Secret Lives (2 page)

Our analysis of all of these elements (and many more) has resulted in only one conclusion: the perfect secret life for you will consist of serving as a private mascot for a wealthy utilities family in Thomasville, Georgia. We are sending you your mascot costume under separate cover.

We will also be sending you a plane ticket to Atlanta, Georgia, where you will be greeted by Jed Perkins, the youngest son of the patriarch of the family, Jedediah Perkins, and transported in the back of a pickup truck to the ancestral residence. Once there, you will wear your mascot costume at all times, except when dining in your private shed in the back of the mansion. Your job will be to keep the Perkins family in high spirits with your antics and gambols. You may not speak at any time, but physical comedy is appreciated.

It has cost us much in political and other capital to procure this opportunity for you. Therefore, this “secret life” is non-negotiable and severe penalties may result if you do not immediately report for duty. After a period of ninety days, one of our operatives, also wearing a personal mascot outfit, will contact you. If you are not experiencing the spiritual and emotional growth we believe this secret life will bring out in you, you will have the option to take up a secondary secret life that we are holding in reserve. (Although we do not believe you will find it as much to your liking.)

Thank you—and good luck!

Sincerely,

Dr. Ronald Simpkin

Institute for Further Studies

P.S. From experience, I should let you know that the mascot outfit tends to get hot in the summer and cold in the winter. You will derive satisfaction from the fine workmanship of the authentic capybara hide mixed with alpaca that forms the outer surface. For several decades, this outfit figured prominently in our Masonic rituals down at the lodge, so it has some history to it.

For several minutes, Hiess stood there, looking at the letter he had just read. Then he recoiled in horror, crumpled up the letter, and tossed it in a nearby trash bin. It was clear now, he thought, that he had no void inside of him. It must have been some recurring bit of indigestion. It must just have been something he’d eaten. It was all gone now. He didn’t need a secret life. He never would need a secret life again. Still, as he walked back inside his home, a part of him looked forward to receiving the costume, which he would put to good use, although not as Dr. Simpkin might have wished . . .

TROY KNUTSON

Troy Knutson is a pharmacist who not only loves to impersonate cartoon voices but also experiences, by his own estimation at least, a high rate of success at this endeavor. Despite this, Troy has felt unfulfilled of late and, after trying several less radical approaches (including kung fu classes, followed by yoga), hired a private detective. “What do you want me to do?” the private eye asked. “I want you to follow me.” “Follow you?” “Yeah—follow me.” “And do what?” “Make a note of everything you find out.” “Interesting,” the detective said. “Wouldn’t it just be easier if I interrogated you about you?” “Maybe,” Troy said, “but I don’t want to do it that way.” “Okay, you’re the boss,” said the detective. “Can I bug your house? It’ll cost extra. It’d be easier if you just let me in and let me listen from a corner or something.” “No,” said Troy. “Just bug the house.” “Fair enough,” the detective said, and proceeded to do just as his client desired.

The detective examined Troy Knutson’s financial records, the interior of his home, and, during the course of one particularly eventful night, the contents of his trash. He followed Knutson everywhere and spent many hours looking through the resulting photographs with a magnifying glass. He also bugged his phone and recorded his conversations. When he was done, he came back to Knutson and said, “I’ve done what you asked. Now what?” “Well, what did you find out?” Knutson asked. “I found out you’ve got a regular routine. I found out your credit rating is pretty decent. And I found out you’ve got no secrets to hide.” “Very good,” Troy said. “Now, show me how you went about finding out what you found out.” “That’ll cost extra,” the detective said. “That’s good to know,” Troy said. “Show me.”

So the detective showed Troy how he had done what he had done—tailing techniques, how to get his credit report, all of the tricks of the trade. At the end of it all, the detective took a sip of his scotch (they had retired to a local bar for the last part of the debriefing), and said, “Satisfied now, Mr. Knutson? I have been very thorough and professional. If you were hoping to find out something about yourself that you didn’t know, I’m afraid you are going to be disappointed. You have no secret life—secret from anyone else, or from yourself.” Troy smiled. “Oh, but now I do.” “Is that so?” the detective said. “You’ve kept something hidden?” “No,” Troy said, “but now I know that I want to be a detective.” The detective stared at Troy for a second, then sighed. “I should have known. I came into the business in a similar way. You start with self-disclosure and before you know it, you want in on everybody’s secrets . . . Mr. Knutson, you don’t
really
want a secret life. You just want a window into the secret lives of
others
. And that’s more of a burden than people think. It will change you in so many ways, and some of them aren’t good ways.” The detective took another swig of scotch, gave Troy a penetrating stare. “Are you sure you’re ready for that?” he asked. And Troy said, in a perfect imitation of Roger Rabbit, “I was born ready, detective.”

LYNN MINNEMAN

Lynn Minneman is a stamp collector and a retired survey statistician. For a long time, he had been content with his life and with his friends and his family. However, one day he received a set of Lewis & Clarke commemorative stamps from the post office that changed his contentment to restlessness. In examining the stamp set through the clear protective envelope, he noticed a small, triangular stamp trapped in a corner, the illustrated side facing away. The back of the stamp had yellow discoloration, indicating some age, the glue having melted.

Generally, Minneman didn’t like to open up his stamp sets right away. He liked to appreciate them from afar, and then, only later, examine them in detail. But the little triangular stamp intrigued him. He wanted to see what was on the front of it, for one thing. As a child, one of his greatest satisfactions with stamp collecting had been the exotic quality of it, the images hailing from far-off lands. Minneman has long forgotten this, but his mother had once given him a dozen stamps from “Nippon,” all with delicate traceries of cherry blossoms and storks and other images that conveyed an
otherness
he treasured. At the time, he had not realized “Nippon” meant “Japan,” and so the country itself had been a mystery, a place not found on the globe, waiting to be discovered.

A flicker of this memory sparked across his vision as he took a pair of tweezers and extracted the odd stamp from the envelope. He turned it over and set it down on the kitchen table, on top of the envelope. It was an etching, very carefully rendered, of a mountain range, with a river winding through the foreground. Whoever had created the stamp had managed to mix monochromatic colors—greens, blues, purples, and browns—into a clever tapestry of texture. Even though it was heavily pixilated, it conveyed authenticity, reality. For a moment, the river even seemed to move, and Minneman drew in his breath. Across the three corners of the stamp lay the words “Republic of Sonoria.”

Minneman raised an eyebrow.
Sonoria?
In all his days of stamp collecting, he didn’t think he’d ever heard of the Republic of Sonoria. It sounded faintly Eastern European, and it was true he still had trouble keeping track of all the former Soviet provinces that had become independent, but it still sounded false to him. He stared at the picture on the stamp one more time, shivered a little as if a breeze blew across the grassy plains surrounding the river. Something about the image not only startled him, it stirred some deeply buried recognition.

Carefully, as if the precision were important, he picked up the stamp using the tweezers and placed it back in the envelope, in the same position, with the front facing inward. Then he walked over to the map of the world framed in his living room, and he looked for Sonoria. First, he tried Eastern Europe, then Central Asia, then randomly, letting his gaze linger where it liked, and then systematically, starting from the left and traveling down and then up, down then up. No Sonoria. No Sonoria in Asia, Europe, South America. No island named Sonoria. No isthmus. No province. No state. No city. Nothing. Unless it was so small, it wouldn’t show up on a map?

He shook his head. Well, it was probably a fake stamp. A postal employee had stuck it in there as a joke. Why should he waste his time with it?

But that night, as he tried to get to sleep, he recalled the weathered quality of the stamp, the yellowish stain on the back, the high quality of the image on the front, and something about it worried at him, made him toss and turn. When he did finally get to sleep, he dreamed he stood in front of a huge rendering of the stamp that blotted out the sky. The image in the stamp was composed of huge dots, but the dots began to bleed together, and then swirled into a photograph that became a living, moving scene, and the edges of the stamp were just a portal. On the plains, strange animals were moving. In the river, birds dove for fish. The mountains in the distance were wreathed with cloud. A smell came to him, of mint and chocolate and fresh days far from the choking, clogging pollution of cities. Then the stars came up in a sky of purest black and blotted it all out, and he woke gasping for breath, afraid, so afraid, that he might forget this glimpse, this door into the Republic of Sonoria.

For a week, the dreams were enough. They came to him more and more frequently—sometimes even while he nodded off after lunch during the daytime—and the details of them grew more and more vivid. He woke from them refreshed, reinvigorated, and everything around him seemed brighter, more intense. Sometimes, in his dreams, he walked along the river bank. Sometimes, he ran through the plains. Sometimes, he walked toward the mountains, although he never reached them. He never saw a single person in these dreams, but animals and plants and birds and fish were all around him, performing their ancient routines.

Once a day, he took out the stamp and stared at it, fixing it in his imagination. But, each time he did so, the stamp lost a little of its intensity for him. And, after a time, so did the dreams. The dreams became as faded as the stamp. The stamp became as faded as the dreams.

Normally, for Minneman, this would have been enough. It was not that he lacked a spirit of adventure. It was more that he had done many things in his life, and he liked a certain sense of order.

But now, he fidgeted. He walked back and forth across the living room, upset that he could not fix the image from the stamp in his mind as clearly as he had before. The Republic of Sonoria. Where might that be? He didn’t know, but he knew that in his dreams, he had drawn his hand across the surface of the water of a mighty river and felt the thick wetness of it against his skin. He knew that his pants had been stained with the yellow-green of the grass of the plains. His face had felt the breath of that place upon it. He had smelled the essence of it. No dream had ever been so real, so true.

After seven days of this, Minneman could take it no longer. He called the post office, asked to speak to whatever employee might have sent him the Lewis & Clarke stamp set. Was told it was impossible—it could have been anyone. Asked if they had ever heard of the Republic of Sonoria—was it in their system as a destination? Was told it was not, with a sort of
heightened concern
in the voice of the woman he was speaking to. Hung up. Sat down at the computer and began a search for “Republic of Sonoria,” and when that didn’t work, “Republic of Slonoria,” “Sembla,” “Shonoria,” “Sonora,” hoping ludicrously that the name on the stamp might be misspelled. Hopeless again in the thought that the stamp was simply a fake, and all this effort a waste.

The more the dreams faded in intensity, the more the little weathered stamp failed to anchor his imagination, the more frantic he became, the more lost, even though surrounded by the familiar.

His friends and family became worried, but said nothing. “Minneman’s on a mission,” they muttered to each other, rolling their eyes. Minneman on a mission, as they all knew from past experience, could not be thwarted or redirected. Let it run its course. Let him run it all out as far as it would go, and then he would come back to reality.

But Minneman himself was unconvinced by this theory, for it was one he had run through his head many times. It was something he’d thought about while he still had control over his actions. A separate part of him observed the part of him searching so desperately for Sonoria with alarm. But, eventually, that part of him faded away, became as pixilated and disconnected from the rest as the little dots that made up the image on the stamp.

Minneman searched the public library. He searched the microfiche of old and obscure newspapers. For a month, he searched, as the dreams dried up, as the depth and breadth of his tactile knowledge of Sonoria faded to a single pixel point.

Then, in an old travel issue of
Granta
, of all things, buried in a footnote in an essay about European refugees, he found something. The single pixel point expanded into the scene on the stamp. He was able to breathe again, properly, for the first time in months. The tight muscles in his shoulders and back relaxed.
Right there, right there.
The sentence. The sentence that unlocked part of the mystery: “This nameless refugee said she came from the Republic of Sonoria, a small country between the borders of Bulgaria and the Czech Republic—a hidden mountain valley. She was in some distress, in that she had not wanted to leave, but had become lost, she said, and could not now find the way back. There is no Republic of Sonoria, and the woman may have been mad, but there was a resonance to her story that shed light, in an emotional sense, on the fate of displaced peoples everywhere.”