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Houston, Texas, where he had been employed as a computer services technician for JPMorgan Chase & Co., named Mike Hayden. Too late, Miles arrived in Rolla, Missouri, where Hayden had been masquerading at the university as a graduate student in mathematics named, cruelly, Miles Spady.
    Too late, also, at Kulm, North Dakota, not far from the Whitestone Hill Battlefield historical site, not far from the place where Hayden had once imagined
the great pyramids of the Dakota … the Giza, Khufu, and Khafre …
It was February, and fat flakes of snow fell on the windshield, the wipers flapping like big wings as Miles imagined the shape of the pyramids emerging out of the gray blur of snowfall. They weren’t really there, of course, and neither was Hayden, but at the Broken Bell Inn in nearby Napoleon, a motel clerk—a sullen pregnant young woman—frowned over the enlarged grainy photo of Hayden.
    “Hmmm,” she said.
    From the photo, it would have been difficult to guess that they were identical twins. The picture had been taken years ago, not long after they had turned eighteen, and Miles had gained quite a bit of weight since then. Who knew, maybe Hayden had as well. But even in childhood they had never been truly indistinguishable. There was an aspect of Hayden’s face—brighter, more avid, friendlier—something that people responded to, and an aspect of Miles’s that they didn’t. He could see it in the motel clerk’s expression.
    “I think I recognize him,” the girl said. Her eyes flicked from the photo to Miles and then back. “It’s hard to say.”
    “Take another look,” Miles said. “It’s not a very good photo. It’s fairly old, so he may have changed over the years. Does it bring to mind anyone you’ve seen?”
    He looked down at the photo with her, trying to see it as she might. It was a Christmas photo. It was that horrible winter break, their senior year in high school, that had ended with Hayden institutionalized once again, but in the picture Hayden looked completely sane—a kind-eyed, smiling teenage boy in front of a tinselly tree, his hair a bit shaggy, but no sign whatsoever in his face of the trouble that he was causing—would continue to cause. The girl’s mouth moved slightly as she looked at it, and Miles wondered if perhaps Hayden had kissed her.
    “Take your time,” Miles said, firmly, remembering episodes of a police procedural he’d seen on television.
    “Are you a policeman?” the girl said. “I’m not sure if we’re supposed to give out that information.”
    “I’m a relative,” Miles said reassuringly. “He’s my brother, and he’s been missing. I’m just trying to locate him.”
    She examined the photo a little longer, then at last came to a decision.
    “His name is Miles,” she said, and she gave him a brief but hooded look, which made him wonder if she was simply being recalcitrant, choosing not to reveal some important tidbit of information she had decided to hold back for no other reason but that she didn’t like him as much as she liked Hayden. “Cheshire was his last name, I think. Miles Cheshire. He seemed like a great guy.”
    He remembered how his heart had contracted when she’d said this, when she’d repeated his own name back to him. It
was
just a joke, he thought then—a complicated, nasty prank that Hayden was engaged in.
What am I doing?
he thought.
Why am I doing this?
    That had been almost two years ago, that trip to North Dakota. He had packed up his things and driven back home, darkly aware that the whole Kulm adventure had been nothing but an elaborate tease. Hayden had been in one of his mean and jolly manic moods, and when Miles got back to his apartment, there was a book waitingfor him:
No Tears for the General: The Life of Alfred Sully
, and an 8 × 12 manila envelope that contained an article torn from the pages of
The Professional Journal of American Schizophrenia
, a passage highlighted in yellow marker. “If one twin develops