The Mentor

by Pat Connid

  One even accused me of faking the RA or at least avoiding memory recovery to avoid any prosecution. He was a dick but he was doing his job, whatever. But, and maybe it's just me, if you killed someone you loved more than yourself, would you want to remember that?

  The pain of shame, pity that I could handle. Remembering the last words Ruthie ever said or the sound of her head and body exploding against the steel car door-- that I could never bear. Maybe that means I'm a coward. I don't care. Didn't want to ever remember.

  But, over the past couple weeks; I'd begun to see bit and pieces. Flashes, sounds, blurs of colors and knew that it was only a matter of time now: somehow a hole had been poked in the dam and soon, the whole damn thing was going to come flooding down.

  I'd been told by the nurses to stay away from beer and booze because alcohol is no friend to the RA sufferer. But, I didn't want those memories and drank more the past few years than the previous twenty-three odd years combined.

  Yet, still here, it was coming.

  Another flash and that sickening sound… not a bone breaking-- crack! -- it was a thunderclap. I'd been driving that night. The moonlight or street lights of the interstate formed into a long eye on the reflective surface of my steering wheel. Couldn't see the wheel but that eye, it stared at me.

  Then, everything was like shuttling through some video.

  A blur and then I'm playing some fighting video game with a friend at a pizza place… it's a restaurant near my old college.

  blur and then back is sore, hard chair pressing into my spine

  blur it hurts, my back, but now I'm in the car again

  blur back in class, like flipping through baseball cars: it's professors, lectures, chatting girls up in the back of class, smells, sounds…

  blur I'm in the car and still hear one of my professors, lecturing. Rain, I see the rain on the windshield now, Christ it looks like we're underwater, but I still hear that chattering away in my ear, in my head, it's all meshing into one moment, collapsing upon itself and then buzzing becomes ringing, louder and louder, it hurts my ears.

  When I wake up, arms swimming at the air above me, as if forcing myself to climb from the muck of the dream back into the real world, my throat feels shredded.

  My eyes barely split open, my face and body is soaked. Body with sweat; face with tears.

  Rummels and Rummels have fled, and I don't blame them.

  Of all the times for these memories to fight their way back… now? When some maniac is torturing me, and I’m fighting to find some way to stay alive?

  Maybe it was just time. That's why they were coming back. Time to face it.

  Or…

  What if it was like some sort of survival function. These "tests" by The Mentor, the shit he was putting me through… for whatever fucked up reason he had for doing it… what if my mind, so clearly focused on the danger, was forcing my subconscious to shake free the hard clumps of barnacles that had seized up nearly two years of memory, simply to add some brainpower in hopes that I might just survive.

  A hackneyed theory I'd heard years earlier: trauma could be used to "treat" trauma. That is, a new trauma could lessen or reverse the effects of another earlier one.

  Sitting there in the safety of the Dvorak home, still, I knew The Mentor was coming back for me the first moment he could. And while nervous about that, I was gaining confidence. Whatever he had in store next, I was pretty sure I could handle it.

  But those memories, they were coming back, too. The ones I'd pressed down, those months and years leading up to my sister's dying moments-- the death I caused!-- not sure I'd be able to handle that.

  Hell, those horrible visions… the dreadful, heartbreaking sounds… they might actually kill me before The Mentor ever got a real chance.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Southern humorist Lewis Grizzard once said about one of the oldest cities in the South: “Atlanta is gonna be a great place whenever they get finished with it.”

  Rapper “Pimp C” (nee Chad Butler) once, in a very rhapsodic manner, told a magazine Atlanta “ain’t in the South.” That little piece of cultural libel was not well received by the folks (read: music buyers) in Atlanta and the surrounding area. Mr. C later apologized and restated his case (emphasis his): “THAT WAS A BULLSHIT STATEMENT! ATLANTA IS AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE DIRTY MTHFKN SOUTH!”

  The implication here is that the second statement is actually some sort of over-reaching atonement for the first, however, I’m not entirely sure I prefer Chad’s new characterization.

  And, finally, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America once named Atlanta the worst American city for asthma sufferers to live in. One plus: if that designation is accepted by the group’s members, it should cut down a little on any annoying, pervasive, inner-city wheezing.

  To me, architecture has always been some sort of civilization merit badge. Forget strong financial infrastructure, low crime rates or competent governance… to me, if a city had slapped together some really cool buildings, it had arrived.

  But, it was "ground floor” where things went terribly wrong in this city.

  Specifically: you take your own life into your hands when you drive in Atlanta. Or, more correctly, you put your life in the hands of anyone within the “killing zone” on the interstate-- an area of, say, a quarter mile in all directions, which increases in size dependent upon the speed of surrounding traffic.

  No one does the speed limit. To do so would put one in danger, even.

  Ironically, everyone in Atlanta drives as though they are racing to the hospital with someone terribly sick in the back seat. Given the high-caliber of accidents this creates, some of them end up being driven to the hospital before the trip is over.

  Einstein (in between long sessions of testing, seeking out an appropriate, yet elusive hair product) said that as an object approaches the speed of light, that object’s mass grows too exponentially. That said, Atlanta’s traffic is, to paraphrase the smartest man ever: heavy, man.

  Pavan takes it in stride, like he does most things, as we head to the campus of Georgia Science Academy which-- whether good or bad-- is situated right downtown.

  For students without cars, it means most of where you want to go is available via good, brisk walk or by bicycle (they know better than to take the bus in Atlanta). Everything else is OTP, as it is called, “Outside The Perimeter”-- the “perimeter” being Interstate 285 which, being that it has three-digits, is a loop around the city of Atlanta. A little like a moat or possibly a wall-- keeping the barbarians out (ie, anything deemed uncool).

  It also means that with all the traffic and few places to park, students walk just about everywhere they go.

  “Uh, I didn’t know we’d be walking, man,” Pavan says sucking down another Camel, “I’d have brought a skate board or something.”

  “You don’t skate board.”

  “No, but I hate walking. Too tiring. I could stand on the skateboard and you could pull me.”

  I looked at my friend, briefly, then back to some pages I'd printed out back at the Dvoraks. In the white spaces, I'd jot notes about little bits of memory that would seep in. A moment here, a moment there.

  Flashes of my past were coming back to me as we drove, and it was jarring as hell. I’d begun to try and make an order of it-- this girlfriend goes here, after my bike got pinched, but before I got food poisoning at the campus coffee bar (this explains my aversion to baklava, check).

  “So you think your old professor guy he used to work at Salm... uh...”

  “Yeah, no question. That was him in the picture. It was taken a few years before I had

  him, but he looked exactly the same. In fact, I’m sure I’d seen that exact ugly shirt and tie combo several of times.”

  Heading toward the exit off the interstate, Pavan shifted lanes, and the moment he did, a white truck loaded with ladders crossed into the spot we’d just slipped out of. You’re always a twist of the wheel away from “traffic fatality” in
this city.

  “But you said he don’t teach here no more.”

  Up ahead, I could see one of the three towers that the campus was famous for.

  “No, he left,” I said, sitting up, and pushing my palms across the jeans to dry them off a little. “After I got back from my accident, I tried for a couple days to get back into the swing of school but I... I mean, nothing. No memory of course work, classmates. Needed a map to walk the streets I’d been walking for nearly two years. Remembered none of it.”

  “So freaky.”

  “Yeah. And, I was laid up for about six weeks or so and when I got back, Jepson was gone.”

  “Fired?”

  “Nah, just left, I guess. They didn’t tell us anything-- just a new guy in his place.”

  Pavan slowed, shot his eyes to the passenger side mirror, and got into the deceleration lane to take the next exit.

  “Freaky. Did you even remember the guy? I mean you forgot most of those years.”

  “Yeah, I had him first semester for Freshman Physics. I remember that and that he was a likable guy. Loved teaching, loved that role, right? Patches on the elbows of his jacket, probably had a pipe in his desk. He seemed to really dig it.”

  My friend nodded, listening. For a moment, I saw him stare off a little-- just a quick stolen moment-- and I worried the talk about college was going to be a bit of a bummer for him.

  After Pavan’s mother died, his father traded oxygen for Jack, as in Jack Daniels... I’m not sure if it was because his dad missed his mother or that his dad missed his mother taking care of the old man. For a while, my friend took on the role but eventually made a bit of a clean break because he didn’t want to be dragged down into another man’s despair.

  Say what you want about my friend (just not with me around, now), but he’s got wisdom in that noggin' somewhere. He can be dim as a Red Dwarf, sure, but somehow--- hell maybe the drug use “squeegied his third-eye” as the great comic Bill Hicks used to say-- he had life smarts in there.

  Which is, ultimately, worth far more than anything a university can teach you.

  “According to my college transcript-- and the only thing I know about most of those years I got from the transcripts-- I had Jepson both semesters on my Sophomore year.”

  “Shit, they must be low on teachers if you got the guy all the time.”

  I laughed, “Nah, he just taught in the discipline I was studying. Sort of a broad, shotgun approach to physics, environmental science, chemistry-- that sort of thing.”

  Pavan cranked the wheel, turning toward the campus. We weren’t officially on campus yet but all the businesses, housing-- this was student territory now. It felt vaguely familiar.

  We were there because I was hoping to find something out about Professor Jepson-- and maybe some reason why he was in that photo at Solomon-Bluth and why his name in the caption wasn’t Jepson at all. It was Eller. The chatty Timothy had confirmed it: the man in the photo was Wilhelm Eller, the lead scientist who’d died in the blast and fire that destroyed the charity’s multi-million dollar research facility.

  But then ended up as a Georgia Science Academy professor who called himself Jepson. Willard Jepson, not Wilhelm.

  He’d also disappeared from the school, albeit that time not in a blaze of glory. Why or where he’d gone, I’d hoped to find out. I didn't yet know the shape of it but, undoubtedly, here was my link.

  Maybe, he was still alive and could tell me something that could lead me to The Mentor-- or could help me piece together what was happening.

  A printout of the campus map in my hand, I directed Pavan where to turn to get to the administrators’ building.

  A wave of exhilaration washed over me, as if a ghost had passed through my body, and it left me a little chilled, buzzed. Changing up the route, I told Pavan to turn around, go the other way. After a few blocks, I looked up and saw dorms.

  Hanging from the seventh floor balcony rail at one apartment was a blanket, flapping a little in the breeze. Maybe the student living there had run out of towels and used it to dry off after a shower.

  Or maybe, one drunken night, the occupants had taken in a stray and fed the dog the only thing they had. Official student food: pizza and beer. The next morning, the dreadful and nausea-inducing clean up resulted in a banister weighed down by rows and rows of drying towels.

  “Used to live up there.”

  Pavan craned his neck to look up through the windshield, nodded.

  He finally asked, “Dex?”

  Turning to him, I asked him to go back the way we came and head to the admin building. Then, I could tell something was bugging him. I said: “Okay. What it is?”

  “Me, I live in my father’s house most of the time and sit on the floor because the dog ate the couch, right? The stuff in the fridge is so old that one of the missing kids on the milk carton is the Lindbergh baby.”

  “Oh shit!” I laughed and nearly spit out my flat Diet Coke. “Damn, that’s funny, man!”

  He smiled huge. “I used to say Jimmy Hoffa-- that got a laugh-- but somebody told me they only put kids on the cartons, so it wasn’t as good. My cousin said the Lindbergh baby is good, so yeah, it gets a better laugh.”

  Still chuckling, I asked, “Do you even know the Lindbergh baby?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and I knew he could care less. “He’s an air to a cheese fortune or something. Sure, it was in all the papers, I bet.”

  This is why we’re best friends. Limburger baby? Fucking love the guy.

  It was great to laugh but I knew, maybe inadvertently, his question got scuttled. Maybe because I knew what the question was going to be and didn’t feel like answering it: Why did I go from a chem-physics major to tearing tickets at a movie theater, getting drunk with him by the soda boxes?

  Guilt is an easy enough, twenty-five cent street-corner psychologist answer. Didn’t deserve a life after I’d taken Ruthie’s. At least, I think that had been the plan. Certainly, worked out that way.

  THE CAMPUS, FOR BEING squeezed into downtown had more open space than one would expect. Thousands of square feet that may have been put to better use as, you know, classrooms on the college campus, was instead dedicated to common seating areas and large, sweeping grass basins that kids, squandering their parents’ hard earned money, skipped class to play Frisbee in.

  It was late afternoon (Pavan and I had both woken up after one in the afternoon and habitually moved slow in the morning [even when morning was an afternoon]) and this was the lull between the midday series of classes and when the night courses began.

  This seemed to be a good time to approach the campus staff-- a little down time, like at the theater between rushes when movies began and let out. Maybe the staff would be more accommodating when not so busy.

  So, I was wrong.

  “I’m sorry” the middle-aged woman who’d given up on makeup years ago, said to me. Pavan waited a few feet behind me, his head wrapped with ten-dollar eyewear from some sunglasses-of-indifference line, leaning up against the wall. “I can’t give you records of the faculty and staff at the university. Did you think we’d hand that out to whoever asked?”

  “Hoped.”

  “Not happening, Mr. Daisy.”

  Ugh. I said, “Please, just ‘Dexter.’”

  "Excuse me," she said a little too loudly, dropping her eyes and raising a bony finger. “Excuse me. Everyone in this office, including those who barge through that door, is a ‘mister,’ ‘missus,’ or ‘miss,’ sir.” She said and glanced around at two other coworkers, subordinates, who had quickly busied themselves with impossibly stacked reams of paperwork.

  They didn’t look up nor did they raise a “sing it, sister” clenched fist in solidarity.

  Strange irony. This person was rudely explaining to me the concept of respect.

  Note to all: It is one’s duty to take these types of folks down a notch.

  “Fine, but please use my original family name, if you’re going to. ‘Daisy’ is the la
st name of an abusive stepfather-in-law, and I hate it,” I lied. “I'm Dexter Miester, but ours is now anglicized German. Miester into Mister. Name is Dexter Mister, now. So if not ‘Dexter’, then...”

  “Fine, fine,” she said and straightened her sweater lapels, another quick glance at her coworkers. She didn’t see it but from my vantage point, I could see one of them trying to hide a smile. “I can’t give you access to Professor Jepson’s records. Just your own. That is just not done, Mr. Mister.”

  Pavan shuffled behind me, letting out a long, slow breath. Behind her, somewhere, a file fell from someone’s desk.

  “Ma’am,” I said, then looked down at her name plaque, “Ms. Leonard, I’m not looking for his bank records or driving record or lab results. Just a phone number or an address.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Jeez, can you maybe give him my number? Then urge him to call me?”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  “No, I'm sorry. We're not Facebook now, Mr. Mister. We don't make 'connections' or whatever it is you all do with it.”

  This time Pavan let out a strange whistle-whimper. He mumbled something and I heard his faint, strained voice half-say and half-sing: "Take!"

  In the back, a pencil or pen holder tipped over, somewhere behind the stacks of paper, loudly scattering to the floor.

  I pushed my adversary, despite the brick wall she was throwing up. It seemed she had her little piece of power, her modicum of authority in this world and by-god she was going to wield it.

  “I know this is an office brimming with Respect, capital ‘R’," I said. "But I’m having a hard time believing you are being fair now. It’s important, like earth-shatteringly important, that I speak with him!”

  Ms. Leonard touched something in her hair, at the scalp and stiffened. She started to say something, and then stopped.

  “I can’t help you, Mr. Mister.”

  He couldn’t hold it in anymore: Pavan broke. He barked out, “Take!"