by Noah Hawley
Why? What did it mean?
Maybe the thoughts in his head had frightened him too much. Maybe after Montana, the journal started to feel like a nosy traveling companion, someone from whom he needed privacy. Or maybe what happened in Montana had humbled him, had driven the thoughts of Seagram from his head. Maybe that dark moment in the snowbound north had shocked Danny, put him back on a saner path.
And yet the words haunted me.
I am the shadow son.
Looking over the pages, it was hard to argue that Danny hadn’t had some kind of break with reality. The logic of his thoughts, especially those revolving around his time in Montana and his run-in with Seagram, was misshapen and troubling.
Did my son really see himself as a ghost who haunted his own family? Or was this just a symptom of some kind of depression? Had he, in a moment of delusional clarity, connected himself to Seagram through a series of warped insights, like a man who handcuffs himself to a corpse?
I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face, careful not to look myself in the eye. Though I knew that Danny had gotten lost during his time on the road—physically, spiritually, emotionally—it still hurt to read the words. Why hadn’t he called? Why hadn’t he asked for help? And why hadn’t I, his father, known in some unnameable part of my heart that he’d needed it?
The room felt claustrophobic to me now. Not knowing what else to do, I changed my clothes and went downstairs to join the opening-night cocktail party, pasting the label with my name on it onto the breast of my suit jacket. I needed to be with people, to talk about the weather. I needed to feel grounded.
Men in suits held champagne flutes and made small talk with women in sensible dresses. Their voices were a senseless buzz, punctured by the occasional shriek of laughter.
Murray was right. There had been no murder confession in the journal. No smoking gun. This was not the journal of Sirhan Sirhan, who wrote R.F.K. must die. R.F.K. must be killed. It was something harder, more mysterious. Though Danny wrote about his time in Sacramento, there was no mention of his arrest, no mention of two men in a boxcar, the things they may have said.
Where the journal answered certain questions, it left others maddeningly open. Would I ever know for sure the real truth, step by step, fact by fact? Or was it a fool’s exercise to even try? Were the factors involved—physical, psychological—too complex? At the end of the day, if a man chooses to lose himself in a wormhole of his own making, how can any of us reconstruct his path? The actions he took? The thoughts in his head?
Wandering through the crowd, the world seemed surreal to me now, as if Danny’s mental unbalance had been contagious. I felt like I was having my own break with reality. I had traveled hundreds of miles from home to read his journal, and now I too was alone, reeling from the flashlight I’d just shined into the dark recesses of his brain.
I struck up a conversation with doctors from Portland and Nebraska. We made small talk about new technology. An anesthesiologist from Providence told me I should really get out and hear some music while I was here. She said Austin was her favorite city. They even had live music at the supermarket. I told her I would be sure to do that, and excused myself to get another drink.
I looked at the faces of strangers, and thought about the people in my son’s life: Ted and Bonnie Kirkland, the Mexicans who got him drunk and gave him a knife for his boot, the beautiful librarian. He had described them all in the journal. Good people, kind and smart. Why hadn’t he grabbed on to them? Why hadn’t he asked for help? And why hadn’t they volunteered it?
I went into the hall and called Fran, needing to hear her voice and talk to the kids.
“Are you okay?” she said. “You sound weird.”
“I’m fine,” I told her. “I’ve just had a few drinks.”
“Good,” she said. “You need to unwind. I want you to get shitfaced. Go to a strip club or, I don’t know, go streaking. Have some fun.”
“I miss you,” I said.
“We miss you, too,” she said. “We had spaghetti and meatballs and watched some movie with superheroes. The kids are brushing their teeth now. I didn’t even have to ask.”
After we hung up, I walked through the lobby and out onto the street. I needed air. The temperature was around eighty degrees. I took off my tie and put it in my pocket. It was eight o’clock and only a glimmer of daylight remained. A man peddling a rickshaw approached me. Did I need a ride? I thought about it. Where would I go? And then it hit me. I gave him an address in the university district, just off Guadalupe. He quoted me a price, and I stepped into the back of his cart.
We must have made a strange sight, an older man in a suit being peddled through the streets of the city by a hippie in flip-flops. We rode up Congress toward the capitol and turned left on Eleventh Street. I pictured my son on his bicycle, dressed all in black, riding through the moonless night. What made a person want to be invisible?
I am the shadow son.
I thought about what a shadow was, a trail of darkness left by an object in bright light. In Daniel’s mind was I the object or the light? Had I overshadowed him, my success? Had I somehow, in my drive for accomplishment, pushed him to fail?
I wracked my brain looking for the truth, but deep down I worried that the answer, when I found it, would make little sense. If Danny had set off on his journey because of an underlying mental illness, or if somewhere in the wilds of this sprawling, friendless nation, he had suffered a break from reality, how was I to understand the ideas and motives that drove him?
The frat house was on Rio Grande Street three blocks west of Guadalupe. It was a two-story structure of indiscernible style, with a white picket fence and large bay window in the front, in which what looked like a bedsheet had been hung for privacy. The orange-and-white Longhorn logo my son had written about had faded to a barely visible smear on the otherwise brown grass. I paid the rickshaw driver and stood looking up at the house. The low bass krump of a nearby party rumbled through the trees. The house was dark except for one window. I could see no movement inside. The rickshaw driver asked if I would need a ride back. I told him I would be fine, and he rode off, jingling his bell. It had been nearly two years since my son had lived at this address. Would any of the boys he wrote about still be here? I tried to imagine what their faces must have looked like when they saw those first images of my son on TV after Seagram’s assassination. Did they remember the gun in their faces? Did they think about how close they themselves had come to death? Did they understand that they had become a part of history?
My mouth was dry but so were my palms. It had always been a strength of mine, this grace under pressure. A pickup truck cruised by, local boys looking for the party. I crossed to the door and rang the bell. Silence. I rang again.
A young man answered, maybe nineteen. He was slim, with sandy brown hair.
“I don’t mean to bother you,” I said.
“Am I in trouble?” he wanted to know.
It was the suit. Boys his age did not talk to men in suits, except under exigent circumstance. “You’re not in trouble,” I told him. “Everyone else is at a party.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I just—I have a favor to ask. I’m a doctor. I’m in town for a conference, and my son—he used to live here.”
“Your son.”
“He died last year, and I thought I would be able to come back here without doing this, but I’m afraid I need to see his room.”
The boy studied me. His parents had taught him to be skeptical of strangers who come to the house at night.
“Your son,” he said.
“He drowned,” I said, “in a boating accident on Lake Travis. There was alcohol involved. His mother and I, we’re from Michigan, and we buried him there, but, well, I’m in town for a conference and—”
“What was his name?”
“Jeremy,” I said. “But we used to call him Jerry.”
“Do you know which room was his?” he asked.
; I took a step forward, using my momentum to move him back out of the doorway. Rather than let me bump into him, he stepped aside. I walked through the front door. The place was as my son had described it, a sty. I smelled stale beer and moldy wall-to-wall carpeting. Empty beer cans lay crushed on the floor.
“Upstairs,” I said. “Next to the bathroom.”
“That’s my room now,” he said. “I moved in last month.”
He lowered his voice, as if to convey confidentiality.
“I don’t really like it. It’s kind of gross.”
The wallpaper was discolored, peeling. What had my son felt, living in a place like this? He had always been a neat boy, orderly.
“Do you mind if I …”
I pointed to the stairs. He led me upstairs to his room, then offered to wait outside.
“I just need a minute,” I said. “I promise I won’t cry or do anything embarrassing.”
He shook his head.
“My mom died when I was seven,” he said. “My dad’s new wife is a total bitch. You take your time. I’m gonna go downstairs and watch TV. Just come down when you’re done.”
“Thank you …”
“Robert. But around here they call me Chief or Sport.” He turned and descended the stairs. I stood in the hall for a moment, trying to picture my son here, in this context. His dorm room at Vassar had been in a stately brick building, imbued with a century of dignity. This house was rotting from the inside, like a melon. The ceilings were low. There were stains on the carpet and a smell coming from the bathroom that could only be described as bovine. I toed open the door to Daniel’s old room. It was small, somewhere between square and rectangular.
On the walls were posters for rock bands and maps from various foreign destinations—Germany, Vietnam, Australia. Unlike the clutter of the rest of the house, the room was neat, with no clothing or trash visible. A computer sat on the desk. The room was only big enough for a twin-size bed, which had been set on the one wall without a door or window. It was there that my son would have set his bed. I tried to imagine him on it, not yet a murderer but instead just a boy on the road. I tried to picture him reading Russian novelists to impress a girl. But the picture would not come. Instead I pictured him at the desk reading computer printouts about famous lunatics. I pictured him opening the closet door and pulling a handgun from the bottom of a laundry hamper. I saw him check the chamber to make sure it was loaded and stride purposefully to the door, intent on showing these oversized Texas boys that they couldn’t bully Daniel Allen. Or should I say Carter Allen Cash. He was the man with the gun. But the room was just a room. There were no ghosts to capture, no shadows to mine. I had come looking for answers but had found only furniture. I turned off the light and went downstairs.
Robert was on the sofa in the living room, sitting on a protective layer of newspaper. He was watching Ice Road Truckers and eating a bowl of cereal.
“All done,” I said. “Thank you.”
He nodded.
“It’ll get easier,” he said. “You don’t want it to. It just does.”
Outside I felt the need to walk. I went east to Guadalupe. Across the avenue stood the orange-roofed buildings of UT. I was a bloodhound on a trail. Seeing the frat house had only whetted my appetite. I had to find the storefront that had housed Seagram’s campaign headquarters, the place where my son had worked. I walked south a few blocks, then turned back and headed north. I found it next to the Church of Scientology, half a block from the Co-op bookstore. It was a tattoo parlor now, its window filled with sketches and designs. This is the history of cities. What was once one thing is now something else.
I pictured my son standing in this spot, a clipboard in one hand, registering students to vote. He was Oswald in New Orleans handing out flyers. A man with a terrible destiny. Could he imagine at that moment, tying string around a ballpoint pen, that he would one day stare down at the body of the very candidate he was promoting? Can any of us see our future, catch a glimpse of it in the dazzle and sparkle of whitecaps? Or does it lurk deeper, hiding in black holes under gnarled tree stumps in a boggy swamp?
What were the symptoms? What was the disease?
As I was standing there, my cell phone rang, startling me. I fumbled it out of my pocket, expecting to see Fran’s number come up. Instead the LCD readout read “Blocked.” I pushed Answer, heard a prerecorded message, a woman’s voice telling me I was receiving a call from an inmate at a federal penitentiary. My heart rate tripled. Was something wrong?
“Daniel,” I said.
“Hey, Dad.”
“What’s going on? It’s late there.”
“Yeah, they don’t usually let us use the phone after eight.”
“Are you okay?”
An ambulance drove by, siren screaming. I plugged my ear with my finger to hear his answer.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Where are you?”
“At a medical conference,” I said. “In … Houston.”
Why did I lie? What would my son say if he knew I was retracing his steps?
“Are you sleeping okay?” I asked him.
“Couple hours at a time,” he told me. “I read a lot. They let me have some watercolors. So I try to paint what I remember. The great outdoors. It helps to have a vanishing point to look at.”
I thought of my younger sons asleep in their beds.
“Listen, Pop,” said Daniel. “I just wanted to let you know. They set a date.”
“A date?”
“For the execution. December 14.”
December 14. Six months. I was an astronaut lost in the weightlessness of space.
“December 14 of this year?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s so soon.”
“Yeah.”
He let me absorb it. A recorded voice came on the line to remind me that I was talking to a prisoner at a federal penitentiary. It was a woman’s voice, and I tried to picture her face. It was a harsh, Nurse Ratched face, a taskmaster’s scowl, a dirty-bitch glare.
“Danny,” I said. “Please. I don’t want to fight, but you have to let us appeal this.”
“No,” he said. “It’s better this way. I can’t do this much longer, live in a box with a toilet, looking at a watercolor horizon.”
“Maybe we could have you transferred.”
“No, Dad. This is where I belong, with the worst of the worst.”
We’re not all put on this Earth to do what’s right.
“Bullshit,” I said. “Bullshit. You’re a good kid. You made a mistake.”
“Dad,” he said, his voice calm, “we both know the truth.”
“What truth?”
“I should have died in a plane crash,” he said.
A stunned silence. I had no thoughts. No words.
“Well, I just thought you should know,” he said. “Have a good night.”
“No. Daniel. Wait.”
But he was gone. I stood there for a long time holding the phone to my ear, willing him to come back. December 14. Six months. My son had six months to live. The knowledge was a fist squeezing me, a choke hold.
I stood there for a long time, watching the traffic with unseeing eyes. I felt like I was trapped at the bottom of a dry well, dying of thirst in a hole meant to water a village. A teenage girl approached me. She was leading a puppy on a frayed rope leash. Her hair was stringy. She asked if I could spare some change. I took out my wallet and handed her a hundred-dollar bill.
“I’m not gonna blow you, dude,” she said.
“No,” I told her. “I’m a father. Please. Get yourself a meal.”
I asked her if she was in school. She told me she was working on it, but right now she just needed something to eat.
“You have someplace to sleep tonight?”
She shrugged. Without hesitation I handed her the key card to my hotel room.
“This is to a room at the Intercontinental. The room is paid up through Thursday. Take a bath, order room service. No
one will bother you.”
She looked dubious.
“I came in for a conference,” I told her, “but I’m not staying. I can’t. I have someplace else I have to be.”
“Where?” she asked.
I thought of all the clothes I had shed in the move, the hair I’d cut, the weight I’d lost. I thought of my three sons, the wife who loved me, the ex-wife who only loved herself. I thought of the chemicals they would inject in my boy, the toxins that would paralyze his muscles and stop his heart. The man I’d been for fifty years had ceased to exist. This was something new.
“Iowa,” I said. “I’m going to Iowa.”
He decided to ride the trains for a while. It was May 20, 20__, three months after his exodus from Montana, his epic escape from winter. The journey between there and here was a study in rootlessness. He drove quickly from town to town, never staying anywhere for more than a few days. Yakima, Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Klamath, Eureka, Ukiah, San Francisco, Berkeley, Davis. He had seen enough redwood trees to last a lifetime, had slept on the beaches of Northern California and woken with his feet in the ocean. After the year he’d spent inland, the endless waves felt like a relief. Along the way, rain forests had given way to Pacific cliffs, then arid hills and vineyards. The men were shaggy, then clean-cut, then fat. Women of indeterminate age eyeballed him from trailers and campsites. They winked at him in diners and gave him the finger from the backs of their daddy’s motorcycles.
He spoke to no one, except to put twenty dollars in pump six or order a hamburger. He was warier now, suspicious of strangers and more furtive. His smile had been lost somewhere in the snowdrifts of the northern plains. He laughed now only in anger.
He had stayed too long in Montana. He knew that. Trapped in the suicide funk of a rural motel. It was the fault of the weather and his broken car. After the incident at the senator’s house, the revelation, he had spent six more weeks holed up at the Derbyshire, socked in by storms that barreled through the great north like freight trains. The sun was only out for a few hours a day, and under it everything looked cold, sterile. In daylight everything turned blue. His own skin looked mottled and deathly, as if he was a zombie in a town full of the undead.