21

Ryan looked up and there was a figure standing in the doorway.

He was almost asleep, bent over his computer, his hands curled into position, his fingertips aligned on asdf jkl; and his chin had grown heavy until at last his neck drooped and elbows grew slack and his forehead began a slow descent toward the surface of the table.

It was a particular dream state. After a few beers, a few bong hits; after a long time traveling, crossing time zones—passing from pacific to mountain to central to eastern—after calming his drunk, possibly ’shrooming father who was stumbling around with a gun; after getting him into bed and gently sliding the gun out of his limp hand and putting it away and then sitting in front of the computer screen with his eyes closed.

Dutifully, he had made reservations for them both to fly to Quito, Ecuador, under the names Max Wimberley and Darren Loftus, and the confirmation was still there on the screen, a box floating on the surface of the monitor like a leaf in a pond, and Ryan was thinking, I should go to bed. I can’t believe how exhausted I am. And he rolled his dry, sticky tongue inside his mouth and peeled open his eyelids.

He’d had dreams like this before.

A man was standing there, silhouetted behind the mesh of the screen door. He stood under the porch light, where moths were circling and bumping groggily against the surface of the ceiling, and there was a revolving shadow-lantern effect above the man’s head. Ryan let his eyes close again.

He had been having these small hallucinations for a while now, imagining that he saw people he knew, these flickers that he knew were nothing but the detritus of exhaustion and stress and lingering guilty feelings, too much beer and pot, too much time alone with Jay, no one else to talk with; too much time sitting in front of a computer screen, which sometimes appeared to pulse with a rapid millisecond strobe, like those old subliminal advertising messages he’d read about.

It reminded him of this one time at Northwestern. He and Walcott had been partying all weekend and he was sitting at the window of his fourth-floor dorm room, smoking a joint. His arm was extended out into the open air to keep the smoke from stinking up the room, and he was trying to blow rings out into the foggy spring night, looking down at the empty sidewalk and the streetlamps that were made to look like old-fashioned gaslights, and there was no traffic, and suddenly someone reached up and touched his wrist.

He felt this very distinctly. It was impossible, he knew. His arm was extended four stories above the ground, but nevertheless someone reached up and clutched it for just a second. It was as if he were trailing his arm out of a boat instead of a fourth-floor window, as if his fingers were brushing the surface of a lake when a hand, a drowning person, had reached out of the water to grasp his wrist.

He’d let out a cry, and the joint had fallen out from between his fingers, and he saw the orange light of the lit end tumbling down through dark space as he yanked his hand back quickly into the room. “Holy shit!” he said, and Walcott had looked up from his laptop, regarding Ryan sleepily.

“Huh?” Walcott said, and Ryan just sat there, holding his wrist as if it had been burned. What could he say? A ghostly hand just swam up four stories and tried to grab me. Someone tried to pull me out of the window.

“Something bit me,” he said at last, calmly. “I just dropped my joint.”

All of this came back to him vividly—more like time travel than memory—and he gave his head a shake, the typical gesture of the daydreamer, as if you could rattle your brain back into place.

He squinched his eyes shut, thinking maybe this would wipe the blackboard clean, but when he opened them, the figure in the doorway had actually become more distinct.

The man had come closer. He was in the room now, stepping toward Ryan, a tall man in a black suit, the shiny cloth glinting.

“Is Jay home?” the man said, and Ryan’s body jerked as he lifted up into full consciousness. “I’m a friend of Jay’s,” the man said. Real. Not a dream.

The man was holding a black plastic object, which looked at first like it might be an electric razor. Something that could be plugged into a computer? A communication device, like a cell phone or a receiver, with a pair of metal tongs extending from the end of it?

The man stepped forward quickly with the thing held out, as if offering it to Ryan, and Ryan actually reached out his hand for a second, right before the man pressed it up against his neck.

It was a Taser, Ryan realized.

He felt the electricity pass through him. He and his muscles contracted painfully, and he was aware of the spasms of his arms and legs flailing, his tongue hardening in his mouth, a thick strip of meat as he made a gurgling sound in his throat. His lips shook out spittle.

And then he was becoming unconscious.

It wasn’t a hallucination. It wasn’t anything except blankness, thick, fuzzy black spots that began to swell over his line of vision. Like mold spreading in a petri dish. Like the film cells of a movie melting.

Ryan’s head lifted, but his neck felt like a limp stalk. He was sitting in a chair, and he could feel the pressure of the duct tape that held him—his forearms, his chest, his waist, his calves, his ankles—and when he tried experimentally to flex, he was aware that he was held fast. His eyes slit open and he could see that he and Jay were sitting at the kitchen table across from each other. He could see that a trickle of blood was running from Jay’s hair, across his temple and his left eye and along the edge of his nose and into his mouth. Jay made a sound as if he were snuffling, as if he had a cold, and a few droplets of blood spattered out and speckled the tabletop.

“Look,” Jay was saying to the man, humbly. “You know what this business is like. People are slippery. I hardly even know the guy,” he said, very eager, very helpful, still trying to find a fingerhold on his old charming Jay self. “You probably know more about him than I do.”

And the guy standing over him mused on this.

“Oh, really,” the guy said, and he stood there looking down at Jay.

It was the guy who had shocked Ryan with the Taser, and for the first time Ryan got a good look at him. He was a big guy, late twenties, narrow shoulders and wide hips, about six foot one or two, and he was wearing a shiny black Italian suit that a mafioso might wear—though he didn’t look much like a gangster. He had a boyish, Midwestern, potato-shaped head, a shock of straw-colored blond hair, and he reminded Ryan of no one so much as the graduate student who had been a TA in his computer science class back at Northwestern.

“You know what,” the guy said, “I don’t believe you.”

He lifted his fist and clouted Jay in the face. Hard. Hard enough that Jay tilted back and more blood droplets flew out of his mouth, and Jay let out a high, surprised yelp.

“It’s a mistake!” Jay said. “Listen, you’ve just got the wrong guy, that’s all. I don’t know what you want me to say. Tell me what you want me to say!”

Ryan was trying to keep himself as small and soundless as possible. He could hear movement—some general thumping and crashing in the next room, and through the doorway he could see men wearing black pants and shirts, two men, he thought, though possibly more, unplugging the hard drives from the rows of computers on the tables and tossing the monitors and keyboards and other extraneous hardware onto the floor, sometimes hitting things with long curved pieces of metal, crowbars, and one of them picked up Jay’s Ouija board from the coffee table and looked at it curiously, front and back, as if it were some form of technology he’d never encountered before. Then he paused, maybe sensing that Ryan was looking at him, and Ryan quickly closed his eyes.

“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.