by Dan Chaon
Still, it’s hard to guess what they imagine I am. I doubt that they think of it much; I am “Dad,” that’s all. It’s strange how easily we fall into those roles—the form-fitting personalities that my children think of as “Mom” and “Dad.” As they’ve grown, we have increasingly given over pieces of our lives to these caricatures, until the “Dad” part of me casts a shadow over what I think of as my “real” self. I feel like an old soap opera actor who, after years of playing the same part, begins to feel the character taking on a presence in his soul. My wife and I have not yet taken to calling one another Mom and Dad, as my parents used to, but much of the time, this is how we think of one another. We are already lost, even to ourselves. We slip helplessly into parody.
There is no way for my sons to know this, no possible way. They don’t even really believe that the world existed before they were born. They know it intellectually, of course, but at the same time it’s as unfathomable as infinity, or zero.
I start my chemotherapy tomorrow, and they don’t know that either. They know that I am going to the hospital, but very little else. We have decided, my wife and I, that it would be too much for them to handle. And so they go on with their everyday lives: playing outside, squabbling at the dinner table, watching some cartoon on television and laughing uproariously, interrupting me as I talk on the phone to the doctor. I turn to my youngest fiercely, cupping my hand over the receiver. “Will you shut up! Can’t you see I’m on the phone?” And in that moment, I see him blanch, hurt and resentment flickering across his face. One more piece of me disappears.
Later, standing at the edge of their bedroom, watching as they play checkers, I want to tell them. I want to say: “I might die soon.” I want to shake them. “Can’t you see me? Can’t you see that I’m real?” But what I say is, “Hey, bud, I’m sorry I was sharp with you when I was talking on the phone. I didn’t mean to snap like that.”
He shrugs his shoulders, absorbed in his game. “S’okay,” he says. He doesn’t look up.
Once, my father hit my mother and I stood by watching, smirking into my hand. For a long time in my life, every bad thing that happened seemed bitterly hilarious. I felt that I had a heightened sense of the absurd. When my father was dying—dying of the same cancer I now have, if you want the truth—I was almost giddy with the terrible irony of it, the sarcasm of God. It was about two months after the retirement he’d been talking about, hoping for; for years he had been planning to buy a Winnebago, to go traveling across the country with my mother. He was diagnosed shortly after he’d purchased the thing.
That time he hit my mother, they had been arguing for a long while. I don’t remember what it was about. It must have been very important to them at the time, but I saw how minuscule it was, how little it mattered in the grand scheme of things. What could I do but try to contain my private laughter? Back then, I believed that I had no connection to these strangers, these two foolish people who didn’t realize that they were already summed up. Their lives were already over, I thought then. Nothing they ever did could change things.
And so, in giddy and adrenaline-fueled shock, I clamped my hand over my mouth. I saw my father’s face twist as he turned to me, and I wonder what he thought I was thinking. His eyes widened and his mouth moved. We looked at one another; I think now that he hoped that I could save him.
Why do we think that, we parents? Why do I think it even now, standing in the dark, watching my sons sleeping? Save me, save me, I think. And yet they can’t, of course. Already I am halfway gone. Even from the beginning, when their infant’s eyes begin to focus on your floating face, the way a cat will watch the moon, already you are a ghost of yourself.
He must have known that, too, my father. He must have seen it in my face as I stared back at him. I sit down on my youngest son’s bed, as my father might have sat on my bed late one night when I was a child. We look down, we touch the child’s ear, watching him stir a little.
But no matter how hard we try, we are disappearing. Oh, my child, you will never save me. You will never be what I wanted to be, you will never love me in the way I need you to, you will never give me myself back.
And yet, I forgive you. You won’t know this until a long time later, my little narrator, my wide-eyed camera. You won’t know it, but I forgave you a long time ago.
PASSENGERS, REMAIN CALM
Here is a snake with a girl in his mouth. She is a little blond girl, about four years old, and he is a rare albino anaconda, pink and white, about three feet long—just a baby, really. Nevertheless, he is trying to eat the child; her hand and forearm have disappeared down his throat, and he has coiled the rest of his body around her bicep, trying to constrict it. His wide mouth gives the impression of gloating merriment; she, of course, is screaming, and Hollis and his young nephew draw closer to the small circle of bystanders who have formed around her. “It’s all right,” the owner of the Reptile Petting Zoo tells the gathering as he tries to unwind the snake’s coils. “Everything is under control.” The girl is apparently the owner’s daughter. “Just calm down,” he says. “Didn’t Daddy tell you that you should always wash your hands after playing with the gerbils? Now Rosario thinks that you are a gerbil!”
“I hate Rosario!” the little girl wails.
“There, there,” her father soothes. “No you don’t.” He speaks in a soft voice, but he grunts with exertion as he attempts to untangle his daughter’s arm from the snake, whose tail whips wildly when it is disengaged. “Damn, damn,” the man whispers, sweating.
“My God!” says a woman in the audience. “Kill the thing! Kill it!”
“Please!” the father cries, struggling to maintain his jovial, showman’s voice. “Stand back, everyone! Everything is under control!”
For a moment, Hollis wonders whether his nephew ought to be watching. But then a uniformed security officer arrives, and with the officer’s help, the girl is pried free. There is a smattering of applause. The girl’s hand is red, a bit swollen, but not bleeding. Hollis watches as the owner returns the snake to its glass cage. The owner presses the snake’s snout into a dish of water. “Here,” the man says. “Have a drink.” He holds the snake’s head underwater for a few moments, and though the man’s voice sounds placid, even gentle, Hollis can see his jaw tighten with rage.
Hollis has noticed that he always seems to witness these weird little incidents more than other people.
This is at the town’s yearly carnival, which, along with the Reptile Petting Zoo, features the usual menagerie—a hay ride, a carousel, a Ferris wheel, a few scary rides, like the Octopus and the Hammerhead. There are a series of game booths, at which children gamble for stuffed animals and plastic trinkets. At two in the afternoon, there is a pet show; at five, there is a raffle for a brand-new Kawasaki motorcycle; at dusk, there will be fireworks. Hollis’s nephew is deeply engrossed, running purposefully from exhibit to exhibit, and Hollis follows thoughtfully, still occupied with the image of the girl and the snake, which he plans to write about in his journal.
Hollis has been spending a lot of time with his nephew lately. Hollis is twenty-two years old, and the boy, F.D., is eight, but Hollis generally finds the child good company. It gives him a chance to do things he wouldn’t otherwise, like going to matinees or ice-cream parlors.
F.D.’s father, Wayne, has been gone for over a month now. Wayne is Hollis’s older brother, and though Hollis had known that Wayne was unhappy, he’d never expected him to do something so drastic. No one knew where Wayne had gone—their mother had gotten a postcard, and so had Wayne’s wife, Jill, but Wayne had offered no explanation, only a kind of vague apology. “Everything is okay,” he’d written to their mother. “Sorry for any worry, will contact you ASAP. xxxooo Wayne.”
Hollis hasn’t seen the postcard that Wayne had sent Jill, but he suspects that she knows more about Wayne’s disappearance than she’s told anyone. She’s been in an odd state since Wayne left—not outraged, not hysterical, not desperate and furiou
s, as Hollis might have expected—but subdued, moody, distracted. Hollis thinks that she might be taking some sort of drug. Her eyes have that floating, somewhere-else look, and on weekends she never seems to get out of her pajamas. Her beautiful dark hair wants cutting, and she has been biting her nails.
But she appears to be getting by: She goes to her job at the supermarket, and F.D. and his little sister Hanna are clean and make it every day to the school bus, but it’s clear that things aren’t going well. Last Friday night, Hollis went through and collected all the dirty dishes that were lying around, empty cereal bowls in the living room, half-full coffee cups on various surfaces, plates still left on the table from two or three suppers back. He gathered up all the dishes in the sink and washed them.
“You’re a nice guy, Hollis,” Jill had said to him as he stood there at the sink, and he’d shrugged, a little embarrassed. The truth was, he felt a little guilty and ashamed of his brother’s behavior. Somebody had to act like a decent person, he’d thought, though he didn’t say this. “You are,” she said. “You’re a nice guy.” He’d just shaken his head.
“Not really,” he said, and after a moment she put her hand on the small of his back, low, right above the slope of his buttock. Her hand seemed to tingle, and the air was heavy with the idea that she might kiss him, or he might kiss her. Then she backed away.
“Hollis,” she said. “Let’s forget I did that, okay?”
He nodded, and she’d looked into his eyes in a way he found inexplicable. He knew then that there were a lot of things she wasn’t telling him and that Wayne hadn’t told him either. “Okay,” he’d said, but it wasn’t as if he could really forget it, either. That night, he’d written about it in his journal, just a little paragraph. He doesn’t write about his feelings or thoughts in the journal. He just describes stuff.
F.D. does not know what is going on. The whole family, including Jill, seems to be colluding to keep it from the boy. Hollis thinks it is wrong, but he hasn’t been given any official say in the matter. The story that F.D. has been given is that Wayne has gone on a long trip, and will be back soon. (“Will he be back by my birthday?” F.D. had asked, and everyone agreed, yes, certainly by F.D.’s birthday, which is October 31, and which is now beginning to loom ominously.) It is criminal, Hollis sometimes feels, to play with the boy’s mind in such a way. F.D. must know that something is wrong, Hollis thinks.
But if so, he never asks. He seems, as far as Hollis can tell, pretty cheerful, pretty normal.
Still, Hollis thinks of this as they sit on the hay ride, listening to the horses clop heavily along the pathways of the park. They are being driven around the circumference of the carnival. They pass by booths of politicians and county agencies: people running for city council or school board; people who represent the county recycling effort, giving demonstrations on how to create a compost heap; people representing the Department of Human Services, handing out pamphlets that tell of how to avoid abusing your children. The fire department is handing out Rescue Me stickers for the childrens’ windows, fluorescent circles that will identify their rooms should their houses ever catch afire. He recognizes a few of the men, from the brief time he’d worked at the fire department, but he doesn’t wave.
But the people on the hay ride do, and the people below wave back, smiling. “Hello! Hello!” the children call. F.D. occupies himself with this for a while, solemnly lifting his hand over his head in a way that makes Hollis sad. F.D. is holding tightly to a small stuffed animal, a furry blue snake with a wide, red felt mouth and google-eyes, about six inches long. F.D. had won it by throwing a dart at a corkboard wall lined with a row of balloons. When a balloon had popped, he’d crowed with triumph and did a little dance. “All right!” he’d said, pumping his fists as athletic champions did on television.
Now, F.D. dotes over the toy snake thoughtfully, smoothing its polyester fur. “You know,” F.D. says, “someday, I’d like to have a real snake as a pet. That’s one of my dreams.”
“Yeah,” Hollis says. “That would be cool. As long as the snake didn’t try to eat you.”
F.D. snorts. “That little girl was an idiot,” he says with distaste. “I felt more sorry for the snake than I did for her.”
“Well,” Hollis says. “She was just little.”
“I suppose,” F.D. says. “But she should have listened to what that man told her, that’s all. Most snakes are a friend to Man.” He looks solemnly across the hay ride to where the woman sits who had earlier shouted, “Kill the thing! Kill it!” in the Reptile Petting Zoo. She is a plump, round-faced woman with shoulder-length reddish blond hair, bobbed in a fashion that is popular among women of her age and social class, and like F.D., Hollis takes an instinctive dislike to her.
“I see what you mean,” Hollis says.
I see what you mean. It was funny, because this was something he would often say when he was talking to Wayne. Wayne was a convincing talker, and Hollis, who was five years younger, would find himself frequently swayed by Wayne’s views. It was Wayne who had said, for example, “Never assume that you know what goes on inside a marriage. Because I’m telling you, no matter how close you think you are, you will never know those people like they know each other. It’s like a closed system. The weather inside a marriage is always different from the weather of everything around it.” Hollis had nodded slowly, considering this. They had been talking about their parents that night, and Hollis had said that he felt certain that neither one of them had ever had an affair. Hollis had said that he couldn’t understand why people would do that to their spouses. It didn’t make sense, he said, and then Wayne swept in with his metaphors of weather. “I’m not saying that I’ve had an affair, either,” Wayne said. “I’m just saying that you can never assume to know.”
“I see what you mean,” Hollis said.
He and Wayne had been sitting out in the garage, near the woodstove, in lawn chairs. It was winter, and they were feeding logs into the fire, drinking beers out of a cooler that sat between them. It was their Friday night ritual. Hollis would come over for dinner, and then they would sit in the garage and drink beer, sometimes smoking a little pot, talking. Wayne read a lot, and he always had something interesting to say. Wayne had hoped to be a lawyer, before Jill became pregnant.
Sometimes, Hollis felt that his brother was his best friend, and he would go to sleep on Wayne and Jill’s couch with a feeling that there was one person on earth who understood him, one person who would always recognize him. Other times, less frequently, he would find himself driving home, his feelings hurt, driving even though he was drunk and afraid of being pulled over, or getting into an accident, and Wayne did not stop him.
Once he’d told Wayne that he thought more weird things happened to him than to normal people, and he’d described that feeling he had, that the world seemed full of strange little incidents. He had expected Wayne to agree wholeheartedly.
But instead Wayne had looked at him sternly. “It’s not the world, Hollis,” he’d said, “it’s you. I mean, you’re an intelligent guy and all, but you’re sort of emotionally retarded.” Hollis was surprised by the irritation in Wayne’s tone of voice. “It’s like, do you remember the time Dad had a heart attack? And we were going to the hospital and you looked out the car window and saw a dog with a missing leg? All you wanted to talk about was that stupid dog, and you couldn’t believe that the rest of us didn’t see it. But we were normal, Hollis. We weren’t looking out the window and noticing goofy shit. We were mentally focused on something serious, which you seldom are.”
Hollis was stunned, as he always was, though he probably should have been used to it. Sometimes, for no reason, Wayne would attack, treating him like a criminal he was cross-examining during a trial. It didn’t make sense. What had he said, to bring this on? He had the sensation of shrinking.
“I didn’t know that Dad had a heart attack,” he said, after a moment, quietly. “Nobody told me.”
“Hollis,” Wayne said. H
e passed his hand, hard, through his bangs, an old gesture that meant, essentially: I can’t believe my brother is so stupid. “Hollis,” he said. “You never bothered to find out what was wrong. There’s a difference.”
Now, thinking of this, Hollis gets a hollow feeling in his stomach. He can’t believe that Wayne didn’t send him a postcard. It makes him feel tricked. But by whom? Wayne, or himself? He thinks that he should know why Wayne left, but he doesn’t.
F.D. looks like the paternal side of his family. More specifically, he looks a lot like Hollis himself, which Hollis has always found secretly thrilling. In his personality, F.D. is more like Wayne. There is an austere confidence that Hollis recognizes, an expectation that what he has to say is true and important, a certain way his gray eyes cloud with confidence, a way his mouth moves in judgment of other people’s ignorance. Most snakes are a friend to Man.
Hollis thinks of this as he and F.D. are sitting at a picnic table, eating nachos. F.D. eats heartily and Hollis mostly watches. They have recently purchased three raffle tickets, five dollars each, and F.D. is talking about the possibility of winning the motorcycle.
“Well,” Hollis says. “I don’t usually win stuff.”
“But if you did,” F.D. says. “What would you do?”
“If I win,” Hollis says, “I’ll give it to you. When you’re sixteen, you can drive it, and until you’re old enough I’ll give you rides on it. We’ll go on a trip on our motorcycle. Like to Washington, D.C., or something. Haven’t you always wanted to see the Smithsonian, and the Washington Monument, and all that?”
“And the White House?” says F.D. enthusiastically. At that moment, F.D. and Hollis love each other unconditionally.
“Yeah,” Hollis says. “All of it.” He smiles. “And when I’m old, you can take me for rides on it. We’ll have to buy helmets.”
“Gold ones,” F.D. says. “That’s the kind I like. Metallic.”