The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  “A biographer?”

  “That’s right. You’ll find steno pads and pens in the glove compartment. They’re for you. Make sure you always have enough to get down what I say.”

  “I don’t understand exactly,” she said.

  “I’ll explain as we go along.”

  He looked down at her. Then he smiled.

  “From now on you’re Boswell,” he said.

  “Boswell?”

  “Right.” He smiled. “A little literary joke, if you will.”

  He closed her door, walked around the car, and climbed into the driver’s seat. She watched him fasten his own belt and turn on the ignition. “Try your door handle,” he said to her. She put her hand on the latch and pulled. The latch moved freely, but the door didn’t open. “One of the nicer aspects of the design of the Chevrolet Camaro is that the door latches are remarkably easy to disconnect. So, whenever we stop, you wait for me to walk around and let you out. Got it?”

  She nodded.

  “I learned that in Cleveland, covering the trial of a football player who liked to pick up hookers, then expose himself. When they tried to get out, no go. That was what gave him the real kick.”

  Douglas Jeffers looked at her.

  “You see, that’s the sort of thing you need to get down.”

  He nodded toward the glove compartment.

  She felt a momentary panic and reached out swiftly.

  He stopped her. “It’s okay. Just giving you an example.”

  He looked at her.

  “Boswell, you see, takes down everything.”

  She nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “Boswell.”

  Then he put the car into drive and gently accelerated, slowly entering the darkness of the nighttime highway. She turned and looked back up at the stars. She thought suddenly of the childhood rhyme and spoke it to herself: Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.

  To live, she thought.

  IV

  A REGULAR SESSION

  OF THE LOST BOYS

  7. Obscenities crashed in the air around him, but he paid no attention. Instead, he pictured his brother sitting in the hospital cafeteria, grinning with an insouciance that he thought more properly belonged on an adolescent, but which on his brother’s adult face had an oddly disquieting property. He tried to remember the regimen of his thoughts, but fixated only on the moment when he’d spoken in a foolishly heartfelt way, “You know, I wish we’d been closer, growing up . . .”

  And his brother’s cruel, cryptic, unfathomable reply:

  “Oh, we are. We’re closer than you think.”

  How close do I think? wondered Martin Jeffers.

  To his right, two of the men’s voices had steadily gained in volume, swiftly escalating in tone and content, reaching to the edge of rage. Jeffers turned and eyed the men, trying to assess the nature and quality of the dispute, wary, cautious, realizing that confrontation was an integral element of the therapy, but equally that these were violent men, and that he wanted no part of the savagery he believed them capable of inflicting on each other. He had the unusual thought that they were like some angry gaggle of old women, arguing less over some idea or real conflict than for the actual enjoyment of dispute. He decided to intercede.

  “I don’t think you’re saying what you mean.”

  This was one of his usual comments. He knew that the men were frustrated by his oblique postures; for the most part, they were men of concrete ideas and sentiments. It was his desire to make them think, then feel, in the abstract. Once they could empathize, he thought, then they can be treated.

  He remembered a professor in medical school standing before an assembled class, saying, “Think of the experience of disease. Consider how it controls our senses, feelings, emotions. And then remember, no matter how capable a physician you think yourself, you’re only as good as your last correct diagnosis.” To which, a decade later, Martin Jeffers thought he would have added: And treatment, too.

  Jeffers eyed the two men who were arguing.

  “Fuck you, Jeffers,” said the first, dismissing him with a halfhearted wave of the hand.

  “Fuck yourself first,” interceded the second. “And you’d better enjoy it, because you ain’t gonna be fucking anything else for a real long time . . .”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “That’s right, you better look at who’s talking, little man.”

  “Whoa. I’m shaking. Look at my hands. They’re fucking shaking with terror.”

  Jeffers watched the two men carefully. He checked each for signs that the argument would prompt them from their seats. He was not terribly concerned about this particular argument: Bryan and Senderling went at it frequently. As long as they were trading insults, it was likely to remain verbal. Under different circumstances, Jeffers guessed, they would probably be considered friends. It was silence that worried him. Sometimes, Jeffers thought, they stop talking. It’s not the silence of not knowing what to say, or being bored, or waiting for someone to say something. It was a silence forced by anger. Then it can be the eyes narrowing and fixing on the opposition that signals an attack, or sometimes just a subtle tensing of the muscles. Jeffers thought that he often spent his time looking for white knuckles on the fingers gripping the arm rests of the day-room chairs. There was once one man in the group, Jeffers remembered, who always sat on the front edge of a chair with his legs crossed in an X beneath him. When one morning the man unfolded his legs, Jeffers was already on his feet, moving to intercept the explosion that had arrived seconds later. Jeffers realized, as the months slid past, that he came to know each man in the group not only as a collection of memories and experiences, but with a recognizable physical posture as well. That there were twelve dossiers crammed with entries back in his office was to be expected; one did not qualify easily for the Lost Boys. It took two things: depravity and the misfortune to be caught engaged in it.

  “Fuck you!”

  “Fuck you right back!”

  Obscenities were the currency of the group, scattered about like so many coins of small denomination. He wondered idly how often he heard the word “fuck” each day. A hundred times? Surely more. A thousand, perhaps. The word no longer had any correlation with the sexual act for him. Instead it was used as punctuation for the group. Some men used “fucking” as others would use commas. He thought of the famous Lenny Bruce routine where the comedian started out by staring at the audience and querying, “I wonder how many niggers are here tonight,” before moving on to spics, micks, kikes, wops, limeys, whatever, and ultimately by commonizing the insults so profoundly that they were rendered harmless and meaningless. Jeffers imagined that much the same process went on in the day room. The men used the word “fuck” with such frequency that it no longer carried any weight. It certainly had little to do with the crimes which they had pleaded guilty to, although each man was a sexual offender.

  “Ahhh, the hell with you,” said one of the men. It was Bryan. He turned to Jeffers. “Hey, doc, can’t you straighten this dumb son of a bitch out? He still don’t realize why he’s here.”

  “Look, asshole,” Senderling replied, “I know why we’re here. I also know that we ain’t going anyplace real quick. And when we do, it’s gonna be over to the state pen to serve some real time.”

  Another man chimed in, first forming his mouth into a kiss, then smacking loudly enough to gain the room’s attention. Jeffers looked and saw that it was Steele, who sat across the room and particularly liked to bait Bryan and Senderling. “And you know, sweethearts, how much guys like you are appreciated over there . . .”

  The three men glared at each other, then turned to Jeffers. He realized that they expected some sort of response from him. He wished he’d been paying closer at
tention.

  “You all know the arrangement here.”

  He was met with sullen silence.

  The first lesson of psychiatric residency, he thought. When in doubt, say nothing.

  So a benign silence filled the room. Jeffers tried to meet each man’s eyes; some glared back at him, others turned away. Some seemed bored, distracted, minds elsewhere, some were poised, anticipating, eager. Jeffers momentarily considered the mystery of the group dynamic: there were twelve members of the Lost Boys, each man unique in the mode of his offense, typical in the nature of it. Jeffers was struck with the thought that the men all suffered from the same thing: once upon a time, in each man’s childhood, they had been lost. Abandoned, perhaps, was a better term. The rocky shoals of childhood, he thought. The darkness and cruelty of youth. Most people rise and grow and leave it behind, carrying their scars internally, forever, learning to adjust. The Lost Boys did not.

  And the punishment they had wreaked upon the adult world was sorry indeed.

  Twelve men. Probably close to a hundred reported crimes shared among them. Easily twice that number hidden, unreported, unsolved, unattributed, ranging from vandalism and petty theft to a rape, or two or a half-dozen, a dozen, a score or more. There were three killers in the Lost Boys as well—men who in the peculiar weighting system of the criminal justice system had managed to take lives that somehow were less valuable and therefore required less punishment, though Jeffers was hard pressed, sometimes, to understand the distinctions between a manslaughter and a first-degree murder, especially when viewed from the corpse’s point of view.

  The silence in the day room persisted and Jeffers thought again of his brother. It had been so typical of Doug, Jeffers thought. Call one instant, show up the next. Three years between visits, months between even casual telephone conversation, acting as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Drop his apartment key off with the usual impenetrable instructions. Typical.

  What was he doing? Jeffers wondered. He returned to the meeting in his mind. But first he thought: What was typical of Doug? and felt a mild uneasiness at his lack of a ready answer.

  He pictured his brother sitting across from him, sunlight caught in his shock of sandy hair. Doug, he thought, has this loose, flush, good-looking appearance, easygoing, relaxed, the kind of good looks that stemmed not from any striking physical feature but from a devil-may-care approach to life. For a moment he envied his brother the blue-jeans-and-running-shoes informality that accompanied the job of the professional photographer, resenting, momentarily, the quiet formality of his own profession. I am stiff, he thought. He envied his brother’s out-of-doors life, surrounded by things that were actually happening instead of merely being talked about. Sometimes I cannot stand the constancy of small rooms and closed doors, suggestive comments and observations, and quiet, meaningful looks that make up my profession, he thought.

  Then he shook his head, inwardly, and said to himself: Of course you can stand it. Not only that, you love it.

  For a moment, though, he wondered idly what it was like to see life through a lens.

  “Oh, we’re closer than you think. Much closer.”

  Is it that different? he thought suddenly. Surely. He sees with an immediacy defined by the event, the moment. I hear the story told long after the fact.

  He was dismayed by the quick realization that he could not remember his brother’s first camera. It seemed that Doug had always had one, from grade school on. He wondered where and how Doug had acquired the first; surely not from their parents.

  The only thing they gave out in substance was misery, Martin Jeffers thought.

  The two brothers had never disagreed about that.

  He suddenly remembered the night they’d been taken in, and wondered instantly why it had been so long since he had thought of it. He thought of the wild rain that had been driving against the police station windows rattling in the summer storm’s wind. Night had surrounded the building, but the hard wooden bench that he’d sat upon, gripping tightly to his brother’s hand, had been awash in artificial light. It had been late at night and they had been very young; not filled with Christmas Eve excitement over staying up late, but filled instead with a complete dread, aware somehow that they had been caught in some adult mystery that had taken place when their own little boys’ eyes properly should have been closed and their minds captured by sleep; seeing something not meant for them to see at an hour not meant for them to be awake. His stomach tightened at the memory of looking up through the light at his first view of his cousin, face set, rigid and unwelcoming, remembering his first words: “Your mom’s gone, which is as we expected for some time. You’re to be with us now. Follow me.” And the sight of that small, bent back, turning and leading them out into the storm. I was four, he thought, and Doug was six.

  He tried to shake the memory loose, wondering why it was that they’d never talked about their real mother. He stared out the day-room window and tried to recall the features of her face, but could not. He remembered only that she’d lacked tenderness and seemed forever angry. She’d not been that much different from the cousin who’d become their mother. He saw her easily, wispy brown hair pulled back in a severe bun, contradicting wide lips covered in bright lipstick that never creaked into a smile. In the car, in the rain, the wipers making a dirgelike drumming sound, this new woman-mother had turned to them and said, “We’re your parents now. I’m mom. He’s dad. There won’t be no talk about any other.”

  He remembered his own therapist asking once, “But what did happen to your real mother?”

  And of his reply: “But I never really learned.”

  The therapist had been silent. A classic doubting silence; he’d used it himself a thousand times.

  What did happen? he asked himself.

  It was simple: She was gone. Dead. Run away. What difference did it make? They both had to work in their parents’ drugstore. He had to clean the medicine bottles and keep the stacks of prescription drugs arranged neatly on the shelves, and he’d become a doctor. Doug’s job had been to sweep out the darkroom and then mix the chemicals for the film-developing service and finally to do the developing himself, when he got older, so he became a photographer. It was simple.

  We turned out fine, he said to himself.

  But what did we become?

  Nothing is simple.

  He knew that. It was the first thing he’d learned in his residency. Things of the mind may seem clear-cut and direct, but they rarely stayed that way. If the formulations of psychiatry made sense—the theories and diagnoses and treatment plans—the realities of behavior always seemed to him strangely inexplicable. He understood why the Lost Boys were sex offenders, in a clear-cut clinical way, but he felt defeated by some greater why that eluded him. He could picture the physical strength it took to seize a victim by the arm and force her, but could not imagine the power of will that it also took.

  He shook his head.

  Doug understands realities, he thought. I understand theories.

  He thought of his own life. I survived, he thought. Hell, we both did. We’ve done well. Damn well. Then he considered how extraordinary it is that one can acquire all the education and experience of human frailties and suffering and fail to be able to apply any of that knowledge to oneself.

  He laughed at himself: You’re a liar, he thought.

  And not a good one.

  He wondered why it was that his brother’s visit stirred so many memories, then thought how silly a question that was; of course his brother’s visit would prompt introspection.

  He felt hot and realized that sunlight was slipping through the window and hitting his chest. He shifted in his chair, unsatisfactorily, then moved his chair slightly.

  “You know what I hate the most,” said one of the Lost Boys. “It’s being treated like we’re some kind of freaks in a sidesh
ow, huh.”

  Jeffers looked up to see who was talking. His eyes caught a glimpse of Simon, the hospital orderly assigned to keeping order among the Lost Boys. Simon seemed to be dozing in the sunlight, unaffected by the con­versation. He was an immense black man whose build was well concealed by the loose-fitting white smock the orderlies wore. Jeffers knew, too, that he possessed a black belt in karate and had fought professionally as a kick-boxer. Simon’s presence was the ultimate deterrent to violence.

  “Freaks, freaks, freaks, that’s what we are.”

  It was Meriwether speaking. This was one of the small man’s favorite topics. Meriwether was a slight, sallow, middle-aged man who had owned a meager accounting business and who had pleaded guilty to the rape of a neighbor’s daughter. It was only after entering the Lost Boys that Jeffers uncovered a compulsive affection for youth in the man. Meriwether was on the doubtful list: Jeffers doubted that the crime he was condemned for was his sole one, and he doubted that the program could do anything for him. Someday, Jeffers thought, he will cruise down some street and pick up some teenage boy who is more than he can handle and will get his throat cut for his pocket change. Jeffers refused to be ashamed by his unscientific guesswork.

  “I can’t stand the way they look at us,” Meriwether said.

  “At you,” said Miller, sitting across the circle. Miller was a bona fide criminal in addition to being a rapist. He had twice killed men in barroom brawls, three times served prison terms for assault, robbery, and extortion. Jeffers particularly liked him for his straightforward approach to the therapy sessions: Miller hated them. He was, however, not on the doubtful list; Jeffers thought it possible that the man could learn not to be a rapist. What would remain, however, was a regular full-time criminal.

  “You see, little man, they can sense something about you. Something slimy just beneath the surface. We all can, little man. We all can. Makes you think, don’t it?”

  Meriwether didn’t hesitate: “Well, maybe they can sense something about me, but all they got to do is take one look at your face and they know, you know what I mean? They know.”