by Dan Chaon
“Hello?” Troy said again, this time more formal, cautious. And then, after another long pause: “Carla?”
And Jonah had abruptly hung up.
Jonah had called again in late April, and then again in May, and both times it had been the same. Even though he’d written out a script for himself, he couldn’t say anything. He would part his lips to speak, but he was only capable of hesitation. He pictured himself stumbling into that brightly lit pause, and his face grew warm with a blush. He would sound like an idiot, he thought. Hi. My name is Jonah Doyle, and I . . . He could imagine his hatefully befuddled voice, and his skin tingled with self-loathing. He hung up in April without saying anything. In May, he said, “Is . . . Is this Jonah Doyle?” And Troy said, “I think you have the wrong number.”
When he called in June, he’d decided to take a different tactic. He’d decided that it might work better if he pretended to be doing a survey for the Mrs. Glass House Institute, and he’d felt calmer then, pretending to be someone else. But Troy was evasive, irritable in a way that got Jonah flustered. I’m not liable to talk to someone over the phone about this. You need to send me a letter or something, Troy said. And Jonah found himself inched into a corner, the conversation that he’d at first imagined was under his control—an interview, for God’s sake, how could it go wrong?—had eventually collapsed under the weight of a simple lie: Jonah claimed that the Mrs. Glass Institute had sent a letter, and Troy hadn’t received it. It was ridiculous, and he’d made plans to correct it, but he’d never been able to get ahold of Troy on the phone again. Thereafter, though he’d called several times in July and August, all he’d gotten was an answering machine, a hurried, wooden voice: This is Troy. Sorry I’m not in. Leave a message if you want and I’ll get back with you.
When Jonah had heard this message for the tenth time, he realized what he had to do. He needed to go to St. Bonaventure. Whatever he was going to say, it had to be said in person.
——
So now here he was. He arrived at last outside the house that, according to all his records and maps, belonged to his brother: Troy Earl Timmens. He parked his car across the street, and hunched down in his seat. The story begins, he thought, but the romantic glow had faded from the phrase.
He had been hoping for something a bit better. He had imagined that his brother—with the advantages of a loving family, approved by the Mrs. Glass House and the St. Bonaventure County Court—might have made something more of himself. Even when he’d seen that Troy Timmens worked for a place called the Stumble Inn Bar and Grille, he’d thought that maybe it was a fancy place, maybe Troy was a burgeoning restaurateur; he thought Troy was perhaps an artist of some sort, working a bar job to make ends meet while he painted or sculpted or, like Steve, wrote screenplays.
Now, such imaginings seemed less and less likely. Troy’s house was a shabby, simple white box, more or less identical to the others on its block—a lower-middle-class neighborhood at the very edge of St. Bonaventure, not far from the barren, hilly prairie that surrounded the town on all sides. It was the kind of home that made Jonah think of a child’s drawing: two windows, a door, a triangle roof. Ancient bare branch of television antenna jutting out. There was a faded awning over the picture window in front. The curtains were pulled closed.
An unhappy place, Jonah thought. The unfenced front yard was overgrown—the grass unmowed and going to seed, patches of weeds thriving. There was a dying tree in one corner, half of the branches dry and bare, the others still leafy, but fading. The lot had the look of a property that had been up for sale so long that it could be considered abandoned, but then there was an aging Corvette in the driveway that signaled someone’s presence, and there was the simple fact that the mailman delivered letters to this address. Jonah sat up and watched as the mailman, wearing khaki shorts and black socks and shoes, strode up the sidewalk and fit a packet of envelopes into the mailbox. He could imagine the letters that he had considered writing arriving in this way, at this sad house, and it made his heart sink.
——
The determination that had fortified him during his long drive seemed to leave him like a spirit lifting out of a corpse. All he had to do was walk up the sidewalk himself; all he had to do was summon the courage to stand there at the front door and touch the doorbell with his finger. He tried to project himself into that moment.
Here: Troy Timmens would come to the door, and he would look at Jonah with mild curiosity. They would resemble each other in some surprising way.
“I have some information that you might be interested in,” Jonah would say, and he would hand over the packet from the PeopleSearch Agency. “I believe we have the same mother,” Jonah would say softly, in a steady voice to buffer Troy Timmens from the shock. “We’re half brothers, I think.”
And then he would extend his hand for Troy to shake.
“My name is Jonah Doyle,” he would say. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time.”
But despite his imagination, Jonah didn’t do anything. He sat there, staring at the door, thinking of his mother. “I didn’t even look at him,” she had told Jonah once. “I didn’t even get the chance to look.” The nurses had taken the baby away while she was still under anesthesia, and he had pictured her drifting into sleep; he had imagined the thin trail of a baby’s crying unraveling down a long blurry hallway while she drifted and dreamed, and then, finally, the infant’s wails shrinking away into a dot of silence, blinking out as her mind went white with static.
“I’d be a different person if I’d have kept that baby,” she said once, cloudy and blissful, and then her eyes focused and grew stern.
“I should have given you up, too,” she said, and Jonah had rested his head against her as she’d stroked his face, tracing the pad of her finger along his scars. “You know that, don’t you?” she murmured. “I could have let you be happy.”
——
Even now, this struck him a glancing blow. He saw again the seaside house, the postcard landscape he’d entered as a child. Then he sat up abruptly.
A man had emerged from the house on Gehrig Avenue. He came around from the back, wearing a white button-down shirt and black pants, but Jonah got only a glimpse of him—a broad-shouldered guy, medium height, with a build like a high school wrestler, curly black hair, olive skin. A subtle, steady limp. Then the man was slamming the door of the old Corvette, revving the engine. Jonah was surprised at how calm he felt as he started his own car. Eased out from the curb. I could have let you be happy, he thought, and his teeth pressed hard against one another.
——
In a film, this moment would require some tricky camera work. For a second, the camera would float far above the town of St. Bonaventure with an ambient hum of chords, hovering and then banking down to follow the two cars in motion, almost two-dimensional from above. The red 1981 Corvette, heading toward the center of town and turning left, followed by the boxy, rattling, toylike Ford Festiva, Jonah’s mother’s old car, white with rust in the creases and cracks. The sky is gray. The leaves on the trees are still green, but it is clearly edging toward autumn. The camera slowly dips as the cars trace their way down the main street, through the few stoplights and finally to a side street—seedy, faded strip of storefronts beyond which the town begins to drift away into aging courtyard motels and trailer parks and fields. At last, the camera’s eye settles onto Jonah’s face. Troy’s car slides into a parallel parking space, and then Troy emerges, unfolding himself from the low-slung bucket seat, limping tenderfooted into a bar that is lit by a blinking neon sign: STUMBLE INN, it says, the letters arranged vertically, and there is the outline of a thin neon cowboy leaning against the words.
In the movie, the camera would hold for a long time on Jonah’s face. He would be expressionless, staring, but the music might hint at complex emotions, drifting into a minor key and some slight discord, pulling closer and closer toward his scarred face, toward his eye, with the pupil dilating larger and larger, as
if he were moving into a darkened room.
——
Which he was.
He entered the dim barroom, with its softly damp, gravelike smell and its forlorn jukebox music. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and the place was quiet. He hovered outside of himself, watching. An older lady, a bartender, busied herself at a chalkboard that listed the food that could be purchased, busily erasing “Chili-Chicken Chimichanga—$4.” Two paint-freckled workers sat at the bar, staring at a muted television mounted above the liquor bottles, watching studiously as a beauty whom Jonah didn’t recognize was being interviewed on an Entertainment News program. At the other end of the bar, a balding man in a checkered sports jacket poked his finger into his drink and plucked out a piece of ice, which he ate; at the far left, two stout, youngish, red-haired women were playing pool while two red-haired toddlers dangled their legs over the edge of a second, unused pool table and observed, sharing popcorn from a bag. The booths that lined the walls and the tables that were scattered throughout the narrow barroom were otherwise empty.
None of these people looked at Jonah. Entering a place like this, with a face like his, he anticipated the hostile curiosity of townsfolk, but it didn’t come. It was as if he was invisible, taking in the atmosphere, trying to locate the person he’d been following. He approached the bar cautiously, and the bartender lady turned.
It was the usual reaction when she saw him—the quick, startled gape and polite swallowing of response, the surreptitious trawl of her glance across his scar, the question: Jesus Christ, what happened to him? echoing murmurously against him as she blinked and regained herself.
“Can I help you?” she said, and Jonah cleared his throat.
I’m looking for Troy Timmens, he thought to say. But he just stared for a moment, crossing his arms over his chest. “I was . . . reading the menu,” he said, hesitantly. “Is the kitchen still open?”
“Oh, yes,” the woman said, and flashed her kindly, silver-edged teeth. She called over her shoulder. “Troy!” she shouted. “What are you doing back there? Will you cook for awhile until Junie gets back? It shouldn’t be more than an hour. He had a doctor’s appointment!” And a voice, deep and affectless, said, “No problem.”
——
In a movie, the camera would rattle for a moment. It would hover over the outside of the bar, banking through the web of treetops and along the flat tar-paper roof of Zyke’s Roller Rink across the street, and then it would begin to gather momentum, speeding up as it plunged toward the Stumble Inn Bar and Grille, until it became the rush of a train as it entered a tunnel—a blur of motion as it barreled through the bar, as the train went straight into the back of Jonah’s head and right through him. Here, framed for a moment in the small window through which orders were passed to the kitchen, was the face of his brother, bobbing up and then disappearing. In a movie, there is only the glimpse of the face. Then the film strip breaks off abruptly, snapping and turning around and around in the reel as the projector shines blank light on the screen.
15
September 13, 1996
The parole anklet—the monitoring device—was always the first thing Troy noticed when he woke up. It was not heavy at all: a small black metal box, seemingly hollow, no bigger than a seat-belt buckle, attached to his ankle by a kind of thick plastic watchband. But still he could feel it there, even before he was conscious. It entered his sleeping mind as a discomfort, and then, slowly, his awareness solidified. Here was the anklet’s weight against his skin. It was itchy. He reached down and scratched along the circumference of the plastic shackle, afraid to touch the thing, afraid that he would set off the tamper alert, which, he had been told, was extremely sensitive. He could almost feel the thing pulsing, sending out its radio signals to a station where someone sat in a swivel chair before a bank of blinking green and red lights. He was under “house arrest.” He had been told that if he moved beyond the perimeter of his yard, an alarm would sound somewhere, and an immediate warrant for his arrest would be issued, and he would be tracked down and sent to prison.
It was sometime in the afternoon. He could feel the dull, steady heat of the sun as strips of it poured through the slats of the blinds, and the unhealthy film of daytime sleep clung to his skin. He stirred, restlessly, and felt a piece of paper crumpled beneath him. It was the T. rex skeleton he’d drawn for Loomis, which must have come untaped from the wall. He sat up and discovered that he had been sleeping in Loomis’s bed. He didn’t remember why.
In the two and a half months since his arrest, the house had been slowly devolving. It had never been particularly neat, but now as he padded in his underwear through the piles of dirty clothes and unwashed bowls of dried-up ice cream, the stacks of unread junk mail and bills, the jigsaw puzzle that he’d begun to put together as a distraction and then abandoned, the empty plastic bottles of soda—he was aware again that he had been overcome by entropy. “Son of a bitch,” he said, as he stepped on the sharp plastic edge of one of Loomis’s Legos with his bare foot. He limped into the kitchen and took a cola out of the refrigerator.
——
He’d been told that he was lucky. He was not in prison, where he would be easy prey for weight-lifting tattooed Nazis and angry Caucasian-hating black men. He had negotiated what was said to be an extremely light sentence—thirteen months of house arrest, with a parole anklet monitor, followed by two years’ worth of regular parole. And his parental rights had not been terminated, exactly—though Judy had official custody of Loomis for an indeterminate period. He was still allowed to work as a bartender at the Stumble Inn, though he was subject to random drug and alcohol tests and part of his salary was garnisheed to offset the cost of the probation program.
His lawyer had convinced him that this plea bargain was the most favorable option. His lawyer, Eric Schriffer, had been one of his regular marijuana customers, and he’d assumed that this would mean that Schriffer would look out for his best interests. But now he wasn’t so sure. It was true that they had photos of him purchasing drugs from the unfortunate Jonathan Sandstrom, but it was also true that they hadn’t been able to accumulate a felony’s worth of drugs from his home. Besides which a police officer had discharged a firearm in the direction of a helpless child. Now, thinking about it, he wondered whether a different lawyer, someone from out of town, might have been more aggressive. He might have had a good case to sue the police department. Sometimes he thought Eric Schriffer had actually betrayed him, leading him into a plea bargain that mostly protected Schriffer himself.
Such ideas occurred to him now, long after he’d signed the myriad of papers, long after the anklet had been pinch-stapled to his bare ankle, long after Schriffer had stopped returning Troy’s calls to the office of Goodwin, Goodwin, Schriffer and Associates. He was aware that he’d probably been duped. But what could he do now? Who could he call to complain—the Better Business Bureau? The ACLU? God?
It was over and done with. There was no one who could help him.
——
On the kitchen table was the black book—his “itinerary,” as his parole officer called it. Stamped in gold leaf on the cover it said Daily Planner in an italicized, pompous cursive that he found offensive. This was #17 of the many conditions of parole that he’d agreed to: “Offenders will submit detailed hourly itinerary of their activities to parole officer”—and thus Daily Planner had become a constant, hated companion through the endless days and weeks of house arrest.
He sat down at the table and flipped it open. Friday the thirteenth: ha, ha. Each hour of the day, from one A.M. to midnight, had several lines next to it where he was to write down his “activities,” and he took up his pen and wrote “SLEEP” in capital letters next to one A.M., and then below it SLEEP next to two A.M., and then down the row: SLEEP, SLEEP, SLEEP, SLEEP until he reached two P.M. He glanced at the wall clock, which said it was nearly three in the afternoon, and he was aware that he’d spent more than half his day unconscious.
His p
arole officer, Lisa Fix, would no doubt take note of this. She commented on patterns that she noticed as she read over the itinerary during their weekly meetings.
“You sleep a lot,” she’d said the last time they had met. “Do you think you’re depressed?”
“That’s a keen insight,” Troy said. “You ever thought of becoming a psychiatrist?”
She raised her eyebrows and looked at him over the rim of her glasses. For a bureaucrat, she didn’t mind sarcasm all that much, and this was one of the things that made their weekly conferences bearable to him. She was in her mid- or late thirties, he guessed, a plump, freckled-faced, cynical woman with overly permed red hair—divorced, he would assume. She was a type he’d seen frequently in his years as a bartender, the kind of woman he could usually joke with or even flirt with a little as he served drinks, and she didn’t seem to mind. She talked to him like she was his begrudging older sister, or a former lover who still liked him a little but knew his ways too well. There was something about her that made him think, for the first time in a long while, of Chrissy, that girl he’d met long ago in Bruce and Michelle’s trailer, the girl who had kissed him when he was eleven. Lisa and Chrissy were probably about the same age, he thought.
“Of course I’m depressed,” Troy said. “Wouldn’t you be, given my situation?”
“Well,” Lisa Fix said, “we’ve talked about various constructive uses for your time. Have you looked any further into the correspondence courses we spoke of?”
“Not really,” Troy said. “Not yet.” He shrugged. “Hey, listen,” he said, “did you go to high school with Chrissy Hart?”
She raised her eyebrows at him. “That girl who committed suicide?” And now it was her turn to shrug. “She was a couple of years older than me, but sure, I knew her. Knew of her, at least. We didn’t exactly run in the same crowd. Why?”
