Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

  And in the meantime, he has no idea where he is. On his BlackBerry cellphone, he has a program with a Global Positioning System and satellite-guided maps, but it appears that the battery on the phone is dead. When he tries to turn it on, it plays a sweetly melancholic bar of notes, the sound of polite regret. Then it goes black.

  When he looks over his shoulder, the landscape is utterly unfamiliar. How far in the distance is the Heathman Hotel? In what direction? He has no clue.

  “This is a predicament,” says Deagle to Deagle, and he stands there, frowning, cursing his reliance on technology and his own poor sense of direction. He scopes the dark street for signs of a common pay phone. He can’t recall the last time he actually used one, and they may, in fact, be extinct—he’s not sure. Certainly there is no sign of one on this block—where the darkened buildings have the blank, unwelcoming faces of people on a subway train. No lights but the street lamps, spotlighting the tangled lines of rain.

  “Hello?” he calls, the way you might call into a canyon to hear your echo. Would it be possible, he wonders, to backtrack, to rediscover the bar—which, he suspects bitterly, is now closed, in any case? He looks over his shoulder.

  “Hello?” he calls again, and it is a bit startling—even alarming—when a female voice responds.

  “Hello,” the female voice says from somewhere in the darkness beyond. Casually—the way a shopkeeper will greet you when you enter his store.

  As much as he’s wished for it, the ghost of his wife has never appeared to him. He has never even, despite all the drinking and drugs and medications, been the victim of a hallucination—her face bending down to kiss his forehead? Shaking her head in disappointment? No, nothing—not the barest phantasm.

  So now he walks toward the sound of the voice with hopeful trepidation. It has occurred to him that the ghost of his wife might be rightfully pissed off at his behavior since her death.

  The figure appears at the mouth of an alleyway. It is a woman with long hair and a long raincoat that reaches almost to her ankles, like a gown. Spread open above her head is a large and ancient black umbrella.

  “Hey there, Drunk Man,” she says, in a clear, girlish voice—she might be nineteen or twenty. “What’re you looking for?” she says, and gives him a musing smile. “Whatever it is, you’re in the wrong neighborhood.”

  She doesn’t resemble Deagle’s late wife in any significant way. Still, there’s the lingering of suggestion, and he stumbles toward her as if he recognizes her.

  “I beg your pardon,” Deagle says. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cellphone that I could borrow, would you?”

  She lets out a little laugh, as if he’s told her a charming joke, and Deagle chuckles, too—though he’s not sure, exactly, what is funny. Still, it’s the first time all night that someone has been amused by something he’s said.

  “You’re soaking wet—do you know that?” she says. “How much have you had to drink tonight? A lot, I’ll bet.”

  “Do I know you from somewhere?” Deagle murmurs, and she cocks her head.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Do you?”

  The girl’s name, she says, is Chloe, and she has lived in this city for six years, and she has never heard of the Heathman Hotel.

  “It’s the one with the guy in front of it,” Deagle tries to explain. “He’s dressed in a costume? A Beefeater—you know, like the ones that watch the Tower of London?”

  “You realize that you’re in Portland, right?” she says. She smiles softly, puts her gentle, thin-fingered, skeletal hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you should come with me.”

  Were Deagle not so drunk, and so melancholy, this might give him pause. He peers uncertainly into the alley she has emerged from: a dim and narrow brick corridor, the walls decorated in brightly colored, uninterpretable graffiti. The rain spatters thickly against black plastic garbage bags and rusting Dumpsters. A puddle contains a discarded hypodermic needle and an oozing packet of fast-food mustard. Is that a doorway in the distance?

  “Do you want to get out of the rain, or not?” Chloe says, as Deagle tries to make the wobbly alley shadows come into focus.

  “I …” Deagle wavers. Then he sighs. He accepts the space she offers him under her umbrella, huddling close enough to her that he can smell her scent of dry grass and copper pennies. “You’re a good Samaritan,” he says.

  “Not really,” she says.

  He follows along unsteadily until they reach a doorway. He stumbles when they come to a stop and she reaches out to keep him from falling, a hand on the small of his back, and my God, it is startling, such a simple kindness—Deagle is quite moved.

  “Is this,” he says—indicating the filthy, rusted door she is wedging open—“is this your home? You’re very generous to invite me into your home.”

  “It’s my office,” she says.

  “Ah,” he says. “Are you a lawyer?”

  “No,” she says. She regards him. “Are you?”

  “Yes,” Deagle says. “Unbelievably.” And he pauses, realizing after a moment that this exchange is a bit non-sequitur, that his hold on the train of thought isn’t very firm. He gives his swimmy head a shake.

  “What is it that you do?” he inquires politely.

  “I’m a psychic,” Chloe says. “I also practice tarot and palmistry.” She pulls the umbrella closed with an athletic, javelin thrower’s thrust, and the metal door makes an exclamation as she pushes against it.

  “Sorry about the mess,” she says.

  The space that opens before them appears to be a small abandoned warehouse. It might, at one point, have held some shabby office cubicles; it might, at another point, have been a sweatshop of some kind. Now, though, it is more or less an indoor junkyard, piled with stacks of scrap metal, some ancient broken computers, fax machines, dot-matrix printers, old filing cabinets, loops of copper wire, rotting furniture.

  In the center, a fire is flickering in a metal barrel. Some wheeled office chairs are arranged around it, and Chloe gestures him forward.

  “Have a seat,” she says. “It’s warm and dry, at least,” she says, and Deagle wavers over a cardboard box filled with cobwebbed 3×5 floppy disks. It is the sort of place that he should describe in his notebook, he thinks, and he fingers his pockets uncertainly. He finds a damp packet of Marlboro Lights, and his dead BlackBerry, and a pen.

  “Do you have a phone in here?” Deagle says. “I’d like to call a taxi.”

  Chloe says nothing. She shakes the rain from her long hair and walks toward the firelight, which exudes translucent undulations of heat and greasy smoke.

  Deagle realizes then that there is another person in the room, a silhouette sitting in a chair near the burning barrel, and when the figure lifts its head Deagle sees that it is a male Caucasian, wiry and shirtless, sporting a kudzu of dreadlocked hair. Deagle’s heart sinks a little, he intuits that things may begin to go badly, and Chloe, psychic that she is, gives him a look as if to apologize.

  “Have a seat,” she says again, and the dreadlocked male leans forward and rests his eyes on Deagle. Deagle imagines that this cavemanlike being will probably use a blunt weapon when the time comes; he imagines that it will hurt to be bludgeoned.

  “What’s up?” the male says.

  Chloe says, “This is Boomer.”

  “How’re you doing, Customer?” says Boomer, and Deagle nods.

  “I’ve been better,” he says.

  “Haven’t we all,” says Boomer.

  Deagle guesses that shortly there will be a robbery, or other crime committed against his person, but he is still drunk enough that the thought disturbs him only vaguely, like that ticklish, heebiejeebie sensation in the small of the back, the monitory intuition that something is creeping up behind you. Is there a scientific word for that? Deagle wonders. Something like déjà vu? He considers writing this in his notebook, pats his pocket. But the notebook is not on his person. He feels a little zing of loss, a distant firework arching into the night
sky, but what can be done at this point?

  It’s better, perhaps, to just sit still. He folds his hands, as he sometimes does at the many arbitration tables he finds himself at—flying here and there across the country to arbitrate labor disputes for his clients, usually pointless, but it has made him an expert at folding his hands in a peaceable and significant way, and it has also allowed him to perfect a certain kind of measured and expectant breathing.

  Boomer regards his performance with some interest. The two of them sit there in silence for a time, while Chloe busies herself in some corridor of dismantled office furniture. Presently, Boomer withdraws a hand-rolled cigarette and lights it.

  “Are you here to get your fortune told?” Boomer asks. “Chloe, she’s pretty accurate, pretty accurate.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Deagle says, and stares at his hands. When you are a widower, you’re supposed to move your wedding band from the left ring finger to the right. This is etiquette, or something. An old tradition, and when Deagle had removed his own ring, about a year after she died, there was a crease in the flesh below his knuckle, a little belt that didn’t go away, though he massaged it and rubbed it with lotion; it seemed for a while that it would be more or less permanent. Now, however, the mark is gone.

  Deagle clears his throat. “Actually,” Deagle says, “I just got lost. Lost in Portland. That’s all.”

  “Word,” says Boomer. “Right on.”

  When Chloe appears at last, she is no longer wearing her raincoat or her boots. She has on a tasseled shawl, and a long, vaguely ethnic skirt, and her feet are bare. She does not wear a turban, Deagle is relieved to see, though her dark hair has a Gypsy-ish kink to it.

  “I thought we might have some of those cheap cellphones,” she says to Boomer. “Those pre-paid, no-contract ones, you remember? What happened to those?”

  “I dunno,” Boomer says. “Did we sell them?”

  “Maybe,” Chloe says, and then she shrugs her shoulders at Deagle regretfully. “Sorry,” she says. “I think you’re out of luck, Mr. Drunk Man,” and Deagle watches as she settles herself into Boomer’s lap, leaning back against him, that thin hand brushing along the length of his bare arm, an absently tender gesture.

  “You got fifty dollars?” she says to Deagle. “I’ll read your palm for you.”

  • • •

  Most people would not believe this, but once there were happier times, a territory of years in which Deagle was surprisingly satisfied. He didn’t even know it at the time, but there was an entire period in which it seemed he was going to have a nice life.

  He loved coming up behind his wife while she was washing dishes, and putting his hands underneath her shirt, to touch her warm back.

  He loved to ride in the car together, the ordinary drives to a cheap restaurant or a park, the four of them listening to children’s music, or speaking brightly about the things you talk to children about—his wife in the driver’s seat, and him beside her, the kids snug in their car seats—

  Or to find her in bed, absorbed in a book, her head bent and a small private smile on her face, marking some comment in the margin—a remark to the author? To a future reader? But now indecipherable, a message only to her missing self.

  Or the little basket of stones and shells and flotsam she had collected; they had spent hours walking along beaches and riverbeds and hiking trails, and he loved the sweet, dreamy attention she paid to these little objects—because they were “pretty,” or “interesting”—choosing one over the other, using some unfathomably subtle calculation—

  As mysterious as the part of himself that was chosen and loved by her, the part of himself that was there only when they were together.

  There is two hundred dollars left in his wallet, plus the credit cards, which, Deagle suspects, will mean more to them than they will to him. He can feel the warmth of the fire in the barrel as he passes the wallet to Boomer, and Boomer grins, showing a row of nice teeth, the orthodontia some long-ago parents once paid for: only one missing.

  In exchange, Boomer offers a thin glass tube, about the size and shape of a cigarette. He extends it, nobly, like a king presenting a sword to a knight. “Take this, brother, may it serve you well,” Boomer says, and Deagle places the tube to his lips, drawing smoke when Boomer holds a lighter to it, and he can feel it go branching through his lungs and brain. His heart quickens. The barrel fire glows orangely, its waves of heat like ripples in an old windowpane, and he leans back as Chloe and Boomer curl in their chair together, and he loves the way they touch each other, the way she puts her lips to his ear and the way his nail-bitten fingers absently roll the edge of her skirt up her thigh, their two heads bending over his billfold, examining its contents like children who have opened a gift.

  “Sweet,” his wife would say, and Deagle closes his eyes.

  Maybe there is time for Chloe to see what is left in his palm.

  Here it is. He holds it out to her.

  The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands.

  1

  Alone for years now, Daddy has settled into his rituals and routines. He wakes up a little before dawn, dresses in the dark: white running shoes and warm-up pants, a plain blue T-shirt. His dog fetches her own leash and stands there, waiting, holding it in her mouth.

  It’s a beautiful morning, middle of June. Birds. Lawns. Flowers. It’s the kind of pleasant upper-middle-class old suburb on the edge of the city where you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find a man like Daddy. But he has changed a lot over the years, has transformed himself into the sort of handsome older guy who jogs with his dog early on a Tuesday morning.

  Six A.M. and they go winding down the long hill that leads from the Ambleside apartment building, everything green and blooming, the dog, Angeline, trotting and gazing up at Daddy with her black Labrador sort of love, soft brown eyes and a coat the same shiny color as Daddy’s hair. His hair still doesn’t have much gray in it.

  In general, Daddy is in great shape for a man his age, broad of chest and flat of stomach, and even the smoking hasn’t done much noticeable damage. He doesn’t have the kind of wrinkles you’d expect from a fifty-four-year-old with a pack-a-day habit. His teeth are healthy, a little yellow but no cavities, none have fallen out. His eyes are still that devastating dark.

  Does he have a lady friend, someone to have sex with? Probably not, but he could, if he chose to pursue it.

  He prefers his solitude. Daddy uses his key card to buzz himself back into the quiet of the apartment building and none of his neighbors notice as he pads along the white fluorescent hallway, leashed Angeline panting demurely beside him.

  If he were to disappear, if police went from door to door in the Ambleside apartment building with his photograph his neighbors would shake their heads. I’ve never seen the guy; oh, once or twice, maybe, but rarely; can’t say I’ve ever spoken to the man

  And turns the key in the lock, opens and closes the door. Angeline goes to the kitchen and laps some water from her dish.

  Alone for years now, Daddy doesn’t usually think about what his apartment might look like to a stranger. The bare walls, the unemptied ashtrays. Easy chair facing a television in the middle of the undecorated living room, jar of spare change on the counter in the kitchen, mattress on the floor of the bedroom, the sheet and blanket braided together by Daddy’s restless feet as he sleeps.

  He tries not to think of how it would all look if he died, for example, and the building super had to unlock the apartment with his master key and they found him there on that mattress, floating on the surface like a fish belly-up in an aquarium, eyes and lips slightly parted and the ceiling fan turning and dirty ice cream bowl with a cigarette put out in it, and so on.

  He tries not to think of these kinds of things and yet it is true that such thoughts sometimes circle around in his head and he finds it difficult to fall asleep, he wakes up in the middle of the night gasping, sleep apnea, sometimes choking or crying out. Angeline, also startled, will rise up from
her curled position beside him on the mattress and begin to bark warnings at the dark opening of bedroom door.

  Usually he doesn’t remember his dreams but there was one last night in which he woke and his eyes were still closed and he could sense someone bending over him. A face was pulling close to his own face, the exhalation of breath touching his lips, feathery brush of lashes against his forehead. A face like someone from childhood, an adult who had once loved him, leaning over his bed at night to smell his hair.

  He was paralyzed. He had stopped breathing.

  He had stopped breathing for a moment and then he sat up abruptly with a glottal choking sound as if mucus were caught in his throat.

  The dream disappeared, and yet a little scrap of it hung above him,

  like a little ragged

  strip of cloth caught

  on a barbed-wire fence

  like the lyrics to an old song or story from childhood.

  The farm.

  The gold.

  The lily-white hands.

  He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  And now it is morning and Daddy is still troubled, still something nagging at him. He opens a can of dog food and spoons it into Angeline’s red dish; she waits with a dignified paw lifted, like a lady in olden days offering her gloved hand to be kissed.

  He makes coffee, opens up the newspaper and turns to the funny pages where he puzzles over Sudoku and brings a cigarette to his mouth. He looks at the space on his left hand where his finger used to be. Considers.

  2

  Years before, he was working as an independent contractor: carpentry, house-painting, cabinet installation, doing pretty well for himself. He owned his own business and even had a guy on the payroll, a buddy, Skully, who worked with him on most jobs.