Obedience

by Will Lavender

  Mary suddenly had a funny idea. She stood and returned to Dr. Williams’s office. Troy had turned on just one light, a desk lamp that emitted a pale glow on the shelves. She wanted to look at his books, but she knew she didn’t have much time before Troy came back. She put her note—it was a bit unfinished, certainly not all she wanted to say, only the part about Summer McCoy, but none of the other stuff, not the Pig and Polly hypothesis that she’d been thinking about—on his desk, her eyes scanning its surface. What was she looking for? She didn’t know. But she couldn’t leave. Now that she was here, in his presence, she had to find something, didn’t she? She’d been brave enough to come this far. There was his mail, for instance. There were a few coffee mugs on the shelves. There was a poster of Einstein on the wall with the heading HE COULDN’T TIE HIS OWN SHOES. But there was nothing of substance that she could see without searching the desk drawers. Quickly she scanned the books—logic texts, philosophy treatises with their spines veined, a whole row of John Locke. But nothing else. She felt ashamed for coming, for—

  On the desk, nearly hidden under a stack of envelopes, was a sentence. It was in the cold, distant font of a typewriter. It looked as if it had been written a long time ago; the text was so faded and the page so yellowed that Mary could barely read it. She leaned down to get a better look.

  Deanna would be the same age as Polly if not

  That was all. The rest of the words were hidden beneath the envelopes. Mary pushed the envelopes aside and leaned in for a closer look.

  “What are you doing?” someone said.

  It was Troy. He was standing at the door looking at her, arms at his sides, as if he couldn’t believe that she would enter the office uninvited.

  “I’m just…,” she tried. “I was just putting my note on his desk.”

  “I said,” Troy stated flatly, “that if you give it to me, it will get to Dr. Williams. I promise.” Then he smiled—it was a stern, rigid gesture.

  “There,” said Mary, pointing at the note she had laid on his desk.

  Troy read the note. He had to spin the paper around so that the words weren’t upside down, and when he did this Mary saw the weird tattoo on the back of his hand. It was an S and a P entangled. The S was almost serpentine. Its head was drawn up as if it was ready to strike down on the soft, nearly feminine P. Mary thought that whoever did this was talented, and she wanted to ask Troy what it meant.

  But then he finished with the note and stood looking at her. His eyes had changed: he was more tentative with her, more cool. “So you’re trying to find Polly,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Troy only nodded, but she silently urged him to go on. She badly wanted to know what he knew, but it appeared that he wasn’t going to volunteer anything more.

  “Do you know him well?” she asked, trying to goad Troy into giving up some information about Williams.

  “Not too well. He just called me up this summer and asked me if I would run for him. I’m just a gofer. He wants all these books catalogued before the fall term’s out. He wants someone to type some stuff for him. Just the usual crap. It’s money, though, so I couldn’t pass it up.”

  “Does he ever talk about Polly?”

  “No,” Troy said evenly. “That’s top secret stuff, man.” He laughed, then, a stoner’s giggle.

  “Did he make it all up?”

  “He made most of it up. Except…”

  “Except what?” she led him.

  “Except there was a real case. A long time ago, back in the eighties. This girl went missing and was never found.”

  “So this girl is Polly?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Polly is fiction. She isn’t meant to symbolize anything except the illogic that is sometimes in the world. Or at least that’s what Leonard says. What, you think she’s real or something?” He stared at her. “Uh-uh. It’s like they say in the movies: Polly is based on a true story.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” said Mary. Though she wasn’t sure if she did or not. In fact, she wasn’t sure what she’d meant. “I’m talking about him. Missing girls. Vengeful boyfriends. It’s not the stuff of academia, if you know what I mean. I was wondering if…you know.”

  “If he has a daughter who was abducted? If he lived through something like this?”

  “Well, it just seems so real. There’s something personal about it for him.”

  “They all ask that question. Listen, he just changes her name. When I took his class, she was named Jean. Last fall she was Elizabeth. Same story, same girl, different outcome.”

  Mary was disappointed. She’d wanted to hear something else, but she didn’t know what.

  When it was apparent that there was nothing more to say, she thanked Troy and left Dr. Williams’s office. As she was leaving, he called down the hall to her, “Watch out for him. He was always misdirecting us.”

  11

  Brian House wanted to get fucked up. Fucked up beyond all recognition, they said. FUBAR. He wanted to lose the world and wake up tomorrow in somebody’s bathtub. Currently he was standing out on the balcony of the Deke house, drinking mojitos. Inside, some girl named Brandy tended a makeshift bar that was really just an old door laid between two cinder-block columns. He was already feeling it, that far-off buzz, the zinging collision of all the molecules in the world. When he drank, he got tuned in. It was like blowing glass or getting laid: the world softening, darkening, imploding like a breath sucked in and then held.

  “Hey,” said someone at his shoulder. It was that girl, Tannie or Bonnie or whatever her name was. She was sort of ugly in the face but had a hot body, and she was coming on to him. There was something weird about her, though. The way she talked and walked and moved, as if she were faking everything. Still, it was getting late, and there were no other possibilities that he saw in his immediate future.

  They went inside, where the music was pulsing and physical around them, and they danced. She was hiding her face from him for some reason. Was she scarred? Brian tried to look at her, but the mojitos were clouding everything. A song bled out and another came on. It was a slower song, grinding riffs of steel guitar, poetry in the lyrics. She leaned into him and breathed warmly onto his chest. She said something—mumbled, actually—but he couldn’t hear anything over the throbbing music.

  They were outside again. On the balcony. “Get happy,” somebody said, handing him something. Acid. He’d done it before, once. He put it on his tongue and closed his eyes.

  They were back inside, sitting on a ratty sofa that smelled as if it had been dragged from a fire. Two girls were sitting Indian-style on the floor, kissing with their tongues. The Dekes had all taken off their shirts and painted symbols on their chests. The paint was peeling in the heat and flaking down to the floor.

  They were out on the yard. The Dekes were running naked across the lawn. Somebody was letting off fireworks. Bottle rockets zipped through the air. Soon, it would be term’s end and Brian would go home. The thought depressed him. Home. He dreaded it, the drive to New York, his mother asking him how he was doing in his classes, his father drinking beer in that pathetic apartment he was renting, the Great Pall of Marcus hanging over them all. The dreary knowledge that nothing could ever be right again. “What’s wrong?” the girl asked. Tannie or Bonnie. She was frustratingly difficult to hear. To understand. Or even see clearly. He shook his head, told her not to worry about it.

  They were on the balcony again. The atmosphere was weird, charred. No one was out there. The world was bending and swerving. The girl was still at his arm, still hiding her face. “What are you doing with your face?” he asked.

  “I’m saving myself for you,” she said. Or that’s what she might have said. He couldn’t be sure. The balcony rail was holding him up. Sparks ran across the Deke yard. Naked sparks. Little blurs of men. Tiny men. Scores of them. They wouldn’t stop. They were in a race with each other, running toward something fiercely, fighting for some distant finish line.

  Later.
They were in the art building. Down by the glassblowing kilns. Someone had spread out a blanket on the concrete floor. Brian was on his back, and the girl was on her knees beside him. She was wearing just her bra and panties. She was doing that face thing again, with her chin on her shoulder. Something was hidden. “Here,” he said, trying to take her face and turn it toward him. But she wouldn’t turn. Her dark hair was over one eye, but she looked at him intently with the other. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Polly,” the girl said.

  “What the fuck did you say?” he asked.

  “My name’s Polly,” the girl said. And then she laughed. It was a mad and desperate cackle, a screech. Someone was in the building with them, firing up a kiln, the growl of the fire echoing off the wide walls. “I’ve told you that twice already.”

  Whatever the hell she wants, he thought. I’ll play along.

  “How’s Mike?” he asked.

  “Mike,” the girl said. “Goddamn Mike. I wish people would stop bringing him up. I’m through with him. I told them—I love Mike, but he’s so…flawed. It’s just the way he is. That’s Mike, you know.”

  Brian let it sink in. He was losing himself here and there, falling into little sharp black trenches every so often. Daylight was coming in through the windows now, and he wondered what time it was.

  “Where are you?” he asked the girl. Her face was still on her chin, her eye still on him.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean where the fuck are you, bitch. Where are you? We’re all trying to find you.”

  “Brian, this is crazy. I don’t know—I don’t—”

  “Stop fucking with me. He sent you here, didn’t he? Williams. That’s why you’re hiding your face. That’s why you’re scared to show yourself.” He was sitting up now, putting his shirt back on, standing up so that he was over her. There was something about the way the girl demurred to him, stayed on her knees below him, that infuriated Brian. “Stand the fuck up!” he shouted. “Get up, goddamn you! You whore. You two-bit whore. You—”

  There was somebody watching him. Some guy. Just behind another kiln, standing there with a mug of steaming coffee, looking right at him. That broke his trance. Brian came back to the world, floated down through the rafters and the glass dust and the smoke to the floor of the building. The descent buckled his knees.

  “Fuck this,” he finally slurred.

  And then he walked out, leaving the girl behind.

  12

  “So,” Professor Williams said. He was sitting today in a rolling chair in the front of the class. He taken down the podium and had his feet kicked up on the front table. He apologized for missing last week, but he told them that his son had gotten the flu and had to be taken to the pediatrician. A young son, thought Mary. But no pictures in his office. “Any theories?”

  “The name Pig,” Dennis Flaherty said.

  “Yes?” Williams asked.

  “Do you know anyone by that name?”

  “There is a man in DeLane named Pig. A former cop. Now he’s a night watchman at the marina. He helped me…research some of my clues, so I paid homage to him.”

  “Ah,” Dennis said softly. Mary looked down the row at him. She thought he looked tired, different somehow. He caught her stare and held it, tried to impart something to her, but then he quickly looked away, down at the legal pad that he had balanced on his briefcase.

  “Anything else?” the professor asked.

  “In the pictures of Polly’s Civic,” said a student behind Mary. Immediately Mary felt herself flush. She hadn’t even looked closely at that one because she had been too focused on the other. Was there a clue in the car photograph, something that she needed to know?

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a railroad track in the right-hand corner,” the student went on.

  “And?”

  “And so that could support a staged crime. Her father could have taken her out to Stribbling Road—”

  “Are people still on that?” Dennis sighed.

  “—and slipped her away on the train.”

  “This isn’t nineteen twenty-five, Ms. Davies. People still hop boxcars where you’re from?”

  When the girl fell silent, Mary began to speak. But before she could say anything Dennis said, “I want to go back to the ‘Place’ clue.”

  “Go on,” Williams led him.

  “Pig and Polly had a thing,” Dennis said.

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” mused the professor. “Here’s a guy about fifteen years older than Polly. He clearly—clearly—isn’t in her class. She’s beautiful, he’s…not.” A few people laughed. Williams rolled his chair around here and there but kept his feet kicked up. “She’s got a family, whereas Pig grew up on the streets. He’s a tough guy. But she sees something in him. What is it?”

  “He takes care of her,” a girl said from the back row. “He’s like a father to her.”

  “A father,” Williams said. “Go on.”

  “She was drawn to him because she had a rocky relationship with her own dad?”

  “The same dad who was waiting up for her the last night she was seen?” he asked. “Try again.”

  “He protects her.” Dennis had picked up the loose thread. “Mike hits her, abuses her, is generally nasty to her. And Pig is there to nurse her back to health. He tends to her wounds, her broken heart.”

  “Sugar daddy,” said Brian. He had his head down and was looking at Williams from the side of his gaze.

  “So they were fucking,” Williams said. The word jarred the class. Some students giggled nervously. Williams apparently didn’t register this strangeness, the ripple it created when a professor used language that was so un-professor-like. “They had an affair. How does this change things?”

  The girl from the back again: “Pig fell in love with her.”

  “And?”

  “And he threatened to kill Mike if he touched her again. They were seen arguing by the pool.”

  “Maybe Polly was obedient to Pig,” Williams said.

  “How do you mean?” asked Dennis.

  “I mean maybe he held some authority over her. Maybe he was demonstrating his authority in everything he did. How he dressed, how he spoke to her. Perhaps he made her afraid to defy him.”

  “Maybe,” Mary said, “he planted the seeds of the abuse in her head.”

  “That’s really interesting, Ms. Butler. And that’s pure Milgram.”

  “Who?” someone asked.

  “Stanley Milgram. You haven’t seen the statue outside the Orman Library? A dedication to Milgram. He came here in the seventies as a visitor of Dean Orman. He lectured right in this room in February of nineteen seventy-six. Do you just walk past that statue without noticing the inscription? Why must students have such tunnel vision?”

  “We have a library?” said a boy in the back. The class laughed, but Williams only grinned and shook his head.

  “Milgram conducted behavior experiments at Yale in the sixties,” Williams continued. “He found that people are willing to go along with anything if an authority figure tells them to do it. Perhaps Pig was Polly’s authority figure.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Dennis.

  “Let’s test it then,” Williams said. “What if you were told you were going to fail this class if you didn’t, say, stand on your head in the corner. Would you do it?”

  “No,” Dennis said. Mary saw him blanch—she knew he was lying.

  “Okay,” the professor continued. “What if someone of tremendous authority at this institution, say Dean Orman, came into this room right now and told you that you would be expelled if you didn’t reach across and pull Ms. Butler’s hair. Would you do that?”

  “Well, it’s not my head,” Dennis said.

  “Exactly!” Williams laughed. “Milgram proved that we will go to great lengths to hurt people if we are told to do it by someone of influence. After all, they know best, right? Dean Orman knows best. He is an aut
hority figure, is he not? He is learned, and his education makes him a figure of control.”

  “The Nazis,” Brian said.

  “Yes,” Williams said. “Milgram was showing that even notions of right and wrong are meaningless when stacked against authority. We are more obedient to another’s authority than we are to our own instincts.”

  Williams stopped speaking. He composed himself, drew in a breath, and went on. “So here we have,” the professor said, “two people who have threatened Mike with his life. Polly’s father and now this guy, Pig. Mike, it seems, is not the most well-liked individual on the planet. Which proves?”

  “Polly is lovable,” said Mary.

  “Polly is indeed lovable. She is the heroine of this story, after all, and she is counting on you to find her. Some of you have developed an obsession for her already.” Mary looked away from him quickly. He wondered what Troy had told him. “Some of you are thinking about this crime when you should be studying for other classes. I know how it is. This is Polly. What you’re feeling is the intuition to save, to deeply care. This is something that, as a species, we are the only ones capable of feeling. Oh, a mother chimpanzee will save her baby, but only if the baby is in immediate danger. Right now, the danger is abstract. You don’t know what it is. In fact, the danger is conceptual: I have created it. I have told you that Polly is going to be murdered, and you believe me—in a purely metaphorical sense, of course. And so you have followed me into this narrative until you care, some of you deeply, about what happens to Polly.”

  Then: “I don’t care.” It was Brian.

  “Oh yes, Mr. House? And why not?”

  “Because everybody’s going to figure it out anyway. Somebody will get the answer and call someone on the telephone and then we’ll all have it.”