Gods of Aberdeen

by Micah Nathan

  The next morning Art left to pick up Dr. Cade at the airport and I stayed at my desk, daydreaming and gazing out the window. I could just see the edge of the pond from my room, a crescent of snow covering the water at the shoreline, which had already frozen over, and a lone crow walking across the side yard. Around 10 A.M. Nilus started barking and I heard the front door open, the crash-bang of luggage, and then Howie’s booming baritone welcoming Professor Cade home. I crept to the hallway and listened from the top of the stairs.

  A few minutes of small talk—vacation was fun but we’re looking forward to getting back to work, stuff like that—then Dr. Cade spoke: I hadn’t been to Havana in nearly thirty years. It’s more impoverished than I remember. He’d had dinner with Castro and signed a copy of his book This Too Must Pass for one of Castro’s sons. Fishing trips in Guantanamo Bay and talking to some old sailor who’d cleaned Hemingway’s boat, long evenings spent in palapas telling the locals about America, and hearing horror stories about mothers who’d lost their children while sending them to supposed freedom on timber-lashed rafts headed for Key West.

  Howie offered to make dinner for him that night, a seafood gumbo using the oysters and some fish he and Art were going to pick up that afternoon. Dr. Cade thanked them and said he was going upstairs to lie down, and if Dean Richardson called, would they mind just taking a message?

  Before I stole back to my room I heard Art ask Howie if he’d heard from Dan. Howie laughed and said Dan was probably having the time of his life with Katie Mott, and that at any time he expected him to show up at the front door, bedraggled and exhausted, suffering from dehydration and in need of a B-12 shot.

  I worked until dusk descended in a bluish veil and I could smell sautéing onions and garlic wafting up from the kitchen. In the kitchen I found Howie slicing haddock at the counter while a kettle simmered on the stove and a tired-looking Art stood over a skillet, stirring a whitish mixture with a wooden spoon. A pile of shucked oysters sat in a gray wet heap atop a plate.

  There was an open bottle of club soda on the kitchen table and what looked like a matching glass of the stuff sitting on the counter near Howie. A pale green disc of lime floated among the bubbles and ice cubes.

  “Art’s burnt the roux twice already,” Howie said, with a grin. He pulled a strip of haddock apart with his fingers.

  I glanced at Art. He looked sick, dressed in an old Aberdeen sweatshirt and plaid flannel pajama bottoms. His hair stuck out at crazy angles like he’d just gotten up from a nap.

  “During the ride home Dr. Cade said we’re way behind schedule,” Art said, in a low monotone. “Don’t be surprised if he doubles our workload. He plans to submit the first draft of Volume One by the end of this semester.”

  Howie dropped the haddock onto the cutting board. “Is he serious? I’ve barely begun inking.”

  “I still have another thirty pages of translations,” I said. “And he wants me to write something on Emperor Barbarossa. Twenty pages minimum.”

  Dinner was amazing. Howie was a much better cook sober than drunk, and thanks to the Chardonnay that Thomas left us, I felt as relaxed as I had the entire week. We sat at the dining room table, Dr. Cade at the head, Howie and myself seated across from each other, and Art at the opposite end. Dan’s chair was conspicuously empty.

  “I’m surprised we haven’t heard from Dan,” said Art, spooning the last of the gumbo into his bowl. He’d drunk a great deal of wine, about three glasses, while Howie continued to sip club soda.

  Dr. Cade showed concern. “Has he not yet returned from Boston?” he said.

  “He came back last week,” Art said. His speech was slightly slurred. “He left here to do some errands…yesterday afternoon, was it?” He looked at me.

  “Yes,” I said quickly.

  “I see,” Dr. Cade said. “And no one has heard from him since?”

  We all shook our heads.

  “I had some time in Cuba to look over what we’ve accomplished so far.” Dr. Cade steepled his hands. “While our progress has quickened, we are still behind schedule. Sections on the papacy are quite rough, and what you’ve given me on the Saxon empire…” He shook his head. “Let’s just say it lacks depth. Howie, you were supposed to have had those portolanos completed and on my desk. Eric”—he raised his voice to stop Howie from interrupting—“Eric, how are the translations coming along?”

  I had a sudden memory of shivering under a dark sky, kneeling in the canoe, struggling to lift Dan while the rush of the Birchkill bubbled and gurgled close by. Make sure nothing comes off of him yet—not his sneakers or his belt or anything else, Art had said, his voice shaking from the cold, and when we checked—everything in order? nothing left in the boat?—we pushed him over the side, the canoe rocking gently as he slipped below the black surface of the pond. I’d cut my hand without even knowing, and I remember later watching the long slit run from red to clear under the bathroom faucet, blood winding in thin tendrils over the glassy white porcelain. Blood had pattered on the floor, on my pants, and smeared across my cheeks where I had rubbed them after coming inside.

  My God, I thought. What have we done?

  “Eric?”

  I blinked. “The translations,” I said. “I finished St. Ripalta’s Miracle.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Cade nodded. “Yes, one of my favorites. A retelling of the Lazarus tale. And the others?”

  “Almost done,” I said. “Tonight…maybe tomorrow.”

  My eyes began to tear up. I excused myself and hurried to my room. I didn’t care what Howie and Dr. Cade thought, and I knew it didn’t matter, because everyone would pretend everything was okay. No one would ever ask me what was wrong, and I hated myself because I was becoming one of them, sweeping emotions under the rug, drinking until the world took on a dull haze. I fell back on my bed and closed my eyes and saw the head of Horatio J. Grimek, sitting in his jar in that musty basement in Prague. Memento mori, he said. Remember that you too must die.

  Monday morning brought painful cold. I floated through the first day of classes, listening to endless throngs of students talk excitedly about what they’d done over the past month. Nearly every story was like something out of Condé Nast Traveler: sunning on the beaches of the Balearic Islands, backpacking through New Zealand, staying at the family estate in San Filipe.

  My last class of the day was Professor Wallace’s The 18th-Century Gothic Novel, with Allison Feinstein in all her dark cosmopolitan elegance sitting beside me, dressed in a black pantsuit and wearing a pair of slender tortoiseshell eyeglasses that sat low upon her thin, aquiline nose. Allison Feinstein was the daughter of a senator from Rhode Island, and the closest thing to a student celebrity at Aberdeen. She was beautiful, of course, with Semitic features and preternatural confidence, often followed by a swirling trail of cigarette smoke and surrounded by an entourage of fawning men and envious women. I’d seen her a few times before, walking across the Quad, eating a bagel at Campus Bean, sunning herself in a black bikini on a lawn chair behind Thorren Hall. Some semesters ago she had supposedly received a D from Professor Cade in his Ottoman Empire course, and as a result the school received a phone call from her irate father, who threatened to pull his funding if Allison wasn’t given an incomplete and allowed to retake the class the following semester. But Dr. Cade stood firm (rumor has it he matched Senator Feinstein’s yearly donation as a swipe at the administration), which only solidified his already sanctified reputation as Aberdeen’s arbiter of uncompromising values.

  She was dressed in all browns and blacks, not a hint of bright color about her, from her raven-colored hair to her chestnut eyes to her nails painted deep red. I noticed she used a Mont Blanc, not the fat ones that Dr. Lang preferred but a thin, rapierlike silver pen. Her beauty was the complete opposite to Ellen’s—dusky and amorphous, blurred around the edges.

  “Please stop,” she whispered harshly.

  I turned to look at her. She was staring at me, wide mouth turned down in disapproval.

>   “Excuse me?” I said.

  “You’re tapping.” She motioned to my feet with a nod of her head. “I can’t concentrate.”

  Any other day I would’ve mumbled an apology and looked away. But recent events had imbued me with a sense of power—that invigorating guilt was now a pair of gray lenses through which I viewed the world, making me feel invisible. Nothing can hurt me, I thought.

  “‘The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd,” I said, quoting Emerson, “keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.’”

  Allison looked at her nails. “Whatever…just stop tapping,” she said, and turned to the front again.

  Professor Wallace talked about the elements of the gothic novel, its common themes of ruined castles and monasteries, deep, dark forests crawling with serpentine vegetation, the melancholic ghost and the distraught heroine. Walpole and Radcliffe and Shelley—all of them, I felt, could have had a field day with any of my memories from the night Art and I dumped Dan into the pond. There had been the hooting of an owl, the tattered veil of clouds passing over a full moon, the black water swirling beneath our oars, and Dan’s body sinking into Stygian nothingness.

  “Has anyone ever traveled to Prague?” Dr. Wallace said, leaning forward against the podium, looking out over the class. He was a tall, thin man, as New England as they come with his gaunt face and rocky features, hands long and knobby-knuckled.

  I was certain several of my classmates owned at least one home in the Czech Republic. When no one responded I held up my hand.

  “I was there over winter break,” I said. Allison looked at me.

  “And your impressions?” said Professor Wallace.

  I could see where he was heading so I talked about the solemnity of the architecture, the cold waters of the Vltava, and the decrepit remnants of the church that had once stood where our hotel was. I wanted to impress everyone but think I ended up sounding pretentious, and Professor Wallace merely thanked me and went on to tell about his years spent in Prague where he wrote his thesis on similarities between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Rabbi Loew’s golem.

  After class Allison Feinstein approached me as I gathered up my books. She introduced herself with a curt little handshake.

  “You know, I haven’t been to Prague, yet,” she said, taking off her glasses and slipping them into a slim leather case. A few of the male students lingered at their desks, eyeing me enviously. “I wanted to study there last summer at Charles University, but my dad insisted I go to Israel instead. Of course, it ended up being way too hot, and the men were all these psycho army guys.” She smiled quickly. “If you don’t mind me asking, where was it you stayed again in Prague?”

  “The Mustovich,” I said.

  “I knew it sounded familiar,” she said, nodding. “My dad stays there when he visits.”

  I smiled. We had absolutely nothing more in common save a working knowledge of Prague’s finest hotel.

  “I know this may be short notice,” Allison said, opening her pocketbook, “but I’m having a party tomorrow night, at my place on Linwood Terrace.” She handed me a silver-embossed calling card. I thought of Dan’s card, that day in the Quad with Nicole when she called out to him and he walked toward us in his big suit with the pants bunched up around his ankles. I still have his card, I think, somewhere, in one of those shoeboxes that reside in our closets like ossuaries, holding the bones of our past.

  “Bring a friend, if you’d like,” she said, with a trace of a smile. What had that meant? I thought. Attraction? Curiosity? Sympathy?

  I thought of possible dates—Nicole, Art, or Howie—but none of them seemed particularly appealing. Allison gave me a quick, formal handshake, closed her pocketbook with an authoritative click, and whisked away, dark hair streaming over her shoulders like a falling shadow.

  Chapter 4

  Instead of going back to Dr. Cade’s I took a cab into town and shopped at the Haberdashery, Fairwich’s finest men’s clothing store. I bought shoes, pants, and two shirts, along with a pair of fourteen-karat gold cufflinks. I then stayed in my dorm room for the rest of the day, worked on my translations, and drank tea that I made on a borrowed hot plate with some old orange pekoe Josh gave to me. There wasn’t much going on in my dorm—jazz rang softly through the halls, the radiators whined and clanked, someone knocked on my door around dinnertime but I didn’t bother to answer. I finished my work and tried solitaire for an hour or so, grew bored, then headed downstairs to grab something to eat before the dining hall closed.

  The usual scraps remained—a browning banana, a bruised apple, a prepackaged single serving of cereal. When I asked the guy behind the hot-food counter if anything was left from that evening’s dinner, he only grunted some kind of response and walked away, scratching the back of his head through his hairnet. I took a muffin from the community bins and sat by myself in the corner of the hall, listening to the sounds of a few students talking on the other side of the room. It was comforting, actually, staring at the brown, scarred wooden walls, reading the countless initials that had been scrawled and etched into the panels over the decades. Most were two letters followed by a year: AM ’78, JT ’85. A few had left their first name, in aged, faded letters that looked as old as the names themselves: Horace, Marvin, Esther.

  I glanced quickly around the room and then took my key and began to scrape out my initials, shielding my left hand with my right arm.

  “Eric?”

  I looked up and there stood Nicole, flanked on either side by artsy-looking young girls. She wore all black—tightly fitting pants and a trim sweater that appeared hopelessly overstretched by her breasts. My initials were half-finished on the wall, a scraggly E and the back line of D.

  “I had no idea,” she said, with her hands on her hips, “that you were such a vandal.”

  “Hi, Nicole,” I said.

  She pouted and rushed forward, embracing me in a rush of vanilla scent.

  “I saw you with your friend the other day, the tall, handsome guy who never smiles, what’s-his-name…”

  “Arthur.”

  “Yeah, him. In his car—”

  “I know, we waved to you.”

  She nodded and smiled, obviously already bored with the topic. “Say, we’re going to see the Bluelight Specials play at the Cellar. You want to come? I can get you in for free.”

  “No, thank you,” I said, pushing my half-eaten corn muffin around on my tray. “I’m not feeling so well.”

  “You do look kind of sick,” Nicole said, and she put her hand to my forehead. “Maybe you picked up something in Prague. The Czech flu or something like that.”

  The girls’ eyes widened. Nicole, sensing this, I think, draped her arm over my shoulder. “He was in Prague over winter break,” Nicole said proudly. “Can you imagine? He called me from a pay phone in some street café. Remember, Eric?”

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t believe it. Of all the people to call and you picked me.” She tousled my hair. “I stayed in lousy old New York. SoHo actually, if you want to be picky about it.”

  “How was it?” one of the wide-eyed girls asked me. She was pretty and blonde, with wet blue eyes and a fresh face. I felt like I could fall in love with her.

  “It was dark,” I said, referring to Prague. “Dark and cold.”

  “We really should get going,” Nicole said suddenly. I knew I’d attracted the attention of the blonde girl, but I didn’t know why (now I know—it’s always the brooding malcontents who attract young women). I wanted to take that girl back to my room and lie in bed with her and talk about her life and listen to her stories. She represented everywhere and everything I wanted to be at that moment.

  But it wasn’t to be. Instead, Nicole kissed me on the cheek and told me to call. I watched them flit away, talking excitedly about nothing.

  The next day I went to Allison Feinstein’s party. She lived in a two-story cape on Linwood Terrace, a one-way street with only seven homes. Her par
ents had bought the house for her, Allison later explained, figuring they could always sell it after her graduation, or, if she liked Fairwich, keep it as a vacation home. Either way, Allison said it was a much-needed alternative to dorm life and apartment living—she’d heard too many stories about rapists who frequent student housing, and thieves partial to dormitories.

  Allison greeted me at the door, dressed in a black cocktail dress, her slender arms bare and finely muscled, her hair pulled back into a high ponytail with a shimmering silvery bow. All the sounds I had ever associated with “adult” parties streamed out from behind her—clink of glasses, low chatter of conversation broken by the occasional polite laugh, music playing softly in the background. Allison took my hand and led me inside. She smelled of alcohol—something medicinal like vodka or gin—and her cheeks were lightly flushed. “Drinks are in the kitchen,” she said, “and the bartender is here until ten, so you still have a couple hours. Not that I need any more…” She laughed and patted my arm, and then pointed (with limp wrist and glittering diamond bracelet) to a large table in what looked like the dining room. “Food is over there, but I’m afraid you didn’t arrive in time for the shrimp.” She laughed again, kissed me on the cheek, and wafted away.

  An hour later I found myself standing in the kitchen doorway next to a cute freshman who’d been in my literature class last semester. We watched a girl sit cross-legged on the living room floor and snort lines of coke off a compact mirror. Someone turned up the stereo and played Art Tatum. The cute freshman gave me a little blue pill and I swallowed it without hesitating, and I wondered if she’d be game for going back to my dorm room, but I was too sad and tired to flirt, and instead I stood there like a zombie and listened to her go on and on about some tragedy involving her friend’s parents both dying in a car accident over winter break.