by Dan Chaon
Simile, she thought. You use the word like or as. My love is like a cherry. His cheeks were as red as apples.
It was a kind of craziness, she thought, that there were such echoes everywhere. It made the world indefinite, turning everything into a kind of cruel puzzle.
The handles on the drawer were like eyes.
The tree outside bowed its head like someone who was praying.
The top of a soup can was like a wrinkled, expressionless face.
Was it supposed to mean something? Was there a message in it? To receive these thoughts—similes, metaphors—was to draw closer to the spirit world. At least she hoped so. It was frightening to think that the world was simply a series of echoes, one object mirroring another randomly, emptily, a vast and multiform and mindless series of repetitions. The thought made her shudder, watching as a jellylike cylinder of cream of chicken soup slid into the little pot. She went to the sink and filled the now empty can with water, which she poured over the quivering gel of condensed soup. It eroded a little. There was a mouth she was thinking of, her fingers.
——
The question was, she thought, when had things started to go wrong? When had she started to lose hold of her mind?
In 1971, when Jonah was born, she had been okay. Twenty-one years old. Five years had passed since the first baby was born, and she was calmer. She was living with Gary Gray by that point, in Chicago. More or less stable. Gary had a job in construction, and they had a little place on the west side. She remembered her swollen belly, the difficulty she had kneeling down to plant petunias in the beds along the side of the house. She had been so big, she remembered, “a whale,” she called herself, and that was how they had first come up with the name—as a joke.
“I feel like a whale,” she said, and Gary Gray had made a quip about “little Jonah” in her belly. She’d called her father, to tell him that she was going to have a baby, and that she would probably be getting married. She just said this to make him happy. She wanted everyone to be glad for her. She wanted to be glad for herself. Being born, Jonah didn’t hurt her nearly as much as the first one had.
14
September 3–4, 1996
Nebraska.
Utter blackness of the nighttime roads, space unraveling beyond the body of Jonah’s car, emptiness. His headlights made the road signs glow like the eyes of animals, geometric shapes looming up abruptly.
Daytime wasn’t any better, really. There were the towns, one after the other, spaced by a distance of ten or twenty miles, each with its grain elevator, a castle tower rising up out of the prairie. There were the flatlands and pastures that surrounded these outposts—round alfalfa bales like Stonehenge boulders in clean mowed fields; a single bare tree or ramshackle house in a barren lot of dirt-clod stubble; wide expanses of wheat, or corn, or sunflowers, with their thousands of heads turned east toward the sun. Blackbirds alit on the faces of the sunflowers, then rose up, flapping darkly. Bruise-colored clouds bunched up along the horizon that the road wove into, thunderheads with the pale sky above them.
Driving forward, he was aware of himself as a presence, a feeling, a sound track full of dissonance.
——
If this were his movie, here is where it would begin: foreboding scenery. He rewound the cassette tape over and over again, back to that same song, the distinct, plunking melancholy guitar, accompanied by the bone-notes of a xylophone. When the singer began to sing, he did, too. Staring out through the windshield at the onrushing highway, Jonah entertained himself by pretending that he could see the opening credits superimposed over the horizon.
He thought of his old friend—his former friend—Steve, holding up his palms, thumbs extended, framing the idea of a scene. “The story begins in late summer,” Jonah said, imitating the thick, whispery male narrators who spoke in the previews for coming attractions. “It began in September, not quite six months after the boy turned twenty-five.” But this didn’t sound right, and so he’d gone back to the beginning. “The story begins . . .” he said. He liked the sound of it.
He found himself murmuring the same thing under his breath as he packed stuff into his mother’s old car. Some books, clothes, compact discs. “It was September. He was twenty-five. No one knew he was leaving. Or where he was going.” He packed some notepads. Some dishes he hated to part with. Clothes. A tent he’d ordered from a catalog.
The rest of his stuff—thrift-store bric-a-brac, winter coat, crappy old RCA radio/cassette/alarm clock, magazines and newspapers, laundry soap, cans of soup, ketchup, and a half-eaten jar of sweet gherkins in the refrigerator—this he left where it was, and he supposed that eventually Mrs. Orlova or her husband would have to clean it out; when they hadn’t received a rent check from him in a while, they would open up his furnished room. Perhaps they would half expect to find him there dead, a suicide or a young-man heart attack. Sasha, Mrs. Orlova’s husband, would mumble a curse in Russian, pulling at the keys that hung from his belt. Jonah had thought of saying something to Mrs. Orlova, he’d thought about calling his boss at the restaurant, but at the last minute he didn’t. Better, he thought, to simply disappear.
——
And yet, when he woke that morning, he imagined that he was still in Chicago. He imagined the familiar framework of his efficiency, his bed, the dusty lamp and bedside table with its stack of books, the sound of the el train rattling beyond his window, the expectation of the restaurant schedule posted on a corkboard in the dark hallway of the restaurant’s basement. The life he’d been leading for more than three years, to no avail.
He was in a tent. He saw a shadow shake against the canvas surface above him, a rustling shape, and after a moment he was aware of the memory of driving, of checking into the campground, a KOA park on the edge of St. Bonaventure. When he unzipped the tent flap and crawled out, the sun was rising low in the sky. There was his car, packed with his belongings; there was a long Winnebago parked across from him. A middle-aged couple—a woman with long brown hair and a fat man with a beard and a Hawaiian shirt—were sitting outside the Winnebago in lawn chairs while their little girl played nearby. They were watching a small portable television and eating peaches, and they waved to him benignly as he looked over, as he limped barefoot over the gravel to his car. He opened his car door and sat down, staring at the road, putting on his shoes and trying to think.
This was not very cinematic. Sitting in the bucket of a car seat with untied shoes, looking at pebbles. The sun hung tentatively over the horizon, gelatinous and shivering like the yolk of an uncooked egg. He could feel an edge of mundane discouragement rising up again, as it often did when he was in Chicago. What now?
He sat there, looking at a map that he had ripped out of a telephone booth phone book, tracing through the puzzle of streets until he found, at last, the one he was looking for—all the way on the other side of town, on the very edge. He reached under the seat and found his pair of binoculars, which he placed on the passenger seat beside him. He listened as the little girl outside the Winnebago sang tunelessly: “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow,” and he watched for a moment as she casually hit her baby doll with a stick in rhythm to the song. He tied his shoes.
——
For almost a year now, ever since that day in October when the packet came in the mail from the PeopleSearch Agency, he’d been trying to decide what to do. How to proceed. He’d gone over and over the information they sent him, tracing underneath each word, each individual letter with his fingernail, as if there were some encryption buried in it that he could uncover with careful study. Here was a name, an address; a credit report; some court documents.
He’d find himself waking up at night to go through this material, sitting there at the window of his third-floor efficiency, staring out at the empty street below, thumbing through the small sheaf of papers, aware of the strange, floating ache they conjured up, a kind of bottomless feeling. It reminded him of the time he’d found a reproduction of a landscape pai
nting in a book for an art history class, a white house on a jagged seacoast that had struck him with the force of a forgotten memory. I used to live there once, he thought, though he also knew that it was impossible. Nevertheless, he could clearly remember walking up the gravel path toward that wooden, red-shingled house, could hear the sound of the waves against the rocks, the calls of gulls. He and his mother must have visited that exact place, he thought, and it was several days before he realized that the painting in the book was the same one his mother had on a postcard that she’d taped on the headboard of her bed. He must have stared into it so deeply that it had lodged in his mind as a memory. Even knowing this, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a place he’d once been, that he’d walked along that path and into that house, where a friendly blind woman sat in a rocking chair, and the sunlight slanted against the blond wood floors. It wasn’t a real memory, he realized, but it felt like one.
That same sensation came over him again as he read through the bare facts of Troy’s life. He remembered the baby, the brother that his mother had told him about, her eyes turned sidelong toward him: I was very young, I had to give it away; and when he’d asked where the baby had gone when she gave it away, he could see again how her eyes had hardened: He went to live with a nice mother.
He had pictured his brother when she said this, very clearly—so clearly that he seemed like someone Jonah had met, a child Jonah had played with, who had perhaps lived in that Winslow Homer shoreline house, with the lighthouse in the distance. He never clearly saw the brother’s nice mother and father, though he felt them not far away when he would come to the edge of the green square of lawn where his brother was casually throwing a ball high into the air, holding his hands out to catch it. Just beyond his brother’s backyard was a cliff, with the sea below, the high tide lapping hard against the rocks. Jonah had stood there at the edge of the fence, with Elizabeth beside him, her ears pricked up and alert. The boy, his brother, had turned to look at him, and the ball had fallen into his open palms. Their eyes met. The boy had smiled, kindly, mysteriously, and tossed the ball across the fence to Jonah.
Years later, when Jonah and Mr. Knotts had been clearing out the old yellow house, he’d found that ball again, in a box of childhood things. It was deflated, almost flat, fading red with a yellow star in the middle. But it was a real thing. The ball existed, though the land that it had come from, the seaside house and the silent child in the patch of bright green grass, those were only his imagination.
——
He thought of all this as he drove through St. Bonaventure. He knew, of course, even before he came here that there would be no beautiful coastal house, no bright patch of lawn on a cliff overlooking the sea—none of the things that he’d imagined. And yet he still would never have believed how closely it resembled the place he’d grown up, Little Bow, South Dakota.
Like Little Bow, St. Bonaventure was the kind of town that people passed through on their way to somewhere else. A typical small Plains town. Here were storefronts: drugstore, cafe, barbershop, liquor store, bar. A Pizza Hut, a church. A Safeway supermarket set back from the road, with a half acre of asphalt parking lot in front of it, mostly unoccupied. The town was not quaint, exactly, though the buildings that some of the stores occupied had a turn-of-the-century feel to them, brick and stone, with high fronts like in Westerns. There was no doubt some history attached to the place, it had once been an outpost or way station along some great migration or another, the Oregon Trail, the Union Pacific Transcontinental railroad. Perhaps it was a fort from back in the time when the United States was busy with the project of wresting the land from the native people who had dwelt there—wanting it very badly, but then finding it not very interesting once it was conquered. While the rest of the world was exploding with population, places like St. Bonaventure were steadily shrinking, fading out. It was the sort of town that Jonah used to talk about bitterly to Steve and Holiday, the kind of town that Jonah had always claimed to have escaped.
He had been wavering now for months, almost a year of rising and falling urgency—an urgency that never went away, but simply tilted back and forth between anticipation and dread.
In the beginning, he’d merely taken pleasure in holding the information in his hands, feeling it take shape in his mind. He read his brother’s name over and over: Troy Earl Timmens. He spoke it aloud, he read through the home address, 421 Gehrig Avenue, St. Bonaventure, Nebraska 69201; the place of employment, Stumble Inn Bar and Grille; the credit report, basically quite good, a MasterCard and an American Express, a car payment, nothing else. He had a wife, Carla, and a son, Loomis, born December 18, 1990.
Jonah had been especially attracted to the adoption decree, with its odd, archaic language, like some olden-time bill of sale: “IT IS THEREFORE ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that the right to custody of and power and control over said minor child and all claims and interest in and to the wages by said Mrs. Glass Institute shall and do cease and determine from and after this date, and the said Baby Boy Doyle is hereby declared the adopted child of the said Earl Roger Timmens and Dorothy Winnifred Timmens, husband and wife.”
He read this aloud sometimes, too, liking the sound of it. Baby Boy Doyle, he pronounced, redolent of some 1930s gangster-movie nickname, faint music of low piano keys and muted trumpet. “Baby Boy Doyle,” he said, into the silence of his efficiency. “Troy Earl Timmens.” A door thrown open with wind and a scuttle of leaves. Here was the history that moved outside of his mother’s knowledge, a pathway tracing its way into the future. Baby Boy Doyle: his mother’s son. Troy Earl Timmens: someone else entirely. The simplicity of it was the thing that stunned him the most. The exchange seemed so easy: a few words, and you were a new person.
——
At first he thought he was going to write a letter. Dear Troy Timmens, he wrote, and then he sat there staring at it for over a month. He wrote: My name is Jonah Doyle, and I am your brother. And then he erased it. He wrote, You may not believe this, but. He wrote, I am writing to inform you that I believe that we are related, and I hope that you will be interested in perhaps meeting and.
And what? The letter was on the table when he got up in the morning, along with a book he’d bought called The Journey of the Adopted Child. When he got home from work it would still be there, waiting, mute. A yellow legal pad: He would tear off the top sheet and write the new date at the top—December, January, February—and then he would write Dear.
Sometimes, he would get past the greeting, and he would even write the first couple of lines of the opening paragraph. He would open The Journey of the Adopted Child and flip through it irritably, looking for some clue about how to proceed. Then he might decide to go out for a walk, to clear his head, to think it over. He might go to a movie, and afterward, sit in the bar on the corner and have a few beers. Then, home again, his head a little fuzzy with alcohol, he’d find himself writing things that he could never send.
Dear Troy Timmens,
Once upon a time there was a woman who had two sons. The first son she gave away when she was a teenager, and she regretted it for the rest of her life. The second son she kept for her own, and she regretted that even more.
Or, even worse:
Dear Brother,
I used to think of you all the time when I was growing up. Our mother would talk about you and she would cry about how she hated herself ever since she gave you away. I’m the kind of woman who would give away her own baby, she would say, and I would sit there and think of you. I used to wonder why she had kept me. Why was I the one who got stuck?
——
It was not hard to find the street where Troy Timmens lived. He had to stop along the roadside a couple of times to consult his map, but the streets came together with an almost eerie inevitability, the way a wooded trail in dreams led closer and closer toward some unknown, waiting thing. A house, a treasure, a shape rising up with small eyes and bright claws among the dapples of leaves. When he saw the signpo
st, he slowed his car to a stop, pulled over to the curb.
Without warning, he had begun to tremble, and he held tight to the steering wheel. He was shuddering, as if inside him was a small motor such as powered an old lawn mower, his teeth humming against one another. Up to now, there had been only a steadily growing hollow pit of anticipation in his stomach, but abruptly it had grown huge. It was terror of a sort he couldn’t even put his finger on—somewhere at the farthest end of stage fright with its limp-boned, consuming paralysis, and moving from there into something childish and primal, like the pure panic of a light being turned out, a door being closed and locked.
On the edge of Gehrig Avenue, Troy’s street, he was momentarily overcome; a thin, thrumming wire stretched taut inside him. He fitted his palms over his face, breathing against his cupped hands.
He didn’t know whether he could go through with it.
——
The first time Jonah had tried to call Troy was on his birthday, in March. He’d begun to realize that the letters he’d been attempting were never going to be finished, he was never going to find the right words that could be sealed up into an envelope and sent out into the empty world, utterly out of his control. Even if he did find the courage to send a letter, he knew that it would be unbearable to wait from a distance, to imagine for days and weeks the moment when the letter would fall into the mailbox, the moment when Troy Timmens would tear it open and—however eloquent Jonah managed to become—scan through the columns of words.
On the night of his twenty-fifth birthday, Jonah had bought a twelve-pack of fancy German beer, to prepare himself. He had drunk three of them when he telephoned Troy’s house. It was ten P.M. in Chicago, nine P.M. in St. Bonaventure, Nebraska, and Troy answered on the first ring.
“Y’ello?” Troy said: A deep, country-accented voice, abrupt and thick. Jonah opened his mouth and silence unraveled out.
