by Dan Chaon
“Pack your bags,” he said coldly. “We need to move to a new hotel right away, and I’ve been sitting here for a fucking hour waiting for you. You’re lucky I didn’t leave.”
As she waited down in the lobby, Lucy didn’t know whether to be angry or hurt. Or frightened.
At least she had the backpack with their money. He wasn’t likely to leave her without that, but still—the way he had talked to her, the way he had transformed in the last few days. Did she know him at all? Did she have any idea what he was really thinking?
Besides which, she couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said about the money. Negotiating problems, he’d said. We may have to give up a much larger cut. Which upset her. She had been counting on that money, maybe even more than she had been counting on George Orson, and she found herself touching the lumps in her backpack, feeling through the canvas to the stacks of bills that she’d arranged beneath some folded Brooke Fremden T-shirts.
It was late afternoon, and people were arriving at the Hotel Ivoire at a greater pace than they had the day before. There were a number of Africans, some in suits, others in more traditional dress. A few soldiers, a pair of Arab men in embroidered kurtas, a Frenchwoman in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, arguing on a cell phone. Liveried hotel agents were trailing along behind various guests.
She should not have come down to the lobby alone, though at the time it had felt like an act of defiant dignity. She had packed her bag angrily as George Orson spoke in rapid, incomprehensible French on the phone, and when she finished with her suitcase, she stood there, trying to piece together what he was saying—until he had glanced up sharply, covering the receiver with his palm.
“Go ahead on down to the lobby,” he said. “I have to finish this phone call and I’ll be down in five minutes, so don’t wander off.”
But now it had been more like fifteen minutes, and still he hadn’t appeared.
Was it possible that he would ditch her?
She felt her backpack again, as if somehow the money might be spirited away, as if it weren’t entirely solid—and she was tempted to unzip the backpack and double-check, just to be positive. Just to look at it.
She scoped again through the expanse of lobby, the cathedral ceilings and the chandelier and the long decorative boxes full of tropical plants. The Frenchwoman had lit a cigarette and stood gently tapping the toe of her high-heeled shoe. Lucy observed as the woman glanced at her watch, and after a hesitation Lucy walked over.
“Excusez-moi,” she said, and made an attempt to imitate the accent that once upon a time Mme Fournier had tried to inculcate in her students. “Quelle,” Lucy said. “Quelle … heure est-il?”
The woman looked at her with a surprising benevolence. Their eyes met and the woman took the cell phone away from her ear as she examined Lucy, up and down, with a soft, motherly look. With pity, Lucy thought.
“It is three o’clock, my dear,” the woman replied, in English, and she gave Lucy a questioning smile.
“Are you quite all right?” the woman asked, and Lucy nodded.
“Merci,” Lucy said, thickly.
She had been waiting for him for almost a half hour now, and she turned and walked toward the elevators, her wheeled suitcase trailing crookedly behind her, the beautiful open-toed sandals she had bought for herself clicking against the glowing marble tile, the people seeming to part for her, the African and Middle Eastern and European faces regarding her with the same wary concern that the Frenchwoman had, the way people look at a young girl who has been a fool, a girl who knows at last that she has been cast aside. You’re lucky I didn’t leave without you, she thought, and when the elevator doors slid open with a deep musical chime, Lucy could feel the swell of panic inside her. The numbness in her fingers, the sense of insects crawling in her hair, a tightness in her throat.
No. He wouldn’t abandon her, he wouldn’t really abandon her, not after all of this, all the distance they had come together.
She was aware of the elevator beginning to rise, and it was as if the gravity were lifting up out of her body like a spirit, it was as if she could open up like a milkweed pod, a hundred floating seeds spilling out of her, floating off, irretrievable.
She thought of that moment when the policemen stood on their porch, her opening the door to their stony faces; that moment when she called the admissions office of Harvard, that sense of sundering, that sense of her future self, the molecules of her imagined life, unmoored, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, scattering outward and outward and outward like the universe itself.
For a second, when the elevator came at last to the fifteenth floor, she thought that the doors were not going to open, and she pressed the button with the “open door” symbol on it. She pressed the button again and ran the heel of her hand along the creased line where the elevator doors were sealed together, her fingers shaking, “Oh,” she was saying, “Oh,” she was saying, until abruptly the doors parted, slid open, and she almost stumbled out into the hallway.
Later, she was glad that she didn’t call out his name.
Her voice had left her, and she paused outside the elevator, just breathing, the air filling her lungs in soft, irregular hitches, and her hands scrabbled against the canvas of her backpack, feeling for the solid bundles of currency the way a person in a plunging airplane might clutch for their oxygen mask, and then when she felt the certainty of those stacks of bills, she fumbled in her new purse and found her passport, Kelli Gavin’s passport. That was safe, too, and there was the confirmation number for her flight to Rome, and she … she …
The velocity of her fall seemed to slow.
Yes, this was what it felt like to lose yourself. Again. To let go of your future and let it rise up and up until finally you couldn’t see it anymore, and you knew that you had to start over.
Later, she realized that she was lucky.
She was lucky, she supposed, that she was trying to be unobtrusive, trying to get a grip on herself, lucky that she’d stopped outside the elevator door to check her bag once again, lucky because that chill calm had swept down and clutched her in its talons.
Lucky that she didn’t call attention to herself, because when she turned the corner, there was a man standing in front of the door to their hotel room.
Posted there, in the doorway of 1541, in the tower of the Hotel Ivoire.
Waiting for her? Or merely blocking George Orson’s escape?
It was one of those Russian men she had seen in the restaurant, the one with the spiked orange hair, the one who had called to her: I am good lover.
He was standing with his back against the door, his arms folded, and she froze there at the edge of the corridor. She could see the gun, the revolver he was holding loosely, almost sleepily in his left hand.
He didn’t look dangerous, exactly, though she knew he was. He would probably kill her if he saw her and made the connection, but he didn’t look her way. It was as if she were invisible, and he was smiling to himself as if at a pleasant memory, gazing up at the ceiling, at the light fixture, where a white moth was circling. Mesmerized.
The other two men, she assumed, were in the room already, in the room with George Orson.
26
“We are on our way to the hospital,” he told Ryan. “Listen to me, Son. You are not going to bleed to death.” He kept repeating it and repeating it, long after Ryan had lapsed into unconsciousness again, just mumbling it to himself the way he used to tell himself stories in that attic room when he was a kid, he could remember that feeling, rocking back and forth and running through the same lines again and again until he’d finally put himself to sleep.
“I promise you are going to be all right,” he said, as the headlights illuminated the tangle of branches that overhung the long back roads. “I promise you are going to be all right. We are on our way to the hospital. I promise you are going to be all right.”
Of course, he’d said the same thing to Rachel, back when they were in Inuvik, pret
ending to be scientists, and that hadn’t turned out so well.
This time, though, he was able to keep his word.
Ryan was in the emergency room, and though there would no doubt be many hours of surgery and blood transfusions and so forth, it would almost certainly turn out okay.
It was nearly six in the morning, a Thursday morning in early May, still before sunrise, and he sat in the fluorescent-lit waiting area in a plastic chair next to the vending machines, still holding Ryan’s blood-spattered hoodie, and Ryan’s wallet, with the newest driver’s license. Max Wimberley. He took the folded stash of currency from his jacket pocket and tucked a few hundreds into the sleeve of Ryan’s billfold.
Jesus, he thought, and he put his face down into his palms for a while—not crying, not crying—before at last he found a scrap of paper and began to write a note.
It was probably for the best.
He was sitting in the parking lot, in an old Chrysler he’d found unlocked, and he was weeping a little now, distractedly, as he removed the ignition cover at the bottom of the steering column.
He had been a good father, he told himself. He and Ryan had made a nice life together while things lasted; they had been close in a way that was important, they had made a connection, a deep connection, and even though it had ended sooner—and more tragically—than he’d expected, he had been a better dad than the real Jay ever would have been.
Thinking of Jay, he felt a little twinge of—what?—not exactly regret. All that time they’d spent together, back before he went to Missouri, all that time, he’d done nothing but encourage Jay to contact his son. “It’s important,” he kept telling Jay. “Family is important; he ought to know who his real father is; he’s living a lie otherwise,” and Jay giving him that wry stoner stare he had, as if to say: Are you joking?
But the fact was, Jay could never bring himself to do it because he was lazy. Because he didn’t want to expend the emotional energy, he didn’t want to take on the responsibility of truly caring for another person, and that was the reason he wasn’t a particularly good con man, either. Hayden had done his best to teach him, but ultimately Jay wasn’t all that competent. He made so many errors, so many errors—God! Ryan was so much better suited to the ruin lifestyle than his father ever was—
But with Jay it was just mistake after mistake, even with a perfect avatar like Brandon Orson, even with everything all set up in Latvia and China and Côte d’Ivoire. And so when Jay hadn’t returned from that ill-advised trip to Rēzekne, Hayden hadn’t been surprised.
Though he had felt sorry that Jay’s poor son would never know the truth, he had felt—what?—curious about that son, even during that period when he was living as Miles Spady, back at the University of Missouri, even when he and Rachel were stuck in that godforsaken research station, bickering and getting depressed, even then he’d find himself thinking about Jay Kozelek’s long-lost son, and when things went wrong with Rachel and he finally got back to the U.S. and he was sitting in a motel room in North Dakota, he thought—
What if I contacted Jay’s son, in his place? What if I did for Jay what he couldn’t do for himself? Wouldn’t that be a kind of favor, wouldn’t that be an honor to his memory?
Well.
Well, as Miles would say.
He sat there in the emergency room parking lot, in the unlocked Chrysler, thinking of this, and then at last he bent down to examine the wires that ran into the steering wheel cylinder, sorting through the tangle of them until he found the red one. It was usually the red one that would provide the power, and the brown one that would handle the starter, and he hunched in the front seat, trying to concentrate. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes again, and dried the wetness on the front of his shirt.
It would have had to end eventually, anyway. It was amazing he’d been able to convince Ryan in the first place, and certainly over time suspicions would have arisen, questions he wouldn’t be able to answer. Probably Ryan would have eventually wanted to move on, maybe even reconnect with his parents, which was fine, which was natural, you couldn’t expect these kinds of things to last forever.
Yes. He took out his pocket knife, and carefully stripped away the plastic casing around the wires. A very delicate procedure. You didn’t want to get shocked; you didn’t want to touch the live current.
He frowned, focusing his attention, and there was a tiny spark as the car shuddered awake. A new life.
“Could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic ghost?”
He was traveling south down I-75, just past Flint, when this came to him.
A quotation.
He had come across it a long time ago, back in that terrible semester he’d spent at Yale. Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century Scottish essayist, fierce and craggy and bearded, not even someone he’d particularly admired, but he’d memorized the passage anyway because it seemed so beautiful and true and so beyond the rest of the students in the class.
The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see a ghost, Carlyle had written. “But could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind’s eye as well as with the body’s, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes; what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility?”
He was passing under a bridge, reciting this aloud, and he wasn’t really crying though his eyes were leaking a little, the glare of headlights behind him and the glowing reflective circles of markers at the edge of the road and a green interstate sign that said
TO COLUMBUS FOLLOW
“Are we not all of us Spirits?”
He wondered what Miles would have to say about that idea.
He hadn’t talked to Miles in a while now, not since the thing with Rachel had gone bad, not since that unfortunate trip to North Dakota, and he wondered. Maybe he could just write Miles a letter, maybe he could send Miles up to the final memorial he had made for himself on Banks Island. Eadem mutata resurgo: “Although changed, I shall arise the same.” Which maybe Miles would understand. Maybe Miles could move on, Miles could transform himself, too. Live his own life.
Of course, he would have to get Miles up to Canada somehow, but with Miles that wasn’t so very difficult. Poor Miles: so obsessive and determined.
He had been reading recently about something called “Vanishing Twin Syndrome,” which Miles would surely be interested in. According to an article that he’d read, one in eight people start in life as a twin, but only one in seventy are actually born as twins. Most of the time, the vanishing twin spontaneously aborts, or it is absorbed by the other sibling, or the placenta, or the mother herself.
He was crying again as he passed from Michigan into Ohio, thinking of Ryan, he supposed, though he knew he shouldn’t.
He had produced an unusually large harvest of lives, that was what he had been told—and he’d passed from death to death, over centuries, he’d passed from Cleveland to Los Angeles to Houston; from Rolla, Missouri, to Banks Island, NWT; from North Dakota to Michigan, and each time he’d been a different person.
His hands were shaking, and at last he had to pull over to a rest area, he had to curl up in the backseat without a blanket or a pillow, his palms tight against his skull, and outside, the rain had turned into sleet, ticking steadily against the surface of the stolen car.
What if he just settled into a new life and stayed there? Maybe that was the answer. He had failed as a father, and yet he had the soul of a teacher, he thought, and that idea appealed to him, made him calmer, the notion that he could still touch a young life in some way.
What if he
became something ordinary, maybe just a simple high school teacher, he thought, and all the students would like him, and he would exert an influence that would extend beyond himself. He would live on through them. Maybe that was corny and stupid, but it didn’t seem like such a bad plan for the present, and he pressed himself against the cold upholstery, squeezing his eyes shut hard.
He would never again think of Ryan, he promised himself.
He would never again think of Jay or Rachel.
He would never again think of Miles.
Are we not all of us Spirits? A voice whispered.
But he would never think of that again, either.
Acknowledgments
My wife, the writer Sheila Schwartz, died after a long battle with ovarian cancer shortly after I completed this book. We were married for twenty years. Sheila was my teacher when I was an undergraduate student, and we fell in love, and over the years that we were together, she was my mentor, my best critic, my dearest friend, my soul mate. I spent the last weeks of copyediting looking at the notes that Sheila had written on the manuscript, and it’s impossible to express how grateful I am for her wise advice, and how terribly I will miss her.
I have been lucky to inherit a patient, thoughtful, and brilliant editor, Anika Streitfeld, who walked me through this book from conception to completion, and who has been an amazing, supportive, and wise presence throughout. I have also deeply appreciated the help and enthusiasm of the staff at Ballantine during my long tenure there, who have taken such good care of my books. I am grateful to Libby McGuire and Gina Centrello for their long-standing patience and goodwill.
Other people who are dear to me have contributed significantly during the process of writing: my wonderful agent, Noah Lukeman, who has always been a great supporter and friend; my best buddies, Tom Barbash and John Martin; my sons, Philip and Paul Chaon; my sister and brother, Sheri and Jed, who have been reading fragments of this for a long while and offering advice; my writing group, Eric Anderson, Erin Gadd, Steven Hayward, Cynthia Larson, Jason Mullin, and Lisa Srisuco; and all my students at Oberlin College who have, over the years, been an inspiration to me.