Quicksand (15 page)

Now, in the wake of the rape accusation, this exposed apartment was the worst possible place to live; car engines revved at late hours and misspelled death threats tied to stones were pelted through windows. When I arrived one afternoon they were sitting in the kitchen; his head was buried in his arms on the table and Leila sat leggily on a stool with a legal pad, pen poised. “What do you think, Liam? Should I speak to the girl's mother?”

What an idea.

“I don't think so.”

“Poor girl. Still. We're in a tough spot; we must be careful not to be too aggressive.” She put down the pen and said, “I'll ask Father Andrew. He knows some lawyers.”

Aldo lifted his head. “I'll bet he does.”

Leila ignored him and said, “Liam, did your parents ever tell you that part of being a grown-up is having the ability to assess risk?”

“Not that I recall.” The idea of my parents saying anything remotely resembling that was laughable. Leila swiveled around to zap me with a disapproving gaze. “What made you throw a party like
that
?!”

Aldo hit his head on the table repeatedly. I looked away to the bunches of lilies by the sink, bulbs and dirt still attached, maybe pulled from a neighbor's flower bed, and to a pile of books we were force read in English class—
Catch-22, Pride and Prejudice, The Caretaker
—and a thick blue faux-leather edition of
Bulfinch's Mythology
, Aldo's old obsession.

“Darling,” Leila said, stroking Aldo's hair, “this whole disaster makes me think of ‘The Black Riders.' By César Vallejo.”

“Mum, don't even start.”

Leila cleared her throat. “
There are blows in life so violent—don't ask me! / Blows as if from the hatred of God; as if before them, / the deep waters of everything lived through / were backed up in the soul . . . Don't ask me!”

“Nobody's asking you.”

“Well, I'm asking you. How could they think you could do such a thing? Why did you have to leave the house that night at all?”

Aldo raised his head again. “Maybe we should move far away. Into the country.”

“The country can be summed up in one image,” Leila said. “A horse's eyes covered in flies. God has thoroughly let that animal down. It can't swat away shit.” She reached across and tugged Aldo's earlobe, a gesture that had no evident purpose or effect. “No, I love this apartment,” she said. “I fully intend to die here.” She glanced at Aldo and added, “Don't look so excited. That won't be for a very, very long time.”

“Don't be so sure. Matricide's making a comeback.”

They both giggled.

I couldn't figure out what they meant by talking to each other like that. It used to stump me—my parents and I were painfully cordial and seemed to have based our relationship on a model that served families well in the Habsburg Empire, while Aldo and Leila layered theirs with a constant casual cruelty. A few months earlier he had given her a birthday card in which he'd drawn a picture of God in heaven sodomized by the hillbilly dead, with the words
I love you incrementally less each day,
and for
his
birthday she gave him one that said
Happy Birthday, you son of a bitch
. I might have envied their relationship, but I never understood it.

“I'm going to the loo, then let's go,” Aldo said to me.

As soon as he left, she said, “You need to look out for him.”

“I'll do my best, Leila.”

Her eyes went to the window, where neighborhood girls hopscotched by. Maybe closed blinds made her feel claustrophobic (though I couldn't see how being hemmed in by foot traffic was any great improvement). Then Leila launched into a monologue about the inexplicable shambles Aldo's life had suddenly become, lamenting that this could be the ruination of her harmless, unimpeachable little boy. As she spoke, I was reminded of her voice-over work (her smoky tones narrated a commercial that pitted margarine against something called Buttersoft). Leila stubbed out her cigarette after four drags, and interrupted herself with questions to me—would you like cake or cheese? Do you want to stay in the kitchen or should we adjourn to the living room?—then snapped her fingers. “Find the real rapist—to prove his innocence we must unmask the real culprit. If this is not nipped in the bud . . .” This was fear talking, and fear can be verbose. She wanted constant reassurance while being totally resistant to any emotional comfort. “I thought the
something bad
that would happen to Aldo would be leukemia, but I was off,
way
off.”

Clearing my throat was all I could think to do. An awkward silence descended. Leila had miraculously run out of things to say. My eyes explored the wall behind her head where, partially obscured by the long fronds of a spider plant, there was an old framed photograph of Henry, Veronica, Leila, and Aldo. They were standing in a yard with arms draped over each other's shoulders, tight little smiles and unbearably sad eyes—the kind of photo that rouses a memory even if you're not in it. Veronica's skin was marginally darker than Aldo's, more like her mother's, while Leila and Aldo, the last two surviving soldiers of a unit that had taken heavy artillery, looked vaguely restless, it seemed to me, as if they wanted to wander off into another photo altogether. Directly above that on the wall was a framed quote:
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted
.

“What's your favorite biblical passage?” asked Leila, catching my interest in the quote.

Did she really think I would have one?

“The Ten Commandments?”

“Oh dear, Liam. Really? Moses did his best I'm sure,” she said, “but at least Matthew didn't try to get the Sermon on the Mount down
in point form.
”
I wondered if she was a little drunk. “And this is certainly the right time to point it out to you—the Ten Commandments is a horrendous document made horrendous by the sin of omission. Where the fucking hell is Thou Shalt Not Rape?”

Her long fingers with their mauve nail polish seized my wrist. “Please keep an eye out.”

“For what?”

“His father, Henry, didn't take well to stress, as you might know. They say these things are genetic, although I don't see how. How can a choice made in adulthood be genetic?” The silence grew broody. I understood now. She was talking about suicide. Every speechless second burned a hole right through me.

Aldo appeared in the doorway.

“Aldo!” she yelled at him. “I almost forgot. Listen to this.”

She ran to the answering machine and played a message. “Leila, it's Hannah, we've just heard about Aldo and we're sick about it. Please call.”

“How did
they
hear about it?” Aldo asked.

“Who the fuck knows?”

“Who's that?” I asked.

“Ech. The
Benjamins
,” Leila said, darting glances at the window before turning to me. “They're a sort of tribe of monumentally rude shits, the kind of people who get kicked off ashrams. Well, some of them did. They're always mocking and urging each other to do something awful, and remember this one, Aldo?” She told a story about visiting Henry's cousin Miguel at his Umina beach house: he'd been arrested for assault and was forced to wear a home-detention cuff on his ankle; his range ran out three meters from the ocean, and they'd spent the summer taunting the poor bastard with ice-cold splashes of sea water.

Aldo wasn't listening; he was back sitting with his head on his arms. Leila made a childlike pout and at that moment a brick crashed through the window with another threat scrawled across it:
Your dead.

•  •  •

The next day, I did my own feeble best to explain to Natasha's brother and his
flinty mates that Aldo had an airtight alibi, but the more I defended him, the
more it looked like they were going to tunnel bodily through my chest wall. For her part, Stella interrogated the girl in her place of residence; she threw pebbles at various windows until Natasha emerged, mellow eyed, and ushered her into a room with next to no furniture in it. Stella said that during the whole conversation the girl was holding what looked like a shoehorn and didn't make the slightest physical movement. “Aldo's a fucking virgin who doesn't know his way around the female body, whereas would you say your rapist seemed to know exactly what he was doing?” Stella asked. Natasha said nothing. A burning cigarette lay untouched in an ashtray next to them. Stella asked Natasha why, if it was pitch-black in the room, she was so certain it was Aldo. She said, in a voice that sounded like a finger was pressing on her vocal cords, “His silhouette.” And: “His smell.” And: “His energy,” then described the same cold feeling she got whenever she was standing next to Aldo. Different strains of nausea grew inside both of them. Stella calmly demanded more details. Natasha said she had taken several bumps of the drug Special K and wanted to sit alone a moment. “He must have followed me in.”

“Special K?!” Stella thought a moment, then in a stifled voice said, “Oh, you mean the horse tranquilizer and powerful dissociative anesthetic?”

Natasha smiled sarcastically. “It was him. I know it was him.”

Stella spoke now with the ferocity of a mother fighting for primary custody. “It's not his word against yours, Tash, it's
mine
against yours.”

“It was him it was him it was him!” she screamed, the sad spooky girl, as the room filled with moonbeams and shadows. “It was him it was him it was him,” she repeated, her words seeming not just to hang in the air, but whirl like propellers.

•  •  •

After that, Aldo and Stella skedaddled together. Nobody could find either one.
Feeling helpless, the only thing I could think to do was go around the school borrowing everyone's photographs from the party so I could scour them for clues. I saw nothing useful. Around dinnertime on the fourth day, my phone rang; it was Aldo asking if I could score some pot.

“Where are you guys?”

“Brighton-le-Sands Motor Inn.”

When I arrived he hurried me inside. “Did anyone follow you?”

“Who do you think you are right now?” I asked.

Stella was demurely tucked in under the sheets but her breasts were visible and the room stank of latex and full body sweat. Aldo confided that Stella had definitively laid waste to his virginity and his penis now enjoyed full employment. “Great,” I said, feeling crotch-level hunger pains and dropping into the red vinyl armchair against the window. As far as I could tell, they had watched movies, gotten drunk, eaten chicken-hero rolls they'd bought from the convenience store across the road and had to liquefy in the microwave on site, fucked on the stiff motel sheets like B-movie characters, and abused Leila's financial support by renting every $12.99 VHS porn movie in the motel's erotic video library. I felt an attack of my most chronic illness—the pain of missing out. The absurdity of these two high schoolers hiding in a motel room having the time of their lives just burned me. Aldo deflected my questions about how long they were planning to live like this.

“Until it's over,” Stella said, with a melodramatic lilt to her voice. She had written three goopy love songs since they'd moved in, six pop songs and one power ballad; there was something about being on the run with Aldo, she said, that had inspired the hottest burst of productivity in her whole life.

Aldo offset my jealousy by assuring me it wasn't all fun and games; he was simultaneously living a high-adrenaline nightmare every time a car pulled into the parking lot or a child clomped in the next room or a housekeeper knocked unexpectedly or a neighboring guest kicked either of the broken vending machines, trying to retrieve a dangling Mars bar or a stuck can of Coke. He was on edge. And going crazy. He was stumped as to why Natasha had positively identified him and he flipped obsessively through the photos of that night that I'd brought with me, scouring the faces for anyone who looked like him. Aldo's own face was tense and he had fear-wrinkles in his forehead. He sat stewing and quivering with anger, trying to see Natasha's side of it. There was no doubt she was raped—she wasn't making it up—but why him? Why did she have to say it was
him
?

“I've written a song about Aldo's innocence,” Stella piped up from under the sheets.

“Oh no,” I said, and it occurred to me then that love is a decision, and the intensity of that love is more closely related to stubbornness than to genuine or spontaneous feeling. For whatever reason, Stella's heart was a nesting ground
for desperate passion, and she had leaped into this union with her eyes open and her mind set on
adore
.

•  •  •

Walking into a nest of teachers in a staff room is like stumbling backstage at a
theater: everyone half in makeup, half-costumed. Mr. Morrell was crouched down, staring into the bar fridge. He took a bite from a cold apple and returned it before sitting in an armchair with a notebook. After his wife died, I remembered, he was often called the Weird Widower, but that was years ago, and now he just seemed overly sad. He sat there like the heir to a throne in a country that had just overthrown its monarchy.

“Excuse me sir,” I said from the doorway. I thought I saw him flinch, though I might've imagined it. “Come in, Liam!” he bellowed. The other educators fumbled with their soggy pink doughnuts as I approached. Mr. Morrell had been doodling on a student's essay: a picture of a face. He saw me looking and tilted it toward me and said, “What do you think?” the subtext of which I took as: Come on, Liam, universal acclaim has to start
somewhere
. I praised his artwork and then explained the situation: Aldo's girlfriend was a singer-songwriter from Beaumont Hills High who thought her protest song would win over the hearts and minds of the vengeful mob who might get to him before he could be cleared of any wrongdoing. Mr. Morrell thought it was an inspired idea. He'd fix it with the administration, put the whole scheme under his umbrella, as it were. Before I left, he asked, “Was it Valéry who called music a naked woman running mad in the pure night?” I said that I didn't know, that I didn't really run in those circles.