How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets by Garth Stein Read Free Book Online Page A

even though he pretended he didn’t. He felt it at the Whitman Memorial, and again when he got home. He tried to fool himself and he succeeded, so who’s the idiot? Stress, fatigue, not eating properly. He thought maybe if he ignored it, it would go away. He smoked his pot, usually a cure-all. But this one got through the defense grid. Dilantin, Tegretol, marijuana—it doesn’t matter. Sometimes the fuse just blows and nothing can stop it. Kind of inconvenient, when you think about it. Kind of a nuisance to carry around the knowledge that at any moment your brain could rage out of control and you could wake up anywhere. And you wouldn’t know what was going on until it was too late. As if there were anything you could do to stop it. No. You would see the monster, you would feel its clammy palms, and then darkness. And if you were lucky, you’d wake up where you started, or even—not so good— you’d wake up in a hospital with tubes in your arms. Or, worst case scenario, you just wouldn’t wake up at all. Pack up your troubles in a Glad trash bag and smile, smile, smile.
    He shuts off the water, still itchy so he doesn’t put on any clothes. The smoothest satin feels like wool after a seizure. He tiptoes through the living room and into the kitchen, where he scoops coffee into the coffee maker and turns it on, something to shake the quease, then he stands at his window in all his glory, observing the morning dawn over Lake Union.
    The water is quiet and the sky is dull as the morning clouds, portending rain, hunker down over Seattle. A lonely seaplane circles over Fremont and prepares for landing. It looks like a toy plane landing on a toy lake. Everything looks fake to Evan. Plasticky. Like two-dimensional cut-outs pasted on invisible wires, worked by elves from behind a cardboard photo of the city.
    The coffee machine heaves its steamy sighs, the seaplane buzzes over the lake. And all is more or less the way it should be.
    “You’re completely naked.”
    Evan jumps. His heart nearly stops. He spins around. Dean is standing in the doorway.
    “Why aren’t you asleep?” Evan asks, brushing by him. Not only was Dean not asleep, he wasn’t even rumpled.
    “I’m not tired, ” Dean says.
    Evan darts into his room, throws on jeans and a T-shirt, and returns to the kitchen.
    “Don’t they sleep where you’re from?” he asks.
    “Not at this hour, ” Dean replies.
    “What, you’re usually out picking apples by now?”
    Dean doesn’t respond. Probably because it was such an asinine comment.
    “Sorry, ” Evan mutters, pouring himself coffee. “I didn’t mean to—” He hears a phone ring quietly, distantly, unreally.
    Suddenly Evan is very afraid. Dean awake and fully dressed shortly after dawn is strange, but the distant ringing in his ears simply isn’t right. His skin crawls as he realizes that maybe he hasn’t awakened after all. Maybe the shower and the coffee and the plane are all part of a dream in which he is still trapped. It is perfectly conceivable that he is in a coma this very second, having seizure after seizure in some hospital while doctors pump gallons of sedatives into his veins in their attempts to stay the evil affliction.
    Ring. Ring.
    Wait—that’s a real ring. A phone. From his bedroom. Right. He’d shut off the living-room ringer. The bedroom phone is ringing. Mystery solved.
    But there’s another mystery. He glances at the kitchen clock. Six o’clock. That doesn’t make sense. He woke up after having a seizure while he had slept. That would make this six A. M. Right? Or not? He looks out the window again. Jesus, it isn’t six A. M. It’s six P . M . Six P. M. and Evan can’t tell the difference!
    He can tell now, though. He hadn’t noticed before because the clouds were so thick and diffused that he couldn’t see where the sun was. But the traffic on the street below, the cars on the freeway across the water, Dean: all clues that now tell Evan that it is evening, not