TIM O’BRIEN

In the Lake of the Woods

Copyright

HarperPress An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 1995

First published in the USA by

Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence 1994

Copyright © Tim O’Brien 1994

The Author asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

Portions of this book have appeared, in substantially different form,

in The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Magazine and Esquire

The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following:

‘Shame’ by Robert Karen, Copyright © 1992 by Robert Karen,

as first published in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1992; ‘Homeless My Lai Vet Killed in Booze Fight,’ from the Boston Herald, September 14, 1988, reprinted with permission of the Boston Herald.

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006543954

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Dedication

FOR KATE

Although this book contains material from the world in which we live, including references to actual places, people, and events, it must be read as a work of fiction. All dialogue is invented. Certain notorious and very real incidents have been altered or reimagined. John and Kathy Wade are creations of the author’s imagination, as are all of the characters who populate the state of Minnesota and the town of Angle Inlet in this novel.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Excerpt

1 How Unhappy They Were

2 Evidence

3 The Nature of Loss

4 What He Remembered

5 Hypothesis

6 Evidence

7 The Nature of Marriage

8 How the Night Passed

9 Hypothesis

10 The Nature of Love

11 What He Did Next

12 Evidence

13 The Nature of the Beast

14 Hypothesis

15 What the Questions Were

16 Evidence

17 The Nature of Politics

18 Hypothesis

19 What Was Found

20 Evidence

21 The Nature of the Spirit

22 Hypothesis

23 Where They Looked

24 Hypothesis

25 Evidence

26 The Nature of the Dark

27 Hypothesis

28 How He Went Away

29 The Nature of the Angle

30 Evidence

31 Hypothesis

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

1
How Unhappy They Were

In September, after the primary, they rented an old yellow cottage in the timber at the edge of Lake of the Woods. There were many trees, mostly pine and birch, and there was the dock and the boathouse and the narrow dirt road that came through the forest and ended in polished gray rocks at the shore below the cottage. Then there were no roads at all. There were no towns and no people. Beyond the dock the big lake opened northward into Canada, where the water was everything, vast and very cold, and where there were secret channels and portages and bays and tangled forests and islands without names. Everywhere, for many thousand square miles, the wilderness was all one thing, like a great curving mirror, infinitely blue and beautiful, always the same. Which was what they had come for. They needed the solitude. They needed the repetition, the dense hypnotic drone of woods and water, but above all they needed to be together.

At night they would spread their blankets on the porch and lie watching the fog move toward them from across the lake. They were not yet prepared to make love. They had tried once, but it had not gone well, so now they would hold each other and talk quietly about having babies and perhaps a house of their own. They pretended things were not so bad. The election had been lost, but they tried to believe it was not the absolute and crushing thing it truly was. They were careful with each other; they did not talk about the sadness or the sudden trapdoor feeling in their stomachs. Lying still under their blankets, they would take turns thinking up names for the children they wanted—funny names, sometimes, so they could laugh—and then later they would plan the furnishings for their new house, the fine rugs they would buy, the antique brass lamps, the exact colors of the wallpaper, all the details, how they would be sure to have a giant sun porch and a stone fireplace and a library with tall walnut bookcases and a sliding ladder.

In the darkness it did not matter that these things were expensive and impossible. It was a terrible time in their lives and they wanted desperately to be happy. They wanted happiness without knowing what it was, or where to look, which made them want it all the more.

As a kind of game they would sometimes make up lists of romantic places to travel.

“Verona,” Kathy would say, “I’d love to spend a few days in Verona.” And then for a long while they would talk about Verona, the things they would see and do, trying to make it real in their minds. All around them, the fog moved in low and fat off the lake, and their voices would seem to flow away for a time and then return to them from somewhere in the woods beyond the porch. It was an echo, partly. But inside the echo there was also a voice not quite their own—like a whisper, or a nearby breathing, something feathery and alive. They would stop to listen, except the sound was never there when listened for. It mixed with the night. There were rustlings in the timber, things growing and things rotting. There were night birds. There was the lap of lake against shore.

And it was then, listening, that they would feel the trapdoor drop open, and they’d be falling into that emptiness where all the dreams used to be.

They tried to hide it, though. They would go on talking about the fine old churches of Verona, the museums and outdoor cafés where they would drink strong coffee and eat pastries. They invented happy stories for each other. A late-night train ride to Florence, or maybe north into the mountains, or maybe Venice, and then back to Verona, where there was no defeat and where nothing in real life ever ended badly. For both of them it was a wishing game. They envisioned happiness as a physical place on the earth, a secret country, perhaps, or an exotic foreign capital with bizarre customs and a difficult new language. To live there would require practice and many changes, but they were willing to learn.

At times there was nothing to say. Other times they tried to be brave.

“It’s not really so terrible,” Kathy told him one evening. “I mean, it’s bad, but we can make it better.” It was their sixth night at Lake of the Woods. In less than thirty-six hours she would be gone, but now she lay beside him on the porch and talked about all the ways they could make it better. Be practical, she said. One day at a time. He could hook up with one of those fancy law firms in Minneapolis. They’d shop around for a cheap house, or just rent for a while, and they’d scrimp and draw up a budget and start paying off the debts, and then in a year or two they could jump on a plane for Verona, or wherever else they wanted, and they’d be happy together and do all the wonderful things they’d never done.

“We’ll find new stuff to want,” Kathy said. “Brand-new dreams. Isn’t that right?” She waited a moment, watching him. “Isn’t it?”

John Wade tried to nod.

Two days later, when she was gone, he would remember the sound of mice beneath the porch. He would remember the rich forest smells and the fog and the lake and the curious motion Kathy made with her fingers, a slight fluttering, as if to dispel all the things that were wrong in their lives.

“We’ll do it,” she said, and moved closer to him. “We’ll go out and make it happen.”

“Sure,” Wade said. “We’ll get by fine.”

“Better than fine.”

“Right. Better.”

Then he closed his eyes. He watched a huge white mountain collapse and come tumbling down on him.

There was that crushed feeling in his stomach. Yet even then he pretended to smile at her. He said reassuring things, resolutely, as if he believed, and this too was something he would later remember—the pretending. In the darkness he could feel Kathy’s heartbeat, her breath against his cheek. After a time she turned beneath the blankets and kissed him, teasing a little, her tongue in his ear, which was irritating but which meant she cared for him and wanted him to concentrate on everything they still had or someday could have.

“So there,” she said. “We’ll be happy now.”

“Happy us,” he said.

It was a problem of faith. The future seemed intolerable. There was fatigue, too, and anger, but more than anything there was the emptiness of disbelief.

Quietly, lying still, John Wade watched the fog divide itself into clusters over the dock and boathouse, where it paused as if to digest those objects, hovering for a time, then swirling and changing shape and moving heavily up the slope toward their porch.

Landslide, he was thinking.

The thought formed as a picture in his head, an enormous white mountain he had been climbing all his life, and now he watched it come rushing down on him, all that disgrace. He told himself not to think about it, and then he was thinking again. The numbers were hard. He had been beaten nearly three to one within his own party; he had carried a few college towns and Itasca County and almost nothing else.

Lieutenant governor at thirty-seven. Candidate for the United States Senate at forty. Loser by landslide at forty-one.

Winners and losers. That was the risk.

But it was more than a lost election. It was something physical. Humiliation, that was part of it, and the wreckage in his chest and stomach, and then the rage, how it surged up into his throat and how he wanted to scream the most terrible thing he could scream—Kill Jesus!—and how he couldn’t help himself and couldn’t think straight and couldn’t stop screaming it inside his head—Kill Jesus!—because nothing could be done, and because it was so brutal and disgraceful and final. He felt crazy sometimes. Real depravity. Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and he couldn’t keep it in and he couldn’t let it out. He wanted to hurt things. Grab a knife and start cutting and slashing and never stop. All those years. Climbing like a son of a bitch, clawing his way up inch by fucking inch, and then it all came crashing down at once. Everything, it seemed. His sense of purpose. His pride, his career, his honor and reputation, his belief in the future he had so grandly dreamed for himself.

John Wade shook his head and listened to the fog. There was no wind. A single moth played against the screened window behind him.

Forget it, he thought. Don’t think.

And then later, when he began thinking again, he took Kathy up against him, holding tight. “Verona,” he said firmly, “we’ll do it. Deluxe hotels. The whole tour.”

“That’s a promise?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “A promise.”

Kathy smiled at this. He could not see the smile, but he could hear it passing through her voice when she said, “What about babies?”

“Everything,” Wade said. “Especially that.”

“Maybe I’m too old. I hope not.”

“You’re not.”

“I’m thirty-eight.”

“No sweat, we’ll have thirty-eight babies,” he said. “Hire a bus in Verona.”

“There’s an idea. Then what?”

“I don’t know, just drive and see the sights and be together. You and me and a busload of babies.”

“You think so?”

“For sure. I promised.”

And then for a long while they lay quietly in the dark, waiting for these things to happen, some sudden miracle. All they wanted was for their lives to be good again.

Later, Kathy pushed back the blankets and moved off toward the railing at the far end of the porch. She seemed to vanish into the heavy dark, the fog curling around her, and when she spoke, her voice came from somewhere far away, as if lifted from her body, unattached and not quite authentic.

“I’m not crying,” she said.

“Of course you’re not.”

“It’s just a rotten time, that’s all. This stupid thing we have to get through.”

“Stupid,” he said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, you’re right. Damned stupid.”

Things went silent. Just the waves and woods, a delicate in-and-out breathing. The night seemed to wrap itself around them.

“John, listen, I can’t always come up with the right words. All I meant was—you know—I meant there’s this wonderful man I love and I want him to be happy and that’s all I care about. Not elections.”

“Fine, then.”

“And not newspapers.”

“Fine,” he said.

Kathy made a sound in the dark, which wasn’t crying. “You do love me?”

“More than anything.”

“Lots, I mean?”

“Lots,” he said. “A whole busful. Come here now.”

Kathy crossed the porch, knelt down beside him, pressed the palm of her hand against his forehead. There was the steady hum of lake and woods. In the days afterward, when she was gone, he would remember this with perfect clarity, as if it were still happening. He would remember a breathing sound inside the fog. He would remember the feel of her hand against his forehead, its warmth, how purely alive it was.

“Happy,” she said. “Nothing else.”

2
Evidence

He was always a secretive boy. I guess you could say he was obsessed by secrets. It was his nature.¹

—Eleanor K. Wade (Mother)

Exhibit One: Iron teakettle

Weight, 2.3 pounds

Capacity, 3 quarts

Exhibit Two: Photograph of boat

12-foot Wakeman Runabout

Aluminum, dark blue

1.6 horsepower Evinrude engine

He didn’t talk much. Even his wife, I don’t think she knew the first damn thing about … well, about any of it. The man just kept everything buried.²

—Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo

Name: Kathleen Terese Wade

Date of Report: 9/21/86

Age: 38

Height: 5′6″

Weight: 118 pounds

Hair: blond

Eyes: green

Photograph: attached

Occupation: Director of Admissions, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Medical History: pneumonia (age 16), pregnancy termination (age 34)

Current Medications: Valium, Restoril

Next of Kin: John Herman Wade

Other Relatives: Patricia S. Hood (sister), 1625 Lockwood Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota³

—Extract, Missing Persons Report

After work we used to do laps together over at the Y every night. She’d just swim and swim, like a fish almost, so I’m not worried about … Well, I think she’s fine. You ever hear of a fish drowning?⁴

—Bethany Kee (Associate Admissions Director, University of Minnesota)

He was not a fat child, not at all. He was husky. He had big bones. But sometimes I think his father made him feel—oh, made him feel—oh—maybe overweight. In sixth grade the boy wrote away for a diet he’d seen advertised in some silly magazine … His father teased him quite a lot. Constant teasing, you could say.

—Eleanor K. Wade

You know what I remember? I remember the flies. Millions of flies. That’s what I mostly remember.⁵

—Richard Thinbill

Exhibit Three: Photograph of houseplant debris

Remains of six to eight plants (1 geranium, 1 begonia, 1 caladium, 1 philodendron, others unidentified)

Plant material largely decomposed

John loved his father a lot. I suppose that’s why the teasing hurt so bad … He tried to keep it secret—how much it hurt—but I could always tell … Oh, he loved that father of his. (What about me? I keep thinking that.) Things were hard for John. He was too young to know what alcoholism is.

—Eleanor K. Wade

Exhibit Four: Polling Data

July 3, 1986

Wade—58%

Durkee—31%

Undecided—11%

August 17, 1986

Wade—21%

Durkee—61%

Undecided—18%⁶

Landslide isn’t the word. You saw the numbers? Three to one, four to one—a career-ender. Poor guy couldn’t get elected assistant fucking dogcatcher on a Sioux reservation … Must’ve asked a trillion times if there was anything that could hurt us, scum or anything. Man never said one single word. Zero. Which isn’t how you run a campaign … Did I betray him? Fuck no. Other way around. Worked like a bastard to get his sorry ass elected.

—Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo

Exhibit Five: Photographs (2) of boathouse (exterior), Lake of the Woods

Exhibit Six: Photographs (3) of “Wade cottage” (exterior), Lake of the Woods

I’ll bet she’s on a Greyhound bus somewhere. Married to that creep, that’s where I’d be. She liked buses.

—Bethany Kee (Associate Admissions Director, University of Minnesota)

I can’t discuss this.⁷

—Patricia S. Hood (Sister of Kathleen Wade)

Engine trouble. That old beat-up Evinrude. Busted cord probably, or the plugs went bad. Give it time, she’ll walk right through that door over there. I bet she will.⁸

—Ruth Rasmussen

I was working down at the Mini-Mart and they come in and I served them both coffee at the counter and then after a while they started having this argument. It went on for a while. She was mad. That’s all I know.⁹

—Myra Shaw (Waitress)

A politician’s wife, so naturally you try extra hard. We did everything except empty out the goddamn lake. I’m not done yet. Every day goes by, I keep my eyes open. You never know.¹⁰

—Arthur J. Lux (Sheriff, Lake of the Woods County)

The guy offed her.¹¹

—Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson

That’s preposterous. They loved each other. John wouldn’t hurt a fly.

—Eleanor K. Wade

Fucking flies!

—Richard Thinbill

1. Interview, December 4, 1989, St. Paul, Minnesota.

2. Interview, July 12 and July 16, 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota.

3. Missing Persons File Declaration, DS Form 20, Office of the Sheriff, Lake of the Woods County, Baudette, Minnesota. Kathleen Wade was reported missing on the morning of September 20, 1986. The search lasted eighteen days, covered more than 800 square miles, and involved elements of the Minnesota State Highway Patrol, the Lake of the Woods County Sheriffs Department, the United States Border Patrol, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Lakes Division), and the Ontario Provincial Police.

4. Interview, September 21, 1991, Edina, Minnesota.

5. Interview, July 19, 1990, Fargo, North Dakota. Former PFC Thinbill, a Native American (Chippewa), served with John Wade as a member of the First Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade, Task Force Barker, Americal Division, Republic of Vietnam.

6. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Minnesota Poll, July 3, 1986, and August 17, 1986, p. 1.

7. Interview, May 6, 1990, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

8. Interview, June 6, 1989, Angle Inlet, Minnesota.

9. Interview, June 10, 1993, Angle Inlet, Minnesota.

10. Interview, January 3, 1991, Baudette, Minnesota.

11. Interview, June 9, 1993, Angle Inlet, Minnesota.

3
The Nature of Loss

When he was fourteen, John Wade lost his father. He was in the junior high gymnasium, shooting baskets, and after a time the teacher put his arm around John’s shoulder and said, “Take a shower now. Your mom’s here.”

What John felt that night, and for many nights afterward, was the desire to kill.

At the funeral he wanted to kill everybody who was crying and everybody who wasn’t. He wanted to take a hammer and crawl into the casket and kill his father for dying. But he was helpless. He didn’t know where to start.

In the weeks that followed, because he was young and full of grief, he tried to pretend that his father was not truly dead. He would talk to him in his imagination, carrying on whole conversations about baseball and school and girls. Late at night, in bed, he’d cradle his pillow and pretend it was his father, feeling the closeness. “Don’t be dead,” he’d say, and his father would wink and say, “Well, hey, keep talking,” and then for a long while they’d discuss the right way to hit a baseball, a good level swing, keeping your head steady and squaring up your shoulders and letting the bat do the job. It was pretending, but the pretending helped. And so when things got especially bad, John would sometimes invent elaborate stories about how he could’ve saved his father. He imagined all the things he could’ve done. He imagined putting his lips against his father’s mouth and blowing hard and making the heart come alive again; he imagined yelling in his father’s ear, begging him to please stop dying. Once or twice it almost worked. “Okay,” his father would say, “I’ll stop, I’ll stop,” but he never did.

In his heart, despite the daydreams, John could not fool himself. He knew the truth. At school, when the teachers told him how sorry they were that he had lost his father, he understood that lost was just another way of saying dead. But still the idea kept turning in his mind. He’d picture his father stumbling down a dark alley, lost, not dead at all. And then the pretending would start again. John would go back in his memory over all the places his father might be—under the bed or behind the bookcases in the living room—and in this way he would spend many hours looking for his father, opening closets, scanning the carpets and sidewalks and lawns as if in search of a lost nickel. Maybe in the garage, he’d think. Maybe under the cushions of the sofa. It was only a game, or a way of coping, but now and then he’d get lucky. Just by chance he’d glance down and suddenly spot his father in the grass behind the house. “Bingo,” his father would say, and John would feel a hinge swing open. He’d bend down and pick up his father and put him in his pocket and be careful never to lose him again.

4
What He Remembered

Their seventh day at Lake of the Woods passed quietly. There was a telephone but it never rang. There were no newspapers, no reporters or telegrams. Inside the cottage, things had a fragile, hollowed-out quality, a suspended feeling, and over the morning hours a great liquid silence seemed to flow in from the woods and curl up around their bodies. They tried to ignore it; they were cautious with each other. When they spoke, which was not often, it was to maintain the pretense that they were in control of their own lives, that their problems were soluble, that in time the world would become a happier place. Though it required the exercise of tact and willpower, they tried to find comfort in the ordinary motions of life; they simulated their marriage, the old habits and routines. At the breakfast table, over coffee, Kathy jotted down a grocery list. “Caviar,” she said, and John Wade laughed and said, “Truffles, too,” and they exchanged smiles as proof of their courage and resolve. Often, though, the strain was almost impossible to bear. On one occasion, as she was washing the breakfast dishes, Kathy made a low sound in her throat and began to say something, just a word or two, then her eyes focused elsewhere, beyond him, beyond the walls of the cottage, and then after a time she looked down at the dishwater and did not look back again. It was an image that would not go away. Twenty-four hours later, when she was gone, John Wade would remember the enormous distance that had come into her face at that instant, a kind of travel, and he would find himself wondering where she had taken herself, and why, and by what means.

He would never know.

In the days ahead he would look for clues in the clutter of daily detail. The faded blue jeans she wore that morning, her old tennis shoes, her white cotton sweater. The distance in her eyes. The way she rinsed the breakfast dishes and dried her hands and then walked out of the kitchen without looking at him.

What if she’d spoken?

What if she’d leaned against the refrigerator and said, “Let’s do some loving right here,” and what if they had, and what if everything that happened could not have happened because of those other happenings?

Some things he would remember clearly. Other things he would remember only as shadows, or not at all. It was a matter of adhesion. What stuck and what didn’t. He would be quite certain, for instance, that around noon that day they put on their swimsuits and went down to the lake. For more than an hour they lay inert in the sun, half dozing, then later they went swimming until the cold drove them back onto the dock. The afternoon was large and empty. Brilliant patches of red and yellow burned among the pines along the shore, and in the air there was the sharp, dying scent of autumn. There were no boats on the lake, no swimmers or fishermen. To the south, a mile away, the triangular roof of the Forest Service fire tower seemed to float on an expansive green sea; a narrow dirt road cut diagonally through the timber, and beyond the road a trace of gray smoke rose from the Rasmussen cottage off to the west. Northward it was all woods and water.

He would remember a gliding, buoyant feeling in his stomach. The afternoons were always better. Waves and reflections, the big silver lake planing out toward Canada. Not so bad, he was thinking. He watched the sky and pretended he was a winner. Handshakes and happy faces—it made a nice picture. A winner, sure, and so he lay basking in the crisp white sunlight, almost believing.

Later, Kathy nudged him. “Hey there,” she said, “you all right?”

“Perfect,” he said.

“You don’t seem—”

“No, I’m perfect.”

Kathy’s eyes traveled away again. She put on a pair of sunglasses. There was some unfilled time before she said, “John?”

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Fuck it.”

He would remember a movement at her jaw, a locking motion.

They swam again, taking turns diving from the dock, going deep, then they dried themselves in the sun and walked up to the cottage for a late lunch. Kathy spent the remainder of the afternoon working on a book of crossword puzzles. Wade sat over a pile of bills at the kitchen table. He built up neat stacks in order of priority, slipped rubber bands around them, dropped them in his briefcase.

His eyes ached.

There was that electricity in his blood.

At three o’clock he put in a call to Tony Carbo, who wasn’t available. A half hour later, when he tried again, Tony’s secretary said he’d gone out for the day.

Wade thanked her and hung up.

He unplugged the telephone, carried it into the kitchen, tossed it in a cupboard under the sink.

“Kill Jesus,” he said, which amused him.

Maybe he dozed off. Maybe he had a drink or two. All he would remember with any certainty was that late in the afternoon they locked up the cottage and made the six-mile drive into town. He would remember an odd pressure against his ears—an underwater squeeze. They followed the dirt road west to the Rasmussen cottage, where the road looped north and crossed an iron bridge and turned to loose gravel. Wade would remember giant pines standing flat-up along the roadbed, the branches sometimes vaulting overhead to form shadowed tunnels through the forest. Kathy sat with her hands folded in her lap; after a mile or two she switched on the radio, listened for a moment, then switched it off again. She seemed preoccupied, or nervous, or something in between. If they spoke at all during the ride, he would have no memory of it.

Two miles from town the land began to open up, thinning into brush and scrub pine. The road made a last sharp turn and ran straight west along the shoreline into Angle Inlet. Like a postcard from the moon, Wade thought. They passed Pearson’s Texaco station, a small white schoolhouse, a row of lonely looking houses in need of paint. Somebody’s cat prowled away the afternoon on the post office steps.

Wade parked and went in to pick up the mail. A statement from their accountant, a letter from Kathy’s sister in Minneapolis.

They crossed the street, did the grocery shopping, bought aspirin and booze and tanning lotion, then sat down for coffee at the little sandwich counter in Arndahl’s Mini-Mart. A revolving Coca-Cola clock put the time at 5:12. In nineteen hours, almost exactly, Kathy would be gone, but now the corners of her eyes seemed to relax as she skimmed the letter from her sister. At one point she snorted and made a tossing motion with her head. “Oh, God,” she moaned, then chuckled, then folded the letter and said, “Here we go again.”

“What’s that?”

“Patty. Double trouble, as usual—two boyfriends. Always the juggler.”

Wade nodded at the counter and said, “Good for Patty. More power to her.” There was that sizzle in his blood, the smell of fish and sawdust sweating up from the Mini-Mart floorboards. An aluminum minnow tank near the door gave off a steady bubbling sound.

“Power’s fine,” Kathy said, “but not more men. No kidding, it seems like they always come in pairs—for Patty, I mean. They’re like snakes or politicians or something.” She flicked her eyebrows at him. “That’s a joke.”

“Good one.”

“John—”

“Clever, clever.”

A muscle moved at her cheek. She picked up a glass salt shaker, tapped it against the counter.

“It’s not my fault.”

Wade shrugged. “Sorry.”

“So stop it,” she said. “Just goddamn stop.”

Kathy spun around on her stool, got up, went over to the magazine rack, and stood with her back to him. Dusk was settling in fast. A cold lake breeze slapped up against the Mini-Mart’s screen door, startling the plump young waitress, causing a spill as she refilled their cups.

It was 5:24.

After a time Kathy sat down again and studied the frosted mirror behind the counter, the ads for Pabst and Hamm’s and Bromo-Seltzer. She avoided eye contact, sliding down inside herself, and for an instant, watching her in the mirror, John Wade was assaulted by the ferocity of his own love. A beautiful woman. Her face was tired, with the lax darkening that accompanies age, but still he found much to admire. The green eyes and brown summer skin and slim legs and shapely little fingers. Other things, too—subtle things. The way her hand fit precisely into his. How the sun had turned her hair almost white at the temples. Back in college, he remembered, she used to lie in bed and grasp her own feet like a baby and tell funny stories and giggle and roll around and be happy. All these things and a million more.

Presently, Wade sighed and slipped a dollar bill under his saucer.

“Kath, I am sorry,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Fine, you’re sorry.”

“All right?”

“Sorry, sorry. Never ends.” Kathy waited for the young waitress to scoop up their cups. “Stop blaming me. We lost. That’s the truth—we lost.”

“It was more than that.”

“John, we can’t keep doing this.”

Wade looked at the revolving clock. “Mr. Monster.”

They had a light supper, played backgammon for dimes, sat listening to records in the living room. Around eight o’clock they went out for a short walk. There was a moon and some stars, and the night was windy and cool. The fog had not yet rolled in off the lake. In the coming days John Wade would remember how he reached out to take her hand, the easy lacing of their fingers. But he would also remember how Kathy pulled away after a few steps. She folded her arms across her chest and walked up to the yellow cottage and went inside without waiting for him.

They did not take their blankets to the porch that night. They did not make love. For the rest of the evening they concentrated on backgammon, pushing dimes back and forth across the kitchen table.

At one point he looked up at her and said, “Kath, that stuff in the newspapers—”

Kathy passed him the dice.

“Your move,” she said.

As near as he could remember, they went to bed around eleven. Kathy snapped off the lamp. She turned onto her side and said, “Dream time,” almost cheerfully, as if it did not matter at all that she was now going away.

5
Hypothesis

The purest mystery, of course, but maybe she had a secret lover. Marriages come unraveled. Pressures accumulate. There was precedent in their lives.

In the kitchen that morning, when her eyes traveled away, maybe Kathy Wade was imagining a hotel room in Minneapolis, or in Seattle or Milwaukee, a large clean room with air-conditioning and fresh flowers and no politics and no defeat. Maybe she saw someone waiting for her. Or someone driving north toward Lake of the Woods, moving fast, coming to her rescue. An honest, quiet man. A man without guile or hidden history. Maybe she had grown tired of tricks and trapdoors, a husband she had never known, and later that night, when she said “Dream time,” maybe it was this she meant—an escape dream, a dream she would now enter.

Among the missing, as among the dead, there is only the flux of possibility.

Maybe a heaven, maybe not.

Maybe she couldn’t bear to tell him. Maybe she staged it. Not likely, but not implausible either. The motives were plentiful—fed up, afraid, exhausted by unhappiness. Maybe she woke early the next morning and slipped out of bed and got dressed and moved out to the porch and quietly closed the door behind her and walked up the narrow dirt road to where a car was waiting.

6
Evidence

We called him Sorcerer. It was a nickname.

—Richard Thinbill

Exhibit Seven: Photograph of John Wade, age 12

Smiling

Husky, not fat

Holding a magician’s wand over four white mice

He used to practice down in the basement, just stand in front of that old mirror of his and do tricks for hours and hours. His father didn’t think it was healthy. Always alone, always shut up by himself. A very secretive boy, I think I mentioned that.

—Eleanor K. Wade

Exhibit Eight: John Wade’s Box of Tricks, Partial List

Miser’s Dream

Horn of Plenty

Spirit of the Dark

The Egg Bag

Guillotine of Death

Silks

Pulls

Wands

Wires

Duplicates (6) of father’s necktie

My sister seemed almost scared of him sometimes. I remember this one time when Kathy … Look, I don’t think it’s something we should talk about.

—Patricia S. Hood

What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.

Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its line of force, she may fall back on superstition or take up a useless hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?¹²

—Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

To study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature.¹³

—Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery)

There is no such thing as “getting used to combat” … Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Thus psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.¹⁴

—J. W. Appel and G. W. Beebe (Professors of Psychiatry)

It wasn’t just the war that made him what he was. That’s too easy. It was everything—his whole nature… But I can’t stress enough that he was always very well behaved, always thoughtful toward others, a nice boy. At the funeral he just couldn’t help it. I wanted to yell, too. Even now I’ll go out to my husband’s grave and stare at that stupid stone and yell Why, why, why!

—Eleanor K. Wade

You know, I think politics and magic were almost the same thing for him. Transformations—that’s part of it—trying to change things. When you think about it, magicians and politicians are basically control freaks. [Laughter] I should know, right?

—Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo

The capacity to appear to do what is manifestly impossible will give you a considerable feeling of personal power and can help make you a fascinating and amusing personality.¹⁵

—Robert Parrish (The Magician’s Handbook)

Pouring out affection, [Lyndon Johnson] asked—over and over, in every letter, in fact, that survives—that the affection be reciprocated.¹⁶

—Robert A. Caro (The Years of Lyndon Johnson)

There surely never lived a man with whom love was a more critical matter than it is with me.¹⁷

—Woodrow Wilson

When his father died, John hardly even cried, but he seemed very, very angry. I can’t blame him. I was angry, too. I mean—you know—I kept asking myself, Why? It didn’t make sense. His father had problems with alcohol, that’s true, but there was something else beneath it, like this huge sadness I never understood. The sadness caused the drinking, not the other way around. I think that’s why his father ended up going into the garage that day … Anyway, John didn’t cry much. He threw a few tantrums, I remember that. Yelling and so on. At the funeral. Awfully loud yelling.

—Eleanor K. Wade

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment. Physiological arousal continues unabated.¹⁸

—Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery)

It wasn’t insomnia exactly. John could fall asleep at the drop of a hat, but then, bang, he’d wake up after ten or twenty minutes. He couldn’t stay asleep. It was as if he were on guard against something, tensed up, waiting for … well, I don’t know what.

—Eleanor K. Wade

Sometimes I am a bit ashamed of myself when I think how few friends I have amidst a host of acquaintances. Plenty of people offer me their friendship; but, partly because I am reserved and shy, and partly because I am fastidious and have a narrow, uncatholic taste in friends, I reject the offer in almost every case; and then am dismayed to look about and see how few persons in the world stand near me and know me as I am.¹⁹

—Woodrow Wilson

Show me a politician, I’ll show you an unhappy childhood. Same for magicians.

—Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo

My mother was a saint.²⁰

—Richard M. Nixon

I remember Kathy telling me how he’d wake up screaming sometimes. Foul language, which I won’t repeat. In fact, I’d rather not say anything at all.

—Patricia S. Hood

For some reason Mr. Wade threw away that old iron teakettle. I fished it out of the trash myself. I mean, it was a perfectly good teakettle.

—Ruth Rasmussen

The fucker did something ugly.

—Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson

Vinny’s the theory man. I deal in facts. The case is wide open.²¹

—Arthur J. Lux (Sheriff, Lake of the Woods County)

12. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965; reprint, New York: Perennial Library, 1990), pp. 21–22.

13. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 7.

14. J. W. Appel and G. W. Beebe, “Preventive Psychiatry: An Epidemiological Approach,” Journal of the American Medical Association 131 (1946), p. 1470.

15. Robert Parrish, The Magician’s Handbook (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1944), p. 10.

16. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 228.

17. Woodrow Wilson, in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (1948; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 310.

18. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 35.

19. Woodrow Wilson, in Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, pp. 310–311.

20. Richard M. Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), p. 1088.

21. Yes, and I’m a theory man too. Biographer, historian, medium—call me what you want—but even after four years of hard labor I’m left with little more than supposition and possibility. John Wade was a magician; he did not give away many tricks. Moreover, there are certain mysteries that weave through life itself, human motive and human desire. Even much of what might appear to be fact in this narrative—action, word, thought—must ultimately be viewed as a diligent but still imaginative reconstruction of events. I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident. In any case, Kathy Wade is forever missing, and if you require solutions, you will have to look beyond these pages. Or read a different book.

7
The Nature of Marriage

When he was a boy, John Wade’s hobby was magic. In the basement, where he practiced in front of a stand-up mirror, he made his mother’s silk scarves change color. He cut his father’s best tie with scissors and restored it whole. He placed a penny in the palm of his hand, made his hand into a fist, made the penny into a white mouse.

This was not true magic. It was trickery. But John Wade sometimes pretended otherwise, because he was a kid then, and because pretending was the thrill of magic, and because for a while what seemed to happen became a happening in itself. He was a dreamer. He liked watching his hands in the mirror, imagining how someday he would perform much grander magic, tigers becoming giraffes, beautiful girls levitating like angels in the high yellow spotlights—naked maybe, no wires or strings, just floating there.

At fourteen, when his father died, John did the tricks in his mind. He’d lie in bed at night, imagining a big blue door, and after a time the door would open and his father would walk in, take off his hat, and sit in a rocking chair beside the bed. “Well, I’m back,” his father would say, “but don’t tell your mom, she’d kill me.” He’d wink and grin. “So what’s new?”

And then they’d talk for a while, quietly, catching up on things, like cutting a tie and restoring it whole.

He met Kathy in the autumn of 1966. He was a senior at the University of Minnesota, she was a freshman. The trick then was to make her love him and never stop.

The urgency came from fear, mostly; he didn’t want to lose her. Sometimes he’d jerk awake at night, dreaming she’d left him, but when he tried to explain this to her, Kathy laughed and told him to cut it out, she’d never leave, and in any case thinking that way was destructive, it was negative and unhealthy. “Here I am,” she said, “and I’m not going anywhere.”

John thought it over for several days. “Well, all right,” he said, “but it still worries me. Things go wrong. Things don’t always last.”

“We’re not things,” Kathy said.

“But it can happen.”

“Not with us.”

John shrugged and looked away. He was picturing his father’s big white casket. “Maybe so,” he said, “but how do we know? People lose each other.”

In early November he began spying on her. He felt some guilt at first, which bothered him, but he also found satisfaction in it. Like magic, he thought—a quick, powerful rush. He knew things he shouldn’t know. Intimate little items: what she ate for breakfast, the occasional cigarette she smoked. Finesse and deception, those were his specialties, and the spying came easily. In the evenings he’d station himself outside her dormitory, staring up at the light in her room. Later, when the light went off, he’d track her to the student union or the library or wherever else she went The issue wasn’t trust or distrust. The whole world worked by subterfuge and the will to believe. And so he’d sometimes make dates with her, and then cancel, and then wait to see how she used the time. He looked for signs of betrayal: the way she smiled at people, the way she carried herself around other men. In a way, almost, he loved her best when he was spying; it opened up a hidden world, new angles and new perspectives, new things to admire. On Thursday afternoons he’d stake out women’s basketball practice, watching from under the bleachers, taking note of her energy and enthusiasm and slim brown legs. As an athlete, he decided, Kathy wasn’t much, but he got a kick out of the little dance she’d do whenever a free throw dropped in. She had a competitive spirit that made him proud. She was a knockout in gym shorts.

Down inside, of course, John realized that the spying wasn’t proper, yet he couldn’t bring himself to stop. In part, he thought, Kathy had brought it on herself: she had a personality that lured him on. Fiercely private, fiercely independent. They’d be at a movie together, or at a party, and she’d simply vanish; she’d go out for a pack of gum and forget to return. It wasn’t thoughtlessness, really, but it wasn’t thoughtful either. Without reason, usually without warning, she’d wander away while they were browsing in a shop or bookstore, and then a moment later, when he glanced up, she’d be cleanly and purely gone, as if plucked off the planet. That fast—here, then gone—and he wouldn’t see her again for hours, or until he found her holed up in a back carrel of the library. All this put a sharp chill in his heart. He understood her need to be alone, to reserve time for herself, but too often she carried things to an extreme that made him wonder. The spying helped. No great discoveries, but at least he knew the score.

And it was fun, too—a challenge.

Occasionally he’d spend whole days just tailing her. The trick was to be patient, to stay alert, and he liked the bubbly sensation it gave him to trace her movements from spot to spot. He liked melting into crowds, positioning himself in doorways, anticipating her route as she walked across campus. It was sleight-of-body work, or sleight-of-mind, and over those cool autumn days he was carried along by the powerful, secret thrill of gaining access to a private life. Hershey bars, for instance—Kathy was addicted, she couldn’t resist. He learned about her friends, her teachers, her little habits and routines. He watched her shop for his birthday present. He was there in the drugstore when she bought her first diaphragm.

“It’s weird,” Kathy told him once, “how well you know me.”

To his surprise Kathy kept loving him, she didn’t stop, and over the course of the spring semester they made plans to be married and have children and someday live in a big old house in Minneapolis. For John it was a happy time. Except for rare occasions, he gave up spying. He was able to confide in her about his ambitions and dreams. First law school, he told her, then a job with the party, and then, when all the pieces were in place, he’d go for something big. Lieutenant governor, maybe. The U.S. Senate. He had the sequence mapped out; he knew what he wanted. Kathy listened carefully, nodding at times. Her eyes were green and smart, watchful. “Sounds fine,” she said, “but what’s it all for?”

“For?”

“I mean, why?”

John hesitated. “Because—you know—because it’s what I want.”

“Which is what?”

“Just the usual, I guess. Change things. Make things happen.”

Kathy lay on her back, in bed. It was late April of 1967. She was nineteen years old.

“Well, I still don’t get it,” she said. “The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail.”

“And that’s bad?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“What then?”

She made a shifting motion with her shoulders. “I don’t know, it just seems strange, sort of. How you’ve figured everything out, all the angles, except what it’s for.”

“For us,” he said. “I love you, Kath.”

“But it feels—I shouldn’t say this—it feels manipulating.”

John turned and looked at her. Nineteen years old, yes, but still there was something flat and skeptical in her eyes, something terrifying. She returned his gaze without backing off. She was hard to fool. Again, briefly, he was assailed by the sudden fear of losing her, of bungling things, and for a long while he tried to explain how wrong she was. Nothing sinister, he said. He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation. Like a magic show: invisible wires and secret trapdoors. He imagined placing a city in the palm of his hand, making his hand into a fist, making the city into a happier place. Manipulation, that was the fun of it.

He graduated in June of 1967. There was a war in progress, which was beyond manipulation, and nine months later he found himself at the bottom of an irrigation ditch. The slime was waist-deep. He couldn’t move. The trick then was to stay sane.

His letters from Kathy were cheerful and newsy, full of spicy details, and he found comfort in her chitchat about family and friends. She told funny stories about her sister Pat, about her teachers and roommates and basketball team. She rarely mentioned the war. Though concerned for his safety, Kathy also had doubts about his motives, his reasons for being there.

“I just hope it’s not part of your political game plan,” she wrote. “All those dead people, John, they don’t vote.”

The letter hurt him. He couldn’t understand how she could think such things. It was true that he sometimes imagined returning home a hero, looking spiffy in a crisp new uniform, smiling at the crowds and carrying himself with appropriate modesty and decorum. And it was also true that uniforms got people elected. Even so, he felt abused.

“I love you,” he wrote back, “and I hope someday you’ll believe in me.”

John Wade was not much of a soldier, barely competent, but he managed to hang on without embarrassing himself. He kept his head down under fire, avoided trouble, trusted in luck to keep him alive. By and large he was well liked among the men in Charlie Company. In the evenings, after the foxholes were dug, he’d sometimes perform card tricks for his new buddies, simple stuff mostly, and he liked the grins and bunched eyebrows as he transformed the ace of spades into the queen of hearts, the queen of hearts into a snapshot of Ho Chi Minh. Or he’d swallow his jackknife. He’d open up the blade and put his head back and make the moves and then retrieve the knife from somebody’s pocket. The guys were impressed. Sorcerer, they called him: “Sorcerer’s our man.” And for John Wade, who had always considered himself a loner, the nickname was like a special badge, an emblem of belonging and brotherhood, something to take pride in. A nifty sound, too—Sorcerer—it had magic, it suggested certain powers, certain rare skills and aptitudes.

The men in Charlie Company seemed to agree.

One afternoon in Pinkville, when a kid named Weber got shot through the kidney, Sorcerer knelt down and pressed a towel against the hole and said the usual things: “Hang tight, easy now.” Weber nodded. For a while he was quiet, flickering in and out, then suddenly he giggled and tried to sit up.

“Hey, no sweat,” he said, “I’m aces, I’m golden.” The kid kept rocking, he wouldn’t lie still. “Golden, golden. Don’t mean zip, man, I’m golden.”

Weber’s eyes shut. He almost smiled. “Go on,” he said. “Do your magic.”

In Vietnam, where superstition governed, there was the fundamental need to believe—believing just to believe—and over time the men came to trust in Sorcerer’s powers. Jokes, at first. Little bits of lingo. “Listen up,” somebody would say, “tonight we’re invisible,” and somebody else would say, “That’s affirmative, Sorcerer’s got this magic dust, gonna sprinkle us good, gonna make us into spooks.” It was a game they played—tongue-in-cheek, but also hopeful. At night, before heading out on ambush, the men would go through the ritual of lining up to touch Sorcerer’s helmet, filing by as if at Communion, the faces dark and young and solemn. They’d ask his advice on matters of fortune; they’d tell each other stories about his incredible good luck, how he never got a scratch, not once, not even that time back in January when the mortar round dropped right next to his foxhole. Amazing, they’d say. Man’s plugged into the spirit world.

John Wade encouraged the mystique. It was useful, he discovered, to cultivate a reserved demeanor, to stay silent for long stretches of time. When pressed, he’d put on a quick display of his powers, doing a trick or two, using the everyday objects all around him.

Much could be done, for example, with his jackknife and a corpse. Other times he’d do some fortune-telling, offering prophecies of things to come. “Wicked vibes,” he’d say, “wicked day ahead,” and then he’d gaze out across the paddies. He couldn’t go wrong. Wickedness was everywhere.

“I’m the company witch doctor,” he wrote Kathy. “These guys listen to me. They actually believe in this shit.”

Kathy did not write back for several weeks. And then she sent only a postcard: “A piece of advice. Be careful with the tricks. One of these days you’ll make me disappear.”

It was signed, Kath. There were no endearments, no funny stories.

Instantly, John felt the old terrors rise up again, all the ugly possibilities. He couldn’t shut them off. Even in bright daylight the pictures kept blowing through his head. Dark bedrooms, for instance. Kathy’s diaphragm. What he wanted was to spy on her again—it was like a craving—but all he could do was wait. At night his blood bubbled. He couldn’t stop wondering. In the third week of February, when a letter finally arrived, he detected a new coolness in her tone, a new distance and formality. She talked about a movie she’d seen, an art gallery she’d visited, a terrific Spanish beer she’d discovered. His imagination filled in the details.

February was a wretched month. Kathy was one problem, the war another. Two men were lost to land mines. A third was shot through the neck. Weber died of an exploding kidney. Morale was low. As they plodded from ville to ville, the men talked in quiet voices about how the magic had worn off, how Sorcerer had lost contact with the spirit world. They seemed to blame him. Nothing direct, just a general standoffishness. There were no more requests for tricks. No banter, no jokes. As the days piled up, John Wade felt increasingly cut off from the men, cut off from Kathy and his own future. A stranded sensation—totally lost. At times he wondered about his mental health. The internal terrain had gone blurry; he couldn’t get his bearings.

“Something’s wrong,” he wrote Kathy. “Don’t do this to me. I’m not blind—Sorcerer can see.”

She wrote back fast: “You scare me.”

And then for many days he received no letters at all, not even a postcard, and the war kept squeezing in on him. The notion of the finite took hold and would not let go.

In the second week of February a sergeant named Reinhart was shot dead by sniper fire. He was eating a Mars bar. He took a bite and laughed and started to say something and then dropped in the grass under a straggly old palm tree, his lips dark with chocolate, his brains smooth and liquid. It was a fine tropical afternoon. Bright and balmy, very warm, but John Wade found himself shivering. The cold came from inside him. A deep freeze, he thought, and then he felt something he’d never felt before, a force so violent it seemed to pick him up by the shoulders. It was rage, in part, but it was also illness and sorrow and evil, all kinds of things.

For a few seconds he hugged himself, feeling the cold, and then he was moving.

There was no real decision. He’d lost touch with his own volition, his own arms and legs, and in the hours afterward he would remember how he seemed to glide toward the enemy position—not running, just a fast, winging, disconnected glide—circling in from behind, not thinking at all, slipping through a tangle of deep brush and keeping low and letting the glide take him up to a little man in black trousers and a black shirt.

He would remember the man turning. He would remember their eyes colliding.

Other things he would remember only dimly. How he was carried forward by the glide. How his lungs seemed full of ashes, and how at one point his rifle muzzle came up against the little man’s cheekbone. He would remember an immense pressure in his stomach. He would remember Kathy’s flat eyes reproaching him for the many things he had done and not done.

There was no sound at all, none that Sorcerer would remember. The little man’s cheekbone was gone.

Later, the men in Charlie Company couldn’t stop talking about Sorcerer’s new trick.

They went on and on.

“Poof,” somebody said. “No lie, just like that—poof!”

At dusk they dragged the sniper’s body into a nearby hamlet. An audience of villagers was summoned at gunpoint. A rope was then secured to the dead man’s feet, another to his wrists, and just before nightfall Sorcerer and his assistants performed an act of levitation, hoisting the body high into the trees, into the dark, where it floated under a lovely red moon.

John Wade returned home in November of 1969. At the airport in Seattle he put in a long-distance call to Kathy, but then chuckled and hung up on the second ring.

The flight to Minneapolis was lost time. Jet lag, maybe, but something else, too. He felt dangerous. In the gray skies over North Dakota he went back into the lavatory, where he took off his uniform and put on a sweater and slacks, then carefully appraised himself in the mirror. His eyes looked unsound. A little tired, a little frayed. After a moment he winked at himself. “Hey, Sorcerer,” he murmured. “How’s tricks?”

In the Twin Cities that evening, he took a bus over to the university. He carried his duffel to the plaza outside Kathy’s dorm, found a concrete bench, sat down to wait. It was shortly after nine o’clock. Her window was dark, which seemed appropriate, and for a couple of hours he compiled mental lists of the various places she might be, the things she might be doing. Nothing wholesome came to mind. His thoughts then gathered around the topics he would address once the occasion was right. Loyalty, for example. Steadfastness and love and fidelity and trust and all the related issues of sticking power.

It was late, almost midnight, when Kathy turned up the sidewalk to her dorm.

She carried a canvas tote bag over her shoulder, a stack of books in her right arm. She’d lost some weight, mostly at the hips, and in the dark she seemed to move with a quicker, nimbler, more impulsive stride. It made him uneasy. After she’d gone inside, John sat very still for a time, not quite there, not quite anywhere; then he picked up his duffel and walked the seven blocks to a hotel.

He was still gliding.

That dizzy, disconnected sensation stayed with him all night. Exotic fevers swept through his blood. He couldn’t get traction on his own dreams. Twice he woke up and stood under the shower, letting the water beat against his shoulders, but even then the dream-reels kept unwinding. Crazy stuff. Kathy shoveling rain off a sidewalk. Kathy waving at him from the wing of an airplane. At one point, near dawn, he found himself curled up on the floor, wide awake, conversing with the dark. He was asking his father to please stop dying. Over and over he kept saying please, but his father wouldn’t listen and wouldn’t stop, he just kept dying. “God, I love you,” John said, and then he curled up tighter and stared into the dark and found himself at his father’s funeral—fourteen years old, a new black necktie pinching tight—except the funeral was being conducted in bright sunlight along an irrigation ditch at Thuan Yen—mourners squatting on their heels and wailing and clawing at their eyes—John’s mother and many other mothers—a minister crying “Sin!”—an organist playing organ music—and John wanted to kill everybody who was weeping and everybody who wasn’t, everybody, the minister and the mourners and the skinny old lady at the organ—he wanted to grab a hammer and scramble down into the ditch and kill his father for dying.

“Hey, I love you,” he yelled. “I do.”

When dawn came, he hiked over to Kathy’s dorm and waited outside on the concrete bench.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted.

In mid-morning Kathy came out and headed down toward the classroom buildings. The routine hadn’t changed. He followed her to the biology lab, then to the student union, then to the post office and bank and gymnasium. From his old spot under the bleachers he watched as she practiced her dribbling and free throws, which were much improved, and after lunch he spent a monotonous three hours in the library as she leaned over a fat gray psychology textbook. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Several times, in fact, he came close to ending his vigil, just grabbing her, holding tight and never letting go. But near dark, when she closed her book, he couldn’t resist tailing her across campus to a busy kiosk, where she bought a magazine, then over to a pizza joint on University Avenue, where she ordered a Tab and a small pepperoni.

He stationed himself at a bus stop outside. His eyes ached—his heart, too—everything. And there was also the squeeze of indecision. At times he was struck by a fierce desire to believe that the suspicion was nothing but a demon in his head. Other times he wanted to believe the worst. He didn’t know why. It was as though something inside him, his genes or his bone marrow, required the certainty of a confirmed betrayal: a witnessed kiss, a witnessed embrace. The facts would be absolute. In a dim way, only half admitted, John understood that the alternative was simply to love her, and to go on loving her, yet somehow the ambiguity seemed intolerable. Nothing could ever be sure, not if he spied forever, because there was always the threat of tomorrow’s treachery, or next year’s treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.

Besides, he liked spying. He was Sorcerer. He had the gift, the knack.

It was full dark when Kathy stepped outside. She passed directly behind him, so close he could smell the perfumed soap on her skin. He felt a curious jolt of guilt, almost shame, but for another ten minutes he tracked her back toward campus, watching as she paused to inspect the shop windows and Thanksgiving displays. At the corner of University and Oak she used a public telephone, mostly listening, laughing once, then she continued up toward the school. The evening had a crisp, leafy smell. Football weather, a cool mid-autumn Friday, and the streets were crowded with students and flower kids and lovers going arm in arm. Nobody knew. Their world was safe. All promises were infinite, all things endured, doubt was on some other planet.

Neptune, he thought, which gave him pause. When he looked up, Kathy was gone.

For a few moments he had a hard time finding focus. He scanned the sidewalks, shut his eyes briefly, then turned and made his way back to her dorm. He waited all night. He waited through dawn and into early morning.

By then he knew.

The knowledge was absolute. It was bone-deep and forever, pure knowing, but even then he waited. He was still there when she came up the sidewalk around noon. Arms folded, powerful, he stood on the steps and watched her move toward him.

“I was out,” Kathy said.

Sorcerer smiled a small covert smile. “Right,” he said. “You were out.”

They married anyway.

It was an outdoor ceremony in the discreetly landscaped yard of her family’s house in a suburb west of the Twin Cities. Balloons had been tied to the trees and shrubs, the patio was decorated with Japanese lanterns and red carnations and crepe paper. Altogether, things went nicely. The minister talked about the shield of God’s love, which warded off strife, and then recited—too theatrically, John thought—a short passage from First Corinthians. Oddly, though, it was not the solemn moment he had once imagined. At one point he glanced over at Kathy and grinned. “And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge”—Her eyes were green and bright. She wrinkled her nose. She grinned back at him—“and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains …” A lawn mower droned a few houses down. A soft breeze rippled across the yard, and spikes of dusty sunshine made the trees glow, and pink and white balloons danced on their little strings. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Then the minister prayed.

They promised to be true to each other. They promised other things, too, and exchanged rings, and afterward Kathy’s sister opened the bar. Her mother gave them bed sheets. Her father presented them with the keys to an apartment in Minneapolis.

“It’s scary,” Kathy whispered, “how much I love you.”

They drove away in a borrowed Chevy to the St. Paul Ramada, where they honeymooned for several days on a package deal. The secrets were his. He would never tell. On the second morning Kathy asked if he had any misgivings, any second thoughts, and John shook his head and said no. He was Sorcerer, after all, and what was love without a little mystery?

They moved into the apartment just after Easter.

“We’ll be happy,” Kathy said, “I know it.”

Sorcerer laughed and carried her inside.

The trick then was to be vigilant. He would guard his advantage. The secrets would remain secret—the things he’d seen, the things he’d done. He would repair what he could, he would endure, he would go from year to year without letting on that there were tricks.

8
How the Night Passed

Twice during the night John Wade woke up sweating. The first time, near midnight, he turned and coiled up against Kathy, brain-sick, a little feverish, his thoughts wired to the nighttime hum of lake and woods.

A while later he kicked back the sheets and said, “Kill Jesus.” It was a challenge—a dare.

He closed his eyes and waited for something terrible to happen, almost hoping, and when nothing happened he said it again, with authority, then listened for an answer. There was nothing.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Kill Jesus.”

Quietly then, John Wade swung out of bed. He moved down the hallway to the kitchen, ran water into an old iron teakettle, put it on the stove to boil. He was naked. His shoulders were sunburnt, his face waxy with sweat. For a few moments he stood very still, imagining himself kicking and gouging. He’d go for the eyes. Yes, he would. Tear out the bastard’s eyeballs—fists and fingernails—just punch and claw and hammer and bite. God, too. He hoped there was a god so he could kill him.

The thought was inspiring. He looked at the kitchen ceiling and confided in the void, offering up his humiliation and sorrow.

The teakettle made a light clicking noise.

“You too,” he said.

He shrugged and got out the tea bags and lay down on the kitchen floor to wait. He was not thinking now, just watching the numbers come in. He could see it happening exactly as it happened. Minneapolis was lost. The suburbs, the Iron Range. And the farm towns to the southwest—Pipestone, Marshall, Windom, Jackson, Luverne. A clean, tidy sweep. St. Paul had been lost early. Duluth was lost four to one. The unions were lost, and the German Catholics, and the rank-and-file nobodies. The numbers were implacable. There was no pity in the world. It was all arithmetic. A winner, obviously, until he became a loser. Which was how it happened: that quick. One minute you’re presidential timber and then they come at you with chain saws. It was textbook slippage. It was dishonor and disgrace. Certain secrets had been betrayed—ambush politics, Tony Carbo said—and so the polls went sour and in the press there was snide chatter about issues of character and integrity. Front-page photographs. Dead human beings in awkward poses. By late August the whole enterprise had come unraveled, empty wallets and hedged bets and thinning crowds, old friends with slippery new excuses, and on the first Tuesday after the second Monday in September he was defeated by a margin of something more than 105,000 votes.

John Wade saw it for what it was.

Nothing more to hope for.

Too ambitious, maybe. Climbing too high or too fast. But it was something he’d worked for. He’d been a believer. Discipline and tenacity. He had believed in those virtues, and in the fundamental justice of things, an everyday sort of fairness; that if you worked like a son of a bitch, if you stuck it out and didn’t quit, then sooner or later you’d get the payoff. Politics, it was all he’d ever wanted for himself. Three years as a legislative liaison, six years in the state senate, four tedious years as lieutenant governor. He’d played by the rules. He’d run a good solid campaign, working the caucuses, prying out the endorsements—all of it—eighteen-hour days, late nights, the whole insane swirl of motels and county fairs and ten-dollar-a-plate chicken dinners. He’d done it all.

The teakettle made a brisk whistling sound, but John Wade could not bring himself to move.

Ambush politics. Poison politics.

It wasn’t fair.

That was the final truth: just so unfair. Wade was not a religious man, but he now found himself talking to God, explaining how much he hated him. The election was only part of it. There were also those mirrors in his head. An electric buzz, the chemistry inside him, the hum of lake and woods. He felt the pinch of depravity.

When the water was at full boil, John Wade pushed himself up and went to the stove.

He used a towel to pick up the iron teakettle.

Stupidly, he was smiling, but the smile was meaningless. He would not remember it. He would remember only the steam and the heat and the tension in his fists and forearms.

“Kill Jesus,” he said, which encouraged him, and he carried the teakettle out to the living room and switched on a lamp and poured the boiling water over a big flowering geranium near the fireplace. “Jesus, Jesus,” he was saying. There was a hissing noise. The geranium seemed to vibrate for an instant, swaying sideways as if caught by a breeze. He watched the lower leaves blanch and curl downward at the edges. The room acquired a damp exotic stink.

Wade was humming under his breath. “Well now,” he said, and nodded pleasantly.

He heard himself chuckle.

“Oh, my,” he said.

He moved to the far end of the living room, steadied himself, and boiled a small spider plant. It wasn’t rage; it was necessity. He emptied the teakettle on a dwarf cactus and a philodendron and a caladium and several others he could not name. Then he returned to the kitchen. He refilled the teakettle, watched the water come to a boil, smiled and squared his shoulders and moved down the hallway to their bedroom.

A prickly heat pressed against his face. The teakettle made its clicking sound in the night.

Briefly then, he let himself glide away. A ribbon of time went by, which he would not remember, then later he found himself crouched at the side of the bed. He was rocking on his heels, watching Kathy sleep.

Odd, he thought. That numbness inside him. The way his hands had no meaningful connection to his wrists.

For some time he crouched there, admiring the tan at Kathy’s neck and shoulders, the wrinkles at her eyes. In the dim light she seemed to be smiling at something, or half smiling, a thumb curled alongside her nose. It occurred to him that he should wake her. Yes, a kiss, and then confess to the shame he felt: how defeat had bled into his bones and made him crazy with hurt. He should’ve done it. He should’ve told her about the mirrors in his head. He should’ve talked about the special burden of villainy, the ghosts at Thuan Yen, the strain on his dreams. And then later he should’ve slipped under the covers and taken her in his arms and explained how he loved her more than anything, a hard hungry lasting guileless love, and how everything else was trivial and dumb. Just politics, he should’ve said. He should’ve talked about coping and enduring, all the clichés, how it was not the end of the world, how they still had each other and their marriage and their lives to live.

In the days that followed, John Wade would remember all the things he should’ve done.

He touched her shoulder.

Amazing, he thought, what love could do.

In the dark he heard something twitch and flutter, like wings, and then a low, savage buzzing sound. He squeezed the teakettle’s handle. A strange heaviness had come into his arms and wrists. Again, for an indeterminate time, the night seemed to dissolve all around him, and he was somewhere outside himself, awash in despair, watching the mirrors in his head flicker with radical implausibilities. The teakettle and a wooden hoe and a vanishing village and PFC Weatherby and hot white steam.

He would remember smoothing back her hair.

He would remember pulling a blanket to her chin and then returning to the living room, where for a long while he lost track of his whereabouts. All around him was that furious buzzing noise. The unities of time and space had unraveled. There were manifold uncertainties, and in the days and weeks to come, memory would play devilish little tricks on him. The mirrors would warp up; there would be odd folds and creases; clarity would be at a premium.

At one point during the night he stood waist-deep in the lake.

At another point he found himself completely submerged, lungs like stone, an underwater rush in his ears.

And then later, in the starwild dark, he sat quietly at the edge of the dock. He was naked. He was all alone, watching the lake.

Later still, he woke up in bed. A soft pinkish light played against the curtains.

For a few seconds he studied the effects of dawn, the pale ripplings and gleamings. He’d been having a curious nightmare. Electric eels. Boiling red water.

John Wade reached out for Kathy, who wasn’t there, then hugged his pillow and returned to the bottoms.

9
Hypothesis

Maybe it was something simple.

Maybe Kathy woke up scared that night. Maybe she panicked, just walked away.

It’s conjecture—maybe this, maybe that—but conjecture is all we have.

So something simple:

He was yelling bad things in the dark, and she must’ve heard him, and maybe later she smelled the steam and wet soil. Almost certainly, she would’ve slipped out of bed. She would’ve moved down the hallway to the living room and stopped there and watched him empty the teakettle on a geranium and a philodendron and a small young spider plant. “Kill Jesus,” he was saying, which would’ve caused her to back away.

The rest must have been automatic. She would’ve turned and moved to the kitchen door and stepped out into the night.

Why? she thought.

Kill Jesus. That brutal voice. It wasn’t his.

And then for a long while she stood in the windy dark outside the cottage, afraid to move, afraid not to. She was barefoot. She had on a pair of underpants and a flannel nightgown, nothing else.

A good man. So why?

Clutching herself, leaning forward against the cold, Kathy watched him pad into the kitchen, refill the teakettle, put it on the stove to boil. His movements seemed stiff and mechanical. Like a sleepwalker, she thought, and it occurred to her that she should step back inside and shake him awake. Her own husband. And she loved him. Which was the essential truth, all that time together, all the years, and there was nothing to be afraid about.

Except it wasn’t right. He wasn’t right. Filtered through the screen door, his face looked worn and bruised, the skin deeply lined as if a knife had been taken to it. He’d lost weight and hair. His shoulders had the stooped curvature of an old man’s. After a moment he lay down near the stove, sunburnt and naked, conversing with the kitchen ceiling. Not the man she’d known, or thought she’d known. She had loved him extravagantly—the kind of love she’d always wanted—but more and more it was like living with a stranger. Too many mysteries. Too much walled-up history. And now the fury in his face. Even through the screen, she could make out a new darkness in his eyes.

“Well, sure,” he was saying. “Shitfuck Jesus.”

Then he said, “You!”

He chuckled at this.

He jerked sideways and clawed at his face with both hands, deep, raking the skin, digging in hard with his fingernails, then laughed again and muttered something indistinct.

A bit later he said, “Beautiful.”

Again, Kathy felt a little gust of panic. She turned and looked up the narrow dirt road. The Rasmussen cottage was barely a mile away, a twenty-minute walk. Find a doctor, maybe; something to settle him down. Then she shook her head. Better just to wait and see.

What she mostly felt now was a kind of pity. Everything important to him had turned to wreckage. His career, his reputation, his self-esteem. More than anyone she’d ever known, John needed the conspicuous display of human love—absolute, unconditional love. Love without limit. Like a hunger, she thought. Some vast emptiness seemed to drive him on, a craving for warmth and reassurance. Politics was just a love thermometer. The polls quantified it, the elections made it official.

Except nothing ever satisfied him. Certainly not public office. And not their marriage, either.

For a time Kathy stood gazing at the night sky. It surprised her to see a nearly full moon, a stack of fast-moving clouds passing northward. She tried to inventory the events unfolding in her stomach. Not only pity. Frustration. The fatigue of defeat. The whole election seemed to have occurred in another century, and now she had only the vaguest memory of those last miserable weeks on the road. All through August and early September, after the newspapers broke things wide open, it was a matter of waiting for the end to come exactly as it had to come. No hope. No pretense of hope. Over the final week they’d worked a string of towns up on the Iron Range, going through the motions, waving at crowds that weren’t crowds anymore. Accusing eyes, perfunctory applause. A freak show. On primary day they’d made the short flight back to Minneapolis, arriving just before dark, and even now, in memory, the whole scene had the feel of a dreary Hollywood script—the steady rain, the threadbare little crowd gathered under umbrellas at the airport. She remembered John moving off to shake hands along a chain fence, his face rigid in the gray drizzle. At one point, as he stepped back, a lone voice rose up from the crowd—a woman’s voice—not loud but extraordinarily pure and clear, like a small well-made bell. “Not true!” the woman cried, and for an instant the planes of John’s face seemed to slacken. He didn’t speak. He didn’t turn or acknowledge her. There was a short quiet before he glanced up at the clouds and smiled. The haggard look in his eyes was gone; a kind of rapture burned there. “Not true!” the woman yelled again, and this time John raised his shoulders, a kind of plea, or maybe an apology, a gesture vague enough to be denied yet emphatic enough to carry secret meaning.

In the hotel that night she found the courage to ask about it. The early returns had come in, all dismal, and she remembered John’s eyes locked tight to the television.

“Is what true?”

“The things they’re saying. About you.”

“Things?”

“You know.”

He switched channels with the remote, clasped his hands behind his head. Even then he wouldn’t look at her. “Everything’s true. Everything’s not true.”

“I’m your wife.”

“Right,” he said.

“So?”

“So nothing.” His voice was quiet, a monotone. He turned up the volume on the TV “It’s history, Kath. If you want to trot out the skeletons, let’s talk about your dentist.”

She remembered staring down at the remote control.

“Am I right?” he said.

She nodded.

“Fine,” he said, “I’m right.”

A moment later the phone rang. John picked it up and smiled at her. Later that evening, in the hotel’s ballroom, he delivered a witty concession speech. Afterward, they held hands and waved at people and pretended not to know the things they knew.

All that pretending, she thought.

The teakettle made a sharp whistling sound. She watched John push to his feet, lift the teakettle off the stove, and move down the hallway toward the bedroom. After a second she nudged the screen door open and stepped inside. A foamy nausea had risen up inside her. She glanced over at the kitchen counter, where the telephone should have been. For a while she stood motionless, considering the possibilities.

The gas burner was still on. She turned it off and went into the living room. At that point a wire snapped inside her. The smell, perhaps. The dead plants, the puddle of water spreading out across the floorboards.

Right then, maybe, she walked away into the night.

Or maybe not.

Maybe instead, partly curious, partly something else, she moved down the hallway to the bedroom. At the doorway she paused briefly, not sure about the formations before her—the steam, the dark, John crouched at the side of the bed as if tending a small garden. He didn’t turn or look up. He seemed to be touring other worlds. Quietly, almost as a question, Kathy said his name and then watched as he leaned across the bed and raised up the teakettle. There was the scent of wet wool. A hissing sound. He was chuckling to himself, saying, “Well, well,” and in that instant she must have realized that remedies were beyond her and always had been.

The rest had to follow.

She would’ve turned away fast. Not afraid now, thinking only of disease, she would’ve grabbed a sweater and a pair of jeans, hurried back to the kitchen, laced up her sneakers, and headed down the dirt road toward the Rasmussen place. Then any number of possibilities. A wrong turn. A sprain or a broken leg.

Maybe she lost her way.

Maybe she’s still out there.

10
The Nature of Love

They were at a fancy party one evening, a political affair, and after a couple of drinks John Wade took Kathy’s arm and said, “Follow me.” He led her out to the car and drove her home and carried her into the kitchen and made love to her there against the refrigerator. Afterward, they drove back to the party. John delivered a funny little speech. He ended with a couple of magic tricks, and people laughed and clapped hard, and when he walked off the platform, Kathy took his arm and said, “Follow me.”

“Where?” John said.

“Outside. There’s a garden.”

“It’s December. It’s Minnesota.”

Kathy shrugged. They had been married six years, almost seven. The passion was still there.

It was in the nature of love that John Wade went to the war. Not to hurt or be hurt, not to be a good citizen or a hero or a moral man. Only for love. Only to be loved. He imagined his father, who was dead, saying to him, “Well, you did it, you hung in there, and I’m so proud, just so incredibly goddamn proud.” He imagined his mother ironing his uniform, putting it under clear plastic and hanging it in a closet, maybe to look at now and then, maybe to touch. At times, too, John imagined loving himself. And never risking the loss of love. And winning forever the love of some secret invisible audience—the people he might meet someday, the people he had already met. Sometimes he did bad things just to be loved, and sometimes he hated himself for needing love so badly.

In college John and Kathy used to go dancing at The Bottle Top over on Hennepin Avenue. They’d hold each other tight, even to the fast songs, and they’d dance until they couldn’t dance anymore, and then they’d sit in one of the dark booths and play a game called Dare You. The rules were haphazard. “I dare you,” Kathy might say, “to take off my panty hose,” and John would contemplate the mechanics, the angles and resistances, and then he’d nod and slide a hand under the table. It was a way of learning about each other, a way of exploring the possibilities between them.

One night he dared her to steal a bottle of Scotch from behind the bar. “No sweat at all,” Kathy said, “it’s way too easy,” and she straightened her skirt and got up and said a few words to the bartender, who went into a back room, then she strolled behind the bar and stood studying the selections for what seemed a very long while. Finally she made a so-what motion with her shoulders. She tucked a bottle under her jacket and returned to the booth and smiled at John and dared him to order two glasses.

He was crazy with love. He pulled off one of her white tennis shoes. With a ballpoint pen he wrote on the instep: JOHN + KATH. He drew a heart around these words, tied the shoe to her foot.

Kathy laughed at his corniness.

“Let’s get married,” he said.

First, though, there was Vietnam, where John Wade killed people, and where he composed long letters full of observations about the nature of their love. He did not tell her about the killing. He told her how lonely he was and how he wanted more than anything to sleep with his hand on the bone of her hip. He said he was lost without her. He said she was his compass. He said she was his sun and stars. He compared their love to a pair of snakes he’d seen along a trail near Pinkville, each snake eating the other’s tail, a bizarre circle of appetites that brought the heads closer and closer until one of the men in Charlie Company used a machete to end it. “That’s how our love feels,” John wrote, “like we’re swallowing each other up, except in a good way, a perfect Number One Yum-Yum way, and I can’t wait to get home and see what would’ve happened if those two dumbass snakes finally ate each other’s heads. Think about it. The mathematics get weird.” In other letters he wrote about the great beauty of the country, the paddies and mountains and jungles. He told her about villages that vanished right before his eyes. He told her about his new nickname. “The guys call me Sorcerer,” he wrote, “and I sort of like it. Gives me this zingy charged-up feeling, this special power or something, like I’m really in control of things. Anyhow, it’s not so bad over here, at least for now. And I love you, Kath. Just like those weirdo snakes—one plus one equals zero!”

When he was young, nine or ten, John Wade would lie in bed with his magic catalogs, drawing up lists of the tricks he wanted—floating glass balls, colorful fekes and tubes, exploding balloons with flowers inside. He’d write down the prices in a little notebook, crossing out items he couldn’t afford, and then on Saturday mornings he’d get up early and take the bus across town to Karra’s Studio of Magic in St. Paul, all alone, a forty-minute ride.

Outside the store, on the sidewalk, he’d spend some time working up his nerve.

It wasn’t easy. The place scared him. Casually, or trying to be casual, he’d gaze into the windows and stroll away a few times and then finally suck in a deep breath and think to himself: Go—Now, he’d think—Go!—and then he’d step inside, fast, scampering past the glass display cases, letting his head fill up with all the glittering equipment he knew by heart from his catalogs: Miser’s Dream and Horn of Plenty and Chinese Rings and Spirit of the Dark. There were professional pulls and sponge balls and servantes—a whole shelf full of magician’s silks—but in a way he didn’t see anything at all.

A young orange-haired woman behind the counter would flick her eyebrows at him.

“You!” she’d cry.

The woman made his skin crawl. Her cigarette voice, partly. And her flaming carrot-colored hair.

“You!” she’d say, or she’d laugh and yell, “Hocus-pocus!” but by that point John would already be out the door. The whole blurry trip terrified him. Especially the Carrot Lady. The bright orange hair. The way she laughed and flicked her eyebrows and cried, “You!”—loud—as if she knew things.

The ride home was always dreary.

When he walked into the kitchen, his father would glance up and say, “Little Merlin,” and his mother would frown and put a sandwich on the table and then busy herself at the stove. The whole atmosphere would tense up. His father would stare out the window for a time, then grunt and say, “So what’s new in magic land? Big tricks up your sleeve?” and John would say, “Sure, sort of. Not really.”

His father’s hazy blue eyes would drift back to the window, distracted and expectant, as if he were waiting for some rare object to materialize there. Sometimes he’d shake his head. Other times he’d chuckle or snap his fingers.

“Those Gophers,” he’d say. “Basketball fever, right? You and me, pal, we’ll catch a game tomorrow.” He’d grin across the table. “Right?”

“Maybe,” John would say.

“Just maybe?”

“I got things to do.”

Slowly then, his father’s eyes would travel back to the window, still searching for whatever might be out there. The kitchen would seem very quiet.

“Well, sure, anything you want,” his father would say. “Maybe’s fine, kiddo. Maybe’s good enough for me.”

Something was wrong. The sunlight or the morning air. All around him there was machine-gun fire, a machine-gun wind, and the wind seemed to pick him up and blow him from place to place. He found a young woman laid open without a chest or lungs. He found dead cattle. There were fires, too. The trees and hootches and clouds were burning. Sorcerer didn’t know where to shoot. He didn’t know what to shoot. So he shot the burning trees and burning hootches. He shot the hedges. He shot the smoke, which shot back, then he took refuge behind a pile of stones. If a thing moved, he shot it. If a thing did not move, he shot it. There was no enemy to shoot, nothing he could see, so he shot without aim and without any desire except to make the terrible morning go away.

When it ended, he found himself in the slime at the bottom of an irrigation ditch.

PFC Weatherby looked down on him.

“Hey, Sorcerer,” Weatherby said. The guy started to smile, but Sorcerer shot him.

John Wade was elected to the Minnesota State Senate on November 9, 1976. He and Kathy splurged on an expensive hotel suite in St. Paul, where they celebrated with a dozen or so friends. When the party ended, well after midnight, they ordered steaks and champagne from room service. “Mr. Senator Husband,” Kathy kept saying, but John told her it wasn’t necessary, she could call him Honorable Sir, and then he picked up a champagne bottle and used it as a microphone, peeling off his pants, gliding across the room and singing Regrets, I’ve had a few, and Kathy squealed and flopped back on the bed and grabbed her ankles and rolled around and laughed and yelled, “Honorable Senator Sir!” so John stripped off his shirt and made oily Sinatra moves and sang The record shows I took the blows, and Kathy’s green eyes were wet and happy and full of the light that was only Kathy’s light and could be no one else’s.

One evening Charlie Company wandered into a quiet fishing village along the South China Sea. They set up a perimeter on the white sand, went swimming, dug in deep for the night. Around dawn they were hit with mortar fire. The rounds splashed into the ocean behind them—a bad scare, nobody was hurt—but when it was over, Sorcerer led a patrol into the village. It took almost an hour to round everyone up, maybe a hundred women and kids and old men. There was much chattering, much consternation as the villagers were ushered down to the beach for a magic show. With the South China Sea at his back, Sorcerer performed card tricks and rope tricks. He pulled a lighted cigar from his ear. He transformed a pear into an orange. He displayed an ordinary military radio and whispered a few words and made their village disappear. There was a trick to it, which involved artillery and white phosphorus, but the overall effect was spectacular.

A fine, sunny morning. Everyone sat on the beach and oohed and ahhed at the vanishing village.

“Fuckin’ Houdini,” one of the guys said.

As a boy John Wade spent hours practicing his moves in front of the old stand-up mirror down in the basement. He watched his mother’s silk scarves change color, copper pennies becoming white mice. In the mirror, where miracles happened, John was no longer a lonely little kid. He had sovereignty over the world. Quick and graceful, his hands did things ordinary hands could not do—palm a cigarette lighter, cut a deck of cards with a turn of the thumb. Everything was possible, even happiness.

In the mirror, where John Wade mostly lived, he could read his father’s mind. Simple affection, for instance. “Love you, cowboy,” his father would think.

Or his father would think, “Hey, report cards aren’t everything.”

The mirror made this possible, and so John would sometimes carry it to school with him, or to baseball games, or to bed at night. Which was another trick: how he secretly kept the old stand-up mirror in his head. Pretending, of course—he understood that—but he felt calm and safe with the big mirror behind his eyes, where he could slide away behind the glass, where he could turn bad things into good things and just be happy.

The mirror made things better.

The mirror made his father smile all the time. The mirror made the vodka bottles vanish from their hiding place in the garage, and it helped with the hard, angry silences at the dinner table. “How’s school these days?” his father would ask, in the mirror, which would permit John to ramble on about some of his problems, little things, school stuff, and in the mirror his father would say, “No problem, that’s life, that’s par for the course. Besides, you’re my best pal.” After dinner John would watch his father slip out to the garage. That was the worst part. The secret drinking that wasn’t secret. But in the mirror, John would be there with him, and together they’d stand in the dim light, rakes and hoses and garage smells all around them, and his father would explain exactly what was happening and why it was happening. “One quickie,” his father would say, “then we’ll smash these goddamn bottles forever.”

“To smithereens,” John would say, and his father would say, “Right. Smithereens.”

In all kinds of ways his father was a terrific man, even without the mirror. He was smart and funny. People enjoyed his company—John, too—and the neighborhood kids were always stopping by to toss around a football or listen to his father’s stories and opinions and jokes. At school one day, when John was in sixth grade, the teacher made everyone stand up and give five-minute speeches about any topic under the sun, and a kid named Tommy Winn talked about John’s father, what a neat guy he was, always friendly and full of pep and willing to spend time just shooting the breeze. At the end of the speech Tommy Winn gave John a sad, accusing look that lasted way too long. “All I wish,” Tommy said, “I wish he was my father.”

Except Tommy Winn didn’t know some things.

How in fourth grade, when John got a little chubby, his father used to call him Jiggling John. It was supposed to be funny. It was supposed to make John stop eating.

At the dinner table, if things weren’t silent, his father would wiggle his tongue and say, “Holy Christ, look at the kid stuff it in, old Jiggling John,” then he’d glance over at John’s mother, who would say, “Stop it, he’s husky, he’s not fat at all,” and John’s father would laugh and say, “Husky my ass.”

Sometimes it would end there.

Other times his father would jerk a thumb at the basement door. “That pansy magic crap. What’s wrong with baseball, some regular exercise?” He’d shake his head. “Blubby little pansy.”

In the late evenings, just before bedtime, John and Kathy often went out for walks around the neighborhood, holding hands and looking at the houses and talking about which one they would someday have as their own. Kathy had fallen in love with an old blue Victorian across from Edgewood Park. The place had white shutters and a white picket fence, a porch that wrapped around three sides, a yard full of ferns and flower beds and azalea bushes. She’d sometimes pause on the sidewalk, gazing up at the house, her lips moving as if to memorize all its details, and on those occasions John would feel an almost erotic awareness of his own good fortune, a fluttery rush in the valves of his heart. He wished he could make things happen faster. He wished there were some trick that might cause a blue Victorian to appear in their lives.

After a time Kathy would sigh and give him a long sober stare. “Dare you to rob a bank,” she’d say, which was only a way of saying that houses could wait, that love was enough, that nothing else really mattered.

They would smile at this knowledge and walk around the park a couple of times before heading back to the apartment.

Sorcerer thought he could get away with murder. He believed it. After he’d shot PFC Weatherby—which was an accident, the purest reflex—he tricked himself into believing it hadn’t happened the way it happened. He pretended he wasn’t responsible; he pretended he couldn’t have done it and therefore hadn’t; he pretended it didn’t matter much; he pretended that if the secret stayed inside him, with all the other secrets, he could fool the world and himself too.

He was convincing. He had tears in his eyes, because it came from his heart. He loved PFC Weatherby like a brother.

“Fucking VC,” he said when the chopper took Weatherby away. “Fucking animals.”

In 1982, at the age of thirty-seven, John Wade was elected lieutenant governor. He and Kathy had problems, of course, but they believed in happiness, and in their power to make happiness happen, and he was proud to stand with his hand on a Bible and look into Kathy’s eyes and take the public oath even as he took his own private oath. He would devote more time to her. He would investigate the market in blue Victorians. He would change some things.

At the inaugural ball that evening, after the toasts and speeches, John led her out to the dance floor and looked directly at her as if for the first time. She wore a short black dress and glass earrings. Her eyes were only her eyes. “Oh, Kath,” he said, which was all he could think of to say, nothing else, just “Oh, Kath.”

One day near Christmas, when John was eleven, his father drove him down to Karra’s Studio of Magic to pick out his present.

“Anything you want,” his father said. “No sweat. Break the bank.”

The store hadn’t changed at all. The same display cases, the same carrot-haired woman behind the cash register. Right away, when they walked in, she cried, “You!” and did the flicking thing with her eyebrows. She was dressed entirely in black except for a pair of copper bracelets and an amber necklace and two sparkling green stars pasted to her cheeks.

“The little magician,” she said, and John’s father laughed and said, “Little Merlin,” and then for a long time the two of them stood talking like old friends.

John finally made a noise in his throat.

“Come on,” he said, “we’ll miss Christmas.” He pointed at one of the display cases. “Right there.”

“What?” said his father.

“That one. That’s it.”

His father leaned down to look.

“There,” John said. “Guillotine of Death.”

It was a substantial piece of equipment. Fifteen or sixteen pounds, almost two feet high. He’d seen it a hundred times in his catalogs—he knew the secret, in fact, which was simple—but he still felt a rubbery bounce in his stomach as the Carrot Lady lifted the piece of apparatus to the counter. It was shiny black with red enamel trim and a gleaming chrome blade.

The Carrot Lady nodded, almost tenderly. “My favorite,” she said. “My favorite, too.”

She turned and went into a storeroom and returned with a large cucumber. The sucker move, John knew—prove that the blade was sharp and real. She inserted the cucumber into the guillotine’s wooden collar, clamped down a lock, stepped back, pulled up the chrome blade and let it fall. The cucumber lay on the counter in two neat halves.

“Good enough,” said the Carrot Lady. She squinted up at John’s father. “What we need now is an arm.”

“Sorry?”

“Your arm,” she said.

His father chuckled. “No way on earth.”

“Off with the jacket.”

His father tried to smile—a tall, solid-looking man, curly black hair and blue eyes and an athlete’s sloping shoulders. It took him a long while to peel off his jacket.

“Guillotine of Death,” he muttered. “Very unusual.”

“Slip your wrist in there. No sudden movements.”

“Christ,” he said.

“That’s the spirit,” she said.

The Carrot Lady’s eyes were merry as she hoisted up the blade. She held it there for a few seconds, then motioned for John to step behind the counter.

“You know this trick?” she said.

His father’s eyes swept sideways. “Hell no, he doesn’t know it.”

“I do,” John said. “It’s easy.”

“Bullshit, the kid doesn’t have the slightest –”

“Simple,” John said.

His father frowned, curled up his fingers, frowned again. His forearm looked huge and meaty in the guillotine collar.

“Listen, what about instructions?” he said. “These things come with instructions, right? Seriously. Written-down instructions?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” John said, “she told you to relax.”

He grasped the blade handle.

Power: that was the thing about magic.

The Carrot Lady folded her arms. The green stars on her cheeks seemed to twinkle with desire.

“Go on,” she said. “Let him have it.”

There were times when John Wade wanted to open up Kathy’s belly and crawl inside and stay there forever. He wanted to swim through her blood and climb up and down her spine and drink from her ovaries and press his gums against the firm red muscle of her heart. He wanted to suture their lives together.

It was terror, mostly. He was afraid of losing her. He had his secrets, she had hers.

So now and then he’d play spy tricks. On Saturday mornings he’d follow her over to the dry cleaners on Okabena Avenue, then to the drugstore and post office. Afterward, he’d tail her across the street to the supermarket, watching from a distance as she pushed a cart up and down the aisles, then he’d hustle back to the apartment and wait for her to walk in. “What’s for lunch?” he’d ask, and Kathy would give him a quick look and say, “You tell me.”

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