Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  And then Vanessa Zuckerbrot called him again and put him in touch with some people.

  He started going to meetings with other exonerees—other non-guilty guys who had been released from prison, and that was helpful. He started to think a lot about social justice.

  He told me all this in our first conversation but he did not tell me that my dad was the testimony. I didn’t know that until later.

  13

  RABBIT AND I were in the basement and I was listening to him geek out about the techniques for shooting up. He liked to find veins, and he’d been reading up on which ones were good and bad, and now he was complaining about how in the movies people shoot between their toes.

  “Bullshit,” Rabbit said. “There are just medium and small veins there, so it takes a lot of knowledge of your feet. Plus the sites fuck up fairly quickly.”

  Rabbit was into the great saphenous vein of his calf. I watched him roll up his pant leg and swab with a little alcohol pad and we both observed as he pulled back on the plunger until blood seeped into the barrel.

  Watching cartoons on his laptop. His mom upstairs, asleep and dying. Sitting on a couch on an old Oriental rug with the coffee table and the TV and the Xbox and Rabbit’s kit spread out before us, washer and dryer and baskets of unclean clothes in one corner, looming freezer in the other, full of leftovers no one would ever eat.

  I didn’t feel exactly paranoid. Mostly, I felt peaceful, with a little veil of sadness over it. “I know a dude who apparently puts his drugs up his ass,” Rabbit said. “I guess that works as well as snorting.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “This dude. Xzavious Reinbolt.”

  “That’s not a real name,” I said.

  “Word,” said Rabbit. “Sometimes he goes by Amy.”

  I considered this. I could hear Rabbit’s fish tank bubbling. “Is he, like, trans or something?” I said.

  “Not that I know of,” Rabbit said. “He just likes putting junk in his butt and telling people his name is Amy.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Actually,” Rabbit said, “I think it’s kind of badass.”

  —

  And then Rabbit and I stared for a while at this gray thing on the wall while we were listening to old Wu Tang. The thing was kind of floating or drifting, like a shadow but with three dimensions.

  … …

  C

  o

  b

  w

  e

  b

  .

  14

  “HE’S GOING TO be fucked,” Terri told me.

  We were sitting on the couch and Rabbit wasn’t home for some reason. We were watching an infomercial about how anyone can make a million dollars.

  “He has no idea how much money it takes to run a household,” Terri said. “And I could never afford life insurance. We’re living on my disability payments as it is.”

  She took a long draw off her pipe and passed it to me. I thought about saying, Terri, you’re not going to die, but then I realized that would be insulting, probably. So I just snagged her lighter from the coffee table and lit up.

  “He’ll be fine,” I said. “He can get a job. He’s not stupid.”

  “No one will help him,” she said. “His dickhead dad is in prison. My brother married a Mormon and moved to Utah. My parents are dead. His father’s parents are both evil alcoholics; he hasn’t seen them since he was three. God! Aaron, you are the only one I can count on.”

  She started to cry a little and I sat there beside her on the couch. What are you supposed to do when a cool lady who is turning into a skeleton starts weeping next to you? I reached out and put my hand over hers. And she gripped me very hard.

  “It doesn’t surprise me that he’s a junkie,” she said. “But it makes me sad. He had me fooled for a while, you know? He loved school when he was a kid. Loved it. And he was so smart! Bright!—that was what his kindergarten teacher told me, and she gave me this look, this suspicious look, like how could a poor white-trash hag like me have a bright child? And I didn’t believe it, either, until I saw it with my own eyes. He seemed like he wanted to do homework; he just loved learning, you know? In a way that never existed for me.”

  She laughed, lifting my hand in her tiny claw and pressing it to her heart.  There was no boob there anymore, just skin and ribs, but she had the strength to push my hand hard against her nipple, which still existed.

  “By the time he was in high school,” she said, “I was starting to feel like he was going to be fine. National Honor Society. Math Club. Computer Club. Friends like you, sweetie, with nice parents and big houses. I let my guard down. Maybe he could be somebody special, I thought.”

  She kept my hand against her chest, and I wanted to pull away but it would’ve required a certain kind of breaking from her grasp, which would seem rude and violent, and so I let her roll the ham of my palm against her breast like someone who is kneading bread.

  “But his father’s genes were too strong,” she said. “As it turns out. Just about the time the testosterone kicked in, suddenly all his dad’s reckless, stupid assholery? It took him over completely. He didn’t even know his dad. But he transformed into him—almost overnight.”

  She pushed my hand against her and made a circling movement. I could feel the hard nub of nipple beneath my palm and I didn’t say anything. With my free hand I picked up a lit cigarette from the ashtray and took a shaky drag.

  “Jesus Christ, Aaron, please kiss me,” she said, and it was a kind of irritable, scolding whisper.  “Give me a break,” she said. “I’m never going to be kissed again before I die.”

  I started crying, I couldn’t help it. Stupid tears ran out of my eyelids, but I did it. I put my mouth on her mouth, and it tasted of metal, and it was dry, and her hands clutched the side of my head and pulled me into her and I felt her tongue press against my teeth. I love you, I wanted to tell her, but all we were doing was mashing, middle school spin-the-bottle type making out, clumsy and embarrassed, licking each other’s teeth.

  —

  And then I glanced up and Rabbit was standing in the doorway, watching us.

  15

  “I’M THINKING ABOUT leaving somewhere,” I told Uncle Rusty. “There’s a lot of bad influences in Cleveland, I’m starting to think. It’s a shithole, you know? I think if I’d been born in a nicer place I wouldn’t be such a fuckup.”

  “Yeah,” Uncle Rusty said.  And then he was quiet like he was remembering a shithole of his own. A whole series of them.

  “You know,” he said at last, “there’s something to be said about putting some distance between yourself and your problems.”

  I loved his deep, 1980s rocker baritone. It was hard to believe that he wasn’t stoned. “I don’t have any money, though,” I said.

  “Mm,” Uncle Rusty said. And then we were silent. “I don’t have no money, either, buddy,” he said. “Or you know I’d give you some.”

  “I’m just trying to think,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s a way to convince my dad that I need to move to a different state and get my own apartment or whatever. I keep thinking that if I told him the right thing, he might be convinced.”

  “Yeah?” Uncle Rusty said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I opened my baggie of H and smelled its weird odor—like a box of Band-Aids, or vitamins, or something. I thought about snorting some but I wanted to conserve. My dad was generous and oblivious, but even he was going to start wondering eventually, with all the money I was hitting him up for.

  “Could I come live with you?” I said.

  “Nah,” he said. “Your dad wouldn’t like that at all.”

  —

  It had been a week since the kiss—since Rabbit had seen me kissing his mom, since I’d left in a hurry and pulled out of their driveway in a blind rush. I hadn’t spoken to Rabbit and I was almost out of heroin, and it worried me that I put those two things in the same sentence. But I felt anxious about both t
hings equally. When I texted him, Rabbit didn’t answer. I couldn’t call his house phone, because his mom might pick up.

  Uncle Rusty and I were both still silent. There was a weird piece of light on the ceiling.  It kept quivering. It was, like, gelatinous.  I had no idea where it was coming from.

  16

  MY DAD REMINDED me that picking out a Christmas tree used to be my favorite thing when I was a kid, and he pointed out that I wasn’t doing anything except sitting on the couch playing Skyrim on Xbox, how many hours of that game have you played, he said, this won’t even take an hour, he said, and it was clear that he wasn’t going to stop blocking my view of the screen until I spoke.

  “Why don’t we wait until Dennis gets home,” I said.

  “Dennis won’t be through with his finals until the twenty-second,” said Dad. “I want to have a tree up before then.”

  And so I rose reluctantly—I had been parceling out my heroin, trying to make it last, relying more on weed and fentanyl, which for some reason made it harder to hold my ground in an argument.  Besides which, I’d been considering how things might play out when he finally realized I dropped out of school.  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  —

  The tree place was a garden center just down past the high school, where we saw kids out running on the field in the falling snow—who knew what they could be thinking on a Saturday morning—and my dad recalled when Rabbit and I went out for lacrosse in ninth grade, too bad we didn’t stick with it, he wished I got more exercise, and then we pulled into the garden center, where “Carol of the Bells” was blaring out of tinny speakers that had been mounted on poles. It was like the kind of music you’d play if Santa was a serial killer.

  “I was thinking about Scotch pine this year,” my dad said. “I really like the smell.”  And I checked my phone, no one had texted me in a couple of days, kind of creepy how far out of touch I’d gotten, and he turned to look at me. “You okay?” he said, and I shrugged and we walked into a row of evergreens with their branches bound in twine and they reminded me a little of corpses.

  “I heard that Rabbit’s mom passed,” he said, after a moment. And this was the sort of shit he liked to pull—he’d take you somewhere, like a grape arbor in a hospice, then spring some dreadful news upon you. I heard him say it and it fluttered hard in my chest for a few seconds before it settled, perching heavily inside me.

  “Fuck,” I whispered, and he tilted his head and eyed me—attentive now in that Psychologist way that I’d always hated.

  “Have you talked to Rabbit at all?” Dad said. He’d found a trio of tightly trussed Scotch pines, and he considered them, stroking his beardlet. “I know you guys used to be close.”

  “Nah,” I said.

  I hoped that I wasn’t shaking, but I felt like I might be. I didn’t make eye contact when he looked at me again.

  “I imagine it would be tough,” he said. “Being around someone who was going through the same thing you went through. I can understand how you’d want to protect yourself from—”

  “We just don’t have that much in common anymore,” I said. “Don’t turn it into something.”

  “Okay,” he said. Then he shut up for a while. “Carol of the Bells” finally ended, and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” started. He sees you when you’re sleeping, Mariah Carey sang. He knows when you’re awake. My dad took out a tape measure and started autopsying one of the victims.

  “If you wanted to go to the funeral,” he said, “you should just take the day off from school. You’ve been working very hard, and you can stand to miss one class. Just email your professors.”

  I watched as he stood the chosen tree up and turned it around slowly.  He cleared his throat.  “It might be good for Rabbit to talk to someone who’s been in his,” he said. “Um.”

  “Shoes,” I said.

  “It might be good for you, too,” he said. “I know you’re not a big believer in counseling, but what about talking to someone your own age? He’s probably going to need someone, I imagine. It was just him and his mom, wasn’t it? Does he have close relatives?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I could see the surface of my coat vibrating, or at least I imagined it was. That was how fast my skin was shaking.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  17

  IN your mom’s car in the parking lot of the church I smoked up the nub of a blunt in Terri’s honor. Not sure I could go through with it. Get out, walk across to the front steps, open the door. I thought of that old nursery-rhyme game my mom taught me when I was little, the way she would knit her fingers together: Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and see all the people.  And then you opened your palms with the fingers still intertwined. Weird that this would come to me now, and I sat there for a while behind the steering wheel, folding my hands like I was praying, then turning them over, open the door, wiggling my fingers    see all the people.

  —

  I was in the suit that I wore to my mom’s memorial, a bit too small for me now, and I had a tie, even, though the knot was fucked, I couldn’t figure it out and finally just wrapped it around my neck as best I could, and I had on these shoes my dad bought me, so shiny and polished that they seemed gaudy and pimpish, even though they were black. Was this the way Terri would want me to dress, I wondered? And then I figured that since she was dead she probably had better things to worry about than my ugly shoes.

  I never would have guessed she’d want to have a funeral in a church. Seventh-day Adventist.

  It was one of the fringe ones, I thought, like Jehovah’s Witnesses or Christian Science, but I didn’t know for sure what the differences were with all of the various religions.

  Maybe it was her family’s religion when she was a kid? A part of her life she never talked about? We never spoke of God, and I was glad of that. My family didn’t go to church when I was growing up, and I was never interested, either. It all seemed so judgmental.

  So I took another couple of pulls on the blunt and then I got out and walked toward the church. TEMPLE OF PRAISE, it said over the door.  It wasn’t even a real church—just a cheaply built one-story building, ranch-house style with brick, and it might as well have been a motel or a cheap suburban bank, except it had a little white steeple on its roof. TEMPLE OF PRAISE, SEVENTH DAY.

  —

  I was anticipating what Rabbit would do when he saw me. If he freaked out and punched me or started calling me names, it would be bad. If he ignored me—that would be worse maybe. I hesitated at the door before I opened it.

  But nothing. Inside it was like you’d expect. Some pews lined up facing an altar and some stained-glass windows. Pretty empty. Maybe a dozen people up at the front. I glided into the very back pew, hunched down, turned invisible.

  There was the casket. All the way at the front, just below the preacher’s podium, and I watched as a lady walked up to it and peered down, her arms folded, like she was at a buffet in a Chinese restaurant where all the choices were horrific and she shuddered but kept looking. Terri’s sister? She looked a little like Terri when she turned up the aisle and took her seat next to a big long-haired dude in a bandanna and white dress shirt. I couldn’t see Rabbit anywhere, and so I started running my eyes along the backs of people’s heads, row by row.

  Rabbit was the kind of guy you notice—six foot four, two hundred fifty pounds, hulking, you would think if you didn’t know him; he could be imposing if he needed to.  The back of his neck was like a block, with three distinct folds of fat in it like bread dough. Head the shape of a pear.

  But there was no one here by that description.

  I passed my eyes over the backs of their heads again, counting. Thirteen people. Rabbit not among them. Could he be late? Maybe his alarm didn’t go off? Eleven was early in the morning for Rabbit, and I almost laughed. It was almost like one of those things that Rabbit and I would jok
e about: Sleeping through your own mom’s funeral? How fucked would that be?

  18

  I WAS IDLING OUTSIDE of Rabbit’s house with my brother, Dennis, sitting in our mom’s car, listening to whatever new indie-rock shit he had on his iPod.  He was telling me about all his new Cornell friends, kids from Manhattan, San Francisco, Austin.

  “Sounds really white,” I said, and he gave me a silent once-over.  After a year and a half at college, he didn’t even seem like the same person.

  Meanwhile, his old best friend from high school was missing. It had been five days now since Terri’s funeral, and Rabbit was nowhere to be seen. There was a light on in his house, in one of the back rooms, and the porch light shined down on the snowy unshoveled front steps and the petrified footprints the postman left as he trudged up bitterly to fill the mailbox.

  “You really think he’s in there?” Dennis said. “Maybe he, like, flipped out and went somewhere. Like, you know, his mom dies and he goes into a, like, fugue state or something.”

  I looked at him. Had he ever known Rabbit to go anywhere?  Had Rabbit ever left the state of Ohio? Had Rabbit been outside of Cleveland? Maybe, but doubtful.

  “Well,” Dennis said.  “Why doesn’t he answer the door, then?”

  I stared at the big front window. The blinds drawn. I shrugged. “We had a falling-out,” I said after a while, and Dennis let this sink in.

  He took up the one-hitter pipe from the dashboard and drew a long hit of weed.

  “Well,” he said. “We could just go around to the back and break in. It’s not like he’s going to call the police on us.”