Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon Read Free Book Online Page B

but you can make your own decision about that. I just thought—it seemed wrong to me. You’re a man, you’re an adult, I feel like you have a right to know.”
    “I appreciate that,” Ryan said.
    But once he’d spent a few hours sleeping on and off, once he’d turned over the facts in his mind a few hundred times, he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with the information. He sat up inbed and fingered the edges of his blankets. He could imagine his parents—his “parents,” Stacey and Owen Schuyler, asleep, back in the house in Council Bluffs, and he could picture his own room down the hall from theirs, the books still on their shelves and his summer clothes still in the closet and his turtle, Veronica, sitting on her rock underneath her heat lamp, all of it like a museum of his childhood. Maybe his parents didn’t even think of themselves as fakes, maybe most of the time they didn’t even remember that the world they had created was utterly false at its core.
    The more he thought about it, the more everything began to feel like a sham. It wasn’t just his own faux family, it was the “family structure” in general. It was the social fabric itself, which was like a stage play that everyone was engaged in. Yes, he saw now what his history teacher meant when she talked about “constructs,” “tissues of signs,” “lacunae.” Sitting there in his bed, he was aware of the other rooms, rows and stacks of them, the other students, all of them housed here waiting to be sorted and processed into jobs and sent down their various paths. He was aware of the other teenage boys who had slept in this very room, decades and decades of them, the dormitory like a boxcar being filled and refilled, year after year, and briefly he could have risen up out of his body, out of time, and watched the generic stream of them entering and exiting and being replaced.
    He got out of bed and took his towel off the bedpost and figured he might as well go down the hall to the communal bathroom and shower, and he knew he had to get a grip on himself and study for his chemistry test, he was earning a D, C-at best,
Oh God
, he thought—
    And maybe it was at that moment that he broke loose from his life. His “life”: it felt suddenly so abstract and tenuous.
    He had originally just gone out for coffee. It was by that time around seven-thirty in the morning, but the campus was still sleepy. From the sidewalk he could hear the music students in their carrels, the scales and warm-up exercises mingling dissonantly, clarinet,cello, trumpet, bassoon, winding around one another, and it felt like a fitting sound track, like the music you hear in a movie when the character is about to have a mental breakdown and they clutch their forehead in anguish.
    He did not clutch his forehead in anguish, but he did think, once again—
    My whole life is a lie!
    There were many things to be troubled by in this situation, many things to feel angry and betrayed about, but the one that for some reason Ryan felt most keenly was the death of his biological mother.
My God!
he thought.
Suicide. She
killed
herself!
He felt the tragedy of it wash over him, though now it was past. Still, it outraged him that Stacey and Owen hadn’t cared whether or not he knew about this. That they found out about it and tsked, and he was probably in the living room in front of the television, three years old, watching some trite and educational program, and they might have shaken their heads and thought what a favor they had done for him, raising him as their own, all the money and effort they’d put into turning him into the kind of kid who could get a scholarship to Northwestern University, into the type of person who could take his place in the top tier, how hard they had worked to mold him. But there was no indication they ever
contemplated
revealing the truth about his parentage, no indication that they realized that this was
important
, no sense that they understood how