How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets (4 page)

Q
UIETLY, GENTLY, HE picks his way through the dark edges of Seattle’s midnight, slips down onto Westlake, up and around to Dexter, where he finds his apartment building just where he left it. He pulls into his stall in the garage.

It was originally his grandfather’s apartment. Evan would never have chosen it, nor would he have been able to afford it, a small one bedroom with spectacular city-lake-mountain views and considerable value on the open market. When his grandfather died, he left it to Evan. And for eight years it collected enough rent to cover Evan’s living expenses when he finally moved out of his parents’ house.

It’s a sad low-slung building with damp brown carpeting in the hallways, inhabited mostly by old people and recent business school grads, the equally pungent smells of mothballs and sandalwood incense intermingling hideously in the halls. Still, it’s the perfect place to hide. No one would ever think to look here. No one ever has.

He hesitates. Dean is sleeping soundly in the passenger seat, and has been for the past hour, since somewhere near North Bend. Evan briefly considers carrying Dean upstairs. A fatherly thing to do. Carry your sleeping kid. And if Dean were ten years younger, Evan would do just that. But the image he has of himself—by no means a hulking brute—struggling up the steps while cradling a fully-grown fourteen-year-old in his arms, stumbling into walls, trying to protect Dean’s head from smacking into doorjambs and corners, is almost laughable. Fantasy, after all, is just that. It allows you to see what could never really happen. Indulge in it, but do not cling to it.

“Dean.”

Crouched next to the open passenger door, he pokes Dean’s arm.

“Deano.”

Dean awakens.

“We’re here.”

EVAN’S PAD IS a bachelor pad, plain and simple, not a place for kids. The kitchen cupboards are grossly understocked. The living room (now the guest room), has a hide-a-bed sofa and a TV and is decorated pragmatically for a musician—a couple of amplifiers and a few guitars on stands—but for no one else. The bedroom is small and messy. The only bathroom is accessed through the bedroom, portending privacy issues. Good for a couple of nights at best. Certainly not for a long-term relationship, which, thankfully, this isn’t.

Dean props himself against a wall, drunk with sleep, while Evan makes the bed. It hasn’t been slept on in years; it smells musty. Evan hopes Dean doesn’t have any environmental allergies which are so common in today’s youth, due largely to trigger-happy doctors and their misguided policies of over-vaccination.

“Maybe we can find a mattress cover for this thing, but I doubt it, ” Evan says.“We’ll go out tomorrow and get you a toothbrush.”

Dean mumbles a response.

“Your grandmother’s going to call once the coast is clear, ” Evan says, though he isn’t really sure what a clear coast might look like. “I’ll drive you back.”

More mumbling.

“Right. Here you go.” He picks up the living room phone and turns off the ringer.

Dean falls face first onto the bed, tries briefly to straighten himself out, but gives up, his legs dangling toward the floor. Evan looks down at him, unsure of what to do. He can’t very well undress Dean; there would be something creepy and inappropriate about that. But he can help him onto the bed. And he can throw a blanket over him. He can watch over him for a second or two. And he can say, “Good night, son, ” as he retreats from the room.

IT’S PAST MIDNIGHT when Evan lies back on his own bed, exhausted. Out of habit he opens
The Stranger
and glances at the listings. He pages through the tabloid for a few minutes, not really paying attention to the words, until he finally gives up and sets the paper down. It’s no good. He isn’t going anywhere. Not with Dean in the next room. And it’s just as well. There’s nothing quite like ending up on the sticky beer-glazed floor of a bar with some idiot trying to shove a spoon down your throat.

He takes off his shoes and closes his eyes. He’s beat. Beat down, beat up, beat in. Driving a ten-hour round trip in one day to attend the funeral of the mother of your estranged child is not something your neurologist would recommend. Nor would he recommend confronting the aforementioned child’s violent grandfather and then fleeing with said child. Too much stress, and you know what stress does to your blood levels. Is that an aura I’m feeling, or are you just glad to see me?

He reaches for his stash, which he keeps not-very-discreetly hidden in an old Dunhill cigar box next to his bed. He slips across the floor to the window, opens it a crack and lights his pipe. A gram of prevention. He closes his eyes and exhales the sickly sweet smoke.

He hears Dean snore softly. What a world. He was seventeen when Dean was born. Three years later, he was the lead guitar player for a hot new band with a single climbing the charts and a platinum future ahead. A week after that, he was an out-of-work slacker with decent chops and a pleasant-enough demeanor to teach middle- aged rich guys how to coax music from a Fender Strat. And now, fourteen years after Dean was born, Evan is just fourteen years further down the line, and nothing more. He’s grown out, not up.

He’s grown tired. He slides back onto his bed and lies down. The ceiling is doing a dance for him. A stoned eurythmics. Ten hours of driving. If that isn’t stupid, what is? He’s lucky he’s still alive. He could have had a seizure, rolled his car into the median, become partially ejected and then cut in half by the door as the weight of the car settled on top of him. That would have been nice. Maybe they would have buried him next to Tracy. HERE LIE THE MOTHER AND FATHER OF DEAN, the marker would read. THEY MISSED THEIR CHANCE.

EVAN WAKES UP in the middle of the night in a sweat. His mouth is parched. His sheets are cold and damp. He feels sick.

Water. He needs a glass of water.

He starts to get out of bed, when he realizes that his left leg feels strange. It must have fallen asleep. From the middle of his thigh on down, he feels nothing; it’s just numb. Above the numbness, he feels a peculiar pins-and-needles sensation.

He shakes his leg sharply to jolt it back to life, but it doesn’t respond. So he starts to massage his thigh to get the circulation going again, coax the blood to flow. He kneads at his quadriceps, working his way down his thigh toward his knee.

But as he gets closer to his knee, his leg seems to change consistency. It doesn’t really feel like his leg any more. It feels more like modeling clay. His fingers press into the flesh, but the flesh doesn’t spring back, it retains the finger and thumb impressions he’s just left.

He continues kneading his leg above his knee until it’s become quite narrow. Actually—and he’s not even sure how he can be so calm at a time like this, so clinical about what’s going on—it would be very easy for him to detach his leg at this point, simply by pulling it free, which he does with a quick twist, and as soon as he does he realizes he’s just pulled off his own leg and he panics, dropping the lower part of his leg in shock. He forces himself to lift the sheets and look down, and he sees that what’s left is the round stump of his thigh and nothing below. What has he done?

Frantically, he reaches for the rest of his leg—it must still be there—maybe it’s not too late to reattach it, maybe he can knead the clay and stick it back on. His hands fly through the blankets, feeling for the amputated foot and shin. He’ll call the hospital. He’ll put the leg in a garbage bag full of ice and go there and they’ll sew it back on.

Ah. He finds it. But suddenly the leg jerks away from him and scurries off, burying itself at the bottom of the bed.

Evan screams in shock. It moved! It moved on its own! Holy shit. The hair rises on the back of his neck. His leg is moving by itself. He can see it shifting around under the sheets; his leg is crawling on its own.

Desperate, panicked, his heart thudding in his chest, he throws back all the sheets and blankets, exposing the entire mattress, and he dives for his leg, which he sees huddled in the corner, suddenly naked and exposed to the cold air in the room. He dives for it and grabs it, but it isn’t trying to escape any more. It’s frozen in fear, shivering, scared half to death. It doesn’t know who Evan is. The poor thing is petrified. Evan lifts it out of the sheets. It’s not his leg. It’s a baby. Such a pretty baby boy.

Carefully, Evan holds him up. He looks fine. Healthy and fine. He’s got a head of raging black hair. His eyes are squinty, his mouth opens and closes like he’s an alien, an appropriate image considering he was born from Evan’s leg. Evan wraps the tadpole in a blanket so he’ll stop shivering. And then he brings the little monster close to him, his tiny hands gripping the air as if he needs something to hold onto, some mama’s fur to grasp, a strange anachronistic instinct harkening back to when we were all simple apes swinging from the branches with our pups clinging to our breasts, desperate not to be dropped to the jungle floor.

Evan kisses the munchkin on the forehead. And the funny Turkish Delight looks up at his father and says, quite simply and quite clearly, “Da.”

Da.

I’m your Da.

So Evan hugs junior, and the clammy goober hugs back, and Evan closes his eyes because he’s so happy, so overjoyed to be the proud father of a freak of nature. And Evan closes his eyes and sings a quiet lullaby for his babe, sleepy-time music to send the booger off to meet the Sandman for some well-deserved rest before the little tyke has to wake up and face the rest of what will turn out to be his sad and miserable life.

L
ONG AGO, WHEN he was still a child, Evan learned that if something seems good, it can actually be bad, and that if something seems bad, it might actually be worse. He learned that there is danger lurking behind every corner, that in the darkness of every closet hides a monster. Evan knew. He’d been ambushed by the monster before. He’d felt the creepiness, the cold clammy hands on the back of his neck. He’d felt the fear that rises up in his body so fast it makes his gums tingle. He had known the monster, had intimate dealings with it, as it crept out of its closet and attacked.

So when he wakes at six in the morning with that familiar queasy feeling—familiar not because it was so frequently felt but because it was so distinctive—and with the memory of his odd but extremely vivid dream fresh in his mind, he knows what has happened. In the night, the monster came out of the closet and set upon Evan, shaking him about in his bed, leaving him groggy and spent. Evan has had a seizure.

He pushes off his bedspread and sits up. Where was Dean for all this? Was he awake? Had he heard anything, any strange gurglings or thrashings about? No. All kids sleep hard and long. That much about adolescence he knows. He swings his aching legs over the side of the bed and places his feet on the floor. The carpeting has an uncomfortable feel to it. An itchiness he doesn’t usually notice. He stands up. A little spin to his vision. And strips off his clothes; he had fallen asleep fully dressed. He plods into the bathroom and checks himself in the mirror. A crusty trail of drool runs from the corner of his mouth across his cheek. His eyes are baggy and dark. He opens his mouth. The inside of his cheeks are bloody. At least his tongue was spared. You can’t swallow your tongue, but you sure can chew the hell out of it. He turns on the water in the shower and stands under the burning hot ribbons, hoping to wash away the crawly sensation on his skin.

A seizure. He hasn’t had a big one in quite a while. The little ones don’t really count. He has those more often, like on the porch of the Smith house. Little ones are annoyances, mosquito bites on the arm of life. Big ones are to be feared. He felt this one coming, even though he pretended he didn’t. He felt it at the Whitman Memorial, and again when he got home. He tried to fool himself and he succeeded, so who’s the idiot? Stress, fatigue, not eating properly. He thought maybe if he ignored it, it would go away. He smoked his pot, usually a cure-all. But this one got through the defense grid. Dilantin, Tegretol, marijuana—it doesn’t matter. Sometimes the fuse just blows and nothing can stop it. Kind of inconvenient, when you think about it. Kind of a nuisance to carry around the knowledge that at any moment your brain could rage out of control and you could wake up anywhere. And you wouldn’t know what was going on until it was too late. As if there were anything you could do to stop it. No. You would see the monster, you would feel its clammy palms, and then darkness. And if you were lucky, you’d wake up where you started, or even—not so good— you’d wake up in a hospital with tubes in your arms. Or, worst case scenario, you just wouldn’t wake up at all. Pack up your troubles in a Glad trash bag and smile, smile, smile.

He shuts off the water, still itchy so he doesn’t put on any clothes. The smoothest satin feels like wool after a seizure. He tiptoes through the living room and into the kitchen, where he scoops coffee into the coffee maker and turns it on, something to shake the quease, then he stands at his window in all his glory, observing the morning dawn over Lake Union.

The water is quiet and the sky is dull as the morning clouds, portending rain, hunker down over Seattle. A lonely seaplane circles over Fremont and prepares for landing. It looks like a toy plane landing on a toy lake. Everything looks fake to Evan. Plasticky. Like two-dimensional cut-outs pasted on invisible wires, worked by elves from behind a cardboard photo of the city.

The coffee machine heaves its steamy sighs, the seaplane buzzes over the lake. And all is more or less the way it should be.

“You’re completely naked.”

Evan jumps. His heart nearly stops. He spins around. Dean is standing in the doorway.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” Evan asks, brushing by him. Not only was Dean not asleep, he wasn’t even rumpled.

“I’m not tired, ” Dean says.

Evan darts into his room, throws on jeans and a T-shirt, and returns to the kitchen.

“Don’t they sleep where you’re from?” he asks.

“Not at this hour, ” Dean replies.

“What, you’re usually out picking apples by now?”

Dean doesn’t respond. Probably because it was such an asinine comment.

“Sorry, ” Evan mutters, pouring himself coffee. “I didn’t mean to—” He hears a phone ring quietly, distantly, unreally.

Suddenly Evan is very afraid. Dean awake and fully dressed shortly after dawn is strange, but the distant ringing in his ears simply isn’t right. His skin crawls as he realizes that maybe he hasn’t awakened after all. Maybe the shower and the coffee and the plane are all part of a dream in which he is still trapped. It is perfectly conceivable that he is in a coma this very second, having seizure after seizure in some hospital while doctors pump gallons of sedatives into his veins in their attempts to stay the evil affliction.

Ring. Ring.

Wait—that’s a real ring. A phone. From his bedroom. Right. He’d shut off the living-room ringer. The bedroom phone is ringing. Mystery solved.

But there’s another mystery. He glances at the kitchen clock. Six o’clock. That doesn’t make sense. He woke up after having a seizure while he had slept. That would make this six A. M. Right? Or not? He looks out the window again. Jesus, it isn’t six A. M. It’s six
P
.
M
.
Six P. M. and Evan can’t tell the difference!

He can tell now, though. He hadn’t noticed before because the clouds were so thick and diffused that he couldn’t see where the sun was. But the traffic on the street below, the cars on the freeway across the water, Dean: all clues that now tell Evan that it is evening, not morning.

Ring
,
ring
,
ring
, goes the phone. Then the machine in the bedroom picks up and his mother’s voice calls to him. “Evan? Evan? Evan?” Now Evan
really
feels sick.

“You gonna get it?” Dean asks. “Some guy named Lars called earlier.”

Lars? He picks up the phone.

“Evan? Are you all right?”

Mom? No, Mom, I’m not. Not really. I’m scared. I just lost an entire
day and I have no idea where it went, and there’s this kid here who says
he’s my son, and I’m having seizures and I’m really scared. Can you come
and hold me?

“Yeah, Mom, I’m fine.”

“You were screening?”

“Yeah, Mom, I was screening. What’s up?”

“We were worried.”

Evan feels her worry unload through the phone line. Just hearing his voice is enough to satisfy his mother, who is forever worried about him. As she probably has a right to be. Even though Evan is thirty-one, to his parents he is still a kid with epilepsy. They call him twice a day without fail. If he isn’t home for a few hours and they don’t know where he’s gone, they panic and call the local hospitals. They treat him as if he were still in high school, still living at home.

Evan used to feel weird about his parents’ concern. Then he got used to it. He even felt at times that if he were suddenly to be rid of his epilepsy and his parents stopped worrying about him all the time, he might actually miss it. It was kind of like a permanent hall pass or diplomatic license plates on your car. Evan was allowed much greater latitude than he would have had if he weren’t afflicted.

“But you’re okay?”

“Yeah, Mom, I just was out yesterday. No big deal.”

“Good. Well, your father wants to know if you’re free for dinner soon. He’s buying.”

Yeah. Like Evan has ever offered to buy.

“I’m pretty busy.”

“We haven’t seen you in a while.”

“A while” in Louise-speak means about two weeks.

“Maybe I’ll drop by, ” Evan says, and almost laughs at his own joke. He could drop by with his teenage son and blow his parents’ minds. That would be a good one. He knew he was in their will. Murder by shock. Who would suspect?

“That would be nice, ” Louise coos. “Oh, Charlie said he was trying to reach you, ” she adds casually.

“Really? I didn’t get any messages.”

“He said he’s left a few, but you never call back.”

“Huh, ” Evan replies, “maybe my machine is broken.”

“Maybe it is. Could you call him?”

His little brother Charlie had, in fact, left five messages, each one ignored. Why? Because whenever Charlie called five times in four days, and Louise called to tell Evan that Charlie had called five times in four days, that meant something good had happened to Charlie—possibly something great—and Evan was supposed to jump up and down with joy and say encouraging and enthusiastic things and proclaim his love and unconditional support. And he was supposed to do it without gagging.
I passed the bar.
I’m getting married. I got a raise. I bought a house. I screwed my wife.
My wife is pregnant. It’s a boy.
Come on, doesn’t anyone else get tired of it?

“What is it this time, Mom, they name a street after him?”

Louise takes Evan’s crack silently for a moment—but only a moment.

“I don’t understand, Evan, ” she says regretfully.“Why can’t you be happy for Charlie? What did he ever do to you that was so bad?”

Evan smiles. Now
that’s
a complicated question. What did Charlie do? How about this: he cried. One soggy evening, many, many years ago, Charlie stood there crying and Evan had to act like an older brother, and because of that Evan’s life was changed forever. That’s what Charlie did that was so bad.

“I’m happy for him, Mom, ” Evan says. “I really am.”

“Then why do you seem so sad?”

Evan glances at Dean, who looks back expectantly, as if he’s waiting to be introduced.
Because my son is standing next to me but
I’m afraid to tell you about him.

“Evan?”

He could do it. He could tell her.
Which son?
she would ask.
My
fourteen-year-old son,
he would answer. It would be easy, actually. Like jumping out of an airplane. Starting is the hard part. Once you get going, you kind of fall by yourself.

“Hey, Mom? . . .”

Tell her.

“Yes, honey?”

Jump. Jump. Jump.

“Never felt better, Mom.”

“Oh, ” she says, not believing him for a second. “Okay. Well. When do you think you might stop by?”

“Soon, Mom. Real soon.”

“Okay. Well, we love you, Evan.”

“I love you, too.”

We love you. Of course they love him. They have to. He’s their son, after all. But Evan knows it’s a disappointed love. They love him like they love their retarded dog who eats rocks. They feel bad his teeth get broken, but the dog is happy, isn’t he? They love that dog, but they won’t think twice about putting him down for his own good as soon as he becomes incontinent. No “Doggie Depends” in Ralphy’s future. Just you wait and see. One puddle on the kitchen floor and Ralphy’s gig is up.

Ah.

When Evan announced to his parents that he wasn’t taking the SAT because he wasn’t going to college, they tried to keep straight faces. They didn’t want to fight him any more. They knew he had no place in college, so why should he bother? Evan left them in the kitchen and went to his room to play his guitar.

They thought he couldn’t hear them. They had to think that. There was no way they would have said what they did if they knew he was listening.

“Poor Evan, ” Louise said as she cleared the dinner table.

“What a waste, ” Carl answered her.“What a waste.”

HE FEELS BAD that he didn’t tell his mother about Dean, but he just couldn’t do it. There’s too much going on, his head is swimming and he feels uneasy and confused. He and Dean both fidget uncomfortably.

Evan can see where Dean dragged the easy chair over to the window so he could sit and look out at Lake Union. Dean had probably spent the entire day staring out the window without uttering a word; he probably hadn’t even rummaged through the refrigerator for food because he felt so out of place that he didn’t know what was acceptable behavior in Evan’s world. Who was to say that Evan didn’t have a violent temper, and that one of his quirks was to sleep until six P. M. every night, and that even the slightest sound could result in corporal punishment? It wasn’t out of the question. So he sat there, all day, not making a sound, not breathing too loudly, for fear of disturbing his new host.

Evan wants to explain why he was so late in rising, he wants to apologize for not being up earlier to tend to Dean, but that would mean he’d have to admit his flaw—a truly tragic one—and he isn’t sure he can do that yet.

“You must be hungry, ”Evan says.“Did you get yourself any food?”

Dean shrugs.

“You want something? I’ve got cereal, but that’s about it.”

“A guy named Lars called, ” Dean reminds him.

“Oh, yeah? What did Lars say?”

“He wondered if you were still going to the show tonight.”

Oh, shit. The show. Lucky Strike is playing in Belltown. Evan forgot all about it.

Dean digs a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket.

“He made me write it down, ” he says. “He said he assumes you’ll be there unless you’re a ‘total fucking douche-bag fuck, ’ in which case he’ll have to ‘rip your balls off and stuff them down your tear ducts’ the next time he sees you.”

Evan laughs.

“Is he your friend?” Dean asks. Evan can’t tell if he’s serious.

“Yeah, pretty much, ” he says.

He scratches his cheek. Damn. He loves Lucky Strike. They’re more jazz than rock, and Evan isn’t a big jazz guy. But they’re a New York band well known for their exceptional chops, and Evan is a fan of their leader, Theo Moody, a saxophonist who has a reputation for mixing it up with record labels.

“Did your mother ever take you to see music?” Evan asks.

“No.”

Can he take Dean to see Lucky Strike? Is it something parents do? Or is it the ultimate mistake, the first step down a path that leads to drug addiction and deviant behavior?