Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon Read Free Book Online

the young man said, and typed again. “Does she have amnesia?” he said.
    “Oh, no,” the woman said. “She remembers things okay. She recognizes the folks that she wants to, at least!”
    They both laughed at this, and Ryan found himself smiling with them. And then—at least partly because he was stupidly smiling at an eavesdropped conversation—he felt lonely.
    Back home in Iowa, where he’d grown up, there were practically no black people to speak of, and he’d noticed since coming eastthat it seemed like black people were always nice to one another, that there was a camaraderie. Maybe that was a stereotype, but still he felt an unexpected sense of longing as the man and woman chuckled. He had an idea about ease, warmth, that private sense of connection. Is that what it was really like? He wondered.
    Lately, he had been thinking about contacting his parents, and there was a letter he had in his mind.
“Dear Mom & Dad,
” obviously.
    “Dear Mom & Dad, I’m sorry that I haven’t been in touch in so long, and I thought I should let you know that I’m okay. I’m in Michigan—
”
    And then, right, they would want to know, or they would figure out.
“I’m in Michigan with Uncle Jay, and I know that he is my biological father, so I guess that is one thing we can stop pretending about—
”
    Which started already to sound hostile.
“I’m in Michigan with Uncle Jay. Staying here for a while until I get some things figured out for myself. I’m writing some songs, earning some money. Uncle Jay has a business venture that I’ve been helping him out with—
”
    Bad idea to even mention “business venture.” It came off immediately as shady.
Jay?
they would think. What was the nature of this “business”? Immediately they would think drugs or something illegal, and he had already promised Jay that he wasn’t going to tell anyone.
    “Swear to God, Ryan,” Jay had said as they sat on the couch in the cabin in Michigan, playing video games together. “I’m serious. You’ve got to swear that you’re not going to breathe a word of any of this.”
    “You can trust me,” Ryan said. “Who am I going to tell?”
    “Anybody,
” Jay said. “Because this is extremely, extremely serious stuff. Serious people could become involved, if you know what I mean.”
    “Jay,” Ryan said, “I understand. Really.”
    “I hope you do, buddy,” Jay said, and Ryan nodded earnestly, though truthfully he didn’t understand much about the project they were engaged in.
    He knew that it was illegal, obviously, a scam of some sort, but the actual purpose was elusive. One day he’d be Matthew P. Blurton and he’d rent a car in Cleveland and then drive the car to Milwaukee and return it at the airport, and then he’d board a plane in Milwaukee using an ID card for Kasimir Czernewski, age twenty-two, and fly to Detroit, and then later, online, he’d transfer bank funds in the amount of four hundred dollars from Czernewski’s bank account in Milwaukee to the account of Frederick Murrah, fifty, of West Deer Township, Pennsylvania. Was it simply a very complex shell game, one person sliding into the next person and so on down the line? He assumed that there must be financial gain involved somehow, but if so he hadn’t seen evidence of it yet. He and Jay lived in basically a hut in the woods, a little hunting lodge, lots of top-notch computer equipment but very little else of value as far as he could tell.
    But Jay looked so serious and stern. He had straight shoulder-length hair, surfer hair, Ryan thought, black with a few threads of early gray running through it, and the droopy army surplus clothes of a teenage runaway. It was hard to imagine him projecting an attitude that wasn’t mellow, but suddenly he was startlingly fierce.
    “Swear to God, Ryan,” Jay said. “I’m serious,” he said, and Ryan nodded.
    “Jay, trust me,” Ryan said. “You trust me, don’t you?”
    And Jay said, “Sure I do. You’re my