by Dan Chaon
“No,” he said, suddenly and insistently. “You just don’t understand, Cheryl. You don’t know what it’s like—in a place like this. It doesn’t take you long to sort out what’s real and what’s not, and to know—the right person to talk to. Good God!” he said, and it made her stiffen because he sounded so much like Wild Bill. “I remember so much,” he said. “I keep thinking about how I used to give you shit all the time, teasing you, and you were just so … calm, you know. Beautiful and calm. I remember you said once that you thought the difference between us was that you really believed that people were good at heart, and I didn’t. Do you remember? And I think about that. It was something I needed to listen to, and I didn’t listen.”
She drew breath—because she did remember—and she saw now clearly the way he had paused, the stern, shuttered stare as he looked at her, the way he would seek her out on those Friday party nights, watching and grinning, hoping to get her angry. Her hands clenched as she thought of the long, intense way he would listen when she argued with him. She worked with high school boys who behaved this way all the time—why hadn’t she seen? “Wendell,” she said. “I’m sorry, but …” And she thought of the way she used to gently turn away certain boys—I don’t like you in that way. I just want to be friends.… It was ridiculous, she thought, and wondered if she should just hang up the phone. How was it possible that they could let him call her like this, unmonitored? She was free to hang up, of course, that’s what the authorities assumed. But she didn’t. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Wendell, I think … I think …”
“No,” he said. “Don’t say anything. I know I shouldn’t say this stuff to you. Because Tobe’s my brother, and I do love him, even if he’s a shitty lawyer. But I just wanted to hear your voice. I mean, I never would have said anything to you if it wasn’t for being here and thinking—I can’t help it—thinking that things would be different for me if we’d … if something had happened, and you weren’t married. It could have been really different for me.”
“No,” she said, and felt a vaguely nauseated, surreal wavering passing through the room. A bank of clouds uncovered the sun for a moment, and the light altered. Wild Bill edged his clawed toes along his perch. “Listen, Wendell. You shouldn’t do this. You were right to keep this to yourself, these feelings. People think these things all the time, it’s natural. But we don’t act on them, do you see? We don’t—”
She paused, pursing her lips, and he let out another short laugh. There was a raggedness about it that sent a shudder across her.
“Act!” he said. “Jesus Christ, Cheryl, there’s no acting on anything. You don’t think I’m fooling myself into thinking this appeal is going to amount to anything, do you? I’m stuck here, you know that. For all intents and purposes, I’m not going to see you again for twenty years—if I even live that long. I just—I wanted to talk to you. I guess I was wondering if, considering the situation, if I called you sometimes. Just to talk. We can set … boundaries, you know, if you want. But I just wanted to hear your voice. I think about you all the time,” he said. “Day and night.”
She had been silent for a long time while he spoke, recoiling in her mind from the urgency of his voice and yet listening steadily. Now that he had paused she knew that she should say something. She could summon up the part of herself that was like a guidance counselor at school, quick and steady, explaining to students that they had been expelled, that their behavior was inappropriate, that their SAT scores did not recommend college, that thoughts of suicide were often a natural part of adolescence but should not be dwelled upon. She opened her mouth, but this calm voice did not come to her, and instead she merely held the phone, limp and damp against her ear.
“I’ll call you again,” he said. “I love you,” he said, and she heard him hang up.
In the silence of her kitchen, she could hear the sound of her pulse in her ears. It was surreal, she thought, and she crossed her hands over her breasts, holding herself. For a moment, she considered picking up the phone and calling Tobe at his office. But she didn’t. She had to get her thoughts together.
She gazed out the window uncertainly. It was snowing hard now; thick white flakes drifted along with the last leaves of the trees. Something about Wendell’s voice, she thought restlessly, and the fuzzy lights of distant cars seemed to shudder in the blur of steady snow. Her hands were shaking, and after a time, she got up and turned on the television, flicking through some channels: a game show, a talk show, an old black-and-white movie.
She could see him now very clearly, as a young man, the years after they’d first moved back to Wyoming—the way he would come over to their house, lolling around on the couch in his stocking feet, entertaining the infant Jodie as Cheryl made dinner, his eyes following her. And the stupid debates they used to have, the calculated nastiness of his attacks on her, the way his gaze would settle on her when he would play piano and sing. Wasn’t that the way boys acted when they were trying not to be in love? Could she really have been so unaware, and yet have still played into it? What is she doing in this family? Wendell had said. She tried to think again, but something hard and knuckled had settled itself in her stomach. “My God,” she said. “What am I going to do?” Wild Bill turned from the television, cocking his head thoughtfully, his eyes sharp and observant.
“Well?” she said to him. “What am I going to do?”
He said nothing. He looked at her for a little longer, then lifted his pathetic, molting wings, giving them a shake. “What a world, what a world,” he said, mournfully.
This made her smile. It was not something she’d heard him say before, but she recognized it as a quote from The Wizard of Oz, which Wendell used to recite sometimes. It was what the Wicked Witch of the West said when she melted away, and a heaviness settled over her as she remembered him reciting it, clowning around during one of the times when they were just making conversation—when he wasn’t trying to goad her. There were those times, she thought. Times when they might have been friends. “Yes,” she said to Wild Bill. “What a world.”
“Whatever,” Wild Bill said; but he seemed to respond to her voice, or to the words that she spoke, because he gave a sudden flutter and dropped from his perch onto the table—which he would sometimes do for the children, but never for her, not even when she was eating fruit. She watched as he waddled cautiously toward her, his claws clicking lightly. She would have scolded the children: Don’t let that bird on the table, don’t feed him from the table, but she held out a bit of toast crust, and he edged forward.
“It’s not going to work,” she told Wild Bill as he nipped the piece of toast from her fingers. “It’s not,” she said, and Wild Bill observed her sternly, swallowing her bread. He opened his beak, his small black tongue working.
“What?” she said, as if he could advise her, but he merely cocked his head.
“Stupid cunt,” he said gently, decisively, and her hand froze over her piece of toast, recoiling from the bit of crust that she’d been breaking off for him. She watched the bird’s mouth open again, the black tongue, and a shudder ran through her.
“No!” she said. “No! Bad!” She felt her heart contract, the weight hanging over her suddenly breaking, and she caught Wild Bill in her hands. She meant to put him back in his cage, to throw him in, without food or water, but when her hands closed over his body he bit her, hard. His beak closed over the flesh of her finger and he held on when she screamed; he clutched at her forearm with his claws when she tried to pull back, and she struck at him as he flapped his wings, her finger still clutched hard in his beak.
“You piece of filth!” she cried. Tears came to her eyes as she tried to shake loose, but he kept his beak clenched, and his claws raked her arm. He was squawking angrily, small feathers flying off him, still molting as he beat his wings against her, the soundtrack of some old movie swelling melodramatically from the television. She slapped his body against the frame of the kitchen door, and he let loose for a moment before bi
ting down again on her other hand. “Bastard!” she screamed, and she didn’t even remember opening the door until the cold air hit her. She struck him hard with the flat of her hand, flailing at him, and he fell to the snow-dusted cement of the back porch, fluttering. “Smell my feet!” he rasped, and she watched as he stumbled through the air, wavering upward until he lit upon the bare branch of an elm tree in their backyard. His bright colors stood out against the gray sky, and he looked down on her vindictively. He lifted his back feathers and let a dollop of shit fall to the ground. After a moment, she closed the back door on him.
• • •
It took a long time for him to die. She didn’t know what she was thinking as she sat there at the kitchen table, her hands tightened against one another. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he flew repeatedly against the window, his wings beating thickly against the glass. She could hear his body thump softly, like a snowball, the tap of his beak. She didn’t know how many times. It became simply a kind of emphasis to the rattle of the wind, to the sound of television that she was trying to stare at.
She was trying to think, and even as Wild Bill tapped against the glass, she felt that some decision was coming to her—that some firm resolve was closing its grip over her even as Wild Bill grew quiet. He tapped his beak against the glass, and when she looked she could see him cocking his eye at her, a blank black bead peering in at her—she couldn’t tell whether he was pleading or filled with hatred. He said nothing, just stared as she folded her arms tightly in front of her, pressing her forearms against her breasts. She was trying to think, trying to imagine Tobe’s face as he came home from work, the way he would smile at her and she would of course smile back, the way he would look into her eyes, long and hard, inscrutably, the way Wild Bill was staring at her now. Are you okay, he would say, and he wouldn’t notice that Wild Bill was gone, not until later. I don’t know, she would say. I don’t know what happened to him.
The rich lady on television was being kidnapped as Wild Bill slapped his wings once more, weakly, against the window. Cheryl watched intently, though the action on the screen seemed meaningless. “How dare you!” the rich lady cried as she was hustled along a corridor. Cheryl stared at the screen as a thuggish actor pushed the elegant woman forward.
“I demand to know where you’re taking me,” the elegant woman said desperately, and when Cheryl looked up, Wild Bill had fallen away from his grip on the windowsill.
“You’ll know soon enough, lady,” the thug said. “You’ll know soon enough.”
BIG ME
It all started when I was twelve years old. Before that, everything was a peaceful blur of childhood, growing up in the small town of Beck, Nebraska. A “town,” we called it. Really, the population was just less than two hundred, and it was one of those dots along Highway 30 that people didn’t usually even slow down for, though strangers sometimes stopped at the little gas station near the grain elevator, or ate at the café. My mother and father owned a bar called The Crossroads, at the edge of town. We lived in a little house behind it, and behind our house was the junkyard, and beyond that were wheat fields, which ran all the way to a line of bluffs and barren hills, full of yucca and rattlesnakes.
Back then I spent a lot of time in my mind, building a city up toward those hills. This imaginary place was also called Beck, but it was a metropolis of a million people. The wise though cowardly mayor lived in a mansion in the hills above the interstate, as did the bullish, Teddy Roosevelt–like police commissioner, Winthrop Golding. There were other members of the rich and powerful who lived in enormous old Victorian houses along the bluffs, and many of them harbored dreadful secrets, or were involved in one way or another with the powerful Beck underworld. One wealthy, respectable citizen, Mr. Karaffa, turned out to be a lycanthrope who preyed on the lovely, virginal junior high school girls, mutilating them beyond recognition, until I shot him with a silver bullet. I was the city Detective, though I was often underappreciated, and, because of my radical notions, in danger of being fired by the cowardly mayor. The police commissioner always defended me, even when he was exasperated by my unorthodox methods. He respected my integrity.
I don’t know how many of my childhood years existed in this imaginary city. Already by the age of eight I had become the Detective, and shortly thereafter I began drawing maps of the metropolis. By the time we left Beck, I had a folder six inches thick, full of street guides and architecture and subway schedules. In the real town, I was known as the strange kid who wandered around talking to himself. Old people would find me in their backyard garden and come out and yell at me. Children would see me playing on their swing sets, and when they came out to challenge me, I would run away. I trapped people’s cats and bound their arms and legs, harshly forcing confessions from them. Since no one locked their doors, I went into people’s houses and stole things, which I pretended were clues to the mystery I was trying to solve.
Everyone real also played a secret role in my city. My parents, for example, were the landlord and his wife, who lived downstairs from my modest one-room flat. They were well-meaning but unimaginative people, and I was polite to them. There were a number of comic episodes in which the nosy landlady had to be tricked and defeated. My brother, Mark, was the district attorney, my nemesis. My younger sister, Debbie, was my secretary, Miss Debbie, whom I sometimes loved. I would marry her if I weren’t such a lone wolf.
My family thought of me as a certain person, a figure I knew well enough to act out on occasion. Now that they are far away, it sometimes hurts to think that we knew so little of one another. Sometimes I think: If no one knows you, then you are no one.
In the spring of my twelfth year, a man moved into a house at the end of my block. The house had belonged to an old woman who had died and left her home fully furnished but tenantless for years, until her heir had finally gotten around to having the estate liquidated, the old furniture sold, the place cleared out and put up for sale. This had been the house I took cats to, the hideout where I extracted their yowling confessions. Then finally the house was emptied and the man took up residence.
I first saw the man in what must have been late May. The lilac bush in his front yard was in full bloom, thick with spade-shaped leaves and clusters of perfumed flowers. The man was mowing the lawn as I passed, and I stopped to stare.
It immediately struck me that there was something familiar about him—the wavy dark hair and gloomy eyes, the round face and dimpled chin. At first I thought he looked like someone I’d seen on TV. And then, as I looked at him, I realized: He looked like me! Or rather, he looked like an older version of me—me grown up. As he got closer with his push lawn mower, I was aware that our eyes were the same odd, pale shade of gray, that we had the same map of freckles across the bridge of our nose, the same stubby fingers. He lifted his hand solemnly as he reached the edge of his lawn, and I lifted my opposite hand, so that for a moment we were mirror images of one another. I felt terribly worked up and began to hurry home.
That night, considering the encounter, I wondered whether the man actually was me. I thought about all that I’d heard about time travel, and considered the possibility that my older self had come back for some unknown purpose—perhaps to save me from some mistake I was about to make, or to warn me. Maybe he was fleeing some future disaster, and hoped to change the course of things.
I suppose this tells you a lot about what I was like as a boy, but these were among the first ideas I considered. I believed wholeheartedly in the notion that time travel would soon be a reality, just as I believed in UFOs and ESP and Bigfoot. I used to worry, in all seriousness, whether humanity would last as long as the dinosaurs had lasted. What if we were just a brief, passing phase on the planet? I felt strongly that we needed to explore other solar systems and establish colonies. The survival of the human species was very important to me.
Perhaps it was because of this that I began to keep a journal. I had recently read The Diary of Anne Frank, and had been dee
ply moved by the idea that a piece of you, words on a page, could live on after you were dead. I imagined that, after a nuclear holocaust, an extraterrestrial boy might find my journal, floating among some bits of meteorite and pieces of buildings and furniture that had once been Earth. The extraterrestrial boy would translate my diary, and it would become a bestseller on his planet. Eventually, the aliens would be so stirred by my story that they would call off the intergalactic war they were waging and make a truce.
In these journals I would frequently write messages to myself, a person whom I addressed as Big Me, or The Future Me. Rereading these entries as the addressee, I try not to be insulted, since my former self admonishes me frequently. “I hope you are not a failure,” he says. “I hope you are happy,” he says.
I’m trying to remember what was going on in the world when I was twelve. My brother, Mark, says it was the worst year of his life. He remembers it as a year of terrible fights between my parents. “They were drunk every night, up till three and four in the morning, screaming at each other. Do you remember the night Mom drove the car into the tree?”
I don’t. In my mind, they seemed happy together, in the bantering, ironic manner of sitcom couples, and their arguments seemed full of comedy, as if a laugh track might ring out after their best put-down lines. I don’t recall them drunk so much as expansive, and the bar seemed a cheerful, popular place, always full, though they would go bankrupt not long after I turned thirteen.
Mark says that was the year that he tried to commit suicide, and I don’t recall that either, though I do remember that he was in the hospital for a few days. Mostly, I think of him reclining on the couch, looking regal and dissipated, reading books like I’m Okay, You’re Okay, and taking questionnaires that told him whether he was normal or not.
