Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

  “These are awesome,” Joni said. “I love the ‘psychic underworld’ one.”

  She had a scrapbook full of stuff that she had come across at the library, and she showed it to him as if she had discovered that they shared the same hobby. As if they were stamps or coins or some such thing.

  “Oh, you have to see this one,” Joni said, and opened the scrapbook to show him a note written on powder-blue memo paper with pictures of kitties on it:

  Hi,

  I had cyber

  sex!! With

  a guy named

  eric! I love sex!!

  “I found this next to one of the computer terminals on the second floor,” Joni said. “Can you believe it? The handwriting looks like she’s about—what?—twelve?”

  To Joni, he guessed, it was something a bit like gossip. Mildly titillating. Something like a glimpse into a window across the street, or an overheard conversation at a restaurant. How weird people were! Her eyes got a kind of conspiratorial glint.

  “I love that it’s written in pink ink!” Joni said. “It’s probably one of those strawberry-scented markers!”

  “Yeah,” Critter said. “Ha ha.”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table together, and Joni had opened a forty-ounce bottle of beer, which she poured into two highball glasses. He had a bed in the guest room, and they had set up a crib for Hazel against one wall.

  He lifted the glass to his lips. How to explain that he was afraid? How to explain that it felt as if these notes were like the stories she used to tell him about ghostly hands that reached up to grasp your wrist when you weren’t expecting it, hands that tightened and wouldn’t let free?

  “What?” Joni said. “What are you thinking?”

  When Beth was killed, she was reading. It was around four on a Thursday afternoon, school was done and she was on her way to pick up Hazel at day care, hurrying down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. Walking and reading, which he always warned her about, her feet moving automatically beneath her as she flipped through a stack of quizzes that her students had taken in preparation for their sixth grade proficiency test.

  What is a hypothesis?

  What is the relationship between a food chain and a food web?

  What holds the solar system together?

  And then she’d taken a step out into the street without looking. That is what the police said. Stepped out into the street without looking both ways. The practice tests fanned out, flew up, fluttering, and were carried away, wafting into the gutters or caught in fences or flattened against the side of a building.

  He started to imagine this, and then he made a choice not to imagine it any longer.

  • • •

  He had always prided himself on being a steady sort of person. Not prone to anxiety. Stable. Even a little intimidating because of his size.

  People always assumed that he was called “Critter” because of how he looked. The mane of red-brown hair and heavy beard and eyebrows, which he’d had since his late teens, the bear-paw hands, broad chest, imposing gut. Very few people knew that his real name was Christopher, and that he had become “Critter” because as a child he’d had such a speech impediment that he had a hard time pronouncing his own name. “Chri’er,” he called himself. “Cridderfer,” he said, and even now he had a hard time pronouncing “Christopher.” Even now, at age twenty-nine, he stumbled over the syllables, there was still a slight lisp and sputter as he spoke his own name, “Chrithdopher Tremley,” even when he pronounced it slowly. He dreaded the various official encounters—banks and government offices, doctors, policemen, the man at the funeral home—which was always the worst time to try to force the hated name out of his mouth. It was a terrible, exposed sort of feeling.

  He was a very private person. Beth used to tease him; she thought it was funny, all the things that he felt uncomfortable about, all the stuff he thought of as personal. He disliked being barefoot, he hated to talk on cellphones when people could overhear him, he didn’t like to sit in the window of the el train, where people from the street could see him as he glided past. My poor shy man, Beth murmured, and he blushed when she kissed him in public.

  He would never, ever, have written a note for people to find lying around the library or the sidewalk. It would have seemed grotesque to him. Maybe that was what bothered him so much about these things that he kept coming across. He had the image of his own personal thoughts softly detaching and being carried off by the wind like dandelion seeds, floating through the city. That was one of the things that grief felt like, he thought. Astral traveling, he thought.

  And now, as if the notes themselves were not enough—

  Lately, he had begun to imagine that he saw notes that weren’t even there. They weren’t hallucinations. Not exactly. Just little misfires, he guessed.

  Like, for example, one day he and Hazel were walking to the grocery store to get a few things that Joni had listed for him, he was pushing Hazel’s stroller down the shady block and she was quiet, fingering her teething ring, and then he hesitated. Stiffened. He could see a piece of paper that had been stapled to the side of a tree.

  YOU SUCK! it said in big capital letters.

  And then when he got closer he realized that he was just imagining things. It actually said: YARD SALE!

  And then there was another time when he thought he saw something written in the mud outside of the library where Joni worked. He glanced down to the bare corner of the lawn where the grass had been worn off and it looked for a moment as if someone had printed something there. IM … WATCHIN … YVV. That’s what it looked like at first. And then when he looked closer he saw that it wasn’t words, after all. Not English words, at least. Some kind of Chinese characters? he thought. But no, it wasn’t that, either. It was just the tracks of birds, pigeons, probably. Their three-toed feet marking a line across the wet ground.

  He was surprised by the disappointment that settled over him. Nothing, he thought, and his throat tightened. Nothing, nothing.

  If the world was trying to send him a message, what was it?

  It was a little after midnight, and he sat there in his room in the dark, in the guest room in Joni’s apartment, staring out of the window, while against the opposite wall Hazel was asleep in her crib, her face leaned gently against the wooden bars.

  There was nothing to look at outside the window, but he kept looking. The sky was starless and purple-gray, and the silhouettes of tree boughs reached up into it. Through a gap in the trees and buildings, he could see a sliver of a busier street, the red taillights of cars sliding past and then disappearing.

  If you have a message for me, he thought, what is it?

  There were the strings of high wires that ran from the buildings and connected to poles and then to other buildings and then to poles again—you could hear how they hummed to themselves if you were near them and quiet; there were the gestures of tree branches and the smattering of fallen leaves running together down the middle of the street in a formation; there were the little whispery, wordless sounds Hazel made as she dreamed and stirred.

  You might be able to read such things, maybe. Someone might: not him.

  He wondered. He was not the man he had been anymore. He thought: You are still you, but changing fast.

  It seemed so obvious, once he thought it, but still the idea sent a little shudder through him. He would never be the same person. He would never be able to go back.

  He could imagine himself the way that he had once been just five or six months ago. What would he have thought, driving by down there on the street, glancing up to see a big bearded man sitting at the third-floor window of an apartment building. A grown man, almost thirty years old, peering out at the street, mumbling to himself.

  He would not have recognized himself, bent over a dollar bill that he’d spread out on the sill of the window, carefully writing with a pen.

  What a weirdo, he would have thought, as the man held his note out in the air, letting the wind ta
ke it from his fingers.

  Back then, he probably wouldn’t have even noticed. He wouldn’t have been looking up toward the windows, and he certainly wouldn’t have seen the dollar bill lift up in a gust of autumn wind, carried off with a few leaves and scraps.

  Off to join the others in their conversations—all the little messages that the world was bearing away.

  St. Dismas

  That summer, not long after he turned twenty-three, Pierce kidnapped his ex-girlfriend’s son, Jesse. Actually, Pierce thought, it wasn’t so much a kidnapping as it was a rescue—Jesse had come with him willingly enough—though there was also, Pierce had to admit, an element of sheer vindictiveness, a desire to wake her up and make her suffer. In any case, after a couple of weeks on the road with Jesse, Pierce had begun to realize that he had probably made a mistake.

  They had been traveling west without any real plan in mind, and they had arrived at last at Pierce’s father’s house in St. Dismas, Nebraska. St. Dismas was one of those old dried-up prairie towns, not even worthy of being called a “town,” not even a settlement anymore. There were a few empty old houses and sheds, and a gas station, long closed, and an abandoned grain elevator alongside the railroad tracks, and a few straggling cottonwood trees sending their snowy seeds through the empty streets. Beyond the little cluster of buildings were long stretches of fields—wheat, sunflowers, alfalfa—and a two-lane highway that led off toward the rest of the world.

  Pierce was dreaming of St. Dismas when he woke up that morning. He could picture the town as seen from above and the tangle of dirt roads that led away from it, and the highway. He was sleeping in his father’s old room, and Jesse was across the hall in the room that Pierce and his brother had once occupied when they were kids. Everything in the house was more or less as it had been since his father died, over a year before—couch and lamp and ashtray, dishes and canned goods in the cupboard and a refrigerator that he didn’t dare to open, dressers and pillows and blankets. A lot of dust and mildew.

  Pierce opened his eyes and he could hear Jesse talking to himself.

  —All right, he was saying. Thank you, thank you, you’re a great audience, he said, and Pierce knew that he was probably hopping around in front of the mirror, “capering,” as Pierce’s father would have said. Telling himself his little secret jokes, making faces and then laughing at the expressions he created. Pierce and Jesse had shared any number of motel rooms, and Pierce had often opened his eyes from a deep sleep to find Jesse deeply involved in one of these private performances.

  In general, Pierce thought, Jesse wasn’t a bad kid, and there were a lot of things that he actually really liked about him. He was an entertaining liar and a natural-born thief, which had proved useful, and he was always eager to please. It hadn’t taken any persuasion at all to get him to turn on his mom, to show where she’d hidden her money and her drugs, and then he’d cheerfully climbed into the car with Pierce and driven away.

  He was an impressive acrobat, too. He could walk on his hands just as naturally as if his palms were the soles of his feet, and he could climb up a tree and in through the window of a house with the ease of a monkey.

  But Pierce wasn’t sure what to do with him. Jesse had recently taken to calling him “Dad,” even though Pierce obviously wasn’t his father, Jesse was only twelve years younger than Pierce himself. But what could you do? His mother was a nasty piece of work, very neglectful, a temperamental drug addict with a meth lab in her basement, and Pierce assumed that the kid had never learned right from wrong or good from bad and probably didn’t have a clear concept of what the term “Dad” even meant.

  Pierce had been mixed up with Jesse’s mother for over a year. She had been a regular at the bar where Pierce had worked, and at first, honestly, he had been flattered by the attention of an older woman, he’d been impressed by her apathy and amorality, which had at the time seemed very worldly and cool. She had been a drug addict for as long as he’d known her, but in those last few months she’d somehow tipped over the line that separated an interesting, sexy druggie from a boring, nasty one. Honestly, it seemed like she’d become less and less human—her teeth had begun to fall out and she got these strange, measlelike bumps on her face that she couldn’t stop picking at, and the tendons on her neck stood out as if she were always straining to sing a high note. Though she was only twenty-seven, she had begun to look like a little old lady, and he pictured her as a zombie, a dead thing clambering out of a grave with a femur clenched in her teeth, her eyes glazed.

  It was almost a joke, by the end. When Pierce and Jesse would see her come stumbling out of the bedroom, hunched and moving her tongue around in her gap-toothed mouth in that slow, lizardy way, the two of them could barely keep from laughing. How repulsive she was, Pierce could hardly believe it, and at first it had made him feel happy to think that not only was he rescuing Jesse from her filthy household, but he was also shafting her at the same time. He loved imagining the tortuous inner debate she must have gone through, trying to decide whether to call the cops out to her house. To go into the police station, maybe. How enraged she must have been! The idea had tickled him.

  Still, he hadn’t really planned ahead—he certainly hadn’t imagined that Jesse would still be with him, his responsibility, all this time later.

  But what to do with him? How to dump him? He was a liability, he called attention to himself with his odd, hyperactive behavior, he made people look at them and ask questions. And remember their faces.

  Pierce rose up out of bed and padded down the hall. Jesse was there in his old bedroom, facing the full-length mirror that was attached to the door. He was saluting himself and marching in place with a look of fierce triumph, like a soldier tramping through the streets of a smoldering enemy town.

  Pierce paused and regarded him for a moment until he stopped moving and put his arms to his sides.

  —What’s up, Pierce said.

  —Nothing.

  —Well, you better think about getting packed up, Pierce said. We’re going to leave pretty soon.

  The boy looked at Pierce in that blank, fake-innocent way that he had, glancing sidelong at the mirror again, as if his reflection were an old pal he shared some little secret with. It had occurred to Pierce recently: Jesse was the kind of person who could betray his own mother.

  —Can we steal some stuff? he asked.

  Pierce gave him a stare.

  —It’s my house, Pierce said. You can’t really steal from your own house.

  —Hmm, he said, and he bent down and picked up a feathered Native American headdress, which Pierce guessed he must have dug out of a closet or a drawer, some old souvenir that Pierce’s father had once bought at some long-ago roadside attraction or another. The old room was still full of this kind of stuff from Pierce’s childhood, junk, Pierce thought, that his dad hadn’t ever bothered to throw away.

  —I guess I can keep this, then, Jesse said.

  He was a real pack rat, this kid, Pierce thought. Every motel room they stayed in, Jesse made up a collection of the free soaps and shampoos and lotions, and sometimes took along the television remote for good measure. And then there were the houses he and Pierce had broken into.

  There was that little place in Champaign-Urbana, the occupants away for the weekend, where Jesse had carefully combed through their CDs for stuff he liked: Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Shins, Young Jeezy. In another place in Wisconsin, a vacation house on a lake, he’d been crazy for the tackle box and the little plastic worms and frogs with hooks in them, the metal spinners with pieces of feather fluff attached, the weights and bobbers. Then there was that farmhouse outside Des Moines, where he’d been so enchanted by the collection of figurines on the shelf in the living room—little china elves and fairies and dwarves and goblins and such—that he hadn’t even seemed to notice the fact that the house was occupied. Pierce went into the bedroom, looking for things to steal, and was surprised to discover that there was a little old man asleep in the b
ed, his gaunt head sticking up out of the covers and his mouth open, drawing small breaths.

  Maybe I should kill him, Pierce thought, but he wasn’t quite ready for that kind of thing yet. He backed out, slowly, closing the door quietly behind him, and Jesse was busily packing the knickknacks into his already overstuffed duffel.

  —Let’s go, Pierce whispered. I thought I told you to check the bedroom. There’s people in here, you fuckin’ jag-off.

  —Wait a minute, Jesse said, in his high, nasal, rat-boy voice. I’m not finished! He spoke stubbornly, loudly, and Pierce couldn’t help but think, Jesus Christ, this kid is going to get me sent to prison.

  —Shh! Pierce said, but Jesse only looked at him, his eyes gleaming. He held up a little knickknack knight, holding its sword aloft.

  —This is so awesome! Jesse said. Can you believe this?

  Still, all that plunder they’d gathered was as nothing compared to the treasures he was finding in Pierce’s old bedroom. Jesse’s eyes were wide with excitement and greed. A shoebox full of plastic dinosaurs and farm animals, another of Matchbox cars, yet another with plastic robot dolls that Pierce and his brother had both loved. It was hard to believe that all of it was still here, Pierce thought, untouched for years, and of course he couldn’t help but feel kind of sad to see it all spread out once again in the open air.

  Back in the day, they had been a pretty nice little family—Pierce, his brother, and his father—and actually, when you thought about it, it didn’t make sense that they hadn’t turned out better. Pierce’s dad had been a housepainter by trade, which meant that he could arrange his schedule to be around whenever they needed him. He was always taking them to school in the morning, or picking them up after basketball practice, or making dinner so they could eat together, the three of them. He didn’t make any kind of big mistake that Pierce could remember, he didn’t do anything wrong, but the kind of familial attachment that you read about or see on TV, that didn’t stick. For whatever reason, they just didn’t love him that much. When he had died, Pierce and his brother had both gone on with their lives—Pierce’s brother was in Seattle, managing a restaurant, and Pierce himself had quit his job as a bartender to spend more time with Jesse’s mother and her meth lab in southern Michigan. It was impossible to take time off for a funeral, too expensive and too far away and so on.