Await Your Reply

by Dan Chaon

  She did not look terrific, that was certain. But perhaps she looked like a fifteen-year-old girl.

  Brooke Catherine Fremden. A dull, friendless girl, probably pathologically shy. Probably a little like her sister, Patricia.

  Patricia used to have anxiety attacks. That was what Lucy was thinking about as she sat in the pickup on the way to Crawford, her heart vibrating oddly in her chest. Patricia would exhibit all kinds of bizarre symptoms when she was having an “attack”: her forehead and arms would feel numb, she would have the sensation of bugs in her hair, she would think her throat was closing up. Very melodramatic, Lucy had thought then, unsympathetically. She remembered standing in the bedroom doorway, impatiently eating a piece of toast, with her book bag over her shoulder as their mother urged Patricia to breathe into a lunch sack. “I’m suffocating!” Patricia gasped, her voice muffled by brown paper. “Please don’t make me go to school!”

  It all looked very fake to Lucy, though she wouldn’t have wanted to go to school, either, if she were Patricia. This was during a period when a group of especially mean seventh-grade boys had singled Patricia out for some reason, they had developed a whole elaborate series of comic routines and sketches that involved Patricia as a character, “Miss Patty Stinkbooty,” who they pretended was the host of a children’s program with puppets that they also had a series of goofy voices for. All kinds of idiotic gross boy humor that had to do with Patricia farting, or menstruating, or having cockroaches crawling in her pubic hair. Lucy could remember the three of them during lunch, Josh and Aaron and Elliot—she still even remembered their stupid names, three nasty, skinny boys doing their routine at their cafeteria table, laughing and chortling until the milk they were drinking came out of their noses.

  And Lucy herself had done nothing. Had merely observed stoically as if she were watching some particularly gruesome TV nature program in which jackals killed a baby hippopotamus.

  Poor Patricia! she thought now, and placed her hand to her throat, which felt a bit tight, and her face felt a little numb and tingly.

  But she was not going to have an anxiety attack, she told herself.

  She was in control of her body, and she refused to let it panic. She placed her hands on her thighs, and let out an even breath, staring fixedly at the glove compartment.

  She imagined that all of the money from the safe were there inside that glove compartment. And they weren’t in a pickup. They were in the Maserati, and they weren’t driving through the sand hills of Nebraska, which, as far as she could see, weren’t even sandy, but just an endless lake of rolling hills, covered with thin gray grass and rocks.

  They were in the Maserati and they were driving on a road that overlooked the ocean, a Mediterranean blue ocean with some sailboats and yachts floating in it. She closed her eyes and slowly began to fill her lungs with air.

  And when she opened her eyes, she felt better, though she was still in a pickup truck, and she was still in Nebraska, where some freaky rock formations were cluttered along the horizon. Were they called mesas? Buttes? They looked like they were from Mars.

  “George,” she said, after she had gathered herself for a minute or so. “I was just thinking about the Maserati. What are we going to do with the Maserati?”

  He didn’t say anything. He had been mute for an unusually long time, and she thought that was what had brought on her nervousness, the lack of his conversation, which, despite everything, still might have buoyed her. She wished he would rest his hand on her leg, like he used to do.

  “George?” she said. “Are you still alive? Are you receiving transmissions?” And at last he turned to glance at her.

  “You need to get out of the habit of calling me George,” George Orson said at last, and his voice wasn’t as soothing as she’d hoped. It was, in fact, a bit austere, which was disappointing.

  “I suppose,” she said, “that you want me to call you ‘Dad.’”

  “That’s right,” George Orson said. “I guess you could call me ‘Father’ if you prefer.”

  “Gross,” Lucy said. “That’s even weirder than calling you ‘Dad.’ Why can’t I just call you David, or whatever?”

  And George Orson had looked at her sternly—as if she really were just an impertinent fifteen-year-old. “Because,” he said. “Because you are supposed to be my daughter. It’s not respectful. People notice it when a child calls a parent by their first name, especially in a conservative state such as this. And we don’t want people to notice us. We don’t want them to remember us when we leave. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” she said. She kept her hands in her lap, and when she felt her heart palpitate, she let out a breath. “Yes, Dad,” she said. “That makes sense. But I sincerely hope, Dad, that you’re not going to talk to me in that condescending tone all the way to Africa.”

  He glanced at her again, and there was a glint of an edge in his eyes, a hint of fury that made her flinch inwardly. She had not seen him truly angry before, and she realized now that she didn’t want to. He would not be a very nice father, she realized. She didn’t even know why, but she intuited it suddenly. He would be cold and demanding and impatient with his children, if he ever had them.

  She thought this, even though his expression softened almost immediately.

  “Listen,” he said. “Sweetheart, I’m just a touch nervous about this. This is very serious business, now. You have to remember to answer to ‘Brooke,’ and you have to be sure that you never, ever call me George. It’s very important. I know it’s hard to get used to, but it’s only temporary.”

  “I understand,” she said, and she nodded, gazing again at the glove box. Out the window, she could see a rock formation that looked like a volcano, or a giant funnel.

  “Do you see that up ahead?” George Orson said—David Fremden said. “That’s called Chimney Rock. It’s a national historic site.”

  “Yes,” said Brooke.

  It was weird to be a daughter again. Even a pretend one. A long time had passed since she’d thought about her own real father, for months and months she had been valiantly containing those memories, setting up walls and screens, pushing them back when they threatened to materialize in her daily consciousness.

  But when she said the word “Dad,” it was more difficult. Her father seemed to genie into her mind’s eye as if decanted, his mild, round earnest face, his thick shoulders and bald head. In life, he had never seemed disappointed by her, and though she didn’t believe in spirits, in an afterlife, she didn’t believe, as Patricia did, that their dead parents hovered over them as angels—

  Nevertheless, she felt a twinge when she called George Orson “Dad.” A small stab of guilt, as if her father could know that she’d betrayed him, and for the first time since his death, he seemed to lean over her, palpable, not angry but just sort of hurt, and she was sorry.

  She had truly loved him, she guessed.

  She knew that, but it wasn’t something she had allowed herself to think about, and so it came as a surprise.

  He’d been a low-key presence in their house, without much of an opinion about the raising of girl children, though Lucy believed he was more temperamentally suited to her than her mother was. He was a private person, like Lucy, with the same cynical sense of humor, and Lucy remembered how they used to sneak off together to see horror movies, which her mother would have forbidden—Patricia was the type of girl who had nightmares over a Halloween mask, or even a movie poster, let alone the actual film.

  But Lucy wasn’t scared. She and her father didn’t go to such movies for thrills. Watching horror movies was oddly relaxing, for both Lucy and her father, it was like a kind of music that confirmed the way they felt about the world. A shared understanding, and Lucy never got frightened, not exactly. Occasionally when a monster or killer would pop out, she would put her hand on her father’s arm, she would lean closer to him, and they would exchange a glance. A smile.

  They understood each other.

  All of this
came to her as she and George Orson drove without a word, and she pressed her cheek against the glass of the passenger seat window, watching as a cloud of birds lifted up from a field, pulling up in a plume as they went past. Her thoughts were not clearly articulated in her mind, but she could feel them moving swiftly, gathering.

  “What are you thinking about?” George Orson said, and when he spoke, her thoughts scattered, broke up into fragments of memories, the way that the birds separated out of their formation and back into individual birds. “You look as if you’re deep in thought,” George Orson said.

  Dad said.

  And she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’m feeling anxious.”

  “Ah,” he said. He turned his eyes back to the road, touching his index finger lightly to the bridge of his sunglasses. “That’s completely natural.”

  He reached over and patted his hand against her thigh, and she accepted this little gesture, though she wasn’t sure if the hand belonged to George Orson or David Fremden.

  “It’s difficult at first,” he said. “Making the switch. There’s a bump you have to get past. You get used to one mode and one persona and there can be some cognitive dissonance, when you transfer over. I know exactly what you’re talking about.” He ran his hand along the circumference of the steering wheel, as if he were shaping it, molding it out of clay.

  “Anxiety!” he said. “I’ve been there, plenty of times! And, you know, it’s particularly hard during the first one, especially, because you’re so invested in that idea of self. You grew up with that concept—you think there’s a real you—and you have some longstanding attachments, people you’ve known, and you start to think about them. People you have to leave behind—”

  He sighed, and even grew slightly wistful, maybe thinking about his late mother, or his brother who had drowned, some long-ago family outing on the pontoon when the lake was still full of water.

  Or not.

  It suddenly seemed so obvious.

  What had George Orson said to her? I’ve been a lot of people. Dozens.

  She had been in an alternate universe for a long time now, she thought, and she had been floating behind George Orson as if in a trance. And then abruptly, as they drove along toward the distant post office, she felt herself awaken. There was a flutter, a lifting, and then her thoughts began to fall into place.

  He didn’t have a brother, she thought.

  He hadn’t really grown up here, in Nebraska. He had never been a student at Yale; nothing he’d told her had been true.

  “God,” she said, and shook her head. “I’m so stupid.”

  And he glanced over at her, his eyes attentive and affectionate. “No, no,” he said. “You’re not stupid, honey. What’s the matter?”

  “I just realized something,” Lucy said, and she glanced down to where his hand was still resting on her leg. His hand, she would recognize it anywhere, a hand that she had held, that she had put to her lips, a palm that she had traced her fingertips across.

  “Your name isn’t really George Orson, is it?” she said, and—

  He was motionless. Still driving. Still wearing those sunglasses, which reflected the road and the rolling horizon, still the same man she had known.

  “George Orson,” she said. “That’s not your real name,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  He spoke gently, as if he were telling her bad news, and she thought of the way the policemen had come to their door on the day their parents were killed, the way they delivered the news in cautious intervals. There had been a terrible accident. Their parents were severely injured. The paramedics had arrived at the scene. There wasn’t anything the paramedics were able to do.

  She nodded, and she and George Orson looked at each other. There was a silent, tender embarrassment. Hadn’t this been understood yesterday, when he showed the Ivory Coast bank account, when he’d produced their fake birth certificates? Hadn’t it been obvious?

  It should have been clear, she guessed, but only now did it begin to sink in.

  She looked down at her pink T-shirt, her breasts pressed flat by a sports bra.

  “That isn’t really the house that you grew up in, is it?” she said, and her voice felt pressed flat as well. “The Lighthouse. All of the stuff you told me. That painting. That wasn’t your grandmother.”

  “Hmm,” he said, and he lifted his fingers from her thigh to gesture vaguely, an apologetic fluttering movement. “This is complicated,” he said ruefully.

  “It always comes to this,” he said. “Everyone gets so hung up on what’s real and not real.”

  “Yeah,” Lucy said. “People are funny that way.”

  But George Orson only shook his head, as if she didn’t get it.

  “This may sound unbelievable to you,” he said, “but the truth is, a part of me truly did grow up there. There isn’t just one version of the past, you know. Maybe that seems crazy, but eventually, after we’ve done this for a while, I think you’ll see. We can be anybody we want. Do you realize that?

  “And that’s all it comes down to,” he said. “I loved being George Orson. I put a lot of thought and energy into it, and it wasn’t fake. I wasn’t trying to fool you. I did it because I liked it. Because it made me happy.”

  And Lucy let out a small, uncertain breath, thinking: a host of thoughts.

  “Why would you want to be a high school teacher?” she said at last. It was the only thing that came to her clearly, the only one of the thoughts that could be articulated. “That doesn’t sound fun at all.”

  “No, no,” George Orson said, and he smiled at her hopefully, as if this were the exact right question—as if they were back in the classroom, discussing the difference between existentialism and nihilism—as if she’d raised her hand and she was his beloved student and he was excited to explain.

  “It was one of the best things I’ve ever done,” he said. “That year in Pompey. I always wanted to be a teacher, ever since I was a kid. And it was great. It was a fantastic experience.”

  He shook his head, as if he were still entranced by it. As if high school had been some exotic foreign land.

  “And,” he said, “I met you. I met you, and we fell in love, didn’t we? Don’t you understand, honey? You’re the only person in the world I’ve ever been able to talk to. You’re the only person in the world who loves me.”

  Had they fallen in love? She guessed they had, though now it felt like a weird idea, since it turned out that “George Orson” wasn’t even a real person.

  Thinking about it made her feel dizzy and squeamish. If you took away all of the pieces that made up George Orson—his Lighthouse Motel childhood and his Ivy League education, his funny anecdotes and subtly ironic teaching style and the tender, attentive concern he’d had for Lucy as his student—if all of that was just an invention, what was left? There was, presumably, someone inside the George Orson disguise, a personality, a pair of eyes peering out: a soul, she supposed you might call it, though she still didn’t know the soul’s real name.

  Which one did she have feelings for—the character of George Orson, or the person who had created him? Which one had she been having sex with?

  It was a bit like one of those word games George Orson had been so fond of offering up to their class—“Strange loops,” he called them. Moderation in all things, including moderation, he said. Is the answer to this question no? I never tell the truth.

  She could picture the way he had grinned when he said that. This was before she ever had an idea that she would become his girlfriend, long before she could have imagined that she would be driving to a post office in Nebraska with a fake birth certificate and reservations for a trip to Africa. “I never tell the truth,” he told the class, was a version of the famous Epimenides paradox, and then he explained what a paradox was, and Lucy had written it down, thinking that it might be on a test, possibly she could get extra credit.

  They had come now almost to the edge of Crawford,
and George Orson—David Fremden—pulled over to consult the map he had downloaded from the Internet.

  They had parked in front of a historical marker, and after he was finished examining his papers, George Orson sat there for a while, regarding the sign’s metal tablet with interest.

  Named for Army Captain Emmet Crawford, a Fort Robinson soldier, the city lies in the White River Valley in Pine Ridge country and serves an extensive cattle ranching and farming area. The Fort Laramie–Fort Pierre Fur Trail of 1840 and the Sidney–Black Hills Trail active during the Black Hills gold rush of the 1870s both passed through this site. Crawford has been host or home to such personages as Sioux Chief Red Cloud; former desperado David (Doc) Middleton; poet-scout John Wallace Crawford; frontierswoman Calamity Jane; Army scout Baptiste (Little Bat) Garnier, shot down in a saloon; military surgeon Walter Reed, conqueror of yellow fever; and President Theodore Roosevelt.

  It was a sad piece of work, she thought.

  Or at least she found it sad, at this juncture in her life. What had George Orson told their class once? “People like to contextualize themselves,” he told them. “They like to feel they are connected to the larger forces of the world in some small way.” And she recalled how he had tilted his head, as if to say: Isn’t that pathetic?

  “People like to think that what they do actually matters,” he’d said, dreamy, bemused, passing his gaze over their faces, and she remembered how his eyes rested in particular upon her, and she’d straightened in her chair, a little flattered, a little flustered. And she’d gazed back at him and nodded.

  Thinking of this, Lucy put her hand to her throat, which continued to have that constricted feeling, that anxiety attack feeling.

  People like to think that what they do actually matters.

  It had occurred to her that, in fact, her own proof of identity—Lucy Lattimore’s birth certificate and social security card and so forth—were back in Pompey, Ohio, still in a plastic Ziploc bag in the top drawer of her mother’s bureau, along with the ink prints of Lucy’s baby feet, and her immunization history, and any other paperwork that her mother had deemed important.