Elliot Allagash

by Simon Rich

  “We have a problem,” I said. “Jessica called and…she asked me to tutor her. I said no, but when Mr. Hendricks finds out—”

  “Good God,” Elliot interrupted. “That’s why you’re so addled?”

  “I don’t speak French, Elliot!”

  He laughed.

  “I take it from your tone that this has less to do with Hendricks than with Jessica.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Give me some credit, Seymour. You thought, for a split second, that maybe she was calling because—”

  “Elliot, this is serious, okay? My teachers are getting suspicious.”

  I made sure my door was locked and continued in a whisper.

  “I’m not like you, okay? People actually care whether or not I’m lying to them.”

  Elliot scoffed.

  “You think nobody keeps tabs on me? Come on. Terry thinks my attendance record at Glendale is ‘stellar.’ I have to bribe James every week to falsify his reports.”

  “It’s different, though. I mean—your father doesn’t even read those reports.”

  There was a pause.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “He throws them away. He told me.”

  “When did he talk about me? What else did he say?”

  “Do you really care?” I asked.

  “Of course not!” he snapped. “I was just curious, but forget it.”

  There was a knock on my door.

  “I have to go, Elliot—we’re having dinner.”

  “Right now?”

  “I’ll talk to you some other time.”

  “Wait! Hold on—I’ll help you with this Hendricks thing.”

  “Not now.”

  “I have a solution, but it’s complicated—come over and we’ll map it out.”

  “I can’t. I got to go.”

  “You’re going to want to hear this one, Seymour! I’ve been saving it—it’s the perfect way to take him down!”

  “Goodbye, Elliot.”

  “But—”

  “Goodbye.”

  Figuring out the dynamics of the Allagash family was like trying to solve a complicated math problem: If Terry paid James x dollars to write him a weekly report about his son, and Elliot paid James y dollars to falsify that report, and Terry threw that report in the garbage, who came out ahead? How much would they save by simply talking to each other?

  These are the questions I asked myself that night at dinner, as I ate with my parents in silence.

  • • •

  “I think this one is probably the most fucked up,” Ashley said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But it’s useful research.”

  “It’s a chart of Mr. Billings’s shits.”

  “You said you’d help me,” I said, grabbing my notebook out of her hands.

  “I’ll help, I’ll help,” she said. “But you have to tell me why you have this.”

  I pointed a finger at her.

  “If you tell anybody about any of this—”

  She laughed.

  “I know, I know, you already threatened me.”

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you at all,” I said. “Honestly, I have no idea why we’re even talking.”

  “Seymour, why would I tell on you?” she said. “I mean, who would even believe me?”

  I hesitated.

  “Okay. But no interruptions.”

  I spread open the book and propped it up against the water tower.

  “Mr. Billings is the high school registrar. That means he gets a copy of every final exam in advance.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, so he can file them away for future reference. He also gets every student’s report cards.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know. So obviously, it’s important to know when he’s going to be away from his office.”

  “So you can break into his desk.”

  I hesitated.

  “Jesus, Seymour, relax!” she said. “There’s nobody up here.”

  “Okay. Well…basically, there are two important things to know about him. The first is that he always eats lunch at twelve thirty. The second thing is that he has irritable bowel syndrome. Now usually after lunch, he goes straight to the fifth floor bathroom for about ten minutes. But on these days—”

  I pointed to the calendar.

  “He goes to the eleventh-floor bathroom. For over half an hour.”

  “Why?”

  “I think because it’s more remote. The eleventh floor is only accessible by Staircase B, and almost no one uses it. I guess he wants privacy for whatever goes on in there.”

  “No, I mean, why does it take him so long on those two days? What’s special about them?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s when the cafeteria serves pizza.”

  She started to laugh out loud, getting louder and louder with every breath.

  “Ashley!” I whispered. “Shh!”

  She scrunched up her eyes and banged both fists against the water tower. I kept trying to shush her, but my pleas only seemed to make her laugh harder.

  “What’s so funny?” I demanded.

  She tried to answer, but every time she caught her breath, the hysterics returned and she couldn’t get any words out. Eventually, she grabbed my pencil and scribbled something onto my chart.

  He eats the pizza anyway!

  It was pretty amazing; Mr. Billings knew exactly what pizza did to him, but twice a month, he threw caution to the wind and went for it.

  Ashley collapsed in her chair, spent. Her lips were parted and her chest was heaving. She eventually caught her breath. But when she opened her eyes and looked at me, it set her off again—and then we were both laughing, stomping our feet against the tar. She started shoving me and I grabbed both her wrists to make her stop. We tried to regain control of ourselves, but whenever we made eye contact, we started laughing again. When we were finally finished, I could feel an ache in my stomach, like I had just done a hundred sit-ups. There were tears in my eyes.

  “Did Elliot think of that chart?” she asked, after we had caught our breath.

  “Actually, that one was mostly my idea.”

  “Well it’s pretty good,” she said.

  I blushed.

  We ran through the answers to Douglas’s history final until the ten-minute bell clanged softly in the distance.

  “Do you want to hear something crazy?” I said, before heading down my tunnel. “It never occurred to me until now that there was something funny about that chart.”

  Ashley nodded solemnly.

  “That is crazy,” she said.

  • • •

  Elliot wheeled up the dumbwaiter and took out two items: a battered cell phone and a copy of the Yellow Pages. He flipped the book open to the Male Escorts section, grabbed the cell phone, and began to dial numbers. After about five calls, he put both objects back into the dumbwaiter and wheeled them down. Then he took out his Enemies book, unscrewed his pen, and made a little check mark.

  “A waiter,” he explained. “He tried to correct my pronunciation.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Elliot took out a pink handkerchief and dramatically wiped his face. I could tell he wanted me to ask a follow-up question. “How did you get the waiter’s cell phone?” for instance. Or, “How will those calls you made affect his life?” But I wasn’t in the mood for a story.

  It was my first trip to Elliot’s house in nearly two weeks. I wasn’t avoiding him, exactly. I just didn’t need his help as much as I had before. It was hard work, perpetuating the strange identity that Elliot had constructed for me, but I had a handle on it. And besides, I wouldn’t have to keep things up for much longer. There were only ninety-four days until college, where I would begin a new life as an anonymous freshman, free of my Glendale persona and all the pressure that came with it. As soon as I set foot on campus, I would put the past few years behind me and go back to being myself.

  “Mr. Hend
ricks never said anything about the tutoring,” I said. “So that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.”

  Elliot ignored me.

  “Steak tartare?” he said. “Clams Casino?”

  I shook my head.

  “James said you needed to tell me something? Something important?”

  Elliot giggled.

  The bags under his eyes had acquired a dark, bluish tint, and I could see the veins in his forehead, like strands of red thread.

  “A new scheme,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t have time.”

  “Okay,” Elliot said.

  I coughed, somewhat startled by his acquiescence.

  “Okay,” I said. “Then I guess…I’ll see you later.”

  “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  I grabbed my coat, buttoned up, and headed for the door.

  “What was it?” I asked, suddenly curious.

  “What was what?”

  “The scheme?”

  “Oh,” Elliot said. “Nothing big.”

  “A school thing?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Just something with Jessica.”

  I stepped back inside.

  “About…the tutoring thing?”

  “No,” Elliot said. “Unrelated.”

  He smirked.

  “She’s yours,” he said. “If you want her.”

  I swallowed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think you know what I mean.”

  My heart was beating so fast, I felt like it might get dislocated. It was a sensation I hadn’t experienced since the eighth grade, when Elliot had first shown up and offered me the world.

  “What would I have to do?”

  Elliot grinned.

  “You should know by now,” he said. “Everything I say.”

  • • •

  I followed Elliot down the hall and into his creaky gated elevator. He jerked the hand crank and we lurched upstairs, to the very top floor of his ten-story home.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been up here,” I said.

  “You haven’t.”

  The gate swung open, revealing a long, narrow hallway. There were no lamps, but the moon shone brightly through skylights in the ceiling. The walls were lined with dozens of portraits. Some of the paintings were so old, the surfaces had cracked. I could tell by the clothes each figure wore that the paintings were arranged chronologically. And their proud smirks gave away that they were Allagashes.

  I walked over to the first portrait, of an ancient, scowling king with a jet-black beard. He held a sword in his right hand; in his left, a bushel of grapes. A small bronze plaque listed the date as 1254.

  “Is this the first Allagash?” I asked.

  Elliot shook his head.

  “It’s fake,” he said.

  “You mean, this isn’t a real portrait?”

  “No,” Elliot said. “This isn’t a real person. None of these people existed.”

  He led me down the hall, past Renaissance and Victorian Allagashes.

  “Terry had them all commissioned a few months ago. To trick some visiting countess into doing God knows what.”

  “Why did she care so much about his family?” I asked.

  “Because she’s a woman,” Elliot said. “And women are easily confused. Jessica is no exception.”

  It was strange to hear Elliot refer to Jessica as a “woman.” In my head, she was very much a girl. The only time I could remember using the word “woman” myself was in history class, when talking about the suffrage movement.

  “Women’s minds are often muddled,” Elliot continued. “They think they’re attracted to honor, or talent, or lineage, when in fact they’re always attracted to the same thing: money.”

  We had sat down on a mahogany bench across from an armored medieval Allagash. He was bleeding from a wound in his chest and waving some kind of flag.

  “I don’t know, Elliot,” I said. “There have to be some girls—or, you know, women—who care about other things. Besides money.”

  “Of course there are,” he said. “Women value all sorts of commodities: fame, knowledge, glory, manners, looks, power, skill. But these are the lesser currencies of the world—the rubles, francs, and shekels! They can all be purchased with hard American cash.”

  He stared at me with an intensity that foretold a lengthy lecture.

  “Women are on the same mental level as birds. They see shiny substances and they want them—but they’re incapable of understanding why. Some women, for example, think they like diamonds. But diamonds are just rocks! Women are actually attracted to the money those diamonds are worth.”

  I thought, with some embarrassment, of my mom. My dad had given her a diamond necklace for one of her birthdays and her hands had shaken so much from the excitement that she needed help fastening the buckle.

  “Women will refer to men as ‘sophisticated,’ or ‘intelligent’ or ‘confident,’” Elliot said. “But they mean ‘rich.’”

  I thought about Lance. He was wealthy, but not as wealthy as some of the other guys in our class. Jessica liked Lance for other, more important reasons.

  “What about being good at an instrument?” I said. “That’s not something you can just buy. You have to be born with it.”

  Elliot smiled condescendingly.

  “Ah,” he said. “Talent!”

  He stood up and began to pace.

  “Lance was able to buy a guitar, an amplifier, and enough lessons to become proficient. His talent couldn’t have cost his parents more than five thousand dollars. Think about the talent I could buy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lance is just a flash in the pan,” he said. “Your album’s going to be a critical and commercial sensation.”

  “What album?”

  Elliot reached into his pocket and handed me a disc.

  “I had James compose the tracks last night,” he said. “It’s called The Seymour Herson Project.”

  “Elliot, I don’t even know any instruments!”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s why I had no choice but to cast you as an experimental genius.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “The album’s mostly sound effects. And spoken-word poetry.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “That sounds awful.”

  “The lyrics are in French.”

  “What? Why?”

  “So no one can tell whether or not they’re profound. If anyone asks what they mean, by the way, you’re to say they’re ‘existential.’”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s pathetic we have to stoop to this,” he muttered. “In ancient Rome, the only people who played music were slaves—and emperors who had gone mad.”

  “Elliot, I really don’t think this is going to work. I mean, who would want to listen to music like this?”

  Elliot rolled his eyes.

  “If Joe Kennedy could make his syphilitic son a bestselling author and then president of the United States, I think I can turn you into some avant-garde artist.”

  I laid the disc down on the bench.

  “I don’t think I want to do this,” I said. “It’s too much. The school stuff is fine…I’m going to be out of there soon. But this is the kind of thing that could really screw up my life.”

  “Two things,” Elliot said. “One: It’s too late. I’ve already mass-mailed your demo to every trendsetter in Williamsburg.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Two: It’s going to work.”

  He opened the elevator gate and yanked me inside.

  “Do you trust me?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Seymour, everything I’ve ever done has been to your advantage.”

  He leaned in so close that our faces were practically touching.

  “Do you trust me or not?”

  I nodded slightly.

  “All right,” he said, catching his breath. “Okay.”


  He jerked on the hand crank and the elevator went into motion.

  “Going down.”

  • • •

  I hurried silently through my living room, narrowly avoiding eye contact with my parents. Then I locked my door, put on my headphones, and fearfully slid Elliot’s disc into my stereo.

  I had known Elliot Allagash for more than four years. I was still as frightened of him as ever. But I liked to think I had grown used to him, that he had lost the ability to shock me. I liked to think I had already seen his madness at its worst.

  I took a deep breath and pressed play.

  The Seymour Herson Project began with a lengthy stretch of ambient sound. About forty seconds in, a siren started wailing, accompanied by gunshots. These noises were interrupted by the sound of a child laughing and, for some reason, the melody of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Eventually, a computerized voice took over, reciting a lightning fast monologue in French. The song, according to the track listing, was called “Rape.”

  The demo was humiliating. But when I took off the headphones, I actually felt somewhat relieved. It didn’t matter how many demos Elliot sent out; there was no way music that ridiculous could find listeners. Jessica would never learn of its existence, Elliot would forget about the scheme, and life would go back to some semblance of normalcy.

  By this point, I really should have known better.

  • • •

  “I heard your song on the radio,” Lance said. “It’s pretty cool, I guess.”

  “He didn’t get that it was an allegory,” Jessica said.

  “Yes I did,” Lance said, glaring at her. “I was about to say that’s what it was, before that critic guy jumped in.”

  “Sure,” Jessica said.

  Lance clenched his jaw and shuffled out of the cafeteria.

  “He didn’t get it,” Jessica said, smiling mischievously at me.

  “But I did.”

  She was wearing dangerously low-hanging sweatpants. I tried not to stare as she pulled up her waistband, barely concealing the grooves of her hip bones.

  “The guy on the radio said the song was existential,” she said. “Is that true?”

  There was a fairly long pause.

  “Yes,” I said, finally.

  Jessica pursed her lips and nodded, as if reflecting upon my response.

  “Well I better go,” she said, rolling her eyes in Lance’s direction.