Mr. X (10 page)

“Please, Ned, really!” He stepped back and raised his gloved hands in surrender. “Only, you do not look well. I ask as a friend, are you all right? Is anything wrong?”

“Here we go,” I said. “Count of three, remember? One.”

“Ned, please, you don’t own a knife. In fact, you are about as dangerous as a bunny rabbit.” Smiling, he lowered his hands. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee. You could tell your problems to me, after which I will explain how to fix them, after which I will bore you with mine, after which we will drink a beer and decide our problems are not so serious after all.”

“After which we will go back to your room and fix your boring problems by taking off our clothes.”

“I’m not talking about that,” Horst said. “Honestly. I am simply offering to be of help.”

“Then simply get out of my way.” I walked straight toward him, and he got out of my way.

Later that afternoon, I sat frozen at the base of a giant oak and attended to the deep, nearly inaudible sound, as of powerful machinery at work, filtering up through the snowpack. Snatches of high-pitched music resounded either from the air itself or from the movement of the air through the branches. The music-laden air filled with grains of darkness, the grains coalesced, and the darkness blotted out the light.

Wednesday morning, I saw my guitar case propped beside the door. The sight immediately suggested the inspiration of adding to the music of Jones’s Woods. I jumped out of bed.

Having breakfasted on sour milk and Cape Cod potato chips, I edged into the quad, keeping a weather eye out for Horst. He did not show himself. Neither did my chemistry results, although Professor Medley’s conclusions had been posted on the board. While the names of everyone else in my section were followed by letters indicating their grades, after “Dunstan, Ned” appeared only the nongrade “Inc,” abbreviation-speak for “Incomplete.” I stumbled back to my room and rammed the day’s nourishment
into my coat pockets, remembering as I did so the summons from On High. Once again I entered the glum post office and found an official envelope pressed against the glass window of my box. Clive Macanudo: The Sequel. This time, he spelled my name right.

The usual sense of being
home
settled my nerves as soon as I entered the woods. The rushing in my ears yielded to the
creaking of laden branches, the territorial chatter of birds, the clicks and taps made by squirrels in the course of their missions. Eventually I began to hear the trebles chiming from glittering icicles and soon after, the deep bass humming beneath the icepack. I opened the guitar case, took out my instrument, and reverently settled it into the hollow between my hunched shoulders and the tops of my thighs.

Shortly before noon the next day, I awoke with no memory of having returned to the campus. I stumbled out of bed, sneezed thunderously, and thrust myself into the most convenient clothing. By force of habit I stopped into the mail-jail on the way out of the dormitory complex. Another official envelope had been jammed against the rectangular glass window. “Clive, baby,” I said and tugged out the enclosed letter with great curiosity.

I blew my nose on Clive’s letter and pitched it into the wastebasket, more disturbed by his sending it to the Grants than by my imminent expulsion. Phil and Laura would understand that what I was doing was vastly more important than the pablum dished out in my classes.

On my way back to the center of the universe I thought I caught a glimpse of a green loden coat and a flash of bright hair in the midst of the row of trees bordering the western end of the campus. The lovesick stalker vanished the instant I looked again, and I put him out of my mind.

After an hour’s silent meditation had permitted me to hear the music in the air, after another hour of adding my part to it, a gathering sense of being as yet not absolutely in
the right place
caused me to get back on my feet and move deeper into the woods until I came upon the ruins of a cottage. I creaked open the door and beheld the rotted wooden walls, the single broken window, the litter of feathers, tiny skeletons, and dried animal feces on the dirty floor, and knew that here it was at last,
the right place
. It, too, was an instrument. Steady music flowed through the cottage, produced by the wind hissing through the gaps in the timbers and the patter of squirrels in the crawl space overhead. I enjoyed a blissful hour of adding a modest accompaniment and, just before dark, ran to my room for blankets and provisions and hurried back while I still had light enough to see.

The cottage emerged from the surrounding darkness like a tall shadow in the sacred woods. Faint strains of the music within
called to me, and I rushed over the snow and opened the creaking door. When I entered, I seemed instantly to plummet through the rotting floor. I fell; I saw nothing; I did not fear. A long, shabby, once-handsome room took shape before me. Out of my range of vision, a man spoke of smoke and gold and corpses on a battlefield. My head pounded, and my stomach was afflicted. On the mantel over the fireplace stood a dying Boston fern, a stuffed fox advancing within a glass bell, and a brass clock with weights revolving left-right, right-left, left-right. This was
backward
, it was
past
, and I had been here before. I fell to my knees on the worn Oriental carpet. Before I vomited, the world melted and restored itself, and the contents of my stomach drizzled onto the ruined floor.
Home
, I thought.

11

While still presentable enough to go into town, I stocked up on canned food and camping equipment. I got a sleeping bag and a battery-powered lamp. After I realized that I could make use of the fireplace, I bought bags of charcoal briquettes, a hatchet, lots of fire starter, a grate, and packages of frozen meat I buried in the snow and thawed out over flames coaxed from lumps of charcoal and chopped-up deadwood. Some nights, raccoons climbed through gaps in the flooring and fell asleep like dogs in front of the dwindling fire. Toward the end of my forty-five days in the cottage, when going into town would have invited arrest or hospitalization, I dropped into my old meal-job kitchen late at night and stole whatever I couldn’t gobble on the spot. Forest-music, nature-music, planet-music took up the rest of my time. My cold turned into pneumonia, and I took the fevers, sweats, and exhaustion for signs of grace.

Everyone else feared that the loss of my scholarship had driven me to suicide. Phil and Laura flew to Middlemount and participated in the search for my hypothetical remains. A livid Clark Darkmund declared that not only had he not invited me on
a family vacation to Barbados, his winter break had been spent entirely in Hibbing, Minnesota. The police searched the college grounds, with no result. The town of Middlemount was canvassed, with next to no result. The winsome senior photo in my high school yearbook reminded one Main Street shop owner of a recent customer, but he had no idea of where the customer might have gone after leaving the store. After stapling posters all over town and campus, the Grants returned to Naperville.

Horst never bothered to look at the posters. He assumed that I had been ducking him. When he did finally happen to notice the resemblance between the photograph and myself, he reported to Dean Macanudo. Within the hour, he was leading a deputation of local police and emergency medical technicians into Jones’s Woods. They found me slumped over my warped guitar and picking at its two remaining strings, and unceremoniously rolled me onto a stretcher.

Seeing a dream-Horst peering down at me from within the upturned collar of his loden coat, I asked, “Why do I think you’re following me, Horst?”

“You told me to watch out for you,” said the figment.

I looked around at the crumbling walls and the mess of blankets on the floor in an unwelcome return of sanity. It had all been a gigantic error. Horst was real after all, and I had been wrong. This had never been the right place for which I had mistaken it.

The first person to visit me in Middlemount’s Tri-Community Hospital was Dean Clive Macanudo, a glossy diplomat whose pencil mustache and Sen-Sen breath could not entirely conceal his terror of any actions I or my guardians might see fit to take against the college. It never occurred to me to sue Middlemount, nor did it occur to Laura, who walked into my room on the second day of my hospitalization. Phil had been denied permission to leave work, or so she said, and although his absence meant that we could speak more freely, the weight of my guilt made her stricken presence a torment. Two days later, Laura went back to the Middlemount Inn for a nap, and I checked out of the hospital, went into the middle of town, passed the inn, turned into the bus station, and vamoosed.