Bill died before the children reached puberty. A few girls showed signs of breasts coming beneath their T-shirts or the blouses of their school uniforms, but most of the kids hadn't even started to change. I suspect that he had meant to go on, that he wanted to film more and more children until a moment came when the figures on the screen could no longer be distinguished from adults. After the last video ended and I had turned off the television, I felt exhausted and a little raw from the parade of bodies and faces, the sheer volume of young lives that had passed in front of me. I imagined Bill on his peripatetic adventure as he sought out kids and more kids to answer some craving in himself. What I had seen was unedited and crude, but when strung together the fragments had formed a syntax that might be read for possible meaning. It was as if Bill intended the many lives he documented to merge into a single entity, to show the one in the many or the many in the one. Everyone begins and ends. Throughout the tapes I had thought of Matthew, first as a baby, then as a toddler, and finally as a boy who had been left in childhood forever.
Icarus. The connection between the children on the tapes and the myth remained oblique. But Bill had chosen the tide for a reason. I remembered Brueghel's painting, with its two figures—the father and the falling boy, whose wings are melting in the sun. Daedalus, the great architect and magician, had made those wings for himself and his son to escape from their tower prison. He warned Icarus about flying too close to the sun, but the boy refused to listen and plummeted into the sea. Nevertheless, Daedalus isn't an innocent figure in the story. He had risked too much for his freedom and, because of it, he had lost his son.
Neither Violet nor I nor Erica in California, who now knew the whole story, doubted that the police would find Mark and question him. It was just a matter of time. After the visit from Detectives Lightner and Mills, I had lost all sense of what was possible for Mark and what was impossible, and without that barrier I lived in dread. The incident in the hallway in the Nashville hotel didn't recede. Every night my helplessness came back to me. Giles's hands. His voice. The shock of my head hitting the wall. And Mark's eyes, which had nothing behind them. I heard myself call out for him, saw my arms reach toward him, and then I was waiting on the bench in the lobby for no one. I had related most of the facts to Violet and Erica, but I had kept my voice even, my description cold, and I hadn't told them about Giles touching my hair. Over time, that gesture had become unspeakable. It was much easier just to say that he had slammed my head into the wall. For some reason the violence was preferable to what had come before it. I found it hard to sleep, and sometimes after lying awake for hours I would go to check the locks on my door, even though I knew that I had bolted them shut and secured the chain.
The only fact that could be determined absolutely from the newspapers was that the broken and decayed body of a boy named Rafael Hernandez had been found in a suitcase that had washed up somewhere near a Hudson River pier, and that identification had been made through dental records. The rest was printed gossip. Blast ran a long article with pictures of Teddy Giles and the headline JUST KIDDING? According to the journalist, Delford Links, people in both the art world and the club scene had known of Rafael's disappearance for some time. The day after the boy disappeared, Giles had made several telephone calls to friends and acquaintances, claiming that he had just done "a real one." That same evening, he had gone out to Club USA wearing clothes that appeared to have dried blood all over them and had careened around the club announcing that the She-Monster had "committed the ultimate work of art." Not a single person had taken Giles seriously. Even after the body had been found, most people associated with Giles refused to accept the possibility that he had actually murdered someone. A seventeen-year-old boy named Junior was quoted: "He was always saying stuff like that. He must have told me fifteen different times that he had just killed somebody."
Hasseborg was also quoted: "The danger inherent in Giles's work is that it attacks every one of our sacred cows. His work isn't limited to sculptures or photographs or even performances. His personas are also his art—a spectacle of shifting identities that includes the psychopathic killer, who is, after all, a celebrated, mythical character. Turn on your TV Go to the movies. He's everywhere. But to suggest that this persona is anything more than that is an outrage. The fact that Giles knew Rafael Hernandez hardly makes him guilty of his murder."
On the Sunday evening after I returned from Nashville, Violet and I were having dinner upstairs when Lazlo buzzed the front door. Lazlo's expression was usually sober, but when we opened the door for him, I thought his face looked almost sad. "I found this," he said, and handed it to Violet. The article came from the gossip column in the downtown paper Bleep. Violet read it aloud: "Rumors are flying about a certain Bad Boy on the art scene and the body of his thirteen-year-old ex-toy and part-time E dealer that bobbed up in the Hudson. One of B.B.'s ex- girlfriends claims that there's a witness—yet another one of B.B.'s many AC./D.C. exes. Could the plot get any thicker? Stay tuned ..."
Violet looked at Lazlo. "What does this mean?" she said.
Lazlo was silent. Instèad of responding to Violet's question, he handed her a business card. "He's married to my cousin," Lazlo said. "Arthur's a real good guy—a criminal attorney. He used to work in the D.A's office." Lazlo paused. "Could be you won't need him." Lazlo didn't move. I couldn't even see him breathe. Then he said, "Pinky's waiting for me."
Violet nodded, and we watched Lazlo walk to the door and close it very gently behind him.
We didn't talk for several minutes. It was dark outside, and it had started to snow. I watched the white motion through the window. Lazlo knew things, and Violet and I both understood that he had left the card for a reason. When I turned from the window and looked at Violet, she was so pale that her skin looked transparent, and I noticed a rash on her neck. Beneath her lowered eyes were faint purple shadows. I knew what I was seeing: dry grief, grief grown old and familiar. It enters your bones and lives there, because it has no use for flesh, and after a while you feel that you're all bone, hard and dessicated, like a skeleton in a classroom. She fingered the little card and looked up at me.