Authors: Dan Chaon
“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.”
That wasn’t true, exactly. He
was
making some sense—to Miles at least. Hayden was talking about the Battle of Whitestone Hill, near Kulm, North Dakota, where Colonel Alfred Sully had destroyed a settlement of Yanktonai Indians in 1863. There were no pyramids, obviously, yet what Hayden was describing was fairly clear, and even quite interesting to Miles.
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?”
“Shut up,” Miles said, and Hayden laughed, low, that wistful, teasing chuckle that Miles found both comforting and galling at the same time.
“You know, Miles,” he said. “I really am a genius. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings before, but let’s face it. I’m a lot smarter than you, so you need to listen to me, okay?”
Okay
, Miles thought. He believed and he didn’t believe, both at the same time. That was the condition of his life. Hayden was a schizophrenic, and he was faking. He was a genius, and he had delusions of grandeur. He was paranoid, and people were out to get him. All of these things were at least partially true at the same time.
In the years since Hayden had gone missing—slipping out of the psychiatric hospital where he had been confined—he had become more and more elusive, harder and harder to recognize as the brother that Miles had once loved so dearly. Eventually, perhaps, that old Hayden would disappear entirely.
If he was, in fact, a schizophrenic, he was one with an unusually practical streak. He covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, changing his name and identity, managing, along the way, to hold down various jobs and appear, to the people he met, convincingly normal. Personable, even.
Miles, on the other hand, had been the one to live a life of nearvagrancy.
He had been the one who must have come across as “feverish” and “disordered” and “obsessive” as he trailed behind Hayden’s various aliases. Too late, he came to Los Angeles, where Hayden had been working as a “residual income stream consultant” named Hayden Nash; too late in Houston, Texas, where he had been employed as a computer services technician for JPMorgan Chase & Co., named Mike Hayden. Too late, Miles arrived in Rolla, Missouri, where Hayden had been masquerading at the university as a graduate student in mathematics named, cruelly, Miles Spady.
Too late, also, at Kulm, North Dakota, not far from the Whitestone Hill Battlefield historical site, not far from the place where Hayden had once imagined
the great pyramids of the Dakota … the Giza, Khufu, and Khafre …
It was February, and fat flakes of snow fell on the windshield, the wipers flapping like big wings as Miles imagined the shape of the pyramids emerging out of the gray blur of snowfall. They weren’t really there, of course, and neither was Hayden, but at the Broken Bell Inn in nearby Napoleon, a motel clerk—a sullen pregnant young woman—frowned over the enlarged grainy photo of Hayden.
“Hmmm,” she said.
From the photo, it would have been difficult to guess that they were identical twins. The picture had been taken years ago, not long after they had turned eighteen, and Miles had gained quite a bit of weight since then. Who knew, maybe Hayden had as well. But even in childhood they had never been truly indistinguishable. There was an aspect of Hayden’s face—brighter, more avid, friendlier—something that people responded to, and an aspect of Miles’s that they didn’t. He could see it in the motel clerk’s expression.
“I think I recognize him,” the girl said. Her eyes flicked from the photo to Miles and then back. “It’s hard to say.”
“Take another look,” Miles said. “It’s not a very good photo. It’s fairly old, so he may have changed over the years. Does it bring to mind anyone you’ve seen?”
He looked down at the photo with her, trying to see it as she might. It was a Christmas photo. It was that horrible winter break, their senior year in high school, that had ended with Hayden institutionalized once again, but in the picture Hayden looked completely sane—a kind-eyed, smiling teenage boy in front of a tinselly tree, his hair a bit shaggy, but no sign whatsoever in his face of the trouble that he was causing—would continue to cause. The girl’s mouth moved slightly as she looked at it, and Miles wondered if perhaps Hayden had kissed her.
“Take your time,” Miles said, firmly, remembering episodes of a police procedural he’d seen on television.
“Are you a policeman?” the girl said. “I’m not sure if we’re supposed to give out that information.”
“I’m a relative,” Miles said reassuringly. “He’s my brother, and he’s been missing. I’m just trying to locate him.”
She examined the photo a little longer, then at last came to a decision.
“His name is Miles,” she said, and she gave him a brief but hooded look, which made him wonder if she was simply being recalcitrant, choosing not to reveal some important tidbit of information she had decided to hold back for no other reason but that she didn’t like him as much as she liked Hayden. “Cheshire was his last name, I think. Miles Cheshire. He seemed like a great guy.”
He remembered how his heart had contracted when she’d said this, when she’d repeated his own name back to him. It
was
just a joke, he thought then—a complicated, nasty prank that Hayden was engaged in.
What am I doing?
he thought.
Why am I doing this?
That had been almost two years ago, that trip to North Dakota. He had packed up his things and driven back home, darkly aware that the whole Kulm adventure had been nothing but an elaborate tease. Hayden had been in one of his mean and jolly manic moods, and when Miles got back to his apartment, there was a book waiting
for him:
No Tears for the General: The Life of Alfred Sully
, and an 8 × 12 manila envelope that contained an article torn from the pages of
The Professional Journal of American Schizophrenia
, a passage highlighted in yellow marker. “If one twin develops schizophrenia, the second twin has a 48% chance of developing it as well, and frequently within one year of the first twin.” There was also an email waiting for him from [email protected], just one more cheerful dig. “Oh, Miles,” it said. “Do you ever wonder what people think of you going around with your posters and crummy old photos and your sad story about your crazy evil twin brother? Do you ever think that people are going to take one look at your raggedy-looking self and they aren’t going to tell you anything? They’ll think:
Why, it’s actually Miles who is the crazy one
. They’ll think:
Maybe he doesn’t even have a twin brother! Maybe he’s just out of his mind!
”
That was it, Miles had thought then, reading the email and blushing with humiliation. He was so furious that he’d thrown the book about Alfred Sully out the window of his apartment, where it landed with an unsatisfying flutter in the parking lot. That was it! he promised himself. They were finished. No more of my time—no more of my heart!
He would forget about Hayden. He would get on with his own life.
He remembered this resolution. It came back to him vividly, even as he sat there in the car, unshaven, unshowered, sorting through the flyers that he’d printed up on simple, durable card stock.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
at the top. Then the photograph of Hayden. Then:
REWARD!
Though that was probably stretching the truth a little.
He angled the rearview mirror and examined himself critically. His eyes. His expression. Did he look like a crazy person?
Was
he a crazy person?
This was the eleventh of June. 68° 18’ N, 133° 29’ W. The sun wouldn’t set again for about five weeks.