To Psychic Underworld:

Critter was standing outside the public library with his one-
year-old daughter in his arms when he saw a dollar bill on the
sidewalk.
It actually came fluttering by, right next to his tennis shoe, car-
ried by the wind along with a leaf.
He hesitated for a moment. Should he pick it up? He adjusted
Hazel's weight. She was straddled against his hip and watched
with silent interest as he bent down and snagged it.
He'd had the feeling that it wouldn't be just a normal dollar
and he was right. There was writing on it. Someone had written
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along the margins ofthe bill in black ink, in a clear, deliberate
handwriting that he guessed mightbe ayoungwoman's. /loye
you / missyou /loyeyou /send this out toyou /loyeyouplease come
back to me / will wait for you always 1-
Thiswrittenallaroundtheedgesofthebill,andhewasstand-
ingtherestudyingitwhenhissisterJonicamedownthestepsof
thelibrarytowardthem. Hehadcome topickherup. Thatwas
oneoftheconditionsofhiscurrentcircumstance.HeusedJoni's
carduringthedaysolongashewas thereatthelibraryto pick
herupfromwork.
"Hello,soldiers,"Jom saidbrightly."Howgoesthewar?"
"Mm," Crittersaid,andHazelstaredatJonisternly.
"Andwhathavewehere?"Jonisaid,indicatingthedollar
hewasstillclutchingawkwardlybetweenhisfingers. "Alittleof-
feringforyourdearestsister,perhaps?"
She took the lovedollar from him and looked it over. He
watchedasshereadthewritingonit,oneeyebrowarching. "Ye
Gods!"shesaid.
"I justfound it," Crittersaid. "Just right here on the side-
walk."
Theireyesmet. Shewasstill his oldersister,thoughshewas
alsoatinylibrarianwomanwithshorthairandapointyface,and
hewasanunemployedSasquatchofamanafootandahalftaller
thanshe.
Shehanded thedollarbacktohim. "Yikes,"shesaid. "Geez,
Critter, you're quite the magnet for freaky notes lately, aren't
you?"
To Psychic Underworld:
Hewas,yes.A magnet, hethought,as theydrovebackto Joni's
house. Thatwasonewaytolookatit.
He'dfoundthefirstnoteafewweeksafterhiswife'sfuneral,on
thesidewalknotfarfrom his apartment. Itwas writteninspiky
blocklettersonanindexcard:
TO PSYCHIC
UNDERWORLD:
STOP ASTRAL
TRAVELING TO
MOLEST/DECEIVE
OTHERS (ANIMALS TOO).
ANIMALS ARE NOT
MADE OF HATE.
CEASE AND DESIST.
"Jesus," Critterthought. Thiswaswhenhe was still in Chi-
cago, still in the old apartment that he and his wife, Beth, had
beenlivinginwhenshedied,still thinkingthathewouldproba-
blybeabletopullhimselftogether.HewaspushingHazelinher
stroller,theywereontheirwaytothepark,andhelookedaround
toseeiftherewereanynoticeablyinsanepeoplenearby.
Buttherewasnobody.ItwasSundaymorning,andthestreet
wasquietexceptforajoggerafewblocksup. Apigeonrustledat
thecurb,peckingatthebonefromadiscardedchickenwing.
Back in the days when his life had been normal, Critter
mighthave beenkindofpleased tofind such a note. Bethhad
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loved this kind of thing. So had Joni, for that matter. Beth had
been a middle school science teacher and Joni was a librarian
and they both had collections of weird stuff they had found.
Bizarre, misspelled letters written by lovelorn eighth graders.
Obscene Polaroids left in between the pages of library books.
They used to call each other on the phone to share their latest
discovery, and Critter had always remained a little off to the
side, never feeling quite as sharp or ironic as they were. Critter
was an electrician, primarily home repair, and so he didn't usu-
ally come across anything except bad wiring and faulty lighting
fixtures.
Several days after he found the first note, he was sitting in the
pediatrician's office with Hazel-he was feeling kind of proud
of himself for remembering to keep the appointment-when
another note fell out of an old copy of Sports Illustratedthat he
was perusing. This was a piece of light-blue unlined paper, and
written on it, in the careful cursive handwriting of a ten- or
eleven-year-old, was a little list:
,. tlo/ojl. a",alk ' i t ~ 901,e01te
9. tlo old 901,e,,,lrejl. "'itlr 901,e01te
8.Talk to &,o1,e01te
4.WatCh7lV
tlo01t fire c0""Pfdejl.
6. CPlay CPla/pfatio1t 9
7. tlo to the ce1,etejl.y a1td talk to 1,y 1,01,
8. c/?i9te1t to 1,fI.&,iC
q tloi1t 1,y jl.Oo1,
To Psychic Underworld:
For a moment, Critter thought he might completely lose it. It
was, he thought, possibly the most heartbreaking thing he had
ever read, and he heard himself make a soft, involuntary sound.
Across from him, a young woman with a sleeping infant
looked up sternly. Here was Critter, thick beard and shaggy long
hair, making snuffling sounds, and the little mother didn't like the
look of him at all. It would not be appropriate for him to start
weeping in the pediatrician's office, obviously, he realized, and he
lowered his eyes and tightened his jaw and he felt a repressed tear
run out of his nose and into his mustache.
Shit, he thought. He needed to get a grip on himself-this was
ridiculous.
Nearby, Hazel was sitting in the play area, among some
wooden blocks. She gave him a thoughtful expression. Then she
lifted two cubes in her hands and touched them together care-
fully, as if they might give off sparks.
"Boom," she said.
He had been having a fairly hard time of it. which was natural, he
supposed. His wife had been killed in a car accident and he was
living alone with his baby daughter and he hadn't been to work
since the funeral; customers would call with their electrical needs
and he would just let the answering machine pick up, he hadn't
even checked the messages in almost a month-there was in fact a
sticky note still posted above the telephone in Beth's handwriting:
Mrs. Palmarosa
555-U22'
Saysherdoorbellgives a ShOCK!
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Which was the last thing On earth that Beth had written to him
before she died.
"Listen," Joni had said. I want you guys to come and stay
with me for a while. Just for a visit. Get out of that apartment for
a while. Get out of Chicago. And-you know what?-you might
find that you actually like Toledo. You can be an electrician any-
where."
"Mm," Critter said. He was sitting on the couch with the por-
table phone, staring at the muted TV. ''I'll think about it," he
said.
"You don't have to do this all by yourself, you know, Critter,"
Joni said. "There are no prizes for being stoic. You realize that,
right?"
"I know," he said.
And so now here he was. It was September, and he and Hazel had
been living in Joni's apartment for more than two months, and he
guessed that he was basically kind of losing his mind.
Not completely, obviously. He continued to do a decent job as
a father, he thought. He kept an eye on Hazel as she toddled
around, he kept her diapers clean and made little plates of food
with cut-up fruit and cheese and crackers, he took her to the park
in the stroller, and they never watched any television that had sex
or swearing in it.
He was not yet ready to start looking for a job, but he was
helping a little bit with various chores. He rinsed off the dishes
and put them in the dishwasher. He took some letters to the post
office, and put gas in Joni's car, and went grocery shopping with
To Psychic Underworld:
a list that Joni had made up--though there was a moment where
he became kind of frozen in the aisle of condiments and crackers;
it was another note, a shopping list stuck to the cage of the shop-
ping cart:
R.oac/t Spray
l3afferiu
Wafer Mell(}11
Which, really, what was so surprising or disturbing about that?
Nevertheless he didn't know how long he had been standing
there looking at the scritchy, pathetic handwriting when a middle-
aged lady had spoken to him firmly.
"Sir, I need to get access to that ketchup, if you could please
move forward."
And Critter awakened from his trance with a little shudder.
It was foolish, he knew, to feel so unnerved by such stuff. He had
never been a superstitious person, and in any case it wasn't as if
there was anything particularly uncanny at work. He was living
in a city--of course there were all kinds of flotsam drifting
around.
But he hadn't noticed it before, that was the thing. Beth used
to tease him, in fact, about how inattentive he was, she was al-
ways pointing out the weirdness of the world that he was
missing-hot-air balloons in the sky over the park; the woman in
the bear suit sitting on the el train a few seats in front of them, her
bear's head in her lap; the pool of blood in the foyer of their
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apartment, right there underneath the discarded catalogs and
junkmaiL "Ohmy God!" Bethsaid. "J can'tbelieveyou didn't
seethatl"
But now, suddenly, he did. Now, suddenly, it seemed that
there were notes everywhere, emergingoutofthe blur ofthe
world.SomethinghadhappenedtohimnowthatBethwasgone,
hethought-therewas an opening, aspace, apartofhis brain
thathadbeendeafbeforewasnowexposed,itwasas ifhewere
along-dormantradio thathadbegunto receivesignals--tuned
in,abruptly,toallthecrazynote-writersoftheworld.
"Please,"someonehadwrittenonanapkinandleftitonthe
tableinMcDonald's,wherehehadtakenHazelforalittlepeace-
ful snack,acasualToledoafternoon,butnowherewasthisother
voice pokingits head through the surface ofhis consciousness
likeawormpeekingupOutoftheground. "Please,"inbaHpoint
penOn thenapkin. Andthen"Please"onthenapkinunderneath
it, and "Please"again On athird. SomeoneeitherverypoliteOr
verydesperate.
Probablyitwasn'tsuchabigdea1. Whenhehadfirstcometolive
withJoni,hehadshownhersomeofthenotesthathehadfound,
expecting, he supposed, that she would find it as eerie as he
had-theaccumulation ofthese strange little documents, pop-
pingupwhereverhewent,allofthemsadordesperateorslightly
creepy.ShewasthetypeofsisterwhohadlikedtoteU himghost
storieswhentheywereyounger, backwhenshe was ateenager
and he was eightornine. He'dfigured thatshe, too, would see
somekindofomeninthearrayofnotes. Butshedidn't.
To Psychic Underworld:
"Theseare awesome," Joni said. "1 love the 'psychicunder-
world'one."
Shehadascrapbookfull ofstuffthatshehadcomeacrossat
thelibrary,andsheshowedit tohimasifshehaddiscoveredthat
theysharedthesame hobby. AsiftheywerestampsOr coinsor
somesuchthing.
"Oh, you have to see this one," Joni said, and opened the
scrapbook to show him a note written on powder-blue memo
paperwithpicturesofkittiesonit:
Hi, I
hadcllber
sex!!With
a01111 named
ericl I love sex!!
"1 found this next to one ofthe computer terminals on the
second floor," Joni said. "Canyou believe it? Thehandwriting
lookslikeshe'sabout-what?-twelve?"
ToJoni,heguessed,it wassomethingabitlikegossip. Mildly
titillating. Something like a glimpse into a window across the
street,oranoverheardconversationatarestaurant. Howweird
peoplewere! Hereyesgotakindofconspiratorialglint.
"1 lovethatit'swritteninpinkink!" Jonisaid. "It'sprobably
oneofthosestrawberry-scentedmarkers!"
"Yeah,"Crittersaid. "Haha."
Theyweresittingatthekitchen table together,andJonihad
openedaforty-ouncebottleofbeer, whichshepouredintotwo
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highball glasses. He had a bed in the guest room, and they had set
up a crib for Hazel against one wall.
He lifted the glass to his lips. How to explain that he was
afraid? How to explain that it felt as if these notes were like the
stories she used to tell him about ghostly hands that reached up to
grasp your wrist when you weren't expecting it, hands that tight-
ened and wouldn't let free?
"What?" Joni said. "What are you thinking?"
When Beth was killed, she was reading. It was around four on a
Thursday afternoon, school was done and she was on her way to
pick up Hazel at day care, hurrying down the sidewalk toward
the bus stop. Walking and reading, which he always warned her
about, her feet moving automatically beneath her as she flipped
through a stack of quizzes that her students had taken in prepara-
tion for their sixth grade proficiency test.
Whatisahypothesis!
Whatistherelationshipbetweenafoodchainandafoodwebi'
Whatholdsthesolarsystemtogether?
And then she'd taken a step out into the street without looking.
That is what the police said. Stepped out into the street without
looking both ways. The practice tests fanned out, flew up, flutter-
ing, and were carried away, wafting into the gutters or caught in
fences Or flattened against the side of a building.
He started to imagine this, and then he made a choice not to
imagine it any longer.
To Psychic Underworld:
He had always prided himself on being a steady sort of person.
Not prone to anxiety. Stable. Even a little intimidating because of
his size.
People always assumed that he was called "Critter" because
of how he looked. The mane of red-brown hair and heavy beard
and eyebrows, which he'd had since his late teens, the bear-paw
hands, broad chest, imposing gut. Very few people knew that his
real name was Christopher, and that he had become "Critter"
because as a child he'd had such a speech impediment that he
had a hard time pronouncing his own name. "Chri'er," he called
himself. "Cridderfer," he said, and even now he had a hard time
pronouncing "Christopher." Even now, at age twenty-nine, he
stumbled over the syllables, there was still a slight lisp and sput-
ter as he spoke his own name, "Chrithdopher Tremley," even
when he pronounced it slowly. He dreaded the various official
encounters-banks and government offices, doctors, policemen,
the man at the funeral home-which was always the worst time
to try to force the hated name out of his mouth. It was a terrible,
exposed sort of feeling.
He was a very private person. Beth used to tease him; she
thought it was funny, all the things that he felt uncomfortable
about, all the stuff he thought of as personal. He disliked being
barefoot, he hated to talk on cell phones when people could over-
hear him, he didn't like to sit in the window of the el train, where
people from the street could see him as he glided past. Mypoor
man, Beth murmured, and he blushed when she kissed him in
public.
He would never, ever, have written a note for people to find
lying around the library or the sidewalk. It would have seemed
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grotesque to him. Maybe that was what bothered him so much
about these things that he kept coming across. He had the image
of his own personal thoughts softly detaching and being carried
off by the wind like dandelion seeds, floating through the city.
That was one of the things that grief felt like, he thought. Astral
traYeling, he thought.
And now, as if the notes themselves were not enough-
Lately, he had begun to imagine that he saw notes that weren't
even there. They weren't hallucinations. Not exactly. Just little
misfires, he guessed.
Like, for example, one day he and Hazel were walking to the
grocery store to get a few things that Joni had listed for him, he
was pushing Hazel's stroller down the shady block and she was
quiet, fingering her teething ring, and then he hesitated. Stiff-
ened. He could see a piece of paper that had been stapled to the
side of a tree.
YOU SUCK! it said in big capital letters.
And then when he got closer he realized that he was just imag-
ining things. It actually said: YARD SALE!
And then there was another time when he thought he saw
something written in the mud outside of the library where Joni
worked. He glanced down to the bare corner of the lawn where
the grass had been worn off and it looked for a moment as if
someone had printed something there. 1M WATCHIN YVv.
That's what it looked like at first. And then when he looked closer
he saw that it wasn't words, after all. Not English words, at least.
Some kind of Chinese characters? he thought. But no, it wasn't
To Psychic Underworld:
that, either. It was just the tracks of birds, pigeons, probably.
Their three-toed feet marking a line across the wet ground.
He was surprised by the disappointment that settled over him.
Nothing, he thought, and his throat tightened. Nothing, nothing.
If the world was trying to send him a message, what was it?
It was a little after midnight, and he sat there in his room in the
dark, in the guest room in Joni's apartment, staring out of the
window, while against the opposite wall Hazel was asleep in her
crib, her face leaned gently against the wooden bars.
There was nothing to look at outside the window, but he kept
looking. The sky was starless and purple-gray, and the silhou-
ettes of tree boughs reached up into it. Through a gap in the trees
and buildings, he could see a sliver of a busier street, the red tail-
lights of cars sliding past and then disappearing.
If you have a message for me, he thought, what is it?
There were the strings of high wires that ran from the build-
ings and connected to poles and then to other buildings and then
to poles again-you could hear how they hummed to themselves
if you were near them and quiet; there were the gestures of tree
branches and the smattering of fallen leaves running together
down the middle of the street in a formation; there were the little
whispery, wordless sounds Hazel made as she dreamed and
stirred.
You might be able to read such things, maybe. Someone
might: not him.
He wondered. He was not the man he had been anymore. He
thought: You are stillyou, but changing fast.
140 Stay Awake
It seemed so obvious, once he thought it, but still the idea sent
a l1tt1e shudder through him. He would never be the same person.
He would never be able to go back.
He could imagine himself the way that he had once been just
five or six months ago. What would he have thought, driving by
down there on the street, glancing up to see a big bearded man
sitting at the third-floor window of an apartment building. A
grown man, almost thirty years old, peering out at the street,
mumbling to himself.
He would not have recognized himself, bent over a dollar bill
that he'd spread out on the sill of the window, carefully writing
with a pen.
What a weirdo, he would have thought, as the man held his
note out in the air, letting the wind take it from his fingers.
Back then, he probably wouldn't have even noticed. He
wouldn't have been looking up toward the windows, and he cer-
tainly wouldn't have seen the dollar bill lift up in a gust of au-
tumn wind, carried off with a few leaves and scraps.
Off to join the others in their conversations--all the little
messages that the world was bearing away.