by Dan Chaon
It was weird to be inside Rabbit’s phone. I had seen him type in his security code thousands of times, so it was easy enough to open it. But once I was there, I was aware that he wouldn’t be cool with me touching it, and it felt invasive and uncomfortable to slide my thumb through the pages of his screens. Something dirty about opening up his texts, as creepster as reading someone’s diary.
I put my index finger on the last text he ever sent.
To Xzavious Reinbolt. Amy.
Be there in 5 min
7
“I REMEMBER THAT night, actually,” Amy said. He was wearing khakis and his green Whole Foods Market polo shirt, which was a little too small for his upper-body muscles. You could see his pectorals flex when he smiled.
“I had just gotten this really good dope,” he said, “and Rabbit was really excited about it, so he drove over to my place. It was, like, about a week before Christmas? He was in a bad mood, but…I wouldn’t say suicidal.”
We were standing in the produce section near a stack of avocados, and Amy had one of those plastic tulip glasses with some pissy-looking white wine in it.
“You should get some if you want,” he told me. “It’s free. Friday is the Single Mingle.”
And then the scene around me kind of clicked into place. I could see that some people were shopping but others were standing, holding wine and scoping for someone to converse with. There was a little cluster of singles mingling around a folding table where an employee was dispensing Chardonnay.
“I’m not into wine,” I said, and Amy nodded sympathetically.
“It takes work,” he agreed. “But once you start learning about it, it can be pretty cool.” I was aware of the weird, uncomfortable heaviness of his arm as he draped it over my shoulder.
“So,” I said. “Have you ever heard of the serial killer thing? The Jack Daniels thing?”
“Oh my God!” he said, and he grinned broadly, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “Jack Daniels is actually one of my favorite serial killers! I mean, for me, Gacy will always be the king. But in terms of contemporary ones…”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
He took a sip from his wine.
“I wouldn’t say that Rabbit fit the profile for Jack Daniels, though,” he said. “He’s the right age but way too fat. And the circumstance doesn’t really match up, either. He wasn’t, like, an innocent college boy. He was a depressed junkie who was on a towpath that no one in their right mind would walk down alone at night. That’s not Jack Daniels material.
“Still,” he said. He smiled as a young blond woman with a toddler pushed her shopping cart past us, and his gaze followed her as she rattled along toward the lettuces. “It’s an interesting idea,” he said.
“But you don’t think it’s…” I said, “like, likely.”
“I’d say it’s ninety-five percent that it was some combination of accident and suicide,” he said. He took in a slow breath, and I wondered if he was pretending to vampire my aura, like he did at House of Wills. “Junkies are always on that edge, you know?”
“I guess,” I said. He let his arm slide off, and it was like there was a distinct feeling of a shadow moving across me. He glanced again at the young mother and her kid, thoughtfully.
“Anyway,” he said. “I’m guessing you want to get hooked up. If you’ve got cash, I’ve got some baggies out in my car.”
8
RABBIT KNEW A lot of people. After I parted ways with Amy in the parking lot of Whole Foods, I sat there and scrolled again through the contacts. It was weird. Even though we hung out practically every day, it seemed like at least 50 percent of his calls and texts were to people I’d never heard of.
There was, for example, this one contact named Gergely. Rabbit had called Gergely fifteen times in that last week that he was in possession of his phone, and it seemed like he and Gergely were talking regularly, stretching back for months.
—
I’d thought about asking Amy about it, but I wanted to be cautious, too. I didn’t want him to have the idea that I was trying to play detective. That tends to be a turnoff for drug dealers.
But then I heard myself bring it up as we were on the way to Amy’s car. “Oh,” I said, very casual. “By the way, I meant to ask you,” I said. “You ever heard of somebody named Gergely?”
“Jurgily?” he said, and looked at me sidelong. “You mean Gairgely?” And he raised his eyebrow in this way that was like, Are you serious? But I didn’t know exactly how to take it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was somebody that Rabbit mentioned.”
“Really?” Amy said. He made a half grin, as if he were calculating. “Mentioned how?”
“It was just somebody he talked to, I guess,” I said, and Amy tilted his head dubiously.
“Huh,” he said. “I guess I didn’t realize that was the road he was going down.”
“What does that mean?” I said, and for whatever reason he laughed.
“It means,” he said, “that’s something you should keep a distance from, little brother.”
—
Which, now that I was thinking about it, kind of pissed me off. Little brother, I thought, as I pulled out of the parking lot and onto Cedar Road. Little brother. It was so condescending. And also the implication that he thought I was less badass than Rabbit, that I was in need of protection. And the way he leaned over me, the way he would deliberately make me aware that he was six feet or more and I was five foot four, just a wee hobbit to his Aragorn.
And of course little brother wasn’t my favorite because I was a little brother. I had grown up with an older brother who was always a few yards ahead, who was always better in school and funnier and more likely to attract girls and so on, and though we had been pretty good friends in high school there was always the sense that Dennis was the leader and Rabbit was second and I was always going to be the follower. Even if I was by myself.
I got home and my dad and Aqil were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Not talking, at least when I walked in. Aqil was scrolling through his phone, and my dad seemed to be seriously involved in reading The Atlantic. When you walk into this kind of scene, it kind of automatically activates your paranoid gland, and a part of you assumes that they have been talking about you up until you opened the door.
“Hey,” I said, and my dad did a performance of man-reading-magazine-is-interrupted.
“Oh,” he said. “Hey, buddy!” And Aqil glanced up and gave me a terse nod.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Nothing,” my dad said. He gave me his warm-and-loving-father expression. “We’re just doing a little”
He gestured at his magazine. “Reading,” I said. “Research,” he said.
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “So,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. I guess I should have thought of this before, but have you talked to Dennis recently? I mean, did you tell him about Rabbit?”
“Well,” my dad said. And the question seemed to startle him. “Of course. I talked to Dennis,” and I watched as he touched the tip of his nose three times, the way he always did when he wasn’t going to tell the truth. “I talked to him a few days ago. But I didn’t”
“You didn’t tell him that Rabbit was drowned by a serial killer.”
“Right,” he said. “I just thought…I don’t know. Dennis isn’t…and you’re more…” He hesitated, and Aqil gave me that look he liked to cast off occasionally.
It was his cop look: cold evaluation. He thought he knew me. He thought I was probably a drug addict of some sort, he recognized something in my face or my posture that he’d seen before, and then at the same time he had to keep his opinion to himself because I was his best friend’s son. And he wanted something from me and was a little repulsed by me at the same time.
“The thing is,” my dad said. “The, well. I don’t really want Dennis to know about the issues of possible. I mean, the possibility of a ‘ser
ial killer’ being involved in Rabbit’s—I don’t think that’s a good thing for Dennis to”
“Know about?” I said.
—
I was aware that a manipulation was probably being perpetrated upon me, but I was helpless against it. The idea that he had confided in me and not in Dennis. The idea that I knew something Dennis didn’t. The pleasure of that was almost as good as a hit of dope.
And of course there was manipulation from my direction, too—now that I was part of his detective posse, now that I was his confidant, it was going to be easier to ask him for money.
9
IT WAS EARLY afternoon when I tried to call Gergely, and he picked up after two rings. “What?” said a deep male voice, and it’s kind of startling when someone answers the phone abruptly like that, and I heard my voice come out kind of weak-ish and uncertain. “Hey!” I said. “I’m a friend of Rabbit’s…”
I don’t know how many words I said before he hung up, but it wasn’t many.
I sat there in bed, staring at my phone. It was a Saturday in the middle of January, the weekend before Martin Luther King Day, and I was still under the covers in my sweats, the dim light of a Cleveland winter day pouring through the window. I checked email on my laptop and scanned through Netflix to see if there was a movie I wanted to watch, but everything seemed boring. It was that dull mood where you kind of felt the angsty life-is-meaningless vibe but you were too lazy to get very worked up about it.
I thought about calling Dennis. But at this point—almost two weeks after Rabbit’s death—it was going to be awkward. Why hadn’t he talked to me right away? Why had he not talked to me at all since he went back to Cornell? He and Rabbit and I had grown up together; we had been best friends. I mean, why would he not call me? We hadn’t had a falling-out that I knew of.
But I guessed that we must’ve. That was the only way I could figure his silence. I must have done something that really pissed him off before he went back to college, but when I tried to run back over those weeks there was so little I could even remember.
10
I WAS SITTING in Mike Mention’s apartment and we were on the couch, passing a blunt back and forth, watching some old videos on his laptop: Mike and Rabbit and I, goofing around. It was hard to believe this stuff still existed.
We were thirteen when we made this, and at the time we thought it was so hilarious that we were busting out laughing throughout the filming, and now it was so sad and unfunny that it was actually hard to watch. Meanwhile, Mike Mention was crying. “Oh, man,” he whispered. “Look at this. We were just kids!” He put his face in his hands and genuinely sobbed for, like, two minutes.
And it was so uncomfortable for me, that kind of emoting. The thing about Mike Mention: He had a certain kind of tall body that got on my nerves. The long arms that hung down floppy like tentacles, and the thin legs that seemed like the femurs must be abnormal, a long narrow skull that was almost horse-like, and so I just sat there stiffly as he wept. I didn’t say anything.
After a time, Mike Mention composed himself. He took a very long pull from the blunt and held it with his chin raised and his hand over his chest, as if he were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Then he expelled smoke in a slow plume. “Oh, man,” he said. His eyes were still wet from crying. “You don’t expect it. This is what happens in life, and we all know it’s coming, but for some reason you don’t expect it.”
“Right,” I said. But I wasn’t actually sure what he was saying. It = Death?
—
For a while, we sat around listening to sad hip-hop: Cage’s Depart from Me, Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool, Capital Steez.
I handed over Rabbit’s phone and Mike Mention took it silently and formally, like the way that the parents of a dead soldier will take the American flag his coffin has been draped in.
“Oh, man,” he said. “Where’d you get this?”
“Xzavious Reinbolt gave it to me,” I said.
“That guy gives me the creeps,” Mike Mention said. “Amy. What is up with that?”
“I know, right?” I said. “But look at Rabbit’s contacts. I don’t know half of those people.”
I watched as Mike Mention put out his long stick finger and respectfully touched the screen of Rabbit’s phone. His face was grim as he scrolled through the alphabetical list, and his hand shook a little. It was almost as if he were touching Rabbit’s dead body.
“Dude,” he said. “I don’t know most of these.” He cleared his throat. “Oh, wait. That’s a drug dealer,” he said. Pointing to Blake B. And then he went down slowly, letter by letter. “That’s another drug dealer,” he said: El W. “She does dabs and edibles, I think.”
“So what about this,” I said. I put out my index finger and touched Gergely. “What the hell? Gergely? That’s freaky, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” he said. “It’s like—Hungarian. It’s basically the same as Gregory.”
“Really?” I said. “It looks made up.”
“No, honest,” Mike Mention said. “It was my great-uncle’s name. It’s totally like a normal Hungarian name.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
11
UNCLE RUSTY’S FACE came up on my laptop. It was the frame of a Skype window, severely pixelated, but I could see his face for the first time. He peered down at me as if he were looking through a hole, his eyes wide, nervous, or surprised. The connection was fuzzy, but you could see that he had shoulder-length brownish hair with white streaks in it and a square face with a thick tattooed neck and broad shoulders. Not exactly what was expected. His image sharpened for a minute and then dissolved into a blotchy portrait that had been done in watercolor.
“Hello?” he said. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said. It was weird to look him in the face. He was squinting and confused by the technology, but it was the actual person nevertheless.
“Ha-ha,” he said. “I can see you! You look so much like your dad!”
He was in his apartment. Some people at the support group he’d been going to had helped him out, and now he had an efficiency on the northwest side of Chicago, and he had been saving his money to buy a cheap laptop and a Wi-Fi plan. At last, he could experience the shoddy magic of the twenty-first century. “This is amazing,” he said, and beamed out a blissful grin. “Like science fiction. Now all I have to do is get me a hover car and I’m really in the future.”
“Ha,” I said. I never understood why people from the 1980S thought there would be flying cars. It just seemed really dangerous and impractical to me, but they all talked about it, so it must have been a thing. Meanwhile, my dream for the future was that it wouldn’t involve mass extinction and large-scale water shortages and cannibalism.
“So what’s been going on with you, man?” he said. “How’s it been going?” I watched as he folded his arms in front of him. He had tattoo sleeves on his forearms—red and black decorations of some sort, though it was impossible to tell, with this blurry connection, what they were of. Hopefully not swastikas, I thought.
I shrugged. I was surprised by how unnerved I was. Seeing him at last, after all these months of talking on the phone, I somehow hadn’t expected that he’d look like a fifty-year-old guy who had spent the last thirty years in prison. I realized that I had been picturing him as if he were still nineteen or twenty, because that’s what his voice was like—that deep, scratchy, hard-rock stoner intonation. Now it was as if his voice was being ventriloquisted out of the head of a mean-looking old redneck, and it freaked me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just…hanging out.”
“Staying safe, I hope,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about our last conversation,” he said. “And the stuff about your friend Rabbit. It worries me.”
He shifted his laptop as if he wanted to get a better look at me, as if he thought he could bring me closer by moving his camera, but all that happened was his fac
e loomed larger in my screen. There was a thick scar above his eye that had split his eyebrow in two, and it ran crookedly up his forehead and disappeared into the hairline.
“I mean,” he said, “a serial killer who drowns young guys? That sounds a little far-fetched to me. And your dad and this guy are investigating this for whatever reason, and suddenly one of your friends dies and the serial killer did it. Does that not sound fishy to you?”
“I guess,” I said. He raised his chin, and for a moment the Skype image resolved so that I could see the letters tattooed there in that Olde English–style font.
“What do you know about this Aqil guy, anyway?” Uncle Rusty said. “Who is he?”
“He was a cop,” I said. “He was a patient of my dad’s.”
“A patient for what?” Uncle Rusty said. “What was wrong with him?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I backed away a little from the screen even as Rusty pressed in closer. “Probably nothing that serious. Nothing you’d have to get pills for, because Dustin can’t prescribe medication. He’s just a psychologist.”
“Hm,” Rusty said.
“I don’t know,” I said again. “The more I’ve been looking into it, the more I feel like—maybe there are some things about the way Rabbit died that don’t make sense. I don’t think I believe that he just drowned.”
He was silent. Then he sighed. “Look,” he said. “There’s some stuff I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. And I’ve just been trying to figure out how to broach it. I wanted us to get to know each other better. You don’t really know me, and I don’t want to…”
He made an agitated movement that sent the Skype connection into fat, blocky pixels. The place where his mouth should have been was a thick, glowing square that pulsed as he spoke.