by Dan Chaon
“I am talking to someone,” he’d said. We were sitting out on the porch and I watched as he flicked his cigarette. He was smoking in front of me at that point. “I talk to plenty of people. Just not a fucking therapist.”
—
“What’s your dad doing right now?” Rusty asks him, and no wonder I had goosebumps on the back of my neck, no wonder I had the sensation of being watched. They were talking about me, just a few walls away.
“He says he’s writing a book,” Aaron says, shut in his room, reclined on his bed with the TV mounted above him, playing some violent video game while they chat.
“Oh yeah?” Rusty says, and laughs his sleepy laugh. Fuh-huh-huh. “What about?”
—
I feel myself blush. It is such a vile, vile, awful thing to imagine that I sit there frozen. My phone is vibrating in my hand. I can see that Kate is trying to call me, and I watch the screen as the phone rings, as it sends her to voicemail, as a pop-up appears to tell me I have a missed call.
I think about a night not long before my parents died. I had been interested in geology, and I’d just ordered a kit with a steel Plumb hammer and a leather sheath for the hammer that attached to your belt and a magnifying loupe, and I had a book about the geology of Yellowstone National Park, and I was sitting at the kitchen table looking through it when Rusty and his friend Trent came in.
“Whoa,” he said. “What have you got there, Dusty?”
“Nothing,” I said, and when he picked up the hammer I said, “That’s mine.” But he only smiled. “Dustin really likes rocks,” he told Trent.
“He does?”
“Yeah,” Rusty said, and gripped my hammer. He held it thoughtfully, as if he was thinking of using it as a weapon. “Yeah,” he said. “He really loves rocks.”
And then Rusty handed the hammer back to me, though now, of course, he’d poisoned it.
—
Each time he talks to Aaron, there is just exactly that kind of poison, a little edge of disparagement, a seed planted between them and growing. If Rusty didn’t do it, who could have murdered those four people? Why won’t I talk to him? What do I have to lose? It would have happened gradually, but there would come a time when Aaron and Rusty were on one team, and I was on the other. Eventually, Rusty would have made Aaron “realize” that I was the murderer.
And Aaron would have believed it.
—
At a certain point, we are repulsive to our children, we parents. It is a stage of development. At such a stage they might be willing to believe anything that confirms
12
I DID NOT do it.
I know I did not do it. When I looked at it logically, I had no reason to kill them. I had no motivation, I actually loved my mom and dad a lot, and my aunt and uncle were fine.
Yet there have been fragments of things. Contradictory images. The truth—my real memories—had always been infected by fantasies or daydreams; the two things kept flipping, shifting, so I had never been certain what was being recalled and what was being imagined.
This was the thesis of my dissertation, in some ways: that experience is so subjective that multiple things actually do happen. That we can’t experience objective reality. Not exactly a useful stance for a court of law, my professor, Dr. Raskoph, said.
The mind has its unknown mercies and ministrations, many sealed chambers, she said once, and she smiled and put her palm on the back of my hand. We were talking about self-hypnosis, about hypnosis as therapeutic practice. Some people’s entire lives are directed by trying not to remember something.
And so now, of course, it comes to me. When I think of what Rusty might have told Aaron, the old dream comes back, settling itself around me, and it’s still as vivid as it ever was.
—
June 12, 1983, and I wake up in the middle of the night. In the trailer, in the driveway. Maybe the sound of shots?
But I don’t know. Wave is snoring. Kate is asleep beside me, and she smells bad. Sharp summer sweat and musky teenage-girl body odor.
I’m thirsty. I decide that I’ll go up to the house and see if I can find a Coke in the refrigerator. I get out of bed and open the door of the trailer, and I step out barefoot onto the gravel. I can feel the round stones beneath my feet. I can hear the soft crunch they make, and I look toward the front door of the house and the June bugs are losing their mind around the aura of yellow porch light. June bugs—flying beetles that Kate and Wave and I used to catch and put into jars—are making clumsy arcs around the bulb, buzzing in a kind of ecstasy or craziness as they make their loops and kamikaze dives, or they miscalculate and hit the side of the house near the light with sharp, surprised ticks and then fall to earth. Tumbling down to where my mom’s body was lying.
And here is the part that doesn’t ever make sense. I see her body, but I’m not there. There is no jolt of fear or horror or sorrow. I look at my mom’s corpse and I don’t feel anything.
Nothing except a calm, dreamy curiosity. I don’t scream. I don’t call for help. I don’t kneel at her side and shake her; I don’t try to talk to her or check if she was still breathing.
It seems impossible to me that this is the way I would have responded. Every time this moment comes back to me, it feels as if I am watching it from far outside my own body. As if I am watching a movie that doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t seem plausible that I would just stand there, looking down at her.
But in this bad movie, I see her. She is lying on her side. Splayed out in the way you’d be if you’d been shot at close range and you fell, and there is a lot of blood around her.
There was a series of snapshots that would play over in my head. For a time, when I was in college, it was almost all I could think about. The images are laid out in front of me like cards in a losing game of solitaire, and I try to think of how I could move them differently:
She is on her side with her arms hugged close to her stomach, and I touch her with my bare foot and she slides over onto her back.
It is a clear night. The moon is out, floating above the television antenna on the roof.
I look at her and her eyes are open but sleepy. Bored. Her lips are parted as if she’s listening to someone drone on and on.
There are dead June bugs around her. One is on its back, stuck in her blood, and its serrated beetle legs are grasping at the air.
—
And then I just step around her, I guess.
Because I am in the living room, and the music is playing from the record player.
It is an old box stereo, a wooden bureau with sound speakers instead of drawers, and the song “Luckenbach, Texas” is flowing out over my dad’s body. My feet find the thick carpet, and the soles sink into it. I see my feet moving, as in a photograph of feet moving. My dad is on his stomach; I don’t see his face at all. I see his prosthetic arm reaching out as if he is trying to use it to point at something. The door, maybe?
I just keep walking toward the kitchen because I need to get a Coke.
—
Here is where the memory—feels—what? Unbelievable?
It is possible that I go into a kind of dissociative, numb state. Almost like sleepwalking.
But I also feel a kind of weird contentment. There is an uncanny glow around the scene. Not fear or horror or numbness. A sense of inevitability.
From the doorway of the kitchen I see my aunt underneath the kitchen table. Later, I learn that she had been shot the most times: four.
But I only notice that the left side of her hair is red and wet and the tips of her curls are matted and dripping blood onto the floor.
Her face is stern. Frowning, but peaceful. Her eyes are open, like someone in a painting who is looking off to the sky and thinking a patriotic thought.
There is blood all over. My uncle is sitting in a pool of it, sitting there on the floor with his back against the cabinets. Gunshot wound to the face, at very close range, but I don’t ever picture the f
ace.
I only see the gun. It’s an old pistol, maybe from a war, I think. Simple, black, almost like a toy, but made of metal instead of plastic, and I stare at it and then I reach down and take it out of his hand.
The gun is a kind of charm, maybe—some little memento that you’d want to keep, something you’d put in a cigar box with your other treasures: a real arrowhead, a baby tooth you’d kept, a buffalo nickel, a stamp from the 1890s. It is just a nice thing to touch, the gun. The handgrip has a pebbled texture, and it is cool and heavy.
I might need this, I think. I don’t know why. I hold it loosely in my left hand and I open the refrigerator and take out a Coke.
—
How can any of this be so? It’s not me. I never would have behaved this way.
The emotions are so odd and muted and distorted, so dreamy. Later, I would diagnose it a vivid fantasy, something that began afterward—after the murders had begun to settle into my consciousness, after I’d begun to try to process the
A guilt dream: That’s what I would call it later. This…this delusional stroll through the crime scene—to get a Coke!—it’s a way for my unconscious mind to exert some control over the narrative. A fantasy I made up at the time to share the guilt and blame for the murders.
The real story, the official story, went like this: Wave discovered the bodies in the morning. In the morning, in the trailer, we hear her screaming, and Kate and I come running, and I see my mom’s body there on the porch among the scattering of dead black June bugs, and I fall to my knees and I pull her into my arms and I say, “Mom! Mom! MOM!” And inside, Wave is letting out shrieks that I will never forget. These high, shrill, bird-like cries. “Eeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeee! Eeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeee! Eeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeee! Eeeee! Eeeeee!”
13
WHAT I REMEMBER: I am stepping out of the house and I see him.
I am stepping out of the house, and I have my can of Coke in one hand and I am carrying the gun in the other, and I am wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else.
He is in the driveway. He’s just pulled up in his pickup and his headlights illuminate me. And I know he is sitting there in the cab smoking. I smell the pot smoke.
I walk up and I see him through the windshield; I see his jaw slacken. He is mouthing: “Wha—?”
I bid his mouth to close, and it does.
I raise my hands like a sorcerer. The can of Coke. The gun.
Things will change soon. It will be better in the future.
The pickup begins to quickly back out of the driveway.
What happens when you are not there, but someone from real life sees you?
Rusty saw me, I thought. I knew that’s what he would tell Aaron. Stood out in front of the house holding a gun in the air. Holding a gun and a can of Coke. With a little smile on his face.
14
“RUSTY’S BEEN TALKING to Aaron,” I say. “I don’t know what kind of lies he’s been telling about me.”
“Jesus!” Aqil says.
It’s Friday morning, and we are sitting in the breakfast nook, and the January sun is shining grayly through the window, and my hand is shaking as I push the plunger on the French press coffeemaker. It gurgles. It had started out as a joke, the French press, Jill and I chortling over how pretentious it was, but then we tried it and found that the coffee was actually really.
Aqil looks at me uneasily as I fill two plain white mugs. “What would he say about you?”
“How would I know?” I say, and he looks at me ruefully, and I realize that my voice has been sharp and condescending.
“I don’t know,” I say, more softly, more reasonably. “He claims to be innocent of the murders. He—obviously—has been acquitted. I testified against him at the trial.”
“So he’s telling Aaron you’re a liar, right?” Aqil says. He takes up his mug of coffee and gives it a sip.
“Mm,” he says. He tilts his head skeptically. “I’m not sure I’m seeing the connections.”
“I think Aaron might have gone to visit Rusty,” I say. “I think he might have gone to Chicago. Maybe Rusty convinced him, or lured him in some way…”
Aqil frowns. “I don’t think that makes sense,” he says. “Why would he do that?”
“I…” I say. “I guess…I think the idea that Rusty wanted him to call Wave…thought Wave would say something…that she might…”
“Are you okay, Dr. Tillman?” Aqil said. “You seem a little confused.”
—
He says that the first thing to do is to file a missing-person report. “He’s a legal adult, of course,” Aqil says. “And there’s no evidence of foul play. So it’s not exactly going to be high priority, but it will go into the NCIC database. And that’s something, at least.”
“So,” I say, and I glance up at the fluorescent light on the ceiling, which has an unpleasant, uncertain flicker. “I just go into the police station and say”
“Yeah,” Aqil says. “They’ll walk you through it.” He tilts his head, peering into my eyes with concern. “And you’ve talked to his friends? You’ve looked at his Facebook and—”
“Apparently he has to accept my ‘friend request’ before I can view his page,” I say. “But I did talk to his brother. And Dennis—actually, he confirmed the possibility of drug use, so”
Aqil nods and gives me a regretful, sympathetic look. “So,” he says. “There’s a good chance that he’s just on a bender. But there’s definitely going to have to be rehab in his future.”
Could I have done it? I think.
I don’t remember killing them, but I remember the walking part, walking through the scene. I remember how it was not scary. I remember how I felt peaceful.
My mom on the front steps. My dad in the living room, the music playing. My aunt under the kitchen table. My uncle against the counter.
—
“What about his room?” Aqil is saying. “You did a thorough search of his bedroom?”
I nodded. “He must have taken his laptop with him,” I say. “And maybe a duffel bag?”
“Uh-huh,” Aqil says.
“Which is why I think he,” I say, and I think: I should tell him.
And then: Tell him what?
15
IT’S LATE AFTERNOON—THOUGH it could be dawn or dusk, the cloud cover is so thick and the sun is so dim and distant. Aaron has been gone for a day and a half, maybe more. It’s Friday afternoon now, and I last spoke with him on Wednesday.
After I got back from the police station, I had begun to compile notes.
“Wednesday, January twenty-second,” I tell Kate. I’m sitting at the window in my bedroom, looking down at the driveway. Waiting—for what? I don’t know.
It was breakfast time, I tell Kate, and he was up unusually early, and I felt pleased. You’re getting on top of things, I said.
He was very pale. There were dark circles around his eyes. He looks so tired, I thought. I was aware, too, that he had lost a lot of weight. I had spoken to him on several occasions about his eating habits.
But at the same time, I didn’t think anything was wrong. There was just a vague unease, and I smiled and made some small talk.
College starts back up for you this week, doesn’t it? I said, and he said, Yeah, which I know now was a lie, because he wasn’t registered for classes. I’d called Cleveland State after I’d filed the missing-person report and discovered that in fact he’d never enrolled. He hadn’t attended classes in the fall, either. They said he’d withdrawn. He’d gotten most of the tuition money refunded, apparently.
“He probably used it to buy drugs!” Kate says. “Oh, Dustin, this is so fucked up.”
And I stare down at the driveway, hastily shoveled. Aaron had cleared just enough so that he could get his mom’s car out of the garage and onto the street. Where was he going at such an early hour? In such a hurry?
I clear my throat. “How long have they been in contact?” I ask Kate. “Do you k
now?”
“I have no idea,” she says. “Dustin, I literally found out about this on Tuesday. And I called him. I called him instead of you, which I know I shouldn’t have done. Fuck,” she says earnestly. “I feel like this is my fault.”
So do I, though I don’t say it. I am trying to keep my voice calm. I have made out a list of questions that I want her to answer, and I need to stick with them.
“I just want you to go through the conversation again,” I say. “Wave called you…and she told you…”
“Not much,” Kate says. “She never says much. She just told me that Aaron had gotten her number and he’d called and left a message saying that Rusty told him to get in contact with her.”
“But how did Rusty have Wave’s number? Even you don’t have it,” I say.
“And I’d love to know the answer to that,” Kate says. “All I can think is that he’s been staking us out for a long time. All of us. Maybe he had access to the Internet when he was in prison, and he spent hours and days searching out every little thing. And it also occurred to me that maybe he and Wave had been in touch at some point, and she gave him her contact information. I just—I don’t know.”
I look down at the list I’ve written. “What did Aaron say to you?” I say. “When you confronted him?”
“He didn’t really say anything,” she says. “He said that he and Rusty hadn’t talked that much about us. Which I didn’t believe. He told me that Rusty said he felt guilty about how abusive he was to you. And I told him not to trust Rusty. And then he goes, ‘Well, why would Rusty tell me to call Wave?’ And he says, ‘What should I know about my dad? What should I know that I don’t know?’ ”
I blink. The notes I have been making have gone swimmy beneath my pen, and so I take the tip and press it against the back of my right wrist until I feel the focus come back into my eyes.
“And what did you say?” I ask. I try to make my voice soft and neutral, as if I’m talking to a patient.