Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
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.
Miles! My brother, my best beloved, my only true friend, I’m sorry that I have been out of touch for so long. I hope you don’t hate me. I can only pray that you understand the grave situation I have found myself in since we last spoke. I have been in deep hiding, very deep, but every day I thought about how much I missed you. It was only my fear for your own safety that kept me from contact. I am fairly certain that your phone lines and email have been contaminated, and in fact even this letter is a great risk. You should be aware that someone may be watching you, and I hate to say this but I think you may actually be in danger. Oh, Miles, I wanted to leave you alone. I know that you are tired of all of this and you want to live your own life, and you deserve that. I’m so sorry. I wanted to give you the gift of being free of me, but unfortunately they know we are connected. I have just lost someone very dear to me, due to my own carelessness, and now my thoughts turn to you with great concern. Please be wary, Miles! Beware of the police, and any government official, FBI, CIA, even local government. Do not have any contact with H&R Block or with anyone representing J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Chase, or Citigroup. Avoid anyone associated with Yale University. Also, I know that you have been in contact with the Matalov family in Cleveland, and all I can tell you is DO NOT TRUST THEM! Do not tell anyone about this letter! I hate to put you in an awkward position, but I urge you to get out of Cleveland as soon as possible, as quietly as possible. Miles, I am so sorry to have involved you in all this, I truly am. I wish I could go back and do things differently, that I could have been a better brother to you. But that chance is gone now, I know, and I fear that I won’t be in this world much longer. Do you remember the Great Tower of Kallupilluk? That may be my final resting place, Miles. You may never hear from me again.
I am, as always, yours, your one true brother,
and I love you so much.
Hayden
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?
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!
“Hayden!” Miles said. “We can’t erase that. We’re going to get in trouble.”
“No, no,” Hayden said coolly. “Don’t be a fag. We’ll just hide it.”
And this was one of those early secrets that they had—the old atlas hidden beneath a stack of board games on a shelf in their bedroom closet.
Miles still had the old atlas, and as he waited there at the edge of the river for the ferry to come, he took it out and paged through it once again. There, on the northern coast of Canada, was the tower that Hayden had drawn, and Miles’s own clumsy attempt at calligraphy: THE IMPATRABLE TOWER OF THE DARK KING!
How ridiculous, he thought. How depressing—that he should still be following the lead of his twelve-year-old self—an adult man! Over the years that he had been looking for Hayden, he had often thought about trying to explain his situation. To the authorities, for example, or to psychiatrists. To people he had become friends with, to girls he had liked. But he always found himself hesitating at the last minute. The details seemed so silly, so unreal and artificial. How could anyone actually believe in such stuff?
“My brother is very troubled.” That was all he ever managed to tell people. “He’s very—ill. Mentally ill.” He didn’t know what else could be said.
When Hayden first started to exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia, back when they were in middle school, Miles didn’t really believe it. It was a put-on, he thought. A prank. It was like the time when that quack guidance counselor decided Hayden was a “genius.” Hayden had thought this was hilarious.
“Geeenious,” he said, drawing the word out in a dreamy, mocking way. This was at the beginning of seventh grade, and it was late at night, they were in their bunk beds in their room, and Hayden’s voice wafted down through the darkness from the top bunk. “Hey, Miles,” he said in that flat, amused voice he had. “Miles, how come I’m a genius and you’re not?”
“I don’t know,” Miles said. He was nonplussed, perhaps a bit hurt by the whole thing, but he just turned his face against his pillow. “It doesn’t matter that much to me,” he said.
“But we’re identical,” Hayden said. “We have the exact same DNA. So how can it even be possible?”
“It’s not genetic, I guess,” Miles had said, glumly, and Hayden had laughed.
“Maybe I’m just better at fooling people than you are,” he said. “The whole idea of IQ is a joke. Did you ever think about that?”
When his mother started bringing in the psychiatrists, Miles thought about that conversation again. It’s a joke, he thought. Knowing Hayden, Miles couldn’t help but think that the therapist their mother consulted seemed awfully gullible. He couldn’t help but think that Hayden’s so-called symptoms came across as melodramatic and showy, and, Miles thought, easy to fake. Their mother had remarried by that time, and Hayden hated their new stepfather, their revised family. Miles couldn’t help but think that Hayden was not above using an elaborate ploy—even to the point of imitating a serious illness—just to stir up trouble, just to hurt their mother, just to amuse himself.
Was he faking it? Miles had never been sure, even as Hayden’s behavior became more erratic and abnormal and secretive. There were times, lots of times, when his “illness” felt more like a performance, an amplified version of the games they had been playing all along. The “symptoms” Hayden was supposedly exhibiting, according to the therapist—“elaborate fantasy worlds,” “feverish obsessions,” “disordered thoughts,” and “hallucinatory perceptual changes”—these were not so much different from the way Hayden usually behaved when they were deeply involved in one of their projects. He was, perhaps, a little more exaggerated and theatrical than usual, Miles thought, a little more extreme than Miles felt comfortable with, but then again there were reasons. Their father’s death, for example. Their mother’s remarriage. Their hated stepfather, Mr. Spady.
When Hayden was institutionalized for the first time, he and Miles were still working on their atlas pretty regularly. It was a particularly complicated section—the great pyramids of North Dakota, and the destruction of the Yanktonai civilization—and Hayden couldn’t stop talking about it. Miles remembered sitting there at dinner one night, his mother and Mr. Spady watching stonily as Hayden pushed the food around on his plate as if arranging armies on a model battlefield. “Alfred Sully,” he was saying, talking in a low, rapid voice as if reciting memorized information before a test. “General Alfred Sully of the United States Army, 1st Minnesota Infantry, 1863. Whitestone Hills, Tah-kah-ha-kuty, and there are the pyramids. Snow is falling on the pyramids and he’s amassing his armies at the foot of the hill. 1863,” he said, and pointed at his boneless chicken breast with his fork. “Khufu,” he said, “the second pyramid. That’s where he first attacked. Alfred Spady, 1863—”
“Hayden,” their mother said, sharply. “That’s enough.” She straightened in her chair, lifting her hand slightly as if she’d considered slapping him, the way you might a hysterical person who is raving. “Hayden! Stop it! You’re not making any sense.”
<
But their mother was unnerved. The things Hayden’s therapist had been reporting had upset her, and later, after Hayden had gone back upstairs and when she and Miles were washing dishes, she spoke in a low voice. “Miles,” she said, “I need to ask you a favor.”
She touched him lightly, and a piece of soapsuds transferred to his forearm, the bubbles slowly disintegrating.
“You need to stop enabling him, Miles,” she said. “I don’t think he would get nearly so stirred up if you didn’t encourage it—”
“I’m not!” Miles said, but he withdrew from her reproachful look. He wiped his fingers over his arm, the wet spot where she had touched him. Was Hayden sick? he wondered. Was he pretending? Miles thought uncomfortably about some of the things Hayden had been saying recently.
“I’m thinking that I might have to eventually kill them,” Hayden had said, his voice in the darkness of the bedroom late at night. “Maybe I’ll just destroy their lives, but they actually might have to die.”
“What are you talking about?” Miles had said—though obviously he knew who Hayden was referring to, and he felt a little frightened; he could feel the pulse of a vein in his wrist and could hear the soft tiptoeing sound of it in his ears. “Man,” he said, “why do you have to say crap like that? You’re making people think you’re crazy. It’s so extreme!”
“Hmmm,” Hayden said. His voice curled sideways through the dark. Floating. Musing. “You know what, Miles?” he said at last. “I know about a lot of stuff that you don’t know about. I have powers. You realize that, don’t you?”