The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  Sitting a few chairs away was another young woman. She was sketching lazily on a pad. Jeffers could just make out the skilled shapes that were forming beneath her pencil. He thought for a moment, excited, about the intriguing possibility of the sketch artist. He wondered if she could sketch with words. He thought: Someone who can re-create reality in art—perhaps a good selection. He decided to watch her as well.

  At a single minute past one the professor entered.

  Jeffers frowned. The man was in his mid-thirties, his own age, and glib. He started the hour with a joke about David Copperfield’s narration of his own birth, as if that were some quirk of Dickens’, some archaic piece of silliness. Jeffers suddenly wanted to rise and scream. Instead, he kept his seat, searching the auditorium for someone who failed to laugh at the professor’s witticisms.

  There was one who caught his attention.

  She was sitting just off to his left. She raised her hand.

  “Yes, Miss . . . uh . . .”

  “Hampton,” said the young woman.

  “Miss Hampton. You have a question?”

  “Do you mean to imply that because Dickens was writing for serial consumption that he tailored his ideas and his style to fit the weekly newspaper form? Don’t you think the reverse is true, that Dickens understood implicitly the points that he wished to make, and, using his considerable skill, fitted them into manageable segments?”

  Jeffers felt his heart slow, his mind concentrate.

  “Well, Miss Hampton, we know that the form was important to Dickens . . .”

  “Form, sir, over substance?”

  Jeffers wrote that down in capital letters and underlined it: form over substance?

  “Miss Hampton, you misunderstand . . .”

  Like hell, thought Jeffers.

  “. . . Dickens was, of course, preoccupied with the political and social impact of his work. But because of the necessities of form, we can now see limitations. Don’t you wonder what his characters and stories would have been like if he had not been forced into the pamphleteer’s role?”

  “No, sir, I can’t say that I have.”

  “That was my point, Miss, uh, Hampton.”

  Not much of one, at that, thought Jeffers.

  He watched the young woman bend her head back to her notepad, scribbling some words on the page rapidly. She had dirty-blond hair which fell haphazardly about her face, obscuring what Jeffers thought was con­siderable natural beauty. He noted, then, that she sat with an empty seat on either side.

  He felt his body quiver involuntarily.

  He breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly.

  Again, he thought, drawing in a great draught of air and letting it loose carefully, as if it were valuable. He surreptitiously placed his hand over his chest, speaking to himself: Be calm. You did not expect to find a biographer in the first class you visited. Caution, caution. Always caution. She has potential. Wait. Watch. He forced himself to study the other two young women he’d noticed earlier. He had a sudden image of himself as some small, dark, coiled beast, waiting, anticipating, curled in obscurity beneath a loose rock on a well-traveled path. He smiled, thinking with pleasure to himself: Progress.

  III

  BOSWELL

  5. Afternoon sun filtered weakly through the library window. It struck the notepad open on Anne Hampton’s table, making the blue-ruled lines disappear, washed away in the glare. She looked down at the words she had been writing, staring so hard that the edges of the letters blurred and grew indistinct, the entire page becoming a floating, vaporous field. It made her think of snowfields in winter, back home in Colorado. She envisioned herself poised at the top of some long run, the sunlight exploding off the open expanse of snow, uncut as yet by skiers’ trails. It would be early morning, the sun would hold no promise of warmth, just a single cold light flooding the white. She thought to herself about the way the reflection seemed to reach up, tangible, blending with the freezing air and wind, creating a world without edges, depth, or height, a solitary great white hole in the world, waiting for her to suppress that momentary hesitation that is the border of fear, and then plunge outward, down, dizzyingly thrust forward, feeling the cold sensation of flying snow bursting like shells around her as she cut through the deep powder.

  She laughed out loud. Then, remembering where she was, clapped her hand across her face in mock embarrassment and sat back in her chair, looking out the window across the quadrangle toward a stand of palms that rippled gently as she watched. The palms, she thought, can find a breath of breeze even when there isn’t one. They clatter their leaves together as if in greeting, feeling the slightest sway in the air, welcoming it, enjoying it, she thought with an odd jealousy, even when she was unable to detect the meagerest motion of relief in the summer’s heat.

  She looked back at the books spread about her. It must be easy to spot the literature majors, she thought. She separated her stack of books into two separate piles: Conrad, Camus, Dostoevsky and Melville on one side of her notepad, Dickens and Twain on the other. Darkness and light, she thought. She shook her head. She wasn’t even reading half of the books and did not really understand why it was so important for her to tote them around in her backpack. But she did, packing them in every day, next to current assignments, as if the weight of great words resting on her back would somehow permeate her vision and motivate her behavior. She wondered if she had some unconscious time limit for carrying once-read works. She imagined that she could develop a rating system for literature; books that she carried about more than a month after completion were true classics. Three weeks meant a lasting greatness. Two weeks, probably should be hauled about for their themes, if not their execution. A week reflected perhaps a great character, but not a great book. Less than a week? Pretenders.

  But, she thought, there is an odd comfort in knowing great words are close.

  She sometimes wondered whether books were alive; whether, after shutting the covers, the characters and the places and the situations didn’t change, argue, debate somehow, only to return to place at the moment the cover was flipped open. It would be fitting. She stared at the Camus, lying atop her dark pile. Perhaps, she thought, Sisyphus rests when the pages are closed. He sits, breathing hard, his back slumped up against his rock, wondering whether this time the rock will teeter at the top and then, miraculously, stick. Then, feeling the pages of the book open about him, he climbs to his feet, puts his shoulder to the rock, and, feeling the comforting coolness of the hard surface, flexes his muscles, gathers his strength, and shoves hard.

  She was suddenly tempted to reach out and snatch open the book, to see if she could catch Sisyphus resting.

  She smiled again.

  She looked up and her eyes momentarily caught those of a man sitting across the room. He had been reading; she couldn’t make out the title. He had looked up, it seemed, at the same moment. He smiled. She smiled back. A young professor, she thought. She looked away, out the window, for an instant. Then she let her eyes return to the man. He had returned to his reading.

  She looked at her books. She looked at her notes. She looked out the window again. She looked back at the man, but he had disappeared.

  She thought suddenly of her mother’s complaint: “But you won’t know anybody in Florida!”

  And her reply: “But I don’t need to know anybody.”

  “But we’ll miss you . . . and Florida is so far away.”

  “I’ll miss you. But I need time to get away.”

  “But it’s hot all the time.”

  “Mother.”

  “All right. If it’s what you want.”

  “It’s what I want.”

  It wasn’t hot all the time, she thought. Her mother had been wrong. In the winter there was an inevitable freeze, some wayward mass of cold Canadian air, lost in its pursuit of Massachuse
tts, tumbling down the midsection of the nation and landing squat and awkwardly on the Florida panhandle. It was a wretched cold, without any of the beauty or terrifying stillness of the Colorado mountains. It was simply irritatingly cold; the palms seemed to buckle, the buildings, lacking much in the way of insulation, seemed tenaciously to hold in the cold air. It was sweaters and overcoats underneath a sky that seemed to speak properly only of beaches. She thought it ironic that she had been far colder on a January day in Tallahassee than she ever had been at home.

  She looked at the sunlight hitting her desk. Thank God for the summer heat, she thought. She was struck with the odd observation that in three and one half years she had failed to make a close friend, despite the warmth, despite the familiarity that it bred.

  Pizza friends, she thought.

  Beer friends. Beach friends. What-did-you-get-on-the-test friends. Did-you-read-the-extra-assignment friends. Will-you-go-to-bed-with-me friends.

  Not too many of those, she laughed to herself.

  But not for lack of people trying.

  She pulled her notepad toward her and wrote: Face it, you’re a cold fish in the margin. She was pleased. It was an easy association: cold fish and Camus.

  She settled into her chair and continued reading.

  It was dusk when Anne Hampton left the library and began to walk slowly across the campus. In the west the setting sun had turned the sky an astonishing purple, illuminating massive, stately cloud formations somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico. She thought how she loved to walk at that hour; the residual daylight seemed tenacious, seeking out form and shape and trying, against the oncoming dark, to give solidity to the world before acquiescing to the night.

  Dying time, she thought.

  She remembered the way it seemed that the last few fragments of sunlight caught on the diver’s regulator when he emerged through the hole in the ice at her grandfather’s pond, carrying her brother’s form. The light had tumbled down from the bright aluminum apparatus of this odd marine creature, just hitting the little boy’s encrusted features. Then she had lost sight; Tommy was surrounded instantly by firemen and rescue personnel, and all she could see was a dark mass being rushed up the hillside toward a pulsating red light. She saw his skates, the laces sliced, tossed aside. She pulled out from her grandfather’s agonized grip and retrieved them.

  Of course, she thought, as she walked along, he didn’t actually die then; it was not until two hours later, amidst all the hum and buzz and beep of modern medical apparatus that he technically expired. The hospital’s intensive-care unit was a wonder of lights, she thought; everywhere she had looked there was another light, filling every angle, probing every corner. It was as if by refusing to allow any darkness into the rooms, they could somehow stave off death.

  She had caught sight of a physician’s chart. It had an entry for Time of Death and the nurse had scribbled in 6:42 p.m. She had thought that inaccurate. When did Tommy die? He was dead when I heard the little spiderwebs growing in the ice surface below my feet. He died when I called out to him and he waved his arm at me in little-boy irritation and overconfidence. He died as he hit the water. She remembered thinking how undramatic it had been: one instant he was sliding along, arms pumping, the next, swallowed by this dark hole that had materialized beneath him, dying as the black cold enveloped him. His head did not bob to the surface even once. She had a sudden memory of the numb-cold pain in her feet as she ran, after stripping her own skates off, for her grandfather’s house. Each step had seemed colder, harder, the snow deeper, more treacherous. She had fallen a half-dozen times, sobbing. She thought: I was only a little girl. And he was already dead then.

  A warm breeze plucked at her shirt and she ran a hand through her hair. The sunlight had almost vanished; with it a sense of purpose and enthusiasm, replaced by a summertime lassitude amidst the evening heat.

  No thin ice in Florida, she thought.

  Not ever.

  She cut through the campus, past knots of students making their way to meals, parties, studies, or whatever, and turned down Raymond Street, heading for her apartment. She filled her mind with the mundane, envisioning the stash of yogurt, cottage cheese, and fruit in her refrigerator, briefly considering stopping for a cheeseburger, then discarding the idea. Eat nuts and berries, she said to herself, laughing. She visualized her parents; both had a tendency to size, she thought. She hated the meals of mashed potatoes and steaks that inevitably hit the table before her on her rare visits home. They must think I’m anorexic, she thought. I’m not. I’m selectively anorexic.

  She cut under the mercury vapor light at the corner of Raymond and Bond streets, marveling, as always, at the way the light turned her clothes and skin into a fluorescent purple. She had a brief vision of herself as the star of some 1950s horror flick; accidently exposed to a unique dose of radiation, now she would turn into . . . into what, she wondered. The Incredible Wallflower? The Fantastic Grind? The Phenomenal Serious Student? She heard raucous laughter pour suddenly from an open window, blending with a quick resonating chord from a stereo with the volume cranked up. Summer session, she thought, is the least serious of all the semesters. She preferred it, she realized; it made her own work stand out amidst all the people making up one failure or another.

  She continued walking along, now humming a nameless snatch of music borrowed from the blasting stereo, until she turned onto Francis Street. She was two blocks from her apartment and she did not see the man until she was almost on top of him.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Can you help me? I think I’m lost.”

  She started. The man was standing at the edge of a shadow, next to the open door of his car.

  “Did I frighten you?” he asked.

  “No, no, not at all . . .”

  “I’m sorry if I did . . .”

  “No, it’s okay. I was just thinking.”

  “Your thoughts were elsewhere?”

  “Right.”

  “I know the feeling,” he said, striding forward. “One thought leads to another, then another, and before you know it you’re in the midst of some tiny reverie. Sorry to intrude.”

  “Reality,” she said, “always intrudes.”

  He laughed.

  She looked at him closely in the meager light from a lamp a half block away. “Didn’t I see you earlier today, in the library?” she asked. He smiled.

  “Yes, I was there, catching up on some reading . . .”

  She saw him study her own face.

  “Aren’t you the girl—I’m sorry, woman—with all the books? I thought you’d never get to leave if you had to read all those.”

  She smiled. “Some. Not all. Some were read already.”

  “You must be an English major.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Not that hard to tell, really.”

  “No, I suppose not,” she said. “It’s funny. I was just thinking that, earlier.”

  “See,” he replied, “good instincts.”

  She smiled at him and he grinned in response.

  They were silent for a moment. She thought the man handsome; he was tall, well built, with a sort of easy scruffiness about him. Probably just the seersucker jacket, she thought to herself. It adds a bit of rumpled familiarity to almost every man.

  “Are you a professor?”

  “Of sorts,” the man said.

  “But not from around here?”

  “No. First visit. And I can’t seem to find Garden Street. I’ve looked all over the place . . .” The man turned, first pointing up one way, then peering down the other. She thought for an instant that he was searching for something as his gaze lingered in each direction before turning back toward her.

  “Garden Street is pretty easy,” she said. “Two turns. Left at the corner, two blocks, then right. Garden Street intersects that
street a couple of blocks down. I forget what it’s called, but it’s not very far.”

  “I’ve got a little map, not a good one,” the man said. “Would you mind just showing me where I am exactly?” He smiled. “That of course is really a philosophical question, but this once I’d settle for the topographical.”

  She laughed. “Sure,” she said.

  She stepped next to him as he spread the map out on the roof of the car. He reached into his pocket for a pencil, talking to himself, really: “. . . now here is where I think I am . . .” And then a sudden “Dammit! Don’t move!”

  “What is it?”

  “I dropped my room key.”

  He bent down. “Got to be here somewhere . . .” She started to bend down to help him look, but he waved her off. “See if you can’t pinpoint for me where I am on that map.” She stepped forward to the edge of the car and looked at the map. For an instant she was confused: it wasn’t Tallahassee, but Trenton, New Jersey.

  “This is the wrong map . . .”

  She didn’t have time to finish.

  For one instant she looked down. She saw the man had a small rectangular device in his hand.

  “Good night, Miss Hampton,” he said.

  Before she could move, he jerked her leg toward him and thrust the device up against her thigh. There was a crackling sound; an immense pain fled through her body; it felt as if someone had reached inside her and seized her heart and twisted it savagely. How does he know my name? she thought. Then she could feel her eyes rolling back and blackness sweeping over her. The crackling sound stopped and she thought: The ice broke.

  And then she entered the darkness.

  6. Her first thought upon reawakening was that death was not as she had expected it. Then, as her faculties came slowly into focus, she recognized that she was alive. Next she realized the pain; it felt as if every bone and muscle in her body had been straightened to its limit then hit or twisted. Her head throbbed and her thigh burned where she had been struck. She moaned slowly, trying to open her eyes against the pain.