Removing his glasses with one grand gesticulation, like Clark Kent snatching them off in an hour of need—the river flooding out the train trestle, the school bus without brakes careening on a curving mountain road—just short of yanking wide his shirt to reveal blue spandex, Yokver massaged the bridge of his nose and rubbed the indentation between his eyes frantically. His ponytail wagged over his left shoulder, then his right, as he shook his head and loudly tsk-tsked. “You apparently think you’ve got all the answers and therefore don’t need to deal with the true substance of this course. So, Calvin, why don’t you tell me what’s really on your mind?”

  Caleb smiled, and the Yok’s eyebrows dropped a notch. It felt much better to be smiling. Something liquid and boiling inside suddenly became solid. His pulse was no longer thrashing around inside his wrists, but his hands still hurt a bit. He brushed his hair off his forehead and said, “If I wanted to watch a clown I’d have gone to the circus.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It is. For a lousy ten bucks fifty midgets will come out of a Volkswagen and I can even buy one of those neon baby flashlights to spin in the dark. Even those dancing poodles are more fun than watching you cartwheel.”

  Jodi snorted a bothered, “Uyh, Cal.” A few of the other kids aahed and hmmed like a choir warming up. Did they think they were in grade school or sitting in church?…Did they want to see someone get decked, were they really that bored? Of course they were, everybody always was.

  “I think the socially acceptable term currently being used is ‘little people.’”

  “I’ve been in this class for three weeks, and so far you haven’t taken a second from your Atlantic City lounge act to address any ethical, moral, or social dilemmas, nor such involved issues as the afterlife, racism, censorship, pornography, abortion, or…” He searched for something relevant, and everything came together in one long flash of images, even though he hardly ever thought of any of it himself. “…prostitution, jihads, incest, Ruby Ridge, hedonism, war, or those pea brains who want to toss AIDS victims behind a fence in the desert, the new welfare laws, Social Security, Oklahoma City.” He swallowed, and his spit was thicker than syrup. “Suicide.”

  “Oh.”

  Other pictures came, but he’d already run the gamut, seeing his sister again in his mind, the red washing up her arms as she reached for him. “You squash Nietzsche, insult Camus, belittle Sartre, and…” The Yok flicked his tongue, giving him a helpful hint. “…and flick your tongue at Bertrand Russell and Socrates.” Cal knew he had to go for one final twist. C’mon already, the kidneys are soft tissue. “And I’ve caught you looking at my girl’s cleavage.”

  Jodi grunted as if she’d been knifed, and Yokver glanced at her, focusing on her chest, that smile swinging up way higher than it should, until the corners of his mouth nearly touched his earlobes. Cal wondered when he’d let it go.

  Neckless asked Candida, “Who’s jihad?” She shrugged and gave Cal a sharp look that had something encouraging, frenzied, and carnal in it.

  Professor Yokver snickered, mimed panic by pulling his hair, mouth wide, then waved on for more, Bring it on home, Calvin. There was too much blood in his face, and there was a flame somewhere inside his cloudy eyes. Caleb knew the furrow that bisected his own forehead had grown dark and deep. “But more than that, you wouldn’t let me withdraw when I wanted to, you son of a bitch, and I’m not squandering any more of my life in this hell.”

  “No?” the Yok asked. “You’ve got a better hell waiting, have you?”

  “Probably.” Cal pointed. “And there’s chalk on your tie. I’m bugging out of here. Have a nice day, everybody.”

  He grabbed his coat and was out the door and down two flights of steps before the crimson tinge left his vision and the full measure of what he’d done set in. Jodi might have to take the brunt of it now. He might be expelled, so that he couldn’t complete the final piece of work that needed to be finished.

  His mouth hurt from the tightness of the snarl he’d been holding back, the ridge of his nose ached. Sweating in the hall, he glanced at the faces of other professors as they lectured with their doors open, echoing voices snapping down the corridors of history, all of them seeming to make sense. The acoustics were good, and their words echoed and resonated in his sternum. He calmed down a little and walked outside, feeling the cold of the morning hitting hard, the February breeze tickling his hackles. He had to force his brow to un-furrow, caught up in a wave of different anger and disappointment because Jo hadn’t followed him.

  Caleb listened to the clock tower chime once, indicating the half hour.

  8:30.

  He’d been alive today for only forty-five minutes.

  Ethics.

  Jesus, God. Ethics would be the death of him.

  Chapter Two

  A sentence from a psychology text about Chinese Water Torture came to mind: Seated in a comfortable chair the victim’s heart would explode with the apprehension of another falling drop.

  Not very clinical when you thought about it, but there it was. Back in the lounge at his dorm, Cal dove onto the couch and tried to watch the morning news. The vertical hold was still busted from when Rocky the security guard had body-slammed a local marijuana dealer over the television, and the picture slowly skipped every few seconds. Caleb caught himself anticipating each new roll of the screen, his knees trembling like a sprinter ready to come out of the blocks. His breath writhed in his sinuses.

  “Oh, boy,” he murmured, pulling a frayed throw pillow into his lap. “Our head really is a snake pit this morning, isn’t it?” Time crept along sideways, like a centipede slinking across his neck. This was turning out to be some day already.

  The sports announcer finished showing reruns of the plays of the week. “Now we move on to our own lovely Mary Grissom for our Accu-weather report.” Capped teeth flashed. Mary Grissom flattened her pleated skirt against her thighs and held a hand up to the weather map. “Thanks, Phil. Okay, everybody, keep in mind I’m only the messenger. It’ll be rough for the rest of today and tomorrow, folks, with snowfall changing to freezing rain before midnight tomorrow…” Bisected by the teetering line that sluggishly rolled over her like a devoted lover, she continued pointing to the curving blue arrows of the coming cold front.

  Hauling the pillow over his face, Cal tried to listen. By now, the rest of the dorm had begun stirring for breakfast and 9:30 classes. Hair dryers, showers, flushing toilets, and stereos tuned in to the university radio station KLAP drowned out the TV. His plans to take Jodi to the winter carnival tonight looked shot down in mid-flight. They couldn’t catch a break lately.

  “Yippie, yappie, yahoo-ooey,” he muttered. “This may put the stranglehold on an already friction-filled love life.”

  A couple of girls from the third floor came in, hitting him with ruefully cute grins. All right, so he’d been talking to himself again. It was part of his charm. Sometimes it got that way.

  “Alzheimer’s, ladies,” he explained. “Sets in right about the time your senior thesis is due.”

  With wool robes and fuzzy slippers plodding along they laughed at him, changed the channel, sat, and started watching “The Brady Bunch,” neither of them irritated with the rotating picture yet. From the opening seconds Caleb could tell this was the episode where Cindy loses Kitty Carry-All—her doll that looked amazingly like “Family Affair’s” Mrs. Beasley without the granny glasses, which young Buffy obsessively carried about the waist. He couldn’t remember Buffy’s, the actress’s, real name. The brother, Johnny Whittaker, did Tom Sawyer and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, then went and joined the Peace Corps to escape the child actor curse.

  Buffy killed herself with a drug overdose, Cal remembered.

  On occasion you couldn’t think of anything good no matter which way you turned, not even while watching “The Brady Bunch.” In the hallway, the radiator clanked with rushing water, windows above running with condensation. He stared out at the frost-covered bushes.

  In class he could think of nothing he’d rather do than lie around the entire day, but now he didn’t feel like reading or sleeping or doing the laundry, which really needed to be done. Packs of students marched up the hill toward the biology and physics buildings, others crossing the lawns to the humanities departments in Camden Hall, or over to the gym. He never understood how anybody could work out first thing in the morning, even though Willy often did. A telephone rang somewhere nearby.

  Maybe he should go over and talk to Fruggy Fred?…Cal checked his watch, the crystal steamed by his sweat.

  He needn’t have bothered. No chance Fruggy was up at this hour. No way to be sure he’d be awake at any hour. The guy could sleep sixteen hours a day and nap a few more—he called it dream therapy and treated the subject solemnly, with reverence. Caleb often got that heavy corkscrew feeling working through his chest when Fruggy talked about it.

  “If you control the dream of the world then you control the world,” Fruggy Fred once drowsily said over the airwaves of KLAP, before he’d passed out at the control panel. The Doors’ sullen “When the Music’s Over” had played four times uninterrupted until Rocks and the other security guards battered the fire doors down.

  Fruggy was out of the scene until at least three in the afternoon, when his radio shift started.

  9:05.

  9:06.

  Caleb thought about waiting for Jodi and trying to talk her out of attending her remaining classes but knew he wouldn’t be able to do it. She’d always taken grades seriously—way too intensely—even in elementary school, getting written about in her local papers for never having missed a day of grade school right up to her graduation. He understood the reason but simply wished it didn’t have to be that way. He felt on the verge of becoming very whiny right now.

  She believed she had to be single-minded if she wanted a chance to elude the white trash poverty that consumed the rest of her family. Two brothers and two sisters, all younger than her, already with swelling families of their own—kids they couldn’t support, rap sheets for hooking, dealing, shooting dogs, a couple of retarded babies in there who’d never get the special attention they needed.

  Her brother Johnny had been stabbed on six different occasions and shot twice, and the guy still was on the street stealing cars, even with half his small intestine gone. Russell was a second-story man and liked to shimmy up drainpipes and climb trellises at night while families were eating dinner and watching sitcoms. He’d been busted five or six times already, but the police couldn’t put him away for long because he never stole anything worth more than fifty bucks. Mostly change jugs, women’s shoes, clock radios, old black-and-white photographs, and any Reader’s Digests that might be lying around. He wasn’t really a burglar, Caleb knew, but some kind of fetishist.

  Cal also had a bad feeling that her brothers might have sexually abused her at some point, with their brown teeth and pork bellies and tattoos stirring up a significantly lurid mental picture, although she never said as much. Jo occasionally kicked and wept while dreaming. Caleb wondered if he could set Fruggy Fred after her during a nightmare, tell him to go in and hunt around her subconscious and come back with the whole truth.

  It proved particularly incongruent that her alcoholic mother still kept the scrapbooks of Jodi’s first attempts at handwriting and math, with gold stars and smiley faces pasted all over everything. He’d flipped through the collection of papers, page after page where even the tiniest kindergarten print was perfect. Each project flawlessly done: the digestive tract drawn in precise scale, the limbic system, weather maps more detailed than Mary Grissom’s, every paper thorough and accomplished, going back year after year. What five-year-old never got her bs and ds mixed up?

  Now in the last semester of their senior year, she’d grown even more absorbed in her studies. So much between them, unsaid and inferred, with even more burgeoning every day. She had to go to the dentist to get a hard plastic nightguard because she’d started grinding her back teeth so badly. The official term was bruxism, and the noise kept him up at night and distracted the hell out of him during the day. She couldn’t even hear it anymore, it had become so much a part of her.

  Her grade point average, letters of reference, contacts among the faculty, and her research paper: Schizophrenia as Stimuli and a Means to the Expression of Racial Memory, Primal Fear, and the Ascension of the Human Animal Mind. He had no clue what it meant, or what was involved in its meaning. She’d tried to explain it to him once but they’d made love instead. It was the much better deal.

  9:10.

  Caleb rested his forearms against the window, observing the present before it could slip even further away. Next year Jo would be in medical school, and as much as she promised that it wouldn’t affect their relationship, she couldn’t keep the truth out of her eyes. It was already unraveling. He hoped his own lies weren’t so obvious but had a feeling they were.

  That telephone up the corridor continued to ring, finally rousing him. He drifted, wondering if anyone would answer it. The radiator rumbled off. On about the fortieth ring, he realized it was his own phone.

  He pulled out his key as he rushed down the hall, almost but not really sure that whoever had hung on this long would probably wait another minute. Wearing only his socks he slid on the tile floor and almost took a header into the wall. On the run he reached his room, fit the key in the lock, and turned the knob. Who wanted him this badly?

  In one slithery motion the door opened much more easily than it should have, knob whipping out of his hand, and his momentum carried him inside too fast. Skidding on the throw rug, he kept his balance but nearly went head over knees as he knocked aside the desk chair. Christ, he was going to break a leg this way. Books launched off his shelf and the peanut butter jar atop the cube refrigerator fell and shattered.

  “Damn.” He snatched the phone out of the cradle. “Hello?” He carefully nudged the larger pieces of glass into a pile with the side of his foot. “Anyone there? Hey, don’t give up on me now. I’m here,”

  No dial tone, and no static from a bad connection.

  Dead air waited, so frigid that he could almost feel a drop in temperature.

  “Hel…?”

  Emptiness. Waiting, the dry silence went on unchanging for another five heartbeats, now eight, ten, as he counted them without reason. No breathing on the other end that he could hear, no train whistles or background sound at all to give him a sign. No suggestion of humanity, and that’s why he held on for so long, because it had waited so long for him.

  As he leaned farther into the receiver he thought he could sense a presence. Something much larger than himself was trying to draw him in. He hesitated to say anything else—the heavy hush so pervasive it felt like there was no phone in his hand, no ear to listen to it.

  Seventeen, nineteen, twenty-five heartbeats, and this was getting ridiculous, he understood that, but there were these frissons working his spine now, his underarms heavy with gooseflesh. This wasn’t a wrong number; somebody wanted him desperately. Who the hell is this and why won’t you talk to me?

  Finally, as he opened his mouth to utter something, he had no idea what, a sound like crunching ice crackled sharply in his ear. Crumpling plastic? Somebody chewing? It fell away to a droning buzz, followed by a high-pitched squeal of distant laughter or sirens or stuck pigs or feedback, and he jerked the receiver away with a groan. Jagged noises afterwards, brittle coughs and dry leaves breaking off piece by piece over the line.

  He held the phone an inch away from his ear. A faint and faraway voice rustled unintelligibly.

  “Is…anyone there?” Something rigid started to loosen up and swirl around inside his chest. “Hey!” he shouted. “Come on, c’mon. Speak up.”

  Another ethereal whimper, clearer now but not distinct, still so removed that the edge of his ears burned as he strained, trying to drive himself down into the phone, reaching for the words.

  Ghosts wanted him dead.

  “Who is this?” he whispered back, thinking how his door had glided open too easily, and knowing that someone else had been inside his room and had left without locking up.

  Cal threw the phone across the room. It broke against the wall where the bloodstains jabbed through a thin layer of peach paint.

  Chapter Three

  He had to take a chance and drop into the library basement in daylight.

  Not that anyone would notice, and if they did, who’d care about seeing a guy lurking behind a veil of branches and slipping through a mud-smeared window with a broken latch? What was he going to steal—The Collected Works of George Eliot? Les Fleurs du Mal? How about a copy of Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father or Snow White? So far as sneakiness was concerned, breaking into the library didn’t rate high on the scale.

  But if you were around last year at about four in the morning at the end of March, and were awakened by awful panting and unknown noises heading up toward your second-floor window, and you happened to get out of bed and draw back your blinds to take a look—having dreamed of your sister again, reaching for you with red arms—only to yell and hop a foot in the air when you saw this humongous milk-white ass shining at you in the moonlight, all 340 pounds of Fruggy Fred playing Human Fly on the wall, extremely agile actually, for a guy his size, keeping all his weight on his toes and hanging on to the brick like a rock climber, naked and smeared with something slick and glistening, maybe baby oil or Vaseline or maple syrup or even honey, silently scaling the wall covered with thick ivy in order to get back into the locked dorm, only minutes after having run from his girlfriend’s room, making the grand escape during a vicious fight with the butter knife-wielding lady because he’d fouled the final moments of romantic milieu just before making love, having fallen asleep in the middle of foreplay again…hey, now that was an attempt at some seriously surreptitious movement.

 

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