Free Stay Awake by Dan Chaon Page B

her knuckle against the fiberglass vest across his chest. It was a weary but gently playful gesture, Zach thought. Partly, it was meant to bring good luck, like knocking on wood. Partly it meant: I can’t really think of anything else to say at the moment. “Well,” she said. “I guess—”
    “Sure,” he said. “You better get going.”
    They both tried out a smile, experimentally. But it felt a little dangerous to be smiling, and they stopped almost at once. As if their greedy sense of hope might be spotted—and punished?!—by some stern Higher Power.
    After Amber left, Zach lay there for a long time, staring up at the ceiling.
It will be okay
, he thought. It was all going to be fine. He tried again to picture them—himself, Amber, baby Rosalie—in the future. Standing in the backyard, beside the tree with the oldswing. All three of them smiling. He could see it as if someone had taken a photograph.
    He would undergo rehabilitation, and eventually, after a struggle, he would walk again. Perhaps there would always be a limp, he thought.
    And even if his body didn’t ever start to work again, at least his brain continued on. Right? He still had his mind, and really wasn’t the flesh just a container, a shell that you inhabited?
    Back when he was spending his nights on the Internet, he had come across a long article about astral projection. According to some philosophies, the self existed outside of the physical body. There were many religions that believed the soul could lift away, a noncorporeal version of your mind could rise up from the tether of muscle and skin and bone and blood and float off on its own.
    Its own journey.
    People who experienced astral travel reported that it seemed to happen from a vantage point such as high in the sky looking down. Astral travel was frequently reported by people who had near-death experiences, in which they could view themselves from above, watching themselves as hospital staff worked on their bodies. Frederik van Eeden presented one of the first studies of out-of-body dreams to the Society of Psychical Research in 1913, and he described a “silver thread” that connected his projected self to his sleeping physical form.
    “In these lucid dreams,” van Eeden wrote, “the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfectawareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition.”
    Zach didn’t know whether he believed in this or not, but he thought that there must be—well,
something
—
    There was a snail track of sweat moving down the back of his neck, leaving an insistent itch in its wake.
    Outside the window, in the parking lot, there was a female clown holding a bouquet of blue and pink helium balloons, each with a cartoon face printed on it. He watched as the woman stood there, flipping through a small notebook. The balloons were revolving upon the axis of their strings, the smiling faces slowly rotating, facing his window and then turning away in a slow circle.
    Zach was aware of the sound of a small voice calling to him, a sound in the back of his mind, and then another trickle down the back of his neck, an odd feeling in his hair, like the ticklish legs of an insect. Movement.
    Why do people
, he thought. He was thinking of something that Amber had asked him once, right after the baby was born.
    Why do people want to have babies?
she had said, her eyes upon him heavily.
What does a baby have that we want from it?
    Well, he had said. It’s … it’s part of life. It’s …
    She had been going through a kind of depression, postpartum depression, he thought, she wasn’t herself—and they were driving along the interstate; he was behind the wheel and there was that feeling you have when the car is just an extension of your body, when you are at least partially a machine and your movements are also the automobile’s movements