by Dan Chaon
“I guess not,” Miles said.
Supposedly, according to Hayden, this incident with Mr. Breeze happened at one of the parties their parents used to have. It was late at night, the wee hours, and Hayden came down to the kitchen in his pajamas, couldn’t sleep, sweaty from the top bunk, the forced air vent had been blowing from the ceiling onto him, he’d been awake anyway from the sounds of music and laughter and the thick hum of adult talking that came wafting through the floorboards and into his dreams. As for Miles, he would have been peacefully asleep in the bottom bunk. Insensate, as always.
The two of them, Miles and Hayden, were eight years old but small for their age, and Hayden was cute and solemn as he drank his glass of water in the kitchen. Mr. Breeze lifted him up and put him on a stool at the counter.
“Tell me, little boy,” Mr. Breeze said, in his deep, deep voice. “Do you know what ‘cryptomnesia’ means?”
Mr. Breeze looked down into Hayden’s eyes as if he were admiring his own reflection in a pool, and he took his index finger and let it hover right at the center of Hayden’s forehead, though he didn’t let it touch.
“Do you ever remember things that didn’t really happen to you?” Mr. Breeze said.
“No,” Hayden said. He looked, unsmiling, back at Mr. Breeze, in the way he always looked adults in the eye: impertinent. Their aunt Helen had come in and she stayed, watching.
“Portis,” she said. “Don’t tease that child.”
“I’m not,” Mr. Breeze said. He was dressed in black jeans and a flowered cowboy shirt, and he had lines around his mouth that looked as if someone had ironed creases there. He peered kindly at Hayden’s face.
“You’re not afraid, are you, young man?” Mr. Breeze said. Out in the next room, there was the sound of the party, some bluesy rock song, some people slow-dancing; out in the yard, a drunk lady wept bitterly while a drunken friend tried to counsel her.
“We’re just going to take a wee peek at his past lives,” Mr. Breeze told Aunt Helen. And he beamed at Hayden. “What do you think about that, Hayden? All the people that you used to be, once upon a time!” Mr. Breeze drew in a soft, anticipatory breath, barely audible.
“I so seldom get a chance to work with a child,” he said.
This Mr. Breeze was fiercely drunk, Miles imagined. So was Aunt Helen, probably. So were all the other adults in the house.
But even drunk Mr. Breeze held Hayden pinned fast with only the pupils of his eyes. “You want to be hypnotized, don’t you, Hayden?” he said.
Hayden’s lips parted, and his tongue tingled in his mouth.
“Yes,” Hayden heard himself say.
The gaze of Mr. Breeze locked into Hayden like one puzzle piece fits into another.
“I want you to tell me what it was like when you died,” Mr. Breeze said. “That moment,” he said. “Tell me about that moment.”
Mr. Breeze had taken Hayden and slit him open the way a fisherman would slit open the belly of a trout. That was what Hayden said. “Not my physical body,” Hayden explained. “It was my spirit. Whatever you want to call it. My soul. You know. Inner self.”
“What do you mean by ‘slit’ you open,” Miles said uneasily. “I don’t get it.”
“I’m not saying sexual,” Hayden said. “You always assume sexual, Miles, you pervert.”
Miles shifted the phone where it was making an uncomfortable, sweaty spot against his ear. It was getting close to five in the morning.
“So—?” Miles said.
“So that was how it started,” Hayden said. “Mr. Breeze told me I had more past lives than any other person he’d ever met—”
“A harvest,” Mr. Breeze told Hayden. “You produce an unusually large harvest,” he said. The lives were clustered inside of Hayden like roe—
“Fish eggs,” Hayden said. “That’s what ‘roe’ means.”
“Yes, I know,” Miles said, and Hayden sighed.
“The thing is, Miles,” Hayden said, “no one realizes, once these things have been opened up, you can’t close them again. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. If most people had to live with the memories I’ve had to live with, a lot of them would kill themselves.”
“You mean your nightmares,” Miles said.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s how we used to refer to them. I know better now.”
“Like the pirate stuff,” Miles said.
“Pirate stuff,” Hayden said, and then he was witheringly silent. “You make it sound like some little romp through Neverland.”
The pirate stuff, so-called, had been one of the recurring nightmares of Hayden’s childhood, but they hadn’t talked about it in years. It was true that he used to wake up screaming. Horrible, horrible screams. Miles could still hear them vividly.
In the dream Hayden used to talk about, he was a boy on a pirate ship. A cabin boy, Miles supposed. Hayden remembered a coil of heavy rope where he would curl up to sleep. There was the dense flapping of the sails and the creak of the masts as he lay there trying to rest, and the smell of wet wood and barnacles, and when he opened his eyes a crack, he would see the bare dirty feet of the pirates, which always had infected sores on them. He would huddle there, hoping not to be noticed, because sometimes the pirates would give him a kick. Sometimes they would grab him by the back of his shirt or his hair and yank him onto his feet.
“They always want me to kiss them,” Hayden would tell Miles. This was back when he was eight, ten years old, and he had woken up screaming. “They always want me to kiss them on the lips.” He grimaced: their breath, their nasty teeth, the filth in their beards.
“Gross,” Miles said. And he remembered thinking even then that there was an unnatural quality to Hayden’s dreams. The pirates would kiss Hayden, and sometimes they would cut off a hank of hair—“as a reminder of yer kisses, me lad”—and one of them even cut off a piece of his earlobe.
This particular pirate was Bill McGregor, and he was the one Hayden feared the most. Bill McGregor was the worst of them—and at night when everyone else was asleep, Bill McGregor would come looking for Hayden, his step slow and hollow on the planks of the deck, his voice a deep whisper.
“Boy,” he would murmur. “Where are you, boy?”
After Bill McGregor cut off the piece of Hayden’s earlobe, he decided that he wanted more. Every time he caught Hayden, he would cut a small piece off of him. The skin of an elbow, the tip of a finger, a piece of his lip. He would grip the squirming Hayden and cut a piece off of him, and then Bill McGregor would eat the piece of flesh.
“And when I’m finished playing with ye,” Bill McGregor whispered, “I’m going to sneak up behind you and—”
Which is exactly what he did, according to Hayden. It was a spring night and Bill McGregor came up from behind him and clapped his hands tightly over Hayden’s eyes and slit his throat and tossed him overboard, and Hayden went flailing into the sea with his neck clutched between his hands as if he were trying to throttle himself, blood gurgling out between his fingers. He could see a trickle of blood droplets falling upward as he plunged headfirst into the ocean—he was aware of the moon and the starry sky vanishing beneath his feet, the swallowing sound he made when he hit the water, the fish flitting away as he sank deeper, strands of seaweed, unfurling eddies of jugular blood, his mouth opening and closing, limbs growing limp.
His exact moment of death.
Yes, of course Miles knew about this. Hayden had the dream regularly when they were kids, once or twice a week sometimes. He would jump down into the bottom bunk and under the covers with Miles—and if Miles wasn’t awake yet, he would shake him until he was. “Miles,” he would say. “Miles! Nightmares! Oh, God! Nightmares!” And he would curl up around Miles as if they were back together in their mother’s belly.
Miles had always prided himself on the fact that he was a good brother. He never got angry, no matter how many times he heard the story of Bill McGregor and so on.
But when he mentioned something
to that effect, Hayden didn’t speak for a long time.
“Oh, right,” Hayden said. “You were such a good brother to me.”
They sat there listening to each other breathing. On Hayden’s end, there was the gurgling sound of a bong. Not surprising.
Yes, Miles knew what he was getting at. Hayden thought that he should have stuck by him no matter what. He thought that Miles should have just thrown away his relationship with their mother and the rest of the family and sided with him, no matter how extreme his stories and quarrels and accusations became.
This wasn’t a topic that Miles felt comfortable discussing, but with Hayden it was difficult to avoid. Sooner or later, every conversation would circle back to these various obsessions that he had, his nightmares, his memories, his grudges against their family—
“His pathological lies,” their mother called them. “He is a deeply, deeply troubled person, Miles,” she said, on any number of occasions. She used to warn him that he was too easily deceived, that he was too much Hayden’s follower—“his little factotum,” she said, acidly.
This was during that period when she was trying to get Hayden institutionalized and she said, “Just you wait, Miles, sweetheart, because someday he will betray you just like he has betrayed everyone else. It’s only a matter of time.”
And so when Hayden called and said that he needed help, he needed his brother’s help—“Just to talk awhile, I can’t sleep, Miles, please just talk to me”—well, Miles couldn’t keep from thinking of his mother’s warning.
It was especially difficult when Hayden would insist so strongly on his version of their lives, his version of events. Events that Miles was pretty certain had never actually happened.
“The thing I’m confused about,” Miles told Hayden—they had been talking now for hours about past lives and pirates, and even though Miles was exhausted, he was trying to be good-natured and reasonable. “I’m a little puzzled,” Miles said, “about this guy. Mr. Breeze. Because I honestly don’t remember you ever telling me anything about him before, and it seems like you would’ve.”
“Oh, I told you about him,” Hayden said. “Most definitely.”
This was a few weeks after he had begun to obsess about the whole “hypnotist in the kitchen” story. Miles was at a rest area off of the interstate, with his window rolled down, talking on a drive-up pay phone. It was probably about two in the morning. A map of the United States was spread out across the steering wheel.
Hayden was saying, “… maybe the problem is that you repressed so much about our childhood. Do you ever consider that?”
“Well,” Miles said. He took a sip from a bottle of water.
“It’s not as if this hasn’t been an ongoing ordeal in my life,” Hayden said. “Remember Bobby Berman? Remember Amos Murley?”
“Yes,” Miles said—and it was true, these were familiar names from their childhood, familiar people from Hayden’s nightmares. Bobby Berman was the boy who liked to play with matches, and who had burned to death in a toolshed behind his house; Amos Murley was the teenager who had been drafted into the Union Army during the Civil War, the one who died while dragging himself across a battlefield, his legs blown off below the knee. Their mother used to call them Hayden’s “imaginary characters.”
“Oh, Hayden,” she would say, with exasperation. “Why can’t you make up stories about happy people? Why does everything have to be so morbid?”
And Hayden would blush, shrugging resentfully. He said nothing. It wasn’t until much later that Hayden began to claim these were his own past lives he was dreaming about. That these “characters” were, in fact, people he had actually been. That the terrible life he was leading with their family was just one of many terrible lives he had led.
But it wasn’t until their father died that Hayden had begun to understand the true nature of his affliction.
At least, that was the version of events he was currently espousing. It wasn’t until their father was gone and their mother had remarried and the hateful Marc Spady was living with them in their house. Only then did he begin to grasp the extent of what Mr. Breeze had “opened up” inside him.
“That’s the thing I wasn’t prepared for, you see,” Hayden said. “I came to realize that it wasn’t just me—it was everyone.”
Steadily, he had begun to comprehend, Hayden said. He had become aware that he was not the only person who had these past lives. Obviously not! Little by little, in crowds, in restaurants, in faces glimpsed on television, in small gestures of schoolmates and relatives—little by little he had begun to feel vague glimmerings of recognition. An eye, shifting sidelong—the fingers of a cashier, brushing his palm—the discolored front tooth of their geometry teacher—the voice of their stepfather, Marc Spady, which was, Hayden said, the exact gravelly voice of the pirate Bill McGregor.
When their father died, Hayden began to see connections in every face. Where had he come across that one before? In what life? No doubt nearly every soul had encountered the others in one permutation or another, all of them interconnected, entangled, their pathways crisscrossing backward into prehistory, into space and infinity like some terrible mathematical formula.
Clearly it had to do with their father’s death, Miles thought. Before that, Hayden was just an overimaginative boy who had nightmares, and Mr. Breeze, if he existed, was just another of their father’s unusual acquaintances, drunk at a party.
“Oh, spare me,” Hayden said, when Miles tried to suggest this. “How facile!” he said. “Is that what Mom told you? That I became a so-called schizophrenic because I couldn’t handle Dad’s death? I know you don’t like me to cast aspersions on your intelligence, but really. That’s so completely simpleminded.”
“Well,” Miles said. He didn’t want to get into an argument about it, but it had been evident that Hayden had undergone some private transformation in the months following their father’s death. That was when they were thirteen, a year after they had started working on the atlas together, and Hayden grew moodier and moodier, angrier, more withdrawn. It had seemed to Miles that Hayden was more susceptible to certain kinds of mementos and reminders of the dead—all the insignificant objects everywhere in the house, now glowing with their father’s absence, which Hayden had begun to accumulate. Here: a gum wrapper that their father had distractedly folded into an origami bird and left on his dresser among some loose change. Here: a pencil with his tooth marks, an unmatched sock, an appointment card from the dentist.
His voice on the answering machine, which they’d forgotten to change until one day Hayden called home and their father’s voice answered after the phone rang and rang:
“Hello. You’ve reached the Cheshire residence …”
Which was plainly a recording; you could tell after only a second.
But for that second! For that second, a person’s heart might leap up, a person might imagine that it had all been a bad dream, that some miracle had happened.
“Dad?” Hayden said, catching his breath.
He and Miles were at the skating rink in the rec center, calling for their mother to come and pick them up, and Miles stood beside Hayden as he spoke into the pay phone.
“Dad?” And Miles could see the brief light of supernatural hopefulness flicker across Hayden’s face before it closed down, a light of surprised joy that shrank almost immediately as it dawned on him: he had been fooled. Their father was still dead, more dead than he had been before.
Miles could sense all this, all this passed through Miles’s mind as if by telepathy, he experienced Hayden’s emotions in the old way that he used to when they were little, when Miles would cry out in pain when Hayden’s finger was slammed in a door, when Miles would laugh at a joke before Hayden even told it, when he knew the look on Hayden’s face even when they weren’t in the same room.
But things weren’t like that anymore.
Hayden’s expression pinched—he glared abruptly, as if Miles’s empathy were a disgusting, groping touch. As
if, having witnessed Hayden’s display of naked eagerness, Miles ought now to be punished. “Shut up, moron,” Hayden said, even though Miles had said nothing, and Hayden turned away, not even willing to look Miles in the eye.
Resolved: never to be happy again.
Was it naïve to think that before their father died they had all been pretty content? Miles had thought about this as he drove down the interstate, as he passed through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska—Los Angeles still thousands of miles distant.
Things had been nice, Miles thought. Hadn’t they?
When they were growing up, Cleveland was fairly idyllic, to Miles at least. This was where their parents had settled early in their marriage, on the east side of town, a comfortable old three-story house on a street lined with big silver maples. It was a pleasantly run-down middle-class neighborhood, a little to the north of the mansions on Fairmount Boulevard, a little to the south of the slums on the other side of Mayfield Road, and Miles remembered thinking that this wasn’t such a bad position to be in. Growing up, he and Hayden had friends who were both appreciably poorer and appreciably richer than they, and their father told them that they should pay attention to the homes and families of their peers. “Learn what it is like in another life,” he said. “Think hard about it, boys. People choose their lives; that’s what I want you to remember. And what life will you choose for yourselves?”
It was clear that their father himself had thought frequently about this question. He was the proprietor of what he called a “talent agency,” though in fact he was all of the employees. Sometimes he worked at children’s birthday parties and the grand openings of shopping malls as Periwinkle Clown, making balloon animals and juggling and face-painting and leading sing-alongs and so forth. Sometimes he was the Amazing Cheshire, a magician. (“Amaze Your Clients and Guests with Magical Fun! Trade Shows! Corporate Events! Special Occasions!”) Still other times he was known as Dr. Larry Cheshire, certified hypnotist, smoking-cessation specialist, and motivational speaker; or Lawrence Cheshire, Ph.D., hypnotherapist.