by Dan Chaon
“What’re you fishing for?” Aqil said.
“Steelhead,” the man said. He squinted one eye.
“Catching any?” Aqil said.
“Not yet,” said the man.
And then he turned. Casting again. The conversation was over.
“If there was a body in this river, they’d have found it by now, don’t you think?” Aqil said as we picked our way upstream, north toward Lake Erie. “I just want you to say now that it doesn’t seem likely that there’s a body in this river.”
“It doesn’t seem likely,” I agreed.
“But there will be a body after December twelfth,” he said. “You know that now, don’t you?”
“I,” I say.
I didn’t quite want to answer yes, though maybe I yes.
—
But my mind was drifting a little. I had done my share of grief counseling, and of course I’d previously experienced grief, as well, after the death of my parents and my aunt and uncle. For years I had taken a pharmaceutical regimen of mood stabilizers, which had always been effective.
But this startled me, whatever it was. The way it inhabited the body. It wasn’t a mood; it was a physical sensation, not unlike drunkenness. The body both numb and hyper-real: the stony weight of the eyes in their sockets, the porcelain scrape of the teeth touching one another, a dull throbbing on the edges of the skin where it met the air. And the air itself had a viscous quality, thick, trudging through mud or snow. Eigengrau. Not atypical to lose chunks of time.
—
And when I lifted my head we were talking to the mother of Slade Gable. She was a couple of years older than I was—forty-four? forty-five?—long, wavy strawberry-blond hair, athletic of build, hazel-eyed, stunned—and I recognized the glazed disbelief, the look of someone who hopes that maybe it’s a dream, and Aqil said, “This is my card. I’m not in any way associated with the police. My partner and I—we’re investigators looking into this particular case, and other ones like it. And not for profit or anything. We’re just here to help,” he said.
Our eyes met, hers and mine. “Thank you,” she murmured.
—
Nemeth’s Lounge was the kind of place where locals were huddled together talking and laughing and they all looked up and grew silent when we walked in. There was a smattering of working men—a laborer, mid-twenties, nursing a beer and whiskey; a road worker who might be his uncle, in an orange vest; a pair of bearded frowners in flannel shirts. There was a woman in a red Buckeyes sweatshirt, her graying hair still teased and feathered into the kind of bouffant a heavy-metal girl would have worn in 1987.
It was a narrow, boxcar room, a length of wooden bar counter on the left, a length of vinyl booths on the right, a pinball machine, a Ms. Pacman video game, a hall at the back that led to bathrooms and a backdoor exit.
Behind the bar was an elderly white man—aged seventy, perhaps; silver-haired, rosacea-nosed, with the wiry look of an old sailor—and a younger Filipino woman, and the two of them turned toward us as we came in.
It was the kind of dive bar that had probably been around since the 1940s or ’50s, the kind of place that had been ironically rediscovered by college students. Rockabilly bands played here on weekends. There were cheesecake nudes, old centerfold calendar girls hanging on the walls, the old-fashioned poses: kneeling, breasts bare and jutting, toes pointed.
We sat in a booth beneath one of these posters and Aqil considered it. “Is that Bettie Page?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. The wooden surface of our table had been gouged with graffiti.
Brittany ’09, it said. Mot! Fangface 2010 and a crude sketch of a cat. I cleared my throat.
“Listen,” I said. “Is there an issue with calling ourselves ‘investigators’? A—somewhat—misrepresentation? Impersonating a”
“Well,” Aqil said. “I didn’t say ‘private investigator.’ I didn’t say ‘licensed.’ I mean, we’re investigating. That’s what we’re doing. I don’t see the problem.”
“Mm,” I said, and the Filipino woman approached our table, smiling exaggeratedly.
“What can I get you, gents?” she said, with just the trace of an accent. A soft, high, musical voice. A round face made severe by heavy makeup.
“I’ll have a Coke or Pepsi,” I said, and Aqil ordered a beer.
“You got a menu?” Aqil said, and the woman touched his shoulder confidentially. “Hamburger or cheeseburger,” she told him kindly. “French fries or potato chips.”
“This is the bar where that kid disappeared, right?” Aqil said. “What’s going on with that?”
“Ugh,” she said. “College students are a lot of trouble! It’s a business, so they’re welcome here, but—so crazy.” She gestured regretfully at the defaced surface of our table. “Look at this mess,” she said. “Why would you do that?”
“I guess they have people out today searching for him,” Aqil told her. “Down by the river.”
She nodded gravely. “He’s dead, probably,” she said, and walked off with our order.
—
“I’d like to talk to that friend of his,” Aqil said. “The one he was with at the bar when he disappeared. He’s probably out there searching, don’t you think?”
“Possibly,” I said. “But I don’t think we should be misleading people.” I sipped my water. “I’m not writing a book, for example.”
“Not yet,” Aqil said cheerfully. “But anyway, all I want to do today is just try a walk-through. Just a pretend thing, like you do when you’re hypnotizing people.”
Pretend! I thought.
It had always been my contention that guided confabulation could be a powerful therapeutic tool, but of course it was never a good course of action in a case where the health-care consumer was having difficulty distinguishing reality.
Was that, in fact, the case with Aqil? I realized that I didn’t think so anymore. I realized that I accepted his basic premise—at least the core of it. I believed that it was likely that the body of this boy would be recovered some time after December 12.
“Let’s imagine,” Aqil said, “just for the sake of expediency, that I’m Slade Gable, and you’re his friend whatshisname. Lambert. It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving. Black Friday!—I didn’t even think of that. So most of the kids have gone home for the weekend, I imagine. With their families. So why are Gable and Lambert at school?”
“They’re both from Pennsylvania,” I said. “And Gable has a track meet coming up, so maybe he has practice over the weekend.”
Aqil nodded. “Okay,” he said. “So. We’re sitting here. It’s a small bar—smaller than I expected—so probably crowded on a Friday night, but fewer college kids than usual. We’re sitting here in the booth, drinking pitchers of beer. We’re drunk, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “But you have track practice in the morning. You wouldn’t be overdoing it.”
“That’s right. We’re not talking about a reckless person, are we?”
“No,” I said. “Although—pole-vaulting. It seems like it might give you a certain kind of adrenaline, doesn’t it?”
“Hm,” he said, and nodded his head thoughtfully, and we were both holding this thing between us—this story. It was nothing but conjecture built on the barest of facts, but I could feel that we were there together. Aqil and I. It was as if we were both leaning over an arena, watching a play unfold, and yet also collaborating in directing its movement. Our brains were both in a shared imaginary space, and both of us could move around in it, we were watching it from above and acting in it at the same time, I was imagining Lambert and Gable as if they were in a movie but I am also sitting here as Lambert, watching my friend drain the cheap beer from his plastic cup and pour another and I surmise that neither one of them had girlfriends, and I see them as athletes but a little on the nerdy side, and I think pole-vaulter. It’s just such an odd thing to want to do. Psychologically, what would be the at
traction? Flying, I guess?
“So,” Aqil said, “we’ve been talking about sports and classes and da da da, and then I get up and I’m going to go take a piss and get another beer and I’ll be right back. And I leave my coat in the booth.”
“And I’m sitting here,” I said, “waiting for you to come back…sipping my beer and thinking and maybe running my fingernail over the graffiti…”
“You don’t pay attention to where he went,” Aqil said.
“No,” I said. “If I’m looking at anything, I’m probably scoping around the bar to see who’s attractive. I’ve probably already previously noticed several women and now I’ll probably devote some time to watching them in earnest.”
“In earnest,” Aqil said. “I love that. But how much time passes before you start to wonder why he hasn’t come back? Five minutes?”
“More, I think,” I said. “You’d probably start getting a little bored after ten, but it wouldn’t be terribly abnormal. Maybe there’s a line at the bathroom. Maybe he saw someone he knew and he’s talking to them? I think it could be as much as twenty minutes before you’d really start to wonder what was going on.”
“So how long before you go looking for him?” Aqil said.
And it struck me. “I actually don’t think I would,” I said. “I’d probably be annoyed and a little hurt, maybe, but I think I’d assume that he left for some reason or met somebody; I don’t think I’d be worried, though. I wouldn’t think he was in trouble or in danger—”
“Would you call him?”
“No. That would be too—I don’t know—needy or clingy.”
“Ha-ha! You’re not his girlfriend, right?”
“Right. I might text him. And then if he didn’t answer I’d just think, fine, screw it, and I’d finish my drink and go home.”
“Yes,” Aqil said. “Exactly. And you’d be annoyed enough for a day afterward not to be worried. I’ll bet that’s exactly what happened. But we’ve got to talk to Lambert.”
—
I imagine that Slade Gable walks through a cluster of people toward the hallway at the back. There’s a pair of café doors that lead to the tiny kitchen where hamburgers and cheeseburgers are made; and then there are the bathrooms, Men’s on the left, Women’s on the right; and beyond that, there are stairs leading down to a basement; and beyond that, there is the back exit, which opens onto a small fenced patio, and some graffiti-tagged dumpsters, and a parking lot.
1. Let’s pretend Slade goes into the bathroom and there is a urinal and a stall and a sink, and the door doesn’t lock. There is a window the size of a bread box, a slot shape with opaque textured glass, and he couldn’t fit through it. He has to come out again.
2. Pretend that Slade goes down the basement stairs and there is a narrow crowded storeroom stacked with beer kegs, cardboard boxes full of liquor, file cabinets, cobwebs, framed posters from rock shows long past, glassware, silverware, napkins, cleaning products. At six foot one, Slade would be ducking his head and feeling the wooden beams of the unfinished ceiling bearing down upon him and he’d wonder why he’d gone down here in the first place; maybe there was a shape a figure something that caught his attention
3. Let’s say that Slade goes out the back door and onto the small fenced patio, where a cluster of smokers has gathered. They are talking—someone is telling a story, and they are listening; the listeners all have one eye on the mouth of the storyteller and another eye is inside the story, picturing it. They don’t turn as Slade walks wordlessly past them.
He may be stumbling a little; he’s surprised to feel so drunk! His head is very fuzzy, and he just needs some fresh air. And he sees the short Mexican dishwasher standing by the dumpster, and the dishwasher is standing there with a plastic bucket of slop and gazing up at a three-quarter moon and draws on a little joint and holds the smoke and then lets it out in a slow cumulous plume and Slade thinks Have I been roofied?
4. Imagine that Slade walks into the parking lot and it’s close to full, though it’s not big enough for more than ten or fifteen cars. There is the freckled crud left behind by melted snow. The asphalt is full of lightning-bolt cracks that have been lazily patched with black tar, and he is aware of the ugliness, the dinginess, of the back ends of things. The place where businesses hide their garbage bins, where the raw brick and metal siding are unadorned and the true nature of things—worn, trashy, economically sinking rust-belt decay—is not hidden by the Main Street façade. There might be a figure at the far end of the parking lot. Someone he knows? Someone who beckons to him? Someone—a police officer?—who is an authority? He walks over. He gets in the car (or he is placed in the car, somehow?) and is driven away.
5. Or he just decides to take a walk. Beyond the parking lot is a slope that leads to a narrow, curving, ill-traveled street, the street that leads past the Kiwanis Recreation Park, where the geese are huddled dark shapes that shudder in their sleep, and a few raise their sleek dark curving necks to observe him as he passes.
Wait. Why would he go this way? His home is in the opposite direction.
Maybe he’s feeling blue. It’s a darker mood than Lambert would have noticed, not something Slade wants to talk about. It’s a feeling that has been bothering him for a long time, that he can’t name, and he comes to the thin river and begins to walk along its banks, stepping along the cement slabs, picking his way through reeds and scrub trees, and above him the icy and merciless stars. He can see that his life is not going to work out the way he was hoping it would. Even something as simple as an upcoming track meet feels like a sign of expected failure, and he can see the old cemetery at the top of the ridge on the other side of the river, he can see the silhouette of the mausoleums and the bare, burnt lightning-struck trees, it’s all like a bad angsty poem written by a sensitive middle school boy and he thinks: I just need to keep walking. Or maybe he starts to jog. There is a path that leads along the edge of the park, tracing the river toward where it dumps into Lake Erie.
6. Let’s say he’s been drugged. Something in his beer, probably, a drug of the soporific class. Yes, Rohypnol, perhaps. Before he gets to the bathroom, a pretty girl takes his hand and maybe kisses him on the cheek. Come on, she says sweetly, follow me, and he can’t quite focus his eyes but he grins because she is so pretty, and she likes him, they are holding hands, he can feel the soft lotiony dampness of her palm, which is a kind of promise, and they cross the parking lot into a copse of trees and just when they are about to kiss he feels a bag pulled over his head
7. “Slade!” a voice calls from the basement. “Slade, come down here. I want to show you something.”
Slade squints uncertainly. He feels woozy—more drunk than he should be. “Who’s talking?” he says. But he takes a step down the stairs. “Lambert? Is that you?”
8. He gets up from the booth and gives his crew cut an itch with his fingers. “Dude,” he says. “I’m going to go take a piss. Do you want another pitcher?”
“Yeah,” Lambert says. “Sure. Why not?” “Okay,” Slade says. “I’ll be right back.”
DECEMBER 8, 2012
IT FEELS so good to be outside yourself! You press yourself into another life and it presses back into you, and then the pressure equalizes—some parts of you have been replaced, or diluted at least. All the things that have been crawling in slow, endless circles around the circumference of your mind have been washed down a drain for the moment. You’re investigating, and it holds you in its arms and focuses your attention.
For example, I hadn’t given much thought to Rusty for weeks. Not until Kate called me on Saturday morning. I was sitting in the breakfast nook with my laptop, searching for news stories about Slade Gable, and I picked up the phone absently. “Hello, this is Dr. Tillman,” I said curtly, and she said, “Dustin…?”
It was a month since Jill’s death, and Kate spoke in that soft, empathy-buttered voice people like to soothe on new widowers. “So how are you doing?” she said�
��an imitation of a therapist’s intonation, one that I’d heard myself using often enough. But in the past weeks I’d come to recognize its awfulness. The way the voice lowered you into a jar of chloroform and sealed the lid.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m back at work. I’ve still got a lot that needs to be taken care of. I haven’t cleaned out her closet yet. I have to take her clothes to Goodwill.”
“You should just,” she said, “just take your time. There’s no hurry, is there?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Because I didn’t know whether there was a hurry or not. I thought that there might be.
—
And then I heard Kate’s breath against the phone’s earpiece again, a soft exhale rendered into digital audio, and it occurred to me that she must be smoking. Maybe I’d buy some cigarettes?
“Rusty called Wave, I guess,” Kate said. “I think they might be in some kind of contact or conversation, I don’t know. But she has talked to him at least once, apparently. She was very vague, as usual.”
“What did he say?”
“God! I have no idea. Talking to Wave is like talking to a Magic 8 Ball. There are no straight answers. I’m just, like…he hasn’t talked to you, has he?”
I blinked. “Of course not,” I said.
“Because he hasn’t called me, either. And I’d just like to know what his game is. Calling Wave. Or whatever her name is now.”
She cleared her throat. She always got quiet when the subject of Wave came up. The fact that she and Wave were estranged, that they were so alienated from one another—it was a kind of loss that wasn’t that different from a death. The two kinds of grief had a kinship.
“How long had it been since you last spoke to her?” I said, and she didn’t reply. Through the line, I could hear the sound of a faucet being turned on, and I guessed that she was getting herself a glass of water.