Stay Awake by Dan Chaon Read Free Book Online

grade, for example, when he and Zachary 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 communicatea 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 the shingles on the neighbor’s roof seemed to be arranged so that 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 Zachary Leven to the hospital. Both he and Zachary 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 Zachary 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 fine afterward, and his parents, even his mother, had 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 PerceptionDisorder (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 afterward 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. Hisfather 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 remembered how Zachary Leven used to joke about it. “Uh-oh, here comes the end of the world,” Zachary used to say as they passed by Brandon’s sleeping father on