Among the Missing Read online

  “BRILLIANT … AN OUTSTANDING COLLECTION … EVERY ONE OF THESE STORIES IS A GEM.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Rewarding … Chaon is a writer who can convincingly squeeze whole lives—the ones we lead and the more alluring ones we so eagerly imagine for ourselves—into a mere twenty pages or so. He writes beautifully.… His repeated grappling with questions of choice and chance in ordinary people’s lives, far from feeling repetitious, yields rich rewards in its every variation. Chaon’s seriousness of purpose and gifts of observation are enough to suggest that when any roster of skilled practitioners of the American short story is drawn up, he should definitely be counted present.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “These stories are filled with a wicked innocence, a wonderful way of seeing what is new in the way we live the lives we’ve grown used to. [Chaon] makes us feel the fearfulness available—given the right light, the wrong music—from the ordinary. He honors his readers and his characters with direct language, compelling moments, and a chance to see clearly what is coming toward them.”

  —FREDERICK BUSCH

  Author of Girls and The Night Inspector

  “Within these pages Chaon’s lonely protagonists struggle to invent or erase themselves. Their histories are disordered, their futures uncertain. But for the reader the pleasures involved are indelible. These are memorable, mighty stories told by a master. An absolutely stupendous collection!”

  —KAREN JOY FOWLER

  Author of Sarah Canary and Black Glass

  “Captivating … Chaon’s work is especially notable for his casually precise prose and deep intelligence for the resonant scene. A gem of a second collection from an immensely promising writer of unmistakably original—and distinctively rewarding—literary gifts.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “[A] SOULFUL, PITCH-PERFECT COLLECTION …

  Chaon’s characters confront their own self-deceptions and strive for truer, more heartfelt existences. Like Ethan Canin and Lorrie Moore, Chaon understands that our lives are the sum of decisions both grand and small. Most important, he conveys how the toughest choice of all is the one to keep moving.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Masterful … Chaon’s work achieves a blend of tenderness and slate-black melancholy.… They also contain an elegance of form—shifting narrative perspectives and clean, brutal language—that accumulates into something splendidly trustworthy.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Among the Missing clearly establishes [Chaon] as one of the most eloquent story writers of our time. Falling naturally into the traditions of John Updike, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Richard Ford, Chaon tells lean, elegant stories of boyhood, rural life, and existential journeys through modern family life with precision, wry humor, and surprise.… Chaon writes with a lyricism and structural logic that turn each story into art so carefully crafted it becomes invisible behind the familiar but startling tales of human hope, loss, disconnection, and survival.… Chaon’s wisdom evolves so seamlessly from realistic situations precisely wrought, and with such freshness and compassion, that even as the dramas and conclusions unsettle, the reader feels grateful for the confidence shared, the understanding provoked.”

  —The Providence Journal

  “Among the Missing is one of the best story collections I’ve read this year. Chaon’s eloquent, finely crafted tales probe the depths of loss and absence with heart-wrenching particularity. Whether it’s with sweet regret or heartfelt despair, a sense of loss weaves through these stories like a fine binding ribbon. Chaon knows how to take his characters to the very edge, and sometimes, luckily for the reader, he brings them back.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Beautiful and insightful stories … Riveting and unpredictable, each pristine tale of absence looms like the proverbial tip of the iceberg as Chaon succeeds brilliantly in suggesting the immensity and mystery floating silently below the surface of everyday life, shadowy compressions of all the complicated and contradictory thoughts and feelings that humans conceal from each other out of fear and love.”

  —Booklist (boxed and starred review)

  “These are stories with dark edges, peopled by characters who face the limits of rage and despair. But in the midst of turmoil, Dan Chaon holds fast to his own sense of the whimsical and the absurd. He sees people with delight; he offers us visions of hope and awe through his own fearless compassion.”

  —MELANIE RAE THON

  Author of Sweet Hearts and First, Body

  “A startling glimpse into [a] strange fictional world. In tight, clean prose Chaon renders story after story brimming with equal parts menace and grace. His stories haunt and amaze, lingering like great fiction should.”

  —ELWOOD REID

  Author of If I Don’t Six and Midnight Sun

  “Dan Chaon writes with superlative craft and compassion about people who step out of their ordinary lives and into mysteries. These are wonderful stories: tough, spooky, and full of heart.”

  —JEAN THOMPSON

  Author of Wild Blue Yonder

  “A brilliant and important new voice in American fiction … Dan Chaon movingly parses the omnipresence of absence in our lives.”

  —DAVID JAUSS

  Author of Black Maps

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2001 by Dan Chaon

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2002 by Dan Chaon and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  The following stories have appeared, sometimes in different form, in the following magazines:

  Triquarterly: “Among the Missing” and “Falling Backwards” (originally published under the title “Seven Types of Ambiguity”); Mid-American Review: “Prosthesis”; Witness: “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom”; Ontario Review: “Safety Man”; Other Voices: “Here Is a Little Something to Remember Me By”; Cut Bank: “Passengers, Remain Calm”; Gettysburg Review: “Big Me”; Epoch: “I Demand to Know Where You’re Taking Me”; PUSHCART PRESS: “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom: also appeared in Pushcart Prize 2000: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Random House Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  www.randomhousereaderscircle.com

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2001119902

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48144-3

  v3.1_r1

  Whatever this was all about,

  it was not a vain attempt—journey.

  —RAYMOND CARVER

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Safety Man

  I Demand to Know Where You’re Taking Me

  Big Me

  Prodigal

  Passengers, Remain Calm

  The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom

  Among the Missing

  Prosthesis

  Here’s a Little Something to Remember Me By

  Late for the Wedding

  Falling Backwards

  Burn with Me

  A Reader’s Guide

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

&nb
sp; SAFETY MAN

  Safety Man is all shriveled and puckered inside his zippered nylon carrying tote, and taking him out is always the hardest part. Sandi is disturbed by him for a moment, his shrunken face, and she averts her eyes as he crinkles and unfolds. She has a certain type of smile ready in case anyone should see her inserting the inflator pump into his backside; there is a flutter of protective embarrassment, and when a car goes past she hunches over Safety Man’s prone form, sheilding his not-yet-firm body from view. After a time, he begins to fill out—to look human.

  Safety Man used to be a joke. When Sandi and her husband, Allen, had moved to Chicago, Sandi’s mother had sent the thing. Her mother was a woman of many exaggerated fears, and Sandi and Allen couldn’t help but laugh. They took turns reading aloud from Safety Man’s accompanying brochure: Safety Man—the perfect ladies’ companion for urban living! Designed as a visual deterrent, Safety Man is a life-size simulated male that appears one hundred eighty pounds and six feet tall, to give others the impression that you are protected while at home alone or driving in your car. Incredibly real-seeming, with positionable latex head and hands and air-brushed facial highlights, handsome Safety Man has been field-tested to keep danger at bay!

  “Oh, I can’t believe she sent this,” Sandi had said. “She’s really slipping.”

  Allen lifted it out of its box, holding it by the shoulders like a Christmas gift sweater. “Well,” he said. “He doesn’t have a penis, anyway. It appears that he’s just a torso.”

  “Ugh!” she said, and Allen observed its wrinkled, bog man face dispassionately.

  “Now, now,” Allen said. He was a tall, soft-spoken man, and was more amused by Sandi’s mother’s foibles than Sandi herself was. “You never know when he might come in handy,” and he looked at her sidelong, gently ironic. “Personally,” he said, “I feel safer already.”

  And they’d laughed. Allen put his long arm around her shoulder and snickered silently, breathing against her neck while Safety Man slid to the floor like a paper doll.

  Now that Allen is dead, it doesn’t seem so funny anymore. Now that she is a widow with two young daughters, Safety Man has begun to seem entirely necessary, and there are times when she is in such a hurry to get him out of his bag, to get him unfolded and blown up that her hands actually tremble. Something is happening to her.

  There are fears she doesn’t talk about. There is an old lady she sees at the place where she often eats lunch. “O God, O God,” the lady will say, “O Jesus, sweet Jesus, my Lord and Savior, what have I done?” And Sandi watches as the old woman bows her head. The old woman is nicely dressed, about Sandi’s mother’s age, speaking calmly, good posture, her gloved hands clasped in front of her chef’s salad.

  And there is a man who follows Sandi down the street and keeps screaming, “Kelly!” at her back. He thinks she is Kelly. “Baby,” he calls. “Do you have a heart? Kelly, I’m asking you a question! Do you have a heart?” And she doesn’t turn, she never gets a clear look at his face, though she can feel his body not far behind her.

  Sandi is not as desperate as these people, but she can see how it is possible.

  Since Allen died, she has been worrying about going insane. There is a history of it in her family. It happened to her uncle Sammy, a religious fanatic who’d ended his own life in the belief that Satan was planting small packets of dust in the hair behind his ears. Once, he’d told Sandi confidentially, he’d thrown a packet of dust on the floor of his living room, and suddenly the furniture began attacking him. It flew around the room, striking him glancing blows until he fled the house. “I guess I learned my lesson!” he told her. “I’ll never do that again!” A few weeks later, he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Sandi’s mother is not such an extreme case, but she, too, has become increasingly eccentric since the death of Sandi’s father. She has become a believer in various causes, and sends Sandi clippings, or calls on the phone to tell her about certain toxic chemicals in the air and water, about the apocalyptic disappearance of frogs from the hemisphere, about the overuse of antibiotics creating a strain of super-resistant viruses, about the dangers of microwave ovens. She accosts people in waiting rooms and supermarkets, digging deep into her purse and bringing up photocopied pamphlets, which she will urge on strangers. “Read this if you don’t believe me!” And they will pretend to read it, careful and serious, because they are afraid of her and want her to leave them alone.

  But she is functional. At sixty-eight, she still works as a nurse’s aide on the neurological ward of the hospital. She’ll regale Sandi with the most horrifying stories about her brain-damaged patients. Then she’ll say how much she loves her job.

  Sandi, too, is functional. Besides Safety Man, there is nothing abnormal about her life. She works, like before, as a claims adjuster at the IRS. She used to have trouble getting up in the morning, but now she wakes before the alarm. She is showered and dressed before her daughters even begin to stir; she has their cereal in the bowls, ready to be doused with milk, their lunches packed, even little loving notes tucked in between bologna sandwiches and juice boxes. She stands at the door as they finish their breakfasts, sipping her coffee, her beige trench coat over her arm. At this very moment, hundreds of women in this exact coat are hurrying down Michigan Avenue. She is no different from them, despite the inflatable man in her tote bag.

  The girls love Safety Man. Megan is ten and Molly is eight, and they have decided that Safety Man is handsome. They have been involved in dressing him: their father’s old black leather jacket and sunglasses, and a baseball cap, turned backward. They are pleased to be protected by a life-size simulated male guardian, and when she drops them off at school, they bid him farewell. “So long, Jules,” they call. They have decided that they would like to have a boyfriend named Jules.

  Sandi works all day, picks up the girls, makes dinner, does a few loads of laundry. She doesn’t have hallucinations or strange thoughts. She doesn’t feel paranoid, exactly, though the odor of accidents, of sudden, inexplicable death is with her always. Most of the time, during the day, her fears seem ridiculous, and even somewhat clichéd. She knows she cannot predict the bad things that lie in wait for her, can never really know. She accepts this, most of the time. She tries not to think about her husband.

  Still, when the girls are asleep and the house is quiet, Sandi feels certain that he will appear to her. He is here somewhere, she thinks. The most supernatural thing she can imagine is the idea that he has truly ceased to exist, that she will never see him again.

  At night, she goes down to the kitchen, which is where he passed away. He had been standing at the counter, making coffee. No one else was awake, and when she found him he was sprawled on the tile, not breathing. She called 911, then pressed her mouth to his lips, thrust her palms against his chest, trying to remember high school CPR. But he had been dead for a while.

  She finds herself standing there in the kitchen, waiting. She imagines that he will walk in, a translucent hologram of himself, like ghosts on TV—that loping, easygoing tall man’s walk he had, a sleepy smile on his face. But she would be satisfied even with something less than that—a blurry shape in the door frame like a smudge on a photo negative, or a bobbing light passing through the hall. Anything, anything. She can remember how badly she once wanted to believe in ghosts, how much she’d wanted, after her father died, to believe that he was watching over her—“hovering above us,” as her mother said.

  But she never felt any sort of presence, then or now. There is nothing but Safety Man, sitting in the window facing the street, his positionable hands clutching a book, his positionable head bent toward it in thoughtful repose, a Milan Kundera novel that she’d found among Allen’s books, a passage he’d underlined: “Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeats day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its messages much as gypsies read the images made by coffee
grounds at the bottom of a cup.” Alone beside the standing lamp, Safety Man considers the passage as Sandi sleeps. Because he has no legs, his jeans hang flaccidly from his waist. He reads and reads, a lonely figure.

  Most of the time, Sandi is okay. Everything feels anesthetized. The worst part is when her mother calls. Sandi’s mother still lives on the outskirts of Denver, in the small suburb where Sandi grew up; her voice on the phone is boxy and distant. Mostly, Sandi’s mother wants to talk about her job, her patients, whom Sandi has come to know like characters in a book—Brad, the comatose boy who’d been in a bicycle accident, and whose thick, beautiful hair her mother likes to comb; Adrienne, who had drug-induced brain damage, and who compulsively hides things in her bra; little old Mr. Hudgins, who suffers from confusion after a small stroke. Sometimes he feels certain that Sandi’s mother is his wife. But the cast of her mother’s stories is always changing, and Sandi has learned not to become too attached to any one of them. Once, when she asked after a patient that her mother had talked about frequently, her mother had sighed forgetfully. “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she said. “He passed away a couple of weeks ago.”

  Sometimes, Sandi’s mother likes to talk about death or other philosophical issues. One night after dinner, while Sandi is drinking tea at the kitchen table and the girls are watching music videos on television, Sandi’s mother calls to ask whether she believes in an afterlife.

  “I realized,” Sandi’s mother says. “I don’t know this about you.”

  Sandi sighs. “I don’t know, Mom,” she says. “I really haven’t given it much thought.”

  “Oh, you must have some opinion!” her mother says. She has that bright, nursely twinkle in her voice that makes Sandi cringe.

  “Really,” Sandi says. “It’s not something I want to talk about. I mean, I hope that there’s some part of us that lives on. That’s about as far as I’ve imagined at this point.”