by Dan Chaon
He got out of bed and took his towel off the bedpost and figured he might as well go down the hall to the communal bathroom and shower, and he knew he had to get a grip on himself and study for his chemistry test, he was earning a D, C-at best, Oh God, he thought—
And maybe it was at that moment that he broke loose from his life. His “life”: it felt suddenly so abstract and tenuous.
He had originally just gone out for coffee. It was by that time around seven-thirty in the morning, but the campus was still sleepy. From the sidewalk he could hear the music students in their carrels, the scales and warm-up exercises mingling dissonantly, clarinet, cello, trumpet, bassoon, winding around one another, and it felt like a fitting sound track, like the music you hear in a movie when the character is about to have a mental breakdown and they clutch their forehead in anguish.
He did not clutch his forehead in anguish, but he did think, once again—
My whole life is a lie!
There were many things to be troubled by in this situation, many things to feel angry and betrayed about, but the one that for some reason Ryan felt most keenly was the death of his biological mother. My God! he thought. Suicide. She killed herself! He felt the tragedy of it wash over him, though now it was past. Still, it outraged him that Stacey and Owen hadn’t cared whether or not he knew about this. That they found out about it and tsked, and he was probably in the living room in front of the television, three years old, watching some trite and educational program, and they might have shaken their heads and thought what a favor they had done for him, raising him as their own, all the money and effort they’d put into turning him into the kind of kid who could get a scholarship to Northwestern University, into the type of person who could take his place in the top tier, how hard they had worked to mold him. But there was no indication they ever contemplated revealing the truth about his parentage, no indication that they realized that this was important, no sense that they understood how badly they had wronged him.
Maybe it was melodramatic, but nevertheless he could feel it sink down through the center of his stomach, that fluttery feeling of epinephrine releasing itself. Part of this was also the upcoming chemistry test, which it was likely he was going to fail, and part of it was that it was one of those cold, tinny mornings in October, very windy, and a school of leaves went scampering into Clark Street like lemmings and were run over by a fast-moving car. It made him think of a term he had read in his psychology class. “Fugue state.” Maybe it was the combination of the discordant arpeggios from the conservatory and the leaves in the street. “Fugue.” A dissociative psychological state marked by sudden, unexpected travel away from home or one’s customary place of work, with inability to recall one’s past, confusion about personal identity, or the assumption of a new identity, or significant distress or impairment.
Which actually sounded very interesting, very appealing in some ways, although he supposed that if you decided to have a fugue state, it wasn’t a true fugue state.
He was also failing psychology.
And there were some issues of minor misappropriation of funds, his student loan, and there had been a letter from the registrar: PAST DUE. DEMAND FOR PAYMENT. It would be very difficult to explain to his parents what he had done with that money, how he had managed to forget about paying his tuition, and instead had frittered the borrowed cash away on things like clothes and CDs and dinner at the Mexican place on Foster Ave. How had it happened? He couldn’t even say.
And so now here he was in his rented Chevy Aveo driving through the darkened corridor of Interstate 80 in late January and thinking that he would write a song about driving down the interstate alone and no one knows my name and I am so far away from you, or something like that. But not so corny.
Dear Mom and Dad, I realize that the choices I have made recently haven’t been exactly sensitive toward you, and I’m sorry for the pain I have caused. I know that I should have contacted you sooner. I realize that at this point the police are involved and that I am probably considered a “missing person,” and I want you to know that it wasn’t my intention to bring trouble and sorrow into your life. But here I have done it.
Right now I am standing in a motel lobby in _______, and on the wall of the manager’s cubicle is this xeroxed sign, one of those kinds of Wise Sayings that people are always taping up on the wall above their computer or whatever, for some reason.
The sign says:
The circumstances of life—
The events of life—
The people around me in life—
Do not make me the way I am.
They reveal the way I am.
And I find myself here thinking about how much you, Mom, would like that saying, how it might be the thing you would tell me if you could hear all my excuses. I can imagine that I have revealed who I am to you all of the sudden and that it has turned out to be an unpleasant surprise. I am not the son you wanted when you took me in as a baby and raised me as your own and tried to turn me into a good person. But I guess I am something else. I don’t know what yet but—
But here he was checking into the motel because he was supposed to have one lodging charge on the Matthew P. Blurton MasterCard and here was a Holiday Inn with free wireless Internet, and he had to check Matthew P. Blurton’s email and log in to Instant Messenger and see if Jay might be trying to get in touch.
He had a Matthew P. Blurton cell phone as well, but Jay was cautious about cells and so he was never supposed to call Jay, never supposed to call the house.
He kept worrying that his mother would track him down. She had claimed for years that she didn’t even know Jay’s whereabouts, but if her son was missing, honestly missing, wouldn’t she finally break down and try to locate Jay? Wouldn’t she feel that Jay—his true father—had a right to know? For most of the months, he had been staying at the cabin in the woods of Michigan with Jay, sleeping on the couch and going on “quests,” as Jay called them, whatever they were doing with the credit cards and the social security numbers and the various lists from the Internet, and it felt like the right thing to be doing even though he sometimes imagined Stacey and Owen back in Council Bluffs.
Sitting at the kitchen table, pressing the tines of their forks into one of Stacey’s casseroles, lifting a bite. They had always been one of those silent-dinner-table families, even though Stacey insisted all through high school that they had to eat together, as if that somehow made them closer, to sit there side by side shoveling food into their mouths until at last Ryan could tilt away from his cleaned plate and say, “Dad, may I be excused?”
Was she sad now? Ryan wondered. Was she worried and terrified and weepy? Or was she enraged?
There had been that one time in high school when he had fucked up, he had been involved with what Stacey thought of as an “inappropriate” girlfriend and he had been skipping school and generally telling lies and sneaking around, and she had acted with such icy swiftness, sending him off to a wilderness program for recalcitrant juveniles, packing him off in the middle of the night with only a duffle bag, the men, the “counselors,” standing at the front door waiting to hustle him into the van and carry him off to a two-week-long disciplinary self-help brainwashing session.
He thought about that, too. He could imagine his mother’s resolve, her anger, sending out minions to bring him to ground and drag him back to the life that he’d fled.
Ryan sat there at the desk in his room in the Holiday Inn and opened up his laptop. It was probably not useful to dwell on such things, but he nevertheless found himself typing his own name into the search engine and looking again at some of the old articles and such. For example:
No Developments in Case of Missing College Student
CHICAGO—Chicago police have come to a standstill in the case of a Northwestern University college student who disappeared without a trace in the morning hours of October 20. Following one anonymous lead, divers searched the frigid Lake Michigan waters near the campus but came up em
pty-handed. Police Sgt. Rizzo said the investigation has come to a standstill, and there have been no new developments.
—which did make him feel guilty, but it was also disappointing. The cops were clearly not particularly good at their jobs. “Without a trace!” Christ! It wasn’t as if he were in disguise. It wasn’t as if someone had put a burlap bag over his head and spirited him away in a van or whatever. He walked off campus and took the el downtown to the bus station, and there were certainly plenty of people who saw him that day. Were people so inattentive? Was he that nondescript?
And the suicide angle also bothered him—how quick they were to send divers into the lake! That was his mother’s doing, he thought. She knew that his biological mother was a suicide, and didn’t it figure that was the first thing she thought of.
It had probably been on her mind for a while, he thought. Every time he talked to her on the phone, she was always asking how he felt, why was he so quiet, was there anything wrong, and he saw now the connections that she had been making all along.
There was a ping as someone signed on to Instant Messenger, and he glanced down because it was about time for Jay to contact him—they always had a brief conversation on IM when he was on these trips, just to touch base, but when he opened up the IM window, it was gibberish.
Or actually, someone was typing in what he guessed was Cyrillic. Russian?
He regarded this string of characters. Was there a problem with Jay’s computer? Was it some obscure joke that Jay was playing? Then he typed:
BLURTON: How about trying it in English, dude?
The cursor sat blinking. Breathing. Then:
How freaky, he thought.
BLURTON: Jay??
No answer. 490490 had grown silent, though it felt like a kind of watchful silence, a stillness in the motel room, the curtains pulled closed and the television’s slate face staring coolly at the bed, and the distant sound of semis passing on the interstate beyond the motel. He thought maybe he should close the IM window.
But then 490490 began to type again.
490490: Mr J. So good to find Mr J. I see were u r.
8
Lucy woke and she was alone in bed. There was the crumpled space where George Orson had been sleeping, the indented pillow, the blankets pulled aside and she sat up as the room loomed over her. The sunlight rimmed the edges of the curtains, and she could see the watchful closet door and the dark stern shape of the bureau dresser and the half-light reflections in the oval vanity mirror, movement, which she realized was herself, alone in the bed.
“George?” she said.
Nearly a week had passed and still they were here at the old house in Nebraska and she was starting to feel a little anxious, though George Orson had tried to be reassuring—“Nothing to be concerned about,” he said. “Just a few things that have to be sorted out….”
But he didn’t explain further than that. Ever since they’d arrived, he’d made himself scarce. Hours and hours locked in the downstairs room he called “the study.” She had actually kneeled in front of the locked door and fit her eye to the keyhole beneath the cut-glass doorknob, and she could see him as if through a pinhole camera, sitting behind the big wooden desk hunched over his laptop, his face hidden behind the screen.
And naturally it had occurred to her that something had gone wrong with their plan.
Whatever the “plan” was.
Which, Lucy realized, she was not that clear about.
She pulled aside the drapes, and the light came in and that felt a bit better. There was a dry, earthy basement smell that was particularly noticeable in the morning, waking up, a taste of underground in her mouth, a taste of rotten fabric, and the windows didn’t open, they were painted shut, and it was clear that the house had been sitting in its own dust for a long time. “I’ve had an exterminator in, don’t worry,” George Orson had told her, “and a cleaning woman—once every few months. The place has never been abandoned,” he said, a bit defensively, but all Lucy wanted to know was how long it had been since someone had actually lived in the house, how long since his mother had died?
And he estimated, reluctantly.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably about—eight years?” She didn’t know why he acted as if even a simple question were an invasion of his privacy.
But a lot of their conversations had been like that lately, and she lingered at the window in her oversize T-shirt and panties looking down at the gravel road that led from the garage past the house and the tower of the lighthouse and the courtyard of the motel units to the two-lane blacktop that ribboned its way eventually back to the interstate.
“George?” she said, more loudly.
She padded down the hallway, and then she went downstairs to the kitchen and he wasn’t there, either, though she saw that his cereal bowl and spoon had been washed and placed neatly into the dish drain.
And so she went out of the kitchen and through the dining room to “the study—”
“Study.” Which, to Lucy, sounded British or something, pretentious, like some old murder mystery.
The Study. The Billiard Room. The Conservatory. The Ballroom.
But he wasn’t there, either.
The door was open and the room was curtained and carpeted and there was a chandelier made of brass with dangling glass dew-drops.
“That was my mother’s idea of elegance,” George Orson had told her when he showed her the room for the first time and she’d folded her arms over her chest, taking it in. His mother’s “idea” of elegance, she assumed, was not real elegance—though to Lucy it was in fact fairly impressive. Beautiful oriental carpet, gold-leaf wallpaper, heavy wooden furniture, shelves full of books—not junky paperbacks, either, but real hardcover books with thread-bound spines and thick pages and a dense, woody smell.
Was there a difference, she wondered, some fine distinction of good taste or breeding that would make it okay to call a room a “study” but not okay to have a light fixture that is called a “chandelier”?
There were a lot of things she had yet to learn about social class, said George Orson, whose college days at Yale had sensitized him to such things.
So what did it say about her that her own experience of chandeliers, studies, and so on was so limited? She herself had come from a long, long line of poor drudgers, Irish and Polish and Italian peasants—nobodies, stretching back for generations.
You could draw her family in two dimensions, like characters in a comic strip. Here was her father, a plumber, a kindly, beer-bellied, muddy little man with hairy hands and a bald head. Her mother: windblown and stern, drinking coffee at the kitchen table before she went off to work at the hospital, a nurse but only a licensed practical nurse, just a vocational degree. Her sister, simple and round like her father, dutifully washing dishes or folding a basket of clothes and not complaining as Lucy sat moodily, lazily, on the couch reading novels by the latest young female authors and trying to emanate an air of sophisticated irritation—
She couldn’t help but think of her lost, sadly cartoonish family as she looked around the empty study. Her old loser life, which she had left behind for this new one.
In the study was an old oak desk, six drawers on either side, all of them locked. And a file cabinet, also locked. And George Orson’s laptop, password protected. And a wall safe, which was hidden behind a framed picture of George Orson’s grandparents.
“Grandpa and Grandma Orson,” George Orson had said, referring to the grim pair, their pale faces and dark clothes, the woman with one light-colored eye and one dark—“called heterochromia,” said George Orson. “Very rare. One blue eye. One brown eye. Probably hereditary, though my grandmother always said it was because her brother hit her in the eye as a child.”
“Hmmm,” Lucy had said, and now, alone in the room, she regarded the picture once again, the way the woman fixed her heterochromatic gaze on the photographer. A frankly unhappy and almost pleading look.
And then she unhooked
the latch the way that George Orson had shown her, and the old photo swung out like a cabinet door to reveal the nook in the wall with the safe.
“So,” Lucy had said when she first saw it. The safe had appeared to be quite old, she thought, with a combination wheel like a dial on an antique radio. “Aren’t you going to open it?” she said, and George Orson had chuckled—though a bit uncertainly.
“I can’t, actually,” he said.
Their eyes met, and she wasn’t exactly sure what to make of his expression.
“I haven’t been able to figure out the combination,” he said. Then he shrugged. “I’m sure it’s empty, in any case.”
“You’re sure it’s empty,” she said. And she looked at him and he held her gaze, and it was one of those moments in which his eyes said, Don’t you trust me? And her eyes said, I’m thinking about it.
“Well,” George Orson said. “I doubt very seriously whether it’s full of gold doubloons and gems.”
He gave her that dimpled half smile of his.
“I’m sure the combination will turn up somewhere in the files,” he said, and touched her leg playfully with the tip of his index finger, as if for good luck.
