by Dan Chaon
“I wonder how long we’ll know each other,” Jonah had said at last, after the pause in the conversation had seemed to settle over them like a layer of soil. He said it cheerfully, trying to sound as if he were just musing, but Holiday looked at him guiltily.
“Oh, Jonah,” she said, reproachfully. “We’ll always know each other! Once you meet somebody, you don’t unmeet them.”
“Jonah, Jonah,” said Steve, as he always did, as if it were an old children’s rhyme. “Jonah in the whale.” He smiled sleepily, and Jonah thought of the Bible verse that he knew, that had once pleased them.
“ ‘Take me up and cast me forth into the sea,’ ” said Jonah. He smiled, speaking sonorously. “ ‘So shall the sea be calm unto you; for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.’ ”
“That’s so pretty,” Holiday said, without enthusiasm, though the first time Jonah had recited it to her, she’d widened her eyes as if he’d performed a magic trick. “Why, Jonah!” she said then. “That’s amazing! What is it? Shakespeare?” Jonah had told her that it was from the Bible, from the Book of Jonah. It was the only Bible verse he had ever memorized.
“The Bible is full of great poetry,” Steve had reflected. “You’ve got a really excellent reciting voice, Jonah!”
But now Steve didn’t say anything. Even discussion of Jonah’s dead brother, David, the imaginary one who looked like Steve, didn’t stir their interest anymore.
But Jonah continued to think about it. He had built a brother out of nothing—a brother who had acted in plays and ran track, a brother who had died in a car wreck. David. Without even meaning to, talking about it had brought Jonah toward a vague but constant awareness of the real brother who presumably existed out there, the male infant his mother had given up for adoption.
——
Nevertheless, when he saw the man on the el train, it took him by surprise. The intensity of it. It was the day after he’d been at Steve and Holiday’s place for the last time, and he’d woken up late, with a headache from the red wine. Take me up and cast me forth into the sea, he thought as he opened his eyes.
He had been late for work that morning, which was unusual for him, and he actually ran the last block to the el platform, full of single-minded anxiety. He pounded up the steps just as the door to the train slid open and the waiting passengers began to funnel their way inside. Usually, he was right at the edge of the ramp as the train pulled up. He had become an expert at gauging the exact spot to stand, so that the doors of the train came to rest directly in front of him and he could be the first one inside. He prided himself on this skill.
But on that day Jonah was the last of the clutch of morning commuters to board. The seats were filled and the aisles were crowded, a thicket of raised arms and solemn faces, so packed that there wasn’t even a handrail or support pole to grasp. When the train pitched forward, he stumbled against the bosom of an impassively frowning African woman in a brick-colored scarf. She said something horrible about him in her native language.
But he hardly noticed. For it was at this moment that he caught a glimpse of the man who might have been his brother. Or rather, he saw a face, floating some six or seven heads beyond.
Their eyes met for a moment, and an electric, rippling sensation slid over Jonah’s skin. He felt it rise, tingling in his hair, and he was actually dazed.
It was him, Jonah thought. Jesus Christ! That’s him! That’s my brother! They might have been twins. They had the same blondish hair, the same brown eyes and short, blunt nose, the same wide mouth and broad cheeks. And more than that, the same . . . what? That old psychic feeling he’d had as a teenager. An aura, Jonah thought, something like a hallucination. Invisible waves emanated from the person he was looking at.
But the man didn’t seem to notice anything. He narrowed his eyes to suspicious slits when he saw Jonah staring at him, then lowered his head deliberately to the paperback he was reading. A person moved, and then another, and then Jonah lost sight of him. Jonah tried to move forward, edging closer to the place where the man was sitting. But before he could even locate the person he’d seen, the train reached the next stop. There was a general, amoeba-like flow of bodies as people poured in one door and out the other. And the person he’d seen was gone.
——
For weeks after that, perhaps months, Jonah had gone to the el train platform and loitered there, in hopes of catching a glimpse of the person who might have been his brother. He went to the train later than usual and stood behind the waiting crowd, sweeping his eyes across the backs of their heads in his search. He tried to remain unobtrusive, slowly and casually strolling by in his white T-shirt and checked cook’s slacks, a baseball cap with the brim low over his eyes. If someone caught him looking, he’d lower his head, staring down at his black scuffed sneakers for a while before resuming.
Maybe this was the child his mother had given up for adoption, he thought. Or maybe it was another child that his biological father had parented, a half sibling that he knew nothing about. Or a cousin. He was aware again of his father—who had lived in Chicago, according to his grandfather. He had never much resembled either his mother or his grandfather, and he considered the possibility that maybe there was a whole tribe of people who resembled him. Who thought like him. Who would welcome him.
But he never found the person he was looking for.
——
On the day the package came from the PeopleSearch Agency, he had been mulling over a passage from one of his anthropology textbooks, Ascent to Civilization: The Archaeology of Early Man. He kept reading it over, trying to make it coherent, to make it fit his thoughts.
“If,” he had underlined. “If, as we commonly accept, the lives and values of the most ‘primitive’ people on earth today are worth as much as any reader of this book, then surely each moment of the past, each person, had equal value. Even in a book like this largely devoted to the Old Stone Age we cannot distinguish the difference between say 150,000 and 140,000 years ago. We do not know what the individuals of those two periods thought, felt, enjoyed, and suffered, or how different they were. But we can at least appreciate that to those people, their lives were as important as ours are to us.”
It made him feel sad. Reading this made him feel worse than he had when he’d been reading novels in his literature class, where the characters were full of a purpose and meaning that had embarrassed him. They had motivations, and complexities, and their lives were full of systems of symbolic importance. They represented something. Various things.
The problem with his own life, he thought, was that he had not been born significant. He was like those primitive peoples whose lives left almost nothing—a few bones and flint tools, a charred circle where their fire pit had been. Unlike the characters in great novels, he had no connection to the major world of human endeavor—no relationship to politics, or sociology, or economics, or the great movements of his time. The stuff that would be remembered. What could he say but that his people were the detritus of various empires. Nothings upon nothing. Irish peasants, arriving at Ellis Island and wandering helplessly through the streets of New York; conquered Lakota, nomadic aboriginals, marched to the barren plains of their reservations and corralled there, to wait endlessly. Even the town where he grew up was a nothing town, not a place that an empire really wanted, but only a mile marker, a place that was necessary to own only because it existed in a great blank space in between significant coasts. The great pulse of the world, which throbbed vaguely in Chicago, grew silent as it irradiated out into the plains.
Jonah would not be remembered for anything. That, at least, was a certainty.
——
He thought of this as he walked home. Maybe his father, or his brother, had more to do with the larger world. Maybe it didn’t matter. He didn’t have an idea for an anthropology paper, not even a thesis, but only two quotes that circled in his head: But we can at least appreciate that to those people, their lives were as important as our
s are to us. And Take me up and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you. There was a great essay in these two thoughts, if only he could bring them together. If only he could articulate it. Mostly, he experienced his thoughts as disconnected, as wobbly planets circled by moons, which were then themselves circled by little asteroids and space junk, all tilting around a central sun, which was himself. His literature teacher said his essays were “ambitious but muddled,” and in the margins she wrote repeatedly: “Unclear.” “Unclear.” Or simply, “Hmmm. . . .”
Mrs. Orlova was outside their apartment building, sweeping the sidewalk with a broom, and he felt a bit better, knowing that she would scoff at everything that troubled him. Loneliness? Significance? Ha! She had grown up in Siberia. He smiled at her as she raised her head from her work to frown at him.
“You look terrible,” she said. “Are you sick?”
“No,” Jonah said. “Not at all.” Even after several years, he was not used to Mrs. Orlova’s bluntness—the gloomy exaggeration that was the exact opposite of the midwestern reticence that he’d grown up with.
“You must be depressed,” Mrs. Orlova said, and peered at him. “You look sweaty.”
“Oh, really?” Jonah said. He passed a hand over his face, which was dry, unperspiring. “No,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
“Whatever you say,” Mrs. Orlova said. “I can see with my own eyes that you have been fired from your job!”
“No, I haven’t.”
“It’s worse then,” Mrs. Orlova said, looking hard at him. “Someone has broken your heart.”
——
He found the response from the PeopleSearch Agency curled up and crammed ungracefully into the narrow mailbox. It seemed unimportant.
But when he slit open the manila folder, he began to shudder. To actually shudder.
Here was the name of Troy Timmens. Troy’s birth certificate. A photocopy of relinquishment papers. The address of the people who had adopted him.
Jonah stood there for a long time, his throat tightening, his breath seeming to harden in his lungs. He looked at the papers.
His life was changing. He could feel it.
11
June 30/July 1, 1996
On the night he was arrested, Troy was thinking that maybe things were okay. He was feeling better than he had in a long time. Pretty good! he thought. Calmed and almost happy, not worrying about anything. There was a little party—Troy and his old high school friend Mike Hawk and Ray. At eleven that night, they were playing Frisbee out in the road in front of Troy’s house, under the streetlights. They were a little stoned, and a little drunk, but not so much as to be a nuisance. They kept their voices low, so the neighbors weren’t disturbed; they kept their eye out for the infrequent car that might pull down the street; and they politely got out of the way when they saw headlights approaching. It was a friendly game—they didn’t stand very far apart, and they passed the Frisbee between them in the same way that a marijuana pipe traveled in a circle from person to person. Troy enjoyed watching the bright green disk hover through the galaxy of insects that accumulated beneath the fluorescence; he enjoyed the minor prowess, the simple athletic movements that were required to snatch the Frisbee out of the air. Nothing special, or competitive: just a toy, passing from hand to hand. Troy, barefoot, in shorts, appreciated the warm, timeless summer air, the intimation of childhood vacation. Loomis was asleep.
——
Playing Frisbee was also fun because Ray was so notoriously bad at it. “Oh, come on,” Ray complained. “Let’s play cards or something.”
“Cards?” Troy said scornfully. “Ray, how many beautiful summer nights like this are you going to get . . . in your entire life? I mean, if you live to be, say, seventy-five, the number of beautiful summer nights is a very finite number.”
“Oh, good,” Ray said. “Just what I need for my beautiful summer night. Morbid philosophy from Mr. I-Just-Turned-Thirty!” But he nevertheless followed Troy and Mike outside, and even, after a time, seemed to be enjoying his own lack of competence.
“Okay,” he said. “I think I’m getting the hang of it.” But the Frisbee, when Ray threw it, wobbled arthritically through the air, or fell on the ground, or spun forcefully in the wrong direction. Once, Troy told Mike Hawk, Ray had thrown a Frisbee and the disk had veered off behind Ray’s head, striking an innocent young woman a glancing blow across the ear. It was weird, Troy thought, that Ray could work as a stripper—someone who had such control over his body’s shifts and sways and gyrations—and yet he was ultimately so uncoordinated. Ray flung the Frisbee and it sputtered through the air, curving past Mike and landing with a thunk against a tree in Troy’s neighbor’s yard.
For his part, Ray was still getting a lot of mileage out of riffing on Mike Hawk’s name. When they were at the bar, Ray loved to bring girls over just so he could say, “Ladies, I’d like you to meet Mike Hawk.” No one thought it was that funny then, but he still kept at it.
“Mike Hawk is really going at it tonight,” Ray said, in a sportscaster voice. “Mike Hawk knows when to get hard, and knows how to ease his way in!” This quip delighted him so much that he tripped trying to grab the Frisbee out of the air and fell onto the little patch of lawn between the street and the sidewalk, his long legs scissoring through the air as he fell. For a moment, it looked as if he might have hurt himself, but he bounced back up. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I really suck at this game. Can we light up another joint, please? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to beat Mike Hawk.”
“Hilarity ensues,” Troy said, making a wry face and curling his toes against the grass. Things were okay, he thought. Everything was normal. Happy. His life wasn’t bad.
——
He had been feeling a lot of unplaceable anxiety lately. He was upset about Loomis’s fall from the tree, and the fact that he couldn’t reach Carla, and the call from the guy at the Mrs. Glass House. And just in general. A few days earlier, when Jonathan Sandstrom had shown up at the bar with the latest shipment, he’d been of a mind to refuse it—to quit, once and for all, as he’d told himself he would. He needed to change his life, and after this he thought he would have to start telling his various customers that they’d have to look elsewhere.
It was, relatively, a small delivery. “Great to see you, Troy,” Jonathan Sandstrom said. He was a blond, glossily handsome guy in his late twenties, with a braying, artificial laugh and an almost disturbingly upbeat demeanor. He gave Troy an elaborate handshake when they met in the parking lot behind the bar. “Troy,” he said, and paused dramatically. “You should maybe sit down, because you are going to be so extremely happy with the stuff I’ve got for you, you’re not even going to be able to contain yourself.”
“Okay, then,” Troy said, and gave Sandstrom a quick, hard smile. “I’m glad to hear it.” He sat down in the passenger seat of Sandstrom’s BMW and opened the small, brightly colored paper tote bag that Sandstrom handed him. “The usual,” he said, and grinned confidentially as Troy examined the contents: three large Ziploc bags of fresh, good-smelling Mexican marijuana, a container of hallucinogenic mushrooms, thirty-six tabs of LSD. This would tide him over for a number of months, and after that, maybe he would cut back even further.
“Listen,” Sandstrom said. “I know you’re not interested in cocaine, and I don’t blame you. Very. Difficult. To. Deal. With.” He underlined each word with a swipe of his hand. “But I think you really ought to think about Ecstasy. It’s a nonaddictive substance. Not dangerous. Very popular. I know that some people are not interested in change, and I respect that, but maybe you . . .” and Troy watched as Jonathan Sandstrom built a kind of elaborate structure in the air with his hand gestures, “maybe you want to try a sample, just to test it out.”
“I don’t think so,” Troy said.
“Something different. Just a suggestion.”
“This ought to do me,” Troy said.
“And that’s fine, too,” Sandstrom said. �
��You know what you want, and I respect that.” He lowered the window and dropped the cigarette that he had just begun to smoke onto the asphalt. Then took another one out of his chest pocket, lit it, drew deeply.
“Listen,” Sandstrom said. “Do you know the way to a little town called Beck? I’m supposed to meet someone there at—” He looked at his watch. “Jesus Christ. At three.”
“Yeah,” Troy said. “Sure.”
They took out a map. Troy fingered the ropes of his tote bag handles, and pointed toward the northwest. He was getting tired, and wasn’t thinking about much of anything. There was no way of knowing that the way to Beck would lead Jonathan Sandstrom to a ten-year prison sentence; there was no way of knowing that Sandstrom was being staked out by police, and that Troy was about to be swept up in the wake.
——
He didn’t think of himself as a “drug dealer,” exactly. It wasn’t as if he hung around outside school yards, tempting children; it wasn’t as if he were getting rich off people’s addictions. He didn’t believe in stuff like crack or heroin, and in fact he basically approved of the so-called War on Drugs, though he also thought that it was long past time that marijuana and other innocuous substances became legal. If the president admitted to trying pot—even if he supposedly “didn’t inhale”—was it really such a big deal?
He liked selling marijuana, in the same way that he enjoyed being a bartender. There was a simple, cheerful camaraderie about it. He and the customer would be sitting together at the kitchen table, with the various objects spread out like chessmen in a friendly game—bong, lighter, cigarettes, baggies, the old pharmaceutical scale he used, with its checker-shaped weights stacked in a pyramid. He really did believe that marijuana was basically good for people, that it brought out what was benign in their hearts and heads. He believed the old line—who said it? Bob Marley?—that if only all the world’s leaders would get high together, there would soon be peace on earth. Sitting there, talking to someone like the young lawyer Eric Schriffer, or the nurse Shari Hernandez, or Bob Boulder, a guy of about his age who taught tenth-grade history at the high school, or Lonnie Von Vleet, the fifty-year-old hippie guy who supervised the mentally handicapped people at the vocational center and who sat on the city council, it had seemed like he was providing a useful service. He had a place in the world, and at such times the notion that he was engaged in a criminal activity seemed distant and faintly ridiculous. A technicality.