The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (20 page)

“The house is (will be; everything “will be”) a white bungalow with carefully kept gardens that had been smashed and there’s a big wide porch covered with debris. All the windows are broken. The front door is gone. Inside, everything’s carefully destroyed, even the carpet looks as if it’s been clawed at by some horrible thing, but upstairs in the bedroom I find some pictures in a dresser drawer of a man who looks like me and a woman who must have been my wife (of course she was) and a boy who must have been my son. We are holding fishing poles in the sun with a blue lake behind us. I take the picture and put it in my wallet and when we get back to the old university I show it to Katy, the leader or director, who asks me if I remember anything about it.

“‘Nothing,’ I’ll say, which is mostly true. Whenever I talk to her, I’ll lie a little bit. Maybe it’s just self-defense.

“I’m in, or will be in, Katy’s office (so will you) the one with the nice view of what’s left of the campus: the crumbled bell tower, the buildings without glass in the windows, the scorched trees. She is someone who I imagine has turned beautiful because of the conflict. She is gaunt but strong, and looks ravaged in a seductive way. I’ll try to picture what she was like before: she was going to get married; she lived on a farm; she believed in God. I have no idea how old she is. Outside, we hear the distant rhythm of helicopter, and some faraway gunfire, like firecrackers might sound on a TV from a different room.

“‘Are you recording all this?’ she’ll say.

“I show her my small recording machine. ‘As much as I can.’

“‘Do you add details later?’

“‘I don’t have enough tapes. Or batteries.’

“‘That’s why you need the bigger machine.’

“But the so-called machine does not work, if it ever did, and
without it everything is falling apart. I tried to tell her this once, Katy. I tried to tell her that there’s no evidence that the machine ever worked at all, or that it was even a machine for recording stories. But she is right about one thing, without a record of what happened, it’s hard to know what to do. Among ourselves, at night, in our sleeping bags, we’ll speculate about the war, and the documentary about the war, and if that’s even the right word for it, and about how long it’s been going on, and how many people have died, and whether it involves the entire world or not. There’s really no way to know. Nothing works. We’ll do everything by hand.

“‘Play me something from last week,’ Katy will say. She takes (will take) two cigarettes from a desk drawer and then hesitate a moment and then put one away. Maybe she thinks I don’t smoke. She puts her feet up on the desk—she is wearing black army boots and green fatigues. Where her pant leg is pulled up a little I’ll see a tattoo of a cartoon face on the white flesh of her calf. I play her some sound from the last time, when we decided to use the catapult against a helicopter that came too close. John Barth and I carried it up to the roof, navigating the narrow metal staircases, and placed it between the gray ventilation ducts. We secured it with the harness, and John aimed it while I targeted it on the copter. After three misses we finally hit.

“‘That part’s important. Put more there,’ she’ll say.

“‘What part?’

“‘About how to use it. The weapon. In case we forget and someone else has to.’

“As absurd as it is—for who is ever going to want to hear about this or any other incident with the helicopter?—I’ll tell her I will and then keep playing the part about the violent kick of the catapult, and how it shook the roof, and how the third cinder block leapt out of the throwing tin, and how after the block crashed through the pilot’s window the helicopter just slowed down and spiraled around slowly and fell. It had happened so
many times before that we didn’t even run to the edge and look over it like we did the first dozen times we shot something out of the sky. Jesus, how many helicopters could there be? We had brought down at least 40 or 50. Then one night John said to me—he was smoking like he always did at night—
the reason there are so many is because it’s the same one.

“I’ll feel the screen contracting and expanding, like a breathing lung. I’ll shift from me to a character playing me to a character who’s playing someone who’s playing me and then back to me again.

“I’ll ask John B. what he means, though I had thought it myself before. That’s why the helicopter always looked the same, and why it returned to the same spot and hung there like an emblem and waited to be taken again and again out of the sky.

“‘Have you ever noticed how it always comes at the same time of day, from the same direction, and how we always hit it on the third try? I’m just asking.’

“‘I guess you’re right,’ I’ll say, pretending that I had never thought of this before. We don’t know where the helicopters are from, or if they are friendly or not, but when they come too close we shoot them down just to be safe. These are real weapons. They kick back hard when you fire to remind you of what you’re fucking with.

“Some of us believe that the real fighting has been over for a long time, and that this is just what’s left. None of us has actually seen, as far as I can tell, anything organized enough to be called a war, or a documentary about a war, and we have never been attacked in a serious way. So that’s not war, is it? We think there must have been a war, or at least some kind of terrible fighting, and that we are what’s left, and that there are probably other people like us scattered around the land. But we’ve never been instructed to actually go out and kill, or pretend to kill, anyone.

“If we could escape the city maybe we could find out. But every time we try to get out we are shot with bullets or blanks,
either by those trying to keep us in or trying to keep us out. We don’t know.

“Katy will get up, flick her burned-down cigarette out the window, and tell me it sounds too much like a journal or a memoir, too much like the private experiences of an uninterested and maybe coerced observer. She’ll ask me
don’t I want to be a writer? Don’t I want to be a sound man?
She tells me to put more detail in, more about the weather, the smells, the bug bites, the bats, the black smoke that rises continually on the horizon like some forever burning underground oil field, more about the secret romances, the way this building seems haunted, the bodies we found buried beneath the floor of the boiler room, Stu’s suicide last month. She has more suggestions, but all I can notice are the silver rings on her fingers, the shape of her hips beneath her fatigues. She is someone I could hold, on screen or off.

“And then Stu’s last words will come back to me, what he said the day before he hung himself. ‘The only way to get out of here is to kill someone.’ And what he said was just the boldest, bravest statement of what we were all thinking, because maybe we all had this one shared memory, this one fact. But the secret beneath that truth involved a sacrifice that no one was brave enough to try yet. And yet this one question was slowly forming in all our minds: by killing another, could you escape unmolested out of the city? But why did we think this? Was it part of the documentary, if that’s what this is? A sort of twist that’s so unreasonable that it actually makes sense. At night I’ll lie in my bunk and work out the formula, which in the dark is perfectly logical. In exchange for escape, you need to kill someone. How or why this is so doesn’t matter to me; it’s just a brute fact that rises up in my head and won’t go away.

“When Stu hung himself we all knew why. It was because he was so good. Too good. It was because Stu, he would rather kill himself than someone else. He’s listed special in the credits for this fact alone. Your name will be there too, but for a different
reason,” Laing says, looking at me there in that Wisconsin motel room with the sort of intensity that destroys the distinction between love and hate. “And your daughter’s name. And the names of the missing children.

“The truth is, my memory is better than anyone knows. It seemed the right thing to do, to lie about it, when they first brought me here. After all, I didn’t know them, and how could I believe what they told me? During the interrogation, as they poked me gently through the cage with sticks (method acting crossing over into something else) I knew they wouldn’t kill me, and I could have told them the truth: that I remembered. Not enough to mean anything, but enough to be sure that there was something before this place. Just images and sounds: A girl’s hand in mine. A lightning storm in the summer. The phone ringing in the middle of the night. Human ashes. Men and women falling from the Towers. The house with the old woman down the dusty road near where I grew up. A friendly dog that suddenly turned on me and seized my ankle at a picnic. The flapping of a kite stuck in a tree at that same picnic, a scene from a movie bathed in blue light with a Well-Dressed Man. I remembered these things, and others, but I haven’t told anyone about them. I keep two sets of tapes, one that I play for Katy to prove to her that I am keeping details so that we can have a collective memory, and one that I keep hidden that describes what I really do remember.

“And then the day will come, the last day that things will hold together. It’s our turn to patrol today, and John comes in, ready to go.

“‘Your turn to carry this,’ he’ll say, tossing me the duffel bag with yellow flags. The tops of his hands and arms will be shiny and hairless, scarred from some burning that he can’t remember.

“‘How do you know you were burned, John? Maybe they were always like that.’

“‘These scars,’ he’ll say, pointing to his shiny skin, ‘are from fire. You’re not born like that.’

“This is pure reality now. Our lines are written as we speak them.

“I’ll open the bag and count the flags. We’ll take the east stairs down, past the endless undecipherable graffiti in its faded yellow and blue and brown foreignness, and step out into the warm sunlight. To our right is the library, and beyond that the iron gate that leads out and into the city.

“We are going to see if the flags that we placed last week are still there. They usually aren’t. Usually, they have been replaced with red ones, and because of this, and also because the helicopters that come sometimes drop red leaflets with foreign words printed on them, we have come to associate red with dangerous strangers. We will find a spot about a mile away from campus—as far as it is known to be safe to go—and put the flags, stick first, into the ground of some vacant lot or grassy area or yard of an abandoned house. We will come back one week later to see if they have been taken or rearranged. We call this peace talks. We call this negotiation.

“In fact, we are going there now, to the house they said was mine, to the backyard beneath the giant maple tree with the rope swing where last week we planted ten yellow flags in a straight line in the weedy yard that stretches in a narrow swath between the back of the house and the garage with its sagging roof.

“There are no indications of other creatures—human or otherwise—as we make our way down the crumbling highway, in parts overgrown with weeds and dry grass. The enormous street lights could be but can’t be movie lights. We’ll carry our guns in our hands, cocked, because we are supposed to, because last year Valerie and her partner Leonard went out on one such patrol and didn’t come back and were found, their faces smashed-in with rocks.

“We’ll follow the highway and walk up the sloping exit ramp
whose green sign we cannot read. There will be, in fact, nothing we can read. Not the signs. Not the newspapers in the grocery stores. Not the labels on food. Not the books in the library. We feel that we ought to be able to read these things, that they are, or were, part of our world, that because we can talk with each other in a language that we all know, we should be able to decipher the written symbols around us. But none of us can. They are just hash marks, severe lines in black against white, a secret code of a lost civilization.

“John is one of those who believes it is our own language that we have forgotten, that along with forgetting about our past we have also forgotten how to read.

“‘But we can still talk, John,’ I’ll say, the sun beating down on us like some big-budget movie production lamp. ‘We haven’t forgotten how to talk.’

“‘That’s because we learned that first. It was more deeply embedded in who we are. Like our basic personalities. These aren’t things you forget.’

“The rest of us, on the other hand, think that it’s the world that changed, not us. That the language around us doesn’t mean anything because it never did—it’s not our language—and that if we saw our language, we would recognize it. We’ve tried to write, but it’s just scribble; we know how to make the sounds with our mouths, but not with our hands. It should be easy to do. It should be easy to take what we say and put it on paper, but we don’t know how.

“‘Is this the place?’ John will say. We’ll be in front of the house spray painted with an enormous snake that’s eating its tail. The chimney has been pulled down, like all the other chimneys on all the other houses, but this time they have left the rope amidst the bricks, like a collapsed lasso. It’s rare to find the ropes, and John coils it up and puts it in his bag.