Await Your Reply (21 page)

“Your name isn’t really George Orson, is it?” she said, and—

He was motionless. Still driving. Still wearing those sunglasses, which reflected the road and the rolling horizon, still the same man she had known.

“George Orson,” she said. “That’s not your real name,” she said.

“No,” he said.

He spoke gently, as if he were telling her bad news, and she thought of the way the policemen had come to their door on the day their parents were killed, the way they delivered the news in cautious intervals.
There had been a terrible accident. Their parents were severely injured. The paramedics had arrived at the scene. There wasn’t anything the paramedics were able to do
.

She nodded, and she and George Orson looked at each other. There was a silent, tender embarrassment. Hadn’t this been understood yesterday, when he showed the Ivory Coast bank account, when he’d produced their fake birth certificates? Hadn’t it been obvious?

It should have been clear, she guessed, but only now did it begin to sink in.

She looked down at her pink T-shirt, her breasts pressed flat by a sports bra.

“That isn’t really the house that you grew up in, is it?” she said, and her voice felt pressed flat as well. “The Lighthouse. All of the stuff you told me. That painting. That wasn’t your grandmother.”

“Hmm,” he said, and he lifted his fingers from her thigh to gesture vaguely, an apologetic fluttering movement. “This is complicated,” he said ruefully.

“It always comes to this,” he said. “Everyone gets so hung up on what’s real and not real.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said. “People are funny that way.”

But George Orson only shook his head, as if she didn’t get it.

“This may sound unbelievable to you,” he said, “but the truth is, a part of me truly did grow up there. There isn’t just
one
version of the past, you know. Maybe that seems crazy, but eventually, after we’ve done this for a while, I think you’ll see. We can be anybody we want. Do you realize that?

“And that’s all it comes down to,” he said. “I loved being George Orson. I put a lot of thought and energy into it, and it wasn’t
fake
. I wasn’t trying to fool you. I did it because I liked it. Because it made me happy.”

And Lucy let out a small, uncertain breath, thinking: a host of thoughts.

“Why would you want to be a high school teacher?” she said at last. It was the only thing that came to her clearly, the only one of the thoughts that could be articulated. “That doesn’t sound fun at all.”

“No, no,” George Orson said, and he smiled at her hopefully, as if this were the exact right question—as if they were back in the classroom, discussing the difference between existentialism and nihilism—as if she’d raised her hand and she was his beloved student and he was excited to explain.

“It was one of the best things I’ve ever done,” he said. “That year in Pompey. I always wanted to be a teacher, ever since I was a kid. And it was great. It was a fantastic experience.”

He shook his head, as if he were still entranced by it. As if high school had been some exotic foreign land.

“And,” he said, “I met you. I met you, and we fell in love, didn’t we? Don’t you understand, honey? You’re the only person in the world I’ve ever been able to talk to. You’re the only person in the world who loves me.”

Had
they fallen in love? She guessed they had, though now it felt like a weird idea, since it turned out that “George Orson” wasn’t even a real person.

Thinking about it made her feel dizzy and squeamish. If you took away all of the pieces that made up George Orson—his Lighthouse Motel childhood and his Ivy League education, his funny anecdotes and subtly ironic teaching style and the tender, attentive concern he’d had for Lucy as his student—if all of that was just an invention, what was left? There was, presumably, someone inside the George Orson disguise, a personality, a pair of eyes peering out: a soul, she supposed you might call it, though she still didn’t know the soul’s real name.

Which one did she have feelings for—the character of George Orson, or the person who had created him? Which one had she been having sex with?

It was a bit like one of those word games George Orson had been so fond of offering up to their class—“Strange loops,” he called them.
Moderation in all things, including moderation
, he said.
Is the answer to this question no? I never tell the truth
.

She could picture the way he had grinned when he said that. This was before she ever had an idea that she would become his girlfriend, long before she could have imagined that she would be driving to a post office in Nebraska with a fake birth certificate and reservations for a trip to Africa. “I never tell the truth,” he told the class, was a version of the famous Epimenides paradox, and then he explained what a paradox was, and Lucy had written it down, thinking that it might be on a test, possibly she could get extra credit.

They had come now almost to the edge of Crawford, and George Orson—David Fremden—pulled over to consult the map he had downloaded from the Internet.

They had parked in front of a historical marker, and after he was finished examining his papers, George Orson sat there for a while, regarding the sign’s metal tablet with interest.

It was a sad piece of work, she thought.

Or at least she found it sad, at this juncture in her life. What had George Orson told their class once? “People like to contextualize themselves,” he told them. “They like to feel they are connected to the larger forces of the world in some small way.” And she recalled how he had tilted his head, as if to say:
Isn’t that pathetic?

“People like to think that what they do actually matters,” he’d said, dreamy, bemused, passing his gaze over their faces, and she remembered how his eyes rested in particular upon her, and she’d straightened in her chair, a little flattered, a little flustered. And she’d gazed back at him and nodded.

Thinking of this, Lucy put her hand to her throat, which continued to have that constricted feeling, that anxiety attack feeling.

People like to think that what they do actually matters
.

It had occurred to her that, in fact, her own proof of identity—Lucy Lattimore’s birth certificate and social security card and so forth—were back in Pompey, Ohio, still in a plastic Ziploc bag in
the top drawer of her mother’s bureau, along with the ink prints of Lucy’s baby feet, and her immunization history, and any other paperwork that her mother had deemed important.

She hadn’t bothered to bring any of this stuff with her when she and George Orson had left town, and now, she realized, she probably had more documentation for Brooke Fremden than there was for her real self.

What would happen to Lucy Lattimore now, she wondered. If she no longer entered the public record, if she never held a job or applied for a driver’s license or paid taxes or got married or had children, if she never died, would she still exist two hundred years from now, free-floating and unresolved in some record bank in some government dead-letter office computer? At some point, would they decide to expunge her from the official roster?

What if she could call someone? What if she could talk to her parents, for one last time, and tell them that she was alone and broke and about to fly to Africa under an assumed name? What advice would they give her? What would she even ask?

Mom, I’m thinking about not existing anymore, and I was just calling to ask your opinion
.

The thought was almost enough to make her laugh, and David Fremden looked over to her as if he had noticed movement. Attentive and dad-like.

“In any case,” he said. “I suppose we should get going.”

J
ay Kozelek was standing on the curb outside Denver International when a black Lexus cruised up alongside him and came to a stop. He watched as the tinted window on the driver’s side slid down with a faint pneumatic hiss, and a thin, dapper blond dude peered out at him. A young guy, about twenty-four or twenty-five. Preppy: was that the right term?

“Mr. Kozelek, I presume?” this person said, and Jay stood there blinking.

Jay didn’t know what he had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this—this slick-looking character with his designer horn-rim glasses and his natty sports coat and turtleneck and his movie-star teeth. Meanwhile, here was Jay with his old hiker’s backpack and army surplus jacket, wearing sweatpants, his hair pulled back and rubber-banded. Not washed in a while.

“Uh,” he said, and the guy grinned, pleased with himself, as if he’d pulled off a good practical joke. Which, Jay guessed, he had—and so he tried out a sheepish smile, though he actually felt vaguely
nervous. “Hey, Mike,” he said, very mellow. “Where we headed? Out to your yacht?”

Mike Hayden regarded him. No reaction.

“Get in,” Mike said, and there was a click as the rear door unlocked, and Jay balked just for a second before he climbed into the backseat, pulling his raggedy backpack behind him.

Was this a trap, maybe?

It was a brand-new car, with that leathery sweet chemical smell, spotless, and as Jay adjusted his knees, Mike Hayden turned around and offered his hand. “A pleasure,” he said.

“Likewise,” Jay said, and when he took Mike Hayden’s hand, it was cool and dry. He was apparently not going to be asked to sit in the front seat, which was heaped with papers and a crumpled fast-food bag and a closed laptop and a smattering of cell phones—five of them, clustered in the debris like eggs in a nest.

Their eyes met, and though he didn’t know what Mike Hayden’s lingering look was meant to convey, there was this expectation in it, and he sat back in his seat as if he had been given a warning.

“It’s wonderful to finally meet you in person, Jay,” Mike Hayden said. “I’m so pleased that you decided to come.”

“Yeah,” Jay said, and then sat back as the car accelerated smoothly away from the curb, picking up speed as they slid in and out of the traffic that was nosing its way toward the airport exit, as they pulled onto the interstate and the rain clouds towered above them in the wide sky.

Jay and Mike Hayden had first met in an online chat room, one of those hidden, private spaces where hackers and trolls tended to gather, and they had hit it off right away.

This was back when Jay was living in a house in Atlanta with a bunch of computer nerds who thought of themselves as revolutionaries. The Association, they called themselves, which Jay tried to point out was the name of a horrible band from the 1960s. “You
know those stupid songs. Like ‘Windy.’ Like ‘Cherish.’” And he sang a line or two, but they just looked at him skeptically.

And so he was beginning to realize that he was a little too old to be living with them. They had some good ideas about moneymaking schemes, but they were just kids, very juvenile a lot of the time, sitting around watching bad horror movies or arguing about pop-culture crap, pop music and TV and comic books and various websites and memes that the housemates briefly became excited about. They were too stoned and lazy to manage much follow-through, but for Jay it was different. He was thirty years old! He had an actual child out there somewhere, even if the child didn’t know that he was its dad. A son, fifteen years of age. Ryan. He figured it was about time to get into more serious business.

“I know what you mean,” Mike Hayden had said, as they typed to each other in the chat room. “I’m interested in serious business as well.”

At the time, Jay didn’t know that the guy’s name was Mike Hayden. The guy went by the user name “Breez,” and he was well-known among certain circles of the Internet community. All the hackers in Jay’s house were in awe of him. It was said that he had been personally involved in a huge national blackout, that he had managed to shut down power grids all across the Northeast and Midwest; it was said that he had stolen millions of dollars from several major banking firms, and that he had engineered the conviction of a Yale University professor on charges of trafficking in pedophilic photos.

“I wouldn’t fuck around with that guy if I were you,” said Dylan—one of Jay’s housemates, a plump, bearded twenty-one-year-old kid from Colorado, with a face the shape of a yam. “That dude is, like, the Destroyer, man,” Dylan said earnestly. “He’ll trash your life just for the fun of it.”

“Hmm,” said Jay. It was an odd thing for Dylan to say, he thought, since Dylan and his buddies spent a good portion of their time playing mean, stupid practical jokes on the Internet—posting
bestiality porn videos on some lady’s bichon frise website, The Wonderful Fluffy World, and uploading graphic accident photos to message boards meant for children; terrorizing some poor girl who maintained a tribute site for a dead pop star they all loathed, sending hundreds of delivery pizzas to her house and getting her power turned off; hacking into the website for the National Epilepsy Foundation with a strobe-like animation they’d decided might send the epileptics into seizures. They sat around doing imitations of convulsions, and chortling wildly as Jay stood by watching with uneasy disapproval. It could get tiresome, he told Breez.

“‘Tiresome,’” said Breez. “That’s a polite word for it.”

It was about three in the morning, and Jay and Breez had been chatting companionably for a few hours. It was a nice change of pace, Jay thought, to talk to someone his own age, though also intimidating. Breez wrote in complete sentences, in paragraphs rather than long blocks of text, and he never misspelled words or used abbreviations or jargon.

“I do get a bit tired of all of these little trolls,” Breez said. “All the antics and the middle school sense of humor. I’m beginning to think there should be a eugenics program for the Internet. Don’t you think?”

Jay wasn’t sure what the word ‘eugenics’ meant, and so he waited. Then he typed: “Yeah. Absolutely.”

“It’s nice to meet someone with some common sense,” Breez said. “Most people just can’t accept the truth. You know what I mean. Do they think we can just continue on like this, all this babble and bullshit, as if we’re not on the edge of ruin? Do they not see it? The Arctic ice cap is melting. We’ve got dead zones in the oceans that are expanding astronomically. The bees are dying, and the frogs, and the supply of fresh water is drying up. The global food system is headed toward collapse. We’re like Fibonacci’s rabbits, right? One more generation—ten, fifteen more years, and we’ll have reached the tipping point. Basic population-projection matrices. Right?”

“Right,” Jay said, and then he watched the small, blinking heartbeat of the cursor.

“I’ll tell you a secret, Jay,” Breez said. “I believe in the ruin lifestyle. Straight-up anarchy is not that far away. Very soon, we’re going to have to start making some difficult choices. There are too many of us, and I’m afraid that before long the question will have to be asked: how quickly can you eliminate three or four of the world’s six billion people? Do you get rid of them in the most just and equitable way possible? That’s the question humanity should start pondering.”

Jay considered.
The ruin lifestyle?

“There are certainly portions of the herd that deserve to be thinned, that’s all I’m saying,” Breez said. “Is there still room on earth for people like your loathsome nose-picking roommates? Would the world be better off without the type of people who become investment bankers? Can you think of a lower form of life? These people are supposedly so smart and talented. They go to Princeton, or Harvard, or Yale, and then they become ‘investment bankers’? Can you think of a more repulsive waste?”

And Jay didn’t say anything. Was the guy kidding? Was he a nutcase?

But still, he was impressed by the things Dylan had told him. “That dude is the Destroyer,” Dylan said. “He’s stolen probably fucking millions of dollars—” And Jay could feel these thoughts slowly tilting and turning slow Ferris wheels in his head. He was pretty stoned.

And, actually, he had to wonder—a guy like this, did he know things that Jay didn’t know? Was he simply paying more attention, while most of the rest of the world was just cruising along, not thinking things through to their logical conclusion?

The ruin lifestyle
.

“I’m not sure what to say,” Jay responded at last. “There’s a lot of things I haven’t thought about too deeply, either, to tell the truth.” He paused. “It sounds like you’re a lot smarter than I am,” Jay said.

It was a kiss-ass move, no doubt, but he was curious. What did this guy have besides talk?

“Why don’t you call me on my cell?” Breez typed. “I have terrible insomnia. Nightmares. I like the sound of a human voice, every once in a while.”

And that was how they had become friends.

That was how he learned that the famed “Breez” was actually a guy named Mike Hayden, an ordinary person who had grown up in the suburbs of Cleveland, and—whatever else he had accomplished, however rich and infamous he was—he still felt lonely. He was looking for someone he could trust, he said. “Which is not so easy to find, in our business,” he said.

“No doubt,” Jay said, and he chuckled moodily. He and his roommates were living in a bungalow in the Westview neighborhood, southwest Atlanta, and he had to admit, he said, that he was thinking about moving on. They had been involved in mostly amateur crap, he said—sitting in the parking lot outside BJ’s Wholesale Club or Macy’s or OfficeMax, searching for holes in the wireless networks of the stores, collecting credit and debit card numbers as they were entered into the registers. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

“It’s actually not a bad idea,” Mike Hayden said. “I know a guy in Latvia who has a computer where you could store the data—and he knows a guy in China who can imprint blank cards with the numbers. People are doing it. You can get a pretty decent harvest from it, if you’re smart and aggressive about it.”

“Yeah, well,” Jay said, “smart and aggressive is not the name of the game around here. I don’t think any of these kids know what they’re doing.”

And Mike Hayden was thoughtful. “Hmm,” he said.

“Yeah,” Jay said.

“So what are you going to do about it?” Mike Hayden said. “Are you just going to sit there?”

“I don’t know,” said Jay.

“If I had access to all of those numbers that you collected,” Mike said, “I could really do something with them. That’s all I’m saying. We could work together.”

“Hmm,” Jay said. It was dark in the house, though through one of the doorways Jay could see Dylan, his face lit by computer light, his fingers moving over the keyboard, and Jay lowered his voice, cupping his hand over the mouthpiece of the cell phone he was talking into.

“I have to tell you the truth,” Jay said. “I’m in a different situation from these guys. I need to start thinking about the future, if you know what I mean. I’m thirty years old. I’ve got a kid out there somewhere—a kid, fifteen years old, can you believe it? I’m not in the daydream age of youth anymore, frankly.”

This revelation had given Mike Hayden pause.

“Why, Jay,” he said at last, “I didn’t know you had a child! That’s so awesome.”

“Yeah,” Jay said, and he shifted. “A son. But it’s complicated. I gave him up, like, for adoption, in a way. To my sister. He doesn’t know that I. That I’m his dad.”

“Wow,” Mike Hayden said. “That must be intense.”

“His name is Ryan,” said Jay—and it was nice, actually, to tell someone this, he felt a warm, paternal glow briefly opening up. “He’s a teenager. Can you believe that? It seems unbelievable to me.”

“That’s so cool,” Mike Hayden said. “It must be such a great feeling—to have an actual son!”

“I guess,” Jay said. “It’s not like he knows or anything. It’s more like this awful secret thing between me and my sister. Most of the time it doesn’t even feel real to me, to be honest. Like it’s an alternate universe or something.”

“Hmm,” said Mike Hayden. “You know what, Jay? I like the way you think. I’d enjoy meeting you. Do you want me to get you a plane ticket?”

Jay didn’t say anything. In the living room, he could hear the
roommates cackling about some new joke they’d recently come up with, a prank to do with doctored photos of a female celebrity. They hadn’t made money in weeks.

Meanwhile, Mike Hayden was still talking about Ryan. “Geez, I wish I had a son!” he was saying. “That would make me so happy. All I’ve got left is my twin brother, and he’s been so disappointing lately.”

“That’s too bad,” Jay said, and he shrugged his shoulders, though he realized that Mike Hayden couldn’t see such a gesture through the phone. “I suppose you have to work on these kinds of relationships, right? You can’t take anything for granted.”

“True,” Mike Hayden said. “Very true.”

And now here Jay was. A week later, and he and Mike Hayden drove east from Denver, he and Breez, he and the Destroyer, traveling through Colorado, and Jay was basically prepared to betray his former roommates.

He didn’t feel that bad about it. They were truly assholes, he thought, though he couldn’t help but feel nervous as the sky darkened over Interstate 76, and they passed through the thick plumes of steam that billowed out of the sugar beet factory just beyond Fort Morgan, and a flock of grackles lifted up out of the field, a long, streaming formation. It was as if the world had conspired to seem ominous.

He shifted, picked up his backpack, and moved it a little to the right. It was awkward to be in the backseat, like Mike Hayden was a taxi driver or a chauffeur, though Mike himself acted perfectly at ease with the situation.

“So how’s your son doing?” Mike Hayden said, and when Jay looked up, he could see Mike’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

He shrugged. “Fine,” Jay said. “I guess.”

It was awkward. Though at the same time, there wasn’t anyone else in the world he’d ever talked to about this stuff.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “We—Actually, to be honest, Mike, I’ve never actually spoken with the kid. You know, after my sister adopted him … I had some problems. I was in jail for a short while. And my sister, Stacey. We had a falling out, a lot of it having to do with—her not wanting him to know. She didn’t see the point in getting him confused, which I understand, I guess, although—it’s a difficult thing to get my mind around.”