The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (21 page)

“The spray paint on the bricks, it looks wet, and when I touch it the tips of my fingers turn red. I’ll hold my hand up
to John to warn him and we quickly turn to leave. But it is too late. Touching the red paint was the wrong thing to do, and the very first shot goes through John’s neck and he leaps in the air and falls to the ground, twisted on his back like an S. So much blood is already out of him, pooling at my feet like someone else’s victory. I’ll run for the street and keep waiting for the shot. Impossibly, I worry about hurting my face or breaking my nose when I fall. I worry about not being able to stop myself from falling down the wrong way, and scuffing my elbows or breaking my wrist. But there is no shot, and after only a few minutes I am exhausted but keep running at the ramp that takes me back onto the highway.

“I’ll ditch my gun and my duffel bag. I’ll throw off my jacket. Every channel in my head is opening up full, screaming. I am running for only one thing now. For Katy. I want to touch her tattoo. I want to make her not sad. I want to make the tapes better, and so full of mystery that she will smile at me, and offer me one of her cigarettes, and the orange sun will finally creak through, and there will be the green of trees, of willows even, and the touch of her fingers to mine as she cups the match between us…” and here Laing ends as everything must end and of the missing children they have not been found as far as I know, even all these years after my interlude with Laing in Wisconsin. Of that last meeting I can say that there was a tension in the air and for the first time I felt the old fear return, the sort of fear that passes away with childhood, creeping up my spine and looking back on it now I attribute it to Laing. My version of what happened at our last meeting—and I say
happened
because something did happen and I say
version
because everything is a version of itself—is that Laing thought he had let me in on a secret and that just before I was to depart he feared I might not keep it and so thought about threatening or hurting me, or worse. In other words the fear I felt was based on the real possibility that Laing might do to me what he had done to
the films and as I’m writing this I recall a detail that seemed so obvious, so utterly obvious, that I hadn’t even considered it: the collapsed metal barrel in the scrubby field adjacent to the motel. I’m ashamed of the wild ideas that fill my head. The barrel (that smelled of rust), the destroyed films, the missing children, that’s all speculation, so remote from the banality of Laing, so fantastical. No, it’s not the barrel that haunts me, or what might have been burned in it, or the HAVE YOU SEEN ME? flyer I found in Laing’s room. Not even the death of Emily. What haunts me is that I was successful. One cannot absolve oneself, of course. It takes another. Absolution—the absolution of moral sins—must be granted by another and I remember driving away from that place and having the strange feeling that it was all a set and that it was being torn down or deconstructed the moment I left, the workers coming out with their sweaty faces from their hiding places, the hidden mics removed from the back of the throne chair and Laing himself undergoing a procedure right there on the motel room bed to extricate his face from the mask which had been sewn across it and screaming for something far stronger than bourbon and yet… of course I knew that nothing of the sort was happening. Laing and I had entered each other’s lives for three brief days, and yet during that time something—someone—had been resurrected, I was sure of it and I floored it, I can tell you, I put the pedal to the metal in that crappy van while the magic still held and tear-assed it back to Pennsylvania knowing beyond reason that those three days in hell (spent with a spirit in prison, as if Laing could be called anything but that) had opened up something new and brief and astonishing and that Emily would be sitting there in the sunlight at the kitchen table waiting for me with a sly smile as if to say: Father, you are in it now, you are really in it now.

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If you would like to receive, in the mail, a short, typed, personal note from the archives of Roberto Acestes Laing, as well as a strip of 16 mm film frames from his obscure cinema collection, simply scissor out the form below and mail it directly to:

             
Nicholas Rombes

             
5589 Villa France Avenue

             
Ann Arbor, MI 48103

Please allow 2-4 weeks for delivery by mail.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement to the editors of
The Rumpus
,
Necessary Fiction
, and
Fiddleblack
, for publishing excerpts, often in much different form than they appear here.

The writing of this novel was greatly assisted by support from the University of Detroit Mercy.

Thank you to Andrea Monheim, Lisa Rombes-Smith, Julia Kristeva, Denise Stull, Wendy and Steve Kern, Eric Obenauf, Eliza Jane Wood-Obenauf, Robert Pollard, Sandy Williams, Carlos Wieder, and Andrzej Żuławski.

For Niko and Maddy.

For Lisa.

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