by Dan Chaon
Walcott was actually from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which wasn’t a city, but he had spent a lot of time in Boston and New York, and so believed himself an expert on such things. He also had a lot of opinions about what people from Iowa were like, though he had never been there, either.
“Look,” Walcott said, “let me give you some advice. Don’t look at people directly in the face. Never—let me reiterate—Never, never, NEVER make eye contact with a homeless person, or a drunk, or anyone who looks like they are a tourist. It’s a super-easy rule to remember: do not look at them.”
“Hmm,” Ryan said, and Walcott patted him on the back.
“What would you do without me?” Walcott said.
“I don’t know,” Ryan said. He looked down at his feet, which were weaving along the dirty sidewalk as if by remote control.
He never would have chosen Walcott as a friend, but they had been thrown together by fate, by the administrative offices, and they’d spent an enormous amount of time together that first year, so Walcott’s voice was still ingrained in his head.
But now it was too late. He stood, making eye contact, staring, and the bald Russian had noticed him. The bald man’s eyes lit up, as if Ryan were holding up a sign with his name on it.
“Hey there, my main man,” the bald Russian said, in a thick but surprisingly slangy English—as if he’d learned the language by listening to rap music. “Hey, how you doing?”
And this was the thing Walcott had warned him about. This was the problem with being from Iowa, because he had been trained, for years and years, to be polite and friendly, and he couldn’t help himself.
“Hello,” Ryan said, as the three men came toward him, grinning as they clustered around him. A bit too close, and he stiffened uncomfortably, though he found himself putting on his pleasant, welcoming Midwestern expression.
The man with the spiked hair let out a burst of unrecognizable Russian syllables, and the men all laughed.
“We …,” said the spike-haired man, and struggled a moment, trying to think of words. “We—tree—alkonauts! We—” he said. “We come with peace!”
They all found this uproarious, and Ryan smiled uncertainly. He shifted his shoulder, the backpack with his heavy laptop and about ten thousand dollars in cash tucked into one of the pockets. Stay calm. He was at the edge of the curb, and tourists and partygoers and other walkers were moving around them with glazed, bedazzled expressions. Not making eye contact.
He was trying to decide how nervous he should be. They were out in the open, he thought. They couldn’t do anything to him right here in the middle of the street—
Though, he remembered a movie he’d seen where an assassin had expertly severed the saphenous vein in his victim’s thigh, and the victim had bled to death right there on a busy street.
The men had formed a circle around him, and he could feel the flow of traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard at his back. He took a step, but the men just gathered closer, as if following his lead.
“You like the cards?” said the bald one. “You like the cards, my main man?”
And Ryan was certain he’d been caught. His hand went automatically to his pocket, where he had his stack of ATM cards. He rested his palm against his thigh, thinking again of the saphenous vein.
“Cards?” Ryan said weakly, and he tried to glance over his shoulder. If he dashed into the four lanes of Las Vegas Boulevard, what were the chances that he would be hit by a car? Fairly high, he guessed. He shook his head at the bald man, as if he didn’t understand. “I … I don’t have any cards,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You don’t understand?” the man said, and he laughed with good-natured surprise, a bit taken aback. “Cards!” he pronounced, slowly, and he gestured at Ryan’s hand. “Cards!”
“Cards!” the spike-haired man repeated, and he grinned, showing his gold-tipped front teeth. He held up a dozen or so of the cards from the escort services, fanned out like a hand of poker, a full house of Fantasie and Britt and Kamchana and Cheyenne and Natasha and Ebony.
And then Ryan realized what they were talking about. He glanced down at the stack of pictures he himself had collected as he walked down the strip. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, anyway, I …”
“Yes, yes!” said the bald one, and the men all burst into laughter again. “Cards! Beautiful girls, my main man!”
“Thirty-nine United State dollars! Incredible!” said the man in the golf cap, who had so far been only observing. And then he let out an extended comment in Russian, which was met with more hilarity. The man held out one of his own cards for Ryan to take, offering it.
“You like Natasha. Big titty Russian girl. Very nice.”
“Yes,” Ryan said, and nodded. “Yes, very nice,” he said, and he gazed down the block—Bally’s, Flamingo, Imperial Palace, Harrah’s, Casino Royale, the Venetian, the Palazzo—all the places he had been planning to visit, all the ATMs he still had to withdraw from before he came at last to the Riviera, where he would check in to the hotel under the name Tom Knott, a young accountant who was attending a convention.
“My name is Shurik,” said the bald Russian, and held out his hand to be shook.
“Vasya,” said the one with the spiked hair.
“Pavel,” said the one in the cap.
“Ryan,” Ryan said, and he felt his face growing hot almost immediately as he pressed palms with the three men, one after the other. It was the most basic mistake—his own real name, given thoughtlessly, and he felt more flustered than ever. Mr. J so good to find, he thought. Was it significant? Or not?
“Ryan, my main man,” said Shurik. “We come with us, yes? Together. Come. We find the best girls. Right?”
“Right,” Ryan said. And then, as the three of them parted for him, as they prepared to fall in behind him, following with their giant tulip cups and their cards and their hopeful, friendly expressions, he made an abrupt feint, a zigzag, pushing himself into the flow of tourists on the sidewalk.
And then he took off running.
It was a stupid thing to do, he told himself later.
He stood in the queue at the check-in desk of the Riviera Hotel, his heart still quickened in his chest.
The poor guys. How startled they’d been when he broke off and dashed away. They hadn’t made any attempt to pursue. Thinking of their stunned expressions as they watched him flee, he couldn’t believe they’d ever been anything more than innocent foreign tourists. A bunch of drunken guys, looking for a native to befriend.
Jay was right: he needed to calm down.
Still, it was hard to shake the adrenaline once it set, that tight, jittery tension, and he sat in his room in the Riviera—Tom Knott, age twenty-two, of Topeka, Kansas—looking again at the escort girls. Natasha. Ebony.
This was the thing he hated most about himself, about his old self—that nervousness, worry knitting inside of him. By the time he got to his sophomore year at Northwestern, he spent so much time fretting about all the work he wasn’t doing that he didn’t have time to actually work.
He guessed that was why he found himself thinking about Pixie again. Despite what had happened, despite the aftermath, the six weeks he had spent with Pixie had probably been the best time of his life. They were skipping classes fairly regularly, and he had been getting home in time to destroy the letters the school was sending about his absences and tardies, and erase the messages on the answering machine from the attendance secretary, and his parents had continued obliviously without noticing anything out of the ordinary. He was, he realized, a pretty good actor. A pretty decent liar. He had not done any homework of significance for a while by that point, and for the first time in his life he had taken a test and he had absolutely no idea what they were asking him. It was his chemistry midterm, and he circled multiple choice questions at random and invented calculations that he had no idea how to perform, and he had a wonderful thought.
I don’t care about anything.
It was like th
e fundamentalist kids when they talked about being born again. “Jesus came into my heart and emptied me of my sin,” a girl named Lynette had told him once, and in some ways that was what had happened to him. All his burdens were lifted, and he felt light and transparent, as if the sunlight could shine right through his body.
I don’t care about anything, he thought, I don’t care about the future, I don’t care what happens to me, I don’t care what my family thinks, I don’t care, I don’t care. And each time he said it in his mind, it was as if a weight detached and flickered away like a butterfly.
And then one day he came home and his mother was in the kitchen, waiting.
As it turned out, it was not the attendance secretary or one of his teachers who had contacted Stacey; it was Pixie’s father. He had apparently intercepted some of the emails they had exchanged, and had found Pixie’s journal, and then—this was the aspect that Ryan hadn’t expected or understood—Pixie had confessed everything to her father.
Who was enraged. Who wanted to kill Ryan.
“Do you have a daughter, Mrs. Schuyler?” Pixie’s father had asked, and Ryan’s mother was sitting there at work, at her desk, in the office of Morgan Stanley in Omaha, where she was a CPA, and Mr. Pixie said, “If you had a daughter, you would know how I feel.
“I feel violated. I feel defiled by your pervert son,” he told Stacey. “And I want you to know,” he said, “I want you to know that if it turns out my daughter is pregnant, I am going to come to your house and I am going to take your son and knock his teeth through the back of his fucking skull.”
By the time Ryan came home, Stacey had already called the police, who had charged Pixie’s father with aggravated menacing, and she was talking to a lawyer friend who was getting a restraining order, but she didn’t tell him this when he came into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and peered into it. He didn’t pay much attention to her. She was often in a bad mood, as far as he could tell. She would situate herself in the kitchen or the TV room or some other area where they could see her being silent, and then she would emanate dense radioactive waves of negativity. He knew better than to look at her when she was in this mode.
And so he got out some milk as she sat there at the kitchen table. He shook some cereal into a bowl and poured milk over it, and he was about to take his snack into the TV room when Stacey looked up at him.
“Who are you?” she said.
Ryan lifted his head, reluctantly. This was also her method, these soft-spoken inscrutable questions. “Um,” he said. “Excuse me?”
“I said: who are you?” she murmured in a sadly musing voice. “Because I don’t think I know you, Ryan.”
He had his first glimmer of nervousness then. He knew that she had found out—what? How much? He felt the expression on his face tightening and growing blanker. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“I thought you were a trustworthy person,” Stacey said. “I thought you were responsible, mature, you had a plan for yourself. That’s what I used to think. Now I can’t fathom what’s going on inside of you. I have no idea.”
He was still holding his bowl of cereal, which was making almost inaudible whispering noises as the puffed kernels soaked up the milk.
He couldn’t think of anything to say.
He didn’t want his adventure with Pixie to be over, and he imagined if he just said nothing, it would last for a while longer. He could still be happy, he could still not care about anything, he could still meet up with Pixie in the morning on the north side of school and watch her smoking a cigarette and toying with her lip ring, threading it back and forth through the flesh of her mouth.
“Do you want to ruin your life?” Stacey was saying to him. “Do you want to end up like your uncle Jay? Because that is the way you are headed. He screwed up his life when he was just about your age, and he has never recovered. Never. He turned himself into a loser, and that’s where you’re headed, Ryan.”
It wasn’t until years later that he understood what she was talking about.
You are going to end up like your father, that was what she actually meant. His father: Jay, getting a girl pregnant at age fifteen, running away from home, floating from shady job to shady job, never to settle down, never to have a normal life. In retrospect, he could see why she had come down so hard on him, he could even sympathize somewhat. She knew what kind of person he would become, even before he did.
And she was not going to let him end up like Jay. For two weeks, Ryan had been sent to a wilderness camp for rebellious teens, while his mother put the pieces of his life back in order. One of those hiking and team-building and group therapy isolation camps, full of military-esque counselors doling out “tough love” and diagnosing their psychological sicknesses. They had lost their way; they were suffering from unhealthy misperceptions about themselves; they needed to change if they ever wanted to become productive members of society, if they ever wanted to see their friends and family again….
Even when he returned, he was under what basically amounted to house arrest for the rest of the school year. She had taken away his cell phone and Internet privileges, and then she had contacted all his teachers to make arrangements for him to make up all the work that he had missed, and she had him seeing a therapist once a week, and she enrolled him in an SAT prep course, and in a community service program called the Optimist Club, which met three days a week to clean up parks and give toys to poor children and conduct recycling drives and so forth. She switched him out of band, which was the only class he had shared with Pixie, though it actually didn’t matter because Pixie herself had been transferred by her father over to St. Albert High. He never saw her again. Her father was found guilty of aggravated menacing and sentenced to probation.
As for Ryan’s father, Owen, he was mostly uninvolved during this period, taciturn and glum as he always was in the face of Stacey’s stubborn organization. Owen did manage to talk her into letting Ryan take guitar lessons, and that was one nice thing about his last year and a half of high school. He and Pixie had talked about forming a band, in which she would be the drummer and he would be the lead singer, and he used to like to fantasize about that. He liked to sit in his room and make up songs on the Takamine that Owen had bought for him. Ryan wrote a song called “Oh, Pixie.” Very sad. He wrote another called “Aggravated Menace,” and one called “Soon I’ll Be Gone,” and “Echopraxia,” which, if he ever made an album, might end up being the single.
It was pathetic, he thought, to be thinking about those lame old songs.
It was depressing because he had spent the whole night thinking about Pixie, remembering her, wondering where she was now. What had happened to her? And he was nowhere close to getting laid.
It was even sad that his paranoia about the Russians had turned out to be nothing, after all. Despite his encounter on the street, there hadn’t actually been any intrigue, there hadn’t been any adventure with gangsters, nothing but the herds of tourists and the workers who went about the job of fleecing them with the grim nonchalance of a clerk at a late-night convenience store.
Maybe he would always be lonely, he thought, and he spread out the escort service cards on the desk and looked at them. Fantasie. Roxan. Natasha.
He sat there at his hotel room desk, contemplating. He typed in his name and room number, and there was a breath as the cyberspace made its connection.
He opened up the Instant Message window, and
No, there wasn’t any new greeting in Cyrillic.
And so he just typed a note to Jay. “Mission accomplished,” he wrote, and then, he decided, he might as well go to bed.
15
They could be leaving soon. That was one thing. On their way to New York, and then to international destinations.
And they could be rich, too, if everything went according to plan. If she was the type of person who would do this sort of thing.
The documents were spread out between them on the kitchen table, and
George Orson adjusted and aligned papers in front of him, as if parallel lines could make their conversation easier. She saw him glance up, surreptitiously, and it almost embarrassed her to see his eyes so earnest and guilty—though it was also a relief to have him wordless. Not trying to assure her or convince her or teach her, but just waiting for her decision. It was the first time in a while that a choice of hers had mattered, the first time in months she didn’t feel as if she were walking in some dreamscape, amnesiascape, everything glowing with an aura of déjà vu—
But now it had solidified. His schemes. His evasions. The money.
She lifted a single sheet off of the sheaf that he’d laid in front of her. Here was a copy of the wire transfer. BICICI, it said at the top. Banque Internationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie de Côte d’Ivoire. And there was a date and a code and stamp and several signatures and a total. US$4,300,000.00. Here was the letter confirming the deposit. “Dear Mr. Kozelek, your fund was deposited here in our bank by your partner Mr. Oliver Akubueze. Your partner further instructed us to execute transfer of the fund to your bank account by completing the bank’s transfer application form, and he also endorsed other vital documents to that effect….”
“Mr. Kozelek,” Lucy said. “That’s you.”
“Yes,” George Orson said. “A pseudonym.”
“I see,” Lucy said. She looked at him, briefly, then down at the paper: US$4,300,000.00.
“I see,” she breathed. She was trying to make her voice cool and disinterested and official. She thought of the social worker she and Patricia had to visit after their parents had died, the two of them watching as the woman paged through the papers on her cluttered desk. I wonder what experience the two of you have with taking care of yourselves? the social worker said.
Lucy held the paper between her thumbs and forefingers in the way the social worker had. She glanced up to look at George Orson, who was sitting patiently across the table, holding his cup of coffee loosely, as if warming his fingers, even though it must have been eighty degrees outside already.
