by Micah Nathan
“I’m an orphan,” I said.
“You are not,” she had said, poking my ribs. She was short and blonde, with thin wrists, a thin neck, and nonexistent breasts. She had a hint of a Southern accent that became more pronounced with each swig of booze.
“I am,” I said. “I lived with a foster family in New Jersey.”
She crinkled her little upturned nose. “I don’t believe you,” she said. You came out like yee-ew.
When I didn’t say anything, she gave me a sideways glance and ran her finger around the rim of her glass.
“Are you serious?” she said.
I looked around to make sure no one else was listening. “Yes,” I said dramatically.
She gasped. “What happened to your parents?”
“My dad just left one day—”
She put her hand to her mouth.
“—and my mom died of cancer.”
The mystery pill had begun to take effect, tilting the floor at a slight angle. I was suddenly tired of the freshman girl. She said something else to me but I just shushed her and kissed her on the forehead and walked away, floated actually, to the living room, hovered just above the hardwood floor, and collapsed onto a leather couch.
A kid in a jacket and loosened tie dropped down next to me and leaned forward, taking a small baggie of white powder out of his jacket pocket. He untied it and sprinkled some out onto the glass coffee table.
“Do you have a credit card on you?” he asked me.
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind,” he said impatiently, and he pushed the coke into a wavy line with the edge of his index finger. He then leaned down, pressed his face against the glass top, sniffed the entire trail, and shot up, wide-eyed and mouth agape.
“Finish it off if you want,” he croaked, tossing the bag into my lap. “I’m fucking blasted.”
“Eric?”
I looked up. Ellen stood in front of me.
“Hi,” I said, casually, as if I’d been waiting for her all evening. I looked down at the baggie. “This isn’t mine.”
“I figured.” She plucked it off my lap and dropped it on the table. “What are you doing here?”
The kid came back for the bag and left. Ellen took his place on the couch. She smelled amazing. “Rachel and I stopped in to say hello to Allison,” she said. “Do you know her?”
“Sort of,” I said, looking away. “She invited me.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yes, it is.”
We said nothing for a few moments. I looked straight ahead, at the small group of students dancing in the middle of the living room. The party had thinned out, and now only the serious guests remained, the ones who’d drank the most and eaten the most and done the most drugs. Allison moved among them, flitting around in her silver hair bow and black dress, as vaporous as a ghost. I don’t know if her friends noticed her. I don’t think they even noticed each other.
Ellen touched my arm. “Eric,” she said cautiously, “are you angry with me?”
I turned to her. She looked the way she always did. Honeyed hair, emerald eyes, soft white neck. Beautiful. That’s all she ever was, really. Just that one word was enough.
“I’m stoned,” I said. “And drunk.” Someone else entered my field of vision—a tall, leggy redhead, wearing a poofy baby-blue sweater and tight jeans. She towered over me, standing to my left, her arms crossed and her mouth set into a hard, straight line.
“This crowd is too young,” she said to Ellen. “Let’s go to Murray’s. Roger said he’d be there.”
“I think I’m going to stay,” said Ellen, sinking back and crossing her legs. “I haven’t seen Eric in a while.”
“Oh…” The tall woman looked down at me. She’s like an Amazon, I thought. “So you’re Eric—Art’s housemate, right?” she said.
I nodded.
She jabbed her long finger at me, the nail curved like a talon. “You tell Art he fucked up. Tell him Rachel said that. Got it?” I nodded again, and she turned on her heels, strutted across the room, and left out the front door. I ran my hand over my face and thought about the last time I’d seen Ellen. I remembered her laughing in her apartment as I’d fumbled for my keys, and the excruciating cab ride back to Dr. Cade’s, feeling as if I were heading to my executioner. Every night I’d waited for Art to burst through my door and pounce upon me, and even though it had taken a dimmer place in my mind—in light of recent events—having Ellen sitting beside me brought everything back with a stunning clarity.
“Art said he’s marrying you.” I stared down at my hands.
“When did he tell you this?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t remember—had it been before Dan’s death or after? His death…The word hissed like a hot brand plunged into cold water.
“Well, that’s news to me,” said Ellen. “We haven’t spoken in quite some time. He said we were getting married?” She laughed humorlessly. A kid fell onto the living room floor, just missing the coffee table. He giggled and rolled around, his pinstripe shirt unbuttoned enough to show one of his nipples. The edges of his nostrils were dusted white. Fellow partiers danced around him in a semicircle, women in stockinged feet and men in dark socks spilling their drinks held aloft, Allison among them, black hair, diamond bracelet gleaming wicked around her bony wrist.
I shrank into the couch, into the corner between the back cushion and the armrest. I wanted to leave but couldn’t see how I’d be able to escape past the Dionysian throng of revelers without being pulled into their midst. I felt a hand on my arm and I jerked away.
It was Ellen, staring at me clinically, the way a doctor or a nurse would. “How much have you had to drink?” she said.
“Enough,” I said. “And I took a pill, something small and blue.”
She leaned in closer. “How do you feel? Drowsy or fidgety?”
“Neither.”
Ellen nodded. “Would you like me to take you home?”
“No,” I said, and I must have sounded thoroughly repulsed because she pulled away in surprise. “I don’t want to go back there.” I tried not to plead. “Take me back to Paderborne.”
As soon as I said it, I envisioned my dark dorm room, cold and dusty, with my old sheets still on the bed. And that smell of emptiness that I hated so much.
“No, take me to the Paradise,” I said, sitting up. The room swayed dramatically, like a rolling ship. “I know Henry Hobbes, the owner.”
Ellen extended her hand to me and I took it and followed her past the swirling mass of revelers and out the front door. The air was thin and icy, and every snow-crunching footstep was the felling of a tree, and the moon was pinned to the black sky in a perfect half circle, and never before had I felt so wonderful and so terrible at the same time.
I remember a short car ride and a long flight of stairs, and then the sound of answering machine messages being played back. I was on a couch, and I remained there for I don’t know how long—it could have been thirty minutes or five hours. Someone was humming in the background, the floor creaking beneath their feet. I heard the soft whisper of a refrigerator door and then the gurgle of a faucet. I opened my eyes. Ellen’s apartment in dim lighting, Ellen seated across from me on the floor, barefoot, legs crossed Indian-style. She wore a Yale sweatshirt and gray sweatpants. She was reading a magazine.
I looked at my watch. It was almost midnight. My head felt much better. A glass of water awaited me on the coffee table. I took a sip and Ellen looked up.
“How are you feeling?”
Fine, I said.
“Art called.” She closed her magazine. “He told me about Dan.”
A bolt of adrenaline rocketed up and burned into my stomach wall.
“It is strange,” she said, picking a strand of hair off her forehead. “Dan’s such a homebody. Except for vacations, I don’t think he’s ever been away from that house for more than a day or two. Do you have any idea where he might be?”
“I know nothing,” I said.
“Well,
” she raised her eyebrows, “that’s just the kind of thing someone who did know something would say. You know what I think…I think Howie may have said something that offended him. Dan and he have had their troubles in the past.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes. I counted the ticks of her kitchen clock.
“Eric,” she said slowly, carrying that pained expression particular to uncomfortable topics, “I think we should talk about the other night.” She closed the magazine and sat back, arms locked behind her, propping her up. “I don’t think I handled it well. I want to apologize.”
If I’d had the mental resources I would’ve rushed out, just as before. Instead I crossed my arms and looked down. “I was just acting foolish,” I said.
“Oh, come on, you’ve already confessed your innermost desires,” she smiled. “No reason to hold back now.”
Why the hell not.
“I do love you,” I said. I looked directly into her eyes.
She opened her mouth to laugh or perhaps say something witty, but my gaze gave her pause. I was so sick of lying. I wanted to confess everything: that I fantasized about her nearly every night, that I both wished for Art’s death and felt horribly guilty about it, that all I wanted was a single evening of physical pleasure to store away in memory and recall whenever needed. Memories of her touch whispering sweetly in my mind would be enough; even if memory passed into illusion as old memories often do, I would choose those illusions over a thousand real women.
“I doubt you know what love is,” she said, not unkindly.
“You’re probably right,” I said.
She smiled, and, keeping mercifully silent, walked over and bent down to kiss my forehead. The touch of her lips cooled on my skin.
“You can sleep here if you’d like.” She yawned. “The couch pulls out into only a twin but the mattress is comfortable. Dan stayed here last year and he swore by it.”
I could smell him, suddenly, a clean, woolly scent, reminding me of his old jackets and funny little hats and his scratchy green pants. A flood of emotion, so powerful that initially I didn’t know what I was feeling, and then the dam shivered and exploded and I let out tremendous whooping sobs, my body wracked with convulsions, sorrow and guilt and shame filling my mouth like acid, choking me. I cried uncontrollably, hearing lashings snap and twang as the moorings that had held my mind in check ripped free from their supports and the entire structure reeled and crashed.
Ellen hurried over and tried to comfort me, obviously thinking I was having some reaction to the drugs, and it was fortunate that she didn’t ask me what was wrong because I would have confessed everything. I cried until I fell asleep, and even then I think I still cried, because I dreamt it so.
The heater’s broken, the cabby said, as he tossed me a blanket and turned onto Main Street. It was sometime after 5 A.M., and the only reason I’d left Ellen’s apartment was because I knew I needed to go back home to Dr. Cade’s.
Instead I told the cabby to drop me off at Paderborne, my courage failing as I imagined a night alone in my room and all manner of ghosts and spirits swirling about. Everywhere was snow and gloom, a morass of shadows and jagged icicles jutting from underneath Paderborne’s eaves. I passed under those icicles warily, convinced they would descend in swift silence and impale me where I stood, spattering my blood across the cigarette butt–strewn threshold of Paderborne. The Paderborne lobby was empty and cold, modular furniture heaped into corners, an abandoned can of soda sitting forlorn atop a garbage bin. The air smelled of cold cement and stale smoke.
I carried my mail upstairs. I hadn’t checked my box in months—there was an invitation to some symposium on cuneiform (courtesy of the history department), a postcard addressed to my box number but to the wrong student, and an envelope from Mr. Daniel Higgins, dated three weeks earlier, around the time I was shivering uncontrollably in the basement of the Paradise Motel.
I entered my room, clicked on my desk lamp, and sat down on my bed, tearing the envelope open. There was a folded page of spiral notebook paper, its top edge crenellated with ripped half circles, and Dan’s smooth handwriting running across the page in fine black ink. Dan always used notebooks that opened vertically, I remembered, because he was left-handed and couldn’t write with the metal spirals digging into the side of his hand.
Dear Eric,
I’ll probably return home before you get this letter, because I don’t know how often you check your box at school, and I can’t remember where you said you were staying over break. But hopefully you’ll receive this on time and accept my invitation to join mother and me for Christmas dinner here in good old Boston. Mother said she’d pay for your ticket, so if you’re reading this at any time before Christmas day, you have no excuse.
What else. Boston is gray and rainy, and I’ve had a cold since arriving. Mother keeps asking about Dr. Cade and when he’ll be coming to visit. If I haven’t told you before (and I don’t think I did), mother idolizes Dr. Cade. But don’t we all?
When I get back to school I have to tell Art I’m no longer interested in his search for the stone, which is a funny thing for me to say because I’m the one who came up with the idea. But it was just a lark, really, something clever to fill the time, and somewhere along the way it got too serious. I’m not saying it’s all nonsense—I still think there might be something to it, but getting to that point is too dangerous. Or maybe there’s nothing to it and we’re all just bored.
Either way, please don’t say “I told you so” when you see me, or I’ll throw out Howie’s stash of single malt and blame it on you.
Waiting in Boston,
Dan
I sat at my bed, staring at the letter. I stayed that way until the blue light of dawn crept across my room, and then I shoved the letter under my mattress and took a long shower.
The phone rang when I got out. I knew who it was. I’d been thinking about him.
“Eric?” It was Art. “Hey, listen, you haven’t heard from Dan, have you?”
“No,” I said. I watched water drip from my hair and fall onto the wooden floor. It started snowing again. I closed my eyes and thought about the letter.
Somewhere along the way it got too serious.
It was Wednesday morning. Dan was still missing.
I heard conversations in the background on Art’s end of the line, Dr. Cade and Howie and a new voice, deep and official-sounding. Art spoke again. “Well, you might want to come over. Campus security is here—I’m sorry, what’s that?” he pulled away from the phone and had a brief discussion with the deep-voiced man. Sure, I’ll tell him, I heard him say, and then he returned.
“Security will send someone to your room if you’d like, or you can stop by their office.”
“What is this about?” I said.
Art paused, gauging, I’m sure, what to say within earshot of the others in the room. “They just have some questions about Dan,” he said, and then after, in a subtle tone that only I could understand the significance of: “Not much else is going on.”
I took two deep breaths and after he hung up I lay there, listening to the stuttering blare of the disconnected line.
The snow was relentless, pouring out of burnt-silver clouds. Snow clung to Garringer’s spires, blew against Thorren’s clock, and covered the last of the Mores’s red roof in an unbroken blanket that stretched out like a glacier sheared off at the top.
Campus security was located in the first floor of Thorren, toward the rear of the building, in a small, cramped office with yellowish lighting and ’70s-style décor: wood-panelled walls, an orange, thin carpet, and frosted-glass windows. I gave the receptionist my name and sat on a mud-brown Naugahyde couch and waited, picking at an old crack that had split along the bottom of the cushion. After a few minutes a tall, heavy man plodded from the back hall into the waiting room, carrying a clipboard, his uniform spotless and pressed, a lineup of fat pens sticking up from his shirt pocket. He looked at me with a kind smile.
“Mr
. Dunne?”
I stood up.
“Officer James Lumble,” he said. He motioned toward the hall. “I just have a few questions for you,” he said. “Officer Pitts should be on his way back from Professor Cade’s house, and I’m sure he can fill you in about the situation better than I can. My office is the next door on the right. Pardon the mess…I took an extended stay in Miami with the kids and I’m still getting organized.”
He accompanied me into his office, rushing ahead to move a small cardboard box from a chair. His desk was littered with papers and manila file folders and Styrofoam cups. A jumble of small photos sat in gold and silver frames all along the edge of his desk, with pictures of laughing children.
Officer Lumble fell back into his chair, swiveling toward his desk. I sat in the small chair across from him. “Now then,” he said, scanning his clipboard. “This is regarding your friend…Daniel Higgins, is it?” He took one of his pens from his shirt pocket.
I nodded and he scribbled something on the clipboard. “And you live with Daniel Higgins at Professor Cade’s home, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The names of your other housemates are…”
I answered and he smiled, continuing to write.
“When was the last time you saw Daniel?”
“Last week. Saturday afternoon, I think. He said he was going out to do errands.”
“Did he drive?”
I shook my head. “Dan doesn’t own a car. He usually takes cabs everywhere.”
“I see. And did he take a cab that afternoon?”
“I don’t know.”
Officer Lumble smiled again, put the clipboard down, and capped the pen.
“Now son, every year we get one or two of these…” He picked at a hangnail. “And it always turns out to be one of two things: either the student went away without telling anyone, in which case they usually end up calling their folks from some motel in Mexico, or this is some kind of frat trick, and the student’s friends eventually confess once we threaten to bring in the police.”
I nodded.
He looked up. “So which one is it?”