by Micah Nathan
“We should do the right thing,” I said.
Art let the door swing shut, and he paced, work boots thudding heavy on the tile. “The right thing. Whatever that is. Nice cozy country estate, a few students living with a famous professor, and now an accidental death by poison. Or should I be more specific, and say our friend died from ingesting a three-hundred-year-old alchemical formula. That’ll go over real well. Fucking puritans would go nuts. All of Connecticut would shout for our heads.” He stared at the floor, still pacing. “We’d be on the front pages. Strung up and stoned. Maybe Dr. Cade, too. And Howie, for good measure. I’ve got money; I’d get a good attorney. What about you? You trust some public defender with the rest of your life?”
His face glowed in the moonlight. His words terrified me.
“The farther the body is from this house the better,” he said. “The Quinnipiac might carry him all the way to the Long Island Sound if we’re lucky.”
“We’re not doing it,” I said.
Art didn’t hear me. “I can carry him myself, but I’ll need your help in the boat.”
“You should’ve left me in bed.” I closed my eyes. “You should’ve never woken me up.”
I opened my eyes and he was staring at me.
“Jesus Christ, Art, I can’t do this.”
“Okay,” he said, buttoning the top of his shirt.
He headed for the dining room and I burrowed my face into my arms and remained on the floor.
I heard terrible things. Art’s labored breathing as he dragged Dan through the kitchen. The swish of fabric across tile, the thud-thud of shoes slipping over the threshold. The twist and creak of a doorknob and shrill, icy wind. Crunching of snow, rattle-bang as the back door swung shut.
I raised my head to see Nilus padding softly across the kitchen. It was 4:45. I walked to the window and there they were. Art and Dan, one hunched over and lurching backward, dragging the other across the ground. One on his back, arms overhead, shoes cutting two trails in the snow. Charlemagne and Pepin. David and Julius. My friends.
To the Long Island Sound if we’re lucky, I told myself. As I walked toward the back door my stomach lurched and I threw up.
I woke up that day at 4:45 P.M. My window curtain was a dark square framed by pale light. I rolled over and pulled a pillow over my head and fell back into a dead sleep, not wanting to remember anything, hoping the Valium Art had given me was tainted with something that would prevent me from ever opening my eyes again.
I awoke again, this time to darkness. I sat up against the headboard and looked around my room. Dan was there, standing casually by my chest of drawers, wearing his Sherlock outfit, his hair and clothes dripping black water that had pooled around his shoes.
“Hornwort,” he said, smiling and tipping his head to one side. He lifted his leg, and I saw it was wrapped in green plant tendrils, twined around his ankle and shin like snakes. “Didn’t I tell you they were a problem? Art and I filled the boat four times last summer with these suckers…and then Art got sunburned so badly on the back of his neck that he peeled for weeks.”
You already told me this story, I said.
“Oh, that’s right.” He let his leg down, and water sploshed out of his brown oxford. I heard Nilus scratching on the other side of my door, whining to be let in.
I’m so sorry, I said. I’m so sorry…We should’ve called an ambulance. I don’t know how this happened…
Dan smiled wistfully. “It’s okay,” he said. “Art can be very persuasive. But eventually I’ll need a proper burial.” He stepped closer. Leafy vines trailed behind him, leaving wet smears along the floor.
But you are buried, I said. You were carried away by the sea.
Dan stopped at the side of my bed. I could smell him—wet, cold, like mud from a pond. A rotting birch leaf was tangled in his hair. He shook his head sadly.
“Have you already forgotten your Aeneid passage? ‘Until my bones rest in the grave, or till I flutter and roam this side a hundred years.’ I know time isn’t supposed to matter over here.” He looked away, to my window, and then back to me, his expression suddenly angry. “But I’ll tell you, Eric. A hundred years is still a long fucking time.”
I woke up with a start, breathing heavily, my back slicked with sweat. Darkness all around, the green glow of my clock read 6 P.M. Heartbeat pulsing in my ears. I fumbled around my nightstand and found the other pill Art had given me, and I popped it in my mouth and let the bitter powder dissolve on my tongue. I closed my eyes and tried to remember summers spent at my house in West Falls—the crisp scent of impending rain, the rumble of faraway thunderheads, and the rich orange tint of the soil falling from my hand in a silty waterfall.
Chapter 3
I’d like to think I spent the next week in panicky seclusion, holed up in my room, paranoid, unable to walk downstairs past the point where Art had dragged Dan’s stiff body from foyer to kitchen. And the nights should have been equally intolerable, with nightmare after nightmare playing endlessly, Dan’s grinning corpse rising up to me from out of the dark water, hands outstretched, his voice bubbly and clotted the way I imagine a drowned man would sound. But while I’ve come to know the incapacitating pain of guilt I’ve also come to know how invigorating it can be. Guilt drove me out of my room and into a blur of physical activity—shoveling the driveway every morning, splitting firewood in the garage, hiking for miles through Dr. Cade’s land with Nilus at my side. I had no desire to sit at my desk and read, and I couldn’t have anyway; it was my room, oddly enough, that most reminded me of what I’d done. Its silence was damning and its blank walls provided a screen upon which evil memories played: a crust of jagged black ice along the pond’s shore, the dark outline of a body on the snow. Art and me pushing the canoe out, the clunk of our oars. Art heaving Dan over the side of the boat and me—trying not to cry—watching Dan’s hair floating for a moment like black moss, before his body disappeared into the inky water. These images only came back in my room, and so I stayed away.
Art and I worked around each other, eating dinner separately, arriving home at different times, leaving the house in the morning before the other came downstairs. We got into a sad rhythm of avoidance, like an estranged married couple. I think we both needed the time alone to somehow come to terms with what we’d done. It had been five days and nothing had happened—the police hadn’t shown up banging on the front door, there were no moments of panic that we’d been found out. Nothing seemed different. I saw my own death vicariously through Dan’s, and because of that I can now recall exactly when my mind made the momentous shift from believing everything revolved around me to understanding that nothing did at all. It was both comforting and scary to know reality didn’t hinge upon my perception of it. The circumstances could have been easily reversed, Dan still alive and me at the bottom of the Birchkill or the Quinnipiac or wherever he was, skimming along the riverbed, brushing against creek stones, hair swirling around my face like strands of silk.
By Saturday afternoon the sky was covered in a vortex of gray clouds that threatened to snow but never got around to it. Art had offered me a ride to school that morning, since I had to pick up my work schedule from Dr. Lang, but the car stalled several times sitting in Dr. Cade’s driveway, and while waiting for the engine to warm the tension between us dissolved. Sitting in silence, in the front seat, was more than either one of us could bear.
“I saw Ellen yesterday,” said Art, looking ahead. His glasses had a thin layer of moisture beading up on their lenses. “She said you guys had dinner last week.”
I stared out my window. “We ate Chinese.” I didn’t even care if she’d told him about what happened.
“Yeah—Han’s Kitchen,” Art laughed. “For a New York girl, Ellen sure doesn’t know good Chinese.”
“She’s from San Francisco,” I said.
Art turned to me, curiosity skittering across his face. He smiled. “Anyway, I’m glad you two got to spend some time together, away from the house
.”
I looked at him. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. Ellen’s a great girl. I see myself marrying her one day. It’s nice to have her get along so well with my friends.”
I don’t know what I felt—some gruesome hybrid of guilt and jealousy. “I didn’t know you thought about marriage,” I said, attempting to sound as disinterested as possible.
Art looked over his shoulder as he backed down the driveway. “There comes a time when you have to make a decision. Ellen’s a traditional girl, you know, likes to have her eggs lined up. She gets a lot of pressure from her folks, always asking her when she’s going to settle down, so I figure, why not me? I can’t imagine her finding anyone else who knows her as well as I do.”
“For example,” I said.
“Well, I know Ellen is a bit…how can I put this…she’s a bit of a free spirit. Gets bored easily. So the more I pull away, the more she tries to get close. If I show any kind of commitment she feels trapped. I see it as the perfect situation—it allows me to enjoy the company of other women, knowing I’m only helping my current relationship by doing so.”
“Sounds like a rationalization.”
“It would,” Art smiled. “But you don’t know Ellen. Not like I do.”
Howie might know her too, I thought.
We stopped at a traffic light. The town sign was straight ahead, atop two stout poles, a small, brown rectangular block of wood with FAIRWICH branded across in straight lettering, and below, almost as an afterthought:
Our Home
Est. 1760
As we rolled down Main Street, Nicole drove by in her little silver sports car, honking to us and waving out her window. There was a girl next to her in the passenger seat, a high-haired blonde who stared at her nails while we waved back, and the moment Nicole’s car turned off Main Street I sank back into my seat and covered my face with my hands. I didn’t know what I was going to feel once my mental shield of denials and justifications was exposed to the public, and yet there was Nicole, someone who knew Dan only in passing, and already I felt as if she somehow suspected what had happened, as if it were obvious in my every action and expression.
We drove past Aberdeen’s patinaed front gates and onto the smooth black surface of its long entranceway, rolling by Paderborne, until Garringer Hall came into view, jutting out against the swirling gray sky in robes of granite.
Art stopped the car. A couple of students stared at us from their small smoker’s group huddled near the building’s entrance.
“I’ve been dreaming about him,” I said. I leaned my head against the door window. “He visits me every night. Sometimes we play backgammon, or just talk about silly stuff, like the weather or what I had for dinner.”
“Who are you talking about?” Art asked, staring ahead.
“Dan,” I said, surprised. Who else?
“Oh, I see…” Art took his pipe out of his jacket pocket and peered into the bowl. “You think he’s haunting you, is that it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, disturbed by Art’s measured movements: the unraveling of the foil pouch, the pinching of clove and the packing of it into the bowl, and then the flick of the match and a wispy curl of smoke dissolving into the air.
Art puffed once, twice. “You could try tracing a thaumaturgic triangle around your bed. Or sleeping with a solace stone under your pillow. Antonio Ebreo recommended heated azurite.” Art opened his mouth slightly and let the white smoke seep out.
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s just a suggestion. At the very least it can’t hurt. I don’t know what else to tell you, Eric.”
“I think I’m being punished,” I said. “Remember Palinurus, doomed to wander for a hundred years? Or Cato, unable to cross the threshold between Hell and Purgatory? Until Dan’s body is found I don’t think I’ll ever have a decent—”
“Nonsense.” Art puffed again. “You simply have to let go of your guilt. I suspect the only ghost haunting you is up here,” he tapped his temple. “Besides, if there is an afterlife, I’m sure Dan has more important things to do than haunt your dreams.”
“And how would you know that?”
He ignored, or didn’t detect, my sarcasm. “Even if we assume the pagans all exist in Hell, there are still enough interesting Christians in heaven to keep one occupied. Think of Justinian and Constantine…Aquinas, Anselm, and St. Jerome…With millennia of people to choose from, don’t you think it’s egotistical to assume Dan would rather spend his time with you?”
Howie came home that afternoon, tan and relaxed, wearing a short-sleeved yellow button-down and faded tan shorts, his hair longer than I’d ever seen it. He’d put on some weight, a heaviness to his face that hadn’t been there before vacation, and when he greeted me with a crushing bear hug and a thundering slap on the shoulder, I realized I’d forgotten how big a man he was. Art was diminishing in size, it seemed, head now always lowered in thought, face pinched, obsession and compulsion molding him into a two-dimensional object that took up less space than it should have. But Howie was bound by nothing, and his presence shoved aside the somber silence that had pervaded the house the past week. He talked about New Orleans’s beautiful women and seedy bars, bragging that he knew all the places the average tourist doesn’t find. He told us about a dangerous affair he had with a Creole woman he’d met in a jazz club his first night in town—two nights of crazy sex that was ended abruptly by her boyfriend bursting into the house and threatening to cut off their heads with a machete.
“Was he armed?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. He was wielding the goddamn thing like a samurai.” Howie sipped from his glass—filled, incredibly enough, with plain orange juice. We sat in the kitchen at the breakfast nook. “I mean, I can understand why he was so pissed. We were in his bed, for Christ’s sake. But still, if you’re going to threaten me, you better make good on it.” Howie looked away for a moment and then continued:
“So I stood up real slow—mind you, I’m naked as the day I’m born—and I said, ‘Look, there’s been a misunderstanding here, I didn’t know this was your woman,’ but he’s getting madder, screaming at me in Creole, screaming at his woman, she’s screaming back, and I’m caught in the middle with my dick hanging out and a two-foot-long razor-sharp instrument not more than a few paces away. He notices me walking toward him and then he raises his arm like he’s going to slice me in half, and so I ran into him full speed, just like a tackling dummy, wham—”
Howie punched his fist into his open palm.
“—and this guy goes flying. His arms shoot up, his legs stick out, and he crashes back into the wall and collapses onto the floor. Out cold.”
Howie took another sip of his orange juice.
“So,” he said. “How the fuck was your break?”
I told him about Prague, about the train trip and the hotel. I said nothing of Albo or the Malezel book, and instead I filled in the time with descriptions of the city and my experience with the gypsy in the street fair.
“I didn’t know you got your fortune read,” Art said.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I told you I just walked by.”
“Voodoo’s big in New Orleans,” Howie said.
Art ignored him. “You shouldn’t mess around with things like that,” Art said to me.
“Didn’t you hear what I said? I didn’t do anything.” I tried to push my anger away. “And maybe I should’ve. At least I’d have something fun to do, with you back at the hotel doing whatever—”
“All right sweethearts, enough.” Howie stood up and heaved a thick cardboard box from the floor, plopping it down on the kitchen table. “Look here.” He produced a penknife, sliced open the box, and took out two tightly packed bags of ice, and then a Styrofoam cooler filled halfway with oysters.
“They’re still alive,” Howie said. “I picked them from their bed two days ago.”
Art took a few oysters from the cooler and handed them to me. He smiled. Everythin
g was fine. Everything was normal.
“We’ll eat them raw,” Howie said, “‘on the half shell,’ as they say. Dash of hot sauce and you’re good to go. And they didn’t cost me one red cent.”
I dropped the oysters on the table. “I heard in Maine, if you’re caught stealing lobster from traps, the lobstermen are allowed to shoot you.”
“Same in New Orleans,” said Howie. “I risked my life for these critters so you better enjoy them. Say,” he looked around, as if he’d forgotten something, “where’s Danny-boy at? I bought him something.”
I looked at Art. He was perfectly composed and casual, leaning against the counter, arms crossed. “Don’t know. He left this afternoon. Said he had some errands to do.”
This is it, I thought. This is where it all starts.
But Howie just sat down on the bench, took another swig of his orange juice, and pried open one of the oysters, sucking the glistening gray flesh into his mouth with a satisfied smile.
Later that night, Art, Howie, and I sat in the living room, engaged in our own little pursuits—Art read from some small book written in French, Howie leafed through old holiday catalogues that had stacked up on the coffee table, and I tried to focus on my notes for Monday’s classes.
“Did Dan say he was going on a date?” Howie said, looking at his watch. The fire crackled in response and Nilus barked in his sleep.
“Not that I know of,” said Art. He glanced at me.
I turned to Howie. “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t even know he’d left.”
“I bet you he ended up going over to Katie Mott’s room.”
“Who’s that?” I said.
“Some girl he liked last semester. They hooked up right before break. Frankly, I didn’t think Dan had the guts to follow through. Usually he never does. The big-city Boston girls probably taught him a lesson this past month. Good for him.”
Howie went back to his holiday catalogues—gifts for him and for her under twenty dollars—while for the next hour I stared at my notes without reading a single word.