The Trawler's continued freedom

The Trawler’s continued freedom is the unresolved threat that shadows both the teenage events of 1981 and the adult narrator’s later attempts to remember them. The Trawler is never captured; even as the narrator works toward telling the story, the killer remains beyond the reach of any confirmed ending, making the past an active fear rather than a safely closed case.

An Unclosed Case

The Trawler’s history reaches back to the late spring of 1980, when the serial killer began haunting the San Fernando Valley. The adult narrator recalls that the Trawler made their presence more strongly felt in the summer of 1981, when the killer was frighteningly connected to the narrator and his friends. By the time the narrator is reflecting on his life away from Los Angeles, the central fact has not changed: the Trawler has never been captured.

That absence of resolution accompanies the narrator’s effort to write about the past. In 2006, at forty-two, he tried to make notes about the autumn of 1981 after returning to Los Angeles, but the effort triggered such severe anxiety that he collapsed and went to Cedars-Sinai. His first attempt at the book had also failed, when he was nineteen and too unnerved even by gently remembering what had happened. The uncaught killer is therefore not only a figure in the old events; the unresolved case is bound up with the narrator’s inability to approach those events without being overwhelmed.

Fear Returned Through Memory

The later narrative repeatedly shows how a seemingly ordinary encounter or object can reopen that fear. During a desert trip, the narrator sees a woman outside the Palihouse Hotel and is thrown back toward the fear of 1981. He sleeps only a couple of hours a night, despite taking benzodiazepines, and lies awake in the house on Azure Court in a state of rising panic. The episode belongs to a seven-year crisis that began after his 2006 attempt to write: anxiety alienated people around him, while stress caused him to lose forty pounds. A therapist he saw weekly for a year helped him through that period, but the memory’s return makes clear that remembering is not a straightforward act of recovery.

The same pattern appears in the story of Matt Kellner. After seeing photographs shown by Ronald Kellner, the teenage narrator recognizes that Matt is gone, and finds Matt’s white jockey shorts in the pocket of his gray slacks. He puts the shorts away in a desk drawer he rarely opens, trying to erase Matt from his mind; he also keeps a note marked with the initials RM and a phone number. These objects preserve what his new schedule is meant to suppress. The narrator’s deliberate turn toward numbness and routine offers a semblance of control, not an explanation of what happened or proof that the danger has passed.

Later, listening to a recording, the adult narrator realizes that the frightened boy’s cries are not an acted performance. He identifies the fish Matt had kept in his aquarium as what Matt is being forced to eat. The recognition makes the recording evidence of real cruelty, but it does not supply a capture or final accounting of the Trawler. Instead, the sounds make the past immediate again, showing how an unresolved crime can persist through what the narrator hears and remembers.

The Van and the Unfinished Story

A beige-colored van parked by a 7-Eleven on Holloway and La Cienega becomes a recurring prompt for the narrator’s thoughts about the Trawler and the killer’s obsession with Robert Mallory. He imagines that the Trawler may have drifted to other states, beginning new narratives and staking out a different story. The possibility is expressly uncertain: it is a fear shaped by the killer’s continued freedom, not a confirmed account of the Trawler’s later movements.

Dreams extend that uncertainty. The narrator sometimes dreams of Robert as a different person in a vast hotel or an empty airplane, sometimes disguised or older, but more often still young, fixed in the beauty of his teenage years. Dreams of Robert, Matt, Ryan Vaughn, Thom, and Susan remind the adult narrator that the fall of 1981 was not simply a dream he could pretend away. The Trawler’s lack of a known fate thus belongs to a wider disturbance in which remembered events, recurring images, and dreams resist being neatly separated or put to rest.

Writing Without a Confirmed Ending

As the book approaches its ending, writing itself becomes another confrontation with the unresolved past. The narrator’s partner disputes the veracity of certain episodes, and the material frightens him enough that he leaves the condo for days at a time. The narrator, meanwhile, returns to old journals, the Buckley yearbook Images, scattered notes, and music from the period, sometimes drinking gin or taking Xanax or Ativan before listening to songs associated with that time. These details show the labor and strain of producing a narrative; they do not turn its unresolved events into a solved case.

The Trawler remains uncaptured in the account the narrator can give. A beige van, a song, a dream, or a recovered object can make the past feel present, but none confirms what became of the killer. That open-endedness preserves the distinction between telling what the narrator remembers and claiming knowledge he does not have: the story reaches an ending, while the threat that shaped it remains without a verified conclusion.