“So she didn’t kill her husband,” Rose said, trying hard to take in everything the lawyer told him.
“She’s a beautiful woman. Admirable also, in a way. And no, I don’t think that she killed anyone.”
“Who did it then?”
“No one knows.”
“The murdered man’s brother?”
“He’s white, like the dead man. He was cleared right away.”
“But what about the knife?”
“Again with the knife.”
“Then it wasn’t a crime of passion?”
“You think what you want and keep those thoughts to yourself.”
“A crime related to the arms trafficking?”
“It could be, but they wanted to make it out to be a hate crime, at first, and then a crime of passion. To cover up things, my friend. They’d have done anything to cover it up. The police would rather no one knows how much they’re drowning in shit.”
“And she’s still in Manninpox?”
“You should know.”
“Me? Why would I know?”
“You messing with me?”
“I’m just asking.”
“No, she’s not in Manninpox.”
“They let her out?”
“Didn’t say that.”
“They transferred her to another prison?”
“Look, my friend, I’m guessing you already know the answer to all these questions, and if you don’t know, go figure it out,” Pro Bono said, glancing at his Cartier Panthere to signal that the time had long run out.
“It was a crucifixion,” Rose managed to say, “a crucifixion without a cross. The husband was crucified.”
“What makes you think such nonsense?”
“A wound on each hand, one on each foot, and one on the side. The five wounds of Christ…”
“The thing with the knife was just some grisly detail meant to distract.”
“I think it was just the opposite, it was a very important detail. Did the witnesses not see this? The stabbings I’m talking about, did they see that?”
“It was four members of the same family. They come out of the building just at that time, see the murder, and go back in; they’re not going to stay there like idiots so that the murderers do them in as well. They call the police from their apartment, which doesn’t face the street but a courtyard in the back, and for obvious reasons do not poke their noses out again. They don’t see anything that happens afterward. Is that good enough? A pleasure to meet you then,” Pro Bono said, ending the meeting.
“Remember, I still have the original,” Rose told him, not knowing where he got the gall at the last minute to continue to put pressure on the lawyer, fanning himself with a manila envelope that contained an identical manuscript to the one Pro Bono had in his hands.
“Are you blackmailing me?” Pro Bono asked, a flash of rage in his eyes.
“Let’s say I’m asking you a favor. I just want to know where she is.”
“Very well, you win again,” Pro Bono said. “Look for her at the Olcott Hotel, 27 West 72nd Street.”
Rose jotted down the information and was on his way out, muttering his thanks, when he heard a burst of Pro Bono’s laughter behind him.
“The Olcott Hotel isn’t there anymore,” he yelled. “It shut down years ago. Go, look for her there; see if you find her.”
From Cleve’s Notebook
Paz says that her work is what she most misses from her life before Manninpox. She worked taking surveys about people’s cleaning habits, and the stories she tells are very interesting, and in the end they’re about a social, ethical, and aesthetic hierarchy of the world according to the standards of cleanliness and dirt. I have been pushing her to write about work, about the kind of people she met, but she’s hesitant. At first she completely refused, saying this wasn’t a good topic. I asked her which topic was a good topic, and she said love was, that any novel that wasn’t a love story was boring. That’s what she told me, and in the end she’s probably right. In any case, little by little I’ve gotten her to write about her work. And I see how she’s transformed when she does it. It’s as if the whole human being that she once was, before she was chewed up by authority and justice, rises to the surface. For a time she was taking surveys on Staten Island, and the other day she told this horrific story in class that made us laugh nonetheless. She said she had been knocking on doors in West New Brighton, one of the most foul-smelling neighborhoods on the island because it is right next to what used to be the Fresh Kills Landfill.
Fresh Kills was not only the largest landfill in the history of mankind — it was also the cyclopean monument that outdid all of them, more massive than the Great Wall of China and taller than the Statue of Liberty. This feat was accomplished by dumping thirteen thousand tons of daily garbage on the site for half a century. There is a grisly symbolism that humankind’s most expansive handiwork was this immeasurable mountain of filth, which in the end remains as our American trademark, as a seal that legitimizes our ownership over this entire section of the planet, because the great paradox is that the more we soil things the more we own, and the more we own the more we soil things, and as Michel Serres says, that which is clean belongs to no one. Take an empty hotel room between guests, all cleaned up and disinfected by housekeeping and that will only become Mr. Doe’s Room 1503, or Mrs. Smith’s Room 711, when Doe and Smith leave the mark of their sweat on the bedsheets, the fungi from their feet on the bathtub, their hair in the drain, their cigarette butts in the ashtrays, the packaging and receipts from their purchases in the garbage can, and their drool on the pillowcases. Because that’s the way it is, we only own what we soil, and what is clean belongs to no one. Pushing this logic to its extreme, one can conclude that a great portion of the earth, sky, and water we call America is buried to the hilt with our garbage, our shit, our smells, and waste. That’s why it is ours, more so than because of land titles, and invasions, and aggressive defenses or the actions of border guards. Here we have deposited the filth that generation after generation has come out of or passed through our bodies; I’m referring to industrial amounts of semen, rivers of blood, tons of used Kotex and tissues and condoms, discarded diapers, obsolete televisions and computers, paper napkins, old cars, plastic bags, and rolls of toilet paper. And, above all, shit. I get dizzy thinking of the inconceivable amount of shit, because just as tigers and dogs mark their territory with their urine, so we have conquered an entire country through shit. With garbage and shit. It is not just us, of course; all the other people in the world do the same, but none of them at our level of magnificence and abundance. Our dead are buried in this earth on whose surface there hardens in geological layers the mountain ranges of crap that our civilization has left behind. Ergo, this land is ours. My reasoning has just proved it. Then there is the name, Fresh Kills. That mega garbage dump was called just that, Fresh Kills, because before it was a landfill it must have been a slaughterhouse, that is, a place bathed in and impregnated by the blood of thousands of animals sacrificed for mankind. Like any ancient sanctuary, from the Temple of Jerusalem to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, dyed crimson and stinking of blood. All of which shows — and what a discovery — that for all intents and purposes, inherently, Fresh Kills must have been a sacred spot, sanctified by sacrificial blood, and on that sacred land we built our temple, our huge dump, an ultimate cathedral of garbage, the tallest and widest by any measure that mankind has built upon the earth, a Notre Dame of filth, a Sagrada Família of waste. And there’s T. S. Eliot, of course, with his most apt quote: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?”
Side note: Yesterday I decided to try out my theory about Fresh Kills on my father, and he tore it to pieces. According to him, Kills doesn’t have anything to do with slaughtering; he says the term comes from the Dutch occupation of NYC and it simply means water or stream. Fresh water or something like that. Too bad, my version made more sense.