by Dan Chaon
But it doesn’t work like that. Whenever she closes her eyes, there is something circling brightly, in the way that a june bug dive-bombs a lightbulb, swinging in unsteady circles and colliding with the side of the house, falling onto its back, buzzing wildly. There are thoughts of the dying girl in The Collector, thoughts of the other girls in the Home, Dominique and Ursula and the lost Maris, thoughts of Nora’s own unimaginable future. She sits at the desk in her room and tries to draw faces on a piece of paper, girls with big eyes and bow mouths, modeling contemporary clothing.
Despite herself, she thinks of her father, back in Little Bow. At 6:45, he would surely be up by now, drinking coffee, ready to leave for work.
In 1914, when Nora’s father was four years old, he was set aboard the Orphan Train. Nora’s grandfather was a beggar who pretended to be blind, and he brought his three sons into the New York Children’s Aid Society wearing gunny sacks, shoeless. Her father remembered that clearly: standing in a waiting room, aware of the stink of his own body, aware that the loose sack he was wearing was like a girl’s dress. The boys’ mother had died, but he didn’t know how. Maybe in childbirth, he’d said, musingly, as if she were the forgotten name of a town he had visited. It all seems like it happened to someone else, he told her. It’s blurry in my mind. He remembered, he said, that his father had hoped for money when he brought them to the Children’s Aid Society. His father was a crafty, bitter man, and had imagined that his sons might be worth something. He argued for a while with a horrified lady in a heavy blue-gray dress, demanding that the boys show her their muscles, show her they could work! And at last, she gave him some coins and he went away.
The lady had turned to them. “Oh, my poor children,” she had said. Nora’s father had flinched when she touched his head, but he recalled that her hand had been tender and slow, and that she had brushed back his hair.
“Are you to be my mother?” Nora’s father had asked, and one of his brothers had filliped him on the back of his skull.
——
As a sophomore in high school, Nora found the word fillip in Webster’s New World Dictionary, 2nd College Edition. It was a find that pleased her with its accuracy, a word she hadn’t known existed. “Fillip,” she said, and thumped her own head like a melon. She sat staring at the dictionary, filled with wonder. It was a word that her history teacher, Mr. Bosley, himself would have to look up. Nora jotted this down. She was doing this as a project for his history class, an extra-credit project that Nora had wanted to do well on, since she had been given a B on the last test. Mr. Bosley was the president of the local historical society, and had offered them a reprieve from his cruel tests if they presented him with well-documented interviews of elderly residents of the community. She had known that her own father’s story could help improve her standing in Mr. Bosley’s estimation. She was aware that she would need to attain a grade point average of at least 3.5 if she wished to attend the college of her choice. At the time, she was of the notion that her future hung in the balance. She wanted to be a famous and remarkable person—different from the rest of her family.
She wrote:
Starting in 1854, the New York Children’s Aid Society began the “placing out” or “free home” programs to give orphaned and deprived children a chance at a new life in the West. Among these children was my father, Mr. Joseph Doyle. In 1914, at the age of four, he traveled by train to the town of Brussels, Iowa. He had been one of thousands of New York street children which were called “street arabs,” but they were actually neglected and abandoned youths who roamed the city. The children made their way in the world by stealing, begging, and working as newsboys or bootblacks or coal shovelers. They spent their nights sleeping in alleys, doorways, and discarded packing boxes.
This is what she had been working on when she found out she was pregnant. The essay remains unfinished, a useless appendage, and she is aware that she will never know how it ends. She will never again interview her father about his experiences, she will never again get the chance to summarize his life and reach a conclusion.
But she knows she will always think about it. She will always wonder whether she would have discovered something about her father’s history that explained everything and she will imagine the essay that she could have completed for Mr. Bosley, an A+ essay, she feels. Her mind will pace in a circle around these little mysteries: her father, and the legend of that disappearing Ambrose child, and the girl at Mrs. Glass House—Maris.
Outside it continues to snow. Whatever escaping tracks had been left by Maris would have been covered a long time ago.
10
October 12, 1995
When the packet came in the mail, Jonah didn’t open it at first. He glanced over the brown manila envelope, and saw who it was from. The PeopleSearch Agency was stamped in smudged black ink in the upper right-hand corner. He saw his own name and address, not even typed, but handwritten in a sloppy, childish cursive, and his heart sank. It didn’t look official at all.
He had waited almost nine months for this packet to arrive, long enough to be convinced that the whole thing was a scam. He’d tried calling them once, to check on the “progress” of his, what?, his account, he said at last, hesitating, and was immediately put on hold. The phone receiver grew wet against his ear as he waited, listening to crooning soft rock that was played to him through the telephone lines, running his fingernails up across his forehead, up through his hair. At last, after almost twenty minutes, an elderly-sounding woman came on to tell him that his case was still being “investigated.”
“We’re working on it, honey,” she’d said soothingly. “These things can take years, I hate to tell you,” and he’d nodded politely into the receiver. Of course, he said, I understand, though he felt his ears heating up, the sound of blood beating, hush, hush, hush. Three thousand dollars, he thought. He had given them three thousand dollars, nearly a third of the money he’d been able to save from the sale of his mother’s house, the little yellow house where he’d grown up, the furniture—some antiques—and his grandfather’s guns and coin collection. He thought to tell the woman this. I gave you all my money, he wanted to say. I should be getting something back for it. But he didn’t. All he said was, “Well!” All he said was, “So! I guess you’ll . . . contact me, when you know something?” And the woman had laughed warmly.
“Yes, we surely will,” she said. “Just be patient, Mr. Doyle!”
And now, here in his hands was the result of his patience, the result of his savings. A thin nine-by-twelve envelope, not more than a few pages by the weight of it. He put it down on the coffee table, set his little statue of “The Thinker” on top of it. He was a fool.
——
That day had begun so simply. Jonah had a quick errand to run and he stepped from the foyer of his apartment building into the thick, chilly drizzle of a Chicago autumn day. October 1995: nothing significant happening in the world, or at least not in America, not in this city where Jonah had awakened to find himself alive and existent. Or sort of existent. Here he was, Jonah Doyle, aged twenty-five, no known connections, a wanderer in a major U.S. metropolis. Just an ordinary, anonymous person like the others who were moving grayly in the distance along the opposite street. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head as droplets of mist speckled his unnecessary sunglasses. He stared down at the movement of his black, square-toed boots on the pavement as he walked. Tough, solid boots, and he was not afraid of stepping on broken glass, or someone’s lost, flattened sock, or a bare, hideous chicken bone. Whatever. He crossed over the sad manhole cover that he liked, the manhole cover with grass growing in a ring from its cracks, beautiful baby grass, so new that the green was almost phosphorescent. He admired it again, wondering how it was possible for the grass to survive like that, how long it would last, with the frost coming. He turned up his headphones. The autumn leaves came spinning slowly out of the sky, sharp-edged Technicolor. His life wasn’t so bad, he thought. The spike-tipped iro
n fences at the edges of the sidewalk seemed more vividly black, the three-story brick apartment buildings more solidly three-dimensional. The flap of a wayward newspaper page lifted its broken wing from the sidewalk and flew forward a few paces before settling, and he wasn’t disturbed by it. Not really.
——
He was on his way to buy notecards. He would go to the drugstore and buy the notecards, and then he would go to the library, and then he would go to work, and then he would come home and begin to write the paper that had been assigned to him in his anthropology class. He would try to go to bed by one A.M.
He had been working very hard lately to keep things in order, to be very specific and goal-oriented. He was trying to make each day like a story he was telling about himself. He consulted the planner that he had begun to carry with him—his At-A-Glance calendar, his street map of Chicago, his train and bus schedules, his notes and memoranda. He would find himself shuffling through it even when he knew where he was going, dividing his day into neat segments, detailing it in his mind as he went. As he walked, he projected himself by increments into the future. He could picture the tattoo parlor two blocks away where he would turn left; he could see the aisle of the drugstore where the notecards and other paper products were kept, and the line at the cash register he would stand in. He had an idea of the particular table where he would sit at the library. At exactly one-fifteen, he would leave the library and walk to the el train, and he could visualize a map of the Howard Red Line, a seam that ran along the coastal edge of the city, and he could hear the crackling, murky voice of the train conductor calling out Roger’s Park. North and Clyborn. Loyola. He could picture the locker room of the restaurant where he worked, his apron and checked cook’s pants hanging there in the narrow metal hollow of his locker (#71); he could picture the table where he would stand chopping vegetables while the cheerful, aggressive Spanish of his coworkers passed over his head, and from there he would project himself even farther into the future—imagining his anthropology paper finished, typed neatly, handed in; imagining actually making it through the class to the end of the semester; imagining the college degree he was working toward. He could picture himself as a center point in expanding space—the other cooks moving past him in their hair nets and white aprons, the swoosh of waiters and waitresses passing through, the chatter of diners at their tables, the skyline of the city, the suburbs, the great silent fields that trailed their long emptiness all the way back to Little Bow, South Dakota, where no one who had ever loved him was alive.
And then, lifting his head from these thoughts, he found that he had not even reached the drugstore yet. He had, in fact, walked past it, or made an incorrect turn, or something. He was on an unfamiliar street, and he had to crouch down on the sidewalk at the edge of a building, irritated with himself and a bit shaky, too. He was lost again.
——
After all this time it should have been easier, he thought. When he first moved to Chicago, he had imagined that he would evolve, step by step, into a new self, a new life. But, though over two years had passed, he was not really a different person. Across the street, seagulls were alighting on discarded food in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, and people were hurrying or strolling along the sidewalk toward the el train station. At the end of the block, a bearded man reached toward him—a sun-browned yam of a hand, shaking a Styrofoam cup in which a few coins were lodged. Jonah straightened his sunglasses and moved past the man without speaking, though his back stiffened as the man stared at him.
By now he should know how to deal with these basic things. Most of the time he did. He knew how to avoid a crazy homeless beggar, he knew how to move headlong down the street with his face turned low, with the aura of a person who was busy and on his way to someplace important.
But it didn’t come naturally to him. That was what he had been realizing. The pattern of his thinking was constantly being marred by intuition, by his imagination, by stories he told himself that soon metamorphosed into half-truths.
Now, standing on the el train platform, he could remember vividly how the PeopleSearch Agency had seemed like a wonderful solution to his problem. How enticed he’d been by the billboard that showed an elderly woman and a young woman embracing. “Are You Missing Someone?” it said. “We Can Help!” How gladly he’d written out a check after talking to them on the phone.
——
This had been only nine months ago, a day in late February not long after he’d been to Steve and Holiday’s for the last time. Steve had quit his job at Bruzzone’s, and the connections between them had become more and more tenuous. Jonah had lost his charm for them—he’d wanted, he realized, to be closer friends with them than they were prepared for.
He remembered once, sitting in their kitchen, playing with Henry while Holiday finished cooking the dinner. Henry was playing a game where he put his hand into Jonah’s mouth, and Jonah pretended to eat it up. Henry found this hilarious. His mouth opened broadly, in toothless delight, and he laughed in that strange hiccuping way babies laughed.
“You know,” Jonah said to Holiday. “If you guys ever wanted to go out on a date by yourself, or something, I could baby-sit for Henry. If you wanted.”
“Oh, Jonah,” Holiday said. “That’s so nice of you. But . . . we have a really good baby-sitter.”
“I’d do it for free,” Jonah said. He smiled up at her, and then, when Henry again extended his fingers, he nipped them very lightly. “Arr Arr Arr,” Jonah said, and Henry chuckled happily.
“Listen,” Jonah said, after they’d played for a little longer. “Does Henry have a godfather? Because, you know, I’d be glad to do it. I mean, like, if you guys died in an accident, or something, I’d be glad to take him in.”
Holiday turned from the stove and gave him a long look. Then she tried on a smile. “Well, Jonah,” she said. “Both my parents and Steve’s parents are still alive. So, I mean, if something were to . . . happen, I suppose he would go to them.”
“Oh, of course,” Jonah had said. “But they’re old! They might not be able to take care of him.”
“And I have three sisters. And Steve has a sister and a brother.”
“Well, sure,” Jonah said. “Right. I was just saying that if . . . it ever came up, I’m available. That’s all.”
“That’s really sweet of you, Jonah,” she said. But she’d stared hard as he chattered his teeth against the sour, rubbery flesh of Henry’s fingers. “Rrrr,” he growled, and her smile tightened, then faded.
Thinking about it later, he was aware that he’d crossed a line that he hadn’t realized was there. He’d come on too strong, had tried to settle himself into the closest circle of their life where he wasn’t wanted. They didn’t say this, of course. But he could tell. They used to invite him places—they went to a festival of animated film, to a farmer’s market, to a Korean restaurant where he fell in love with kimchi. But now they didn’t call him anymore, and when he tried to telephone them, he always got their answering machine, even though he was certain they were there in their apartment, monitoring their calls. “Hey, guys,” he said, awkwardly speaking as he imagined the bland slow turning of a recording tape. “I was just checking in . . . to see what was going on.” And then he called an hour later, just in case. One week, he had left them fifteen messages, and not one of them was returned.
He had only been invited to dinner because he had run into Holiday on the street, on Michigan Avenue outside of the Walgreen’s, and she’d hugged him and said, “Oh, it’s so good to see you! We should get together sometime.”
“Okay,” Jonah said. “This week is good for me. Any night this week, actually.”
“Oh,” said Holiday. And then he’d realized that she hadn’t meant it, though she immediately came up with a time and date. “It will be so nice to see you again!” she’d said. “We’ve missed you.”
But it was clear, even as he arrived at their apartment, that this was to be the last time. There were silences even as t
hey opened the door, and they would not show him Henry, who was of course asleep, and Steve and Holiday kept exchanging glances as Jonah tried to make conversation.
They used to like hearing him talk. They used to take pleasure in the various things Jonah saw as he wandered through Chicago, they used to say that he was “a brilliant observer.” But now, it seemed, they could hardly wait for him to finish. He kept hoping that if he just continued on his observations would become brilliant again. But they didn’t. He told a story about Mrs. Orlova, how every time he saw her she said “What’s wrong? You look sick!” even when he felt happy. He tried to amuse them with talk about the people he saw from his apartment window, and the neighbors who shared the building with him who were always going in and out. Once, in the middle of the night, a shaggy, drunken young man had taken his trash to the Dumpster wearing only a pair of briefs, tiptoeing barefoot through the light snow with a garbage bag that, when Jonah had later out of curiosity slit it open, contained only beer cans and coffee grounds and grapefruit halves. Once he’d seen a man beating up a woman near the foyer, and the woman had put her hand over her mouth to muffle her own cries. People kissed in doorways, they hurried down the sidewalk or strolled slowly, they called to one another or sang. In the middle of the night, a pair of men had attacked each other, rolling around and gnashing in the street, and one of Jonah’s neighbors had opened up a window and yelled at them. “Shut up!” his neighbor had called, throwing a stuffed animal down at them, and the men had both stopped fighting, rising up from their battle to shout angrily at the man who had thrown the toy at them. “Come down, you coward,” they called. “Come down, come down. We’ll kick your ass!” And they’d both begun to stomp on the toy before, finally, they stalked away together down the middle of the street.
In his mind, this had been a wonderful and hilarious account, one that would please them. But as he talked, he could feel the story faltering, becoming pointless and rambling, and Jonah was aware that they wished he would go home. Holiday was leaning forward as Jonah groped for words. The more painful it became, the more Jonah wanted them to laugh, or nod, or say “Ah!” in the way that they used to.