PART VII. AFTER
Now begins a very upsetting and difficult time of my life, on which I would rather not (but suppose, in the interest of honesty, must) dwell, if only briefly.
I have to admit that I remember very little of the initial interrogation and rather less of the arrest, which is strange, for I recall feeling extraordinarily alert and almost painfully engaged in the activity at hand (which was, unfortunately, a recounting of the events leading to my undoing). I remember looking about me at the colors and shapes sharpening and deepening in tone and line before my eyes, and finding the world oppressive, with its needlessly aggressive colors and strange objects and harsh, jangling sounds. Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense. In particular, I remember waiting in an interrogation room at the police station, and even in the blandness of that space—the dreary, dimpled sea-gray brick walls, the stone-gray floors, the gray aluminum table with its silvery filaments like threads in silk—I felt attacked, as if the gray itself might gather into a great wave and drown me under its weight.
So. What can I say about the accusations, the investigation, the articles, the trial? What can I say about the institute placing me on administrative leave (after assuring me that I had its full support), about the quotes from unnamed personnel that began appearing in the articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal? What can I say about how my remaining children were taken from me, how I was denied access to Victor, how when I showed up at his dorm room—I wanted only to talk to him, and he had not returned my calls or my letters—I was arrested like a criminal, even though I had every right to speak to him? It was my money that had paid for the room he hid in, laughing at me, and my money that had brought him here to begin with.
But although all of these things were awful, unbearable, the worst moments were not when I learned of my rapidly diminishing rights—each day seemed to bring a new betrayal, a new humiliation, a new insult—but when I learned of Owen’s involvement: how after Victor had called him one night, it had been he who had urged him to speak to the police, he who had helped him find a lawyer, he who wrote the checks to his college after I no longer would. My own brother, my twin, my constant, choosing a child over me. I could not fathom it, cannot fathom it still.
Then there were more details. Victor had become friends with Xerxes, Owen’s companion (how, I wanted to know—for did not that relationship, between a grown man and a college-age boy, seem suspicious in itself?), and it was Xerxes who had presented Victor’s accusation to Owen, and Xerxes, presumably, who had convinced Owen of its veracity. This information I learned in shreds—an unhelpful piece here, an upsetting bit there—from the few children who had decided that they would believe me, the man who had paid for and raised them for these many years, over Victor. I was happy for their loyalty, of course, but there were very few of them, very few—far fewer than I would have assumed or expected—and at times I found myself outraged that I should even have to be grateful to them at all, that I should have to consider exceptional what should have been the only proper response.
In the end, though, it is not Xerxes whom I blame but Owen. “Who are you?” I asked him in my last conversation with him, one of the few we’d had between my arraignment and my trial, after which we never spoke again.
“Who are you?” he hissed before hanging up.
That was a bad day, one of the worst. On that day I crashed about my house looking for something to irrationally break, someone to irrationally kick. This was during the period when I was imprisoned in my own house, my occasional fantasy ironically having come to life: there were no children, no …
