by Dan Chaon
But he doesn’t think about this. He puts his hands on the steering wheel at ten and two and stares out at the road. Thinks about smoking a joint. But it’s probably too cold to crack the window open; he doesn’t want to disturb Laura’s sleep.
It’s April—nominally spring. Though this is the kind of landscape that doesn’t seem to know what spring is.
—
His dad has been missing for about ten weeks, and it’s been even longer since Dennis actually saw him. Not since right after Christmas, not since Dennis had made his excuses and headed back to college early. Just feeling kind of uncomfortable and skeezed out by all the dynamics at home.
Back in Ithaca, he thought he could imagine his way back into the role of normal college student. Sitting in his dorm room and watching bad movies on his laptop, smoking a lot of weed. Spending a lot of time with Laura, and everything else kind of fell away for a while. Laura said he had a certain kind of energy, a certain kind of aura that interested her, and no girl had ever thought he was interesting before. He felt like maybe his life would work out after all. Just like Bob Marley said: Everything little thing gonna be all right!
That was when the shit suddenly began to pour down on him. Aaron missing. Then his father missing. Police coming to talk to him in his dorm room. Aunt Kate calling, crying, not making any sense.
—
They said that his father had killed a man in Chicago. He and Laura had sat and watched the news report of it—Russell Tillman, recently acquitted and released after spending thirty years behind bars, killed by his adopted brother. “A bizarre case on the west side,” the news anchor said, and then there were video clips. People heard shots fired; they came out into the hallway as Dennis’s dad fled from the apartment, carrying a gun. People took photos of him with their cell phones as he ran out; there was video of him—clearly it was him, though Dennis could hardly believe it.
He and Laura sat side by side on the narrow dorm-room bed, the laptop on their thighs, and watched the videos over and over, like it was the Zapruder film.
Here: Dennis’s father is outside the building; he comes to the curb.
He stops and stands still. His body language suggests astonishment. His mouth opens. He looks to the left and right, urgently. Seems frozen with confusion, his eyes panicked.
“See?” Dennis said. “He thought a car was going to be waiting for him! There was someone else with him.”
“That seems like a stretch,” Laura said. “He just looks scared.”
And so they rewound and watched again. He comes out and does a double take. His mouth hangs open in surprise. He looks left and right.
Behind him, a small group of apartment residents has gathered. Some of them are taking videos with their phones. “You better run, motherfucker,” someone off-camera says. “I just called the police.” And there’s a kind of resigned, melancholy quality to the off-camera voice. “What are you standing there for?” the voice says, and Dennis’s father begins to stumble uncertainly down the block. A bus pulls up at the corner, and we watch as he gets on it, dropping the gun on the sidewalk like he’s discarding a gum wrapper. The bus doors fold closed, and someone in the crowd that’s watching cries, “He’s getting away!” but no one pursues him.
—
So how did Dustin get from Chicago to an irrigation ditch in Nebraska? No one knew. The last time we saw him, he was getting on a city bus. Surely if he’d changed buses at the station, he’d have been caught, right?
“Oh yeah,” Laura said. “Surely. Because when an ex-convict bum gets killed at a flophouse, the cops pull out all the stops to find the killer. A massive manhunt ensues.”
“Well,” Dennis said. Nonplussed. Laura ran her soft fingertips over his arm.
“Does it matter how he got there?” she said. “We’ll probably never know. But that’s not the most important thing.”
And in fact there was so much that wasn’t known. Dennis himself hadn’t known that his father had a brother—or an adopted brother, at least.
He had to find it on the Internet—the massacre of his father’s parents and aunt and uncle, the asinine trial, the eventual acquittal. He sat with Laura and read through the old news articles and blog posts and everything, and then she shook her head.
“Oh shit,” she said. “Your dad was the one who actually killed his parents! Don’t you think?”
“What?” Dennis said.
“He didn’t want Rusty to tell the truth! That’s why he murdered him.”
“Well,” Dennis said.
—
He looks over at her now. They are on the interstate, moving down along a blue line that his phone is following, and the halogen lights hang over the interstate and illuminate the glow strip between the lanes, and geometric planes of light move across her face.
“I’m starting to feel like I might figure it out,” he says.
—
It would be nice to know what his mom knew, Dennis thought. She used to joke about the way his dad would space out, trying to normalize it. Astral traveling, she called it, as if it were some kind of superpower, but in the end she didn’t think it was so cute. Just before Dennis left for college, a few months before she died, she’d clutched his hand in the kitchen. Out of nowhere she grabbed his wrist while he was eating cereal. “Someone needs to keep an eye on your father,” she said.
And in retrospect he had to ask: What was she trying to tell me?
In retrospect, now that he thought about it, there were signs. He thinks back to Christmas Day, the way his dad kept going on and on about those drowned boys. Dennis was in the kitchen with him that morning, watching as he washed the turkey in the sink, feeling more and more uncomfortable as he rubbed the wet naked skin with salt and rosemary. “I’m thinking of writing a book,” he said, and gave Dennis a bright, feverish look. Something really wrong with him, Dennis had thought. Maybe on the verge of a breakdown? Maybe already in the midst of one?
He thinks of the text that he got from Aaron.
I guess u know Rabbit is dead. I don’t know why u havnt called me maybe ur mad? But weird stuff is happening at home and I rly need 2 talk 2 u.
He thinks of the phone conversation he had with the young FBI agent. His father a “person of interest” in the disappearance of Aaron, in the disappearance of his friend Aqil. Possibly a number of others. “It’s beginning to seem like there might be quite a few,” the FBI girl said. “Deaths,” she said. “Which your father might be…associated with.”
—
Despite everything he knows, he doesn’t think his father would kill Aaron. And he can’t imagine his father overpowering Aqil Ozorowski—who looked more like an Italian mobster than a Polish cop.
“What do you think of this?” Dennis said to Laura. “What if Aqil went to Chicago with my dad? What if Aqil somehow convinced—or even coerced—him? And that it resulted in my dad killing his brother, like…accidentally?”
Laura shook her head. He watched as she pushed her fingers through her bright, curly red hair. “Dennis…” she said. “That doesn’t really—”
“I don’t believe my dad killed Aaron. I don’t think he killed Aqil, either.”
“You think that they’re still alive?” she said. “That they both went into hiding or something? That they both just coincidentally disappeared at the same time?”
“No, of course not,” Dennis said. “No. That’s…” He felt something shift in his brain, like a Rubik’s Cube you almost could solve. In the video, his dad was looking for someone, wasn’t he? There was a car he was expecting to be waiting for him; he looked for it, scoping wildly: Aqil? Aaron? Someone else?
“Maybe your father wasn’t the person you thought he was,” Laura said. She shrugged, and then began to knead his shoulder. “That’s what sociopaths are like.”
—
A sociopath, Dennis thinks.
He thinks of the way his father would stop talking in the middle of a sentence, hesitating mid-word,
as if someone invisible had interrupted him.
Every memory he thinks of now is discolored and ugly. The past suddenly has vanished from underneath him, distorted, memories turned into something he doesn’t recognize, something malevolent.
—
Twenty-nine miles now outside of Fort Morgan, Colorado, and cars keep passing him huffily. He’s going too slow, the speed limit is 75, and so he presses on the gas pedal. Up ahead, there is a single bare tree off to the left. It’s the only one for as far as he can see. Just the one tree and then flat bare sod. No houses. Just the two lanes of I-76 reaching to the horizon in either direction.
He glances over at Laura: still asleep. You may have to just accept the fact that you grew up as the child of a sociopath, that’s what she’d told him on the plane, and he thinks of this again as a semitruck abruptly storms past him on the left, a wall of hostile force streaming past their car so close he can feel the shudder of it, and it startles him so badly that he lets out a grunt as if he’s been slapped.
He remembers one night during Christmas break, waking up and seeing his dad standing in the doorway of his bedroom. A silhouette watching him as he slept. It had seemed kind of wistful and sweet at the time, his dad an empty-nester remembering his son as a child. But now it comes back to him again and he can’t shake that sensation of being watched by someone you don’t know. The feeling that a hidden presence is nearby while your eyes are closed, observing, leaning closer, emanating ill will.
The semi is already moving away from them into the distance. Must be going fucking 90 miles an hour, he thinks. It could have killed us, he thinks. Laura is still asleep.
—
There was this one night he remembers. Just before his mom got sick, and he was studying in the kitchen when his dad came in and started rummaging through the silverware drawer. “The Tao that we speak of isn’t the true Tao,” he was mumbling under his breath. “The name that can be named isn’t the real name.”
“What?” Dennis had said. He lifted his head from his AP U.S. History study guide and watched as his dad began to eat a peanut butter sandwich. Dustin said it was a poem by the Chinese poet Lao-Tzu, he’d read it somewhere online, and he was thinking that it would be a cool mantra to read to his patients. Dustin took a bite of his sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. It was about ten o’clock at night, and they’d found themselves together by accident. Aaron was upstairs in the bedroom, playing something on Xbox, and their mother was asleep or reading, but for some reason Dustin was prowling around in a philosophical frame of mind.
“I just love it so much,” he said. “It’s so beautiful! The Non-Existent and Existent are identical in all but name. This identity of apparent opposites I call the profound, the great deep, the open door of bewilderment. Don’t you think that’s gorgeous?”
Dennis could feel him gazing earnestly. Ardently. Dennis didn’t want to get into it. All Dennis really wanted to do was finish memorizing dates so he could go to bed. He was hoping that Aaron would have a little weed to share.
“Look,” Dennis said. His father was a little white man in a sports coat and jeans, with a goatee, but Dennis didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “Dad,” he said. “There’s 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…”
“Well,” he said.
And okay, yeah, his feelings were hurt. Things went silent.
“Can I make you anything?” he said at last. “Can I make you a sandwich?”
“Yeah, sure,” Dennis said.
And then his dad wiggled his fingers like a magician. “Poof!” he said. “You’re a sandwich!”
And Dennis had given him a laugh. It was only fair. He was putting in a good effort.
—
Now he can’t help but think of that moment. He thought of it when the police called to talk to him; he thought of it when he saw the news report and the stuff on YouTube. The idea that somehow his dad had made his way back to Nebraska, that he had gone there to kill himself.
The Tao that we speak of isn’t the true Tao. Had his father been trying to give him a message?
The Dustin that we speak of is not the true Dustin. The memory that we speak of is not the true memory.
Who knew what he was really thinking as they sat there together in the kitchen that night?
And now, Dennis thought, I’ll never know.
—
Laura wakes up when they pull into a travel plaza, stares for a moment at him sleepily as if she doesn’t recognize him. “Where are we?” she says, and he shrugs.
“Still in Colorado,” he says. “Just stopping for gas.” They’re pulled up beside a pump but he doesn’t open the door. He just sits there with his hands on the steering wheel, as if he’s still driving.
“What’s wrong?” she says, and he feels himself shudder. Two men are standing against the side of the “travel store,” smoking cigarettes, and they seem to be observing Dennis’s rental car with interest. One leans over and whispers to the other, smirking.
“I don’t know,” Dennis says at last. “I don’t want to do this, I guess.”
“Oh, honey, I know,” she says, and puts her hand on his leg. “It’ll be over soon,” she says. “One last thing, and then you can start to put it behind you. You can get on with your life.” She leans over and kisses his ear, he can hear the sound of her lips, and he shudders as she gets out of the car and walks across the lot toward the restrooms.
It’ll be over soon, he thinks. Does she believe that?
The last time he’d heard from Aaron was a text. He woke up one morning and found it on his phone. A string of emojis, appearing without context:
It was weird, because this came a few days after his father told him that Aaron was missing, and he typed back:
Fuck you, Aaron! Where R U ?!?
But there was no answer. At the time, Dennis thought it was some kind of joke from Aaron, a confirmation that Aaron wasn’t missing at all. Aaron was fine, and his dad was just crazy and hysterical, and Aaron would turn up eventually when he needed money. It was all going to eventually be fine.
But now it appears that it will be the last thing Aaron ever said to him. Is that possible? He gets out his phone from time to time and looks at it again. He texts hopefully:
Aaron? Are you there?
And then he looks at the set of emojis again. Is it a secret message? Some sort of code? Did Aaron send it at all?
The name that can be named is not the real name.
Here on the edge of Nebraska he tries again. He sends another text to Aaron’s phone, and the phone makes its wistful bloop as the text floats away into the digisphere.
Aaron?
—
In the distance, giant wind turbines are churning with stately, solemn unfriendliness, and a plastic bag lifts up above the asphalt and spins delicately in the air, tossed by a gust of wind. He glances over and the smoking men are gone, though there is still a tang of something watching.
He puts his phone in his pocket and slowly opens the door of the car. About a hundred miles to go. About a hundred miles from where his father is waiting to be identified.
FOR PAUL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’M GRATEFUL TO the many friends and family members who read the book in progress and gave me great advice—John Martin, Imad Rahman, Dan Riordan, Lynda Montgomery, Alissa Nutting, Tom Barbash, Scrounge Rocheleau, my sons Phil and Paul, my sister Sheri, and particularly my friend Lynda Barry, for the conversations we’ve had over the past few years while I was working on this novel, and for her inspiring books. Thanks, too, to my brother-in-law, Luke Lieffring, for telling me the story that became the core of this novel.
As always, I owe a debt to the members of the Penguin Random House staff for their faith and generosity—Rachel Kind, Jennifer Garza, Bridget Piekarz, John Hastie, Michael Kindness, Liz Sullivan, Nancy Delia, Simon Sullivan, Julia Maguire, Priyanka Krishnan
, Grant Neumann, Daniel Christensen, Emily Hartley, and many others! Thanks, too, to Libby McGuire (my former publisher) and Jennifer Hershey (my current publisher) for sticking with me—and to Gina Centrello for her long-standing support.
And finally thanks to my editor, Susanna Porter, who has been remarkably patient with my wild ideas and whose wise advice was instrumental in showing me the path through multiple revisions.
BY DAN CHAON
Ill Will
Stay Awake
Await Your Reply
You Remind Me of Me
Among the Missing
Fitting Ends
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAN CHAON is the acclaimed author of Stay Awake, Await Your Reply, You Remind Me of Me, Fitting Ends, and Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s short stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon teaches creative writing at Oberlin College.
danchaon.com
@Danchaon
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