Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  I tried to be stealthy as I troll-footed my way through calf-deep drifts into Rabbit’s backyard, which now of course was so haunted I almost lost my nerve. There was the old trampoline, still set up, though we hadn’t jumped on it since probably sixth grade. There were the lawn chairs we’d sat in on summer nights, the three of us and Rabbit’s mom, getting high and listening to her old Black Sabbath records; there was Rabbit’s bike, leaned against the high wooden fence and so coated with snow that it looked like it was an ancient, worn statue. It made me think of those old gravestones where the engraving has been smoothed away by the years of rain and wind. I didn’t know who would come into possession of the house now that Rabbit and his mom were dead, but I figured that whatever little piece of them was still here was going to be gone soon.

  So why was I here? I dug through the hard crusted snow on the back stoop until I found the broom thatch of the welcome mat, and I turned it over and there was the key, where it had been for as long as I could remember. I scraped it up out of the ice and put it into the dead bolt. Why am I here? Why am I here?

  I guess I was looking for clues.

  A part of me that wanted to think that my dad was right. A part of me that wanted to think there was some way to make sense of the idiot world.

  —

  It was a small house. One floor plus an unfinished basement, a little square ranch house type thing. The back door opened onto the kitchen, and then there was the dining room, where Rabbit’s mom spread out her bills and papers on the table, and the living room with the sofa facing the TV.  I used my phone as a flashlight and ran a dim illumination across the walls. A shelf of knickknacks—mostly Día de los Muertos skeletons that Terri had collected over the years. A cheaply framed painting of wolves howling at the moon above the couch where Terri and I had kissed.

  On the coffee table, a mug with the thin slime of evaporated coffee in it. I shined my light on it, and I was mesmerized for a moment. Someone’s last cup of coffee, I thought: Terri’s, or Rabbit’s.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I figured that Rabbit’s room was the place to start.

  I held my phone aloft like a girl in a fairy tale, holding a candle.

  Wasn’t this the way it always went? You put your hand slowly on the doorknob, and there was the room that you thought you knew, the room you’d been in so many times before, but now bathed in an aura of eerie hostility.  Rabbit’s little twin bed, the same bed he’d had since I met him in third grade—how had he even slept in it? The bongs lined up on the shelf, along with the model ships he’d been obsessed with in fifth grade, and the action figures from Game of Thrones, and the framed photo of him and his mom, right there on his nightstand, the sweetly grinning Bruce Berend and the proud Terri, set up like a guard to watch him while he slept. And I thought: Oh.

  The bed was unmade, a mass of tangled blankets, and the closet was open, and there were some dress shirts on hangers and his one suit jacket. I knew if I reached into the side pockets I would find a bundle of hypodermics with the caps still on the needles, and if I reached into the vest pocket I might find a little baggie of dope.

  —

  Well, it turned out the pocket was empty. But I couldn’t help but look.

  —

  And then down at last to the basement, where we’d spent so much time in the last year, the two of us side by side, wasted, holding our game pads even though the game had been paused for so long it seemed that it hadn’t ever started. Just staring.

  And there was that sense that heroin gave you—not happy, not hopeful, not even interested. Just free from thinking that things were logical. Free from thinking that the world was benevolent or something, or that it cared at all. I always thought it was how you would feel in the womb, before you knew that there was such a thing as being born.

  So there were the game pads, laying there on the coffee table like a pair of severed hands with a wire extending from the wrist. There was evidence that he’d been cooking before he left. A spoon. A piece of aluminum foil. There was a bottle of cheap whiskey, and a tumbler glass.

  Go ahead: Sit right down and contemplate suicide with him.

  —

  The worst thing: Rabbit’s fish tank was still going. Still lit up, still bubbling and filtering, and the little plastic treasure chest opening and closing. The fish themselves were long dead. It had been a month since they’d been fed, and their corpses were floating at the top of the tank.

  —

  And then I saw it.

  It was a three-by-five note card, tucked underneath the ashtray. Rabbit carried these note cards around with him in his pocket, because he liked to use them to write down observations, or draw sketches, or whatever. It was the one way that he still allowed the smart, eccentric, poetic nerd he’d once been to draw an occasional breath—though mostly he was fastidious about tearing the note cards into tiny pieces or even burning them up with his lighter.

  But this one on the coffee table was whole. It was just a simple card with an address written in the middle of it in Rabbit’s neat block letters.

  18

  IT WAS ABOUT four in the morning and I was finally asleep in my bed when the phone rang. It was Aunt Kate, my phone said.

  “What the fucking fuck?” said Aunt Kate. “You’ve been talking to Rusty?”

  —

  I had been pretty sound asleep. I’d had a complicated night, and quite a bit of drugs had been consumed, and so it took me a while to try to calculate what was going on.

  Aunt Kate + Rusty = ?

  Aunt Kate (Waverna) > Rusty

  “What?” I said groggily.

  “Are you an idiot?” she said.

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  She made a scoffing sound through her nose. “Honey,” she said, “I’m trying to protect you. I’m just asking you: Do you want your life to be completely fucked?”

  “No,” I said. I sat up in bed with my phone to my ear and my other hand holding a blanket to my neck. “No. But there’s a lot that’s been, like…obscured from me. I mean, I didn’t even know about—”

  “What did he tell you?” Aunt Kate said. “What did he say about me?”

  “Nothing,” I said.  “We never talked about you.”

  “Right,” she said. “You just became phone pals to talk about sports and video games.”

  I put my hands over my eyes and rubbed my upper face. You could tell it was almost morning, because birds were beginning to cheep monotonously outside, even though it was dark. There was the sound of a salt truck lumbering down an artery road somewhere in the distance.

  “What would I tell him?” I said. “I don’t know anything. I didn’t even know that your parents were murdered until, like, a year ago. I’m not exactly a great source for family secrets.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But you’re the little hole that he can squeeze into. You’re his point of entry. You don’t get it, Aaron. You don’t have any idea.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t get it.  I mean, first, there’s this guy that calls me and says he’s my long-lost uncle, and he’s been released from prison because of injustice, and so I get that story, and then he says that you and my dad won’t talk to him, and so I’m the only person he has a connection to in the world, and so we just talked. That’s all. I thought I was doing a decent thing.

  “But I also know that it’s more fucked up than that. Whatever happened between the four of you—whatever, I don’t know. I’m just like, okay, so, Rusty tells me to call Wave, and then Wave must have called you, I guess, and then you called me, and it’s like some kind of weird chain letter. What do you want from me?”

  “Mmf,” she said. And then she was silent for a while.

  “So tell me what I’m supposed to know,” I said. “What does Rusty think Wave is going to tell me about my dad?”

  “I’m curious about that myself,” she said. Her voice had grown calmer, or at least
she’d decided she was going to take a different tack. “I’d like to know what he thinks he’s doing. Because I can tell you this, Wave is never going to call you. So whatever game or scam he’s playing on you, it’s a way to get to me and Dustin.”

  “I’m not going to turn against my dad,” I said. “Or you. I’m not that easy to manipulate.”

  “Really,” she said.

  “And Rusty…it seems like he basically took responsibility for what happened. He admits that he was, like, really abusive to my dad, and my dad was a kid, so it was easy to get him to believe in this stuff about cults and witches and demons and so on. I mean, he more or less said that he brought the whole thing on himself.”

  “That’s very big of him.”

  “I’m not saying that I totally trust him, either,” I said. “Because I don’t. Which is why it would be nice if you would be straight with me.”

  “About what?” she said.

  “What should I know about my dad?” I said. “What should I know that I don’t know?”

  “That’s an impossible question to answer,” she said. “How am I supposed to figure out what you don’t know? Or even what you should know?”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “What do you think Wave would tell me?”

  Kate made a short, unkind laugh.  “I don’t think she would tell you anything,” she said. “But I’m guessing maybe Rusty hoped she would say that she thought Dustin and I framed him. And she would probably tell you that I maliciously lied because I’m evil and that Dustin lied because he’s delusional and crazy.”

  I caught my breath. “What do you mean by crazy?” I said softly.

  Kate was quiet, seeming to consider.  “I don’t mean anything. I’m just telling you what I think Wave might have said. Which is that Dustin was very…impressionable? Imaginative? Gullible? More than normal. And he had a hard time telling the difference between what was real and what was not real. That’s what Wave would tell you, and it’s not untrue.”

  I heard the sharp snap of a lighter’s flint being hit and then heard her exhale.

  “What I would tell you,” she said, “is not to talk to Rusty. Not to trust anything he says. He’s telling you, oh, I’m soo sorry I was abusive to your dad, but I can guarantee that he hasn’t told you the half of it. Maybe he didn’t commit those murders. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But he’s definitely not innocent.”

  He woke up as she said this.  My dad.

  He made a few phlegmy coughs, and then I heard the creak of his bed as he sat up, the sound of his bare feet on the floor. Bathroom light went on, bathroom door closed shut. It was quiet enough that I could hear him pissing, the trickle of water on water.

  I was aware that I couldn’t trust him. I couldn’t trust Rusty, or Aunt Kate. Dennis?

  Maybe he was hiding things from me, too?

  “I have to call you back,” I said to Aunt Kate. But she had already hung up.

  19

  MY DAD was eating cereal in the kitchen when I came in. He was very involved in the newspaper, and there were a few droplets of milk clinging to his goatee.

  “Hey,” I said. And he looked up, sleepy and surprised and pleased to see me. It felt painful to have him beam a smile my way.

  “What are you doing up so early?” he said. “That’s fantastic. Getting on top of things!”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “College starts back up this week for you, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. And I had to wonder: How could he investigate a serial killer if he couldn’t even figure out that I wasn’t going to college. That I’d never even been to college once.

  “Have you talked to Dennis recently?” he said. “I guess you saw on Facebook that he has a girlfriend?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I took a bowl from the cupboard. There was a part of me that must have been exhausted, but I couldn’t make contact with it. It was like that one period when Rabbit and I were doing Adderall, that sort of hunter’s focus, that tingling in the front of your brain, knowing that there’s something you’re chasing, even if you’re not quite sure what it is. I poured Wheaties into my bowl and poured milk over them and then a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and then I began to shovel it into my mouth in a very determined way. My dad watched me as if what I was doing was really interesting, an unusual and complicated experiment.    Astral traveling.

  “So,” I said. “Can I ask you a psychology question?”

  “Of course!” he said, and he seemed so flattered that I was paying attention to him, and it was both sad and creepy. He made a “curious” look.

  “Are you taking a psychology class?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Neat,” he said.

  “So,” I said. “The thing I wanted to ask you. What do you call it when someone can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not real?”

  He didn’t flinch. “Delusional,” he said. He picked at his goatee thoughtfully. “But it’s a spectrum. At the far end, of course, it’s schizophrenia. But everyone has occasional glitches.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I was reading this interesting article,” he said. “Apparently, most people have a fold in their prefrontal cortex called a paracingulate sulcus. And this fold seems to help us distinguish between the real and the imaginary. But only about seventy-five percent of people have the fold—and there’s some circumstantial evidence that people without the fold are more susceptible to schizophrenia. And they tend to be more trusting and gullible.”

  I took a moment to finish my last bite of cereal. “Uh-hum,” I said.

  20

  IF SHE WERE alive, my mom would help me.  It almost made me laugh, it was such a wussy, pansy-ass thing to think, but it was also true: None of this would be happening if she were here.

  It was snowing again, and I woke up out of a mid-afternoon doze and stared out at the gray-and-white streetscape. It could’ve been dusk or dawn again. A certain kind of loneliness magnified inside me. A kind of terrible, unsolvable homesickness—for the home that doesn’t exist. That maybe never even was. But there’s no path back. In a fairy tale, there would be a witch you could make a deal with, the same witch that stole away everyone you loved, and you could ask her: What can I give you to be with them again?

  I pulled the covers up to my chin and closed my eyes. It would be so nice if my mom came to me in a dream and told me what to do.

  And then at the same time I knew exactly what she would tell me to do. Stop taking drugs. Consider rehab. Don’t be involved with the people you’re messing with. Get out of the situation you’re in, Aaron. So of course I fell back to sleep and ignored her ghostly advice.

  —

  When I woke up again, it was full-on dark. My phone had pinged the arrival of a text, and when I picked it up I saw that it was 10:01 P.M. A message from Xzavious Reinbolt.

  Hey! Saving some good shit 4 U! HOW, 2NITE.

  I stared at the message for about five minutes, and I was like, “HOW?”

  What’s HOW?

  —

  And then I was like, “Oh.” House of Wills.

  21

  So when I head out I am thinking about my mom’s advice, I can feel it chasing me even though I have muffled it with a small hit of fentanyl and I turn the music on loud. It’s my mom’s Bob Marley CD, her constant companion ever since I was a kid, and I remember how we would sit in the back seat when we were little and sing along, and years later I was surprised to find out that the songs weren’t written for children.

  “Could you be loved,” he is singing, and it makes my nerves feel a little less jangled, though there is still the edge of an anxiety attack underneath the drugs and the music and my left leg is twitching but not to the beat.

  “Only the fittest of the fittest shall survive,” Bob Marley tells me.

  “And then, in the end, not even them,” I tell Bob Marley.

  That night Rabbit
leaves the house—you guess that he’s desperate—maybe he’s made an appointment with Gergely, maybe he’s been drinking Jim Beam whiskey even though he hates alcohol, maybe he’s getting up the courage for something he can’t turn back from.

  On his phone is a selfie taken on December 18, 2013, which was the day before his mom’s funeral. Which was also the last day that anyone saw him alive.

  And he looks like a person who’s going to die. Even though it’s just a head shot, you can see that he’s lost a lot of weight since you last saw him in November, gaunt is the word that comes to you, and his skin is grayish except around his eyes where it’s dark, bruised-looking. Stretched and hollow-looking like a real actual junkie. Yet he’s trying to smile as if he’s posing for a graduation photo, displaying his upper teeth in that unnatural way that means I am smiling—

  Which reminds me of something that Terri told me once. I was driving her back home from the infusion room and she started laughing to herself, and I said “What?” and she said, “Do you know the funniest thing about dying? It’s that you have to live through it.”

  “That’s weird,” I said, and I felt her put the pads of her fingers on the back of my hand.

  “You know how, when you realize that everyone dies, and it’s like: You realize that you can’t get out of it, you can’t escape. You’ve had that thought, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “But then it kind of dissipates, and you’re like, ok, I can’t worry about it, nothing I can do, and you stop thinking about it. You just keep going along.”

  I nodded.

  This was the photo he texted to Gergely. 10:01 P.M.

  He wrote down an address on an index card. He was completely out of dope, and so he decided to try some whiskey.

  No good.

  And then he texted Xzavious and made plans to spend whatever money he had left. His mom had been dead for three days by that point, and he was in a certain frame of mind.