Read Online Among the Missing by Dan Chaon - Free Book Online

being fired by the cowardly mayor. The police commissioner always defended me, even when he was exasperated by my unorthodox methods. He respected my integrity.
    I don’t know how many of my childhood years existed in this imaginary city. Already by the age of eight I had become the Detective, and shortly thereafter I began drawing maps of the metropolis. By the time we left Beck, I had a folder six inches thick, full of street guides and architecture and subway schedules. In the real town, I was known as the strange kid who wandered around talking to himself. Old people would find me in their backyard garden and come out and yell at me. Children would see me playing on their swing sets, and when they came out to challenge me, I would run away. I trapped people’s cats and bound their arms and legs, harshly forcing confessions from them. Since no one locked their doors, I went into people’s houses and stole things, which I pretended were clues to the mystery I was trying to solve.
    Everyone real also played a secret role in my city. My parents, for example, were the landlord and his wife, who lived downstairsfrom my modest one-room flat. They were well-meaning but unimaginative people, and I was polite to them. There were a number of comic episodes in which the nosy landlady had to be tricked and defeated. My brother, Mark, was the district attorney, my nemesis. My younger sister, Debbie, was my secretary, Miss Debbie, whom I sometimes loved. I would marry her if I weren’t such a lone wolf.
    My family thought of me as a certain person, a figure I knew well enough to act out on occasion. Now that they are far away, it sometimes hurts to think that we knew so little of one another. Sometimes I think: If no one knows you, then you are no one.
    In the spring of my twelfth year, a man moved into a house at the end of my block. The house had belonged to an old woman who had died and left her home fully furnished but tenantless for years, until her heir had finally gotten around to having the estate liquidated, the old furniture sold, the place cleared out and put up for sale. This had been the house I took cats to, the hideout where I extracted their yowling confessions. Then finally the house was emptied and the man took up residence.
    I first saw the man in what must have been late May. The lilac bush in his front yard was in full bloom, thick with spade-shaped leaves and clusters of perfumed flowers. The man was mowing the lawn as I passed, and I stopped to stare.
    It immediately struck me that there was something familiar about him—the wavy dark hair and gloomy eyes, the round face and dimpled chin. At first I thought he looked like someone I’d seen on TV. And then, as I looked at him, I realized: He lookedlike me! Or rather, he looked like an older version of me—me grown up. As he got closer with his push lawn mower, I was aware that our eyes were the same odd, pale shade of gray, that we had the same map of freckles across the bridge of our nose, the same stubby fingers. He lifted his hand solemnly as he reached the edge of his lawn, and I lifted my opposite hand, so that for a moment we were mirror images of one another. I felt terribly worked up and began to hurry home.
    That night, considering the encounter, I wondered whether the man actually
was
me. I thought about all that I’d heard about time travel, and considered the possibility that my older self had come back for some unknown purpose—perhaps to save me from some mistake I was about to make, or to warn me. Maybe he was fleeing some future disaster, and hoped to change the course of things.
    I suppose this tells you a lot about what I was like as a boy, but these were among the first ideas I considered. I believed wholeheartedly in the notion that time travel would soon be a reality, just as I believed in UFOs and ESP and Bigfoot. I used to worry, in all seriousness, whether humanity would last as long as the dinosaurs had lasted. What if we were just