What I Loved

he was four, his parents, who were both addicts, had deserted him and an infant sister. The little girl had died of AIDS when she was two years old. Rafael had run away from his third foster family, somewhere in the Bronx, and found his way into the clubs, where he met Giles. He had turned tricks. He had sold Ecstasy to willing buyers and at thirteen had made a pretty good living. Otherwise the boy was a cipher.
    Giles's arrest turned the perception of his work inside out. What had been seen as a clever commentary on the horror genre began to look like the sadistic fantasies of a murderer. The peculiar insularity of the New York art scene had often made obvious work seem subtle, stupid work intelligent, and sensational work subversive. It was all a matter of how the art was "pitched." Because Giles had become a sort of minor celebrity, embraced by critics and collectors, his new designation as possible felon was both embarrassing and intriguing to the world he had left so abruptly. During the first month after his arrest, art magazines, newspapers, and even the television news picked up the story of the "art murder." Larry Finder issued a statement in which he said that in America a person is innocent until proven guilty, but that if Giles was found guilty of the crime, he would vociferously condemn the act and would no longer represent him.
    In the meantime, however, prices for the work went up, and Finder did a brisk business selling Teddy Giles. Buyers wanted the work because it now seemed that it mimicked reality, but Giles, who freely gave interviews from Rikers, mounted a defense that was just the opposite. In an interview for DASH, he argued that it was all a hoax. He had staged a murder in his apartment for the benefit of his friends, using artificial blood and a realistic replica of Rafael to do it. He had known that Rafael was leaving, going to visit an aunt in California, and he had used the trip to perpetrate an elaborate "art joke." Rafael Hernandez had been murdered, but Giles insisted that he hadn't done it. He cited the fact that his "fabricators" had known about his plan. Maybe one of them had committed the murder to frame him. Giles seemed to know that the police case rested on the shoulders of a nameless friend, a friend who had arrived that day and looked through the doorway into his apartment. Could the friend swear that the blood he had seen was real blood, that the body on the floor wasn't a fake? Perhaps the most curious aspect of the case was that Giles was able to produce an artificial corpse. Pierre Lange told the journalist that he had cast a simulation of Rafael's body on the Tuesday before he disappeared. Giles had instructed him about the injuries to the body, as he always did, and then he had worked with police and morgue photos to give the damage the appearance of believability. Of course, he added, the bodies were always hollow. Blood and sometimes crushed internal organs were added for effect, but he did not reproduce tissue or muscle or bone. According to the article, the police had impounded the faux corpse.
    The case lasted for eight long months. Mark camped out in the apartment of "a friend"—a girl named Anya, whom we never met. Violet spoke regularly to Arthur Geller on the telephone, and he sounded reasonably confident that Mark's testimony at the trial would result in a conviction. She spoke to Mark once a week, but she said their conversations were forced and mechanical. "I don't believe a word that comes out of his mouth," she said. "I often wonder why I talk to him at all." On  some evenings, Violet would speak to me while she looked out the window. Then she would stop talking and her lips would part in an expression of disbelief. She never cried anymore. Her dread seemed to have frozen her. She would stop moving for seconds at a time and become as inert as a statue. But at other times she was jumpy. The smallest noise would make her start or gasp. After she recovered from the momentary shock, she would rub her arms repeatedly as though she were cold. On the nights when she felt nervous, she would ask me to stay on the sofa, and I would bed down in the living room with Bill's pillows and the comforter from Mark's bed.
    I can't say whether Violet's anxiety was the same as mine. Like most emotions, that vague form of fear is a crude lump of feeling that relies on words for definition. But that inner state quickly infects what is supposedly outside us, and I felt that the