by Dan Chaon
Also, about half a year after my mom died. He kept his distance for a while. I didn’t want to intrude, Rusty said. I mean, yeah, it’s a lot to deal with. I wanted to give you all some space.
Not that it mattered. No one would talk to him: Not my father. Not my aunt Kate.
He had no one in the world. They just put him out at the prison gates, and the government didn’t make reparations for what they’d done to him. They didn’t even give an apology.
Basically, he got so screwed, there are no words for it. His trial had happened back during the 1980s, when the idea of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” got very popular. That’s how he put it: “The idea of Satanic Ritual Abuse got very popular,” he said, and it made me think of a crowd of eager fans rushing toward a stage, as if Satanic Ritual Abuse were a rock band.
I’d never heard of that term before—“Satanic Ritual Abuse.” It sounded so corny that I kind of chuckled until he explained it to me, and then I started doing some Internet searches.
According to the World Wide Web, Satanic Ritual Abuse was basically an urban legend (a moral panic, according to Wikipedia), which the people of the 1980s started to believe was real.
Seems like a lot of people accepted it as truth—that there were hidden Satanic cults all over the country, secretly doing human sacrifices and torturing children and calling up Satan in graveyards. There was actually a news special on television—Exposing Satan’s Underground—which you can watch on YouTube. You will not believe their hair. You will not believe how simple-minded they all are. Looking back from the future, it’s kind of embarrassing how superstitious and gullible they were back then. The famous reporter named Geraldo Rivera says, “Estimates are that there are over one million Satanists in this country. The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secretive network. From small towns to large cities, they have attracted FBI attention to their Satanic ritual child abuse, child pornography, and grisly Satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town!”
And you think, okay, that was a knee-slapper, but then you go on to read about how the whole country was mesmerized by this bullshit. So there were local police departments starting their own “cult task forces,” and there were arrests and witch trials where preschoolers testified that they had seen their teachers disemboweling infants and drinking their blood, kids claiming that they’d been forced to have orgies while hooded figures watched. Psychiatrists were swamped with people who had “recovered memories” of past Satanic abuse that they’d repressed.
You travel through a K-hole of link after link after link, and the stories grow more absurd and impossible as they go along. You read that Father James LeBar, appointed chief exorcist for the archdiocese of New York by Cardinal O’Connor, spoke of an international conference of Satanists that he claimed took place in Mexico, in which the Satanists discussed plans for world domination. It was said that there was a global network of the ultra-rich, who made use of flunkies from local police departments, who had minions who were school superintendents and CIA agents and congressmen, and that women and children were ritually sacrificed, or forced into sexual slavery, and there was bathing in the blood of infants, and children were boiled alive in front of a host of Satanists, and their organs were lavishly eaten.
It seems like people must have truly believed this shit, because, as it happened, “SRA”—as the cognoscenti call it—had been a big component in Uncle Rusty’s trial. They brought in the fact that Rusty loved death-metal music, and that he had drawn pentagrams on his school notebooks, and basically they made the trial about Satanicness rather than the fact that they had no real evidence.
My dad testified that he had seen Rusty sacrificing baby rabbits to Satan. Which, my uncle Rusty admits, was true. He really did kill baby rabbits. With a brick. In the middle of a pentagram that he had drawn on the floor of an old abandoned house. At the time, he thought this was hilarious. He loved trying to freak my dad out.
“It’s probably not forgivable, when you do shit like that,” my uncle Rusty said. And then he was silent for a long time, so that I checked my phone to make sure that we hadn’t been disconnected. I cleared my throat.
“I was, like, fourteen or fifteen,” Uncle Rusty said. “And your dad was about eight, I guess. And he would follow me around like a puppy dog, and I just wanted to scare him, maybe, to make him go away.” And he let out a stream that was like a long, soft exhalation of breath, but emotional. “Shit,” he said. “I fucked up so bad when I was your age. I was seriously an awful person.”
“Well,” I said.
He knew he had a lot of amends to make, because he was abusive to my dad. And if my dad wouldn’t talk to him, maybe he could pass on the amends through trying to help me? “I want to be an uncle to you,” he said. “Like, a real uncle. Someone you can trust and count on.” And then he told me: “I’m not going to judge you. Because I’ve been in all the dark places, and I’ve tried every drug there is, and I know what it’s like, bro. My mom died, too.”
8
WHEN YOU ARE eighteen, it is hard to look at your father. Whatever the situation.
For example, you might wake up to his terrible coughing. It goes on and on while he is in the shower, that rich, loamy, phlegmy sound until he gags and you hear him throw up. And you know that he has been smoking like a chimney since your mom died, it’s probably two or three packs of Marlboro Reds every day, and you think: if he dies
And then he’ll come into your room and stand in the doorway as you fold a pillow across your head like the typical disaffected teenager and he’s bitching that you forgot to take the garbage out last night like you promised you would. Did you get the oil changed in your mom’s car, he wants to know; he still refers to it as “your mom’s car” even though you’ve been driving it for almost a year.
Your Mom’s Car. Think about that. Try to wrap your mind around the supernatural and spiritual implications that the name bears down toward you. Your Mom’s Car, holding its hands out straight, fingers curled, a zombie reaching for your neck.
—
And yet you’ll still feel this weird pinch of tenderness toward him. It was his dream to have sons who adored him, to be the fabled Good Dad, to be sweet and kind and wise, to be your buddy in your time of need, and you feel a twinge of compassion but combined with the urge to flee, to put as much distance between the two of you as possible.
You will soon be on your way to someplace like Austin or Boulder or Seattle. Portland, Oregon, possibly? Humboldt County, California?
—
You’ll come in and he’ll be on the couch, watching TV in his underwear. He’ll have an old knitted afghan across his shoulders like a shawl, smoking a cigarette openly now, drinking from a tumbler of his whiskey. Watching that one comedy series about loser hipster girls trying to make it in New York City, but his face won’t have an expression until you tap on the doorframe and he’ll lift his head and his eyes trace nothing across you.
Hey, you say Hey, he replies
You never really thought that much about what he did for a living. Which maybe made you a shitty person, bad son, et cetera. He provided for you, but you had no idea how that happened. Food, shelter, spending money, taxes and electric bills, and all that. He worked as a psychologist, and he had what he called a “practice” and “clients” who came to speak to him about their troubles and sadnesses and addictions and so forth, but he never talked much about it because of privacy reasons, and honestly you’d never been interested enough in it to ask him.
—
Imagine him as a child of eight. That kind of gullible.
“At that age, they don’t know the difference between reality,” Uncle Rusty said. “It’s so easy to fuck with them.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
“Like—if you want to make them believe in God or the devil or ghosts or vampires. Whatever. It’s easy to convince them.”
“Back then—like, maybe 1981 or so—Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a dove,” Uncle Rusty said. “And then later he bit the head off a bat. I was just kind of copying him.”
“I thought you said you killed the bunnies with a brick,” I said.
“I did,” Uncle Rusty said. “But it was the same basic idea.”
The phone was quiet for so long that I took it away from my ear and looked at the screen. The call was still connected. “Uh,” I said.
“Fuck!” he said. “It’s hard to admit this stuff! But I promised I’d be straight with you, about everything that happened. I will never tell another lie; I will never try to screw with another person’s head. That’s what put me in prison, Aaron. And in a lot of ways, I deserved what I got.”
I thought about this. “Well,” I said.
I was the kind of person who got high at some girl’s house on the night my mom died. While my mom was taking her last breath, the girl was giving me a blowjob. I had my phone turned off, even though I knew my dad was trying to find me. Calling and calling, my dad was.
“She wants to see you, buddy,” my dad said in one voice message. “And you need to see her, too. You don’t want to regret this.”
“Well,” I said now. “Well,” I said to Uncle Rusty.
And I wondered what I deserved.
9
WE WERE SITTING in Rabbit’s basement and he was showing me this website called Silk Road. You had to access it through an anonymous hidden server, and it was basically like Amazon.com for anything illegal you wanted. Drugs. Guns. Uranium. Human organs. He was scrolling through photographs of different kinds of heroin that was apparently for sale. He was looking for a certain Thai White #4 that he’d heard about.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “You’d think it would be super traceable or whatever. If you give them your credit card.”
“You have to pay in Bitcoin,” Rabbit said. “Which is getting expensive.”
“It doesn’t sound legitimate to me,” I said. I took a bong hit and held it, clenching my fist to the center of my chest. “What? Do they just, like, send a baggie of heroin to a P.O. box? It seems like the DEA or the FBI or whatever would have caught them.”
“Ha-ha,” said Rabbit. “That’s the thing. ’Cause it’s the Internet. It’s not a real place. You can’t catch them, because they don’t exist.”
“That’s profound,” I said.
I offered him the bong, which was a tower of blown glass, fluted at the top, a little bit like a miniature bassoon. But he shook his head. He took out his kit—the beautiful syringe he’d bought, so steampunk, like something that Sherlock Holmes would have used to shoot up with in the Victorian times. I watched him flex his hand.
“Have you ever heard about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s?” I said. “Dude, you have to watch this fuckin’ video—this guy, this reporter, Gerardo Ravira. It’s, like, so insane it’s hilarious.”
“Geraldo Rivera,” Rabbit said, and tilted his head back, his eyes closed, and I watched as a distant spaceman smile opened on his face. “What’s hilarious about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t told Rabbit about Uncle Rusty. I hadn’t told anyone, and for a second I thought about what it might be like to talk about it. To say, I’ve got this uncle. He went to prison for murders he didn’t commit. My dad was one of the ones who testified against him.
“I don’t know,” I said. “All this corny stuff. Back in the day they thought Satanists were around every corner. There were even, like, these kind of trials. Like witch trials, you know? And little kids had all this, just, like, wacked-out testimony about being in orgies and watching human sacrifices, and I guess people thought it was a big conspiracy of Satan worshippers all over the country. It was ridiculous.”
Rabbit smiled quietly. “Really?” he said. He let his head loll back, and his Adam’s apple moved in the center of his throat. “So you think that all these people who had experiences with Satanic rituals, they just made it all up? They hallucinated it or something?”
“Well,” I said. “I don’t think there’s millions of cultists out there drinking baby blood and performing human sacrifices. That’s just stupid.”
“Ha-ha,” Rabbit said. “I have to say, I think just the opposite. I think we can’t even fathom the extent of the depravity and fuckedupness that’s out there. Me? I hear a conspiracy theory, I’m more inclined to believe it than not. You know? I think there’s more bad shit going down in the world than we are privy to, not less. Just look at the darknet, Sweetroll!”
“Ff,” I said. He had been talking about the darknet for a while now—he’d downloaded this browser that let him go into anonymous sites, and he claimed to have seen all sorts of horrors.
There was a site supposedly full of photos of dead naked children, for people who were both pedophiles and necrophiliacs. There was a site that claimed it would sell you living human dolls, orphan girls from some Eastern European country, who had their arms and legs amputated, their eyes blinded, their voice box removed. There was a site that said it would allow you to direct your own snuff film. A victim was tied up in some kind of bondage on live video, and you got to choose the way they would be tortured. My guess was that most of it was fake.
But Rabbit only shrugged. I watched as he scrolled through rows and rows of artistically arranged pictures of heroin. Amber Mexican Tar. Sweet powdered brown sugar. Raw #1.
10
“SO WHAT ARE you on?” said Terri.
Rabbit’s mom. Mrs. Berend. Terri Berend. Early October and she was in her kitchen, wearing one of Rabbit’s skullies because all of her hair had fallen out, and she looked kind of badass as she put a bowl of oatmeal down in front of me.
“Are you boys shooting up?” she said. “I’ve noticed that I’m missing a lot of spoons.”
She took a long, considering drag from her glass pipe and held it out to me before she exhaled a fat puff of white smoke. I took the pipe gingerly and breathed a little hit. It was deadly pot, this stuff they called AK-47.
“It’s not like I’m ignorant,” she said. “I used to do horse with Bruce’s dad. I was, like, a fucking motorcycle chick. I’m not blind, Aaron.”
I didn’t say anything. Her eyes were sunken so deep into her skull that it was crazy; you could actually see the edges of the bone around the sockets. I took a bite of the oatmeal and she slid a little sugar bowl across the table toward me.
“Thanks,” I said.
She considered me ruefully.
“There aren’t any happy heroin stories,” she said. “You know that, right?”
I kept my eyes down. Her skull goggles beamed into me as I stirred sugar into my oatmeal.
If you compared her emaciated face to my mom’s emaciated face, her skeleton-ness to my mom’s skeleton-ness, you would calculate that she probably had one or two months left.
“We’re not, like…junkies,” you hear yourself mumble. “It’s not like…”
11
I WAS SITTING in your mom’s car in the parking lot of the Kaiser Permanente building and smoking a joint when I saw a bunch of crows over in the corner near the fence. Maybe ten or twenty of them.
They were landing and fluttering and then they were clustering and pecking at something. Some garbage, a scatter of fast-food, roadkill maybe. A hair extension?
And here suddenly: What do you call that feeling when you’re certain that the world is doomed? It’s one of those feelings that’s physical, like low blood sugar or too much caffeine, a message from the lizard brain. But for a moment you know that it’s not just you. Not just Cleveland. It’s everything. We, the creatures of earth, are really and truly fucked. “We’re the last generation,” Rabbit said, even though I pointed out that a lot of people our age already have kids themselves, so, worst-case scenario, we’re really the second to last.
“Okay, fucker,” said Rabbit thoughtfully. “The penultimate generatio
n, then. If you want to be a nit-prick about it.”
Back in the day, Rabbit was one of the smartest kids in school. Straight A, college track, trying-to-learn-calculus-on-his-own-in-eighth-grade sort of dude. Then he began to see through too many things. He cogitated all the hope out of his life, which of course is the danger.
—
And then I opened my eyes. I felt the hot cherry of my cigarette against my fingernails and I looked down and the cigarette was nothing but a cylinder of ash and the minute I glanced at it it collapsed and fell off. It landed on the knee of my jeans. Paphf. Like an eyelash or an asteroid.
And then chunk the car door opened and Terri got in and I glanced at the clock on the dashboard and somehow three hours had passed.
12
UNCLE RUSTY LEFT the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution in Tecumseh, Nebraska, on May 4, 2012. He was given $5.30, and he had a duffel bag full of his possessions—some clothes, a few books, a few photographs. He was forty-eight years old.
He was amazed by the smell of the world. He had been breathing refiltered air for almost thirty years. Even just seeing motion—a car rushing by—was so startling!
He walked along the side of highways, down gravel roads, passing through little farm towns, sleeping in ditches and abandoned sheds. He didn’t dare to hitchhike. Fifty-two miles to Lincoln.
In Lincoln, his lawyer sent him some money by Western Union—just out of the goodness of her heart; Vanessa Zuckerbrot, she was the best—and he took a bus to Chicago.
He got a job washing dishes at a restaurant, and he slept on the streets until he’d earned enough to get himself a little apartment. His lawyer helped him with the deposit.
He tried calling my dad a few times but my dad wouldn’t answer.
He didn’t know that my mom was dying. He didn’t have that much information about us—only what he’d been able to glean in a Google search on the Internet. And, amazingly, he had seen the Internet for the first time only recently, and of course he didn’t really know how to work it.