A Murder of Crows

by David Rotenberg

  12

  AN ADVANCE OF AFRICAN TRIPS—T EQUALS 1 MONTH PLUS

  TWO DAYS LATER DECKER WAS SITTING IN THE HEATHROW departure lounge in B concourse because his flight to Johannesburg had been delayed by a British Air strike when he heard, “Will Mr. Decker Roberts please report to security to receive an important message.”

  Decker picked up the security phone and wasn’t even a little surprised to hear the southern stylings of Special Agent Yslan Hicks.

  “You know who this is?”

  “Jodie Foster?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Ah, not Jodie Foster, Clarice Starling.”

  “When did you become such a smartass?”

  Decker didn’t respond. He’d stopped answering open-ended questions a long time ago.

  “Fine. You have a ticket waiting for you to JFK, it leaves gate twenty-nine in thirty-six minutes.

  “First class?”

  “The U.S. government doesn’t do first class. Be on that plane, Mr. Roberts. Someone will meet you at JFK.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like you travelling to foreign lands—”

  “Without reporting in first?”

  “That was the deal, so get your ass on that plane. By the by, how’d you like Las Vegas?”

  After a moment he responded, “Not much.”

  “Too much fear and loathing?”

  “Maybe . . . sure. Question?”

  “Maybe.”

  “When did you become such a smartass?”

  The question floored Yslan—when the fuck had she become such a smartass? She always was annoyed with people who had a quip for every circumstance. Who talked like, well, like smartasses on TV.

  Decker hung up the phone and looked around him. No doubt someone was watching him. He’d known he was being watched for some time now. But an airport was a good place to lose a tail—and that’s exactly what Decker believed he’d done.

  Three hours later he handed over a fake passport to the air hostess at Gatwick. She smiled at him as she said, “Enjoy you flight, Mr. Rose.”

  Gatwick to Amsterdam. Amsterdam to Cape Town.

  He had promised Eddie that he would lose himself in Africa for a while, and that’s just what the fuck he was going to do. And direct a play—he hadn’t directed a play in a while and was surprised how much he was looking forward to it. The very thought of directing again had released two wonderfully random ideas in his head.

  Four months back while he’d prepped a Canadian/Somali singer for a film audition, the musician had mentioned that most Somali men have committed their family histories to memory in verse. The poems often ran to several hundred stanzas and traced their exact lineage back to the first Somali. He had recited his. The buzzing cadence and the rhymes of the poems were unique and clearly present in the man’s music. They are the “path” of his music, he thought. A path backwards.

  The other idea that intrigued Decker was the Australian aboriginal use of song lines, intricate memorized songs that described in great detail all the twists and turns of long land journeys, some in excess of a thousand miles with as many as seven hundred exact references such as “at the bend in the river, find the fallen rock with the cleft in its side—turn toward the rising sun at the rock. That is the track to follow. But do not drink from the water of the river there.”

  A path forward, Decker thought, and somehow he knew that he personally stood at the meeting point of the two paths—one forward, one back.

  13

  A MURDER OF CROWS—T MINUS 12 DAYS, 4 HOURS AND 8 SECONDS

  THOUGHTS: We look like crows—all of us in our black gowns and the profs up there in theirs. We look like a flock of fucking crows. No, that’s not the right collective noun. Not a flock of crows, but a murder of crows—yeah. A murder of crows. Good phrase that—a murder of crows. Gotta love that—a murder of crows.

  How does that joke go? Yeah, there’s this Taliban suicide prevention hotline and a kid calls up in the middle of the night and claims he’s thinking terrible thoughts—that he’s seriously considering killing himself. “Please help me,” he says.

  The guy on the helpline says, “Sure. Can you drive a truck?”

  14

  A SINGULARITY OF TURD—T EQUALS 1 MONTH PLUS

  AS GROVER CLEVELAND RABINOWITZ EMERGED FROM THE FOURTH stall on the third-floor men’s room of Lyndon Baines Johnson Dormitory at Ancaster College, he noticed that the turdlet had returned.

  He’d first seen it almost five months ago. Then it disappeared and reappeared periodically thereafter. This time it had been gone for almost a week but now it was back—a desiccated thing, no more than an inch long, sitting on top of the floor drain almost directly across from the janitors’ cleanup sign-in sheet, upon which the dates and times were all carefully printed but the signatures were completely illegible.

  He closed his bathrobe and nudged the thing with the side of his flip-flop. If it wasn’t the same one that had been there before then it was its twin sister—to Grover Cleveland Rabinowitz all turds (and turdlets) were female.

  Grover noted that it didn’t stink—no smell whatsoever. The others hadn’t stunk either. It had been dried somehow, maybe microwaved. He went through the physics of microwaving in his head—a gross process as far as he was concerned—but yeah, this dried turdlet could definitely have been microwaved, or sun-dried, but that was hard to do in the spring rainy season here in upper New York State.

  It never occurred to him to question who could have placed the thing on the drain outside the fourth stall of the men’s washroom on the third floor of Lyndon Baines Johnson Dorm, let alone why the individual who did this would have done such a thing.

  He was a “how” man—not a “who,” let alone a “why” man. “How” was the scientist’s question.

  And Grover Cleveland Rabinowitz was a scientist.

  So he’d carefully noted the days the turdlet had appeared, disappeared then reappeared in a file he kept beside his computer that also contained his thesis on how to dry human fecal material.

  It would prove to be a vital clue as to why and even who had planted the bombs that would in a month kill more than two hundred people. It was also the only thing that a heartbroken Mr. and Mrs. Rabinowitz didn’t bother taking home from their dead child’s room in Lyndon Baines Johnson Dormitory at Ancaster College—the world’s most famous institution of higher learning in sciences, maths and applied engineering.

  15

  A DIFFERENTIAL OF TOWN AND GOWN—T EQUALS 1 MONTH PLUS

  THE ANCASTER COLLEGE CAMPUS OVERLOOKED A SMALL, formerly industrial town in the dead centre of which was its famous eighteenth-century church built by the founders of the college in a pristine symmetry they believed reflected the seriousness of their god.

  There was an overpriced inn named after the college, naturally enough, then cheap outlying motels. The inn had an adequate to good restaurant, and the rest of the two-street town had the college’s elaborate bookstore, a very fancy candy shop and of course a Whole Foods grocery.

  The college was self-contained—the students never carried money, as every establishment in the town took Caster Cards. There was a small movie theatre that showed first-run flicks for five bucks and held pay-what-you-can Sundays and Mondays, but then Ancaster College brought in bands as famous as Arcade Fire and speakers as exclusive as the Dalai Lama—all for free. The students accessed a bar that served the under-aged with watered-down beer. The cops knew, the college knew—everyone knew. All agreed that it was the best way to handle the inevitability that the smartest science students in the world needed a place to blow off steam, no matter what their age.

  Some of the faculty lived in college-owned properties on the outskirts of town, but the really famous (and wealthy) professors all flew into the tiny airport for their classes then returned through the same airport to their real residences in New York or Chicago or Boston.

  But on the other side of the hill, across the thruway, lived th
e townies in an enclave of their own, Stoney River—America’s version of South Africa’s townships.

  And in the midst of that side growth to the college was the basement apartment of one of the college’s many janitors, but this apartment had a microwave oven that had been used to desiccate several pieces of human fecal material—stuff that the young janitor called shit.

  16

  AN EXTREMIS OF PROFESSORS—T EQUALS 1 MONTH PLUS

  AS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR NEIL FROST ROCKED BACK IN HIS wooden office chair he plunked his socked and sandaled feet on his desk and stared at the stack of exam booklets that awaited his attention.

  He had a terrible urge to fail them all just to show them how unfair the real world was.

  Without opening a single booklet he knew that more than 95 percent of them would be perfect or darn near perfect.

  These kids had been working at being perfect since they could walk—maybe before they could walk.

  The other 5 percent would have some obvious errors since their authors would have been too drunk to notice that they’d skipped some questions—maybe even puked on the booklet so that they couldn’t see the question.

  At Ancaster College, even on the freshman level where he was relegated to teach, there were few mistakes made on exams no matter how hard professors made the questions, because Ancaster College rejected more than seven thousand applicants every year coming from the very best prep schools in the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Any less than the very best were cordially invited to not apply. The college accepted fewer than three hundred new students into each freshman class. Three hundred of the very brightest maths, science and computer students in the world.

  He poked at the pile of exam booklets with the edge of his tattered sandal and wasn’t unhappy to see the booklets slide off his desk into the wastepaper basket.

  If only I could just leave them there, he thought. Then he remembered his meagre salary, his diffident supposed colleagues, and finally his overdue rent, and he picked up the topmost of the booklets—naturally from a Bengali or maybe it was a Pakistani, who could tell the difference or cared to, Ibrahim Mohammed something or other—and began to read.

  By noon he’d finished marking 17 of the 291 exams and was ready for a diversion, so he flicked on his video of the last committee hearing where a busty student named Marcia had complained about the “unwarranted attentions”—he just loved that euphemism, “unwarranted attentions”—of one of Ancaster College’s janitors.

  He fast-forwarded the tape to the part where he told her, “Look, Ms. Lavin, even the cat is allowed to watch the king.”

  Her perplexed look so pleased him that he replayed the section, several times.

  But he knew that he owed Ms. Marcia Lavin.

  Without this bitch’s complaint he’d never have met the young janitor who microwaved human shit—Mr. Walter Jones, Esq.

  He turned to the window and stared at the neatly manicured campus and remembered when the idea first came into his head.

  Popped in—God given, actually.

  He was adjusting his girth in his theatre seat at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as the lights were going down. They evidently made theatre seats narrower now than they used to. Must be so they can stuff more seats into the theatre, even though the prices they charged were outrageous. He couldn’t believe it when they told him it was $140 a seat to see the RSC!

  But as the play began, he found it glorious to hear Shakespeare spoken by his countrymen. And Julius Caesar had always been a favourite of his.

  He’d played Cassius in college and had for a while considered a career on the stage, but he’d been rejected by RADA, the Central School and the Old Vic—no doubt Jews were in charge of those places then. No doubt. Then there were those ahead of him: Ralph Fiennes, Kenneth Branagh, Timothy Dalton, et al. They put me in the shadows, and now they’re famous and rich and have women for the choosing.

  His reverie was broken by a familiar speech about brilliance hidden beneath the shadow of Caesar.

  Know how you feel brother. You tell ’em.

  And what did he do to ol’ Caesar—ate two—is what he did!

  Ate two—why stop at two?

  How’s about six or sixty or six hundred? In for a penny . . .

  Ouch—the damned seat pinched him!

  Show them all. All of them.

  A smile crept over his face. Yeah, time to get back at every one of them who put him in shadow, who rejected his brilliance. Who refused him admission to their damned club. Well, I’ll grant you all admission—admission to hell.

  And as he watched the third act he thought of how simple it was to make an explosive device—kid’s stuff really. But where to put it? That was the question: where to put it?

  Then he saw the mob gathering onstage to hear Anthony’s speech over Caesar’s dead body—and he knew. A mob gathered to listen. Oh, yes. Universities have such gatherings once a year. We surely do.

  He ran the three necessities for a crime in his head:

  Motive: in spades

  Means: you bet

  Opportunity: he’d have to work on that. Bombs need to be planted. And what would a professor be doing digging in the ground or lifting platforms. No, he’d need an assist with that.

  Then he remembered the janitor who had given “unwarranted attentions” to bouncy Marcia and smiled . . . and to his surprise he felt comfortable in his theatre seat. He had lots of room; it fit just fine.

  17

  A VOID OF CARING—T EQUALS 1 MONTH PLUS

  WALTER APPLIED THE HOT WAX TO HIS CHEST AND GASPED. THE smell almost made him puke. He counted to twenty then ripped the wax off—with his body hair. He hated body hair.

  He waited for his breathing to slow down then he applied more hot wax to his upper thigh. This time although he gasped he also smiled—because things were going along just fine. Better than things had ever gone for him. And soon, so soon . . .

  He peeled off the hot wax, then pried open a can of soup and put it on the hot plate. “Dinner,” he said aloud to the emptiness of his basement apartment. That used to piss him off—him eating soup out of the can while those students had the choice of more than ten different things to eat at their dining halls. And people like me to clean up after them, he thought.

  But that didn’t bother him now.

  Cause this will show her and that snot-nosed professor who thought he was just so fucking clever. Well, Mr. Professor, nobody uses me. I use them. And you, Mr. Bigshot, you don’t get it. Or the rest of them who think they’re so much smarter—so much better—than me.

  He put on an oven mitt and picked up the can of bubbling soup and took a long swallow. It was hot—and it burned—but Walter Jones didn’t care. Not a bit.

  18

  A DREAM OF SOUTH AFRICA AND NAMIBIA—T EQUALS 1 MONTH PLUS TO T MINUS 21 DAYS

  DECKER TAUGHT IN THE MORNINGS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAPE Town, a school that religiously followed his teaching methods and had even produced two PhD theses based on his unique approaches to acting.

  More importantly, the school was now producing some of the finest young actors in the English-speaking world. The students were bright, ambitious and talented. But almost every white student eventually approached Decker about the possibility of working in Canada, since they realised that the sins of their parents were being visited upon them in a fairly draconian fashion. To be blunt, South Africa’s affirmative action policy was unapologetically driving many whites from the country. NGO hypocrites always defended affirmative action with the blather of “Yeah but would the whites rather be in their position or in the position of the blacks?”

  Only those who don’t have to suffer the brunt of discrimination would talk this way. It’s the talk of the self-righteous who stand to lose nothing themselves.

  Decker felt it was wrong to visit the sins of the parents on their children—period, full stop.

  In the afternoons he rehearsed the two short plays and was
excited by what he found in the pieces and by the raw talent of some of the students.

  Several professional actors (almost all of whom were University of Cape Town Drama grads) sat in on his classes and rehearsals. At first the university had objected, but Decker had insisted that the pros be permitted to audit his classes. Shortly he organised evening classes for the pros—well, actually, for a specific pro, an extraordinary creature named Tinnery who had shown up to watch his third class.

  She was a graceful Afrikaans beauty—strong of body, strong of heart, and strong of head—and she was talent that walked and talked.

  Decker turned in profile to the attentive actors and pointed at his nose. “Your nose is attached directly to an ancient part of your brain. Modern man doesn’t use his nose much except to steer clear of cesspools and the like. But modern man is only the end product of all the creatures who have come before him. And those men and women used their noses, and the knowledge that they gained is still stored in our brains.

  “The human brain consists of three parts. Up here the frontal lobes, which in fact make us human. The frontal lobes control the middle section—the mammal portion of the brain—which in turn controls the most ancient part of our brains, the reptilian part.

  “When we sleep it’s the frontal lobes that sleep. That’s why we have nightmares. With the frontal lobes resting the other two parts of the brain tell us what they saw that day—somewhat different than what the frontal lobes saw.

  “Have you ever been in the middle of a nightmare and suddenly you pop up and say, ‘That’s enough, you’re scaring me?’