by Dan Chaon
It would be such a relief, Miles thought, such a comfort to think that they’d finally come to the end of the story. Wasn’t that the gift that Hayden was giving to them, with this display? Wasn’t this Hayden’s version of kindness?
A present for you, Miles. A present for you, too, Lydia. You’ve come at last to the edge of the earth, and now your journey is finished. An ending for you, if you want it.
If only you’ll accept it.
24
Ryan had been living in Ecuador for almost a year now, and he had begun to get used to the idea that he would probably never see Jay again.
He was getting used to a lot of things.
He was living in the Old Town part of Quito—Centro Histórico—in a small apartment on Calle Espejo, which was a fairly busy pedestrian boulevard, and he had become inured to the sound of the city, its early waking. There was a magazine stand just below his window, so he didn’t need an alarm clock. Before daylight, he would hear the metal clatter as Señor Gamboa Pulido set up his racks and arranged his newspapers, and shortly thereafter voices began to weave their way up into his half consciousness. For a long while, the sound of Spanish sentences was little more than burbling music, but that had begun to change, too. It had not taken as long as he’d expected before the syllables had begun to solidify into words, before he realized that he himself had begun to think in Spanish.
He was still limited, obviously. Still recognizably American, but he could get by in the market or on the street, he could absorb the patter of the disc jockeys on the radio, he could watch television and understand the news, the plots and dialogue of the soap operas, he could exchange friendly conversation at the coffee shops or Internet cafés, he was aware when people were talking about him—watching curiously as he bent over the keyboard, impressed by how quickly he could type with one hand.
He was becoming accustomed to that, as well.
Sometimes in the morning there were occasionally odd twinges. The ghost of his hand would ache, the palm would itch, the fingers would appear to be flexing. But he was no longer surprised to open his eyes and find that it was gone. He had stopped waking up with the certainty that the hand had come back to him, that it had somehow rematerialized in the middle of the night, sprouted and regenerated from the stump of his wrist.
The keen sense of loss had faded, and these days he found that he stumbled less and less over that absence. He could dress and even tie his shoes without much trouble. He could make toast and coffee, crack an egg into a skillet, all one-handed, and some days he wouldn’t even bother to wear his prosthesis.
“Eggs” was one of the words that he sometimes stumbled over.
Huevos? Huecos? Huesos? Eggs, holes, bones.
For the time being, he was using a myoelectric hook, which fit like a gauntlet over his stump. He could open and close the prongs simply by flexing the muscles in his forearm, and he was actually pretty adept at using it. Nevertheless, there were days when it was easier—less conspicuous—to simply button a cuff over the bare empty wrist. He didn’t like the interest that the hook aroused in people, the startled glances, the fear from women and children. It was enough to be a gringo, a Yankee, without the added attention.
In the beginning, as he made his way through the Plaza de la Independencia, in the promenade around the winged victory statue, he would find that he attracted notice, despite himself. He remembered Walcott’s admonition: Never look at people directly in the face! But nevertheless he found that shoe-shining street urchins would dash behind him, making their shrill incomprehensible cries, and the old country women, in their gray braids and anaco caps, would deepen their frowns as he passed. Quito was a city full of a surprising number of clowns and mimes, and these, too, were drawn to him. A ragged, red-nosed skeleton on stilts; a white-faced zombie in a dusty black suit, walking like a mechanical toy through a crosswalk; an elderly man, with lipstick and green eye shadow and a pink turban, holding up a fistful of tarot cards, calling after him, “Fortuna! Fortuna!”
Sometimes it would be a college kid, with a backpack and sandals, army surplus clothes. “Hey, dude! Are you American?”
This happened to him less frequently now. He passed through the plaza without much incident. The old fortune-teller merely lifted his head as Ryan passed, the brothel makeup worn down by perspiration, sad eyes following as Ryan made his way toward the Presidential Palace, the white colonnaded façade, the old eighteenth-century jail cells that had once lined the foot of the palace now opened and transformed into barber shops and clothing stores and fast-food joints.
Above the city, on the mountaintops, a Calvary of antennae and satellite dishes gazed down. And through the gaps in buildings he could occasionally see the great statue on Panecillo Hill, the Virgin of the Apocalypse in her dancing pose, hovering over the valley.
Financially, he was doing okay. Despite the setbacks, he still had a few bank accounts that had not been discovered, and he had begun, very cautiously, to transfer monies from one to the next—a little trickle that was keeping him comfortable. He had set up some trusts that were, in fact, producing dividends, and in the meantime he had managed to find a new name that he had settled into. David Angel Verdugo Cubrero, an Ecuadorian national—with a passport and everything—and when people would look at him oddly, he would shrug. “My mother was an American,” he told them, and he set up a savings account and got David a couple of credit cards, and it seemed to be fine. He appeared to have escaped.
The men who had attacked them, the men who had cut off his hand, had apparently lost his trail.
He guessed that Jay had not been so lucky.
Whatever had happened that night was still blurry in his mind. He still didn’t know what the men had been after, or why they had insisted that Jay wasn’t Jay, or why they had left in such a panic, or how Jay had managed to get free from the chair he was taped to. No matter how many times he tried to put it together in his mind, the events remained stubbornly illogical, random, fragmentary.
By the time they reached the hospital, Ryan had lost a lot of blood, and the color had washed out of his vision. He could remember—he thought he remembered—the automatic sliding doors opening as they stumbled into the entrance of the emergency room. He could remember the surprised, quivering nurse in her balloon-patterned smock, puzzled as Jay thrust the beer cooler at her. “It’s his hand,” Jay said. “You can put it back on, right? You can fix it, right?”
He could remember Jay kissing his hair, whispering thickly, “You’re not going to die; I love you, Son; you’re the only one who has ever been there for me; I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you; you’re going to be fine—”
“Yes,” Ryan said. “Okay,” he said, and when he closed his eyes, he could hear Jay telling someone, “He fell off a ladder. And his hand—caught on a piece of wire. It happened so quickly.”
Why is he lying? Ryan thought dreamily.
And then, the next thing he could recall he was in a hospital bed, the stump of his wrist mummy-wrapped and the ghost of his hand throbbing dully, and the young doctor, Doctor Ali, with his black hair pulled back in a ponytail and his weary brown eyes, telling him that there was some unfortunate news, about his hand, the doctor said they had been unable to reattach the extremity; too much time had passed, and as a small hospital they were not equipped—
“Where is it?” Ryan said. That was his first thought. What had they done with his hand?
And the doctor had glanced at the tiny blond nurse who was standing off to the side. “Unfortunately,” the doctor said ruefully, “it’s gone.”
“Where’s my father?” Ryan had asked then. He was comprehending things all right, but nothing was sinking in. His brain felt flat, two-dimensional, and he gazed uncertainly at the door to his hospital room. He could hear the clip, clip of someone’s hard-soled shoes against the floor of the hallway outside.
“Where’s my dad?” he said, and again the doctor and nurse exchanged solemn looks.
“Mr. Wimberley,
” the doctor said, “do you have a phone number where your father can be reached? Is there someone else that you’d like us to call?”
It wasn’t until Ryan had finally looked in his wallet that he had found the note. The wallet—still with his Max Wimberley driver’s license—was stuffed with money. Fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills, some twenties, some ones, and there was also a small folded piece of paper, Jay’s neat, tiny block-letter handwriting:
R—Leave the country ASAP. I will meet you in Quito, will contact you when I am able. Hurry!
Love always, Jay.
When he’d first arrived in Quito, he kept expecting that Jay would arrive any day. He would scope through the pedestrians on the plaza and the cobblestone sidewalks, he would peer into the narrow cluttered shops, he would sit in various Internet cafés and type Jay’s names into search engines, all the names that he could remember Jay ever using. He’d check through every email account he’d ever had, and then he’d double-check.
He didn’t want to think that Jay was dead, though maybe it was easier than imagining that Jay just wasn’t coming.
That Jay had abandoned him.
That Jay wasn’t even Jay, but just some—what?—another avatar?
In those first few months, he would stand at the balcony of his second-floor apartment, listening to the peddler girls who stood outside the Teatro Bolivar, just down the block. Beautiful, sorrowful Otavaleñas, sisters perhaps, twins, with their black braided hair and white peasant blouses and red shawls, holding their baskets of strawberries or lima beans or flowers, chanting “One dollar, one dollar, one dollar, one dollar.” At first he’d thought the girls were singing. Their voices were so sweet and musical and yearning, twined together in counterpoint, sometimes harmonizing: “One dollar, one dollar, one dollar.” As if their hearts had been broken.
Now almost a year had passed, and he didn’t think of Jay quite so much. Not quite so often.
In the afternoon, he’d walk down to Calle Flores to an Internet café that he liked. It was just past the coral-colored stucco walls of the Hotel Viena Internacional, where the American and European students could stay for cheap, and the Ecuadorian businessmen could spend a few hours with a prostitute. Just down the hill, where the narrow side street opened abruptly into a panorama view of the eastern mountains, the stacks and stacks of houses were set in cornrow circles beneath the thin blue sky.
Here. Just an open doorway with a hand-painted sign: INTERNET, and a set of steep, crooked stairs. A cramped back room with rows of ancient, dirty computers.
The proprietor was an old American. Raines Davis, he was called, perhaps seventy years old, who sat behind the counter, slowly filling an ashtray with cigarette butts. His thick white hair had a yellowish tinge, as if stained with smoke.
Often the place was full of students, all hunched over their keyboards, eyes fixed on the box of the monitor, but sometimes in the late afternoon it was more or less empty, and that was Ryan’s favorite time, very tranquil, very private, the thin cirrus of cigarette smoke hanging just below the ceiling. Yes, sometimes he would type in “Ryan Schuyler,” just to see if anything came up; he would look at satellite photos of Council Bluffs, it was so sophisticated these days that you could see his house, you could see Stacey’s car in the driveway, pulling out, on her way to work, he guessed.
He had even wondered what would happen if he contacted them, if he let them know he was alive after all. Would that be kind or cruel, he wondered. Would you really want the dead to come back to life again, after you’d spent so much energy trying to put the world back in order? He wasn’t sure—didn’t know who to ask—though he could imagine bringing the question up to Mr. Davis someday, when they knew each other better.
Mr. Davis wasn’t a talkative person, but they would converse from time to time. He was an old military man, Mr. Davis. A true expatriate. He had grown up in Idaho, but had lived in Quito for thirty years now, and he didn’t expect to ever return to America again. He didn’t even think about it anymore, he said.
And Ryan had nodded.
He imagined there must be a point when you stopped being a visitor. After the tourists had flown off, after the exchange students had stopped playing native, after the idea of “back home” had started to feel fictional.
How far away, the child he’d been to Stacey and Owen Schuyler. How distant, the gawky, eager boyfriend he’d been to Pixie, the roommate he’d been to Walcott, the son he’d been to Jay.
Was this any less real than the small, transient selves he’d discarded? Kasimir Czernewski, Matthew Blurton, Max Wimberley.
At a certain point, you must be able to slip loose. At a certain point, you found that you had been set free.
You could be anyone, he thought.
You could be anyone.
25
George Orson was losing his cool.
He’d wake up in the middle of the night with a thrashing cry, and then he would sit with his knees pulled up, with the bedside lamp on and the television going. “I’m having bad dreams again,” he said, and Lucy sat there uncomfortably beside him as he emanated a long, barren silence.
It was their second day in Africa, holed up in a fifteenth-floor room at the Hotel Ivoire, and George Orson would go out and come back, go out and come back, and each time he returned, he looked more flushed and unnerved.
Meanwhile, Lucy had been sitting there in their room, high in the spire of a skyscraper hotel, bored and pretty freaked out herself, delicately un-taping currency from the pages of books, staring down at the stream of traffic on the highway below. Six lanes of cars, running the circumference of the Ébrié Lagoon—which was not the azure brochure blue she had expected, but just ordinary grayish water, not much different from Lake Erie. At least there were palm trees.
She heard him at the door, rattling the knob, muttering to himself, and when he finally burst in, he threw his key card onto the carpet, his teeth bared.
“Motherfucker,” he said, and hurled his briefcase onto the bed. “God-fucking-damn it,” he said, and Lucy stood there, holding a hundred-dollar bill, blinking at him, alarmed. She had never heard him swear before.
“What’s wrong?” she said, and she watched as he stomped over to the minibar and yanked it open.
Empty.
“Fucking piece-of-shit hotel,” he said. “This is supposed to be four stars?”
“What’s wrong?” she said again, but he merely shook his head at her, irritably, passing his fingers across his scalp, his hair standing up in dry, grassy tufts.
“We’re going to get new passports,” he said. “We need to get rid of David and Brooke as quickly as possible.”
“Fine with me,” she said, and she watched as he went to the phone on the desk and lifted the receiver from its cradle with a flourish of controlled fury.
“Allô, allô?” he said. He took a breath, and it was uncanny, she thought. His face actually seemed to change as he adopted his deep, exaggerated French accent. His eyelids drooped a bit, and his mouth turned down and he lifted his chin.
“Service des chambres?” he said. “S’il vous plaît, je voudrais une bouteille de whiskey. Oui. Jameson, s’il vous plaît.”
“George,” she said—forgetting herself again, forgetting that he was “Dad.” “Is there a problem?” she said, but he only held up one finger: Hush.
“Oui,” he said into the phone. “Chambre quinze quarante-et-un,” he said, and then, only after he had set the phone down, did he turn to look at her.
“What’s going on?” she said. “Is there a problem?”
“I need a drink; that’s the main problem,” he said, and he sat down on the bed and took off his shoe. “But if you want to know the truth, I’m feeling just a touch worried, and I’d like to get us some new names. Tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said. She set Bleak House down on the coffee table and discreetly put the hundred-dollar bill into the front pocket of her jeans. “But that doesn’t answer my question. What’s goin
g on?”
“Everything’s fine,” he said, shortly. “I’m just being paranoid,” he said, and dropped his other shoe onto the floor. One of those men’s slip-on loafers, with leather tassels where the laces should be.
“I want you to go down to the salon downstairs tomorrow morning,” he said. “See if they can make you a blonde. And get it cut,” he said—and she imagined that there was just a slight edge of distaste in his voice. “Something sophisticated. They should be able to manage that.”
Lucy put her hand to her hair. She hadn’t yet undone her Brooke Fremden braids, though she hated them. Too childish, she’d said. “Am I supposed to be sixteen? Or eight?” she’d said, though ultimately she had let herself be talked into it, when George Orson insisted.
I never wanted this hair in the first place. That’s what she wanted to remind him, but it probably didn’t matter. He had taken his palm-size notebook from the pocket of his suit jacket, writing in his fussy, tiny block letters.
“So you’ll get your hair done first thing in the morning,” he was saying. “We’ll get the pictures taken before noon, and we can hopefully have the new passports done for us by Wednesday morning. We’ll move to a new hotel by Wednesday afternoon. It would be good if we could get out of the country as soon as possible. I’d like to be in Rome by Saturday, at the latest.”
She nodded, staring down at the carpet, which was spotted with the indentations of small black cigarette burns. The remnant of an old piece of gum, worn as flat as a coin. Unremovable, apparently.
“Okay,” she said, though now she was feeling nervous as well. She had not been out of the hotel room without George Orson, and the idea of the hair salon was suddenly daunting. I’m just being paranoid, he’d said, but she was sure he was anxious for a good reason, even if he wouldn’t admit it.
It would be scary, she thought, going out into the public areas of the hotel, all by herself.