by Dan Chaon
But he needed to try to think more positively! Not everything had to be so morbid, as his mom always said.
He had rented an apartment on Euclid Heights Boulevard, not far from the University Circle area, not far, actually, from the street where he and Hayden had grown up.
But he wasn’t going to think about that.
His apartment was in an old brownstone called the Hyde Arms. Third floor, one-bedroom suite, hardwood floors and refurbished kitchen, heat and water inclusive, cats welcome.
He thought about getting a cat, since he was settling down after all. A big, friendly black-and-white tuxedo cat, a mouser, he thought, a companion—and the idea pleased him, not least because Hayden had always had a horror of cats, various superstitions about their “powers.”
He had found one of his old friends from high school in the phone book—John Russell—and he had been surprised and actually moved at how happy John Russell was to hear from him. They used to play clarinet together in the marching band and they used to hang out together all the time and John Russell said, “Why don’t we go out for a drink? I’d love to catch up!”
Which was exactly what Miles had hoped for when he’d returned to Cleveland. A night out with an old buddy, renewed friendships, familiar places, easy but not unserious conversations. A couple of nights later, the two of them sat in Parnell’s Pub, a nice corner bar near the art-house movie theater, and there was a real Irish bartender—“What can I get for you, gents?” he brogued in his pleasant accent—and two televisions mounted unobtrusively in the alcoves above the liquor bottles played a baseball game that people were periodically noticing, as meanwhile the jukebox was emitting rock music that seemed vaguely college-educated, the clientele both reserved and relaxed, not too boisterous, not too aloof.
This could be my bar, Miles thought—imagining a scenario in which he and his group of friends met regularly for drinks, and their lives had the fixed rhythms and amusing complications of a well-written ensemble television show. He’d be the funny, slightly neurotic one, the one who might get involved with a smart, edgy younger girl—possibly with tattoos and piercings—who stirs up his life in interesting and comical ways.
“It’s fantastic to see you, Miles,” John Russell said, as Miles was eking his way through this reverie. “Honestly. I can’t believe it’s been ten years! Good Lord! More than ten years!” And John Russell put his palms against his cheeks, comically miming surprise. Miles had forgotten about John Russell’s odd, nerdy gestures, as if he had learned about emotions from the anime cartoons and video games he used to love.
“So what have you been doing with yourself?” John Russell said, and he raised his eyes as if he were prepared for Miles to reveal a remarkable story. “Homunculus!” as he used to say, back in their teenage years—by which he meant: “Incredible!”
“Miles,” he said, “Where have you been all these years?”
“A good question,” Miles said. “I wonder that myself sometimes.”
He was indecisive. He didn’t want to get into all of the stuff about Hayden—which would have, he supposed, come across as ridiculous and exaggerated in any case. What would he say? I’ve basically been wasting the past decade of my life pursuing my insane twin brother. You remember Hayden, don’t you?
Even mentioning Hayden’s name was probably bad luck.
“I don’t know,” he told John Russell. “I’ve been somewhat—nomadic, actually. Involved in a lot of different stuff. It took me about six years to finish college, you know. There were … some issues….”
“I heard,” John Russell said, and he made what Miles assumed was a commiserating expression. “My condolences about your parents.”
“Well,” Miles said. “Thank you.” But what was there to say? How do you respond to expressions of sympathy, so long after the fact? “I’m better now.” That was a good answer, he decided. “It was difficult, but—I’ve gotten myself together, it’s been awhile and—and I guess I’m just thinking about settling down for a while. Looking for a job, you know, whatever.”
“Most definitely,” John Russell said, and nodded as if Miles had been articulate. What a relief! For as long as they’d been friends, John Russell had always been a blithely, blissfully accepting kid—the perfect friend when you had a crazy brother and a troubled home life and limited social skills—and in personality he was essentially unchanged, though he’d aged radically in other ways: his hairline had receded, and the bare dome of his head now looked more oblong, and his chin had grown weaker, and he’d gotten heavy in the stomach and hips and bottom, so that he was shaped a little like a bowling pin. He was a tax attorney.
“I’m not necessarily looking for anything specific at this point,” Miles was saying. He still felt vaguely embarrassed and—he couldn’t help it—defensive. “Some job … and, I don’t know, go back to school? I need to get more focused in my life, I guess. I’ve wasted a lot of time.”
But John Russell only tilted his head sympathetically. “Who knows?” he said. “I actually sometimes wish I’d done more traveling and maybe a little less settling.” And he patted his round belly wryly.
“I think probably most people waste their lives in one way or another,” John Russell said. “You know—one time I tried to figure out how much time I’d spent in my life playing video games and watching TV. My rough estimate is, like, ninety-one thousand hours. Which is actually probably conservative, but that amounts to just over ten years. Which I have to say, I found a little scary—though, it hasn’t stopped me from watching TV and playing video games, but—it’s sad, I guess.”
“Well,” Miles said. “It seems like it would be hard to calculate something like that.”
“I’ve actually put together a spreadsheet,” John Russell said. “I’ll show it to you sometime.”
Miles nodded. “That would be cool,” he said—and he couldn’t help but think how the idea of John Russell’s “spreadsheet” would have delighted Hayden.
“That kid is a bigger freak than we are, Miles,” Hayden used to say.
And Miles would protest. “We’re not freaks,” Miles would say. “And he isn’t, either.”
“Oh, please,” Hayden would say.
He remembered how amused Hayden had been by the fact that John Russell went by both his first and last name. “What a ridiculous affectation,” Hayden had said. “But I actually kind of like it.” And then Hayden had performed a small parody of John Russell’s delicate hen-like way of walking. Which, despite himself, Miles had found hilarious, and even now it was hard not to think of John Russell as a humorous character.
But he was not going to think about Hayden.
“Anyway,” he said.
He and John Russell had pints of beer, and both of them lifted their glasses to their lips and took a sip. They smiled at each other, and Miles was aware of how urgently he wanted them to be friends, to be normal friends, but instead there was an awkward silence that he didn’t know how to fill. John Russell cleared his throat.
“In any case,” John Russell said, “people take different paths. Like—for example—did you hear about Clayton Combe? You remember him, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Miles said, though he hadn’t thought of Clayton Combe in years.
He was a boy at Hawken School that both he and John Russell had disliked: a bright, popular student, beloved by nearly everyone, athletic, good-looking, but also, they thought, a condescending ass. He had the most hideously self-satisfied grin Miles had ever seen on a human being.
“You won’t believe this,” John Russell said, confidentially. “Everybody thought he was going to do so well? As it turns out, he killed himself. He was an investment banker at ING, and there was an embezzlement scandal of some sort. He claimed he wasn’t guilty, but he got convicted and he was supposed to get about fifteen years in prison but then he—”
John Russell raised his eyebrows significantly. “Hung himself.”
“That’s awful,” Miles said.
And it was, though he didn’t necessarily feel that badly about it. He remembered how Hayden had disliked Clayton Combe intensely—how he used to mimic Clayton’s way of tilting his head back when he smiled, as if he were being applauded. Hayden would raise his hand and wave to an imaginary, appreciative crowd, like a beauty queen on a float, and Miles and John Russell used to find this parody uproarious.
And then, Miles couldn’t help it, the detective part of him woke up and blinked.
Wasn’t ING one of those companies, Miles thought, one of the many entities that Hayden bore some grudge against?
Hadn’t he mentioned it in one of his emails? One of his various rants?
But he didn’t have to let himself go in that direction.
“Poor Clayton,” he heard himself murmur. “That’s so …,” he said. “So strange.”
But was it? Was it strange?
He reflected on this, in the week after that conversation with John Russell. Why did it always have to circle back to Hayden? Why couldn’t he just sit there and have a pleasant conversation with an old friend? Why couldn’t the story of Clayton Combe just be a bit of gossip? And he refused to research it. He was not going to look up news articles about Clayton Combe; he was not going to turn it into some paranoid fantasy.
But then, ultimately, he wrote it down in his notebook anyway:
Did Hayden destroy the life of Clayton Combe and drive him to suicide?
Unknown.
He was feeling very vulnerable at that point. Very vulnerable and unsettled and depressed, and he kept thinking about what John Russell had said. Most people waste their lives in one way or another.
I have to change directions, Miles thought. A person can use his life wisely, if he just thinks about it. If he just makes a plan, and sticks to it!
Yet, despite his best intentions, he’d find himself going through his files once again.
He’d find himself staring out the window of his apartment, looking out toward the northeast, out over the suburban treetops. A few blocks away was the street where his family used to live, and he could feel their old house sending out uninterpretable signals, telegraphing its absence, since of course it wasn’t there any longer.
He thought about going over to look at the site.
What was left? he wondered. Was it just a grassy lot? Was there a new house where the old one once stood? Was there anything left that he would recognize?
The house had burned down during his sophomore year at Ohio University. Hayden had been missing for more than two years by then, and Miles had never been able to bring himself to come back. What reason was there? His father, his mother, even his stepfather, Mr. Spady, were all dead, nothing to return for except morbid curiosity, which he ultimately resisted. He didn’t want to see the remains of the structure, burnt timbers and caved roof, charred pieces of furniture; he didn’t want to imagine the windows lit with fire, the neighbors gathering on the lawn as the fire truck and ambulance arrived.
He didn’t want to envisage the possibility of Hayden standing there, shadowed in the copse of lilacs at the edge of the yard, perhaps with his arsonist’s tools still in a backpack on his shoulder.
There was no real evidence of this—nothing beyond a vivid snapshot in his imagination, a picture so sharp that sometimes he couldn’t help but add the house to the tally of Hayden’s crimes. The house, and his mother and Mr. Spady.
And now, he thought, there was poor Clayton Combe, hanging himself in a jail cell. He thought of Hayden’s Clayton Combe impression: chin up, eyes rolled back, mouth stretched into a rictus of self-regard.
Down below his third-story window, he could see the roof of the building next door; a mummified newspaper, still rolled and rubber-banded but slowly decaying; and a smattering of leaves came running down the alleyway in a formation like birds or football players; and then a helicopter appeared, gliding heavily, passing close to the treetops, its thick propellers chopping the air up. On its way to the hospital, no doubt, though Miles watched it sternly. For years, Hayden had believed that helicopters were spying on him.
A few days later, Miles had found a job. Or rather (he sometimes thought) the job had found him.
He was downtown, had managed to put together a few interviews, low-level programming and IT support, an “associate” position at the public library, nothing spectacular, but who knew? He was settling down, he thought, he had to be persistent and optimistic—though optimism wasn’t easy to come by walking down Prospect Avenue. So many empty storefronts with their long-faded SPACE AVAILABLE signs, so many soundless blocks. Probably, he thought again, it was a mistake to come back.
He was thinking this when he saw the old novelty shop, Matalov Novelties, just around the corner on 4th Street, nested among the ancient jewelry stores and pawnshops.
He was amazed it was still there. It was the last place he would have thought of surviving the economic spiral that had overcome most of these downtown establishments. Matalov Novelties hadn’t crossed his mind in years—certainly not since his father had died, back when they were thirteen.
When they were children, their father used to take Miles and Hayden with him when he went to the novelty store. A treat—to go with their father to this peculiar run-down establishment. The magic shop, he called it.
They had never been allowed to see their father perform—not as a clown, not as a magician, certainly not as a hypnotist. At home, he was reserved, untheatrical, which had made their visits to Matalov Novelties all the more impressive in their minds. Their father holding their hands: “Don’t touch anything, boys. Just look with your eyes.” Which was very difficult, since it was, after all, a magic store—rows and rows of shelves, floor to ceiling, a clutter of antiques and odd devices, wooden figurines like chess pieces in the shapes of gargoyles, Chinese finger traps, feather boas, top hats and capes, an elderly rhesus monkey in a silver cage—
—and then the old woman would emerge. Mrs. Matalov. Aged but not doddering, though her spine was curving into a question mark, a hump raising her bright silky blouse. Her hair was like dandelion fluff, dyed a peach color, and her lips were red with the waxy, glistening lipstick that old silent-movie actresses wore.
“Larry,” she said, her voice accented. Russian. “So good to see you!” Their father made a small bow.
When Mrs. Matalov saw Miles and Hayden, she performed a brief dramaturgical double take, drawing a slow gasp through her teeth, her eyes widening.
“Oh, Larry!” she said. “Such lovely boys. They break my heart.”
As Miles thought back to this, it felt more like a memory of a children’s storybook than an event that had actually happened. Like a lie Hayden would make up. And so he was hardly surprised to find that Matalov Novelties appeared to be closed. A folding metal grate was pulled across the entranceway, and the narrow shop window was covered with paper.
But still—beyond the grate, through the frosted glass of the door, he could see that the place wasn’t empty. He could make out shelves, and when he reached through the grate to tap on the glass, he thought he saw movement. He stood there, hesitantly, and soon, enough time had passed that he began to feel foolish he was still waiting.
Then, abruptly, the old woman jerked the door open and peered out at him through the bars.
“No retail!” she shrilled. “No Indians, no Browns, no Cleveland memorabilia. This is not a retail establishment.” Her accent was muddy, even thicker than he remembered. He stood gaping as she waved a hand at him: go, go.
“Mrs. Matalov?” he said.
Needless to say, she had aged in the seventeen years since he had last seen her. Even when he was a child, she had been an old woman; now she was practically a skeleton. She had grown shorter, smaller. The curve of her spine was so pronounced that her vertebrae stood out in ridges along her stooped back, and her head was tilted toward the ground so that she had to peer up like a turtle to see him. Her hair was very thin, just a few sparse tufts, though still dyed the color of a pea
ch. It was impossible that she was still alive, Miles thought. She must be well into her nineties.
“Mrs. Matalov?” he said again. He tried to speak loudly and clearly, and he put on what he hoped was a winning smile. “I don’t know whether you would remember me. I’m Miles Cheshire? Larry Cheshire’s son? I’m in Cleveland and …”
“One moment,” she said crossly. “You’re babbling, I can’t hear what you’re saying. One moment please.”
It took more than a moment for her to unlock the metal grate and pull it back, but once it was open, she appeared to be willing to let him inside.
“I’m really sorry to bother you,” Miles said, gazing around, the rows of shelves the same as he recalled, the junk-store smell of cigarettes and dust and sandalwood and wet cardboard. “I,” he said sheepishly, “—don’t mean to intrude. I haven’t been in Cleveland in many years and I was just passing by. Nostalgia, I guess. My dad was an old customer of yours.”
“Larry Cheshire, yes. I heard you already,” Mrs. Matalov said sternly. “I remember. I myself am not a nostalgic person, but come in, come in. Tell me what I can do for you. You, too, are a magician? Like your father?”
“Oh,” Miles said. “No, no.” As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw that the shop was not, after all, unchanged since his childhood. It was more like an old garage or attic, and the shelves extended back where the dark aisles were clogged with a disorder of stacks of partially opened boxes. Clustered at the front of the shelves were a number of desks and tables, each one bearing a number of old personal computers of various antiquated generations; and monitors, and tangled birds’ nests of electrical cords and connection wires. At one of the desks sat a dark-haired girl—perhaps twenty or twenty-one years old?—wearing black clothes and black lipstick and pointed silver earrings, like the teeth of some prehistoric carnivore. She glanced up at him, expressionless and emanating irony.
