Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  “James?” I said. “Guess who’s here? Hello, Doctor Dee. Hello, you old bastard.”

  I flattened myself against the right-hand wall of the hallway and tried to brush past him, but he came at me. I panicked and lost my balance, stumbling over Doctor Dee, accidentally giving him a sharp kick in the ribs. The next instant I felt a stab of pain in my foot, somewhere in the vicinity of my ankle, and then I fell to the floor, hard. Doctor Dee scrambled to his feet and stood over me, his throat filled with a single long rolling syllable.

  “Get away from me,” I said. I was afraid, but not too afraid for it to occur to me that dying torn to pieces by blind, mad dogs had a certain mythic quality that might work well in the section of Wonder Boys in which I planned to have Curtis Wonder, the oldest of the three brothers who were the central characters of my book, meet the fate that his colossal pride and his lurid misdeeds had earned for him. I raised my fist, as Curtis might, and tried actually to punch Doctor Dee, as you would slug a man, but he caught the blow in his teeth, as it were, and worked his jaw around the meat of my hand.

  There was a sudden sharp crack! as of a rock against the windshield of a car. Doctor Dee yelped. His tail jerked straight up into the air like an exclamation point and ratcheted around a few times on its hinge. Then he toppled over onto my legs. I looked up, my ears ringing, and saw James Leer, standing half in the shadow of the doorway, the pretty little pearl-handled pistol in his hand. I yanked my legs out from under Doctor Dee and the dog landed with a soft thud against the floor. I rolled down my sock. There were four bright red holes in my foot, on either side of my Achilles tendon.

  “I thought you said that was a cap gun,” I said.

  “Is he dead? Did he bite you bad?”

  “Not so bad.” I pulled my sock up and scrambled up onto my knees. Carefully I passed my hand around Doctor Dee’s head and cupped the moist tip of his snout in my fingers. There was no trace of his breath against them. “He’s dead,” I said, climbing slowly to my feet. I could feel the first delicate tickle of pain in my ankle. “Shit, James. You killed the Chancellor’s dog.”

  “I had to,” he said miserably. “Didn’t I?”

  “Couldn’t you have just pulled him off me?”

  “No! He was biting you! I didn’t—I thought he—”

  “Easy,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Okay. Don’t freak out on me.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to go find Sara and tell her, I guess,” I said, feeling the desire for a sweet poisonous glass of bourbon steal over me like a fog. “But first I’m going to get cleaned up. No. First you’re going to give me that cap gun of yours.”

  I held out my hand, palm up, and he obediently set the pistol on it. It was warm, and heavier than it looked.

  “Thanks,” I said. I slipped it into the hip pocket of my blazer, and then he helped me into the bathroom, where I washed out the puncture holes with foaming hydrogen peroxide and found a pair of Band-Aids to cover them up. Then I rolled up my sock again and tugged down the leg of my trousers, and we went back out into the hall, where the handsome old dog lay dead.

  “I don’t think we should leave him lying there,” I said.

  James said nothing. He was so lost in working out the ramifications of what he had done that I don’t think he was capable of speech at that moment.

  “Don’t sweat it,” I said. “I’m going to tell her that I did it. That it was self-defense. Come on.”

  I knelt down beside Doctor Dee and wrapped my arms around his heavy head. A dark red smear was turning to purple in the fur around the base of the right earflap, and there was a smell of burnt hair. James knelt and took hold of the dog’s hindquarters, a dazed, almost sweet expression on his smooth face.

  “A little curl of smoke came out of the bullet hole,” said James.

  “Wow,” I said. “I wish I could have seen that.”

  Then we carried Doctor Dee down the stairs and along the endless driveway to the street, where we laid him out in the back of my car, on the seat, beside the tuba.

  BY THE TIME WE arrived for the lecture, both of the school’s main lots were full, and we ended up parking in one of the quiet residential streets at the other end of campus from Thaw Hall, under an old stand of beech trees, at the foot of some happy professor’s driveway. I cut the engine and we sat for a moment, listening to the rain drop like beechnuts from the trees and scatter across the canvas top of the car.

  “That sounds nice,” said James Leer. “It’s like being in a tent.

  “I don’t want to do this,” I said, filled with a sudden longing to be lying on my back in a little tent, peering up through the silk mesh window at Orion.

  “You don’t have to. It’s dumb for you to tell her you did it, Professor Tripp. I mean, it’s a lie.” He picked at the threads fraying along the hem of his long black coat. “I don’t care what she does to me, to tell you the truth. She probably should kick me out.”

  “James,” I said, shaking my head. “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have sneaked you up there in the first place.”

  “But,” said James, looking confused, “you knew the combination.”

  “True,” I said. “Think about that one for a minute or two.” I looked at my watch. “Only you can’t, ’cause we’re late.” I grabbed hold of the handle and leaned against the door. “Come on, help me get him into the trunk.”

  “The trunk?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m probably going to have to drive a bunch of people over to the Hi-Hat after the lecture, buddy. There isn’t going to be a whole lot of room for people with a tuba and a dead dog in the backseat.”

  I climbed out of the car and tilted my seat forward. My fingers were cold and I could feel a very faint envelope of heat around the body of Doctor Dee as I passed my arms beneath it. I lifted without crouching first to gain leverage, and felt a sharp twinge in the small of my back. There was a vinegar tang of blood in my nose. James had gotten out of the car by now, and he came around to help me pitch the stiffening old pup into the trunk, alongside Miss Sloviak’s bags. We slid the body as far back as we could, under the rear dash, until there was a sound like a pencil snapping in two, and we jerked our hands away.

  “Yuck,” said James, wiping his hands against the flaps of his overcoat. That garment bore the stains of all manner of hell, bad weather, and misfortune, but I wondered if it had ever before been used to wipe away the invisible effluvium of a dead dog. Quite possibly so, I imagined.

  “Now the tuba,” I said.

  “That’s a big trunk,” James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. “It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly.”

  “That’s just what they used to say in the ads,” I said, reaching for Crabtree’s garment bag. I palpated its pockets for a moment, then zipped open the largest of them. To my surprise I found that it was empty. I felt around in the next largest pocket, and then in a third, and found that they were empty, too. Laying the bag open across the other luggage, I unzipped its main compartment. Inside there were a pair of white dress shirts, a couple of paisley neckties, and two suits, glinting faintly in the streetlight.

  “They’re the same,” said James, lifting the uppermost suit and peering underneath.

  “What’s that?”

  “His suits. They look just like the one he has on now.”

  He was right: the suits were both double-breasted, with peaked lapels, cut from the same kind of sleek metallic silk. Although it was difficult to tell their color, you could see that they matched each other and the suit he was wearing. I thought of Superman’s closet at the North Pole, a row of shining suits hanging on vibranium hooks.

  “I find that odd,” I said, finding it somehow pathetic. I’d always thought there was something a little pathetic about Superman, too, way up there in his Fortress of Solitude.

  “I guess he doesn’t like to have to
worry about what he’s going to wear,” James said.

  “I guess he doesn’t like having to remember to worry.” I zipped the garment bag closed and stuffed it back into the trunk. “Come on, Crabtree,” I said, “I know you’re holding.” I pulled on the handles of the canvas grip, and it weighed so little that when it came free it nearly flew out of my hand.

  “Whose tuba is that, anyway?” said James.

  “Miss Sloviak’s,” I said, plunging my hand into the grip, hoping, with an odd foretaste of horror, that it did not contain nothing at all. To my relief I discovered three pairs of boxer shorts, bundled into little balls, rolling around like marbles inside the bag. Wrapped up in one of these bundles I felt something hard, and my fingers curled around it. “Actually, no, it isn’t. I don’t know who it belongs to.”

  “Can I ask you something about her?” said James.

  “She’s a transvestite,” I said, pulling out what proved to be an airline bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Hey. How do you like that?”

  “I don’t like whiskey,” said James. “Oh. So. Is—is your friend Crabtree—is he—gay?”

  “I don’t like whiskey, either,” I said, handing him the bottle. “Open that. Most of the time he is, James. Bear with me now. I’m going to make another dive down to the wreck.” I stuck my hand back into the grip and fished out another rolled-up pair of boxers. “Some of the time he isn’t. Oh, my goodness. What have we here?”

  Inside the second roll of underwear there was a small prescription vial of pills.

  “No label,” I said, examining the outside of the vial.

  “What do you think they are?”

  “Looks like my old friend Mr. Codeine. That’ll be good for my ankle,” I said, shaking out a pair of thick white pills into my palm, each of them marked with a tiny numeral 3. “Have one.”

  “No thanks,” he said. “I’m fine without them.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “That’s why you were standing out there in the Gaskells’ backyard trying to decide whether or not to kill yourself. Right, buddy?”

  He didn’t say anything. A gust of wind blew a handful of rain from the trees and it splashed against our faces. The bell over in the Mellon Campanile rang out the quarter hour, and I thought of Emily, whose father, Irving Warshaw, had been a young metallurgist assigned to the casting of the steel bell back in the late forties. An experimental and later discredited method had been employed in the bell’s manufacture, leaving it to toll in a voice that was off-key and faintly mournful and that usually reminded me of old Irv, to whom I had been a constant source of disappointment.

  “I’m sorry I said what I said, James.” I took the bottle from him and unscrewed the lid. I tossed one of the codeine pills into my mouth like an M & M, and downed it with a swallow of Jack Daniel’s. The whiskey tasted like bear steaks and river mud and the flesh of an oak tree. I had another swallow because it tasted so good. “I haven’t had any of this stuff in four years,” I said.

  “Give me,” said James, biting his lip in anger and trepidation and a childish desire to force himself into being a man. I handed him the pill and the dark little bottle. I knew it was irresponsible of me but that was as far as my thinking on the subject went. I told myself that he could hardly feel worse than he already did, and I suppose that I told myself that I didn’t really care. He took a long, careless pull from the bottle, and half a second later spat out the whole mouthful.

  “Take it easy,” I said. I peeled the soggy pill from the lapel of my jacket and returned it to him. “Here, Why don’t you try that again?”

  This time he was more successful. He frowned.

  “It tastes like cordovan shoe polish,” he said, reaching for the bottle again. “Another sip.”

  “There isn’t any more,” I said, giving the bottle a demonstrative shake. “These things don’t hold a whole lot.”

  “Look inside the other ball of underpants.”

  “Good thinking.” In the remaining pair of boxers was another little bottle of bourbon. “Hello,” I said. “We’re going to have to confiscate this, too, I’m afraid.”

  James smiled. “I’m afraid so,” he said.

  We ran splashing through puddles all the way to Thaw Hall, passing the little bottle back and forth between us, avoiding a group of young ladies who glared at us, and when we got to the hall and came laughing into the high, gilt lobby, James Leer looked thrilled. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were full of water from the bite of the wind on his face. As I stood, doubled over, at the closed doors to the auditorium, trying to catch my breath, I felt him place a steadying hand on my back.

  “Was I running funny?” I said.

  “A little. Does your ankle hurt bad?”

  I nodded. “It’ll be all right in a few minutes, though. How are you feeling?”

  “All right,” he said. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and I saw that he was trying to keep himself from smiling. “I guess I’m feeling sort of glad I didn’t kill myself tonight.”

  I stood up and put my hand on his shoulder, and reached out with my other hand to open the door.

  “What more could you ask for?” I said.

  THAW HALL HAD SERVED as a preliminary exercise for the architects who later went on to build the old Syria Mosque. The exterior was trimmed with sphinxes and cartouches and scarabs, and the lobby and auditorium were all pointed arches, slender pillars, a tangled vegetation of arabesques. The seats and the loges were arranged around the stage in a kind of lazy oval, just as in that late, lamented concert hall, only there were far fewer of them—seats, I mean—and the stage itself was smaller than that of the Mosque. The place held about five hundred in the orchestra and another fifty up above, and by the time we got in there every one of the blood red velvet seats was taken, and at the creaking of the door hinges every one of those five hundred heads turned around. Some folding chairs had been set up at the back, in the standing aisle, and James Leer and I took a couple and sat down.

  We hadn’t missed much; the elfin old novelist, I later discovered, had commenced his lecture by reading a lengthy extract from The Secret Sharer, and it didn’t take long for me to pick up the thread of his argument, which was that over the course of his life as a writer he—you know the man I mean, but let’s just call him Q.—had become his own doppelgänger, a malignant shadow who lived in the mirrors and under the floorboards and behind the drapes of his own existence, haunting all of Q.’s personal relationships and all of his commerce with the world; a being unmoved by tragedy, unconcerned with the feelings of others, disinclined to any human business but surveillance and recollection. Only every once in a while, Q. said, did his secret sharer act—overpowering his unwilling captor, so to speak, assuming his double’s place long enough to say or do something unwise or reprehensible, and thus to ensure that human misfortune, the constant object of the Other Qs surveillance and the theme of all his recollections, continued unabated in Q.’s life. Otherwise, of course, there would be nothing to write about. “I blame it all on him,” the dapper little man declared, to the apparent delight of his audience, “the terrible mess I have made of my life.”

  It seemed to me that Q. was talking about the nature of the midnight disease, which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to “fit in” by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your own hostile gaze.

  There was a lot I could agree with in Q.’s argument—but I soon found myself having a tough time concentrating on his words. The mark of Doctor Dee’s teeth on my ankle had dulled with the codeine to a faint pulse of pain, but things had al
so gone smeary at their edges. I could feel the machinery of my heart laboring in my chest, and there was a jagged codeine cramp in my belly. I was drunk on five swallows of Jack Daniel’s and a heavy dose of oxygen from our run across the campus, and all the radiant things around me, the stage lights, the gilt wall sconces, the back of Hannah Green’s golden head seven rows away from me, the massive crystal chandelier suspended above the audience by the thinnest of chains, seemed to be wrapped, like streetlights in a mist, in pale, wavering halos. As soon as I managed to focus my eyes on them, however, the halos would vanish. I smelled something dank and somehow nostalgic in the air of Thaw Hall, dust and silk and the work of some devouring organism—rotten ball gowns, ancient baby clothes, the faded flag with forty-eight stars that my grandmother kept in a steamer trunk under the back stairs and flew from the porch of the McClelland Hotel on the Fourth of July. I sat back in my chair and folded my hands across my stomach. The warm ache of codeine there felt sad and appropriate. I wasn’t worrying about the tiny zygote rolling like a satellite through the starry dome of Sara’s womb, or about the marriage that was falling apart around me, or about the derailment of Crabtree’s career, or about the dead animal turning hard in the trunk of my car; and most of all I was not thinking about Wonder Boys. I watched Hannah Green nod her head, tuck a strand of hair behind her right ear, and, in a gesture I knew well, raise her knee to her forehead and slip her hands down into her boot to give a sharp upward tug on her sock. I passed ten blissful minutes without a thought in my head.

  Then James Leer laughed, out loud, at some private witticism that had bubbled up from the bottom of his brain. People turned around to glare at him. He covered his mouth, ducked his head, and looked up at me, his face as red as Hannah Green’s boots. I shrugged. All the people who had turned to look at James now returned their gazes to the podium; all except one. Terry Crabtree was sitting three seats away from Hannah, with Miss Sloviak and Walter Gaskell between them, and he kept his eyes on James Leer for just a second or two longer. Then he looked toward me, winked once, and arranged his studious little face into a playful expression that was supposed to mean something like What are you two up to back there? and without really meaning to I gave him back an irritable frown that meant something like Leave us alone. Crabtree looked startled, and quickly turned away.