by Dan Chaon
Why couldn’t it have been me? he wondered. Why couldn’t a pretty girl fall in love with me? Why does Hayden always get everything?
When he came out of the bathroom, Lydia Barrie was already up, already partially dressed, and she turned to look at him, wistfully.
“Good morning,” she said. She was wearing a bra and a slip, and her formerly coifed hair was tousled into a tangle, like one of the witch wigs they sold back at the magic store in Cleveland. Her makeup was almost completely smudged off, and her eyes were haggard, hungover. You could tell for certain she was getting ready to enter her forties, though he didn’t find that fact unappealing. In her rumpled, unpolished state, there was a vulnerability he found himself feeling tenderly toward.
“Hey,” he said sheepishly, and he smiled as she put a hand shyly to her hair.
And then he saw the gun.
It was a small revolver of some sort, and she was holding it loosely in her left hand as she smoothed her right hand over her hair, and he watched as she made an attempt to unobtrusively tuck the weapon into her attaché. For a second, she acted as if she hoped he hadn’t noticed.
“Holy shit,” Miles said.
He took a step back.
Actually, he guessed that he had never seen a gun in real life, though he had probably viewed hundreds of people with guns on television and in movies and video games. He had watched many people get killed; he knew what it was supposed to look like: the small circular hole in the chest or the belly, the blood spreading out in a Rorschach across the shirt.
“Jesus,” he said. “Lydia.”
Her expression wavered. At first, she seemed to hope that she could play innocent—she widened her eyes, as if she were preparing to say: What? What are you talking about? And then she appeared to realize that such a tactic was fruitless, and a cool, defiant look crossed her face before, at last, she shrugged. She smiled at him ruefully.
“What?” she said.
“You have a gun,” he said. “Why do you have a gun?”
He was standing there in his underwear, still a bit groggy, still a bit dazzled by the fact that he’d had sex for the first time in two years, still circling through the conversations they’d had the night before, and the picture of Hayden and Rachel, and the sadness he’d felt. Lydia Barrie raised her eyebrows.
“You don’t have any idea what it’s like to be a woman,” she said. “I know you don’t think your brother is dangerous, but be realistic. Put yourself in my shoes. I need some security, Miles.”
“Oh,” Miles said. They stood there, facing each other, and Lydia laid the gun on the bed and held up her hands as if it were Miles who had the weapon.
“It’s just a little mousegun,” she said. “A little .25-caliber Beretta. I’ve carried it for years,” she said. “They’re not particularly deadly, as guns go—I would call it more of a deterrent than anything else.”
“I see,” Miles said, though he wasn’t quite sure he did. He was standing there in his boxer shorts with their ridiculous hot pepper print, and he crossed his hands uncertainly over his chest. A wobbly shudder ran through his bare legs, and he wondered, briefly, if he ought to make a dash for the door.
“Are you going to kill my brother?” he said at last, and Lydia widened her eyes at him as if astonished.
“Of course not,” she said, and he stood there as she pulled her skirt on up over her thighs and zipped up the back, and then she gave him a pinched smile. “Miles,” she said. “Dear heart, I asked you last night if you had a plan, and you told me that you more or less expected to improvise, once you located your brother. Well, I’m not going to improvise. When I was fired from Oglesby and Rosenberg, one of the first things I did in my ‘free time’ was acquire private investigator and bail enforcement agent licenses from the state of New York. Which was an enormous help, as I was looking for—Hayden.” She slipped her arms decisively into the sleeves of her blouse. “And the first thing I did when I arrived in Canada was hire Mr. Joe Itigaituk, who is a licensed Canadian private investigator, so that when we take your brother into custody, I won’t be interfering with the sovereignty of a foreign power.”
Miles watched as Lydia fastened the buttons down the center of her blouse, from the neck to the belly, her fingers moving in a deft sign language as she talked.
He glanced at the door, which led to the hallway, and his leg shuddered again.
“I’m not a murderer, Miles,” Lydia said, and they stood there, looking at each other, and her expression softened as she looked him up and down.
“Why don’t you put your clothes on,” she said. “Mr. Itigaituk and I are flying to Banks Island in a couple of hours, and I thought you’d like to come along with us. That way you can be absolutely sure that no one will hurt him. If you’re there, he may come along with us peacefully.”
It was Lydia’s belief that Hayden was currently occupying an abandoned meteorological station located on the northern tip of Banks Island, not far from the limit of permanent ice.
“Though the limit of permanent ice is not as stable as it used to be,” she said as they rode in the taxi. “Global warming and so forth.”
Miles was reticent. He leaned his head against the window, peering out at the treeless streets, a row of brightly colored townhouses—turquoise, sunflower-yellow, cardinal-red—linked together like children’s building blocks. The dirt along the roads was the color of charcoal, and the sky was cloudless, and he could see the melting tundra just beyond the line of houses and storage facilities. It was green out there, even spotted with wildflowers, though it seemed to him that the landscape wouldn’t truly be itself until it was covered again in ice.
Lydia had not given him the full details of how she had traced Hayden to this particular spot, just as Miles had not fully explained his own, less rational methods—the intuition or presentiment or idiocy that sent him driving for days upon days, four thousand miles. But Lydia was fairly confident. “The fact that we’re both here in Inuvik seems like a good sign, doesn’t it? I feel very encouraged, actually. Don’t you?”
“I guess so,” Miles said, though now that the prospect of Hayden’s capture was looming, he felt a sense of apprehension branching through him, taking root. He was thinking of the way Hayden had screamed when he was put in restraints at the mental hospital. It was one of the most awful things that Miles had ever heard—his brother, eighteen years old, a grown man, bellowing out these dreadful crowlike shrieks, his arms flapping as the orderlies descended on him. It was a few days after the new year, and it was snowing in Cleveland, and Miles and his mother stood there in their winter coats, dandelion fluff snowflakes melting in their hair as Hayden was pressed to the floor, his back arching, legs jerking as he tried to kick free, his eyes wide as he tried to bite. “Miles!” he was crying. “Miles, don’t let them take me. They’re hurting me, Miles. Save me, save me—”
Which Miles had not.
“You’re quiet,” Lydia Barrie said, and she reached over and brushed his forearm, as if there were a crumb or a speck of dust. “Worried?”
“A little,” he said. “I’m just thinking about how he’s going to react. I don’t know, it’s just—I don’t want him to get hurt.”
Lydia Barrie sighed. “You’re a sweet person,” she said. “You have a kind heart, and that’s a wonderful quality to have. But you know what, Miles? He’s running out of options.”
Miles nodded, and looked down to where Lydia had lightly pressed the pads of her fingertips against the back of his hand, just below his wrist.
“He’s found himself in a corner,” Lydia said. “And I would venture to guess that there are some extremely bad people who are closing in on him. People much more dangerous than I am.”
He had suspected as much himself, when he’d gotten that letter from Hayden. I have been in deep hiding, very deep, but every day I thought about how much I missed you. It was only my fear for your own safety that kept me from contact….
“Yes,” Miles said. �
��I think you’re probably right.”
He couldn’t help but think again of that photo of Hayden and Rachel, together on the couch at Christmas. He hoped they were still together—that Rachel would be there in the meteorological station with him. He could imagine the moment, when he and Lydia opened the door and Hayden and Rachel stood there in the tiny shacklike room, haggard and startled, and probably thin. What, after all, had they been eating up there in that abandoned place? Fish? Canned goods? Had they been able to shower? Would they be wild-haired like hermits?
Undoubtedly they would panic at first. They would be expecting a looming thug or a swift, efficient assassin—
And then, they would see that it was just Miles. Just Miles and Lydia, a brother and a sister. And wouldn’t they, after that first shudder of recognition, be grateful? It would be a reunion of sorts. He and Lydia had come to save them, and they would understand that there was nowhere else to run, that they had reached the end.
And at least it was someone they loved who had found them.
The taxi had arrived at the airfield, where Mr. Itigaituk was waiting for them. The taxi dropped them off, and Lydia paid the driver, and then she turned to wave as Mr. Itigaituk approached. He was a short mustachioed middle-aged Inuit man in a corduroy jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots, and to Miles he looked more like a high school math teacher than a private eye.
The man frowned when he saw Miles, but he didn’t say anything. Miles watched as he and Lydia Barrie shook hands, and he stood a short distance away as they spoke together in low voices, as Mr. Itigaituk eyed Miles skeptically and then nodded, his dark eyes resting coolly on Miles’s face.
The airfield was about fifteen kilometers outside of town, and he was aware again of the endless sunlight, the green, flat expanse of tundra rolling away from them in all directions, the glint of muddy bogs and melt ponds in the distance.
Just beyond, at rest on the tarmac, was the small six-seater Cessna that was waiting to take them to Banks Island, to Aulavik.
21
Ryan looked up and there was a figure standing in the doorway.
He was almost asleep, bent over his computer, his hands curled into position, his fingertips aligned on asdf jkl; and his chin had grown heavy until at last his neck drooped and elbows grew slack and his forehead began a slow descent toward the surface of the table.
It was a particular dream state. After a few beers, a few bong hits; after a long time traveling, crossing time zones—passing from pacific to mountain to central to eastern—after calming his drunk, possibly ’shrooming father who was stumbling around with a gun; after getting him into bed and gently sliding the gun out of his limp hand and putting it away and then sitting in front of the computer screen with his eyes closed.
Dutifully, he had made reservations for them both to fly to Quito, Ecuador, under the names Max Wimberley and Darren Loftus, and the confirmation was still there on the screen, a box floating on the surface of the monitor like a leaf in a pond, and Ryan was thinking, I should go to bed. I can’t believe how exhausted I am. And he rolled his dry, sticky tongue inside his mouth and peeled open his eyelids.
He’d had dreams like this before.
A man was standing there, silhouetted behind the mesh of the screen door. He stood under the porch light, where moths were circling and bumping groggily against the surface of the ceiling, and there was a revolving shadow-lantern effect above the man’s head. Ryan let his eyes close again.
He had been having these small hallucinations for a while now, imagining that he saw people he knew, these flickers that he knew were nothing but the detritus of exhaustion and stress and lingering guilty feelings, too much beer and pot, too much time alone with Jay, no one else to talk with; too much time sitting in front of a computer screen, which sometimes appeared to pulse with a rapid millisecond strobe, like those old subliminal advertising messages he’d read about.
It reminded him of this one time at Northwestern. He and Walcott had been partying all weekend and he was sitting at the window of his fourth-floor dorm room, smoking a joint. His arm was extended out into the open air to keep the smoke from stinking up the room, and he was trying to blow rings out into the foggy spring night, looking down at the empty sidewalk and the streetlamps that were made to look like old-fashioned gaslights, and there was no traffic, and suddenly someone reached up and touched his wrist.
He felt this very distinctly. It was impossible, he knew. His arm was extended four stories above the ground, but nevertheless someone reached up and clutched it for just a second. It was as if he were trailing his arm out of a boat instead of a fourth-floor window, as if his fingers were brushing the surface of a lake when a hand, a drowning person, had reached out of the water to grasp his wrist.
He’d let out a cry, and the joint had fallen out from between his fingers, and he saw the orange light of the lit end tumbling down through dark space as he yanked his hand back quickly into the room. “Holy shit!” he said, and Walcott had looked up from his laptop, regarding Ryan sleepily.
“Huh?” Walcott said, and Ryan just sat there, holding his wrist as if it had been burned. What could he say? A ghostly hand just swam up four stories and tried to grab me. Someone tried to pull me out of the window.
“Something bit me,” he said at last, calmly. “I just dropped my joint.”
All of this came back to him vividly—more like time travel than memory—and he gave his head a shake, the typical gesture of the daydreamer, as if you could rattle your brain back into place.
He squinched his eyes shut, thinking maybe this would wipe the blackboard clean, but when he opened them, the figure in the doorway had actually become more distinct.
The man had come closer. He was in the room now, stepping toward Ryan, a tall man in a black suit, the shiny cloth glinting.
“Is Jay home?” the man said, and Ryan’s body jerked as he lifted up into full consciousness. “I’m a friend of Jay’s,” the man said. Real. Not a dream.
The man was holding a black plastic object, which looked at first like it might be an electric razor. Something that could be plugged into a computer? A communication device, like a cell phone or a receiver, with a pair of metal tongs extending from the end of it?
The man stepped forward quickly with the thing held out, as if offering it to Ryan, and Ryan actually reached out his hand for a second, right before the man pressed it up against his neck.
It was a Taser, Ryan realized.
He felt the electricity pass through him. He and his muscles contracted painfully, and he was aware of the spasms of his arms and legs flailing, his tongue hardening in his mouth, a thick strip of meat as he made a gurgling sound in his throat. His lips shook out spittle.
And then he was becoming unconscious.
It wasn’t a hallucination. It wasn’t anything except blankness, thick, fuzzy black spots that began to swell over his line of vision. Like mold spreading in a petri dish. Like the film cells of a movie melting.
And then: voices.
Jay—his father—nervous, sidling.
Then a calm reply. A voice from a relaxation tape?
I’m looking for Jay. Can you
help me out with that?
Ouch, Jay said, a little shrilly.
I don’t know, I don’t
Is the name Jay Kozelek familiar to you?
I …
Where is he?
… don’t know
All I need is an address. We can make this very easy on you.
Honestly
Anything you might be able to tell me will be a big help right now.
Honest to God, I swear
I don’t
Ryan’s head lifted, but his neck felt like a limp stalk. He was sitting in a chair, and he could feel the pressure of the duct tape that held him—his forearms, his chest, his waist, his calves, his ankles—and when he tried experimentally to flex, he was aware that he was held fast. His eyes slit open and he could see that he and Jay were sitti
ng at the kitchen table across from each other. He could see that a trickle of blood was running from Jay’s hair, across his temple and his left eye and along the edge of his nose and into his mouth. Jay made a sound as if he were snuffling, as if he had a cold, and a few droplets of blood spattered out and speckled the tabletop.
“Look,” Jay was saying to the man, humbly. “You know what this business is like. People are slippery. I hardly even know the guy,” he said, very eager, very helpful, still trying to find a fingerhold on his old charming Jay self. “You probably know more about him than I do.”
And the guy standing over him mused on this.
“Oh, really,” the guy said, and he stood there looking down at Jay.
It was the guy who had shocked Ryan with the Taser, and for the first time Ryan got a good look at him. He was a big guy, late twenties, narrow shoulders and wide hips, about six foot one or two, and he was wearing a shiny black Italian suit that a mafioso might wear—though he didn’t look much like a gangster. He had a boyish, Midwestern, potato-shaped head, a shock of straw-colored blond hair, and he reminded Ryan of no one so much as the graduate student who had been a TA in his computer science class back at Northwestern.
“You know what,” the guy said, “I don’t believe you.”
He lifted his fist and clouted Jay in the face. Hard. Hard enough that Jay tilted back and more blood droplets flew out of his mouth, and Jay let out a high, surprised yelp.
“It’s a mistake!” Jay said. “Listen, you’ve just got the wrong guy, that’s all. I don’t know what you want me to say. Tell me what you want me to say!”
Ryan was trying to keep himself as small and soundless as possible. He could hear movement—some general thumping and crashing in the next room, and through the doorway he could see men wearing black pants and shirts, two men, he thought, though possibly more, unplugging the hard drives from the rows of computers on the tables and tossing the monitors and keyboards and other extraneous hardware onto the floor, sometimes hitting things with long curved pieces of metal, crowbars, and one of them picked up Jay’s Ouija board from the coffee table and looked at it curiously, front and back, as if it were some form of technology he’d never encountered before. Then he paused, maybe sensing that Ryan was looking at him, and Ryan quickly closed his eyes.