by Dan Chaon
• • •
I don’t remember much about my father from that summer when I was twelve. We certainly weren’t having conversations that I can think of, and I don’t ever recall that he pursued me with a gun. He was just there: I walked past him in the morning as he sat, sipping coffee, preparing to go to work. I’d go into the bar, and he would pour me a glass of Coke with bitters “to put hair on my chest.” I’d sit there on the bar stool stroking Suds, the bar’s tomcat, in my lap, murmuring quietly to him as I imagined my detective story. My father had a bit part in my imagination, barely a speaking role.
But it was at the bar that I saw Mr. Mickleson again. I had been at his house that morning, working through a box of letters, and then I’d been out at the junkyard behind our house. In those unenlightened times, it was called The Dump. People drove out and pitched their garbage over the edge of a ravine, which had become encrusted with a layer of beer cans, broken toys, bedsprings, car parts, broken glass. It was a magical place, and I’d spent a few hours in the driver’s seat of a rusted-out Studebaker, fiddling with the various dashboard knobs, pretending to drive it, to stalk suspects, to become involved in a thrilling high-speed chase. At last I had come to the bar to unwind, to drink my Coke and bitters and re-create the day in my imagination. Occasionally, my father would speak to me and I would be forced to reluctantly disengage myself from the Detective, who was brooding over a glass of bourbon. He had become hardened and cynical, but he would not give up his fight for justice.
I was repeating these stirring lines in my mind when Mr. Mickleson came into the bar. I felt a little thrum when he entered. My grip tightened on Suds the cat, who struggled and sprang from my lap.
Having spent time in The Crossroads, I recognized drunkenness. I was immediately aware of Mickleson’s flopping gait, the way he settled heavily against the lip of the bar. “Okay, okay,” he muttered to himself, then chuckled. “No, just forget it, never mind,” he said cheerfully. Then he sighed and tapped his hand against the bar. “Shot o’rum,” he said. “Captain Morgan, if you have it. No ice.” I watched as my father served him, then flicked my glance away when Mickleson looked warily in my direction. He leveled his gaze at me, his eyes heavy with some meaning I couldn’t decipher. It was part friendly, that look, but part threatening, too, in a particularly intimate way—as if he recognized me.
“Oh, hello,” Mr. Mickleson said. “If it isn’t the staring boy! Hello, Staring Boy!” He grinned at me, and my father gave him a stern look. “I believe I know you,” Mr. Mickleson said jauntily. “I’ve seen you around, haven’t I?”
I just sat there, blushing. It occurred to me that perhaps, despite my precautions, Mr. Mickleson had seen me after all. “Staring Boy,” he said, and I tried to think of when he might have caught me staring. How many times? I saw myself from a distance, watching his house but now also being watched, and the idea set up a panic in me that was difficult to quell. I was grateful that my father came over and called me son. “Son,” he said, “why don’t you go on outside and find something to do? You may as well enjoy some of that summer sunshine before school starts.”
“All right,” I said. I saw that Mickleson was still grinning at me expectantly, his eyes blank and unblinking, and I realized that he was doing an imitation of my own expression—Staring Boy, meet Staring Man. I tried to step casually off the bar stool, but instead stumbled and nearly fell.
“Oopsie-daisy!” Mr. Mickleson said, and my father gave him a hard look, a careful glare that checked Mr. Mickleson’s grin. He shrugged.
“Ah, children, children,” he said confidingly to my father as I hurried quickly to the door. I heard my father start to speak sharply as I left, but I didn’t have the nerve to stick around to hear what was said.
Instead, I crept along the outside of the bar; I staked out Mickleson’s old Volkswagen and found it locked. There were no windows into the bar, and so I pressed myself against the wall, trying to listen. I tried to think what I would write in my notebook: that look he’d given me, his grinning mimicry of my stare. I believe I know you, he’d said: What, exactly, did he know?
And then I had a terrible thought. Where was the notebook? I imagined, for a moment, that I had left it there, on the bar, next to my drink. I had the horrifying image of Mr. Mickleson’s eyes falling on it, the theme book cover, which was decorated with stylized question marks, and on which I’d written: ANDY O’DAY MYSTERY SERIES #67: THE DETECTIVE MEETS THE DREADFUL DOUBLE! I saw him smiling at it, opening it, his eyes narrowing as he saw his photo pasted there on the first page.
But it wasn’t in the bar. I was sure it wasn’t, because I remembered not having it when I went in. I didn’t have it with me, I knew, and I began to backtrack, step by step, from the Studebaker to lunchtime to my bedroom and then I saw it, with the kind of perfect clarity my memory has always been capable of, despite everything.
I saw myself in Mickleson’s living room, on my knees in front of a box of his letters. I had copied something in the notebook and put it down on the floor. It was right there, next to the box. I could see it as if through a window, and I stood there observing the image in my mind’s eye, as my mother came around the corner, into the parking lot.
“Andy!” she said. “I’ve been calling for you! Where the hell have you been?”
She was in one of her moods. “I am so sick of this!” she said, and gave me a hard shake as she grabbed my arm. “You God damn lazy kids just think you can do as you please, all the God damn day long! This house is a pigsty, and not a one of you will bend a finger to pick up your filthy clothes or even wash a dish.” She gritted her teeth, her voice trembling, and she slammed into the house, where Mark was scrubbing the floor and Debbie was standing at the sink, washing dishes. Mark glared up at me, his eyes red with crying and self-pity and hatred. I knew he was going to hit me as soon as she left. “Clean, you brats!” my mother cried. “I’m going to work, and when I get home I want this house to shine!” She was in the frilly blouse and makeup she wore when she tended bar, beautiful and flushed, her eyes hard. “I’m not going to live like this anymore. I’m not going to live this kind of life!”
“She was a toxic parent,” Mark says now, in one of our rare phone conversations. “A real psycho. It haunts me, you know, the shit that we went through. It was like living in a house of terror, you know? Like, you know, a dictatorship or something. You never knew what was next, and that was the scariest part. There was a point, I think, where I really just couldn’t take it anymore. I really wanted to die.” I listen as he draws on his cigarette and then exhales, containing the fussy spitefulness that’s creeping into his voice. “Not that you’d remember. It always fell on me, whatever it was. They thought you were so cute and spacy, so you were always checked out in La-La Land while I got the brunt of everything.”
I listen but don’t listen. I’m on the deck behind my house with my cell phone, reclining, watching my daughters jump through the sprinkler. Everything is green and full of sunlight, and I might as well be watching an actor portraying me in the happy ending of a movie of my life. I’ve never told him about my blackouts and I don’t now, though they have been bothering me again lately. I can imagine what he would come up with: fugue states, repressed memories, multiple personalities. Ridiculous stuff.
“It all seems very far away to me,” I tell Mark, which is not true exactly, but it’s part of the role I’ve been playing for many years now. “I don’t really think much about it.”
This much is true: I barely remember what happened that night. I wasn’t even there, among the mundane details of children squabbling and cleaning and my mother’s ordinary unhappiness. I was the Detective!—driving my sleek Studebaker through the streets of Beck, nervous though not panicked, edgy and white-knuckled but still planning with steely determination: the notebook! The notebook must be retrieved! Nothing else was really happening, and when I left the house I was in a state of focused intensity.
It must have been about eleven
o’clock. Mark had been especially evil and watchful, and it wasn’t until he’d settled down in front of the television with a big bowl of ice cream that I could pretend, at last, to go to bed.
Outside, out the door, down the alley: It seems to me that I should have been frightened, but mostly I recall the heave of adrenaline and determination, the necessity of the notebook, the absolute need for it. It was my story.
The lights were on at Mickleson’s house, a bad sign, but I moved forward anyway, into the dense and dripping shadows of his yard, the crickets singing thickly, my hand already extended to touch the knob of his back door.
Which wasn’t locked. It didn’t even have to be jimmied, it gave under the pressure of my hand, a little electrical jolt across my skin, the door opening smooth and uncreaking, and I passed like a shadow into the narrow back foyer that led to the kitchen. There was a silence in the house, and for a moment I felt certain that Mickleson was asleep. Still, I moved cautiously. The kitchen was brightly fluorescent and full of dirty dishes and beer cans. I slid my feet along the tile, inching along the wall. Silence, and then Mickleson’s voice drifted up suddenly, a low mumble and then a firmer one, as if he were contradicting himself. My heart shrank. Now what? I thought as I came to the edge of the living room.
Mickleson was sitting in his chair, slumping, his foot jiggling with irritation. I heard the sail-like snap of a turning page, and I didn’t even have to look to know that the notebook was in his hands. He murmured again as I stood there. I felt light-headed. The notebook! I thought, and leaned against the wall. I felt my head bump against something, and Mr. Mickleson’s plaque tilted, then fell. I fumbled for a moment before I caught it.
But the sound made him turn. There I was, dumbly holding the slice of wood, and his eyes rested on me. His expression seemed to flicker with surprise, then terror, then annoyance—before settling on a kind of blank amusement. He cleared his throat.
“I believe I see a little person in my house,” he said, and I might have fainted. I could feel the Detective leaving me, shriveling up and slumping to the floor, a suit of old clothes; the city of Beck disintegrated in the distance, streets drying up like old creek beds, skyscrapers sinking like ocean liners into the wheat fields. I was very still, his gaze pinning me. “A ghostly little person,” he said, with satisfaction. He stood up for a moment, wavering, and then stumbled back against the chair for support, a look of affronted dignity freezing on his face. I didn’t move.
“Well, well,” he said. “Do I dare assume that I am in the presence of the author of this—“ and he waved my notebook vaguely “—this document?” And he paused, thumbing through it with an exaggerated, mimelike gesture. “Hmm,” he murmured, almost crooning. “So—imaginative! And—there’s a certain—charm—about it—I think.” And then he leaned toward me. “And so at last we meet, Detective O’Day!” he said, in a deep voice. “You may call me Professor Moriarty!” He made a strange shape with his mouth and laughed softly—not sinister exactly, but musing, as if he’d just told himself a good joke and I was somehow in on it.
“Why so quiet?” he exclaimed, and waggled the notebook at me. “Haven’t you come to find your future, young Detective?” I watched as he pressed his fingers to his temples, like a stage medium. “Hmm,” he said, and began to wave his arms and fingers with a seaweedlike floating motion, as if casting a magic spell or performing a hula dance. “Looking for his future,” he said. “What lies in wait for Andy O’Day? I ask myself that question frequently. Will he grow up to be …”—and here he read aloud from my journal—“… ‘troglodytic’ and ‘sinister’? Will he ever escape the sad and lonely life of a Detective, or will he wander till the end of his days through the grim and withering streets of Beck?”
He paused then and looked up from my journal. I thought for a moment that if I leapt out, I could snatch it from him, even though the things I had written now seemed dirty and pathetic. I thought to say, “Give me back my notebook!” But I didn’t really want it anymore. I just stood there, watching him finger the pages. He leaned toward me, wavering, his eyes not exactly focused on me, but on some part of my forehead or shoulder or hair. He smiled, made another small effort to stand, then changed his mind. “What will happen to Andy O’Day?” he said again, thoughtfully. “It’s such a compelling question, a very lovely question, and I can tell you the answer. Because, you see, I’ve come through my time machine to warn you! I have a special message for you from the future. Do you want to know what it is?”
“No,” I said at last, my voice thick and uncertain.
“Oh, Andy,” he said, as if very disappointed. “Andy, Andy. Look! Here I am!” He held his arms out wide, as if I’d run toward them. “Your Dreadful Double!” I watched as he straightened himself, correcting the slow tilt of his body. “I know you,” Mr. Mickleson said. His head drooped, but he kept one eye on me. “You must be coming to me—for something?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know. I couldn’t even begin to imagine, and yet I felt—not for the last time—that I was standing in a desolate and empty prairie, the fields unraveling away from me in all directions. The long winds ran through my hair.
“Don’t you want to know a secret?” he said. “Come over here, I’ll whisper in your ear.”
And it seemed to me, then, that he did know a secret. It seemed to me that he would tell me something terrible, something I didn’t want to hear. I watched as he closed my notebook and placed it neatly on the coffee table, next to the TV Guide. He balanced himself on two feet, lifting up and lurching toward me. “Hold still,” he murmured. “I’ll whisper.”
I turned and ran.
I once tried to explain this incident to my wife, but it didn’t make much sense to her. She nodded, as if it were merely strange, merely puzzling. Hmmm, she said, and I thought that perhaps it was odd to remember this time so vividly, when I remembered so little else. It was a little ridiculous that I should find Mr. Mickleson on my mind so frequently.
“He was just a drunk,” my wife said. “A little crazy, maybe, but …” And she looked into my face, her mouth pursing. “He didn’t … do anything to you, did he?” she said awkwardly, and I shook my head.
“No—no,” I said. And I explained to her that I never saw Mr. Mickleson again. I avoided the house after that night, of course, and when school started he wasn’t teaching Science 7. We were told, casually, that he had an “emergency,” that he had been called away, and when, after a few weeks, he still didn’t return, he was replaced without comment by an elderly lady substitute, who read to us from the textbook—The World of Living Things—in a lilting, storybook voice, and who whispered “My God,” as she watched us later, dissecting earthworms, pinning them to corkboard and exposing their many hearts. We never found out where Mr. Mickleson had gone.
“He was probably in rehab,” my wife said sensibly. “Or institutionalized. Your father was right. He was just a weirdo. It doesn’t seem that mysterious to me.”
Yes. I nodded a little, ready to drop the subject. I couldn’t very well explain the empty longing I felt, the eager dread that would wash over me, going into the classroom and thinking that he might be sitting there behind the desk, waiting. It didn’t make sense, I thought, and I couldn’t explain it, any more than I could explain why he remained in my mind as I crisscrossed the country with my family, any more than I could explain why he seemed to be there when I thought of them, even now: Mark, fat and paranoid, on his houseboat; my mother in Mexico, nodding over a cocktail; Debbie, staring at a spider in the corner of her room in the group home, her eyes dull; my father, frightened, calling me on the phone as his liver failed him, his body decomposing in a tiny grave in Idaho that I’d never visited. How could I explain that Mickleson seemed to preside over these thoughts, hovering at the edge of them like a stage director at the back of my mind, smiling as if he’d done me a favor?
I didn’t know why he came into my mind as I thought of them, just as I didn’t know why he seemed to appear
whenever I told lies. It was just that I could sense him. Yes, he whispered as I told my college friends that my father was an archaeologist living in Peru, that my mother was a former actress; Yes, he murmured as I lied to my father about Katrina; Yes, as I make excuses to my wife, when I say I am having dinner with a client when in fact I am tracing another path entirely—following a young family as they stroll through the park, or a whistling old man who might be my father, if he’d gotten away, or a small, brisk-paced woman, who looks like Katrina might, if Katrina weren’t made up. How can I explain that I walk behind this Katrina woman for many blocks, living a different life, whistling my old man tune?
I can’t. I can’t explain it, no more than I can admit that I still have Mickleson’s plaque, just as he probably still has my notebook; no more than I can explain why I take the plaque out of the bottom drawer of my desk and unwrap the tissue paper I’ve folded it in, reading the inscription over, like a secret message: “I wear the chains I forged in life.” I know it’s just a cheap Dickens allusion, but it still seems important.
I can hear him say, “Hold still. I’ll whisper.”
Hmmm, my wife would say, puzzled and perhaps a bit disturbed. She’s a practical woman, and so I say nothing. It’s probably best that she doesn’t think any more about it, and I keep to myself the private warmth I feel when I sense a blackout coming, the darkness clasping its hands over my eyes. It’s better this way—we’re all happy. I’m glad that my wife will be there when I wake, and my normal life, and my beautiful daughters, looking at me, wide-eyed, staring.
