by Dan Chaon
“They’re hanging themselves, anyway,” he said. “The stuff those two are saying is the most asinine crap I’ve ever heard in my life. Prayers to Satan. Sacrificing baby bunnies. It’s absurd. What adult in their right mind would find any of this credible?”
And I was like, “Actually, I did kill some rabbits. But it was, like, four years ago.”
And he was like, “That’s why you’re not testifying.”
4
NEXT #77 bus won’t be for forty minutes so I head along Belmont, marching west toward my destination. My apartment on Cicero is about two miles away, and I’m trying to walk down the street and talk to Wave on the cell phone at the same time. I’ve never tried this before and it’s an upsetting experience.
First and foremost, you want to pay attention to your surroundings—which, at this time of night, in this part of Chicago, seems like a wise thing to do. Not that anything is going to happen to you, walking past Walgreens and some row houses and an Asian lady pushing a baby carriage.
Mounds of piled snow scorched black with mud and filth. You’re fine, you’re not in danger.
But with a cell phone, it’s a complicated balance, because you think you’re staying alert but at the same time you’re conversing, you’re pulled by her voice into some hippie parlor in Oregon and also into your wayback machine of memories, and you stop in front of an auto body shop and think, Fuck, this is impossible. How do people walk and talk on these things at the same time? Read on them? Play games on them?
It’s because they are not walking, I realize. They are not in their actual bodies.
—
“The concern that Wolf has,” Wave is saying. “The house phone number should not really be in the hands of strangers. We don’t know this person. Dusty’s son. And you tell me he has drug problems?”
“He’s going through a rough time,” I say.
“The point is,” Wave says, “now we have to go through the whole rigmarole of changing the number, and contacting clients to let them know that the number has changed, and then the possibility of some lineman from the phone company coming out here? Wolf is beside himself.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t thinking when I gave him the number.”
There’s an old guy standing by the entrance to an indoor car wash, and I don’t want to walk past him, because I’m afraid he’s a beggar, so I cross the street. My shoes sink into the salted slush and I can feel the icy wet begin seeping through to my socks.
“I should have asked your permission and I did not and for that I apologize,” I say, and I flinch because my feet are already beginning to sting. Fuck. Fifty-year-old-man feet.
“Well,” she says. Maybe my tone makes her raise an eyebrow. “What’s done is done. And I did what you wanted. I talked to him and I told him the same thing I would tell you.”
“I hope he listened,” I say.
I stand there on the sidewalk, panting out puffs of steam from my mouth and nose. The lifelong smoker, breathless from running across the length of a street.
“He did or he didn’t,” Wave says. Galadriel says. She has the voice of a stern Elf Princess. All shall love me and despair!
“You know,” she says, “I want to be supportive. But I think this thing with Dusty’s son is a bad idea. I don’t know what you were thinking, but if I can be honest with you I think you need to be a little smarter. This could be considered stalker behavior.”
“Oh, wow,” I say. “Huh. I never thought of that.” And I limp along the block, past the Laundromat and Fragrantica perfumes, and I can feel the melting ice water begin to soak into the skin of the soles of my feet.
“It’s funny, though,” I say. “I mean, I’m not completely a stranger, you know? The truth is, I’m still his uncle. Not by blood, but they did adopt me, you know? So he’s still officially my nephew. Dustin’s still officially my brother. Even you, Galadriel. You’re still my cousin. We’re still related.”
“You don’t need any bad publicity,” she says. “I can just picture a think piece in The Wall Street Journal. ‘The Dark Side of the Innocence Project.’ ”
“Yeah,” I say, and for the first time I add her to the list of people I might kill. Dustin’s on the list, for sure. Kate, definitely. Trent. Uncle Lucky. The first foster family I stayed with: all of them. My mom’s boyfriends. The people who killed my mom when she was in prison. My mom herself. Me.
I never once thought about killing Wave, though. Until now. I could probably kill Galadriel. Even though I think she means well. Even though she’s generous. She can’t help but talk to me like she’s my benefactor, though the truth is she didn’t come to my aid when it mattered.
“You do have a life ahead of you,” she says. “It doesn’t all have to be about the past.”
I look out west. I’m coming up on North Central Park and a 7-Eleven that’s closed. A few flakes of snow are hanging in the air, mesmerized as fireflies. There is a long corridor that leads, eventually, to my bed, and I begin to walk in that direction.
Poor me. A murderer who got caught before he could murder anybody.
5
I GET BACK to my little place at the Elinor Hotel, and climbing the stairs I think that actually I probably wouldn’t kill Dustin after all. I might put his head down in a toilet until he stopped bubbling and blacked out, but then I’d yank him up by his hair so he could take a breath.
I sit down on the couch and take off my shoes, peel off my wet socks—there must be holes in the soles of these fucking sneakers?—and I lower my feet into a tub of warm Epsom salts. Take the remote from the coffee table, let the TV light up.
Think about that one time you tried to show Dustin the Big Dipper. This was the night that they said that they wanted to adopt you. You were fourteen; he was seven or eight? You put your hands on the sides of his head and he was warm like a dog, you tilted the head like a telescope, you steered it in the right direction.
“There it is,” you said. “Do you see it?” And there was the feeling of wanting him to be your little brother. Knowing you were going to hurt him very bad, but also hoping not to.
—
For a while in prison you would go to the group therapy. There was this one guy you felt friendly toward. Dr. Sharp. A young guy—younger than you, by that point you were thirty or so, and he was maybe twenty-four, twenty-five?—and he took you aside one time after a session and he said, “You’re smart, Russell. But you need to understand something. When you’ve been abused in the way you were, you have a virus. And the virus will demand that you pass it on to someone else. You don’t even have that much of a choice.”
I remember that I grinned at him, and laughed, and cocked my head.
“Good to know,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind for future use.”
But by the time I got back to my cell I was feeling very low. I laid down on my bunk, facedown, covered my head with my arms. Pressed my mouth and nose hard against the pillow.
—
It wasn’t that I felt that sorry for the things that I’d done to Dustin. I didn’t, really. I didn’t give a shit about Dustin.
But the idea that I passed on a virus, and the virus would turn around and it was my own doom?
That was so fucking funny. That was so sad and so funny.
6
IMAGINE ME IN the third-floor window of the Elinor Hotel, looking down toward you. You poor thing: A streetwalker. Lady of the night, I reckon. Wearing a silver halter top and Daisy Dukes hot pants, not a coat on or a hat, and even from here I can see that you’re almost my age. Poor woman on the long end of her forties, I’d guess. Sipping a cup of coffee from Starbucks under the streetlight. Reminds me of this girl I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with back in Nebraska, fourteen-year-old redhead, looked just exactly like the girl who was naked on the cover of the Blind Faith album. We’d get so stoned and this girl would come up with the craziest shit. I was an orc, name of Murder Mook. Carried a two-handed battle-ax
, +2 against undead.
Ha! Dungeons & fucking Dragons. They actually brought that up at the trial. It was “Satanic,” I guess—and the gal in the halter top gazes up toward my window, as if she sympathizes.
I had been having a lot of fun. For some reason, I thought the gibbeners weren’t going to catch me. Finished high school, working as a driver for 7Up, stocking the shelves with the refreshing Uncola. Smoking a huge amount of weed but never doing the kind of heavy shit that poor Aaron was into. We did peyote that one time. LSD a few times. Psychedelic mushrooms—well, actually, quite a bit.
I partied, but I still got up for work in the morning. I was a productive citizen. If not for me, the people wouldn’t have the delicious carbonated 7Up that they craved.
—
But then I look down and my lady has moved on.
I reckon she saw that neck tattoo, maybe? Didn’t like the look of it.
Had a roommate in prison who was a tattoo guy, name of Lincoln Kelly. He was a murderer like me; he killed his wife and two little girls. Very quiet. Did a lot of drawing. I could probably count on my fingers the number of words we exchanged the whole time he was inking me, and it took a good long time to put that tattoo on. It was supposed to say REMEMBER, but he got distracted or something so actually it said REMEMEMBER, which actually I liked better. It was in a font that was based on the logo of Judas Priest on their album covers, and first he did the outlines of the letters and then it was a month, off and on, coloring the letters in.
I sat in a chair with my head tilted all the way back, open and exposed in a way that even a child would think: Someone should cut that dude’s throat! Yes, it did hurt.
I mostly kept my eyes closed, tried not to wince. He filled in each letter in thick black, so it is the first thing that anyone who ever looks at me will see.
He put his fingers on my chin and pushed my head back, so I could feel the skin on my neck stretching. There are certain kinds of muscles in your neck that get warm in this position, and then hot. You can feel the blood in your jugular vein.
The good thing about Link Kelly was that he never asked me why. Hey, man—what does REMEMEMBER mean? What are you trying to say?
That poor fucker had REMEMEMBER tattooed on every inch of his body, on the inside of his skin. He didn’t need to ask me a thing about it.
7
“SO TELL ME what you remember, Dusty,” I say, and I pretend he’s down there by the streetlight, looking up at me. I look down out of my third-floor window give him a little nod and play a ZZZMM! chord on my electric guitar.
Yeah. The sound waves hit him hard and electrocute him, and he stares up openmouthed. “Tell me how you remember it, Dusty,” I say. ZZZMM! I hit the guitar again! “Because I’d really like to know!”
—
I know what I remember.
I remember sucking peanut butter off a pervert’s fingers. I remember the smell of my mom when I put my face against her neck; I remember being four and drinking milk from her titties. I remember a little rat terrier we had named Bibi, and the way she slept on her side, the way you could tell she was dreaming about running away because of the way her paws twitched.
—
I remember what it felt like to wake up with a house on fire, and a room full of smoke, and when you get outside they think it’s maybe your fault. I remember bringing a brick down on naked baby rabbits that Dustin had stolen from their nest, and they would have died anyway, less mercifully if he’d gotten his chance to take care of them. I remember making use of him, running my cock along the crack of his ass until I came on his back.
I remember the night in the graveyard, putting the ketchup on the baby doll and arranging it and saying, “I pray to you now, O Guland,” because that was the name in the book.
If you look it up, you will see that he is mostly a very minor demon. Guland. The one we called up. Guland, lord of disease and drowning.
I remember the trial a little bit, but mostly I remember the moment I got put in prison. I remember being escorted to my cell. My footsteps, tifty tifity, in my orange slip-on boat shoes.
Exactly as I expected it.
—
I remember the time that Wave came out to visit me in prison.
I was in my thirties by then, and so was she. She flew out from Oregon and sat at a table in the visitor center: one of the tables that we made at the penitentiary—nice laminate table, eighteen inch by seventy-two—not exactly made by slave labor, available for purchase now on the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution website!
She looked like a ghost of herself. Gaunt. Her hair colored. She had markings on her hands, which she said was henna, and fuck me, I did start crying when I saw her.
She told me that my dad—Uncle Dave—was fucking her mom and my adopted mom, Colleen, at the same time, and I was like, yeah, I told you that, I remember the time I saw him kissing on Vicki—Dave was such a horny badass—and she was like, I think my dad killed them.
—
I remember that when we were in the graveyard, Kate called upon the demon Guland to kill her parents.
I remember that I finally accepted that Dustin probably didn’t do it himself. That was a hard one to give up, but I never could come to grips with why he would kill them. Even if he came walking out of the house with a gun, I couldn’t figure what would make him shoot his own parents. There was nothing that suggested he had the kind of nuts it would take for such a performance.
Yeah, it was probably as Wave said. Lucky killed them all, the fornicators, the crazy swingers, and then Dusty came in and moved shit around, so that the crime scene was fucked, and then he walked out glowing ecstatically and fingering the gun in my direction, and I thought he wanted to kill me.
Well. He probably did want to kill me. I had tortured him for a long time, after all, and he probably would’ve done it, too, if he’d gotten close enough. But I put the truck in reverse and backed out of there so fast. Should’ve kept driving all the way to Mexico.
—
I remember the first time I talked to Aaron. That kid’s voice, so sleepy and stoned and gentle. You knew from the beginning that you could fuck him up.
Though that’s not exactly what you meant to do.
I liked him. Didn’t I? Didn’t I want to help?
8
FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AND I’m at the prep table, deveining shrimp. Slice along the back and pull out the string of dirty intestine, flick it into the can, repeat repeat repeat and try to do it fast enough that you don’t get yelled at by the cook and slow enough that you don’t devein your fucking thumb by mistake.
Thinking about Aaron. So weird to see him on that screen; he has that round face like Dusty, same wide eyes, but he put a ring in his eyebrow and dyed his hair black to make himself look a little less like a Raggedy Ann doll.
Probably going to kill himself with the drugs that he’s taking.
—
Standing out in the alley on break, hunched up over a cigarette, and trying to call him. You put the phone to your face and your hand smells of shrimp veins.
“Hello?” says the voice that answers. It’s gruff and deep: not Aaron.
“Hello?” I say.
“Who is this?” the gruff voice says.
“It’s Rusty,” I say. “Aaron?”
“Oh, good,” the voice says. “I’m really glad you called.” And you can picture him smiling.
Friendly, almost like he knows you. “You should watch your back,” he says.
And then he hangs up.
9
FREAKS ME A bit.
Try calling him back but it goes straight to voicemail. Yo what up this is Aaron leave a massage. Try again. Same.
—
After work, waiting for the blue line train on Clark and Lake: Yo what up this is Aaron leave a massage. Yo what up this is Aaron leave a massage. Yo what up this Yo The “massage” thing was funny the first couple of times, but now I hang up t
he minute he says Yo. Keeping an eye on my surroundings. There’s a black cop with a hat like a Russian would wear. Two girls in hooded coats and short skirts, an old white crazy lady cruising for change.
You should watch your back. That’s upsetting.
More than likely you got a wrong number, and somebody took an opportunity to screw with you. I’m really glad you called, they said. If it was a wrong number, what a shitty thing to do. If it wasn’t, even worse.
What if it was Dustin? It seems impossible that his voice sounds like that now—harsh and purring at once, gravelly, deep. I just can’t picture it.
But let’s say Dustin picked up Aaron’s phone for some reason. Answered it, and you said, It’s Rusty.
Would he really say, You should watch your back? Maybe. Maybe if he didn’t want you talking to Aaron. Could be he’s hired somebody to kill you and they’re watching you right now.
Glance around and up comes the crazy white lady with three teeth in her head. Begging for change. She’s wearing a parka trimmed with dirty pink fur and she’s wearing a pair of pink plastic clogs. Maybe your age? Maybe younger? She’s got eye makeup like Joan Jett, but otherwise she looks like hell, so you give her a dollar and then you turn to your phone again.
Never been to Vegas, but you can imagine you’d be one of those old men that sit in front of a slot machine and pull the handle over and over.
Yo what up this is