by Dan Chaon
Cal used to shake his head. “Geez,” he used to say. “Take a Valium.” Hap remembered one night they’d gone to this place, Elbow’s Room, where they didn’t card. It was a dim, hazy bar, with country music on the jukebox, and they went in before a party. Hap was eager to get back; he didn’t want to miss anything. But Cal was in no hurry. Hap was telling him that he was going to miss the fraternity when they graduated, that it was one of his main reasons for staying in school, and Cal stared at him. His face was lit by the fireplace glow of neon, made spooky and dark by it. Hap was hoping he’d say, “Me, too,” or even, “Yeah, when we go that place is dead.” But all he said was, “Christ, I can’t wait to get out. You’re crazy, Hap.” He shrugged, and Hap felt something clench inside him; it was like Cal was abandoning him.
That was one of the things that stuck in his mind that night. The dancing had died down early, and Hap was making his way upstairs to his room. There were four girls on their way up to the ladies’ room when they saw Hap rubber-legging up the steps. He nearly fell over them, and they caught him, laughing. It was what he did, sometimes; he wasn’t sure why. He liked to act more drunk than he was. The girls wrapped their arms around his shoulders and guided him toward his room—someone in the hall directed them. Hap kept his eyes closed, and shortly he felt one of the girls sliding her hand in his back pocket to get his keys. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said breathlessly, and another whispered, “Is he out?” He wasn’t, of course. But when their grip loosened, he slumped to the floor, and another girl said, “I guess he’s out.” They carried him in and put him on the bed, but he didn’t sleep. The more he lay there, the more awake he became, listening to the music pulsing through the floor. A couple stood outside his door, thinking they had privacy, and murmured urgently—he couldn’t tell if they were arguing or making out. When he was sure the party was over, at nearly five in the morning, he went downstairs. He planned to pass out again, this time sprawled on the pool table.
It was a gray morning: it could have been dawn, or dusk again. When he passed the window in the stairwell, a heavy bird lifted from the sill and blurred into the fog. It startled him, and he felt suddenly that there was someone watching him. He wondered if the house was all closed up. Often after a party he found the front door hadn’t been bolted, or one of the fire exits was slightly ajar, or a window on the first floor was open, crepe paper streamers trailing off into the breeze. Sometimes it was hard to feel safe.
Everything seemed to pause, waiting. He peered in on each floor. All the doors were closed, lined up as still as motel rooms. Long shadows stretched in the dim hallways. He felt as if the place had been abandoned.
When he went downstairs the living room seemed thick with haze. No one had cleaned up after the party. The furniture was all cleared out still, and there were plastic cups cluttered on every surface. From across the room he could hear the wind blowing through an open window. He squinted in the pale half-light. For a moment he was certain he saw the shape of someone standing there, a figure by the window, with the curtains fluttering around him.
“Hello,” he called, and his voice rang hollowly in the empty room. “Hello? Is someone there?”
And then he turned and ran up the stairs to his room. He bolted the door and put on the radio. He wanted to wake someone up, just to prove he wasn’t alone in the house. He kept turning the stereo louder, until at last Doug Cohn in the next room began knocking heavily on the wall between them. Hap turned off the stereo and sat there in the bed until it was light enough to sleep.
There were times, lots of times, when it seemed like everything was back to normal. Hap would go downstairs before dinner to find a group of guys standing around the pool table, tapping balls into the pockets with the palms of their hands, and the talk was all easy jokes and gossip. Mornings, he’d walk into the bathroom, where a line of people from his floor were all at sinks, shaving, and he’d move in beside them without a hitch. Even the day after the party, when he woke, there was a moment when he imagined himself shrugging to Doug Cohn, and he heard himself chuckling, “Hey, thought I saw a ghost last night, Doug. Scared myself shitless.”
But later, when he saw Doug Cohn on his way out the front door with his bookbag, it seemed that the things he planned to say were frivolous and artificial. He drew back, acting as if he hadn’t noticed Doug, and he decided that it was probably best not to mention anything at all. After that, the day didn’t seem like it would cruise along so easily. There was always some little snag to send him spinning.
The early evenings were the worst, after everyone had gone off to the library or their girlfriends’ rooms. He flipped through channels in the television room, one after the other so the voices and music and yelps of white noise melted together in a collage, an abstract code he could almost recognize. Or he’d end up back in his room, listening for someone to come down the hall. He made lists: party ideas; things he planned to do tomorrow; friends, in ascending order of closeness. He’d number things from one to ten. It was calming to mark things down.
Sometimes he thought he would just give in, that he would let himself spend the whole day brooding about Cal. But he found he couldn’t. He tried to remember something specific about Cal, some significant conversation they had, the special things they used to do together. But his mind would go blank. Or rather, he’d remember how once someone spray-painted ELIMINATE GREEKS on the outside of their house. They’d circled the A in ELIMINATE, and there was a picture of Cal in the campus newspaper, standing in front of the big red A in his Greek-letter sweatshirt and grinning. He recalled the time he and Cal came up with a way to combine philanthropy and partying. They planned to get a bunch of organ-donor cards from the Department of Motor Vehicles and use them as admission tickets to a huge bash. They were going to have T-shirts that said LOSE YOUR LIVER—DONATE AN ORGAN/HAVE A BEER!
It seemed to Hap that all these memories were grotesque, like the old photos he’d found once in his basement at home, pictures half-eaten by silverfish. He wondered if something was wrong with him. He believed that if things were the other way around, Cal would remember him better—that Cal would have fond stories of the night they pledged or the time they were both elected officers of the fraternity; some recollection that would make everyone laugh.
He didn’t know what the others were thinking. At the chapter meeting on Monday night, he announced, effortlessly, it seemed, that “a group of brothers will be visiting Cal Fuller this Sunday,” and then went on with the other items on the agenda. When he scanned their faces he couldn’t read anything. Even the other three guys who planned to go to Cal’s house didn’t seem to respond. Eric sat staring at the textbook he’d opened on the table in front of him; Charlie Balbo rocked back in his chair, balancing on two legs; Russ, Cal’s freshman-year roommate, traced his index finger across his palm.
He didn’t know what he expected. But he didn’t like it when Balbo patted him on the back, and said, “I hear you made it to bed Saturday night, for once.” He didn’t like his own reply: “Yeah, your girlfriend showed me the way.” He gave a short laugh, and the sound of it made his face feel pale and visible.
There was no party that Saturday, and the house was unnaturally still. Yet he felt too edgy to go out. In the distance, up and down the fraternity quad, people were calling and laughing, on their way to other parties. Any other Saturday night, Hap would be out there with them, on his way somewhere to unwind. He’d melt into the heat and flex of crowded rooms, nodding at aquaintances, easing into casual conversation with girls, just letting the smoke and alcohol work through him. There might even be a moment, late at night, when everything seemed perfect—like the time he and Cal had sung “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” on their way home, very slowly and with melancholy, and there had been a few bars of clear harmony, echoing against the walls; or the time an enormous raccoon had regarded him from a rain-soaked lawn, standing on its haunches, holding an apple. Heavy clouds of steam were rising from manholes, drif
ting low to the ground, all the way down the sidewalk.
Hap could see his reflection in the window, staring in at him. The ivy was thick across his window so he couldn’t see who was laughing outside. All he could see were twisting vines, the shadows of leaves showing through his reflection like an X ray of something—he wasn’t sure what. This was what it was like for Cal, he thought—floating as people passed below you, as if you’d levitated out of your own body.
When Russ knocked on the door, Hap was staring out the window and feeling as if he could lift out of his skin. He hoped there wasn’t an edge of desperation in his voice when he said, “Come on in, buddy. Have a beer with me.”
“I was just stopping by to let you know when we were going to leave in the morning,” Russ said. He glanced around as if he were entering a room full of strangers. When Hap handed him a beer, he sat there considering it. For a moment, they sat not saying anything, both moving their heads to the music that Hap had playing, constantly.
“So anyway,” Hap said at last. “It’ll be good to see Cal again, huh?”
Russ shrugged. “I guess,” he said. He moved his mouth as if to say more, but then took a sip of beer instead. He swallowed. “I mean, you know,” he said.
“Well, anyway, they say he’s doing pretty well,” Hap said. “It’ll be cool. We’ll just sit around, shoot the breeze for a while. No big deal.”
They nodded at one another. Russ had never been easy to squeeze conversation out of; some people used to say that if he hadn’t been roommates with Cal freshman year, he never would have gotten a bid. He’d still be in the dorms, studying his Saturday nights away.
Yet it used to be easier to talk, even to Russ. Hap used to believe he could connect with most any of them, that they would all get together in twenty years, like the old paunchy alumni who came back every spring to drink together, to tell old stories and sing songs. Hap had seen that as part of his future. He used to imagine that his fraternity brothers would think of him from time to time for the rest of their lives. Some little thing—an old song on the car radio, a face glimpsed as an elevator closed—would startle them, and they’d think suddenly, Hap! What’s he up to these days?
Russ lifted the beer to his lips; when he set it down, a droplet of moisture trickled slowly down the side of the can. Russ seemed to be waiting for him to say something. But all he could think of was small talk, trivia: sororities, classes, sports teams. It made him cringe. Outside, the wind came up. Hap could hear the muffled buzz of a motorcycle speeding down a faraway street, someone showing off.
“I don’t think it will be so bad tomorrow,” Hap said.
Russ nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said at last. “It should be okay. I mean, I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
Hap said, “Hey, I’ll be sober at least.”
Russ looked down and shook his head. “Yeah,” he said softly.
“No big deal,” Hap told him. “It won’t be any big deal.”
Cal’s home was in a new development called Stone Lake Estates. It was at the far edge of the suburbs, and some of the streets weren’t marked clearly on Russ’s map. No trees had been planted yet, so the rows of houses stood bright and unshaded against the clear sky.
The boys were all still as they circled through Stone Lake, so quiet that Hap could hear Charlie Balbo in the backseat, breathing through his nose. Every time they passed a street sign, Russ slowed and gazed at it uneasily. At last, he pulled into a driveway. “This is the place,” he said. Hap saw him cast a quick look at Charlie Balbo. None of them seemed to look at him, though if they had, he would have simply smiled firmly.
Cal’s mother came to the door, but she didn’t open it right away. She peeked through the curtains, and they waved at her uncertainly. Hap could hear the bamboo wind chimes that hung from the porch, the deep hollow tones as they rustled in the breeze. Then they heard the lock turning, and she stared at them through the half-open door.
“Hi, boys,” she said.
“Hi,” they echoed. They stood for a moment on the threshold, and she took Russ’s hand. He’d stayed over with them one Thanksgiving, and she spoke lightly: “Good to see you again, Russ.” Then she turned expectantly to the rest of them. Eric and Charlie introduced themselves quickly, and they shook hands, too. “Welcome, Charlie, Eric,” she said. Then she smiled at Hap.
“I’m Hap,” he said. “We talked on the phone.”
“Of course,” she said. “I believe I met you once at a reception.”
She had dark eyes. They seemed wet and glittering as Hap took her hand. Hap thought maybe she was wishing the same thing on him, wishing him crippled or dead, though she held his hand for a long moment, tightly. She was always angry with Cal, Hap remembered; she always complained that he spent too much time socializing and not enough time preparing for his future. Hap wondered if she thought he had led Cal astray. He wished he could tell her that everything, everything had always been Cal’s idea.
“You’re very lucky,” she said softly, and dropped his hand.
She ushered them past several framed photographs of Cal: as a baby, as a longhaired high school boy, another that Hap recognized as the one Cal had taken for the fraternity composite when he was elected president. They walked into a living room, and it was then that they saw him. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching an old black-and-white television series. He didn’t move. He had his face turned away from them, and the mother seemed not to notice him.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” she asked, and it sent a shiver through Hap, as if it were an accusation. “Coke? Milk? Water?”
As she went toward the kitchen, Cal looked up, and Hap lifted his hand hesitantly, as if to wave, or to shield his face. But Cal let his eyes drift shyly over them, then turned back to the TV. He didn’t recognize them, Hap realized. Their stares made him shift bashfully. He leaned toward the television as if to be swallowed up by it and vanish. None of them looked at one another, or spoke. Hap just watched the screen, thinking that all of them were sharing the same images, at least.
The curtains had been drawn, so the TV seemed bright. The sleepy dimness of the room reminded Hap of winter, of childhood sicknesses. Everything was muted. In the next room, beyond the cheerfully artificial voices of the TV characters, he could hear ice cubes being cracked.
Mrs. Fuller came in, carrying their drinks on a tray. Cal continued to watch television until she said, “Cal, honey,” very firmly. Then he looked up at her impatiently. Hap tried not to glance at him. He held tightly to his glass, staring down into it.
“Do you see your friends?” Mrs. Fuller said. “Look who’s come to visit you!”
“Hi.” Cal sighed, and Hap’s hands began to throb. He wasn’t the same person, Hap thought. He tried to put on a polite smile, but he knew it looked false. All he could think was that Cal must be in that body somewhere, but sleeping, or maybe only vaguely aware, like someone drugged; he imagined the real Cal was submerged somehow, curled up like a fist, struggling to break out.
“How’s it going, Cal?” he said brightly, and Cal gazed up at him. Russ and Eric and Charlie were lined up on the long sofa that faced the television, and Hap was a little apart from them, in a high-backed easy chair. Everyone was watching him. “Good to see you!” he said, but Cal didn’t answer. He glanced back at the TV show.
“Cal,” Mrs. Fuller said, in her calm, stern voice. She got up and shut off the TV, and Cal’s head turned as she went, noting each movement wistfully. “Look, Cal,” she said softly. “Who are those boys?”
He hung his head. “My friends,” he whispered.
She was close to him, avid, bright-eyed. She lifted her finger suddenly and pointed at Hap. His heart leapt. “Who’s that boy, Cal? Who is that?”
Hap caught his breath, stiffening, but Cal was silent. The quiet stretched out like a long shadow, and Hap felt that all of them were waiting for him to do something. He stood up. For a moment, he just wavered there, awkwardly, as if he’d been asked to
give a speech, but at last he began to move forward a bit. He nodded encouragingly at Cal. “Who am I, Cal?” he whispered, so soft he could barely hear himself, and Cal closed his eyes. He slumped down, and for a moment Hap thought he’d fainted. But then his eyes snapped back open.
“I don’t know,” Cal said.
The room seemed to darken. Hap kept inching forward, holding out a hand to shake, though he could see that Cal didn’t quite trust him; he drew back a little, the way a child would when a stranger’s friendliness seemed false. “Hey,” Hap said. “It’s me, Cal.” He raised his voice. “It’s me—Hap.”
Cal sat there on the rug, his legs tucked carefully under him, and Hap just hovered there, looking down on him. He thought maybe he ought to crouch down on the floor, too, so that Cal could see him face-to-face, but before he could Cal stood up and walked over to his mother. He sat down next to her, leaving Hap alone in the middle of the room. He faced all of them.
Mrs. Fuller put her arms around Cal, and he leaned his head against her shoulder. “When he came out of the coma,” she said—Hap standing there helplessly, as if surrounded—“When he came out of the coma, he didn’t even know who I was.” She smiled ruefully. “He was like a baby again: couldn’t dress himself, feed himself, anything. But he’s come a long way.” She couldn’t look up. They all watched her, hypnotized, as she spoke in a slow, sweet voice, as if to Cal. She told them how happy she’d been when he’d drawn a circle on a piece of paper, when he played a game of Chutes and Ladders with a nurse. “Who knows what he remembers?” she whispered, her mouth close to Cal’s ear. “He’ll look at those pictures from your fraternity for hours. He’s just fascinated. And sometimes he’ll say something and he’ll sound almost like himself.”
She sighed. “But you can’t think of it that way,” she said. “He’s a new person now. And we have to love him in a different way than we used to. Not any less,” she said. “Just different.” She laid her hand on Cal’s cheek, and he nuzzled against her. There was a long silence, and at last, the spell broken, Hap edged back to his chair. That was it, he thought. Cal was gone. He imagined a sudden bright flash burning away the person who had been Cal, leaving only a blurry whiteness, a hiss of static. He saw it so clearly that for a minute he felt as if the chair were tilting underneath him. He held to the arms, tightly.
