by Dan Chaon
“Hmm …” her mother says thoughtfully. “I’m undecided, myself. I don’t think most people are interesting enough to have souls.” And her voice takes on a musing quality that Sandi recognizes with grim resignation. “Do you know that the living now outnumber the dead? You understand what I’m saying? It’s the result of the global population boom. There are six billion people alive on this planet, and that’s more than have died in all of recorded history! It’s a fact.”
“Where did you hear that?” Sandi asks. “That doesn’t seem accurate.”
“Oh, it’s true,” Sandi’s mother says brightly. “I read it!” Then she sighs. “Oh, Sandi,” she says. “I wish your father and I had given you kids some religious training when you were young. Religion would be very helpful to you right now.”
“Oh, really?” Sandi says. She thinks of Uncle Sammy and his packets of devil dust.
“Well, you are that type of person, sweetheart,” her mother says firmly. “You’ve always been that way, ever since you were little. I’m very comfortable with doubt, and I thought you’d be the same way, because you’re my child. But you’re not that way at all!”
Sandi doesn’t know what to say to her. “Comfortable with doubt?” What does that mean? Where has her mother picked up language like that? “Okay,” Sandi says passively. She has been reading a lot of self-help books with the same tone. They spoke like this—“coping,” “coming to terms,” “finding closure.” As if such a thing is possible.
At the IRS, sometimes people are threatened. The woman in the next cubicle, Janice, has been getting letters from a man who wants to kill and eat her. It’s not funny, Sandi feels, though Janice often pretends it is. She reads his letters aloud—gruesome descriptions of what this person would like to do to her—and her voice takes on a dry, comic quality, as if it is nothing more than an anecdote. “It’s like something out of a movie!” Janice exclaims. And Sandi loves Janice’s easy, unfrightened confidence.
Still, when she and Janice go out to lunch, Sandi wonders if the letter-writer might be watching, following them. As they pass through the lobby of the building where they work, Sandi watches the faces. The man will look outwardly normal, Sandi feels. She lets her eyes rest on the lecherous security guards at the front desk, the skinny one and the handsome one. She scans over the heavy-set man who sits before his open briefcase, eating a sandwich; beyond him, three young men in identical suits and haircuts burst into laughter; through the window behind them, Sandi can see the figures of people walking by on the sidewalk, their shapes hazy in the windblown snow, the small cadre of secretaries huddled against the side of the building, smoking cigarettes.
Once, not long ago, she walked past the standing ashtray they convene around. She remembers looking down. There, among the slender, lipstick-stained cigarette butts, which stood up in the gravel like dead trees, she saw a tooth—a human tooth, lying there. She stood staring at it. What’s happening to the world? she thought.
She wishes she could tell this story to Allen. What would he say? she wonders.
She has noticed that when she imagines speaking to him, she can clearly hear his voice. She can carry on long conversations in her head, and it seems very real. For a while, she’d had the same experience after her father died. Then the voice faded away.
Most of the time, she imagines Allen laughing his baritone laugh. “You’ve really built a big thing out of this, haven’t you?” he says. He would tease her into smiling about it. “You’re a trooper with the big stuff, but you obsess over the details,” he says. “You’re funny that way.”
Once, he told her that he thought she tended to “displace her emotions.” She didn’t mind it when he would use this kind of jargon, though she kidded him about it. He had been a psychology major in college, had become an insurance salesman. She didn’t think he could help himself. It was something she’d loved about him, that mix of irony and kindly officiousness.
“Displaced emotion,” she’d said, rolling her eyes. “Oh, please. What does that mean, exactly?”
He smiled a little, as if he knew more than he was willing to say. They were washing dishes, and he handed her a plate to dry. “It means,” he said, “that you’re not worried about what you think you’re worried about.”
Which is something she worries about, nowadays. What should she be worried about? What are the things she tries not to think about?
Well, there’s this: Sometimes, she sleeps with Safety Man. The thought of someone knowing this actually makes her blush, so she tries not to let it cross her mind. It’s no one’s business—probably it’s perfectly natural, perfectly normal to want to fill that empty spot in their bed with a body, even an artificial one.
But what about that one night, when she’d stayed up late, drinking? In bed, she’d boozily cuddled against Safety Man, legless though he was. She’d even kissed him.
No, she doesn’t think about that. She doesn’t think about the way, in crowds, she sees Allen’s face, or her mother, or her daughters, and her heart will crackle like a product being freeze-dried. She doesn’t think about the janitor who resembles Safety Man, disappearing around the corner of a hallway as she walks from her cubicle to the restroom to pat water on her face. She doesn’t think about her mother, clutching her at Allen’s funeral. “You know, honey,” her mother said, “you’re never going to find another man who loves you as much as Allen did.” Her mother sighed. “It’s a real tragedy,” she said, and put a hand to her throat, as if to constrict a sob.
Sometimes, such thoughts seem unbearable.
But she is functional. She maneuvers through her day, despite the cannibal letter-writers, despite teeth in ashtrays, despite Safety Man janitors steering their wheeled mop buckets past her workstation. When she begins to feel a wave of grief or terror washing over her, she likes to visualize a line of cheerleaders in her mind’s eye. They jump and do splits and wave their pom-poms: “Push it back! Push it back! Push it wa-a-ay back!” they chant, and it seems to work. She thinks of how much Allen would like these mental cheerleaders. How he would laugh.
Sandi’s daughters, Megan and Molly, seem to be coping fairly well. Sandi knows that she doesn’t think about them as much as she should, but she is there for them. She makes nice desserts, she helps them with their homework. She sits in the TV room with them for a while, trying to watch what they are watching.
“What is this?” she asks, and Megan shrugs, her eyes blank, reflecting light.
“I don’t know,” Megan says. “It’s something like, I Eat Your Flesh, or something like that. It’s not scary. They don’t show anything,” she says with disappointment, and Sandi nods.
“Mom,” Molly says. “Put your arm around me.” And Sandi does. Molly leans against her as, on screen, a woman opens a basement door. The woman peers down the dark stairs, and the lightbulb fizzles and goes out as the music begins to build.
“This doesn’t seem like it’s appropriate,” Sandi says, though she’s hypnotized as the woman begins to descend the stairs into darkness.
She is thinking of her mother. “You sound depressed,” her mother had said, earlier, and Sandi had sighed.
“Not really,” Sandi said. “Not especially, under the circumstances.”
“Mmm,” her mother said, in the same suspicious voice she used once, when Sandi would say she was too sick to go to school. “You know something, sweetie?” her mother said at last, thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you. I don’t pity the dead. The ones I feel sorry for are those poor children. I think about them all the time, the little doomed things. You and I, Sandi, we probably won’t live long enough to see the end of things, but they will. They’ll see the beginning of the end, at least. It’s going to be so hard on them, and I just keep thinking, what can we do to prepare them and make it easier on them? I don’t know, honey. It’s inevitable, now. There’s no turning back.”
Sandi had closed her eyes tightly while her mother was talking, and when she opened them, she saw that her hand
s were folded on the kitchen table, limp as gloves. “Mother,” she said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
• • •
But she does. That’s the worst thing. She knows now, as they sit watching TV, and she will know later, when the girls are asleep, when the house is quiet: There are terrible forces at work in the world. She will sit in front of the television, but even with the volume up she will hear the noises as the house settles, creaks, sighs. She’ll be aware of the sudden movement of shadows; she’ll slip into the girls’ bedroom, hovering over their beds, feeling their breath. Once, as she leaned over Molly’s bed, the child stirred. “Dad?” she murmured, sleepily, and when Sandi touched her she relaxed. She even smiled vaguely, and Sandi knew that in the child’s dream, her father’s fingers were against her cheek. A feeling shot through Sandi’s hand.
Perhaps there are times such as this for everyone, Sandi thinks, times when we draw closer to the spirit world, to the other lives. Allen himself had said as much, having grown up in a funeral parlor, with dead bodies always downstairs from his bedroom. “I don’t discount anything,” Allen had told her. “I’ve seen too much to think that death is really just death.”
At the same time, it seems to Sandi that most people, normal people, would recoil from such intimations. Schizophrenia is merely intuition gone awry—intuition metastasizing and growing malignant. Sandi can feel it sometimes, and as she sits in front of the television, she can hear her husband’s laugh among the audience that responds to a late-night talk show host’s punch line. “Allen?” she whispers, and Safety Man seems to glow in the moonlight as he sits by the window. He says nothing.
• • •
“So, who’s the guy?” says Janice one afternoon, while they are eating lunch. Across the room, the praying lady is solemnly bending over her salad, and for a moment Sandi is so lost in watching, so lost in thought, that she doesn’t know what Janice is talking about.
“Guy?” she says blankly.
“The man I saw you with,” Janice says, smiling. “He was riding with you in your car.” She arches her eyebrows, gently suggestive. “He looked cute, from a distance.”
What can she say? “Oh,” she says. “No, it’s … just someone I know.”
“That’s a start,” Janice says. “Knowing someone, I mean.” She shakes her head thoughtfully, and her bobbed hair sways from side to side. “You know,” she says. “I just wanted to say that … I don’t know anyone who has gone through the kind of personal tragedy you’ve gone through, and I just want you to know how much I admire you. You really are a together person, and it’s such an inspiration to me. I wanted you to know that. I mean, you’re seeing people, and you’re getting on with your life, and I’m just really glad for you.”
Sandi thinks for a moment: a myriad of things. “Thank you,” she says at last, and Janice briefly touches her hand.
“You’re a real role model for me,” Janice says earnestly. “I’m sorry, I just wanted to tell you that.”
The old woman across the room has stopped praying. She now appears to be sobbing silently.
• • •
Sandi used to have a normal life. Didn’t she? She remembers thinking so, when they first moved to Chicago. She’d loved the big north suburban house they’d bought—so old, so much history! She loved that there was a little park right around the corner, and not far beyond was a row of small quaint shops, and beyond that was the girls’ school, everything comfortably arranged. She was away from her crazy family at last, away from the small-town restrictions of her former life.
So it had seemed. But now, as she feels more and more unsettled, she can’t help but worry that this comfort is only an illusion. Earlier that week, as she stood on the playground, waiting to pick her girls up after school, a thin, shrill woman—another parent, apparently—had harangued her about the hormones that were being injected into chicken and cattle. These hormones were affecting the children, the woman said. The girls are having their periods earlier and earlier, sometimes as young as nine and ten! And the boys, the woman continued. Had Sandi noticed how aggressive they’d become? “Doesn’t it frighten you?” the woman asked, glaring, and Sandi had nodded, somewhat dizzily.
“I saw a tooth,” Sandi confided. “A human tooth, outside the building where I work. In an ashtray!” And the woman had looked at her warily, silent. After a moment, she walked away, as if Sandi had somehow offended her.
She must have seemed like a crazy person, Sandi thinks now as she sits at her desk. She frowns, moving her cursor along a line of numbers on her computer screen. Somewhere, over the tops of the thin-walled maze of cubicles, she can hear Janice laughing her flirtatious laugh, and she has to swallow down the presentiment that Janice will die soon, that Janice will, in fact, be murdered. She slides the arrow of her mouse, points and clicks as the janitor who looks like Safety Man passes by and salutes cheerfully when she glances up. I am an insane person, Sandi thinks. They will all recognize it, eventually. She can’t go on like this much longer. Sooner or later, they’ll begin to realize that she is not really one of them; that she is in a different place entirely.
But she continues on: weeks pass, months, and yet here she is, driving through the flow of traffic, humming to a tune on the radio, and Safety Man smiles serenely beside her, gazing forward like a noble sea captain.
“You’re doing fine,” Safety Man tells her. “Everyone thinks so. You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you’re going to hit some sort of bottom, but I’m here to tell you: There is no bottom.”
“Yes,” she murmurs to herself. “Yes, that’s true.”
And maybe it is. Despite everything, she and her daughters arrive in the parking lot across from their apartment building. Despite everything, there is dinner to be made, and homework to be done, and storybooks to be read. Sandi almost hates to let the air out of Safety Man, but she does nevertheless. She deflates and folds him up, so they can all walk with dignity across the street, to their door. Later, after the girls are put to bed, she will reinflate him, so he can sit in the window while they sleep. But now, as she lays him out on the backseat, as his comforting face begins to shrivel and sag, as he gasps and sighs, she can’t help but feel a pang.
“Poor Jules,” Molly says. “He’s passing away.”
“Hush,” Sandi says. She presses the flat of her hand against Safety Man’s plastic skin. “Shh,” she says, as if comforting him, and he replies back: “Shhhhhh …” It’s all right. The street lights are beginning to click on above her, and the city sky glows above the silhouette edges of the rooftops. Far away, her mother is leaning over the bed of a comatose child, combing his beautiful hair; far away, a man suddenly shudders as he rounds a dark corner, whispering, “Kelly? …” uncertainly; in the distance, Allen’s spirit pauses for a moment, midflight, and listens.
“It’s all right,” she says, and she smiles as the last bit of air goes out of Safety Man. Megan and Molly are standing behind her, solemnly, as she begins to fold him neatly into a square. They watch her hopefully.
“It’s all right,” Sandi says again. As if she means it.
I DEMAND TO KNOW
WHERE YOU’RE TAKING ME
Cheryl woke in the middle of the night and she could hear the macaw talking to himself—or laughing, rather, as if he had just heard a good joke. “Haw, haw, haw!” he went. “Haw, haw, haw”: a perfect imitation of her brother-in-law Wendell, that forced, ironic guffaw.
She sat up in bed and the sound stopped. Perhaps she had imagined it? Her husband, Tobe, was still soundly asleep next to her, but this didn’t mean anything. He had always been an abnormally heavy sleeper, a snorer, and lately he had been drinking more before bed—he’d been upset ever since Wendell had gone to prison.
And she, too, was upset, anxious. She sat there, silent, her heart quickened, listening. Had the children been awakened by it? She waited, in the way she had when they were infants. Back then,
her brain would jump awake. Was that a baby crying?
No, there was nothing. The house was quiet.
• • •
The bird, the macaw, was named Wild Bill. She had never especially liked animals, had never wanted one in her home, but what could be done? Wild Bill had arrived on the same day that Tobe and his other brothers, Carlin and Randy, had pulled into the driveway with a moving van full of Wendell’s possessions. She’d stood there, watching, as item after item was carried into the house, where it would remain, in temporary but indefinite storage. In the basement, shrouded in tarps, was Wendell’s furniture: couch, kitchen set, bed, piano. There were his boxes of books and miscellaneous items, she didn’t know what. She hadn’t asked. The only thing that she wouldn’t allow were Wendell’s shotguns. These were being kept at Carlin’s place.
It might not have bothered her so much if it had not been for Wild Bill, who remained a constant reminder of Wendell’s presence in her home. As she suspected, the bird’s day-to-day care had fallen to her. It was she who made sure that Wild Bill had food and water, and it was she who cleaned away the excrement-splashed newspaper at the bottom of his cage.
But despite the fact that she was his primary caretaker, Wild Bill didn’t seem to like her very much. Mostly, he ignored her—as if she were some kind of wife, a negligible figure whom he expected to serve him. He seemed to like the children best, and of course they were very attached to him as well. They liked to show him off to their friends, and to repeat his funny sayings. He liked to ride on their shoulders, edging sideways, lifting his wings lightly, for balance.
Occasionally, as they walked around with him, he would laugh in that horrible way. “Haw, haw, haw!” he would squawk, and the children loved it.
But she herself was often uncomfortable with the things Wild Bill said. For example, he frequently said, “Hello, sexy,” to their eight-year-old daughter, Jodie. There was something lewd in the macaw’s voice, Cheryl felt, a suggestiveness she found troubling. She didn’t think it was appropriate for a child to hear herself called “sexy,” especially since Jodie seemed to respond, blushing—flattered.
