by Dan Chaon
This idea made her start laughing silently to herself. She looked around the room. Where was Kate? She wanted to tell Kate—Montgomery couldn’t weigh much more than her clothes.
Kate and Rusty weren’t in the room, and she thought—oh. Didn’t they agree that they weren’t going to do that anymore? Kate was more and more keeping secrets from her, Wave thought, but then maybe it didn’t matter. She went back to the dream of the Yellowstone trip. There would be the confrontation, and then the release, and they would hug and cry, and then closure.
The sensation that she will never forget: The way a car feels when it begins to go down a hill, the way you tilt along with it, and down is something your body feels. The descent will last for the rest of your life.
—
They did go out to the graveyard, just like Kate and Dustin later claimed. As Wave remembered it, they rode in Trent’s old tank of a Buick, a green GS 400. Trent and Rusty were in the front. Kate and Montgomery and Wave were in the back. Dustin was not with them—how could he possibly have been with them?—though later he testified under oath that he was.
The cemetery was notable in particular because of the number of trees. In this part of Nebraska, in the high rocky prairie, trees were an extravagance. They were planted in yards, frugally, but they were only immigrants. Outside of town for miles upon miles were treeless hills and hard sod.
Still, this cemetery could be said to be an actual grove. Not quite a woods—yet enough to feel keenly what she had been missing for her whole life. Forests. Seas and Oceans.
Without trees I will never experience true oneness, she thought. Rusty handed her a Coors and she took it gravely. They walked among the headstones, and the trees bent their boughs over them, the shadows of leaves trembling in the wind.
He looked at her and winked.
Then he showed her the backpack he was carrying. He lifted up the flap. Inside was a cheap plastic baby doll, about the same size as an actual infant.
“Sacrifice,” said Rusty confidentially.
—
The “Satanic ritual” was pretty sophomoric, as Wave remembered, because both Rusty and Trent were fairly well wasted at the time. They had found a gravestone that Rusty claimed was his mother’s, and they drew a pentagram in the dirt and placed candles at the five points and then finally the baby doll in the center of the pentagram.
Montgomery said, “They’re not even doing it right.”
“Mm,” Wave said. She was watching the trees as they were moving and gesturing. The trees were able to manipulate their leaves and the shadows of their leaves to make shapes so they could communicate with her. She watched as Uncle Dave came out of the bushes in his underwear and started dancing. It appeared that he was only about a foot high, and he was really adorable. She smiled at him fondly.
—
Later, Kate would “recover” the memory that she had wakened from a kind of trance, and that she was naked and spread-eagled on a pentagram in a graveyard, and that she was clutching a bloody naked doll in her arms. A crucifix had been put into her vagina. Later, Dustin “remembered” being sexually molested by Rusty and Trent and a group of hooded figures, who also beheaded baby rabbits and made him drink their blood.
Later, no one except Wave remembered that Montgomery had been there. Montgomery—or whatever her name might have been—was never questioned, was never called to testify, and Wave had no idea where she even lived.
Had she just imagined Montgomery? Was she—Wave—the one who didn’t remember things correctly? Was it possible that she blacked out? Riordan didn’t think so.
“Jesus,” he said. “If there was a bunch of robed motherfuckers making me drink baby rabbit blood and putting a crucifix into my sister’s twat, I really do think I’d remember. That’s like…people really, like, accepted that as testimony?”
And then they grew quiet.
—
God! She remembers being so happy.
Even now, it seems that they were all having a good time. Rusty brought out his boom box and played Black Sabbath, and he and Kate danced around to “Sweet Leaf.” And Wave sat there watching and laughing, and various figures moved inside the trees, the dancing Uncle Dave emerged, then some long-fingered shadows, and Rusty stumbled around trying to read from one of his Satanism books while Trent and Kate laid the doll on the pentagram and poured ketchup on it.
“I conjure thee, O Guland, in the name of Satan, in the name of Beelzebub, in the name of Astaroth, and in the name of all other spirits, to make haste and appear before me. Come, then, in the name of Satan and in the names of all other demons. Come to me, I command thee,” Rusty yelled, stumbling and shouting up toward the sky—but he kept losing his place and dropping the book and finally he got caught up in another song and started dancing again.
And then Kate joined him. “Please, O Guland, in the name of Satan, don’t make us go to Yellowstone!” she said, and laughed wildly.
And then they were all dancing in a circle underneath a thing of trees and passing around a bottle of Jim Beam, and it was only for fun, they were just being crazy, it was just being young and alive and stupid. It didn’t mean anything.
That’s all that happened. She’s sure of it.
APRIL 2012
I WAS TRULY happy. I will always believe that.
I was settled into a normal life. Married. Children. Owned a home.
I believed I was good at what I did. I helped people deal with dysfunctional thought patterns, catastrophizing anxiety, panic cycles, obsessive–compulsive issues, addiction, body dysmorphia, unhelpful thinking styles of all types. Trying to make a small difference.
—
But I doubted that I could do anything for Aqil Ozorowski. There was a pathology there that was beyond what I
There was a potential pathology—disturbance?—that was beyond what I felt comfortable trying to diagnose. Paranoia? Obsession? He gave me these folders—dossiers, he called them—about the boys who died. In each there was a picture of the corpse, an autopsy report, and then occasionally a few printouts from their Facebook page and their obituaries, and Aqil’s eyes were alight with excitement.
I cleared my throat.
“Okay,” I said, “Yeah, sure, this is”
—
Let’s say that I was happy, but there were personal issues pressing upon me.
My wife was seriously ill.
I’d recently heard some disturbing news regarding my
What to call him? My foster brother? My adoptive brother?
That he’d been released from prison.
And there were many things about that which I hadn’t thought about, which hadn’t crossed my mind, in many years. Which I didn’t care to revisit.
—
It was during this period that Aqil Ozorowski wanted to talk about a serial killer.
“Just listen to me,” he said, and grinned in a way that showed both his top and bottom teeth. “Why not? Maybe it’ll make you curious, right?” He had a quick, aggressively friendly demeanor, as though he’d gone through some sort of rigorous sales training at one point in his life and had learned to make eye contact and hold it. He had enormous dark brown eyes, like a fawn in cartoons.
“I was a good cop,” Aqil said. “I was on my way, I was going to do homicide, I was going to be a detective. And then I got fucked over.”
He had been placed on leave from the force, for reasons that he refused to discuss—psychological reasons, I assumed, though that wasn’t confirmed, either. “Look,” he said, and gave me his grin. “It’s not what I’m hiring you to talk about. I’ve got to separate my realities, you know what I mean? I’ve got a court-appointed one of you guys and I have to talk to him once a week about my policing issues. So when I’m with you, I don’t want to talk about my policing issues, right? I want to talk about my dossiers! Did you read them?”
“Well,” I said.
—
I didn’t k
now why he would approach me with this…information.
At first, he said he wanted smoking cessation therapy, which was one of my areas of specialization, and that seemed reasonable. Then he said he wanted help with relaxation techniques. He had insomnia, he said. Then he said he just needed someone to talk to. “Someone who isn’t part of the system,” he said.
“What do you mean by ‘system’?” I said.
“You know,” he said.
—
To be honest, most of the work that I had been doing recently was a bit colorless. I taught people breathing techniques and talked to them about the difference between helpful and unhelpful rumination; I had them fill out behavioral activation worksheets when they were too depressed to pay their bills; I tried to guide them through the various woes that we face, the shame and self-blame, the inexplicable sense of loss or dread, the ordinary sorrows for which there is no true cure.
But I didn’t get many like Aqil Ozorowski—who was, for lack of a better word, interesting. I have to admit that a part of me was grateful to him for bringing me this mystery—this “case,” as he called it, as if we were going to be Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson together.
—
The deaths—the “killings”—had become a kind of urban legend. Aqil was not alone in imagining that there was some kind of pattern in these apparent accidents. There were websites devoted to various theories, and conspiracists had tried to christen the murderer with a nickname: “Jack the Dipper,” “Jack the Drowner,” or—popular among college students—“Jack Daniels,” since apparently the killer would single out young college men who did shots of whiskey at a bar. There was even a hashtag on Twitter: #JackDanielsKiller.
“It seems silly, doesn’t it?” Aqil said. “That’s what’s brilliant. You just can’t take it seriously. A drunk frat boy can drown in a river and people are kind of a little amused. They say, ‘There’s a killer, all right! And his name is Darwin!’ and everybody chuckles.”
Investigations had been made, of course. The police had judged these cases “Death by Misadventure,” or “Auto-assassination”—by which they meant that the victims had been so reckless that an ordinary, sensible person would expect to die as a result of their actions. He showed me a newspaper clipping:
“I think there’s definitely a serial killer on these college campuses,” said Police Chief Wilkinson. “And its name is ‘Binge Drinking.’ These are students who drink alcohol very quickly, without a lot of forethought. The inebriates become separated from their cohorts. They encounter a river or waterway. And they drown. I am sorry to say that there is nothing to indicate anything other than a very tragic and preventable demise for these young men.”
“It makes sense, right?” Aqil said. “He doesn’t sound unreasonable, does he? And none of these deaths has ever—ever—been considered a criminal case.”
“Well,” I said. “It does seem like the logical explanation. Even with your thing with the dates. It seems to me that even if you have someone who drowned on October tenth, 2010, we could also probably find a similar sort of drowning on October eleventh, or October ninth. People can find patterns in all kinds of random events. It’s called apophenia. It’s the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information. For example, some people believe in what’s called the ‘twenty-three enigma.’ That everything is related to the number twenty-three. It’s a surprisingly involved belief.”
“Ha-ha.” Aqil grinned. “That’s a movie, isn’t it? With what’s his name? Ace Ventura? But you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Just until you shift your oculus a little bit.”
And I watched as he performed this “shift of vision,” turning his chair away from me, toward the window. He looked down silently at the cars moving along Cedar Road.
“Imagine for one second if this was a bunch of drowned sorority girls,” Aqil said. “People would be losing their minds over it. The thing that’s interesting to me about this is that nobody thinks of white guys as vulnerable. We don’t think of ourselves as vulnerable. And that makes it so easy, doesn’t it?”
—
Ourselves.
It was a big breakthrough in some ways, because up until that moment I wasn’t entirely sure what race Aqil identified himself as. He appeared to be a white person, but he was ambiguously complexioned, and it always felt too uncomfortable to ask him directly.
He refused to talk about his family. “Estranged” was how he described it, which was an oddly formal term for Aqil—a word he would have mocked me for using.
Estranged. Were his parents dead or alive? I didn’t know. Did he have brothers or sisters? “Not that I’m aware of,” he said.
I did know that he grew up in Cleveland. Once, I was driving down East 55th toward the interstate, and I passed by the place where he claimed to have grown up—a clutch of low-income-housing apartments. “Enterprise Village,” he’d said. “How fucked up is that? Maybe they should call it ‘Pull Yourself Up By Your Own Bootstraps’ Village, right?”
I didn’t say anything. It seemed as if the residents would be primarily African American, but it felt awkward to bring this up.
Once I had commented that he had an unusual name, and he’d given me a suspicious look. “Ozorowski?” he said. “It’s a common Polack name. People think it sounds funny because it has ‘Oz’ in it, but I swear to God if you ever call me the Wizard of Oz, I will kill you.”
“Well,” I said. “I meant that…‘Aqil’ is a name that I don’t really see very often.”
“Really?” he said. “There were, like, three Aqils in my high school. All different spellings, but still. I don’t think it’s that uncommon for people my age.”
I nodded. I kept my face mildly quizzical. “So,” I said at last. “Was there a story behind why your parents decided to call you…”
“Pff,” he said. “Who knows?”
—
I’d heard about his former colleagues in detail. There were the ones who he knew were his enemies, and then there were the ones who he thought were his friends but who betrayed him. Karen, Spark, Davis, Constantine. I’d heard stories about them all; he’d painted scenes so well that I felt as if I could picture their faces: Karen, in the late-night McDonald’s, confiding in Aqil about her abusive teenaged son; Spark—this pale red-haired kid, no more than twenty—playing basketball with the teens in a poverty-stricken precinct, using awkward slang, trying to get people together for a “community policing seminar.” Davis, tackling the psychotic woman and tasing her, and then afterward weeping in the police car. Poor Constantine, with his weight-lifting addiction that never seemed to cure the high blood pressure and low blood sugar, and then the lymphoma diagnosis.
But when I’d ask him directly about the medical leave, he’d shake his head vaguely. “I don’t really know,” he’d say. Or: “I think I had been too outspoken on a couple of occasions.” Or: “Some people thought there were irregularities in the way I interrogated suspects.” Or: “I rubbed the wrong people the wrong way.”
APRIL 2012
The Tao that we speak of isn’t the true Tao.
I found myself thinking this over and over for about a week—or not even thinking it, exactly. It just kept repeating in my head.
It was a line from a poem by the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu that I’d come across, and it had struck me. It seemed like something I could tell my patients. It could potentially apply to a lot of things, I thought.
I considered trying it out on Aqil. Are we really talking about a serial killer, I imagined saying, or is the serial killer a stand-in for something larger and more abstract? There’s a saying by the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu…
No, I thought. Probably not.
—
I came home that evening and Jill was already asleep, and the boys weren’t home. I made myself a bowl of cereal and sat watching a cooking program on TV, turning my worries over in my head. Rusty. I still hadn’t made any decisions
about it—about what to do, when to tell Jill. And meanwhile she had not decided about how she wanted to tell the boys about her illness. She was going to start chemotherapy at the beginning of May, and Aaron and Dennis still knew nothing.
What should I do? I thought. And then: The Tao that we speak of isn’t the true Tao. And then I leaned my head against the arm of the couch and closed my eyes for a moment, to try to reach a calm, logical state of mind.
—
I woke up and I was curled on the couch, and I hadn’t even taken off my sports jacket or shoes. Very disorienting. It was almost ten o’clock at night.
When I came into the kitchen to make myself a sandwich, Dennis was at the table with his books spread out, studying. “Hey,” I said, but he didn’t look up. He continued reading.
It was hard, this new stage of things between us. We used to have a great rapport—we used to try to find the dumbest jokes to tell one another, we used to talk about what he was reading, we used to go to movies together a lot—but over the last few years of high school he’d become more and more distant. This is what happens, I told myself.
And so when he didn’t answer, I quietly made a peanut butter sandwich, and then I leaned against the counter a respectful distance away and tried to chew without making noise.
You can never be a passive parent. That’s what I often told my patients. Passive Parent is an oxymoron, like Jumbo Shrimp. If you’re passive, you’re not parenting!
I cleared my throat. “What are you reading?” I said at last, and he glanced up grimly. “Lies and propaganda,” he said. He showed me the cover of the book: AP U.S. History Study Guide. And I smiled and nodded.
“The Tao that we speak of isn’t the true Tao,” I said. “The name that can be named is not the real name.”
Dennis used to be very interested in philosophy. He actually read Camus’s The Stranger when he was twelve, and he’d even tried to dip into a little Heidegger. We used to have good discussions. But now he said nothing, and so I took a bite of my sandwich and chewed thoughtfully for a time.