What makes you so sure he’s dead? That boy in the house and on the street was pretty lively. He gave you a handful of marbles, too. Maybe Aaron just ran away.
Yes, but his face . . .
A game system was tucked into a narrow entertainment center with a door of tinted black glass. Above it, an Onkyo rack with CD and DVD units wired up to a small, collapsible flat-screen monitor. On his desk was a Mac mini. Nice stuff, but I wasn’t going to search his computer files, not now, not with Annette just down the hall. I needed something that spoke to him, about him. Most boys don’t keep diaries, do they? I didn’t find one in his desk, but I did find something else that seemed a bit of a coincidence. In the desk’s shallow center drawer there was a single scrap of white notebook paper with numbers written on it.
22 38 44 06
And above that, written in the same stiff, pencil scrawl -
Middle combination
I kept the combination to Stacey’s storage locker in my desk’s center drawer, too. This must have been Aaron’s locker combination from school. The numbers seemed excessive, though, and oddly familiar. Four of them instead of the usual three. I tried to distinguish a pattern to them. 22 38 44 06. What did they have in common? Anything? I looked up at his wall and thought for a moment, mumbling. 22 38 44 . . . I knew these numbers, could almost hear them. And then I could hear them, they came to me in a marching rhythm, a track with heavy base, a slow tempo, and a Bone Thugs set of harmonizing back-up vocals.
The 22 is for you
Cause I love my guns
The 38 is for hate
Treat ’em like my sons
The 44 is for whores
Cause I love my guns
The aught-six is for the pigs
Who sent my brother to the pen
Cause he loved his guns
The AK is for the State
Can you feel the white hate?
Motherfuckuhs grab yo guns
The Revolution’s rising sun
They make me feel like a man
Join the Revolution, son
It was another Ghost song, ‘From My Cold Dead Hands’. The numbers were guns. Gun calibers. A coincidence? They didn’t mean anything to me except for the fact that I remembered the song, and I doubted a kid would choose gun calibers for a locker combination. You didn’t get to choose your locker combo when I was a kid. You bought the stupid lock from the drugstore and it came with pre-set numbers. I was closing the drawer when my eyes caught on something white and glossy - another photo. I turned it over.
A Christmas tree with bundles of torn wrapping paper. Aaron, younger, sitting on the floor in a pair of footie pajamas. Next to him, a large stuffed bear, the Kenneth bear, its eyes red from the camera flash.
The bear. She lied. Annette left Aaron’s bear in my house. When? Why? What was she trying to tell me? And what if she didn’t lie, but wasn’t even aware of what she had done?
I put the photo back and closed the drawer.
Next to the entertainment center, on the floor and so innocuous I hadn’t noticed it on my first pass, was a blue footlocker with leather handles. I had a green one just like it when I was a kid, filled with plastic Army men and Micronauts. Aaron’s was latched, but I popped the brass flap open with a ballpoint pen I found in his desk drawer. Inside was Aaron’s music collection. As I ran my fingers over the spines of the jewel cases, I became dizzy.
Ninety per cent of his collection consisted of releases from one artist.
The bad one.
I crouched over Aaron’s footlocker, opened the copy of Ghost’s first Rolling Stone cover, and found the review that introduced the monster to the world.
Parents, teachers and brain-dead celebs be warned - you’re about to be bombed. Ghost, a white rapper cold as ice and anything but vanilla, has delivered a masterpiece in what is sure to become a hip-hop landmark of self-evisceration. Over the course of sixteen diabolical tracks produced by his mentor, PhD-Jay, Autotopsy combines terrifyingly nimble wordplay, no less than three personalities (alternately homicidal, comedic, tortured), and emcee-slaying splatter-crunk in genius and despicable ways. It may be the first rap album crafted equally for a generation of ADD tweens, Ivy League brats, desperate housewives and anyone else who prefers their audible pharmaceuticals, gonzo porn plots and Tarantino exploding heads served up on a bloodstained scratch-table smorgasbord of knives, ski masks, witches and farmhouse nightmares . . .
The review went on for another half-page. They gave it five stars. But, then, they gave all of Ghost’s records five stars, except for Snuffed, the last one, which everyone knew was a tremendous hunk of shit and which even Ghost had started referring to as his Godfather III. There were dozens more such rags in the footlocker, the ones that had given my former employer top billing.
It didn’t stop there. Little Aaron, at the ripe old age of eight (nine? ten?) had not been just another Ghost fan. He had the entire catalog. All five studio albums, the soundtrack to Ghost’s movie, Haunted Tracks, the singles, even the imports. He also had the collectible Playa Cards and a pair of Ghost’s signature Converse (size 5, never laced), a pint-sized white Vaporware tracksuit, as well as half a dozen concert tees, and - shrink-wrapped and autographed in green marker - a replica of the skull and bones wristband Ghost wore on stage to keep the sweat from shorting his mic. I could vouch for the signature. I’d seen it a thousand times and signed it a couple hundred more during those encounters when I was trapped into providing an autograph instead of just fleeing as the cameras began to click.
It was real, this was real.
The black hooded sweatshirt. The white letters across the chest spelled Ghost. The limited edition ones he had sold through his website. Of course, that’s why I had almost recognized it.
Perhaps Aaron had died in it.
Or was this all a coincidence? I needed it to be. Ghost had millions of fans, after all. This footlocker did not mean there was a sinister connection between Aaron’s world and mine, between Annette and me.
Even so, the guilt over Stacey that had reawakened during my encounter with Annette this morning now combined with Aaron’s whispering - look what they did, look what they did - and this entire Ghost mess, and I knew it was all connected somehow, and that I was at the center of it, responsible for something worse than I ever imagined. The undefined guilt hung over me like a steel-spiked albatross, leaving me to dig for an explanation that would justify all I had dedicated to this man, this rapper who had become my alter ego and would not leave me alone, and I found myself sinking deeper into myself and defending him as if both of us were to blame.
The kid. Had Arthur and Annette condoned this? They must have known what their son was listening to. Had they caved in to incessant ‘but all the others kids have it’ whining? Or were they the kind of cool parents who understood that rap music, no matter how much it glorified violence and pornified women, was fiction and sometimes art? Did they accept that Ghost was a personality, an identity construct created out of a poor but fiercely intelligent trailer kid’s imagination as a response to his nightmare childhood? Did they understand that the content of his music came from his environment and inspirations, his first means of escape: earlier rap music, horror films, his father’s gun collection, his mother’s medicine cabinet? Or was it simpler than all that justification? Maybe Annette was one of those moms who couldn’t decipher the lyrics that rivaled De Sade’s, the kind that hears only the catchy beats and rhyming sounds, and remained ignorant of what her son was giggling about from behind his bedroom door, from inside his iPod cocoon.
She and Arthur might have liked his music, I realized (which necessitated that she had also lied to me about not liking his music). The hate letters came from fundamentalists and censorship warriors: no surprise there. But Ghost’s fan mail also came from Japanese schoolgirls, suburban American boys and girls of all colors and, yes, parents. Adults. Educated, cultured people. More than I would have imagined.
It wasn’t just his music
, which always had a pop hook to go along with the meat cleaver. There was something All-American appealing about Ghost’s serrated honesty and charisma, his success story, the rise from poverty to empire, his very suburban appearance (read: white, clean-cut). He wasn’t the Oakland Raider-clad, corn-rowed gangsta that had scared the shit out of the establishment in the eighties. He was just this guy with a knack for looking victimized, small enough you wanted to take him under your arm and explain it to him that it couldn’t be all that bad.
They loved him because he tore himself apart for their listening pleasure. His demons and sins were their entertainment. Very few popular artists are capable, let alone willing, to open themselves to such an extent. But Ghost didn’t know how to do it any other way. It was his calling card and philosophy. Music would heal him, but only after he had used it to destroy himself in front of the audience. It was right there in the title of his first album. Autotopsy, and he meant it.
But even Ghost fictionalized his self-image, exaggerated his wicked deeds. Of course he did. Otherwise he would be in jail by now. He could rap about making love to a headless woman - while her severed head used the voice of his mother to make fun of him from atop the dresser across the room - because it was too outrageous to take seriously. And the critics offered cover aplenty. Because he was literate, took poetry to another level. He had street cred because he flowed with exceptional ease and was his own worst critic. He used words the way Bobby Fischer used pawns and bishops, mixing slang and gutter talk with five syllable wowzers like some love child of Michael Chabon and Bushwick Bill. A guy who could cross-pollinate references to John Wayne Gacy with text excerpts from Pinske’s translation of The Inferno couldn’t really be a psycho in real life, could he?
No. Not at first, anyway.
Later, after his wife left him, when he became obsess—
There was something else in the footlocker, buried under the magazines. I set the CD aside. It was a black binder, a scrapbook full of plastic sleeves. I opened it. The sleeves were full of news clippings. The first headline said,
PARENTS CLAIM SUICIDAL SON OBSESSED WITH RAPPER
My heart stuttered. This is it, this is what happened to Aaron. But, no, this article was about a boy of sixteen named Brian Jennings, of Dallas. I’d never heard of or read about him, and doubted Ghost had either. He didn’t like to hear bad news. Brian Jennings had come home for lunch one day, painted his face white with clown make-up, and hanged himself in the garage.
I turned the page.
TEACHER ASSAULTED FOR CONFISCATING GHOST
Carl Sanders, forty-three, of Newark. A high school social studies teacher who had taken an iPod away from one of his students. The iPod contained only one artist, Ghost’s third album, American Bloodland. The student, who had been chanting the lyrics and making a nuisance of himself all week, went berserk. Mr Sanders was kicked and beaten savagely in front of his class. He spent three days in a coma, and, while a partial recovery was expected, Mr Sanders would never teach again due to the brain trauma he suffered.
On the opposite page,
PAROLED SEX OFFENDER USED GHOST TIX TO LURE SIXTH-GRADERS
I scanned the article. It made no mention of Aaron Copeland, and the pederast had been caught trolling suburbs outside of Indianapolis.
MADISON SCHOOL SHOOTER’S DIARY REVEALS OBSESSION WITH RAPPER
This one I remembered. Stacey and I had argued about it several times, and it had made international headlines, plastering the cable channels for weeks. A Hmong exchange student with a history of at least three mental illnesses had recorded video of himself at home in his basement, posing with Tec-9s while Ghost’s chart-topping single ‘Hot Lunch’ played in the background. Thirty-two minutes later he had entered his high school cafeteria and shot eleven students and the custodian before turning one of the guns on himself. Neither the boy nor the media paused to reflect that the song was written as a eulogy, told from the point of view of a fictional girl who had survived the Columbine massacre, the unfolding horror of which, Ghost claimed, left an indelible impression on him when he was nineteen, touching notes of outrage and empathy in him from twelve hundred miles away. It was one of the first songs he ever wrote, before he even had a recording contract.
In 2006, Ghost performed ‘Hot Lunch’ at the Grammys as a duet with Sting, and later donated an undisclosed amount of proceeds from the single to the prevention of school violence. If you studied the lyrics, which were brutal but heartfelt, rippling with outrage and nuance that went far beyond sentiment and pop-culture references, you understood it was a work of art, an ingenious and haunting cry for honesty about America’s love affair with guns, and a call for parental responsibility. Of course, the media took a handful of lines out of context and slapped them under the real killer’s chilling self-video, turning Ghost into more fodder for the censorship warriors and a scapegoat for grieving parents. As the evangelists arrived outside his gated St Louis compound waving pitchforks, Ghost became apoplectic. He was hurt. He issued his only written response to this kind of thing, defending himself and the importance of music as a means to reach young people and help them consider society’s ills, but he did so too late and it was buried beneath the next wave of national news, a political sex scandal.
I needed to find Aaron’s hot lunch. I read on, hypnotized by the paper clippings and articles printed from internet news sites.
FOUR YOUTHS SUSPECTED OF GANG RAPE OUTSIDE GHOST CONCERT
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD CHARGED IN TWENTY-TWO CAT KILLINGS, CITES RAPPER
DORM MONITOR RAPIST USES ‘GHOST’ DEFENSE, CLAIMS HE WAS HAUNTED
BROOKLYN MAN BEHEADS WIFE WHILE SINGING GHOST SONG
MIDDLE SCHOOL GHOST-TEENS TORCH REPUTED GAY TAVERN
The lurid headlines throbbed before me. There were dozens of them, but none mentioned Annette, Aaron or Arthur Copeland. I wanted to leave, run downstairs, get in the car and drive to another state. But the secret was in here, I was certain. I had to find out what happened, why Aaron had collected these.
No, that was stupid. Of course Aaron had not been the one to save these. Annette or Arthur had. Why? Did they blame Ghost for whatever had happened to Aaron? Did Arthur kill himself out of guilt, or had she blamed his death on Ghost too?
I didn’t even know for sure that Aaron was dead, or that he was her son. But why else would she preserve the room this way? Keep all this Ghost memorabilia? Why hadn’t she told me about him? She had told me her husband was responsible for Stacey’s death. That required some courage. What was so bad about Aaron that she needed to hide it? Pretend he did not even exist?
Nervous, wired now, I began flipping the pages too quickly. I stopped, went back to the middle, to read them more carefully:
PSYCHOLOGISTS SEE RISE IN PATIENTS TREATED FOR ‘EVIL RECORDINGS’
I didn’t have to read very far into this one to discredit the psychologist who provided the most provocative quote. ‘It’s not so much the content,’ Dr Paul Brown of the Institute for a Brighter America said. ‘This music presents extreme violence, pornography and drug abuse not as tragedies but as episodic cartoons, a sort of consequence-free funhouse where anything goes. It’s destroying in forty-some minutes what parents spend years trying to instill in their children - namely, values and common decency.’ Dr Brown was on the board of a right-wing lobbying firm that had been waging war on the First Amendment for almost two decades. He had simply moved on from Judas Priest to Ghost.
SALVAGGIO DEATH RULED SUICIDE, WIFE BLAMES HOUSING BUBBLE FOR HUSBAND’S DEPRESSION
This was different. There was no mention of Ghost but—
A soft but urgent scraping noise in the hallway whispered at me, disrupting the silence. I closed the scrapbook quickly, wincing from the slap of plastic. I started to close the footlocker’s lid, then realized I had left the CD on the floor. I grabbed it as the scraping sound started again. I stood holding the copy of Autotopsy, afraid to move.
Scoosh-ush, scoosh-ush, scoosh-ush.
The sound of feet dragging along carpet drew nearer to Aaron’s bedroom, but stopped short of entering. I didn’t want to be confronted by Annette. She was supposed to be fast asleep three doors down. Was she sneaking up on me? I would not call out to her. She would have to break cover first. Maybe she was just using the hallway bathroom and had not realized I was in Aaron’s room.
I waited, the guilt mounting exponentially. For being in Aaron’s room and sifting through his belongings, and for whatever she thought Ghost had done. I had never robbed a grave, but I imagined the feeling being similar to this, the sense of being an intruder, of being watched by the dead.
The swishing footsteps started again, coming closer now.
The room was cold. I was dizzy, my legs stiff from crouching. It was morning and the sun was not high enough to warm the house yet, but Aaron’s room was colder than could be explained by the time of day. The steps sounded too small and too light to belong to an adult.
The Haunting of James Hastings Page 24
