Twisted Fate (16 page)

He’s mentioned several times things that they used to do together, and he regularly expresses pride in how tough and smart Eric was. Yesterday he said he would give anything to just have something of Eric’s. It nearly broke my heart. If it wasn’t for the bad blood I would almost feel inclined to contact Eric’s family to see if that was possible. But I am sure once the settlement payment cleared they were happy to never hear from us again. Such a pity. We all ache for their loss. And no one feels it more profoundly than Graham.

Lately I get the sense that he is finally capable of expressing himself and maybe looking for another friend who he can bond with. These days that possibility seems most likely from the next-door neighbors.

They even invited Graham to go out on an early fall excursion on their boat. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as happy as when he returned home, his cheeks red and hair windblown. He looked like he’d had some great epiphany. Raced up to his room, he said to take some notes. This move may be the best decision we ever made. The ocean is certainly an inspiration and maybe just the kind of combination of adventure and wholesome activity that can reach him.

Looking forward to meeting with you to discuss his progress this coming Wednesday.

Take care, Doc, and thank you.

1:34—Cleaning the decks

4:01—Tate tying knots close up

7:55—Coastline, lowering boom

15:03—Below deck

20:00–65:04—Talking with Julia

Dear Lined Piece of Paper,

She wasn’t kidding about being able to sail with her father! That girl is so at home on the ocean she’s like some superhero. I think I’ll tell Brian there’s a new superhero named Tate who battles sharks. That kid believes pretty much anything anyone tells him.

Mr. Tate is awesome. He actually smokes a pipe! I think he had it in the corner of his mouth the entire time we were out in the harbor. He doesn’t talk much at all—more like grunts and points to things. Mrs. Tate is like some kind of celebrity. They
both have funny accents, but very different from each other’s. Mr. Tate actually built the ship himself and apparently li’l miss Tate used to go out on it with him when she was just a toddler.

That girl is amazing.

Her mother was not much of a sailor but she was very funny. She reminded me of the people who buy Kim’s paintings. And she was dressed in some kind of perfect sailing suit. She and Tate dressed alike. White shorts and blue-and-white-striped T-shirts and red sweaters with a picture of an anchor on them and Docksiders. It was really funny and kinda cool to film.

Sooo. Dr. Adams changed the drugs. Dad and Kim think he’s some kind of genius. But really the thing that is making me so happy is that I doubled the dose. Obviously. Whatever he changed it to did not take into account I had already changed the dosages of the other stuff like six months ago. I can buy all of it online—well, I don’t buy it myself; it’s on my private wish list, which I send out to people who buy more than one hundred dollars of my films. They pay and the stuff comes in boxes that look like books or prints. Dr. Adams started asking me about dosages and I figured eventually they’d figure things out—so this method works best because it doesn’t worry anyone. Anyway . . . all this is to say I guess this new doubling the dose is more like quadrupling it.

How can someone who is not me know how I feel just by things I’ve told him? It doesn’t make any sense. I know how I feel on this stuff and I know the kind of state I need to maintain to produce good work and I am not going to let that stop. Also—if they stop prescribing it I can just get shit online. He took me off
the Xanax because he said I seem to have the anxiety under control. That’s because I already got myself some Librium and have been taking it for weeks! The Librium combined with Effexor, and the Adderall from Dr. Adams, is pretty sweet. Add to that the occasional half bottle of NyQuil to give things that floating sparkling effect that makes things beautiful and you’re good to go. But overall I am focused, relaxed, and ready to achieve greatness.

The kind of greatness Eric always talked about. After sailing with Tate, I started to feel like Rockland might have been one of the more beautiful places I had ever been and I started to think that maybe I could make enough films and sell them and not actually have to go to school at all. I would wander around looking for good subjects.

It’s amazing how much money people pay just for a simple little interview with a child. Near the skate park, near the elementary school, there’s always interesting subjects. For example, Julia Blair, who I talked to. She was playing on the swings and then she jumped off and was sitting by herself near the sandbox, clearly waiting for someone to pick her up. She was wearing a pink shirt and a little dark-green cardigan sweater with pictures of tulips on it. I sat on the swings. I had my camera attached to my hat as usual. And I was pretty sure I was getting some beautiful footage. The woods behind her—the contrasting colors of her clothes, the way she played absently by herself, looked distracted and thoughtful. I knew this would look good edited together with footage of things I had taken off the news or footage of cars driving really fast.

Finally I asked her, “Are you waiting for someone to pick you up?”

She nodded. “I’m waiting for my babysitter. She should be here soon.”

“You don’t walk home by yourself? You seem like a big girl.”

“I do on Wednesday and Friday, but today my babysitter’s taking me to her house. I’m in third grade. My mom says I can stay at home by myself soon.”

She told me she lives on Westmont. While she was talking I was thinking how cool it would be to get little kids to describe the whole geography of the city. How it would be really weird. And I could intercut the descriptions with footage of highways and maybe old pictures of Rockland. I was sure the same people who usually buy my films would pay even more if I had a film with lots of kids talking about their neighborhoods and how they walked around, how they saw it. Maybe I could even get a production company interested in it.

“Do you have any friends who might want to be in a movie?” I asked her.

“Maybe,” she said. “But can I be a princess in it?”

I told her of course. It really didn’t matter what she was going to be. People would buy the movie no matter what.

I lay down on the grass near her and pointed the camera up at the sky—the canopy of trees overhead and the blue and the clouds. And it felt like the world was full of possibility. I left before her babysitter came to pick her up and went out to drive the Austin Healey on the beautiful winding roads of Rockland.

A
pparently it was on some kind of automatic system. Once people had paid enough to his PayPal account or bought him everything from his Amazon wish list, the video would automatically download from his site. There were already dozens of films. I thought the worst were the ones of kids. Talking to them about what they liked and then asking them questions about where they lived and went to school and who picked them up and when. The films were basically doing all the groundwork for any pedophile who wanted to come along. I couldn’t believe them when I saw them. He was literally assisting the potential abduction—the potential harm—to a child.

One little girl gave her address, phone number, school, and listed all the streets she walked home on and what time. Our jaws dropped when we saw it.

According to his parents, that was some kind of point he
was making with his art. Like the films were a comment on what he was actually doing. That they were about trust and how the world has changed and how we are all constantly being watched and have no privacy and are at risk for people harming us . . . and God knows what other excuses these people came up with for what he was doing. They were blind to what their kid was up to. This was not art. This was some kid with a camera seeing how far he could push it, how much he could get away with. How he could get any attention at all. This is a very sick, very spoiled kid and nothing more. In the end, when I look back on it it’s amazing only two people were killed. The potential harm was so great.

And who knows if some new terror will come out of it.

I
probably did it to spite her, I can see that now. Syd told me to stay away from Graham and then she and Declan went over there. Watched movies with him. She literally did that the day after she told me not to hang out with him. I knew that he was just another boy she would treat badly. I’d seen her do it before. I wanted to be friends with him and I wanted to do something interesting in my life before I went off to college. Something daring. I wanted to be with someone who could appreciate me for who I was and also show me things I didn’t know about. Syd is so crazy the way she exaggerates. “Stay away from him or it’ll ruin everything we have,” she said. I mean, please. I was like, “What exactly do we have? We haven’t had one good conversation since we were ten years old.”

Syd never introduced me to her friends. We used to play with Becky together when we were little but Declan—I
don’t think he’s even said a word to me. The two of them are always off together. If I come in the room and they are there, she pretends I’m not there and says “Let’s go” to him and he makes kind of an awkward face and then does whatever she wants. I started thinking about all the things Sydney had excluded me from. How after elementary school she pretty much ignored me at all times. And when she started smoking dope, and doing God knows what else she and her stoner friends get up to, it’s like I don’t even exist.

Graham was maybe the first person who hung out with us together a lot because he lived next door. And because of the way we met—all of us standing out there by the edge of the woods. We would sometimes hang out talking together. He seemed to really like both of us and be interested in both of us. He was weird and cool and had something rebellious in him like Syd and he cared about things the way I did. At first, I thought he was maybe one of those academic stars that she always liked to be around and then I realized he was gentler and shier. More like me.

Anyway I had all this on my mind and also the whole thing about going off to college. I used to look at it as a great adventure, but the closer I got to leaving the more I thought of it as being gotten rid of, maybe permanently. I know our parents loved me and that it wasn’t true but I felt like Sydney had outgrown everything about me and wanted me gone. I wanted to get away from her too. I did. But I couldn’t help feeling like I was the one who was being cast out and might
never be a part of her life again. Even her talking about us coming together and being unified about things also freaked me out. For some reason it made me feel more like she was getting rid of me—not less. It was so unlike her. I just felt in those days like I was about to disappear.

So I did it. I did. I went over to his house because he invited me. And went up to his room. The house was amazing. Though it looked smaller than I thought it would be after seeing it from the outside. There were these tiny little paintings hanging all over. A whole wall taken up with miniatures that looked like they had been painted with a single eyelash they were so delicate. The house was really tastefully done. Not in the cozy New England style my mother preferred, but in a sophisticated way. Outside in the backyard there was a marble fountain with a single long smooth stone in the middle—it looked like one of those polished stone sculptures we studied in art history. I think the artist was Brancusi.