by Ronald Malfi
“…can’t read anymore…”
“Susan? Susan?”
Static overrode the connection. Then there was nothing but silence.
I ended the call, remembering how Finter had picked up his receiver back at the shop and commented that the phone was working perfectly fine despite my inability to call his store. This book here, Finter had said. This is not an honest book.
“What are you, jamming the signal?” I said to the book, unsure what was crazier—that I was talking to a book or that I was beginning to believe it possessed the power to do exactly what I’d just accused it of.
I tucked the cell phone back in my pocket and tried to concentrate on driving. When the silence became too unnerving, I clicked on the radio and flooded the car with Christmas music.
9
Nearly two decades had passed since I’d been to Montclair Community College. In those intervening years, I’d lost some hair, gained a few extra pounds, and achieved a level of success the twenty-something English and creative writing instructor I’d once been could only dream about. The school had undergone a revitalization, and boasted a collection of attractive glass buildings where there had previously only been squat brick boxcar-like structures no doubt filled with asbestos and lead paint. For a moment I worried that the old library had been replaced, too, but as I drove alongside the campus just off the highway, I could see the old library quad had remained unchanged.
I took the first turn, and found myself on Primrose Avenue. The houses here were unchanged as well, each little A-frame corralled behind whitewashed fences. The lampposts that lined the sidewalk were decorated with Christmas wreaths. Back when I taught here, I’d lived in one of these houses, rented it from someone in the English department. After all this time I’d forgotten the address, but as I coasted up the street, my gaze fell upon the house. It had been repainted a garish blue, and its front porch was overflowing with half-dead plants spooling out of hanging baskets. The yard was overgrown and there was a motorcycle parked in the driveway. For some reason the sight of that motorcycle bothered me, and would remain imprinted on my brain like the afterimage of a flashbulb.
I thought about stopping, about going up to the door and knocking, but decided not to. There was a small voice in the back of my head that told me I’d find nothing in that old place—nothing that would help with my current situation, anyway.
At the end of the block, I pulled into one of the campus parking lots. What I originally thought was spume kicked up from puddles in the road was actually a gentle snowfall, and as I stepped out of the car, I could feel the cold droplets landing on my face and gathering in my eyelashes.
The campus was a ghost town. It occurred to me, as I campaigned across the quad to the library, that the students were probably on Christmas break. Would that mean the library would be closed until after the holidays?
“Can’t catch a break,” I muttered, moving swiftly through the cold toward the library doors, which looked all but shuttered against the fading daylight. When I felt something pressed against my ribs, I looked down to see that I was carrying the book. I’d taken it off the passenger seat without realizing it. It was as if the damn thing had become part of me.
I mounted the brick steps to the library doors, reached out for one of the long aluminum handles, and gave it a tug. To my surprise, the door swung open. A blast of heat greeted me, and I stepped hurriedly inside the building.
If Finter’s Manhattan bookshop had been a submarine corridor, the Montclair Community College library was a vast mausoleum—equally as silent and unused, only much larger. My footfalls echoed along the tiled entranceway. On both sides of the foyer were glass cases filled with various trophies, ribbons, awards, photographs. The school’s green-and-gold colors were everywhere, with a little red bunting added for the Christmas season.
The library was just as I remembered it. I had done hours of writing here in my twenties, between classes or in the evenings, and it was as if they hadn’t even rearranged the tables. The librarian’s desk—currently unoccupied—took up one whole wall. Beyond, I could see the study carrels and the stacks of nonfiction texts. The only change I could see was that the microfiche machines had been replaced with computer terminals. Also, the giant chest of drawers that had housed the Dewey decimal cards had been replaced by a display of hardcover books; there was a sign posted on the table that read NOTABLE READS, and as I walked by it, I saw a few of my novels among the titles.
This is like traveling back in time…
“Hey, man,” said a voice. I spun around to see a slender fellow in a checked flannel shirt rummaging among a stack of books on a cart. He was maybe in his early twenties, possibly a student aide. “Did you need help with anything?”
“There used to be artwork on the walls. Drawings and paintings done by the faculty and students.”
“There’s some framed pictures in the back, by the poetry stacks.”
“Thanks.”
“Anything in particular you’re looking for?”
I nearly held up the book and showed him the cover, but caught myself at the last minute. As it was, the guy was staring at the book cradled against my side, as if I’d shoplifted it.
“Not really. I used to teach here.”
“Yeah? Well, let me know if I can do anything for you.”
“Will do. Thanks.”
I walked down the center of the library toward the poetry section. I could smell the books—that musty parchment odor that was as comforting as a warm bed. Yet despite the comfort of that smell, a tremor of apprehension was coursing through me. It had been there on the drive to Montclair and had only increased as I got out of the car and crossed the parking lot to the quad. Now, it rattled me to the point that my teeth began to chatter. I tried to tell myself it was due to the cold, but the interior of the college library was stiflingly hot.
I crossed between two shelves labeled POETRY and saw that the walls back here were adorned with framed artwork—watercolor paintings, charcoal sketches, collages made from magazine clippings. There were sculptures here, too—modern-art pieces comprised of metal rings and sprockets, household items, papier-mâché masks on wooden pedestals.
I walked the length of the wall, studying the framed artwork. With each passing minute, I grew more and more certain that this had been a waste of my time. In fact, I was just about to give up the search when I noticed a stack of framed pictures leaning against a wall, partially hidden behind a photocopier. Either these hadn’t been hung up yet or they had recently been taken down—either way, I went to them, dropped to my knees, and rifled through them. Sweat tickled the side of my face despite the chill I felt at the center of my bones.
And then there it was—the pencil-sketch of Primrose Avenue that was the source of the artwork reproduced on the book’s dust jacket. I slid the frame out from the stack and held it up to my face. Swiping a film of dust off the glass, there was no denying that it was the same picture. It was about twice the size of the image on the dust jacket, but that did not make it any easier to make out the details in the hazy swirls and crosshatches of pencilwork.
There was no word or name drawn in the sky above the houses, as there appeared to be beneath my name on the book’s dust jacket. This was because the dimensions were off—the dust jacket was taller while the actual drawing was longer and narrower. If there had ever been a name written in the sky of the original, it had been cut away to fit the frame. So despite having located the drawing, I was no better off than I’d been prior to visiting Finter’s bookshop.
“Goddamn it.”
But then I saw something at the bottom right-hand corner of the drawing—what appeared to be the artist’s signature scrawled in pencil. I could make out the tops of the letters, but the bulk of the name was covered by the frame.
I cast a glance over my shoulder, then turned the frame over in my lap. I pried back the staples that held the cardboard backing in place then stripped the drawing out of the frame altogether.
The name of the artist was Tony Meeks.
I felt my stomach drop at the sight of it.
But of course it’s Tony, said a small voice in the back of my head. I leaned back against a bookshelf before I passed out. Of course it is. And a part of you knew it all along. Isn’t that right, Wilson? Isn’t that right?
Yes.
That was right.
10
In 1999, I achieved a certain morbid celebrity after a student of mine, Tony Meeks, was killed in a motorcycle accident. He had been a quiet, abashed sort of fellow who was somehow always more noticeable in periphery than he was if you looked straight at him. He was tall, with an undisciplined mop of black hair, and sharp, wolfish eyes that always seemed to peer out at you from beneath a slightly downturned brow. Despite his tallness, his face was an assemblage of delicate, almost effeminate features, and he possessed the neatly manicured and articulate hands of a surgeon. His clothes always looked second-rate, an ensemble of faded dungarees, motorcycle boots, flannel shirts, and a military-style surplus jacket with ambiguous insignias on the sleeves. Whenever he shifted in his seat, I could hear the chain clipped to his wallet clang against the chair leg.
I had him for just one class, Creative Writing 101, where he would sit in the back of the room, nearly with his back against the wall, as though it were his intention to become part of the masonry. On the rare occasions when he spoke, be it aloud to the rest of the class when answering a question or in a more intimate one-on-one setting in my office, he gave the impression that he was doing so with reluctance, even if he was the one to have initiated the dialogue. There was the slightest backwoods drawl to his speech, though you really had to listen for it, and I remember thinking that maybe he didn’t talk much because he was embarrassed by it.
I don’t believe he had many friends at the college. It wasn’t that the other students disliked him. No one knew him well enough to dislike him. The few times I’d glimpsed him shuffling with his head down across the quad or curled vulture-like over a Styrofoam bowl of vegetable stew in the cafeteria, he was always alone. Sometimes I would see him sitting on a bench by himself along the path that wound between Pratt Hall and the modular little annex that looked like a trailer, his face buried in a paperback novel or in one of his notebooks as he scribbled wildly, that dark hair hanging down over his eyes in unruly curlicues.
Halfway through the semester, I paired students up to collaborate on a short piece of fiction. I joined Tony Meeks up with a similarly introverted student, Eric Mayfield, because I incorrectly assumed they might find some commonality in their brooding. However, when Mayfield handed in the assignment, I could tell from the disjointed tone of the writing as well as the dejected look on Mayfield’s face that my supposition had been incorrect. There hadn’t been any collaboration between the two, and my guess was that Meeks had simply typed up some random passages which he then gave to Mayfield, who included them in the body of his own half-finished story, desperate to make some vague sense of it all.
Meeks was just six days shy of his twentieth birthday when the tires of his 1972 Yamaha motorcycle surrendered their grip on the asphalt of Primrose Avenue, firing the bike up and over a guardrail while simultaneously propelling Meeks into the air. Police recovered his body over two hundred and fifty feet from the site of the crash, his motorcycle boots stripped from his feet and his surplus jacket shredded to bloody ribbons. He must have been going pretty fast and he hadn’t been wearing a helmet. According to the toxicology report, there were no traces of alcohol or narcotics in his system. Perhaps he had simply been speeding and lost control of the bike.
I read about the accident in the newspaper. Other things I happened to overhear on campus—in the hallways, restrooms, even the teachers’ lounge. Some even suggested that maybe the crash hadn’t been an accident at all. He was a loner, a solitary shadow creeping among the redbrick hallways and puke-green linoleum of Montclair Community College. If ever there had been a man bent on vehicular suicide, it was the inauspicious artist and wannabe writer in the military surplus jacket.
I hadn’t known Tony Meeks well enough to formulate my own opinion about his death, be it accident or deliberate. I had hardly known him at all, really. Comments about him being nothing more than a shadow were pretty accurate. He had been a talented writer and artist—a few of his sketches had been put on display in the college library and behind a display case in the humanities building—but he was shy, reserved, distant. Yet despite how unassuming and practically invisible he had been when he was alive, I came to find Tony Meeks’s empty desk at the back of my classroom somewhat troubling in its conspicuousness in the days and weeks following his death. I began to suffer dreams in which I came to understand that the empty desk was in fact not empty at all; I could feel Meeks’s eyes on me, watching me from the back of that room, even though I couldn’t see him. I would turn to write something on the chalkboard, and that was when I’d hear the familiar clink of his wallet chain against the hollow metal chair leg. Or I would be out in the quad, the sun blazing through a bank of pinkish spring clouds, when I’d glimpse his murky slump-shouldered form vanishing between two buildings. These nightmares plagued me.
Two weeks before his death, I asked Tony to stay after class. Reluctantly, he’d remained seated at his desk at the back of the room after all the other students had filtered out into the hallway. Fairly certain he wasn’t going to come up to my desk, I approached him, opting to sit on the edge of the desk in front of him.
“Why are you taking this class?” I asked him.
His smooth, effeminate features seemed to slacken. Yet his eyes remained dark and fixed on me. “What do you mean?” he said, his voice just above a whisper. He feigned interest in digging something out of the sole of his motorcycle boot.
“I mean you’re so much better than the rest of these guys. Creative Writing 101 is a throwaway elective. You should be in an advanced class.”
“I like this class.”
“Yeah, but are you getting anything out of it?”
He seemed to consider this, dropping his eyes to whatever he was digging at in his boot, black commas of hair curtaining his forehead.
“Have you ever submitted any of your stories for publication?” I asked him.
“Are you kidding?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Well, there’s the campus literary magazine, for one. Not the most highbrow lit journal on the planet, I agree, but it might give you some sense of accomplishment.”
To my surprise, he laughed. It was a sharp whip-crack, and it startled me. “Do they pay anything?” he asked.
“No, they don’t. No money, anyway. Just contributor copies.”
“It doesn’t matter. I write for myself.”
“That’s why you’re so good.”
Those dark eyes found me again, but they didn’t linger this time. Just as quickly as he had looked up at me, he turned his attention toward the wall of windows that looked out on the quad. Outside, some students stood smoking cigarettes by one of the campus security boxes—a phone-booth–shaped callbox with a blue light on top, which all the students referred to as rape boxes.
“Listen,” I said. “Have you written anything longer than short stories? Maybe a novelette or something?”
“Oh,” he said, looking back down at his motorcycle boot. There was a gritty piece of chewing gum stuck to the heel which he dug at with his neatly trimmed fingernails. “I’ve written a novel.”
“Have you? What’s it called?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a title yet.”
“What’s it about?”
“Just…I don’t know. Stuff.”
“Would you mind if I read it? Maybe I could give you some pointers, point you in the right direction.”
Again, Tony Meeks’s girlish features seemed to smooth out so that there was hardly a crease in his face. Even the lines that bracketed
his mouth vanished into that smooth valley. He looked like an infant expelled from the womb. “You know about that kind of thing? Publishing novels and whatever?”
What I knew was that I’d written my fair share of novel manuscripts, none of which amounted to the proverbial hill of beans. I’d submitted a few to agents and small presses, but no one had been interested in representing or publishing me. But I could certainly read this kid’s work and offer him some advice about plot, structure, character, whatever it might lack. I told him as much, and he seemed surprised.
“You’d do that for me?” he said.
“Sure. Heck, if it’s good enough, maybe we can find you an agent.”
He laughed—this time there was more musicality to the sound—and when I smiled in return, he seemed to relax for the first time since I’d come over and sat on the edge of the desk.
“Thanks, Mr. Paventeau. I’ll bring it in next week.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“And if it stinks, just say the word.”
“I’ll be honest, I promise,” I told him. “But I don’t think it’ll stink.”
“Righteous,” he said, nodding his head. When he reached down for the straps of his backpack, I knew he was ready to leave.
“Just do me one favor, will you?” I said.
“What’s that?”
“This is a creative writing class. There aren’t any exams, any tests. Your final grade is split between the grades you get on your written assignments and your class participation. Which, as you know, is practically nil.”
“I don’t like speaking in public.”
“It’s thirteen students.”
“I don’t like speaking in front of thirteen students,” he retorted, and I could sense a vein of effrontery in his tone now.
“Well, let’s see if we can work on that, all right?”
“Yeah, all right, Mr. Paventeau.”
“Have a good weekend, Tony,” I told him, getting up off the desk and moving back toward the front of the room. I expected him to say something similar to me, but when I turned back around, I found he had slipped silently out the back door of the classroom.