by Dan Chaon
Alan looked up. He had been staring at the blinking cursor on his computer for well over half an hour, and he didn’t want Dugan to see how blank his screen was. “What?” he said.
Dugan told him again. He hated having to repeat himself; he’d take on the expression of a comic who had to explain his punch line. “This is the name of a drugstore on Superior,” Dugan said, and handed Alan a slip of paper. “I’m sure they have something decent. Where’d you get that stuff ? Woolworth’s?”
“I just had a first-aid kit at home,” Alan said, and Dugan nodded, flexing his hand as Alan smiled sorrowfully. The hot core of loathing Alan felt for Dugan was often cooled by the idea that maybe Dugan was right. In his own way, perhaps Dugan was really trying to help him. And everyone else on the floor seemed to like Dugan. Dugan had nicknames for some of the employees, little private jokes, and Alan would watch them laughing together beyond the glass wall of his cubicle. Some of them even called their boss Dave.
“I’ll take care of it,” Alan said agreeably. He gave Dugan a thumbs-up, having seen Dugan do this himself on occasion, and tucked the slip of paper into his pocket. But Dugan just stared at him.
“Good man, Lowe,” he said.
When Alan graduated from college, everything had been perfect. He had a good job, an apartment. Three banks sent him notes of congratulations, offering him credit cards so he could buy the things he needed for his apartment, the appliances and furniture he’d always imagined himself owning. “You deserve it,” they told him. “We want to invest in your success!” He curled himself up into this new life as a hermit crab might ease itself into a conch.
But within a few months Alan became aware that something had changed, something was wrong. He had been well liked in college, but suddenly there was something about him that people hated. That autumn, a homeless man walked up to him and spit in his hair, for no reason. Apparently the man just hadn’t liked his looks. Another time, he’d been by himself in a restaurant, sipping coffee, when a smartly dressed, grandmotherly woman had glared at him from a nearby table. “Please don’t watch me while I’m eating, sir,” she said coldly. And even his old friends from college called him less frequently. They had jobs they were settling into, new lives.
“Do I seem different to you at all?” he would ask his friends when they were all together. “What do you guys think of me? I mean really?”
The friends seemed to answer kindly. But afterwards he felt certain they were not telling him the whole truth.
In the mornings, he always resolved that his day at work would be a good one. Even that day, the morning after he was mugged, he’d tried to imagine himself as a young executive, purposeful, eager, the Pete Preneta & Co. Person they often spoke of in their memos. He loved the moment when he reached the elevator banks, the brush of shoulders as a group of people moved toward the opening doors, the sudden tingling in the pit of his stomach as the elevator glided upward. This was how he used to imagine himself when he was in high school, when he was riding in the passenger seat of his father’s pickup with empty beer cans and twenty-two shells rattling on the floor. He would see himself in a suit and tie, sitting down at a desk on the upper floors of a skyscraper, writing with gold-plated pens in a leather-bound appointment book.
He sat at his desk and took the stack of papers from the in-box. He smoothed and straightened them in the center of his desk. But when he looked down, it seemed as if these were the exact same memos and computer manuals he’d gone over the day before. He’d been working there for only six months, but already it seemed as if there were no discernible beginning, middle, or end. Minutes and words began to melt into one another with the hallucinatory tedium of a lava lamp. By ten, Alan would find himself falling into dreams, eyes closed, fingers poised above his keyboard as if in brief, brilliant thought.
He spent a little time applying his new bandages in the shining, brassy bathroom. Dugan had been right: the old ones looked awful—dingy. A crust of blood had appeared through the gauze he’d taped to his forehead. But after he’d finished, the afternoon extended like a dark tunnel in front of him, and he found himself on one of the long errands he often felt compelled to make at this time of day.
That afternoon, he’d gone to the supply closet. He did this usually once or twice a week, and if he was lucky, he would kill almost an hour collecting fine-point felt pens and stationery, Post-it notes and erasers. It was very peaceful.
No one seemed to wonder where he was. He always left his desk in a bit of a clutter, as if he’d be returning any minute; but no one, not even Dugan, mentioned it. It reminded him of a spooky television program he’d once seen, where a man went about his business for days and days before he finally realized that people weren’t noticing him because he was dead. A ghost.
At home, after he had put away his cache of office supplies, he tried on the trench coat again. He had hurried back to his apartment in the waning late January light, his back prickling as the streetlights began to hum, turning blue in the dusk. He’d jumped when a dour young woman had rushed past him on the sidewalk. Now it was dark, and he pulled down the shades in all three rooms, fingering the black buttons of the trench coat through their holes.
In the mirror, he could see the trench coat had been damaged by the attack. It was wrinkled, scuffed with dirt. The sleeve had been torn a little, and the collar marked like a map with dark islands of blood. He hung the coat back up in the closet, regretfully. He had wanted to wear it when he went out that night. It would have made him feel calm.
He liked to go out to restaurants and bars, or to go shopping in those cathedral-like downtown malls, with their high ceilings and gentle music. He knew it was wrong to do this, actually destructive since his money troubles had begun. But most of the places a person could go for free seemed drab and sad, and he dreaded sitting in his apartment alone.
He forced himself to stay at home that night and did not even call for a pizza. He had considered it, but when he picked up the receiver, he discovered that the phone company had made good on their threats. There was no dial tone.
The next day, rent was due. But he didn’t have enough money in his account, and he had even tried calling his parents from a pay phone. “Boy, I know it can be tough financially those first few years out of college,” his father had said. “You know we’d help you out if we could, but we just can’t.” He couldn’t bring himself to tell his father how desperate things were. How would he explain where his money had gone when he didn’t know himself ?
He decided that rather than panic, he would just have to wait a few weeks until his next paycheck. Then he would just go without groceries for a while, that was all. He tried not to let himself imagine his debt rolling over and over, accumulating. It would be all right, he told himself.
He was thinking this, actually whispering it under his breath, when he rounded the corner and bumped into the two boys. They had been walking close together, their shoulders almost touching, and he stepped into them as if into an invisible wall.
“Oh,” he said. “Excuse me!” He grinned. They seemed young, maybe seniors in high school.
“You better take care, mister,” said the taller of the two. “Your head in the clouds.”
“Yes, well,” he said, a bit flustered. They were at the mouth of an alleyway, near a liquor store that hadn’t opened yet. In the distance, people were striding toward the rapid transit station. “I guess I’m a little spaced out,” he said. “Sorry.”
The boys exchanged glances, and it was then that he began to have a feeling. He hadn’t been able to see his muggers—it was too dark and fast—but an image flashed through his mind, like a single frame of film, and he had the sudden intuition that these boys were his attackers. It was the way they looked at one another, as if trying not to chortle; it was the way they had their eyes fixed on him. Yet they were so young and clean cut. He told himself not to be paranoid.
“How much do you want for those sunglasses?” the taller one said.
He was wearing a pair of yellow-tinted sunglasses that made him, he thought, look sort of hip. Sandy had given them to him. He took them off, and he sensed how easy it would be for the boys to pull him into the alleyway. He put his fingers on the grate across the liquor store window. “They’re not for sale,” he said. “Thanks for offering.”
“I’ll give you ten dollars for them,” the taller one said. The boys smiled, and Alan watched as the taller one took a black leather wallet out of his back pocket. Of course, many people have black wallets, Alan told himself. But it looked very much like the one the muggers had taken from him.
“Those are the nicest sunglasses I’ve ever seen,” said the boy.
“No, no,” Alan said. “Seriously. They have sentimental value.”
The two boys stood there, and Alan wondered whether he could grab something—a blade of broken glass, a stone—to fend them off. Then they turned. “Stay cool,” the smaller one said. When they rounded the corner, walking toward the space of ground where he’d been mugged, Alan thought he heard them laugh.
This was not a story that would amuse people, he thought: it made him sound insane. Often, he would finish relating some anecdote, and the silent faces of his coworkers or friends would be like the heavy ticking of a clock. It made him cringe. Once, he’d told someone about the time he had worms as a child. It had seemed comical in his head, but afterward, when he was alone, he was so filled with disgust at himself that he’d struck his idiot mouth with his fist, making it bleed. Once, he was trying to tell Sandy about the Pete Preneta Trainee Week—how the company had shipped them all to Atlanta, where they lived in dorms and learned about Firm policy—but Sandy stopped him halfway through. She shook her head. “You know what’s weird,” she said. “You’re not who you think you are.” She wouldn’t explain what she meant.
Alan gazed out the window of the train. He’d taken this trip hundreds of times now, but nothing ever looked familiar. They could be taking him anywhere. At some corners, buildings slid by only a few feet from the window; walls shuffled past in a blur of colors and textures—grimy red brick or wood or ancient brownstone, the crowns and curlicues and stylized letters of gang graffiti, billboard models with their eyes and teeth blocked out. Then suddenly, there would be a flash of open sky, and an empty school yard would appear, or a street, tunneling its way toward Lake Michigan. Then, just as abruptly, the train descended into the underground, and there was only darkness, or in a sudden flicker of light, the crumbling damp walls and shadowy nooks and crannies of the subway. The train conductor mumbled out the names of the stops in bursts of static over the PA system, but Alan could never understand the words. Often, it wasn’t until he recognized his stop that he was sure he wasn’t going the wrong way.
The rent—of course it came back to him in the middle of the day, while he was trying to talk to Dugan. There was this buzz in his head, like interference from a distant station on the radio.
“So—like, my father,” Alan was telling Dugan, “is in the unions? An organizer. He’s, you know, fairly big.” He wasn’t sure how this had started, how it had led into this lie about his father.
“What union?” Dugan said. He seemed vaguely interested, turning the heavy gold ring on his finger around and around.
“Teamster,” Alan said quickly. “A real old-time progressive, you know.”
“The unions are dying fast,” Dugan mused. He looked at Alan pointedly, and Alan tried to remember where the conversation had been going before this terrible detour. It had been something about Dugan’s parents.
“Well . . . yeah,” Alan said. “That’s what I tell him. He’s always giving me crap about working here, for a corporation and all. But I tell him, you know, this is the nineties.” This was one of Dugan’s phrases, and Alan waited a moment for some slight acknowledgment.
“Hmmm,” Dugan said. This was the longest and most personal conversation Alan remembered he and Dugan ever engaging in. But it was fading fast. “Well, anyway,” Dugan said.
“Hey,” Alan said. “You know what I wanted to ask you.” He hesitated for a moment, but the buzz in his head had grown loud enough that he thought he could risk it. “You know those emergency loans they talk about in the employee handbook?”
“Yeah?” Dugan said.
“How do you get one?”
Dugan considered him, his expression flickering. He looked suspicious, and Alan could sense that the rapport had been killed. So that’s why he came to my office, Dugan was thinking. “What’s the emergency,” Dugan said at last.
“I don’t know,” Alan said weakly. “I’m out of money?”
Dugan’s face was blank for a long second. Then, as if Alan’s voice had just reached him from a distance, he chuckled. “Nice, Lowe,” he said. “Very cute.”
A few days later, on a Saturday, Alan saw Dugan walking down a street. This was in Alan’s neighborhood, far from the Gold Coast condo where Dugan lived. What was he doing here? Alan wondered, and he felt a trickling sensation go through him. He’d never before seen someone from work in the civilian world, and there was something unsettling about it. He saw Dugan come out of an occult bookstore wearing a thick leather jacket with a fur collar, striding slowly, purposefully away from him. He waited for Dugan to get a bit ahead of him; then he followed.
It was an unseasonably warm day for January, and Alan had been wandering the street all morning, trying to stay out of the apartment for fear his landlord would come looking for him. But he’d felt edgy and vulnerable out in the open, and he’d been trying to stick close to people. For a while, he’d browsed in windows beside an elderly lady in heavy makeup and a fur. Perhaps, he imagined, people passing would think she was his mother, and he tried to look bored and impatient. It wasn’t long before he’d made her nervous, however, and she hurried away.
He’d followed Dugan a few blocks when he remembered that he was wearing the trench coat. The realization branched across his skin like frost: it was impossible, but he had actually forgotten that it was stolen. When he paid for the dry cleaning, it had been as if he’d purchased the coat. It felt like he’d always owned it, now.
He stopped and swiftly shed the coat. For a moment, he considered stashing it somewhere. But of course it would be stolen. He folded it a couple of times and then rolled it up tightly, as his father had taught him to roll sleeping bags on camping trips when he was a child. He bent down and picked up a piece of newspaper that was lying on the street, wrapping it carefully around the bundled coat. When he tucked this cocoonlike creation under his arm, it looked like he was just carrying a newspaper—the Sunday edition, but a paper nevertheless.
Dugan had stopped, too. He was peering into a storefront window, absently drumming his thighs with the heels of his hands, as if trying to remember a tune. From a distance, Dugan’s mouth looked odd, doll-like. It took Alan a minute to realize Dugan was whistling.
Alan hung back. He knew he should take his opportunity, turn back before Dugan caught sight of him. And yet there was something exciting about this. For once, it was as if he knew more than everyone else on the street, he had his own secret purpose. He was transformed into someone shadowy yet magnetic, someone larger. Maybe this was what his muggers had felt.
Dugan was completely unaware. He walked on, pausing sometimes in front of a store. Where was he going? Alan cruised easily around the little islands of walking people, sometimes letting Dugan drift far ahead, sometimes drawing close enough that if Dugan turned, he would surely see him. But he didn’t turn.
At the end of the block, Dugan went into a coffee shop. When Alan got to the entrance, he peered in the doorway just in time to see the hostess leading Dugan to a booth. The angry-looking Greek man at the cash register looked over at Alan as he was watching Dugan being seated. Alan smiled. He’d been in this coffee shop several times, and the man, the owner apparently, was always nasty to him.
“You coming in or going out? What?” the man said to him. “You want me to heat the who
le world?” Alan pulled back uncertainly, but then he surprised himself by giving the man the finger. Then he went out quickly, imagining for a moment that the man might come after him. But the man just waved a tired hand at him, making an ugly face from beyond the glass doors. Alan tapped his crotch, as he’d seen disgruntled people do. “Heat this,” he said, and then he stepped back a few paces, out of the man’s line of vision, and leaned against the wall. He didn’t want to get in a confrontation and risk drawing Dugan’s attention.
But he was pleased with himself. “Heat this”: it was a very urban thing to say, the kind of response Dugan himself might have for such a person. Generally, Alan never thought of quick comebacks until long after the fact; often they would come to him when he was trying to go to sleep and he lay there with his eyes open.
People walked by, and he looked at their shoes. Sandy had once told him that if you make eye contact with people on the street, you’re asking for trouble: that was in July, when he’d nodded at a man in a big Russian-style fur hat as he and Sandy came out of a bar. The man had followed them for blocks, asking for money, and they hadn’t been able to go to the automatic teller machine until he’d finally given up on them. “What’s wrong with you?” Sandy had said afterwards. “Do you like being harassed?” But it was hard to avoid looking into people’s faces; often he’d find himself smiling and saying “Morning” to those he passed, as his father used to on the streets of their small town.
But now, he didn’t look up. He leaned back against the wall, hardening his face, narrowing his eyes as if he were concealing a weapon. It made him smile a little to imagine that some redneck was walking by, trying not to look at him.
When Dugan came out, that warm sensation of menace rose up in him like a rush of adrenaline. It was the opposite of what he’d been feeling on the street for weeks now. The people strolling by seemed as vulnerable and trusting as the pigeons that waddled around statues downtown, moving out of the paths of passersby so slowly you could kick one, if you wanted.
