Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

  The cremation ashes arrived by parcel service a few weeks after his death, and one Sunday afternoon not long later, stoned and feeling kind of ceremonial, Pierce took them out on a boat and poured them into Lake Erie. He peered down at the surface of the lake as the ashes soaked up the dark-green water and slowly dissolved. That was it. There were a couple of exchanges of emails, but, as it turned out, neither Pierce nor his brother ever managed to get back to St. Dismas to clean out the house and put all their things to rest. There wasn’t anything of value in there, and even the property wasn’t worth the cost of the upkeep and yearly property taxes.

  So mostly their home was still here, just as they left it, a delinquent house that maybe the county owned now—Pierce didn’t know for sure. Maybe nobody owned it now, and it was just going to melt into rot and ruin and vanish into the soil.

  Out in the garage, Pierce found the shovel neatly stored among the tools where it had always been, and he took it out into the backyard to look for a place where possibly a hole could be dug. The garden was high with weeds, and flocks of grasshoppers flicked themselves ahead of him as he walked through the old plot. When they were growing up, Pierce’s father was proud of his tomato plants. They had pumpkins, zucchini, radishes, potatoes. None left, of course, but the soil was still soft enough to dig a hole into.

  • • •

  Jesse was still sitting on the floor of Pierce’s former bedroom, wearing that crown of Indian feathers, sifting through another box, and he didn’t even look up as Pierce stood there in the doorway.

  Jesse had found a little trunk under the bed, and Pierce guessed that the kid thought it was going to be something really special—pirate’s treasure, gold doubloons and necklaces of jewels; who knows what he imagined. Pierce could picture the greedy look that Jesse’s mother would get, hovering over her little Baggie full of clear, chunky meth crystals.

  But when Jesse opened his treasure chest, there were only blocks. Wooden building blocks—red rectangles, blue squares, green cylinders, orange triangles. Jesse picked one up out of the trunk and examined it. Smelled it. He began to sift through the wooden pieces, thinking that there was something better underneath.

  Pierce shifted a little. Of course, he knew what was in that little trunk, but he was surprised at how vividly a memory arranged itself in his mind.

  He had an affection for blocks as a kid—he didn’t know why. You have the soul of a carpenter, Pierce’s father told him once, but his father was wrong about that, Pierce thought, as he was with most things he imagined he knew about Pierce’s soul.

  In fact, there hadn’t been any particular artfulness or skill in the constructions Pierce made. That didn’t really matter to him. Still, standing there at the edge of the room, listening to the xylophone rustle of wood as Jesse sifted his way toward the bottom of the trunk, Pierce could picture the game he used to play with them.

  It was something to do with making a city, Pierce remembered. For a moment Pierce could distinctly recall the feeling of being alone in the center of this old room. Stacking blocks into skyscrapers. Clustering the skyscrapers into cities. How good it felt to be alone, stacking blocks. That’s what came to him again, a kind of weight solidifying in his chest: how much he had loved to be alone—to be outside of his own life, a giant, sentient cloud looming over his imaginary city, hovering above it. There was a certain kind of blank omniscience that felt like his true self, at last.

  But then his father stood in the doorway, peering in at him, and he looked up. The feeling flew up out of him like a startled pigeon.

  —What are you making? Pierce’s father asked. He was smiling a little, hopefully, imagining his son with the soul of a carpenter, his son the builder, the architect, but Pierce’s shoulders tightened and his eyes grew flat, that joy of aloneness ruined.

  —Nothing, Pierce said. His hand moved, as if innocently, and the skyscrapers came down easily, spilling over into a scattered pile of disordered shapes.

  —Oops, Pierce said.

  I should just kill him, Pierce thought. That would be the simplest thing, if I was smart, he thought. He imagined the gangster-type people you saw on TV; they probably would have put a bullet in the back of Jesse’s head right then, while he was kneeling there, pawing through the blocks. It would solve a lot of future complications.

  • • •

  Jesse must have heard the car start, because he came running out of the house just as Pierce was turning out of the driveway. Pierce had nearly forgotten the sort of dust plume that a car pulls up on those old dirt roads, and he could see Jesse in a cloud behind him, waving his arms.

  —Hey, Jesse was yelling. Dad! Pierce! Come back!

  It was the kind of devotion that Pierce’s father would have been moved by. The kind of devotion he had deserved. How Pierce’s father’s heart would have broken, to see one of his sons wailing with sorrow, tears streaming, calling after him as he drove down the driveway.

  There was about five miles of dirt road up ahead before Pierce got to two-lane blacktop, and then another twenty miles or so to the next town, another grain elevator tower rising up out of the prairie, with a little scattering of little houses around it, and then eventually the interstate and some cities and something. He could picture himself from above, from a distance. The landscape a series of geometric blocks. His car no bigger than a flea, and Jesse even smaller, running and shrinking, running and shrinking.

  Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow

  The baby dies and there is a little funeral. Okay, try to insert yourself into that moment. Stay calm, stay cool, stay sane. No one else is crying. Everyone probably thinks it is for the best. After all the tortuous debates—abortion or no abortion, adoption or no adoption, marriage or no marriage—now suddenly everything can go back to the way it was. Meg is an ex-mother and you are an ex-father and she can go to college like she’d planned before she got pregnant and you can do whatever it is that you’re going to do. That’s right.

  Through your sunglasses, you can look at Meg privately; you can observe the solemn congregation, your basketball buddies with their hands folded in front of their groins like they’re posing for a team photo, your mom with her jaw set, some of Meg’s relations. It’s hard not to imagine a guilty sense of relief rippling across all their faces. You can see it as they bow their heads, and you clasp your hands in front of you. “Of dust thou art,” the preacher intones, and Meg looks at you for a second, the kind of glazed look of someone who has just been startled awake, and then your younger brother, Dooley, who is all bloodshot and damp-faced, staring at you with his mouth quivering. You turn your head away and there are the waves of July heat flickering like holograms over the alfalfa fields beyond the cemetery.

  You can be rude if you want—no one will blame you. You can skip the gathering afterward, where the women will bring covered dishes as if for a picnic and the men will sit in the yard near the beer keg your dad has bought, and maybe one of your friends—Jerry, probably, the quiet, sensitive one—will be sent out to scout for you. What you’re doing is acceptable. You can drive the interstate with all the windows down, the music so loud it’s distorted in the speakers, going twenty miles over the speed limit, and no one will say you’re wrong. Everyone is thinking of you in your time of sorrow, everyone’s heart goes out to you.

  Where to now? People always say you have your whole life in front of you, but then again, doesn’t everybody? You know what they mean, of course: that now you are free, you can get out of town like everyone else your age with any brains, you’re not stuck anymore. That’s what they’re really saying, and you can appreciate it, though it takes some adjustment. For a while now, you’ve been getting used to another sort of life in your mind. In your imagination, you’ve been building houses, buying baby stuff, finding some sort of trade, like carpentry or plumbing. It was even beginning to seem like something you might even grow to like, though you know it wouldn’t have worked out. Take a look around: The town is full of dumb clods w
ho got their high school sweethearts pregnant. See how happy they are?

  You haven’t talked to Meg in a while. You risk seeming like an asshole in that regard, but what is there to say? The last time you saw each other, really, was when she was still in the hospital, right before the baby died.

  The baby was born with a severely malformed heart, and there was nothing they could do except make it comfortable for its brief time in the world. It was a boy, who had to be given a name for the birth certificate, and death certificate. While Meg was still sedated, you chose “Caleb,” because you thought it sounded cool, and sturdy, like a cowboy who could survive anyway when they told him he was going to die. But when you told Meg she looked at you with her high verbal SAT stare and said, “I wish you would have waited to ask me.” Caleb meant “dog” in Hebrew, she said, and you felt awful. The baby was in a little plastic case; you couldn’t even see what it looked like, really, with all the machinery and the white papery tube taped over its mouth.

  Meg wouldn’t go to see it. Him. She just stayed in her hospital bed with her face turned toward the wall, an IV dripping fluid into her arm, which was very gross, you thought. Her mother sat with her day and night, though when you would come in her mother left the room, trailing icy silence that echoed with a deeply godful prayer for you to die and suffer for a long time beforehand.

  Meg said nothing. “Hey, baby,” you said softly, and then were sorry. You should erase the word “baby” from your vocabulary, you dick, right along with “Caleb.” When you touched her, she flinched. She knew that you were the one who put this deformed child inside of her. Everything inside both of you was separating and pulling apart, and already you were both calculating ways to get away from each other as quickly as possible. The two of you stood there, side by side, and the tectonic plates of your lives began to shift and resettle, continents separating. This is one of your younger brother’s fascinations. Dooley is thirteen, and he likes to think about such stuff—he can tell you about the great landmass, Pangaea, which existed before the continents broke apart, and he can tell you the names of the insects and bacteria that will live long after mankind is extinct, and he can tell you of a time in the future when the sun will grow so hot that the earth will burn into a piece of charcoal. It puts things in perspective, Dooley says sometimes.

  When you come home the night of the funeral, Dooley is still waiting up. He sits on the sofa, watching a Saturday night horror movie in which some old actor is running through the future, screaming. “Soylent Green is people!” he cries.

  Dooley looks up, glazed, when you walk in. He stares at you, full of aching.

  “What are you watching,” you say quietly, and Dooley shrugs.

  “Nothing interesting,” he says, and stands awkwardly. “Everybody was wondering what happened to you,” he says, and gives you his grim eyes. He believes in propriety.

  Dooley is a homosexual. He hasn’t really admitted it, but you know that he will become a gay person: It is already in the cards. There has always been a hint of it in his demeanor, but now you are more or less certain. A few months ago, you happened to come into the bedroom the two of you shared. He thought he’d locked it, but you’d given an irritable shove and it opened; there he was, kneeling by the bed, with pictures of half-dressed men taped to the wall in front of him. “Get out! I’m getting dressed!” he’d cried, trying to move quickly, but it was too late. “Sorry,” you said, trying to pretend you’d seen nothing—though really you’d been noticing stuff for a while, so this came as no surprise. You’ve noticed the secret looks he gives your friends, the way he stiffened and backed away, panicked, when Jerry tried to wrestle playfully with him. You understood what Dooley’s stricken, frightened look meant: He had a hard-on, and he was afraid that someone would notice. You can’t help but think that life will be tough on him, unfairly tough, and that makes you sad. He’s got a better heart than most people.

  Like now. He feels the grief you should be feeling more keenly than you do, with the kind of dignity and self-possession you’ve never been able to manage. “You probably got out at about the right time,” he says. “It got ugly.”

  You nod thoughtfully. “How bad?” you ask, and he shrugs.

  “About medium,” he says. “They got into a fight and everybody left. Mom’s really pissed, though. She’s going to nail you bad when she sees you.”

  “Asleep?”

  “So far. Dad’s passed out in the garage on a lawn chair. He’s not going to wake up until morning. Did Jerry find you?”

  “No,” you say. “I was just out driving around.”

  “Well,” Dooley says, and purses his lips diplomatically, “he was out looking for you, so maybe you should call him or something. I don’t know, maybe you should stay over at his place, because Mom is … you know.” He clears his throat. “Did you go see Meg?” he says hopefully, and when you shake your head his mouth grows smaller, more judicious. “Well,” he says. Then his eyes widen in warning.

  And you turn. Your mother is standing in the doorway, observing the two of you, her nightgown spectrally pale and billowy in the dark.

  She’s taken something, some pill, and she puts her hand on the door frame for support. “Look who’s home,” she says.

  Brace yourself.

  She is an angry woman, your mother. There are reasons for that, reasons that you might feel more or less sympathetic toward, if you had time to think about it. But there isn’t time. There is only space enough to dodge what she is throwing at you—a cake of soap, which bounces harmlessly onto the sofa.

  “Do you think of anybody but yourself?” she says, as if it is a real question, as if she just wonders. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a person like you,” she says, and she’s gritting her teeth like she does when she’s trying to keep calm. “Do you realize that people were out hunting you? There were fifty people at this house and they came to pay their respects to that baby and to give you their condolences. But you didn’t even have the common decency to show up. You don’t think about others. All you think about is me, me, me.”

  “Listen,” you say. “I’m sorry! I was upset, that’s all.” Which is true—but her words get under your skin, and your face feels flushed. You can’t think of how to explain. “I just needed to get away,” you tell her. “I didn’t think it would matter that much. Why should anybody care what I do? I mean, my God, it was my baby, not theirs!”

  “Your baby!” she says, and you see that she will snap this up like a weapon, the way she is prone to do. “Let me tell you something, mister. That wasn’t your baby. That was Meg’s baby. All you did was have sex with a girl. That doesn’t make you a father by a long shot, I’ll tell you that right now. It doesn’t give you the right to play the prima donna. What do you suppose people think of a person who decides a baby’s funeral is a good time to put on a big show? How do you think they feel about such a person?”

  “They think such a person is an asshole,” you say. Why not? It’s true.

  “Exactly right,” she says. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  “I’m sorry,” you say, and she looks at you with such disdain that you lower your eyes. “I thought …” you say.

  “No you didn’t,” she says. “You didn’t think about anything. You just acted on a shitty little whim. That’s your problem, sweetheart—you don’t know what thinking is.”

  “I deserve that,” you say, hoping to disarm her, but you don’t.

  “Yes you do,” she said. “And probably worse than I can give you.”

  And then she is quiet, glaring at you, waiting for you to answer, though she knows she’s won. You are speechless. You are a big boy—six-one, 210 pounds—so you know that bawling won’t help, but it comes out of you anyway, a thin line of tears and snot, not sorrow, but frustration and hate and shame. “I can leave,” you say to her, and Dooley says, “Come on, come on,” placing himself between the two of you, because it can get worse—much worse. It has before.


  “I’ll be so glad when I can get out of this place,” you whisper.

  And she grimaces with disgust. “Is that supposed to be a threat?” she says. “You need to learn a new trick, sonny boy.”

  After that, you can’t go to sleep. You sit there with Dooley, who is silent in the waves of grimness you are emanating. The two of you sit side by side as Dooley flips slowly through the channels—music videos, home shopping networks, old black-and-white movies, static.

  “So,” you say after a while, “do you think I’m an asshole?”

  “No,” Dooley says. “Not really.” He looks at you sidelong, gauging your reaction. “You should call some people,” he says. “That’s what I would do. People will understand.” He stares at the screen thoughtfully, clicks forward. Women in sequined bathing suits are dancing. “I think you should call Meg, too.”

  “Yeah,” you say. “I know.”

  You wonder what is the worst thing that can happen to a person. How far from where you are is the very worst? You make some calls in the morning, sitting at the kitchen table where your mother can hear you apologize if she wants, though she pretends she isn’t paying attention. You go through the cards and call the people—your relatives, your parents’ friends, your coach. Your own friends can wait.

  “I just wanted to let you know,” you say. “I just wanted to say that I appreciated the card, and that I’m real sorry I wasn’t able to see you last night. I went out for a drive to clear my head and I kind of lost track of things and didn’t get back as soon as I should have. So I just wanted to apologize …”