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Chapter 23

Summary: Chapter 23, Where They Looked

The next morning John, Pat, and Claude take out Claude’s boat to search for Kathy. After an hour of finding no evidence, John finds it hard to concentrate. Memories flash through his head of good times with her and of his time in Vietnam. Claude notices John’s inattention and asks if he needs a break. Pat insists they keep going and accuses John of not trying.

The search continues until lunch. Sensing that Pat is watching him, John keeps to himself. He knows that he is the prime suspect. He tried to pull off too big of a trick: remaking himself. Even though he didn’t have ill intentions, people now think he is a liar and a cheater.

That night, they return to town. A group of searchers including Lux and Vinny has built a bonfire on the beach. Claude and Pat walk toward them with John trailing, feeling everyone’s eyes on him. Lux says they will keep searching tomorrow. Vinny and John spar verbally, and Vinny, a Vietnam vet, says he never participated in mass murder. Lux and Pat separate for a private conversation, and John again loses focus. John watches Lux and Pat and wonders if he should reveal all his secrets.

John, Pat, and Claude go out every day, but within a few weeks, most searchers give up. John wants to go alone, but Claude, fearing John might disappear too, refuses to give him a boat. One afternoon, snow keeps them ashore. While clearing away the snow, John works out how to perform the trick of causal transportation, making oneself disappear, as his father did. As he puts his plan together, he talks to himself in the second person. John knows and imagines his father and Kathy know too: The art of the disappearance was in the mystery.

That evening, John dives to the bottom of the lake. Maybe Kathy is down there. Maybe he is doing a test run, and maybe his father had too. There is no way to rid himself of the guilt. John practiced tricks his whole life, all so he would be loved. He imagines he can feel Kathy’s presence and rises to the surface. Later, Lux calls and tells John the official search is over but they will continue to look in specific places. Lux then tells Claude they want to search the cottage and its grounds. Claude, whom John realizes is a true friend, says that people will blame John even if nothing turns up. John repeats his desire to search by himself and declares that if Claude won’t give him a boat, he’ll find another.

The next day on the water, Pat won’t look at or speak to John. John doesn’t mind. He feels better now that the secrets of Thuan Yen have been revealed. John no longer must struggle to keep things hidden. When they stop in town, John purchases supplies. He awakens before dawn the next day. John packs his supplies and grabs the key and an envelope. As he takes out the boat, he looks back at the cottage and imagines he can see himself and Kathy on the porch as they often were that first week.

Analysis: Chapter 23

This chapter shows John identifying with those people who matter most in his life: Kathy and his father. The two share certain commonalities. John wanted to be desperately loved by them, and they both perfected the magical art of causal transportation, of making themselves disappear without any explanation.

John shows his desire to identify with Kathy in several ways. Like Kathy, he wants to take a boat out alone. Like Kathy in the previous chapter, on the first day out searching, John feels better. While not feeling optimistic like Kathy did, he does see things more clearly than he had in a long time. Perhaps John is on the brink of moving ahead to the future he and Kathy always talked about.

The continued inability to find any sign of Kathy or her boat turns John’s thoughts back to magic, as if he needs a trick to figure out how to bring this situation to an end. Interestingly, he doesn’t try to create a trick to make Kathy reappear, which is the climax that takes place after a magician has made a person disappear. Maybe John knows that it is impossible to bring her back because she is dead. At any rate, John puts his mind to figuring out the details of making himself disappear, just as his father did through suicide, which will be John’s one last trick.

The passage in which John goes over the details shows him more strongly identifying with his father than in any other part of the book. He speaks in the second person, talking about “you” shoveling snow and diddling at politics to make it abundantly clear that he is referring to himself. Then, still speaking in the second person, he lists items that surely come from his father’s suicide, like the clothesline and a garbage can. John’s speech merges the two men, John and his father, much like the two snakes John saw years ago in Vietnam. They can only become one man if John works out the details of his suicide.

That evening, John goes down to the lake and dives in. While much of the language in this part of the chapter is indistinct, John seems to be on the verge of taking his own life, just like his father but through a different method. His thoughts come in short bursts, reflecting the heightened state of his brain as he performs this final trick. John notes that his actions resemble a rehearsal or a test run, and he imagines his father going into the garage and eyeing the beams to figure out how to hang himself. John’s inability to find a solution to his feelings of guilt has brought him to the cusp of suicide. At the point when John feels the lake water inside his mouth, he seems ready to die. However, he senses Kathy’s presence, thinks it is “[a]mazing . . . what love could do,” and then propels himself to the surface. Here, readers are presented with another ambiguous statement. Did thoughts of Kathy inspire John to return to life, perhaps believing she is still somewhere out there? Or is John acknowledging that he killed Kathy over her affair with the dentist, Harmon? As has been typical throughout the novel, the answer is not clear.

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