by Dan Chaon
Davis found this woman fascinating. She became a character in his consciousness, part of the landscape of his and his wife’s early life as a couple. They would report unusual sightings to one another: the time the woman crawled out of her third-story window and walked around on her roof, hunched over, apparently looking for something specific; the time she spent hours in her front yard, decorating her scruffy bushes with tinsel and Christmas tree ornaments. Long after they had moved away, they continued to imitate her high, hysterical cries when one of the pigeons escaped inside her house. “No! No!” she would wail. “Come back! Come back!”
7.
One night Davis is coming home late again, and he is certain that he can see his four-year-old son looking out of the secondfloor bedroom window. The curtains are parted, and the child’s pale, oblong face is just an outline without an expression. What is he looking at? Davis wonders. Why isn’t he asleep? It gives Davis an odd, panicky feeling.
The strange thing is that when Davis goes upstairs, the boy is asleep. Davis walks, feeling almost stealthy, down the narrow upstairs hallway. The lights are all off except for in his and his wife’s room, a diagonal of light falling onto the carpet, his wife visible through the half-open door, stretched out on the bed with a book. Everything appears to be normal. His wife glances up when she sees him and he raises his hand, a signal that says both “Hi” and “Hush.”
He goes to his son’s door and opens it. But the boy is flat on his back, snoring softly through his open mouth. Outside the boy’s window, Davis can see a half moon, the branching of trees, the hovering, blurry saucer of a distant streetlight. Across the street, the neighbors’ television is flickering in their living-room window, pale blue. “What is it?” his wife says. He turns from the window above his sleeping son’s bed, and she is standing in the doorway, her book closed over her fingers. He shakes his head. “Nothing,” he whispers. He lets his eyes flick again to the television across the street. He can’t tell what they’re watching.
“Nothing,” he says. “Just me, playing tricks on myself again.” He shrugs, smiling.
8.
From time to time, he will see something that isn’t there. He will appear to hallucinate—what?—a fast moving shadow, perhaps, or a globe of light, or sometimes a figure or a face. This has happened to him since he was small, and though it is always disturbing, he has come to accept it, the way others come to accept a nervous tic or an occasional hot flash. It is what happens, he tells himself, to people who spend too much time looking out of windows, or into them.
What is it about windows that he finds so attractive? It seems to be no more than a habit, like any other, something that calms the spirit. He has seen, for example, the way a smoker can sit with a cigarette, drawing on it, exhaling, eyes seemingly blank, or focused inward. That is what it is like, he has thought.
But sometimes he isn’t so sure. Like on that night: it is almost four in the morning, and he finds himself slipping into his son’s room again, to that window. Outside, the houses are all dark, and their walls glow in the glare of their security lights. A darkened window is like a face that pretends it doesn’t recognize you. There is something about it that is coy, and mysterious, and mean.
He remembers that once, when he was about twelve, on his way home from school, he thought he saw a kind of scarecrow—a figure made of twisted vines and branches and dressed in old brown work clothes—propped as if staring from his own bedroom window.
Once, in a parking lot, he thought he saw a dark, glittery fish, a carp maybe, swimming behind the windshield of a parked car. It seemed to flit, startled, and the light caught its scales, and then it was gone.
9.
Davis has never been a superstitious person. He doesn’t try to read hidden meaning into anything he has seen or imagined seeing. It is, he believes, a simple misfiring of his optical nerve, a dysfunctional synapse somewhere in his brain. Perhaps it is due to a fall he had as a child. Apparently, he was fascinated with windows early on, because he once fell out of a second-story window when he was two years old. He doesn’t recall the incident at all, but his mother has told it often enough. She can’t imagine how it happened. He had been in his bedroom, taking a nap, and to this day she can’t figure out how he got out of his crib and over to the window. She was in the kitchen, and (this has always been his favorite part of the story) she remembers looking up from washing the dishes and seeing, first, the window screen and then Davis himself—flailing solemnly, a surprised look on his face as he dropped past the kitchen window. His mother said that he looked at her for a second as he fell past, seemingly pleased with himself.
He required some twenty-five stitches, and even today, if he lifts up his bangs he can see a faint, pale scar running along his forehead.
10.
No, he does not think of these things as omens. What troubles him is that he’s never quite certain of what he sees. Did he see a woman in a silver turban singing in a red car? Did his son watch him pulling into the driveway?
One weekday morning before work he sees the woman next door, and in the course of polite conversation, he asks what breed her little dog is. He realizes as soon as he asks that this is bad, for he can’t admit that he saw the dog while peering through her window. But the woman just gives him a blank smile. “Oh,” she says, “we don’t have a dog.”
“Ah,” he says. “I was under the impression . . .”
“No, no.” The woman laughs. “God forbid! My husband is deathly allergic to animal dander of all kinds. One whiff, and his throat closes up. He feels like he can’t breathe. It’s really awful.”
“That’s terrible,” Davis says. He puts his hand to his own throat. He has a vivid image of the little dog putting its dainty black-nailed paws on the windowsill and cocking its head. A heaviness settles over him.
All that day, he feels depressed. Maybe it is getting worse, he thinks. He wonders if he should see someone about it. A doctor would probably refer him to a psychiatrist. Is he, perhaps, a mentally disturbed person? Maybe he has a brain embolism or something of that sort. Maybe, any minute now, he will feel a sharp, electric brightness in his head and then all will go black. He will open his mouth silently and then his head will fall limply onto the computer keyboard and a thin line of blood will draw a curving trail from his nose or ear. Oh, something is wrong with my life! he thinks suddenly. He doesn’t know where this sense of sadness comes from. His new office—the unfamiliar trappings of the new job he’d felt so pleased with only a month ago—seems to become sharp-edged and grotesque as a dream: the thick white-painted pipes along the ceiling, the shelves cluttered with papers, the bare walls, and he instinctively turns his eyes toward the window.
Cars are driving by on the street outside; a long gray bus trawls slowly to the curb, and the doors part open. He watches as a tall, long-chinned woman in a trench coat emerges. In the back window of a bus, a ponytailed schoolgirl watches the woman, too, grimly interested, as if no one can possibly see her.
He feels calmer. Slowly, the feeling of panic lifts from him, and he reaches out to touch the cool glass of the window, almost affectionately. A warm fog of condensation forms around his splayed fingers, framing them, leaving a ghost that melts and shrinks when he draws back his hand.
11.
“Are you in love with me?” his wife says.
Davis looks up. The view from their bedroom window is not spectacular, but he likes the way the trees become one dimensional at night, the way the silhouettes of bare branches make dark-furrowed maps against the sky.
“Of course I love you,” he says. “Honey, what’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry—it’s just . . . oh, I hate it here! I hate the way we’ve been living since we moved here. I never see you anymore.”
“I know,” says Davis. “It’s terrible.” He resists glancing out the window again, because he knows this will offend her. He has often told her he can think better when he is looking out a win
dow, but she prefers to speak to his face. “It’s horrible,” he says. “But maybe if we can just get through the next few months. . . . I mean, I won’t have to work late forever. I’ll be settled in soon, and . . .”
“I know,” she says. “I know. I just wish . . . I mean, you know what I’m talking about. It’s like the cliché suburban life. You wake up one day and twenty years have passed and your kids are grown and your husband is a stranger.”
“I don’t think it really works like that,” he says. He hugs her. “Not for us. We’re not that type of person.”
It’s not what his wife thinks it is, he knows that. It’s not love or the lack of it; it’s not working too much, nothing so simple. It’s something much worse, he thinks. He holds her loosely, trying to name it. He can see his own reflection over her shoulder, against the window. The dark net of branches seeps through the mirror-image of his face, fingering across his forehead.
12.
He is driving home from work. What is it? he thinks. What is it? What is it? The cars in the next lane file past him: an elderly man, hunched over the steering wheel of his Oldsmobile, eyes wide; a bearded, angry man in a knit stocking cap; a lady whose children wave mockingly from the backseat as they drift past. One child, a lovely little red-haired girl, no more than ten years old, but wearing lipstick, smirks specifically at Davis. Her middle finger is extended as she waves.
Davis’s lane is slower than theirs, and soon her bobbing hand grows small and vanishes in the distance. He does not feel affronted. The little girl is simply an image, which he adds automatically to a string of other images, extending back and back. A string of images curling, snaking through his memory in lazy figure eights, mobius strips of images that he sometimes wishes might lead him somewhere. And yet there doesn’t seem to be any order to them, no specific logic: a dog on its hind legs; a window full of fluttering pigeons; the flick of a golden fish disappearing into the backseat of a car; his mother’s startled look as he flashes past, falling.
What is it? he thinks again.
13.
A darkened window is like a face that doesn’t recognize you. He can sense that he is waiting for something, but it is too late. Everyone is asleep. All along the block, the windows are nothing but black rectangles set in solemn walls—shades, curtains, blinds, silence. The shadows of trees stretch across the road, and cars on other streets murmur as they rush past. Beneath where he is standing, his sleeping son’s mouth draws air. The boy’s eyelids seem translucent, and his eyes rake back and forth, scoping something in a dream.
The glass of the window is soft and cool against his palms; limpid, liquid against his cheek, his lips. It is a membrane he could easily push through. It wouldn’t take much, he thinks, and he would be—where? Where?
Somewhere else entirely.
FRATERNITY
Cal used to be president of the fraternity. But then he was in a car wreck. Cal and Hap and a group of boys from the fraternity house had been out to the bars, and they were on their way home. Afterwards Hap often pictured Cal dipping his hand into a cooler of beer, letting the water run off the can, popping the tab. Cal’s head was tilted back, Hap could see him in the rearview mirror, and it was when he looked back to the road that he saw the parked truck. Hap remembered, or thought he remembered, someone screaming, “Mom!”
John wasn’t hurt that bad. He was in the hospital for a few weeks, but then he didn’t come back to school. He was still at home, working in his father’s auto parts store. He didn’t drink anymore; he didn’t go out. Talking to him, Hap remarked to people, you’d think he was middle aged.
Alexander wasn’t injured at all, but he graduated early—finished up his major and got out of school and their fraternity as quietly as possible, packing up like a swindler without even saying good-bye.
It was Cal who got the worst part of it. He’d ducked down at the last minute and covered his head, but it was his side of the car that was crushed. They had to cut him out of the wreckage, where he was pinned between the car door and the seat.
Cal was in a coma for nearly a month, and all that time they were expecting him to die. He woke up one morning, but he wasn’t the same person. There was brain damage, and he had to go to a rehabilitation clinic.
Hap had been driving the car. He wasn’t drunk, and in fact he took a Breathalyzer at the site of the accident. All he could remember were the faces peering out of the slow-moving cars, and the whirlpool of red and blue lights from the police cars. He passed the test. He’d had a beer or two, of course, but he was definitely within the legal limit. It was an accident. And it wouldn’t happen again: he didn’t drive anymore.
Not that anyone ever blamed him. Still, he sometimes noticed how their eyes darkened sidelong when he reached for another beer. He noticed how their faces suddenly tightened when he was in a good mood and got to laughing. It was as if, he thought, he’d turned for a second into something unclean.
Hap had tried to put everything back in order. They’d held an emergency meeting when they found out Cal wouldn’t be returning, and since Hap was vice president at the time, they told him the presidency was his if he felt up to it. And so he’d stood there, with bandages on his head and hands, talking in nervous circles, saying how life had to go on, how Cal would have wanted it that way.
A few months after the accident, Hap began to pass out in unusual places. The first time it happened was for real: he woke up in the hallway, with no idea how he got there. His face and belly were scribbled with Magic Marker, as if he’d been trying to write himself a message.
After that first time it became an act. On mornings after parties, his fraternity brothers began to find him in the foyer, curled up among the discarded advertisements and catalogs, or in the shower fully dressed, with the water running, or outside under a tree, his hands caked with dirt as if he’d been digging. At first they thought it was funny. They joked that Hap ought to have bells tied to his heels before he was allowed to drink a beer. Some of the incidents became amusing anecdotes.
He planned things in advance, considering which place might be most surprising, most ridiculous. One night he’d squeezed onto a shelf in the trophy case, twisted around gold statuettes of basketball players and wrestlers and the engraved plaques. Even in that precarious position they couldn’t tell he was faking. He opened his eyes with a start and sat straight up. One of the trophies fell, clattering onto the living-room floor.
Often he’d wait a long time before anyone found him. He’d get frustrated, sometimes, and decide he was just going to forget it and go on up to bed. But then he’d hear voices and his heart would pound and his mind would begin to whir like a fan. He could feel the shape of them as they moved closer, slow, hovering, and he’d open his eyes to find them leaning over him like surgeons. Once, this pre-med named Belcaster reached down and took his pulse. The pressure of his finger had run through Hap like an electric shock. He jerked up, and everyone laughed, circled around him, shaking their heads.
But the novelty began to wear off. “Oh, brother,” he heard Charlie Balbo say one morning. “Look who’s passed out again.” Balbo pulled on Hap’s arm. He was in ROTC and always woke up early to do exercises. Hap could hear Balbo sighing through his nose. “Rise and shine, buddy,” Balbo said, and when Hap fluttered his eyelids and moaned, none of them were smiling. Hap figured they were all thinking about the accident.
Cal’s mother called. Cal was back home, she told Hap, and she hoped some of his fraternity brothers would come for a visit. It had been six months since the accident.
Hap wondered how she’d gotten his number. He hadn’t met her, really, just shook hands with her once during parents’ weekend when Cal pointed them out to each other and said, “Mom this is Hap—he’s one of my best pals,” or something like that, quick and stilted; that was the way he talked. Later, after Cal had gone to the clinic, Hap sent a get-well card to his home. He never visited the hospital, though he told people he had: “Cal’s doing real good,” he�
��d say. He called the hospital a number of times, and that’s what they told him. “Under the circumstances,” they said, “he’s doing well.”
As the visit approached, Hap would feel a wave of panic pass over him, and he was desperate to call Cal’s mother and make some excuse. But what? He couldn’t think of any excuse that wouldn’t provoke disbelief. He would think of it from time to time, when he wasn’t expecting to. That Saturday, a week before he was to go, it was like a rushing at his back.
There was a party that night, and Hap had been downstairs long before anyone else, organizing guys to clear the furniture and push it against the wall, directing the football players to lift kegs of beer into ice-filled trash cans, hurrying to get the tap or the strobe light. There were certain things Hap did that he felt no one else could do quite so well. Hap was the one who liked to put up decorations and make up themes for parties—putting red lights in the windows and taping up orange and yellow posterboard in the shape of flames, so the house looked afire; lining the dance floor with old matresses and balloons; setting up elaborate spreads of dips and vegetables and so on. He played the music, building up to the best dance songs, urging the crowd into a kind of frenzy. He’d stand on the window ledge and look out over their heads, calling out chants, which the crowd would repeat. It was almost as if this were his fiefdom, for one night at least.
