Stay Awake (6 page)

“Of course,” Brandon said.

“Thank you—you’re very kind,” she said, and she brushed her hand through her hair as she bent to write a check, and a few strands came out and remained attached to her fingernails like trailing moss. Beyond her, Brandon could see the customers moving along behind their shopping carts, and he thought about this old zombie movie that he and Zachary Leven had watched together—they had loved getting stoned and watching horror movies—and there was the one about the undead overrunning a shopping mall. “A trenchant critique of capitalism,” Zachary had said, and of course that was one way to look at it. Another way was just that the undead were pissed off and bitter. “Youth is wasted on the young,” his father used to say. “Life is wasted on the living.” His dad thought this was hilarious.

More and more, he thought, his days at the grocery store were like being in a zombie movie except that here the undead appeared to be too depressed to be cannibals. You didn’t even realize, most of the time, that they were dead, and he had the worrisome thought that he would look up and there would be his mom or Zachary Leven or there would be Patrick Lane, gray-skinned and surprised-looking, standing at the end of an empty checkout aisle, his hands moving slowly as if he were packing an unseen grocery bag with air.

It had occurred to him that if the undead don’t realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

But that wasn’t it, either. Of course he was still alive! In the employee bathroom he pressed a ballpoint pen against the palm of his hand and naturally he could feel the pen poking against his skin, of course he still had feeling.
Hello?
he wrote.
Anyone home?

That was what his mom used to ask him. He would space out, he wouldn’t hear what she said to him as they sat there at dinner eating and he’d be gazing down at his plate and she’d touch her finger to his shoulder.

“Hello, Brandon? Is anyone home? Do you hear me talking to you?” And she’d look over at his father in her very ironic, conspiratorial way. “I think there’s something missing there,” she said. Referring to Brandon.

The memory made him shift uncomfortably. He took off his apron and hung it up in his locker and ran his time card through the ancient punch clock and smiled at Marci who was looking at him curiously and then he was walking home, walking home from work, taking the same route he had taken for years now so that he hardly saw the houses and trees and the unscrolling sidewalk beneath his feet.

“You know,” his mother had once said to his father, “it worries me—he never really seems to grasp cause and effect very well,” she said. Brandon was sitting right there watching TV but she spoke as if he weren’t, and his father gave him a mournful expression.

“Now, Cathy,” his father said, “some people just don’t think in that way.”

And it occurred to Brandon as he stood once again in the doorway of his house that perhaps he
didn’t
understand cause and effect—maybe that was the problem. He kept trying to put together a sense of what had happened to him, and it refused to cohere.

“A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.” That was one of his father’s sayings, and this, too, was a kind of joke, a kind of sad joke between his father and his mother; they had both laughed in that way that he had since realized was more than just laughing, though even now, Brandon didn’t understand it.

Is anybody home?
he thought, and he could remember the day that his parents had died, he walked back from the grocery store like he always did and there was that note taped to the door and he had come into the house and stood in the foyer.

“Hello?” he said uncertainly, the note held loosely in his hand. Obviously it seemed like a suicide note but he felt almost certain that it wasn’t. Of course not.

“Mom?” he said. “Dad?” and he was shaking a little as he picked up the phone in the front hallway and called the police like the note told him to do and he knew that he should go up there because there was a sound up there, a thud, as if someone had jumped down on the floor and he was aware that someone else probably would have gone up, gone running up, but he just stood there, his feet gesturing agitatedly as if they were going to start walking.

There was something that he should have understood that he hadn’t understood. That he still didn’t understand.
Hello? Is anyone home?

• • •

He was sitting there in the living room of the house with the video-game controller, and the geometric shapes of Tetris were slowly floating past on the TV screen like protozoa under a microscope.

“People get through things,” Jodee told him once. “People who have suffered a lot worse than we have. Like the Holocaust, for example. Or slavery. Or the Depression. I mean, you think about what a lot of people have endured, and you could almost be sort of thankful. You’ve just got to try harder.

“Like me, for example. You know? That semester that Mom and Dad died, I could’ve taken the rest of the term off, or whatever, but I didn’t. And I was taking really hard classes! Chemistry. Calculus. But I just
focused
, and I ended up getting three A’s and a B plus. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

“Mm-hm,” Brandon had said—and now, thinking of his sister’s report card, he cupped his palms over his forehead.

As if to prove something to himself, he actually got some tools out—a pipe wrench and a hammer—and he had his home-repair book open and he read: “Remove the valve plunger and you’ll see one or two washers or O-rings …” and he hesitated, feeling vaguely shaky, standing there at the bottom of the stairs, looking up to where the closed doors lined the hallways.

He just had to get himself together, he told himself. That was what Jodee always said. He was just a little lazy, that’s what Jodee said, lazy, unmotivated, and if only he applied himself a bit more—

He could imagine that there was a way in which all the pieces came together and interlocked, some kind of lines that could be
drawn from the funerals of his classmates to the plumbing problems in the house, which also connected the clutter of hair dryers in the abandoned beauty academy with his old grade-school teacher, which was associated with the time he and Zachary Leven had watched that zombie movie, which was linked to the scattered tiles of the Scrabble game and the graffiti in the grocery-store bathroom and the note that his parents had left him—it was a map, he thought, a net that cast itself outward, and if he only applied himself he would see how the weather would lift and he would get the house finished and the economy would shift again and he would go back to college and meet some new friends and the wars would come and go and he would move to a new place and maybe get married and he would tease his own children about how they never seemed to grasp cause and effect very well.

He sat there, huddled underneath the hum of electrical equipment that made a halo around the sofa bed, but the house crept gently closer. He could sense the house, the way you sense someone leaning over you and watching while you’re sleeping. He could hear the rattle of the apple tree in the wind, the shifting sound of the floorboards upstairs, the red flutter of an emergency vehicle on a distant street. Outside the window, some streetlights winked off and on, hesitating.

Then, with a sigh, the power shut down again. All across the city the light folded into itself, and the darkness spread out its arms.

Zach and Amber’s baby was born with a rare condition that the doctors told them was called craniopagus parasiticus. This meant that their baby had two heads. Or—more properly—it meant that there had once been two babies, conjoined twins, but the second one had failed to develop completely. They were connected by the fused crowns of their skulls, and shared a small portion of the parietal lobes of their brains.

The second twin, which was called the “parasitic” twin, had a head and a neck but didn’t really have a body. The neck stump below the head contained fragments of bone and vestiges of a
heart and lungs, and there were tiny buds attached to the neck that were the beginnings of limbs.

Nevertheless, the head of the second twin was perfectly formed, with a beautiful little face.

Naturally, there was interest in the media, though they had tried to keep their situation as private as possible. Everything that was written felt upsetting, invasive, even cruel. It was reported that a number of world-class surgical specialists were being consulted, but that “there was little hope for survival.”

The whole baby—the “host” baby, as it was termed—was named Rosalie, the newspapers informed their readers, and then they explained that “the parasitic head that is to be removed from Rosalie is capable of blinking and even smiling, but not of independent life.”

One reporter called them to ask whether they had given the parasitic head a name, and Zach sat there at the kitchen table, hesitating. Across from him, Amber appeared to be watching her folded hands, her face blank.

“No,” Zach said. “No, we have not.”

Not long after this, he was driving home from the hospital.

Should they have given the other head a name?
he was wondering.

This was a little after ten o’clock at night. It was snowing slowly, and the headlights of the cars shimmered in a way that struck him as particularly vivid. Even the white trail of steam from the steel plant seemed deliberate and painterly, but perhaps that was because he was so tired, perhaps the world was already half in dream.

Amber was asleep back at the house. When he got home, they would lie together in the same bed for a few hours, and then he would get up and go to work. In the few months since the birth they had honed their routines, their daily schedules, their lives separate and divided into hours and half-hours and posted side by side on the refrigerator.

In his dream, Zach pulled into the snow-boughed, pine-darkened driveway and pressed the button so that the automated garage door lifted gently open. Things seemed almost normal, almost like they were before Rosalie. His keys jingled as he unlocked the back door and stepped into the darkened kitchen, where the yellow tabby cat was sitting on the counter, blinking solemnly at him in the moonlight. He slipped off his shoes at the foot of the staircase and began to undress as he ascended, slipping off his shirt and unbuckling his belt and feeling his way down the hallway toward their room, where the bed was waiting with his wife curled up and warm on the right-hand side, and she would sit up and smile, squinting sleepily, tenderly, pulling a strand of her hair away from her lips.

He was just about to bend down to kiss her when his car went off the road.

He was only dreaming that he was home, he realized. He had fallen asleep while driving and he awakened with a start as the steering wheel lurched beneath his hands.

His head jerked up just in time to see a sign fly up over the hood and past the windshield, and he watched in surprise as the red octagon with the word
STOP
printed on it lifted up and whisked away over his head like a balloon.

Then the windshield smashed, and the car hit a tree, and the safety air bag punched him in the face as it expanded, blocking out his vision.

In her bassinet, baby Rosalie was asleep, though the other head, the parasitic head, was apparently alert. Was it conscious? The other head seemed to sleep less than Rosalie did, and even late at night the nurses would find it blinking slowly and gazing serenely into the darkness, peacefully awake. The other head didn’t seem to be in pain, the way Rosalie often was. While Rosalie balled her fists and scrunched her face and screamed, the other head let its eyes drift along the ceiling, its mouth puckered and moving, as if nursing.

Zach had often wondered what was going on inside their brains. Could they dream each other’s dreams, think each other’s thoughts? Could they see what the other one saw, the two pairs of eyes looking at the world both right side up and upside down?

Or perhaps they weren’t aware of each other whatsoever. After all, they couldn’t see each other. They’d never looked in a mirror. To Zach, this was a terrible thought—that they had no idea that anything was wrong. It was awful to think that the babies both assumed that this was the way the world was supposed to be.

Of course, he realized that this probably wasn’t an accurate way to think about things. He knew that it was not appropriate to attempt to interpret the various expressions and glances that passed across the faces.

“It’s a bad idea,” one young, friendly doctor told him.
“You don’t want to get into a relationship with … Well. You don’t want to anthropomorphize—is that the right word?—anthropomorphize the deformity. If you see what I mean.”

According to the doctors, the other head was probably blind and almost undoubtedly had very low levels of brain function. It had no thoughts or feelings.

Zach woke up in a bed in the hospital. Despite the air bag, he had sustained multiple injuries to his neck, spine, arms, legs, and pelvis, and he was held in spinal traction, in a halo crown and vest. He could feel the titanium pins that held the halo ring to his head, fixed tight to his skull, a pressure just behind his ears. His legs, too, were in traction, but he was not as aware of the splints that held them immobilized. When he opened his eyes, the ceiling swam hazily above him.

“You’re very fortunate,” a nurse whispered to him. He lay there, motionless, and he had an image of himself drifting upon a wide sea. The nurse was checking his blood pressure and intravenous tube. “Very lucky,” she murmured.

He assumed that she meant that his injuries weren’t permanent, that he would walk again, that he wasn’t a quadriplegic. He had vague memories of conversations being held in the air above him, the voices of doctors undulating.
Some function remained below the level of spinal injury
, they’d told him.
Early immobilization and treatment are the most important factors in achieving recovery
, they said.

“Am I …?” he said, and he thought he felt his fingers flex.

“They tell me that you’re Baby Rosalie’s father,” the nurse said after a moment. Her face hovered briefly over him, her severe
eyes and the pointed white nurse’s cap, and then she withdrew. Zach couldn’t turn his head far enough to maintain eye contact, so he wasn’t certain what her expression was like. No doubt there was a lot of gossip among the hospital staff about Rosalie. And there had been that short segment on a television news program that had focused—rather unsympathetically, he thought—on the fertility treatments that they’d undergone.