Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

  When he goes upstairs at last, Karen is already in her nightgown, in bed, reading a book.

  “Karen,” he says, and she flips a page, deliberately.

  “I don’t want to talk to you until you’re ready to tell me the truth,” she says. She doesn’t look at him. “You can sleep on the couch, if you don’t mind.”

  “Just tell me,” Gene says. “Did he leave a number? To call him back?”

  “No,” Karen says. She doesn’t look at him. “He just said he’d see you soon.”

  He thinks that he will stay up all night. He doesn’t even wash up, or brush his teeth, or get into his bedtime clothes. He just sits there on the couch, in his uniform and stocking feet, watching television with the sound turned low, listening. Midnight. One A.M.

  He goes upstairs to check on Frankie, but everything is okay. Frankie is asleep with his mouth open, the covers thrown off. Gene stands in the doorway, alert for movement, but everything seems to be in place. Frankie’s turtle sits motionless on its rock, the books are lined up in neat rows, the toys put away. Frankie’s face tightens and untightens as he dreams.

  Two A.M. Back on the couch, Gene startles, half-asleep as an ambulance passes in the distance, and then there is only the sound of crickets and cicadas. Awake for a moment, he blinks heavily at a rerun of Bewitched, and flips through channels. Here is some jewelry for sale. Here is someone performing an autopsy.

  In the dream, DJ is older. He looks to be nineteen or twenty, and he walks into a bar where Gene is hunched on a stool, sipping a glass of beer. Gene recognizes him right away—his posture, those thin shoulders, those large eyes. But now, DJ’s arms are long and muscular, tattooed. There is a hooded, unpleasant look on his face as he ambles up to the bar, pressing in next to Gene. DJ orders a shot of Jim Beam—Gene’s old favorite.

  “I’ve been thinking about you a lot, ever since I died,” DJ murmurs. He doesn’t look at Gene as he says this, but Gene knows who he is talking to, and his hands are shaky as he takes a sip of beer.

  “I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” DJ murmurs, and the air is hot and thick. Gene puts a trembly cigarette to his mouth and breathes on it, choking on the taste. He wants to say, I’m sorry. Forgive me. But he can’t breathe. DJ shows his small, crooked teeth, staring at Gene as he gulps for air.

  “I know how to hurt you,” DJ whispers.

  Gene opens his eyes, and the room is full of smoke. He sits up, disoriented: For a second he is still in the bar with DJ before he realizes that he’s in his own house.

  There is a fire somewhere: He can hear it. People say that fire “crackles,” but in fact it seems like the amplified sound of tiny creatures eating, little wet mandibles, thousands and thousands of them, and then a heavy, whispered whoof as the fire finds another pocket of oxygen. He can hear this, even as he chokes blindly in the smoky air. The living room has a filmy haze over it, as if it is atomizing, fading away, and when he tries to stand up it disappears completely. There is a thick membrane of smoke above him, and he drops again to his hands and knees, gagging and coughing, a thin line of vomit trickling onto the rug in front of the still-chattering television.

  He has the presence of mind to keep low, crawling on his knees and elbows underneath the thick, billowing fumes. “Karen!” he calls. “Frankie!” but his voice is swallowed into the white noise of diligently licking flame. “Ach,” he chokes, meaning to utter their names.

  When he reaches the edge of the stairs he sees only flames and darkness above him. He puts his hands and knees on the bottom steps, but the heat pushes him back. He feels one of Frankie’s action figures underneath his palm, the melting plastic adhering to his skin, and he shakes it away as another bright burst of flame reaches out of Frankie’s bedroom for a moment. At the top of the stairs, through the curling fog he can see the figure of a child watching him grimly, hunched there, its face lit and flickering. Gene cries out, lunging into the heat, crawling his way up the stairs, to where the bedrooms are. He tries to call to them again, but instead, he vomits.

  There is another burst that covers the image that he thinks is a child. He can feel his hair and eyebrows shrinking and sizzling against his skin as the upstairs breathes out a concussion of sparks. He is aware that there are hot, floating bits of substance in the air, glowing orange and then winking out, turning to ash. For some reason he thinks of bees. The air thick with angry buzzing, and that is all he can hear as he slips, turning end over end down the stairs, the humming and his own voice, a long vowel wheeling and echoing as the house spins into a blur.

  And then he is lying on the grass. Red lights tick across his opened eyes in a steady, circling rhythm, and a woman, a paramedic, lifts her lips up from his. He draws in a long, desperate breath.

  “Shhh,” she says softly, and passes her hand along his eyes. “Don’t look,” she says.

  But he does. He sees, off to the side, the long black plastic sleeping bag, with a strand of Karen’s blond hair hanging out from the top. He sees the blackened, shriveled body of a child, curled into a fetal position. They place the corpse into the spread, zippered plastic opening of the body bag, and he can see the mouth, frozen, calcified, into an oval. A scream.

  Patrick Lane,

  Flabbergasted

  There had been several funerals of his old high school friends and Brandon hadn’t gone to any of them. He was aware that this was a problem, a problematic decision, and sure enough, afterward one of the girlfriends of the dead called him up and told him how rude she thought he was. “It really shocked me,” Rachel said. “Zachary was always a good friend to you and this just says something about you as a person that I wouldn’t have expected. I lost a lot of respect for you today,” she said.

  He didn’t know what to say. The truth was, he didn’t have any excuse. He hadn’t wanted to get dressed up, and he didn’t like going into churches and being preached at. He had never really liked rituals, period. But he couldn’t say this, and so instead he tried to tell her that he couldn’t get out of work.

  “Oh, come off it, Brandon,” Rachel said. They had dated briefly in ninth grade and ever after she had had little use for him. “Everybody can get out of work for a funeral,” she said. “Why don’t you just admit that you have turned into a complete shitheel? That would be the decent thing to do right now.”

  “Okay,” Brandon said. “I turned into a shitheel.”

  “Yes you did,” Rachel said. “What happened?” And then she hung up.

  Brandon probably could have argued with her, but he realized that it was not the kind of argument that you could win.

  What could he say? He had known a lot of dead people recently. But was that a legitimate complaint? Was it enough of an excuse to say that he simply felt worn out?

  To be honest, there were simply fewer and fewer things he felt like doing. That he could even bring himself to do. He’d stay up late playing video games on an aging PlayStation system he had hooked up to the television in the living room. He’d go to work at the grocery store. Sometimes he’d look at porn or read various message boards on the Internet. That was about the extent of it.

  It seemed like he hardly ever talked to anyone anymore. At the grocery store he was working in the produce department stacking pumpkins when a beaming older woman came up to him holding some Seckel pears in her cupped palms as if they were delicate eggs.

  “These are so adorable!” she exclaimed at him. “They are tiny little pears!”

  “Yes,” he said. “They are Seckel pears.”

  “Oh,” she said enthusiastically. “And are they ripe? Could I eat one right now if I wanted to?”

  “Well,” Brandon said. He was a bit taken aback by her excitement. “Actually, these could probably stand to get a little riper. If you put them in a sealed plastic bag with a couple of bananas, and keep them at room temperature, they should ripen up pretty quickly. They will have a yellowish hue when they’re ready to eat.”

  “Wonderful,” the woman exclaimed.
“You are really very knowledgeable and helpful.”

  “Thank you,” Brandon said, and the woman clutched her tiny pears.

  “No,” she said. “Thank you!”

  The depressing thing was, he realized later that this was one of the nicest conversations he’d had in quite a while.

  He had been working at the grocery store for a number of years by that point. “What are you now?” his first grade teacher, Mrs. Love-Denman, had asked him. “Twenty-five? Twenty-six?” They had abruptly come face-to-face in an aisle where he was stocking cans of soup and he couldn’t believe she recognized him. “You’re Brandon Fowler, aren’t you?” she said in that gentle, unnervingly sensual Southern accent. “Oh, my land! I can hardly believe it! Brandon Fowler—all grown up!” He guessed that he had known that she still existed, that she was still wandering around town, but nevertheless seeing her freaked him out a little. She must have been at least seventy years old but she was dressed like a much younger woman, wearing an ill-fitting, stiff blond wig—and he had no idea what to say to her. He supposed that he’d been rude for not talking to her. He did say “Hello,” actually. And then he’d just smiled tightly at her and nodded in a kind of dazed way.

  It was the sort of encounter that was really problematic and it took a long time to get over. At night, as they were closing, he paced slowly down the spice-and-cereal aisle pushing a wide dust mop, listening to music on his iPod, and trying not to think. In the parking lot he collected empty shopping carts, stacking them, inserting one into the next until he was propelling a kind of millipede of metal and wheels across the asphalt. Still not thinking. In the basement he lifted boxes of cabbages, crates of tangelos, rubber-banded bunches of beets and mustard greens and parsnips.

  In the employee-only bathroom, he stood at the urinal stall and aimed toward the zinc cake that rested near the drain. Above the porcelain-and-silver piping of the toilet, people had written on the wall in pencil and ink and Magic Marker: various things.

  His favorite piece of graffiti said: PATRICK LANE, FLABBERGASTED.

  This had been scrawled above the urinal for as long as Brandon could remember, and he occasionally wondered about Patrick Lane as he peed.

  Patrick Lane had apparently once been a grocery store employee, and Brandon liked to imagine that they might have become friends. He imagined that Patrick Lane was the sort of person who wrote odd, quirky, self-deprecating graffiti about himself, just for his own amusement. Perhaps Patrick Lane dreamed of becoming a cartoonist, or a singer-songwriter, or simply a perceptive and thoughtful wanderer in the mode of Sal Paradise in the Kerouac novel On the Road.

  Did people ever hitch rides in the boxcars of trains anymore? Brandon wondered.

  He liked to picture Patrick Lane, rambling across the country, leaving a record of his emotions—FLABBERGASTED—EXULTANT—INSULTED—DEVASTATED—and so forth, from bathroom to bathroom as he went.

  This idea really appealed to him, but then someone said: Oh, he’s that poor kid that killed himself. I just couldn’t bring myself to scrub his writing off the wall.

  Brandon was still living in the old house where he grew up, which he realized was probably a big part of the problem. His parents had been dead for two years, and his older sister, Jodee, was now living in Chicago with her boyfriend, Jake the Medical Resident.

  After their parents’ funeral, Brandon and Jodee had both agreed that the best thing to do was to sell the house and split the profits equally. The original plan was that Brandon would live in the house for a few months and fix things up a little to make it more presentable so they could sell it.

  But the house didn’t seem to want to be sold. Things that had never been wrong in the twenty years that the family had lived there together suddenly turned sour when the housing inspector came to check on the building.

  One problem was called “deterioration of the structural roof deck” and cost an enormous amount of money to get fixed.

  Other issues were smaller, and presumably should have been repairable by Brandon himself, with the help of a home fix-it book. These included improper wiring connections, bulges and crumbling spots in the drywall, some plumbing stuff, and so on—but much of this was more complicated than a person would think.

  “But you’re a smart guy,” Jodee had told him. “You can figure it out. I think it’s good for you to have a project to work on.”

  Brandon had spent some time at a couple of different colleges and then finally he had decided to take a while off and earn some money. He imagined that he would enjoy hanging around with some old high school friends, like Zachary Leven and Matty, and he was also kind of looking forward to having his mom do his laundry and so on.

  And actually, Brandon’s mom had thought it was a good idea. She thought that he still needed time to “find himself.” This was right before she and his dad died.

  Jodee was four years older, and she believed that their parents had been stricter when she was growing up.

  “But honestly, I’m glad that Mom and Dad were harder on me,” Jodee said once. “Because now I have a work ethic.”

  Then she hesitated. Brandon knew that she hadn’t meant to be insulting, exactly. Nevertheless, he realized that she couldn’t quite understand how it was possible that he was still living there, still fixing up the house, after almost five years.

  Of course, Brandon was aware that things had probably deteriorated even more than Jodee realized.

  Steadily, he had been relinquishing, withdrawing from portions of the house, and the actual living quarters had shrunk considerably.

  There was, for example, his parents’ bedroom upstairs, which he was naturally hesitant to enter, and Jodee’s old bedroom, where he had decided to store all of the stuff that he’d eventually sell at an estate or garage sale, such as small pieces of furniture, vintage-esque clothing, his father’s phonograph records and coin collection, his mother’s jewelry and shelves of mystery novels, the boxes of photographs of the trips that they had taken as a family, Disney World, the Grand Canyon, New York City, and so forth.

  There was the second-floor bathroom, which was now off-limits, following a weirdly disastrous attempt to replace the toilet’s ballcock assembly and flush valve.

  And then there were areas that he had started to clean or pack up but then had broken off for one reason or another.

  For example, in the basement “rec room” area, on the upper shelf of a closet, he’d come across a bunch of games that the family used to play when Brandon and Jodee were kids: Monopoly. Yahtzee. Battleship. Which he’d planned to get rid of.

  But then he opened the mildewy cardboard box of an ancient Scrabble game and an enormous number of cockroaches came scuttling out of it. Oh, my God! He chucked the game across the room and it broke open and all the little wooden tiles with letters printed on them scattered across the shag carpet.

  His mom used to love to play Scrabble. He had this image of the four of them sitting at the kitchen table with the game board in the middle. He could picture his mother counting out her score and teasing their father, laughing and flourishing her little dictionary. She had seemed really happy at the time. It was weird to think that none of them had guessed how things would eventually turn out.

  He knew it was childish, but after the incident with the cockroaches he had been unable to bring himself to pick up the scattered pieces of the game.

  He had somehow gotten the idea that he would bend over and discover that the Scrabble tiles had spelled out some kind of eerie message.

  When Brandon came home from work on the day that his parents died, he found a note that his mother had taped to the front door. It was a letter addressed to him, and he stood there on the stoop with his hand still on the side of the house, reading it.

  Dear Brandon,

  Your father and I have made a very difficult decision and I am writing to apologize for any pain that may be caused. Please, honey, don’t feel guilty or as if this is all your fault because there is really nothin
g you could have done. Just always remember the happy times we shared as a family. You were a wonderful son!

  All our love,

  Mom & Dad

  P.S. Please do not go up to our bedroom. Just call the police and tell them that you have found this note and they will come out to the house and help you take care of things.

  P.P.S. I already sent a letter to Jodee so she should get it today.

  This letter was one of the things that he tried not to think about too much, though sometimes little phrases from it would rise up for no reason to float on the surface of his consciousness.

  You were a wonderful son! He thought. You were a wonderful son! There were a lot of ways to take that.

  He often wondered about Jodee’s letter, and whether they had told her something that they hadn’t told him. Because she was older, or more responsible, or whatever. For example, had they explained to her in more detail about why they had killed themselves?

  But he and Jodee had never actually talked about the letters.

  Every once in a while, Jodee would call to check up on him and she would talk about how much she wanted to come back “home” for a visit, just to hang out and maybe even help with whatever finishing touches he was putting on the house. Give him that added “push” he seemed to need.

  “I miss you, Li’l Bro,” she said. “I can’t believe how long it’s been since we’ve seen each other.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I hope you don’t think I’ve abandoned you,” she said.

  “No, no,” he said. He gave a kind of chuckle, and for a moment he thought again about the letter she had received from their parents. Did it say something like: Jodee, please don’t abandon Brandon!

  “Abandon,” he said. “Whatever.”

  “Well, you know what I mean,” Jodee said. “We had a toxic childhood—I realize that—but there comes a time when we all have to move on.”