Stay Awake Page 11

  I was silent for a moment, the phone held in the crook between my ear and my shoulder, and I rubbed the little freckles of paint off my forearm. “Actually,” I said, “I don’t remember things that well. About what happened.”

  “I doubt that,” she said. “What we experienced, that’s not something you just forget.”

  “Really,” I said. “You were older than me, so I think it’s probably a lot clearer to you.”

  “Well, then,” she said. “I envy you your forgetfulness.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I’ve had nightmares every single night of my life since it happened,” she said. “God! All of us have. Poor Cecilia Joy said that she was contemplating suicide for a while, before she met her husband. She thought about killing herself, just to get away from the bad dreams!”

  “Oh,” I said. Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn’t a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag.

  When Cassie said things about craziness, mental illness, schizophrenia, that sort of thing, I couldn’t help but feel a bit self-conscious. Concerned. I thought about the way the world played tricks on me—squirrels, for example, that transformed into paper bags, phone calls that seemed half whited out when I woke up, memories spotted with imaginary pterodactyls and organ-grinder monkeys and glacial lakes—little things that perhaps

  added up.

  Such things might give a person pause.

  Nearly every week I would come across some little thing: a car parked alongside the road, a tree with its branches held up in some kind of sign language, a pattern of wallpaper or a certain color of hair that brought tears to my eyes like an old remembered lullaby—just minor things that would startle me as if I recognized them. What is it? I would think. What is it? Even worse, I’d notice things that should have been there but weren’t—Rob Higgins and I would drive by a park and for a moment I’d be certain a brownstone apartment ought to be there, a building where a pregnant girl should be sitting on the porch steps with her dog. I’d open a drawer in the kitchen and expect to find it full of pennies and postcards and costume jewelry when in fact there was only silverware inside.

  The day I lost my finger was something like that. One minute I was on the ladder, three stories up, painting along the frame of an old round window near the peak of the house; the next minute a swimmy feeling trickled up my spine and into my brain. The window was empty and then the face of a woman floated up like a transparent reflection on the surface of water, moving toward me, pressing up against the glass, a face like someone who had loved me once, leaning over my bed at night to kiss my hair. I don’t even remember falling, though I recall the feeling as my ring caught against a nail, the finger separating from my body, not so much pain as a kind of gasp. I hit the ground and the wind knocked out of me. For a second I thought I felt my soul, my spirit, bounce out of me and fly up a few feet before fluttering down and settling back into my body.

  Rob Higgins and Tony and Tino teased me afterward about it, how they thought I was dead when I hit the ground, the way I sleepily opened my eyes as they rushed over to gather around me. “Where am I?” I said, like a sleepwalker, like a coma person or blackout drunk, and they all laughed with relief. “You were like a little kid waking up from a dream,” Rob Higgins said. “Ha! Like you just woke up from a refreshing nap!”

  I didn’t tell them what I’d seen up there, through the window. The bathroom, the bathtub filling up with water, the naked lady with her long red hair, arms held out to me, gliding swiftly toward where I was peering in.

  This wasn’t something I told Cassie about, either. It was too—what?—upsetting, probably. It would take things too far, I thought, and I could sense that she was growing bored with me. Frustrated? I imagined that maybe there was something the other brothers and sisters had that I lacked.

  “What would you do if you saw her again?” Cassie said, almost casually, almost dreamily, the last night I talked to her.

  “Saw who?” I said.

  Cassie made a soft sound, like swallowing. “Oh, Robbie,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know who I’m talking about.”

  “Oh,” I said. It was probably about three-thirty in the morning, and I hadn’t turned on the light, so Mrs. Dowty wouldn’t know that I was up. “Right,” I said.

  “Well?” she said, and she coughed lightly. There were some strange echoing sounds in the background—as if she were in a busy public space. An announcer or a conductor was speaking sternly; it sounded as if a nearby child was making a whining request, and a mother responded irritably. But Cassie didn’t seem to notice any of this noise. “It’s a simple question,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I had to be up in the morning, Rob Higgins would be pounding on my door and jiggling the knob. But it had always been hard for me to go to sleep. I brushed my eye with my thumb, rubbed my feet together beneath the covers.

  “No, really, Robbie—” Cassie was saying. “Really. What would you do? Do you think you would talk to her?”

  “I guess so,” I said. Then I thought of that face in the window on the day that I fell off the ladder. “I don’t know for sure,” I said. “Maybe I wouldn’t.”

  She sighed. I think I must have sounded bored and evasive, though really I was just tired. I would have tried harder, I guess, if I had known that it was the last time I would talk to her.

  “I can’t believe you haven’t considered it,” she said. “Of course you have. What kind of person wouldn’t think about it? What kind of person wouldn’t remember?”

  It was a good question, I guess, but by that time there had accumulated a lot of good questions that were competing for my attention. What kind of person, Cassie said, and I wondered about that.

  What kind of person was I? This was yet to be decided.

  It had been a particularly hot summer, with a lot of thunderstorms. The power was always going out, and sometimes I would wake up in complete darkness—no bedside lamp, no streetlight, no moon. The fan no longer turning, so the air grew close and still. I could hear the cicadas in the boughs of the trees, a vibrating, held note that sounded like hissing.

  Of course I thought of her then.

  Our mother.

  • • •

  I looked out from the window of my apartment above the garage and I could see Mrs. Dowty moving through her kitchen carrying a candle. She had a brass candlestick that one of her ancestors had brought across the ocean when they immigrated, and now Mrs. Dowty went padding barefoot through her kitchen, holding her light aloft. Her heirloom.

  I myself had a flashlight, which I kept in the drawer of the night table, along with some packages of alkaline batteries. Even through the walls of sleep I’d sensed the lights going out, the electricity shutting off—that face floating down, I could feel it, moving toward me in the dark, the kiss of the breath, that sweet voice that sounded as if she were smiling, the face looming down as she lifted me from the bed, the sound of water running in the bathroom wake up sleepy head wake up my little one

  —Oh yes I remembered I remembered and I jolted up and grabbed for my flashlight even before I was fully awake.

  To Psychic Underworld:

  Critter was standing outside the public library with his one-year-old daughter in his arms when he saw a dollar bill on the sidewalk.

  It actually came fluttering by, right next to his tennis shoe, carried by the wind along with a leaf.

  He hesitated for a moment. Should he pick it up? He adjusted Hazel’s weight. She was straddled against his hip and watched with silent interest as he bent down and snagged it.

  He’d had the feeling that it wouldn’t be just a normal dollar a
nd he was right. There was writing on it. Someone had written along the margins of the bill in black ink, in a clear, deliberate handwriting that he guessed might be a young woman’s. I love you I miss you I love you I send this out to you I love you please come back to me I will wait for you always I—

  This written all around the edges of the bill, and he was standing there studying it when his sister Joni came down the steps of the library toward them. He had come to pick her up. That was one of the conditions of his current circumstance. He used Joni’s car during the day so long as he was there at the library to pick her up from work.

  “Hello, soldiers,” Joni said brightly. “How goes the war?”

  “Mm,” Critter said, and Hazel stared at Joni sternly.

  “And what have we here?” Joni said, indicating the dollar bill he was still clutching awkwardly between his fingers. “A little offering for your dearest sister, perhaps?”

  She took the lovedollar from him and looked it over. He watched as she read the writing on it, one eyebrow arching. “Ye Gods!” she said.

  “I just found it,” Critter said. “Just right here on the sidewalk.”

  Their eyes met. She was still his older sister, though she was also a tiny librarian woman with short hair and a pointy face, and he was an unemployed Sasquatch of a man a foot and a half taller than she.

  She handed the dollar back to him. “Yikes,” she said. “Geez, Critter, you’re quite the magnet for freaky notes lately, aren’t you?”

  • • •

  He was, yes. A magnet, he thought, as they drove back to Joni’s house. That was one way to look at it.

  He’d found the first note a few weeks after his wife’s funeral, on the sidewalk not far from his apartment. It was written in spiky block letters on an index card:

  TO PSYCHIC

  UNDERWORLD:

  STOP ASTRAL

  TRAVELING TO

  MOLEST/DECEIVE

  OTHERS (ANIMALS TOO).

  ANIMALS ARE NOT

  MADE OF HATE.

  CEASE AND DESIST.

  “Jesus,” Critter thought. This was when he was still in Chicago, still in the old apartment that he and his wife, Beth, had been living in when she died, still thinking that he would probably be able to pull himself together. He was pushing Hazel in her stroller, they were on their way to the park, and he looked around to see if there were any noticeably insane people nearby.

  But there was nobody. It was Sunday morning, and the street was quiet except for a jogger a few blocks up. A pigeon rustled at the curb, pecking at the bone from a discarded chicken wing.

  Back in the days when his life had been normal, Critter might have been kind of pleased to find such a note. Beth had loved this kind of thing. So had Joni, for that matter. Beth had been a middle school science teacher and Joni was a librarian and they both had collections of weird stuff they had found. Bizarre, misspelled letters written by lovelorn eighth graders. Obscene Polaroids left in between the pages of library books. They used to call each other on the phone to share their latest discovery, and Critter had always remained a little off to the side, never feeling quite as sharp or ironic as they were. Critter was an electrician, primarily home repair, and so he didn’t usually come across anything except bad wiring and faulty lighting fixtures.

  Several days after he found the first note, he was sitting in the pediatrician’s office with Hazel—he was feeling kind of proud of himself for remembering to keep the appointment—when another note fell out of an old copy of Sports Illustrated that he was perusing. This was a piece of light-blue unlined paper, and written on it, in the careful cursive handwriting of a ten- or eleven-year-old, was a little list:

  1. Go for a walk with someone

  2. Go out somewhere with someone

  3. Talk to someone

  4. Watch TV

  5. Go on the computer

  6. Play PlayStation 2

  7. Go to the cemetery and talk to my mom

  8. Listen to music

  9. Go in my room

  For a moment, Critter thought he might completely lose it. It was, he thought, possibly the most heartbreaking thing he had ever read, and he heard himself make a soft, involuntary sound.

  Across from him, a young woman with a sleeping infant looked up sternly. Here was Critter, thick beard and shaggy long hair, making snuffling sounds, and the little mother didn’t like the look of him at all. It would not be appropriate for him to start weeping in the pediatrician’s office, obviously, he realized, and he lowered his eyes and tightened his jaw and he felt a repressed tear run out of his nose and into his mustache.

  Shit, he thought. He needed to get a grip on himself—this was ridiculous.

  Nearby, Hazel was sitting in the play area, among some wooden blocks. She gave him a thoughtful expression. Then she lifted two cubes in her hands and touched them together carefully, as if they might give off sparks.

  “Boom,” she said.

  He had been having a fairly hard time of it. Which was natural, he supposed. His wife had been killed in a car accident and he was living alone with his baby daughter and he hadn’t been to work since the funeral; customers would call with their electrical needs and he would just let the answering machine pick up, he hadn’t even checked the messages in almost a month—there was in fact a sticky note still posted above the telephone in Beth’s handwriting:

  Mrs. Palmarosa

  555–7622

  Says her doorbell gives a shock!

  Which was the last thing on earth that Beth had written to him before she died.

  “Listen,” Joni had said. “I want you guys to come and stay with me for a while. Just for a visit. Get out of that apartment for a while. Get out of Chicago. And—you know what?—you might find that you actually like Toledo. You can be an electrician anywhere.”

  “Mm,” Critter said. He was sitting on the couch with the portable phone, staring at the muted TV. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “You don’t have to do this all by yourself, you know, Critter,” Joni said. “There are no prizes for being stoic. You realize that, right?”

  “I know,” he said.

  And so now here he was. It was September, and he and Hazel had been living in Joni’s apartment for more than two months, and he guessed that he was basically kind of losing his mind.

  Not completely, obviously. He continued to do a decent job as a father, he thought. He kept an eye on Hazel as she toddled around, he kept her diapers clean and made little plates of food with cut-up fruit and cheese and crackers, he took her to the park in the stroller, and they never watched any television that had sex or swearing in it.

  He was not yet ready to start looking for a job, but he was helping a little bit with various chores. He rinsed off the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. He took some letters to the post office, and put gas in Joni’s car, and went grocery shopping with a list that Joni had made up—though there was a moment where he became kind of frozen in the aisle of condiments and crackers; it was another note, a shopping list stuck to the cage of the shopping cart:

  Roach Spray

  Batteries

  Water Mellon

  Which, really, what was so surprising or disturbing about that? Nevertheless he didn’t know how long he had been standing there looking at the scritchy, pathetic handwriting when a middle-aged lady had spoken to him firmly.

  “Sir, I need to get access to that ketchup, if you could please move forward.”

  And Critter awakened from his trance with a little shudder.

  It was foolish, he knew, to feel so unnerved by such stuff. He had never been a superstitious person, and in any case it wasn’t as if there was anything particularly uncanny at work. He was living in a city—of course there were all kinds of flotsam drifting around.

  But he hadn’t noticed it before, that was the thing. Beth used to tease him, in fact, about how inattentive he was, she was always pointing out the weirdness of the world that he was missing�
�hot-air balloons in the sky over the park; the woman in the bear suit sitting on the el train a few seats in front of them, her bear’s head in her lap; the pool of blood in the foyer of their apartment, right there underneath the discarded catalogs and junk mail. “Oh my God!” Beth said. “I can’t believe you didn’t see that!”

  But now, suddenly, he did. Now, suddenly, it seemed that there were notes everywhere, emerging out of the blur of the world. Something had happened to him now that Beth was gone, he thought—there was an opening, a space, a part of his brain that had been deaf before was now exposed, it was as if he were a long-dormant radio that had begun to receive signals—tuned in, abruptly, to all the crazy note-writers of the world.

  “Please,” someone had written on a napkin and left it on the table in McDonald’s, where he had taken Hazel for a little peaceful snack, a casual Toledo afternoon, but now here was this other voice poking its head through the surface of his consciousness like a worm peeking up out of the ground. “Please,” in ballpoint pen on the napkin. And then “Please” on the napkin underneath it, and “Please” again on a third. Someone either very polite or very desperate.

  Probably it wasn’t such a big deal. When he had first come to live with Joni, he had shown her some of the notes that he had found, expecting, he supposed, that she would find it as eerie as he had—the accumulation of these strange little documents, popping up wherever he went, all of them sad or desperate or slightly creepy. She was the type of sister who had liked to tell him ghost stories when they were younger, back when she was a teenager and he was eight or nine. He’d figured that she, too, would see some kind of omen in the array of notes. But she didn’t.