by Dan Chaon
“Hello, Troy,” she says, coolly and cordially, and Troy pauses several yards in front of her. Little Man is already inside the house, probably already perched in front of the television, setting up the Nintindo game that they’d decided to leave at Grandmom’s house so he had something to do while he was there. Troy hesitates; he had meant to say good-bye to Little Man before he went off to work, but now it’s awkward. Judy makes a point of not inviting him into the house.
And so now he just stands there for a moment. “So,” he says, as Judy regards him. “Well,” he says. “I guess I’ll just pick him up in the morning as usual. Around ten or so.” He makes a vague gesture with his open palms, but Judy’s expression doesn’t change.
“Yes,” she says. “That sounds fine. I’ll expect you.”
“Okay,” he says, and tries to smile. He clears his throat. Of all the things that he didn’t expect from the world, this one perhaps surprises him the most. He has never been prepared to be hated, and maybe this is why he keeps coming back, this is why he smiles at her and offers Loomis up to her three times a week. He can’t believe that she’ll continue to dislike him forever, and standing there he wants to tell her about his plans for the future, about Commercial Art. He wants to say that he’s changing his life. He wants to say that he had a terrible dream, he wants to tell her about Loomis at the top of the tree, getting ready to fall.
But he doesn’t. He only clears his throat, politely, hoping that she’s disliking him a little less than she did the last time he was standing in front of her. “Loomis!” he calls, vaguely, into the quiet of the house behind her. “I’m headed out, buddy! I’ll see you in the morning!”
He shrugs as she stands there, her arms still folded.
“Okay, then,” he murmurs.
7
1994
Jonah was better off in Chicago, he thought, better off than he would have been in South Dakota. This was what he told Steve and Holiday, when they had him over for dinner. “Much better off,” he said, and he meant it, even though he had been lonely much of the time since he’d arrived. He did not want them to know that he didn’t make friends easily, that he had spent much of the past year alone with his own mind, thinking. He didn’t want to say that his life in the city so far had been more or less a void.
What did he do with himself? Well . . . He went to the movies a lot, sat at the very rear so he could feel the wall against his back. He watched many movies, film after unmemorable film, tracing the lines on his palm with his fingernail while various banalities played on the screen. He reheated carryout Chinese food in the kitchenette microwave, read various novels—Dickens, Tolstoy, Camus—while spooning up rubbery black mushrooms and tofu from his hot-and-sour soup; he sometimes drank beer at a bar where an extremely intoxicated woman once leaned herself against him and whispered, “Tell me something about yourself.” He soaked in the small, efficient bathtub, curled into a space a little larger than a child’s coffin—his knees up, filling and refilling it until the hot water was depleted.
He knew this was not what Steve and Holiday wanted to hear. They were a nice young couple, about his own age, spacey with bliss. Holiday had just had a baby, and they were both very excited and proud. Even though they’d had to drop out of college (they were both trying to take classes part-time); even though they seemingly had no more prospects for the future than Jonah did (Steve worked as a waiter at Bruzzone’s, where Jonah also worked, but he wanted to be a filmmaker); even though it seemed to Jonah that having a baby would make their lives stressful and difficult—their faces shone with optimism.
So Jonah tried to think of positive things, too. There were positive things he could talk about, after all, and he had them all listed in his head as he got off the el train and walked the several blocks to Steve and Holiday’s apartment. Good things, he thought. He liked his concise little apartment, and his job as a line cook at Bruzzone’s. Boring, but okay. He could mention that he’d begun to take college classes—he registered for them at least, though he didn’t always make it very far into the semester before he quit going—Composition 101, The Philosophy of Science, Introduction to Communication Studies. He could legitimately say that he’d sooner or later have a college degree; an associate’s degree, at least, anyway. “It’s a start,” he could say, and shrug. He could tell them that he was saving money, that he was paying his bills ahead of time to develop a good credit rating. He did have some ideas about the future: trying to get some decent plastic surgery, for one, he could say. Thinking about different careers. Some kind of normal life: getting married, buying a house. Having kids maybe?
He had these talking points planned out in his mind, but when they were actually sitting there he couldn’t bring himself to speak them. They didn’t seem like very convincing subjects, really, and he didn’t want them to get into the depressing fact that he frequently doubted the possibility of even these simple things. He didn’t want them to know that they were the only people he’d had a real conversation with in almost a year. Eventually, he ended up doing imitations of Mrs. Marina Orlova, with her hatred of smiling Americans. He showed them how she grimaced like a chimpanzee and tried out a version of Mrs. Orlova’s voice: “I smile at you! Eee! It is repulsive.” They laughed and laughed, and Holiday said, “Jonah, why are you so shy? You’re blushing. You’re so hilarious.”
——
Jonah had noticed Steve before Steve noticed him. He had gotten into the habit of watching other people whom he imagined to be about his own age, just because he was curious. He wanted to know what he should be like. He would walk behind a trim young executive, observing the short haircut, the dark blue squared-off suit and bright red tie, the brisk, purposeful stride; he would linger in a music store to examine a sloe-eyed employee, with pierced nose and tattooed forearms, an attitude of bored, pouting superiority; he would follow two grinning sailors in their anachronistic uniforms, stumbling and laughing loudly as they emerged from a bar. For a moment, he could almost imagine himself into another life. He could exist for a second inside of these people—a flash in which his own skin sloughed off and he turned down a different path, as if he could pass through the membrane of their bodies and suddenly find himself looking out through their eyes.
At first, Steve had just been another vessel he could project himself into. Steve was a waiter—one of those distant, vague figures who moved in and out of the kitchen; a blond, round-faced person with a charmingly earnest demeanor that Jonah vaguely associated with teen idols of the 1970s. There was a way that Steve would widen his eyes and say “Wow!” that seemed to Jonah particularly notable. He tried it out when he got home from work, standing in front of the bathroom mirror. “Wow,” he said, and put on an imitation of the sleepy, knowing smile that Steve used. “Cool,” Jonah said, in the odd way that Steve did, so that it sounded like: “Coo-el.” He and Steve would look very much alike, he thought, if it weren’t for the scars. They both had a similar type of straight, blondish-brown hair, a similar round-cheeked boyishness in the face. They were even about the same height—a little under six feet—though Steve’s body was better constructed, all smooth lines, like a swimmer. Jonah’s own body was more angular, odder—pale-skinned, reddish at the hands and foot soles; broad shoulders and chest and ropy muscled arms, which led to a round, slightly plump belly, and then to narrow legs and long-toed, nobby feet. He was like three different bodies grafted onto one person, he thought, though he also was aware that posture made a difference. He tended to hunch and to let his belly stick out, and if he straightened up and sucked in his gut he looked better. He tried his version of Steve’s smile again, looking at himself in the mirror from first one angle, then another, covering up the scar on his face with his hand. Not bad, he thought. Really. Not bad.
——
Steve was more present in the kitchen than most of the waitstaff. Mostly, the waiters and waitresses would rush in and out—they would thrust pieces of paper at the cooks, scribbles of food requests, cry
“Order!,” and then hurry away. And Jonah was even more peripheral than the other cooks—mostly, he was in a corner at a cutting board, chopping mushrooms or celery or carrots, the tips of his fingers at the very edge of the rapid movement of the knife in his other hand.
But Steve had noticed Jonah. Steve was always coming in to chat up the heavyset black woman, Ramona, and the older Mexican man, Alphonso, the two main cooks. Steve would tell them about his pregnant wife, keeping them abreast of the developments, saying “Wow,” and “Cool!” to them, and then he brought in photos of the baby’s birth, which he passed around in the late afternoon, when the lunch crowd had cleared out and the work had lulled. He was grinning, very pleased with himself, and he gave people cigars as a kind of joke. Even the women.
Jonah watched him with cautious interest. He admired Steve’s ease with people, the genial, natural way he would flirt with Ramona, or tell a joke (in Spanish!) to Alphonso, both of them laughing deeply, their eyes narrowed slyly. But it was disconcerting, too, because Steve kept catching Jonah’s eye, noticing Jonah’s staring before Jonah could drop his gaze. On the day he brought in photos of the newborn, he’d looked directly at Jonah all of a sudden.
“Hey, man,” Steve said. “Do you want to see?”
Jonah shrugged awkwardly. “Sure,” he said, and Steve came around the divider and passed a few pictures into Jonah’s latex-gloved hands. In one photo, a bloody infant, with a body like a skinned squirrel, opened its wide mouth and scrunched its eyes; in another, the infant, now swaddled in a blue blanket, was pressed against the bare breast of an exhausted girl in a hospital gown.
“That’s Henry,” Steve said. “That’s my son!”
“Huh,” Jonah said, uncertainly. “Nice.”
Steve grinned and extended his hand. “I’m Steve,” he said. “I see you looking sometimes, but we never connect.”
Jonah started to insert his slick, latex-covered hand into Steve’s palm, and then realized how rude and odd it was. “Oh, sorry,” Jonah said, and he took off his glove, wiping his damp palm on his shirt.
“I’m Jonah,” Jonah said. He felt very self-conscious. I see you looking at me sometimes, he thought, and he wasn’t sure what else to say. He’d thought his watching of Steve had been quite subtle.
But Steve didn’t seem upset about it. “Hi, Jonah,” he said. “Nice name.”
“Thanks,” Jonah said, and he gave Steve the grin he had been practicing, before he realized that Steve might recognize it as an imitation. He looked down at the pictures again, at the wife’s expression of wonder as she held the infant—Henry—her face wan and shell-shocked and yet, Jonah thought, quite beautiful. He was embarrassed that he could see her breast, even though the infant’s mouth was covering the nipple. “These are nice, really nice pictures,” he said, holding the photos out for Steve to take back.
“I’ve been meaning to introduce myself,” Steve said. “I always see you looking over at me, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, I must be getting on that guy’s nerves!’ You know, coming in here and talking to everybody and kind of like, not talking to you. I must’ve seemed annoying!”
“Oh,” Jonah said. “No, no. Not at all. I didn’t mean to . . . give the impression that I was annoyed.” He smiled again, and made an effort to look Steve in the eye. “It’s probably something about my face. I think my expressions are weird.” He cleared his throat, wincing inwardly. Why did he feel the urge to draw attention to his face? It was no wonder he didn’t make friends, he thought. He was always making people uncomfortable.
“Actually,” he said, “I was just noticing you because you look a lot like someone I know.” He didn’t know what he was doing, except that he felt the urge to explain his staring. And then, for no reason he could figure out, he said: “You look almost exactly like my brother.”
“Oh, really?” Steve said.
“Well,” Jonah said. “He’s dead now. He was killed in a car accident. But you . . . you look almost exactly like him. I’m sorry for staring.”
Steve’s eyes widened, and he took the photos Jonah was trying to return to him. “Geez,” Steve said. “Wow! How weird!”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.”
——
Afterward he was terribly flustered. Why had he said such a thing? He paced his apartment, moving from the kitchen to the bathroom’s medicine cabinet mirror; he stood at the window looking down at the empty street, the traffic light at the end of the block blinking yellow in soft breathing beats. It was a very freakish thing to do, he thought, and he sat down on the fold-out sofa and tapped his forehead with the knuckles of his fist, staring grimly down at the carpet. You look exactly like my dead brother, he thought. How ridiculous.
But the lie had come to him almost supernaturally, like a premonition, that was the thing. Lies often did. He could actually picture the brother who looked like Steve. He experienced the car accident, a slow-motion slide into a semi-truck on a slick interstate, he pictured the way his brother would throw up his arms in front of his face as the seat in front of him loomed and turned into a thundercloud, an onrushing darkness. He heard his brother’s final gasp, which was strangely delicate. “Ah,” his brother breathed, and then everything went dark. The whole thing had burst forth with such vividness that it had almost seemed real. He thought of the fairy tale in which one sister is blessed to cough up diamonds, while the other is cursed to spit out toads—that’s what it felt like.
Whether this was a diamond or a toad, he wasn’t sure. The truth was, the lie had effected exactly what he wanted it to. It had established a connection between them, a bond, and suddenly Steve was interested in becoming his friend. Steve was pleased in some way, flattered that he looked exactly like the brother who had died.
Steve told Holiday about Jonah. Jonah was invited to dinner at their house.
——
He had been thinking a lot about relatives lately, that was one thing. About the baby his mother had given up for adoption, about his father, who was still out there somewhere, presumably. About his mother and grandfather and Elizabeth. There were times when he thought that his past was more present now than it was when he was living it. He had not kept a single photograph or memento, but memories would constantly float up and create a scrim over his daily life.
He had been thinking about his father, for example. His mother had always been very coy about this—many times she had told him that she didn’t know who his father was, and it had always been awkward to ask, since more often than not even a vague hint in that direction would send her into an irrecoverable mood.
“Why do you do this to me?” she would say. “It doesn’t matter. Whoever it is, he doesn’t care about you anyway. He doesn’t even know you exist!” And her teeth would clench together. “Jesus Christ!” she would murmur to herself, the plaits of her long hair pulling dully across the surface of the table as she lowered her head.
His grandfather had been more sympathetic. “Son, you know I would tell you if I knew anything about it,” his grandfather had said. Jonah had been about twelve then, and had finally gotten up the nerve to speak to his grandfather in private. They sat together, in lawn chairs out behind the house, and his grandfather took a long drink of beer. “I think,” his grandfather said carefully, “that it wasn’t someone she knew real well. She was living out in Chicago at the time, and I imagine that he was from there, but I really couldn’t say.”
Not long afterward, on a Saturday, his grandfather had driven him over to the Pine Ridge Reservation, to visit some of Jonah’s grandmother’s relations. There was Jonah’s grandmother’s sister, Leona, an enormously fat Sioux woman who stood aside grimly as Jonah and his grandfather sheepishly entered her house. The living room had a cement floor with a thin, faded red rug on it, and they sat there on an old sofa that was draped with an old bedspread, his grandfather and his great aunt Leona smoking cigarettes and saying little. She told them a story about a rattlesnake that had gotten
in the window, trapped between the pane and the screen, and how they’d killed it. Some boys who were identified as Jonah’s cousins came in to look at them, bronze-skinned, dusty kids, two plump and one narrow, and then they left, ran outside to play, and Jonah didn’t follow. He sat there, with his hand across the side of his face, while his aunt observed him heavily. Jonah didn’t know why they had never gone back, and when he had asked his mother once she had only shrugged. “That’s just what you need,” she said, glaring at him. “Go loiter around that dirty Indian reservation. Aren’t you close enough to the bottom as it is?” And that, as far as she was concerned, was the end of the discussion.
Jonah’s mother would talk about his brother sometimes—the baby she had given up for adoption when she was in high school. She would joke sometimes about it. Whenever she saw a lady with an infant, she would say, “Oh, look, there’s my baby!” and she would smile at Jonah, as if they were sharing a bitter joke. After Jonah’s grandfather died, when she started taking drugs more and more, she would occasionally grow sentimental.
“Don’t you wish I’d given you up, Jonah?” she would say, full of slurry self-pity, in a haze of her own angry thoughts. “I’ll bet he’s a lot happier than you are.”
Jonah, a teenager by then, thought about how to respond to this. He sat at the kitchen table considering, watching as his mother’s head dipped abruptly, as if her neck muscles suddenly gave out and then recovered. “It doesn’t matter,” his mother said, and caught her hair in her hands and gave it a sharp tug, testing the strength of her scalp. “Don’t even listen to me, just . . . go play somewhere.” And she waved her hand vaguely, as if shooing Jonah off toward some carefree existence she imagined he lived. Jonah sat frowning at her. Hating her. Of course he’d have been happier if she’d given him away, he thought, but that wasn’t even the point. The point of her obsession, he thought, the reason she kept going over and over it in her mind, was that she’d be happier. Her life could have been different, that was the point of everything: the axle around which the dull wheel of their life had turned for as long as he could remember.