Stay Awake by Dan Chaon Read Free Book Online Page B

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 him 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 lined 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 bedrawn from the funerals 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