The night class, p.4
The Night Class, page 4
“You too, ’bye.”
He watched her cross the dried grass with a quick but heavy tread, hair tugged briefly by the breeze. His Adam’s apple felt larger than his head as bad ideas started circling and diving. Ah, no, don’t do it, don’t even think it, you’re going to get into such deep shit, but he couldn’t stop himself and there was nobody else there to knock him down.
Impossible to keep from asking—so when she was fifty yards away he shouted, “Hey, Melissa, since neither of us has a class to go to tomorrow morning, would you like to get breakfast together?”
She faced him and walked backward several steps. “Okay! We can talk about jihads, censorship, pornography, Ruby Ridge, and midgets.”
“Well, yeah, I suppose we could do all that, so long as we don’t touch on the subject of motion. I’ll meet you in the cafeteria at eight.”
She waved an all-right motion, almost a power-to-you sign.
When she’d faded from sight he reached into the pocket of his coat to make sure his notes hadn’t been lost. Papers crinkled aggressively at his touch. He folded them to keep them safe and slowly worked his way over the fence again, careful of the barbs this time, and cautiously jumped down on the other side.
Moving behind the branches, he yanked the spindly tree from his face and sneaked to the dirty window. His palms were sweaty again, and he sniffed at his hands to make sure there wasn’t any odor of mash whiskey coming from him.
Pressing his weight against one edge of the frame, he shoved at the hinges until the latch he’d broken a week earlier jiggled open.
From there he shifted his feet, crouched and stared into the darkness of the secluded room below, seeing clearly for the first time just how much like a tomb it truly was inside.
What do angels dream?
Chapter Four
Hopping down from the window ledge, into the shadows, he tripped over Sylvia’s wicker love-seat the same way he’d stumbled onto her death in the first place.
Lying sideways in the chair, he felt the wicker braids and knots bulging beneath his back. “All right, so I’m back again,” he said through clenched teeth. The milieu of the place made you whisper like this, that sense of hallowed ground all around you, atmosphere so heavy it felt like being straddled by a great, living weight. You could get caught up in symbols without even having to look hard.
He grew acutely aware that he now sat in a dead girl’s chair.
Dead, as in Ted Bundy or Richard Speck catching and killing you dead, her presence growing in his mind while he became more uneasy yet exceptionally snug, realizing this was a love seat, meant for two. Again it seemed that this had been his fate for longer than he could remember. He and Sylvia together down here and trying to get to know each other a little better, a blind date of a much different kind.
Feeling his way through the blackness, he found the light switch beside the door, flicked it, and scanned the tiny room.
Perhaps not a tomb exactly. More like a coffin.
The single light bulb above lit a musty storage room stuffed with the remains of Sylvia Campbell’s life: her furniture and clothes, a decrepit orange crate containing paperbacks. She had good taste in literature, and owned just about every book written by John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, José Saramango, William S. Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, and John Fowles. Like him, she didn’t go in for linear plotlines. A pink toothbrush had been shoved inside a box of envelopes, and above it sat a sheaf of loose-leaf paper, which he now used to write out his thesis in longhand.
This was all she had left behind. Maybe sixty pounds of possessions if you totaled it up. If he died tomorrow he’d have just a tad less to show for the entirety of his own life.
He took off his shredded coat and crouched among her belongings, touching them here and there, marking different textures. He envisioned her gestures, a voice and laughter, style and manner, and drew out thickly detailed scenarios, pondering what it must have been like to live with these things day in and out. These objects that had seen her die.
In the beginning of this…research…he had checked the mattress for indentations, scanning for the deeply set outlines of her and her men, trying to discriminate between those of himself and Jodi on his own bed. There weren’t many bloodstains on the mattress, not as many as you might think. Plenty of scenes threw themselves at him as he tried to find her there: at eighteen there was still time enough to be a virgin, wasn’t there? Maybe not.
Perhaps she’d left her boyfriend far back in some Midwestern corn crop, or had a guy on campus she preferred staying with. Cal tapped the box spring and listened to the tight metal coils’ vibrating hum.
Had an angry lover decided to take her life? The kid’s sitting at the desk long past midnight, poring over logarithms and implicit differentiation and hyperbolic functions, his accelerated calculus homework thrashing his ass to pieces. No matter how long he glowers at the books he’s going to fail, and he knows it. His father will give him hard glares of disappointment, his mother will wring her hands on her apron and snarl at him with waxy lips. His brother the chiropractor will try to take him into the business, teach him to give massages, gently crack the atlas vertebra.
So he looks over and stares at Sylvia snuggled under the covers, sleeping so easily, not a trouble in the world. He starts thinking that he’s fighting the battle for her, to get her the house she wants, to be able to afford the three children she’s always talking about, the cocker spaniel and a couple of cats and the fish pond with the motorized waterwheel, a new truck to go camping in with the kids; he’s doing all of this for her and she’s not suffering in the slightest, just lying there breathing softly in her sleep. How can he deal with that day in and out, can’t she hear him suffering here? Why doesn’t she know he’s shrieking?
Who were you?
The question came alive in the stillness, the one that mattered most. It grated against Caleb. There was some bitterness right from the beginning of this journey because he knew he’d never be able to entirely finish it. No matter how far he went or how much he gave. A grail always beyond his grasp, unless he too was dead.
“Shut up,” he said aloud.
His voice rang around the room.
That first day back at school he’d stared at the peach paint covering the blood on the wall while Willy repeatedly asked him about his vacation. Christ, he knew somebody had died here.
He knew his sister was on her way.
Willy was a weightlifter who stood 6'5" of solid muscle, an imposing figure as he leaned over Caleb trying to grasp his friend’s attention. Cal couldn’t look away from the wall; he knew bloodstains when he saw them. Willy kept quizzing him about Christmas and New Year’s, asking about New England lovelies, wild Ivy League times. “How badly in trouble did you get? I mean, you have that look in your eye. You got to Boston, didn’t you? You must’ve hit the Combat Zone at some point, no? It’s nothing like it used to be, they tell me, but still, you gotta go down there. Remember my old roommate, Herbie Johnson? Nah, you wouldn’t; well, he came from Massachusetts, used to tell me all kinds of funky stories about the Zone before they cleaned it up. At least Disney hasn’t taken it over yet like Times Square. Hey, I hear that’s where they…”
Willy didn’t notice the new color of Caleb’s room, didn’t seem to mind the terrible lingering smell of decomposition that tore at Cal’s sinuses. The windowsill was frosted with rime.
No way to be positive about what had happened while he’d been away, but Cal stood entranced, looking at the ugly area of the wall, sniffing the meaty stench.
At that instant, he heard his dead sister’s voice in his ear as clearly as though she were standing behind him.
He whirled as if a blade had been flicked against his kidneys—scared, revolted, and sick, twisting sideways to get a better look at someone who wasn’t there anymore. He bit his tongue until she vanished back into his childhood, where all the ghosts—or at least most of them—had been stored. Willy kept talking, starting to look a little annoyed. Cal’s palms itched as though tickled by spikes. He watched the wall, knowing the blood, understanding why his sister had come back, tying things together as the seconds counted off.
Willy grew more agitated as he repeated Cal’s name, grabbed an arm and tried to rattle him loose. “Hey, you all right? What’s the matter? What’d I say?”
Caleb’s heartbeats grew too loud in his head as he thought, Okay, so that’s someone’s blood splashed on my wall, in my own room…who?…what?…the bed’s been moved, and Willy pulled harder, but Caleb wouldn’t turn yet. The fact that the red could still be seen beneath so much peach paint proved it had coagulated and been left there for a while. Two, three days? They didn’t find her right away, she must’ve been a loner, no friends searching her out, why didn’t anyone smell it?…never realizing that he’d only assumed the victim had to be a woman, not even considering she was a suicide. No one would spill that much of their own blood against a wall, not even if they shot themselves in the mouth. Maybe that was true. It seemed that it would be true.
Willy had started shouting by then, drawing his large, powerful hand back to slap Cal’s face, perhaps playfully but probably not. “Cal! What the hell are you doing?” Rose came walking into the room with Fruggy Fred bouncing behind her reading a worn copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Déjà vu slammed Caleb, and what had been disjointed fell perfectly into place.
Rose said, “I heard about your legs. Are you okay? Cal? Hey, what’s the matter? What’s going on in here?” She hit a pose like a scared badger, neck bent too far forward, hands hanging from her wrists like paws. “What are you two doing?” Willy finished drawing his massive arm back and started to bring his fist down, picking up speed as it came like a hammer hurled from overhead, and Cal let go of one crutch and blocked Willy’s slap. Some things you do on instinct. It jarred him anyway, though, and his teeth snapped together.
He never thought for a second that the killer had been found.
Fruggy hugged him and murmured in his ear, laid down on the bed and instantly fell asleep, the center of the mattress sinking nearly to the floor. Cal looked closer and saw that it wasn’t his mattress at all; this was a brand-new one. What happened to the old one? Where did they put it?
Willy relaxed and put his arm around Cal’s shoulders and said, “You must’ve had a hell of a fun time if you’re still wigging out. You did go to the Combat Zone, right? Like I was saying, Herbie Johnson used to tell me about…”
Rose shut the windows and helped him unpack. “It’s freezing in here. You’re all sunburned. You coming to our get-together tonight?” She put his underwear away, and for some reason that made his scalp prickle. “What happened to your hands? Jodi didn’t tell me about how badly you’d cut your hands. Holy shit, you need some antibiotic ointment and a bandage. Oh, Cal…”
“Cut them on a broken bottle of rum,” Caleb answered, listening to his own voice, so far away that it sounded as if he were already out there with his sister. “No big deal, really.”
“You’re bleeding,” Willy said.
He looked down and saw his palms spotting. “It’s nothing.” He tried a grin, and it felt as if his lips were breaking off. But he had to make small talk. “So, what’s been going on with you two? How’d Christmas and New Year’s treat you both?”
Fruggy’s soft snores accented their friendship as Willy and Rose told him what they’d received and given over the holidays, what clubs they’d been to, how their families were, other classmates they’d seen and stories they’d heard, and Cal couldn’t remember a damn word about any of it.
He could still smell Sylvia in the room.
Branches scraped angrily against the windows of this coffin, battered by the rising wind.
Caleb sat in Sylvia Campbell’s love seat and took out his notes, straightening them and struggling to read in the dim light. His script didn’t look the same and he couldn’t figure out what he’d written. There were pages and pages, but he didn’t know where he’d started or where he’d left off. Shadows refused to speak to him this time.
Until he’d discovered the small self-portrait pencil drawing she’d done, he hadn’t known what Sylvia Campbell looked like. She’d kept no photo albums along with her belongings. Though he’d found a purse—one of those big purple plastic wrinkled things like a giant raisin—there’d been no driver’s license, college ID, no address books, or even cash for that matter. The cops, or somebody, must have taken it all.
Before finding the scrap paper sketch, he’d been forced to use Jodi’s features as a starting point when conjuring Sylvia. The more he thought about it, the more he realized he needed a visual image to work with as he wrote about her. Bringing Sylvia to life was necessary if he was going to feel her in his guts, and get the slow burn going. He’d smoothed a few lines around Jo’s brow, lengthened and curled her blond hair, switched the color of her eyes from blue to an off-hazel, and altered the shape of her nose just a bit, giving him someone else yet retaining familiarity. You cannot create, you can only embellish.
He could love her, in a manner, as he loved Jodi, in order to grow that much closer to who she’d been, in a way that mattered. In the beginning it had been difficult to keep the new face from melting back into Jo’s, but eventually his vision of Sylvia could move like a marionette through a life he attempted to string together.
It didn’t always work. Sometimes the strings got tangled. At other times she became his sister, and the puppet mouth would be moving, trying to tell him something that just wasn’t coming through.
The pencil drawing itself had been done on the back of an index card she’d used as a bookmark, placed at page 395 of Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur, a chapter entitled “The Wicked Son.” Cal had always wanted to read the book, but he’d been intimidated by its 700 small-print pages.
He’d flipped through each of Sylvia’s paperbacks and the sketch had flown free, just an index card arching onto the windowsill like a luna moth alighting. By that time he’d been having dreams about her, nightmares involving vivisection that made him breathless before dawn and gave him night terrors, until Jo sobbed in nervous fear and had to shake him awake. The plastic nightguard made it seem as if she had no teeth, just a black hole there in the center of her face where it made him want to scream. Looking up at Jodi as the sweat slid into his eyes, he’d once started to say Sylvia’s name before realizing where he was.
Sylvia Campbell didn’t look anything like the marionette he’d pictured, although for some vague reason he’d hoped she would. He’d erred on the side of caution anyway, because she was far more beautiful than he’d imagined. She was an altogether different woman than the chimera dragging painfully through his dreams. The sketch was signed Sy. C., faintly smudged about the edges. A caption printed beneath her face read simply, Me.
And so there they were.
It had been a pleasant shock to finally meet her. Graceful curves and swirling graphite shading of pigments brought a reality to her that had been lacking before. He clung to the index card with an intensity that startled him, afraid to fold or bend it. He knew he was in trouble. He recognized that he was smiling too much, repeatedly tracing the outline of her eyes, holding her face in his hands. This was bad.
She wasn’t self-conscious. Long black tresses twirled curling down past one eye, grinning back at him with her bottom lip out in a near pout, a pretty deep gaze catching him off guard. He could almost believe she watched him from the grave, beckoning him forward.
“Shut up,” Caleb said with more resignation, trying to give it an extra kick. It didn’t work. He sighed too loudly for the room and spread his notes, tapping his pen.
After Willy and Rose left him on that first day of class this semester, Fruggy Fred snored in the bed as Cal sat on the floor rubbing his legs, trying to sort the conflicting messages.
There was murder here, and nobody had even warned him. No yellow police tape over the door. No note from the dean. Fruggy turned over, and turned again, mouth moving nonstop. Cal wondered who he was having such intense conversations with. He bent to listen but couldn’t make out the words. He got closer to the wall and stared at the bad paint job.
He’d smelled this before.
After she’d decided—in the last week as a novitiate before her final vows—not to go through with it and become a nun, his sister went to work as a social worker before the term became too cliché.
Back then, when you still had the spillover from Vietnam, and Amer-Asian children were coming over by the boatload looking for their fathers, and the Cubans were kept in cages in the underpasses and deported back to Castro, everybody shrieking, and the Death Squads marched up through South America and into suburbia, white-bread girls still looked at Harlem as a sort of Mecca for furthering the Black movement, and nobody knew what the hell they were doing anymore. It was all right, at least they were making an effort. Crack and AIDS hovered, descending to pluck at the fabric of the world, just waiting for the final minutes of disco to die out.
She’d gone on to describe more horrors to him than he could ever forgive her for. She hadn’t meant for it to happen, for him to pick up on so much of what she’d muttered and sobbed about, but even at five he’d had a penchant for damnation.
Eventually, though, he’d forgotten most of the finer details of what she’d said, and he’d caught himself actually trying to remember, going after the flitting memories, and still wanting to think kindly of her.
Rat stories were some of her favorites, as she held him on her knee and he watched cartoons. Telling him how they chewed the thick meat of the thighs of infants and the homeless, where they got inside the dying and came out their throats. How she had held her hands over kids’ stomachs after a liquor store holdup on Jerome Avenue had gone very bad, and about when twelve-year-old girls left their babies stopping up toilets, and how there were husbands who lit their wives on fire for overcooking hamburger. His sister said something to him about once being raped by three guys in a green van, who’d wanted to nab themselves a nun.
