by Dan Chaon
Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Praise
MY SISTER’S HONEYMOON: A VIDEOTAPE
GOING OUT
SPIRIT VOICES
CHINCHILLA
THIRTEEN WINDOWS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
FRATERNITY
TRANSFORMATIONS
SURE I WILL
ACCIDENTS
DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?
RAPID TRANSIT
PRESENTIMENT
FITTING ENDS
A Reader’s Guide
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Also by Dan Chaon
Copyright Page
For my parents, and with love and respect, for Sheila
“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of things that Will be, or are they the shadows of things that May be, only?”
—CHARLES DICKENS
A Christmas Carol
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The original version of this book was published in 1995 by Northwestern University Press. The Ballantine edition has been significantly rearranged and revised; some of the stories from the first edition have been deleted, and some new stories have been added. I am deeply indebted to Gina Centrello, my publisher, and Dan Smetanka, my excellent editor at Ballantine, for the unusual opportunity of revisiting this book, and—hopefully—making it a bit better.
I am thankful for permission to reprint stories that appeared, mostly in different form, in the following publications: “Fitting Ends,” “Rapid Transit,” “Going Out,” and “Sure I Will” in Tri-Quarterly; “Fraternity,” in Ploughshares; “Spirit Voices” in American Short Fiction; “Accidents,” in MSS; “Transformations” in Story. Stories new to this edition are “Thirteen Windows,” which originally appeared in Ohio Review; and “Presentiment,” which was first published in Washington Square. “Fitting Ends” also appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1996, edited by Katrina Kenison and John Edgar Wideman, and in Welcome to Your Life , edited by David Haynes and Julie Landsman; “Do You Know What I Mean?” also appeared in A Ghost at Heart’s Edge, edited by Susan Ito and Tina Cervin; “Fraternity,” was reprinted in Student Bodies, edited by John McNally; and “Transformations” also appears in Conversations, edited by John Selzer.
The excerpt in “Spirit Voices” is from Liz Rosenberg, Adelaide and the Night Train (New York: Harpercollins, 1989); the excerpt in “My Sister’s Honeymoon: A Videotape” is from the song “Top of the World” by Richard Carpenter and John Bettis (Alamo Music Corp./Hammer and Nails Music [ASCAP]).
I would like to thank the Ragdale Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council for their financial assistance in writing this book. Deep gratitude is also due to Reginald Gibbons, my editor at Northwestern University Press, who first published my work and who has been a lifelong mentor.
More praise for Fitting Ends
“In each of the thirteen stories in Dan Chaon’s first collection, Fitting Ends and Other Stories, the reader is pulled along an emotional beltway that doesn’t stop until the last line. . . . Chaon’s deft use of tension keeps the reader turning pages. . . . [His] stories clutch the heart, and his detail makes them believable—a skill worth noting and one that makes this reader look forward to his next book.”
—The Columbus Dispatch
“While Chaon evokes the magnification of feeling, the ubiquitous loneliness of adolescence as vivid as the best of recent exemplars—Theodore Weesner and Alice McDermott come to mind—there is something about the freefloating anxiety of a few of these stories that transcends chronological age.”
—Boston Book Review
“The stories are deftly written and brilliantly structured, with titillating beginnings and somewhat cryptic endings. The prospect for this generation is not grim, Chaon seems to say; it’s just uncertain.”
—Publishers Weekly
“It is in the telling, the subtle shifts of perspective, and the transformation of character in a short space that distinguish Chaon as a writer to watch.”
—Library Journal
Acclaim for Among the Missing, A Finalist for the National Book Award
“One of the best short story writers around . . . Dan Chaon’s stories are funny, heartbreaking, beautifully written, and intelligently conceived.”
—LORRIE MOORE
Author of Birds of America
“Unforgettable . . . [Among the Missing] hums with life and wry humor. . . . The stories sneak resolutely up on you, like new weather that hits before you know it.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“With a story like this one from the marvelous writer Dan Chaon, I am confronted not only with an unfathomable mystery such as that of the endurance of a single human identity over time, but also with new proof of the enduring value of telling tales in the ongoing struggle to understand those mysteries.”
—MICHAEL CHABON
On the 2001 O. Henry Award–winning story, “Big Me”
“One of those writers who possess an uncanny and seemingly otherwordly understanding of the human condition . . . Chaon [is] a remarkable chronicler of a very American kind of sadness, much in the tradition of Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, and Denis Johnson. Like these writers, Chaon offers prose that’s straightforward, chiseled with a Hemingwayesque clarity and deceptive simplicity. . . . These stories are to be savored.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“These twelve stories—filled with compassion, sensitivity, and a quirky brand of humor—will stir readers to recall their own deepest moments of fear and sadness. Chaon’s characters struggle for meaning and connection, but they do so with quiet dignity, which is why (aside from the author’s precise, elegant prose) this collection is so pleasurable to read.”
—The Washington Post
MY SISTER’S HONEYMOON: A VIDEOTAPE
There is a moment or two of vertigo in the beginning, that kind of cinema verité thing that all the young future filmmakers back at school were so crazy about for a while. The date stamp in the corner of the screen holds steady: 8-11-94, it says, but the time stamp moves swiftly. PM 12:01:46, and the second counter babbles through a garble of numbers, almost too rapidly to notice. 12:02:01, and there is nothing recognizable on the screen. Many seconds scroll by until we can recognize that the blur of color and darkness has some purpose. 12:03:56 before the camera comes to rest on the motion of the landscape passing outside the car: the blurry silver stream of an interstate guardrail sliding past, impressionistic dapples of green and yellow vegetation, and the sky. We’re moving forward. 12:04:28. 12:04:51. It is almost 12:06:20 before part of the dashboard rises up and we see a map. One of my sister’s red fingernails appears hugely in the corner of the frame.
We hear her voice: “Do you think this is working?”
She is not very steady. The camera jerks and bobs—the window frame, the glint of the rearview mirror, her feet, barely recognizable in the dimness below the dash. She points the camera at the map, focuses.
Colorado.
PM 12:59:03
8 - 1 1 - 9 4
My sister’s husband’s grip is firmer. He makes a clean sweep over an orchard of apple trees, an orderly orchard made quaint and picturesque by its many boughs of bright, heavy fruit. A red van crosses in front, obscuring the view for a moment, and then my brother-in-law arcs slowly over the trees again.
“Old apple orchard,”
he murmurs solemnly, as if reading aloud to himself, as if narrating for a blind person. “Along the side of the road. Lots of apples!”
He zooms in for a close-up of a particularly bountiful branch. Another red van, or the same one, drives across the picture.
PM 1:18:32
8 - 1 1 - 9 4
Deer are eating grass by the side of the road. The couple doesn’t say anything.
It is about three in the morning, and I lean back, taking a slow drink from my beer. I don’t know why I’m watching this videotape—out of boredom, maybe, restlessness, insomnia. I’m not sure why I’ve come here after all, to my sister and brother-in-law’s new house, not far from the small town where my sister and I grew up. I guess one has to be somewhere at Christmas, and I am single, unconnected, and we used to be close, my sister and I. You haven’t seen your new niece yet, my sister said to me. You’ve got to come. But my sister goes to bed at ten every night, and the quiet seems to expand and expand, radiating out from the newly occupied house. In a nursing home five miles away, my mother lies in her bed, her thumb and forefinger moving against each other in her sleep, the late early stages of Parkinson’s. Across miles, in a distant city, my empty apartment sits in darkness. The faucet drips slowly into a pot I didn’t have time to wash before I left.
On the screen, the camera tries to zoom in on a doe, who is now lifting her head suspiciously, but the picture won’t focus properly. High weeds obscure the view of the suddenly alert animal; the frame is mottled with blurs of leaves.
“They’re sure not scared of people, are they?” my sister says at last, in a stage whisper.
PM 2:14:05
8 - 1 1 - 9 4
Here are my sister’s thick bare legs walking along a narrow asphalt path. She is wearing sandals, her toenails are dull red, a polish that is almost wood colored. Other legs can be seen in front of her. The camera rattles; the microphone jostles hollowly as they march.
You have to wonder about a shot like this, especially when it continues on and on like it does. Has my brother-in-law turned on the camera accidentally, or does he completely lack imagination, any sense of aesthetics? Can we read this as a representation of his mental process, some secret symbolic system that isn’t clear? Maybe it’s merely his sophomoric sense of humor—the camera lingers as she tugs at the back of her shorts, which have ridden into the crack of her buttocks.
Everyone else in the house is asleep. My sister and her husband are spooned together under the comforter in their king-size bed; their baby is motionless in her crib. The living room is dark except for the slow-blinking colored lights on the Christmas tree my sister has erected. The shadows of wrapped packages extend under the blinking lights, expanding and contracting in a creepy way, like something breathing.
It’s a larger house than I expected, more nicely furnished. There is a plush beige sofa, new; glass coffee table; big stereo; wide-screen TV. “Forty-eight inches!” my brother-in-law informed me, and I was, like, “You’ve got me beat, buddy.”
He finally takes the camera off her backside. We move upward, and there is my sister, turning her head back to say something I can’t catch—the sound is turned very low, so as not to wake anyone, and I’m already so close to the screen I can touch it. It seems like she says, “Nice one,” but what is she referring to? She laughs after she says whatever she says, that old edgy, cynical chuckle I’m familiar with, though it’s more polite than I’m used to, tempered by something—by love? By the fact that this is her honeymoon and the weight of the “fun” and “romance” she is supposed to be portraying is pressing down? Is it simply that the camera makes her self-conscious? My brother-in-law turns the camera from her laughing face abruptly, revealing a railing with a magnificent, high-cliffed vista beyond. There is a river far, far below; we zoom in and back.
PM 2:18:17
8 - 1 1 - 9 4
The Royal Gorge, that’s what it is. We see the words on a historical marker, in large capital letters, underneath which is a brief text explaining the gorge’s history and significance.
The camera doesn’t move. Unbelievably, we pause before the placard and stay there. I watch as a minute clicks by, and then another—the video camera has automatically superimposed the time and date of the taping in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. Even the seconds seem to crawl by. The focus is adjusted obsessively.
I refuse to read it. There is something irritating about having this thing thrust on you, the camera’s dull, plodding insistence that we take it all in, every last word. It says a lot about my brother-in-law, I think—you can see how pushy and oblivious he is.
I don’t really know him that well. We’ve only just met. But this reminds me of the way he directed me on a tour of their house, each room with its specific, unvariable focal point of something he had to fix or something he’d recently purchased.
“Here’s our new bathtub. We’ve had big plumbing problems here, so I had to go into that there wall and . . .” “Here’s the baby’s room. We put up the wallpaper ourselves, and that crib’s the one my mom just bought us. This is the toy box I built, and as you can see, it’s full of toys. She’s got a lot of them, doesn’t she?” And then the minute he was done talking he’d say, “Moving right along.”
I think he bullies her. I noticed right away when I got here that there was something subdued, something submerged about her now. I noticed little things. The night I arrived we were sitting down to dinner, after my sister had put the baby to sleep. She’d prepared the meal, set the table, even poured his beer into a glass for him, but the minute she lifted her fork, he said, “Is that the baby?” We were all silent. Nothing. The conversation started again, but before too long he raised his finger. “Shh,” he said. “I think she’s crying.” Again, we heard nothing, but I watched as my sister got up from the table and went to check. He got his way.
Four full minutes of screen time pass before we are allowed to turn from the historical marker. I wait, feeling a bit bullied myself, wondering if it had really taken my brother-in-law that long to read the text. At last, we get some views of the scenery, the gorge from various angles, and even—for a moment—my sister herself. She stands at the railing and smiles at the camera he’s pointing at her. The wind lifts her long hair. She looks down, over the edge, and he comes closer. We stare down at the rushing of the rapids, see a raft, bright orange, whisk past.
“It doesn’t look that deep, does it?” my sister muses. “But I guess it is.”
PM 3:20:56
8 - 1 1 - 9 4
More scenery. My sister’s shaky hand gives the frame an unpleasant edginess—I am reminded of reading newspapers on microfiche at the library, and the vague queasiness that comes from too much of it. There are views of mountain roads seen from the moving car. We pass high cliffs, walls of sediment-layered stone that have been gouged through by the highway. We pass beautiful drop-offs, mountain passes gilded by silver highway railings.
I guess she trains the camera on this because she is moved, awed by the beauty of it. She wants to record it. But it’s odd how little the camera can catch. In our old photo albums, it’s not the background but our own faces I notice now—us, as children, eight, eleven, thirteen years old, posed before the Space Needle in Seattle or the Grand Canyon or some cactus we drove by in Arizona. This is us, we seem to be saying. We exist, even in this strange landscape. And the photos that are without people are as anonymous and inexpressive as postcards. No one is capable, at least in my family, of framing a view so that it expresses anything beyond the fact of its obvious grandeur.
Although there is a photograph my sister once took when we were growing up that has something to it. It’s a photo of a train wreck that happened near our house, when I was twelve and she was eleven. She rode her bike over there, our mother’s pocket camera tucked under the waistband of her shorts, the hard plastic casing nudging her belly as she pedaled.
It’s not a morbid photograph. At the very center of it, framed perfectly, is a
plume of blue-white smoke, rising in a column and spreading out in that familiar cauliflower shape at the top, like a cumulus cloud. At the bottom of the photo, clustered around the trunk of smoke, are the derailed boxcars, piled together as if arranged. It’s a mysteriously calm picture—no hint of melodrama or sensationalism. It’s almost romantic, in its way, like those solemn and stirring photos of thunderstorms over the prairie that sometimes appear in magazines like Life or National Geographic.
Of course, I don’t know if that’s the way she really saw the thing. But I am one of those who can’t help but see a relation between style and soul. I can’t avoid imagining this eleven-year-old girl, her bike tipped beside her, her gangly bare legs shifting as she steps back—this child standing before a great disaster and slowly, with a purity of self-possession, arranging the scene in the crosshairs of the camera. That is what she was, what she could have been.
PM 4:01:37
8 - 1 1 - 9 4
My god, more panoramas. They’ve stopped the car—this one has really impressed them. But I’m not really paying attention. I take another long sip of beer, thinking that this one will be the last, this one will put me to sleep. I lean back and close my eyes. I keep thinking of sex.
I’ve masturbated twice since I’ve been here. Once, the second day of my visit, I kneeled in the basin of the bathtub with the shower running hot on my back; the next night, I did it in bed, surrounded by fistfuls of toilet paper, which I used to clean away the snotty evidence of my passion.
It bothers me now, thinking of it—considering it again, actually. Ten years ago, I would have been disgusted to learn that I’d still be jerking off at age twenty-five, thwacking away at myself while playing some blurry mental pictures of a girl I’d seen at the airport. I haven’t had a steady girlfriend in over a year. The pathetic twitch of my stockinged feet makes me feel less horny.
I wonder if I seem pathetic to my sister, or to her husband.
When I awoke this morning, the baby was already taking her nap, and I slouched through the kitchen in my T-shirt and sweatpants, heading for the coffee. I felt like a brother-in-law—smelly, shiftless, liable to steal a few towels. I could feel it as I crossed the room. She was showered, brushed, dressed in some bright color. Chipper. She is still on maternity leave from the photo-developing store where she works. Picture Palace, it is called, nestled in a mall on the outskirts of the town where we grew up. I could feel her gaze as she turned to look at me this morning, and at that moment she wasn’t anyone I knew—just an anonymous little wife and mommy in the center of her ranch house. She could have been anyone. I stood there, listening as she hummed along deliberately to the soft rock on the radio.
