by Dan Chaon
“I’m, like, thinking about torturing you,” the Taser man said to Jay at last. He had a soft, reasonable, almost monotone voice, reminiscent of a DJ on a college radio station. “Listen to me. It’s actually one of the fantasies that kept me going all these years. Thinking about torturing Jay Kozelek is one of the few things that made me happy all the time I was in prison, so don’t fuck with me. I tracked him here. I know he’s here somewhere. And if you don’t tell me where Jay is, I’m going to torture you and your little buddy here until you puke blood. Okay?”
Ryan’s lips parted, but nothing came out. No sound, not even a breath.
This was a situation Ryan had never thought too much about. In all the time he and Jay had been engaged in criminal activity, even when he was getting those IMs in Russian, even when he ran from those guys in Las Vegas, he had never pictured himself tied to a chair in a cabin in the deep woods of Michigan with a man who said I’ve been thinking about torturing you.
He was surprised at how useless his mind was. He had always imagined that in some desperate situation, his brain would sharpen—his thoughts would begin to race—his epinephrine would kick in—his instinct to survive would suddenly rise to the surface—but instead he felt a dull, pulsing blankness, a numb heartbeat, like the quick breath of some trapped rodent. He thought of a rabbit, a small animal in the wild, how it will sink into a motionless state as if it is pretending it is invisible. He thought of Jay’s meditation tapes: Picture a circle of energy near the base of your spine. This energy is strong. It connects you to the earth….
And sitting there, it was as if he was nothing but earth. A sack of dirt.
Meanwhile, the man had his hand in Jay’s long hair, and as he was talking, he curled a lock of Jay’s hair around each finger, a tangle that he pulled tighter even as his voice grew softer.
“I was in prison for three years,” the man was saying. “Prison. You may not realize this, dude, but prison has a tendency to make you kind of mean. And you know what? Every single day of every single month, the one thing that made me happy was imagining ways that I could hurt your friend Jay. I thought about that a lot. Sometimes I would just close my eyes and I would ask myself: what should be done with Jay? I would think of his face, and what he would look like when he was tied to a chair, and I would think: What would be the worst thing? What would make him suffer the most?”
The man paused thoughtfully, with a fistful of Jay’s hair entwined between his fingers, growing taut.
“And so you see,” the man said, “The fact that I don’t have Jay is really pissing me off.”
By this point, Ryan had begun to find their conversation surreal, incomprehensible, but it was hard to focus on anything except the expression on his father’s face, Jay’s gritted teeth, his blank, trapped eyes.
Ryan guessed that the man had been planning to pull a hank of Jay’s hair out by the roots, but this required more force than he initially expected. “Ow!” Jay screamed, but the hair remained stubbornly attached to his scalp, and after a brief struggle the man realized that it would require more leverage, or more muscle, than he wanted—or was able—to expend.
“God damn it,” the man said, and instead he gave Jay’s head a vigorous shaking, the way a dog might whip a rag with its teeth, and Jay’s face jittered rapidly before the man gave up and loosed Jay’s hair with a flourish.
He hadn’t yanked the hair out, but it had hurt enough that Jay was now whimpering and cringing.
“I haven’t seen him in years,” Jay said. “I don’t have any idea where he is, I swear.”
Jay was crying a little, a faint childlike snuffling, a quivering of the shoulders, and this gave the man pause: torturing someone was more work than it had been in his fantasy.
“The last time I saw him, he was planning to go to Latvia. To Rēzekne,” Jay said earnestly, and drew in a wet breath through his nose. “He’s been out of the picture for a long time, a very long time.”
But this wasn’t what the man wanted to hear, and Ryan himself had no idea who they were talking about. Was there a different Jay?
“You didn’t understand me, did you?” the man said. “You think you can just feed me another line of bullshit, don’t you?” And he let out a stiff, theatrical chuckle. “But ve have vays of making you talk,” he said, in an imitation of a German or Russian accent.
Ryan watched as the man felt in the pocket of his jacket, the way someone might grope for a lucky coin, and when he touched the object in his pocket, his eyes focused again, his resolve began to return, and his expression settled into a small, private smile.
From his pocket he withdrew a coil of thin silver wire, and he regarded it as if he were recalling some pleasant long-ago memory.
Jay didn’t say anything. He just hung his head, and his long hair made a tent around his face, his shoulders rising and falling as he breathed. A droplet fell out of his nose and onto the front of his shirt.
But the man didn’t notice. He had turned his attention away from Jay and now looked over at Ryan.
“So,” he said. “Who do we have here?”
Ryan could feel the man’s eyes fall on him. The brief sense of invisibility lifted away, and he watched as the man unwound the length of wire, a simple rubber handle at either end. The man tilted his head.
“What’s your name, man?” the guy said. He gestured casually, stretching the wire out until it was taut, until it quivered like a guitar string.
“Ryan.”
And the man nodded. “Good,” he said. “You know how to answer a question.”
And Ryan wasn’t sure what to say to that. He was staring across the table, hoping that Jay would lift his head, that Jay would look at him, would give him a signal, some sense of what to do.
But Jay didn’t look up, and the man bent his attention toward Ryan.
“You’re Kasimir Czernewski, I guess?” the man said.
Ryan was staring down at the tabletop, on which water stains had spread into a map—a continent, surrounded by tiny islands.
He could feel his skin shuddering—the involuntary physical response he associated with being wet and cold, but this, this was actual fear, this was what being terrified felt like.
“We’ve been keeping an eye on you, too, you know,” the man said. “I think you’re going to be surprised to find how many of your bullshit bank accounts are not solvent anymore.”
Ryan could hear the words the man was saying, he could process them, he knew what they meant—but at the same time they didn’t feel like real sentences. They sunk into his consciousness like a weighted fishing line cast into a pond, and he felt the ripples circle out across his body.
What did he want from Jay right then? What does a son want from a father in such a situation?
To begin with, there is the fantasy of heroic action. The father who might give you a confident, reassuring wink—a little chk, chk at the edge of his mouth, and suddenly he breaks free of his bonds and produces a gun that was strapped to his ankle and the bullets enter the back of the torturer’s head and he freezes midstep and falls face-forward and your dad gives you a shy grin as he rips the tape from his legs and swings around, gun aloft, aiming for the henchmen—
And then there is the father of steely determination. The father who shows you his gritted teeth: Stay firm! We’ll face this together! We’ll be okay!
Or the father of regret—eyes brimming with tenderness and sorrow, eyes that say: I am with you. If you suffer, I will suffer tenfold. I send you all my love and my strength …
And then there was Jay. Blood had been running out of his hair into his face, and tears had made pathways through some of the dried blood, and when their eyes met, they barely recognized each other.
For the first time in a long time Ryan thought of Owen. His other father. His former father—the father he had known all his life, who had raised him, the father who thought he was dead. At this very minute, Owen might be waking in Iowa to let the dog out, standing in the yard
in his pajamas and watching as the dog sniffed and circled, looking out at the streetlights that were beginning to go dim as the sun came up, bending down to pick up the newspaper from the grass.
For a moment, Ryan was almost there. He might have been sitting like a bird in the old bur oak in front of the house, peering tenderly from above as Owen unwrapped The Daily Nonpareil to look at the headlines; as Owen snapped his fingers and whistled and the dog came running, pleased with herself; as Owen glanced up, as if he could sense Ryan somewhere above him, leaning down, a brush of air across the top of Owen’s uncombed, sleepy head.
“Dad,” Ryan said. “Dad, please, Dad.”
And he saw Jay wince. Jay didn’t look at him, he didn’t lift his head, but a shudder ran through him, and the man in the suit straightened with interest.
“Oh my goodness,” he said. “This is an unexpected development.”
Ryan lowered his head.
“Ryan,” the man said, “is this your father?”
“No,” Ryan whispered.
He let his eyes fall back to the cloud-shaped water stain on the table. A continent, he thought again. An island, like Greenland, an imaginary country, and he let his eyes trace along the coastlines, the bays and archipelagos, and he could almost hear the voice of the meditation tape.
Imagine a place, the voice said. Notice first the light. Is it bright, natural, or dim? Also notice the temperature level. Hot, warm, or cool? Be aware of the colors that surround you. Allow yourself to simply exist….
A hiding place, he thought, and for a second he could picture the tents that he used to construct when he was a little boy, the kitchen chairs draped with a big quilt, the dark space in the middle where he would pile pillows and stuffed animals, his own underground nest, which he pictured extending outward into soft, dim, winding corridors made of feathers and blankets.
“I’m going to start with the left hand,” the man said. “And then the left foot. And then the right hand, and so on.”
The man reached down and touched the freckled skin of Ryan’s forearm, very lightly.
“We’re going to put a tourniquet here,” he murmured. “Which is going to be tight. But that way you won’t bleed out quite so fast when I cut your hand off.”
For some reason, Ryan was almost distracted. He was thinking of Owen. He was thinking of that ghostly hand that had risen up and grasped his wrist, back when he was a student in a dorm room. He was thinking of his cave under the bedspread.
The man said: “Above the wrist? Or below the wrist?”
And Ryan hardly knew what was being asked until he felt the wire encircling just above his hand, just above the joint of his thumb. He was shaking so badly that the wire quivered, too, as the man tightened it.
“Please don’t,” Ryan whispered, but he wasn’t sure whether any sound had come from his mouth, after all.
“Now, Ryan,” the man said, “I want you to tell your father to be reasonable.”
Jay had been watching all of this with a stricken, glassy look, and his eyes widened as he watched the man wrap the thin wire around Ryan’s wrist.
“I’m Jay,” he cried hoarsely, and the sound was like the call of a crow on a branch. “I’m Jay, I’m Jay, I’m the person you’re looking for, my name is Jay Kozelek, I’m the one you want….”
But the man only let out a thick, disgusted sound.
“You must think I’m an idiot,” the man rasped. “I know Jay Kozelek. He was my roommate. I know what he looks like. We used to sit around and talk and watch movies together and all that shit, and I thought he was my friend. That’s the worst thing. I actually felt personally close to him, so I know exactly what his face looks like. Do you get that? I know what his face looks like. Do you honestly think you can scam me, after all this time? Do you think I’m a moron? Do you think I’m kidding around here …”
None of this made sense to Ryan, but he couldn’t think properly in any case.
The man had already begun to tighten the grip on the handles of the cutter, and Ryan let out a scream.
It actually took a very short time.
Astonishingly short.
The wire was sharp, and it sank deeply into the flesh until it reached the radiocarpal joint. It hitched just below the radius and ulna, slipping along the edge of bone until it found the softer gristle, and the man tightened his fists around the handles and pulled tighter, pumping his arms in a quick sawing motion, and the hand came off abruptly. Cleanly.
Ukh, the man said.
There was that memory,
a ghost reaching up out of the air to touch his wrist and
Not really conscious.
Not looking, not looking at his hand, but there was a hard voice—Jesus fucking Christ, what are you doing?—and Ryan’s eyes opened and he could see the man standing there, looking down at the floor, blinking. The wire still held loosely in his hands, but he had gone pale and there was a wet sheen over his face. A pinched look, as if he’d taken a drink of something he should have spit out.
There was another man there, too, now—one of the ones Ryan had thought of as a “henchman”—saying, oh my god Dylan are you insane you said you weren’t really going to do it, and Ryan shuddering and woozy as the two figures blurred into silhouettes and then sharpened against a flare of light reflected against the kitchen window, one of them holding a kitchen towel and bending toward Ryan
and Jay’s voice—
“He’s going to bleed to death, you guys, it’s not his fault, please don’t let him bleed to death—”
And then the man, Dylan, staring at Ryan with a wide-eyed, horrified revulsion. The rumpled black gangster suit hung on him like a costume someone had dressed him in while he slept, and he stood there, dazed, uncertain, like a sleepwalker who had awakened into a room that he thought he’d only been dreaming about.
“Oh, jeez,” Dylan whispered.
Then he bent over to throw up.
22
It was three and a half hours from Denver to New York on JetBlue Airways, time enough to swing from panic to acceptance and back again several times, and Lucy sat upright in her chair in a state of uneasy, pendulous suspension, her hands folded tightly in her lap.
She had never been on an airplane before—though she couldn’t bring herself to admit this embarrassing fact to George Orson.
David Fremden. Dad.
She had been trying to wrap her head around the fact that actually there was no such person as George Orson.
It wasn’t simply that everything she knew about him had been invented, or borrowed, or exaggerated—it wasn’t simply that he had lied. It was larger than that, an uncanny feeling that opened up in her mind whenever she tried to think calmly and logically about the situation.
He didn’t exist anymore.
It made her think of the days after her parents died, the laundry basket still full of their unwashed clothes, the refrigerator stocked with food her mother had planned to cook that weekend, her father’s cell phone filling up with calls from customers who wanted to know why he had missed his appointments. At first they would leave behind a few empty spaces in the world—customers who relied on her father, patients who were waiting for her mother to nurse them at the hospital, friends and coworkers and acquaintances who would miss them, for a time—but these were very minor rips and tears in the fabric of things, easily repaired, and the thing that shocked her the most was how quickly such absences began to close. Even after a few weeks you could see how soon her parents would be forgotten, how their presence became an absence, and then—what? What did you call an absence that ceased to become an absence, what do you call a hole that has been filled in?
Oh, she kept thinking. They’ll never come back. As if the idea were supernatural, science-fictional. How could you believe that such a thing was possible?
That was the thought she had, in bed beside him the night he’d told her the truth, as she traced her fingers across the arm, which was not George Orson’s arm. I’ll never
talk to George Orson again, she thought, and she drew her hand back.
He was right there, the same physical body she had been with for so long now, but she couldn’t help but feel lonely.
Oh, George, she thought. I miss you.
And now she thought it again as she sat in her seat next to David Fremden on the airplane and tried to compose her thoughts.
She missed George Orson. She would never talk to him again.
She had never been on a plane before and she was aware of the terrible, unfathomable distance between herself and the ground. She could sense the air quivering beneath her feet, a shudder of empty space, and she tried to avoid looking out the window. It wasn’t so bad to look out and see the thick meringue contours of clouds, but it was harder when the earth began to appear through. The topography. You could see the geometric spread of human habitation, the tiny pencil lines of fields and roads and the boxy spatter of towns, and it was hard not to think of how it would be to fall—how long you would have to plunge before you finally landed.
She’d never have told this to George Orson, anyway. She’d have hated to seem so unsophisticated, for George Orson to see her as some silly rube of a girl, atingle with ignorant dread over the idea of air travel, pressing her nails into the upholstery of the seat arms as if somehow that could anchor her.
David Fremden, meanwhile, looked entirely composed. He was watching the miniature television screen that was embedded into the headrest of the seat in front of him, pausing over a program on pyramids on the History Channel, passing quickly by the news and the weather, smiling nostalgically at an episode of an old 1980s sitcom. He didn’t look at her, but he let his hand rest on her forearm.