Await Your Reply

by Dan Chaon

  “Shut up,” Miles said, and Hayden laughed, low, that wistful, teasing chuckle that Miles found both comforting and galling at the same time.

  “You know, Miles,” he said. “I really am a genius. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings before, but let’s face it. I’m a lot smarter than you, so you need to listen to me, okay?”

  Okay, Miles thought. He believed and he didn’t believe, both at the same time. That was the condition of his life. Hayden was a schizophrenic, and he was faking. He was a genius, and he had delusions of grandeur. He was paranoid, and people were out to get him. All of these things were at least partially true at the same time.

  In the years since Hayden had gone missing—slipping out of the psychiatric hospital where he had been confined—he had become more and more elusive, harder and harder to recognize as the brother that Miles had once loved so dearly. Eventually, perhaps, that old Hayden would disappear entirely.

  If he was, in fact, a schizophrenic, he was one with an unusually practical streak. He covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, changing his name and identity, managing, along the way, to hold down various jobs and appear, to the people he met, convincingly normal. Personable, even.

  Miles, on the other hand, had been the one to live a life of nearvagrancy. He had been the one who must have come across as “feverish” and “disordered” and “obsessive” as he trailed behind Hayden’s various aliases. Too late, he came to Los Angeles, where Hayden had been working as a “residual income stream consultant” named Hayden Nash; too late in Houston, Texas, where he had been employed as a computer services technician for JPMorgan Chase & Co., named Mike Hayden. Too late, Miles arrived in Rolla, Missouri, where Hayden had been masquerading at the university as a graduate student in mathematics named, cruelly, Miles Spady.

  Too late, also, at Kulm, North Dakota, not far from the Whitestone Hill Battlefield historical site, not far from the place where Hayden had once imagined the great pyramids of the Dakota … the Giza, Khufu, and Khafre … It was February, and fat flakes of snow fell on the windshield, the wipers flapping like big wings as Miles imagined the shape of the pyramids emerging out of the gray blur of snowfall. They weren’t really there, of course, and neither was Hayden, but at the Broken Bell Inn in nearby Napoleon, a motel clerk—a sullen pregnant young woman—frowned over the enlarged grainy photo of Hayden.

  “Hmmm,” she said.

  From the photo, it would have been difficult to guess that they were identical twins. The picture had been taken years ago, not long after they had turned eighteen, and Miles had gained quite a bit of weight since then. Who knew, maybe Hayden had as well. But even in childhood they had never been truly indistinguishable. There was an aspect of Hayden’s face—brighter, more avid, friendlier—something that people responded to, and an aspect of Miles’s that they didn’t. He could see it in the motel clerk’s expression.

  “I think I recognize him,” the girl said. Her eyes flicked from the photo to Miles and then back. “It’s hard to say.”

  “Take another look,” Miles said. “It’s not a very good photo. It’s fairly old, so he may have changed over the years. Does it bring to mind anyone you’ve seen?”

  He looked down at the photo with her, trying to see it as she might. It was a Christmas photo. It was that horrible winter break, their senior year in high school, that had ended with Hayden institutionalized once again, but in the picture Hayden looked completely sane—a kind-eyed, smiling teenage boy in front of a tinselly tree, his hair a bit shaggy, but no sign whatsoever in his face of the trouble that he was causing—would continue to cause. The girl’s mouth moved slightly as she looked at it, and Miles wondered if perhaps Hayden had kissed her.

  “Take your time,” Miles said, firmly, remembering episodes of a police procedural he’d seen on television.

  “Are you a policeman?” the girl said. “I’m not sure if we’re supposed to give out that information.”

  “I’m a relative,” Miles said reassuringly. “He’s my brother, and he’s been missing. I’m just trying to locate him.”

  She examined the photo a little longer, then at last came to a decision.

  “His name is Miles,” she said, and she gave him a brief but hooded look, which made him wonder if she was simply being recalcitrant, choosing not to reveal some important tidbit of information she had decided to hold back for no other reason but that she didn’t like him as much as she liked Hayden. “Cheshire was his last name, I think. Miles Cheshire. He seemed like a great guy.”

  He remembered how his heart had contracted when she’d said this, when she’d repeated his own name back to him. It was just a joke, he thought then—a complicated, nasty prank that Hayden was engaged in. What am I doing? he thought. Why am I doing this?

  That had been almost two years ago, that trip to North Dakota. He had packed up his things and driven back home, darkly aware that the whole Kulm adventure had been nothing but an elaborate tease. Hayden had been in one of his mean and jolly manic moods, and when Miles got back to his apartment, there was a book waiting for him: No Tears for the General: The Life of Alfred Sully, and an 8 × 12 manila envelope that contained an article torn from the pages of The Professional Journal of American Schizophrenia, a passage highlighted in yellow marker. “If one twin develops schizophrenia, the second twin has a 48% chance of developing it as well, and frequently within one year of the first twin.” There was also an email waiting for him from generalasully@hotmail.com, just one more cheerful dig. “Oh, Miles,” it said. “Do you ever wonder what people think of you going around with your posters and crummy old photos and your sad story about your crazy evil twin brother? Do you ever think that people are going to take one look at your raggedy-looking self and they aren’t going to tell you anything? They’ll think: Why, it’s actually Miles who is the crazy one. They’ll think: Maybe he doesn’t even have a twin brother! Maybe he’s just out of his mind!”

  That was it, Miles had thought then, reading the email and blushing with humiliation. He was so furious that he’d thrown the book about Alfred Sully out the window of his apartment, where it landed with an unsatisfying flutter in the parking lot. That was it! he promised himself. They were finished. No more of my time—no more of my heart!

  He would forget about Hayden. He would get on with his own life.

  He remembered this resolution. It came back to him vividly, even as he sat there in the car, unshaven, unshowered, sorting through the flyers that he’d printed up on simple, durable card stock. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? at the top. Then the photograph of Hayden. Then: REWARD! Though that was probably stretching the truth a little.

  He angled the rearview mirror and examined himself critically. His eyes. His expression. Did he look like a crazy person? Was he a crazy person?

  This was the eleventh of June. 68° 18’ N, 133° 29’ W. The sun wouldn’t set again for about five weeks.

  7

  In the waiting area of Enterprise Auto Rental, Ryan checked through his identification materials again. Social security card. Driver’s license. Credit cards.

  All the flotsam that proved that you were officially a person.

  In this particular case, Ryan was officially Matthew P. Blurton, age twenty-four, of Bethesda, Maryland. Ryan didn’t think that he looked like he was twenty-four, but no one had ever questioned him, so he supposed that he must not look suspicious.

  He sat there politely, thinking about a song that he was learning on the guitar. He could picture the tablature in his mind, and his fingers moved inconspicuously as he thought of the positions on the frets, the ham of his hand on his thighs, palm up, the fingers posed into various combinations like sign language.

  He knew that he ought to be paying more attention; he was going to screw things up if he didn’t take better care. That’s what Jay—his father—would probably tell him.

  And so he lifted his head to see what was going on.

  At the counter, there was a middle-aged Afr
ican American woman in a navy-blue coat and a small purple hat, and Ryan observed her surreptitiously as she withdrew a billfold from her purse.

  “My grandmother is ninety-eight years old!” the lady was saying. She regarded her billfold as if she were playing a game of pinochle, frowning, then withdrew a bent ancient-looking credit card. “Ninety-eight years old!”

  “Mmmm-hmmm,” said the young man behind the counter, who was also African American. The young man’s eyes were on the computer screen, and he typed out a burst of letters onto the keyboard.

  “Ninety-eight years old,” he said. “That’s a long time to be alive!”

  “It certainly is,” the woman said, and Ryan could sense that they were on the verge of settling into a comfortable conversation. He glanced down at his watch.

  “I wonder how long my lifeline is,” the young man at the computer mused, and Ryan watched as the woman nodded.

  “Only the Lord knows,” the woman said.

  She set her credit card and driver’s license upon the counter.

  “You know,” the woman said, “it’s not easy at that age. She doesn’t talk much at all anymore, but she does sing a lot. And prays. She prays, you know.”

  “Mmmm-hmmm,” the young man said, and typed again. “Does she have amnesia?” he said.

  “Oh, no,” the woman said. “She remembers things okay. She recognizes the folks that she wants to, at least!”

  They both laughed at this, and Ryan found himself smiling with them. And then—at least partly because he was stupidly smiling at an eavesdropped conversation—he felt lonely.

  Back home in Iowa, where he’d grown up, there were practically no black people to speak of, and he’d noticed since coming east that it seemed like black people were always nice to one another, that there was a camaraderie. Maybe that was a stereotype, but still he felt an unexpected sense of longing as the man and woman chuckled. He had an idea about ease, warmth, that private sense of connection. Is that what it was really like? He wondered.

  Lately, he had been thinking about contacting his parents, and there was a letter he had in his mind. “Dear Mom & Dad,” obviously.

  “Dear Mom & Dad, I’m sorry that I haven’t been in touch in so long, and I thought I should let you know that I’m okay. I’m in Michigan—”

  And then, right, they would want to know, or they would figure out. “I’m in Michigan with Uncle Jay, and I know that he is my biological father, so I guess that is one thing we can stop pretending about—”

  Which started already to sound hostile. “I’m in Michigan with Uncle Jay. Staying here for a while until I get some things figured out for myself. I’m writing some songs, earning some money. Uncle Jay has a business venture that I’ve been helping him out with—”

  Bad idea to even mention “business venture.” It came off immediately as shady. Jay? they would think. What was the nature of this “business”? Immediately they would think drugs or something illegal, and he had already promised Jay that he wasn’t going to tell anyone.

  “Swear to God, Ryan,” Jay had said as they sat on the couch in the cabin in Michigan, playing video games together. “I’m serious. You’ve got to swear that you’re not going to breathe a word of any of this.”

  “You can trust me,” Ryan said. “Who am I going to tell?”

  “Anybody,” Jay said. “Because this is extremely, extremely serious stuff. Serious people could become involved, if you know what I mean.”

  “Jay,” Ryan said, “I understand. Really.”

  “I hope you do, buddy,” Jay said, and Ryan nodded earnestly, though truthfully he didn’t understand much about the project they were engaged in.

  He knew that it was illegal, obviously, a scam of some sort, but the actual purpose was elusive. One day he’d be Matthew P. Blurton and he’d rent a car in Cleveland and then drive the car to Milwaukee and return it at the airport, and then he’d board a plane in Milwaukee using an ID card for Kasimir Czernewski, age twenty-two, and fly to Detroit, and then later, online, he’d transfer bank funds in the amount of four hundred dollars from Czernewski’s bank account in Milwaukee to the account of Frederick Murrah, fifty, of West Deer Township, Pennsylvania. Was it simply a very complex shell game, one person sliding into the next person and so on down the line? He assumed that there must be financial gain involved somehow, but if so he hadn’t seen evidence of it yet. He and Jay lived in basically a hut in the woods, a little hunting lodge, lots of top-notch computer equipment but very little else of value as far as he could tell.

  But Jay looked so serious and stern. He had straight shoulder-length hair, surfer hair, Ryan thought, black with a few threads of early gray running through it, and the droopy army surplus clothes of a teenage runaway. It was hard to imagine him projecting an attitude that wasn’t mellow, but suddenly he was startlingly fierce.

  “Swear to God, Ryan,” Jay said. “I’m serious,” he said, and Ryan nodded.

  “Jay, trust me,” Ryan said. “You trust me, don’t you?”

  And Jay said, “Sure I do. You’re my son, right?” And then he gave Ryan that grin that, despite himself, Ryan still found pretty dazzling, even breathtaking, like he’d almost got a crush or something—You’re my son, and that deliberate eye contact, both unnerving and flattering, and Ryan, all flustered, was like:

  “Yeah, I guess I am. I’m your son.”

  This was one of the things that they were still figuring out—how to talk about this stuff—and it was all still very uncomfortable, they would start to talk about it, and then neither one of them knew what to say, it required a certain language that was either too analytic or too corny or embarrassing.

  The basic fact was this: Jay Kozelek was Ryan’s biological father, but Ryan had only found out recently. Up until a few months ago, Ryan had thought that Jay was his uncle. His mother’s long-estranged younger brother.

  Ryan’s existence had been due to the usual teenage mistakes; that was the short version. Two sixteen-year-olds getting carried away in the back of a car after a movie. This was back in Iowa, and the girl’s, the mother’s—Ryan’s mother’s—family was strict and religious and didn’t believe in abortion, and Jay’s older sister, Stacey, wanted a baby but she had something wrong with her ovaries.

  Jay had always felt that honesty was called for, but Stacey hadn’t felt that it was a good idea at all. She was ten years older than Jay, and she didn’t think very highly of him in any case—in terms of his morals, his ideas about life, the drugs, etc.

  There’s a time and place, she had told Jay, back when Ryan was a baby.

  And then later she said: Why does it matter to you, Jay? Why does it always have to be about you? Can’t you think of someone else besides yourself?

  He’s happy, Stacey said. I’m his mom and Owen is his dad and he’s happy with that.

  Not long afterward, they had stopped talking to each other. Jay had had some run-ins with the law, and they had argued, and that was that. Jay was hardly mentioned when Ryan was growing up—and then only as a negative example. Your uncle Jay, the jailbird. The hobo. Never owned anything he couldn’t carry. Got involved in narcotics when he was a teenager and it ruined his life. Let that be a warning. Nobody knows where he is anymore.

  And so Ryan hadn’t learned the truth—that Stacey was actually his biological aunt, that his little-seen uncle Jay was his “birth father,” that his biological mother had committed suicide in her sophomore year in college many years ago, when Ryan was a three-year-old kid living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, with his supposed parents, Stacey and Owen Schuyler, and Jay was backpacking around South America—

  Ryan hadn’t learned all of this until he was himself in college. One night Jay had called him up and told him all about it.

  He was himself a sophomore in college, just like his real mother had been, and maybe that was why it struck such a blow. My whole life is a lie, he thought, which he knew was melodramatic, adolescent, but he woke up that morning after Jay had called him and
he found himself in his dorm, a corner room on the fourth floor of Willard Hall, and his roommate, Walcott, was asleep under a mounded comforter in the narrow single bed beneath the window, and a gray light was coming in.

  It must have been about six-thirty, seven in the morning. The sun wasn’t up yet, and he rolled over and faced the wall, chilly old plaster with many thin cracks in the beige painted surface, and he closed his eyes.

  He hadn’t slept much after his conversation with Uncle Jay. His father.

  At first it was like a joke, and then he thought, Why is he doing this, why is he telling me this? though all he said was, “Oh. Uh-huh. Wow.” Monosyllabic, his voice ridiculously polite and noncommittal. “Oh, really?” he said.

  “I guess it’s just something I thought you ought to know,” Jay told him. “I mean it’s probably better if you don’t say anything to your parents, but you can make your own decision about that. I just thought—it seemed wrong to me. You’re a man, you’re an adult, I feel like you have a right to know.”

  “I appreciate that,” Ryan said.

  But once he’d spent a few hours sleeping on and off, once he’d turned over the facts in his mind a few hundred times, he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with the information. He sat up in bed and fingered the edges of his blankets. He could imagine his parents—his “parents,” Stacey and Owen Schuyler, asleep, back in the house in Council Bluffs, and he could picture his own room down the hall from theirs, the books still on their shelves and his summer clothes still in the closet and his turtle, Veronica, sitting on her rock underneath her heat lamp, all of it like a museum of his childhood. Maybe his parents didn’t even think of themselves as fakes, maybe most of the time they didn’t even remember that the world they had created was utterly false at its core.

  The more he thought about it, the more everything began to feel like a sham. It wasn’t just his own faux family, it was the “family structure” in general. It was the social fabric itself, which was like a stage play that everyone was engaged in. Yes, he saw now what his history teacher meant when she talked about “constructs,” “tissues of signs,” “lacunae.” Sitting there in his bed, he was aware of the other rooms, rows and stacks of them, the other students, all of them housed here waiting to be sorted and processed into jobs and sent down their various paths. He was aware of the other teenage boys who had slept in this very room, decades and decades of them, the dormitory like a boxcar being filled and refilled, year after year, and briefly he could have risen up out of his body, out of time, and watched the generic stream of them entering and exiting and being replaced.