by Dan Chaon
When we cross through the tollbooth at the edge of Ohio and into Indiana, I take out my wallet and hand Aqil a twenty and he pays.
“Can we stop for something to eat soon?” I say.
—
There is an oasis just off the interstate with a combination Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, and when I get out of the car I can see the overstuffed trash can, with its square robot head and the flaps for a mouth, full to bursting with fast-food bags and scattered uneaten French fries, dried drips of ketchup and neat little baggies of dog shit, and when we get close I push the folded letter into the opening of a wax cup that is still half-full of Coke.
Aqil doesn’t notice. We walk quickly toward the glass doors as the wind blows sharp particles of snow across us.
20
I AM DRIVING and trying to dream myself into it.
“I hope you have a plan,” Aqil says, and I do. Vaguely. I am going to find Aaron and I am going to convince him to come home and then he will go into rehab.
“Okay,” Aqil says. “Run me through it, brother.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I won’t know what I’m going to say until I see him. When I see his face, I’ll know. It can’t be a planned speech.”
“So,” Aqil says. “You’re just going to hope that roses come out of your mouth?”
“Yes.”
“Hm,” he says. “Kind of stupid but kind of badass.”
—
I have gotten as far as the expression that will be on my face when I see him. I want to look at him the way I did when he was first born—I think about the surprised grimace on his face, the way he squinted at the light as I held him and cut his umbilical cord, the way he gasped but didn’t cry, the way his tiny translucent fingers made grasping gestures as he rested in my arms. I was so astonished, and I want to see him that way again. I want to feel that kind of wonder.
I want him to remember me from that moment. When he was just born, and I held him, and we were connected forever.
—
But this is not what I say to Aqil, of course.
“Seriously,” Aqil says. “Let’s walk through it, Dustin. Let’s pretend we go to Rusty’s apartment building. You walk up to the door. Do you ring a bell and have to talk to an intercom? Do you go straight up and Aaron opens the door and looks out at you through a door chain, and you hypnotize him with the words that are just going to come flowing out of your mouth?”
—
I picture it. The door opens a crack. Aaron’s eye, and the chain running taut just beneath.
“I don’t know yet,” I say, and I hold the steering wheel and stare out at Indiana.
—
“Okay,” Aqil says. “I’m rolling here with what you’re saying. I’m respecting it.”
He runs his hand across his hair. “But you do know that Aaron is not going to open the door, right? Rusty is.”
“Yes,” I say. And even as I say it, I can picture Rusty’s eye in place of Aaron’s, and I recognize his eye even though it is fifty years old and he’s been in prison more than half his life.
There are rows of uninteresting billboards passing us. We are part of a row of cars, a line of insects following each other at 73 miles an hour, which is the speed that most of us have agreed to. We hurry along, bobbing against a current, and I think, If I’d been brave enough to
The version of your life that can be taken away from you. The story of yourself that you tell yourself as you go through the daily routines, the story that you think other people would tell about you, your wife, your children, your loved ones.
—
“This is what he wanted all along,” I say. “He wanted to make me talk to him.”
“Does it occur to you,” Aqil says, “that he might be luring you somewhere to kill you?”
“No,” I say. I shake my head, and a semi looms in the rearview mirror, speeding up to pass me. “He won’t do that. If he’d wanted to, he would’ve done that already.”
21
THERE IS THE long death strip at the end of Indiana, Gary and then Hammond, an apocalyptic peninsula of half-ruined hangars and weedy marsh, the feeling that some country lost a war.
—
And then we find ourselves on the long steel Skyway Bridge, one hundred twenty-five feet above the mostly frozen Calumet River. I wonder, briefly, how many young men have drowned down there.
—
And then the towers of Chicago appear in the distance out of opaque January mist, cold and austere and yet with a fairy-tale quality nevertheless—an Emerald City in black and white and gray.
—
The memory of happiness.
—
“Well,” Aqil says. “We’re here.”
22
IT’S AFTER SIX when we arrive at 3216 Cicero. Dark already.
The building is an old rectangle of brick, five stories. The Elinor Hotel, it says on the awning above the door, not quite as shoddy as I was expecting.
The neighborhood is quite a ways from the skyscrapers of downtown. In fact, the towers don’t even seem to be visible in the distance. Instead, we are on a strip of mostly low-lying storefronts. The Elinor Hotel is next to a liquor store, and across the street is El Nino de Oro, “For all your special needs,” and Mimi’s Mature Book Store: “Exotic Films—Marital Aids—Novelties—Latex” and a pawn shop called Easy Cash. WE BUY GOLD, the storefront advertises. Down the block, an elegant old movie theater front has been converted into a place called Golden Tiara: Chicago’s Finest Bingo and Raffle.
The street isn’t busy. Aqil drives around a block and we find parking almost directly across from the place. He wedges in between a small Toyota pickup and a salt-stained Pontiac, right in front of an establishment called Alliance Behavioral Services: D.U.I.
He puts the car into park, and we sit there, idling for a few minutes in silence. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he says.
“Let’s just sit here for a minute,” I say.
—
And we do. A monstrous salt truck approaches, a sound of grinding and lurching, and then it goes by. I look up and the windows of the Elinor Hotel look down. Four windows vertical, three across, all of them dark, empty, staring. There is a stone gargoyle face sticking out his tongue above the front entrance.
I can see now how stupid I’ve been. This is possibly the most idiotic thing I’ve ever done, in a whole lifetime of sleepwalking into one disaster after another.
Nothing I’m doing makes any sense. It is what Aqil has been trying to tell me all along. I look over at him and he looks back and raises his eyebrows. He’s sympathetic: He understands an obsession and a series of disconnected hunches, but I can tell that even he doesn’t have any faith in this one, this impetuous trip.
—
But Aaron’s mom’s car was nearby, I think. That’s the key. Jill’s car—somewhere nearby.
—
And then I see him.
23
I RECOGNIZE HIM by his walk. A certain kind of focused light appears in the scene: I see him moving down the block, and there’s that particular way that he swings his arm, a certain gait, and I think: Rusty.
He’s wearing an old dirty ski jacket, no hat or scarf, and he comes around the corner with his head down and his shoulders hunched. He has somehow become a middle-aged man, and his face looks heavier and more jowled than it used to be. He’s got an unfortunate neck tattoo, and his long hair is lank and tied into a halfhearted ponytail.
—
But he is still the same person. I know him, I think.
—
I watch as he slouches his way into the front entrance of the Elinor Hotel with his plastic grocery bags swinging from his right hand. As he disappears inside.
—
I sit up, and Aqil looks over at me. He’s been involved with his device, but now he’s alert. “What?” he says, and I lift my chin to point.
“That’s him,” I whisper. “Did you see him?” Because it seems
possible that he wasn’t there.
24
I REACH INTO the glove box and take out the gun. It’s the gun that Aqil gave me a long time ago, Colt .380 Mustang XSP, and he watches me curiously.
“Dustin,” he says. “Don’t you think you better reconsider the weapon for a minute?”
He watches as I put it in the pocket of my coat.
“I’m not going to do anything,” I say, and he clears his throat, gives me a skeptical squint. “I’m not thinking any kind of violent thoughts,” I say. “I’m just going to talk to him. But you don’t think I should have protection?”
He smiles, but sadly. He puts his hand on my hand, the hand that is holding the gun, and I feel the pads of his fingers rest on my wrist.
“If you take a gun, it’s not imaginary anymore, brother,” he says softly. “It’s real.”
And then he leans down and presses his lips to the back of my hand. “Thank you,” he whispers.
—
And it occurs to me that Aqil is probably the only true friend that I have ever had.
1
YEAH, I was a bad person. I knew it from the beginning, from the days when I was living with my real mom back in Grand Island, Nebraska, back before she went to prison, before the foster homes and the group homes; even my own mother knew something was wrong.
Today I am standing outside in back of the restaurant, in an alleyway by the grease dumpster, smoking a cigarette and taking a little break, when from out from the blue I find myself thinking about the peanut butter man.
He was one of my mom’s boyfriends. One of our boyfriends, I realized later. He liked to sit with me on his lap and feed me peanut butter from the jar with his finger. He would put his finger in my mouth and I would lick the peanut butter off. My mom sat at the kitchen table across from us, watching. I guess I was about five.
I remember the peanut butter man had an unshaved face, not quite a beard. He ran his chin across the top of my head while he fed me, and I could feel it scratching. The taste of his finger was like old meat, and his aftershave was sweet and vinegary. It was my job to sit there and be fed.
“This is a very naughty boy,” the man said to my mother, and she agreed with him. She took a sip of coffee. I was a bad boy, she said.
The man wanted to watch her give me a spanking, and so she did. It didn’t hurt that much, but I blushed and tears came to my eyes because he was laughing at me.
She would never leave me alone with them. That’s what she told me once, after one of the boyfriends had left. We were in bed and she was running her hand across my hair. “Don’t worry, Rusty,” she murmured. “I won’t let anything get out of hand.”
Fuck, I think. So many people I should have killed, and never got a one.
I don’t know why this should come back to me now. It hasn’t crossed my mind in years, but now here I am and it time-travels its way into my head. Hello, bad boy, the memory says, and I flick my cigarette against the trod-down slush of wet garbage and dirty snow, wincing a little. I look down at my shitty black canvas sneakers—wino shoes—and the wet cuffs of my checked pants.
I take out my cell phone and look at it. Polish that screen so that it lights up. That was the most amazing thing about getting out of prison. I knew about cell phones, of course, but I never expected to see all the people of the world walking through the streets with their little black rectangles held out, stumbling along like the phones were leading them. Stroking their phones, poking their phones, staring at them lovingly and asking them questions. I heard the voice of the robot lady coming out. It was fucking crazy, man. Unbelievable.
Nobody’s called me today. Might have expected to hear back from Aaron but he hasn’t called me since we “Skyped,” and I wonder if I scared him somehow. The neck tattoo probably didn’t help. Maybe he was imagining somebody different.
2
GET ON the blue line train after work and take it to Belmont station. Nobody’s alert on these trains, all bundled up in their coats and scarves and hats like fat birds, plugged into their earphones, staring at their screens. You see someone who’s watchful, you figure they must have been in prison or they’re on their way there soon. Keep an eye out for the ones who are looking.
Step off the train and onto the underground tunnel platform and the conductor’s voice echoes metallic and incomprehensible, it kind of feels like you’re underwater because the light has that blue, swimmy quality, and you move with the other fishies in your school toward the escalators that will take you to the surface. Faint smell of piss and ice.
Emerge into the aboveground and it’s after midnight. There’s a little awning area where you can wait for the #77 bus to Cicero, a couple of people sitting there so you don’t want to smoke near them. Across the street an old-fashioned drive-in called Mic Duck’s, a couple of black teenagers loafing around outside even though it’s about ten degrees; they’re having a great time teasing one another. You light a cigarette and keep your eye on them.
And then the phone in your pocket starts buzzing and it scares the shit out of you for a second. You didn’t have such a terribly rough time in prison, not like some of them, but you can be easily startled. You shift your head back and forth as if suddenly all eyes will be upon you.
They’re not.
You’ve seen plenty of people answer their phone in public. They walk down the street laughing like wackjobs, or dictating stern instructions, arguing, calling out “I love you, too, sugar” in a babyish croon. Doesn’t seem to bother them.
But you can’t imagine doing it. Having a private conversation on a bus, on a train, in a public place, with other people able to listen? Might as well pull your pants down and take a shit on the sidewalk.
But then you pull the phone out, thinking that there’s a button you can push to make it stop ringing, and you realize you fucking have to answer it.
It’s Wave.
3
“SO,” WAVE SAYS. “I talked to the kid.”
I look around me, feeling exposed, hunching down over my phone. “What did he say?”
“Why are you whispering?” she says. “Are you still at work?”
“I’m waiting for a bus,” I say. I raise my voice a little and put the phone closer to my lips, as if it’s something I’m trying to warm my face with. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him what I perceived to be true,” she says. “Wolf didn’t want me to do it at all.”
“Oh, wow,” I say. “Okay.” Wolf is her “mate,” as she calls him. At some point in the history of things, they legally changed their names to Wolf and Galadriel Bluecloud. I can’t really get behind it, but it’s also not really mine to judge. I have gotten checks in the mail from Galadriel Bluecloud, and they did not bounce. Galadriel Bluecloud privately donated fairly large amounts of money to the Innocence Project group that was handling my retrial.
“What’s your game, Rusty?” she says.
I feel myself shrug. “I made friends with his son,” I say. “I thought it was important that he heard stuff from another perspective. So it didn’t just seem like I was vengeful.”
“Because you’re not vengeful, right?” she says.
“Nah,” I say. The #77 bus has arrived, and I watch the people getting on it. But I can’t picture myself getting on a bus while talking on a phone. Paying the driver while talking. I watch as the bus doors close.
“It’s just—I would personally be interested in hearing Dustin tell the truth,” I say. And I sit down and hunch over a cigarette, protecting it from the wind as I light it. “What is his truth, as he knows it? I don’t think that’s so much to ask for twenty-nine years in prison.”
“Oh, Rusty,” she says. “The truth as he knows it? What could that possibly be? It’s not going to help anything.”
“I’m not expecting it to,” I say. “And I’m not vengeful. I’m not. But come on, Dusty, be a man. Admit what you did. It doesn’t have to be in the
newspapers. It doesn’t have to be a notarized statement. I’d just like to hear him say it,” I tell her. “And if he can’t explain it to me, maybe he’ll explain it to his son.”
—
I always think of the way he looked when he came out of that house.
There’s this one movie I saw when I was a kid, and it’s about this girl who’s an outcast but the popular kids trick her into thinking that she’s queen of the prom. Then when she gets up on the stage and they give her the flower bouquet and crown and so on, they dump pig blood on her. It just goes all down her hair and her face and over her dress and drips off the hem onto a pool on the floor. She’s like a statue made of pig blood. And then she opens her eyes through this thick red syrup, and they’re really wide and white and surprised. But then she looks at the camera and you can see that they are the blank eyes of the goddess that kills everyone.
That’s what Dusty was. That kind of monster.
His eyes were open so wide but they weren’t seeing anything, and he had a can of pop in one hand and a gun in the other, and he was moving them in his hands like they were sacred priestly fucking icons, and I was just in my truck smoking a J and I looked up and here he’s coming toward me. The revolver kind of wobbling in his hand, and his eyes completely dead.
Yes: The scariest thing I’ve ever seen. The way his face was fixed and rigid. Eyes stretched open. Puppet-like twitching of the body. I literally thought he was fucking possessed, and I booked it out of the driveway, drove all the way back to Trent’s house.
Trent was tripping on PCP so he didn’t really understand what I was trying to explain to him. Later he told the police that he vaguely remembered that I’d told him that I killed my family.
I told the police what I’d seen when they arrested me but wasn’t believed. Told the lawyer, too, and I don’t know whether he believed me or not. He didn’t want me to testify—he said that I wasn’t sympathetic, that it wouldn’t make things any better if I got up on the stand and accused a traumatized thirteen-year-old. “They’d decimate you on cross-examination,” he said, and held up his hand when I tried to say something.