinks. He lifts his hands, shrugging—a posture of innocence and exasperation, though his insides are trembling. “I know,” he says. “It was weird to me, too. I was having nightmares. I really don’t know what happened.”
She gazes at him for a long time, her eyes heavy. “I see,” she says, and he can feel the emanation of her disappointment like waves of heat. “Gene,” she says. “All I’m asking is for you to be honest with me. If you’re having problems, if you’re drinking again, or thinking about it. I want to help. We can work it out. But you have to be honest with me.”
“I’m not drinking,” Gene says firmly. He holds her eyes. “I’m not thinking about it. I told you when we met, I’m through with it. Really.” But he is aware again of an observant, unfriendly presence, hidden, moving along the edge of the room. “I don’t understand,” he says. “What is it? Why would you think I’d lie to you?”
She shifts, still trying to read something in his face, still, he can tell, doubting him. “Listen,” she says, at last, and he can tell she is trying not to cry. “Some guy called you today. A drunk guy. And he said to tell you that he had a good time hanging out with you last night, and that he was looking forward to seeing you again soon.” She frowns hard, staring at him as if this last bit of damning information will show him for the liar he is. A tear slips out of the corner of her eye and along the bridge of her nose. Gene feels his chest tighten.
“That’s crazy,” he says. He tries to sound outraged, but he is in fact suddenly very frightened. “Who was it?”
She shakes her head sorrowfully. “I don’t know,” she says. “Something with a ‘B.’ He was slurring so bad I could hardly understand him. BB or BJ or …”
Gene can feel the small hairs on his back prickling. “Was it DJ?” he says.
And Karen shrugs, lifting a now-teary face to him. “I don’t know!” she says hoarsely. “I don’t know. Maybe.” And Gene puts his palms across his face. He is aware of that strange buzzing, tickling feeling behind his forehead.
“Who is DJ?” Karen says. “Gene, you have to tell me what’s going on.”
But he can’t. He can’t tell her, even now. Especially now, he thinks, when to admit that he’d been lying to her ever since they met would confirm all the fears and suspicions she’d been nursing for—what?—days? weeks?
“He’s someone I used to know a long time ago,” Gene tells her. “Not a good person. He’s the kind of guy who might … call up, and get a ki
ck out of upsetting you.”
They sit at the kitchen table, silently watching as Frankie eats his hamburger and corn on the cob. Gene can’t quite get his mind around it. DJ, he thinks, as he presses his finger against his hamburger bun, but doesn’t pick it up. DJ. He would be fifteen by now. Could he, perhaps, have found them? Maybe stalking them? Watching the house? Gene tries to fathom how DJ might have been causing Frankie’s screaming episodes. How he might have caused what happened last night—snuck up on Gene while he was sitting there watching TV and drugged him or something. It seems farfetched.
“Maybe it was just some random drunk,” he says at last to Karen. “Accidentally calling the house. He didn’t ask for me by name, did he?”
“I don’t remember,” Karen says. “Gene …”
And he can’t stand the doubtfulness, the lack of trust in her expression. He strikes his fist hard against the table, and his plate clatters in a circling echo. “I did not go out with anybody last night!” he says. “I did not get drunk! You can either believe me, or you can …”
They are both staring at him. Frankie’s eyes are wide, and he puts down the corncob he was about to bite into, as if he doesn’t like it anymore. Karen’s mouth is pinched.
“Or I can what?” she says.
“Nothing,” Gene breathes.
There isn’t a fight, but a chill spreads through the house, a silence. She knows that he isn’t telling her the truth. She knows that there’s more to it. But what can he say? He stands at the sink, gently washing the dishes as Karen bathes Frankie and puts him to bed. He waits, listening to the small sounds of the house at night. Outside, in the yard, there is the swing set, and the willow tree—silver-gray and stark in the security light that hangs above the garage. He waits for a while longer, watching, half expecting to see DJ emerge from behind the tree as he’d done in Gene’s dream, creeping along, his bony, hunched back, the skin pulled tight against the skull of his oversize head. There is that smothering, airless feeling of being watched, and Gene’s hands are trembling as he rinses a plate under the tap.