Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  It didn’t mean he was a fag, Rusty said, and Dustin had nodded. There were children at Dustin’s school who were called fags. They were too skinny, or too fat; they were weak, or sissies, or wore glasses.

  “You can’t tell anybody,” Rusty said. “Ever.” He traced his finger along Dustin’s lips, and then down, along Dustin’s neck, his chest, his belly button.

  “I know,” said Dustin, and let his tongue move over Rusty’s chest. They wouldn’t know we were still alive, Dustin thought, and he closed his eyes. For a moment, it was true: His family was dead, and he and Rusty were on their way together somewhere, and it was all right. He wasn’t scared anymore. His lips brushed against Rusty’s nipple and he liked the strange, nubby way it felt. He pressed his tongue against it and was surprised by the way Rusty’s body jolted.

  Rusty rolled off him, pushing away, and Dustin’s eyes opened. He watched as Rusty knelt in the corner of the old house, unzipping his jeans.

  “What are you doing?” Dustin said, and Rusty hunched over himself fiercely.

  “I’m jerking off, you moron,” Rusty said hoarsely. “What, do you want me to fuck you?”

  Dustin took a step closer, trying to see what Rusty was doing to his penis, but Rusty gritted his teeth and glared, so he kept his distance.

  “Would it hurt?” Dustin said, and Rusty hunched even further, the muscles of his back tightening.

  “Yes,” Rusty hissed. “It would hurt.” And he was silent for a moment. “Get the fuck away from me, Dustin. Get lost, I mean it!”

  And Dustin had slowly backed away, uncertainly. He stood in the high weeds at the door of the house, waiting. There was the summer buzz of cicadas; grasshoppers jumped from the high sunflowers and pigweed into his hair, and he shook them off.

  “Rusty?” he called. “Rusty?” After a time, he went cautiously back into the house, but Rusty wasn’t there. Though Dustin looked everywhere, Rusty didn’t appear until suppertime.

  —

  And then suddenly it was over. A week later, they returned to school. They didn’t go back to the old house together, and, though they would wait together for the bus in the morning, Rusty was distant. Whatever had happened between them was gone. Why? Dustin thought. What did I do? But Rusty wouldn’t say anything. When Dustin tried to talk to Rusty at night, Rusty would pretend to be asleep. Once, when he tried to get in bed next to Rusty, Rusty had kicked him, hard—hard enough to send him across the room with a clatter that brought his mother running.

  “Dustin fell out of bed,” Rusty said solemnly, and Dustin just sat there on the floor, crying, while his mother stared at them.

  “What’s going on here?” she said, and Rusty shrugged.

  “Nothing,” Rusty said, and Dustin crawled back into his own bed, silently. “Nothing,” Dustin said.

  —

  Afterward, Dustin lay there for a long time, silent, his eyes open in the darkness. He could hear Rusty breathing. He could hear the distant yodels of coyotes in the hills, and nothing circled in his mind. Nothing, Rusty said. Nothing, Dustin said. Nothing: It settled into him.

  —

  I would have done it, he thought. He would have chosen Rusty over them.

  Maybe he wouldn’t have killed his parents himself, but he knew he’d have let Rusty do it. He would’ve stood watching the house burn down, and then he’d turn and get into the passenger seat of the Jeep, and he and Rusty would have driven off to California to meet Black Sabbath. They would have seen the Grand Canyon; they would have seen the saguaro cactuses and the desert and then the Pacific Ocean. He would’ve been sorry—he would’ve cried for his parents, he would miss them terribly—but he had accepted the new life that was being offered to him.

  And he saw now that it wasn’t real. That it had never been real. He could feel that other life shrinking and losing its possibility, and he knew that it was something that he should never, ever, think of again.

  1

  MY MOM HAD been dead almost a year, and my dad was losing his mind. He would hang out with this guy named Aqil Ozorowski, who I guess was once his patient? They would meet up at a bar down the road called Parnell’s, and they’d talk through their paranoid conversations, pints of beer and shots of Jameson whiskey, and then my dad would walk home through the suburban greenery of Cleveland Heights, carrying a six-pack of beers that he bought from CVS and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, and the streets were utterly empty, and the trees were dripping from a thunderstorm, and he’d be stumbling along in the dark and his feet would splash in puddles on the sidewalk and the old houses would stare at him, their windows lightless, and he was a widower, forty-something years old, sad and wobbly and flushed and intoxicated with a plastic bag swinging from his hand. One time he saw a deer; one time he thought he saw a bear walking down Briarwood.

  “It’s not completely improbable,” he told me. “There are between seventy and ninety wild black bears in the state of Ohio.”

  Was that true? How crazy was he? Maybe a lot, I didn’t know for sure.

  I was eighteen and supposedly starting college and living home alone with him. My brother, Dennis, was out of the picture: a sophomore at Cornell, very very very busy. Not interested in what was happening with his crazy dad and loser brother at home.

  —

  I remember waking up and hearing my dad come in and I saw his silhouette in my door tilting back and forth a little, and he had for some reason decided that he needed to wake me up to inform me about a serial killer.  Some person murdering college boys, he said. Drowning them.

  How 1990s, I thought.

  He was investigating it, he said. Possibly writing a book about it.

  And I was like, “Cool.” And then I rolled over and faced the wall.

  2

  “I’VE HEARD ABOUT that,” my friend Rabbit said the next day. “It’s like an urban legend among college kids. Supposedly there’s this serial killer who kidnaps drunken bros and then tortures them and dumps them in a river so it looks like a drowning. They call the guy Jack Daniels, which I think is hilarious. Or else some people think it might be some kind of cult initiation ritual.”

  He had his hypodermic kit out and was cooking some heroin on a spoon with his lighter. He grinned at me. “How’d your dad get into that? He’s really losing his shit, isn’t he?”

  —

  Rabbit liked the needle. He preferred it to snorting or smoking, but when he heard his mom open the door to the basement, when he heard her slow heavy steps begin to clump down the stairs, I watched the way he sprang quickly to tuck the syringe under the cushion of the couch.

  He put the little baggie of heroin in his pocket and the spoon into a coffee cup. He left the bong where it was, on the coffee table in front of us.

  “Bruce?” she called. Which was Rabbit’s actual first name. “Sweetheart? I need your help.”

  Rabbit looked at me sidelong. One of the first personal things he explained about himself was that no one, no one, called him Bruce. Whenever that name was spoken, he’d give me a warning glance.

  “What do you want?” he said now, looking hard into my eyes. “Ma, I’m busy.”

  “I can’t reach the cupboard above the refrigerator. With my leg like it is, I don’t want to try to climb up on a chair.”

  “Ma,” he said. “What do you need so bad at one in the morning? Why don’t you just go to sleep?”

  “Ummm,” I murmured. I made some kind of weird gesture thing with my hand. “Rabb,” I said. “I could help her, if…”

  But Rabbit froze me with a glare.

  “Go to sleep, Ma,” Rabbit said, which made no difference. Like in a horror movie, his mom kept plunking down the stairs and then her body came into view. She was somewhere in her forties. Not really bad-looking for her age. Barefoot. Sweatpants. A T-shirt that was cut off at the midriff.

  “Okay, I’ll admit it,” she said. “It’s vodka. I put a bottle of vodka in that cabinet and I need it. God damn it, Rabbit, I’m in pain.”

>   And actually, she probably was in pain. Rabbit’s mom had cancer. Ovarian cancer.

  Cancer of the see you in tee, Rabbit said, because he took pleasure in making me wince with how filthy he could be. It’s the one main game that guys play together after they turn about thirteen or so: Who can be most offensive, who can be most callous, who can care the least?

  How fuckin’ fucked up is that? Rabbit said, and his mouth twitched, very rabbit-like.

  And yet: Even more fucked up—unspeakable—was that my own mom died of the same kind of cancer. To me, this was the kind of coincidence that could make you suddenly think that some Higher Power or whatever was watching you. And not in a friendly way.

  This wasn’t something I could say to Rabbit, of course. Rabbit knew how my mom died, obviously, but he had studiously unknown it, and it was not something that would ever appear in our conversations.

  3

  WHEN I FOUND out my mom was going to die, I cried for about five minutes. Ten minutes, tops.

  But it was the kind of crying that you never forget.  Let’s call it weeping. You don’t know the difference until you experience it—the way that your body suddenly turns into a, like, organism; all your molecules are steaming out of your skin and you are being pumped full of a hotter, heavier matter. Up to that point, you thought that emotions were part of the brain, but then you realize that in truth they are part of the body, that they are processes of your muscles and lungs and bones.

  My mom was in a hospice, and at the time I didn’t know what that actually meant. My dad took me out onto this hospice patio, which had a wooden boardwalk lined by trellises, like you were supposed to be walking through a grape arbor or something.

  “I’m not sure your mom is going to make it,” he said. And then cleared his throat.  “I mean, I’m pretty sure. That she’s not.”

  —

  And now, ten months later, he was concerned that I hadn’t cried enough. Tearlessness: It’s a symptom.

  I’d been to a colleague of my dad’s who prescribed Zoloft. Which, by the way, I was selling. And I’d been to another colleague of my dad’s who thought I might need lithium. Which nobody was interested in buying.

  4

  I WAS SUPPOSED to be going to college.  I hadn’t gone in for the whole apply-to-a-bunch-of-expensive-schools-and-wait-with-bated-breath-to-see-if-you-get-into-the-Ivy-League! thing that my brother had turned into such a huge drama. Instead, I was going to live at home and take classes downtown at Cleveland State, and I’d gone so far as to register for an English and a math and a political science, though as it turned out school had started two weeks ago and I had somehow not attended any of the classes yet.

  My dad didn’t know this, of course. He doled out money for “books” and “expenses” without even blinking an eye—I guess he’d gotten some money from my mom’s insurance—and honestly the majority of our conversations involved him opening his wallet and handing me some cash. Sometimes he would pop up and attempt an amateurish performance of a dad—he would go off on some digression about how constellations aren’t real, or how kale is really good for you, or how he wished we would have gone camping more when I was little. Did I want to go camping? Or he would lay some wisdom on me, Sufi wisdom, he said, which seemed completely random and impenetrable. Then he’d roam off, trailing his wisps of positivity through the house. Mostly we avoided each other successfully.

  Sometimes, I’d see him standing in the backyard smoking a cigarette; I’d smell it wafting up through my window, and I’d watch from above as tendrils of smoke curled out of his mouth and nose, as he looked around nervously, and it was kind of sad, in a way, that he didn’t know I was gazing down at him. Kind of hoping that he would glance up and see me, that it would be one of those moments from a corny movie. Eye to eye: Epiphany! Connection! Cue up a gentle alternative-rock song. Still, for a second, I couldn’t help but wish for it. Look up here, Dad!

  Instead, I found a cluster of stubbed cigarette butts in a potted plant. It looked like a diorama of a crime scene, the bent cigarettes curled up like bodies that had been executed.

  It was September, and leaves were still green on the trees. The big old elms outside spread canopies that were twice as high as our three-story house, and I loved the darkness they cast at night. I loved the corridors of side streets as you walked along, the smell of cut grass, the four-way stoplight blinking wetly red, the smell of a skunk that would linger for a block or so, the chirr and zuzz of insects and the barking of toads, and the moths glowing gold in the high, hard streetlights.

  And then I emerged out onto Lee Road, which is a business street, and a while or so back they put up surveillance cameras because of loitering teens, and then a little later they made a curfew law for the street—because of, they claimed, teenaged “flash mobs”—so that until this year it was actually illegal for me to be walking here, and I instinctually put the hood of my sweatshirt up and slid on into the all-night CVS for some chips and Skittles and a large energy drink.

  Outside, I leaned against the wall that faced the parking lot and dined. It was 3:23 in the morning, and I didn’t know what I was waiting for. I put a lozenge of Skittle into my mouth and then drank some of the NRG tea. Looked over at the shadows beyond the dumpsters at the edge of the fence.

  Better hope you don’t see any bears on the way home, I thought.

  5

  MY UNCLE RUSTY called late at night. And usually when he called I was extremely high.

  Picture me spread-eagle in my underwear on my bed. I’d been without language for maybe two hours, staring at the textures on the ceiling, which are possibly rotting leaves, or centipedes marching single file, or Chthulus. Imagine that my phone would begin to vibrate from somewhere underneath my body and it sent a slow tentacle of awareness through me and at last I put my phone to my ear and my eyes were still on that fucking insanely alive ceiling.

  And Rusty said, “Hey there, man.”

  His voice was kind of scratchy and deep, and it made me think of stoners and heavy-metal music from the 1980s. The intonation and inflection, and so forth. First time I heard him it occurred to me that there are certain ways of speaking, maybe even certain ways of moving your tongue and your voice box, that only a particular generation of humans learns how to do. I sometimes thought that my uncle had a way of talking that was preserved in amber from 1983, and even from the first time he spoke to me I thought it was amazing.

  “Hey,” I said. After a pause that seemed really overly long. I was imagining him with a beard. Maybe wearing a paisley bandanna. Shitty orthodontia, but not in a bad way.

  “Man,” he said. “Are you on dope again?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “I’m ’shrooming.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said: “I’m sorry to hear that.” He said, “I thought you said you were going to—”

  “I am,” I said. “I am, I am, I am.”

  6

  RABBIT’S MOM AND I smoked a little weed together, and then I drove her to the chemotherapy. “The infusion room” was what she called it.

  This was about nine in the morning and Rabbit was still sound asleep, and Terri told me what a good person I was. “You’re such a sweetie,” she said. “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?”

  But that was not really a question, because she kept talking. She told me about the other women in the infusion room. She had nothing in common with them, she said.

  There was an old widowed white lady with one of those perms that made her hair look like dandelion fluff, and she was super proud that it hadn’t fallen out yet.

  There was a “spiritual” one, a hippie in a big bright colored scarf over her bald head, who brought plants and little statues of the Hindu god Ganesh. The remover of obstacles, this woman explained to Terri.

  There was one who was so thin, probably less than ninety pounds, a kind of aloof or meek black woman; the only thing Terri knew about her was that she loved the television show Law & Order. This woma
n always had the TV tuned to Law & Order, and kept the volume loud, and watched avidly with her skeleton eyes.

  And so I pulled up in front of the Kaiser Permanente building and I hadn’t said a word—Terri was talking the whole time—and I said, “Should I wait for you?”

  And she put her hand on my knee and gave me one of those looks that was impossible to read. One part of my brain said that her expression was very sad, the way my mom would have looked if she had been willing to tell me that she was going to die.

  And another part of my brain said that Terri was kind of weirdly, creepily, flirting with me.

  And then another part of my brain said, Wait, what if she just wants to be your friend? What if it doesn’t matter that she’s Rabbit’s mother, that she’s dying, that she has spent twenty-five years more than you on earth? What if it’s just, like, you got stoned together an hour ago. You did her a favor. The two of you are pals, that’s all.

  “Go on,” she said.  “I don’t know how long I’m going to be.”

  “Well,” I said. “I could hang out. If you need me to.”

  “Aaron,” she said. “You don’t owe me anything. You know that, right?”

  “I know,” I said, and she smiled.

  The smile was in this way that I hoped I’d never see again, because it wasn’t a smile—it was a black hole, a magnetic field. A rush like you are in a spaceship passing, video-game style, through stars and stars and stars.

  7

  I STARTED TALKING to my uncle Rusty about six months ago.

  This was after he was released from prison, after most of the stuff that my dad had testified at the trial was proved to have been a lie.