by Dan Chaon
——
He wished he could tell someone these stories. He could imagine telling them to Steve and Holiday at some point, for example, though the lie he had told would make that enormously complicated. He would have to insert the imaginary brother who looked like Steve into the fabric of his past, somehow, in the way that special effects were added to films; he would have to alter or modify certain stories to include his imaginary brother in the action, or at least to explain his absence from the scene.
He thought of this as he sat at the dining table in Steve and Holiday’s apartment, but he discreetly avoided mentioning the dead brother again, whose name (he had decided, just in case they asked) was David. “I was glad to get out of South Dakota,” he said. They were eating linguine and drinking red wine, Chianti, Steve told him. As he spoke, Holiday leaned her hand against her cheek and smiled, her eyes warm and attentive, as if he were dear to her. “I wanted to . . . find a place with more opportunities. I thought about Omaha, you know, because that’s not so far away from Little Bow, but Chicago just seemed, well, more exciting. Sort of like going to New York, but not so . . . scary.” And both Steve and Holiday nodded. They were both from Wisconsin, so he guessed they had some idea of what he meant.
“It was brave of you, to set out like that on your own,” Holiday said. “Don’t you think so, Pie?” she said—she called Steve “Pie” as an endearment—and Steve raised his eyebrows and nodded.
“Absolutely,” Steve said. “You’d never been to a city or anything before?”
“Not exactly,” Jonah said. “My mother and I lived in Chicago and Denver when I was really little, but I don’t really remember it.”
“Does your mother still live in South Dakota?” Holiday said.
“Not exactly,” Jonah said. He took a small sip of red wine, blushing a little. “She’s dead, actually.”
“Oh,” Holiday said. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Jonah said. He shrugged, feeling himself blushing again. “I’m not . . .” he said, “I’m not sensitive about it.”
But there was a respectful silence. There was an awareness that Jonah had experienced tragedy that Steve and Holiday had not, and the two of them looked at him thoughtfully. His brother’s name was David, Jonah thought. Maybe his mother had been killed in the same car accident in which David had perished?
They talked about things like movies—which was great, which was fine. One of the things that Jonah had purchased with his newfound wealth was a VCR, and so he had seen both Carnival of Souls (“Brilliant!” said Steve) and Choose Me (“Highly underrated,” said Holiday). Steve talked about the script that he was working on, which was based upon a children’s book called Louis the Fish, a book Steve had loved as a child and which he thought was a “work of genius.”
“It’s not going to be a film for children,” Steve said. “There are a lot of adult themes that I want to stress. It’s going to be kind of surreal and disturbing, but not inaccessible.” And when Jonah admitted that he hadn’t read or heard of the book, Steve exclaimed enthusiastically, “Jesus, Jonah! You won’t believe how incredible it is! I have to give you a copy!” He got up to look for an extra copy of the book, and as he did he gave Holiday a kiss on the side of her face.
“Four hundred and fifty-five!” he exclaimed. He told Jonah that he wanted to give Holiday one thousand kisses before the end of the week, and so he was counting.
Jonah laughed. They were funny together, Steve and Holiday. Delightful. Sometime later, he would realize that they were the kind of people who were at their best when they had an audience. They were happiest when they had someone they could dote on, someone who in turn could bear witness to the way they were in love.
It was not a role he minded playing, of course. Maybe they were interested in him because he had a dead brother, because he had ugly scars and a shy demeanor, a whiff of tragedy. When they talked about other friends, he got a sense of it: Allison, who had been homeless for a while and who was struggling to stay off drugs; Javier, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who had worked at the restaurant for a time before Jonah got there; Dallas, the bartender they knew who had been divorced twice and hadn’t even turned thirty, who once stayed with them for almost a month after his wife kicked him out, sleeping on their couch and rotating through the same three changes of clothing. Listening to the anecdotes they told of these friends, Jonah could imagine himself becoming part of this menagerie, another stray they’d brought home and loved for a while. But he didn’t care. All that really mattered to Jonah was that they were interested in him, and their interest—their focused, smiling attention—was wonderful.
——
After dinner, Jonah and Steve cleared the table and washed the dishes while Holiday sat at the kitchen table, nursing baby Henry. Holiday was a small-boned girl, with short, dark hair and a long face and nose, but her breasts were enormous for such a thin figure. Of course, Jonah thought. They’re full of milk. But he made a conscious effort not to look over at her as she sat, with her blouse lifted. He was drying the dishes, and the first couple of times that Steve handed him a rinsed plate he stupidly said “Thank you!” as if he were being given a gift. Steve and Holiday both thought this was very funny and made a little joke of it: “Here, Jonah. A colander for you!” And Jonah played along. “Thank you so much,” he said. “I really appreciate it.” In a clownish mood, he did his imitation of Mrs. Orlova for them, and they laughed once again.
“You should be an actor, Jonah,” she said. “Have you ever thought about it?”
“Not really,” Jonah said. “Not with—” He started to say “Not with my face,” but then stopped himself. According to Fifteen Steps on the Ladder of Success, one of the signs of a losing mentality was to disparage oneself in front of others.
“I’m surprised,” Holiday said. “You didn’t even act in high school? You seem like one of those guys who seems shy until they get up on a stage.”
“Ha,” Jonah said. “Not hardly. High school was like—” And he cleared his throat, accepting the big, dripping pot that Steve handed him. “Well,” he said, “let’s just say that I wasn’t the type to be in plays.”
“Were you athletic?” Holiday said.
“No,” Jonah said. “I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t anything really.” And he tried to think back. The few friends he’d had were like him, at the bottom of the social ladder: Mark Zaleski, whose IQ didn’t quite qualify him as retarded, but who was nevertheless two years older than everyone else in their grade, a friendly but humorless boy who liked to trade comic books and talk about various types of cars; Janine Crow, an intelligent girl, part Sioux like his mother, a girl who developed so early that she looked like a middle-aged woman by the time they were juniors, the sad outline of her bra visible through the dowdy blouses she wore; she was picked on so constantly that she automatically flinched when people spoke to her. And even with these people, he hadn’t been close. He was ashamed, sometimes, to realize how little his teenage years had involved anything that other people would recognize as normal rites of passage.
“My brother did a lot of that sort of stuff,” Jonah said. “He was in—what do you call it?” He glanced surreptitiously at Steve, trying to imagine what sports Steve might have played. “Track,” he said. “And, well, he was in a play.” He scoped his mind for a minute. “The Glass Menagerie.”
“Oh, I love that one,” Holiday said. “I’ll bet he played Jim didn’t he? Jim O’Connor, the gentleman caller.”
“That’s right,” Jonah said. He cleared his throat—he would have preferred it if Holiday hadn’t been so familiar with the text, which he’d read but didn’t remember very well. “How did you know?”
“It’s funny,” Steve said, wiping his hands on a dish towel. “Actually, I played Jim when we were in high school. And Holiday played Laura. The crippled girl.”
“That’s almost spooky,” Holiday said, and Jonah felt his face reddening.
“Well,” Jonah s
aid. “He did a lot of things, my brother. He was involved in a lot of stuff.” And he was silent as the two of them grew solemn; silence expanded in the kitchen as he continued to wipe the pot that Steve had given him even though it was dry. He wished that he hadn’t said anything.
“You must miss him very much,” Holiday said, respectfully.
“I do,” Jonah said. He averted his eyes as Holiday unplugged Henry from her nipple and lowered her shirt. “We don’t have to talk about it, though.”
“Oh, no! Of course not!” Holiday said. And when Jonah looked at Steve, Steve was observing Jonah’s hands, the thin tooth marks that left scar trails from his wrists to his knuckles. There was a silence, and then Holiday said: “I’ll bet Henry would like it if you held him, Jonah.”
——
It was a significant moment, he thought later. It was maybe the first time he’d held a baby. He sat down in the kitchen chair and Holiday lowered Henry into his arms, and he actually felt weirdly shaky. Steve and Holiday smiled benignly, watching, but he almost forgot about them. He was caught up with the amazement of it, the warm, squirming weight that settled into his arms and grew still.
The baby stared at him, steadily gazing. There was a weight of the past. It made him think of the way his grandfather used to sit and look out at the horizon. He thought of his mother’s bitter joke: Oh, look, there’s my baby.
The baby’s large eyes settled on him, and though this had been one of his happiest nights in his whole life, it made him melancholy. He had read somewhere that babies are instinctively drawn to faces, that they will fixate even on drawings or abstract, facelike shapes, and round objects with markings that might resemble eye-mouth-nose. It was information that struck him as terribly sad, terribly lonely—to imagine the infants of the world scoping the blurry atmosphere above them for faces the way primitive people scrutinized the stars for patterns, the way castaways stare at the moon, the blinking of a satellite. It made him sad to think of the baby gathering information—a mind, a soul, slowly solidifying around these impressions, coming to understand cause and effect, coming out of a blank or fog into reality. Into a reality. The true terror, Jonah thought, the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die, but that we were all born, that we were all once little babies like this, unknowing and slowly reeling in the world, gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn’t exist, and then, through no fault of our own, we had to.
8
June 20, 1996
After his fall, Little Man cries for a while. He is going to have a black eye—“A real nice shiner,” Troy says—and Little Man touches the swollen area gingerly.
“I can see my cheek,” he says, bitterly. “And I’m not even trying to look at it.”
He rests his head against Troy’s shoulder, nuzzling a bit, sniffling. He seems okay, and Troy tightens his grip around the child’s middle. Troy’s hands are trembling, and he hopes that Little Man doesn’t notice the shuddering of his palm as he presses it against his back. He keeps smelling Little Man’s hair as they hurry down the sidewalk.
It freaks him out a little. He thinks of his nightmare, of Little Man falling from the tree. And here Loomis had, in fact, fallen from a tree!
“What were you thinking, man?” Troy whispers, soothingly chiding. “Are you going to become a daredevil on me? The Evel Knievel of tree climbing?”
“Those kids lied,” Loomis says grimly. “They said there was a bird nest with eggs in it, and I believed them. They boosted me up there, and I fell.” He presses the good side of his face against Troy’s shirt. “What’s Evel Knievel?”
“Oh,” says Troy, distractedly. “He was this famous motorcycle guy. He did, uh, daring things.” But he isn’t thinking about Evel Knievel. He is thinking about the other kids, boosting Loomis up into a tree. “Bastards,” Troy says, and his dislike for the other children hardens into something like hatred. Scotty and Davey, little white-trash pieces of shit from down the block. What were they? Eight or nine? Taking advantage of a five-year-old. He had known it when they came running up to the screen door, faces flushed, eyes bright. “Mr. Timmens! Loomis fell! He’s hurt! He’s crying!” gleeful, he thought, almost shining with excitement. He should have known not to trust them from the beginning, with their ugly shaved heads and their dirty white T-shirts, sockless feet in thrift-store basketball shoes. They’d started coming over to play, to eat his good cookies and potato chips, and when they’d offered to take Little Man over to their house, he’d had a moment of weakness, thinking it would be nice to have an hour or so to himself, he’d do the dishes and wash a load of laundry, stuff he’d been neglecting for several days. He should never have trusted them, he thinks now, and his mood darkens, he bites the inside of his cheek. He tries to think of ways he could scare the crap out of them. Teach them to screw around with his son. Mr. Timmens! Loomis fell! He’s hurt! Jesus Christ, he had never felt that kind of dread before, running down the block, imagining blood, broken bones. An ambulance.
It wasn’t as bad as that. He puts Little Man down in a kitchen chair and holds up three fingers.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” he says, and Little Man looks at him warily, puzzled.
“Three?” he says, and this makes Troy feel a bit better. Troy takes an ice-cube tray from the freezer of the refrigerator and cracks it over a dish towel. He bundles up some chunks of ice into the cloth.
“Here,” he says. “Hold that over your eye. It’s going to be cold but it will make the swelling go down.”
Little Man does as he’s told, but winces as he presses the balled, ice-filled dishrag over his eye. “Why will this make the swelling go down?”
“I don’t know,” Troy says. “Trust me. It just does.”
He sinks down into a chair across the table from Little Man, looks him over for a moment. He’s okay. Troy reaches into the small glass ashtray that sits in the middle of the table and plucks up the dead marijuana joint, half a finger long, and flicks it toward the sink. Good shot: It lands in the basin where the garbage disposal is, and he leans his forehead against the ham of his hand. He should not be smoking pot in the middle of the day, he thinks, and then he picks up the portable phone, which is also on the table, and puts it to his ear. No sound. He had been sitting there, smoking a joint and talking to Ray on the phone when Scotty and Davey came racing to his screen door, and he supposes that he should call Ray back eventually, just to let him know everything is all right.
But he doesn’t feel like it right now. Ray has been in a neurotic mode lately, and they had been talking about Ray’s fear that he might have some mental illness, like Tourette’s syndrome. “I have these urges,” Ray had been saying. “You know? Like, urges to do bad things. I mean, like, suddenly I have the urge to shout profanity in the supermarket. Or, like, I’m at a restaurant, and the waitress is coming down the aisle carrying a load of plates, and I’ll have the urge to trip her. I mean, really bad. Like an evil urge. And, you know, I think about exposing myself to, like, old ladies and shit. It’s very disturbing.”
“Ray,” he said. He’d begun to roll a joint automatically, sitting at the table with the phone tucked in the crook of his chin. It’s natural to want to get high when he’s talking to Ray. “Ray, man, does it ever occur to you that you’re just an exhibitionist? I mean,” he said, “you’re a stripper. You take off your clothes for dozens of women week after week and you think that’s, what? Normal?” He drew deeply on the puckered end of the marijuana cigarette, just as the children appeared at his door.
——
He puts down the phone. Ray has other people to call, other people to complain to. He examines Little Man’s black eye again.
“How are you feeling?” he says. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I guess,” Little Man says. The area around his eye is black and blue, fairly bad. Falling out of the tree, he’d struck his face against the bark of the trunk. He’d lain there, huddled in the sparse gr
ass, holding his face and crying silently. He is the kind of kid who plays dead when he’s hurt. It wasn’t until Troy came charging into Scotty and Davey’s backyard that Little Man had lifted his head. Jesus Christ, Troy thought. Where was their mom? No sign of her—the windows of their house were blocked by tacked-up sheets patterned with football logos. A naked engine was sitting on cement blocks near the tree, the grass around it dead from shade and motor oil. He could’ve been killed, Troy thought, and drew breath. He tried to suck the thought back into his brain and out of existence.
“You’re really okay?” Troy says now, and Little Man shrugs.
“I’m a little upset,” he says.
“Those kids,” Troy says. “I’m sorry that they fooled you.”
“They didn’t know what they were talking about.”
“Fucking idiots,” Troy says.
Little Man purses his lips and presses the ice against his eye. “I agree,” he says.
Troy has been having lifestyle issues, or something. He feels vaguely guilty all day, with Little Man so subdued and quiet. Poor kid, he looks terrible. The side of his face around his eye is bruised brownish-black, and a swollen knot has risen up on his cheek, and he seems very blue.
——
“I wish I could talk to mom,” Loomis says, and Troy actually blushes.
“I’m sorry, kiddo,” he says. “You can talk to me, if you want.”
But Loomis just turns back to the television. He’s been very moody ever since his fall, frowning gloomily at children’s programs like “Sesame Street,” “Barney,” “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” stuff that usually would have been much too babyish for him. Nevertheless, he sits there, listening as Mr. Rogers sings, “You’ll never go down, you’ll never go down the drain . . .” holding his old blanket against his face, rubbing the silky lining between his fingers. It’s a habit from when he was a toddler, and it worries Troy enough that in the afternoon he calls a nurse he knows, a woman named Shari who is also one of his regular marijuana customers. He has her run over the symptoms for concussion with him: headache, dizziness, confusion, nausea, vomiting, vision change—none of which Loomis is presenting.
