The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes Read Free Book Online Page A

forks into the boulevard.
    “Hector leans forward in the backseat. He points through the front windshield: ‘There?’
    “‘About there, I suppose.’
    “‘Drive me up there, Hutton,’ Hector says abruptly, leaning back in his seat. ‘Drive me to where you think you saw me.’
    “Hector starts the car, adjusts the rearview mirror so that he can see Hector, pulls forward along the curb. The sun is very low now. The earth is disappearing. This is conveyed,” Laing tells me, “by some weird red line that suddenly appears horizontally across the screen. That line, that wavering line, somehow suggests the disappearance of the earth. The very earth itself as well as the conditions that made earth possible along with any thought of humanity. This is something that both Aimee and I felt, as it seemed to drain the space we were in of meaning and while it’s true that my library office was never the same after that red line appeared it may have had more to do with what was going on secretly and magnetically between Aimee and myself than with the line, which after all was just something projected on the wall.”
    Laing pauses, as if deciding whether to lie to me or not, and I say this because—and listening to the tapes again now makes this clear—rather than pause or hesitate when he was about to lie he sped up, as if the speed of words could waterfall on ahead of the rotten ideas they signified, or as if that knife formed by the angle of the sun on the motel room floor had been anything other than something conjured, some warning to me but not a warning from Laing, but rather from the dead field next to the motel where, if this were a film that had lost its way, the bodies of some of the children were buried would be revealed in a series of cuts that would strobe across the screen, depicting firstLaing’s room, the throne chair splashed in blood, followed by a shot of the motel from a distance, followed by the field with the buried bodies framed by the motel in the very near background, followed by a final shot of an X-ray version of the field, with the bones of five or six small bodies, some intertwined as if in forced embrace.
    “‘Here,’ Hutton says, stopping. ‘You crossed right about here.’
    “‘From which side?’ Hector asks.
    “‘From left to right,’ Hutton says, gesturing. ‘From there into the park.’
    “‘And you’re sure it was me.’
    “‘It looked like you.’
    “‘Of course.’
    “‘I thought that was part of the assignment,’ Hutton says.
    “‘The assignment.’
    “‘Why I was here. To notice something unusual, out of the ordinary. Seeing you at 2:30—when you said you wouldn’t return until evening—was unusual.’
    “In the film (movie as Aimee called it; she thought film was snobby) it’s fully dark now. Hector has lit a cigarette, and Hutton can see him in the rearview mirror, the orange glow illuminating the vague shape of his bearded face. A distant siren wails.
    “‘Hutton,’ Hector says, tapping his cigarette ashes outside the open backseat window, ‘let me ask you something.’ He pauses. ‘Let me ask you this: what if who you saw wasn’t me, but someone who looks just like me?’
    “Hutton thinks about this for a moment. Turns the question over in his mind, it seems, wondering if it’s some sort of trap. The movie conveys this in a secret way, making you complicit in the act of moral defilement that gives rise to omniscience.
    “‘Looks just like you…?’
    “‘Let me put it another way,’ Hector says. ‘Hutton: are you not unhappy?’
    “‘I am not.’
    “‘Not what?’
    “‘Unhappy,’ Hutton says.
    “‘So then you are happy. Can we reliably agree on that?’
    “‘I’m afraid not.’
    “‘You’re not happy?’
    “‘That’s right,’ Hutton says.
    “‘And you’re not unhappy?’
    “‘True.’
    “‘For God’s sake , man! You’re neither happy nor unhappy.’
    “‘I’m afraid I’m neither. It’s the