I knew that I could try harder to find Zeke, but I wouldn’t hire someone, couldn’t imagine trying to explain it to a detective who was wondering if I was a stalker ex-girlfriend, wanting to simply tell me that I didn’t need to create some story about outsider art and satanic panic and the spirit of true collaboration. He would just need a cool grand, and then I could go kill this guy or whatever.

And so for five straight hours, I really tried, wrote down every bit of information that the internet would give me, even about people who clearly weren’t Zeke, like someone from Georgia who had died in 1982, just in case it could lead me to him. I bookmarked and saved and copied and pasted, checked the distance from Coalfield to places like Eastland Heights, Georgia, and Bluffton, South Carolina, and Medford, Oregon, praying to find a single image of that goofy boy. I went to the forums devoted to the poster, where I was registered but had never commented, and searched for the name “Zeke,” but nothing came up just like it hadn’t come up the hundred other times I checked. I looked up Memphis and violin and art school and Cydney Hudson, his mother’s maiden name, but there was nothing new, nothing that got me closer to him. I didn’t even have a photo of him from that summer, hadn’t even thought about it, or maybe I had assumed there would be more time, and all I could do now was try to keep the image of him in my mind, to not let time degrade it or change it. I felt like I’d done a fairly good job, could still see him so clearly, but who knows how close it was to the real thing. The entire summer still felt hallucinatory, a fairy tale, and so maybe I’d misremembered every detail about him. I mean, it took me a long time to even figure out his full name. How could I be sure what his teeth looked like? But I did. I knew that I had it right.

When I was done, I had three locations that seemed feasible, all of them ones I’d seen before, and six different phone numbers. Not a single photo. No idea about jobs or schools or if he was married or had kids. This was the edge. I was at the edge, and I had to go beyond it if I wanted him.