Await Your Reply (20 page)

“We have no idea what our government is up to,” Jay said, and Ryan nodded uncertainly.

“That’s why I’ve never felt like I’m a criminal,” Jay said. “The people who control this country are the real gangsters. You know that, right? And if you play by their rules, you’re nothing but their slave.”

“Uh-huh,” Ryan said, and tried to read Jay’s expression.

Was he kidding? Was he a bit crazy?

There were times when Ryan was aware that the choices he’d made would come across as incredibly reckless to an outside observer. Why would he leave behind a pair of stable, loving parents, and throw his lot in with someone like Jay? Why would he abandon a good college education to become a petty con man, a professional liar and thief? Why was he so relieved that he would never have to be part of his nice family again, that he would never have to take another class, that he would never have to put together a résumé and go out on a job interview, that he would never have to try
to get married and have a family of his own and participate in the various cyclical joys of middle-class life that Owen had been so attached to?

The truth was, he was actually more like Jay than he was like them; that was what they didn’t ever realize.

Stacey and Owen’s life, he thought, was no more real than the dozens that he had created in the last year, the virtual lives of Matthew Blurton or Kasimir Czernewski or Max Wimberley. Most people, he thought, had identities that were so shallow that you could easily manage a hundred of them at once. Their existence barely grazed the surface of the world.

Of course, if you wanted to, you could inhabit one or two personas that accumulated more weight. If you wanted, Jay said, you could have wives, families even. He said he knew of a guy who was on a city council in Arizona, and who also ran a real estate business in Illinois, and who was also a traveling salesman with a wife and three children in North Dakota.

And then there were the people who could actually be a single, significant individual. You would have to start work on such a persona from very early on, Ryan thought, maybe from childhood. You’d need a certain precise confidence and focus, and all the abstract elements of luck and circumstance would have to arrange themselves around you. Like, for example, becoming a rock star, building a talent and a name for yourself, working your way into the public eye. He had thought about that a lot, he had liked the idea of turning into a well-known, respected singer-songwriter, but he was also aware that he was never going to be quite good enough. He could sense his own limitations, he could intuit the road blocks that were just a ways down the path of that particular ambition, and truthfully, if you knew you were going to probably fail, then what was the point? Why bother? If you could have dozens of lesser lives, didn’t that add up to one big one?

He thought of this again as he maneuvered his way through the airport in Portland, Oregon. The rental car safely abandoned, the prepaid wireless phone crushed under the heel of his shoe and dropped into a trash can, the brand new Max Wimberley driver’s license and plane ticket produced for the security officer at the front of the passenger security line, his backpack and laptop and shoes and belt and wallet placed in plastic tubs and sent along their way through the X-ray machine on the conveyor belt, and then he himself, Max Wimberley, motioned forward, passing through the doorway-shaped metal detector. All without incident. All simple, no problem, nothing to worry about at all. Max Wimberley could move through the world with much more ease and grace than Ryan Schuyler could have ever managed.

“Okay,” he murmured to himself. “Okay.”

He sat there in the boarding area, with a chocolate frozen yogurt shake and a copy of
Guitar
magazine, his backpack in the seat beside him. He made a quick, surreptitious scan of the other people in the seats around him. Youngish, tightly wound businesswoman with a palm pilot. Elderly hand-holding couple. Jocky Asian guy in a Red Sox cap. Etc.

No one who looked at all familiar.

There hadn’t been any hallucinations on this trip, and he supposed that was a sign. The last vestiges of his old life were finally fading away. The transformation was almost complete, he thought, and he remembered those long-ago days when he drove around trying to compose a letter to his parents in his head.

Dear Mom and Dad
, he thought.
I am not the person you thought I was
.

I am not that person
, he thought, and he remembered those Kübler-Ross stages Jay had told him about. This was what acceptance felt like. It wasn’t just that Ryan Schuyler was dead; Ryan Schuyler had never existed in the first place. Ryan Schuyler was just a shell he had been using, maybe even less real than Max Wimberley was.

He looked down at his boarding pass, and he could almost feel the residue of Ryan Schuyler exhaling out of him, a little ghostly bat with a human face, which dissolved into a shower of tiny gnats and dispersed.

“Okay,” he whispered, and closed his eyes briefly. “Okay.”

It was late and warm when he arrived in Detroit Metro, 1:44
A.M.
after a connection in Phoenix, and he walked purposefully through the hushed terminal toward the long-term parking garage, where Jay’s old Econoline van was waiting for him. He stopped at a gas station to buy an energy drink, and then he was on the interstate, feeling very calm, he thought, listening to music. He rolled the windows down and sang for a while.

North of Saginaw, he turned west onto a highway, and then onto a county two-lane, over some railroad tracks, the houses farther and farther apart, his headlights illuminating the tunnels of woods, some trees beginning to bud with spring leaves, some dead bare skeleton branches mummified in a gauze of old tent caterpillar webs, with only occasional squares of human habitation cut out alongside the road. Back in the 1920s, according to Jay, the Purple Gang from Detroit had one of their hideouts up this way.

At last, he turned onto the narrow asphalt lane that would eventually turn into a dirt road that led up to the cabin, deeper into the forest. It was about four in the morning. He saw the lights of the porch shining and as he pulled up he could hear that Jay had his music going, a thump of old-school hip-hop, and he noticed that a couple of Jay’s computers had been tossed out into the gravel driveway. They looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to them.

And in fact, just as Ryan turned off the ignition, Jay came out onto the porch carrying a silver aluminum bat in one hand and a Glock revolver in the other.

“Fucking hell, Ryan,” Jay said, and he tucked his revolver into
the waistband of his pants as Ryan stepped out of the car. “What took you so long?”

In general, Jay didn’t tend to carry guns around, although there were a number of them in the cabin, and Ryan wasn’t sure how to react. He could see that Jay was fairly drunk, fairly stoned, in a mood, and so he took vigilant steps across the gravel as he approached the house.

“Jay?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

He followed Jay onto the screened porch, past the cast-iron woodstove and the cheap lawn furniture, and into the living room of the cabin, where Jay was in the process of dismantling another computer. He was unplugging various wires and USB cords from the back panel of the machine, and when Ryan came in, he paused, running his fingers through his long hair.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Jay said. “I think some asshole has stolen my identity!”

“You’re kidding,” Ryan said. He stood there uncertainly in the doorway, and watched as Jay lugged the disconnected computer off the table and let it fall heavily, like a cement block, to the floor.

“What do you mean, ‘stolen’ your identity?” Ryan said. “Which one?”

Jay looked up, blankly, holding a limp cord as if it were a snake he had just strangled. “Christ,” he said. “I’m not sure. I’m starting to feel concerned that they all might be contaminated.”

“Contaminated?” Ryan said. Despite the fact that Jay was carrying around a revolver and dismantling computers, he still looked relatively calm. He wasn’t as intoxicated as Ryan had thought at first, either, which made things seem more serious. “What do you mean, contaminated?” he said.

“I lost two people today,” Jay said, and he bent down and pulled an old laptop out of a cardboard box that had been shoved under
one of the tables at the back of the living room. “All of my Dave Deagle credit cards have been canceled, so somebody must have gotten into him a few days ago. And I started to get nervous and I started to go through everybody, and it turned out that someone had cleaned out Warren Dixon’s money market account, some fishy electronic transfer—and this happened, like, this morning!”

“You’re joking,” Ryan said. He observed as Jay began to attach the old laptop to various plugs, watched the machine begin to quiver as it booted up.

“I wish I
was
joking,” Jay said, and he stared hard at his screen as it sang out its tiny melody of start-up music. “You better get your ass online and start checking your people. I think we might be under attack.”

Under attack
. It might have sounded silly and melodramatic, out here in the woods, in this room that looked like a cross between a college dorm room and a computer repair store, the thrift store couch surrounded by tables that were cluttered with dozens of computers, beer cans, candy wrappers, printers, fax machines, dirty plates, ashtrays. But Jay had tucked the revolver into the waistband of his jeans, and his mouth pulled back in a grimace as he typed, and so Ryan didn’t say anything.

“You know what?” Jay said. “Why don’t you buy us some plane tickets? See if you can get us some reservations for someplace out of the country. Anyplace that’s third world is fine. Pakistan. Ecuador. Tonga. See what deals you can get.”

“Jay …,” Ryan said, but he sat down at the computer as he had been instructed.

“Don’t worry,” Jay said. “We’re going to be fine. We have to pull together, here, but I think we’re going to be totally fine.”

L
ucy and George Orson were in the old pickup together, on their way to a post office in Crawford, Nebraska. It was the perfect place to submit their passport applications, according to George Orson, though Lucy wasn’t sure why this town was better than another, why they had to drive three hours when there were surely a lot of cruddy post offices closer to home. But she didn’t bother to pursue the matter further. She had a lot on her mind at the moment.

The sense of relief she’d felt when she’d discovered the stacks of cash had begun to dissipate, and now she was aware again of a flutter in her stomach. She had a memory of that roller coaster at the Cedar Point amusement park, back in Ohio. Millennium Force, with its three-hundred-ten-foot drop, the way you would wait there, once you were strapped in, the heavy ticking of the chain as you were pulled slowly up the slope to the top of the hill. That terrible anticipation.

But she was trying to appear calm. She sat subdued in the passenger seat of the old pickup, watching as George Orson shifted
gears, wearing the hideous pink shirt George Orson had bought for her, with its cloud of smiley-faced butterflies printed down the front. This was his idea of what a fifteen-year-old girl might wear—

“It makes you look younger,” he said. “That’s the point.”

“It makes me look retarded,” she said. “Maybe I should act like I’m mentally handicapped?” And she extended her tongue, making a thick cave girl grunt. “Because I can’t think of any fifteen-year-old who would wear this shirt, unless she was in some kind of special education group home situation.”

“Oh, Lucy,” George Orson said. “You look fine. You look the part, that’s all that matters. Once we’re out of the country, you can wear whatever you want.”

And Lucy hadn’t argued any further. She just looked balefully at her reflection in the bedroom mirror: a stranger she’d taken an instant dislike to.

She was particularly upset about the hair. She hadn’t realized that she’d been attached to her original hair color—which was auburn, with some highlights of red—until she had seen what it looked like when she dyed it.

George Orson had been insistent about this—their hair, he said, should be approximately the same color, since they were supposed to be father and daughter—and he came home from his trip to the store with not only the horrible pink butterfly shirt but also a bag full of hair dye.

“I bought six of them,” he said. He put a grocery bag on the kitchen table and drew out a glossy box with a female model on the front of it. “I couldn’t decide which one of them was right.”

The color they’d eventually chosen was called brown umber, and to Lucy it looked like someone had painted her hair with shoe polish.

“You just have to wash it a few times,” George Orson said. “It looks fine now, but it will look completely natural once you’ve worn it for a couple of days.”

“My scalp hurts,” Lucy said. “In a couple of days, I’ll probably be bald.”

And George Orson had put his arm around her shoulder. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he murmured. “You look terrific.”

“Mm,” she said, and regarded herself in the mirror.

She did not look
terrific
, that was certain. But perhaps she looked like a fifteen-year-old girl.

Brooke Catherine Fremden
. A dull, friendless girl, probably pathologically shy. Probably a little like her sister, Patricia.

Patricia used to have anxiety attacks. That was what Lucy was thinking about as she sat in the pickup on the way to Crawford, her heart vibrating oddly in her chest. Patricia would exhibit all kinds of bizarre symptoms when she was having an “attack”: her forehead and arms would feel numb, she would have the sensation of bugs in her hair, she would think her throat was closing up. Very melodramatic, Lucy had thought then, unsympathetically. She remembered standing in the bedroom doorway, impatiently eating a piece of toast, with her book bag over her shoulder as their mother urged Patricia to breathe into a lunch sack. “I’m suffocating!” Patricia gasped, her voice muffled by brown paper. “Please don’t make me go to school!”

It all looked very fake to Lucy, though she wouldn’t have wanted to go to school, either, if she were Patricia. This was during a period when a group of especially mean seventh-grade boys had singled Patricia out for some reason, they had developed a whole elaborate series of comic routines and sketches that involved Patricia as a character, “Miss Patty Stinkbooty,” who they pretended was the host of a children’s program with puppets that they also had a series of goofy voices for. All kinds of idiotic gross boy humor that had to do with Patricia farting, or menstruating, or having cockroaches crawling in her pubic hair. Lucy could remember the three of them during
lunch, Josh and Aaron and Elliot—she still even remembered their stupid names, three nasty, skinny boys doing their routine at their cafeteria table, laughing and chortling until the milk they were drinking came out of their noses.

And Lucy herself had done nothing. Had merely observed stoically as if she were watching some particularly gruesome TV nature program in which jackals killed a baby hippopotamus.

Poor Patricia!
she thought now, and placed her hand to her throat, which felt a bit tight, and her face felt a little numb and tingly.

But she was not going to have an anxiety attack, she told herself.

She was in control of her body, and she refused to let it panic. She placed her hands on her thighs, and let out an even breath, staring fixedly at the glove compartment.

She imagined that all of the money from the safe were there inside that glove compartment. And they weren’t in a pickup. They were in the Maserati, and they weren’t driving through the sand hills of Nebraska, which, as far as she could see, weren’t even sandy, but just an endless lake of rolling hills, covered with thin gray grass and rocks.

They were in the Maserati and they were driving on a road that overlooked the ocean, a Mediterranean blue ocean with some sailboats and yachts floating in it. She closed her eyes and slowly began to fill her lungs with air.

And when she opened her eyes, she felt better, though she was still in a pickup truck, and she was still in Nebraska, where some freaky rock formations were cluttered along the horizon. Were they called mesas? Buttes? They looked like they were from Mars.

“George,” she said, after she had gathered herself for a minute or so. “I was just thinking about the Maserati. What are we going to do with the Maserati?”

He didn’t say anything. He had been mute for an unusually long time, and she thought that was what had brought on her nervousness,
the lack of his conversation, which, despite everything, still might have buoyed her. She wished he would rest his hand on her leg, like he used to do.

“George?” she said. “Are you still alive? Are you receiving transmissions?” And at last he turned to glance at her.

“You need to get out of the habit of calling me George,” George Orson said at last, and his voice wasn’t as soothing as she’d hoped. It was, in fact, a bit austere, which was disappointing.

“I suppose,” she said, “that you want me to call you ‘Dad.’”

“That’s right,” George Orson said. “I guess you could call me ‘Father’ if you prefer.”

“Gross,” Lucy said. “That’s even weirder than calling you ‘Dad.’ Why can’t I just call you David, or whatever?”

And George Orson had looked at her sternly—as if she really were just an impertinent fifteen-year-old.
“Because,
” he said. “Because you are supposed to be my daughter. It’s not respectful. People notice it when a child calls a parent by their first name, especially in a conservative state such as this. And we don’t want people to notice us. We don’t want them to remember us when we leave. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” she said. She kept her hands in her lap, and when she felt her heart palpitate, she let out a breath. “Yes, Dad,” she said. “That makes sense. But I sincerely hope, Dad, that you’re not going to talk to me in that condescending tone all the way to Africa.”

He glanced at her again, and there was a glint of an edge in his eyes, a hint of fury that made her flinch inwardly. She had not seen him truly angry before, and she realized now that she didn’t want to. He would not be a very nice father, she realized. She didn’t even know why, but she intuited it suddenly. He would be cold and demanding and impatient with his children, if he ever had them.

She thought this, even though his expression softened almost immediately.

“Listen,” he said. “Sweetheart, I’m just a touch nervous about this. This is very serious business, now. You have to remember to answer
to ‘Brooke,’ and you have to be sure that you never, ever call me George. It’s very important. I know it’s hard to get used to, but it’s only temporary.”

“I understand,” she said, and she nodded, gazing again at the glove box. Out the window, she could see a rock formation that looked like a volcano, or a giant funnel.

“Do you see that up ahead?” George Orson said—David Fremden said. “That’s called Chimney Rock. It’s a national historic site.”

“Yes,” said Brooke.

It was weird to be a daughter again. Even a pretend one. A long time had passed since she’d thought about her own real father, for months and months she had been valiantly containing those memories, setting up walls and screens, pushing them back when they threatened to materialize in her daily consciousness.

But when she said the word “Dad,” it was more difficult. Her father seemed to genie into her mind’s eye as if decanted, his mild, round earnest face, his thick shoulders and bald head. In life, he had never seemed disappointed by her, and though she didn’t believe in spirits, in an afterlife, she didn’t believe, as Patricia did, that their dead parents hovered over them as angels—

Nevertheless, she felt a twinge when she called George Orson “Dad.” A small stab of guilt, as if her father could know that she’d betrayed him, and for the first time since his death, he seemed to lean over her, palpable, not angry but just sort of hurt, and she was sorry.

She had truly loved him, she guessed.

She knew that, but it wasn’t something she had allowed herself to think about, and so it came as a surprise.

He’d been a low-key presence in their house, without much of an opinion about the raising of girl children, though Lucy believed he was more temperamentally suited to her than her mother was.
He was a private person, like Lucy, with the same cynical sense of humor, and Lucy remembered how they used to sneak off together to see horror movies, which her mother would have forbidden—Patricia was the type of girl who had nightmares over a Halloween mask, or even a movie poster, let alone the actual film.

But Lucy wasn’t scared. She and her father didn’t go to such movies for thrills. Watching horror movies was oddly relaxing, for both Lucy and her father, it was like a kind of music that confirmed the way they felt about the world. A shared understanding, and Lucy never got frightened, not exactly. Occasionally when a monster or killer would pop out, she would put her hand on her father’s arm, she would lean closer to him, and they would exchange a glance. A smile.

They understood each other.

All of this came to her as she and George Orson drove without a word, and she pressed her cheek against the glass of the passenger seat window, watching as a cloud of birds lifted up from a field, pulling up in a plume as they went past. Her thoughts were not clearly articulated in her mind, but she could feel them moving swiftly, gathering.

“What are you thinking about?” George Orson said, and when he spoke, her thoughts scattered, broke up into fragments of memories, the way that the birds separated out of their formation and back into individual birds. “You look as if you’re deep in thought,” George Orson said.

Dad said.

And she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’m feeling anxious.”

“Ah,” he said. He turned his eyes back to the road, touching his index finger lightly to the bridge of his sunglasses. “That’s completely natural.”

He reached over and patted his hand against her thigh, and she accepted this little gesture, though she wasn’t sure if the hand belonged to George Orson or David Fremden.

“It’s difficult at first,” he said. “Making the switch. There’s a bump you have to get past. You get used to one mode and one persona and there can be some cognitive dissonance, when you transfer over. I know exactly what you’re talking about.” He ran his hand along the circumference of the steering wheel, as if he were shaping it, molding it out of clay.

“Anxiety!” he said. “I’ve been there, plenty of times! And, you know, it’s particularly hard during the first one, especially, because you’re so invested in that idea of self. You grew up with that concept—you think there’s a
real you—
and you have some longstanding attachments, people you’ve known, and you start to think about them. People you have to leave behind—”

He sighed, and even grew slightly wistful, maybe thinking about his late mother, or his brother who had drowned, some long-ago family outing on the pontoon when the lake was still full of water.

Or not.

It suddenly seemed so obvious.

What had George Orson said to her?
I’ve been a lot of people. Dozens
.

She had been in an alternate universe for a long time now, she thought, and she had been floating behind George Orson as if in a trance. And then abruptly, as they drove along toward the distant post office, she felt herself awaken. There was a flutter, a lifting, and then her thoughts began to fall into place.

He didn’t have a brother, she thought.

He hadn’t really grown up here, in Nebraska. He had never been a student at Yale; nothing he’d told her had been true.

“God,” she said, and shook her head. “I’m so stupid.”

And he glanced over at her, his eyes attentive and affectionate. “No, no,” he said. “You’re not stupid, honey. What’s the matter?”

“I just realized something,” Lucy said, and she glanced down to where his hand was still resting on her leg. His hand, she would recognize it anywhere, a hand that she had held, that she had put to her lips, a palm that she had traced her fingertips across.