Stories From the Plague Years (3 page)

—Doctor, I knew that before I started to . . .

There was a sound behind me, like the swift
click-click
of dog claws. I whipped my head back and, as always, saw nothing . . . and as always, scolded myself for looking when I knew I’d see nothing. I’d not even caught a shadow-glimpse in the silvered eye that framed our modest stage; the mirror disdained reflecting even the change of light that shaded my vision. I turned back to Doctor Johansson and said, —I may not be dead by then. But I’ll be too sick to stand trial.

—Dean, what were you looking for just now? Behind you?

He spoke the way a Dad would to a confused child. A final sip of the vintage Rogerian therapy exchanges we’d shared throughout our First Act in this glorified closet of dirty-chalkboard-coloured cinder block and linoleum, begun when I’d first been delivered here in my orange and silver raiment as Doctor Johansson stood like a gentleman to greet me from behind his mahogany stockbroker’s desk.

—Thought I heard something. Sounded like a dog. Maybe a guard dog. Sorry. I’m kinda jittery here.

All I told him was true, though I didn’t tell him the dog in question sounded to be walking on two feet.

—Ah. I see. Dean?

—Yes?

—Why did you kill those people?

—They killed me first.

He jolted, like a man awakened on a subway to find he’s gone past his stop. He’d asked me that question many times, with many inflections, over the past week. Each time I gave no answer. I think he’d been ready to give up, and had re-asked the question just now as the same kind of farewell we’d just given to our Rogerian interaction, of a kind once quaintly cherished by
gin and valium-fogged
‘60s housewives. In answering, I’d taken off my mask of recalcitrance, and had put on another mask that was much older, and potent.

He collected himself, retook his own priestly mask of the cool clinician and asked, —
How
did they kill you first?

—They gave me cancer.

—How . . . did they give you cancer?

I drank a deep breath and carefully chose my words, knowing he expected a rant about microwave towers and tin-foil hats. The feeling of being waterlogged left me. The jig of dead shadows in my sight stilled.

—By making me miserable for so long. By filling me with self-loathing for years. By denying me so much sleep, peace and well-being that my body devoured itself.

I sighed, as if a splinter had been pulled from my psyche.

Tension, poison crowding my chest and throat like wet black fur. Quiet violence steeping my heart—thoughts of the arguments I should have had, the things I’d been coerced and manipulated to do.

The end of a typical day for me: the world grown large and me overwhelmed like a child within it. With no outlet or recourse save that which I had cut from myself in order to despise it for my weaknesses.

Pathetic. Useless. Helpless.

I gag on these feelings now, and the feelings of dread that washed over me each time I cracked my eyes to a new day, still tired from the riot of dreams that had bludgeoned my sleep, my jaw and teeth sore from the endless grinding I suffered through the night.

—The people you killed . . .
stressed
you, so that you developed cancer?

—Stress causes disease. What they did to me was . . .
is
murder.

Doctor Johansson reached for a lighter that was not on his desk, closed fingers on air, rubbed his thumb against his index finger as if to strike the flint. The thumb of his left hand pressed nothing into the bowl of his pipe. The prop that gave him an air of authority may not have been prop, but relic. The air filter by his desk, with an intake vent the color of old teeth, hinted that he once smoked here in defiance of state ordinance.

—You shouldn’t smoke near someone as sick as I am, I said helpfully.

—From what you tell me, it shouldn’t matter if I smoke or not.

Touché
, I thought, as he placed the pipe between his teeth, and after a moment, removed it.

—You killed ten people to avenge your own death ahead of time?

—I can’t set things right
after
my death. I don’t believe in ghosts, not the Dickens kind that get things done. And what I did wasn’t revenge. It was balancing the scales.

—Then why did you kill in the ways you did? Why were you so . . .

—Creative?

—Extravagant.

—There had to be meaning to their deaths. If their deaths had no meaning, my death would have no meaning. Then my life would have no meaning.

—Revenge for the cancer isn’t meaningful enough?

There was no judgment in his voice: a true professional, so rare in this world.

—No. Even children have a sense of revenge. It’s a basic instinct. But
Justice
requires a sense of art. Like art, Justice has to challenge. It has to intrude on preconceived notions.

—I don’t follow.

My words fell from my mouth as would stones.

—I killed those people in ways that reflected how they’d killed me, or ways that reflected fundamental Truths . . . Truths from On High or from deep within those I killed . . . that could cut through their senses of comfort. That would let me reclaim the hijacked power they’d asserted over me. I had to challenge what they’d imagined to be safe for them, because they’d challenged and warped my sense of being safe in my own body.

—I . . . very much . . . need an example. Please.

His judgment-less request
obliged
me to speak of how I’d passed Judgment. My throat clotted. This was much harder than I’d thought it would be, no matter how many times I’d prepared to cross this threshold, when I would have to make known and then cast aside the turmoil that had driven me to reap lives. Strong emotions
hurt
as they are released. Even emotions like love hurt. Yet unless I purged what was inside me, I’d never be free of it. It would latch to me beyond my pine-coffin escape in Potter’s Field. If I escaped still burdened, I’d not truly be free.

Doctor Johansson wished to understand my trespasses . . . the mask I wore, the avatar I’d become. Invading the senses of safety of others is unsafe for the trespasser as well. To explain all would lead Doctor Johansson into these unsafe places with me. Did I have the right to do this, to a man who held no ill will toward me?

I choked down the blood-warm scree in my throat.

—All right, Doctor. I’ll give you an example. Professor Molino was a two-faced son of a bitch. He was a liar and a fraud and he could have better served us both by telling the truth. But because he was such a manipulative, shifty-eyed snake he ruined two years of my life. Just took them away from me, for
nothing
. Nothing but his own niche in that Political Science department he thought he ruled.

Sickness, outrage, as Molino greased me with that half-living gaze of his, his left eye never fixing on me, but afloat, drifting in the welling of clear gel that congealed under his lids. His one dead eye was less animated than were the smooth, stone and metal eyes of the Great Western Thinkers whose busts adorned the shelves of his office along with gimcrack Doric column bookends of plaster.

“I’m recommending you be dropped from the program, Dean.” Each word is like a blow. Not random, like the blows I’d landed on a face more like my own than that of any child I might father. But precise as those of a martial artist.

“
Dean
.” How fucking dare he use my first name now? As a weapon?

For two years it’s been “Mr. Garrison,” and now as he brings down the axe, he wants to be a friend? All his reassurances amounting to a mouthful of shit, the scalding flood of memories of his “grooming me” to be one of his prized students making me loathe myself for being so gullible. Molino is throned before me, sitting in complete comfort into his own paunch. Even his face sits.

“
Why?
” The word is a choked whisper. As a choked whisper spoken by another, the word would haunt me in a way that would rewrite this moment.

“You’re not qualified to be a student here, certainly not in the graduate program. It’s doubtful you’d be qualified to be an undergraduate at this university. For two years, you’ve been conning this department into thinking you’re a competent scholar. But competence is beyond you. You demonstrated that when you first came here.”

I stand in this arena of career execution, the rules of this terminal game unknown to me. Livy and Lorenzo Valla look down in disdain from their perches behind Molino. With his affected Noel Coward diction, Molino refers to the grades of my first semester, when I’d come to this university exhausted, having had a full class load throughout the summer while working forty hours a week. For a year and a half, he’s told me these grades would have no bearing on my career. Now he’s done with me, and this ace comes into play.

I’d been given warning letters to improve my performance, which I had. But now, according to the head of the Graduate Division, these improvements weren’t enough . . . despite Molino’s hand-on-my-shoulder assurances that he’d gone to bat for me at the academic review sessions.

I know he’s betrayed me, and I feel like cackling. The man’s academic specialty is Machiavelli, whose bust presides over the infamous overstuffed leather sofa that dominates the wall to my left. It’s the sofa on which a number of female grad students and undergrads had come to deeper personal and intellectual understandings with Molino. It’s the sofa on which desperate prospective new faculty members were invited to sit during campus interviews; once the candidate had sunk deeply into the cushions, Molino would invite the paschal lamb to help himself or herself to coffee from the porcelain service baited across the room. Molino and the other Inquisitor faculty would judge the suitability of the candidate based on how gracefully he or she could rise from the sofa.

It’s too sick to acknowledge, this man’s nature and his field of study. But why am I worth the effort of crushing
now
?

“This department does not have any more time to waste on you. You are a distraction and a liability.”

My mind screams: “THEN WHY HAVE YOU TOLD ME THAT I’M YOUR GOLDEN BOY?! WHY THE FUCK HAVE YOU STARTED GUNNING FOR ME AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY?”

I instead bow to the totemic power of this office. This chapel. I genuflect to the Great Tomes on his shelves. The staid Ivy League mustiness of the carpet. Even the yellowing rolls of thick newsprint he’s placed among his books to suggest Roman scrolls. He wears the place as a cloak of earthly and spiritual power the way that Borgia popes wore their robes.

My voice defies my screaming mind and whispers: “I think I understand, sir.”

“I’m glad of that. There’s no reason to protract this unfortunate situation. It should not be more complicated than it need be.”

His upper lip does not move as he speaks words of cutting emptiness; his still lip and shaggy moustache make him look vaguely like a rabbit. His dripping eyes float with his gaze, and I realize I hate his eyes. Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart” murmurs to me of how an unsightly eye can drive someone to murder. With that thought, the fine wood clock in the corner beside Petrarch ticks in my awareness with the rhythm of water dripping in a pan.

“Will I be awarded the master’s degree?”

“You’ve earned the master’s. In theory. It’s reflected on your transcript. In spring, you’ll have it as a consolation prize.”

The clock’s metronome dirge continued as I turned and passed under the guard of Dante by the door.

I signed for a letter the next week informing me I’d not be awarded the master’s degree. I was numb as I read it, too dazed to feel Molino’s
coup de grace
.

Later, in the kind of sympathetic exchange tinged with gloating that is the jellied backbone of academia, I was told by one of the younger faculty members that at the last meeting of the year, Molino had urged I not be granted the master’s, that to award it to me would invalidate the credibility of the department and the university. The young faculty member, in his tenure-track largesse, paid for the coffee at the end of our meeting. I stared at the brown rings dried in my cup long after he left.

To compound the humiliation, I couldn’t pack up and leave; I had to linger through the exam period to come away with credits for the courses I’d paid for. I dangled. Inert as the Hanged Man in a Tarot deck.

I was deadwood in Molino’s reign. Disowned. Errant. Over my last weeks at the department, I figured out, through asking the right questions and eavesdropping at the right moments, that Molino had big plans: he’d petitioned the University to hire away from Harvard a Professor Herliman, a grad school friend of his who’d become a luminary in Early Modern political theory. News of Herliman’s move virus’ed through academia, and sterling applications to the Political Science department flooded in.

Molino would lap up Herliman’s overflow. Therefore I, and his other chaff-students doing unorthodox research at his behest, had to be jettisoned in favour of the new crop. Each of us he cast aside were unable to secure the letters of recommendation needed to go on.

Two years of my life made ash in a graduate program with nothing to show for it. Two years of my life exiled in a shithole college town with nothing to show for it, all for a petty tyrant’s inflated ego. A man who’d lied to me, knowing I was expendable, that if the research I did proved unfashionable, he could be rid of me. But if it turned out well, he could cry to the world how he’d fostered my brilliant young mind.

A man who knew I could be flushed when better prospects to jack his reputation came along.

I carry defeat like lead beside my liver.