The Alaska Scam
It started with a miracle. It was a useless miracle, but it still counted as a jaw-dropper, a malfunction of reason and time. That was the turn of the century, the year of miracles. We believed the millennium would come with knives and fangs, ready to carve up our comfort and give us the kick in the ass we would need to embrace the apocalypse. Instead, it came as quietly as a twelve-year old sharing a hotel room with his parents, and we had to spend our death wishes elsewhere. People sounded disappointed—almost offended—that these next thousand years would resemble the last thousand. No one, not even the believers, called it a miracle.
I can burn my own bushes, so I have no patience for miracles. They are to heavenly grace what writing BOOBS on an upside down calculator is to trigonometry. The long-burning Jew oil and the loaves and fishes feels like proof that God can be replaced by a coupon from the Sunday paper. For every leper with his dick reattached, we get four instances of Jesus Christ, Supersaver, saying ‘You bring the water, and we’ll throw in the wine for free!’
And still, there’s the inexplicable, the bending of time and sense. Recounting it, I sound like a child at a magic show, dumbly reciting what I saw, knowing it can’t be true. In the end, when we somehow survive, we’re too busy tallying up the losses to remember we’ve accomplished something monumental. It takes a lot of delusion to be so self-righteous, but, then again, I’m apparently the sort of dumb motherfucker who believes in miracles.
•
Mom’s in love again, this time with a glasses model claiming to be a commercial fisherman in Alaska. It’s the same picture she fell in love with eight months earlier, though then he said he was a bounty hunter in Lincoln, Nebraska. I explained it was a scam, but she didn’t believe people could lie over the computer. A year ago, I would’ve fought it. Now, her mind was scrambled, and her memories had the same lifespan as an open carton of buttermilk.
I was seventeen, and I only stayed at home maybe two nights a week. Each time I returned, I could chart her decline by how big the pile of clothes was she had made in the middle of the floor. She spent her time surrounded by old pictures and yellowing magazines, staring at the computer and waiting to fall in love. Every couple of months, she’d get an email from a series of 1’s and 0’s masquerading as a blandly handsome suitor. I’d hidden her wallet, and so the emails would stop, and the cycle would start again. Better this way, I thought, with the constant seesaw between love and loss. Every day she’d tear off the Band-Aid and stare at her wound, remember the pain and remember the cure, and there’d be no room for stillness, no room for death. It would have to catch her with her back turned. Then again, I prefaced most of the thoughts about my mother by saying, Better this way.
That morning, we woke up to find that Nightwolf had hit our house, the third time that month. Nightwolf was a tagger rampaging all over town that year, treating the Lexington skyline like his personal coloring book. He began in the suburbs and the bus stations, but gradually moved downtown, and now he was hitting the bars near campus. At first, we thought he was a crank, spray-painting his name on anything big enough to take nine block letters, but then he focused on our house. Sometimes he wrote little sayings like “‘You might as well appeal against a thunderstorm as against these terrible times of war’—The Nightwolf” and “If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can’t read this, thank a teacher sarcastically—The Nightwolf.”
It was harmless, if a little immature. Except then our local CBS reported that someone wearing a garbage bag with eyeholes cut out attacked a man and two women. The man was fighting with his girlfriend and her sister, the three of them screaming at each other on the street, when the garbage-bag man attacked. “Stop in the name of Nightwolf,” he yelled. The girlfriend said Nightwolf was trying to help, that he mistakenly thought her boyfriend was beating her. The upshot was that the man and two women kicked the ever-loving shit out of Nightwolf and held him almost until the cops came. But Nightwolf elbowed the girlfriend’s sister in the neck and escaped.
That changed his reputation. Now he was a vigilante and not even a good one. The news didn’t have a picture, but they showed the police sketch of a man with a bag over his head, with one gigantic eyehole and a diagonal slit over the mouth. It felt unnecessary—I know what a bag looks like.
Here’s the thing: I think my brother is Nightwolf. My older brother, Aaron Byers, ran away when he was fifteen, and we never looked for him. I was only seven, but I remember he lived inside his comic books and even went a whole month where he made Mom call him Aquaman. He didn’t read me his comics, but he summed them up, mentioning characters like Bruce Wayne and The Penguin by their first names, as if they were his fraternity brothers. Plus, he wrote on the walls of our room. Both he and Nightwolf had the same G’s where they looked like 8’s.
After Aaron disappeared, I swore I’d never tell Mom another thing about my life. In case I wanted to run as well, I could leave and she’d never find me. But she stopped asking questions. Secrets are no longer secrets if nobody wants to hear them.
“She’s going to sell the house,” I said to my friend Riley Boggs that night, the two of us sitting in her hatchback, scoping out the neighborhood. “She wants to move to Alaska for a fake boyfriend.”
“So let her,” Riley said. “You don’t have to go to Alaska.”
“And live where with no house?”
“You’re a capable guy,” she said. “Surely, you can figure out how to sleep in a bus station.”
Riley’s uncle and older brother were private detectives. When she was thirteen, they brought her along on a few low level jobs, mostly following cheating husbands or deadbeat dads.
When I asked her about the secrets of the trade, she told me how everyone hates to be unseen. It’s better to be followed than ignored, and those are your two options. Riley told me there’s a moment, if you use reflections to check people’s face, where you can see into their souls. Look at the reflective glass for their face a second before they see themselves. It’s the only time they will ever be completely unguarded. The instant they see themselves, and they rearrange their faces to something more suitable. How quickly they make themselves thinner and happier shows you how much they fear reality.
This was my plan. Riley and I would find Nightwolf. If I was right, and it was my brother tagging up the city, we’d stuff him in the car and drag him back to Mom’s house. That would kill this Alaska talk.
“Your mother’s a lunatic and your brother’s a vandal,” Riley told me. “Your family tree must be that kind that smells like semen.”
We were parked on Poplar Lane, between Marimow’s bar and the Rexall in Irishtown. Nightwolf hit one of those buildings every three or four days, so it was a matter of outwaiting him. The first few hours, we saw nothing except for a well-dressed couple heavy-petting in the alley and a homeless person snorting crystal meth. I thought both of those could be leads, but Riley called me a pervert.
“What a goddamn way to spend my time.” I opened an airplane bottle of Seagrams that I’d stolen from Riley’s father and took a sip. “This is a day built by motherfuckers.”
“It’s just a day,” Riley said. “Someone will make us a new one. You get so hung up on your misery, it becomes an obsession. Like you are with Mr. Wolf here.”
“Nightwolf.”
“I don’t think that changes my point.”
“It’s Aaron,” I said. “Every time I think about it, I get more positive. I wish they’d print something about his voice.”
“How old is Aaron now?” Riley asked. “If he’s alive.”
“Twenty-five.”
“Then how do you know what his voice sounds like? You’re imagining him as a thirteen-year old?”
“Fifteen.”
“I’ll tell you what Nightwolf sounds like,” she said. “Like a dickhead impersonating Batman. I remember Aaron, you know. He threw rocks at me when I was seven. Nightwolf sounds like a real asshole, but that alone doesn’t prove he’s your brother.”
“That was a long time ago,” I said.
“If a guy like that threatens to leave you, throw a parade,” she said. “That’s like a serial rapist threatening to go on strike.”
“It’s not exactly the same thing.”
“That’s your comeback?” she said. “It’s not exactly like a rapist strike.”
At that point, it was past midnight, and we were both nodding off. Riley had her eyes closed and I had already stepped one foot inside my dream. Out of instinct, for warmth, I reached across the consul and grabbed her hand. She lay so perfectly still, it had to be calculated.
“You think he’s dead, don’t you?” I said. “Aaron.”
“How can he be dead?” She didn’t open her eyes. “He’s playing superhero with spray-paint, assholing up the city.”’
A little later, I figured she was asleep, so I could risk telling her something. “What if Alaska is a scam?”
There was a long pause before she muttered, “The guy from Alaska?”
“No, all of Alaska. I’ve never seen it. I never knew anyone who saw it. What if the only thing that’s real is what we see. Then with people like Mom, it’s not that they’re crazy, it’s just that they’re seeing another world? It makes as much sense as what the doctors say.”
“You shouldn’t sound like a stoned high school student, when in reality, you’re a stoned high school dropout.” She squeezed my hand. “Alaska is a real place with bears and eagles and Jews and slow-swimming salmon. You could enjoy it if you put your mind to it.”
“Did you say Jews?”
“Yeah, they’re everywhere. Don’t be racist.”
“Alaska’s just not part of the plans,” I said. “Not like this.”
“You know the old expression,” Riley said. “If you want to make God laugh, show him your penis.”
“What?” I opened my eyes. “It’s plans. If you want to make God laugh, show him your plans.”
“Your plans?” she said. “What’s funny about your plans?”
•
I wish I could tell you that we stayed true to our mission, that we searched the unexplored corners of the night, and we did not stop until we found either answers or adventure. In truth, we didn’t move. I couldn’t even bring myself to run my finger across her knuckles. For as much as we tell ourselves to live each moment to the fullest, we don’t mean it. We seek pattern and stillness—even our dreams bring us home.
When we woke up, it was the first minutes of dawn, still more dark than light. Riley dropped me off in front of my house. It was only the first night. We still had time, so we could enjoy this hour where the sun and the night interplay—the dividing line between today and tomorrow. In Alaska, the sun never sets at all.
When I got back to my house, Mom was still in position, hunched over her computer. The room smelled like tuna casserole—it was the last dish she could remember how to make, and she made it almost every night. The other nights, she just boiled water and stood over the steam until it evaporated. “I didn’t think you’re coming home.” The picture of the glasses model was still on her monitor. “You eat today? If a man don’t eat, he’ll keel over on his ear.”
I put my hand on her shoulder.
“Where did you go?” she said. Her skin was the color of the leftover milk at the bottom of a bowl of Froot Loops. “Why’d you leave me for? I knew you’d come back now when it’s too late, but when it mattered, you were gone.”
She didn’t recognize me. It happened in the early morning. She slowly stood up and kissed me on the cheek. Recently, the part of her brain that told her how to finish a kiss had stopped firing, so she showed affection by blowing sour breath on the side of my face. Then she doddered off into the kitchen.
When I was alone, I looked out the window and saw my neighbor practicing his magic show. I could see into his living room when he kept his light on. During the day, he had a job that required a tie, a briefcase, and a thermos, but in the early morning or late at night, he’d put on his showman clothes and go through his routine twice—first in full motion and later at half speed. He looked like a birthday magician, with an ill-fitting suit and a loose red bowtie, like he was an especially confused member of the Nation of Islam, pulling an endless scarf out of his sleeve.
I believed in magic, but only a little. There was a coldness to magic, its way of showing us a new world and then correcting itself as though nothing happened. The sawed-apart woman gets reattached, and we pretend that’s the proper order of the world, as though miracles are mistakes. What if nature worked the same way? What if we saw the chicken hatch, and while its feathers were still wet, the egg resealed around it? It was the way my neighbor worked. He showed us himself transformed into a magician, a believer, then retreated back into his outside skin again. No need for alarm, people, just one more inversion of God—all muscle and mistake—we can see from our living room window.
Willie Davis’ work has appeared in The Guardian, Salon, The Kenyon Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and storySouth. He is the winner of The Willesden Herald Short Story Prize (judged by Zadie Smith) and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize (judged by Amy Hempel). He received a Waiter Scholarship from The Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. He teaches English at Kentucky State University.
