Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted
by Dan Chaon
There had been several funerals of his old high school friends and Brandon hadn't gone to any of them. He was aware that this was a problem, a problematic decision, and sure enough, afterwards one of the girlfriend of the dead called him up and told him how rude she thought he was. "It really shocked me," Rachel said. "Zachary was always a good friend to you and this just says something about you as a person that I wouldn't have expected. I lost a lot of respect for you today," she said. He didn't know what to say. The truth was, he didn't have any excuse. He hadn't wanted to get dressed up, and he didn't like rituals, period. But he couldn't say this, so instead he tried to tell her that he couldn't get out of work.
"Oh, come of it, Brandon," Rachel said.They had dated briefly in ninth grade and ever after she had little use for him. "Everybody can get out of work for a funeral," she said. "Why don't you just admit that you have turned into a complete shiteel? That would be the decent thing to do right now."
"Okay," said Brandon. "I turned into a shiteel."
"Yes you did," Rachel said. "What happened?" And then she hung up. Brandon probably could have argued with her, but he realized that it was not the kind of argument that you could win.
What could he say? He had known a lot of dead people recently. But was that a legitimate complaint? Was it enough of an excuse to say that he simply felt worn out?
To be honest, there were simply fewer and fewer things he felt like doing. That he could even bring himself to do. He'd stay up late playing video games on an aging PlayStation system he had hooked up to the television in the living room. He'd go to work at the grocery store. Sometimes he'd look at porn or read various message boards on the Internet. That was about the extent of it. It seemed like he hardly ever talked to anyone anymore. At the grocery store he was working in the produce department stacking pumpkins when a beaming older woman came up to him holding some Seckel pears in her cupped palms as if they were delicate eggs.
"These are so adorable!" she exclaimed at him. "They are tiny little pears!"
"Yes," he said. "They are Seckel pears."
"Oh," she said enthusiastically. "And are they ripe? Could I eat one right now if I wanted to?"
"Well," Brandon said. He was a bit taken aback by her excitement. "Actually these could probably stand to get a little riper. If you put them in a sealed plastic bag with a couple of bananas, and keep them at room temperature, they should ripen up pretty quickly. They will have a yellowish hue when they're ready to eat."
"Wonderful," the woman exclaimed. "You are really very knowledgeable and helpful."
"Thank you," Brandon said, and the woman clutched her tiny pears.
"No," she said. "Thank you!"
The depressing thing was, he realized later that this was one of the nicest conversations he'd had in quite a while. He had been working at the grocery store for a number of years by this point, "What are you now?" his first grade teacher, Mrs. Love-Denman, had asked him.
"Twenty-five? Twenty-six?" They had abruptly come face-to-face in an aisle where he was stocking cans of soup and he couldn't believe she recognized him. "You're Brandon Fowler, aren't you?" she said in that gentle, unnervingly sensual Southern accent. "Oh, my land! I can hardly believe it! Brandon Fowler-all grown up!" He guessed that he had known that she still existed, that she was still wandering around town, but nevertheless seeing her freaked him out a little. She must have been at least seventy years old but she was dressed like a much younger woman, wearing an ill-fitting, stiff blond wig-and he had no idea what to say to her. He supposed that he'd been rude for not talking to her.
He did say "Hello," actually. And then he'd just smiled tightly at her and nodded in a kind of dazed way.
It was the sort of encounter that was really problematic and it took a long time to get over. At night, as they were closing, he paced slowly down the spice-and-cereal aisle pushing a wide dust mop, listening to music on his iPod, and trying not to think. In the parking lot he collected empty shopping carts, stacking them, inserting one into the next until he was propelling a kind of millipede of metal and wheels across the asphalt. Still not thinking. In the basement he lifted boxes of cabbages, crates of tangelos, rubber-banded bunches of beets and mustard greens and parsnips.
In the employee-only bathroom, he stood at the urinal stall and aimed toward the zinc cake that rested near the drain. Above the porcelain-and-silver piping of the toilet, people had written on the wall in pencil and ink and Magic Marker: various things.
His favorite piece of graffiti said: PATRICK LANE, FLABBERGASTED.
This had been scrawled above the urinal for as long as Brandon could remember and he occasionally wondered about Patrick Lane as he peed.
Patrick Lane had apparently once been a grocery store employee, and Brandon liked to imagine that they might have become friends. He imagined that Patrick Lane was the sort of person who wrote odd, quirky, self-deprecating graffiti about himself, just for his own amusement. Perhaps Patrick Lane dreamed of becoming a cartoonist, or a singer-songwriter, or simply a perceptive and thoughtful wanderer in the mode of Sal Paradise in the Kerouac novel On the Road.
Did people ever hitch rides in the boxcars of trains anymore? Brandon wondered.
He liked to picture Patrick Lane, rambling across the country, leaving a record of his emotions-FLABBERGASTED-EXULTANT-INSULTED-DEVASTATED-and so forth, from bathroom to bathroom as he went. This idea really appealed to him, but then someone said: Oh, he's that poor kid that killed himself. I just couldn't bring myself to scrub his writing off the wall.
Brandon was still living in the old house where he grew up, which he realized was probably a big part of the problem. His parents had been dead for two years, and his older sister, Jodee, was now living in Chicago with her boyfriend, Jake the Medical Resident.
After their parents' funeral, Brandon and Jodee had both agreed that the best thing to do was to sell the house and split the profits equally. The original plan was that Brandon would live in the house for a few months and fix things up a little to make it more presentable so they could sell it.
But the house didn't seem to want to be sold. Things that had never been wrong in the twenty years that the family had lived there together suddenly turned sour when the housing inspector came to check on the building.
One problem was called "deterioration of the structural roof deck" and cost an enormous amount of money to get fixed.
Other issues were smaller, and presumably should have been repairable by Brandon himself, with the help of a home fix-it book. These included improper wiring connections, bulges and crumbling spots in the drywall, some plumbing stuff, and so on-but much of this was more complicated than a person would think.
"But you're a smart guy," Jodee had told him. "You can figure it out. I think it's good for you to have a project to work on."
Brandon had spent some time at a couple of different colleges and then finally he had decided to take a while off and earn some money. He imagined that he would enjoy hanging around with some old high school friends, like Zachery Leven and Matty, and he was also kind of looking forward to having his mom doing his laundry and so on. And actually, Brandon's mom had thought it was a good idea. She thought that he still needed time to "find himself." This was right before she and his dad died. Jodee was four years older, and she believed that their parents had been stricter when she was growing up.
"But honestly, I'm glad that Mom and Dad were harder on me," Jodee said once. Because now I have a work ethic." Then she hesitated. Brandon knew she hadn't meant to be insulting, exactly. Nevertheless, he realized that she couldn't quite understand how it was possible that he was still living there, still fixing up the house, after almost five years.
Of course, Brandon was aware that things had probably deteriorated even more than Jodee realized.
Steadily, he had been relinquishing, withdrawing from portions of the house, and the actually living quarters had shrunk considerably.
There was, for example, his parents' bedroom upstairs, which he was naturally hesitant to enter, and Jodee's old bedroom, where he decide to store all the stuff that he'd eventually sell at an estate or garage sale, such as small pieces of furniture, vintage-esque clothing, his father's phonograph records and coin collection, his mother's jewelry and shelves of mystery novels, the boxes of photographs of the trips they had taken as a family, Disney World, the Grand Canyon, New York City, and so forth.
There was the second-floor bathroom, which was now off-limits, following a weirdly disastrous attempt to replace the toilet's ballcock assembly and flush valve. And then there were areas that he head started to clean or pack up but then had broken off for one reason or another. For example, in the basement "rec room" area, on the upper shelf of a closet, he'd come across a bunch of games that the family used to play when Brandon and Jodee were kids: Monopoly. Yahtzee. Battleship. Which he'd planned to get rid of. But then he opened the mildewy cardboard box of an ancient Scrabble game and an enormous number of cockroaches came scuttling out of it. Oh, my God! He chucked the game across the room and it broke open and all the little wooden tiles with letters printed on them scattered across the shag carpet.
His mom used to love to play Scrabble. He had this image of the four of them sitting at the kitchen table with the game board in the middle. He could picture his mother counting out her score and teasing their father, laughing and flourishing her little dictionary. She had seemed really happy at the time. It was weird to think that none of them had guessed how things would eventually turn out. He knew it was childish, but after the incident with the cockroaches he had been unable to bring himself to pick up the scattered pieces of the game. He had somehow gotten the idea that he would bend over and discover that the Scrabble tiles had spelled out some kind of eerie message.
When Brandon came home from work on the day that his parents died, he found a not that his mother had taped to the front door. It was a letter addressed to him, and he stood their on the stoop with his hand still on the side of the house, reading it.
Dear Brandon,
Your father and I have made a very difficult decision and I am writing to apologize for any pain that may be caused. Please, honey don't feel guilty or as if this is all your fault because there is really nothing you could have done. Just always remember all of the happy times we shared as a family. You were a wonderful son!
All our love,
Mom & Dad
P.S. Please do not go up to our bedroom.Just call the police and tell them that you have found this note and they will come out to the house and help you take care of thing.
P.P.S. I already sent a letter to Jodee so she should get it today.
This letter was one of the things that he tried not to think about to much, tough sometimes little phrases from it would rise up for no reason to float on the surface of his consciousness. You were a wonderful son! He thought. You were a wonderful son! There were a lot of ways to take that. He often wondered about Jodee's letter, and whether they had told her something that they hadn't told him. Because she was older, or more responsible, or whatever. For example, had they explained to her in more detail about why they had killed themselves?
But he and Jodee had never actually talked about the letters. Every once in a while, Jodee would call to check up on him and she would talk abut how much she wanted to come back "home" for a visit, just to hang out and maybe even help with whatever finishing touches he was putting on the house. Give him that added "push" he seemed to need.
"I miss you, Li'l Bro," she said. "I can't believe how long it's been since we've seen each other."
"I know," he said.
"I hope you don't think I've abandoned you," she said.
"No, no," he said. He gave a kind of chuckle, and for a moment he thought again about the letter she had received from their parents. Did it say something like: Jodee, please don't abandon Brandon!
"Abandon," he said. "Whatever."
"Well, you know what I mean," Jodee said. "We had a toxic childhood-I realize that-but there comes a time when we all have to move on."
"True," Brandon said. He hesitated. There often came a point in the conversation when Jodee would offer to put him touch with a grief therapist who had been very helpful to her.
"When you grow up with people like Mom and Dad, they catch you up in a cycle," Jodee said. "You can't escape-that's the problem."
"Absolutely," he said. He considered. What did she mean by that?
There were times when he would have liked to tell her that something really weird had been happening to him-something to do with his sense of time...or? But what could he say? He was sitting on the fold-out couch in the living room, on the edge of the bare wafer of sofa mattress with the sheets and blankets crumpled at his feet, and the TV stand right at the foot of the bed with the PlayStation wires and the console and cartridges-Tekken 3, Q*bert, Crypt Killer, that kind of stuff-and the dresser from his bedroom and the computer and basically everything from his room upstairs that he wanted cluttered in a kind of fort around the sofa bed. He hadn't been upstairs to his bedroom in probably a long time.
"Well, anyway," Jodee said. "I know you're busy."
He took off his socks and rubbed the itchy soles of his feet, which were being very slowly consumed by a fungus. He had tried all sorts of ointments but the fungus appeared to be indestructible.
"Did I tell you about Zachery?" he said.
In the background, through the telephone line, he could hear the deep, jocky voice of Jake the Medical Resident asking Jodee a question, and she hesitated-maybe gesturing or miming or mouthing, "IT'S BRAN! DON!" exaggeratedly so that Jake the Medical Resident could read her lips.
"Zachery who?" she said. "Zachery Leven from high school?"
"Yeah," Brandon said. "Zachery Leven. He died, actually."
"Geez," Jodee said. "You sure have lost a lot of people from your class. What was it? A car accident? I hope it wasn't drugs."
"Um," Brandon said. He thought about it. "You know-I'm not completely sure what it was. It definitely wasn't a car wreak but...? Some kind of, like, illness? I hadn't talked to him in a long time and I missed his funeral, so..."
He found himself sitting there in a state of pause. It was totally unnerving, because surely he had heard how Zachery Leven had died. Or read it somewhere...? I t reminded him of the day that his parents died, sitting there in the living room with the cop, a weight-lifter-looking guy named Mark Mitchell, who had a notepad he was writing in. Had he noticed anything out of the ordinary about them recently? Officer Mitchell asked. Were they having marital problems? Had they made any statements concerning feelings of despair, had they verbally expressed any concepts of life not being worth living, that sort of thing? Were they having financial difficulties? And Brandon had been unable to think of a single explanation. There was nothing unusual that he noticed, he said, and he sat there in the wingback chair, the cop on the sofa, the neat living room and the candy dish on the coffee table full of red and brown M&M's that he had never seen anyone eat.
He sat there remembering this, holding the phone against his face, and his eyes ran over the topography of the floor. It looked sort of like there was a kind of drain, a vortex around where the sofa bed was. A spiral of materials had begun to form an orbit: a spoon and empty yogurt container on the carpet, wasabi pea, Post-it note, throat lozenge, a sock in fetal position.
"Well-anyways," Jodee said at last, after the ellipses had trickled past for a while. She sighed in a gently emphatic way. "I don't want to keep you," she said. "I suppose I better let you get off the phone."
It had occurred to him that maybe something was going wrong with the world. Like global warming or an economic collapse or a coming plague. He could imagine that his parents had somehow intuited or found out about such an event, something so terrible that they couldn't beat to live through it. But what? He couldn't quite conceptualize such a catastrophe, though often he was aware of its presence, its force, something large and omnipotent hovering over not just himself and his house but also the neighborhood, the state, the country. Possibly the planet?
He noticed, for example, that many of the stores were closing and remaining empty-the old Beatrice Academy of Beauty across from the high school had shut down, and through the cracked windows you could see the hair dryers all piled together in a jumble, like dead spacemen. Parking meters along the block had been beheaded and were now just bare pipes sticking up out of the sidewalk. There were also more vacant lots than there used to be when he was growing up. There were lots where there once were houses, houses that he used to pass by on his way to school as a kid, and it seemed that they just came and took the houses away when he hadn't been paying attention. All that remained were patches of high grass and weeds, not even a foundation.
He had mentioned this to Patty and Marci, the two head cashiers at work, but this didn't seem to make an impression on them.
"Brandon," Patty said. "This city has been sliding downhill for so many years I barely notice it anymore."
"Hon, you have some writing on your arm," Marci observed.
In the bathroom in the basement of the grocery store, Brandon washed the pale underside of his forearm with a paper towel and some industrial liquid soap. But it seemed that he had written on himself with a permanent marker, so it wouldn't come off very well. WTF...? he thought. He pulled his sleeve up and saw that the writing ran up the length of his arm from his wrist to his biceps; it was definitely his own handwriting.
On the lower part of his palm:
Intercerebral myiasis-
maggot infestation of the brain-
extremely rare but not unheard of.
And then crawling up his wrist, very shaky handwriting:
slab rat fed garble fast bed bad bag serflet
Then, more neatly, on his forearm:
Conclusion simply the place where you tired of thinking.
And finally, on his biceps, little teeny litters:
Flabbergasted. Flutterghosted. Flatterguessed. Flabergist. F1
Back when he was in high school, he had the habit of writing notes to himself on his own skin when he didn't have a piece of paper handy. But he had no memory of writing any of this. Maybe he'd done it in his sleep? He tried not to let this concept freak him out. He rubbed at it until it had begun to fade a little and his skin felt kind of sore. He was aware that he might be having sleep issues. He might be addicted to the Internet and video games and maybe that was part of it. That was why he couldn't seem to get the house cleaned up and that was why he kept missing important social-obligation-type things like funerals and that was why he was waking up in the middle of the night writing stuff on his hands and his arms and even his legs and so on which he couldn't remember writing in the morning though there would sometimes be a Sharpie pen clutched in his fist.
When he first started sleeping in the house alone he had found it comforting to have a little music playing when he tired to go to bed, or maybe the sound of the television, The Weather Channel, just the chatter of voices-but soon it was the video games and the computer as well, multiple programs stacked on top of one another, and before long there was a semicircle of electronic devices around the sofa bed where he slept. It wasn't a powerful force field, but it was at least enough to allow him to rest for a little while. There were electrical outages in the city and then he couldn't sleep at all. He would sit there alone in the dark, clutching his flashlight. He was certain he could hear sounds in the house. In the ruined bathroom, his parents' bedroom, in the basement, where he imagined the scuttle of cockroaches or Scrabble tiles-And he'd once actually fled out the back door in his underwear with his flashlight and sleeping bag in his arms and tried to sleep on the lawn under the old apple tree. But even that-the beloved apple tree of their childhood, "Jonathan the Apple Tree," their mother had called it-even that behaved strangely. Its leaves would get a white powdery substance on them and then they curled up and fell off, and the apples themselves were tiny and wrinkled and deformed in a way that made them look like little ugly heads, and as he sat in the backyard on the sleeping bag he heard one drop....tunk?
A sinister little questioning sound. And then, after a long silence, another one-"tunk?"-and he imagined he saw the whispery movement as the shrunken apple rolled through the unmowed grass. You could say that his problem had started with the death of his parents...or the death of his friends-you could say that it was just a stage of grief, maybe-but he worried that it was actually much bigger than that, it could be traced in concentric circles rippling back into the past who knew how long? There was that time back in ninth grade, for example, when he and Zachery Leven ate some mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms, and it had been a very unpleasant sort of psychedelic drug trip. At first there had been the mystical hilarity and talking trees and couches "breathing," etc.-but then it had become increasingly anxious, the world had begun to seem as if it wanted to communicate a dreadful, dire message, uncomfortable words and letters began to emerge-for example, the long vine from his mom's pothos plant in the kitchen was curling down in a way that appeared to be unreadable cursive writing, possibly Arabic, and they formed H's and I's in a pattern: H I H I H I H I H I which freaked him quite badly.
By that time Brandon's parents had found out and they drove him and Zachery Leven to the hospital. Both he and Zachery Leven had gotten paranoid and begun to imagine that their brains were going to turn off. Like suddenly they would become vegetables. And both he and Zachery Leven were crying and his mom said, I am so ashamed of you, I hope you remember this when I'm dead, after all I've done for you this is how you repay me, I hope you think about this moment when I am gone, and his father had looked pained and said, Oh, Cathy, that kind of talk isn't necessary, and the doctor gazed at them and said: "I am going to prescribe some clonazepam-that should do the trick," and his mother said, with enthusiastic disgust: "They are both of them throwing up and they both have diarrhea!" And though it had all been forgiven him, and he had gone on to college, etc.-even still there was occasionally a lingering memory of that terrible message the world had been trying to telegraph. Something had happened, he thought, something had happened, something subtle but actually deadly had been implanted and was possibly consuming his brain the way the fungus was consuming his feet.
On the Internet he read about Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD). Could this condition have been caused by the mushrooms? And at the library he checked out the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and he tried to read up on HPPD, but afterwards that didn't seem quite right, either.
"Halos around objects," he read. "Colors of objects changing while looking at them. Illusion that objects are moving." He lifted his head and stared at the discarded white sock on the floor, which wasn't breathing, he was pretty sure.
"Aeropsia," he read. "Floaters."
What if it was worse than just the lingering effects of a bad trip? What if something was really wrong? Maybe it was just Ohio, or just America, or just Homo sapiens as a species, but it might also be that the world, the entirety of Planet Earth was basically fucked. There were long stretches when time seemed to have stopped working. The weather had stopped acting like it had when he was a child, with white Christmases and April showers and May flowers and so forth. Much of the time you would look outside and it would be gray and foggy, and you couldn't tell whether it was early morning or dusk. More and more frequently, the power would go out in his part of town and he would wake up and the clocks in the house would all say something different.
On The Weather Channel it said: "A large swath of dead clouds covered many areas of the Tennessee Valley to the Northeast yesterday." His father used to enjoy watching The Weather Channel. His father liked to sit in his recliner and doze in front of it, letting the gentle hysteria of distant blizzards and floods and tornadoes and hurricanes wash over him, and Brandon remember how Zachery Leven used to joke about it. "Uh-oh, here comes the end of the world," Zachery used to say as they passed by Brandon's sleeping father on their way to the basement to play video games. What would Zachery Leven say now? he wondered. He could imagine Zachery and Rachel stopping by for a visit, the two of them exchanging glances.
They might be like, "Um, how come you nailed your mom and dad's bedroom door shut?" They might turn on the light in the second-floor bathroom and let out a cry of surprised disgust. "Holy shit! What is that greenish shit? Mold?" They might say, "You need to get out of this house, man!" They might say: "You need to get out of this town! You need to get out of Ohio! You need to get out of this country! Hurry! Before it's too late!"
He was thinking of this again as he was on bag-boy duty that afternoon at the grocery store, standing at the end of Marci's checkout aisle-Hurry! Before it's too late! he thought, but he only stood there staring as various items came trembling down the conveyor, boxes of tea, a square of tofu, a can of organic chicken broth. They reached the end of the conveyor and began to cluster together, shoaling into a kind of tombolo at the end of the counter.
"Paper or plastic?" Brandon said, unfolding a bag, and he lifted up from his daze to see that it was the lady who loved Seckel pears-he recognized her at once, though it had been a while since he had seen her. She looked terrible. The skin around her mouth was raw and chapped, and glistened with some kind of ointment she had rubbed on it. Her eyes were large and sorrowful and appeared to be made up primarily of water.
"Can I have both plastic and paper? she said.
"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 Zachery 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. "And trenchant critique of capitalism," Zachery 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 Zachery 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 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 liked 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 funeral 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 Zachery 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 life and he would get the house finished and the economy would shift again and he would go back to college and mmet 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.
by Dan Chaon
There had been several funerals of his old high school friends and Brandon hadn't gone to any of them. He was aware that this was a problem, a problematic decision, and sure enough, afterwards one of the girlfriend of the dead called him up and told him how rude she thought he was. "It really shocked me," Rachel said. "Zachary was always a good friend to you and this just says something about you as a person that I wouldn't have expected. I lost a lot of respect for you today," she said. He didn't know what to say. The truth was, he didn't have any excuse. He hadn't wanted to get dressed up, and he didn't like rituals, period. But he couldn't say this, so instead he tried to tell her that he couldn't get out of work.
"Oh, come of it, Brandon," Rachel said.They had dated briefly in ninth grade and ever after she had little use for him. "Everybody can get out of work for a funeral," she said. "Why don't you just admit that you have turned into a complete shiteel? That would be the decent thing to do right now."
"Okay," said Brandon. "I turned into a shiteel."
"Yes you did," Rachel said. "What happened?" And then she hung up. Brandon probably could have argued with her, but he realized that it was not the kind of argument that you could win.
What could he say? He had known a lot of dead people recently. But was that a legitimate complaint? Was it enough of an excuse to say that he simply felt worn out?
To be honest, there were simply fewer and fewer things he felt like doing. That he could even bring himself to do. He'd stay up late playing video games on an aging PlayStation system he had hooked up to the television in the living room. He'd go to work at the grocery store. Sometimes he'd look at porn or read various message boards on the Internet. That was about the extent of it. It seemed like he hardly ever talked to anyone anymore. At the grocery store he was working in the produce department stacking pumpkins when a beaming older woman came up to him holding some Seckel pears in her cupped palms as if they were delicate eggs.
"These are so adorable!" she exclaimed at him. "They are tiny little pears!"
"Yes," he said. "They are Seckel pears."
"Oh," she said enthusiastically. "And are they ripe? Could I eat one right now if I wanted to?"
"Well," Brandon said. He was a bit taken aback by her excitement. "Actually these could probably stand to get a little riper. If you put them in a sealed plastic bag with a couple of bananas, and keep them at room temperature, they should ripen up pretty quickly. They will have a yellowish hue when they're ready to eat."
"Wonderful," the woman exclaimed. "You are really very knowledgeable and helpful."
"Thank you," Brandon said, and the woman clutched her tiny pears.
"No," she said. "Thank you!"
The depressing thing was, he realized later that this was one of the nicest conversations he'd had in quite a while. He had been working at the grocery store for a number of years by this point, "What are you now?" his first grade teacher, Mrs. Love-Denman, had asked him.
"Twenty-five? Twenty-six?" They had abruptly come face-to-face in an aisle where he was stocking cans of soup and he couldn't believe she recognized him. "You're Brandon Fowler, aren't you?" she said in that gentle, unnervingly sensual Southern accent. "Oh, my land! I can hardly believe it! Brandon Fowler-all grown up!" He guessed that he had known that she still existed, that she was still wandering around town, but nevertheless seeing her freaked him out a little. She must have been at least seventy years old but she was dressed like a much younger woman, wearing an ill-fitting, stiff blond wig-and he had no idea what to say to her. He supposed that he'd been rude for not talking to her.
He did say "Hello," actually. And then he'd just smiled tightly at her and nodded in a kind of dazed way.
It was the sort of encounter that was really problematic and it took a long time to get over. At night, as they were closing, he paced slowly down the spice-and-cereal aisle pushing a wide dust mop, listening to music on his iPod, and trying not to think. In the parking lot he collected empty shopping carts, stacking them, inserting one into the next until he was propelling a kind of millipede of metal and wheels across the asphalt. Still not thinking. In the basement he lifted boxes of cabbages, crates of tangelos, rubber-banded bunches of beets and mustard greens and parsnips.
In the employee-only bathroom, he stood at the urinal stall and aimed toward the zinc cake that rested near the drain. Above the porcelain-and-silver piping of the toilet, people had written on the wall in pencil and ink and Magic Marker: various things.
His favorite piece of graffiti said: PATRICK LANE, FLABBERGASTED.
This had been scrawled above the urinal for as long as Brandon could remember and he occasionally wondered about Patrick Lane as he peed.
Patrick Lane had apparently once been a grocery store employee, and Brandon liked to imagine that they might have become friends. He imagined that Patrick Lane was the sort of person who wrote odd, quirky, self-deprecating graffiti about himself, just for his own amusement. Perhaps Patrick Lane dreamed of becoming a cartoonist, or a singer-songwriter, or simply a perceptive and thoughtful wanderer in the mode of Sal Paradise in the Kerouac novel On the Road.
Did people ever hitch rides in the boxcars of trains anymore? Brandon wondered.
He liked to picture Patrick Lane, rambling across the country, leaving a record of his emotions-FLABBERGASTED-EXULTANT-INSULTED-DEVASTATED-and so forth, from bathroom to bathroom as he went. This idea really appealed to him, but then someone said: Oh, he's that poor kid that killed himself. I just couldn't bring myself to scrub his writing off the wall.
Brandon was still living in the old house where he grew up, which he realized was probably a big part of the problem. His parents had been dead for two years, and his older sister, Jodee, was now living in Chicago with her boyfriend, Jake the Medical Resident.
After their parents' funeral, Brandon and Jodee had both agreed that the best thing to do was to sell the house and split the profits equally. The original plan was that Brandon would live in the house for a few months and fix things up a little to make it more presentable so they could sell it.
But the house didn't seem to want to be sold. Things that had never been wrong in the twenty years that the family had lived there together suddenly turned sour when the housing inspector came to check on the building.
One problem was called "deterioration of the structural roof deck" and cost an enormous amount of money to get fixed.
Other issues were smaller, and presumably should have been repairable by Brandon himself, with the help of a home fix-it book. These included improper wiring connections, bulges and crumbling spots in the drywall, some plumbing stuff, and so on-but much of this was more complicated than a person would think.
"But you're a smart guy," Jodee had told him. "You can figure it out. I think it's good for you to have a project to work on."
Brandon had spent some time at a couple of different colleges and then finally he had decided to take a while off and earn some money. He imagined that he would enjoy hanging around with some old high school friends, like Zachery Leven and Matty, and he was also kind of looking forward to having his mom doing his laundry and so on. And actually, Brandon's mom had thought it was a good idea. She thought that he still needed time to "find himself." This was right before she and his dad died. Jodee was four years older, and she believed that their parents had been stricter when she was growing up.
"But honestly, I'm glad that Mom and Dad were harder on me," Jodee said once. Because now I have a work ethic." Then she hesitated. Brandon knew she hadn't meant to be insulting, exactly. Nevertheless, he realized that she couldn't quite understand how it was possible that he was still living there, still fixing up the house, after almost five years.
Of course, Brandon was aware that things had probably deteriorated even more than Jodee realized.
Steadily, he had been relinquishing, withdrawing from portions of the house, and the actually living quarters had shrunk considerably.
There was, for example, his parents' bedroom upstairs, which he was naturally hesitant to enter, and Jodee's old bedroom, where he decide to store all the stuff that he'd eventually sell at an estate or garage sale, such as small pieces of furniture, vintage-esque clothing, his father's phonograph records and coin collection, his mother's jewelry and shelves of mystery novels, the boxes of photographs of the trips they had taken as a family, Disney World, the Grand Canyon, New York City, and so forth.
There was the second-floor bathroom, which was now off-limits, following a weirdly disastrous attempt to replace the toilet's ballcock assembly and flush valve. And then there were areas that he head started to clean or pack up but then had broken off for one reason or another. For example, in the basement "rec room" area, on the upper shelf of a closet, he'd come across a bunch of games that the family used to play when Brandon and Jodee were kids: Monopoly. Yahtzee. Battleship. Which he'd planned to get rid of. But then he opened the mildewy cardboard box of an ancient Scrabble game and an enormous number of cockroaches came scuttling out of it. Oh, my God! He chucked the game across the room and it broke open and all the little wooden tiles with letters printed on them scattered across the shag carpet.
His mom used to love to play Scrabble. He had this image of the four of them sitting at the kitchen table with the game board in the middle. He could picture his mother counting out her score and teasing their father, laughing and flourishing her little dictionary. She had seemed really happy at the time. It was weird to think that none of them had guessed how things would eventually turn out. He knew it was childish, but after the incident with the cockroaches he had been unable to bring himself to pick up the scattered pieces of the game. He had somehow gotten the idea that he would bend over and discover that the Scrabble tiles had spelled out some kind of eerie message.
When Brandon came home from work on the day that his parents died, he found a not that his mother had taped to the front door. It was a letter addressed to him, and he stood their on the stoop with his hand still on the side of the house, reading it.
Dear Brandon,
Your father and I have made a very difficult decision and I am writing to apologize for any pain that may be caused. Please, honey don't feel guilty or as if this is all your fault because there is really nothing you could have done. Just always remember all of the happy times we shared as a family. You were a wonderful son!
All our love,
Mom & Dad
P.S. Please do not go up to our bedroom.Just call the police and tell them that you have found this note and they will come out to the house and help you take care of thing.
P.P.S. I already sent a letter to Jodee so she should get it today.
This letter was one of the things that he tried not to think about to much, tough sometimes little phrases from it would rise up for no reason to float on the surface of his consciousness. You were a wonderful son! He thought. You were a wonderful son! There were a lot of ways to take that. He often wondered about Jodee's letter, and whether they had told her something that they hadn't told him. Because she was older, or more responsible, or whatever. For example, had they explained to her in more detail about why they had killed themselves?
But he and Jodee had never actually talked about the letters. Every once in a while, Jodee would call to check up on him and she would talk abut how much she wanted to come back "home" for a visit, just to hang out and maybe even help with whatever finishing touches he was putting on the house. Give him that added "push" he seemed to need.
"I miss you, Li'l Bro," she said. "I can't believe how long it's been since we've seen each other."
"I know," he said.
"I hope you don't think I've abandoned you," she said.
"No, no," he said. He gave a kind of chuckle, and for a moment he thought again about the letter she had received from their parents. Did it say something like: Jodee, please don't abandon Brandon!
"Abandon," he said. "Whatever."
"Well, you know what I mean," Jodee said. "We had a toxic childhood-I realize that-but there comes a time when we all have to move on."
"True," Brandon said. He hesitated. There often came a point in the conversation when Jodee would offer to put him touch with a grief therapist who had been very helpful to her.
"When you grow up with people like Mom and Dad, they catch you up in a cycle," Jodee said. "You can't escape-that's the problem."
"Absolutely," he said. He considered. What did she mean by that?
There were times when he would have liked to tell her that something really weird had been happening to him-something to do with his sense of time...or? But what could he say? He was sitting on the fold-out couch in the living room, on the edge of the bare wafer of sofa mattress with the sheets and blankets crumpled at his feet, and the TV stand right at the foot of the bed with the PlayStation wires and the console and cartridges-Tekken 3, Q*bert, Crypt Killer, that kind of stuff-and the dresser from his bedroom and the computer and basically everything from his room upstairs that he wanted cluttered in a kind of fort around the sofa bed. He hadn't been upstairs to his bedroom in probably a long time.
"Well, anyway," Jodee said. "I know you're busy."
He took off his socks and rubbed the itchy soles of his feet, which were being very slowly consumed by a fungus. He had tried all sorts of ointments but the fungus appeared to be indestructible.
"Did I tell you about Zachery?" he said.
In the background, through the telephone line, he could hear the deep, jocky voice of Jake the Medical Resident asking Jodee a question, and she hesitated-maybe gesturing or miming or mouthing, "IT'S BRAN! DON!" exaggeratedly so that Jake the Medical Resident could read her lips.
"Zachery who?" she said. "Zachery Leven from high school?"
"Yeah," Brandon said. "Zachery Leven. He died, actually."
"Geez," Jodee said. "You sure have lost a lot of people from your class. What was it? A car accident? I hope it wasn't drugs."
"Um," Brandon said. He thought about it. "You know-I'm not completely sure what it was. It definitely wasn't a car wreak but...? Some kind of, like, illness? I hadn't talked to him in a long time and I missed his funeral, so..."
He found himself sitting there in a state of pause. It was totally unnerving, because surely he had heard how Zachery Leven had died. Or read it somewhere...? I t reminded him of the day that his parents died, sitting there in the living room with the cop, a weight-lifter-looking guy named Mark Mitchell, who had a notepad he was writing in. Had he noticed anything out of the ordinary about them recently? Officer Mitchell asked. Were they having marital problems? Had they made any statements concerning feelings of despair, had they verbally expressed any concepts of life not being worth living, that sort of thing? Were they having financial difficulties? And Brandon had been unable to think of a single explanation. There was nothing unusual that he noticed, he said, and he sat there in the wingback chair, the cop on the sofa, the neat living room and the candy dish on the coffee table full of red and brown M&M's that he had never seen anyone eat.
He sat there remembering this, holding the phone against his face, and his eyes ran over the topography of the floor. It looked sort of like there was a kind of drain, a vortex around where the sofa bed was. A spiral of materials had begun to form an orbit: a spoon and empty yogurt container on the carpet, wasabi pea, Post-it note, throat lozenge, a sock in fetal position.
"Well-anyways," Jodee said at last, after the ellipses had trickled past for a while. She sighed in a gently emphatic way. "I don't want to keep you," she said. "I suppose I better let you get off the phone."
It had occurred to him that maybe something was going wrong with the world. Like global warming or an economic collapse or a coming plague. He could imagine that his parents had somehow intuited or found out about such an event, something so terrible that they couldn't beat to live through it. But what? He couldn't quite conceptualize such a catastrophe, though often he was aware of its presence, its force, something large and omnipotent hovering over not just himself and his house but also the neighborhood, the state, the country. Possibly the planet?
He noticed, for example, that many of the stores were closing and remaining empty-the old Beatrice Academy of Beauty across from the high school had shut down, and through the cracked windows you could see the hair dryers all piled together in a jumble, like dead spacemen. Parking meters along the block had been beheaded and were now just bare pipes sticking up out of the sidewalk. There were also more vacant lots than there used to be when he was growing up. There were lots where there once were houses, houses that he used to pass by on his way to school as a kid, and it seemed that they just came and took the houses away when he hadn't been paying attention. All that remained were patches of high grass and weeds, not even a foundation.
He had mentioned this to Patty and Marci, the two head cashiers at work, but this didn't seem to make an impression on them.
"Brandon," Patty said. "This city has been sliding downhill for so many years I barely notice it anymore."
"Hon, you have some writing on your arm," Marci observed.
In the bathroom in the basement of the grocery store, Brandon washed the pale underside of his forearm with a paper towel and some industrial liquid soap. But it seemed that he had written on himself with a permanent marker, so it wouldn't come off very well. WTF...? he thought. He pulled his sleeve up and saw that the writing ran up the length of his arm from his wrist to his biceps; it was definitely his own handwriting.
On the lower part of his palm:
Intercerebral myiasis-
maggot infestation of the brain-
extremely rare but not unheard of.
And then crawling up his wrist, very shaky handwriting:
slab rat fed garble fast bed bad bag serflet
Then, more neatly, on his forearm:
Conclusion simply the place where you tired of thinking.
And finally, on his biceps, little teeny litters:
Flabbergasted. Flutterghosted. Flatterguessed. Flabergist. F1
Back when he was in high school, he had the habit of writing notes to himself on his own skin when he didn't have a piece of paper handy. But he had no memory of writing any of this. Maybe he'd done it in his sleep? He tried not to let this concept freak him out. He rubbed at it until it had begun to fade a little and his skin felt kind of sore. He was aware that he might be having sleep issues. He might be addicted to the Internet and video games and maybe that was part of it. That was why he couldn't seem to get the house cleaned up and that was why he kept missing important social-obligation-type things like funerals and that was why he was waking up in the middle of the night writing stuff on his hands and his arms and even his legs and so on which he couldn't remember writing in the morning though there would sometimes be a Sharpie pen clutched in his fist.
When he first started sleeping in the house alone he had found it comforting to have a little music playing when he tired to go to bed, or maybe the sound of the television, The Weather Channel, just the chatter of voices-but soon it was the video games and the computer as well, multiple programs stacked on top of one another, and before long there was a semicircle of electronic devices around the sofa bed where he slept. It wasn't a powerful force field, but it was at least enough to allow him to rest for a little while. There were electrical outages in the city and then he couldn't sleep at all. He would sit there alone in the dark, clutching his flashlight. He was certain he could hear sounds in the house. In the ruined bathroom, his parents' bedroom, in the basement, where he imagined the scuttle of cockroaches or Scrabble tiles-And he'd once actually fled out the back door in his underwear with his flashlight and sleeping bag in his arms and tried to sleep on the lawn under the old apple tree. But even that-the beloved apple tree of their childhood, "Jonathan the Apple Tree," their mother had called it-even that behaved strangely. Its leaves would get a white powdery substance on them and then they curled up and fell off, and the apples themselves were tiny and wrinkled and deformed in a way that made them look like little ugly heads, and as he sat in the backyard on the sleeping bag he heard one drop....tunk?
A sinister little questioning sound. And then, after a long silence, another one-"tunk?"-and he imagined he saw the whispery movement as the shrunken apple rolled through the unmowed grass. You could say that his problem had started with the death of his parents...or the death of his friends-you could say that it was just a stage of grief, maybe-but he worried that it was actually much bigger than that, it could be traced in concentric circles rippling back into the past who knew how long? There was that time back in ninth grade, for example, when he and Zachery Leven ate some mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms, and it had been a very unpleasant sort of psychedelic drug trip. At first there had been the mystical hilarity and talking trees and couches "breathing," etc.-but then it had become increasingly anxious, the world had begun to seem as if it wanted to communicate a dreadful, dire message, uncomfortable words and letters began to emerge-for example, the long vine from his mom's pothos plant in the kitchen was curling down in a way that appeared to be unreadable cursive writing, possibly Arabic, and they formed H's and I's in a pattern: H I H I H I H I H I which freaked him quite badly.
By that time Brandon's parents had found out and they drove him and Zachery Leven to the hospital. Both he and Zachery Leven had gotten paranoid and begun to imagine that their brains were going to turn off. Like suddenly they would become vegetables. And both he and Zachery Leven were crying and his mom said, I am so ashamed of you, I hope you remember this when I'm dead, after all I've done for you this is how you repay me, I hope you think about this moment when I am gone, and his father had looked pained and said, Oh, Cathy, that kind of talk isn't necessary, and the doctor gazed at them and said: "I am going to prescribe some clonazepam-that should do the trick," and his mother said, with enthusiastic disgust: "They are both of them throwing up and they both have diarrhea!" And though it had all been forgiven him, and he had gone on to college, etc.-even still there was occasionally a lingering memory of that terrible message the world had been trying to telegraph. Something had happened, he thought, something had happened, something subtle but actually deadly had been implanted and was possibly consuming his brain the way the fungus was consuming his feet.
On the Internet he read about Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD). Could this condition have been caused by the mushrooms? And at the library he checked out the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and he tried to read up on HPPD, but afterwards that didn't seem quite right, either.
"Halos around objects," he read. "Colors of objects changing while looking at them. Illusion that objects are moving." He lifted his head and stared at the discarded white sock on the floor, which wasn't breathing, he was pretty sure.
"Aeropsia," he read. "Floaters."
What if it was worse than just the lingering effects of a bad trip? What if something was really wrong? Maybe it was just Ohio, or just America, or just Homo sapiens as a species, but it might also be that the world, the entirety of Planet Earth was basically fucked. There were long stretches when time seemed to have stopped working. The weather had stopped acting like it had when he was a child, with white Christmases and April showers and May flowers and so forth. Much of the time you would look outside and it would be gray and foggy, and you couldn't tell whether it was early morning or dusk. More and more frequently, the power would go out in his part of town and he would wake up and the clocks in the house would all say something different.
On The Weather Channel it said: "A large swath of dead clouds covered many areas of the Tennessee Valley to the Northeast yesterday." His father used to enjoy watching The Weather Channel. His father liked to sit in his recliner and doze in front of it, letting the gentle hysteria of distant blizzards and floods and tornadoes and hurricanes wash over him, and Brandon remember how Zachery Leven used to joke about it. "Uh-oh, here comes the end of the world," Zachery used to say as they passed by Brandon's sleeping father on their way to the basement to play video games. What would Zachery Leven say now? he wondered. He could imagine Zachery and Rachel stopping by for a visit, the two of them exchanging glances.
They might be like, "Um, how come you nailed your mom and dad's bedroom door shut?" They might turn on the light in the second-floor bathroom and let out a cry of surprised disgust. "Holy shit! What is that greenish shit? Mold?" They might say, "You need to get out of this house, man!" They might say: "You need to get out of this town! You need to get out of Ohio! You need to get out of this country! Hurry! Before it's too late!"
He was thinking of this again as he was on bag-boy duty that afternoon at the grocery store, standing at the end of Marci's checkout aisle-Hurry! Before it's too late! he thought, but he only stood there staring as various items came trembling down the conveyor, boxes of tea, a square of tofu, a can of organic chicken broth. They reached the end of the conveyor and began to cluster together, shoaling into a kind of tombolo at the end of the counter.
"Paper or plastic?" Brandon said, unfolding a bag, and he lifted up from his daze to see that it was the lady who loved Seckel pears-he recognized her at once, though it had been a while since he had seen her. She looked terrible. The skin around her mouth was raw and chapped, and glistened with some kind of ointment she had rubbed on it. Her eyes were large and sorrowful and appeared to be made up primarily of water.
"Can I have both plastic and paper? she said.
"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 Zachery 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. "And trenchant critique of capitalism," Zachery 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 Zachery 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 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 liked 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 funeral 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 Zachery 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 life and he would get the house finished and the economy would shift again and he would go back to college and mmet 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.