by Dan Chaon
When someone you love dies, you die, too, of course. There’s a freeze frame, a pause button, and you’re stuck in an endless GIF, the same fifteen seconds looping around and around in your head.
“And I think it might be like that all the way to the end,” Terri said. “Even if you just have five minutes left, you’re still moving into the future, you’re still thinking about what you’re going to do next, making plans, there’s a part of you that’s still saying everything’s going to work out somehow…”
I felt her fingernails blanch the skin above my wrists. “And then it stops,” she said. “I think that you might be alive up until the very second that you’re not.”
One of the images might have been the moment you walked in and your best friend was kissing your dying mom in a sexual way. Let’s make a GIF of that one. Let it play for eternity while Bob Marley sings “Three Little Birds,” every little thing gonna be all right
Rabbit pushes the garage-door-opener-button and watches the wall lift, listens to the metal rattle.
Even then he isn’t alive anymore, probably. He gets into the car. He turns the ignition. But he is already leaving the living part of himself behind.
22
I pull around to the parking lot behind House of Wills and I walk toward the employee entrance with a certain kind of loping gait that is confident but wary. The kind of walk that tells other people that you’re minding your own business but they shouldn’t mess with you. Probably not convincing, but I do my best, put my hoodie up, my arms loose at my sides like a gunslinger. As a regular customer of street drugs, I have gotten used to walking in blighted neighborhoods, dangerous places, but this is also a business district of a sort, and as long as a white boy is shopping he will probably not be harmed.
Rabbit must have parked in the back just like you did and you do a quick scan of the cars just to be certain that his isn’t among them. You can see the ghost light of a blunt being passed around in a 1980s’ Lincoln, and a Kia with a cap of snow on top of it a half foot high, and only the driver’s-side windshield has been cleared. There is a car that vaguely resembles Rabbit’s, you think, but when you get closer you see that there is a girl with long bejeweled fingernails in the passenger seat, delicately stroking the screen of her phone with her clawed finger, and she looks up at you balefully as you glance in at her.
Rabbit recognizes the House as an example of Georgian architecture; it’s one of those weird bits of knowledge he soaked up somehow, he doesn’t even remember.
Three stories, a line of gabled windows at the top. The skeletal framework of an awning leads from the sidewalk and up the front steps to the red wooden doors of the entryway. Come in the back, Xzavious said, and so he parks his car in the nearby strip mall which is full of ghetto-y storefronts—a cellphone place, a place to buy hair extensions and beauty products, a place called Manhattan Fried Chicken Fish Shrimp.
For a while, Rabbit told me, they were running ghost- hunting tours out of this place. It got mentioned on websites about “Haunted Places,” but it was hard to make money when you found that you were more likely to discover drug deals going down or junkies fucking or meth heads tweaking hostilely than you were to encounter some misty spirit vapor shit floating down the hallway in olden garb.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I believe in…? What?
Malevolence?
A girl and a guy are kissing right next to the back entrance. She has her back pressed to the wall and his legs are spread wide apart as he leans into her, and you don’t look at them until one of them says, very distinctly: “Aaron?” And then you turn and say, “What? Did you say something?” And the guy doesn’t stop kissing his girl but lifts his hand with his middle finger extended and puts it right in your face.
Maybe this is the first of the night’s hallucinations?
Rabbit doesn’t like the idea of going into an abandoned funeral home on the night before his mother’s funeral, but there’s really no other choice. It’s not like he’s going in alone. He watches as a car pulls up and a dude gets out.
Teenager. White. He’s got his hoodie pulled up and he’s trying to put on a kind of menacing, faux-street-smart walk, and Rabbit feels a little shudder of recognition.
“Aaron?” Rabbit says, but the guy doesn’t turn.
I believe in bad places.
I believe that there is a part of your brain that knows things but cannot speak. That feeling of the hairs rising on your neck, that sense that someone is watching you, the way a building can contain a presence that is observing. I open a door and there are stairs going down, probably down to where they embalmed the bodies. I back away.
Even though you’ve been here before it doesn’t seem familiar at all. Doors and hallways, stairs going down or up, and you keep hearing the sound of voices but you’re not sure where they are coming from. You open a door and all the carpet has been pulled up and rolled into a lump against one wall, and there is a single folding chair in the center of the room, waiting.
Labyrinthine. It seems like it was built to get lost in. He walks along an empty hallway and opens a door and there is a clutter of chairs, along with a life-sized plastic Santa—why would a funeral home need Christmas decorations?—and a collapsed ceiling with the asbestos hanging down like kudzu. The sound of someone talking in another room.
I can hear voices out of the corner of my ear, which may or may not be my imagination. The sound always seems as if it’s coming from several rooms away, and when I open another door it stops altogether. The hallway I am in now is lined with round wooden columns that seem to be sort of Egyptian in their designs. The carpet is still red, with a pattern of green fans or fronds, though there is a path through the middle of it that is worn black from the soles of dirty shoes, scattered with garbage: hypodermic, gum wrapper, a dead mouse, a used condom, a naked Barbie whose hair has been burned off.
It feels like it’s laid out like a maze, which makes sense: Back in the day, they might have had three funerals going on at once, and they had to keep them from running into one another. They’d need all these side-hatch rooms to put people in when they started losing it. And you realize that if there are ghosts, they are not the ghosts of the dead. The ghosts are the ones who sat in these little waiting rooms. The bereaved. They are the ones who can’t help but return, over and over—they remember every detail of that couch they sat on while they were weeping; they are the ones who can’t leave.
“Oh my God,” says the girl. Rabbit thinks she must be talking on her phone. “I just saw Xzavious Fucking Reinbolt, I can’t believe it.” And she draws in a noisy breath. “What an asshole,” she says. “He’s over there with some little chick who looks like she’s fourteen. He’s probably talking his vampire shit. The creep.” She listens for a moment and then she scoffs. “Oh no I didn’t,” she said. “Who told you that?” And Rabbit moves toward the sound of her voice; he opens a door and there’s a little room with a bar. The girl isn’t in the room, but her voice is coming clearly from a vent.
The sound of voices in the corridor. A young woman exclaims, “Oh no I didn’t! Who told you that?” And then she laughs in that softly mean way that girls have when they are talking about one another. “I’ve actually been pretty good about avoiding him,” the voice says, and I stand in the dark hallway listening.
In the distance, at the other end of the corridor, is the sound of human grunting, male and female, sexual, and in the other direction a white boy with a hillbilly accent calls out: “You guys! I’m fuckin’ lost!” His voice plaintive, starting to get scared. “Guys?”
That hospice where your mom died, for example. She’s not there anymore, but you are, you walk down that mentholated hallway practically every day, you know how to get from the front desk to her room, you can make your way to the boardwalk that looked like a grape arbor. I don’t think she’s going to make it.
Try to focus. You’re here to buy some dope or else you’re here to investigate a mystery, or possibly both. B
ut you have gotten turned around again, and you open the door to the room with the folding chair. An old camping lantern on the floor glows dully.
“I’ve actually been pretty good about avoiding him,” she is saying. “The last time I saw him, you will not believe it, was in this place called Club Eros? I know, how embarrassing.” And Rabbit moves hesitantly into the room; there is a mirrored shelf behind the bar with one bottle on it. Crème de menthe.
“But there had been a lot of buzz on social media about this event. Because apparently this girl, this stripper, had agreed to be, like, flayed. And I admit I was curious about it.” She laughs. “Shut up!” she says to the person she is talking to. “I am not!”
But when I walk in that direction, the frightened hillbilly is nowhere to be seen, and I find myself at the base of a balustrade, a formerly elegant staircase with a thick, curving rail, the kind of staircase a woman in a ball gown would descend in an old movie.
Maybe this is the right way?
Echoes of people talking in the distance, a woman’s voice, hollow and tinny like it’s coming out of a barrel. Is it an auditory hallucination, maybe? It seems like it’s probably coming from the room at the top of the stairs, faint and wispy like some plant that grows underwater. I can’t help but think:
Ghost?
For a second you think you see someone standing in the corner. A figure with their back to you, facing the wall, very still, as if they are looking at a painting in a museum, and you turn on the flashlight app on your phone and hold it up and say “Hello?” and take a hesitant step forward.
“Excuse me,” you say, but the figure doesn’t turn, and then when you step closer it’s not there anymore. Your light shines onto a water stain on the wallpaper, which might be said to vaguely resemble a human shape. But that wasn’t what you saw.
And you guess that may be the second hallucination of the night.
The woman’s voice appears to be coming from the room directly above him, and Rabbit looks around to try to identify what part of the house he’s in.
But there are no windows, and practically no light. Just a candle burning on the liquor shelf next to the crème de menthe.
“It was very theatrical,” she says. “You bought a ticket and you got taken down in an elevator to a basement—they were calling it a ‘dungeon,’ but the set design was so corny and conventional and the girl was really not attractive. Like, folds of flab coming off of her ribs and severe cellulite. She was probably, like, thirty-five?”
But, no, when I open the door it’s just another empty room and the voice is coming from a vent in the ceiling so I think that I just have to go up one more floor somehow. I look down a hallway lined with doors, like a hotel.
Rabbit used to talk about “dissociating.” It was a word he used a lot. He “dissociated” in English class when this one asshole student started talking. He “dissociated” in the grocery store in front of the salty-snack aisle. I thought he meant he “spaced out.”
How many drugs have you taken? You actually need to start reading up on drug interactions and so forth; you actually need to start parceling things out a little more or you’re going to die of an overdose.
But maybe that’s part of the plan. It’s not your plan, but there’s more than one person running the good ship Aaron, and several of them are pretty fucking feckless. Some parts of yourself don’t care if you die. They are just in this for a good time, and they’ll evacuate when it goes bad.
“So she’s strapped to this wooden X-bar, right? And a shirtless dude in crotchless leather chaps he’s cracking a whip around and showing off like a cowboy at a circus. So lame! And that’s when I saw Xzavious.
“Just standing there in the group of people who are watching, and he’s acting so cool like he’s so fascinated and this is so deep, right? And he looked over at me and gives me that stupid fucking grin?
But actually it’s more like the feeling of being detached from your body. Or the feeling of having more than one body, all of them moving along in different universes, unaware of each other, three different films playing on three separate screens and you happen to be acting in all of them.
There is another staircase at the end of the hallway, and I move toward it past the rows of doors. Some open, some shut. Some dark and some with a bit of light coming out. I’m trying to keep an eye on my surroundings. Be aware that a grinning meth head could pop out of a door holding a broken bottle above his head. Someone could creep up behind you with the intention of robbery. Be aware of the need to beware. Don’t dissociate.
Pot. Fentanyl. A little heroin. Ritalin. Possibly one or two others that you can’t remember. Your body is awake in ways that it probably shouldn’t be, and all your worst instincts are having a party together. All of them have an oar, rowing toward opposite shores.
Oh, shit! Maybe you’re dying? Maybe the last pill you took set some bodily process in motion that will end with your functions shutting down, and when you come to the bottom of the stairs you feel your muscles tensing and the endorphins pinging and you can hear your teeth tighten against one another. You can hear the soft, squeaky rubber sound the teeth make as they grind, and you do it over and over for a few moments.
Fascinated.
“It was a very triggering moment! I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to think about his bleachy-tasting cock, or the way he kept trying to bite my clit when he was giving me head, or that time that he talked about trying to get pregnant so we could eat the fetus.
“God! He was such a poseur! And then he gives me that stupid gaze. You know what I’m talking about. Where he tells you that he’s ‘drinking from your aura,’ or whatever, and then suddenly Flabby the Stripper starts, like, shrieking when the guy hits her with the whip. And a splatter hits me? Right in the face! Right on my, like, mouth, and honestly that is the one thing that I thought was well done. Because it tasted like actual blood. Not corn syrup or something.
At last, I think I recognize where I am. A light at the end of the hall opens up into a chapel, wooden pews facing an altar where the coffin would’ve been displayed and some dudes of my type are sitting around passing a glass pipe, and I pause at the edge of their circle: “Hey, do you guys know where I can find Xzavious?” and one of them squints at me and points to a door.
Third hallucination: two dudes. One in a long cape with a three-pointed cap that has a feather in it. The other one is a midget, except instead of a nose and a mouth he has a long pointed beak like a bird. “Hey,” I say, “do you know where I can find Xzavious?” and the taller one points with his gloved hand. He speaks to me in a foreign tongue.
“But I wasn’t about to hang around with Xzavious in the same room. And so, you know—the whip cracked again, and the victim screamed, but I didn’t look at it anymore. Some of the BDSM biddies were giving me a judgmental look, like they thought it was too heavy for me and I couldn’t handle it, but fuck them. I was out of there.”
23
“Aaron!” Amy says, and waves me over. He’s in a bare room with an elaborate fireplace, and I watch him feeding various items of trash into the flames.
Pieces of furniture. Paperback books. A Beanie Baby. A pair of tennis shoes. A hairbrush. The smoke coming off it smells upsetting. He and this girl are standing there watching the fire and when I walk in he turns to me.
“Hey, Sweetroll,” he says, and hugs me unpleasantly. “I’ve been thinking about you, man. I’ve been a little worried, actually.”
Worried? I think. “What do you mean?” I say, and he shrugs.
“Well, you know. Things get around.”
“Hey, Amy,” Rabbit says. He is not even sure how he got to this room. It’s like someone shoved him from behind and now he stumbles into his place. Amy looks up.
His girl stands over by the fireplace, and she taps a wooden spoon against the edge of the iron kettle. She looks fourteen, skinny and flat-chested, silver halter top and a pair of cut-off jeans that barely stop at the edge of he
r legs. Barefoot.
“Hey, my bunny!” Xzavious says, and gives Rabbit a bear hug. “Damn! You’ve lost weight! Have you been working out?”
“Not really,” Rabbit says. Being hugged—being touched—undoes him for a moment, and a tear volunteers itself at the bottom of his eye.
“Rabbit,” the kid whispers, which was my dog’s name. And that wakes me up. I burn a little brighter.
For the most part I am aware of them as lights and shadows, lumps of meat that give off heat and stink, their sad, dirty anxieties. We are not awake enough to notice them, most of the time, nor to notice each other, nor to haunt, in the traditional sense.
But there’s a little jolt when you’re near someone who is going to die soon, particularly those who are going to die horribly, and so I drift along behind the kid for a while, out of curiosity. Curiosity: like the time I went to Club Eros, to see a woman flayed. I remember standing right here, telling my friend Eve the story when
There is an iron pot suspended on a spit over the fire—the kind of thing you’d see at a cowboy campfire in a movie—and the girl stirs it with a wooden spoon. “It’s nothing,” I say. “It’s just some very fucked-up family shit that I’m trying to figure out.” And Xzavious/Amy nods his head vigorously, showing off his perfect white teeth.
“Well,” he says, “this dope that I’ve got will definitely help you pack up your troubles.”
“Oh, man,” Xzavious says softly. “Dude, I heard about your mom. That sucks, I’m so sorry,” he says, and looks sidelong at the girl.