Authors: Dan Chaon
Stay Awake (27 page)
She considers. She is fond of this kind of vague philosophical conundrum, and perhaps that is why her life feels sad to her even though she should be happy. She wants to find connections where there are none, meanings and structures that she can’t completely discern, that are perhaps indiscernible.
Metaphors for what?
12
Actually, if you look closely, our ghosts are fluttering everywhere, dispersed and dispersing, smoke and glimmers of ash rising up from Daddy’s cigarette, earthworms emerging from the soil when it rains and lifting up with birds to grip the power lines in our claws, we fall as leaves upon a human finger, curled in the grass at the edge of a house and never found, we settle as dust upon a key in a basement door that leads nowhere. We cast down through the sixty-watt lamplight onto the page that Eden is bent over, reading diligently.
“Could anything be more miraculous than an actual, authentic ghost?” she reads. Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century Scottish essayist, how the students loathe him. She reads:
The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see a Ghost; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind’s eye as well as with the body’s, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes; what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility?
She will read this passage aloud to them, Eden thinks, she will read it with great inflection and feeling and they some of them
She will look out at the students at their desks and there will be Christopher with his dark sad eyes
Are we not all of us Spirits? And she will look directly at him right into
Let us say that there is soon to be a moment when Daddy wakes up and he cannot breathe; the dog Angeline is sound asleep on his chest and his mouth opens to try to take in air and there is nothing, his throat clenches and his lungs don’t fill up
and there is that feeling of someone bending over him. A face is pulling close to his own face, and in the dream he is having he is a little girl whose father has come into the room to kill her while she sleeps
and in the little girl’s dream she is a woman who is walking down the stairs into the basement, where in a little earthen room she will see a woman hanging from a noose made of knotted sheets, a woman who looks almost exactly like her
a poor fucked-up woman in the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in Mitchellville, Iowa, a convicted drug felon, the cloth of the sheets tightening around her windpipe and her legs kicking, her hands as if with a mind of their own scratching at her throat, her mouth opening and closing, eyes rolling up and she can see a boy with a baby pig in his arms, standing there watching her
and there is a woman who wakes up suddenly from a dream and she knows that she is still in her apartment in Portland, it is still raining, she can hear the patter and rattle of rain against the windowpane and she thinks
She knows: My father has just died.
Let us say that this, all of this, has a logic to it. We understand each other, don’t we? Are we not, you and I, both of us spirits?
Reader, do not ask me who at this very moment is dreaming you.
Do not ask me when you are going to die.
Do not ask me where the gold is buried.
For good friends:
Tom Barbash, John Martin, Imad Rahman
For family:
Jed, Sheri, Philip, Paul
For Sheila:
Thinking of you
Thanks to the Ohio Arts Council and Pauline Delaney Professorship Fund, which offered financial support during the writing of this book. I’m also indebted to my agent, Noah Lukeman, and my editor, Susanna Porter, as well as Gina Centrello, Libby McGuire, and all of the great people at Ballantine/Random House who have made the past decade so remarkably easy—I know I’ve been incredibly lucky to have found such a warm, friendly, and patient home for my books.
Many people helped me with individual stories, and I owe thanks to the editors of the journals in which some of these stories first appeared, as well as to a great number of friends who indulgently read and commented on these pieces.
ALSO BY DAN CHAON
Await Your Reply
You Remind Me of Me
Fitting Ends
Among the Missing
D
AN
C
HAON
is the acclaimed author of
Among the Missing
, which was a finalist for the National Book Award;
You Remind Me of Me
, which was named one of the best books of the year by
The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle
, and
Entertainment Weekly
, among other publications; and
Await Your Reply
, which was a
New York Times
Notable Book and appeared on more than a dozen “Best of the Year” lists. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including
The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize
, and
The O. Henry Prize Stories
. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.