Await Your Reply (8 page)

“The thing I’m confused about,” Miles told Hayden—they had been talking now for hours about past lives and pirates, and even though Miles was exhausted, he was trying to be good-natured and reasonable. “I’m a little puzzled,” Miles said, “about this guy. Mr. Breeze. Because I honestly don’t remember you ever telling me anything about him before, and it seems like you would’ve.”

“Oh, I told you about him,” Hayden said. “Most definitely.”

This was a few weeks after he had begun to obsess about the whole “hypnotist in the kitchen” story. Miles was at a rest area off of
the interstate, with his window rolled down, talking on a drive-up pay phone. It was probably about two in the morning. A map of the United States was spread out across the steering wheel.

Hayden was saying, “… maybe the problem is that you
repressed
so much about our childhood. Do you ever consider that?”

“Well,” Miles said. He took a sip from a bottle of water.

“It’s not as if this hasn’t been an ongoing ordeal in my life,” Hayden said. “Remember Bobby Berman? Remember Amos Murley?”

“Yes,” Miles said—and it was true, these were familiar names from their childhood, familiar people from Hayden’s nightmares. Bobby Berman was the boy who liked to play with matches, and who had burned to death in a toolshed behind his house; Amos Murley was the teenager who had been drafted into the Union Army during the Civil War, the one who died while dragging himself across a battlefield, his legs blown off below the knee. Their mother used to call them Hayden’s “imaginary characters.”

“Oh, Hayden,” she would say, with exasperation. “Why can’t you make up stories about
happy
people? Why does everything have to be so morbid?”

And Hayden would blush, shrugging resentfully. He said nothing. It wasn’t until much later that Hayden began to claim these were his own past lives he was dreaming about. That these “characters” were, in fact, people he had actually
been
. That the terrible life he was leading with their family was just one of many terrible lives he had led.

But it wasn’t until their father died that Hayden had begun to understand the true nature of his affliction.

At least, that was the version of events he was currently espousing. It wasn’t until their father was gone and their mother had remarried and the hateful Marc Spady was living with them in their house. Only then did he begin to grasp the extent of what Mr. Breeze had “opened up” inside him.

“That’s the thing I wasn’t prepared for, you see,” Hayden said. “I came to realize that it wasn’t just me
—it was everyone.
”

Steadily, he had begun to comprehend, Hayden said. He had become aware that he was not the only person who had these past lives.
Obviously not!
Littl
e
by little, in crowds, in restaurants, in faces glimpsed on television, in small gestures of schoolmates and relatives—little by little he had begun to feel vague glimmerings of recognition. An eye, shifting sidelong—the fingers of a cashier, brushing his palm—the discolored front tooth of their geometry teacher—the voice of their stepfather, Marc Spady, which was, Hayden said, the exact gravelly voice of the pirate Bill McGregor.

When their father died, Hayden began to see connections in every face. Where had he come across that one before? In what life? No doubt nearly every soul had encountered the others in one permutation or another, all of them interconnected, entangled, their pathways crisscrossing backward into prehistory, into space and infinity like some terrible mathematical formula.

Clearly it had to do with their father’s death, Miles thought. Before that, Hayden was just an overimaginative boy who had nightmares, and Mr. Breeze, if he existed, was just another of their father’s unusual acquaintances, drunk at a party.

“Oh, spare me,” Hayden said, when Miles tried to suggest this. “How facile!” he said. “Is that what
Mom
told you? That I became a so-called schizophrenic because I couldn’t handle Dad’s death? I know you don’t like me to cast aspersions on your intelligence, but
really
. That’s so completely simpleminded.”

“Well,” Miles said. He didn’t want to get into an argument about it, but it had been evident that Hayden had undergone some private transformation in the months following their father’s death. That was when they were thirteen, a year after they had started working on the atlas together, and Hayden grew moodier and moodier, angrier, more withdrawn. It had seemed to Miles that Hayden was more susceptible to certain kinds of mementos and reminders of the dead—all the insignificant objects everywhere in
the house, now glowing with their father’s absence, which Hayden had begun to accumulate. Here: a gum wrapper that their father had distractedly folded into an origami bird and left on his dresser among some loose change. Here: a pencil with his tooth marks, an unmatched sock, an appointment card from the dentist.

His voice on the answering machine, which they’d forgotten to change until one day Hayden called home and their father’s voice answered after the phone rang and rang:

“Hello. You’ve reached the Cheshire residence …”

Which was plainly a recording; you could tell after only a second.

But for that second! For that second, a person’s heart might leap up, a person might imagine that it had all been a bad dream, that some miracle had happened.

“Dad?” Hayden said, catching his breath.

He and Miles were at the skating rink in the rec center, calling for their mother to come and pick them up, and Miles stood beside Hayden as he spoke into the pay phone.

“Dad?” And Miles could see the brief light of supernatural hopefulness flicker across Hayden’s face before it closed down, a light of surprised joy that shrank almost immediately as it dawned on him: he had been fooled. Their father was still dead, more dead than he had been before.

Miles could sense all this, all this passed through Miles’s mind as if by telepathy, he experienced Hayden’s emotions in the old way that he used to when they were little, when Miles would cry out in pain when Hayden’s finger was slammed in a door, when Miles would laugh at a joke before Hayden even told it, when he knew the look on Hayden’s face even when they weren’t in the same room.

But things weren’t like that anymore.

Hayden’s expression pinched—he glared abruptly, as if Miles’s empathy were a disgusting, groping touch. As if, having witnessed Hayden’s display of naked eagerness, Miles ought now to be punished. “Shut up, moron,” Hayden said, even though Miles had said
nothing, and Hayden turned away, not even willing to look Miles in the eye.

Resolved: never to be happy again.

Was it naïve to think that before their father died they had all been pretty content? Miles had thought about this as he drove down the interstate, as he passed through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska—Los Angeles still thousands of miles distant.

Things had been nice
, Miles thought.
Hadn’t they?

When they were growing up, Cleveland was fairly idyllic, to Miles at least. This was where their parents had settled early in their marriage, on the east side of town, a comfortable old three-story house on a street lined with big silver maples. It was a pleasantly run-down middle-class neighborhood, a little to the north of the mansions on Fairmount Boulevard, a little to the south of the slums on the other side of Mayfield Road, and Miles remembered thinking that this wasn’t such a bad position to be in. Growing up, he and Hayden had friends who were both appreciably poorer and appreciably richer than they, and their father told them that they should pay attention to the homes and families of their peers. “Learn what it is like in another life,” he said. “Think hard about it, boys. People
choose
their lives; that’s what I want you to remember. And what life will you choose for yourselves?”

It was clear that their father himself had thought frequently about this question. He was the proprietor of what he called a “talent agency,” though in fact he was all of the employees. Sometimes he worked at children’s birthday parties and the grand openings of shopping malls as Periwinkle Clown, making balloon animals and juggling and face-painting and leading sing-alongs and so forth. Sometimes he was the Amazing Cheshire, a magician. (“Amaze Your Clients and Guests with Magical Fun! Trade Shows! Corporate Events! Special Occasions!”) Still other times he was known as Dr.
Larry Cheshire, certified hypnotist, smoking-cessation specialist, and motivational speaker; or Lawrence Cheshire, Ph.D., hypnotherapist.

Miles and Hayden had never in their lives seen him perform as any of these characters, though they would occasionally come across photos of him in his various guises laying around the house, even snippets of promotional material he was working on: “Periwinkle Clown and his puppet friends invite you to a magical hour of storytelling …” or “Cheshire Hypnotics Workshops will help you discover the powers of your own mind …”

Occasionally, they would hear him on the phone, sitting at the kitchen table with his large black appointment book, pausing to bite thoughtfully on his pencil. They found it hilarious that he would take on different voices depending on whom he was talking to. An earnest, boyish dopiness when he was Periwinkle; a sleek managerial smoothness when he was Dr. Larry Cheshire; a baritone stage-trained plumminess when he was speaking for the Amazing Cheshire; a somewhat affectless, calming monotone when he was Lawrence Cheshire, Ph.D.

They would hear such stuff, but it felt disconnected from the man they knew, who was so utterly unlike the various costumed folks in makeup and hats and toupees that he wore over the bald head they were used to at home. Miles didn’t remember him doing anything that could have been identified as “theatrical,” and in fact he was perhaps even unusually subdued and wistful in his everyday life. Miles supposed it was simply that when he came home from work, he was tired of performing for people.

But he was a good dad, nevertheless. Attentive in his restrained way.

They played cards together, Miles and Hayden and their father, board games, computer games. They went camping a few times, and on nature walks. When they were small, Miles and Hayden were particularly fond of the world of insects, which their father would
help them find by turning over large rocks and logs. Identifying the creatures, reciting from his paperback Peterson guide.

He liked to read aloud.
Goodnight Moon
was the first book Miles recalled.
The Return of the King was
the last, finished only a week or so before their father’s death.

Even though they were almost thirteen, they liked to sleep next to him when he took his afternoon naps. The three of them, Miles and Hayden and their father, lined up on the king-size bed in their stocking feet, Hayden on one side, Miles on the other, the dog nestled down at the foot of the bed, curled up with her muzzle resting on her tail. Their mother had photographs of them all sleeping this way. Sometimes she would just stand in the doorway, watching. She loved how peaceful they all were, she said. Her boys. She might’ve been a good mother, Miles thought, if their father had lived.

Their father had been fifty-three years old when he died. It was completely unexpected, of course, though as it turned out his blood pressure had been extremely high and he hadn’t been taking care of his body very well. He had been a regular, if secretive, smoker, and he was overweight and hadn’t bothered to watch what he ate. “Cholesterol through the roof,” their mother had murmured to people at the funeral, and Miles could sense that she was making her way through thickets, mazes of regret and possible preventative measures that might have been taken, and alternate futures, now fruitless but still occupying her thoughts. “I told him I was concerned,” she said to people, earnestly, urgently, as if she expected them to blame her. “I spoke to him about it.”

In the weeks that followed, Miles spent a lot of time thinking about this. His death. Had they failed his father, had they been inattentive, could they have acted in a way that might have changed the course of events? He would close his eyes and try to imagine what a “massive heart attack” would feel like. Did you just go blank, he
wondered, did your mind just empty out, like water spilled out of a cup?

He tried to picture what it might have been like, tried to picture his father standing in front of the audience when the first twinges came upon him. A pain in his left arm, maybe. A tightening in his chest.
Heartburn
, he probably thought.
Exhaustion
. Miles imagined him putting his hands against his toupee, pressing it down tightly with both palms.

Miles thought he knew the basic facts of what had happened. He remembered talking to Hayden about it on the night their father had died.

Their father had been out of town for a weekend event in Indianapolis and he’d died during one of his hypnotism shows.

It would have made a cute news item, Hayden said. One of those jokey, heavily ironic human interest pieces you might read about in
News of the Weird
.

The performance was taking place in a conference room in an office complex on the outskirts of the city; it was a “team-building” exercise for the people in the company, probably some bright idea that a manager in human resources had.
Neat!
they thought. Their father probably convinced them with a pitch about “helping people discover the power of their own mind,” and he took volunteers from among the group, people who were bravely willing to be hypnotized, and he brought them up to the front of the room and had them sit down in folding chairs while their coworkers watched, and everyone waited expectantly as one by one their father put each of the volunteers into their own individual trances.

Everyone was delighted. What fun! The coworkers in the audience were tittering to see their colleagues actually hypnotized, deeply relaxed, deeply vulnerable, right there in chairs in front of everyone.

Their father was perspiring a little as he spoke. He pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead, then the back of his neck.