by Dan Chaon
“No, no,” Miles said. “Definitely not a magician. I never exactly pursued—” And he felt himself blushing, he didn’t know why. “I’m not anything, really,” he said, and watched as Mrs. Matalov stalked through the maze of desks—a wobbling but unexpectedly swift gait, like someone hurrying over thin ice.
“What a shame,” Mrs. Matalov said. She sank into a wheeled office chair, where several ornamental pillows cushioned her back. She motioned for him to come and sit as well. “Your father, I liked him very much. Such a kind and gracious spirit.”
“He was,” Miles said. She was right: but how much time had passed since he’d remembered his father? An old bit of grief awakened and turned over in his chest.
“Poor man!” she said. “He was a very talented performer; you knew that. If he had lived in a different time, he might have made a lot of money, instead of playing at children’s parties.” She clucked her tongue at this, a series of soft exclamation points, and Miles felt as if she were going to reproach him, a young man who was squandering his life. But she merely eyed him shrewdly.
“And what of your brother?” she said. “He is not a magician, either, I take it?”
“No,” Miles said. “He—”
But what was Hayden? A magician of sorts, perhaps.
“I remember the two of you,” Mrs. Matalov said. “Twins. Very pretty. You were the timid one, I think,” she said. “Miles. A little mouse name. But your brother—” And here she raised a finger and wagged it, unspecifically. “He was a very naughty one. A thief! I saw him stealing from me, many times, and I would have caught him by his neck! But.” She shrugged. “I did not want to embarrass your father.”
Miles nodded uncomfortably, glancing over to the dark-haired young woman who was watching him with a look of almost imperceptible amusement.
“Yes,” Miles said. “He could be—mischievous.”
“Hmm,” Mrs. Matalov said. “Mischievous? No. Worse than that, I think.” And she regarded Miles for what felt like a long time. “I pitied you,” she said. “So shy, and with a brother such as that!”
Miles said nothing. He hadn’t expected to find himself in this situation—in this gray fluorescent-lit windowless place, the old woman and the dark-haired girl both observing him closely. He had not expected to find his father—or himself—so closely remembered. What should he say?
Mrs. Matalov took a cigarette from a pocket of her thin cardigan, and Miles watched as she toyed with, but did not light, it. “I had a sister,” Mrs. Matalov said. “Not a twin, but very close in age. A terrible show-off. If she had not died, I would never have escaped her shadow.” She shrugged, raising her thin eyebrows mildly. “So—I was lucky.”
She rummaged again in the pocket of her cardigan, and drew out a clear plastic lighter, which she, trembling, tried to operate. Miles gestured uncertainly. Should he help her?
But before he could decide, the dark-haired girl spoke suddenly. “Grandma!” she said sharply. “Don’t smoke!” And Miles sat back.
“Ah,” Mrs. Matalov said. She looked at Miles darkly. “This one,” she said—referring to the girl, he guessed. “Another naughty one. She doesn’t approve of smoking—but drugs! Drugs she likes. She likes them so much that the police come and put an electronic monitor upon her ankle. An electric bracelet. What do you think of that? And now, poor thing, she is my prisoner. I keep her trapped here, and she should be less nosy or I will put a cloth over her cage like a parrot.”
Miles was speechless. Too many things, too many odd revelations were revolving in his head, though he did exchange glances with the girl, her curtain of black hair and complicated eyes communicating a series of impenetrable messages.
Mrs. Matalov, meanwhile, had managed to strike the flint of her lighter, and she put her cigarette to her mouth, impressing a tattoo of lipstick onto the filter.
“So—” she said, appraising him. “Miles Cheshire. What brings you here to Cleveland? What is it that you do, if you are not a magician?”
Miles mulled over this question. What was he? He regarded the wall, tiled with framed black-and-white photos, various costumed performers from the thirties and forties, wearing tuxedos and capes, turbans and goatees, expressions of theatrical intensity. There was Mrs. Matalov herself—Mrs. Matalov, age perhaps twenty, not unlike her granddaughter in her dark-eyed beauty, wearing spangled circus-performer’s tights and a headdress made of peacock feathers. A magician’s assistant, performing at the fabulous Hippodrome Theater, capacity of thirty-five hundred, a beautiful stage, now nothing but a parking lot on East 9th.
And here was a photograph of his father as well. His father, tall and magisterial in a cape, a thin mustache of greasepaint sketched beneath his nose, a wand held aloft in his right hand, bouquets of roses and lilies at his feet. His eyes kind and sad—as if he knew that, years and years later, Miles would look at this picture and miss him once again.
“Do you know about computers?” Mrs. Matalov was saying. “We have very large Web presence. We rarely do business anymore outside of the Internet. I don’t open my doors anymore, to tell you the truth. Twenty years now, and I can count on my hands the number of paying customers who have walked into my store off the street. It is nothing out there now but homeless and shoplifters and tourists with their horrible children.
“I have always hated children,” Mrs. Matalov said, and her granddaughter, Aviva, raised her eyebrow and stared at Miles.
“That’s true,” Aviva said.
And Miles said: “I do know about computers. Actually. I mean, I’m kind of looking for a job.”
Later, he found it difficult to explain that this encounter seemed extraordinary without sounding as if he were trying to be melodramatic, without acting as if he believed that something—what?—supernatural?—had happened.
“It freaked me out, kind of,” he told John Russell later. They were sitting once again in Parnell’s, and Miles was thinking of some of the things that Mrs. Matalov had said to him.
I pitied you, Mrs. Matalov had said. And: If she had not died, I would never have escaped her shadow. And: He was a very naughty one! A thief! And: He will come to a bad end, your brother. I can assure you of that.
“I think it’s great,” John Russell said. “So you’re carrying on the family tradition. That’s very cool, in a way.”
“Yes,” Miles said. “I guess so.”
And now, sitting in another bar, four thousand miles from Parnell’s Pub, these were the things that skated across the surface of his consciousness. These were the images that came to him as he sat at the bar in Inuvik with the cell phone pressed to his ear: The burning house. The helicopter. The knotted sheets around Clayton Combe’s neck. John Russell lifting his glass of beer, Mrs. Matalov putting her cigarette to her waxy red lips.
Each image distinct and capsulized, like tarot cards laid down one by one.
“Certainly,” he said to the American woman. “Yes, absolutely. I’d like to meet with you. I’d like to speak about this matter in more detail. Could we possibly …”
He had spent a good part of the day wandering around Inuvik. It was daylight, still daylight, when he woke up, and when he went outside, the sky was dark blue, fading into white at the lip of the skyline. The clouds were stacked up against the horizon like mountains. Or maybe they were mountains that look like clouds, he wasn’t sure. Some concrete slabs had been laid down into a sidewalk that ran between the road and the parking lots of the multiple boxy buildings—all of which had the cheap, hastily constructed look of a strip mall, corrugated siding, satellite dishes bending their heavy heads over the roofs. He had his sheaf of posters, and he paused to staple one to a bare telephone pole, and the paper rippled uncertainly, impermanently, in the wind.
He would blanket the city, Miles thought. He stood there leafing through the glossy Inuvik Attraction and Service Guide, which had been available for free at the hotel desk. Where would Hayden have been spotted? Boreal Bookstore? The famed Igloo Church, Our Lady o
f Victory? The extension campus of Aurora College? He had looked over their list of courses, and he felt a light spark of suspicion. Microsoft Excel: Level 1, with George Doolittle; Foot Reflexology Certification, with Allain St. Cyr; Advanced Wilderness First Aid, with Phoebe Punch. Did those sound like invented names?
Or what about the Inuvik liquor store? The bars—Mad Trapper Pub, perhaps, or Nanook Lounge? Perhaps Hayden would have rented a car at Arctic Chalet, or spent some time in the library, perhaps he’d hired a guide of some kind and headed out toward—what?
God! This was what always happened to him. He would begin in a state of urgent determination, but by the time he reached his destination, his confidence would dissipate.
What did he even know about Hayden anymore? After ten years, Hayden was hardly more than conjecture—a collection of postulations and projections, letters and emails full of paranoia and innuendo, phone calls in the middle of the night in which Hayden ranted about his current fixations. There were a few possessions Hayden had left behind in various apartments across the country, a few strangers who had seen or known some version of Hayden.
In Los Angeles, for example, Miles had found the abandoned apartment of Hayden Nash, whom neighbors described as dark-haired, “possibly Hispanic,” a “reclusive guy” that apparently no one ever spoke with, and whose filthy apartment was cluttered with stacks of tabloid newspapers and indecipherable dot matrix printouts, and two dozen computers, all of the hard drives degaussed and irrecoverable. In Rolla, Missouri, professors described Miles Spady as a very bright young mathematician, a thin blond-haired Englishman who claimed to have done his undergraduate work at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. There were some fellow students, acquaintances, to whom Hayden had told assorted lies and so forth, which Miles had recorded diligently:
His father was a well-known stage magician back in England, one of these acquaintances told Miles.
His father was an archaeologist who had been studying some Native American ruins in North Dakota, said another.
His parents had been killed in a house fire when he was a small child, said a third.
He was very eccentric, they told Miles. But it was fun to listen to him.
“He had this theory about ley lines. Geodesy, you know? We used to go out to the Stonehenge model on the north campus, and he would take out this old map of the world that he had drawn all over….”
“I think he might have been crazy. He was a good mathematician, but …”
“He told me this peculiar story about being hypnotized, and he suddenly remembered all his past lives, a ridiculous story about pirates, or ancient kings or some sort of fantasy world….”
“He said he had a nervous breakdown when he was a teenager, and his mother made him stay in the attic, and she used to tie him to the bed when he went to sleep and he’d lie awake all night thinking that there was a fire downstairs, thinking he smelled smoke. It was hard not to feel sorry for him, he was such a sweet-tempered person. You didn’t know what to think when he would tell you these horrible things about his past….”
“He had a twin brother who died in an ice-skating accident when they were twelve. And I gathered that he still blamed himself. I felt bad for the guy, actually…. There was a lot of … you know … deepness … under the surface….”
There had also apparently been a girlfriend, an undergraduate student named Rachel, but she had refused to speak to Miles, she wouldn’t even open the door when he stood on the porch of her ramshackle student house, she merely peered out at him through the door-chain crack, a single blue eye and sliver of face.
“Please,” she said. “Go away. I don’t want to have to call the police.”
“I’m sorry,” Miles said. “I’m just trying to find out some information about. Um. Miles Spady. I was told that you might be able to help me.”
“I know who you are,” she said. Her eye, framed and disembodied in the slice of door frame, blinked rapidly. “I will call the police.”
He didn’t have the nerve—the aggressiveness, the imposing persuasiveness—of a true detective. He had left as she’d instructed, and walked for a ways, and he could feel his determination lifting up off him, trailing away in the late October drizzle.
There actually was a scale model of Stonehenge on the campus. A half-size replica, the granite stones carved in the university’s high-pressure water-jet lab. He stood there looking at it, the four pishaped archways facing away from one another, north, south, east, west.
Oh, what was the point, he thought, what was the point in hounding the poor girl? Why was he even doing this? He should just get on with his own life!
It wasn’t until a few weeks later, long after he’d left Rolla, that it occurred to him: Maybe Hayden had been there.
What if Hayden was there, in Rachel Barrie’s house, when Miles came that day? Was that why she wouldn’t let him in? Was that why she wouldn’t open the door more than a crack? He could picture Hayden, the shape of him, somewhere beyond the foyer, Hayden listening, probably no more than a few feet away from where Miles was standing on the porch.
Too late, he felt the realization settle into him. A shudder. A sickness.
“Hello?” said the voice at the end of the phone. “Hello? Are you still there?”
And Miles straightened. Back in the bar. Back in Inuvik. His memories had been pulling past him in a train of hieroglyphs, and it took him a breath or two to settle back into his physical body.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, absolutely.”
He was trying to recover the detective part of himself.
“I …,” he said. “We …,” he said. “I’m very eager to speak with you. Can we set up a time to talk in person?”
“How about now?” the woman said. “Tell me where to meet you.”
14
The message arrived on his computer his first night in Las Vegas, and once again Ryan couldn’t help but feel a bit antsy.
This was the third or fourth time a stranger had contacted him out of the blue, writing to him in Russian or some other Eastern European language. In this case, it was someone named and Ryan’s Instant Messenger window made its knock-knock sound.
—and Ryan immediately closed the window and shut down the computer and sat there as a creeping feeling dappled its way up his arms and down his back. Why did he let this stuff get to him?
“Shit,” he said, and folded his hands over the glass-topped hotel room desk, staring at the blank black screen of his laptop.
He had been doing so well. He had learned the ins and outs of Jay’s schemes fairly quickly, had taken to it, Jay said, “like a duck to quack,” and it was hardly any time at all before he was juggling nearly a hundred different personas.
“I can tell that you’re my son,” Jay said. “You’ve got the talent.”
And he had been having fun, for the most part. He loved traveling—driving, flying, riding the Amtrak train—a different city every week, a new name, a new personality that he could try out, a new role, as if each new trip were a movie he was starring in. Floating through, that was what he thought sometimes. Floating. There was a great relief of freedom, swashbuckling, becoming a smooth con man criminal thief, the idea of adventure and rule-breaking and shifty, vaguely alluring danger.
And yet, there were times when his calm began to abandon him, brief moments—an unexplained IM, a suspicious clerk at the DMV, a credit card charge abruptly denied—and suddenly he’d feel that old panic crackling across the back of his neck, a shadow had been trailing after him all along, and suddenly he knew that if he turned to look over his shoulder, there it would be.
At times such as this, he wondered if he had the nerve for this lifestyle after all.
Maybe he was just being paranoid.
He had reported this anomaly before, these unexplained messages in Cyrillic letters, and Jay hadn’t been concerned at all.
“Oh, don’t be such a pussy,” Jay told him.
“Doesn’t it
seem—suspicious?” he’d asked Jay, but Jay wasn’t concerned.
“It’s just spam,” Jay had told him. “Just block it and change your user name, man. There’s all kinds of random crap out there.”
Jay explained that he had been using Internet servers in Omsk and Nizhniy Novgorod to scramble their IP addresses, and so, he said, it wasn’t a surprise that they got occasional Russian junk mail. “It’s probably about cheap prescription drugs, or penis enlargement, or hot teenage lesbians.”
“Right,” Ryan said. “Ha.”
“Don’t be so uptight, Son,” Jay said. And Jay was basically a very cautious person, Ryan thought. If Jay wasn’t worried, then why should he be?
Still, he didn’t turn the computer back on.
He stood there, holding his cell phone, waiting for Jay to answer, staring from the window on the thirty-third floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel.
Here was Las Vegas spreading out before him: the pyramid of the Luxor, the castle turrets of the Excalibur, the blue glow of the MGM Grand. The Mandalay Bay itself was a big shining gold brick on the edge of the strip. From the outside, at least, the windows were shimmering golden reflective glass, so that no one could see him standing there, peering out. It was a cityscape that looked as if it had been invented, architectural shapes that might appear as the cover illustration for one of those fantasy novels he used to read back in high school, or digital imagery from a big budget SF movie. It would be easy to believe he’d landed on a different planet, or traveled into the future, and he put a hand to the glass, letting these pleasant, calming whimsies settle over him.
