by Dan Chaon
“Uncle Hollis,” F.D. says. “Who do you love more? My mom or me?”
“You,” Hollis says. He doesn’t even have to think. “I love you more than anyone else in the world. That’s why I’m sorry that I did a wrong thing. I didn’t want to make you sad.”
“That’s okay,” F.D. says. And he reaches up and rubs against Hollis’s arm, and Hollis can feel the eagerness of his affection. I have put him in a terrible position, Hollis thinks. But he doesn’t know what he can do about it.
For the last month, Hollis has been trying to remember the last thing Wayne said to him. It was probably something mundane—“Good-bye,” or “So long,” or “See you around”—but of course, given that Wayne would disappear a few days later, even these pleasantries are potentially heavy with meaning. But he can’t recall. It was an ordinary evening, like any other. He and Wayne had been drinking beer in the garage, and Jill had stayed in the house, watching TV. She often did this. “You need your ‘boy time’ together,” she’d always said, ironically, though Hollis always liked it best when she sat with them and joined in the conversation.
But in any case, there was nothing to indicate that Wayne was planning to leave. What did they talk about? Movies, mostly, as Hollis remembered. They talked about a recent plane crash, in Scotland, that had been all over the news; the plane might have been downed by a terrorist bomb planted in the luggage. Hollis remembered this only now. The operator of the Hammerhead had brought it back to him, and he recalls Wayne mentioning it. “What do you think goes through your mind when you’re going down like that? When you know you’re going to die?”
“I don’t know,” Hollis said. “But you know what I’d be thinking? I’d be thinking, ‘This is going to really, really hurt!’ ”
Wayne had laughed at that, and had told the old joke they both loved in childhood: “Q: What’s the last thing that goes through a mosquito’s mind when he hits your windshield? A: His butt.” And they’d laughed some more, full of beer and dumb camaraderie.
And it strikes him suddenly, a heavy blow. Wayne knew he was leaving, even as they sat there laughing and telling stale jokes. But he would never have told Hollis. Hollis can see himself as they see him, even as they are making their secret plans and living their secret lives. He is a distraction to them, an amusement, and he understands Wayne’s occasional flashes of anger, too—he can see himself as Wayne saw him, full of earnest, innocent stupidity, chattering vacantly about the “weird things he’d noticed,” not someone who had ever really mattered. His cheeks grow warm, and he wishes that he’d responded to Wayne’s question more seriously. What goes through your mind when you know you’re going to die? He could have finally told Wayne about that kid, that kid whose corpse fell apart when he tried to pick it up. He could have said a lot of things. And maybe then Wayne would have respected him. Maybe Wayne would have told him the truth.
He is so lost in thought that when the man on the stage reads the winner’s name, he begins to applaud with the rest of the crowd before he realizes that the man has just read his own name.
“Hollis Merchant!” the man says. “Is Hollis Merchant in the audience today? You are the winner!”
F.D. whoops. “That’s us! That’s us!” And Hollis is brought back abruptly from his reverie. The crowd has turned to look at him, their eyes wide and expectant. And miraculously, F.D. is healed, is made whole and happy again. He is jumping up and down. “We won!” he cries, his voice shrill with excitement, and hurls his body against Hollis’s in a rough dance of joy. “You and me, Uncle Hollis! Remember? You and me!”
Hollis lifts F.D. onto his shoulders, and the weight of him settles easily into place. Despite everything, he can’t help feeling proud and happy, just as F.D. does. The crowd applauds as they walk up to the stage, probably thinking that F.D. is his son, and Hollis is willing to borrow this for the time being. Once F.D. is on his shoulders, he can stride to the stage.
And he has a vision, what he should write in his journal: What if you believed that everything in life was like a prize? What if you thought of the world as a big random drawing, and you were always winning things, the world offering them up with a big grin, like an emcee’s: Here you go, Hollis. Here is a motorcycle. Here is a little boy who loves you. Here is a weird experience, here is something bad that you should mull over because it will make you a better person. What if you could think that life was this free vacation you’d won, and you won just because you happened to be alive?
He is not deluded. He can see clearly that he is foolish, that his life is made up of a series of muddled interpretations and distractions, that he doesn’t know anything about the world he’s moving into. But he can also see the two of them on that motorcycle, in those golden helmets that F.D. dreamed up, going somewhere. “You and me,” F.D. whispers, and the roads are clear, there are green fields and wildflowers on either side, and the motorcycle seems to be driving itself. He can even close his eyes for a moment, as the wind and velocity sweep over them. They fly down the highway, calmly, headed off to wherever it will take them.
THE ILLUSTRATED
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE
ANIMAL KINGDOM
On the second floor of an old Victorian house that has been converted into tiny apartments, Dennis dreams that he is holding a baby. The infant in the dream is wrapped in a gray-blue blanket, with only its round face peeking out. Dennis can feel its limbs squirming beneath the swaddling as he smooths his palm lightly over the infant’s cheek. When his hand touches the baby’s skin, he wakes up.
Above him, he hears the woman on the third floor, walking. Her floorboards—his ceiling—sigh as she goes, as if she’s stepping over shifting ice. He is aware, even as he opens his eyes, that the dream is partially hers, a seed she has planted. He doesn’t know her really, but he thinks about her often. She walks across his ceiling at all hours of the night. In certain rooms he will occasionally hear a radio playing above him, and on some evenings if he sits by the radiator in his bedroom he will hear her stumbling, sweetly awkward monotone as she reads her son a story. Dennis believes that her husband has left her. Perhaps he is dead. Perhaps there never was a husband to begin with.
It is the woman upstairs, or the dream, or maybe simply the fact that it is a new town and he knows no one and he is twenty-five years old and spends far too much time (he thinks) in his own head, too much time lying on his bed in his underwear with a beer growing warm on his chest as he listens. It is a combination of all these things, no doubt. Something makes him decide to call the hospital, which is located in the city that he lived in before he moved to this new one. He is aware that it is foolish to call the hospital. But he just wants to see what they will say.
So he calls one morning from work during his lunch when his coworkers are out, they all seem to have places to go, their days full of purpose, et cetera. He calls and is transferred several times. While he waits, classical music that seems somewhat familiar is played for him through the phone lines.
The lady who finally answers is very professional about the whole thing, very administrative. He has signed a contract that is legally binding, she says, and (hundreds of miles away) he nods earnestly into the receiver. I know that, he says. He explains that he doesn’t want to cause trouble, he’s just sort of curious, and she says, “That’s sweet,” in a condescending voice that suggests that she is probably pretty, probably used to turning men down quickly and cheerfully, a tight fake smile reducing them to a speck. Dennis feels himself shrinking. “You must get calls like this all the time,” he says apologetically, and she says, “No, frankly, I don’t.”
Well, he thinks when she hangs up the phone. He can feel himself blushing, though of course no one knows whom he has called, and he certainly won’t tell anyone. He feels stupid.
Maybe it is strange to wonder, he thinks: odd. It wasn’t as if there were love involved, not even physical contact, just an easy fifty dollars he’d heard about through a friend who was in the first year of medical sc
hool. The friend had been doing it about once a week and he got Dennis in, though Dennis’s vital statistics, his looks and IQ and extracurricular activities were probably not as impressive as those of the medical school boys. So maybe they didn’t even use his. He’d only done it because he really had needed the cash at the time—it was his senior year in college.
When he went in he’d felt very embarrassed. The nurse was not much older than he—a short, stocky girl who wore her hair in a way that made him think maybe she’d had an unhappy childhood. She couldn’t look at him. She just gave him some forms to fill out on one of those clipboards with a pen hanging on a beaded metal chain like the kind that is attached to bathtub drain plugs. He turned in the paperwork and the nurse led him down a hospital-smelling corridor, both of them shy, silence trailing down the long hallway until they came to a halt in front of a little bathroom. She gave him a kind of test tube with a screw-on lid and cleared her throat, shifting her weight in those chunky white shoes, and she opened a door and said that there were some magazines he could look at if he wished. She might have used the word “peruse.”
He glanced in and there were some old Playboy and Penthouse magazines on the table next to the toilet. He nodded, not meeting her eyes. What was there to say? The nurse was trying to be professional about it, but he could see she was secretly mortified behind her nurse facade, and when he tried to smile ironically she just cleared her throat again and left in a hurry. Poor girl, he thought.
It was strange, because it was she, the nurse, whom he ended up thinking of rather than the centerfolds with their tawny unreal shapes and unmarked expressions. When he brought his test tube out and gave it to her he felt a sort of regret shudder through him. Her eyes were so sad that he was sure for a moment that she knew he’d been thinking of her. He sometimes thought that any baby that came out of it must be as much that nurse’s as it was his own.
He finds it difficult to truly believe that there is a baby, but it’s something he thinks about sometimes. It’s interesting imagining someone—maybe an infertile couple or perhaps a single woman who has some money—someone going through pages of descriptions and deciding on him. Maybe he has the nationality they are looking for, the color of hair or eyes, or one of the accomplishments he’s written down—his winning the state spelling bee in high school, his abilities in baseball, his college major—attracts them in some way, and they say, “This is the one.” He wonders if that’s how it works. He likes to imagine that there is the possibility of a person out there. The person might have a certain shape of face or fingers, or a certain way of smiling. He or she might even eventually have certain moods—a particularly vague and watery melancholy feeling sometimes—because of him. He doesn’t know why he wants so badly for this to be true.
It’s summer. Cicadas fill the air with an intermittent static, and in the weeks that follow he often sees them in the morning, in the tiny backyard out behind their apartment house, his upstairs neighbor and her son, who must be about four, a thin, deep-eyed kid with a head like a baby bird. Dennis gazes down at them, watching as the boy builds something with mud and sticks in the corner by the fence; watching as the boy reads his books: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom. On the cover, there are drawings of a snake, a zebra, a parrot, a beetle, all the same size.
The woman sits quietly, smoking. She runs her fingers thoughtfully along the side of her bare foot, her curling-iron hair, crushed flat in the back where she’s slept on it. When he thinks of her face in his mind, it looks hard and melancholy and almost cruel because of the traces of makeup that remain around her lips and eyes. She exhales smoke.
On the day he made his phone call to the hospital, he happened to be walking home from work and he found a box of books. The box had been put out by the curb for the trash man to pick up, right outside a big old house that looked something like his except it hadn’t been split up into apartments. There was nothing wrong with the books that he could see—an old set of children’s encyclopedias, not a complete set but nice nonetheless, with beautiful photographs. It didn’t even look like they’d been read! He glanced around to see that no one was looking and then he lifted the box and carried it home.
After dinner that evening, he had gone up the stairs with the box and knocked on the woman’s door.
“I found this,” he said, showing her the books and smiling sheepishly. “I’ve heard you reading to your son and I thought it would be something he would enjoy.”
He’d practiced this short speech several times, but after it left his mouth he realized that it was a mistake to say that he’d heard her reading. Her eyes narrowed a bit, suspiciously, and when she leaned down to look at the titles of the books, she wrinkled her nose. He was aware that they smelled a little like a basement.
“He’s a little young for encyclopedias,” she said, and Dennis shifted his weight. The books were heavy.
“Well,” he said. “They’ve got nice pictures.”
“Hmm,” she said. She looked him over again, and he saw her eyes come to a decision. If they were to fall in love, Dennis thought, it would never work out. She saw something essential about him that she could never learn to like. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, but he could feel it in the air around him, like a smell—a particular trigger which he lacked—a winking type of confidence, or body hair, or a temper. Whatever it was.
“If you want to leave them,” she said, “that’s okay. I mean, he’ll probably just wreck them. Color in them and stuff. You could sell them,” she said. She shrugged, and put a hand against her hair. “You don’t have kids of your own,” she said.
“No.” He smiled, hesitating because she made no move to take the box. He braced it against his hip. “No, not really,” he said thoughtfully. And then, after a second he realized that this was an odd thing to say. “I guess I might have kids,” he said, “but none that I know of.”
“Oh,” she said, and then she laughed shortly. “You’re one of those, huh?” She looked at him for a moment with something like, what? Flirtation? Sarcasm? Something familiar but not quite friendly. He couldn’t tell, but it made him blush. He set the box down.
“No,” he said. “No, it’s …” and for a moment he actually considered telling her about the hospital and the rest, though he knew that would be worse, at that point, than just letting her think what she wanted.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” she said. She gave him that same look again, and he watched her thinking; a whole complex set of things were passing through her mind. She did not believe that he was the type, and she wondered, briefly, why he would say such a strange thing, what he really meant. She thought of her son’s father, or maybe she didn’t. She opened the door a little more, and Dennis could see the boy inside, sitting cross-legged in front of the television, his face lit unnaturally as he trotted a plastic elephant along the carpet. It would have been neat if the boy suddenly turned to look at him, but he did not.
“Well,” the woman said. “Thanks.”
When Dennis first moved into the apartment, the little boy upstairs was going through a period of having bad nightmares. The child would wake up screaming, and of course Dennis would awaken as well. “Help me!” Dennis thought he could hear the child crying. “Help me!” At last, Dennis would hear the woman’s footsteps, and then her voice, gentle and tired. “Hush,” she was probably saying. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Be still now.” And then, after a time, she would begin to sing.
He doesn’t know why this had affected him so, the sound of her singing, but he can remember shuddering. He had curled up a little more, thinking, “What is it? What’s wrong with me?” and trying to decide that it was simple, that it was ordinary loneliness, being disoriented in a new place, boxes still not unpacked, his family far away, his own father, dead a few years now, buried in a cemetery some thousand miles distant.
But it had felt, at that moment, that there was something wrong with the world itself. He c
ould have sworn he knew in his heart that something terrible had happened to the world, and that everyone knew it but him.
AMONG THE MISSING
My mother owned a lakefront cabin, not far from where the bodies were discovered. She watched from the back porch when the car was pulled out of the water. She could hear the steady clicking of the big tow chain echoing against the still surface of the lake. Brown-gray water gushed from the windows and trunk and hood as the car rose up. The windows were partway open, and my mother’s first thought was that animals were probably in the car also: suckers and carp and catfish and crawdads—scavengers. The white body of the car was streaked with trailing wisps of algae. She turned away as the policemen gathered around.
There was a family in the car: the Morrisons. A mother and father, a seven-year-old girl, a five-year-old boy, and a baby, a little boy, thirteen months old. They had been missing since late May, over six weeks, and the mystery had been in the papers for a while. People around town reported having seen them, but no one had taken much notice. They were a typical family, apparently, no different from the hundreds that passed through during the summer months. Lake McConaughy was the largest lake in Nebraska, one of the largest man-made lakes in the entire Midwest, and it drew not only locals but also vacationers from Omaha and Denver and even farther. When the police came around with the pictures, people thought they had seen them, but they couldn’t be sure. The investigation was bogged down by our town’s uncertain memory. It didn’t occur to anyone to drag the lake, especially since reported sightings continued to come in from as far away as Oklahoma and Canada. Most people believed that they would turn up, and that there would be some rational explanation—despite the claims of the grandmother, who lived in Loveland, Colorado, and who had first reported the family missing. She felt foul play was certainly involved. Why else hadn’t they contacted her? Why else had the father, her son, not returned as scheduled to the real estate office where he’d worked for ten years?