Fall (33 page)

I’m not eleven.

I can still remember everything my cousin said. There must be things in that letter you remember.

I suppose.

“I love you so much. I can’t wait to remember things.”

I didn’t read it closely.

But you were their little servant.

Yes.

And you decide to read it and it says all that really private stuff. One thing I remember about overhearing my cousin was that I was never mentioned. That bothered me. When you’re a kid, you want to be in people’s conversations. Especially when they’re being all private like that. It was all about her boyfriend.

I’m not a kid, Sergeant D’Arcy.

No. You’re right. Were you aroused?

Certainly not.

So why did you keep it, Noel?

I don’t know.

Julius says you behave oddly sometimes. Look at him in strange ways while he gets dressed sometimes.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Do you love him?

No.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of. He’s a handsome guy.

I’m not a homosexual.

He says you spent a maximum of two hours alone with Fall in her life. He says she barely knew you. You went to a café with her once.

Julius doesn’t know everything.

He says Fall thought you were a creep. She said you made her really uncomfortable at the café.

No she didn’t.

Is that why you guys have knives?

I don’t.

Those knives we found of Antony’s. You like making people feel uncomfortable.

I don’t own a knife.

You know she’s dead, don’t you?

What?

You know.

No.

You know. This has been a murder investigation for a long time, Noel. She didn’t run away, like you always say. She could barely walk. She didn’t pack a bag. Didn’t leave a note. Hasn’t contacted a single person. Her sister in New York. We found her, and she hasn’t heard a thing. There are some pretty sad people around all this, Noel. Why are you crying?

She’s not dead.

You know that?

She’ll come back.

From where?

She’s not. She’s here.

In your head? What’s that supposed to mean?

. . .

Quit crying and tell me why you kept her last note to Julius.

How could I have done anything to her. I don’t like you.

Tell me.

I cared about her.

Did you?

Yes.

She barely knew you. You didn’t know each other.

We were friends.

She was pretty.

So pretty.

So you and Antony took her somewhere. Things got out of hand. We’re testing his knives. You’re full of frustration because this is a weird little place and you took her somewhere.

Someone else took her. I don’t know. Why wasn’t she kidnapped? You read it all . . . People take young people.

You got annoyed. You read the note. In your anger you told her you loved her.

I never told her that.

You didn’t go far. Her mother said she had crutches.

No.

People say you’re always in some pointless corner of the school. You know all the cracks, and you and Antony took her to one of them. I can’t even find the front office in this place.

You’re not funny.

Some perfect little hiding place. You were a little worked up. Maybe Ant wasn’t with you. Did you get her to lean on you? Everyone was at dinner. You had to get something off your chest. You told her she was gorgeous. She didn’t react well, you had a little tussle. All accidental.

I did not.

You hurt her.

Where?

We’ve been looking for her body. We’ll find her body. We’ve been through all your clothes. Your teachers have been through everything you own while you go to class and play your games. We’ll find something. You’re really blubbering there, Noel. Do you want to tell me what happened? Where you put her pretty body? It can be a relief. Let the tears go. Let the truth out. You’re a young healthy guy and you wanted to have sex with a beautiful girl. You realized she didn’t want to. Because it’s clear, isn’t it. In that note. That girl really loved Julius. Maybe not your kind of love. You wanted to tell her and she didn’t want to hear it. You hurt her. Tell me why you’re crying.

Dishonesty is the death of everything; and the beginning of the world. Every house, street, and story is a lie. If we were as honest as hyenas our cities would be smaller. That job you do. I wish I could slough this fat. I wish I could be honest. I wish I could bite the meat off everyone I hate.

I haven’t been honest with myself.

It’s a depressing realization at the age of thirty. I feel like so much has calcified already.

The responsibility of being honest with oneself should, naturally, be borne by oneself alone, but I am happy to blame others. Despite everything I did in those days, my odd attempts to find my nature, I was trapped in these four walls which most of us are trapped in. The belief that effort will improve things, that we can be perfected, always stronger, always smarter, always better to each other. No matter how our standards vary, or what experience teaches us, it is what we are told to do.

I have tried my best to be alone. Even at the large institution I was sent to later, where everything was communal, where we were constantly made to behave kindly to each other, I endeavoured to stay alone. I have believed that as long as there are other people there will be expectations. As long as there are expectations there is a need for definition, a hope for perfection; and as long as there is that hope, no one will be honest.

What should I call what I am?

I have read stories about love and love gone wrong. I read about a man who had everything, who had found abiding and unconditional love. He was happy, but the wheels of want kept spinning. He found love elsewhere and learned that his abiding and unconditional love was neither. “Try to understand,” he said, but she wouldn’t. All he could say to explain himself was “With blood like this . . .”

I think I understood. And I have thought the solution would be solitude. I could be true to myself if there was no one to expect things from me. I could cause no pain if no one was near me.

Perhaps I was responsible for her death. I put it in motion. All she could say was I don’t like you.

I know that with blood like this I walked upstairs that day, away from D’Arcy’s infuriating questions, to my room, where Julius was waiting. And when I came in he arose and pinned me against the wall by the door. “You ugly fuckin’ prick,” he said.

I saw his punch coming and chose not to flinch. He held me by the throat and I remember a clarity in his eye. “You’ve been saying you know her. You’ve been saying you know me. They told me to be nice. You’re telling fuckin’ stories.”

I felt all the fear and hatred that I had perversely been yearning for. So much easier than honesty.

And I wanted to tell him that I wished I had given him that letter. I wanted to tell him that there was so much we could have talked about. To say that I loved them both and I didn’t understand it.

If we could get into our bunks right now. If he is still alive, spry enough to get up top. We could turn off the light and try again, old enough to know that perfect isn’t possible.

He spat in my face and left the room.

The article I recently read about oil in the north said “the United States and Canada, among several other countries, continue to compete for the rights to whatever is under the ice in the Arctic.”

Underwater land that was once so unlikely, a richness of oil unparalleled, of minerals unimaginable. It talks of men in a distant room, listening to foreign submarines. Trying to determine from their noises where they are from and whether they belong.

The oil, the minerals, we know will never be the answer. We acknowledge that the cure we seek is the cause of our greatest illness.

I think about the submarines surveying that land. What does it mean to be honest with oneself? Perhaps it’s a matter of taking each wrong path to the very end, not by accident but by choice. To discover error with elaborate ceremony and make our discoveries known. The captains of those submarines, donning trousers and caps, searching through water that doesn’t belong to them for treasure that might not be theirs. They should declare at every moment that there is violence ahead. Drills, disappointment, and the hot black melt.

We will look in all the wrong places. With blood like this, we have no choice. We’ll move our lips in a language we can’t resist, and across some sea might be someone who understands our foolish and intimate ping. All other words are liars.

I walked outside with a swelling lip.

For what I did to Julius I was almost charged and made to face an adult court. Many things conspired in that cloistered world to keep me from that future. I was expelled from St. Ebury, though not before the school set up a tribunal at the request of my father. He met with Julius’s father and I managed to show contrition, and somehow with all the attention being paid to the school and Julius’s family, it was decided that formal charges would not be brought, that a suitable punishment could be privately determined. I was sent to a quasi-reformatory for just over a year, where I read an awful lot. In a way I can’t believe my luck.

Sergeant D’Arcy’s suspicion of me, heightened by what I did later that day, eventually came to nothing. Fall never returned. D’Arcy visited me often but I was never able to tell him what happened that night.

Julius left the school. His father took him back to the U.S. and resigned his post as ambassador.

I burned the skin off his chest and belly and genitals. At the tribunal his chin was bandaged as well.

He sat in a room with strangers and authorities, made declarations about who he thought I was, who everyone thought I was. I knew they were talking about me, but I still don’t know who I am. I was only eighteen.

Everyone wondered how I could have done such a thing to someone who lost his girlfriend. I had no explanation.

At the tribunal we were both afraid of each other.

I wonder sometimes whether his neck has thickened, eyes retreated. Whether we would enjoy a moment as strangers. He might forgive me for his scars. He might be able to tell me about children or coaching or a corner of the world I never could have imagined.

I think I’m still afraid.

I walked outside with a swelling lip and his spit on my face, which I left as a lingering insult. The air, this school, these trees are mine as much as yours. The spit dried in the cold, and the conviction grew in my heels that anger was my right. I walked and let it rise.

When I went back inside I didn’t know precisely what I would do. I wasn’t even sure that I would find him right away.

In the hallway, I passed the bathroom and heard a shower running. When I opened the door to our room I saw Julius’s clothes in a pile on the chair.

I filled the kettle, waited for it to boil, and poured the water quickly into the Bodum. I walked down the hall and into the bathroom and threw the boiling water at him just as he turned off the shower.

As I was walking nervously back from the bathroom his noises kept surprising me. The cries of a little boy who learns that the world won’t be what it was.

I’
M JERKING LIKE
a bunny.

Lurky jerky.

I’ve got bunny legs, leap leap.

I’m jumping with my soft little bunny cock, feel how soft it is.

Feel it.

It’s so soft.

I’ve gotta catch the witch, he’s bald and he’s riding the butterfly. They’re dragging Fall on the rope and if I bounce, leap leap, I’ll save her. Twitch. Look how fuckin fast I am on my long lean bunny legs, twitch twitch.

Feel my cock on the back of your hand.

So soft.

It is so soft.

They’re flying. They’re flying away. The air’s hot and it stinks because the witch and the butterfly farted.

Poor Fall.

I’ve gotta catch her.

Twitch.

I’ve gotta save her.

Faster.

Twitch twitch.

What the fuck.

Where the fuck am I.

William’s.

I’m naked on William’s bed.

Fall’s in her little red coat.

Her scarf is on my cock.

I’m gonna wake her up.

I’m gonna figure out exactly who and where I am.

I am Julius.

This is my naked ass on William’s bed.

My cock is very hard and pretty big, in fact, and I’m gonna show it to Fall.

It’s weird being on your bed, William, and I’m sorry and I’m not gonna think about it.

Fall is fully dressed and very cute and I don’t know why I’m naked.

Is she alive.

Her nose is really cute.

I’ve never seen it like that.

Hey.

Hey.

Wake up, little girl.

Wake up.

Your scarf is really soft.

Wake up.

Kiss cheek.

Mm she says.

Hey soft soft.

Ooo she says.

I know I say.

Why are you naked she says.

Why are you in your coat I say.

Put some clothes on it’s rude.

Take some off.

Put some of mine on.

Your scarf is really soft.

I’m gonna have to wash that she says.

Her breath stinks but I’m kissing her.

Please take some clothes off. I feel like a, like a pervert, but I also feel like you’ve got, you know; you’re not being fair.

Let me look at you she says.

I’m shy.

Let me see.

I’m shy.

Move your hand.

Take your coat off.

Let me look at you. I wish I had a camera she says. I want a picture for William.

Take your clothes off.

I need to pee she says. I feel pretty gross she says.