Await Your Reply (3 page)

After their parents died, Patricia had become Lucy’s guardian—perhaps officially still was? Though now Lucy was almost nineteen. Not that it mattered in any case, because Patricia had no idea where she was.

She did feel a pang about that.

She had the image of Patricia and her pet rats—the rats’ cages stacked in the eaves, and her sister coming home late from her job at the Circle K, kneeling there in that red and blue vest with the name tag that said
PATARCIA
, talking to the rats in that crooning voice, the one rat, Mr. Niffler, with an enormous tumor coming out of its stomach that it was dragging around and her sister had paid to have the veterinarian remove it and then it
grew back
, the tumor, and still Patricia persisted. Showering the dying creature with love, buying it plastic toys, talking baby talk, making another appointment at the vet.

Lucy was glad that she had never told George Orson about Mr. Niffler, just as she was glad that he’d never seen the house she had grown up in, where she and Patricia had continued to live. Her father used to call it “the shack,” affectionately. “I’ll meet you back here at the shack,” he’d say when he left for work in the morning.

It didn’t occur to her until later that it
was
basically a shack. Ramshackle, haphazard, a living room and kitchen that bled into each other, the bathroom so cramped that your legs touched the edge of the bathtub when you sat on the toilet. A garage stuffed with car parts, bags of beer cans that her father never took to the recycling center, the hole in the plasterboard wall of the living room through which you could see the bare two-by-fours, the carpet that looked like the fur of a worn-out stuffed animal. Some stairs led up to an attic, where the girls, Lucy and Patricia, had their beds. The ceiling of the bedroom was the roof, which slanted sharply over them while they slept. If George Orson had seen it, she imagined, he would have been embarrassed for her; she would have felt dirty.

Though—she couldn’t say that she was particularly happy to be
here
, either.

In the middle of the night, she found herself wide awake. They were in the old bed of George Orson’s parents, a king-size expanse,
and she was aware of the other rooms in the house—the other empty bedrooms on the second floor, the trickle of a pipe in the bathroom, the toothy rows of bookshelves in the “library,” the flutter of birds in the dead trees of the high-fenced backyard. A “Japanese garden,” George Orson called it. She could picture the small wooden bridge, the bed of stunted, un-flowering irises choked with weeds. A miniature weeping cherry tree, still barely alive. A granite Kotoji lantern statue. George Orson’s mother had had an “artistic bent,” he’d told Lucy.

By which he meant, Lucy assumed, that his mother had been a little crazy. Or so Lucy gathered. The place—the motel and the house—seemed as if it had been put together by someone with multiple personality disorder. A lighthouse. A Japanese garden. The living room with its gruesome old sheet-covered upholstery, and the room with the television and the big picture window that looked out onto the backyard. The kitchen with its 1970s colors, the avocado-green stove and refrigerator, the mustard-colored tile floor, drawers and cabinets full of dishes and utensils, an old wooden butcher block and an almost obscenely large collection of knives—George Orson’s mother had apparently been obsessed with them, since they could be found in almost every shape and length a person could imagine, from tiny filet blades to enormous cleavers. Very disturbing, thought Lucy. In a pantry, she found three boxes of china dishes and some disturbing canning jars, still full of dark goop.

On the second floor, there was the bathroom and three bedrooms, including this one she was in right now, the very room, the very bed where his parents had slept, where his elderly mother had continued to sleep, Lucy imagined, after the husband had died. Even now, many years later, there was still a vague hint of old-lady powder about it. A few hangers still in the closet, and the empty dresser sitting darkly against the wall, and then the stairs that led up to the third floor—to the turret, a small octagon-shaped room with a single window, which looked out away from the lake, out onto the
cone of the faux lighthouse, and the courtyard of motel rooms. And the highway. And the alfalfa fields. And the far distant horizon.

And so—she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t sleep, and she lay there staring up at the swimmy darkness that her brain couldn’t quite process. The door was closed, the window shade was pulled, so there wasn’t even moonlight or stars.

Suggestions of shapes floated across the surface of the dark like protozoa seen through a microscope, but there wasn’t too much for the optic mechanisms to actually hold on to.

She slid her hand beneath the covers until she came up against the shoreline of George Orson’s body. His shoulder, his chest, the ribs rising and falling underneath his skin, his warm belly, which she pressed against—until at last he turned over and put his arm over her, and she felt her way along the length of it until she found his wrist, his hand, his pinkie finger. Which she held.

Okay
.

Everything would be fine
, she thought.

At the very least, she wasn’t in Pompey any longer.

M
iles’s twin brother, Hayden, had been missing for more than ten years, though probably “missing” wasn’t exactly the right word.

“At large”? Was that a better term?

When the most recent letter from Hayden arrived, Miles had pretty much decided that it was time to give up. He was thirty-one years old—they were both thirty-one years old—and it was time, Miles thought, to let go. To move on. So much energy and effort, he thought, squandered, pointless. For a while Miles felt a new determination: he was going to live his own life.

He was back again in Cleveland, where he and Hayden had grown up. He had an apartment on Euclid Heights Boulevard, not far from their old house, and a job managing a store called Matalov Novelties, an old storefront mail-order establishment on Prospect Avenue that dealt primarily in magicians’ equipment—flash paper
and smoke powder, scarves and ropes, trick cards and coins and top hats and so forth, though they also sold joke gifts and gags, useless gadgets, risqué toys, some sex stuff. The catalog was somewhat unfocused, but he liked that. He could organize it, he thought.

Was it what he had hoped to do with his life? Probably not exactly, but he had a good brain for receipts and orders, and he felt a certain affection for the stock on the shelves, the carnival aura of the trashy occult and bright plastic legerdemain. There were times, sitting at the computer in the dim windowless back room, when he thought it wouldn’t be a bad career after all. He had grown fond of the old proprietress, Mrs. Matalov, who had been a magician’s assistant back in the 1930s, and who now, even at ninety-three, had the stoic dignity of a beautiful woman who was about to be cut in half. He had a good rapport with Mrs. Matalov’s granddaughter, Aviva, a sarcastic young woman with dyed black hair and black fingernails and a narrow, sorrowful face, whom Miles had begun to imagine he could probably ask out on a date.

He had been thinking about going back to college, maybe getting a degree in business. Also, possibly, getting some short-term cognitive therapy.

So when Hayden’s letter arrived, Miles was surprised at how quickly he had fallen back into his old ways. He shouldn’t have even opened the letter, he thought later. And in fact, when he came home to his apartment building that day in June and opened the mail cubbyhole and saw it there among the bills and flyers—he actually decided that he should leave it unopened.
Set it aside
, he thought.
Let it rest for a while before you look at it
.

But no, no. By the time he had gone up the three flights of stairs to his apartment, he had already torn open the seal and unfolded the letter.

My Dear Miles
, it said.

So.

What does a person do with a letter such as this? Miles sat there for a while at the kitchen table, with the letter spread out in front of him, and opened a packet of artificial sweetener into a cup of tea.
What would a normal person do? he
wondered. He imagined the normal person reading the letter and shaking this head sadly.
What could be done?
the normal person would ask himself.

He looked at the postmark on the envelope:
Inuvik, NT, CANADA X0E 0T0
.

“I’m going to have to take some personal time, unfortunately,” Miles told Mrs. Matalov the next morning, and he sat there with the phone pressed to his ear, listening to her silence.

“Personal time?” said Mrs. Matalov, in her old-fashioned vampire accent. “I don’t understand. What does this mean, personal time?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Two weeks?” He looked at the itinerary he had planned out on the computer, the map of Canada with a green highlighter mark running a jagged, rivering way across the country. Four thousand miles, which would take, he calculated, approximately eighty-four hours. If he drove fifteen or sixteen hours a day, he could be in Inuvik by the weekend. It might be difficult, he thought, but then again didn’t truck drivers do it all the time? Weren’t they always making marathon drives such as this? “Well,” he said. “Maybe three weeks.”

“Three weeks!” Mrs. Matalov said.

“I’m really super sorry about this,” Miles said. “It’s just that—something urgent has come up.” He cleared his throat. “A private matter,” he said.
Do not trust the Matalov family
, Hayden had said, which was crazy, but Miles felt himself pause.

“It’s complicated,” he said.

Which it was. Even if he were to be completely honest, what would he say? How could he ever explain the ease with which these old longings had come back to him, the lingering ache of love and duty?
Perhaps to a therapist it would seem simply compulsive—after all this time, after all the years that he had already wasted—but here, nevertheless, came that same urgency he’d felt when Hayden had first run away from home all those years ago. That same certainty that he could find him, catch him, help him, or at least get him locked up somewhere safe. How could he explain how badly he wanted this? Who would understand that when Hayden left, it was as if a part of himself had vanished in the middle of the night—his right hand, his eyes, his heart—like the Gingerbread Man in the fairy tale, running away down the road:
Come back! Come back!
If he were to tell this to someone, he would seem as crazy as Hayden himself.

He had thought that he was past such feelings, but, well. Here he was. Packing his things. Taking the milk out of his refrigerator and pouring it down the drain. Sifting through his old notes, printing out long-ago emails that Hayden had sent him—the various hints and clues of his whereabouts dropped into fantastical descriptions of invented landscapes, the angry rants about human overpopulation and the international banking conspiracy, the late-night suicidal regrets. And then Miles sat at his desk examining with a magnifying glass the envelope of the letter that Hayden had just sent him, that postmark, that postmark. Rechecking the directions. He knew where Hayden was going.

And now he was almost there.

Miles sat in his car by the side of the road, casually reading through one of Hayden’s journals as he waited for the ferry that would take him across the Mackenzie River. Some rails ran up from the slate-gray muddy bank and into the green wrinkled lobes of tundra, but otherwise there wasn’t much sign of human habitation. A toilet house. A diamond-shaped road sign. The river was a calm reflective surface, silver and sapphire blue. Once he was across, it was only about eighty miles to Inuvik.

Inuvik was one of the places Hayden had gotten fixated on.
“Spirit cities,” he called them, and he had written extensively about Inuvik, among other places, in the journals and notebooks that Miles now had in his possession. For years now, Hayden had been taken with the idea that Inuvik was the site of a great archaeological ruin, that on the edge of Inuvik was the remnants of the Great Tower of Kallupilluk, which had been a spire of ice and stone, approximately forty stories tall, built around 290
B.C.
at the behest of the mighty Inuit emperor, Kallupilluk—a figure whom Hayden believed he had contacted once in a past life.

None of this was true, of course. Very few of the things Hayden was obsessed with had much basis in reality, and in the last few years he had strayed even further into a mostly imaginary world. In actuality, there had never been a tower or a great Inuit emperor named Kallupilluk. In real life, Inuvik was a small town in the Northwest Territories of Canada with a population of around thirty-five hundred people. It was located on the Mackenzie Delta—“nested,” according to the town’s website, “between the treeless tundra and the northern boreal forest,” and it had existed for less than a century. It had been constructed building by building by the Canadian government as an administrative center in the western Arctic, incorporated at last as a village in 1967. It wasn’t even, as Hayden seemed to believe, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

Nevertheless, Miles couldn’t help but think of Hayden’s drawings of that great tower, the simple but vivid pencil sketch Hayden had done, reminiscent of the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, and he felt a small, dizzy quiver of anticipation pass through him as the Mackenzie River ferry appeared on the horizon, approaching. Miles had spent a good portion of his life poring over Hayden’s various journals and notebooks, and even longer living with Hayden’s various delusions. Despite everything, there remained a tiny core of credulity that glowed a little brighter as he came closer to the town of Hayden’s fantasies. He could almost picture the place at the edge of the town where the Great Tower once rose up out of the folds of tundra, stark against the wide, endlessly shining sky.

This had always been one of the problems: this was maybe one way to explain it. For years and years and years, Miles had been a willing participant in his twin brother’s fantasies. Folie à deux, was that what they called it?

Since their childhood, Hayden had been a great believer in the mysteries of the unknown—psychic phenomenon, past lives, UFOs, ley lines and spirit paths, astrology and numerology, etc., etc. And Miles was his biggest follower and supporter. His listener. He had never personally believed in such stuff—not in the way that Hayden appeared to—but there had been a time when he had been happy to play along, and perhaps for a while this alternate world had been a shared part of their brains. A dream they’d both been having together.

Years later when he came into possession of Hayden’s papers and journals, Miles was aware that he was probably the only person in the world capable of translating and understanding what Hayden had written. He was the only one who could make sense of those stacks of composition notebooks—that tiny block-letter handwriting; the text and calculations that ran from edge to edge and top to bottom of each page; the manila envelopes full of drawings and doctored photographs; the maps Hayden had torn out of encyclopedias and covered with his geodetic projections; the lines across North America that converged at places like Winnemucca, Nevada, and Kulm, North Dakota, and Inuvik in the Northwest Territories; the theories, increasingly serpentine and involuted, a hodgepodge of crypto-archaeology and numerology, holomorphy and brane cosmology, past-life regression and conspiracy theory paranoia.

My work
, as Hayden had at some point begun to call it.

Miles often tried to remember when Hayden first began to use that term: “My work.” At first it had just been a game the two of them
were playing—and Miles even remembered the day they had started. It was the summer that they turned twelve, and the two of them had been poring over books by Tolkien and Lovecraft. Miles had been particularly fond of the maps that were included in the novels of
The Lord of the Rings
, while Hayden had been more inclined toward the mythologies and mysterious places in Lovecraft—the alien city beneath the Antarctic Mountains, the prehistoric cyclopean cities, the accursed New England towns.

They had found one of those old gold-leaf hard-bound atlases, 25 × 20, on the shelf in the living room with the
World Book Encyclopedia
, and they had loved the feel of it, the sheer weight, which made it feel like it could be some ancient tome. It had been Miles’s idea that they could take some of the maps of North America and turn them into fantasy worlds. Dwarf cities in the mountains. Scorched goblin ruins on the plains. They could invent landmarks and histories and battles and pretend that in the olden days, before the Indians, America had been a realm of great cities and magical elder races. Miles thought it would be fun to make up their own Dungeons and Dragons game with real places and fantasy places intermingled; he had some very specific ideas about how this would develop, but Hayden was already bending over the map with a black ink pen. “Here is where some pyramids are,” Hayden said, pointing to North Dakota, and Miles watched as he drew three triangles, right there on the page of the atlas. In ink!