Cartwheel (6 page)

But at that point he did not know; he was not sure. He wasn’t sure that afternoon, when he went home to drink two tumblers of whiskey and take ibuprofen for his costochondritis (an inflamed chest wall, his doctor had told him, though he knew that it was actually the somatic manifestation of loneliness, that his heart was finally quitting in protest). He wasn’t sure that night, when he was still awake past three, walking heel to toe through his living room, the apartment so empty around him that he could hear the sonic groans of his own intestines, like whale song. And he wasn’t sure the next day, when the police brought him the transcript of their initial conversation with Lily Hayes.

There were a lot of transcripts—the police’s first talks with the neighbors, the vendors, the traumatized American study-abroad students, the family who’d been hosting both girls, the improbably named boy who had been kissing Lily Hayes in the garden. But the conversation with Lily Hayes stood out, and not only because there was no sign of a break-in and she was the only person in a hundred kilometers who’d had a house key. Eduardo read the transcript in his apartment with the shades drawn, while the sky outside his window stayed maddeningly light well past eight o’clock. In the transcript, of course, it was difficult to ascertain exactly what Lily Hayes’s tone had been as she answered questions about Katy Kellers’s short life and violent death. But Eduardo detected a cold current, a psychological dislocation, that made him read and reread the interview—though, for obvious reasons, Lily Hayes was not likely to have been the sole perpetrator of the crime.

“You say you saw some blood in the bathroom,” said the interviewing officer.

“Yes,” said Lily.

“How much blood was there, exactly?”

“Not much,” she said—and Eduardo could feel the pause there, the implied flippancy. At one point, the transcript remarked flatly that Lily Hayes, left briefly alone but for the watchful gaze of the security camera, had done a cartwheel. Eduardo turned this image over in his mind.
He regarded it without judgment. He was surer, but he was not yet sure. And it was very important to be sure, because once he was sure, he was never wrong.

The next morning, Eduardo arose before dawn to run through the darkness. He was sweating by the end of the block; he was, as usual, overdressed for the weather. He could never believe that the world outside was so much warmer than it looked.

The running was new, though the general ritualized masochism was not. Whenever Eduardo felt it coming back again, he commenced a series of steps, a sequence arrived at through guessing and testing and the emergence of a grim, white-knuckled will. First, he assessed all the things in life that would make him feel worse. You won’t feel any better if you get fat, he’d tell himself, while jogging. You won’t feel any better if you get gingivitis, he’d tell himself, while flossing. The corollary—which was intrusive and unarticulated and omnipresent—was that he wouldn’t feel any better either way. It never worked, of course. But it did make Eduardo feel as though he had tried. If Eduardo did anything, it was try. And, after all, it had been only two months since Maria left.

Maria—Eduardo would be the first to admit—had crashed into his existence, unearned, unwarranted. They’d been married for three years, and during that time Eduardo had never entirely gotten used to the idea. So when she left him—for a Brazilian opera singer, he’d heard—who was Eduardo to say she was not making the right decision? He had felt, somewhere in his devastation, that the universe was actually righting itself, and that resenting this was irrational. And if Eduardo was anything, it was rational.

Around him, Belgrano’s streets were rain-slicked and silver. Eduardo tried to breathe evenly. He thought about all the cigarettes he hadn’t smoked in the fifteen years since he’d quit. Could he feel the difference in his breathing? He was not sure. Sun split the clouds, startling a flock of birds off their telephone line. Eduardo could not feel a difference, he
decided. But he did feel a little stab of virtue every time he wanted and did not allow himself a cigarette, which was still a few times a day, every day, even now. Sometimes it seemed to Eduardo that his whole life was only a collection of small impulses denied. The birds flew over his head, casting chevrons of shadow on the concrete.

At least, Eduardo knew, his work would not suffer. In the very precise triage system he’d set up within his life, work was the most critical priority. And on his better depressed days, Eduardo didn’t so much as snap out of his sadness as sink into it—it contracted in his chest like a heart, giving him some propulsive force as he moved through an investigation. This compulsion to work could sometimes feel congenital, genetic—though, in fact, Eduardo had not originally wanted to be a lawyer. He had studied piano as a teenager and had hoped to continue in college, right up until the day he watched Julio César Strassera deliver closing remarks in the Trial of the Juntas. It was 1985 and Eduardo was sixteen. He’d been practicing Mozart’s Sonata in F Major for a school recital that would later be canceled due to bomb threats, and his time with the school’s piano was limited, but still he went to the cervecería across the street to watch. Never again, said Strassera. The television cut to footage of the Mothers, testifying. The bar around Eduardo smelled sour, and a man next to him was crying. One of the Mothers looked straight into the camera. “What has happened cannot be fixed,” she said. “It can only be told.” On her face was an expression of righteous sadness, a grief well beyond weeping. And suddenly Eduardo understood—with shocking and fatal clarity—that she was not trying to get her child back. This thought had never really occurred to him before. “They have to be dead,” the woman was saying, “but they are only truly desaparecido if we turn away. They are only really gone once we stop looking for them.”

Standing before the television, Mozart’s allegro still throbbing in his fingertips, Eduardo had felt himself rising to a grave and difficult understanding. Perhaps this was only because he’d been looking for one—he was, after all, sixteen. But whatever the reason, he’d known that he was seeing something he could not forget: He was learning that
goodness could not be goodness if it was dimensionless and passive; he was beginning to believe that there was a compassion beyond compassion. Eduardo looked at the Mother’s face, and he saw that forgiveness without justice was not Christ’s forgiveness, or any other kind worth extending. He walked out into the blazing sun and did not return to the piano that day, though he could not now remember where he went.

Eduardo, it turned out, was suited to studying law. He had always been diligent and high scoring, but he did not have that easygoing sheen that made people want to think well or expect much of him; he had never managed to effortlessly inspire confidence or lust. There was something about him that was too solicitous—it was subtle as a pheromone and just as permanent; it made people understand that they could ignore him and get away with it. Eduardo’s freakishly good memory did not help matters. Growing up, he had often surprised peers he barely knew by revealing his shockingly accurate retention of any scrap of information they’d volunteered the first time they’d met him, which occasion they invariably could not recall. Children reacted to this party trick with some bemusement, since their worldviews were not really at odds with the notion that everyone around them might somehow know who they were. As he grew older, however, Eduardo learned that mature narcissism responded with more suspicion: People tended to assume that Eduardo’s attention was particular to them, and he watched as their eyes narrowed and they wondered, visibly unnerved, just what exactly he might be after.

Still, Eduardo excelled in the clean realms—standardized testing, blind admissions, paper applications—where personality was scoured away; where memory was a strength, not a weakness. And it was these successes that delivered him to the University of Buenos Aires School of Law, where he finally learned—not in the classroom, but the bars—how to effectively wield his memory. Women, he learned, could be made to feel that Eduardo had a depth and singularity of feeling for them, whether he did or not. Men, as long as Eduardo used the right tone, could be made to feel quietly flattered and impressive. No matter
how people felt about Eduardo, they usually left Eduardo’s company feeling faintly good about themselves. And Eduardo quickly saw that this was what mattered—that that slight untraceable rosy glow was the important emotional takeaway, even if it had nothing to do with Eduardo at all. He would never be particularly attractive or charismatic or possessed of the kind of authority that commanded attention. But he could make anybody he met feel that
they
were. And this, Eduardo saw, could leverage a power that was subtler and, depending on the situation, more potent than what was lost.

After graduation, Eduardo began clerking in Córdoba. Around him, Kirchner was repaying the IMF loan; privatization was peeling away every expectation the people had ever had for anything beyond themselves in this world. Shared Dreams was investigated for corruption and the economy exploded overnight. Forgiveness was work, Eduardo told victims’ families—but so, then, was love, and deciding what was right, and defending it. Recusing yourself from judgment so you won’t be tainted by the aggressor’s sin is the same as turning away from empathy so you won’t be touched by the victim’s pain. And God did not shrink from either task, Eduardo often thought—though he didn’t say this to anyone. Eduardo would never have been fool enough to try to persuade anybody of the existence of God, just as he would never have been fool enough to try to persuade anybody of the existence of his own consciousness. No one can ever really prove their sentience externally—there’s no argument or syllogism that gets you there: The systems of measurement are too fatally implicated in the thing they’re trying to measure—and God, Eduardo thought, presented the same sort of mess. It was, at heart, a kind of epistemological Heisenberg uncertainty principle problem. But Eduardo’s morality did not require a belief in God. If anything, man’s compassionate justice was even more necessary in a secular universe. Because if not now, after all, then when? If not for this, after all, then for what?

After a few years, Eduardo was appointed the fiscal de cámara for Buenos Aires Province. Forgiveness is admirable, he told the judicial panels, but not when it is automatic; not when it is done because it’s the
easy way to stay shallowly blameless. Eduardo developed instincts of great accuracy and precision about suspects, and these instincts led him to a streak of notable and just convictions. Standing outside the courtroom after one of them, he posed a question to the assembled press: What does it mean for a killer to deserve our empathy if a victim does not? It just means that we are lazy. It just means we want to be left alone.

But Eduardo did not want to be left alone; instead, he wanted to work, and to try. Trying was a modest thing to have at the center of one’s life. Nevertheless, it was going to save him. He wanted to try, and he wanted to keep trying—even now, with Maria gone. This meant he was not suicidal. He knew because he had looked it up.

Eduardo turned back toward his apartment building. He could still see it, all those blocks down the street, looking hazy and insubstantial in the mist. A mile away, Eduardo figured, the rain must be starting again.

That day, the emails were subpoenaed.

Lily Hayes and Katy Kellers were, it turned out, voluminous correspondents—they both kept track of the minute contours of their emotional lives, and this careful accounting produced several salient facts. First, it seemed that Lily had not much cared for Katy—in two emails and one Facebook message, all sent in early January, she had gone to some lengths to support her thesis that Katy was a “bore.” Second, it seemed that Katy and Lily had had a fight, or possibly several fights, toward the middle or at the end of February. This fact was not mentioned in Lily’s exchanges, but was described by Katy in a Google Chat exchange with one friend from home (who, alas, seemed already familiar with the situation, rendering the narrative fairly sketchy) and possibly referenced in a conversation with another (Sara Perkins-Lieberman: How are things with the roomie?? Katy Kellers: Ugggggggh :/). Finally, the third and most interesting piece of information revealed in the emails was that Katy, apparently, had been in a relationship.
In an email written to that same Sara Perkins-Lieberman, she’d said:
I’ve met someone. It feels kind of crazy.… We’re sort of sneaking around because I don’t think Lily would like it very much (she’s kind of histrionic), though maybe partly it just makes things more fun? I don’t know. I didn’t think I was really ready for anything yet, but now I sort of wonder
. This revelation, of course, explained the condoms. And it seemed that Katy had indeed kept the relationship from Lily: In all of her extensive narrative journalism about their lives in Buenos Aires (which continued to cover Katy throughout the rest of February, though in increasingly fond terms), Lily never mentioned it. Katy’s relationship, apparently, really had stayed a secret. At least for a while.

In the afternoon, over coffee, Eduardo Googled “Lily Hayes.” It was a common name in the United States, it turned out, though it struck Eduardo as fussy and prim, an odd moniker for Me Generation parents to give to a child. Nonetheless, “Lily Hayes+Middlebury” yielded several hits. There was Lily Hayes dressed up as a green pepper for some children’s theater troupe, and there was Lily Hayes raving about the generosity of alumni donations in the school magazine, and there was Lily Hayes arguing in the Middlebury
Campus
—with a blend of self-righteousness and world vision totally unsullied by reality—for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Next, Eduardo found Lily on Facebook: a Molière quote, a variety of subsexual poses, a loving catalog of reasonably challenging fiction. He scrolled down. He saw stern admonishments to sign petitions, flirtations with bearded and bespectacled young men, birthday wishes sent and received. It was certainly not the kind of trail that most of Eduardo’s suspects left in their wake. Eduardo did not believe that crime—murder, in particular—was ever inevitable. But with most defendants, you could track the way each misfortune had impelled the next; you could look at their lives and nearly reach out to trace the filigreed twists and turns that had deposited them, with shaking hands, before their victims and their fates. Most defendants Eduardo saw were broken. Lily Hayes—if she was guilty—had never been whole.