In the Lake of the Woods

The night that Kathy disappears, John experiences a complete psychotic break with memory loss. He reviews in his mind again his defeat in the polls after reports of his war crimes were published by his opponent. He pours boiling water over all the plants in the cabin, killing them. At one point, he remembers standing over Kathy’s sleeping form in the bed, while holding a kettle of boiling water. Disjointed memories, including red boiling water and disturbing snapping and electric sounds, come back to him in the morning. He remembers standing waist-deep in the lake. He remembers finding himself naked on the boat dock.

In the morning when he wakes up, he turns to Kathy’s side of the bed, but she is gone. He rolls over and goes back to sleep.

The narrator imagines Kathy waking up to the sound of John moving around the cabin, shouting things like “Kill Jesus”. She goes out into the living room to find the boiled plants. Terrified, she watches the man she loves having a psychotic breakdown. She sees him pour boiling water from the teakettle onto her place in the bed. She grabs her jeans, a sweater, her sneakers, and she runs toward the closest neighbors, the Rasmussen’s house. She never makes it there because of a fall, or a wrong turn; she might still be out there.

This chapter explores John’s version of love, primarily through flashbacks to his college days with Kathy, to his relationship with his father, and to his time in Vietnam. John Wade went to war in order to be loved and admired; in order to be a hero. The narrator travels back and forth in time exploring significant moments in John’s life: trips to the magic shop when he is 9 or 10 years old; dancing with Kathy; shooting PFC Weatherby and pretending that the Viet Cong did it; getting elected to the Minnesota Senate in 1976, and then lieutenant governor at age 37; and calling in an airstrike on a village in Vietnam, making it disappear.

During the war, he writes to Kathy about two snakes swallowing each other. This becomes, for him, a symbol of their love. Only instead of two becoming one; two become zero. He finds this sexy and romantic. He also reports that he likes being called Sorcerer by the guys in his company. He kills many people but writes about none of it in his love letters home to Kathy. He often imagines that he wants to crawl inside of Kathy and swim around in her blood.

In another flashback, the narrator explains how John created the mirror in his head and that he primarily lived in his head for most of his childhood. For example, “In the mirror, where miracles happened, John was no longer a lonely little kid. He had sovereignty over the world” (65). Because John can create a world where he has control and power, he lives there as much as possible.

John reveals other secrets: his father, who is admired by all of the neighborhood children for his friendliness, often taunts and abuses his son, calling him fat, “Jiggling John” (67), and other names. In the mirror, after his father’s death, his father is always kind and supportive.

At one point after they are married, John tries to tell Kathy about the bad things that he has done, because he knows that he is mentally ill; she does not want to hear about it. Though she is disturbed at night by him shouting obscenities in a voice that isn’t his own, she does not ask for him to see a psychiatrist. John shoves the secrets away; he coasts along on the surface of his life.

John wakes up and spends the day doing routine things: showering and getting dressed, eating, cleaning up, doing laundry, and vaguely wondering where Kathy is. He assumes she’s on a nature hike.

He starts drinking in the afternoon; he is still not concerned about Kathy’s whereabouts. At six o’clock, as it is getting dark, he gets a flashlight and walks up and down the road, looking for her. He is still drinking.

A midnight, he suddenly remembers to check the boathouse and finds that the boat, the engine, the life jacket and oars are missing. Disturbing images from the previous night come back to him, but nothing that tells him where Kathy is now.

He gets in his car and drives to the Rasmussen’s cabin to report Kathy missing and to get help. Ruth starts making phone calls, while Claude drives John back to the cabin.

Claude finds the now empty, cleaned-up flower pots, and he asks where the phone is, just in case Kathy was trying to call. John had unplugged the phone and put it under the sink a couple of days ago in a fit. He plugs the phone in again, and he and Claude go down and look at the empty boathouse.

John denies that he and Kathy had a fight, as Claude looks over the flower pots. John wants to call the police and start a search for Kathy, but there really are no local police to call, and no searches that can start in the middle of the night in the wilderness.

This chapter contains contradictory quotations about John’s character: he was nice and polite; he was Sorcerer. Pat, Kathy’s sister, reports that John actually thought of himself as Sorcerer, and Kathy did too. Other experts speak about the damage war causes to veterans, and Tony Carbo, John’s election manager, imparts that all politicians share a need to be loved by everybody.

In a long footnote, the narrator laments his inability to either come to any firm conclusions or to stop pursuing answers to this mystery. He is fascinated by John’s character and decides that it is impossible to know anyone’s heart, even those closest to us.