by Dan Chaon
It wouldn’t feel bad to kick Dugan, he thought. There was something annoyingly mincing about the way he walked. He was so proud of those dainty, slipperlike Italian shoes, with their ridiculous sheen, and Alan could tell he was keeping an eye on the ground to avoid stepping in something that might mess them up a little. It wouldn’t feel bad to take a blowtorch to those shoes.
Nothing bad could ever happen to Dugan: that was how he acted, that was what he said with his pace and his whistling. He would never lock eyes with a crazy man on the street; such a person didn’t quite exist in Dugan’s dimension. He never shuddered as strangers brushed past. Not even a knife in the heart could faze him.
Alan’s hands were shaking, but it was a good feeling. When he was little, his father imagined he was going to be an athlete and taught him how to box. If he let down his guard, his father struck a good one to his face or chest, and by the end of a session, Alan’s hands would be shaking like that. “You got the butterflies?” his father would say, feigning punches. “You nervous?” That was good, his father told him. It meant his body was getting him prepared.
Prepared for what?
He wasn’t going to do it, he thought. But then Dugan was slowing down, flexing his shoulders luxuriously, as he always did when he’d made some nasty comment. Nice, Lowe. Very cute, Alan thought, and then he knew he was going to do it after all. They had strolled off the busy street, away from the shops and people, and when Alan saw Dugan turn down a narrow alleyway, toward a parking lot, Alan quickened.
He felt his hand pull the trench coat from under his arm; he worked swiftly to unravel it as he came up on Dugan, stretching it out, and just as Dugan heard the rushing footsteps and began to turn, Alan pulled the coat over his head from behind.
This muffled Dugan’s surprised cry; Alan jerked back on the coat, and he could see the shape of Dugan’s face, like a mask emerging on the surface of the canvas. It was easy to knock him to the ground. Alan had once helped one of his father’s friends clip the ears of his calves, and this was much easier than throwing a calf. Dugan struck earth, and Alan landed on his back with both knees, knocking the wind out of him.
“Help!” Dugan gasped, and Alan struck him with his fist.
“Shut up!” Alan said in a deep voice. He was trying to imitate a street accent, but it came out more like a Southern one. “I’ve got a knife, you motherfucker, and I’ll use it.”
“This is a busy street!” Dugan cried. “Someone will be coming!” His voice was barely intelligible: Alan had tightened the belt of the coat around Dugan’s neck, creating a sort of bag over Dugan’s head. But when he realized what Dugan was saying, it made sense: he had to hurry. They were kneeling beside a trash Dumpster, and he maneuvered behind it with Dugan still beneath him, shoving toward the blackened back wall of the building as one might push off from a dock. Dugan’s hands clawed the cement, and Alan picked up a long shard of broken glass and pressed it against Dugan’s back.
“You think you’re so great,” Alan said through his teeth. “You really need to suffer a little, man.” His accent wavered, and he knew he shouldn’t talk; Dugan would surely recognize his voice. Alan pressed the glass harder against Dugan’s back, and Dugan let out a small shriek, though he wasn’t cut.
“For the love of God,” cried Dugan. “I’ve got money! Credit cards! Take them! Take them!” And Alan did reach into Dugan’s pocket and draw the wallet out.
But that wasn’t what he wanted. He didn’t know what he wanted, really, or how this could have possibly happened. He could feel the adrenaline ebbing away, and he felt as if Dugan was a raft he was kneeling on, adrift on the open sea.
He did want Dugan to suffer—but there was nothing he could bring himself to do that would hurt him enough. He wished he could think of some word, something that would go straight through Dugan’s heart as no weapon could.
“You . . . ,” he said, and he hoped his voice boomed. But he couldn’t think how to finish the sentence, and there wasn’t time to ponder it. “Say Momma,” Alan said at last, and Dugan paused for a moment, then did.
“Momma,” Dugan said woodenly.
Alan wanted to make him repeat it with more conviction, but his stomach was beginning to feel heavy, and all he could think was to reach down and pull off Dugan’s shoes. He wasn’t wearing socks, and his pale feet lay there like beached fish. Alan slipped his belt off and knotted it tightly around Dugan’s ankles. That would give him time to run, he thought, and he could picture himself melting into the groups of people on the distant street, walking lightly in Dugan’s shoes, off toward where the train was pulling into the station, waiting to bear him away.
PRESENTIMENT
Rich never said that it was a ghost he saw that night—it was nothing so specific—though that was the word his wife, Georgia, used. He found the beginning of a letter she was writing to her friend, Mary A. “You’ll love this,” she’d written. “R. apparently saw a ghost in the basement the other night when he went down to check the water heater. I heard him pounding up the stairs and he slammed the door and actually looked quite scared. ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, and at first he wouldn’t say but then later that night he told me that he thought he’d seen ‘something.’ And then later he said it was probably a shadow but that it had seemed too pale. It was like a column of steam or smoke that appeared to move across the wall—the way the shadow of a tree moves when headlights go by, said R. Very poetic, weird for him. So I suppose we could be infested with a spirit, do you think? R. is v. embarrassed and has clammed up.”
Rich picked up a pen from her desk and wrote at the bottom of the stationery, in capital letters: PLEASE DO NOT SEND THIS!
“How dare you read my personal mail off my desk!” Georgia said later.
“No,” Rich said. “How dare you write about me in that way to Mary A.! Do you enjoy making me look like a fool? Is that the way you think of me? What am I, some kind of joke?”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “You’re crazy. I was relaying a personal anecdote to my friend, which is absolutely none of your business.”
“It was about me,” he said. “So it’s my business. I don’t want you to tell her stories about me without my permission.”
“Ye God,” she said. “Your permission! Maybe you should draw up a contract so I know what I can tell my friends and what I can’t.”
“It’s common sense, Georgia!” he said. “That’s all it is. Common sense and common courtesy. It just shocks me that you think about me in that way.”
“What way? You’re paranoid. I’m writing a letter to my friend. What are you, Big Brother? I have to clear my thoughts through you?”
“No,” he said. “Think what you want. It’s just—I can’t imagine being able to trust you with anything personal anymore.”
“Oh, brother,” Georgia said. “When have you ever trusted me, really?”
The argument continued in this unpleasant vein for some time and never came to any satisfactory conclusion. An edge of bitterness lingered the next day, and the day after, leaving a vague film over their ordinary conversations and day-to-day activities. This bothered him more than her, he felt. Unresolved troubles were like a disease, fingering their hideous anxiety through his physical person, discoloring his workday, prodding him pitilessly when he lay down to sleep. It was for this reason that he usually capitulated when they had a disagreement. But in this case, he was so certain that he was right, unquestionably, that he couldn’t bring himself to give in. And yet, it was frightening, because he could sense that Georgia was perfectly willing to let this go on for months, even years. She was a very stubborn person.
A long time before they were married, Georgia found a golden ring at the bottom of a YMCA pool in Chicago. It was strange to picture her then, a dewy, slender, sullen girl he’d seen only in blurry Polaroids: twenty-two years old. He could imagine that body passing through the pale aquamarine water, the deep echo of her hands treading water, the warm smell of humidity and
chlorine. He could picture her dipping down, her body arcing gracefully, her fingers extending to grasp the bright glint of the ring, a wedding band which was now on the right finger of her best friend, Mary A. Mary A. had worn it for years now, had never taken it off.
“For good luck,” Mary A. said, once when she was visiting. She held out her hand for him to see, tilting it the way, in olden times, ladies offered their fingers for gentlemen to kiss. She placed her fingers lightly in the palm of his hand. “Georgia had a presentiment that I would die by drowning, and she gave me this to protect me.”
“I see,” Rich said. He looked sidelong at Georgia, raising his eyebrows slightly. “I didn’t know you had presentiments, honey,” he said.
“I don’t,” Georgia said. She shrugged, unwilling to be teased. “I observe, and I have common sense. That’s all.”
“Well, whatever it was,” Mary A. said. “I credit it with saving my life on more than one occasion.” She went on to recount an incident that happened a few years before, when she and some friends had been swimming off the coast of Texas late at night, and she’d been swept out to sea. She was almost ten miles out when she was picked up by a fishing trawler. It was only by the rarest luck that they chanced to hear her cries for help. “Isn’t that strange?” said Mary A. “It’s amazing that you foresaw that!”
“No, it’s not,” Georgia said, and shrugged again. “That’s not the point I was trying to make. It doesn’t take a psychic to know that only you would get into a situation like that.”
“Well,” said Mary A.—she wasn’t nonplussed by Georgia’s bluntness, as Rich sometimes was—“What I meant was, just the idea of the ring being lucky. And the association with water, you know.”
“Yes,” Rich said.
A few weeks after Mary A. left, he was sitting alone with Georgia.
“Georgia,” he said. “How do you think I’m going to die?”
“Cancer,” she said. “Especially if you don’t stop smoking.”
“Oh,” he said.
“I won’t feel sorry for you, either,” she said.
“I’m going to stop,” he said. “After the first of the year. I already told you.”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said.
You didn’t have to be superstitious to believe that Georgia knew things. There was something about her eyes—that pale, almost colorless blue; something about that dreamy Brooklyn monotone that seemed to suggest secret wisdom. Her modesty only reinforced this sense. She seemed to have come to some sort of deep peace within herself, even when—as in the case of the letter—she was clearly in the wrong.
They had been married for ten years, more or less happily, though at times there would be disagreements that would extend, underground, hidden, for several months before they dissipated. But mostly, he thought, their life together was good. Georgia owned a small bakery, which specialized in unusual breads made with things like marjoram or sunflower seeds. He owned a used cassette and CD store. They had a son, Erik, who was severely autistic and who stayed at a special school some ninety minutes away, in Denver. There was some guilt in this, for both of them, but it seemed to be the best thing. They had no other children. There had been two fairly brutal miscarriages after Erik, and after the second, Georgia had her fallopian tubes tied. She said that she didn’t think she could take going through it again.
He loved her. It had happened fairly early on in their dating, during the period when they were having long conversations over the phone. She was, he realized, the person he wanted to be, if he could be another person and still be himself. She thought like him, only darker and calmer. He was still denying that he’d seen a ghost, but he knew that if Georgia had seen it, the vision would have become matter-of-fact. “It was strange,” Georgia would have said, and shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, well.” And she would have simply accepted it.
The weekend after the argument, they were supposed to drive over to Denver to see Erik.
They did this on the first Saturday of every month, almost always. But this time they hadn’t officially discussed it.
So on Friday night he said, “Are we still going to Denver tomorrow?”
She was in bed, with the comforter pulled up to her chin, reading a book. He had been downstairs, watching music videos on TV and drinking beer. He felt heavy and thickheaded with loud music and alcohol.
She looked up. “I wasn’t planning not to go,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. It took him a moment to sort this out: Not planning not to go, he thought. Wasn’t not planning to go. Wasn’t planning to go not. Why couldn’t she just answer yes or no?
“What does that mean?” he said.
She gave him another look—this one both hard and sorrowful, a kind of classical gaze, he thought, like a tragic heroine. It was the kind of look Medea would give a servant who’d asked her what she wanted for dinner.
“Yes,” she said, very distinctly. “I’m still planning to go to Denver tomorrow.”
“Okay,” he said. “I was just asking.” He waited until she was asleep before he came to bed.
The next morning, it was raining, very gloomy. The shapes of the world had been turned to smudges, as if they were being erased, and passing cars spat thick mist as they drove. Georgia sat in the passenger seat, staring out at it, silent. When he tried to turn on the radio, she turned it off. “Please, please,” she said, as if it were a silly question she couldn’t bear to answer. And then she’d turned solemnly back to the highway. It seemed that she was communing with it.
He had been in the habit of taking some sort of drug when he visited Erik—a little MDMA, if he could get it, or some sort of mild amphetamine. He had taken two pills that morning, little lozenges shaped like pink hearts, but he didn’t feel very perked by them. Once, while peaking on Ecstasy, he’d actually taken the stiff, vacant child into his arms and crooned a song from his childhood. “This little light of mine,” he sang. “I’m going to let it shine.” He felt visionary, filled with love.
But now, all he felt was a vague, hallucinatory anxiousness. Georgia’s mood had contaminated him, and he longed for the trip to be over. The few overtures he’d made toward conversation had been met with monosyllables, and at last he’d begun to hum a bit, ignoring her basilisk stares. There was a new song he was into, he said, that he couldn’t get out of his head. She didn’t say anything. It was horrible.
Sometimes he thought, “What if I’m going to die?” He didn’t like to think of this when he was doing drugs, because it brought him down, but there was something in Georgia’s silence that made him think he was lost. It was over. A sort of dull panic began to close over his chest, which he had to fight by driving faster and more recklessly, concentrating on road signs, on passing any car in front of him. He looked at the speedometer, watching it move upward.
When he looked back up, he half expected to see something on the roadside—an ominous hitchhiker, perhaps, with a flapping black overcoat; or a walleyed animal, frozen and staring as he bore down on it; or something like he’d seen in the basement.
That thing—it wasn’t a ghost. It wasn’t something that had once been alive. It was, he thought, the physical manifestation of a feeling. He was looking at the knobs on the water heater, hoping to improve the volume and pressure, since both he and Georgia had begun their late autumn ritual of taking several long, hot showers a day. He wasn’t thinking of anything else.
Then, at the edge of his vision, he saw it. It could have been a shadow, but it didn’t move like one. It was more three dimensional than that, like a cloud or a hologram, suggesting depth. It moved quickly along the back wall, loping with a kind of gangly grace, like a retarded or mentally ill person, walking fast. And when he saw it, it seemed to say, not in words, “Something bad is going to happen! You are in terrible danger!”
He remembered the feeling he had then: the kind of clean panic that he hadn’t experienced since he was a child. His hair seemed to surge with electricity, and his legs quivered and vibr
ated with an old and almost-forgotten chord. Run! Run! His body shuddered. So he ran. He reached the top of the stairs, panting, and slammed the door behind him, looking into Georgia’s startled face. She was at the kitchen counter, cutting up vegetables for soup.
“What?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
Erik’s special school was an old brownstone building in an area that, one hundred years ago, had been on the edge of the now sprawling, ill-managed city. The building had once been a lunatic asylum, and, though they’d brightened and modernized the interior, the exterior remained its old self—a dark, turreted castle, surrounded by a vast lawn, enclosed within a black, spike-tipped cast-iron fence, shaded by enormous oak trees. Now, in the wind and scattershot rain, the falling leaves of these trees filled the air, fluttering and gliding like dozens and dozens of small birds. Others scampered, reckless then hesitant, across the road in front of the car, and he swerved instinctively to avoid hitting them. Georgia looked at him sharply.
“What?” she said. And he looked at her, trying on a self-deprecating smile.
“Just startled me,” he said. “The leaves.” She gazed at him for a moment and then turned her attention back to the parking place they were pulling cautiously into. He had to get a grip on himself, he thought. The pills he had taken were doing him absolutely no good, and as they walked up the steps and into the lobby, he tried to remember exactly what he had taken. He had purchased the pills from one of his young employees at the record store, and he wondered vaguely if he’d been given something contaminated.
But now, what could he do? Ahead of them at the reception desk, a plump, smiling nun was standing guard, and if that were not enough, the walls were lined with disturbing “drawings” done by the children—scrawls and splashes of paint, slow, obsessive attacks on the sheets of paper, lines and circles repeated over and over.
Georgia didn’t seem to notice his anxiety, was not aware of the involuntary flinch his arm made. She was thinking of Erik now, and the lines around her face deepened. There was a time, a few months after they’d decided to institutionalize Erik, that he realized that she’d never again be completely happy. It wasn’t even that she was depressed, though of course she was. It was that happiness had begun to seem a little sinful to her: a willful, trivial, dangerous extravagance, like smoking, or taking mind-altering drugs.
