by Dan Chaon
“Nah,” I said, and our eyes met then in a way they used to when we were kids—when we were almost twins, “Irish twins,” my dad called us, and we pretended we could read each other’s minds.
“Oh,” Dennis said finally. “You don’t want to go in because you think he
19
THINGS STARTED GETTING bad—the hallucinations and stuff—just a little bit before Christmas. I thought it would help if I made a list, but it just freaked me out more.
1. Feelings of being watched.
1a. In the bathroom, waiting to pee and hearing a voice outside the bathroom door whispering but maybe it’s your own breathing and then the sound of your piss hitting the water and the way the sound is musical in a kind of upper-key ice-breaking-apart cascade—when you are this high, ordinary body functions seem to take forever—and the whispering gets deeper and deeper from beyond the door, deeper and quieter, so maybe it’s the sound of the radiator?
2. Legs aching and restless, unable to sleep, kicking at the covers, twitching. A heavy shape leans over me when I close my eyes. Rabbit?!
3. My dad and Dennis getting along swimmingly, laughing about stuff that doesn’t make sense. You have the terrible feeling that they are talking about you in some kind of code.
4. How am I going to get more heroin?
5. Actual orc—such as from Skyrim or Lord of the Rings—standing at the bus stop in full armor.
6. Flickering; time jumping. Objects flattening into two dimensions and pixelating.
7. My mom’s voice coming from downstairs, the sound of her humming to herself.
8. Unable to form a pleasing visage. Dad: “Why do you have that look?” Me: “What look?!” Feeling of panic.
9. Cold. Antarctica cold. In the mirror, pallor.
10. You’re not a heroin addict. It doesn’t happen that fast. Maybe you’re just a pussy. What’s wrong with you? Maybe you’re losing your mind? Maybe you should just snort up a little bit and calm down?
20
VOICE MESSAGE FROM Uncle Rusty, 10:00 A.M., December 25: “Hey, young dude. Thinking of you. Merry Christmas!”
—
Voice message from Uncle Rusty, 10:35 A.M., December 25: “We know the official story isn’t true. That’s all we know.” Silence.
“That’s all we know.” Silence.
“Merry Christmas.”
—
Voice message from Uncle Rusty, 10:51 A.M., December 25: “Dude, ignore that previous message. I get very emotional on the holidays and
—
“Never mind I don’t want to bring you into this”
21
AT ELEVEN-THIRTY MY dad knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to come downstairs and open presents, and I couldn’t think of a better gift than another hour’s worth of sleep. But he kept standing in the doorway, and when I tried to drift off he came over and pulled the covers off me.
“I swear to God,” he said. “Aaron David Tillman, I’m going to bring up some ice cubes if you’re not out of bed in fifteen minutes.”
So I unaffixed myself from the mattress and put on some sweats but I couldn’t shake this feeling of shitty unfriendliness. There was the distribution of wrapped packages, the forced jollity, the desperation of a widower trying to make “family memories.” I couldn’t stand it. I was thinking like, Oh, a book. Oh, a cheap video game. Oh, a sweater I will never wear. Thank you. May I go now?
But I didn’t say it. Even I myself was shocked by the riptide of sullenness that had me in its grip, and I did my best to mumble, nice, cool, oh sweet, as I pulled off the gay wrapping paper that he had pointlessly taped around some shit he bought at Target.
There’s this spiral where you can’t stop feeling horrible about your horrible self, and it makes you act more horrible. I was fighting it. My dad and his friend Aqil and Dennis were in the TV room, watching an anthology of Chris Farley skits from Saturday Night Live, all of them laughing, and there was a ham cooking in the oven, which we would be forced to feast on at some point, and I came in and stood there and pretended to watch and when something funny seemed to happen on the TV I tried to make an appropriate facial expression.
I focused on my phone. I listened to Rusty’s messages, tried to call him (no answer), texted back and forth with a couple of random people, and no one mentioned that I was being a standoffish asshole, because it’s Christmas, and we’re all trying to be peaceful.
22
WHEN UNCLE RUSTY called again it was early afternoon and now my father and Aqil and Dennis and me were watching a DVD of The Big Lebowski that Aqil brought over, and for some reason the ham was showing no signs of being done.
“So,” I said. “When are we going to eat?” and then before my dad could respond, my phone rang and I said, “I’ve got to take this,” and I answered as I was walking upstairs to my room.
“Hey,” I said. I closed the door, a bit surreptitious. Even after all these months, there was still a kind of illicit thrill of talking to him—the fact that my dad didn’t know, the fact that Rusty never called Dennis, the fact that I was the only one, which made my heart feel strangely open.
“Are you having a good time?” Rusty said.
“No,” I said. “Bored.”
“What are you doing right now?” he said.
“Watching The Big Lebowski.”
“Is that a TV show?”
“A movie,” I said. “Coen brothers.”
“Oh,” he said. And there was this little gap of silence where I realized that he had been in prison for thirty years. He’d never heard of the Coen brothers. He’d never heard of most of the crap that took up prime real estate in my brain—music, movies, video games, memes, pop-culture factoids, all the stuff I’d larded my mind with, which wasn’t even reality.
“So how about you?” I said. “What have you been doing?”
He sighed. “Working at a soup kitchen,” he said. “Dishing up turkey and dressing from steam trays. It’s a good shelter, they helped me out, so I want to…you know. Give back, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. I settled onto my bed and held the phone to my ear, and I could see a framed photo of me and my mom from when I was about ten and we were at Butterfly World in Florida and the two of us were posing together. “That’s very cool,” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. And then through the phone I heard him light up a cigarette. “I was thinking about,” he said, “like, your dad always liked Christmas so much?” Then he was silent for a long time. My mom stared at me, a butterfly in her hair.
“I think about him,” he said. “He was always so full of, I don’t know, wonder. Like that starry-eyed shit kids do in commercials, except for real. And that had to be pretty hard to pull off, given all the fucked-up shit that was going on all around him.”
“Um,” I said.
And I actually did know what he was talking about. That kind of hopeful excited look he’d get, which was so dopey that it activated the meanest part of you, the bully part that wanted to squash it. “Yeah,” I said.
“Does he ever say anything about me?” Uncle Rusty said. “I mean, does he ever…” He hesitated, and there was a weird, weary sound in his voice.
“…does he ever talk about what happened?”
“Um,” I said, and I’m not really sure what he was asking me. Rusty and I have been over it about a hundred times. “I mean, like I told you, I didn’t even know that…” I heard him clear his throat.
And then, just then, a text comes from Rabbit’s phone.
23
Is this Sweetroll?
I read the text and it took me a second to calibrate.
“Sweetroll” was the nickname Rabbit gave me back in middle school. I don’t even remember its origin story—only that he and Dennis couldn’t stop laughing when it first stuck. Something about me, my personality, was perfectly represented for them.
“What?” I’d said. “I don’t get it.” And this made them laugh even mo
re.
“That’s such a Sweetroll thing to say,” Rabbit said. I knew he would never let go of it.
So now I sat looking at the little balloon on my phone and I said to Uncle Rusty: “I’ll have to call you right back.”
And then I stared at it some more and before I could type anything another text popped up.
This is Rabbit’s friend Amy he left his phone at my house and I don’t know how to reach him so I’m calling his contact list.
Are you his GF?
Hey yea I am Rabs friend Aaron but not a chick tho
My heart was beating very fast. Because, I realized, yes, I maybe did think Rabbit was dead, or at least I was dead to him, and even this ghostly touch was more than I expected.
Do you know where he is?
No. Do you?
When was the last time you talked to him?
IDK like a week ago? Should we be worried?
He was mad depressed bc his mom died and some dude he thought was his friend betrayed him
Are you busy tonite? You know where House of Wills is, right? E. 55th S of Carnegie
24
VOICE MESSAGE FROM Uncle Rusty, 2:15 P.M., December 25:
“You know what? I just need to be happy. This is my second Christmas of freedom! Right? I don’t want to hold on to things. I really don’t.”
My dad and Dennis and Aqil laughing, and I tried to smile, even though what was happening on the TV didn’t seem remotely funny. My dad looked over at me so full of wonder and I glanced down at my phone.
I hadn’t talked to Mike Mention in probably two months but I texted him:
What’s House of Wills
And then I had to wait awhile. I stared at the TV and my leg was twitching and I wondered how bad I looked. I didn’t look like a junkie, I didn’t think, but Aqil, I knew, was a former cop and maybe he could tell? But none of them were even looking at me until my phone made its text-arriving bloop, and I looked down immediately.
Ha-ha Crack house
Bloop!
Why? Are you going?
Bloop!
Supposed to be a great party
25
AFTERWARD, I STARTED having this weird hallucination. Things were moving in slightly slow motion, and they were fragmenting in an uncomfortable way. When someone spoke, it sounded like a clip, a sample. When I observed the images before me, it felt like I was taking snapshots with my eyes; the frame seemed to freeze for a moment.
And that horrible iPhone bloop sound seemed to have crept out of my device and into the real world.
“Are you asleep?” my dad said. (Bloop!) “You look really pale,” he said. (Bloop!) “Are you feeling all right?” (Bloop!)
“Oh, I…” (Bloop!) “Yeah, I’m fine.” (Bloop!)
And then suddenly I was sitting at the dining room table and my father was bringing the ham in on a platter and Aqil said, “There it is!” and my eyes freeze-framed.
Bloop!
Seriously, it was like my dad actually got paralyzed in the doorway for a moment, his mouth half open, his eyebrows raised the pink meat glistening with fat sweat jolly distorted like a bad illustration in a magazine a cicada flutter over my skin
26
VOICE MESSAGE FROM Uncle Rusty, 4:45 P.M., December 25:
“Maybe this is weird to say because you’re his son, but…I don’t know.
“If you found out the person who supposedly killed your family was innocent…Wouldn’t you want to talk to them? Wouldn’t you be curious? Like, if I didn’t do it, who did?”
—
Voice message from Uncle Rusty, 4:48 P.M., December 25, 2013:
“I’m sorry, that was not cool of me to say.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry. I’m kind of drunk. I shouldn’t be. But this stuff can be hard, you know?” Silence.
“I thought I’d give him some time, but it’s been over a year.”
—
Dennis put his hand on my shoulder as I passed through the kitchen. “Bro,” he said. “What the fuck are you tweaking on?”
27
THE NIGHT OF Christmas, 11:36 P.M., December 25, pull out of the shoveled driveway and you get a flutter in the stomach the way you do going downhill on a roller coaster, and then out onto the street, the homes of Scarborough Road, the dark snowy boughs against the streetlights, everything you look at has a melty quality. There’s no way the tires are touching the ground.
And you’re driving west into the Carnegie hospital corridor, the complex that looms around you on all sides, a massive parking lot and then a hotel full of sick people and then another hotel full of sick people and then a glass bridge that curves above you, you can see an old person being pushed in a wheelchair as you pass underneath, and this is probably near the place where Terri died.
Then there’s the stretch of vacant lots and empty red-brick factories, the urban rot, and then turn left on East 55th, with the grand, abandoned, dilapidated churches on one side and, on the other, a grim public housing project called “Enterprise Village.”
And then: House of Wills. It has been abandoned for a long time—an old funeral home, giant three-story Victorian house, and you park in the lot in the back, where there are a number of other cars—some occupied, still running, the exhaust chugging out in fluffy puffs of carbon dioxide. Some are pretty expensive-looking; there’s even a Maserati convertible.
You open the door of your mom’s car. A white girl is sitting in a Prius texting, her face fascinated, lit by the little screen.
28
THIS PART WAS the casket showroom. A long corridor, empty now, the walls covered in graffiti and tags and beer cans and crack pipes. But then on the ceiling was a huge, intricate crown molding that took the shape of curlicues and paisleys. Like something out of the French palaces of Marie Antoinette, and you couldn’t believe you were this crazy to be walking down such a hallway. At the end of the corridor, people were moving through the darkness by candlelight, or maybe sitting beside little fires that they’d made from detritus.
A long strip of fucked-up carpet ran down the center of the corridor, an actual red carpet, like celebrities walked down at the Oscars, but this carpet would be for, like, the zombie Oscars, so rotten and full of unimaginable stains of food, weather, insects, bodily fluids, mold, that it made you feel filthy to put your shoes on it.
But you kept walking toward the darkened room. Exactly like the stupidest one in a horror movie, practicing your lines in your head. Yo, hey, what up, or maybe just a lift of the chin, and then Hey, can you help me out with…Or: I’m looking for Amy, yo.
And you entered the darkened cathedral-like space, which you guessed was one of the chapels where funerals were held. You could dimly make out an altar at the front of the room, and around the nave there were little campfires going. You glanced over and three teenaged white boys sat around a fire that was built inside an old stainless-steel mixing bowl, crouched on their haunches and their faces alit only by firelight, their eyes darkened.
And then someone said, not all that far away from you: “Hey—you’re the friend of Rabbit’s, right?”
29
“I RECOGNIZED YOU right away,” the guy said. “I’ve got a little psychic ability, so they tell me.” He had a kind of mellow, radio-friendly voice, this dude who was sitting in an old rotting wing chair in a crack house that used to be a funeral home. About twenty years old, muscled like a regular gym rat, and wearing a tight white T-shirt to show it off. He had long black hair and a goatee and gold ear gauges, his earlobes stretching around a three-quarter-inch hole. Very straight white teeth, which once upon a time his parents must have paid some serious money for.
“You’re Aaron, right?” he said. “Hey, man, I’m Amy!”
And then something, I don’t know what exactly, clicked in my brain. I remembered about that guy that Rabbit used to talk about—Xzavious Reinbolt. He stood and his hand extended and gripped mine in this odd, quick grapple,
like some kind of secret handshake, and his palm was unpleasantly wet—almost, like, viscous, you could say, and when I drew back he laughed.
“Ha-ha,” he said. “That’s the trouble with being a vampire; my palms are gross, right?”
“Um,” I said. I was trying to remember why I thought it was a good idea to come here—like, what? Investigating Rabbit’s disappearance?
No. I was here because I wanted to buy some heroin. Probably this had been in the back of my mind all along but it didn’t bloom into full awareness until just this minute. I was like: Oh.
“Come over and sit with me!” Amy said. “I’m so glad you showed up. Everybody’s really worried about Rabbit, right? Like, so much tragedy and shit. We’ve been doing some chants and burning incense and the whole deal, but he’s vanished, right? It’s very worrisome.”
“Yeah,” I said. And I felt a kind of clamminess as Amy draped his thick arm across my shoulder. He gave me his expensive grin.
“Rabbit is so great,” he said. “I love that dude.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”
“I hope that you don’t mind,” Amy said. “I just drank a little from your aura. I can’t really help it, because I’m a vampire.”