Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

  “True,” Brandon said. He hesitated. There often came a point in the conversation when Jodee would offer to put him in touch with a grief therapist who had been very helpful to her.

  “When you grow up with people like Mom and Dad, they catch you up in a cycle,” Jodee said. “You can’t escape—that’s the problem.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. He considered. What did she mean by that?

  There were times when he would have liked to tell her that something really weird had been happening to him—something to do with his sense of time … or?

  But what could he say?

  He was sitting on the fold-out couch in the living room, on the edge of the bare wafer of sofa mattress with the sheets and blankets crumpled at his feet, and the TV stand right at the foot of the bed with the PlayStation wires and the console and cartridges—Tekken 3, Q*bert, Crypt Killer, that kind of stuff—and the dresser from his bedroom and the computer and basically everything from his room upstairs that he wanted cluttered in a kind of fort around the sofa bed. He hadn’t been upstairs to his bedroom in probably a long time.

  “Well, anyway,” Jodee said. “I know you’re busy.”

  He took off his socks and rubbed the itchy soles of his feet, which were being very slowly consumed by a fungus. He had tried all sorts of ointments but the fungus appeared to be indestructible.

  “Did I tell you about Zachary?” he said.

  In the background, through the telephone line, he could hear the deep, jocky voice of Jake the Medical Resident asking Jodee a question, and she hesitated—maybe gesturing or miming or mouthing, “IT’S BRAN! DON!” exaggeratedly so that Jake the Medical Resident could read her lips.

  “Zachary who?” she said. “Zachary Leven from high school?”

  “Yeah,” Brandon said. “Zachary Leven. He died, actually.”

  “Geez,” Jodee said. “You sure have lost a lot of people from your class. What was it? A car accident? I hope it wasn’t drugs.”

  “Um,” Brandon said. He thought about it. “You know—I’m not completely sure what it was. It definitely wasn’t a car wreck but …? Some kind of, like, illness? I hadn’t talked to him in a long time and I missed his funeral, so …”

  He found himself sitting there in a state of pause. It was totally unnerving, because surely he had heard how Zachary Leven had died. Or read it somewhere …? It reminded him of the day that his parents died, sitting there in the living room with the cop, a weight-lifter-looking guy named Mark Mitchell, who had a notepad he was writing in. Had he noticed anything out of the ordinary about them recently? Officer Mitchell asked. Were they having marital problems? Had they made any statements concerning feelings of despair, had they verbally expressed any concepts of life not being worth living, that sort of thing? Were they having financial difficulties? And Brandon had been unable to think of a single explanation. There was nothing unusual that he noticed, he said, and he sat there in the wingback chair, the cop on the sofa, the neat living room and the candy dish on the coffee table full of red and brown M&M’s that he had never seen anyone eat.

  He sat there remembering this, holding the phone against his face, and his eyes ran over the topography of the floor. It looked sort of like there was a kind of drain, a vortex around where the sofa bed was. A spiral of materials had begun to form an orbit: a spoon and empty yogurt container on the carpet, wasabi pea, Post-it note, throat lozenge, a sock in fetal position.

  “Well—anyways,” Jodee said at last, after the ellipses had trickled past for a while. She sighed in a gently emphatic way. “I don’t want to keep you,” she said. “I suppose I better let you get off the phone.”

  It had occurred to him that maybe something was going wrong with the world. Like global warming or an economic collapse or a coming plague. He could imagine that his parents had somehow intuited or found out about such an event, something so terrible that they couldn’t bear to live through it. But what? He couldn’t quite conceptualize such a catastrophe, though often he was aware of its presence, its force, something large and omnipotent hovering over not just himself and his house but also the neighborhood, the state, the country. Possibly the planet?

  He noticed, for example, that many of the stores were closing and remaining empty—the old Beatrice Academy of Beauty across from the high school had shut down, and through the cracked windows you could see the hair dryers all piled together in a jumble, like dead spacemen. Parking meters along the block had been beheaded and were now just bare pipes sticking up out of the sidewalk. There were also more vacant lots than there used to be when he was growing up. These were lots where there once were houses, houses that he used to pass by on his way to school as a kid, and it seemed that they just came and took the houses away when he hadn’t been paying attention. All that remained were patches of high grass and weeds, not even a foundation.

  He had mentioned this to Patty and Marci, the two head cashiers at work, but this didn’t seem to make an impression on them. “Brandon,” Patty said. “This city has been sliding downhill for so many years I barely notice it anymore.”

  “Hon, you have some writing on your arm,” Marci observed.

  In the bathroom in the basement of the grocery store, Brandon washed the pale underside of his forearm with a paper towel and some industrial liquid soap. But it seemed that he had written on himself with a permanent marker, so it wouldn’t come off very well. WTF …? he thought. He pulled his sleeve up and saw that the writing ran up the length of his arm from his wrist to his biceps; it was definitely his own handwriting.

  On the lower part of his palm:

  Intercerebral myiasis—

  maggot infestation of the brain—

  extremely rare but not unheard of.

  And then crawling up his wrist, very shaky handwriting:

  slab rat beg fed garble fast bed bad bag serflet

  Then, more neatly, on his forearm:

  Conclusion simply the place where you tired of thinking.

  And finally, on his biceps, little teeny letters:

  Flabbergasted. Flutterghosted. Flatterguessed. Flabergist. Fl

  Back when he was in high school, he had the habit of writing notes to himself on his own skin when he didn’t have a piece of paper handy. But he had no memory of writing any of this.

  Maybe he’d done it in his sleep?

  He tried not to let this concept freak him out. He rubbed at it until it had begun to fade a little and his skin felt kind of sore.

  He was aware that he might be having sleep issues. He might be addicted to the Internet and video games and maybe that was part of it. That was why he couldn’t seem to get the house cleaned up and that was why he kept missing important social-obligation-type things like funerals and that was why he was waking up in the middle of the night writing stuff on his hands and his arms and even his legs and so on which he couldn’t remember writing in the morning though there would sometimes be a Sharpie pen clutched in his fist.

  When he first started sleeping in the house alone he had found it comforting to have a little music playing when he tried to go to bed, or maybe the sound of the television, The Weather Channel, just the chatter of voices—but soon it was the video games and the computer as well, multiple programs stacked on top of one another, and before long there was a semicircle of electronic devices around the sofa bed where he slept. It was as if they were projecting a small force field around him. It wasn’t a powerful force field, but it was at least enough to allow him to rest for a little while.

  There were electrical outages in the city and then he couldn’t sleep at all. He would sit there alone in the dark, clutching his flashlight. He was certain he could hear sounds in the house. In the ruined bathroom, his parents’ bedroom, in the basement, where he imagined the scuttle of cockroaches or Scrabble tiles—

  And he’d once actually fled out the back door in his underwear with his flashlight and sleeping bag in his arms and tried to sleep on the lawn under the old apple tree. But even
that—the beloved apple tree of their childhood, “Jonathan the Apple Tree,” their mother had called it—even that behaved strangely. Its leaves would get a white powdery substance on them and then they curled up and fell off, and the apples themselves were tiny and wrinkled and deformed in a way that made them look like little ugly heads, and as he sat in the backyard on the sleeping bag he heard one drop.

  … tunk?

  A sinister little questioning sound.

  And then, after a long silence, another one—“tunk?”—and he imagined he saw the whispery movement as the shrunken apple rolled through the unmowed grass.

  You could say that his problem had started with the death of his parents … or the death of his friends—you could say that it was just a stage of grief, maybe—but he worried that it was actually much bigger than that, it could be traced in concentric circles rippling back into the past who knew how long?

  There was that time back in ninth grade, for example, when he and Zachary Leven ate some mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms, and it had been a very unpleasant sort of psychedelic drug trip. At first there had been the mystical hilarity and talking trees and couches “breathing,” etc.—but then it had become increasingly anxious, the world had begun to seem as if it wanted to communicate a dreadful, dire message, uncomfortable words and letters began to emerge—for example, the long vine from his mom’s pothos plant in the kitchen was curling down in a way that appeared to be unreadable cursive writing, possibly Arabic, and the shingles on the neighbor’s roof seemed to be arranged so that they formed H’s and I’s in a pattern: H I H I H I H I H I which freaked him quite badly.

  By that time Brandon’s parents had found out and they drove him and Zachary Leven to the hospital. Both he and Zachary Leven had gotten paranoid and begun to imagine that their brains were going to turn off. Like suddenly they would become vegetables. And both he and Zachary Leven were crying and his mom said, I am so ashamed of you, I hope you remember this when I’m dead, after all I’ve done for you this is how you repay me, I hope you think about this moment when I am gone, and his father had looked pained and said, Oh, Cathy, that kind of talk isn’t necessary, and the doctor gazed at them and said: “I am going to prescribe some clonazepam—that should do the trick,” and his mother said, with enthusiastic disgust: “They are both of them throwing up and they both have diarrhea!”

  And though it had all been fine afterward, and his parents, even his mother, had forgiven him, and he had gone on to college, etc.—even still there was occasionally a lingering memory of that terrible message the world had been trying to telegraph. Something had happened, he thought, something had happened, something subtle but actually deadly had been implanted and was possibly consuming his brain the way the fungus was consuming his feet.

  On the Internet he read about Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD). Could this condition have been caused by the mushrooms? And at the library he checked out the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and he tried to read up on HPPD, but afterward that didn’t seem quite right, either.

  “Halos around objects,” he read. “Colors of objects changing while looking at them. Illusion that objects are moving.”

  He lifted his head and stared at the discarded white sock on the floor, which wasn’t breathing, he was pretty sure.

  “Aeropsia,” he read. “Floaters.”

  What if it was worse than just the lingering effects of a bad trip? What if something was really wrong? Maybe it was just Ohio, or just America, or just Homo sapiens as a species, but it might also be that the world, the entirety of Planet Earth was basically fucked.

  There were long stretches when time seemed to have stopped working. The weather had stopped acting like it had when he was a child, with white Christmases and April showers and May flowers and so forth. Much of the time you would look outside and it would be gray and foggy, and you couldn’t tell whether it was early morning or dusk. More and more frequently, the power would go out in his part of town and he would wake up and the clocks in the house would all say something different.

  On The Weather Channel it said: “A large swath of dead clouds covered many areas of the Tennessee Valley to the Northeast yesterday.”

  His father used to enjoy watching The Weather Channel. His father liked to sit in his recliner and doze in front of it, letting the gentle hysteria of distant blizzards and floods and tornadoes and hurricanes wash over him, and Brandon remembered how Zachary Leven used to joke about it. “Uh-oh, here comes the end of the world,” Zachary used to say as they passed by Brandon’s sleeping father on their way to the basement to play video games.

  What would Zachary Leven say now? he wondered. He could imagine Zachary and Rachel stopping by for a visit, the two of them exchanging glances.

  They might be like, “Um, how come you nailed your mom and dad’s bedroom door shut?”

  They might turn on the light in the second-floor bathroom and let out a cry of surprised disgust. “Holy shit! What is that greenish shit? Mold?”

  They might say, “You need to get out of this house, man!” They might say: “You need to get out of this town! You need to get out of Ohio! You need to get out of this country! Hurry! Before it’s too late!”

  He was thinking of this again as he was on bag-boy duty that afternoon at the grocery store, standing at the end of Marci’s checkout aisle—Hurry! Before it’s too late! he thought, but he only stood there staring as various items came trembling down the conveyor, boxes of tea, a square of tofu, a can of organic chicken broth. They reached the end of the conveyor and began to cluster together, shoaling into a kind of tombolo at the end of the counter.

  “Paper or plastic?” Brandon said, unfolding a bag, and he lifted up from his daze to see that it was the lady who loved Seckel pears—he recognized her at once, though it had been a while since he had seen her. She looked terrible. The skin around her mouth was raw and chapped, and glistened with some kind of ointment she had rubbed on it. Her eyes were large and sorrowful and appeared to be made up primarily of water.

  “Can I have both plastic and paper?” she said.

  “Of course,” Brandon said.

  “Thank you—you’re very kind,” she said, and she brushed her hand through her hair as she bent to write a check, and a few strands came out and remained attached to her fingernails like trailing moss. Beyond her, Brandon could see the customers moving along behind their shopping carts, and he thought about this old zombie movie that he and Zachary Leven had watched together—they had loved getting stoned and watching horror movies—and there was the one about the undead overrunning a shopping mall. “A trenchant critique of capitalism,” Zachary had said, and of course that was one way to look at it. Another way was just that the undead were pissed off and bitter. “Youth is wasted on the young,” his father used to say. “Life is wasted on the living.” His dad thought this was hilarious.

  More and more, he thought, his days at the grocery store were like being in a zombie movie except that here the undead appeared to be too depressed to be cannibals. You didn’t even realize, most of the time, that they were dead, and he had the worrisome thought that he would look up and there would be his mom or Zachary Leven or there would be Patrick Lane, gray-skinned and surprised-looking, standing at the end of an empty checkout aisle, his hands moving slowly as if he were packing an unseen grocery bag with air.

  It had occurred to him that if the undead don’t realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

  But that wasn’t it, either. Of course he was still alive! In the employee bathroom he pressed a ballpoint pen against the palm of his hand and naturally he could feel the pen poking against his skin, of course he still had feeling. Hello? he wrote. Anyone home?

  That was what his mom used to ask him. He would space out, he wouldn’t hear what she said to him as they sat there at dinner eating and he’d be gazing down at his plate and she
’d touch her finger to his shoulder.

  “Hello, Brandon? Is anyone home? Do you hear me talking to you?” And she’d look over at his father in her very ironic, conspiratorial way. “I think there’s something missing there,” she said. Referring to Brandon.

  The memory made him shift uncomfortably. He took off his apron and hung it up in his locker and ran his time card through the ancient punch clock and smiled at Marci who was looking at him curiously and then he was walking home, walking home from work, taking the same route he had taken for years now so that he hardly saw the houses and trees and the unscrolling sidewalk beneath his feet.

  “You know,” his mother had once said to his father, “it worries me—he never really seems to grasp cause and effect very well,” she said. Brandon was sitting right there watching TV but she spoke as if he weren’t, and his father gave him a mournful expression.

  “Now, Cathy,” his father said, “some people just don’t think in that way.”

  And it occurred to Brandon as he stood once again in the doorway of his house that perhaps he didn’t understand cause and effect—maybe that was the problem. He kept trying to put together a sense of what had happened to him, and it refused to cohere.

  “A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.” That was one of his father’s sayings, and this, too, was a kind of joke, a kind of sad joke between his father and his mother; they had both laughed in that way that he had since realized was more than just laughing, though even now, Brandon didn’t understand it.

  Is anybody home? he thought, and he could remember the day that his parents had died, he walked back from the grocery store like he always did and there was that note taped to the door and he had come into the house and stood in the foyer.

  “Hello?” he said uncertainly, the note held loosely in his hand. Obviously it seemed like a suicide note but he felt almost certain that it wasn’t. Of course not.

  “Mom?” he said. “Dad?” and he was shaking a little as he picked up the phone in the front hallway and called the police like the note told him to do and he knew that he should go up there because there was a sound up there, a thud, as if someone had jumped down on the floor and he was aware that someone else probably would have gone up, gone running up, but he just stood there, his feet gesturing agitatedly as if they were going to start walking.