by Dan Chaon
Miles and Hayden had never in their lives seen him perform as any of these characters, though they would occasionally come across photos of him in his various guises laying around the house, even snippets of promotional material he was working on: “Periwinkle Clown and his puppet friends invite you to a magical hour of storytelling …” or “Cheshire Hypnotics Workshops will help you discover the powers of your own mind …”
Occasionally, they would hear him on the phone, sitting at the kitchen table with his large black appointment book, pausing to bite thoughtfully on his pencil. They found it hilarious that he would take on different voices depending on whom he was talking to. An earnest, boyish dopiness when he was Periwinkle; a sleek managerial smoothness when he was Dr. Larry Cheshire; a baritone stage-trained plumminess when he was speaking for the Amazing Cheshire; a somewhat affectless, calming monotone when he was Lawrence Cheshire, Ph.D.
They would hear such stuff, but it felt disconnected from the man they knew, who was so utterly unlike the various costumed folks in makeup and hats and toupees that he wore over the bald head they were used to at home. Miles didn’t remember him doing anything that could have been identified as “theatrical,” and in fact he was perhaps even unusually subdued and wistful in his everyday life. Miles supposed it was simply that when he came home from work, he was tired of performing for people.
But he was a good dad, nevertheless. Attentive in his restrained way.
They played cards together, Miles and Hayden and their father, board games, computer games. They went camping a few times, and on nature walks. When they were small, Miles and Hayden were particularly fond of the world of insects, which their father would help them find by turning over large rocks and logs. Identifying the creatures, reciting from his paperback Peterson guide.
He liked to read aloud. Goodnight Moon was the first book Miles recalled. The Return of the King was the last, finished only a week or so before their father’s death.
Even though they were almost thirteen, they liked to sleep next to him when he took his afternoon naps. The three of them, Miles and Hayden and their father, lined up on the king-size bed in their stocking feet, Hayden on one side, Miles on the other, the dog nestled down at the foot of the bed, curled up with her muzzle resting on her tail. Their mother had photographs of them all sleeping this way. Sometimes she would just stand in the doorway, watching. She loved how peaceful they all were, she said. Her boys. She might’ve been a good mother, Miles thought, if their father had lived.
Their father had been fifty-three years old when he died. It was completely unexpected, of course, though as it turned out his blood pressure had been extremely high and he hadn’t been taking care of his body very well. He had been a regular, if secretive, smoker, and he was overweight and hadn’t bothered to watch what he ate. “Cholesterol through the roof,” their mother had murmured to people at the funeral, and Miles could sense that she was making her way through thickets, mazes of regret and possible preventative measures that might have been taken, and alternate futures, now fruitless but still occupying her thoughts. “I told him I was concerned,” she said to people, earnestly, urgently, as if she expected them to blame her. “I spoke to him about it.”
In the weeks that followed, Miles spent a lot of time thinking about this. His death. Had they failed his father, had they been inattentive, could they have acted in a way that might have changed the course of events? He would close his eyes and try to imagine what a “massive heart attack” would feel like. Did you just go blank, he wondered, did your mind just empty out, like water spilled out of a cup?
He tried to picture what it might have been like, tried to picture his father standing in front of the audience when the first twinges came upon him. A pain in his left arm, maybe. A tightening in his chest. Heartburn, he probably thought. Exhaustion. Miles imagined him putting his hands against his toupee, pressing it down tightly with both palms.
Miles thought he knew the basic facts of what had happened. He remembered talking to Hayden about it on the night their father had died.
Their father had been out of town for a weekend event in Indianapolis and he’d died during one of his hypnotism shows.
It would have made a cute news item, Hayden said. One of those jokey, heavily ironic human interest pieces you might read about in News of the Weird.
The performance was taking place in a conference room in an office complex on the outskirts of the city; it was a “team-building” exercise for the people in the company, probably some bright idea that a manager in human resources had. Neat! they thought. Their father probably convinced them with a pitch about “helping people discover the power of their own mind,” and he took volunteers from among the group, people who were bravely willing to be hypnotized, and he brought them up to the front of the room and had them sit down in folding chairs while their coworkers watched, and everyone waited expectantly as one by one their father put each of the volunteers into their own individual trances.
Everyone was delighted. What fun! The coworkers in the audience were tittering to see their colleagues actually hypnotized, deeply relaxed, deeply vulnerable, right there in chairs in front of everyone.
Their father was perspiring a little as he spoke. He pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead, then the back of his neck.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and swallowed a dryness in his throat.
“Ladies and
“Ladies and gen tlemen.”
And then they were all hushed as he raised a finger—one moment please, the gesture meant—and then he sat down on a folding chair beside the hypnotized volunteers. The audience chuckled. The last guy in the row was a goofy curly-haired computer dude, slack-jawed, and they were particularly amused by him, he was in such a deep trance.
They waited to see what would happen. Their father put his hand on his chin and appeared to be thinking. He squeezed his eyes shut in a posture of solemn contemplation.
More chuckling.
Probably he died about then.
Sitting in a folding chair—his body balanced, equilibrated, and his audience was still waiting.
A few more chuckles, but mostly expectant silence. A held breath.
Their father’s body slumped slightly. Then tilted. Then—at last—fell over, and the metal chair folded shut with a metallic clap onto the echoing tile floor.
A lady cried out in surprise, but still the audience continued to sit there, uncertain, uncertain. Was this part of the act? Was it part of the team-building?
And meanwhile the people who had been hypnotized were not hypnotized any longer. It was, after all, not possible to become stuck in a trance. That is just a myth.
The hypnotized volunteers had begun to stir, to open their eyes and peek out.
Wake up! Wake up! Miles and Hayden’s father used to call out in the mornings when they were young. Wake, my little sleepyheads, he would whisper, and he would touch their ears lightly with the soft tips of his fingers.
In truth, this was not an event any of them—Miles or Hayden or their mother—had actually witnessed, but in Miles’s mind’s eye it was always as if he’d actually watched it. As if it had been filmed, one of those grainy, boxy educational movies the teachers would dust off on a rainy day at Roxboro Middle School. Martin Luther King. The Reproductive System. Mummies in Egypt.
Sometime later, Miles happened to mention this scene, this scene of their father’s death, and his mother had studied him.
“Miles, what on earth are you talking about?” she said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, very still, though her cigarette was shaking between her fingers. “Is that what Hayden told you?” she said, and she regarded him worriedly. Her feelings about Hayden were beginning to solidify.
“Your father died in his hotel room, honey,” she said. “A maid found him. He was staying at a Holiday Inn. And it was in Minneapolis, not Indianapolis, if you want to know, and he was attending the convention of the National Guild of Hypno
tists. He wasn’t performing.”
She took a sip from her coffee, then lifted her head sharply as Hayden came into the kitchen in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, just waking up though it was two in the afternoon.
“Well, well,” she said. “Speak of the devil.”
Even then, Miles had begun to realize that many of his “memories” were simply stories that Hayden had told him—suggestions that had been planted, seeds around which his brain had begun to build “setting” and “detail” and “action.” Even years later, Miles remembered his father’s last moments most vividly in the version that Hayden had described.
Looking back, it was as if there had been two different lives that Miles was leading—one narrated by Hayden, the other the life he was living separately, the life of a more or less normal teenager. While Hayden was delving deeper into the world of the past lives that Mr. Breeze had opened up, while Hayden was becoming more and more isolated, Miles was working on the high school yearbook and playing lacrosse on the junior varsity team at Hawken School, where Marc Spady was director of admissions. While Hayden was going into therapy and staying up all hours of the night, Miles was placidly getting B’s and C’s in his classes and going out to practice for his driving test with Marc Spady, backing through orange cones in a parking lot while Spady stood a few yards from the car calling: “Careful, Miles! Careful!”
Meanwhile, Hayden’s life was moving in a different direction. His nightmares had grown more and more pronounced—pirates and bloody Civil War battles and that burning shed where Bobby Berman had been playing with matches, where the flames sucked the oxygen from his lungs—and this meant that Hayden rarely slept. Their mother made up a new bedroom for him in the attic, and a special bed with cloth straps for his wrists and ankles just to keep him from sleepwalking, or from hurting himself in his sleep. There had been the night that he busted the kitchen windows with the ham of his palms, blood everywhere. There had been the time that their mother and Marc Spady woke to find him standing over them with a hammer, wavering there, mumbling to himself.
And so it was for his own safety, for all their safeties, it wasn’t a punishment, but Miles had been surprised at how willingly Hayden had accepted this new arrangement. “Don’t worry about me, Miles,” Hayden had said, though Miles wasn’t sure what, exactly, he was supposed to be worried about. Hayden got video games, cable TV in his new room, and in fact Miles used to be a little jealous of this. He remembered evenings when they would lie there in Hayden’s attic room, in bed together, playing Super Mario on that old Nintendo system, side by side holding their game pads and staring at the miniature TV screen on Hayden’s dresser. “Don’t worry, Miles,” Hayden said. “I’m taking care of everything.”
“That’s good,” Miles said.
Hayden had already been through “a battery” of psychologists and therapists, as their mother said. Various prescriptions. Olanzapine, haloperidol. But it didn’t matter, Hayden said.
“It’s not like I can tell anyone the truth,” Hayden said, and the MIDI music of Super Mario was burbling along. “You’re the only one I can talk to, Miles,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” Miles said, mostly focused on the journey of his Mario across the screen. They were sitting there under the covers together, and Hayden slid over and stuck his ice-cold foot against Miles’s leg. Hayden’s hands and feet were always pale and freezing, bad circulation, and he was always sticking them under Miles’s clothes.
“Cut it out!” Miles said, and in the game a mushroom monster killed him. “Oh, man! Look what you made me do!”
But Hayden just gazed at him. “Pay attention, Miles,” he said, and Miles watched as the GAME OVER tablet came up onto the TV screen.
“What?” Miles said, and their eyes caught. That significant look, as if, Miles thought, as if he should know.
“I told them about Marc Spady,” Hayden said, and let out a soft breath. “I told them who Spady was, and what he did to us.”
“What are you talking about?” Miles said, and then Hayden looked up abruptly. Their mother was standing in the doorway. It was time for them to go to bed, and she had come to strap Hayden in.
Miles had arrived at last in California. This was the first time he had known Hayden’s location in quite a while. More than four years had passed. Miles didn’t even know what Hayden looked like, though since they were twins, he imagined that they still looked a lot alike, of course.
This was in late June, just after they had turned twenty-two, and their mother and Marc Spady were dead, and Miles had been roaming from job to job ever since he dropped out of college. He came to the end of I-70 in the middle of Utah, then followed I-15 south toward Las Vegas.
When he came at last to the edge of Los Angeles, it was morning.
There was a Super 8 motel near Chinatown, and he slept the whole day on the thin-mattressed bed in his room, curtains closed tightly against the California sunshine, listening to the hum of the miniature refrigerator. It was after dark when he woke, and he groped around on the nightstand and found his car keys and the alarm clock and, at last, the phone.
“Hello?” Hayden said. It was hard to believe that he was only a few miles away. Miles had traced the path he would take to get to the neighborhood where he lived—up past Elysian Park toward the Silver Lake Reservoir.
“Hello?” Hayden said. “Miles?” And Miles deliberated.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s me.”
10
An invader arrives in your computer and begins to glean the little diatoms of your identity.
Your name, your address, and so on; the various websites you visit as you wander through the Internet, your user names and passwords, your birth date, your mother’s maiden name, favorite color, the blogs and news sites you read, the items you shop for, the credit card numbers you enter into the databases—
Which isn’t necessarily you, of course. You are still an individual human being with a soul and a history, friends and relatives and coworkers who care about you, who can vouch for you: they recognize your face and your voice and your personality, and you are aware of your life as a continuous thread, a dependable unfolding story of yourself that you are telling to yourself, you wake up and feel fairly happy—happy in that bland, daily way that doesn’t even recognize itself as happiness, moving into the empty hours that probably won’t be anything more than a series of rote actions: showering and pouring coffee into a cup and dressing and turning a key in the ignition and driving down streets that are so familiar you don’t even recall making certain turns and stops—though, yes, you are still present, your mind must have consciously carried out the procedure of braking at the corner and rolling the steering wheel beneath your palms and making a left onto the highway even though there is no memory at all of these actions. Perhaps if you were hypnotized such mundane moments could be retrieved, they are written on some file and stored, unused and useless in some neurological clerk’s back room. Does it matter? You are still you, after all, through all of these hours and days; you are still whole—
But imagine yourself in pieces.
Imagine all the people who have known you for only a year or a month or a single encounter, imagine those people in a room together trying to assemble a portrait of you, the way an archaeologist puts together the fragments of a ruined façade, or the bones of a caveman. Do you remember the fable of the seven blind men and the elephant?
It’s not that easy, after all, to know what you’re made up of.
Imagine the parts of yourself disassembled; imagine, for example, that nothing is left of you but a severed hand in an ice cooler. Perhaps there is one of your loved ones who could identify even this small piece. Here: the lines on your palm. The texture of your knuckles and wrinkled skin at the joints in the middle of your fingers. Calluses, scars. The shape of your nails.
Meanwhile, the invaders are busily carrying away small pieces of you, tidbits of information you hardly think about, any more than you think about the flakes of sk
in that are drifting off of you constantly, any more than you think of the millions of microscopic demodex mites that are crawling over you and feeding off your oil and skin cells.
You don’t feel particularly vulnerable, with your firewall and constantly updating virus protection, and most of the predators are almost laughably clumsy. At work you receive an email that is so patently ridiculous that you forward it to a few of your friends. Miss Emmanuela Kunta, Await Your Reply, it says in the subject line, and there is something almost adorable about its awkwardness. “Dear One,” says Miss Emmanuela Kunta,
Dear One,
I know that this mail will come to you as a surprise since we did not know each other, but I believed that is the will of God for us to know ourselves today and I thank him for making it possible for me to inform you of my great desire of going into long time relationship and financial transaction for our mutual benefits.
Emmanuela Kunta is my name, residing in Abidjan, while I’m 19 years of age, I’m also the only daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Godwin Kunta, with my younger brother Emmanuel Kunta who is also 19 years because we are twins.
My father was Gold Agents in Abidjan(Ivory Coast). Before his sudden, death on 20th February in a private hospital here in Abidjan, he called me on his bedside and told me about the sum of (USD $20.000,000,00)Twenty Million United state Dollars, he deposited in a security company here in Abidjan (Ivoiry Coast) for business investment that he used my name his beloved duaghter and only son as the next of kin in depositing the money, because our mother died 13 years ago in a fatal car accident. And that we should seek for a foreign partnerin in any country of our choice where we will transfer this money for investment purpose for our future life.
I humbly seek for your assistance, to help us transfer and secure this money in your country for investment, and to serve as guardian of the fund since we are still students, to make arrangement for us to come over to your country to further our education. Thanks as you made up your mind to help orphans like us. I am offering you 20% of the total amount for your humble assistnace and 5% is mapped out to refund any expenses incure during the transaction.
