Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  “Cool,” you say, but also realize again why you dislike this dude. This came up. “This,” meaning Rabbit’s death. As if he’s completely oblivious to the fact that Rabbit was your best friend, that Rabbit was a person who died. On the hunt again. What a douche.

  He opens the screen door for you like you’re a lady, and you’re like, okay, fine, and you go in first. He follows close, shuts the front door behind him. “Dustin?” he calls. “Aaron’s here!”

  But your dad is nowhere to be seen. You’re in the living room of one of those little box suburban houses, and it looks like the kind of place where somebody’s Polish grandma spent her last years. There is a horrible sofa facing the front door, looks like it’s covered with the kind of material that Velcro sticks to, and there is a poster-sized family photo from the early nineties hanging on the wall, with a carved wood frame. There is a glass-topped coffee table with an ornate doily and some china knickknacks. Sort of the opposite of the kind of place that a BDSM dude would lure you to and tie you up.

  “Whose house is this?” you say, and you take the note out of your pocket and show it to him.

  “Look,” you say. “This is the right address, isn’t it? Rabbit was texting this guy named Gergely. Kind of an…” you say, and even as you speak you realize you are falling into cop lingo from TV. “An unsavory character,” you say, and Aqil raises an eyebrow. He smiles.

  “You’ve got Rabbit’s cell phone?” he says. “That’s good news.”

  “Yeah,” you say, and you glance around again. The place doesn’t look abandoned. There are vacuum-cleaner lines on the carpet. There isn’t any dust.

  “Hey, Dustin?” Aqil calls again, and gestures you toward a hallway. “Dustin!” he says, more loudly, and gives you a conspiratorial shrug. That wacky Dusty! So spacey!

  “What are you guys doing here?” you say, and you feel a glimmer of puzzlement. Is this Gergely’s house?

  Have you been somehow following a thread that is connected to the thread they have been following? Is it possible that Gergely is the serial killer they’ve been looking for? You step hesitantly down the hallway. You figure that the door at the end probably leads to a basement? “Whose house is this?” you repeat.

  Aqil raises his eyebrow again. “Well,” he says. “We have a new theory.”

  And as you pass the first bedroom you can see out of the corner of your eye that there is a setup in there, a staging area for filming. A tarp has been draped over the window, and there are photographer’s lights pointing toward it.

  “Your dad’s idea is that this may be an ‘event cluster.’ That’s his term. Some of the deaths may be accidental drownings. Some of them may be opportunistic murders. But then—as they begin to accumulate they begin to attract people who want them to be a pattern. And once people begin to believe in something, it starts to become more true.”

  “Um,” you say. There is some equipment hanging from the ceiling of the bedroom, a structure made of pole and wire that looks like a giant version of the controller for a marionette. The poles are limp and tilted, but you can see that they have cuffs hanging from them. Is that blood on the floor underneath?

  “That’s what happened with the whole Satanism thing in the 1980s,” Aqil is saying. “That’s what happened with the school shootings, too, I think. Once an interesting concept comes into the world, some folks will want to take a ride on it, right? It attracts a certain kind of—”

  He shrugs. “A certain kind of energy, right?” he says, and I feel him coming up closer behind me, almost touching.

  “It’s kind of like your dad, you know?” he says. “He’s like a little bratwurst walking through the dog pound. He attracts a certain kind of interest.”

  “Um,” you say. You’re aware that even though he’s talking he’s not actually talking. He’s just murmuring words. Like he’s trying to hypnotize you.

  And then the sound of a gun being unholstered, a kind of metallic rattling that you recognize from movies, one of those Foley sound effects that you hear over and over in every cop show and thriller.

  And you start to turn around and Aqil has taken out a pistol.

  “Dad?” you call. Your voice high and hoarse, like an old chicken in a cartoon calling out for water. “Dad?” you say.

  “He’s just up ahead,” Aqil says, and the two of you look at each other. “Hey, Dustin,” he says. He puts the barrel of his gun against the hollow of your lower back. “Aaron’s here.”

  —

  Let’s go over this scene again.

  Let’s say it’s you, and your dad’s crazy friend is holding a gun. Let’s say you’ve been taking some serious drugs all night, and your reflexes are shit. What do you do?

  Do you start crying or begging? Even while your entire body is unsolidifying and you can feel the liquidation running down your spine and spreading its branches through your nerves? Do you try to negotiate? Even though you don’t actually have anything to trade?

  “Hey, man,” you say. Surprisingly reasonable. “Come on. We don’t have to do this.”

  But he doesn’t respond. The barrel of the gun presses where your spine meets your coccyx. “Put your hands behind your back for me,” he says. “Wrists together.”

  Maybe there’s someone who would have found a way to break off and make a run for it. Or maybe there’s the person who would start talking fast and dazzle him with some sort of clever bit of dialogue. Maybe there’s someone who knows some sort of magician’s way of getting out of cuffs, and they just wait for the chance.

  You don’t have any of those skills, though your mind considers them anyway, runs you through the heroic scenarios. You wish you hadn’t dropped out of tae kwon do in first grade.

  And that’s exactly what you hear your brain saying. It’s all right, it’s all right, you tell yourself, even as Aqil nudges you down the stairs. He won’t kill you, you think. He’s your dad’s friend. There’s a solution here.

  “You will walk safely in your way, and your foot will not stumble,” he says. “When you lie down, you will not be afraid; yes, you will lie down and your sleep will be sweet.”

  “What?” you say.

  “It’s a mantra your dad taught me,” he says. Then he calls down the empty hallway. “Hey, Dustin! Aaron’s here.”

  In the bedroom is a kind of oblong spaceship thing, and the first thing that you think is that it’s a car. Or a time-travel device, possibly? You remember Uncle Rusty talking about his dream of flying cars in the future.

  “Um,” you hear yourself say.  “Just don’t kill me, okay?”

  “Okay,” he says, and he steers me toward the Thing, which seems to be a kind of egg-shaped bed with an open lid, and blue light was coming from it.

  “What is that?” you say, and Aqil presses the gun against your back.

  “It’s called a sensory-attenuation tank,” he says. “Get in it.”

  DARKNESS.

  Wake up.

  The last thing you remember:   the rap of knuckles against glass.

  Then darkness again. Fuck!

  —

  You know you’re floating in the tank. Hands and feet tied.

  —

  Thrash.  Thrash thrash thrash.    Not really very useful. Must be earplugs in your ears, because you can’t even hear the water sloshing. The water is the same temperature as your body and the air, so it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Some kind of tube in your arm, you think, keeping you fed and hydrated, but your mouth is so dry. You call out: “Help! Help!” and it echoes distantly like a voice in a jug.

  You think about being rescued.  The cops break in and open up the lid, and behind them is—who? The last person you talked to was Wave, and she’s not going to do shit.

  Who will rescue you? Uncle Rusty? Aunt Kate? Dennis? The ghost of your mom, the ghost of Terri?

  What about your dad? You know that’s not going to happen. He’s probably sitting up in his study right now with Aqil, smo
king cigarettes and sipping on whiskey, talking away about the “serial killer” they’re chasing, and Aqil so happy he’s about to bust in his pants. What did he say about your dad? A little bratwurst walking through the dog pound. He had Dustin picked out a long time ago.

  You lie there, breathing. Darkness. You know you’re in a tank, but it feels like it might go on for miles in every direction.

  —

  Your dad’s never going to figure it out, of course. You run through it again and again, and even with what you actually know, it still doesn’t quite come together. How many people has Aqil killed, you wonder? Is he Jack Daniels?

  Probably not. Those killings started in the nineties, when Aqil was only a kid.  More likely he’s just riding on them, just like he said, like a roller coaster at a theme park. He’s done a few, you think—Rabbit, for sure, maybe the kid who died in Painesville, maybe the one before that at Kent State. It was something he got interested in at a certain point, and he just must have decided that it would be fun to pursue. He’s just another parasite. Some folks will want to take a ride on it, right? It attracts a certain kind of—

  —

  Aqil. That’s not his real name, you think.

  He probably has lots of avatars, and you figure that one of them was Gergely. Maybe he has been playing a whole bunch of games at once. Running scams on people like your dad, people who attract a certain kind of interest.

  You wonder what he’s going to do to you. Drown you somehow, you guess? Will he hold you down under the water so he can watch your face as you gulp and gasp? Maybe just fill up the tank you’re floating in? He gets off on it, so he’ll make it last.

  You think about the joy of seeing someone else suffering. It’s sort of like the opposite of grieving.

  Wake up. Darkness. You think your wrists and ankles might be  you think you might be imprisoned. You can’t see or hear.

  You’re floating down a river but you can’t move. Faceup? Facedown?

  Thrash.            Thrash.

  The things that they say about withdrawal from heroin are true. Legs so restless. Bad abdominal cramps. Eyes keep on watering. Terror. Hallucinations.

  Not sure whether that’s part of withdrawal or part of the fact that you’re confined to a sensory-deprivation tank by a serial killer. You try screaming again, and your throat hurts like hell.

  And then dream on.  Float on down the river.  Impossible to tell how much time has passed. Impossible to tell if you’re awake or not.

  —

  Somewhere above you, you can hear Amy and his girlfriend talking in low voices. You have the idea that somehow the tank you are in has been moved to House of Wills. You are in that room where you last saw them—the red-haired girl in her silver halter top, smoking and stirring a pot by the fireplace.

  “You open that door, and you made a decision,” Amy is saying. “That’s what I told him.”

  “He got a lot more chances than most of them did,” the girl says.

  You imagine that Amy nods thoughtfully. “Should we let him out?” Amy says, and you call out from the floating dark, Yes! Let me out! You can imagine the black sky above you opening like a lid, and the two of them will peer down from the heavens, the light behind their heads, light pouring onto your face. Help! Let me out! you call.

  But the girl says: “Not yet. It’s not time.”

  —

  And then their voices aren’t there anymore. Amy? you call. Xzavious?

  —

  Still dreaming? Still not dreaming? You don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know, you seem to be moving and not moving at the same time, and when you try to lift your bound ankles you don’t know whether you did or not. Water and air and your skin, all the same temperature, so that you can’t tell if you still have a body or not.

  And you think, They did warn me after all. Three times they warned me.

  “Scoot over, Sweetroll,” you hear Rabbit say. “It’s so fuckin’ cramped in here.”

  —

  But for some reason you don’t feel that scared anymore. You think of this girl that you met once at a party, the two of you sitting in a corner passing a joint back and forth, she was telling you about astral traveling. She was teaching herself how to do it, she said. She’d done it, like, once.

  “It’s the point-of-view switch,” she says. “That’s how you know. One minute you’re in, like, the first person, looking out through your own eyes, and suddenly then you’re seeing yourself in third person, you know? You’re above your body, looking down at it while it’s sleeping.”

  “And are you, like, transparent?” you ask her, and you like her hair a lot. Long, brown, with magenta streaks in it, but not like she’s trying to make a big statement. “Do you have clothes on?” you say.

  “You don’t have a body at all!” she says. “You’re just like a presence that can move around without it. But you still have all your senses—maybe more than all of them!”

  “Like,” you say, “what? You mean telepathy, or, like, you can see through walls? Or…”

  “You can see through everything,” she says. “There’s no such thing as solid. But it’s hard to explain. It would be like trying to tell a deaf person about music.”

  —

  You get it now. Let’s say you’re doing it. Astral traveling.  Moving and not moving at the same time. It’s like that.

  You can float up out of this tank, down the hallway, back out the door into the snowy street; your mom’s car isn’t there anymore. Lift up a little higher and you can see the whole of Lyndhurst from above, just like Google Maps. Like that old screen saver your dad still has on his computer, you’re moving backward through outer space, and the stars pull away from you in an endless stream, an eternal tunnel, stars upon stars upon stars.

  You can fly like that. Through a tunnel, you move across Rabbit’s house, your own house, the graveyard where Rabbit is buried under the undignified name of Bruce. You ride for the first time in a plane with your mom, you get to sit in the window seat, and your mom smiles and says, “Can you see the ground?” And you gape down! “Only clouds,” you say. “Only the tops of clouds!”

  You can picture Rabbit in this same chamber, the same coffin, passing in and out of dreams just like you, hoping, like you, that someone was going to open that lid and let you out. Did he hope that you were going to find him? Did he, maybe, forgive you in the end? Probably not.

  You can picture your brother fucking that skinny, prissy-looking girl you’d seen on his Facebook page, the two of them in his little single bed in his dorm room, and Dennis frowns, flinching as you glide past. You can see the ashes of your mom, still in a clear plastic bag in a cardboard box in your dad’s study. He won’t ever scatter them like she asked him to. He won’t ever let her go like she wanted.

  You wonder if Aqil is going to kill your dad. Maybe he has already? But for some reason you don’t think so. With your dad it’s something else Aqil wants, maybe something even worse. He wants to drag him down to the bottom and then look in his eyes. A certain kind of energy, that’s what Aqil wants, but you don’t know if it’s just random, or if somehow Dustin invited it.

  —

  And then you wake up and your dad is sitting on the edge of your bed with his hand on your back, rubbing in slow circles like he did when you were little. “Are you asleep?” he whispers. And you whisper back: “No.”

  But you are. You’re pretty sure you’re not awake, even though when you open your eyes it’s only darkness. The sound of your heart, the sound of your breath. Can’t really tell where your skin ends and the water begins, and when you try to squirm you feel like you’re turning end over end in outer space, weightless.

  —

  Maybe someone will realize, you think, maybe someone will put it together

  maybe

  and

  “Do you know the funniest thing about dying?” Terri says.  “It’s that you have to live through it.�
�

  You can feel her pressing against your back, she says, “Kiss me.” She says, “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…”

  —

  That tattoo on Rusty’s neck. REMEMEMBER

  —

  Aware of    as particles that are beginning to dissipate

  Are you awake? Are you dreaming?

  Wait—? Are you still alive?

  In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.

  —SACHEVERELL SITWELL, For Want of the Golden City

  “I THINK I have it figured out,” Dennis says, but then he looks over and Laura is asleep.

  They are driving down the interstate in a rental car, heading from Denver to St. Bonaventure, Nebraska—a little town not far from the Colorado border, according to his phone. The phone speaks to him from the cup holder where he’s placed it.  “Continue on. I-76. East. For. One hundred and. Sixty-three! Miles,” the automated female voice of his phone proclaims, and he peers out at the unwinding interstate. The yellow sod-grass fields pocked with melting snow. He thought Colorado had mountains? But he can’t see any.

  His girlfriend, Laura, has her earbuds on, and her eyes are closed, and Dennis can hear the metallic beats of the EDM music she likes emitting ghostly from the shell of her ear. The screen of his phone flickers briefly, as if it were about to say something but then changed its mind.

  He is on his way to identify his father’s body, and he is trying not to think about it. The body is in a morgue in St. Bonaventure, Nebraska—the corpse found five days ago, floating in an irrigation ditch on the edge of an alfalfa field, and it had been there for a considerable amount of time, the coroner said.

  Dennis made the mistake of doing an Internet search for drowned corpse, so he has a pretty good idea of what his father might look like. The skin is usually taut like a balloon, the body swollen. Often the mouth is a round O shape, like the mouth of a blow-up sex doll.  The lips will be thickened, as if with collagen injections; the tongue will be extended, the color of pâté.