by Dan Chaon
“Probably…five years?” she said.
I nodded. I glanced back to the Google search that I had been doing on Slade Gable, scanning through the paltry results. “Well,” I said.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said after a moment. “Have you…?”
“What?” I said.
“Have you told Aaron and Dennis? About the Rusty stuff?”
I looked up from the laptop. The question actually sent a spark of electricity through me. “No,” I said.
I hadn’t told anybody except Aqil about Rusty. But especially not the boys.
In truth, we had never even discussed the murders. They knew that my parents were dead, but Jill and I had never agreed about how to tell them the full details, or when. “We’ll explain it to them eventually,” she said. “When they’re ready.”
I didn’t really know when that would be. How do you explain to your children that your parents were murdered? And at what age would they be mature enough to absorb the information? Age twelve? Age sixteen? Now—age seventeen and eighteen, just after their mother had died?
“It doesn’t seem like a good time right now,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “But I just keep thinking: What if Rusty tries to call them? It’s a scary thought!”
“What?” I said, and the electricity ran through my fingers and toes; I straightened up. “I don’t think he even knows I have children. How would he know…? Unless…did Wave say?”
“If he can get in touch with Wave, he can get in touch with anybody. With the Internet—Facebook? I just think you should be prepared. They need to be prepared.”
“What are you talking about? Why would he…?”
“Dustin, he could do a lot of damage,” she said. “He could do a lot of damage in a short time.”
DECEMBER 9, 2012
HIRAM COLLEGE was about an hour southeast of Cleveland, about half the way to Youngstown along Route 422. We crossed over the La Due Reservoir and Aqil regarded it. We were on a four-lane highway, passing across a stretch of water on a low bridge, but the air was so misty and the light was so dim that the lake was just a blurry flatness, still as a parking lot. The sky and the water reflected each other, horizonless, just a blank scrim beyond the low corrugated metal bridge fence that traced the edge of the highway.
“That would be a good place to drown,” Aqil said. “But it’s too far for him to walk there.”
“Ah,” I said. I had been thinking about talking to the boys. Broaching the issue of Rusty with them. But Dennis was away at Cornell, and it wasn’t a conversation to have over the phone. And Aaron was elusive at best—the only times I seemed to encounter him, he was on his way out the door, or on his way up to his room.
But maybe when Dennis came home for Christmas? I could order some pizza, and we could watch a movie—maybe a movie about prison? Or about foster brothers? Something that would give me a jumping-off point for further discussion. Would that be the way to do it?
I wished that I could consult Jill, but I couldn’t prompt her to say anything, even in my imagination. All she ever whispered was wait…wait…wait.
—
I don’t know how long I’d been quiet before Aqil cleared his throat. “Dustin,” he said. “What do you know about isolation tanks?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I blinked. Had I missed some part of the conversation? “I’ve recommended them for some patients. I think the preferred term is sensory-attenuation tank. It’s a,” I said. “I think it’s a good experience for many people. Which is—the word isolation has negative connotations, and I don’t think it really reflects—”
“I was thinking that maybe that would be a good way to keep them incapacitated,” Aqil said. “What if you kept them in an isolation tank? Their hands are tied, or maybe they’ve even been mummified in some way…but when they come out, they’re so disoriented that it’s really easy to sacrifice them. Don’t people go crazy after a certain number of days in isolation?”
“There are studies,” I said. And I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the passenger-side window, and outside there was a yellow diamond sign that said RIGHT LANE ENDS and a three-armed telephone pole and a smatter of bare trees that clustered, staring like bystanders. “There are the Lilly experiments from the 1950s about sensory deprivation—which, yes, can lead to hallucinations and depression and so forth. But on a practical level”
“But if you fell asleep in an isolation tank, you wouldn’t drown, right?”
“My understanding,” I said, “is that you’re in a very dense saline solution—probably Epsom salts? So it keeps you floating even if you were to go to sleep.”
“Interesting,” Aqil said.
“Well, I don’t think,” I said. “It would be very complicated to keep someone in sensory attenuation for more than a few hours. The captive would have to…urinate and defecate and so forth. So practically speaking that would be,” I said, “a problem.”
“A problem for who?”
“Well,” I said. And I pushed the idea of that from my mind. “I suppose more importantly, if you were keeping them in a tank longer than a day, they’d have to eat and drink.”
“Mm,” Aqil said. “What if they have a feeding tube? Or maybe there’s just rubber straws dangling near their mouth that they can suck on, and water comes out. Water laced with painkillers. Sometimes they get some kind of liquid protein. Sometimes they get whiskey.”
DECEMBER 9, 2012
IT SEEMED LIKE I was clear a lot of the time. Right now, for example, Aqil and I were in Garrettsville, Ohio, and we were sitting down to speak to the sister of the boy who went missing at Hiram College. And I felt very alert and present.
The disappearance of Keegan Brewer was less newsworthy, even, than that of Slade Gable. No search parties had been organized, however small; no one was combing the edge of a river, however shallow and unlikely. There was only a single mother, waiting in her home for news from the police. The older sister, Ciara, aged twenty-two, worked as a waitress in nearby Garrettsville, and Aqil had somehow organized a meeting with her at a coffee shop. I imagined that Aqil had told her we were “investigating,” and it was easy for me to settle across from her as if she were a patient.
“How are you doing?” I said. Made eye contact. Gave her a sympathetic gaze. “I hope you’re holding up okay,” I said. “It’s got to be a hard time for you and your family.”
I can imagine that Aaron and Dennis would laugh if they saw me. They would think it was phony, this attention I was bending toward this sister, smarmy, they might say, but it wasn’t that at all. I was trying to direct my whole mind toward her—not an easy thing to do—and if my approach would seem laughably obvious to them, that was only because there was a certain kind of soft, calm voice that I knew was relaxing. Even if smarmy. Even if uncool.
She was a small, thin young woman with a sharp face that reminded me a bit of Kate and Wave. She had those thin hands, too, but hers were chapped and cold, and she had the fingernails of a severe onychophagiac. It was the kind of nail-biting that seemed like the sign of an impulse-control disorder.
Ciara sighed, looked at me skeptically. “Well, we’re not getting a lot of support.”
“That’s a shame,” I said. “You haven’t had a good impression of the police response?”
“Fff,” she said. “I don’t know what the cops are doing.” She observed a hangnail on her index finger with dislike, and then plunged it into her mouth and gave it a bite. “And there was, maybe, one article in the Akron paper. Nothing in the Cleveland news. Like it’s no big deal; I guess people go missing all the time.”
I nodded. There were a lot of things I was making an effort not to think about. I was not thinking about Jill. I was not thinking about her face, that last smile. I was not thinking about Dennis or Aaron; I was not thinking about Rusty in Chicago. I was not thinking about the picture that Aqil had shown me, my dad with his pros
thetic arm extended as if reaching out with his hook, his eyes and his mouth still open.
“That’s why we contacted you,” I said, and I focused on the young woman’s flecked hazel eyes. “We just want to help you out in whatever small way we can. You should know that we’re not associated with an official agency of any kind, we’re just privately investigating. I’ve been…working on a book about these kinds of disappearances.”
The girl regarded me. “What do you mean—these kinds of disappearances?”
And I acknowledged her concern silently with my expression. “Unexplained,” I said. “Disappearances where the facts don’t quite add up. Is that your own experience with this? Do you have some ideas about what might have happened?”
She looked at her cup of coffee. “He wasn’t depressed,” she said. “But he had a concussion about six weeks ago. Something from wrestling practice. And it took him a long time to get completely over it. And I think he wouldn’t say how bad he really felt, because he didn’t want to have to miss a wrestling meet. So that’s something that worries me.”
“I see,” I said. I glanced over at Aqil, who was watching avidly, and he gave me an encouraging nod. “I wonder,” I said. “Do you know whether he’d experienced any previous brain injury? With athletes, mild traumatic brain injury is often underreported. If there’s substance abuse, that can prolong the symptoms. Did he seem more nervous or irritable than usual?”
“I don’t know,” Ciara said, and it occurred to me that she herself was nervous and irritable in the way of a concussed person—that, in fact, grief and brain injury had a lot of the same sets of symptoms. “I do know he was drinking. A lot. But not, like, alcoholic. Just—the way college guys are heavy drinkers.”
She took a small sip of her coffee. “But why would he go out walking at eleven o’clock at night in November?” she said. “That doesn’t even make sense. I mean, it’s Hiram, Ohio. There’s no place to walk to. I don’t know. Was he in trouble in some way, and he had to skip town? I was close to Keegan, but there are probably things he wouldn’t tell me.”
I nodded, and Aqil and I exchanged looks again. He lifted an eyebrow.
“Have you ever heard of fugue states?” Ciara said. “I’ve been reading about it online. It’s like you have amnesia? But at the same time you start traveling. Like you’re running away from something, but you don’t know what.”
She paused. “I’m thinking maybe it could be a fugue state,” she said. “I feel like I would know it if he was dead.” I watched as my hand reached out and touched the back of her hand. As a therapist I’d always felt that physical contact should be used sparingly: It could be a very loaded and psychologically complex gesture, difficult to gauge appropriately—but she didn’t flinch.
—
Of course he was dead. That’s what I told Aqil afterward.
“But I don’t think it’s a match,” I said. “With the other profiles you’ve shown me, I think this one—he’s not one of ours.”
Aqil raised his eyebrows. “You got a little psychic glimmer, did you, Doctor?” he said, and I winced.
“No, no,” I said. “Not at all. Just an intuition. And it might not be right. But I think she suspects he’s dead, as well. I could tell that right away.”
Aqil gazed out at the road, quiet for a long while. We listened to a song on the radio. “See?” Aqil said at last. “I knew you were the right one.”
DECEMBER 10, 2012
I’D NEVER IN my life had a “psychic glimmer,” as Aqil had called it. I don’t have psychic glimmers, I said.
Though for years and years, I wished to. In middle school, I dreamed of having telepathy: imagined hearing people’s thoughts and then perhaps creating subliminal suggestions that they thought were their own ideas. Also moving objects with my mind, making silverware bend and books fly off the shelves and locking doors so no one could get away.
I used to try to practice. In high school, after the murders, back when I was living with Grandma Brody in Gillette, Wyoming, I used to concentrate hard on the necks of fellow students as I sat in my desk behind them. Hoping to make them feel an itch or a sharp poke.
I wished for magic powers. I used to practice moving my hands as if I were a wizard, as if I were casting a spell. I used to pretend that I could turn people into animals—monkeys, pigs, chickens, rabbits, dogs. I would just form my fingers into rune shapes and the transformation would happen immediately. In the lunchroom, I once turned a student-council girl into a mole, and a shy ugly boy into a snake. The mole and the snake both looked surprised at first, but then the snake turned to the mole and felt very happy. I almost burst out laughing!
I still remember that fantasy so clearly. More vividly than any actual thing that happened during that time.
After Kate graduated from high school and moved away, I was very lonely. An active imaginative life, but not much in the real world. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t read anyone’s mind. No matter what I wished, I couldn’t make them sprout feathers or scales.
But I did, genuinely, have a good intuition. I didn’t know how I knew, for example, that blowing on Mrs. O’Sullivan’s fingers would give her relief from her pain, but it came to me clearly, and in the same way, talking to this girl, Ciara Brewer, I could feel a sharp picture of her brother emerging. He had a brain injury. He had been drinking heavily. He was likely using steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs. There would obviously be severe mood swings, I thought, and if he hadn’t killed someone else, I thought, he had likely killed himself.
And I saw that Ciara thought that, too, when I looked into her eyes. I feel like I would know it if he was dead, she said, and I thought, oh, you know it. She was already in mourning.
—
Yes. He’s likely killed himself, I thought.
I sat on the couch, eating carry-out Vietnamese food and staring at the news. The death toll in the Philippines from Typhoon Bopha was nearing seven hundred, and rebel forces had seized an army base near Aleppo, Syria, after weeks of heavy fighting. The governor of Colorado had issued a proclamation allowing the personal use of marijuana. There had been a murder–suicide at the Cleveland airport.
And yet most of the workings of the world slipped by incognito. CNN wouldn’t broadcast the news of Keegan Brewer’s death, or Slade Gable’s; there were, no doubt, terrible tragedies in Nigeria and New Zealand that I would never know about. I could hear Aaron coming through the back door, and I looked up from the TV to see him pass briefly through my peripheral vision. A flit.
Have you told Aaron and Dennis? About the Rusty stuff?
—
“Hey, honey!” I called out. “What have you been up to?”
—
No answer.
DECEMBER 10–11, 2012
WOKE UP AND there was an image I couldn’t catch. A memory? A dream?
I was sitting on the couch with my tumbler of whiskey still clasped in my left hand. TV going, the same news from the Philippines, no idea what time it was anymore, and I thought I had a realization. The gibbeners! I thought. As if I had just had a bolt of inspiration. I wrote it down.
—
“Here’s the place where that kid drowned,” Rusty said.
It was the irrigation ditch that ran along the neighbor’s property. You could see it from a distance because the banks of it were the only thing that was green in the flat gray-yellow sod: Wet, greedy grasses and reeds growing high on the borders. A barbed-wire fence along one side.
You’d think it was nothing. Not much wider than a sidewalk—with a running start, you could jump across it. The water was flat murky brown, moving steadily toward the sluice gate, but in a smooth, still way. You’d never guess it was deep.
But I knew that the boy had been swimming and had been caught by a pipe that was carrying the irrigation water. The suction was very strong, that’s what my dad told me, which is why you should never ever play near it.
“You know what a gibben is, right?” Rusty said. “It’s where they tie your hands behind your back and then they push you into the water. And then they just watch you drown.”
He put his arm on my back and I felt the touch of his palm. We were alone together on weekends, after school. Just the two of us, Dusty and Rusty, going for a hike.
must’ve been eight or nine years old
—
“But,” I said. “Why would…”
“That’s the rule. If you talk, that’s what happens,” he said. “If you try to tell anyone that they exist.”
“But who are they?”
“The gibbeners,” Rusty said, and gave me one of his secretive looks, nudging me closer to the edge of the water, so that I stumbled a little. “The gibbeners. They get around you in a circle, with their hands behind their backs.”
“What have they got behind their backs?” I said. I looked into the water. Eddies of mud, coursing sinuously but purposefully, too.
Rusty only smiled. “You should take a dip,” he said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“No way,” I told him.
“Why not?” Rusty said. He put his hands behind his back. “Don’t you trust me?”
—
And the radio in the car still playing just a little of the tinnitus in the ear, a slow, high-pitched leak of air
behind your back
And then
parking in the lot behind the Bay Village office, spraying sharp, painful mint
into my mouth to mask
the smell of cigarette
and I also spray a little
mist of fabric refresher onto my clothes
And I have my session with Mrs. Goland at nine-thirty and