by Dan Chaon
It was Mike Hayden’s opinion that Jay should contact his son. That Ryan should be told the truth about his adoption, and all the rest.
“I think he deserves to know the truth,” Mike Hayden had said. “That is not a cool situation with that sister of yours. She’s controlling, don’t you think? And think of poor Ryan! If the people that you think you love are hiding something that important, it’s a major betrayal. That’s one of those things that screws up the karma of the entire world.”
“I don’t know,” Jay said. “He’s probably better off.”
But in some ways Jay had taken this advice to heart. Jay was actually thinking a lot about this situation, ever since he turned thirty, and Mike Hayden’s friendship and counsel had been important to him.
But at the same time, it felt funny to be talking about it now, with this—stranger. With this young, fussy-looking Mike Hayden. It was always the problem with virtual relationships, Internet friendships, whatever you wanted to call them. There was always a shock, in which you realized that the person you had been building in your mind—the simulacrum, the avatar—didn’t resemble the actual flesh and blood in the slightest.
He wondered if it had been such a good idea to leave Atlanta. Perhaps, he thought, he shouldn’t have been so forthcoming about the schemes the Association was involved in; perhaps he shouldn’t have ever mentioned his son—and he felt a pinprick of unease, imagining the boy, his son, sitting peaceful and unaware back at Stacey’s house, “doing so well,” Stacey had written, back when Jay was in jail that first time, back when Ryan was just a toddler. “You’ve done a good thing for him, Jay. Don’t you forget that.”
And now Mike Hayden—Breez—knew about him. He remembered again what Dylan had said about Breez: He’ll trash your life just for the fun of it.
He wiped his damp palms on his pant legs, then combed his fingers through his hair as they passed from Colorado into western Nebraska. They were listening to some awful, repetitive classical music, dreadful stuff that sounded like scales being played over and over on a piano.
It was coming on dusk when they pulled into the motel. The Lighthouse Motel, it said, but the neon wasn’t lit, and it looked abandoned.
“Home at last!” Mike Hayden said, and he moved the gear stick into park with a flourish. He turned to look over his shoulder, grinning as Jay looked up from his mumbling backseat thoughts.
“This is my place,” Mike Hayden said. “I own it.”
“Oh,” Jay said, and he peered out. It was just an old courtyard motel, with a big replica of a lighthouse at the entrance, a cement cone painted in red and white stripes like a barber pole. “Huh,” he said, and tried to nod appreciatively. “Cool.”
They walked, Jay and Mike, up the path that led from the motel to the old house on the hill, not saying anything. It was drizzling, late October, and it didn’t seem to know whether it planned to rain or snow. The wind pitched the dry high weeds back and forth.
The house that stood above the motel was one of those places you would see in Halloween illustrations, the classic “haunted mansion” sort of deal, Jay thought, though Mike acted as if it were an architectural wonder.
“Doesn’t it blow your mind?” he said. “It’s called Queen Anne style. Asymmetrical façade. Cantilevered gables. And the turret! Don’t you love the turret?”
“Sure,” Jay said, and Mike Hayden leaned toward him.
“I managed some extremely interesting things with this estate,” Mike said. “The former owner actually died three years ago, but her social security number is still in play. As far as the official record goes, she’s still alive.”
“Oh, okay,” Jay said. “That’s cool.”
“Wait—it gets better,” Mike said. “Because as it turns out, she had two sons. Both of whom died young, but I think they are resurrectable. The best thing is, if they were alive, they would be just about our age! George. And Brandon. They both drowned—when they were teenagers. They were out swimming in the lake, and Brandon was trying to save George. I guess it didn’t work out.”
Mike Hayden let out a stiff laugh, as if there were something bitterly funny about this fact that Jay didn’t quite understand.
“Listen,” Mike said. “How do you feel about becoming brothers?”
“Um,” Jay said. He glanced at the place that Mike’s hand was resting: the ball of his shoulder, and he didn’t tighten or flinch. It was one of the advantages that he’d learned from his year in Vegas: a decent poker face.
He was being offered an opportunity. He had dead-ended in Atlanta, and here was a chance to move on.
Did it matter that he himself had been played a little bit? Did it matter that, for a short time, he had actually felt closer to Mike Hayden—Breez—than was probably wise? Did it matter that he’d revealed personal information, did it matter that this guy, whatever his name was, now knew personal details about his life? About his son. His secrets.
Yes, of course it mattered, dumb shit. He had been a fool, and Mike Hayden—or whoever—was smiling gently. As if Jay were a puppy in a glass case at a pet store.
“One of the things I can show you,” Mike Hayden said. “There are some phenomenal things you can do with dead people. Do you have any idea how many unclaimed estates there are in this country? It’s like Risk or Monopoly or whatever. You can just land on a property, and basically it’s yours, if you know what you’re doing.”
Mike laughed, and Jay laughed a little, too, though he wasn’t exactly sure what was funny. They had come to the porch of the old haunted house, and Jay watched as Mike Hayden withdrew a key ring from his pocket, a thick, jingling wind chime of keys. How many? Twenty? Forty?
But he had no difficulty finding the right one. He inserted a key into the keyhole just below the doorknob and then made another flourish with his hands, like a stage magician: abracadabra.
“Just wait until you see the interior,” Mike Hayden said. “There’s a library. With an actual wall safe behind a painting! Doesn’t that kill you?”
And then Mike Hayden stiffened—as if he were suddenly embarrassed by this burst of goofy enthusiasm, as if he thought Jay might make fun of it.
“I’m so glad that we’re going to be working together,” he said. “I’ve always missed having a true brother, you know? When you’re born a twin, there’s always this part of you that wants that other person in your life. That other—soul mate. Does that make any sense?”
He opened the door and an odd, musty scent poured out. Jay could see, just beyond the foyer, beyond an expanse of faded oriental carpet, some furniture that was covered in sheets, and a large staircase with a coiling banister.
“I’ve taken care of your associates back in Atlanta for you, by the way,” said Mike Hayden. “I suspect that the Feds have already begun to round the little buggers up, so—we’re free of that interference, at least.”
And with that, he and Jay stepped into the house.
PART THREE
First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.
—EPICTETUS
20
In the photograph, the young man and the girl are sitting on a sofa together. Both of them have gift-wrapped packages in their laps, and they are holding hands. The young man is blond and slender and pleasantly at ease. He is looking at the girl, and you can see in his expression that he is making some gently teasing joke, and the girl is just beginning to laugh. She has auburn hair and mournful eyes, but she is looking at him now with open affection. It’s obvious that they are in love.
Miles sat there, staring at the picture, and he wasn’t sure what to say.
It was Hayden, all right.
It was his brother, though you wouldn’t have ever believed that he and Miles were twins. It was as if this Hayden had been raised from birth in a different life, as if their father had never died, as if their mother had never grown angry and distant and desperate with him, as if Hayden had never lain ranting in an attic room, his hands cuff
ed to the bed with cloth ties, calling out, his hoarse, hysterical voice through the closed door, muffled but insistent: “Miles! Help me! Miles, cover my neck. Please, please, someone has to cover my neck!”
As if through all that time, some other, normal Hayden were growing up, going to college, falling in love with Rachel Barrie. Slipping into the world of ordinary happiness—the life, Miles thought, they both should have been granted, good suburban middle-class boys that they were.
“Yes,” Miles said. He swallowed. “Yes. That’s my brother.”
They were sitting in Lydia Barrie’s room in the Mackenzie Hotel, in Inuvik, but for a moment it didn’t feel like they were anywhere. This place, this town, the boxy, flimsy buildings with their corrugated sheet-metal siding, as impermanent as a hastily erected movie set; this room with the rim of steady, implausible sunlight glowing through the edges of the shades on the window—it all felt so much less real than the young people in the picture that it wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that, in fact, it was he and Lydia who were nothing but figments.
He let the pad of his fingertip rest lightly on the glossy surface of the photo, as if he could touch his brother’s face, and then he watched as Lydia reached down and gently lifted the photograph out of his hands.
“Listen,” he said. “Is there a way I can get a copy of that picture? I’d very much like a copy.”
There was no way to explain the sense of sadness that he felt, the sense that this photo she was tucking away was almost supernatural: a picture of what might have been. For himself. For Hayden. For their family.
But that wouldn’t make sense to Lydia Barrie, he thought. To her, Hayden was merely a fake, a scam artist, an imposter in her family photo. She didn’t realize that the person she had known as Miles Spady was a real possibility. An actual existence that might have been.
“I imagine that you’re hoping to save him,” Lydia Barrie said, and she gave Miles a long, searching look he didn’t quite understand.
She’d had a lot to drink that night, but she didn’t act drunk, exactly. She wasn’t stumbling or anything, though her movements seemed more premeditated, as if she had to deliberate before she executed them. Still, there was something very precise about the way she carried herself. She was a lawyer, with a lawyerly sort of grace—a flourish in her wrist when she filed the folder back in its place in her leather portfolio, a sharply choreographed click as she opened the matching attaché, an elegant swiff of paper as she laid her documents down on the bed between them. You could see that she was drunk only when you looked in her eyes, which had a damp unfocused intensity.
“You think if only you can find him, you can somehow convince him to—what?” She paused, long enough so they could both note how illogical he was.
“What exactly are you thinking, Miles?” she said mildly. “Do you think you can talk him into giving himself up to the authorities? Or perhaps you can talk him into coming back to the U.S. with you, and get some therapy or something? Do you think it’s possible that he’ll voluntarily allow himself to be committed to an institution?”
“I don’t know,” Miles said.
It was unnerving to be so transparent. He wasn’t sure how she had so accurately articulated his own line of thinking, the doubtful ideas he’d entertained over the years, but hearing them spoken aloud made him aware of how lame and flimsy they sounded.
He didn’t exactly have a plan, to tell the truth. He had always thought that when—if—he finally caught up to Hayden, he would have to improvise.
“I don’t know,” he said again, and Lydia Barrie fixed him with her bright, slurry gaze. Even drunk as she was, he could tell that she had been a terrific prosecutor—deadly, no doubt, during cross-examination.
He looked down with an abashed, rueful smile. He’d had a bit to drink himself, and perhaps that was why it was so easy for her to read him. But, he thought, it was also true that he was not particularly cagey. That had always been his problem—even from the womb, some amniotic chemical must have been washing over him, he had been primed from birth to be the credulous one, the mild twin, easily manipulated.
“He’s not who you think he is, Miles,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”
She had already told him her various theories concerning Hayden.
Some of them, he basically agreed with.
He knew, without question, that Hayden was a thief, that he had defrauded numerous individuals and corporations, that he had focused particularly on several investment banking firms, from which he had possibly stolen millions of dollars.
Miles doubted that such a large sum was actually involved.
As for Lydia Barrie’s other accusations, he wasn’t so sure. Was Hayden involved in setting loose various Internet worms—including one that had shut down Diebold Corporation’s computers for more than forty-five minutes? Had Hayden hijacked the cell phone of a hotel heiress and for a brief time convinced her father she’d been kidnapped? Had Hayden ruined the career of a Yale University political science professor by planting pedophilic photographs onto his computer? Was he a supporter of and financial contributor to terrorist organizations, including one environmental group that advocated the spread of biological weapons as a means of slowing overpopulation?
Had Hayden orchestrated the suspicions of embezzlement that had forced Lydia Barrie to leave the law firm of Oglesby and Rosenberg under a cloud of unverified accusations, which had marred and perhaps ruined her career?
It was far-fetched, Miles thought, to suggest that Hayden was involved in all of this. So many different things.
“You make him sound like some kind of supervillain,” Miles said, and he let out a small chuckle, to show her how silly it sounded. But she merely raised one eyebrow, expectantly.
“My sister has been missing for three years,” she said. “That’s not a comic book story, for me. I take it very seriously.”
And Miles found himself blushing. Flustered. “Well,” he said. “I understand. I didn’t mean to—belittle—your situation.”
He looked down at his hands, down at the meticulous stacks of papers she had arranged for him to examine, staring at the headline of a newspaper article she had photocopied: “U.S. Prosecutors Indict 11 in Massive Identity Fraud Case,” he read. What to say?
“I’m not trying to make excuses for him,” Miles said. “I’m just saying—it strains credulity, you know? He’s only one person. And he’s actually—I grew up with him, and he’s actually not that much of a genius. I mean, if he’s done all the stuff you think he’s done, wouldn’t someone have caught him already?”
Lydia Barrie tilted her head, and once he met her gaze, she didn’t break eye contact. “Miles,” she said, “you haven’t looked at all the information I’ve got here yet, have you? We—you and I—might be in a unique position to bring your brother to justice. To try to help him, cure him if you will. To hold him accountable for his actions. He may not be a ‘supervillain,’ as you put it, but I think we can both agree that he’s a danger to himself. And to other people. We can agree on that point, can’t we, Miles?”
“I don’t think he’s evil,” Miles said. “He’s—troubled, you know? I honestly think a lot of this is just like a game. We used to do all these kinds of games when we were kids, and in a lot of ways it’s still the same thing. It’s, like, role-playing for him. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“I do,” Lydia Barrie said, and she leaned forward, and her expression looked almost sad, almost sympathetic. “You’re a very sentimental person,” she said, and then she smiled, very briefly and mildly, and rested the cool, smooth palm of her hand against his wrist. “And very loyal. I admire that enormously.”
He was aware that there was a possibility that she was going to kiss him.
He wasn’t sure what he thought about it, but he could sense that odd, heavy feeling in the air, like a barometric drop before a thunderstorm descended. She didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her, he thought. She wasn
’t exactly his ally, he thought, but nevertheless he felt his eyes closing as she leaned toward him. That uncanny sunlight was still glowing around the edges of the window shade as her hand slid up his forearm to his biceps, and okay, yes, their lips were touching.
When Miles woke up in the morning, Lydia Barrie was still asleep, and he lay there for a time with his eyes open, staring at the red numbers on the old digital alarm clock at the bedside. At last, he began to discreetly grope around under the blankets for his underwear, and once he found them, he carefully put his feet into the leg holes and pulled them up over his thighs. Lydia Barrie did not stir as he padded his way toward the bathroom.
Well. This was unexpected.
And he couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit pleased with himself. A bit—uplifted. He was not used to this: falling into bed with women, even very drunk women, was not a usual occurrence. He looked at himself critically in the bathroom mirror. He was not double-chinned, but he almost was, unless he kept his jaw lifted. And he was fat enough in the middle that he had man boobs and a round toddler-like gut. How embarrassing! There was a miniature traveler’s bottle of mouthwash on the ledge of the sink, and he poured a finger of it into a glass and swished it around in his mouth.
She was deeply crazy, he supposed. Probably that was why she slept with him. He examined his face, and wiped a hand across his unruly hair and combed his fingers through the tight, curly tangles of his beard.
She was as obsessed as he was, if not more so—more conspiracy-minded, more focused in her methods, better organized, more professional. It was likely, he thought, that she would find Hayden before he did.
He ran some water into the basin of the sink and patted it onto his cheeks.
And she was very attractive. Quite out of his league in a lot of ways, he supposed. He thought again of that photo she had shown him, the picture of Hayden and Rachel Barrie, that hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach as he looked at their happy faces, an old hurt rising up from childhood.
