How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets

by Garth Stein

  “I’ll take you down tomorrow and show you how it works.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good night.”

  “Night.”

  AFTER HE BRUSHES his teeth, Evan opens the medicine cabinet and takes out three pill bottles. He spills little white pills from one of them onto the palm of his hand. How easy it would be to kill himself this second. A handful of phenobarbital and a fifth of vodka and he’d be beyond the reach of stomach pumping, that’s for sure. It is Evan’s ongoing struggle. If some people feel a compelling urge to jump, then he has a compelling urge to swallow every pill in the container every time he opens it. Every single time he has to say to himself calmly, “Only two, Evan. Only two.”

  Only two.

  “I’ve really gotta—”

  “What?” Evan jumps. He’s so startled that he drops the bottle; the pills scatter in a million powdery-white directions. Pills, pills everywhere. He scrambles to scoop them up before they get wet.

  “Sorry, ” Dean says as he pees noisily into the toilet.“I really had to go.”

  Shit. Several have slipped down the drain. A few are soaking up puddled water on the counter. And these are serious drugs, too. You can’t just go back to the pharmacy and ask for a refill of barbiturates because you dropped the bottle. They’ll want to know what happened to the pills. These pills actually have value on the black market. Some people take them for fun.

  “Can I help?” Dean asks.

  “No, no, I got it.”

  Dean watches Evan for a moment.“What are they?” he asks.

  “Allergy pills.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “No biggie. I have to get used to your being in the house. You startled me.”

  “Sorry.”

  Evan waves him off, and Dean goes back to the living room. Evan hears the springs of the bedframe flex as Dean climbs on. He looks down at the pills that are gathered near the drain stopper. Allergy pills. Jesus. What a stupid lie. What a stupid, pathetic lie.

  HE WAS STILL in the hospital after the accident when he first learned he had epilepsy. He was lying in bed watching Magnum, P.I. with the sound off. His parents were there.

  “How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Good, good. Evan . . .” the doctor said, hiking up his hospital scrubs as he sat at the end of the bed.

  Evan waited for the doctor to speak. He was a hawklike man, long teeth, a hook nose, beady gray eyes behind thick glasses. Rough cheeks, oversized ears.

  “While you were asleep, we had to perform surgery.”

  Evan stiffened. Asleep?

  “You may not remember much of what happened before you got here. Do you remember?”

  Evan thought hard. He remembered things.

  “It’s very common, ” the doctor went on, “after a person has been in a coma for a time, for that person not to remember the events prior to the coma. Understand?”

  Evan nodded. But he remembered things.

  “It’s the body’s way of protecting you from trauma. Your body is censoring its own thoughts. Kind of nice, right?”

  Right. But he remembered a lot of it. He remembered a car. He remembered the street.

  “There was some bleeding in the membrane that surrounds your brain, and we had to relieve some of the pressure. You probably don’t remember. And that’s just fine. It was a relatively simple procedure.”

  A procedure. At twelve, Evan, a doctor’s son, already knew most of the medical jargon. A procedure is an operation.

  “There was also a small bone fragment we had to dig around a bit to find. We found it, but it seems that there is still some activity in that brain of yours.”

  With this, the doctor pointed to Evan’s head and grinned a long, toothy grin.

  “The EEG—the machine we use to monitor your brain waves—shows that your brain is sometimes working even when you think it isn’t.”

  The doctor glanced back at Carl and Louise, who stood underneath Tom Selleck, staring intently at Evan.

  But he remembered more. He remembered looking out from the body he was driving (driving, he thought, like driving a large construction crane, because at the time he felt a genuine separation of mind and body, dualism confirmed, cogito, ergo sum), looking out of those eyes and wondering at the dark stain on the road that grew and at the effect of parallax, which made the pool look large through his left eye but not so large through his right.

  “It’s called epilepsy, ” the doctor explained. “Epilepsy is a generic term for a neurological disorder that is characterized by seizures. Do you know what a seizure is?”

  Evan nodded.

  “We don’t exactly know what causes epilepsy, ” the doctor continued. “Most epileptics are born with it. Some develop it later in life. Some develop a seizure disorder after a bad sickness. Some after a head trauma.”

  He remembered a woman asking him a question, and he remembered crinkling his brow. What had he done? He had done something. Something bad. And his actions had produced immediate results. There was blood. There was a taste of powder in his mouth. There was a darkling sky. There was a numbness in his body. He blinked, but he realized it was only a half-blink, really, because his eyes didn’t open again. Not until he was safe and warm and dry in a hospital bed.

  “We don’t know how long you’ll have this condition. It could go away tomorrow, or it could never go away. The epilepsy could manifest itself in seizures, or it could simply be a few spikes on our machines and nothing more. We don’t know. There’s no way to know.”

  There’s no way to know. Evan branded that phrase into his mind. A doctor saying that. There’s no way to know. That wasn’t how Evan was raised. Evan was raised to believe that doctors knew everything. That was their job. To know things. To save lives. To fix problems.

  “You’ll have to stick close to your parents for a while, ” the doctor went on. “In case you have a seizure. You won’t know about it, most likely, but someone will need to be there who can help you. Don’t get down on yourself about it. A lot of people have epilepsy. Many people who have epilepsy lead full and productive lives. Some of them are teachers, for instance. Carpenters.”

  Evan tried hard to remember everything. He didn’t want his body to protect him from anything. He wanted the truth.

  “We’ll give you some medication, ” the doctor said. “It may make you feel funny. It may take you a while to get used to. Some of the medication has side effects which you’ll learn about. But the side effects are better, generally, than epilepsy. Side effects are predictable, epilepsy is not.”

  Evan must have had a strange look on his face, because the doctor held his gaze, then appealed to Carl, who said, “Do you understand what the doctor is saying, Evan?”

  “Yes.”

  The doctor nodded approvingly at Carl.

  “It’s important to remember one thing, Evan, ” the doctor said. “It’s a condition, not a disease. People can’t catch it from you. Many great men have had epilepsy. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Evan remembered the doctor saying that.It’s nothing to be ashamed of.

  Ashamed? The thought hadn’t entered Evan’s mind. But when he went home two days later and his parents said again, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, he began to suspect. And then when they told him not to tell his friends he had epilepsy, not to tell his teachers, even not to tell his cousins, Evan understood what was going on: epilepsy was something to be ashamed of. But if anyone asked, he was supposed to say that he didn’t feel ashamed.

  THE PHONE RINGS late the next morning and it’s Lars.

  “Listen, Ev, ” he says, “I hope I didn’t bum you out last T night, man.”

  “No.”

  “I wasn’t trying to give you a hard time. Everyone’s got to do his own thing, right? I mean, I don’t even know the whole situation, so I’m not trying to judge or anything.”

  “Yeah, sure, ” Evan says.

  “But I’ve been thinking
, ” Lars plows ahead, “since you’re jamming with Lucky Strike and hanging with Billy Marx, I think maybe it’s time for us to cut our demo.”

  Whoa, quick switch. Cut a demo? Their band, The Last, had been gigging for a few months, but they were still a little nervous about cutting a demo and trying to get a record deal. They knew they were good and they didn’t want to screw it up.

  “Talk to Rod and Tony about it, ” Evan says.

  Rod and Tony were the de facto leaders of the band. They started it, found Lars, and then brought in Evan as a ringer. Sure, Evan was good, but he also had experience and credibility, which he figured they needed more than a good guitarist.

  “I already did, ” Lars says.“They’re cool with it.”

  “They are?”

  “They’re up for laying down a couple of tracks and seeing how it sounds. If it’s good enough, we’ll mix it and shop it around. They’re cool with it.”

  But Evan isn’t totally cool with it; he thinks they need more work. Time to mature. Rod doesn’t listen to Lars’s drumming, and Tony sounds too much like Kurt Cobain. But if everyone else wants to . . .

  “All right, ” Evan says. “I’ll call Billy and book some time.”

  “I already did, ” Lars says proudly.

  “Oh?”

  “Tomorrow night, seven o’clock, The Sound Factory. Don’t forget your guitar.”

  WELL, THAT CHANGES things. Here he is, expecting to give Dean back at a moment’s notice, and now he can’t. He’s willing to give up a lot, but when it comes to his music, Evan does not compromise. There’s no way he’s going to drive to Walla Walla and back before a recording session. No way. It would take too much out of him. Even if Ellen called that minute, he would tell her she had to wait. So, he’s stuck with Dean for a couple of days; at least until after the session, the day after tomorrow if it doesn’t go too late, probably the day after that. So.

  So they head up to Northgate Mall to buy things Dean will need in the next few days, underwear and socks mostly. They prowl the cavernous, taupe-colored mall, scavenging for sale items; and they find stuff. Evan isn’t sure how he’ll afford it, but his credit card takes hit after hit without barfing on the counter, so something’s going right for him. All the time they’re shopping, young men and women insistently pop in front of them with offers of a better deal on a cell phone than the deal they are currently getting. Twenty-five hundred free—twenty-five thousand free—no, no!—twenty-five million free minutes—anywhere, anytime, in perpetuity! Evan is afraid of these child-salesmen. They’re like twelve-year-old hookers: accepting or declining their offer feels equally horrible. And, on top of that, Evan is mortified that he can’t discern the ages of these people. Are they fresh out of high school, or fresh out of college? They’re so clean. Haziness about age is not usually a problem Evan has to confront, especially considering that he spends a lot of time in bars playing gigs for these same kids—albeit these same kids in wilder clothes and spikier hair. He has always relied on his ability to divide people into Those Under and Those Over, a simple survival tactic. And he’s good at it: he’s never gotten into trouble for buying a sixteen-year-old vixen an amaretto sour, for instance. That’s why these cell phone warriors confuse and concern him.

  “What grade are you in?” Evan asks as he and Dean sit in the food court eating lunch, suddenly fearful that Dean will become a cell phone automaton when he grows up.

  “I’m going into ninth.”

  Ninth? Jesus. It’s August first. The new school year is a month away. That leaves only four years before Dean will be wearing a suit, hair neatly combed, hawking cell phone accessories at the local mall.

  “Are you doing well?”

  “Pretty well, I guess.”

  Who the hell cares? All you have to do is teach people how to tuck that earpiece thing behind their lobes. Big deal.

  “Have you spent much time in Seattle?” Evan asks cheerfully, trying to block out the images he has of himself—a worse nightmare, if there could be one—impressed into employment and standing in a ridiculous booth with a handful of literature on roaming plans and calling features.“Do you want to do some sightseeing?”

  Dean answers with a Dean-shrug.

  “You must want to see something in Seattle. The Space Needle? We just have to watch out for earthquakes and terrorist attacks.”

  “How do you watch out for an earthquake?”

  Did Evan detect a half-smile? A snide remark? Sarcasm? Something to build on?

  “I don’t know. If the monkeys start going crazy, I think. Don’t monkeys sense earthquakes?”

  “Do they keep earthquake monkeys at the Space Needle? What do they feed them? Popcorn and hot dogs?”

  Humor. Excellent. Fantastic.

  “Okay, forget it. It was just an idea.”

  They eat: Evan, his steamed vegetables and rice; Dean, fried clams and French fries and lemonade. When they are finished, they gather their garbage, bus their table, take up their bags and leave the mall.

  “Where did my mom live?” Dean asks as they cross the parking lot toward Evan’s car.

  “When she was growing up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want me to show you?”

  Shrug. “I don’t care.”

  Sure you do.

  MAGNOLIA IS ALMOST an island; a hilly peninsula only accessible by bridge, just north of downtown, just south of Ballard, and just above Puget Sound. Its housing options are highly stratified. Basically, there are those houses with views, and those without, the ones “with” being much more expensive. Evan grew up with a view, Tracy without.

  Evan takes Dean to Tracy’s childhood house and stops across the street. The house has changed in the fifteen years since Evan last visited. Gone is the dark brown clapboard. Gone is the flat roof with the white rocks on it. (Truly a mystery: why did they put rocks on those roofs?) Gone are the large, unbroken expanses of glass, the aluminum screen doors, the cheap brass-plated door knobs, the uneven slate entryway, the strange ceramic wind chime that hung from the front eaves and played a deep, rich, melancholy tune on breezy nights. Tracy’s house is not Tracy’s house anymore.

  Now it is a low, mission-style remodel, all natural cherry and faux limestone. A new shallow-peaked roof with cedar shakes. Sensible double-glazed windows with real wooden frames. It is a travesty of a renovation carried out by people who had enough money to do whatever they wanted with a house, but not nearly enough to buy a small container of good taste that they could keep in the back of their Sub-Zero and dip into on those rare occasions they might need it to save their aesthetic souls. Evan isn’t sure if he feels worse for the people who live there or for Dean, who will never fully understand that his mother grew up in a completely run-of-the-mill Seattle-style, middle-income house, the kind that nobody ever thought twice about until some dweeb invented Windows and changed the world.

  “It didn’t look like that when she lived there.”

  The house is on the town side of the bluff, tucked into a winding road toward the south, near the Magnolia Bridge, formerly an undesirable location, but possibly now a New Hot Spot, since it provides a quicker escape at the expense of seclusion.

  “It’s nice, ” Dean says.

  Is it nice? Maybe. If Evan could face the source of his own resentment, get over himself for a minute and confront his own prejudices, maybe it is nice. Sure. It’s nice. But it isn’t Tracy’s house. That’s what bugs him. It doesn’t reflect her childhood at all. It doesn’t hold a single memory for him. It has been gutted, stripped to the studs and rebuilt, and any echo of previous lives still held by the bones of the house are muffled beyond the range of human hearing by sturdy new 5/8” Imperial Sheetrock and skim coating.

  “Where did you live?”

  “Me? On the other side of the hill.”

  Dean waits. Not with a look of expectation, Evan thinks, but a look of naive assumption: obviously the Wallace house will be the next stop on The Tour. It’s on the schedule.
So Evan starts up the car and goes along with it.

  They drive up through the ravine and around to the edge of the bluff where the madrona trees rustle their leaves at the wind. Here, the houses are bigger in size and stature. The yards are neater. The paint is fresher. Seeing that his mother’s car isn’t parked in the turning circle where she always parks it, Evan pulls in.

  The Wallace house is a grand two-story Colonial, white, and clean, clean, clean. It’s so clean, Evan’s mother can’t even keep a cleaning lady. They invariably quit on her when they realize how much will be asked of them, or they are fired when, after the third week of service, Louise discovers a picture frame that hasn’t been moved for dusting. (Nothing bothers Louise more than a dusty spot under a picture frame.) After years of futility, Louise has given up and she cleans the house herself.

  “Wow, ” Dean says, sizing up the place, “you’re rich.”

  “I’m not rich, my father is.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “He’s a heart surgeon—or, he used to be. He doesn’t operate anymore. He’s too famous. Now he runs the hospital.”

  “Cool, ” Dean says.

  “Not really.”

  Evan feels a strange kind of pride, though, having brought Dean to the place he was raised. A sense of authorship over his life, or something. Thus emboldened, he gets out of the car.

  “Where are we going?” Dean asks.

  “Inside.”

  Dean hesitates.

  “Don’t worry, ” Evan says.“Nobody’s home.”

  The house is, indeed, quite empty. The alarm warning goes off when Evan opens the door, and he feeds it the code to shut it up.

  “Shoes, ” Evan says, slipping his off as an example. You always take off your shoes when you go to Carl and Louise’s house. Dean complies.

  They hear a weak woof from the kitchen. Evan leads Dean back through the marble hallway. A dog gate is braced between the doorjambs. Behind it is Ralphy.

  Ralphy is Carl and Louise’s sad old retriever that they got when Evan moved out on his own and Charlie went away to college. At the time they said their house felt so empty that they needed to fill it. So they saved Ralphy from Death Row at the animal shelter and brought him home. Little did they know he would be a major problem. Cute. Scruffy. But totally retarded and untrainable, able to eat entire pillows without so much as a burp, skilled at chewing the most expensive shoes into rawhide and at crapping in the worst possible places. And he eats rocks. Nobody knows why. Veterinarians are mystified. But Ralphy actually eats rocks.