by Dan Chaon
—
In the distance you can see the lights of a train coming along the elevated track, a glimmer through the icy fog. Maybe it’s your blue train.
Think of Dustin strolling toward you across the platform, slow and delicate like when he walked out of the house holding the gun. His feet barely touching the ground, his eyes wide, the gun and the can of Coke moving in his hands as if he were making them into puppets, pretending they were walking, too.
Watch your back.
10
OLD IRISH GUY at the front desk of the Elinor Hotel. Wavy hair of pure white and red nose shaped like an ace of clubs, and though you’ve been living there over a year and a half, he looks like he only half-recognizes you. You slouch past and he watches you take the stairs, not the tiny creepy elevator, and arrive at last in your little furnished room. Vanessa Zuckerbrot, your Innocence Project lawyer, found it for you, and even paid for the first three months’ rent. Though now that you are in Chicago, she is careful to keep her distance. If you thought that she maybe was on the prowl for fifty-year-old prison-dude cock, you were sadly mistaken. Sweet Vanessa! She’s already moved on to the next victim she’s going to rescue, working tirelessly.
—
But Vanessa can’t help you now anyway. You have to be a man, and you pause at the fire door to your floor, you look out through the little portal window with its chicken-wire glass, nobody waiting in your hallway, nobody by your front door.
You should watch your back: What a cruel thing to say to someone just out of prison!
11
SATURDAY AND YOU’RE like fuck it. Back at the restaurant early in the morning, you’re making a vegetable stock in a 120-quart pot, chopping onions, garlic, parsley, carrots, celery.
If he calls you back, he calls you back. You never want to hear that message on his phone again, as long as you live. Leave a massage. Yeah, I’ve got a massage for you, you little shit.
—
The other bit of it is not so easy to shake, though. That little stab: I’m really glad you called.
You should watch your back. Somebody who knows how to screw with you. Not Dustin. Not Dustin, it doesn’t seem like Dustin.
You’ve got to consider that maybe something went very wrong in that last call. The video call, the Skype. Something you said? Something about the way you looked?
I’ve got this crazy uncle that keeps calling me, Aaron tells his friends. I don’t know how to get rid of him. They’re sitting around some crappy apartment getting high, and Aaron’s phone rings, and one of his friends says, I’ll get rid of the fucker for you. The friend puts on a deep voice and takes up Aaron’s phone.
Maybe Galadriel was right. “Stalker behavior,” she said, and sure, why not, let’s say that’s what it is. You’re just obsessed with the past, aren’t you, Russell? Just can’t leave well enough alone.
So let it go. You’ve got some kind of life in front of you, right? Lifelong smoker, fifty years old, completely without skills or resources. You could live another ten years! Twenty even! Why not fucking enjoy it, rather than dwelling on the past?
I think this, I feel this in my heart, and then as I’m cutting a stalk of celery I slice the tip of my left pointer finger all the way off. I feel the knife go through the skin and bone, and I see the fingertip sitting there on the cutting board, a little piece of meat with a fingernail attached to it, and the blood spurts out like my finger is a water gun. I put my other hand over it and blood trickles out of my fist.
“God damn!” I say. “I just cut off my finger.”
And the guy who is doing prep work at the next station, Alphonso, looks up.
“¿Qué?” he says.
12
SO ALPHONSO DRIVES me to the emergency room but they don’t reattach my fingertip like I think maybe they will. Nope. My finger meat is now medical waste, being hauled by semi to a landfill in Indiana.
And I—fully bandaged and gauzed and prescribed with painkillers, am sitting at a bus stop and waiting for the chariot that will bear me homeward.
Up until now, I have been pretty judicious about the use of substances. I have a beer now and then, or a shot of bourbon. I’ll buy some weed from time to time from the kid who hangs around at the bus stop on the Belmont corner.
But nothing like this sweet painkiller. I’d forgotten what drugs could be like, and riding along in the window seat of a bus I think: Hell, yeah. This might be the motherfuckin’ answer.
Get home and the thing continues to bleed like a house afire. Soaked all the way through the gauze and so I change the bandages, take just a quick glimmer of what the tip of a chopped-off finger looks like.
Exactly as you would expect it to look.
—
And so wrap it back up as best you can. You’ll never get the mummy wrap as tight as that kind nurse got it, little brunette Hispanic lady. You said something funny and laughed and she liked you. When the doctor told you to get over-the-counter pain medication, she raised one eyebrow, then later slipped you a handful of goodies.
13
WAKE UP AND it’s afternoon. Sunday, the restaurant is closed—not that you would have gone back anyway.
You pick up your cell phone and look at the time: two-fifteen in the afternoon, as a matter of fact. You just slept for about eighteen hours, and your bandage must have shed at some point, because your bed is covered in blood. One place soaked through to the point that the mattress is wet. Blood on the cook’s shirt you slept in, the pants—you did manage to take off your filthy bum’s shoes, good job!
Blood in your hair and on your face. The creases of your left palm, stuck together as if you’d let a piece of red candy melt in your hand.
Starving, and in pain. So wash your face off and take a half of one of those pills the nurse gave you, and then head out the door. Pull on your shoes and your ski coat, don’t even change your fucking bloody duds. Just want to get something to eat, because otherwise you’re going to have some upsetting times.
Trudge your way to Burrito King, which is the closest possible food, just a couple of blocks; get in there, order the Special of the Day, and sit down at the table with it and promptly fall asleep.
Awakened and ejected by the stern old Mexican owner, and you see that the cute little teenaged waitress, maybe his daughter, is looking at you with her arms crossed over her chest, her face scared and sad, and you look down and see that your finger has bled all over their table.
“Oh, wow,” you say, and you sound a little mushmouth. You take some paper napkins from the dispenser on the table and smear through the grue. “Let me clean up this mess for you,” you say, groggily smearing blood into a finger painting. “I don’t want you all to have to do it.”
“Just go,” the man says. He gestures, and poor teenaged daughter makes the kind of sad face that babies make right before they begin bawling.
—
On the street, stand under the sign that says KUPUJEMY ZTOTO, whatever that means, and then you make a hobbling jaywalk across Belmont to the Walgreens. Wherein you plan to purchase more gauze, bleach, a box of assorted chocolates, lunch meat, and a forty-ounce Cobra malt liquor.
You keep your poor left hand in the pocket of your coat, still bleeding, copiously as they say, and then you get to the front of the checkout line and put your items on the counter and the librarian-like white-haired white lady gives you a look of horror.
She sees that your hand is in your coat pocket curled in the position of a gun, and she is fully prepared to be robbed. She puts her little old hands up, and in turn you slowly raise your bum hand out of your pocket and show her your wound.
“Somebody bit off my finger,” you tell her. “I need to buy this gauze. And these chocolates.”
14
SO IT APPEARS that I look pretty bad. I keep my head down and try to find a clear path down the sidewalk back to my place. Left hand in pocket, still bleeding. Right hand with two Walgreens plastic bags
swinging back and forth by their handles.
The injured finger throbbing to a fucking disco beat. “You Shook Me All Night Long,” by AC/DC. That song sucks.
Get up to my apartment and put the bags down on the table and open the box of gauze with my teeth, because my left hand now feels like it’s roasting over an open fire. Very red and swollen, not at all what I’d like to see happening right now.
More than likely means a trip back to the emergency room, an hour on the bus, another four or five in the waiting room.
I look at my phone. Seven o’clock at night? How is that even possible?
—
And then I see that I have a text message.
From Aaron.
It says:
And then somebody knocks on my door.
15
OPEN THE DOOR and there he stands.
—
I recognize him right away, though he should by all rights be unrecognizable. Hasn’t aged well. Those kids that look like they are fresh-faced and freckled and ever-young? Round about forty, I imagine, it starts to get jowly and puffy in the jaw, the skin kind of plucked chicken–like. He also looks like he hasn’t had much sleep.
“Hey,” I say, and I let out an awkward laugh, which seems to be a bad choice, because his face hardens even further. He shudders.
“Is Aaron here?” he says hoarsely.
—
There’s blood up and down my shirt, and I watch as he assesses the scene. Here’s my bags on the little table. My kitchenette, with microwave and mini-refrigerator. My TV on the dresser, my laptop on the nightstand, and a little animated Windows icon is bumping drunkenly back and forth across the screen. He stares at my bed. Just an ordinary cheap twin bed, but the sheets have big bright red stains of blood on them.
And just like that he draws a gun.
“Okay,” I say, and I lift my hands. “Look,” I say. “Fuck. I cut the tip of my finger off at work. Aaron’s not here, man,” I say.
He closes the door behind him with the back of his shoe. “You’ve been in touch with him recently?” Dustin says.
And I’m like, “Fuh! I just got a fucking crazy text from him. All those little pictures, like comic-book pictures? What are they called? Emojoes?”
He looks puzzled, but the gun is very steady in his hand. Holds it like he knows what he’s doing, and the eyes are wide and bright.
Remember would not be the right word for what is happening when he steps forward with that gun.
—
I take my phone and hold it up to him, so that he can see Aaron’s text. “See?” I say. “He just sent this to me a second ago.”
“His car was parked on this street two days ago, and now it’s been towed. Where is he now?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He has never been here. Ever. I talked to him on Skype on Monday. That’s the last time I saw him.”
I hold up my sore hand, because, I guess, I’m going to stop the bullet with my palm?
“What did you tell him?” he says. “You told him to call Wave, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I did.”
I glance behind me, but there’s nothing in my vision that looks like it could be weaponized to defend against a revolver.
“But he never came here,” I say. “I don’t know what he’s playing at, but I have been trying to get in touch with him for three or four days, and I literally just got a text from him with an exclamation point and a picture of a gun in it.”
Dustin cocks his head. “I don’t believe you,” he says. “I don’t believe you’re innocent.”
“I’m not innocent,” I say. “I’m not innocent, I was never innocent. I never said I was.”
Just a second and he comes out of whatever trance he was in. You see his eyes sharpen, you see—what?—some little shred of the kid he was when you first shared a cot in his bedroom, back when you were fourteen. Back when they thought they would adopt you and make you well. Some shred of the kid who laughed his head off when you let crawdads pinch their claws to your earlobes and you wore them like jewelry. Some shred of the kid you took to the abandoned shed and let suck your nipple. Some shred of the kid who stood with you at the canal, and you told him about the gibbeners. They were the men that would come for you, that’s what your mom always said.
Especially if you couldn’t keep secrets.
—
He looks at me, and he probably sees his own version of that stuff, too. After all this time, you’re both on the same page.
“I’m sorry,” I say. By which I mean: I feel bad about abusing you, man. By which I mean:
Please put the gun down. Please don’t kill me. By which I mean: I can’t even guess why I ever lived.
What if the last thing you think before you die is not even regret? What if it’s just, like, puzzlement? Why would they put you on this earth and then make your life so pointless? Who wished you alive? How dare they? The whole thing just seems accidental and random. Throw a baby that no one asked for into the world, grin as it fumbles its way into the shitty arenas you made for it. Watch it fight. So much less cruel if you’d just taken a brick to it when it was born.
“The reason I was calling you,” you say. “I just really want to know what happened,” you tell him. “For a while, I thought you might know. But I think you probably don’t, right?”
He doesn’t reply. Just stares at you, the way a cat stares at the moon. His lips move for a second, but you can’t read them. His eyes are wide like they were that night when he came out of the house carrying the gun. Blank or full of wonder, you can’t say which, but you feel a keening go down your back.
He is dangerous, of course. Maybe he’s always been dangerous, but you only see it now clearly for the first time. “Easy,” you whisper soothingly. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
The gun moves back and forth in his hand. For a second, it seems like I could just reach right out and take it. Just snatch it away from him, and then I could fuckin’ beat his ass and put his head in the toilet and then send him home. We’d be more or less even.
My hand twitches, and I make a move to reach toward him.
He flinches back. He still has the instinct of when he was a little kid, when I’d sometimes snatch something out of his hand, just out of pure meanness.
Flinches full body, and pulls the fuckin’ trigger.
—
Oh.
—
The bullet enters somewhere in my torso and I have time to register the surprised look on Dustin’s face. I have time to register the echoing ricocheted bang. So much time to see everything.
—
And I think: Wait
R e me me m b er
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.
—
Last thing you remember: the rap of knuckles against the car window. Great. It’s the classic policeman gesture, tap tap tap, roll down your window, sir, license and registration, and you already have your cop face on before you even glance up.
But instead it’s your dad’s friend Aqil. He peers in at you, frowning, squinting one eye. Makes a twirling motion with his finger that means “roll down your window.” And so you obey and he says, “What are you doing here?”
And you’re like, blink. Blink. “Um,” you say. “What are you doing here?”
“Mm,” he says. And you get the hostile vibes that you’ve always gotten, ever since he started hanging around your dad. Aqil Ozorowski. He has the kind of face that always seems to be studying your expression, as if he’s heard some rumor about you that he won’t mention.
“I’ll be honest with you, Aaron,” he says. “This is a place that your dad and me have been s
couting for a long time.”
Scouting? What did that mean? “That’s weird,” you say. “I found this address when I was over at Rabbit’s house. Is my dad with you?”
“Yeah,” Aqil says. “He’s inside.”
“Oh,” you say. “Isn’t that, like, breaking and entering?”
He gives me a salty look. “Technically, maybe,” he says. “But it’s been abandoned for years, and we’re not doing any damage. Just looking around.”
“If you say so,” you say, and he cocks his head, his smile full of teeth.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go talk to your dad.”
Truth is you’re not really sure you want to talk to your dad at this point, given the conversation you’ve just had with his cousin, given that letter you read, given all the things that are starting to emerge. But what can you do? And so you turn off your mom’s car and follow Aqil across the street toward the house. Watching as he looks left and right as if he’s afraid of anyone seeing him. They’re definitely breaking and entering, you think. They’re going to end up getting arrested.
“It’s cool that you’ve taken an interest,” Aqil says. “Makes your dad really proud.”
“Uh-huh,” you say, and when the two of you get to the edge of the curb he takes another scope around. It’s probably like three in the morning, so you’re not sure who would be peeping, but whatever. Then he heads up the sidewalk, moving quickly. The front stoop of the house has been recently shoveled, which makes you kind of wonder how “abandoned” it is, but Aqil moves fast and so you follow suit.
“I think we’re making some progress,” Aqil says. “We hit a fallow patch after that drowning in Painesville, ’cause we got so close, I feel like, and then 2013 was very dry for us; there was just nothing that fit the pattern. But this came up, and we’re really back on the hunt again!”
