Free Stay Awake by Dan Chaon

would have to be discussed at some point, once the situation with Rosalie was resolved.
    His life had started out pleasantly enough. He and his sister growing up uneventfully in a suburb of Chicago, moving dutifully through elementary school and middle school and high school and college and finding jobs not far from their parents, who had then died abruptly when Zach and Monica were in their early twenties. Their father, a heart attack in his car, in the parking lot outside of the little strip-mall office where he’d had a dentistrypractice. Their mother, about six months later, in the same car, sitting in the garage of their old childhood house with the engine running.
    It was not something he liked to think about. “You should get a little therapy,” Monica had said. “I’ve found it very helpful, just to talk about my feelings, and sort of put everything in perspective,” and he agreed that it sounded like it would be a good idea and he’d visited a mental-health professional who had given him some medication, temporary medication, which had basically been enough. Shortly thereafter he had met Amber and they had fallen in love and gotten married and his life had moved back onto the track; they had their honeymoon in Scotland and they’d bought a house and two cars, and they’d worked fastidiously to pay off their student loans and mortgage and tried to save a little for the future.
    Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future
. He had read that somewhere, but it came to him like a voice speaking from the back of his mind, and he shuddered. The titanium pins that held his halo traction in place, the pins that had been drilled into the skull above his ears, felt like they’d loosened a little. It was as if he could sense them twisting and untwisting.
    He fingered a buzzer that would call a nurse to help him, but didn’t press it. What did he need help for? He could feel the nipple of the button beneath his thumb.
    He was remembering an article he had read on the Internet about the transplantation of heads. In 1970, Dr. Robert White first successfully transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey ontoanother monkey’s body. It lived for several days, paralyzed from the neck down but aware. Eating. Following people with its eyes. Sometimes trying to bite.
    He came alert abruptly and the nurse was leaning over him. She looked surprised, drew back abruptly.
    “Mr. Dixon,” she said, and adjusted her nurse’s hat, which looked a little like a paper boat. “Mr. Dixon,” she breathed, and he felt the pinch of an injection. “You shouldn’t be up at this hour,” she murmured, and then she began to hum to him. An old lullaby he thought he remembered, the whispered words barely audible, coming as if from a great distance.
    … while the moon … drifts in the skies … stay awake … don’t close … your … eyes.…
    And then suddenly morning sun was streaming into the room. The morning, and Amber appeared, backlit against the window with a rind of light around her.
    “Is—?” Zach heard himself whisper. “Dead?”
    It was the first thing that he thought of, the first word that his lips formed. He couldn’t see her expression, but he felt fairly certain. “Dead?” he whispered, and she came forward and bent down and the features of her face came into focus.
    “No,” Amber said. Her face was pinched and her eyes were lit and fierce, in the way of a marathon runner, or an all-night gambler. Her lips drew back and she showed her teeth but it was too exhausted and intense to be a smile. “She’s alive,” Amber said. “She made it through. She—”
    He watched as her eyes scoped along the edges of his traction, the halo crown and the metal bars that ran past his ears and attachedto the vest at his shoulders; the web of rope and pulleys that held his legs suspended—as if she had noticed for the first time.
    “It’s not—as they