Await Your Reply (26 page)

“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:

“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 before 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?

It would be such a relief, Miles thought, such a comfort to think that they’d finally come to the end of the story. Wasn’t that the gift that Hayden was giving to them, with this display? Wasn’t this Hayden’s version of kindness?

A present for you, Miles. A present for you, too, Lydia. You’ve come at last to the edge of the earth, and now your journey is finished. An ending for you, if you want it.

If only you’ll accept it.

R
yan had been living in Ecuador for almost a year now, and he had begun to get used to the idea that he would probably never see Jay again.

He was getting used to a lot of things.

He was living in the Old Town part of Quito—Centro Histórico—in a small apartment on Calle Espejo, which was a fairly busy pedestrian boulevard, and he had become inured to the sound of the city, its early waking. There was a magazine stand just below his window, so he didn’t need an alarm clock. Before daylight, he would hear the metal clatter as Señor Gamboa Pulido set up his racks and arranged his newspapers, and shortly thereafter voices began to weave their way up into his half consciousness. For a long while, the
sound of Spanish sentences was little more than burbling music, but that had begun to change, too. It had not taken as long as he’d expected before the syllables had begun to solidify into words, before he realized that he himself had begun to think in Spanish.

He was still limited, obviously. Still recognizably American, but he could get by in the market or on the street, he could absorb the patter of the disc jockeys on the radio, he could watch television and understand the news, the plots and dialogue of the soap operas, he could exchange friendly conversation at the coffee shops or Internet cafés, he was aware when people were talking about him—watching curiously as he bent over the keyboard, impressed by how quickly he could type with one hand.

He was becoming accustomed to that, as well.

Sometimes in the morning there were occasionally odd twinges. The ghost of his hand would ache, the palm would itch, the fingers would appear to be flexing. But he was no longer surprised to open his eyes and find that it was gone. He had stopped waking up with the certainty that the hand had come back to him, that it had somehow rematerialized in the middle of the night, sprouted and regenerated from the stump of his wrist.

The keen sense of loss had faded, and these days he found that he stumbled less and less over that absence. He could dress and even tie his shoes without much trouble. He could make toast and coffee, crack an
egg
into a skillet, all one-handed, and some days he wouldn’t even bother to wear his prosthesis.

“Eggs” was one of the words that he sometimes stumbled over.

Huevos? Huecos? Huesos?
Eggs, holes, bones.

For the time being, he was using a myoelectric hook, which fit like a gauntlet over his stump. He could open and close the prongs simply
by flexing the muscles in his forearm, and he was actually pretty adept at using it. Nevertheless, there were days when it was easier—less conspicuous—to simply button a cuff over the bare empty wrist. He didn’t like the interest that the hook aroused in people, the startled glances, the fear from women and children. It was enough to be a gringo, a Yankee, without the added attention.

In the beginning, as he made his way through the Plaza de la Independencia, in the promenade around the winged victory statue, he would find that he attracted notice, despite himself. He remembered Walcott’s admonition:
Never look at people directly in the face!
But nevertheless he found that shoe-shining street urchins would dash behind him, making their shrill incomprehensible cries, and the old country women, in their gray braids and anaco caps, would deepen their frowns as he passed. Quito was a city full of a surprising number of clowns and mimes, and these, too, were drawn to him. A ragged, red-nosed skeleton on stilts; a white-faced zombie in a dusty black suit, walking like a mechanical toy through a crosswalk; an elderly man, with lipstick and green eye shadow and a pink turban, holding up a fistful of tarot cards, calling after him,
“Fortuna! Fortuna!
”

Sometimes it would be a college kid, with a backpack and sandals, army surplus clothes. “Hey, dude! Are you American?”

This happened to him less frequently now. He passed through the plaza without much incident. The old fortune-teller merely lifted his head as Ryan passed, the brothel makeup worn down by perspiration, sad eyes following as Ryan made his way toward the Presidential Palace, the white colonnaded façade, the old eighteenth-century jail cells that had once lined the foot of the palace now opened and transformed into barber shops and clothing stores and fast-food joints.

Above the city, on the mountaintops, a Calvary of antennae and satellite dishes gazed down. And through the gaps in buildings he could occasionally see the great statue on Panecillo Hill, the Virgin of the Apocalypse in her dancing pose, hovering over the valley.

Financially, he was doing okay. Despite the setbacks, he still had a few bank accounts that had not been discovered, and he had begun, very cautiously, to transfer monies from one to the next—a little trickle that was keeping him comfortable. He had set up some trusts that were, in fact, producing dividends, and in the meantime he had managed to find a new name that he had settled into. David Angel Verdugo Cubrero, an Ecuadorian national—with a passport and everything—and when people would look at him oddly, he would shrug. “My mother was an American,” he told them, and he set up a savings account and got David a couple of credit cards, and it seemed to be fine. He appeared to have escaped.

The men who had attacked them, the men who had cut off his hand, had apparently lost his trail.

He guessed that Jay had not been so lucky.

Whatever had happened that night was still blurry in his mind. He still didn’t know what the men had been after, or why they had insisted that Jay wasn’t Jay, or why they had left in such a panic, or how Jay had managed to get free from the chair he was taped to. No matter how many times he tried to put it together in his mind, the events remained stubbornly illogical, random, fragmentary.

By the time they reached the hospital, Ryan had lost a lot of blood, and the color had washed out of his vision. He could remember—he thought he remembered—the automatic sliding doors opening as they stumbled into the entrance of the emergency room. He could remember the surprised, quivering nurse in her balloon-patterned smock, puzzled as Jay thrust the beer cooler at her. “It’s his hand,” Jay said. “You can put it back on, right? You can fix it, right?”

He could remember Jay kissing his hair, whispering thickly, “You’re not going to die; I love you, Son; you’re the only one who
has ever been there for me; I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you; you’re going to be fine—”

“Yes,” Ryan said. “Okay,” he said, and when he closed his eyes, he could hear Jay telling someone, “He fell off a ladder. And his hand—caught on a piece of wire. It happened so quickly.”

Why is he lying?
Ryan thought dreamily.

And then, the next thing he could recall he was in a hospital bed, the stump of his wrist mummy-wrapped and the ghost of his hand throbbing dully, and the young doctor, Doctor Ali, with his black hair pulled back in a ponytail and his weary brown eyes, telling him that there was some unfortunate news, about his hand, the doctor said they had been unable to reattach the extremity; too much time had passed, and as a small hospital they were not equipped—

“Where is it?” Ryan said. That was his first thought. What had they done with his hand?

And the doctor had glanced at the tiny blond nurse who was standing off to the side. “Unfortunately,” the doctor said ruefully, “it’s gone.”

“Where’s my father?” Ryan had asked then. He was comprehending things all right, but nothing was sinking in. His brain felt flat, two-dimensional, and he gazed uncertainly at the door to his hospital room. He could hear the
clip, clip
of someone’s hard-soled shoes against the floor of the hallway outside.

“Where’s my dad?” he said, and again the doctor and nurse exchanged solemn looks.

“Mr. Wimberley,” the doctor said, “do you have a phone number where your father can be reached? Is there someone else that you’d like us to call?”

It wasn’t until Ryan had finally looked in his wallet that he had found the note. The wallet—still with his Max Wimberley driver’s license—was stuffed with money. Fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills, some twenties, some ones, and there was also a small folded piece of paper, Jay’s neat, tiny block-letter handwriting:

When he’d first arrived in Quito, he kept expecting that Jay would arrive any day. He would scope through the pedestrians on the plaza and the cobblestone sidewalks, he would peer into the narrow cluttered shops, he would sit in various Internet cafés and type Jay’s names into search engines, all the names that he could remember Jay ever using. He’d check through every email account he’d ever had, and then he’d double-check.

He didn’t want to think that Jay was dead, though maybe it was easier than imagining that Jay just wasn’t coming.

That Jay had abandoned him.

That Jay wasn’t even Jay, but just some—what?—another avatar?

In those first few months, he would stand at the balcony of his second-floor apartment, listening to the peddler girls who stood outside the Teatro Bolivar, just down the block. Beautiful, sorrowful Otavaleñas, sisters perhaps, twins, with their black braided hair and white peasant blouses and red shawls, holding their baskets of strawberries or lima beans or flowers, chanting “One dollar, one dollar, one dollar, one dollar.” At first he’d thought the girls were singing. Their voices were so sweet and musical and yearning, twined together in counterpoint, sometimes harmonizing: “One dollar, one dollar, one dollar.” As if their hearts had been broken.

Now almost a year had passed, and he didn’t think of Jay quite so much. Not quite so often.

In the afternoon, he’d walk down to Calle Flores to an Internet café that he liked. It was just past the coral-colored stucco walls of the Hotel Viena Internacional, where the American and European students could stay for cheap, and the Ecuadorian businessmen
could spend a few hours with a prostitute. Just down the hill, where the narrow side street opened abruptly into a panorama view of the eastern mountains, the stacks and stacks of houses were set in cornrow circles beneath the thin blue sky.

Here. Just an open doorway with a hand-painted sign:
INTERNET
, and a set of steep, crooked stairs. A cramped back room with rows of ancient, dirty computers.

The proprietor was an old American. Raines Davis, he was called, perhaps seventy years old, who sat behind the counter, slowly filling an ashtray with cigarette butts. His thick white hair had a yellowish tinge, as if stained with smoke.

Often the place was full of students, all hunched over their keyboards, eyes fixed on the box of the monitor, but sometimes in the late afternoon it was more or less empty, and that was Ryan’s favorite time, very tranquil, very private, the thin cirrus of cigarette smoke hanging just below the ceiling. Yes, sometimes he would type in “Ryan Schuyler,” just to see if anything came up; he would look at satellite photos of Council Bluffs, it was so sophisticated these days that you could see his house, you could see Stacey’s car in the driveway, pulling out, on her way to work, he guessed.

He had even wondered what would happen if he contacted them, if he let them know he was alive after all. Would that be kind or cruel, he wondered. Would you really want the dead to come back to life again, after you’d spent so much energy trying to put the world back in order? He wasn’t sure—didn’t know who to ask—though he could imagine bringing the question up to Mr. Davis someday, when they knew each other better.

Mr. Davis wasn’t a talkative person, but they would converse from time to time. He was an old military man, Mr. Davis. A true expatriate. He had grown up in Idaho, but had lived in Quito for thirty years now, and he didn’t expect to ever return to America again. He didn’t even think about it anymore, he said.

And Ryan had nodded.

He imagined there must be a point when you stopped being a
visitor. After the tourists had flown off, after the exchange students had stopped playing native, after the idea of “back home” had started to feel fictional.

How far away, the child he’d been to Stacey and Owen Schuyler. How distant, the gawky, eager boyfriend he’d been to Pixie, the roommate he’d been to Walcott, the son he’d been to Jay.

Was this any less real than the small, transient selves he’d discarded? Kasimir Czernewski, Matthew Blurton, Max Wimberley.

At a certain point, you must be able to slip loose. At a certain point, you found that you had been set free.

You could be anyone, he thought.

You could be anyone.