Stay Awake Stories Part 4

"In these lucid dreams," van Eeden wrote, "the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition."

Zach didn't know whether he believed in this or not, but he thought that there must be-well, something- There was a snail track of sweat moving down the back of his neck, leaving an insistent itch in its wake.

Outside the window, in the parking lot, there was a female clown holding a bouquet of blue and pink helium balloons, each with a cartoon face printed on it. He watched as the woman stood there, flipping through a small notebook. The balloons were revolving upon the axis of their strings, the smiling faces slowly rotating, facing his window and then turning away in a slow circle.

Zach was aware of the sound of a small voice calling to him, a sound in the back of his mind, and then another trickle down the back of his neck, an odd feeling in his hair, like the ticklish legs of an insect. Movement.

Why do people, he thought. He was thinking of something that Amber had asked him once, right after the baby was born.

Why do people want to have babies? she had said, her eyes upon him heavily. What does a baby have that we want from it?

Well, he had said. It's ... it's part of life. It's ...

She had been going through a kind of depression, postpartum depression, he thought, she wasn't herself-and they were driving along the interstate; he was behind the wheel and there was that feeling you have when the car is just an extension of your body, when you are at least partially a machine and your movements are also the automobile's movements and he was both listening and not listening; part of him was talking to her and part of him was watching the road, steering.

All the babies in the world, she was saying. All the babies that need homes and we had to create another one. It's greedy, isn't it? Avaricious and acquisitive. We had to have a baby of our own, right? No one else's-it's got to be ours, only ours. Isn't that what it is?

No, he said. No, of course not. There's nothing ... avaricious ... about it. It's about being in love ... and you want to ... create something that no one else can create, right? And ... it's biological. It's normal to want to have a baby.

Is it? she said, and she looked at him for a long moment and he could feel it but he was also watching the traffic. He didn't want to look her in the eyes, in any case.

Then she seemed to lose herself in thought-perhaps to forget what she had been talking about, or dismiss it, or else it vanished along with the majority of her depression after she got some prescriptions. In any case, they never spoke of it again.

But he had thought of it, later, considered it from time to time over the ensuing months as the drama of their deformed baby had played itself out, and now he found himself remembering it once again.

Why do people want babies? he thought, and of course there were the usual things. Urges.

You want a child because it is a piece of yourself that will live on after you are dead. That is one answer.

You want a child because it is a specific kind of love, a specific kind of experience of love that you feel certain can't be replicated in any other way. The way your parents loved or failed to love you, for example.

You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.

He opened his eyes and the nurse hovered over him, drawing blood from his arm, and he watched a thread of his own blood weaving its way upward through a thin tube.

There was that odd feeling in the back of his head, that little ticklish feeling that didn't seem to want to go away. He tried to give his head a shake, but of course it was held in place by the halo, held in traction.

For a moment he had the impression that something moved at the back of his skull. There was a subtle quiver of the skin like an expression s.h.i.+fting, and he thought of the blinking of eyelids, a mouth opening and drawing breath.

Even when we are dead, we carry the possibility of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

"I didn't realize that I was sleeping," he said to the nurse, and she looked down at him silently. Her face was thoughtful and private, as if she were gazing down into a reflecting pool. She tilted the tube that was filling up with Zach's blood, but she didn't respond. It was the same way that Amber had seemed to stop hearing his questions. As if he were not even there.

Upstairs in the intensive-care ward, Rosalie was comatose. Her coma was an expanse of gray ice water, a sensation of bottomless sinking; perhaps it was nothing at all. It may essentially have been the same as the nothing that was now being experienced by the other head, which no longer existed except as pieces of skin and bone grafted to Rosalie's scalp and skull, as ashes that sifted in a fine layer at the bottom of the incinerator.

Nearly asleep, Zach could feel the shadowy stirrings of presences and absences. The perception of that other brain must surely have been a tangible thing. Rosalie must have felt it. She must have felt it rising, he thought, connected by a thin silver thread, drifting up and up as it was removed.

In the same way, Zach was himself hovering over his own body. The corporeal Zach was a sad, stick figure of a person, arms and legs spread like a child's drawing, and he gazed down toward it tenderly, even as it grew smaller and more distant.

He understood, now, vividly, what it would be like, and as he drifted up he wished he could tell someone. Amber, perhaps? Or Rosalie herself?

At some point, perhaps, at five or thirteen or twenty-seven, his daughter, Rosalie, would wake up and remember the way someone else's thoughts felt as they grazed lightly against the surface of her own. A flicker of consciousness would wink on and off.

h.e.l.lo, a voice would say. I'm still here. I'm still with you.

Rosalie, someone would whisper. I'm still awake.

Long Delayed, Always Expected.

When January turned forty-four she began to have gloomy thoughts about the future, about mortality, and so forth. Her daughter had left home to go away to college, and had been gone for one month, which was part of it. It occurred to her that a whole segment of her life had come to an end.

Wow, she thought. So that was what it was like to raise a child.

Then she thought: I guess I won't be doing that again!

Which was kind of disturbing, after she considered for a moment. She didn't like to think of the things that-more than likely-she might have already done for the last time.

She sat there at the open window and stubbed out a cigarette into the dirt of a potted plant.

It wouldn't have been so weird if it hadn't been for the fact that it seemed like many other women her age were just beginning-they all seemed to have babies and grade-school children-and they had spent their youth getting their careers under way, making lots of money and having fun and probably getting laid frequently as well. Now their skin had a rosy, post-maternal glow, and they spoke in gently therapeutic voices as they walked around carrying their babies in expensive papooses. She, meanwhile, had the haggard eyes and quick temper of a woman who had just lived for five years with a teenager.

Personally, she didn't like the looks of this stretch between forty-five and fifty. She felt very uncomfortable about it.

She drank a gla.s.s of wine and then called her ex-husband, Jeffrey, and invited him to come over to the house for dinner.

Jeffrey had been severely injured-brain-damaged, actually-in a car accident after they had divorced and now he lived in a group home with a number of other mentally challenged men. He was generally in better shape than the rest of them-he was the only one of them who held a Ph.D. in mathematics, for example-but he seemed basically content with the situation. She imagined that it was a little like his old fraternity house.

"Jeffrey," she said. "I'm sorry to bother you. But I'm wondering if you would mind keeping me company if I made you dinner. Do you want to rent a movie and come over?"

"Are you drinking?" he said.

"Yes," she said. "But I'll stop if you come over."

"You're smoking, too," he said. "I can hear you breathing smoke."

"Well," she said. "I've got the window open."

Lately, he'd been quoting various horrifying cigarette-smoke statistics to her, and she didn't mind it, really. She hoped that maybe he would be able to scare her into stopping.

They had been divorced for almost five years when Jeffrey had his accident. Their daughter, Robin, was fifteen, and she'd grown used to shuffling between the two of them, their houses about twenty minutes apart on either side of the city, and she'd been very good about accepting the fact that her parents were going to have separate lives, though they both loved her still, they were both connected through her, and they continued to be very cordial to each other, despite some lingering bitterness. They were basically on friendly terms.

But when it became clear that Jeffrey's injuries were more extensive than they had expected, Robin began to give her long, impatient looks. She grew judgmental, then outraged.

"Aren't you going to help him?" Robin said. "Aren't you going to do something?" This was during the period when it was becoming clear that he couldn't return to independent living. When the doctors were suggesting a nursing-home facility.

"Honey," January said. She found herself s.h.i.+fting under Robin's scrutiny. "Listen," January said. "I'm not going to take care of him. I hope you realize that he can't live here."

Robin had gazed at her bleakly.

"Robin," she said. "I'm not going to dedicate my life to caring for a man I divorced five years ago. I'm sorry for him. But it's just tough luck. Seriously."

Tough luck. Had she really said that?

Now, thinking back, she was aware that it was one of those things that Robin would later repeat when people asked what kind of person her mother was. She remembered how Robin's eyes had lingered on her face. A defining moment, Robin probably thought.

Jeffrey took the bus from the group home and arrived about a half an hour early. She saw him from the window, pacing back and forth along the sidewalk in front of her house and pausing to read his watch. He could tell time but it took some processing on his part, and she never understood why he couldn't just get a digital watch.

She came out onto the porch and folded her arms. "Jeffrey," she called out as he was walking past, and he stopped and looked startled. Agape. "What are you doing?" she said.

"I'm early," he said.

"You can still come into the house," she said. "It's okay."

He hesitated.

Over the last few years, since his accident, he had changed a lot. He had lost quite a bit of weight, for example, and his face had taken on a certain kind of sloe-eyed, sleepy quality that might be a.s.sociated with marijuana smoking or post-coital tristesse. His hair, once carefully and severely close-cropped, had gotten thick and wavy in a way that made him seem younger. The old Jeffrey would have probably been pleased about all of this-he had once been quite vain about his looks, his body. But the current Jeffrey couldn't have cared less, which was part of his charm. He had magically returned to the mind of the sweet, nerdy eleven-year-old he had probably once been.

"Are you hungry?" she said. "Come in, come in."

She thought that she was almost used to this new Jeffrey. It was actually as if he were a nephew of Jeffrey, rather than Jeffrey himself. Occasionally there would be little resemblances between the Jeffrey of the past and the current version. There was, for example, a certain boyish way of rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling when he was remembering something-a cute and endearing expression on both of the Jeffreys. It was problematic to regard a brain-damaged person as "s.e.xy," but he was, somehow.

It had been about seven or eight years since she had last slept with him-the old Jeffrey. They had still been married when it stopped and she actually couldn't remember when the very "last time" had been. It was probably one of those dutiful married-person f.u.c.ks that happened right before they went to sleep or right after they woke in the morning, and no doubt it had been fine; s.e.x had never been a big issue in their marriage- -but of course there was a part of her that placed importance on the notion of "firsts" and "lasts," of "mosts" and "leasts"; she had been, after all, a little girl who had memorized parts of the Guinness World Records book and so it was troubling that she wasn't able to recall such an important milestone: the Last Time I Slept with My Ex-Husband.

She had considered asking him. She was a little curious about whether Jeffrey-this new, childlike Jeffrey-had any memory of their s.e.xual relations, but of course it was probably better not to know. He appeared to have the emotional life of an intelligent preadolescent, and there had never been any hint of, well.

"Jeffrey," she said. "Would you like a c.o.ke?"

"Yes, thank you," he said, watching sternly as she put her empty winegla.s.s on the counter, next to the sink.

He had been injured by a drunk driver, and now he disapproved of alcohol on general principle.

The last time January went on a date, she had been trying out an Internet matchmaking service that brought people together based on a complex personality survey. "Our total compatibility system takes into account the 'whole' you-personality, life and love-style, values and preferences-matching you on what counts in a lasting relations.h.i.+p!" the website said, alongside a series of testimonials from happy customers who had gotten married, found love, happiness, and so forth.

And the man that she eventually met was, honestly, a very nice person. Steve Schiller: fifty-four years old, a curator at the natural-history museum, a trim, sweet, dapper little man, a widower with two adult children. They had gone to the same midwestern liberal arts college, albeit ten years apart, and they liked a lot of the same music and books, and he had a dry, pleasantly low-key way of speaking, and they had gone to a funny little Ethiopian restaurant that she had actually been interested in going to-they were so compatible, she thought, it was almost irritating.

Why do I hate him so much? she kept wondering. What's wrong with me?

There was a certain kind of earnestness, that was part of it. Something eager and hopeful and slightly embarra.s.sing. "You know what they say," he told her. "Fifty is the new thirty." He said it wryly, with a little ironic shrug, but she could see how much he'd like to believe it.

"Really?" she said. She put her hand to her chin thoughtfully. "Does that mean that thirty is the new ten?"

Which was b.i.t.c.hy, of course. She saw what he meant, she really did. The desire to remake that shrinking expanse of life they were still allotted, to make use of it, to fill it up with possibility. Oh, please: one more transformation.

He looked at her, and she could see the pinch and fuss of museum curating beneath the charming exterior.

"Ha," he said awkwardly. "It's stupid, I know."

"I've also heard that one hundred is the new eighty," she continued. "And thirteen is actually the new negative seven."

"Okay," he said. "Cut it out. I get it."

She had made hamburgers for Jeffrey. Hamburgers and French fries and macaroni and cheese-everything starchy and salty and blandly meaty, which is where his brain-damaged taste buds seemed to have settled.

Back when they were married, he'd been a finicky eater, the kind of person who wouldn't eat chicken breast because he didn't like the "texture" of it, who had to have his apples and pears cut into slices, who didn't like bread crust, the kind of person you never wanted to cook for because he made every meal seem like an examination he was grading.

It was like that with a lot of things in their marriage. He had been her teacher when they first met-a handsome young a.s.sistant professor, only a few years older than she was, teaching a course called Math for Mystics, which she'd hoped would satisfy the general education requirement and not be too difficult-though, actually, most of what they talked about in cla.s.s was over her head-Pythagoras and the golden ratio and Venus's pentacle ... and later she wondered if he'd let her pa.s.s only because he was attracted to her.

In any case, the "lenient teacher" and "underachieving student" template had lingered on in their relations.h.i.+p. He'd had a set of unspoken, unspecific rules in his mind, tests she always felt as if she were failing, though he'd never admit it. "What's wrong?" she would ask, as he sat at the table looking skeptically at the food she had prepared, or when he made a little grunt while she was driving, or when she came downstairs in the morning and he let his eyes run over the clothes she was wearing.

"What?" she'd say. "You don't like this s.h.i.+rt?"

And he'd shrug and turn back to his crossword and coffee: No comment.

How weird it was that he'd once had such power over her, that he could once shame her with only a glance.

Of course, she was not that person any longer. In the years since their divorce, she had developed a thicker skin, a resilience. She was the type of person who didn't take anyone's c.r.a.p-that's what her friend Joni told her. "That's what I like about you, Jan," Joni said. "You tell it like it is. You speak your mind. You call it like you see it."

"Thank you," January said, though actually she thought of herself as fairly restrained. If she actually spoke her mind, she probably wouldn't have any friends at all.

They worked together at the library, and mostly they shelved books together and gossiped unkindly about their coworkers. She had been an employee for years, but had never advanced very far in the ranks. In the beginning, the flush of independence, the sense of making her own way alone in the world, had been enough. Now, it wasn't quite so enthralling. One quiet late afternoon, as she was rolling her cart through a narrow, desolate row of bookshelves, a line abruptly came into her mind: She is the type of person who has rejected love at every turn.

What was this from? A movie? A novel? It sounded to January like some bulls.h.i.+t chick-lit claptrap, and she dismissed the thought with annoyance. But it returned to her as she sat watching TV with Robin later that night, and for a moment she considered speaking it aloud.

Then she reconsidered. She was afraid it might be an a.s.sessment that Robin would agree with.

And perhaps Jeffrey would as well. As he sat eating his hamburger, he gave her one of those inscrutable looks that reminded her of the days when they were married. He considered her in a way that seemed, she thought, vaguely judgmental, and then he bent to sip his c.o.ke with a kind of dedicated, trancelike seriousness.

"What?" she said. "The hamburger isn't well done enough?"

"It's good," Jeffrey said, and he took a moderate bite, and chewed, and swallowed. "I like it," he said.

"I know my lips look weird," January said. "They've been very chapped-it's gross."

"Oh," Jeffrey said. He peered at her lips thoughtfully, scratching along the bite-shaped line of scar along his forehead, where he'd had some surgery or another. "Hmm," he said.

"So have you talked to Robin recently?" she asked.

"I talk to Robin every day at eleven o'clock," he said. "She calls me on my cellphone before lunch."

"Oh," January said. And-well, yes, it did bother her, a little. A small twinge of hurt, or jealousy, a momentary recurrence of she is the type of person who.

As it happened, Robin hadn't called her since being dropped off at the dorm room on the first day of New Student Week. Robin had declined January's offer to help her unpack, and hadn't wanted to be taken out to a bon-voyage dinner at a nice restaurant, either-instead, trotting off with her new roommate, leaving January to walk alone to her car and sit there for a moment in the parking lot (not crying) and drive silently through the rude Chicago traffic toward the miles of interstate that would take her back to her empty home.