by Dan Chaon
“Geez,” Lucy’s father said, and Lucy, who was studying at the kitchen table, lifted her head.
“What does this have to do with me?” she said, though her mother was essentially right. There was no way she was going to hang around Pompey, caring for a sick parent. She would pay for a nursing home, she thought. But still—it was weird of her mother to compare her to Patricia in such a way, and she leveled an offended stare in her mother’s direction. “I don’t know what’s so wrong with wanting to go to college and maybe do something different.”
At the time, she was thinking that she might go into law, corporate law was where the money was, she had heard. Or investment banking and securities: Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, one of those types of places. She could picture their shining offices, all glass and glistening wood and blue light, the wall-length windows with a Manhattan skyline hanging in the air outside. She had even downloaded information from company websites about internships and so on, though looking back it was clear they didn’t give internships to high school students in Ohio.
Her mother had been surprisingly hostile about the idea. “I don’t know if I could stand to have a lawyer in the family,” her mother had said blithely. “Let alone a banker.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lucy said.
And her mother had sighed humorously. “Oh, Lucy,” she said, and adjusted her pink hospital scrub blouse, getting ready to go off to her shift. She was just an LPN, not even a registered nurse; she hadn’t even been to a real four-year college. “That stuff is all about ‘What’s in it for me?’ It’s all about money, money, money. That’s not a way to live.”
Lucy was silent for a moment. Then she said, softly: “Mother, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Now, as she and George Orson approached the old dock, she was thinking again about leaving, thinking again about the plane lifting off toward some blank space—like a cartoon plane flying off the page into nothingness.
Or, she could stay.
She needed to think over her choices prudently. She was aware that George Orson was engaged in activity that was illegal; she was aware that there was a lot he hadn’t told her—a lot of secrets. But so what? It was that secretive quality that drew her to him in the first place, why deny it? And as long as the money itself was real, as long as that part of the situation could be worked out …
They’d come to a building at the end of the road. A single-frame storefront, above which a sign said: GENERAL STORE & GAS in old-time letters, and below that a series of offerings were promoted:
BAIT … ICE … SANDWICHES … COLD DRINKS …
It looked like it had been closed since the days of the pony express. It was the kind of place where a stagecoach would stop in an old Western.
But that was the way things were out here, she’d come to realize. The dry wind, the hard weather, the dust. It turned everything into an antique.
George Orson stood with his head cocked, listening to the faintly creaking hinge of an old sign that advertised cigarettes. His face was expressionless, and so was the face of the storefront. The windows were broken and patched with pieces of cardboard, and there was some trash, a faded candy wrapper and a Styrofoam cup and leaves and such, dancing in a ring on the oil-stained asphalt. The pumps were just standing there, dumbly.
“Hello? Is anyone home?” George Orson called.
He waited, almost expectantly, as if someone might actually respond, some ghostly voice perhaps.
“Zdravstvuite?” he called. His old joke. “Konichiwa?”
He lifted the arm of a nozzle from its cradle on the side of a gas pump and tried it experimentally. He pulled the trigger that made the gas come out of the hose, but nothing happened, of course.
“This is what the end of civilization will look like,” George Orson said. “Don’t you think?”
When George Orson was a child, the lake—the reservoir—was the largest body of water in the region. Twenty miles long, four miles wide, 142 feet deep at the dam.
“You have to understand,” George Orson told her. “People would come from all over—Omaha, Denver, they’d drive a hundred miles to get here. When I was a kid, it was amazing. That’s what’s hard to imagine now: it was full of life. I remember when you could look from the top of the dam, and you couldn’t even see the end of it. Just huge, especially for a poor Nebraska kid who’d never seen an ocean. Now it looks like pictures you see from Iraq. A geologist friend of mine was talking about the Euphrates drying up and showed me pictures, and it looked exactly like this.”
“Hmm,” she said.
This was the stuff he liked to talk about. A geologist friend of mine—no doubt someone he had gone to school with at Yale, once upon a time. He knew all kinds of people, all kinds of stories and trivia, which occasionally he would trot out to impress her, and which, yes, she did find pretty compelling. She herself would love to know people who would grow up to be geologists and famous authors and politicians such as George Orson’s classmates had done.
Lucy had applied to three colleges: Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.
Those were the only places she was interested in, the most famous places, she’d thought, the most important—
And she could picture herself on their campuses—standing underneath the statue of John Harvard outside University Hall—hurrying through the McCosh Courtyard at Princeton with her books under her arms—or walking along Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, “The most beautiful street in America,” according to the brochures, on her way to a reception at the president’s house—
She would have come across as bashful when she first arrived, and though she wouldn’t have had any nice clothes, it wouldn’t matter. She would’ve dressed simply, in dark, modest outfits that might even be thought of as mysterious. In any case, it wouldn’t have been too much time before people began to recognize her, as George Orson had, for her subtle wit, her sharp sense of the absurd, her incisive comments in class. Her roommate, she thought, would probably be an heiress of some sort, and when Lucy at last shyly revealed that she was an orphan, she might be invited to spend the holidays in the Hamptons or Cape Cod or some such place—
These were not fantasies she could tell to George Orson. He was very critical of his Ivy League education—despite the fact that he mentioned it frequently. He didn’t think very highly of the people he’d encountered there. “That grotesque performance of privilege,” he said. “All the princes and princesses, primping while they waited to take their rightful place at the front of the line. God, how I hated them!”
He would tell her these things after they became involved, back during the spring semester of her senior year, and she would lie in his bed with her face turned away from him trying to think of how she would probably have to break things off when she went off to Massachusetts or Connecticut or New Jersey. She would have to tell him when the acceptance letters finally came, it would be painful but it would probably be for the best, ultimately.
A few days later, the first rejection had arrived in the mail. She’d discovered it when she came home from school—Patricia was at work—and she sat there at the kitchen table and she could feel her mother’s collection of Precious Moments figurines staring down at her. Round-headed porcelain children with large eyes and almost no nose or mouth: reading a book together, or sitting on a giant cupcake, or holding a puppy. All of them arranged on a plastic shelving unit her mother had bought at the drugstore. She smoothed the letter out in front of her: they wished they could be writing with a different decision, they said. They wished it were possible to admit her. They hoped she would accept their best wishes.
In retrospect, she didn’t know why she had been so confident. True, she had earned A’s in almost all her classes—her grade point average marred by only a couple of B+ semesters in French, the gentle but unforgiving Mme Fournier, who never approved of her accent or embouchure. She had dutifully joined clubs of various sorts—the National Honor Society, Masque and
Gavel, Future Business Leaders of America, Model United Nations, and so on. She had scored in the ninety-fourth percentile on the SAT.
Which, she realized now, was not nearly good enough. George Orson was right: a person would have to think in a certain calculated way from early on, from grade school, or before grade school, or, more likely, you would probably need to be groomed for it from the start. By the time you were Lucy’s age …
The other two rejection letters had come that next week.
She knew what they were even before she looked at them. She could hear the neighbor’s dog’s dull, aggrieved barking outside, and at last she opened one of the letters and she could guess the contents from the first word.
“After …”
She laid the palm of her hand across the page and closed her eyes.
She had been doing so well. Despite her parents’ deaths, despite the terrible situation of her home life, the empty refrigerator, the bills she and Patricia could barely pay, the meager income Patricia earned from the Circle K Convenience Store and the remains of their parents’ insurance and the two of them eating frozen dinners and canned soups and horrible convenience store hot dogs and nachos that Patricia brought home from work—despite the fact that she didn’t have a cell phone or an iPod or even a computer like most normal kids her age—
Despite everything, she had been moving forward, you could even say she’d behaved with a certain degree of dignity and grace, you might even say she was heroic, going off to school every day and doing her homework at night and writing her papers and raising her hand in class and she had never once cried, she had never complained about what was happening to her. Didn’t that count for something?
Apparently not. Her palm was still resting across the words on the letter, and she peered down at her hand as if it were a discarded glove in a snowbank.
She had been mistaken. She could feel the realization settling over her. The life she had been traveling toward—imagining herself into—the ideas and expectations that had been so solid only a few weeks ago—this life had been erased, and the numb feeling crept up from her hand to her arm to her shoulder and the sound of the barking next door seemed to solidify in the air.
Her future was like a city she had never visited. A city on the other side of the country, and she was driving down the road, with all her possessions packed up in the backseat of the car, and the route was clearly marked on her map, and then she stopped at a rest area and saw that the place she was headed to wasn’t there any longer. The town she was driving to had vanished—perhaps had never been there—and if she stopped to ask the way, the gas station attendant would look at her blankly. He wouldn’t even know what she was talking about.
“I’m sorry, miss,” he’d say gently. “I think you must be mistaken. I never heard of that place.”
A sense of sundering.
In one life, there was a city you were on your way to. In another, it was just a place you’d invented.
This was not a period of her life she liked to remember, but she found herself thinking of it nevertheless. This was one of the things George Orson did not understand, one of the things she could never have told him about herself. She couldn’t imagine describing the conversation she’d had with a “counselor” at the admissions office at Harvard—the way she’d started crying—
“You don’t understand,” she said, and it wasn’t just that a little sob or whimper had escaped her—it was as if her whole body were draining and becoming hollow, a thick needles-and-pins sensation ran down through her scalp and over her face, and her heart and lungs tightened. “I don’t have anything,” she said. “I’m an orphan,” she said, and the sensation had gone from her lips and for some reason she thought maybe she could possibly go blind. Her fingers were shaking. “My mother and father are dead,” she said, and a ragged, heavy space seemed to open up beneath her throat.
This was what real grief felt like—she had never truly felt it before. All the times she had been sad, all the times she had wept in her life, all the glooms and melancholies were merely moods, mere passing whims. Grief was a different thing altogether.
She let the phone slide down and she put her hand to her mouth as an awful and soundless breath came out of it.
And a few weeks later, when George Orson suggested that she leave town with him, it felt like the only reasonable thing to do.
They’d reached the edge of the boat ramp, a cement slope that led down into the basin of the former lake, and there was a battered sign that said:
NO SWIMMING OR WADING WITHIN 20
FEET OF RAMPS OR DOCKS
“I’ve been meaning to show you this,” George Orson said, gesturing out toward some point in the sandy expanse of flatland and scrubby weeds, where the water had once been.
“I don’t see anything,” Lucy said.
She’d been inside her own head for a while by that time, growing bleaker as their path descended, but of course George Orson couldn’t read her thoughts. He didn’t know that she was remembering the great humiliation of her life; he didn’t know that she was thinking about leaving; he couldn’t hear her wondering whether there was any money in the house.
Though naturally he could read her mood; she could see how he was trying to entertain her. Now it was his turn to try to cheer her up. “Just wait. You’ll like this,” he said, clasping her hand, his voice brightening as he guided her along.
Her own private history teacher.
“Down this way is where the town was,” he said, and he gestured like a lecturer as they walked. “Lemoyne,” he said. “That was what it was called. It was a small village, and when they decided to make the reservoir back in the 1930s, the state bought up all the land and the houses and relocated the people, and then they flooded it. It’s not a unique phenomenon, actually. There are, I would guess, hundreds of them all across the United States. ‘Drowned towns’—I think that’s the term. As the technology for creating these irrigation and hydroelectric reservoirs advanced, the people just had to move aside—”
And he paused, checking to see if he still had her attention.
“Such is progress,” he said.
She saw it now. The town. Or rather, what was left of it, which was not particularly townlike after all. The dust was blowing hard in the basin, and the structures ahead were blurred, as if in fog.
“Wow,” she said. “This is weird.”
“Nebraska’s own Atlantis,” George Orson said, and glanced at her, gauging her reaction. She could see him planning out what he was going to say, then reconsidering.
“There’s a lot of energy here,” George Orson said, and he gave her one of his intense, secretive smiles. He was teasing, but he was also serious in a way she didn’t quite understand.
“Energy,” she said.
His smile broadened—as if she knew exactly what he was getting at. “Energy of the supernatural variety. So they say. They list it in all of those hokey books—America’s Most Haunted, Mysterious Places of the Great Plains, you know what I mean. Not to say that I discount it wholesale. But I guess if there is energy, it’s probably mostly negative, I’d imagine. Not too far from here is where the Battle of Ash Hollow happened. This was back in 1855, and General William Harney led six hundred soldiers onto a Sioux encampment and massacred eighty-six people, many of them women and children. It was part of President Pierce’s plan, you see, the westward expansion, the Oregon Trail, the growth of the U.S. Army—”
Lucy frowned. She had been hoping for more about their current situation, but it appeared that this was just another one of his distractions. More chitchat about the things that he found fascinating—cheesy-sounding new age philosophy mixed up with conspiratorial antigovernment historical analysis—though at one time she’d liked it when he would hold forth on such stuff, not least because then she could play the part of the skeptic.
“Oh, right,” she said now, and let herself touch once again on their bantering voice, the way they used to talk to each oth
er, the earnest teacher and the wryly challenging student.
“I suppose there are probably secret alien UFO landing bases right around here, too,” she said.
“Ha, ha,” he said.
And then he pointed, and she felt the back of her neck prickle.
Up ahead, there were perhaps a dozen buildings, rising up among the silt and sand and big tumbleweed-shaped bushes and scrub grass, though “buildings” wasn’t exactly the right term.
Remains, she thought. Pieces of structures in various states of collapse and ruin—foundations and scattered slabs of cement—a fat hexagonal block, an oblong column, a triangular corner piece—all with tails of sand pulling behind them. There was a single rocky wall with the rectangle of a door in it. The detritus of an old outhouse or shed had heaved itself over into a pile of rotting boards, covered in silt and algae, and beyond it a crooked, rusted street sign was still posted. At the end of what she guessed had once been the street, there was a larger four-walled frame, some steps leading up the front of the stone block façade.
“Holy shit, George,” she said.
Which had always been another part of their relationship. She was the cynic and he was the believer, but she could be persuaded. She could be brought to a state of wonder, if only he was convincing enough.
And he had succeeded this time.
“That was the church,” George Orson said. They stood there together, side by side, and she thought that actually he was right about “negative energy,” or whatever.
“Doesn’t this seem like a good place to perform a ritual?” George Orson said.
