by Dan Chaon
“And if we don’t find him?” Lydia said, after they had trudged in silence for a while. “What then? You’ll just get back into your car and drive home to Cleveland?”
“I suppose so.”
He shrugged again, and this time she laughed, a surprisingly lighthearted, even affectionate sound.
“Oh, Miles,” she said. “I can’t believe that you drove all the way to Inuvik. That just astounds me.” She glanced up ahead at Mr. Itigaituk, who was a dozen or more yards ahead of them, leading determinedly onward.
“You’re a very odd person, Miles Cheshire,” she said, and regarded him thoughtfully. “I wish—”
But she didn’t complete her sentence. She let it drift off, and Miles guessed that she had thought better of what she was going to say.
He was trying to think about the future.
The longer they walked, the more it became clear to Miles that this was yet another one of Hayden’s elaborate practical jokes, another maze that he had created, that they were winding their way through.
He would go back, he guessed. Back to Cleveland, back to Matalov Novelties, where the old lady was waiting impatiently for him to return to work; and he would return to his corner of the cluttered store, sitting at his computer under the framed black-and-white photos of old vaudevillians, sometimes contemplating the photo of his own father, his dad, dressed in a cape and tuxedo, holding a wand with a flourish.
As for Miles, he was not a magician, nor would he ever be, but he could picture himself becoming a respected figure among them. Their shopkeeper. Already, he had a good eye for the inventory and expenses at Matalov, already he had straightened the disordered shelves and updated the website to make shopping more user-friendly doing something useful at least, making a small pathway through his life that his father might have respected.
Wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t there the possibility that he could settle in, that he could become happy or at least content? Wasn’t there the chance that—after this one last time, the shadow of Hayden would begin to draw away from his thoughts and he could finally, finally escape at last?
Was that so difficult? So improbable?
And then he glanced up as Mr. Itigaituk turned and called back to them.
“I see it,” Mr. Itigaituk said. “It’s just up ahead!”
Lydia adjusted her sunglasses and craned her neck, and Miles shaded his eyes against the gleaming sky and the wind, squinting toward the horizon.
They all stood there, uncertainly.
“So,” Miles said at last. “What do we do now?”
Mr. Itigaituk and Lydia Barrie exchanged a look.
“I mean,” Miles said, “do we just walk up to the door and knock? Or what?”
And Lydia regarded him, her sunglasses an unreadable blankness.
“Do you have another suggestion?” she said.
The research station was like a beachfront house. A stilt house, Miles thought, except that there was no water or shoreline in sight, no sense that there would ever be flooding here.
The building itself was little more than three linked mobile homes, propped up on piles, about four or five feet off the ground. It had the white corrugated metal siding he’d seen so much of back in Inuvik, and on the flat roof was a small orchard of metal antennae and satellite dishes and other transmitting instruments. Along the side of the building was a large capsule-shaped tank, such as holds natural gas, and a few metal barrels, also raised on stilts, probably for petroleum. Some wires ran from the main building to a small wooden shack, the size of an outhouse.
“Are you sure this is …,” Miles said, and Mr. Itigaituk turned to glare at him with a brisk hunterlike focus.
“Shhhhhhh,” Mr. Itigaituk said.
The place was obviously abandoned, Miles thought. The windows—four on each side—were not windows you could look out of. They had a gray opaque film over them, probably a form of insulation. A weathervane, an aluminum wind spinner, was creaking in the tranquil thicket of metal poles on the roof of the building.
As Mr. Itigaituk crept forward, a raven lifted up from the ramshackle outhouse structure and sailed off.
“He’s not here,” Miles whispered, more to himself than to Lydia.
He had never believed in any of Hayden’s paranormal nonsense, though over the years he had played along with various of Hayden’s obsessions: past lives and geodesy, numerology and Ouija boards, telepathy and out-of-body travel.
But he did believe in something.
He did believe that when he finally found Hayden, when he finally came within striking distance, he would be able to tell. There would be some extrasensory “twin” radar, he thought. An alarm would be triggered and he would sense it in his body. It would go off in his chest like a cell phone set to vibrate. If Hayden was inside this building, Miles would know it.
“This isn’t the place,” he murmured.
But Lydia only turned to him, blankly. She put out her gloved hand and rested it on Miles’s shoulder.
Hush.
She was watching with an ardent, almost quivering attention. He thought of a gambler, that prayerful second of held breath as the roulette wheel slows and the silver ball settles into its place at last.
She looked so certain and focused that he couldn’t help but doubt his own instincts.
Maybe. Maybe it was possible?
She seemed to know things that he did not, after all, she seemed to have done her research.
What if Hayden really was there? What would they do?
Miles and Lydia stood at a distance from the building as Mr. Itigaituk came to the set of wooden stairs that led up to the door.
They watched as Mr. Itigaituk crouched to creep up each step. Together they watched; they caught their breath as he placed his hand on the knob of the door.
Not locked.
Miles closed his eyes. Okay, he thought.
Okay. Yes. This is it.
The place was empty.
The door opened unsteadily, and Mr. Itigaituk stood for what seemed like a long while, peering in. Then he turned and looked at them.
“Uninhabited,” Mr. Itigaituk said, and finally the spell broke. Miles and Lydia both realized that they’d been standing at a distance, as if waiting for Mr. Itigaituk to defuse a bomb.
“Nothing,” Mr. Itigaituk said critically, and gave them both a mild, accusatory look. “Nobody here for a long time.”
A very long time, Miles realized. Perhaps a year, maybe more. He could tell from the mushroomlike cellar smell of the air as they stepped inside.
The front room, about the size and shape of a semi truck trailer, was gray-carpeted and entirely devoid of furniture. Some pieces of paper were pinned to the corkboard that lined the walls, and they set up a flutter of henhouse anxiety when the wind came in.
“Hello?” Lydia called, but her voice was small and wan. “Rachel?” she said, and stepped hesitantly toward the open doorway that led toward the back rooms. “Hello? Rachel?”
It was darker in the back rooms.
Not pitch-black, but dim, like a hotel room with the shades pulled, and the resourceful Mr. Itigaituk took a small flashlight from his pocket and clicked it on.
“God damn it,” Lydia Barrie said, and Miles said nothing.
Here, in this next room, the walls were lined with folding tables, such as you might find in a high school cafeteria. And there was some unplaceable equipment—a large boxy thing, with jagged picket-fence teeth; smaller weathervanes and pinwheel-like wands; a file cabinet with the drawers removed, folders scattered on the floor.
The musky old-clothes smell was stronger now, and Mr. Itigaituk ran the line of his flashlight into a side room that Miles saw was a kitchen and pantry area. Dirty dishes were piled high in the sink, and empty cans and candy bar wrappers lined the counter space, beneath cupboards that were open and mostly empty.
A box of Cap’n Crunch cereal, almost unrecognizably faded, was sitting on the table, next to a bowl and a spoon and a can
of condensed milk.
Mr. Itigaituk solemnly turned to look at Lydia, and his expression confirmed what Miles had been thinking. The place had been abandoned for—years, Miles guessed. It wasn’t even a close call.
“Fuck,” Lydia Barrie said, under her breath, and at last she took a flask from her bag and sipped from it. Her face was drawn, tired, and her hand had a tremor as she offered the flask to Miles.
“I was feeling so confident,” she said as Miles took the flask. He considered it, but didn’t drink.
“Yes,” Miles said. “He’s good at this. Fooling people. I guess you could say that it’s his life’s work.”
He held the flask out to her, and she took it, putting it to her lips again.
“I’m sorry,” Miles said.
He had been doing this for so long now that this was a familiar feeling—the urgency and anticipation, the swell of emotion. And then disappointment. Anticlimax, which, in its own way, was like sorrow. It was not unlike having your heart broken, he imagined.
And then they both looked up as Mr. Itigaituk cleared his throat. He was standing a few yards away, near the dark entrance to the back rooms.
“Ms. Barrie,” he said. “You may want to look at this.”
It was a bedroom.
They stood in the doorway, staring in, and it was from here that the smell of old earth and musty cloth emanated most strongly. It was a narrow room, with barely enough space for a bed and some shelves, but it had been decorated extravagantly.
Decorated? Was that the right term?
It reminded him of the stuff they’d talked about in one of the art classes he took at Ohio University. Art Brut, the teacher called it. Outsider Art: and he’d thought then of the dioramas and statues that Hayden used to make when they were kids.
This “decoration” was along those lines, though much more elaborate, filling the entire room. There were mobiles that had been strung from the ceiling, origami fish, origami swans and peacocks, origami nautilus shells and pinwheels; clouds made from cotton batting, wind chimes made of small stones and microscope slides. The shelves were filled with knickknacks that Hayden had made out of rocks and bones, nails, bits of wood and soup cans, plastic wrap, strips of cloth, some feathers, some fur, computer parts, all kinds of unrecognizable junk.
Some of these creations had been arranged into a tableau—and Miles had worked in the magic shop long enough to recognize scenes from the tarot cards. Here was the Four of Swords: a tiny figure made out of clay or mud or flour rested on a cardboard bed, covered in a tiny blanket cut from a piece of corduroy and above the bed were three nails, pointing downward. Here was the tower—a conical structure made from pebbles, with two miniature paper clip stick people hurling themselves from the turret.
Beneath these objects, clothes had been arranged on the bed. Side by side: a white blouse and a white T-shirt, arms outstretched. Two pairs of jeans. Two pairs of socks. As if they had been sleeping there next to each other and then had simply evaporated, leaving nothing but their empty clothes.
And all around these figures were various flowers: lilies made from goose feathers, roses made out of the pages of books, baby’s breath made from wire and bits of insulation. Flecks of mica glinted as Mr. Itigaituk passed his flashlight over the—
Shrine, Miles supposed you would call it.
It was like one of those memorials that one sees along the side of the highway, the jumble of crosses and plastic bouquets and stuffed animals and handmade signs that marked the place where someone had been killed in a car wreck.
Above the empty clothes, some large flat rocks had been arranged in an arch, and on each rock a rune had been etched.
Runes: it was the old game, the old alphabet that they’d invented back when they were twelve, “letters” that were somewhere between Phoenician and Tolkien, which they’d pretended was an ancient language.
He could read the letters well enough. He still remembered.
R-A-C-H-E-L, it said. H-A-Y-D-E-N.
And then below that, in smaller letters, it said:
e-a-d-e-m m-u-t-a-t-a r-e-s-u-r-g-o
He guessed it was like a grave of some kind.
The three of them stood there mutely, and they could all see what this exhibit was meant to convey they could all tell that they were in the presence of a memorial, or a tomb. There must have been a breeze coming in from the front door, because the mobiles had begun to stir lightly, casting slowly turning shadows on the wall as Mr. Itigaituk’s flashlight caught them. The wind chimes made an uncertain, rattling whisper.
“I guess those must be Rachel’s clothes,” Lydia said at last, hoarsely, and Miles shrugged.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“What is it?” Lydia said. “Is it a message?”
Miles shook his head. He was thinking about the oddly stacked figures of rocks and branches that Hayden used to make in the backyard of their old house, after their father died. He was thinking of the tattered copy of Frankenstein, which he’d received in the mail not long after his trip to North Dakota, the passage in the final chapter that had been highlighted:
Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost to which I am impassive…. Come on, my enemy.
“I think it means that they’re both dead,” Miles said finally, and then he paused.
Did he really think that? Or did he just wish that it were true?
Lydia was shuddering a little, but her face remained still. He didn’t know what she was feeling. Rage? Despair? Grief? Or was it merely a version of the numb, blank, wordless hollowness that had settled over him as he remembered the letter that Hayden had sent him:
Do you remember the Great Tower of Kallupilluk? That may be my final resting place, Miles. You may never hear from me again.
“He left this stuff for me,” Miles said quietly. “I guess he thought I would understand what it meant.”
Knowing Hayden, Miles assumed that every single object in the room was a message, every sculpture and diorama was supposed to tell a story. Knowing Hayden, each object was built as if it would be given the attention that an archaeologist would give to a set of long-lost scrolls.
And—Miles supposed that he did understand the gist of it. Or at least he could interpret—in the way that fortune-tellers found a story in the random lines of a person’s palm or the sticks of the / Ching; the way mystics found secret communications everywhere, converting letters to numbers and numbers to letters, magical numerals nestled in the verses of the Bible, incantatory words to be discovered in the endless string of digits that made up pi.
Would it be a lie to say there was a narrative to be found in this jumble of dioramas and statues and mobiles? Would it be dishonest? Would it be any different than a therapist who takes the stuff of dreams, the landscapes and objects and random surreal events, and weaves them into some meaning?
“It’s a suicide note,” Miles said at last, very gently, and he pointed toward the stack of stones, with the paper clip people throwing themselves from the summit.
“That’s the Great Tower of Kallupilluk,” he said. “It’s … a story we made up when we were kids. It’s a lighthouse at the very edge of the world, and that’s where the immortal ones go, when they are ready to leave this life. They sail off from the shore beyond the lighthouse, and into the sky.”
He gazed intently at these objects that Hayden had left for him, as if each one were a hieroglyph, each one a still frame like the fresco cycles of ancient times.
Yes. You could say that there was a story here.
In Miles’s version of things, he imagined that they had come here in the fall.
Hayden and Rachel. They had been in love, like they were in that photograph that Lydia had shown him. This was a place that they thought they could hide, just for a short time, just until Hayden got things back on track.
They hadn’t planned to stay long, but winter came faster than they expected, and they were trapped bef
ore they knew it. And Rachel—you could see her in that mobile, there, with the down feathers and bits of colored glass—had gotten sick. She had gone out to look at the aurora borealis. She was a romantic girl, an impractical girl, an amateur photographer—you could see the rolls of film in that diorama, perhaps they could be developed—perhaps they’d contain the pictures she took in her last days—
But she didn’t realize. She didn’t understand that in this country, even a few minutes of exposure to the elements could be terribly dangerous. You could see her there, delirious in her bed, under those nails—
And by that time, the food had begun to run out, and Hayden didn’t know how long the generator would last. And so he’d made a sled for Rachel, and he’d wrapped her in blankets and coats and furs, and he set out. He planned to try to walk to the southern part of the island. It was their only hope.
“No,” Mr. Itigaituk said, and shook his head cynically. “That’s ridiculous. They would never make it. It would have been impossible.”
“He knew that,” Miles said. “That’s what those stones mean, there. He understood that it was hopeless, but he wanted to try anyway.”
Miles looked at Lydia, who had been standing there, listening blankly as he’d talked. As he interpreted.
“No,” she said. “That doesn’t make sense. How could they have been dead for so long? How could—we both have letters from him, recent letters—”
Letters that might have been left with someone, perhaps. Please send these out if I don’t come back in a year. Here’s a hundred dollars, two hundred dollars for your trouble.
“Maybe you’re right,” Miles said. “Maybe they’re still alive somewhere.”
But Lydia had fallen into her own thoughts. Not convinced, but.
Even so.
It probably wasn’t true, but wouldn’t it be nice to believe?
