Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

  There was something that he should have understood that he hadn’t understood. That he still didn’t understand. Hello? Is anyone home?

  • • •

  He was sitting there in the living room of the house with the video-game controller, and the geometric shapes of Tetris were slowly floating past on the TV screen like protozoa under a microscope.

  “People get through things,” Jodee told him once. “People who have suffered a lot worse than we have. Like the Holocaust, for example. Or slavery. Or the Depression. I mean, you think about what a lot of people have endured, and you could almost be sort of thankful. You’ve just got to try harder.

  “Like me, for example. You know? That semester that Mom and Dad died, I could’ve taken the rest of the term off, or whatever, but I didn’t. And I was taking really hard classes! Chemistry. Calculus. But I just focused, and I ended up getting three A’s and a B plus. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

  “Mm-hm,” Brandon had said—and now, thinking of his sister’s report card, he cupped his palms over his forehead.

  As if to prove something to himself, he actually got some tools out—a pipe wrench and a hammer—and he had his home-repair book open and he read: “Remove the valve plunger and you’ll see one or two washers or O-rings …” and he hesitated, feeling vaguely shaky, standing there at the bottom of the stairs, looking up to where the closed doors lined the hallways.

  He just had to get himself together, he told himself. That was what Jodee always said. He was just a little lazy, that’s what Jodee said, lazy, unmotivated, and if only he applied himself a bit more—

  He could imagine that there was a way in which all the pieces came together and interlocked, some kind of lines that could be drawn from the funerals of his classmates to the plumbing problems in the house, which also connected the clutter of hair dryers in the abandoned beauty academy with his old grade-school teacher, which was associated with the time he and Zachary Leven had watched that zombie movie, which was linked to the scattered tiles of the Scrabble game and the graffiti in the grocery-store bathroom and the note that his parents had left him—it was a map, he thought, a net that cast itself outward, and if he only applied himself he would see how the weather would lift and he would get the house finished and the economy would shift again and he would go back to college and meet some new friends and the wars would come and go and he would move to a new place and maybe get married and he would tease his own children about how they never seemed to grasp cause and effect very well.

  He sat there, huddled underneath the hum of electrical equipment that made a halo around the sofa bed, but the house crept gently closer. He could sense the house, the way you sense someone leaning over you and watching while you’re sleeping. He could hear the rattle of the apple tree in the wind, the shifting sound of the floorboards upstairs, the red flutter of an emergency vehicle on a distant street. Outside the window, some streetlights winked off and on, hesitating.

  Then, with a sigh, the power shut down again. All across the city the light folded into itself, and the darkness spread out its arms.

  Stay Awake

  Zach and Amber’s baby was born with a rare condition that the doctors told them was called craniopagus parasiticus. This meant that their baby had two heads. Or—more properly—it meant that there had once been two babies, conjoined twins, but the second one had failed to develop completely. They were connected by the fused crowns of their skulls, and shared a small portion of the parietal lobes of their brains.

  The second twin, which was called the “parasitic” twin, had a head and a neck but didn’t really have a body. The neck stump below the head contained fragments of bone and vestiges of a heart and lungs, and there were tiny buds attached to the neck that were the beginnings of limbs.

  Nevertheless, the head of the second twin was perfectly formed, with a beautiful little face.

  Naturally, there was interest in the media, though they had tried to keep their situation as private as possible. Everything that was written felt upsetting, invasive, even cruel. It was reported that a number of world-class surgical specialists were being consulted, but that “there was little hope for survival.”

  The whole baby—the “host” baby, as it was termed—was named Rosalie, the newspapers informed their readers, and then they explained that “the parasitic head that is to be removed from Rosalie is capable of blinking and even smiling, but not of independent life.”

  One reporter called them to ask whether they had given the parasitic head a name, and Zach sat there at the kitchen table, hesitating. Across from him, Amber appeared to be watching her folded hands, her face blank.

  “No,” Zach said. “No, we have not.”

  Not long after this, he was driving home from the hospital.

  Should they have given the other head a name? he was wondering.

  This was a little after ten o’clock at night. It was snowing slowly, and the headlights of the cars shimmered in a way that struck him as particularly vivid. Even the white trail of steam from the steel plant seemed deliberate and painterly, but perhaps that was because he was so tired, perhaps the world was already half in dream.

  Amber was asleep back at the house. When he got home, they would lie together in the same bed for a few hours, and then he would get up and go to work. In the few months since the birth they had honed their routines, their daily schedules, their lives separate and divided into hours and half-hours and posted side by side on the refrigerator.

  In his dream, Zach pulled into the snow-boughed, pine-darkened driveway and pressed the button so that the automated garage door lifted gently open. Things seemed almost normal, almost like they were before Rosalie. His keys jingled as he unlocked the back door and stepped into the darkened kitchen, where the yellow tabby cat was sitting on the counter, blinking solemnly at him in the moonlight. He slipped off his shoes at the foot of the staircase and began to undress as he ascended, slipping off his shirt and unbuckling his belt and feeling his way down the hallway toward their room, where the bed was waiting with his wife curled up and warm on the right-hand side, and she would sit up and smile, squinting sleepily, tenderly, pulling a strand of her hair away from her lips.

  He was just about to bend down to kiss her when his car went off the road.

  He was only dreaming that he was home, he realized. He had fallen asleep while driving and he awakened with a start as the steering wheel lurched beneath his hands.

  His head jerked up just in time to see a sign fly up over the hood and past the windshield, and he watched in surprise as the red octagon with the word STOP printed on it lifted up and whisked away over his head like a balloon.

  Then the windshield smashed, and the car hit a tree, and the safety air bag punched him in the face as it expanded, blocking out his vision.

  In her bassinet, baby Rosalie was asleep, though the other head, the parasitic head, was apparently alert. Was it conscious? The other head seemed to sleep less than Rosalie did, and even late at night the nurses would find it blinking slowly and gazing serenely into the darkness, peacefully awake. The other head didn’t seem to be in pain, the way Rosalie often was. While Rosalie balled her fists and scrunched her face and screamed, the other head let its eyes drift along the ceiling, its mouth puckered and moving, as if nursing.

  Zach had often wondered what was going on inside their brains. Could they dream each other’s dreams, think each other’s thoughts? Could they see what the other one saw, the two pairs of eyes looking at the world both right side up and upside down?

  Or perhaps they weren’t aware of each other whatsoever. After all, they couldn’t see each other. They’d never looked in a mirror. To Zach, this was a terrible thought—that they had no idea that anything was wrong. It was awful to think that the babies both assumed that this was the way the world was supposed to be.

  Of course, he realized that this probably wasn’t an accurate way to think about things. He knew that it was not appropria
te to attempt to interpret the various expressions and glances that passed across the faces.

  “It’s a bad idea,” one young, friendly doctor told him. “You don’t want to get into a relationship with … Well. You don’t want to anthropomorphize—is that the right word?—anthropomorphize the deformity. If you see what I mean.”

  According to the doctors, the other head was probably blind and almost undoubtedly had very low levels of brain function. It had no thoughts or feelings.

  Zach woke up in a bed in the hospital. Despite the air bag, he had sustained multiple injuries to his neck, spine, arms, legs, and pelvis, and he was held in spinal traction, in a halo crown and vest. He could feel the titanium pins that held the halo ring to his head, fixed tight to his skull, a pressure just behind his ears. His legs, too, were in traction, but he was not as aware of the splints that held them immobilized. When he opened his eyes, the ceiling swam hazily above him.

  “You’re very fortunate,” a nurse whispered to him. He lay there, motionless, and he had an image of himself drifting upon a wide sea. The nurse was checking his blood pressure and intravenous tube. “Very lucky,” she murmured.

  He assumed that she meant that his injuries weren’t permanent, that he would walk again, that he wasn’t a quadriplegic. He had vague memories of conversations being held in the air above him, the voices of doctors undulating. Some function remained below the level of spinal injury, they’d told him. Early immobilization and treatment are the most important factors in achieving recovery, they said.

  “Am I …?” he said, and he thought he felt his fingers flex.

  “They tell me that you’re Baby Rosalie’s father,” the nurse said after a moment. Her face hovered briefly over him, her severe eyes and the pointed white nurse’s cap, and then she withdrew. Zach couldn’t turn his head far enough to maintain eye contact, so he wasn’t certain what her expression was like. No doubt there was a lot of gossip among the hospital staff about Rosalie. And there had been that short segment on a television news program that had focused—rather unsympathetically, he thought—on the fertility treatments that they’d undergone.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice parched. “Yes. That’s right. I’m Rosalie’s father.”

  “I’ve seen her,” the nurse said. “Them.” There was a pause and Zach flexed his fingers again. Something about her tone of voice disquieted him.

  “You … saw her?” he said. But the nurse was silent, busy with some task, and maybe she didn’t hear him. He could sense her presence, her movement at the periphery of his vision, the winged tip of her nurse’s hat. He didn’t know they still wore those.

  “You know,” the nurse said, after he had almost decided that she wasn’t going to answer him, “I’ve always believed that God puts every one of us on earth for a reason.”

  He cringed inwardly, but tried to smile. “Yes,” he said. Ever since Rosalie’s birth, people had been quoting such homilies to him, and he had gotten used to accepting them—gracefully, he hoped. He was not a particular fan of religion.

  “I think you’ve been blessed,” the nurse continued, in her oddly singsong voice. “That’s just my opinion. Some people might tell you otherwise.”

  Zach felt the woman’s hand brush lightly across the lower part of his abdomen. “Thank you for your kind thoughts,” he said. He wasn’t sure what else to say.

  He rolled his eyes downward and he could vaguely see the white shape of her uniform. There was a tube that had been inserted into him, a catheter. Tape had been applied to his skin below his navel and he felt her fingers smoothing it down.

  “Poor baby,” the nurse said softly, almost musically. “Poor baby.”

  Of course no one was to blame for Rosalie’s condition.

  Though he often felt guilty about it—it seemed as if, with some people, there was a kind of unspoken condemnation hovering in the air, his sister, Monica, for example, Monica and her two healthy children. He would be describing their struggles with conception, all the biological and scientific complexity, all the tests and methods—gamete intrafallopian transfer. Superovulation. Intracytoplasmic sperm injection. Gonadotropins. And then he would sense a very light film of judgment in her voice. What about adoption? Monica said. What about adopting a baby from China? They have such beautiful babies.

  “We want to have a baby of our own,” he said.

  Was that wrong? he wondered, after Rosalie was born. Were they being punished?

  When Zach woke again, Amber was sitting at his bedside. It was dark outside, and he could see the entire hospital room mirrored against the surface of the window. Here was Amber in the foreground, reading through a sheaf of papers. Here he was, in the bed nearby, posed like a statue in his various braces. Snow was falling through their translucent reflections.

  It had been, he guessed, several days since he and Amber had actually spoken. In the months since the baby’s birth, their paths seemed to cross less and less. He would sometimes come into a room and it would surprise him to find her there and she, in turn, would seem to stiffen, alert and wary as he entered. It was like finding a deer or some other sort of woodland creature grazing in the backyard.

  The two of them had been married for five years, and increasingly much of that time had been occupied by the issues of fertility. The process of conception, in all its arcane biological complexity. Long stretches of their married life together had been given over to such concerns—packets of materials arriving in the mail; hushed, endless waiting rooms and the subsequent conversations with condescending specialists and gently manipulative quacks; silent drives home afterward.

  He could often sense Amber brooding as he drove. She was a lawyer by training, and she was bothered by the unfairness of it—by the simple fact that so many women had babies without even trying. They hadn’t had to struggle, as she was; they hadn’t even had to ask. Sometimes, in a supermarket or on the street they would encounter a mother who was not taking proper care of her baby. The mother would be swearing at it, or carrying it in the bright sunlight without a bonnet, or holding it carelessly against her hip, ignoring it, letting its nose run as she gossiped with another mother. At such times, Zach would watch Amber’s eyes settle on the woman. It would seem that the very molecules of the air vibrated with Amber’s disapproval, with her intense dislike.

  Once they had heard on the radio a program about a woman who had drowned her two toddlers during some kind of postpartum depression and Amber’s hands had tightened against each other in her lap.

  “I’d like to see that woman tortured,” Amber had said quietly. “I’d like to see her burned alive.”

  Zach hadn’t said anything then, though the light in her eyes had disturbed him. They didn’t really argue about things, the way he imagined other couples did—though the ghosts of their disagreements would waft underneath their conversations, curling like the fingerlets of incense smoke that Amber would sometimes burn. RELAXATION, the incense said. GOOD FORTUNE, HAPPINESS.

  He looked up at her face from his hospital bed and he was reminded of the grim look she would get as she lit her little incense sticks and candles. She had never expected to have so much hardship in her life.

  Amber had looked up from her reading at last, and she’d noticed that his eyes were open. They regarded each other, and he could see her expression tighten. It felt as if her thoughts were withdrawing backward into the shadows so that he couldn’t see them.

  “You’re awake,” she said softly.

  For a moment, he expected that Amber was going to tell him that their baby had died. That was, of course, what would happen eventually. Sooner or later, some member of the hospital staff would emerge from a closed room to speak to them in a hushed voice: Mr. and Mrs. Dixon. They both knew this was coming. I’m so sorry to tell you—there was nothing to be done. The doctors had more or less assured them of this, even as they prepared for the surgeries. There had never been a successful separation.

  On the Internet, Zach had found one examp
le of a craniopagus parasiticus baby who had survived into childhood. This was the so-called Two-Headed Boy of Bengal, who was born in 1783 in the village of Mundul Gait. He had apparently lived for four years without any special medical treatment, and had purportedly died of a cobra bite, rather than anything relating to his condition.

  The skull of the Two-Headed Boy was still on display at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

  Zach would sit in front of the computer late at night after Rosalie was born, searching the Internet. He downloaded a photo of the Two-Headed Boy’s fused skull. He read various accounts.

  He read that the parents of the Two-Headed Boy were poor farmers who soon realized that they could earn money by exhibiting their child. In Calcutta, they would cover him with sheets to prevent people who hadn’t paid from glimpsing him.

  After the Two-Headed Boy died, he was buried near the Boopnorain River, outside of the city of Tumloch. The grave was later plundered by an agent of the British East India Company, who dissected the child’s decaying body and carried the fused skull away with him to England.

  Sometimes Zach would fall asleep in front of the computer and wake up with his forehead pressed against the keyboard.

  One morning after he’d been up nearly all night, he awoke and Amber was standing above him. “Zach,” she was saying, her hand against his shoulder, and when he lifted his head he could feel the tooth marks of the keyboard impressed into the skin above his eyes. “Zach,” Amber said, and she stared at the screen of his computer, at the photo of the Two-Headed Boy of Bengal’s skull in its glass museum case—