Await Your Reply Read Online Free PDF

follower and supporter. His listener. He had never personally believed in such stuff—not in the way that Hayden appeared to—but there had been a time when he had been happy to play along, and perhaps for a while this alternate world had been a shared part of their brains. A dream they’d both been having together.
    Years later when he came into possession of Hayden’s papers and journals, Miles was aware that he was probably the only person in the world capable of translating and understanding what Hayden had written. He was the only one who could make sense of those stacks of composition notebooks—that tiny block-letter handwriting; the text and calculations that ran from edge to edge and top to bottom of each page; the manila envelopes full of drawings and doctored photographs; the maps Hayden had torn out of encyclopedias and covered with his geodetic projections; the lines across North America that converged at places like Winnemucca, Nevada, and Kulm, North Dakota, and Inuvik in the Northwest Territories; the theories, increasingly serpentine and involuted, a hodgepodge of crypto-archaeology and numerology, holomorphy and brane cosmology, past-life regression and conspiracy theory paranoia.
    My work
, as Hayden had at some point begun to call it.
    Miles often tried to remember when Hayden first began to use that term: “My work.” At first it had just been a game the two of themwere playing—and Miles even remembered the day they had started. It was the summer that they turned twelve, and the two of them had been poring over books by Tolkien and Lovecraft. Miles had been particularly fond of the maps that were included in the novels of
The Lord of the Rings
, while Hayden had been more inclined toward the mythologies and mysterious places in Lovecraft—the alien city beneath the Antarctic Mountains, the prehistoric cyclopean cities, the accursed New England towns.
    They had found one of those old gold-leaf hard-bound atlases, 25 × 20, on the shelf in the living room with the
World Book Encyclopedia
, and they had loved the feel of it, the sheer weight, which made it feel like it could be some ancient tome. It had been Miles’s idea that they could take some of the maps of North America and turn them into fantasy worlds. Dwarf cities in the mountains. Scorched goblin ruins on the plains. They could invent landmarks and histories and battles and pretend that in the olden days, before the Indians, America had been a realm of great cities and magical elder races. Miles thought it would be fun to make up their own Dungeons and Dragons game with real places and fantasy places intermingled; he had some very specific ideas about how this would develop, but Hayden was already bending over the map with a black ink pen. “Here is where some pyramids are,” Hayden said, pointing to North Dakota, and Miles watched as he drew three triangles, right there on the page of the atlas. In ink!
    “Hayden!” Miles said. “We can’t erase that. We’re going to get in trouble.”
    “No, no,” Hayden said coolly. “Don’t be a fag. We’ll just hide it.”
    And this was one of those early secrets that they had—the old atlas hidden beneath a stack of board games on a shelf in their bedroom closet.
    Miles still had the old atlas, and as he waited there at the edge of the river for the ferry to come, he took it out and paged through itonce again. There, on the northern coast of Canada, was the tower that Hayden had drawn, and Miles’s own clumsy attempt at calligraphy: THE IMPATRABLE TOWER OF THE DARK KING!
    How ridiculous, he thought. How depressing—that he should still be following the lead of his twelve-year-old self—an adult man! Over the years that he had been looking for Hayden, he had often thought about trying to explain his situation. To the authorities, for example, or to psychiatrists. To people he had become friends with, to girls he had liked. But he always found himself hesitating at the last minute. The