by Dan Chaon
“Huh,” Troy says, and it’s another way in which they are completely different. Troy is aware again of the way in which Jonah soaks up information, that glint of gentle, steady computation in his eyes, which Troy had noticed when Jonah talked about his college classes, or when he talked about the details that he’d gathered about Troy himself—Troy had been amazed, and more than a little disconcerted, to look through the folders of court records and letters, certificates and credit reports, all annotated in Jonah’s tiny cursive handwriting. He can picture Jonah alone in his trailer, transcribing their conversations into a little notebook or something. He’s probably got shelves of notebooks, Troy thinks. He probably knows what he ate for breakfast three years ago on this day.
“That’s right,” Troy says at last. “It’s his birthday. Six years old. Pretty amazing if you think about it. I mean, that’s when you start to become a real person. You start getting, like, a consciousness, you know? You start getting this sense of yourself as a separate person in the world. I mean, your mind is more mature. You remember what it was like to be six years old, more than you remember being a toddler. And then after that, you’re starting to become yourself. Your personality and brain. It’s weird to think of that happening to a person you saw getting born.”
“I guess,” Jonah says, and watches as Troy sips coffee. Troy can see his expression moving through its shifts, the time-lapse-photography quality of a leaf, opening. “Did you get to talk to him?” Jonah says at last.
And Troy blushes. “No,” he says. He shifts in his chair, grimaces, and he can’t help but feel a little ashamed—a failure as a father, a man whose child would be better off without him, at least according to Judy. “That’s actually a problem right now. I haven’t been able to talk to him . . . for a while.”
“Oh,” Jonah says, and Troy watches as he processes this. “What are you going to do?” he says finally.
“I don’t know,” Troy says. “I don’t think there’s anything I can do, really. At least while I’m in this situation.”
Jonah inclines his head, and his entwined fingers twitch lightly. Their eyes meet for a moment, and Troy is aware of . . . what? That odd, ambient sense of connection. He remembers the day Loomis was born, the moment when the nurse had lowered the swaddled infant into his arms, and it had struck him, suddenly, that Loomis was the first person he had ever met who was connected to him by blood, and now, as he looks at Jonah’s eyes, he can feel a flutter of recognition in the pit of his stomach. That’s the connection, he thinks. If Jonah and Loomis stood side by side, an observer would easily recognize that they were related. There are particularities of expression, something shared in the way their eyes flicker and then grow calm, a certain ruminative turn of the mouth. The resemblance is so clear for a moment that Troy feels a knot in his throat.
28
Winter 1997
Jonah drives around and around the edges of St. Bonaventure, but he can’t seem to find a way out of his predicament. It has been this way always, he thinks—a long hallway, like the corridor of a motel or apartment building, and he winds his way along, checking the knobs, feeling his fingertips pulse with the dull electric current of all the people he might have been. He could have stayed on in Little Bow, working his way through the kitchen to a job as an orderly at the old folks’ home. He could have tried to weather his way through Chicago—finishing college, maybe. Finding a career. Pursuing the tentative relationships that he’d made with more tenacity, maybe even really meeting a wife, having a family. He could have stuck it out at the Stumble Inn, too; he could have become friends with Troy, if not his brother; he could have been almost happy with Crystal and Vivian, making food for people. Almost.
But it is as if each possible life is just beyond his reach. He thinks of a fly against a windowpane, tapping steadily against a transparent barrier. He always gets to a certain point, he thinks, and then he fails.
And so it goes again: the worst one of all. He had the opportunity to make a real connection. He has shown bravery, has taken wild chances—is there anyone, he thinks, who would have taken such measures as he had to get close to Troy? Who else would have had such determination?
Yet he has let himself screw it up so easily. So stupidly. As many times as he goes over his life in his mind, he can’t seem to find a way past the roadblocks that he has created for himself. He drives past the Discount Mart, with the great, dirty hills of snow plowed up in the corners of its parking lot. He drives to the edge of the interstate, to the truck stop with rows of sentient eighteen-wheelers lined up not far from the gas pumps. He drives along past country houses and sheds, posted at intervals along the rutted state highway, past winter fields and telephone lines hung with xylophones of icicles. White-faced Hereford cows alongside a fence, the snow accumulating on their backs. A blank billboard, with tatters of old advertising hanging from it in strips. He should be able to figure out a way to make this work, he thinks. He should be able to correct his mistakes somehow.
——
His biggest failures, he supposes, were the simple ones, the ones that shouldn’t have caught him off guard. Like that day in November, when he’d brought in all the paperwork, and Troy had gotten to see his original birth certificate for the first time.
In the beginning, it seemed to be going well. Troy sat there reading the document over and over, and his hands actually shook as he turned the pages. Jonah watched as Troy’s mouth tightened.
“Baby Boy Doyle,” Troy said. He didn’t look up for a long moment, and Jonah shifted, tense and respectful.
“I know it’s kind of heavy,” Jonah said, and cleared his throat. “It’s a lot to take in at one time.” He was trying to imagine what Troy might be thinking. Was he wondering about Nora, picturing his infant self as he was parted from her, his infant’s eyes watching a blank ceiling unscrolling above him? Was he parsing the ways that his life might have been different? Did he feel, as Jonah sometimes did, the vast randomness of life spreading out in a long plain all around him?
But when Troy lifted his head, he was not overcome with emotion. He looked puzzled.
“Wait a minute,” Troy said. “Why is your last name Doyle?”
“What do you mean?” Jonah said.
“I just mean . . . that’s Nora’s maiden name. I thought you said you had a father.”
“Oh,” Jonah said, and he could feel the blush spreading across his face, bane of liars.
“Actually,” he said, and hesitated for a moment. “Well . . . my father’s last name was Doyle, too. They weren’t . . . related or anything. It’s not that uncommon of a name. It just so happened that they were . . . lucky that way.”
He smiled at Troy, who was looking at him with his forehead wrinkled—disbelieving?—Jonah couldn’t be sure.
“Huh,” Troy said. “Well, that was convenient, I guess.”
“They used to joke about it,” Jonah said. “That’s . . . actually, that’s how they met. He was getting her mail by mistake. His name was, um. Norwood. Norwood Doyle.”
“Norwood?”
“Yup,” Jonah said, and he looked Troy in the eye, steadily, smiling, hopefully sincere. “It was some sort of family name. He hated it. He went by Woody.”
——
It still bothered him that he’d saddled himself with this imaginary, spur-of-the-moment father with the goofy name. It was such a mistake, he thought, because now he had to spend time inventing stories about this man, Woody Doyle, whom Troy had inexplicably taken an interest in.
“What kind of a father was he?” Troy said, one day in December. “Did you like him?”
“Hmm,” Jonah said. “Well, sure. Of course. He was a carpenter. Like my grandfather. He built me a tree house when I was . . . I don’t know . . . about eight. He was a pretty quiet guy, though.”
“What did he look like?” Troy asked.
“Like me, I guess,” Jonah said. “I mean, without the—” and he gestured lightly toward the scars on his face. “You
know. Kind of blondish-brown hair. Round face. The same sort of build, basically.”
“It’s too bad you don’t have any pictures,” Troy said, and Jonah stiffened inwardly.
——
This had been an issue between them, this lack of photographic evidence. It was the thing that Troy seemed to find hardest to believe, even though it was perhaps the most truthful thing Jonah had told him.
“You mean you don’t have any pictures of your family?” Troy said, incredulously, and Jonah thought of the time, all those years ago, when he’d been clearing out the old yellow house outside of Little Bow, the auctioneer, Mr. Knotts, watching him as he tossed the photos into an extra-large garbage bag. You should go through those, Mr. Knotts had said. People can be rash when they are in mourning. And now, of course, he was sorry.
“I lost them . . . in a fire,” he’d told Troy, and Troy raised his eyebrows.
“That’s weird,” Troy said. “You mean there’s no more pictures of them—period? I mean, there’s got to be pictures of them somewhere. What about, like, other of your relatives? Or a high school yearbook?”
“Maybe,” Jonah said doubtfully. “I wouldn’t know how to get ahold of one.”
And Troy had shrugged. “Well,” he said, “you figured out how to find me. That’s got to be harder than tracking down a few pictures!”
Troy didn’t understand, Jonah thought. Troy had no idea how easy it was to disappear off the face of the earth, how easy it was for time to swallow you up. He thinks again of his mother’s ashes, combining with the soil in a ditch somewhere in Iowa, shot through with the roots of small plants, which drew the nutrients from what remained of her body before dying themselves. Or his grandfather. More than fifteen years have passed since Joseph Doyle’s death, and by now Jonah himself is perhaps the last living person on the planet who had loved the old man, who remembers his face clearly, who remembers the stories that he’d told about himself.
——
Maybe, Jonah sometimes thinks, he himself is fading out in the same way. He has spent so much of his adulthood wishing to be a different person, so many hours dreaming of exactly this sort of transformation. In the new self that he’s portraying, Nora no longer walks through the rooms of the little house, muttering to herself, telling him that she wanted to die and then finding excuses not to; there is no Elizabeth, her bobbed tail tucked shyly between her legs; there isn’t the sound of his grandfather’s coughing phlegm into a handkerchief, there is no longer that morning when Jonah found him dead, his rigid fingers clutching the silky edging of an old blanket, pressing it to his half-open mouth.
There is hardly anything at all. His life is suddenly a large, empty house, with each vacant room waiting to be furnished. His made-up wife. His invented father. His pretend childhood.
He wonders if it is possible to unlie yourself.
——
Sitting in his trailer house, he tries to find a way to go back to the beginning, to that day in September when he’d arrived in St. Bonaventure, to do it over again. He draws diagrams in his notebooks, working backward, trying to fold up the expanding accordion of lies. February, January, December, November, October, September. He tries to walk himself through the dull dailiness of his new job at the Gold Coin Restaurant—burritos and chimichangas, tostadas and refried beans; through the days indoors, behind the shades, under a blanket on the couch, watching television, reading.
He finds himself driving a lot. Sitting in his car with the defroster on high, idling in the empty, snowy parking lot of Zike’s Roller Rink, with its boarded-up windows. Puttering up into the hills behind Troy’s house, where, months ago, he brought Rosebud, after he’d killed her.
The dog’s body is concealed in a little alcove under a cliff of lichen-covered pumice rock, and he’s not sure why he’s drawn to check on it from time to time. Maybe he’s just making sure it’s still there—some kind of guilt or superstition pricking him. The body is almost skeletal now, crusted with snow, mummified, the skin pulled taut over bones, the lips shrinking back over the teeth in a kind of smile. Standing over the corpse with the wind and the dust of snow blowing up in whirlwinds, he thinks of that teenaged boy, Jinx, standing at his door. “I wonder if you’ve seen my dog,” Jinx said, and he was no more than fourteen, though when they’d first met he’d seemed somehow threatening. Powerful with his group of stoned cronies. “I let her out last night, and she never came back.”
And Jonah had looked at him, his forehead creasing, miming concern. “No,” he said, and he was aware then that almost all of his life was a secret. The boy’s eyes, undrugged, had an earnest, deerlike gentleness that reminded him a little of Troy, and Jonah had felt his heart blanch.
“Sorry,” he said. “But . . . I’ll keep my eyes open for her. I’m sure she’ll . . . turn up.”
December turned into January turned into February, and still Jonah would wake up at night and hear Jinx calling from the porch of his house.
“Rosebud,” Jinx’s voice would echo. His hands cupped around his mouth. “Rosebud! Rosebud!” And Jonah would press his face hard against his pillow.
——
Troy wanted to talk about the past, that was the worst part of it all. Troy wanted to hear stories about Grandpa Joe and the orphan train, about Joe and Lenore, their grandmother, who had died in a car accident before Troy or Jonah was born, and Jonah felt obliged to make up stories out of nothing. It was irritating that Troy was so interested in Lenore’s relatives, the aunt Jonah had been to visit once, Aunt Leona, whose face Jonah could barely recall.
“Wow,” Troy had said. “So we’re part Indian. Part Sioux. That’s really kind of cool.”
Jonah sighed lightly. “I guess,” he said.
And then he wanted to know about Nora. It was even harder to talk about her, since all the characteristics that Jonah most remembered about her were compromised by her imaginary marriage to the imaginary Woody Doyle. And it was even more difficult to talk about his own life, since he had to make up nearly everything. He had a Chicago childhood to invent, a house on the west side, with a pretend father and mother patched together out of projections: What would she have been like, if she’d been happy, if she’d been normal? What would he himself have been like? With that as his premise, he had to create an entirely new childhood, and from there, concoct a girl who would fall in love with him, and whom he would marry, and who would die in a car accident.
At first, this didn’t seem so problematic. It was only when Troy began to talk about his own past, it was only when Jonah saw the photo albums that Troy kept, the stacks of pictures and mementos, each with a little anecdote or funny story attached, that he saw how thin and underdeveloped his own make-believe world was.
They looked at pictures a lot, at first. Dozens and dozens of Troy’s “relatives”—the family he was adopted into. Here was Troy as a baby. Troy’s adoptive mother and father, and Troy himself, aged about ten, outside a tent at a lakeside campground. Troy’s cousins Bruce and Michelle, and their child, Ray, circa 1979. Troy’s father, in an upholstered recliner, grinning, holding a beer. Troy and Carla and teenage Ray, sitting in the same kitchen that he and Troy now occupied. He looked at the photo, and Troy put his thumb across the bong that was prominently centered in the middle of the table. “Ignore that,” Troy said, shrugging, flipping the page, and here was a collection of photos of Loomis as a baby. Even as a toddler, Loomis’s eyes were recognizable: stern and serious and critical.
What could Jonah do in the face of such records? He had no such organized bank of history, nothing that tethered him to the facts of the world, not even something so small as a photo album.
Troy seemed so dauntingly grounded, so familiar with the story of his life, that Jonah found himself ashamed of the pitiful skeleton of his own.
He remembers the day of Loomis’s sixth birthday, the way they’d sat there, looking at photo after photo of Loomis, the child’s life mapped out year by year.
“You remember wh
at it was like to be six?” Troy said.
“Yes,” Jonah said. But he didn’t know what else to say. “It’s funny,” Jonah said at last. “I’m not really sure if I remember anything correctly. About being a kid.” He presses the inside of his lip against his teeth, trying to think. He should have stories about growing up in Chicago, about Woody and Nora Doyle, about the girl he’d married, but nothing came to him.
“I got bitten by a dog,” Jonah said, and he could feel himself blushing as if this were a lie. “That’s what I remember about being six. My mom’s dog, Elizabeth. She was a . . . Doberman, and . . . she bit me pretty badly. I’ve always been kind of scared of dogs, ever since.”
“Huh,” Troy said. “Was that in Chicago?”
“In South Dakota,” Jonah said. He could feel a pang against the surface of his eyes, a sharpness. “I had to go to the hospital.”
“Wow,” Troy said, and he seemed to muse on this, but not very sympathetically, Jonah thought. “We never really had pets,” Troy continued. “I don’t know why. My mom, I guess, didn’t like the idea of having animals in the house.” Then he smiled, as if remembering something fondly. “We had fish for a while,” he said. “I really loved those fish.”
“Ah,” Jonah said. He hesitated. “I . . . like fish, too,” he said.
He could have said it then. He could have said, “Look, Troy, I’ve been lying to you all along. I want to tell you the true story of my life.” He even stood up for a moment, pushing his chair back from the kitchen table, sick of the single room that they seemed to have settled themselves into, sick of the weight of the false life that he kept on inventing. He stood there, helplessly. Each time he and Troy met, it felt as if he’d unraveled a little bit further from himself, from his true history. Each afternoon that they sat down at that kitchen table to talk, it felt like he was acting out a persona that was more false than the time before. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, and he would be completely imaginary.
