Stay Awake by Dan Chaon Read Free Book Online Page A

their way to the basement to play video games.
    What would Zachary Leven say now? he wondered. He could imagine Zachary 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 Seckelpears—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 Zachary 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. “A trenchant critique of capitalism,” Zachary 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 Zachary 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