Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

a myth.
    The hypnotized volunteers had begun to stir, to open their eyes and peek out.
    Wake up! Wake up!
Miles and Hayden’s father used to call out in the mornings when they were young.
Wake, my little sleepyheads
, he would whisper, and he would touch their ears lightly with the soft tips of his fingers.

    In truth, this was not an event any of them—Miles or Hayden or their mother—had actually witnessed, but in Miles’s mind’s eye it was always as if he’d actually watched it. As if it had been filmed, one of those grainy, boxy educational movies the teachers would dust off on a rainy day at Roxboro Middle School.
Martin Luther King. The Reproductive System. Mummies in Egypt
.
    Sometime later, Miles happened to mention this scene, this scene of their father’s death, and his mother had studied him.
    “Miles, what on earth are you talking about?” she said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, very still, though her cigarette was shaking between her fingers. “Is that what Hayden told you?” she said, and she regarded him worriedly. Her feelings about Hayden were beginning to solidify.
    “Your father died in his hotel room, honey,” she said. “A maid found him. He was staying at a Holiday Inn. And it was in Minneapolis, not Indianapolis, if you want to know, and he was attending the convention of the National Guild of Hypnotists. He wasn’t performing.”
    She took a sip from her coffee, then lifted her head sharply as Hayden came into the kitchen in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, just waking up though it was two in the afternoon.
    “Well, well,” she said. “Speak of the devil.”
    Even then, Miles had begun to realize that many of his “memories” were simply stories that Hayden had told him—suggestions that had been planted, seeds around which his brain had begun to build “setting” and “detail” and “action.” Even years later, Miles remembered his father’s last moments most vividly in the version that Hayden had described.
    Looking back, it was as if there had been two different lives that Miles was leading—one narrated by Hayden, the other the life hewas living separately, the life of a more or less normal teenager. While Hayden was delving deeper into the world of the past lives that Mr. Breeze had opened up, while Hayden was becoming more and more isolated, Miles was working on the high school yearbook and playing lacrosse on the junior varsity team at Hawken School, where Marc Spady was director of admissions. While Hayden was going into therapy and staying up all hours of the night, Miles was placidly getting B’s and C’s in his classes and going out to practice for his driving test with Marc Spady, backing through orange cones in a parking lot while Spady stood a few yards from the car calling: “Careful, Miles! Careful!”
    Meanwhile, Hayden’s life was moving in a different direction. His nightmares had grown more and more pronounced—pirates and bloody Civil War battles and that burning shed where Bobby Berman had been playing with matches, where the flames sucked the oxygen from his lungs—and this meant that Hayden rarely slept. Their mother made up a new bedroom for him in the attic, and a special bed with cloth straps for his wrists and ankles just to keep him from sleepwalking, or from hurting himself in his sleep. There had been the night that he busted the kitchen windows with the ham of his palms, blood everywhere. There had been the time that their mother and Marc Spady woke to find him standing over them with a hammer, wavering there, mumbling to himself.
    And so it was for his own safety, for all their safeties, it wasn’t a punishment, but Miles had been surprised at how willingly Hayden had accepted this new arrangement. “Don’t worry about me, Miles,” Hayden had said, though Miles wasn’t sure what, exactly, he was supposed to be worried about. Hayden got video games, cable TV in his new room, and in fact Miles used to be a little jealous of