Stay Awake: Stories by Chaon Dan

Author:Chaon, Dan [Chaon, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780345532305
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

And then she’d taken a step out into the street without looking. That is what the police said. Stepped out into the street without looking both ways. The practice tests fanned out, flew up, fluttering, and were carried away, wafting into the gutters or caught in fences or flattened against the side of a building.

He started to imagine this, and then he made a choice not to imagine it any longer.

• • •

He had always prided himself on being a steady sort of person. Not prone to anxiety. Stable. Even a little intimidating because of his size.

People always assumed that he was called “Critter” because of how he looked. The mane of red-brown hair and heavy beard and eyebrows, which he’d had since his late teens, the bear-paw hands, broad chest, imposing gut. Very few people knew that his real name was Christopher, and that he had become “Critter” because as a child he’d had such a speech impediment that he had a hard time pronouncing his own name. “Chri’er,” he called himself. “Cridderfer,” he said, and even now he had a hard time pronouncing “Christopher.” Even now, at age twenty-nine, he stumbled over the syllables, there was still a slight lisp and sputter as he spoke his own name, “Chrithdopher Tremley,” even when he pronounced it slowly. He dreaded the various official encounters—banks and government offices, doctors, policemen, the man at the funeral home—which was always the worst time to try to force the hated name out of his mouth. It was a terrible, exposed sort of feeling.

He was a very private person. Beth used to tease him; she thought it was funny, all the things that he felt uncomfortable about, all the stuff he thought of as personal. He disliked being barefoot, he hated to talk on cellphones when people could overhear him, he didn’t like to sit in the window of the el train, where people from the street could see him as he glided past. My poor shy man, Beth murmured, and he blushed when she kissed him in public.

He would never, ever, have written a note for people to find lying around the library or the sidewalk. It would have seemed grotesque to him. Maybe that was what bothered him so much about these things that he kept coming across. He had the image of his own personal thoughts softly detaching and being carried off by the wind like dandelion seeds, floating through the city. That was one of the things that grief felt like, he thought. Astral traveling, he thought.

And now, as if the notes themselves were not enough—

Lately, he had begun to imagine that he saw notes that weren’t even there. They weren’t hallucinations. Not exactly. Just little misfires, he guessed.

Like, for example, one day he and Hazel were walking to the grocery store to get a few things that Joni had listed for him, he was pushing Hazel’s stroller down the shady block and she was quiet, fingering her teething ring, and then he hesitated.

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