The Genius

by Jesse Kellerman

  “Why does she think you’re a liar?” Andrade asked.

  “How the hell do I know?” I said. “She’s insane.”

  LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR

  “If you ask me,” said Andrade, “this would seem to lend some credence to her claim about having done the drawings.”

  LIAR

  “You said those first two letters came from the artist, right?” Trueg asked.

  “I thought so.”

  “Well, this looks like the same person to me,” he said. He looked at Andrade. “Benny? What do you think?”

  “I think so.”

  Trueg smiled at me. “That’s our professional opinion. Same person. So she fooled you once, I don’t see why she couldn’t do it again.”

  “But.” I picked up the letter. LIAR LIAR LIAR. “Don’t you think—I mean, she’s threatening me, why don’t you arrest her for assaulting me?”

  “Well,” said Trueg, “that’s not so straightforward, either. She admits to sending you the first two letters—”

  “All right,” I said. “There you go.”

  “—and she says she was going to send another. But then she tells us that the first two were intended as some kind of practical joke.”

  “You have got to be—”

  “And when you got jumped, she started to worry about implicating herself, so she stopped sending them. She’d written half of the next one but she didn’t finish it, and that’s the one we found. This one.”

  “And you believe her?”

  Trueg and Andrade looked at each other. Then they look at me.

  “Yeah,” said Trueg. “I do, actually.”

  Andrade said, “That was my instinct, as well.”

  “She offered to take a polygraph.”

  “Oh come on,” I said. “This. This is… So what are you saying—that she’s the one or not.”

  “We don’t know,” said Trueg. “She might have arranged for you to get beat up, but it wasn’t her who did it. At eleven forty-five she was at a party across town. All the other guests we talked to swear she was there from ten until at least one in the morning.”

  “She could get them to say that,” I said. Even to my ears I sounded paranoid.

  “That’s true,” Andrade said kindly.

  “She could get someone to do it for her,” I said.

  “That’s true, too.”

  I said, “I don’t know what else to think.”

  “Right now we don’t have anything we can charge her with that’s going to stick. Maybe, like, harassment for those first couple of letters. But I gotta be honest with you, I don’t think they’re going to bother. She says it was just a joke.”

  “Do you find this funny?” I demanded, holding up the letter.

  Trueg and Andrade exchanged another look.

  “Well,” said Andrade, “not a hundred percent funny.”

  “But like sixty percent,” said Trueg.

  I stared at them. Why did everyone kept finding my distress so amusing?

  “Maybe more like thirty,” Trueg said.

  Andrade said, “Essentially, we’re where we were before. We’ll keep looking for the art to pop up. In the meantime you can relax about those letters. I don’t think you’ll get any more of them.”

  I nodded dumbly.

  Said Trueg, “Wheels within wheels.”

  I LEFT THE STATION IN A FOG and stayed that way until my meeting with Samantha. She saw me and immediately asked if I was feeling all right. I explained to her what the detectives had told me and she said, “Wow.”

  “Indeed.”

  “That’s messed up.”

  “Indeed.”

  She grinned. “Well, allow me to add a little clarity to your life.”

  She told me that she had found James Jarvis, the man who, thirty years prior, had survived an assault reminiscent of the Queens murders. He now lived in Boston, where he taught marketing at a community college. Samantha had spoken with him, and although he claimed not to remember much, her gut told her that he was holding back. Having dealt with many victims of sexual assault, she believed we would get more from him face-to-face; the telephone made it easier for people to detach themselves and to repress frightening memories. And when, the next day, the assistant director at Green Gardens called to let me know that while he couldn’t send out copies of the photographs, we could come have a look for ourselves, Samantha and I decided to make a trip of it.

  Wednesday morning two weeks later, we boarded a puddle-jumper from LaGuardia to Albany International Airport. The previous evening’s weather report warned of an incoming nor’easter, and I expected a long delay, if not a cancellation. But that day dawned bright and clear; the terminal’s picture windows threw long rectangles of sunlight, a big blank filmstrip through which Samantha moved, illuminated, toward me. She wore lavender corduroys and a black sweater and no makeup; she swung a battered duffel bag, and when she stood at the ticket kiosk, she hooked her thumbs into her back pockets. I stood off a ways, looking at her, reluctant to break the spell she had cast around herself, and when I finally did come over to say hello and she smiled at me, it was hard not to tell her how lovely she looked.

  We got our tickets and boarded a bus that took us across the tarmac to a rickety-looking prop plane, its wings glistening with deicer. There were only thirty seats, and as we took our places across the aisle from each other, Samantha turned her attention out the window, to the maintenance worker spraying down the blades.

  “I hate flying,” she said.

  I took her at face value. Who doesn’t hate flying? Especially these days.

  But I underestimated her. At every bump—and in a tiny plane, you feel them—she clutched at the armrests, sweat beading at her hairline.

  “Are you okay?”

  She was pale. “I just really hate this.”

  “Do you want some water?”

  “No, thank you.” The plane dipped and her whole body tensed. “I’m not like this,” she said. “It started after Ian died.”

  I nodded. I did a quick risk assessment and, hoping I was making the right decision, reached across the aisle and took her hand. She held on to me for the remainder of the flight, letting go only to allow the beverage cart past.

  I DIDN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT ALBANY except that Ed Koch had once referred to it as a town without a decent Chinese restaurant, and as we pulled out of the airport I saw the wisdom of his words. A limp sense of obligation compelled us to take a spin past the Capitol, which proved an ostentatious red-and-white mess, an attempt at dignity in a place obviously discredited by time. In hindsight, it might’ve been prudent of the first New Yorkers to reserve judgment a bit before choosing their capital. What seemed important three hundred years ago—an abundance of locally procurable beaver pelt— might eventually matter less than, say, being the worldwide center of culture and finance. But we’ll not Monday-morning quarterback.

  Green Gardens was over the Hudson, off Route 151. We drove through low neighborhoods still festooned with tinsel; we came to a highway junction where, in a wet asphalt lot adjacent to a gas station, two men stood watching a third as he walked backward atop a truck tire. Before letting Samantha get behind the wheel, I’d made her promise she was calm enough, and by now she had returned to her dry, rational self, spending the bulk of the drive flatly relaying holiday horror stories.

  “My mom called Jerry my dad’s name.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Wish I was.”

  “Was she drunk?”

  “No. But he was. That’s why she did it, I think. I think she was having one of those flashbacks to when she used to yell at my dad. Jerry was being an ass about something she cooked and she goes, ‘Goddammit Lee!’ Right away she put her hands over her mouth, like in a cartoon.”

  “Did he notice?”

  “Yup.”

  “Oh boy.”

  "Yup.”

  "That’s appalling.”

  “It is what it is.” She looked at m
e. “Did you call your father?”

  I hesitated. “No.”

  She nodded, said nothing.

  Feeling defensive, I said, “I was going to. I actually did pick up the phone.”

  “But?”

  “I had no idea what to say.”

  “You could have asked why he wanted to buy your drawings.”

  “That’s true.”

  “It’s up to you.” She signaled left. “We’re here.”

  The stone columns flanking the entrance to Green Gardens had once supported a gate; similar columns ran all along the frontage, stained with rust runoff near the empty bracket holes in their tops and sides. Thickets of pine and alder blocked the view from the road; as we cleared them, I felt a rising sense of anticipation. A towering white house came into view, gabled and turreted and encircled by a porch. We parked and mounted the steps and were greeted by a man with a little red goatee.

  “Dennis Driscoll,” he said.

  “Ethan Muller. This is ADA Samantha McGrath.”

  “Howdy.” One corner of his mouth turned up. “We don’t get a lot of visitors.”

  The interior of the house was creaky and musty and berugged, its original Victorian trimmings intact: god-awful wallpaper, push-button light-switches, an off-kilter chandelier. Steam pipes hissed. In the foyer hung a severe oil portrait of a jowly, baldpated man: THOMAS WESTFIELD WORTHE, according to the nameplate.

  “He was in charge until the mid-sixties,” Driscoll said. “In its time, it was considered a fairly progressive place.” He led us upstairs, pausing on the landing to point out the window. Across a wide, snowy meadow stood a second building, this one squarely modern. “That’s where the dormitory used to be. They knocked it down in the 70s to make room for the main rehab facility. The house is from 1897.” He started up toward the third floor. “I was surprised to hear from you so soon. Frankly, I don’t think Dr. Ulrich expected you to show up, which is probably why she agreed.”

  “Here we are.”

  “Yessirree.” We walked along a cramped, dark hallway, went up another flight of stairs. “This part of the house isn’t used very much, because the heat doesn’t work that well. And in the summer it’s like a kiln. Mostly we use these rooms for storage. Long-term patients can leave their bags. We get a lot of out-of-staters, a few Canadians tired of being on a waiting list. In theory family members could sleep here, but I always recommend they use the Days Inn. Voilà.” We turned the corner.

  He said, “You can see why I didn’t want to go through them all myself.” All along the hallway hung hundreds of photographs, their frames cracking from decades of seasonal fluctuation in humidity. Virtually every inch of wallpaper was covered, evoking one of those claustrophobic seventeenth-century “paintings of paintings,” some Flemish archduke’s personal gallery smothered floor to ceiling in art. A few of the photos were of individuals, but most were as Driscoll had described, in the style of a class portrait, the subjects arranged in rows, tallest in the back, shortest sitting cross-legged, all of them dead-eyed, their hair slicked down and their collars buttoned up; all of them rigid and sullen, as befits the subjects of an old photo. But I detected, too, an extra dose of insolence; sneers lingering and chins jutting out farther than strictly necessary. Was I overreading? I did know, after all, that they’d been sent here for bad behavior. Either way, I felt a profound sympathy for them, these castoffs. Had I been born in a less indulgent era, to a less indulgent family, I might have ended up among them.

  Knowing that somewhere in this array of faces we might find Victor Cracke gave rise to the temptation to rush, but we proceeded methodically, squinting to read the legends. Some were unlabeled. I lifted one frame off the wall and found nothing on the reverse but June 2, 1954. All these faces and names; all these forgotten souls. Where were their families? What kinds of lives did they lead before coming here? Did they ever leave? Ghosts tugged at my sleeves: spirits looking for a living body to carry them away.

  I think I expected fireworks when we found him. All that happened, though, was Samantha saying,

  “Ethan.”

  Seven men in a single row. She put her finger near the bottom of the frame.

  STANLEY YOUNG FREDERICK GUDRAIS VICTOR CRACKE MELVIN LATHAM

  Shorter than the men to either side of him by at least four inches, wearing an uneven moustache, his eyes wide and terrified as he waits for the flash. A high forehead and a rounded chin give his face the shape of an inverted tombstone, its width out of proportion with his torso, which is sunken and slight. He might be hunchbacked. Based on the other men in the photo, seemingly from the same cohort, I put him at about twenty-five, although he looked prematurely wizened.

  Driscoll said, “I’ll be darned.”

  My hands shook as I took the picture from Samantha. I felt a lot of things—sadness, relief, excitement—but most of all I felt betrayed. Once, he had not existed. Once, I had been the one to create him; I had been the prime mover. Then, as we hunted him down, I had been forced to forfeit those beliefs, piecemeal and painfully. I talked to people who knew him. I ate his apples. I walked in his footsteps. He became realer and realer, and afraid of losing him entirely, I had grabbed at him. Instead of minimizing him, I inflated him. I had expected that when I finally did lay eyes on him, he would be more: more than a typed name; more than a bunch of muddled grays and chalky whites, a piece of institutional arcana; more than a sad-looking golemlike little man. I wanted someone monumental; I wanted a totem, a superman; I wanted a sign that he was of the Elect; I wanted a halo hovering above him, or devil’s horns sprouting from his forehead, or anything, anything at all to justify the sweeping changes he had wrought in my life. He was my god, and his plainness shamed me.

  Interlude: 1944.

  In the little house he has everything he needs. Mrs. Greene cooks for him and does his laundry. She teaches him how to read and how to do simple math. She teaches him the names of birds and animals, she gives him a big book, she puts him on her lap and reads to him from the Bible. The story he likes best is Moses in the bulrushes. He imagines the basket on the Nile, surrounded by crocodiles and storks. Mrs. Greene uses her hands to make their snapping jaws, scaring him with loud claps. Chomp! But Victor knows that the story has a happy ending. Moses’s sister watches from the banks. She will not let anything happen to him.

  Most of all he likes to draw, and when Mrs. Greene goes to town she brings back boxes of colored pencils and paper so thin he has to be careful not to tear through. She does not go often enough to satisfy his hunger for blank space and so he draws on the walls. When she sees she is angry. You must not do that, Victor. There is never enough room to draw, so he learns to hoard paper of all kinds: envelopes he fishes out of the trash, the insides of books Mrs. Greene reads and puts away on the shelf. One time she pulls down a book and sees what he has done and then she is angry again. He doesn’t understand. She has already read them, what does it matter? But she says You must never and then she beats him.

  But she does not beat him too often. Most of the time she is tender and he loves her like a mother although he does not have a mother and Mrs. Greene will not let him call her that. He doesn’t understand where he came from, but he doesn’t worry, he has everything he needs, food and Mrs. Greene and paper.

  They walk all around the property. Mrs. Greene teaches him the names of the flowers and he studies their petals up close. There are bees but he never gets stung. He stares at a flower until he sees it in his mind perfect, then he goes back to the cottage and draws. Mrs. Greene calls him an odd duck but she smiles when she says it. Victor, you’re an odd duck. Look at that daffodil. Look at that dandelion. Foxglove, chicory, and clover, they all have different shapes. You’re an odd duck, you are, but you are quick with a pencil.

  He is six. He sees other children moving along the road on funny things and she says Those are bicycles. They move so fast! He wants one. Mrs. Greene says No, you cannot leave the property. He replies that he will not leave the property,
but please oh please give me a bicycle.

  No.

  Victor hates her. To get back at her he waits until she has fallen asleep in the afternoon, which she often does, and then he pulls a stool over to the wall where the key hangs on a ribbon. He unlocks the front door and the front gate and walks all the way into town. He has been to town before but always hanging tightly to her hand. Before the town seemed exciting but now it is loud. A car honks at him. A dog barks at him. He feels dizzy and to escape he goes into a store. The storekeeper looks at him like he is a big bug. It starts to rain and he cannot leave. He stays in the store for hours. He gets hungry. He wants something to eat but he has no money so he takes the first thing he sees, some rock sugar. He puts it in his pocket and runs out. The storekeeper chases him. Victor runs as fast as he can. The storekeeper slips in a puddle and falls and when Victor looks back the man is blotched with mud brown-and-white like a cow. But he is no longer chasing. He yells still and still Victor runs. By the time he gets to the front gate his feet hurt and fire burns in his chest.

  Mrs. Greene is not in her room. Victor climbs on the stool and puts the key back and goes to his room and lies on his bed, wheezing and touching the sugar rock in his pocket. He is not hungry anymore. He doesn’t like sweets, he should have taken something he liked more. He doesn’t like to eat very much at all, and so he is very skinny and not too tall, he knows this because when the man with the mirror and the tongue stick came to visit he told Mrs. Greene that the boy needed to eat more, his growth was already stunted. And she replied that didn’t he think she had tried. The man was a doctor. He left. Mrs. Greene said he would return.

  Victor takes the sugar rock out of his pocket. He likes the way it feels, sharp and hard and delicate. He plays with it until it begins to melt in his hands. He puts it on the table and observes the way it bends the sunlight. He takes a piece of paper and traces the jagged shape. He starts to shade its different faces and then Mrs. Greene bursts in with her face red like a chicken’s. She says she knows what he has been up to, she has been half mad looking for him. Where did he think he was going, what did he think he was doing? Never again oh you wicked boy, you must learn, you are a fool. She smashes the sugar rock on the floor. Then she puts him over her knee and paddles him until he wails. You wicked boy. She takes his half-completed sketch and tears it to pieces.