by Dan Chaon
“It’s a good quote, isn’t it?” I said. “It’s from a poem by the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu. From around the sixth century B.C.E. I was thinking that it would be a cool kind of mantra to give to my patients. Like a kind of thought puzzle to mull over.”
“Hmm,” Dennis said. He didn’t look up from his reading. “I don’t think you should use Chinese sayings,” he said.
“Really?” I said. “Why? I think it’s very beautiful. And thought-provoking! The Non-Existent and Existent are identical in all but name. The identity of apparent opposites I call the profound, the great deep, the open door of bewilderment,” I recited. “Don’t you love that? The open door of bewilderment! How would you interpret it?”
I smiled and shrugged. His mom was sick and he didn’t know it, and I wished I could hug him, but that wouldn’t have been welcome. So I offered this little token. This little quote.
“Look,” he said. “Dad. I wouldn’t tell that to your patients. There’s just some…cultural-appropriation stuff that I think you’d need to…frame more carefully. I mean, you’re not a Taoist. You’re not Chinese, so…”
“Right,” I said. I smiled a bit more tightly, and I felt a little flush in my cheeks. I remembered how red in the face Kate would get when you’d contradict her. “Right,” I said, because he thought I was a kind of racist, I guess. A sentimental Orientalist looking for fortune-cookie wisdom. He couldn’t understand that I thought that the poem—the translation of the poem—was beautiful and profound. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell me what he thought of those words. How he understood them. The name that can be named is not the real name: That was the tragedy.
—
“Can I make you anything?” I said, after a while. “Can I make you a sandwich?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
So I wiggled my fingers like a magician. “Poof!” I said. “You’re a sandwich!” And that, at least, brought out a wan laugh.
MAY 2012
AFTER THE FIRST chemotherapy treatment, we waited for her hair to fall out. She had pretty hair, but not in a vain way. It was blond, naturally wavy, shoulder-length.
Two weeks passed and nothing happened. “Maybe it won’t,” I said. “It doesn’t always.”
She gave me a grim look. The snow had finally begun to melt, and the lilacs were out, and she had cut some blooms and I watched as she put them in a vase.
“Honey,” she said. “I don’t think being hopeful is a good idea. Let’s not be the kind of people who are hopeful.”
—
At work, I hypnotized Mrs. O’Sullivan. She was a secretary in the alumni office of Case Western, fifty years old, divorced, and she had constant pain that could not seem to be diagnosed. Pain in her fingers, in her feet, in the sides of her neck. The doctors had found nothing, and the word psychosomatic had been suggested.
“But I’m not making it up,” she told me hoarsely. “Why would I make up something so awful? Why would I invent my own suffering?”
I told her to show me the places that her pain was emanating from, and then I told her to imagine an elevator that was taking her to a place of her choice. A beach, maybe. “Any place that you’d like to be right now, that you can picture vividly.” We stood in the elevator and went down together. “There’s a little bank of buttons,” I said, “and each one lights up as we go. Here we are.
“Negative one. Negative two. Negative three…”
When we reached negative one hundred, I said, “I think we’ve reached our destination. Are we there?” And she smiled shyly.
She was in a good state of relaxation and suggestibility. I said, “Mrs. O’Sullivan, I want you to repeat after me.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I trust myself,” I said, and she whispered it back to me.
There was a verse from the Bible, from the Book of Psalms, that I had discovered in a book of quotations, and I had been trying to adapt it into something more like a mantra.
“I will walk safely in my way,” I said.
“I will walk safely in my way,” she repeated, and smiled privately.
“And my foot will not stumble,” I murmured.
“And my foot will not stumble,” she said, and made a thoughtful frown.
“When I lie down I will not be afraid. Yes, I will lie down and my sleep will be sweet.”
“When I lie down I will not be afraid. Yes, I will lie down and my sleep will be sweet.”
“I trust myself, I trust the universe, I accept myself for who I am.”
“I trust myself, I trust the universe, I accept myself for who I am.”
“Let’s say it again,” I said.
—
There is a kind of peacefulness that settles over the face of a hypnotized person. There is a moment when you can see the child they once were, what they must have looked like when they were four or five. Some people have a phobia about being watched while they’re sleeping. It’s creepy, they think—they feel vulnerable, exposed. But there’s also something beautiful about it.
I put the fingers of Mrs. O’Sullivan’s hand in my palm, and I let them rest there until they were warmed by my skin, until our two skins seemed to be the same temperature. Then I lowered my head and breathed softly along the length of her pinkie.
“Do you feel a tingling in your right pinkie finger?” I said. My voice was so low as to be almost inaudible. But she heard it.
“Ah,” she said, and I breathed across it again.
“Is that where the pain is in that finger?” I whispered. “Yes,” she whispered back, and I exhaled breath again.
“You should begin to feel the pain lifting out now,” I said. “Like vapor.”
A tear slipped out of her eyelid and slid toward her ear. “I feel it,” she whispered.
—
Later, when Aqil showed up, I was still thinking of the face of Mrs. O’Sullivan. The way her mouth twitched as the pain left her pinkie. The way the mask of her face played through a whole series of expressions, the way a person’s face changes while they are dreaming.
Afterward, untranced, she told me that her pinkie didn’t hurt anymore, and we made an appointment to work on the remaining nine fingers. The neck. The feet. We would need to meet weekly, I told her, for about six months or so, and as I was ushering her out, Aqil was sitting there in the waiting room. He stared at us with his big dark eyes.
“Wow,” he said, after the door had closed and Mrs. O’Sullivan had disappeared down the hall. “She looked satisfied.”
I cleared my throat. “Okay,” I said. “What are we discussing today?”
—
It was the usual.
Aqil wanted to talk about his idea that the drowned boys had been drugged. Rohypnol can be more difficult to detect than similar drugs, he told me, because it is in low concentrations and is cleared quickly by the body.
He put his face in his hands. “These autopsies,” he said. “These autopsies are so bad! Just lazy—it’s depressing! Was the victim dead or alive before he went into the water? Is it possible he was drowned elsewhere and then placed at the site of discovery? There’s no sense that they even thought of that. What if they were held for a time before they were placed in the water?”
“So,” I said. “Wait. You’re saying that there’s evidence that the dead boys had ingested Rohypnol?”
“Not evidence, no,” he said. “They didn’t test for it. The autopsies failed in a lot of ways.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I’m struggling to understand why this would even occur to you. Why should they have tested for Rohypnol?”
“Well,” he said. “Let’s just look at the things that don’t make sense here, right? First: All of our victims are at a bar with friends. They’re not walking down a dark lonely road by themselves.
“But then, lo and behold, they get ‘separated’ from their buddies. I mean, really? You just wander away from the friends that you’re having fun with? You just leave without telling
anybody?”
I nodded. We walked through these steps nearly every time we went over his “case,” and sometimes he repeated himself almost word for word. It was like a zoo animal circling in a cage, thinking that this time he was going to find an opening.
“Second, once you’ve stumbled away from the bar or the party, what’s the first thing you do? You make a beeline for the nearest body of water you can drown in? Look at the blood alcohol level in some of these jokers. They couldn’t walk across a room, let alone maneuver their way for blocks until they just happened to fall into a river. Really? Nobody sees them wobbling along? They don’t pass out on the way? They’re like lemmings with a purpose, you know? They’re like hypnotized or possessed or sleepwalking with their arms out. Got…to…find…river….How can you not think that is weird, Doctor?” he said. “How can you think that sounds in any way reasonable?”
“Well,” I said.
And I paused, because for a moment I allowed myself to be a drunk boy, leaving a bar, leaving my friends behind. People ignored me as I brushed past them. I took a path downhill, because it was easier. Ahead of me was a flat surface. A parking lot?
We’re more attracted to our doom than we think we are, I thought. But I didn’t say that, and Aqil shook his open palms vehemently.
“I don’t know how they do it,” he said, “but I can’t help but think that if there is foul play here, it’s not just a thrill killing. These victims aren’t just chosen opportunistically. There’s a window of time, and they disappear, and then they’re floating facedown. How do we get from A to B to C? Could it really be the exact same accident, over and over?
“But! What if you had a thing for a specific kind of athletic white male, aged eighteen to twenty-four, how would you get them? You’d have to stalk them and plan it out, right? And they’d probably put up a good struggle, so you’d want to prepare for that.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “That’s actually a question I have. Because it seems to me that”
“Have you ever seen someone who has been roofied?” Aqil said. He leaned back in his chair and gave a long sigh. “They’re incredibly pliant. You could tell them, ‘Come with me to the river,’ and they’d say, ‘Yeah, that sounds great,’ and you could put your arm around them and they’d stumble along beside you, chuckling all the way.”
I frowned. “But—it doesn’t seem that there was any evidence of sexual abuse, though. Or torture? That would be the typical serial killer. Some form of sexual violence.”
Aqil lifted his eyebrow. “I didn’t say sexual,” he said. “Did I imply that?”
“I’m just,” I said. “I’m not sure why…What’s the motivation?”
“Ha-ha,” he said. “You’re a hypnotist? And you never wanted someone in your power?”
—
By the end of the month, the hair had begun to come out in her brush in clumps. I found a ball the size of a fist in the trash can, and I took it out and washed it and tried to make a braid with it.
“What are you doing that for?” she said, and I shrugged awkwardly.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems wasteful to throw it away. We could make a—”
“I don’t want a wig,” she said. “I’m not wearing a wig.”
—
As the baldness became pronounced, the remaining straggles hung down in strands like moss, and she began to buy caps. Turbans.
“God, I look stupid,” she said. “Fuck. It’s useless.”
And she tightened the purple velvet genie bandore. She was on her way to work, but it would be the last case she would try.
MAY 2012
I TALKED TO a colleague who worked as a therapist for the Cleveland PD. “If he’s been placed on leave due to psychiatric issues,” she said, “it could be anything. Maybe he suffers from PTSD. Maybe he’s a psychotic. Maybe he’s just a screwup, and this is the easiest way for them to get him out of their hair without getting the union involved.”
“Would you,” I said. “Actually, would you be able to look at his records and so forth?”
“No,” she said coolly. “I don’t think so.”
And Aqil was no more forthcoming.
“Listen,” I said. “I’d like to talk a little bit about your life up till now. I mean, it’s clear that these deaths are very important to you, and I think it’s valuable for you to work through these ideas. But do you ever think about why you’ve found yourself focused on these—these particular…”
“Because I think they’re murders that nobody else is noticing. I don’t like the idea of somebody getting away with murder. Do you?”
“No, but,” I said. “There are root causes. For our obsessions. For example, what made you decide to become a policeman in the first place?”
“Really?” he said. “Really, Doctor? You think this is about my backstory?”
“The backstory is often more relevant than we think,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
MAY 2012
“HE GOT OUT on May fourth,” Kate said. Her voice was tight, and I could sense how upset she was. “But they won’t tell me anything else. I have no idea where he’s at right now. He could be in the next room, with an ax.”
“Well,” I said. “That doesn’t seem,” I said. “Doesn’t seem likely.”
“I don’t know how you can be so calm,” Kate said. “I mean, as far as we know, he could be standing outside your house. Have you looked out your window lately?”
“I’m in the car,” I said. And actually I was. I had patched together my practice as part of a health-care consortium and did a lot of commuting, sharing offices in various suburbs around the city, rotating with other therapists. Currently I was on the interstate, driving to the office in Bay Village, a stretch of a certain kind of emptiness. There was a roadside memorial: the cross, the plastic flowers, a handmade sign with a weathered, enlarged photo of the deceased. R.I.P. DYLAN, it said. CHILL WITH US 4EVER!
—
I cleared my throat. “So,” I said. “To be honest, there are some. There are some issues with Jill’s health.” I activated my turn signal. The exit was a quarter of a mile away.
“You haven’t told her,” Kate said. “You didn’t tell her that Rusty’s been released.”
“No, of course I,” I said. I sped up to pass an elderly woman in a Volvo.
“And what’s her advice? She’s a lawyer.”
“Well,” I said.
God!” Kate said. “I can’t believe you. Don’t you think she has a right to know? There’s a person out there who could be stalking her family.”
“That seems melodramatic,” I said. “I don’t think that…”
“Really? Because I think that we are in a very dire situation. You and I. I even called Wave, which tells you how serious I think this is. He’s on the fucking loose, Dustin! He’s been released from prison and we don’t know where he is. Doesn’t this concern you at all?”
I tried to picture myself telling Jill. Imagined the questions she would ask me, the alarmed, angry expression she’d have, sitting there in her turban with her thin hands trembling a little around a mug of tea. She would look at me as if it were all my fault. God! she would say. Why now?
To be honest, that was much more frightening to me than the idea of Rusty crouching in my bushes.
JUNE 2012
THE BOYS GOT out of school. It was Dennis’s senior year, and we went to see him graduate in his cap and gown, and there were photographs with Jill posing in her spangled bandore and silk scarf, and Dennis smiling under his mortarboard, and Aaron looking sullen in a black beanie, and me, hatless but trying to be present. Trying not to float away. There were a lot of different thoughts vying for my attention.
—
Show up. Be present. Tell the truth. Don’t be attached to results.
This is Sufi wisdom, I tell my patients. It was one of the mantras I especially liked to share, but when I imparted it to Aqil he seemed do
ubtful.
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” he said. “I am attached to results. I don’t think I want to live a life without results.”
“Well,” I said. “There are always results. It’s just that we shouldn’t expect the results that we want. We have to be open to the possibility that things won’t turn out in the way that we imagine they will.” I cleared my throat. “We have theories about how things will turn out, and when we cling to those too tightly, it…closes off our experience of the world. Our ability to see things for what they are.”
He considered, and I watched as he gazed out the window, scratching the tip of his nose. It was about three in the afternoon. Traffic down below was quiet.
“Seeing things for what they are,” he said. “Seeing them for what they really fucking are. Wow. That’s a project, isn’t it?”
“Well,” I said. “Yes. It’s an idealized”
Aqil cocked his head. And the
“Concept,” I said. “A way of trying to live in the world.”
“You look pale,” Aqil said. “Are you eating enough?”
—
The boys had made themselves scarce. Sometimes days would pass and I wouldn’t see them and there was a particular kind of absence in the house. A brief feeling of the uncanny, though of course it wasn’t. Dennis was working as a delivery boy for a sub sandwich shop. Aaron was volunteering at a homeless shelter with his friend Rabbit. I sat at Jill’s bedside as she vomited into a Tupperware bowl, and then she had a fit of coughing. Barking, phlegmy.
“Motherfucker,” she said. “This shit is going to get into my lungs.”
“No,” I said. “No it’s not. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
I lay down on the bed and we curled up together.
—
I drove to work. I passed the sign that said CHILL WITH US 4EVER!
Who is us? I wondered.