Await Your Reply (10 page)

Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being—not a constant state—that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden.

—
VLADIMIR NABOKOV,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

R
yan had just gotten back from his trip to Milwaukee when the news came that he was deceased.

Drowned
, that was what they were saying.

Friends said Schuyler, a scholarship student, was despondent over poor grades, and police now speculate that

Jay sat on the couch, chopping up a bud of dried marijuana, separating out the seeds, as Ryan read the obituary.

“It’s interesting, you know?” Jay said. He was already stoned, in a musing mode as he crouched over the coffee table. He had an old-fashioned Ouija board that he used as a surface for cutting up his marijuana, and Ryan stared down at it—the alphabet laid out in the middle, and the sun and moon at the corners—as if there might be a message waiting for him.

“It’s like one of those things that practically everybody fantasizes about, right?
What if you woke up one morning and people thought you were dead? A
classic scenario, right? What would you do if you could
totally leave your old self behind? That’s one of the great mysteries of adulthood. For most people.”

“Mm,” Ryan said, and he lowered the printout that Jay had given him. The obituary. He folded it in half and then, uncertain what to do, slipped it into his pocket.

“It’s not that easy to accomplish, you know,” Jay was saying. “Actually, it’s kind of hard to get yourself officially declared dead.”

“Uh-huh,” Ryan said, and Jay squinted up at him.

“Believe me, Son,” Jay said. “I’ve looked into it, and it’s not simple. Especially these days, with DNA tests and dental records and all that. It’s a pretty complicated trick to pull off, truth be told—and here you are, you just slipped into it. Smooth as a feather.”

“Huh,” Ryan said, but he wasn’t sure what to say. Jay sat there, leaned back in his sweats and fleece slip-on shoes, peering up at him expectantly.

It was a lot to take in.

He didn’t quite see how they could make such a declaration without an actual body, but apparently, according to the newspaper account, a witness had come forward who claimed to have seen him on the rocks on the shore of the lake, just beyond the student center. The witness claimed they had seen him dive into the lake—a young male of his general description, standing on the big graffiti-covered boulders that lined the shore, and then abruptly jumping—

Which, Ryan thought, sounded highly unlikely, easily contradicted. But apparently the police had decided that this was what had happened, apparently they were eager to wrap things up and move on to more important cases.

And so now, he imagined, his parents were on their way to Evanston for the “memorial service,” and he guessed that maybe a couple of his friends from high school might also come. Probably quite a few people from his dorm—Walcott, obviously, and some of the other people on his floor he had hung out with, possibly some
acquaintances from freshman year he hadn’t seen recently. Some teachers. Some of the various administrative people, deans or assistant deans or whatever, functionaries whose job it was to show up and look regretful.

Jay himself—“Uncle Jay”—would not be in attendance, needless to say.

“Honestly, I’m glad your mother doesn’t know how to get ahold of me,” Jay said. “She’d probably feel compelled to call me, at this point. After all these years, she’d finally want to make peace. She’d probably even ask me to come to the funeral. Jesus! Can you picture it? I haven’t laid eyes on her since you were born, man. I can’t even imagine the look on her face if I showed up after all these years. That’s definitely not something she needs right now, with all she’s dealing with.”

“Right,” Ryan said.

He himself was trying not to imagine the look on his mother’s face.

He was trying not to picture the expressions of his parents as they arrived at last in Chicago and checked into their hotel room and dressed in their somber clothes for the memorial. He compressed that image and tamped it down deep in the back of his mind.

“Dude,” Jay said. “Why don’t you sit down, man? You’re concerning me.”

They were on the porch of Jay’s cabin, and the cast-iron wood-stove was sending out waves of sleepy heat, and Jay gazed up from the old porch couch, pushing his bangs back from his eyes. He gave Ryan a wary, compassionate look—the look you give people when you’ve told them a difficult or tragic fact—but it was not a gaze Ryan wanted to meet.

“You’re upset,” Jay said. “You’re pretending not to be, but I can tell.”

“Hm,” Ryan said. And he reflected.
Upset?

“Not exactly,” Ryan said. “It’s just—it’s a lot to try to wrap your mind around.”

“No doubt,” said Jay, and when Ryan finally sat down beside him, he lowered his arm over Ryan’s shoulder. His grip was surprisingly fierce, and he pulled Ryan close with a hug like a wrestler’s grapple, pinning Ryan’s arms. It was uncomfortable at first, but there was also a degree of comfort in the weight and strength of that arm. He would have been a good dad to have when you were a kid, Ryan thought, and he experimentally rested his head against Jay’s shoulder. Just for a second. He was shuddering a little, and Jay squeezed harder.

“Undoubtedly it’s going to take some time to sink in,” Jay said gently. “This is a pretty huge thing, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Ryan said.

“I mean,” Jay said, “look. You have to realize—at the psychological level, this is a loss. This is a death. And you may not think so, but you probably have to, like, process it in the way you would with a real death. Like those Kübler-Ross stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression … You have to work through a lot of emotions.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

He wasn’t entirely sure of what emotion he was currently experiencing. What stage. He watched as Jay fished a beer out of the Styrofoam cooler at their feet. He took the can when Jay handed it to him. He popped the tab, and Jay observed as he tilted the liquid into his mouth.

“But you’re not freaking out or anything,” Jay said, after they sat there for a while. “You’re okay, right?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

Ryan sat there staring at the old Ouija board on the coffee table. The letters of the alphabet spread out on it like on some old-fashioned keyboard. Smiling sun in the left corner. Frowning moon in the right. In the bottom corners were clouds, and he hadn’t noticed this before but inside the clouds were faces. Featureless, indistinct, but, he guessed, slowly emerging from whatever beyond-place there was. Waiting, off to the side, for someone to call them forth.

“You know I’m here for you,” Jay said. “I am your father after all. If you want to talk.”

“I know,” Ryan said.

They drank a few more beers, and then passed a bong back and forth between them, and after a while Ryan began to feel the concept slowly sinking in. He was dead. He had left his old self behind. He put his mouth against the chimney of the bong as Jay lit the bowl. The realization opened up in slow motion, like one of those time-lapse nature films where seedlings broke through the earth and unwound their spindly stems and unfolded their leaves and lolled their heads in slow circles as the sun crossed the sky.

Meanwhile, Jay went on talking in a placid, soothing, conversational voice. Jay was a man of many stories, and Ryan sat there, listening as Jay held forth.

Apparently, Jay himself had once tried to fake his own death.

This was back in the days when Jay was growing up in Iowa, before he met the girl who would eventually become pregnant with Ryan.

It was the summer after ninth grade, and he had spent a lot of time planning it out. They would find his clothes and shoes in the park along the bank of the river, and he would make sure that someone had heard him screaming for help. He would hide until dark, and then he would hike south, secretly, until he was far out of town, and then he would hitch rides at truck stops until he got to Florida, and then he would stow away on a boat that was going to South America, to some city on the coast near the rain forest or the Andes, where he’d work on the tourists as a confidence man.

“It actually sounds pretty stupid, now that I think back on it,” Jay said. “But at the time it seemed like a pretty good plan.”

Jay chuckled, his arm still loosely draped over Ryan’s shoulder. Jay leaned his face affectionately against him, and he felt the hot, dark, vegetable smell of Jay’s smoky breath pass across his neck.

“I don’t know,” Jay said. “I guess I was feeling a lot of despair at the time—I’d been having some hard times in school. I wasn’t much of a student. Not like Stacey. I was just so bored all the time, and I felt like I was disappointing everyone, and I hated my life so much—

“My parents were always putting Stacey up on a pedestal. Like she was the model for how to live, you know. I’m not trying to disrespect her achievements or anything, but you know, it was hard to take. My mom and dad would hold her up like she was this goddess. Stacey Kozelek! Stacey Kozelek got straight A’s! She was so diligent! She had a
plan
for her life! And I was supposed to be, like, ‘Oooooh: worship. So impressive.’”

He shrugged, reluctantly. “Not to talk down on your mom. It wasn’t her fault, you know—she was a hard worker. Good for her, right? But as for me, that wasn’t what I wanted. I never wanted to get to a point in my life where I knew what was going to happen next, and I felt like most people just couldn’t wait until they found themselves settled down into a routine and they didn’t have to think about the next day or the next year or the next decade, because it was all planned out for them.

“I can’t understand how people can settle for having just one life. I remember we were in English class and we were talking about that poem by—that one guy. David Frost. ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood—’ You know this poem, right? ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth—’

“I loved that poem. But I remember thinking to myself:
Why?
How come you can’t travel both? That seemed really unfair to me.”

He paused and took a drag of his cigarette, and Ryan, who had been listening dreamily, waited. Outside, it was snowing, and he could feel his heart making a soft shushing sound in his ears.

“I didn’t get very far, though,” Jay said. “The cops picked me up just after midnight, walking down the highway—after curfew, and
my mom and dad were there waiting for me when I got home. Pissed as hell.

“But nobody thought I was dead. They didn’t even find my clothes that I’d left on the riverbank. I went back the next day, and there they were, my shoes and shirt and pants, just lying there.”

As he listened to Jay talk, Ryan leaned back against the old couch and closed his eyes.

It was a relief. It was actually a relief to be dead, a lot better than committing suicide, which was what he had been considering during those fall months before Jay called him. He had known, all that semester, that he was going to fail out of college. An academic suspension, they would call it, and probably around that time his parents would find out he had wasted the money from his student loans instead of paying the college bills he owed. All that autumn, he could feel the inevitable revelations looming closer and closer, only a few weeks or months in the future, the various humiliations and the sessions in the offices of various administrators, and at last his parents’ surprise and disappointment as they learned how badly he had fucked up.

Late one night in his dorm room, he had typed “painless suicide” into a search engine on the Internet and discovered an assisted-suicide society that was recommending asphyxial suicide by inhalation of helium inside a plastic bag.

He was thinking particularly about how difficult it would be to have to face his mom. She had been so happy that he had gotten into a good college. He remembered the way she had obsessed over his college application process. Starting his freshman year in high school, she had kept a chart of his grades, his GPA, how could it be improved? What activities would be most impressive? How did his achievement test scores compare, and were there improvements that could be effected by taking a summer course in How to Take Achievement Tests? What teachers—potential recommenders—
liked him? How could he make them like him more? What would he write about for his college essay? What did a successful college essay look like?

He spent a lot of time dreading the look on her face when she finally found out that he’d screwed up again—her dour watchful silence as he moved back into his old room, as they talked about community college options, or getting a job for a year or so—

It was probably easier on her, in some ways, to be presiding over his funeral.

Easier on a lot of people. He found his obituary posted online, and when he did an Internet search on his name, he saw that a lot of friends had written tributes to him on their blogs, and there was a series of touching farewell messages on his Facebook page. “Rest in peace,” people said, “I will not forget you,” they said, “I’m sorry that such a terrible event happened to a cool guy like you.”

Which, he had to admit, was probably better than the uncomfortable, embarrassed dissipation that would have happened after he’d been sent back home to Council Bluffs in disgrace, the emails and IMs dwindling as he and his friends had less and less in common, knowing that some of them were gossiping about him or flat-out dismissing him, that guy who
flunked out
, or probably after a while he would just not be on their minds at all, their lives would roll forward and after a year or so they would have difficulty calling up his name.

Better for all involved to have this kind of closure.

Better, he thought, to start over entirely.

He had been working on putting together some new identities. Matthew Blurton was one. Kasimir Czernewski was another.

“Clones,” Jay called them. Or sometimes: “Avatars.” It was like when you were playing a video game, said Jay, who spent a lot of his free time wandering through the endless virtual landscapes of World of Warcraft or Call of Duty or Oblivion. “That’s basically what
it’s like,” Jay had said, and he’d fixed his eyes on the large television screen, where he was advancing on an enemy with his sword raised. “It’s basically the same idea,” he said. “You create your character. You maneuver them through the world. You pay attention, watch what you are doing, and you are rewarded.” And then his thumbs began to work rapidly on the buttons of his game controller, as he engaged in battle.