Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

  Everyone is nice about it. Their voices are soft and considerate, and even their hard questions—How’s your family holding up? Have you spoken to Meg? What are your plans now?—you can gloss over pretty well.

  Dooley is in the living room on the sofa, watching cartoons with his blanket over his legs like a little kid, though he is also reading from the book he’s been carrying around all summer, which is A Brief History of Time by that famous crippled scientist, and he’s also raising his head occasionally to listen to you. Dooley is a whiz in this regard. He can juggle three or four things in his mind, though he often can hardly walk without tripping over himself.

  You keep talking to people, repeating some of the lines, until your mother mumbles, “Mr. Smooth,” under her breath, staring at you like you are a fake. And you have to wonder: Are you a fake? You don’t even know, do you? You can’t even hear yourself speaking anymore.

  Jerry calls to cuss you out. He got the worst of it, not the rest of them, who sat around and drank beer and had pie and coffee and munched from a relish tray surrounded by funeral flowers. Jerry was out looking for you.

  “What the hell, man?” Jerry says. He is the type of person who will always be your friend, for as long as you can stand to keep disappointing him. But the truth is, you’re already starting to imagine a world without Jerry, who, in his loyalty, has begun to seem like a moron. People like Jerry, or even Dooley, for that matter, seem to lose IQ points every time they turn their faithful eyes toward you. You feel ashamed for them.

  “Why didn’t you call me, man?” Jerry says now, plaintively. “Everybody was, like, worried and freaked out for you. Like, who knew what could have happened to you? You should have just told me—I would have covered for you or whatever.” He is silent for a moment, waiting for your apology, your explanation. “I mean, where did you go, man? I drove up to Meg’s place, I drove down Union Ave., I drove down the interstate …” And he wants to hear that he was close, that he missed you by inches, by moments. That’s all he wants, but for some reason you can’t even bring yourself to give him that.

  “I was just around,” you say, “just around and about,” you say, lightly enough that his quiet grows brittle with hurt. “Look,” you say, “I’m sorry. I apologize,” knowing that this probably wounds him more than anything. You can feel the edges of the friendship begin to crumble in the pause at the other end of the phone.

  Burn, bridge, burn.

  You have yet to call Meg. There are other people to call. The navy recruiter, for example. Imagine yourself aboard a ship, headed for other countries. Imagine yourself stupid and numb, yelled at by some abusive sarge, doing push-ups and marching while chanting stupid call-and-response rhymes. Try to insert yourself in that situation. It might not be so bad.

  There are college brochures to look at. There is a fishing boat in Alaska that you read about in the back of your father’s Outdoorsman magazine, six months and fifty thousand dollars, no healthy man turned away. There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty little whims. The man you will become is at your mercy.

  Already, one man you might have been is dead, and you should take some time to clear his cobwebbed bones from your mind. His house, his garden, his dull, loser job. His baby. And Meg—your former future wife—you should clear her out of your mind as well, before you speak to her, you should get rid of the wife you were already kissing good morning and fucking and loving into imagined decades. Wave good-bye to that alternate dimension, that other life. Dismiss that, and then call her and finish this—you’ll be fresh and new as a squeaky baby leaf, unfolding.

  But Fate intervenes. You hang up with Jerry and the minute the phone is down it rings. It’s her: She’s calling you, and you see Dooley lift above his cartoons and books; your mother freezes, like a deer in a forest before a bullet hits it.

  “It’s me,” Meg says when you say hello, and that’s all she needs to say.

  “Hi,” you say, and she clears her throat.

  “Are you okay?” she says. “I heard that you went missing last night and I was worried. I mean, I heard a lot of shit. You’re okay, aren’t you?”

  “Of course,” you say. “I just went for a drive. You know.”

  “Yes,” she says, and her thoughtful pause stings, needlelike, inside of you.

  “Do you want me to come over?” she says, and your heart pinches like a nerve. You shrug against the phone.

  “It doesn’t matter,” you say. “If you feel like it. It’s up to you.”

  She is silent: hurt, maybe. “Okay,” she says, coolly, uncertainly.

  Why do you even bother? What can you do that isn’t wrong?

  What? Your dad is awake now, arising from his lawn chair in the garage and perambulating through the house in stocking feet, his footpads arousing your mother to the various sorrows of her own life. Dooley lays his open book on the arm of the sofa.

  “Was that Meg?” Dooley asks, and you shrug at him.

  “Yeah,” you say, after a moment, and your mom and dad look at you, too. Your screwed-up family mobilizes their screwed-up attention.

  “She’s not coming to see you, Dooley,” you say, and your eyes manage to wither him back into his sunken spot on the sofa. Jesus Christ, why are you so mean? Why do you act like such a rotten person?

  Your mother could perhaps answer this for you but when she opens her mouth to speak your father says, “Leave him alone, Angie.” He mutters, shaking his head at her. “Let him be, will you?” Good old Dad.

  • • •

  You’re not a bad person. In fact, it was not so long ago that it seemed like you were the only one in your family who was doing anything right. People liked you in school, despite your weird family, you were good in sports—football, basketball, track—you got decent grades, you were dating a girl whose beauty and niceness were an honor to you and your family. Wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t it enough that you were willing to give your future to Meg and the baby? Didn’t that prove something?

  Maybe not. Maybe they can see something about you that you can’t, and that’s why you should be leaving. Go somewhere, someplace where—if you keep a low profile—people will assume that you are an all-right guy. An upstander, as Jerry says.

  You are thinking about these things when Meg’s car pulls into the driveway. You are standing on the porch, and in the background your parents are fighting again, and Dooley comes to the window from time to time, peering out at you with hopeful sorrow. You’ve put them behind you. Now you have only Meg to get through, and you’ll be on the other side.

  She’s still beautiful, even after everything, that round heart-face and deep eyes, the perfect, fleshy, short-girl ass that would of course have become fat if she had married you, the hint of sadness in her face that you’d loved as if it were your own sadness, your self-pity made honest and real, and it does break your heart to see her as she opens the door and climbs out. You might have grown old with her, but now, this might be the last time you see her. Okay, insert yourself calmly into the scene: the clunk of the car door shutting, her tennis shoes scrunching on the gravel driveway, her eyes hooking into you.

  “Hey,” she says, and the syllable hangs in the air. You walk across the grass to meet her, and you recall that once there had been a babble of easy conversation between you, schoolbooks and gossip and future plans, all meaningless.

  “Hey,” you say, and the two of you face each other. Oh, please: if only you could give her what she wants, if only you knew what it was. Then it would be over and you could go.

  “How are you doing?” you say.

  “Okay,” she says, and gives you a kind of smile—the kind of smile she might give Jerry, famously gullible Jerry, with his quotable dumb questions. You recall, out of nowhere, a Jerry-question the two of you used to laugh about: “Do fish freeze in the ice in the winter?” he’d asked, and she
knew how to smile at such things. It is probably true, as you’ve often thought, that girls are wiser than boys, and having her smile at you like that makes you feel sorry for everything all over again.

  “Sorry,” you say.

  “Don’t be,” she says. “I’m sick of people being sorry. I don’t even know how I feel about it anymore.”

  “I know,” you say, and you do understand, at least a little bit. “Me, neither.”

  “I just came over to see how you were doing,” she says. She shudders a little. “I was worried.”

  “Why?” you say. You try to touch her for a moment, and she lets you, she lets you put your hand on her arm, but you can see that she really doesn’t want you to; she moves back after a second: off-limits. She looks at you again, sighing heavily.

  “People were saying that you died last night, did you know that?” she says. She waits a minute, seeing that you didn’t know, then shrugs. “That’s what was going around. They said you killed yourself. You got drunk and drove into a tree. You know how it goes.”

  “Jesus,” you say. “Who told you that? That’s just sick! Who said that?”

  “Oh, come on,” she says, and flinches irritably. “I’m sure all your friends heard the story, and all my friends heard the story, and I’m sure they all passed it around among themselves. Like whispering down the lane. I mean, I don’t even care where it started. They can’t help themselves. It’s all one big TV show to people.”

  “Well,” you say. You let this sink in for a moment. What do people really think of you? “Well, I guess I’m still alive,” you say at last. “Are you glad?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. And that’s not what you want to hear. But she only shrugs, doesn’t look at you. “You know, the first thing I thought when I heard it was, like, ‘Good for him.’ I mean, I thought—at least you did something. Do you know what I mean? I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn’t you think so? Doesn’t it seem like the houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never—I never thought it would be this small, did you?” She wipes a hand over her nose, shutting her eyes tight. She looks small and fierce standing there, though everything in the neighborhood is quiet. A car passing in the distance is playing Top 40 music loudly, and sprinklers are ticking away on lawns, and an airplane is drawing a white line across the sky. She is not crying. “I’m glad you’re all right,” she says. She looks up at you as you stand stupidly. “I mean, you are, aren’t you? You aren’t going to kill yourself, are you?”

  “Not unless you want me to,” you say, and it’s only half a joke—you don’t know what the rest of it is. But she doesn’t answer anyway, only puffs out her cheeks in a tired sigh.

  “So,” she says at last, “what are you going to do now?”

  You notice, of course, that she doesn’t say “we.” That can’t be helped, though it also tends to make your reply pretty much meaningless. You wave your hand vaguely. “Haven’t decided yet,” you say, and she nods.

  What if you said, “We could still get married”? What if you said, “I still love you. We could have other kids.” There was a time, before Caleb died, when you could have said it. You prayed to God, actually. Dear God, you said, please don’t take my baby. I’m sorry that I ever bitched about Meg getting pregnant, I truly repent every negative thought I ever had, and I swear that I’ll be a good father and a good husband and I’ll be happy with my life. Please, God, you said, hunched outside the glass case of Caleb, his poor little monkey body drawing another breath, please, God, I made a mistake. I take it all back.

  But you can’t tell her this, either—your maudlin prayers would only hurt her, would only draw you both back to the baby’s eyes, opening, raking across the incomprehensible world. That empty, terrible look: She knows it, too, though she never went to look at him like you did. You can see it in her expression as she shifts from foot to foot. There will be no more marriage, no more babies.

  “Well,” you say, “I would have married you, you know. I would have been happy.”

  “I know,” she says. She is quietly thoughtful for a moment, but she is leaning away from you. You won’t touch her again, or kiss her, and it’s even hard to look her in the eye.

  “Do you think we’ll always be sort of in love with each other?” she says, and smiles at a sad thought she’s thinking. She doesn’t blame you, exactly, though she knows you should have been a different person. “Do you think we’ll be always connected?”

  You just shrug. “I don’t know,” you say. “I haven’t lived that long.”

  Dooley comes out after she leaves. He’s been watching, of course. He wants to know if something beautiful or tragic has happened, because he believes in beauty and tragedy. And though you don’t want him near you, you don’t have the heart to drive him away. At least he loves you—that’s something. Watching the car pull away, you think of him at the window, watching Jerry playing touch football with you. You think of him offering up a complicated, scientific answer to one of Jerry’s stupid questions, and Jerry widening his eyes in that earnest, good-natured way: “Whoa, you’re brother’s kind of a brainiac, isn’t he?” and Dooley glowing at him. Watching her car turn left at the stop sign, you imagine that you and Dooley could understand each other perfectly, if you wanted. “Get this,” you say, as he stands there expectantly behind you. “Rumor has it that I got drunk and drove myself into a tree last night. People are saying I killed myself.”

  “Geez,” he says.

  “People will talk,” you say, and he nods. The fag of the school, he already knows this.

  “But she wanted to know you were all right,” he says hopefully.

  “Yeah,” you say. “She was thinking of me.”

  Your tone of voice makes him silent, and you both listen. The argument indoors has mellowed; there are no voices. They’ve gone to separate rooms, probably, or they might even be making up. This happens sometimes: There is evidence that they were once wildly in love. They got married young, as young as you and Meg are, and maybe if they hadn’t had kids right away they would have been okay. You really don’t know.

  “They’ve quieted down,” you say, and he tilts his head doubtfully.

  “So far,” he says.

  But you wonder. If Caleb had lived, would Meg have hated him as much as your mom hates you? Would you have become an old drunk, like your dad? Does everything perpetuate itself?

  Who knows? You and Dooley are here now—there’s no turning back. You sit there together, and Dooley’s fingers pick at one another nervously, as if he’s trying to pluck words out of them.

  “Did you guys make up?” he asks in a small voice, and you give him a hard look.

  “What are you talking about?” you say, and you feel his big eyes turn on you—earnest, sad eyes, hoping for approval.

  “You could still get married,” he says. “You could have another baby.” It’s a squeak, a whisper, but of course it goes right through you like a thin arrow.

  “No,” you say. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “But …” he says. And then, terribly, he starts to cry. “It’s not fair,” he says, and you stand there, frozen in place, as he snuffles stiffly, as kids are riding their bicycles on the sidewalk and the fourteen-year-old girl next door is setting out her towel on the front yard to sunbathe. “I miss the baby,” Dooley tells you solemnly, wiping his eyes. “I know it sounds weird, but I would have liked to be an uncle. It would have been fun.” He clears his throat. “Just that,” he says, “it could be so different, that’s the weirdest thing.”

  “It could have been so different,” you repeat. What do you say to that? “Dooley,” you say. “Let me tell you something. Look at your books. Look at The Great History of Time, or whatever the fuck it is. One person doesn’t mean anything. There are how many people in the world? Five billion? Six billion? How long did you say it would take to count to a billion? You know, yo
u told me once. Like a hundred years or something? One baby doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, Dooley,” you say, and when he gives you that stricken, red-eyed gape, you have to go on. He has to know, doesn’t he? He’s not a child anymore.

  “Listen to me,” you say, and you give him a hard shake, holding him tight by the scruff of his shirt. “Does it ever occur to you that you need to start thinking about yourself, Dooley? Does it ever occur to you that you don’t fit in here, and you’ll never fit in here, and that if you are ever going to be happy you are going to have to stop worrying about how different things could be and get out of this rotten place? That’s what I’m going to do, and that’s what you should do, as soon as you can. Does that ever occur to you? Or are you a total moron?”

  Oh, horrible—to see him bawling like that, to feel him jerk away as you try to catch him. “Don’t touch me!” he cries. “You don’t know me! You don’t have any idea what would make me happy, you asshole, you asshole,” he cries. And you can hold him in your arms, you can restrain him. You can hug him, rocking.

  But there’s something in his eyes that frightens you.

  What if it’s more terrible than you think? What if Dooley knows more than you? What if you have to carry this dead baby with you forever? What if you have to linger with this for the rest of your life?

  That wouldn’t be fair, would it?

  Slowly We Open Our Eyes

  1

  O’Sullivan and his older brother, Smokey, have been driving in silence for a long while when the deer steps out of the darkness and into the middle of the road.

  For a second, it seems as if the world is paralyzed. They can see the deer with its hoof lifted, taking a delicate step into their path, dreamy as a sleepwalker. They can see the enormous skeletal bouquet of antlers as it turns to face them. They can see the truck’s headlights reflected on the blank black surface of its eye.