I stopped at the bottom of our gray stairwell, looking at Nicodemus’s red New Testament in my hand. “I think I should give it back to him.”
Dubnicek stopped midway up the steps causing Tag and Todd Kessler to run into him. He turned to me. His face was fierce and hurt. “After all of that?” He had that same look Nicodemus had earlier like his eyes wanted to escape his head and they were pulling his neck forward. It seemed he might cry. “After all of that, Hastings?”
“What do you care, Dubnicek,” I said.
His arms reached forward and Todd Kessler and Tag restrained him.
“Let him go!” I said, bravely.
And they did!
Dubnicek flew down the stairs and he was on me, slamming my back into the gray and black painted cinderblocks. We struggled and he flipped me over his hip onto the stairwell landing’s cement floor.
Members lining the stairway above cheered. “Blue Room! Blue Room!” “Take ‘em to the Blue Room, Victor!”
He had strength and agility I hadn’t anticipated and I found myself jerked in new directions before I could react to the last. I rolled him on his side and swung, striking his jaw with that sick sensation of knuckles sinking into warm flesh and bone. He lunged over me and swung but I ducked into his chest. He screamed and I realized he lay limp on top of me. I pushed him off, scraping the New Testament off the floor before climbing a few steps. Dubnicek lay on his back in the landing clenching his right hand, blood running over the knuckles, tracing runlets down the purple and pink skin. There was a knuckle smudge of blood on the cinderblock wall where his punch had landed.
“It’s broken. I know it is, I know it is,” Dubnicek said, his hot tears streaming. “I knew you heard us fucking. You’re sick. Sick. You want us sick like you.” He gripped his hand and closed his eyes. “You don’t even believe in what you say.”
“I’m sorry,” I said and touched to my heart as it hit my chest. Nicodemus was right: my heart hurt more than the force of it striking inside my ribs as my thoughts clogged at my center.
“You, sorry?” Dubnicek said. “For what?”
“For anything!” I told him.
CHAPTER NINE
MOSES FISTFIGHTS WITH JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
As it turned out, Dubnicek’s hand was broken and he turned it into a positive by having all the most beautiful women on campus sign his cast (including his girlfriend, Erin). I was going to give sleeping in the quieter rack-room a try. This meant hanging a ‘Call-Tag’ on the board in the communal bathroom. This board hung on the wall between the stalls and the sinks. It was a thin old board, about five by four feet with a grid of rusty brass hooks for the hanging of circular tags on the various half-hour wake-up increments.
“Victor,” Tag grinned. He stood in front of the bathroom’s mirror with shaving cream on half of his face. “It’s good to see you. Stay right there.” And he exited out the opposite bathroom door in the middle of his shave.
“What?” I mumbled to myself.
Tag came back with Gerhard at his side.
“Go get him,” Tag said, patting more shaving cream on his face.
Gerhard was a recent pledge and he was Tag’s pledge-son. This meant Tag was assigned as Gerhard’s mentor.
Gerhard looked at Tag with confusion.
“Go on, do it now,” Tag said. “You can do it.”
Gerhard headed for me with a slight grin. He was a heavy-set, short young man, wearing his usual denim overalls and his black curly hair was mussed like a bird’s nest. His real name was Robbie Ford. We called him Gerhard because he hated the French. He had proved slick with his country charm that semester. He liked to start off talking about soybeans and old school fertilizing methods then segue into some lackadaisical diatribe, faulting them frog-boys, as he called them, with everything from the Aids Pandemic to the toilet bowl Coriolis effect in his grandma’s farmhouse.
I turned to him, “What’s up, Gerhard?”
He smiled and shoved my chest; forced me back.
“Hey,” I smiled. “I love you too, Gerhard.”
He shoved me again and stretched that toothy grin.
“Calm down now,” I said. “I’m not in the mood.”
He shoved me again and I stepped forward. I couldn’t move back, again, from a pledge, not from Gerhard. We bent our knees and I grabbed his wrists. I lowered my weight and stiff-armed his collar-bone. He shoved me toward the call board’s rusty hooks. He kept his eyes on me, oblivious to them. I lacked the time and the strength to warn him. I was going to have to protect both of us from those hooks as they neared and bounced, gleaming yellow in fluorescent light. It felt unreal, like some action/adventure serial and I was struggling with the villain, avoiding a wall of spikes or some encroaching saw blade.
Gerhard bent over to grab at one of my legs. He over committed his weight too far in front as I wrapped my arm around his head tightly, twisting and lunging from side-to-side so his struggling arms couldn’t get a good hold of me. I held my back slightly bent and stepped backward to maintain leverage.
“Blue room! Blue room!” Tag cheered. “Take him to the Blue Room, Victor.”
I gasped and struggled. He just needed to be humiliated, then he would leave me alone. A stalemate was adequate humiliation. I was in better shape than he was. He would tire himself out in my headlock and then I would be free to go about my business.
So I held him there, feeling his breath grow heavier. He stopped trying to grab at my legs and escape from my headlock as he focused on getting enough breath despite my tight grasp around his neck. He groaned and made a couple of last ditch efforts. I felt his bloated self-esteem shrivel in the tense cradle of my arm as he groaned and tried to lift up one of my legs.
I let him go. He managed to stand up straight and look me in the eyes as he gasped with a flushed face. Sweat beaded his forehead. I held my lips tight to conceal my fatigue and said with a plucky smile, “Hey, Gerhard! How’s it going, buddy!”
Then I walked forward, past him, even though I originally planned on going backward and exiting through the door closest to my room. It was necessary to walk past him to show that he hadn’t stopped or impeded me.
“Take him to the Blue Room, Victor!” Tag said. “Finish him off.”
“I gotta study,” I lied.
“That’s all you ever do, Victor, is study. You never kick anybody’s ass.”
I turned away from him and snuck a quick gasp in between slit lips. “It’s college,” I said, turning back to him, shrugging. I thought this was a reasonable argument.
He looked at me with disapproving eyes.
It was not a reasonable argument. Since my confrontation with Dubnicek, members had been giving me blue rooms like these more often. Historically, the soft, well maintained carpeting of the Blue Room had made a preferred place to settle drunken disputes and rivalries through sloppy wrestling but, over time, the term ‘blue room’ had taken the broader meaning of any wrestling that was pissing-match in nature. Of the six blue rooms I had been forced into over the past nine days, I had won about half. Strangely, of the three that I had lost, these guys all thought they needed some gimmick to beat me. They’d turn off the lights just before or sneak up behind me because their confidence was so precious and, therefore, well guarded.
The only place free from violence was the dining area at mealtimes. Since lunch was over, I was fairly certain I would be left alone to read the daily edition of our campus newspaper. I pushed through a swinging oak door and walked over the dining area’s cyan tiles, which were covered in brown streaks from muddy mop water.
The pledge class friends of Stanley Jordan and Michael Kessler sat along an oak veneered folding table and they appeared to be having a conversation worthy of eavesdropping. So, as I walked past them towards the kitchen door, I considered finding a seat close by on my way back.
Inside the kitchen, I heard our cook, Annie, rummaging, clinging and clanking metallic pans and utensils. I noticed that the pledges had y
et to wash the glasses for dinner so I had my choice of drinking milk out of an empty plastic peanut butter jar or a large Pyrex measuring cup. The measuring cup was dirtier so I choose the jar.
The silver milk refrigerator was back in the corner of the dining area. I filled my peanut butter jar and choose a table to the left of the pledges, passing over a few maroon, plastic chairs whose seats were pooled with dirt-ringed rainwater. I slid some spray paint cans and half finished poster boards out of my way so I had room to read a newspaper that had been left open.
Our student newspaper had five or six sections to it. Through the windows that faced the back porch a squirrel scampered and skid across the ice and white salt pellets to nab one of the last acorns. And back in the underclassman rows of cars, a Jeep wrangler—buttoned up in its plastic and canvas canopy—it rolled over icy gravel to stir menacingly-large crows into the grey sky.
I opened the newspaper and sipped milk. The stories inside seemed ridiculous and I wasn’t sure whether this was from the college climate or the college journalism.
Michael Kessler clanked his spoon on his table like a drumstick.
I lowered the newspaper and looked at him.
“Hey, Victor,” he said.
“Hey,” I said.
He was the younger brother and pledge-son of Todd Kessler. We would have given both these guys nicknames if they weren’t so boring and innocuous. This younger one, Michael Kessler, had a wide and powerful body. He could have been a champion bodybuilder, if he had ever lifted over twelve ounces. He was in the process of growing pudgy. He had blonde hair that he shaved himself with a quarter-inch clipper guard, full cheeks and he wore oversized one color T-shirts like blue or orange or… blue, again, only dirtier and more wrinkled. He seemed to have a simple philosophy gleaned from a bag of potato chips or a fast food commercial.
“So you just find some dealer?” Michael Kessler asked, “and he gets it for you.”
Stanley Jordan set down his glossy muscle mag and told Michael Kessler, “It’s even easier than that. They’re legal. Because they’re not steroids. They’re steroid precursors. It’s no different than if you were to eat, like, ten T-bones and just metabolize them in half the time. You can order them online and even if you use your credit card, they fall under supplements. They can’t make laws fast enough to evaluate them all. Then you get huge and people start acting different around you. Like, right now, I can kick people’s asses, but they don’t know it. And that’s a disadvantage to them. Because they could get hurt… bad. This way, there’s something to let them know to keep walking. It doubles my security and the security of people around me, especially the people I care about protecting, because I’ll be strong, plus I know how to fight. That’s as good as it gets.”
“Yah. Double-security,” Michael Kessler said. “Cool. Do you think that there could be a way to get triple-security? You know, like the triple threat in basketball or the Holy Trinity. Or, OR! the three branches of government.” Michael Kessler scratched his hair. “I don’t know, it seems like a lot of things come in threes—”
“No,” Stanley Jordan said. “I worked it out. There’s just double-security. God—!” he rocked back in his chair, running his hands over his face, “I want to be big.”
The footsteps of heeled shoes and the rustling of a dress crept up behind me as Ma Red rushed through the kitchen’s swing door. I heard her tell Annie, “We can’t serve this many green beans for dinner. We need to save half the order for the dinner exchange with the Beta women on the twenty-seventh.” She sounded flustered. She always sounded flustered when she spoke to the cook. I marked this as another data point towards my theory that she felt threatened by Annie.
Rex had apparently been too busy to enjoy lunch that afternoon. He walked through the main hallway door in a white t-shirt adorned with the black lettering: ‘Garbage!’ and a grey messenger bag with safety pins stuck in thick clusters along his shoulder strap. I had the sudden urge to look busy as he passed. He said to me, “Don’t go anywhere, Victor. I want to talk to you.”
I stayed silent.
He came back with the Pyrex measuring cup full of milk. A scraggly spiral of Raman noodle reached out off the cup’s rim from its glued position. “Hello, Victor. How are you this afternoon?”
“I’m fine. Do you have some news for me?” I said, and then I swallowed.
Rex spoke slowly through his hoarse throat, “I do. I do.” He was looking past me, bleary-eyed.
“Tough night at the bars, last night?” I asked.
“Yes.” Rex drank his milk down another red demarcation. “They defeated me—the bars. I’m beaten.” Rex scratched his blond beard stubble and stared up toward white ceiling tiles. “Victor, I do have news for you. The council voted to drop charges. I’m not supposed to say this but everyone voted to drop the charges except for Nicodemus Smith.”
“Even Dubnicek?” I asked.
“Even Dubnicek. He wasn’t that wild about you since you broke his hand—”
“I didn’t break his hand.”
“Anyways, he thought the charges were inflated because you agreed to pay the damages. He even brought up past cases of room damage. The dude has some integrity after all.”
“Rex,” I said, “why did you take me to Frat Court?”
“When I see something happening that I don’t like—even if I don’t understand what’s happening—I can’t just sit by and do nothing. It’s always been tough for Alpha’s at a tech school like this to meet girls and grow socially. This has been the slowest semester I’ve seen or heard of. Hardly anyone’s dating or inviting girls over. I just thought you were the head of it all, somehow—”
“People keep blue-rooming me,” I interrupted. “I’ve had, like, six in the past nine days.”
Rex smiled and looked behind me. “We thought we had you figured out, Victor. Then you went and fought Dubnicek. That messed up everyone’s idea of the hierarchy. Once they figure out where you fit in with the tough guys, the blue rooms will die down.”
“But I don’t want to be tough.”
“It’s not about what you want. It’s about how people see you. Plus, you’re the wrong size. You’re medium sized. You’re not big enough for anyone to be afraid of. You’re not small enough for anyone to look like a jerk if they blue room you.”
“I don’t know. A few minutes ago, I think Tag gave his pledge-son, Gerhard, the idea that he should take me on as some right-of-passage or test-of-manhood. I didn’t get the feeling it had that much to do with size.”
“You’re right,” Rex said. “It’s more complicated than size. We have to represent our beliefs with our minds and our bodies.”
“So, might makes right?”
“Are you saying that ‘might makes right’ isn’t true?” Rex asked. “Are you saying that hasn’t been the case historically?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said Tag put Gerhard up to it. Those guys are conservatives. You’re a liberal,” Rex said.
“I’m not sure I’m a liberal.”
Rex skidded back in his chair and raised an impatient eyebrow. He shook his head. “Knowledge of self, Victor. It’s important.”
“So you know about yourself.”
“I know as much as I can know,” Rex said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Last fall semester, my parents.” Rex snickered. “My parents, that’s funny… anyways. My parents decided that they would feel better about themselves if they told me I was adopted. See—the plan was to never tell me and be one-big-happy-family. Their original thought was that it’s not fair to tell an adopted kid he’s adopted. And when I was two or three years old, they thought I looked enough like my brothers on the outside. But, as I grew up, I grew so far apart from them mentally and, maybe, spiritually… anyways, my existence was a constant reminder of their lie.
“They could of still had more of their own kids. It was weird. It was something they just did. Out of pity for th
e world or some bullshit. They asked me if I wanted to find my birth parents and I said, ‘why?’ If a parent gives up on you, there’s no longer a bond or an obligation. You’re free. Absolutely free. It was like my parents wanted to take that freedom away from me because they were jealous of what I had been given. When a parent gives you up, that means the world gives you up and you’re free from them, free from the world—free from its laws. You know what I mean.”
“No. I’m not sure I do.”
“There was this science fiction story I read by Robert Heinlein,” Rex said. “It’s called ‘All You Zombies’. About a man who was a hermaphrodite who traveled back and forwards in time and got stuck in this time loop where he or she—whatever—it, got stuck in this loop where it had to keep giving birth to itself. Then, at the end, it looks at a tattoo on its shoulder of a snake eating its own tail. And it says something like, ‘I know where I come from. But where do all you zombies come from!’ That’s kind of how I feel about all you zombies. And sometimes I think I’m the snake, eating my own tale, like a perfect circle without a real beginning or a real end. You know?”
“That’s, that’s—man—I don’t know, Rex.”
Rex grinned. “No laws!”
“What do you mean: no laws?”
“Do you believe in laws, Victor? I mean like the kind that Moses brought down from the mountain.” Rex waited for some response. “Do you believe that there’s some kind of truth we’re supposed to live by that’s outside ourselves and never changes even after a million years? Or do you think that truth is always changing and that there is one unique truth for each situation?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess, I’ve never really thought of it.”
“But you have! When you argued about how the Bible and Scobey’s Field-guide were all old and shit, you said that we needed a new truth for our situation—for today.”
“I guess that was what I said.”
“You did, Victor. You’re a liberal. You always want to change everything.”
“I don’t think we should change everything. I mean, there are some of those commandments that Moses gave that we really can’t do without. All of them are pretty good—”
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