by Dan Chaon
And she was aware again of that feeling, that end-of-the-world stillness. She thought of what George Orson had told her back when they were driving through Indiana or Iowa and she was still vaguely talking about going to college: she’d apply again in a year or so, she’d said.
“I wouldn’t bother if I were you,” George Orson had said, and he’d looked over at her, his lopsided smile pulling up. “By the time you’re forty, it’s not going to matter whether you graduated from college or not. I doubt if Yale University will even exist.”
And Lucy had given him a stern look. “Oh, right,” she said. “And apes will rule the earth.”
“Honestly,” George Orson said. “I’m not so sure there will even be a United States by that point. At least not as we know it.”
“George,” she said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But now, standing in the dried-out basin of the lake, on the steps of the old church where the body of a carp had mummified among a clump of cobwebbed moss—now she could easily imagine the United States was already gone; the cities were burnt and the highways glutted with rusting cars that had never made it out of town.
“It’s funny,” George Orson was saying. “My mother used to tell us you could see the steeple underneath the water when it was clear—which was a myth, naturally, but my brother and I used to come out here on the pontoon and dive down, looking for it. We’re probably about—what would you say?—pretty close to the middle of the lake, and you have to imagine that it was fairly deep at the time. Twelve or thirteen fathoms?”
He was in his own dreamy state, and she watched his finger as he lifted it and pointed upward. “Think about it!” he said. “About seventy or eighty feet above us, there would be the boat, and you could see the two of us dive into the water. You’d be like a shark down here watching the legs splashing and you’d see the surface of the water up there—”
Yes. She could see it. She could imagine being at the bottom of the lake—the membrane of the water hovering above them like the surface of a sky, and the rippled shadow of the pontoon boat, and the figures of the boys in the diffuse blue-green light, their silhouettes like birds skimming the air.
She shuddered, and the fantasy of water and childhood nostalgia drained away.
The pale dust was blowing in horizontal streams close to the ground, snaking in thin, rippling pathways that built tombolos off the scrub plants. All the color around her was washed out by the dust and glare, like a photograph with the brightness and contrast turned up too high.
There was nothing like that in her own childhood, no idyllic vacations at a beach, no pontoon boats or mysterious underwater towns. She could remember summer days at the Pompey swimming pool, or running through the sprinkler in the yard with Patricia, Patricia a plump little girl in a one-piece bathing suit, her mouth open to catch the spray of water.
Poor Patricia, she thought.
Poor Patricia, washing the dishes and doing the laundry and looking sorrowfully at Lucy as she sat there on the couch watching TV. As if she were too good to clean up after herself. Perhaps, Lucy thought, it was better for both of them that she was gone. Maybe Patricia was happier.
“So,” Lucy said. “Where is your brother now? Do you ever call him, or talk to him or anything?”
George Orson blinked. He was coming back from some memory himself, she guessed, because at first he was taken aback. As if the question puzzled him. Then he straightened.
“He’s—actually he’s not around anymore,” George Orson said at last. His forehead creased. “He drowned. Somewhere—I guess about five miles north of here. He was eighteen. It was the year he graduated from high school, and I was in college, I was still in New Haven, and apparently—” He paused, as if he were straightening a painting in a room in his mind.
“Apparently, he went out for a swim at night, and—that was it. What happened, it’s impossible to know, because he was alone, but they never did figure out why. He was an excellent swimmer.”
“You’re not joking,” she said.
“Of course not,” he said, and gave her one of his gently reproachful looks. “Why would I joke about something like that?”
“Jesus, George,” she said, and they fell mute, both of them looking up to the narrow slate-colored cirrus clouds that were laid across the sky. The former surface of the water, twelve fathoms above them.
She wasn’t sure what to think. How long had they been together? Almost five months? All those hours and hours of conversations, all the talk of various kinds of history and movies and his years at Yale and his geologist friend and his magician friend and the crazy computer guys from Atlanta, all this flotsam and jetsam, and yet she couldn’t have put together even a basic biography of his life.
“George,” she said, “don’t you think it’s weird that you never told me that you had a brother who died?”
She was trying to maintain their usual bantering tone, but her voice hitched, and she had the awful feeling that she might be overcome by another crying fit such as she had on that day she called the admissions counselor on the phone. She paused; tightened her mouth. “I told you about my parents,” she said.
“Yes, you did,” George Orson said. “And you know, I’ve always appreciated that you’ve been so forthright.” He shrugged mildly; he didn’t want to argue, he didn’t want her to be upset. His expression flickered, uncertainly, and she wondered if he had been caught in a truth—the same way some people were caught in a lie.
“Honestly?” he said. “I didn’t think you needed to hear any more tragic death stories. With your own loss still weighing so heavily on you? You needed to get away from all that, Lucy. You told me about your parents—you did. But you didn’t really want to talk about it.”
“Hmm,” she said—because perhaps he was right; maybe he did understand her, after all. Was it possible that she was as lost as he seemed to think she was?
“Besides which,” he said, “my brother died a long time ago. I don’t find myself thinking about it very often. Most of the time, only when I’m out here.”
“I see,” she said, and they sat down together on the crumbling steps of the old church. “I see,” she said again, and here was that pitch in her voice again, that tremor. She thought of that one time when her father took her and Patricia fishing on Lake Erie, the boat with the sonar scanner that would help them find the big fish. She could imagine George Orson sounding his memory, locating the shadow of his brother, sliding through the dark water.
“But—don’t you miss him?” she said.
“I don’t know,” George Orson said at last. “Of course I miss him, in a certain way. I was very upset when he died, naturally; it was a terrible tragedy. But—”
“But what?” Lucy said.
“But fourteen years is a long while,” George Orson said. “I’m thirty-two years old, Lucy. You might not realize that yet, but you pass through a lot of different stages in that amount of time. I’ve been a lot of different people since then.”
“A lot of different people,” she said.
“Dozens.”
“Oh, really?” she said. And she was aware of that wavering shadow passing over her once again, all the different people she herself had wanted to become, all the sadness and anxiety that she had been trying not to think about now shifting above her like an iceberg. Were they merely bantering again? Or were they in the midst of a serious conversation?
“So—” she said. “So—who are you right now?”
“I’m not sure exactly,” George Orson said, and he looked at her for a long time, those green eyes moving in minnow darts, scoping her face. “But I think that’s okay.”
She let him run his palm over the back of her hand. Across her knuckles, her fingers, her nails, her fingertips. He touched her leg, the way he always did when he was particularly focused on her.
He did love her, she thought. For whatever reason, it felt like he was probably the only person left who truly knew her. The
real her.
“Listen,” George Orson said. “What if I told you that you could leave your old self behind? Right now. What if I told you we could bury George Orson and Lucy Lattimore, right here. Right in this little dead town.”
He wasn’t dangerous, she thought. He wouldn’t hurt her. And yet his face, his eyes had such an odd, unnerving intensity. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he was going to tell her that he had done something terrible. Murdered someone, maybe.
Would she still love him, would she still stay with him, if he had committed some awful crime?
“George,” she said, and she could hear how hoarse and uncertain her voice sounded, down in this valley. “Are you trying to scare me?”
“Not at all,” George Orson said, and he took her palms in his and held them firmly and drew his face close to hers, so that she could see how bright and avid and earnest his eyes were. “No, honey, I swear to God, I would never try to scare you. Never.”
And then he smiled at her, hopefully.
“It’s just that—oh, sweetheart, I don’t think I can be George Orson for much longer. And if we’re going to stay together, you can’t be Lucy Lattimore much longer, either.”
Across the weedy lake bed, the clouds were stacked above the opposite shore, dirty white fading upward into dark gray. A vapor of dust stirred up across the valley where there were once fathoms of water.
13
Miles was sitting in a bar in Inuvik when his phone rang.
He was hovering over his fourth beer, and at first he wasn’t sure where the sound was coming from—just a tiny computerized twitter of birdsong that seemed to be emanating from an undisclosed location in the air around him. He glanced at the bartender, and then over his shoulder, and then at the floor below his bar stool, and then at last he discovered the chirping was actually the phone in his jacket pocket.
This was the phone he had purchased at the local wireless place—Ice Wireless, it was called—since he had realized his own phone couldn’t get reception. One of the many things he hadn’t taken into account when he left Cleveland. One of the many expenditures that had been added to his credit card over the years, in search of Hayden.
But here: this time it turned out to be worth it. The phone was actually ringing.
“Hello?” he said, and there was a blank sound. “Hello? Hello?” he said. He wasn’t used to this phone yet, wasn’t sure if he was operating it correctly.
Then there was a woman’s voice. “I’m calling about the poster?” she said, and at first he was so flustered to encounter a voice at the other end of the phone that synapses in his brain stumbled over one another.
“The poster …?” he said.
“Yes,” the woman said. “There was a flyer—a missing person—and this was the number that it said to call. I think I have information about the person on the poster.” She had an American accent, the first one he’d heard in a while, and he straightened, patting his pockets for a pen.
“I believe I know the person you’re looking for,” she said.
He was a terrible detective.
That was one of the things he had been thinking about on the drive to Inuvik. He had spent the entire decade of his twenties looking for Hayden—sleepwalking through various odd jobs and attempts at higher education—and all the while thinking that his “real” vocation was elsewhere. His real vocation was “detective,” his real vocation was looking for Hayden, he’d thought, his every attempt at normalcy punctuated—punctured—by periods of intense Hayden-obsession: gathering and sifting through data, spending his money and charging up credit cards so that he could go on these long, fruitless trips.
Though in fact, the truth was, in all these years, he’d done little but accumulate endless notebooks full of unanswered questions:
Is Hayden schizophrenic? Does he have a mental illness, or is that an act?
Unknown.
Does Hayden really believe in his “past lives,” and if so, how is that related to his study of “ley lines,” “geodesy,” and “spirit cities”? Or is this, too, a scam?
Unknown.
Was Hayden responsible for the house fire that killed our mother and Mr. Spady?
Unknown.
Why was Hayden in Los Angeles, and what was the nature of his “residual income stream consultant” business?
Unknown.
What was the nature of his graduate work in mathematics at the University of Missouri, Rolla? How did he get accepted into graduate school when he hadn’t even completed an undergraduate degree?
Unknown.
What happened to the young woman he was dating in Missouri?
Unknown.
What, if any, is Hayden’s relationship with H&R Block, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, etc.?
Unknown.
Why did Hayden warn about Mrs. Matalov/Matalov Novelties?
Unknown.
Why is Hayden in Inuvik? Is Hayden in Inuvik?
Unknown.
He sat there at the bar, staring at his spiral reporter’s notebook, into which he had printed these and other questions in neat block letters, his handwriting, which, ever since childhood, had been a pale imitation of Hayden’s more elegant script.
He held the phone to his ear.
“Yes,” he said. “You have information about the—the person—the poster?” He was aware that he sounded somewhat incredulous, and he wavered. The woman said nothing.
“We’re—as the poster says, we’re, ah—prepared to offer a reward,” Miles said.
Reward. He supposed he could get another cash advance on his credit card.
He was still addled. Eighty-four hours, with a few sessions of sleeping in the car alongside the road—curled up in the backseat with his knuckles pressed against his mouth, a thin blanket tucked at his neck. Once, he’d awakened and he’d had the notion that he was seeing the aurora borealis in the sky, a wispy, winding smokelike shape, a glowing fluorescent-green, though this was also the color he imagined a UFO would give off as it hovered over you.
By the time he had finally arrived in Inuvik, he was in an out-of-body state. He’d taken a room in a downtown motel—the Eskimo Inn—thinking he would pass out the minute he lay down on the bed.
It was late, but the sun was still shining. The midnight sun, he thought—a dim, dull, yellowy light, as if the world were a basement room lit by a bare forty-watt bulb—and he drew the blackout curtains and sat down on the bed.
His ears were ringing, and his skin felt as if it were lightly shimmering. The buzz of his car’s wheels on asphalt had worked its way inside his body, forward movement, forward movement, forward movement, and he wished that he’d had the presence of mind to buy some beer before he checked in—
Instead of sitting there, blinking stupidly, with the old atlas in his lap. A terrible detective, he thought. Dominion of Canada, the atlas said, the building block rectangles of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, in colors of lilac and tangerine and bubblegum-pink, the Northwest Territories rising above them in mint-green. On this map, Nunavut did not yet exist. On this map, the teenage Hayden had printed a series of runes that ran up the length of the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula and marched through the Beaufort Sea to Sachs Harbour.
Miles had the image of Hayden wrapped in an Eskimo coat with a fur-lined hood, traveling across the plain of a frozen sea on a dogsled, and behind him the sheet of ice was breaking into jagged jigsaw pieces. The pallid seabirds skated circles overhead, screeching: Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
It had already occurred to him that this was just another dead end—
Another Kulm, North Dakota—
Another Rolla, Missouri—
Another humiliation like the one at the JPMorgan Chase Tower in Houston—the security guard escorting Miles out of the Sky Lobby and depositing him onto the plaza. Mister, you’ve been warned before, the guard said—
All of those times when he’d been convinced he was on the verge of catching Hayden at last.
He tried to meditate. He imagined he was back in his apartment in Cleveland, the sheer white curtains were moving in a morning breeze, and his face was pressed against the nice extra-heavy pillow he’d purchased for himself at Bed Bath & Beyond, and he was going to wake up and go to his job at Matalov Novelties, and he had given up on detective work forever.
He was twenty-nine years old when he moved back to Cleveland—this was after his last expedition, his trip to North Dakota—and he had decided that going home, returning to the city of his childhood, would give him a sense of stability and equilibrium. Months had gone by and he hadn’t heard from Hayden, and he felt as if his mind were clearing. He was going to enter a new phase of his life.
Cleveland was not in great shape. At first glance, it appeared that Cleveland was in the midst of its final death throes: infrastructure collapsing, stores closed and boarded up, Euclid Avenue—the great central street—dismantled, the asphalt torn off and piled along the sidewalk, the left lane a muddy trench lined with orange construction barrels, the beautiful old buildings—May Company, Higbee’s—hollowed out, belts of empty lots and haunted-looking warehouses.
This had been ongoing for as long as he could remember—for years and years the city had been sliding into ruin and despair, people always spoke with nostalgia about the former glory of the city’s past, and he had never taken such talk particularly seriously.
But now it looked like a place that had been bombed and then abandoned. Driving downtown for the first time, he had an apocalyptic feeling, a last-man-on-earth feeling, even though other cars were driving a few blocks ahead, even though he saw a dark figure disappearing into the doorway of a ramshackle tavern. It was the feeling you got when you woke up and everyone you loved was dead. Everyone was dead, and yet the world was continuing on, austere and thoughtless, the sky stirred full with gulls and starlings. A blimp floated lethargically in the haze above the baseball field like an old balloon that had been discarded in a muddy lake.
