by James Renner
The Speeder sputtered to life, its voice like a combine shucking corn. Nils’s old man pulled at the levers inside the cab and the crane swung over the black lake. He lowered the netted hook into the water. Bednarik took it and descended.
Twenty minutes later the crane lifted the nude body from the lake, tendrils of inky water running off its extremities. It was wrapped in white netting, arms and legs hanging through holes. The skin had darkened to leather from the cold and muck at the bottom, and from a distance it resembled a life-size wooden marionette, a grotesque.
The people still sitting around the lake picked up their things and left the way they’d come.
Jack walked to where Nils was guiding the body to the ground. It was hard to see Tony’s features in the corpse. It was all warped and stretched and there were holes in the skin. Jack wondered if the jagged rock walls of the quarry had done that on the way down. His large penis was smashed flat like jerky.
The buzz-cut detective joined him.
Jack extended a hand. “Jack Felter,” he said.
The cop shook it. “Captain Marlon Hoover.”
“So do we call the coroner? Or what happens from here?”
“It’s your show, boss,” said Marlon.
“Uh,” said Nils. The large man stepped back from the body and bumped into Jack. “Uh, guys, his teeth just fell out.”
Jack looked to the body, which Nils had unwrapped from the netting. The corpse’s dentures sat askew in its decomposed jaw.
“What the…,” Jack began.
Marlon reached down and pulled out the false teeth. What was left of the gums was charred and diseased.
No, thought Jack. He turned to the professor, who was climbing onto the far shore. “Hey,” he shouted. “Did you search the entire floor?”
“I did a sweep. It’s not that big at the bottom, really. It slopes into a small square. A couple cars. Lots of street signs. Garbage and stuff. Why?”
“No room for other bodies?”
“What? How many do you want?”
Jack turned back to the body with the dawning realization that he was his own disaster.
“That’s not Tony, is it?” asked Nils.
“No. No, it’s not,” said Jack.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Mark Brooks,” said Marlon. “Samantha’s brother.” He leaned down and put a fat finger in one of the wide gashes across the dead man’s chest. “And, unless I’m mistaken, this man was murdered.”
“Uh,” said Nils. “So where the fuck is Tony?”
PART TWO
WHERE IS EVERYBODY?
This highway leads to the shadowy tip of reality: you’re on a through route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable.
—ROD SERLING
ONE
THE LONELY
1 Jean stood at the picture window and watched Jack drive off to find Sam. It was his job now to tell Sam it wasn’t her husband in the lake but her brother. Jean lit another cigarette. It was her own fault. She knew that. Why in the hell did she go with Mark when she knew he was deep for trouble? Of course, she knew that answer, too.
* * *
When the DJ cued up Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” Jean walked outside, onto a wide veranda that overlooked the gardens of Emerson Country Club. Her bridesmaid’s dress, a garish teal, swished loudly around her bare feet. It was night, and the sweeping rows of aspen trees were dark borders against the moonlit grass. Inside, Tony held Sam close on the dance floor.
Mark leaned on the rock wall, waiting, a bottle of Miller Lite in one hand. His hair was long, black, tucked behind his ears. How old was he? Twenty-nine? His dimples appeared as he smiled a welcome and waved her over.
“I’m Mark,” he said. “Sam’s brother. You’re Jean, right?”
She’d had a couple of glasses of wine by then and was feeling daring, so she said, “We’ve met.”
Alarm washed over his face but vanished before it took hold. “We have?” he asked. “I’m sure I would have remembered that.”
She laughed and placed a cigarette between her red lips. He fished out a lighter for her. She pulled deep and let the hot smoke singe her lungs. “I was thirteen,” said Jean. “I spent the night at your dad’s house, with Sam. You were on leave from the navy, I think. Your hair was buzzed.”
Mark laughed nervously. “I don’t remember. Long time ago.”
“Not so long,” she said. “You looked in on us when we were changing out of our bathing suits, remember? Sam caught you sneaking a peek through the heat register that connected your rooms. You did that a lot, didn’t you?”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. He only looked at her, reading her, trying to understand if he was in some kind of trouble. Finally, he exhaled, shook his head, and looked out over the golf course.
“Memory is a funny thing,” he said. “Hard to tell what really happened.”
Jean stepped close to him. Once, when they were little, her parents had taken her and Jack to a petting zoo in Cleveland. There was a tank with a hissing cockroach. Jack was four years older than her, but he was too afraid to pick up the bug. Jean didn’t hesitate. She liked the rush. Always had.
“I was curious, back then,” she said. “I let you watch.”
Mark grunted and took a pull on his beer. He nodded. Seemed to decide something. He turned to her. “Still curious?” he asked.
“Not about you. You don’t have anything I need.”
He looked in her eyes. His irises were as dark as his sister’s, open voids. “You like to party?” he asked.
She didn’t say anything, only crushed the cigarette on the wall.
He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a small square envelope, no bigger than a postage stamp. He looked back at the glass doors to make sure they were alone, then emptied a bit of powder into his palm and held it out to her.
“Coke?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Better.”
* * *
Had she even hesitated? She couldn’t remember anymore.
2 Sam wasn’t at her house, the Cape Cod she’d shared with Tony out on Giddings. And she wasn’t answering her cell. So Jack sat in the wicker chair on her front porch and waited for her to return.
While he waited, he contemplated their next move. A team of investigators from the coroner’s office were parked around Claytor Lake now. Cops were combing the shoreline. Eventually that mouth-breathing detective would come around with some tough questions. There was a body now, a murder. And plenty of motive to go around. Even Jack had thought about killing Mark Brooks.
* * *
Jack’s mistake was stopping at the Walmart in Ravenna on the way into Franklin Mills. But he wanted to pick up a card and candy or something for Jean. He didn’t want to show up at the hospital empty-handed. His father had called him an hour ago, asked him to come down, quick. They’d both known about Jean’s habit. She promised she’d stopped with the meth shit when Paige was born. But the Captain had found Jean passed out on the back porch that morning, after a three-day bender. Mark had sweet-talked Jean into snorting some of his new cook. “It’s her last shot,” his father had said. “We need you.”
Jack was still with Danielle at that time. This was eighteen months into their deal and she was living at his place in Lakewood. In hindsight, she had seemed distant for a while, and it was probably not that day that really did them in but the thousand small things leading up to it. He remembered how she’d pulled her blond hair into a harsh ponytail that morning and how that had annoyed him for some reason. Yes, they were probably just about done with each other anyway.
They had parked and Jack was walking toward the store when he saw Mark coming out, wheeling a loaded shopping cart toward his El Camino. Jack crossed the lot, balling his fists as he went. When he got close, he could see into the cart. There were bags full of acetone, bottles of Drano, and boxes of stick flares. Mark looked up when Jack was still a step away.
<
br /> “Hey, man,” he started, and then Jack’s right fist connected with his face. Mark was not a big man, not anymore. The muscle he’d built in the navy had wasted away and he was maybe 120 pounds soaking wet. His whole body buckled and he collapsed to the ground.
“Jack!” shouted Danielle.
“Hey, what the fuck, man?” said Mark, wiping the blood away from his nose, painting his cheeks red.
“Stay the fuck away from my sister,” he said. “And Sam, too. Go back to Warren, asshole.”
Mark looked at him a moment and then smiled. “Sam never loved you. You know that, right? She never loved anybody. And all you got was my sloppy seconds.”
Jack’s vision blurred and he lunged forward. Danielle caught his arm. In his anger, he pulled out of her grasp and, in so doing, she fell back against a car door. That snapped Jack out of his rage. He helped Danielle up and put an arm around her. But that was the moment it was over. He could feel it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, walking her back to his car.
* * *
Tony had answers, wherever he was. Someone had placed his watch around Mark’s wrist, after all. Had that been some kind of attempt at misdirection? Did Tony really think anyone would mistake Mark’s body for his? They needed to find him. And there was only one person who might know where Tony was. And that person was a minor in a psychiatric ward—not the easiest source to question.
Sam returned a few minutes after six. She walked to Jack clutching a brown paper bag. He hugged her. It made him feel nauseated.
“It’s all over the radio,” she said. She pulled back to look at him. “My brother is dead. Good. Good,” she said. “So Tony killed him and ran away. Great. But why did he leave me? Why did he leave me here?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do! You do! You knew he was a snake. You knew he was a selfish prick. You warned me, Jack, and I didn’t listen.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Goddamn it! It is!” She pushed him. Out of frustration. Out of self-loathing. Anger. All those things.
“Stop,” he said. He held her arms still at her sides.
She leaned into him. Her lips pushed against his, opening his mouth. Her tongue found his. He could taste the menthol cigarette she’d snuck in the car.
He pulled away. “Stop. Please stop.” He pulled her down so that they were sitting on her front steps.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was…”
“What’s in the bag?”
She handed it to him. It was a brown paper sack, the kind you put kids’ lunches in. He opened it. Inside was Tony’s watch.
“I didn’t know what to do after I left. I didn’t want to come home. All I could think to do was do something with the watch. A memento. It was for you. It’s for you, I mean. Unless it’s evidence or something now.”
He turned the watch over in his hand. She had taken it to her shop and engraved more detail around the original dedication. RIP, Tony Sanders. 1978–2012, it read now. He thought about it for a moment and then slipped it into his pocket. He wasn’t about to give it to the police until he learned more about Tony. For now, it was better he held on to it.
3 It took Jack several days to talk his way into Haven. He had to relay his request for visitation through the director to the boy’s mother, who had returned to New York years ago. Luckily, the mother remembered Tony fondly. The doctor and her son had shared a special bond. A meeting was arranged for Monday morning. Jack arrived at a quarter to nine, pulling through the main gate on Fisher Hill and up a winding drive to a grand Colonial mansion that looked like something from a John Irving novel.
A smartly dressed woman with the auspicious name of Kimberly Quick escorted Jack to a tiled common room full of comfy couches. A wall of windows looked out on a small pond edged with cattails. Cole sat at a table, bobbing his head to a tune on his iPod. His hair was jet-black, still mussed from sleeping. He was sixteen, a wiry boy with bloodshot eyes that blinked almost constantly, tic-ish. He was dressed in jeans and a vintage Nintendo controller T-shirt.
“He’s a good kid,” Quick whispered as they approached. “But he has a temper. Also, he doesn’t sound crazy. Not at first. Try to remember that he’s a schizophrenic. If you need any help, just holler.” She left them alone to talk.
Jack took a seat across from the boy, who pulled out his earbuds and regarded him with mild amusement.
“My name is Jack Felter,” he said. “I’m a friend of Dr. Sanders.”
“I know who you are,” the boy said. “He told me you’d come. I just didn’t think it would take three goddamn years.”
TWO
YOUNG MAN’S FANCY
1 “Tony told you I’d come here?”
Cole nodded. “It was the last thing he said to me. He said that eventually you’d come visit me and when you did I should tell you where he went.” The boy’s voice was hesitantly deep, the way young men talk when they’re afraid their voice might slip back into a childhood soprano at the slightest provocation.
“You know where Tony is?”
Cole nodded.
“Where is he?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“What do you mean?”
Cole looked out the window, at the cloud shadows moving over the surface of the pond. “You ever heard of Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’?”
Jack shivered. “Yes,” he said. “Tony explained it to me.”
“It’s sort of like that. You’re in the cave and I have to get you out before you can find your friend. I think that’s why he left me behind.”
“Why don’t you tell me where he is and we’ll see how it goes?”
Cole laughed. “This is going to be very difficult.”
“What?”
“Teaching you. You’re much more stubborn than Dr. Sanders, I can tell.”
“Cole. Please. Where is he?”
“Your friend is on a large island, roughly the size of the state of Ohio, that sits in the ocean a hundred miles northwest of Dutch Harbor, the main port of Amaknak Island, Alaska.”
It was, he supposed, the last thing he had expected to hear. “What?”
“Haven’t you ever seen Deadliest Catch? Dutch Harbor is the place they’re always unloading the crab.”
“I know the show. My dad watches it.” He rubbed at his neck, where a pinkish bruise reminded him that nothing could be taken for granted. “But why would Tony want to go all the way out there?”
Cole smiled. “To save the world,” he said. He seemed so earnest.
“If I called out to Dutch Harbor. To the newspaper. Or the police. If I called the Dutch Harbor police, Cole, and I asked them about a huge island somewhere north of them in the Bering Sea, what would they tell me?”
“They’d tell you it didn’t exist. But that’s because they can’t see it.”
“But Tony can see it.”
“Yes.”
“And you can see it.”
“Yes.”
“But nobody else?”
Cole thought about this a moment. “I suppose some people might be able to see it.”
Jack shook his head.
“Dr. Sanders called it ‘inattentional blindness,’” said Cole. “I guess our minds have trouble seeing things we don’t expect to see. There was this study he told me about. Some Harvard psychological study. Group of scientists showed two hundred students a videotape of a basketball game. During the game, a woman in a gorilla suit walked across the basketball court. Afterward they asked the students if they noticed anything strange. Almost half of them did not—or could not—see the gorilla. Because it was so weird, their minds ignored it. Their minds edited it out.”
It was another idea from that psych textbook Tony had carried around. When they were kids, Tony had told Jack about how, when Columbus discovered America, the Indians on shore couldn’t see his ships. The natives didn’t use sailboats, so they had no frame of reference to draw from. It was too weird. For three
days, while the Santa Maria was parked in the water, all the Indians could see was a “shimmer” on the water. Inattentional blindness.
“If nobody can see this island, how do you know about it?” Jack asked the boy.
“My dad told me.”
“What’s the island called?”
Cole shook his head. “Can’t tell you that. Not yet.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, glancing out at the pond again. “I can’t trust you. You’re still under their influence.”
Jack had misused the word “paranoia” all his life. It was not a light thing. Paranoia is not thinking your coworker might be angling for your job or that your professor is subjectively lowering your grade because he doesn’t like you. Paranoia is sickness. Disease. Trying to pull any sense from what Cole was saying was like listening to someone who spoke English but who had hijacked certain words and stuffed them with new meaning. Like someone from the United States trying to have a conversation with a man in Ireland when they were both drunk.
“Help me understand,” said Jack.
“First things first,” said Cole. “Before we speak again, you have to start boiling your water.”
2 Paige was eating Pringles, watching TV, and Jean was sipping coffee at the table when Jack came downstairs the next morning.
“Have you seen my watch?” he asked.
“You have a watch? Who wears watches anymore?”
“Tony’s watch. Sam gave it to me. I had it yesterday. But I can’t remember where I put it.”
“Where’d ya go last night, Uncle Jack?” the girl asked between mouthfuls.
“Out with Aunt Sam. She was feeling sad, so I took her to a movie.”
“Is she your girlfriend?”
“Nope. Just a friend.”
“Did you kiss her?”
“No.”
“You wanted to kiss her, I bet.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You think she’s pretty.”