by Dan Chaon
“Hi,” she said. She brought her cigarette to her lips, and her hand trembled.
“Hello,” said one of them, and the other made a quick bob of his head, like a bow. Then the first one took out a key and unlocked the door.
—
She stood and watched snow fall. Cars went by in the street and ground the snow into muddy slush. She would be eighteen in March. Then…what? She could leave somehow. How had Wave managed it, with no money? She looked at the quiet Gillette street, the row of one-story brick storefronts with their worn awnings bent with snow and icicles. A station wagon drove by with the chains on its tires rattling. A long black Pontiac rolled past, and the driver stared at her. A bearded guy, maybe late twenties. If she wanted to, she could get a ride, she thought. But she knew that she couldn’t leave Dustin. Not ever.
Then the door to the Chinese restaurant opened and a boy peered out. This was Vincent Cheng. He was maybe nineteen? Twenty? Wearing jeans and a T-shirt and black Converse high-tops, with straight black shoulder-length hair and tan skin. He made her think of a surfer. He grinned at her: big white teeth.
“Hey,” he said. “Are you here about the waitressing job?”
“Oh,” she said. She blinked. Speechless for a moment.
—
She would always remember Vincent fondly. Years later, when she was living in Los Angeles, she once thought she saw him on the street. She started waving and grinning at the poor kid, until it occurred to her that Vincent Cheng would be a man in his fifties. And even if she saw him she probably wouldn’t recognize him.
But he had saved her life. If he hadn’t opened the door of the Oriental House, who knows? Would she have gotten into a car with some letch or rapist or worse?
Would she have killed herself outright?
Well, she didn’t. She stood now at a window of an apartment in Hollywood that looked down onto the grand old hotel that was now the Scientology Celebrity Centre. She was still alive.
You sacrificed them, she thought. And this is your reward.
She wasn’t even sure what Wave meant by that. Who had she sacrificed? What kind of reward had she gotten?
—
It was the spring of 1984. She was very involved with Vincent Cheng, working at the restaurant, et cetera. And Dustin seemed okay. He had friends at school, other nerdy boys, and it seemed as if he didn’t think about any of that stuff anymore.
It seemed like he came back to himself by not remembering. It seemed that he had found some kind of powerful formula that allowed him to unremember things; it seemed like he was—what? Better? Cured? Free?
Whatever had happened to him, she never dared to ask. She never found out.
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
—C. G. JUNG, Psychology and Religion: West and East
1
MY DAD SAID that Rabbit was the victim of a gang of serial killers. He said that he and Aqil had been investigating the murders for over a year now, and he widened his eyes in that awful expression. Wonder, Uncle Rusty called it.
We were sitting in the living room, and I was not in a good frame of mind. I didn’t feel like it was cool for him to make Rabbit a part of his insanity. It seemed kind of offensive, actually, and I balled my hands in my lap.
He brought out charts and folders full of photographs and notes; he showed me a time line he had made and transcripts of interviews that they’d done. Meanwhile, Aqil stood at the front window facing away from us, and from time to time he would rock up onto the balls of his feet.
Like he was pretending to be a Secret Service agent.
“This is all making me really uncomfortable,” I said.
He opened his laptop and showed me a video that he’d been sent: in it, black-and-white blobs moved around the screen, and there was a sound that might have been breathing or sawing or the sound of a microphone being licked. But my dad felt that it was clearly an image of one of the “victims” being held before they were “murdered—sacrificed.”
—
And I was like: blink. blink.
He believed it was a cult of some kind, religious or otherwise, and that it might have ties to the Fraternal Order of Police. He said maybe the video was sent to him as a way for the cult to let him know they knew he was snooping. That it was a way for them to boast but also to warn him.
“But I never thought they would do something this close,” he said. “I think they killed Rabbit to let me know that anyone I knew could be next. It could be you. Or Dennis. I should have told you sooner.”
2
HE HAD ALREADY been dead for a while when I found out about it. Xzavious Reinbolt texted a link to an article, and for a while I just sat there on my bed looking at it.
Cleveland Police report that a nineteen-year-old Cleveland Heights man found dead beneath Hope Memorial Bridge appears to have been the victim of an accidental drowning.
Police say that Bruce Allan Berend, a recent graduate of Cleveland Heights High, had drugs in his system when he apparently stumbled into the Cuyahoga River, just a hundred yards from the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail. The body was discovered on the west bank of the river by volunteers from a local homeless advocacy group, who were distributing coats and blankets to homeless residents in the area.
I smoked some weed, and then I crushed up an Oxycontin and snorted it, then I read it again. January 6, 2014.
Which, when I checked my phone, turned out to be eight days ago.
Wait, I thought. Did they have a funeral?
—
I did a bunch of Google searches. Funeral Bruce Berend. Funeral Rabbit Berend. Death Rabbit Berend. Death Bruce Berend. Body Bruce Berend. Bruce Allan Berend. And the only thing that came up was that stupid two-paragraph article: BODY OF MAN RECOVERED FROM RIVER’S EDGE.
Otherwise it was just his Facebook page, which he hadn’t touched since 2012, and a Google+ that he’d never really set up, and an ancient Myspace page from middle school.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I said to Uncle Rusty. “I was thinking I should call his dad, because do you think they notified him? His dad’s in prison, and I’m not even sure how you go about calling someone in prison. Do they have phone numbers?”
Uncle Rusty was quiet for a moment. “Listen,” he said. “I’m not sure why you think you need to do anything.”
“Well,” I said. “His mom’s dead. She was alienated from her family and not in contact with them much. She didn’t like his dad’s parents. His dad is in, like, jail. So I don’t know who else is going to do it.”
“Somebody will get the body taken care of,” Uncle Rusty said. “It’s a corpse. They won’t just leave it lying around. And maybe the rest of it is none of your business. You don’t even know his dad, and you’re going to try to make contact with him in prison? That doesn’t seem like a good idea, for about ten thousand reasons.”
“I guess,” I said.
But I thought back to that moment when I looked up from kissing Terri and Rabbit was standing there in the door, watching us. It seemed overdramatic to say that I was a contributing factor in his death, but I couldn’t help but think that I was.
“Look,” Uncle Rusty said. “Let’s look at it from Rabbit’s perspective. Say that Rabbit knew how he was going to die, and he’s making a list of things that he wanted you to do. Do you think calling his dad would be on it?”
I considered this for a second. “Oh,” I said.
3
IF YOU ARE very high and watch the “captive murder victim” video that Dustin showed you, it is like watching a lava lamp. It is like watching a lava lamp with fuzzy close-ups of body parts projected onto it. Is that someone’s fingers? Or a vagina? Is that water? Or just a silvery pixelation that glints in the way that
water does?
—
I tried to describe it to Uncle Rusty over the phone. “Whatever it is,” I said, “it’s not what he says it is. It’s not anywhere near as obvious as he seems to think.”
“Mm,” Uncle Rusty said.
“Do you think he’s, like…unsound?” I said. “I mean, I think he might be for real crazy.” He was silent, and his silence was like a frown traveling through satellites.
“I don’t think it would be cool for me to comment on that,” he said at last.
4
DUSTIN OPENED THE door without knocking and I slid my pipe under my thigh; it was like a high school cliché…and he stood there blinking in the drifting cirrus cloud of smoke, and in any case the smell of marijuana was plenty strong as it floated over him.
His face was ridiculously transparent. I could see him shuffling through a whole series of responses, his expression practicing different opening lines, and finally he settled on a look of blank cluelessness. He decided it was easier to pretend he didn’t notice.
It felt like he was inviting you to perform in some kind of play. He was going to pretend that he wasn’t aware that there was a still vaguely smoking glass pipe under my leg, and I was supposed to pretend…what?
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?” I raised my head and met his eyes. He didn’t look crazy—just kind of sad and puzzled. He looked, I thought, like a gambler whose winning streak had vanished and now he was in debt; he looked like a guy who was pretty happy a couple of years ago and then had all the things he was happy about stripped away.
He thought he could remake his life and become a detective and a celebrated author of investigative books. He thought that maybe his life wasn’t over.
It could have been worse. He might have been doing Civil War role-playing, or Zen Buddhism, or online dating. There was a part of me that felt sorry for him; I could feel it crawling over my skin like an ant, and I thought I should squash it but I didn’t.
“So,” he said. “I just wanted to…check in with you. To see how you’re feeling. I know that we put a lot of very”
He made his palms-out gesture again. “Disturbing,” he said. “Disturbing material. And complicated.”
“It’s a lot to take in,” I said at last.
“It is,” he agreed. “I know I could have done a better job of…presenting it to you.”
I shrugged.
“You have a right to be confused,” he said. “And even angry! I understand that I didn’t do this perfectly. He was your childhood friend, and there have to be,” he paused, “many different emotions.”
I nodded, and then he came forward awkwardly and sat down on my bed. It was something I remembered from childhood—lying in bed and my dad sitting on the edge, reading to me, or talking to me about my day at school, or just running his fingertips along the hairline at the edge of my forehead, which was how he used to put me to sleep.
Of course none of those things had happened in many years, but they were ghostly presences as he settled near the foot of the bed. I shifted, and I felt like he was thinking about putting his hand on my leg, which was under the covers. But, thank God, he didn’t.
“I would understand if you thought it was,” he said. “If you thought it was too speculative, and you just didn’t want to get involved.”
My laptop was open but he couldn’t see it. I didn’t think he knew that I was watching his insane video. Which, you had to ask yourself, why would someone send to him? If they were this powerful network of serial killers, why would they send it to him as a “warning”? Why wouldn’t they just kill his ass?
I looked down and it was paused, and for a second I thought I could see a face in the blurry black-and-white blotches and dapples. A pair of wide eyes, scoping blindly; an open mouth.
“I guess,” my dad said, “I wanted to make an appeal to you. We’ve been interviewing people for the past year. The victims’ families and friends and so forth. But there are obviously issues of trust and—who are we, why are we asking questions, and we do reach a kind of dead end with these after a while it’s not”
He thumped his head with his forefinger.
“You know,” he said. “But!” he said. “I guess the question is.
If you were willing to
You’d be uniquely
Maybe canvassing people that Rabbit knew and
—
“Well,” he said.
5
“YOU KNOW,” UNCLE Rusty said. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to get involved in Dustin’s—I don’t know.”
I was out driving and my phone was mounted on its little throne on my dashboard. His voice came out through the car speakers. “Dustin’s fantasies,” he said at last.
“I mean,” Uncle Rusty said, “his imagination sent me to prison for close to thirty years. I wouldn’t want to be the next guy he testifies against.”
“Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t think of an answer for that. I glanced over to my phone as if it were a figure I was talking to, although it was just a thin, blank rectangular screen. I nodded at it.
“Part of the time I think he believed it,” Uncle Rusty’s voice said from my speakers. “He was brainwashed, maybe. They, like, ‘implanted memories’ when they questioned him at the police station. That social worker was a…piece of work.
“But then I’m like…I don’t know. A part of him must have known that it wasn’t true. I mean, don’t you think that there’s really a reality, and we all know it is reality?”
“Huh,” I said.
—
And then I pulled into the grim old strip of storefronts that sat across from the ancient Richmond mall, glided into one of the many empty parking spots in front of Taj Palace Indian Cuisine, and I said, “Wait, I’ve got to turn the Bluetooth off for a minute,” and then I went in and the lady brought out a plastic bag with the carry-out, and I pulled up the wad of twenties that my dad had given me and I realized that it was about twenty dollars too much. Maybe some of it was meant to be a tip, I thought, but tough luck. I’m not going to tip you for walking a bag from the kitchen to the front counter.
Still, it felt nasty to pocket the money. I was aware that I was sort of stealing from my dad, yes, but also from that Indian lady that I could’ve tipped. There was a vase with a tulip opening, and an index card taped to it: Gratuity Welcomed! But I was beginning to need every cent I could get my hands on.
—
I sat in the parking lot and I laid out a line of dope on the side of my hand. If you make a fist, you can make a nice little surface between the base of your thumb and the knuckle of your pointer finger, and then you bring it to your nose and pinch one nostril and it snorts up perfectly. Rabbit used to tease me about this. “Dude,” he said, “you’ll never really experience heroin until you shoot up. It’s like fucking with a condom.”
I thought about what Uncle Rusty had said. Don’t you think that there’s really a reality, and we all know it is reality? It was an excellent point. But I was also feeling like, hm.
So was he saying he just didn’t believe my dad on principle? Because Dustin’s presentation did have some good points, too. And there were plenty of other people besides my dad and Aqil who believed it. It was an actual meme on the Internet.
I looked at the phone on the dashboard and I still didn’t call him back.
I closed my eyes and found that I was having a pleasant memory of the book series that my dad used to read to me. The Three Investigators. There was one kid who was fat but brainy, and another one who was athletic, and then another who was good at fixing things. And they solved mysteries. The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot. The Secret of Terror Castle.
—
And then—I wasn’t sure. I reached over to the passenger seat and touched the bag of food and it wasn’t warm anymore.
It must have been eight o’clock.
&nbs
p; “Shit,” I whispered.
6
I STILL HAD Rabbit’s phone. Xzavious Reinbolt had given it to me weeks ago, when I met him at House of Wills, and at the time it hadn’t even occurred to me to look through it for clues. It was only when my dad suggested that I “canvass” some of Rabbit’s friends that I realized that I actually had Rabbit’s contacts list.
This was not to say that I was eagerly joining up as the junior investigator with my dad and Aqil. I was not, like, Yeah, Dad, let me be Robin to your Batman! We can fight crime together! But I found myself thinking about the stuff he told me. The folders full of pictures of drowned guys, and the pattern of the dates, and how there was always something suspicious about the way they seemed to suddenly disappear without leaving any witnesses, and then it’s always days or weeks before the body is discovered. Always dismissed as an accident, every time.
—
I plugged in Rabbit’s phone and let it charge. It had been dead for a long time, so it took a while for it to wake up.
Finally, the Apple symbol began to apparate, solidifying and brightening in the center of the screen. And it occurred to me for the first time that the apple had a bite taken out of it, and I realized that it was, like, a reference to Adam and Eve, the apple in the garden of Eden.
Forbidden knowledge.
He had a background photo I’d never seen before. It was a calm blue pond with ripples in it, like you’d just tossed in a pebble and made a wish. Very disturbing in a way, I thought, given how he died. And also not really what you’d imagine Rabbit would choose.