Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  “When was the last time you saw Peter?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There was a group of us. I mean, I remember him being there. And I remember him not being there. But in terms of the last time I saw him? His mom asked me that a bunch of times, and all I can say is that I draw a blank. I wish I had a better answer.”

  “Do you remember seeing anyone who seemed unusual or suspicious?” I said.

  Another raised eyebrow.  “Uh,” he said. “It was Halloween? People were in costumes. There was some insane stuff. There was a girl wearing a thong? Which was just, like, a little strip of spandex that barely covered her ass crack? And then she had, like, a bikini top, and a werewolf mask.  And there was this girl that had, like, a bondage halter? And she was carrying a teddy bear that had the exact same bondage halter?”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s a good start.”  I cleared my throat.  “I’m wondering—would you possibly be willing to try hypnosis?  Just to get you in a more relaxed state—maybe there are some things that you might recall if”

  “No,” Ben Tramer said. He balked in a way that was so abrupt that it startled me. “Uh, no! Absolutely not. I don’t believe in that shit.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, and Tramer made an agitated gesture.

  “Are you guys cops?” he said. “Because, like, hypnotism?  That’s not even real! It’s, like, Ouija board shit.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s actually not”

  “Wait,” Tramer said. “Are you guys really cops?”

  —

  “You know,” I said afterward. “It’s probably not a good idea to misrepresent ourselves. Isn’t that,” I said, “illegal? Impersonating a”

  “Yeah,” Aqil said. “There are some things we need to refine.” He sank into the easy chair that Tramer had previously occupied and let out a long sigh.

  “I have something for you,” he said.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun. Colt .380 Mustang XSP. “He’s in Chicago,” Aqil said.

  And he was silent for so long that finally our eyes met. “What?” I said—but I knew who “he” was.

  “Homeless, I think,” Aqil said. “Working in a restaurant as a dishwasher. Doesn’t seem like he’s going anywhere.”

  I paused. Fingered the cylinder of the e-cigarette in my jacket pocket. “So,” I said calmly. “How do you know this?”

  “You know, a man gets released from prison after thirty years, it does make the news in a few places. Not USA Today, but it’s on the Internet. Besides,” he said, “I’m a cop; I have my sources. I know lots of databases.”

  “Actually,” I said. I folded my hands in my lap. “Aqil, you’re not a cop. You haven’t been a cop for well over a year.”

  Aqil grinned. “Well, then,” he said. “I still have a few cop powers lingering on. And I’m using them for your benefit, Dustin. I can tell you for a fact that he’s in Chicago. I thought that might ease your mind.”

  There were a lot of things to consider in this statement, and I gave it some thought, until Aqil cleared his throat.

  “I’m not trying to be inappropriate,” he said. “I’m just trying to help. As a friend.”

  Of course, it was entirely inappropriate. That he had been researching my life, such as it was, on the Internet. That he had discovered things about me and then had discovered things about Rusty, and there was a—what? A breaking of the therapist/patient dynamic, a

  We were silent. As a friend, I thought. There was a beat, and then another one, and he glanced out the window and I

  AUGUST 2012

  I BROUGHT THE gun home with me in my briefcase and I tried to think of a place in my house where no one would ever look, and my first thought was behind the big row of diagnostic manuals on my shelf. If the boys had ever snooped in my little office—of course they must have—they would have long ago realized that there was nothing personal or titillating to find, nothing precious that I had hidden in it. Long ago, I thought, they would have lost interest, and so I put the gun behind the editions of the DSM-III-R and the DSM-IV, and it fit snugly behind them but the books didn’t noticeably protrude.

  And Jill was upstairs in bed watching a horrible reality show about rich housewives that somehow mesmerized her with the awful emptiness of the subjects and I said, “Can I get you anything, sweetie?”

  “Hot tea, please,” she said, even though it was ninety degrees outside and she was under the covers and had a cap on.

  —

  It would’ve been wrong to tell her about Rusty. It would have been cruel.

  —

  Downstairs, Aaron was getting himself a snack—for most of the summer, we hadn’t been doing our traditional family dinners—and he observed as I put the kettle on.

  “So what are you up to today?” I said, and he shrugged, sliding a layer of peanut butter onto a piece of bread in that slow, careful, focused way he had. His expression hooded.

  “Could you do me a favor?” I said, and he shrugged again, so resentfully that if I were like my own dad was, I would’ve smacked him hard on the top of his head. I would have slapped him into the middle of next week, as my dad used to say.

  “Can you please take some tea up to your mother?” I said. I imagined him coming into her room with the tray, and that they would sit for a while and talk, and that she would finally decide to confide in him. That she might decide to explain to him that she was probably dying.

  —

  It did disturb me that she hadn’t told them much.

  She had once been a fairly social and engaged person. She had a full circle of women friends, and they met in groups to go to movies or restaurants or talk about books—though she pulled the plug on those friendships pretty soon after she started chemo.

  She’d also been deeply involved as a mother, much more intimately involved in their daily lives—the school days and teachers and homework and who their friends were, and who their friends’ parents were—far more than I ever was. So it was surprising to see that she was beginning to abandon them, as well. Her illness had coincided with a certain drop in household temperature that comes with teenaged boys—the way they become secretive and aloof and embarrassed in an almost hostile way. And so maybe that closeness between Jill and the boys would’ve ended anyway, but it struck me as very abrupt and pronounced.

  —

  There were times when it felt more like a dream or hallucination.

  The feeling that I would wake up at any minute and it would be the way it was six months ago. Jill would be well, our family would still be a warm place that I could settle into, everything would be normal again. If only I could wake up.

  This was of course a very common sensation for people who are experiencing a difficult or traumatic life event. Not at all unusual.

  There was a quote that I remembered. The German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers talking about what he called “the primary delusionary experience”:

  Patients feel uncanny and that there is something suspicious afoot. Everything gets a new meaning. The environment is somehow different—not to a gross degree—perception is unaltered in itself but there is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light…

  And the other thing about a dream, I thought: The way it collapses when you wake, the way it stops making logical sense and you can’t hold it in your conscious mind anymore.

  Because it doesn’t exist in language. There are images, layered upon one another, which communicate each to each. There is a face that is four faces at once. You are you but not you.

  In Freud this might be symbolic. In most current practice, it means nothing. It means a variety of synapses firing together.

  —

  I came into the television room with a cup of tea on a tray, and Aaron looked up at me. I wasn’t sure how the tea had been made, or why it was on a tray. It was a fancy, embossed silver tray that I didn’t recall seeing before.

 
“Will you please take this to your mom?” I said. “And sit and talk to her for a little bit, okay? She’s lonely.”

  And Aaron looked at me silently: baleful but resigned.

  —

  And so then I made myself a smoothie and called Kate. “He’s in Chicago,” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “He’s in Chicago. He doesn’t have an address yet, but he’s working at a restaurant as a dishwasher. In other words, he’s not stalking you.”

  Kate was silent. She had told me that she could see the Hollywood sign from her window, and I imagined that she was looking at it.

  “How do you know this?” she said at last, and I looked down from my study window at a car idling in the driveway. Rabbit was in the passenger seat, and Aaron was opening a rear door, and the driver looked like he was not a high school student. Nineteen? Twenty? The car was full of smoke.

  “I,” I said.  And I watched the car make a display of backing down the driveway.  “I have a private detective who’s keeping an eye on it for me,” I said. “I’m consulting with him on a case right now, so he’s doing me a favor.”

  “That’s a relief,” she said. “It’s something, at least. I feel like I haven’t been able to sleep for three months. How’s Jill doing, by the way? Is she feeling better?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  And then it was abruptly 10:00 or 11:00 P.M. And I took out the dossier on Peter Allingham.

  —

  Okay, I was trying to picture him in that bar on Halloween night. Without question he’s drunk, hanging out with his friends, talking and laughing. He leaves to go to the bathroom.

  How could no one ever see him again? He’s dressed in a costume. If he’s stumbling down the street and makes his way finally to the river, is it plausible that no one saw him, despite all the posters and searching and social-media blitz that went on for months? And that he could have been under the ice for so long?

  Let’s say they’ve been stalking the target for a while, in advance.

  Less and less unconvincing.

  SEPTEMBER 2012

  DENNIS PACKED HIS things and drove off to college and it was a very bad day. Once his car was loaded, Jill slowly made her way down the stairs from the bedroom and stood on the porch. She lifted her hand and waved with a kind of grim blankness. She was like an elderly person in mid-stage dementia, and when she called, “Have fun!” in a rheumy, toneless voice, Dennis took a step back and put his hand on the hood of his car as if it were a talisman of protection.

  Of course, they knew that their mother was undergoing chemotherapy, but we’d told them everything was going to be fine. They didn’t know that it had spread by this time to her brain and her lungs—but really? Did it need to be spelled out to them?

  Aaron came home late that day—he had begun his senior year in high school—and when he finally appeared, he sat on the couch in the TV room with a bowl of microwave macaroni and cheese. He didn’t look up from his program when I stood there in the doorway.

  “Your brother left for college today,” I said. “I was—I felt surprised that you weren’t here to say goodbye.”

  “I didn’t realize it was supposed to be a, like, ritual,” Aaron said. Still not looking up. “I texted him two hours ago.”

  And that was when it occurred to me that it was truly over. It was finished.

  This little island that I’d built for myself, this family that had seemed so safe and stable, was dissipating beneath my feet.  I watched as Aaron forked noodles into his mouth, and they were yellow like warning signs on a construction site. I felt a gaze pressing on my back.

  —

  Besides Jill and her doctors and me, the only one who knew the extent of it was Aqil. He was sitting on the couch across from me in my Kent office when I told him about the metastasis into her right cerebellum, and he lowered his face into his palms.

  “They’re using the word ‘palliative’ now, but I don’t think she understands.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, and shuddered. And for a few seconds, it appeared that he was weeping into his hands.

  Somehow, over the past months, we’d talked about my life more that we’d ever talked about his. Somehow, I’d managed to tell him about Jill’s cancer, about Rusty’s release from prison, all the things my children didn’t know about.

  There was a word for this, I thought. A syndrome, I just couldn’t remember the name of it. When the therapist begins to rely on the patient for emotional support. When the therapist begins to confess secrets to the patient. When, somehow, you have bonded with them, they have almost become your therapist.

  He put his hand out and touched the top of my head gingerly, giving my hair an uncertain stroke. “Shhh,” he whispered. “Shhhhh.”

  SEPTEMBER 2012

  THERE WAS A kind of comfort in thinking about the case. The “investigation,” which I wasn’t sure I should put in quotations anymore. Maybe there wasn’t any killer, but the more I read about the Allingham drowning, the more compelling I found it. More than any of the others, it felt like a kind of locked-room mystery—and when I focused my attention on it, my mind seemed to solidify out of its haze.

  I said we should reach out to Allingham’s mother. “His widow,” I said, and then I realized that was the wrong word: There wasn’t even a term for a parent who had lost a child, not in English at least. “She was very outspoken after his disappearance,” I said. “The statements she made to the media. She didn’t think it was an accident, either.”

  We were sitting in my office in Cleveland Heights, and Aqil was pacing at the window, looking down at the cars passing on Cedar Road. His hands were folded behind his back. It was the kind of pose that a president might make in the late nineteenth century, and for a second I had a kind of—what? A picture rose up, liquid and woozy in my mind.

  I remembered the look of a man with his hands behind his back. The—gib? Gibben? I thought.  Coming forward, something hidden behind his back, I guess. I saw a little flash as the image touched the front of my mind sharply for a moment, and I blinked.

  And then Aqil was looking at me curiously. What are you thinking? I heard him say. “I don’t know,” I said.

  OCTOBER 2012

  “I DON’T BELIEVE in accidents,” the woman said. Mary.  Mary Allingham, Peter’s mother. “I don’t believe that my son died for no reason.  I just don’t think it’s possible.”

  We were sitting there in my office in Bay Village, and she was on the sofa across from the desk, and Aqil was standing near the bookcase, staring at the bindings and rubbing the hairs on his chin as if the volumes on the shelf had completely absorbed him, and Mrs. Allingham sat across from me in the easy chair as if she were an ordinary patient. She was, I would guess, not quite fifty: thin; dark brown hair cut just below the ears; a dainty, pointy face; large, hollow eyes. And I assumed that she had not been getting therapy; if she had been prescribed antidepressants, she had not been taking them. She seemed addled with grief.

  “I’m just grateful that you reached out to me,” she said. “Because there’s nobody else. My husband—” she said, and shook her head sadly. “We don’t have a marriage anymore.”

  I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Allingham,” I said. “You know, you’ve been thinking about this with the conscious mind for so long. And your conscious mind has done the best it could: We’ve got all this information that you’ve compiled, and you’ve presented it to us in a lot of detail.”

  “It’s all I think about,” she said. She was staring at the back of her own hand with the blank look of someone who’s beginning to have a recollection.

  “Mary?” I said, and she looked up—a dying person, I thought. Or no: already dead. “So you’ve been working your conscious mind very hard. Maybe it’s time to try to talk to your unconscious,” I said. “I wonder if you’re willing to talk to me while you’re under hypnosis? I    wonder if you”

  And she gave me a surprisingly gentle, q
uizzical smile. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  “Okay,” I whispered. “Let’s imagine you’re in an elevator. And you’re going to a place you need to go….Maybe it’s the last time you saw Peter. Maybe it’s the last time you talked to him. Maybe it has nothing to do with Peter at all—it’s just a memory that draws you in. There’s another part of your brain that doesn’t have language, it can only think in images, and I’d like you to let that part of the brain come forward.  Close your eyes.

  “This is not a test, Mary. We just want to show up, be present in the moment, be truthful about what we see. We’re not looking for results, we’re just looking for what you see, whatever that might be.

  “Are you ready?” I said. “Are we going down in the elevator together?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me where we’re going,” I said softly. “I want you to surprise me. But I’m going to push the button now, and we’re going to go down, and down, down to the very bottom floor.

  “I’m pressing the button now,” I said, “and I want you to repeat after me. I trust myself. I trust the universe….”

  —

  There is almost always a moment of dissociation when you are hypnotizing someone, when you stare hard at the stony, dreaming face and you hear your own voice vibrating in your skull and when they open their eyes you close your own.

  “Where are we?” I said.

  “I’m in the kitchen of my house,” she said. “I’m reading a magazine. People? People magazine. The radio is on.”

  “What time of day or night does it seem to be?” I said.

  “It’s,” she said.