Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

  It’s pretty surreal, I guess. I didn’t realize that such things were allowed, but apparently they are desperate enough for nicotine that someone (the orderly, smoking himself) has decided to take pity on them. Has sneaked them out the back door for a quick fix.

  This isn’t, after all, the fanciest neighborhood in the world, nor the nicest of emergency rooms. The women are all poor to working class, grim-faced, clearly having a bad day, and I can’t help but think of my mother—who wouldn’t go anywhere unless she could smoke. Had, in fact, once left a hospital in outrage because they refused to give her a “smoking room.”

  I stand up, gentlemanly, and nod as the women approach.

  “Hello, ladies,” I say. “Beautiful evening.”

  Having grown up kind of poor to working class myself, I can’t help but feel a kinship with them. “You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,” Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but perhaps true.

  There is, for example, this blond woman who reminds me of my mother’s side of the family—all sharp cheekbones and shoulder blades and sinewy muscle, a body built for hardscrabble living—and I smile companionably at her as she breathes smoke into the night air. She is gazing off toward some cheap apartment buildings in the distance, the vertical rows of identical balconies, and I stare out with her. Together we look up and see the moon.

  9

  As expected, she’s dead by the time I get there. By the time my plane touches down she’s being moved from the hospital to the funeral home, and her friend Mrs. Fowler calls me on my cellphone as I’m standing in line at the rental-car place.

  “Charles,” Mrs. Fowler says. “Would you go and sit down somewhere for me, honey? Sit down in a comfortable chair.” And then her voice breaks. “I have some terrible news.”

  About two hours later, I pull into the driveway of my mother’s house in my rented car and it still hasn’t sunk in.

  The death of a parent is one of those momentous occasions, one of the big events of your life, but what do you do, exactly? My father died when I was three, so I barely even remember it, and my ex-wife’s mother passed away during the early, happiest years of our marriage, and I hardly had to do anything at all; I just stood by looking sympathetic and supportive and people would occasionally nod at me or pat me on the shoulder.

  So: sinking in. I sit there in my car, idling in the driveway, and I try to remember exactly what went on at the funeral of my late ex-mother-in-law but my mind has gone completely blank. Here is the door of my mom’s house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.

  I left home when I was eighteen—more than twenty years have passed!—and though I came back dutifully every year the connections that held us together grew more threadbare as time went on.

  I can remember being about five or six and running around and around that lilac bush in the front yard, chased by Mother. Laughing, joyous, etc.

  I turn off the ignition in the rental car and after a minute I take out my cellphone and call Rain.

  I don’t know why. We seem to have connected, she seems like a very bright, sensitive, caring woman.

  “This is Rain,” she says. She is in the midst of directing a commercial, a public-service announcement about teen suicide, and her voice has an official snap to it.

  “I need some advice,” I say. “I’m not sure what to do.”

  “Charlie?” she says, and I love the way that she says my name, a matter-of-fact tenderness.

  “My mom’s dead,” I tell her.

  10

  A little past midnight, the television has been shut off and the children in the waiting room are huddled together in a row on the chairs, leaned up against one another, smallest to largest, sound asleep.

  How long are people expected to wait in these places? No one seems to know the answer, though as time has passed I’ve tried to engage some of my fellow waiters in conversation on the subject.

  “I’ve been waiting here for five hours,” I disclose, and people regard me with varying degrees of commiseration. “Does that seem normal?” I ask them. I don’t know why I do this: why, after all these years in Los Angeles, I still have the Nebraska-like urge to banter with strangers.

  I seem vaguely familiar to people, which is frequently a kind of advantage, particularly in Los Angeles. They are always asking: Do I know you from somewhere? And I shrug modestly. Probably they have recognized my voice from television commercials, or—especially if they have children—from one of several popular animated series such as Fuzzy Fieldmouse and Friends. One of my specialties is the earnest, disarmingly boyish voice. “I don’t know if I can do it,” Fuzzy Fieldmouse often says. “But I know I can try!” Anyone who watches children’s programming on public television has no doubt heard me utter this phrase.

  Which is not to say that this gives me any particular leverage in a situation such as this one. It’s not as if I can throw my weight around with Valencia: “Do you realize that I am the voice of Fuzzy Fieldmouse?” doesn’t exactly open too many doors. Though I have to admit that I am used to being a little better liked than I have been tonight. Valencia glances over at me once, but when I give her a little hopeful wave her face goes still and her gaze sweeps past. When I finally manage to catch her eye, she emanates a serene kind of inhospitality, like Antarctica or deep space.

  And so another hour has passed when a man comes out of the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL area to wake the children.

  “Little ones,” the man whispers, and I watch as, head by head, they lift their sleepy faces. “Do you want to go back and see Mommy?” the orderly says. “Your mommy wants to see you guys.”

  It’s kind of heartbreaking how delighted the poor kids are, how excited they are to see the mommy. Yes! Oh, yes! They beam, and the girl of about four actually does a little hopping bunny dance, and the orderly gives me an indulgent look. “Cute,” he says.

  It occurs to me at that moment that no one will stop me if I follow along behind them. I can just walk right through along with them, just shadow them past the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL sign, past the security guard who stands holding the door open for them, following along as if I might be some kind of guardian, an uncle, perhaps, a neighbor or family friend.

  Amazingly, no one says a word. I just line up behind the tiniest child and march right through; the security guard even smiles respectfully at me as if to acknowledge that, hey, I’m a good guy, to be watching over these children. I glance over my shoulder at Valencia, and she’s chatting with someone on the phone; she isn’t even looking.

  11

  Shortly before she falls out of the tree, I think Rain is getting ready to break up with me. We have been circling around that sort of conversation all evening long.

  She has been telling me about her husband. “Your ex-husband?” I say, and she says no, actually, they are still married—it’s just that he has been living in Japan for the past year and they’re going through a period of questioning. Deciding what to do, letting things drift, and so forth. “You know what I mean,” Rain says, and takes a long drink from her glass of Chardonnay.

  “Um,” I say, and consider. “Hmm,” I say. Did I know what she meant? Up until the moment that she told me about the husband, I’d thought things were going pretty well between us—so perhaps not.

  “I’m a little surprised,” I tell her. “About the husband thing.”

  She sighs. “I know,” she says. “I realize that I should have told you. But—you know. All this stuff with your mother and so on. You seemed like you were in a very fragile state.”

  “Fraj-ile,” I say, pronouncing it the way that she does—as if it might be a popular tourist destination in the Pacific, beautiful Fraj Isle, with its white sandy beaches and shark-filled coves.

  It’s the kind of conversation that reminds me of my own former marriag
e, which fell apart abruptly, perhaps similarly, with a series of emotional signals that I had completely failed to interpret.

  “Surely you realized how unhappy I’ve been for the past few years,” my ex-wife murmured, and I recall this as Rain tilts another few ounces of wine into her glass.

  12

  The rooms where the patients are being kept are not exactly the way they appear on television. Everything is very subdued, people huddled individually in their little warrens with the flimsy curtains pulled partway closed.

  I fall back as the children are led toward the cubicle where their mother is awaiting them—no one has stopped me or even seems to notice that I’m here, and it appears that actually once you make it past Valencia that’s pretty much all there is. Still, I’m feeling a bit wary. I slow my pace, let the children pitter-patter away. I try to peer surreptitiously into the little curtained roomlets, looking for Rain.

  I can’t help but think of the pens in an animal shelter, the stricken, doomy look of the strays as you pass by, that sense that it’s a bad idea to make eye contact or pause.

  I drift past several dreadfully intimate tableaus, trying to avert my eyes. Behind one curtain is the melancholy glare of a bleeding, tattooed hip-hop guy, emasculated by a cotton smock with a periwinkle pattern; behind another is a skeletal old person in an oxygen mask, male or female, whose gaze of biblical despair trails along beside me as I pass.

  “Hello,” I say, at last, to a woman with a clipboard—my heart is beating very fast at this point, I’m feeling as if I’m having a kind of panic attack; wouldn’t that be a laugh? “Hello,” I say, whispering exaggeratedly, as if the nurse were an usher at a matinee I’m interrupting. “I’m looking for a woman named Rain Welsh—”

  And then—as if I have been led directly to her curtained doorstep—there she is; I see her only a few yards away. She is sitting propped in her bed, wearing a neck brace and a metal halo that encircles her forehead, frozen there into an alert, attentive posture the way statues of empresses sit in their thrones.

  “Charlie?” she says, and she watches with a kind of dreamy abstraction as I come toward her. It’s not clear if she’s glad to see me, but I hold up her purse like a treat: Look what I brought for you!

  “Hey, sweetheart,” I say, still in my whispery voice. “How are you?”

  “Meh,” she says. It seems like it takes her a lot of effort to compose a sentence. “I don’t know. They’ve got me on pain meds, so I can’t really tell.”

  “But you’re okay,” I say encouragingly. “You’re not paralyzed or anything, right?” I say this and then I realize that it has been a fantasy hovering in the back of my mind: What if she’s paralyzed? Would I be courageous enough to stick with a wheelchair girl? Would I be amazingly, fiercely loyal, would she love me for it, marry me, etc.? I can feel this scenario passing again briefly through my future, and my smile stiffens.

  “Charlie,” she says. “What are you doing here? It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I couldn’t exactly leave you.”

  “Oh,” she says—her voice a dreamy, medicated sigh. “Oh, Charlie. I told them to tell you. You should just go home.”

  “Well,” I say, “I’m just trying to be, you know. A good guy.”

  “I appreciate that,” she says, “but—” and her brain seems to drift along down the stream for a ways before she lifts her head. “But honestly, I’ve been thinking. This is,” she says, “really not working out between us. I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while that …”

  She closes her eyes for a moment, five seconds, ten seconds, and when she opens them again it seems that she has lost her train of thought. She smiles up at me fondly, as if I’m an old dear friend she hasn’t seen in a long time. “Did I tell you, Charlie? My husband is flying back from Japan! I’m going to be in traction for a few weeks and he’s flying home to be with me.”

  I consider this for a moment. “Wow,” I say. “That’s wonderful,” I say.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says, and I watch as she closes her eyes, blissful as a sleepy child. “I wanted our last night together to be …”

  I wait for her to finish her sentence, but now she appears to be completely unconscious, and her expression slackens and sags. “Rain?” I say, and I adjust the blanket on her bed, straighten the wrinkles underneath her hand. For a moment, I imagine that I could just sit here and talk, the way Mrs. Fowler used to talk to my mother, my mother sitting there deafly, the two of them watching TV, Mrs. Fowler chatting away.

  I have this concept going around in my head. I would love to try to get it off my chest, but when I start to talk she makes a little sad face in her sleep. She moans lightly.

  At last, I set Rain’s purse down on the bed at her feet. Her cigarettes are still tucked in my pocket.

  13

  This is one of those things that you can never explain to anyone; that’s what I want to explain—one of those free-association moments with connections that dissolve when you start to try to put them into words.

  But I consider it for a moment, trying to map it out. Look: Here is a china knickknack on my mother’s coffee table, right next to her favorite ashtray. A shepherdess, I guess—a figurine with blond sausage curls and a low-cut bodice and petticoats, holding a crook, a staff, in one hand and carrying a lamb under her arm—a more mature Bo Peep, I suppose, and when I am eleven years old I will notice for the first time the way her porcelain neckline dips down to reveal the full slopes of her porcelain breasts. Years later, when I am nearing forty I will notice a woman in a hospital gown and slippers walking through the parking lot of an emergency room, holding her IV stand like the crook a shepherdess carries, and I will lean over my sleeping ex-girlfriend and try to explain how I found myself in a Mobius strip of memory, traveling in a figure eight out of the parking lot and cruising past the glimmering sexual fantasies of an eleven-year-old noticing the boobs on a porcelain figurine and then curving back again to find myself in my mother’s house, a few days after her funeral, hesitating as I’m about to drop the shepherdess into a plastic trash bag full of my mother’s other useless belongings.

  Alone in my mother’s house, I am ruthless with her possessions. I live in an apartment in Venice, California, and I don’t have enough room for my own stuff. For example, what should be done with an old cigar box full of buttons and beads that she has inexplicably kept? The collection of whimsical salt and pepper shakers? The cards and letters, the dresses wrapped in plastic in the closet, unfinished needlework, clippings from newspapers, her high school yearbooks, her grade school report cards, a doll she loved when she was two, all the accumulation she stuffed into drawers and boxes and the corners of closets? What can I do but throw it away? Though at last I spare the little shepherdess; I stick it in my pocket and eventually I’ll find a place for it on my own coffee table.

  The dogs, Lady and Peaches, are not so lucky. They hide from me most of the time that I am cleaning out the house. They sleep underneath my mother’s bed, crouching there as I haul bag after bag of junk out into the daylight, as I dismantle furniture and leave bare rooms in my wake. At last, almost finished, I tempt them out of their lair with a trail of luncheon meat that leads to a dog cage, and when I close the metal door behind them, they gaze out through the bars at me with a dull, grief-stricken stare. They are older dogs, and it seems cruel to take them to the pound, to try to find some new home for them after all the years they spent with my mother. Still, I don’t look at them in the face again. I do not stick around as the veterinarian “puts them to sleep,” as they euphemistically say, one after the other, with an injection of sodium pentobarbital. I drop the dogs off at the veterinarian’s office and drive away, back toward California, and, driving along the interstate, I realize that this is something I will probably never tell anyone, ever.

  Perhaps such things will accumulate more and more from now on, I think. More and more there will be things I can never explain to anyon
e. More and more I’ll find myself lost in parking lots at four in the morning, stepping through the rows upon rows, a long sea of vehicles spreading out beneath the canopy of halogen streetlights, and me with no idea whatsoever where my car might be. I’ll find myself pressing the teeny button on my car’s automatic anti-theft alarm system. “Where are you?” I will whisper to myself. “Where are you?” Until at last, in the distance, I will hear the car alarm begin to emit its melancholy, birdlike reply.

  Take This, Brother, May It Serve You Well

  Sitting in the bar of the Heathman Hotel in Portland, Oregon, early May. Here is Dave Deagle peering from the foggy window as a chill rain falls on the metal patio furniture outside and a skinny red-haired kid in a Beefeater costume, apparently the doorman, is opening a taxi and extending an umbrella to an alarmed-looking businesswoman.

  What’s up with the Beefeater costume? Dave Deagle wonders, and decides that he will allow himself two glasses of beer. He is lonely and so he decides it is okay to bestow a little indulgence upon himself. This is one of those situations, he thinks, fairly dire situations, in which the Deagle of the past, the former Deagle, is to be allowed a certain amount of leverage.

  The Deagle of the past is the Deagle who managed to become the victim of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine. It was a minor heart attack, but still it hurt quite badly and he collapsed to the sidewalk outside his building while having a cigarette with some secretaries. Totally humiliating. And of course it was scary—the proximity and approach of death, etc. He found himself in the hospital, where his bad habits were cataloged with grave disapproval. He was a lifelong smoker, for example, and a heavy drinker and a glutton. Along with his poor heart, his lungs were blackened; his liver was growing fatty; he was, in general, out of shape and “obese” (the word used by a very smug and judgmental prick of a doctor).