by Dan Chaon
After a while, he had come to be particularly interested in the issue of organ donation. For the clerks, it was a rote question. “Would you like to be an organ donor?” the clerks would ask, monotone, reciting: “Joining the donor registry is a way to legally give consent to the donation of your organs, tissues, and eyes upon your death, for any purposes authorized by law. You could save up to seven lives through organ donation and enhance the quality of life for over fifty others through tissue and eye donation. May I take this opportunity to sign you into the registry?”
Ryan was surprised by how many people were taken aback by this question. In Knoxville, for example, there was one old hippie man, gray ponytail and cutoff jean shorts, who had laughed aloud. He looked over his shoulder at the rest of them, as if a joke were being played on him. Ryan watched as the man’s grin wavered, as the man thought briefly about his own death. Being cut up and taken apart. “Heh, heh,” the man said, and then he shrugged, making an expansive motion of his hand. “Why … sure!” he said. “Sure, by God, why not?” As if this were an act of bravado that the rest of them would be impressed by.
In Indianapolis, there was the old woman in her lemon-yellow jacket and pants, who paused for a long time to think about it. She became very grave, folding her hands over each other. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t believe in that.”
In Baltimore, there was the tough-looking hip-hop guy, muscle T-shirt pulled tight over his chest, jeans sagging down to show his boxer shorts. But he drew back from the clerk in genuine—almost childlike—horror. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Uh-uh.” As if someone might be waiting in the back room with a saw and a scalpel.
As for Ryan, he didn’t have any qualms. It was a basic social good, like giving blood or whatever. Just the right thing to do, he thought, until he had come home that weekend with his cache of fake IDs.
“What the fuck?” Jay said. He had been in a good mood until he had started to look at the licenses that Ryan had given him. “Ryan, dude, you signed up as an organ donor on every goddamn one of these things.”
“Uh …,” Ryan said. “Yeah?”
“What the hell,” Jay said—and his face reddened in a way that Ryan had not yet seen. Jay cultivated a slacker look, his straight black hair down to his shoulders, vintage thrift store clothes. But his expression became impressively hard and threatening. “What the hell were you thinking, man?” Jay said, and gritted his teeth abruptly. “Are you out of your mind? These are ruined!”
“But—” Ryan said. “I’m sorry, I don’t get what you’re saying.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jay said. “Ryan, what happens when you add your name to a state organ donor registry?” His voice had grown lower, and he spoke slowly and rhetorically, enunciating Organ. Donor. Registry. Each word a balloon he was poking with a pin.
“I don’t know,” Ryan said. He was flabbergasted, and he tried to speak lightly, a cautious, apologetic shrug. But Jay didn’t stop glaring at him.
“Do you realize that you consented to give the federal and state government access to your private medical and social history? Any confidentiality between you and a doctor is now moot. They are now legally allowed to examine current and past medical records, laboratory tests, blood donations—”
“I didn’t know that,” Ryan said, and he looked at Jay uncertainly. Was he joking? “Are you sure? That doesn’t sound—”
“Doesn’t sound what?” said Jay fiercely.
“I don’t know,” Ryan said again. He thought: It doesn’t sound true. But he didn’t say that.
“You don’t know,” Jay said. “Did you read the contract you signed?”
“I didn’t sign a contract.”
“Of course you signed a fucking contract,” Jay said, and now his voice was hot with disgust. Controlled contempt. “You just didn’t read it, dude. Did you? They told you to sign on the line and you signed, isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you did?”
“Jay,” Ryan said, “it wasn’t even my own name.”
“Do you think that matters?” Jay said. “The names on these cards are our names. We worked hard to harvest these names. They’re like gold to us. And now they are open to government surveillance. Totally useless!” He shook one of the laminated cards between his thumb and forefinger, repulsed by it, and then flipped it across the room, where it hit the wall with a tick. “Completely. Ruined. Shit! Do you get that?”
There were things about Jay that he still hadn’t figured out—the unpredictable bursts of temper, the oddities of philosophy, the supposed facts that sounded made-up, which Ryan guessed were mostly gleaned from conspiracy theory websites.
Did Jay really believe in the stuff about chakras, for example? Was he serious when he consulted the Ouija board on the coffee table, or when he began to hold forth on various “shadow government” organizations such as the Omega Agency and secret societies such as the Bilderberg Group and the Order of Skull and Bones at Yale, and the global surveillance network, Echelon—
“We have no idea what our government is up to,” Jay said, and Ryan nodded uncertainly.
“That’s why I’ve never felt like I’m a criminal,” Jay said. “The people who control this country are the real gangsters. You know that, right? And if you play by their rules, you’re nothing but their slave.”
“Uh-huh,” Ryan said, and tried to read Jay’s expression.
Was he kidding? Was he a bit crazy?
There were times when Ryan was aware that the choices he’d made would come across as incredibly reckless to an outside observer. Why would he leave behind a pair of stable, loving parents, and throw his lot in with someone like Jay? Why would he abandon a good college education to become a petty con man, a professional liar and thief? Why was he so relieved that he would never have to be part of his nice family again, that he would never have to take another class, that he would never have to put together a résumé and go out on a job interview, that he would never have to try to get married and have a family of his own and participate in the various cyclical joys of middle-class life that Owen had been so attached to?
The truth was, he was actually more like Jay than he was like them; that was what they didn’t ever realize.
Stacey and Owen’s life, he thought, was no more real than the dozens that he had created in the last year, the virtual lives of Matthew Blurton or Kasimir Czernewski or Max Wimberley. Most people, he thought, had identities that were so shallow that you could easily manage a hundred of them at once. Their existence barely grazed the surface of the world.
Of course, if you wanted to, you could inhabit one or two personas that accumulated more weight. If you wanted, Jay said, you could have wives, families even. He said he knew of a guy who was on a city council in Arizona, and who also ran a real estate business in Illinois, and who was also a traveling salesman with a wife and three children in North Dakota.
And then there were the people who could actually be a single, significant individual. You would have to start work on such a persona from very early on, Ryan thought, maybe from childhood. You’d need a certain precise confidence and focus, and all the abstract elements of luck and circumstance would have to arrange themselves around you. Like, for example, becoming a rock star, building a talent and a name for yourself, working your way into the public eye. He had thought about that a lot, he had liked the idea of turning into a well-known, respected singer-songwriter, but he was also aware that he was never going to be quite good enough. He could sense his own limitations, he could intuit the road blocks that were just a ways down the path of that particular ambition, and truthfully, if you knew you were going to probably fail, then what was the point? Why bother? If you could have dozens of lesser lives, didn’t that add up to one big one?
He thought of this again as he maneuvered his way through the airport in Portland, Oregon. The rental car safely abandoned, the prepaid wireless phone crushed under the heel of his shoe and dropped into a trash can, the brand new Max Wimberley driver’s
license and plane ticket produced for the security officer at the front of the passenger security line, his backpack and laptop and shoes and belt and wallet placed in plastic tubs and sent along their way through the X-ray machine on the conveyor belt, and then he himself, Max Wimberley, motioned forward, passing through the doorway-shaped metal detector. All without incident. All simple, no problem, nothing to worry about at all. Max Wimberley could move through the world with much more ease and grace than Ryan Schuyler could have ever managed.
“Okay,” he murmured to himself. “Okay.”
He sat there in the boarding area, with a chocolate frozen yogurt shake and a copy of Guitar magazine, his backpack in the seat beside him. He made a quick, surreptitious scan of the other people in the seats around him. Youngish, tightly wound businesswoman with a palm pilot. Elderly hand-holding couple. Jocky Asian guy in a Red Sox cap. Etc.
No one who looked at all familiar.
There hadn’t been any hallucinations on this trip, and he supposed that was a sign. The last vestiges of his old life were finally fading away. The transformation was almost complete, he thought, and he remembered those long-ago days when he drove around trying to compose a letter to his parents in his head.
Dear Mom and Dad, he thought. I am not the person you thought I was.
I am not that person, he thought, and he remembered those Kübler-Ross stages Jay had told him about. This was what acceptance felt like. It wasn’t just that Ryan Schuyler was dead; Ryan Schuyler had never existed in the first place. Ryan Schuyler was just a shell he had been using, maybe even less real than Max Wimberley was.
He looked down at his boarding pass, and he could almost feel the residue of Ryan Schuyler exhaling out of him, a little ghostly bat with a human face, which dissolved into a shower of tiny gnats and dispersed.
“Okay,” he whispered, and closed his eyes briefly. “Okay.”
It was late and warm when he arrived in Detroit Metro, 1:44 A.M. after a connection in Phoenix, and he walked purposefully through the hushed terminal toward the long-term parking garage, where Jay’s old Econoline van was waiting for him. He stopped at a gas station to buy an energy drink, and then he was on the interstate, feeling very calm, he thought, listening to music. He rolled the windows down and sang for a while.
North of Saginaw, he turned west onto a highway, and then onto a county two-lane, over some railroad tracks, the houses farther and farther apart, his headlights illuminating the tunnels of woods, some trees beginning to bud with spring leaves, some dead bare skeleton branches mummified in a gauze of old tent caterpillar webs, with only occasional squares of human habitation cut out alongside the road. Back in the 1920s, according to Jay, the Purple Gang from Detroit had one of their hideouts up this way.
At last, he turned onto the narrow asphalt lane that would eventually turn into a dirt road that led up to the cabin, deeper into the forest. It was about four in the morning. He saw the lights of the porch shining and as he pulled up he could hear that Jay had his music going, a thump of old-school hip-hop, and he noticed that a couple of Jay’s computers had been tossed out into the gravel driveway. They looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to them.
And in fact, just as Ryan turned off the ignition, Jay came out onto the porch carrying a silver aluminum bat in one hand and a Glock revolver in the other.
“Fucking hell, Ryan,” Jay said, and he tucked his revolver into the waistband of his pants as Ryan stepped out of the car. “What took you so long?”
In general, Jay didn’t tend to carry guns around, although there were a number of them in the cabin, and Ryan wasn’t sure how to react. He could see that Jay was fairly drunk, fairly stoned, in a mood, and so he took vigilant steps across the gravel as he approached the house.
“Jay?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
He followed Jay onto the screened porch, past the cast-iron woodstove and the cheap lawn furniture, and into the living room of the cabin, where Jay was in the process of dismantling another computer. He was unplugging various wires and USB cords from the back panel of the machine, and when Ryan came in, he paused, running his fingers through his long hair.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Jay said. “I think some asshole has stolen my identity!”
“You’re kidding,” Ryan said. He stood there uncertainly in the doorway, and watched as Jay lugged the disconnected computer off the table and let it fall heavily, like a cement block, to the floor.
“What do you mean, ‘stolen’ your identity?” Ryan said. “Which one?”
Jay looked up, blankly, holding a limp cord as if it were a snake he had just strangled. “Christ,” he said. “I’m not sure. I’m starting to feel concerned that they all might be contaminated.”
“Contaminated?” Ryan said. Despite the fact that Jay was carrying around a revolver and dismantling computers, he still looked relatively calm. He wasn’t as intoxicated as Ryan had thought at first, either, which made things seem more serious. “What do you mean, contaminated?” he said.
“I lost two people today,” Jay said, and he bent down and pulled an old laptop out of a cardboard box that had been shoved under one of the tables at the back of the living room. “All of my Dave Deagle credit cards have been canceled, so somebody must have gotten into him a few days ago. And I started to get nervous and I started to go through everybody, and it turned out that someone had cleaned out Warren Dixon’s money market account, some fishy electronic transfer—and this happened, like, this morning!”
“You’re joking,” Ryan said. He observed as Jay began to attach the old laptop to various plugs, watched the machine begin to quiver as it booted up.
“I wish I was joking,” Jay said, and he stared hard at his screen as it sang out its tiny melody of start-up music. “You better get your ass online and start checking your people. I think we might be under attack.”
Under attack. It might have sounded silly and melodramatic, out here in the woods, in this room that looked like a cross between a college dorm room and a computer repair store, the thrift store couch surrounded by tables that were cluttered with dozens of computers, beer cans, candy wrappers, printers, fax machines, dirty plates, ashtrays. But Jay had tucked the revolver into the waistband of his jeans, and his mouth pulled back in a grimace as he typed, and so Ryan didn’t say anything.
“You know what?” Jay said. “Why don’t you buy us some plane tickets? See if you can get us some reservations for someplace out of the country. Anyplace that’s third world is fine. Pakistan. Ecuador. Tonga. See what deals you can get.”
“Jay …,” Ryan said, but he sat down at the computer as he had been instructed.
“Don’t worry,” Jay said. “We’re going to be fine. We have to pull together, here, but I think we’re going to be totally fine.”
18
Lucy and George Orson were in the old pickup together, on their way to a post office in Crawford, Nebraska. It was the perfect place to submit their passport applications, according to George Orson, though Lucy wasn’t sure why this town was better than another, why they had to drive three hours when there were surely a lot of cruddy post offices closer to home. But she didn’t bother to pursue the matter further. She had a lot on her mind at the moment.
The sense of relief she’d felt when she’d discovered the stacks of cash had begun to dissipate, and now she was aware again of a flutter in her stomach. She had a memory of that roller coaster at the Cedar Point amusement park, back in Ohio. Millennium Force, with its three-hundred-ten-foot drop, the way you would wait there, once you were strapped in, the heavy ticking of the chain as you were pulled slowly up the slope to the top of the hill. That terrible anticipation.
But she was trying to appear calm. She sat subdued in the passenger seat of the old pickup, watching as George Orson shifted gears, wearing the hideous pink shirt George Orson had bought for her, with its cloud of smiley-faced butterflies printed down the front. This was his idea of what a fifteen-year-old girl mig
ht wear—
“It makes you look younger,” he said. “That’s the point.”
“It makes me look retarded,” she said. “Maybe I should act like I’m mentally handicapped?” And she extended her tongue, making a thick cave girl grunt. “Because I can’t think of any fifteen-year-old who would wear this shirt, unless she was in some kind of special education group home situation.”
“Oh, Lucy,” George Orson said. “You look fine. You look the part, that’s all that matters. Once we’re out of the country, you can wear whatever you want.”
And Lucy hadn’t argued any further. She just looked balefully at her reflection in the bedroom mirror: a stranger she’d taken an instant dislike to.
She was particularly upset about the hair. She hadn’t realized that she’d been attached to her original hair color—which was auburn, with some highlights of red—until she had seen what it looked like when she dyed it.
George Orson had been insistent about this—their hair, he said, should be approximately the same color, since they were supposed to be father and daughter—and he came home from his trip to the store with not only the horrible pink butterfly shirt but also a bag full of hair dye.
“I bought six of them,” he said. He put a grocery bag on the kitchen table and drew out a glossy box with a female model on the front of it. “I couldn’t decide which one of them was right.”
The color they’d eventually chosen was called brown umber, and to Lucy it looked like someone had painted her hair with shoe polish.
“You just have to wash it a few times,” George Orson said. “It looks fine now, but it will look completely natural once you’ve worn it for a couple of days.”
“My scalp hurts,” Lucy said. “In a couple of days, I’ll probably be bald.”
And George Orson had put his arm around her shoulder. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he murmured. “You look terrific.”
“Mm,” she said, and regarded herself in the mirror.