“I suppose you always loved movies,” she said.
“Actually, I loved sitting alone in the dark, and watching movies was a very acceptable way of doing it.”
“I think you’re telling me more than I want to know.” When she laughed her entire face laughed and her body laughed and it made Jack laugh.
It had been a long time since he’d laughed like that.
After the rain, in the early morning, the sun burned through the clouds and there was the smell of ozone in the air. The grass was still damp and nothing had changed except Jack was not alone. He sat on the back porch drinking coffee with Stan Miller, who had dropped by to say hello and to make sure Jack was ready to be Dr. Owens again, not that Stan would have been so insensitive as to ask. He wouldn’t have risen to chair of the department without a large share of tact and the intelligence not to ask the obvious or state it, which is a winning combination anywhere, Jack thought, ungraciously, for he was not in a gracious mood this morning.
He didn’t want Stan there. He didn’t want to be reminded of who Stan thought he was talking to, who he expected, had every reason to expect, would show up the first day of fall semester. After all, Stan had a department to run and only a small cadre of teachers with which to run it, and if Jack wasn’t up to the job, if he was going to turn in his application for emergency leave and avoid the carnage, or what Jack feared would be the carnage once he walked into the classroom and looked at the ten faces, sympathetic, apprehensive, wondering if Dr. Owens would give them their tuition’s worth—while he wondered the same thing, himself, wondered if he would look at his students and think only about Danny, who had not lived to be their age. And would they see that in his face?
If Dr. Owens wasn’t up to the job, he’d better say so now.
But Stan didn’t need to ask this. They’d been colleagues for ten years, they had the same friends, their sons had played together. All Stan needed to say was, “How have you been doing, Jack?” while the birds took flight across the field, the mourning doves cooed like heartbreak, the sunlight grew and the shadows tiptoed their silent retreat.
“Trying to put things back together,” Jack answered. “Slowly.”
Stan could say slow was the best way. He could say, “Christine and I thought of you quite often this summer.” But he couldn’t know that Dr. Owens had died along with Danny and all that remained was Jack, the ghost of Dr. Owens, rattling his chains and making noises, no more substantial than ectoplasm, and Jack didn’t know if he could show up come September. He didn’t know if he was up to the job. Not that that’s the sort of thing he’d confess to his department chair; in spite of Stan’s good manners, that would not be what he wanted to hear.
Jack knew that Stan didn’t have time to waste listening to equivocations, he only wanted Jack to make his job easy. He only wanted to hear the word “yes” as he moved the mug of coffee around in his hand and took another look at the scenery beyond the backyard, giving his attention to the hawks circling above the field, and not saying anything. Maybe the task of saying what was on his mind put a strain on his wealth of tact, or maybe it was the words themselves, there aren’t any strict guidelines for asking a father whose son committed suicide if he’s capable of teaching, for saying: “Look, I know you’re feeling like shit, but I’ve got my own corner of self-interest to consider. I’ve got a job to do. So what is it, Jack, can you or can’t you?” But you can’t ask that question and can’t say what’s on your mind, at least not if you’re Stan Miller.
But Jack wasn’t going to let Stan sit there looking alone and uncomfortable. He told him, “You don’t have to worry about being blunt with me. You don’t have to measure your words.”
Stan smiled and said he appreciated that. He said, “I apologize for not being very good at this, but if I have to replace you, I have to know now.”
“Sure.”
“I have to—” Stan stopped short when the doorbell rang. Jack got up and walked to the front of the house. It was Hopewell standing by the screen door.
“I don’t mean to bother you, Dr. Owens, but I need to talk with you. Just for a couple of minutes.” Something about him had changed since that day in his office. He seemed edgier, unable to come to a full stop. His right hand flayed the air when he spoke. He stepped forward and back, walked toward the swing, then pivoted on his heels, as though he’d just thought of something else to say, and came back to the door. Only he didn’t say anything, but stuck his hands in his pockets and jiggled his keys and loose change. He was like a man on the run.
Jack looked over his shoulder in the direction of the back porch and closed the front door. “I’ve got company,” and he moved Hopewell down the front steps and away from the house. They walked to the road and stood next to Hopewell’s car. The engine was still running.
The detective said, “I’m afraid I have some unpleasant—I’m going to have to ask you to look through your son’s e-mail.” Only the detached, empty voice hadn’t changed.
“Danny’s e-mail?”
“Some sick creep’s been getting into chat rooms—there’s no nice way to talk about this. He’s been going online with young boys—”
“Danny wouldn’t get into anything like that.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t.” Hopewell did not sound convinced. “Just to be on the safe side—you see, guys like this, they’re degenerate pederasts and predatory as hell. They can get their hooks into boys in very subtle ways.”
“Can you keep your voice down.” Jack looked back at the house.
“This guy’s”—Hopewell lowered his voice—“been preying on young boys, mostly messing with their heads, but also trying to get them to meet him at secluded spots. He might’ve already been too successful at it…Maybe he lives in the area, maybe just close enough to drive here and far enough not to be traced.” Hopewell swiped a handkerchief across his forehead. The flesh on his face was pale and drooped against the cheekbones. There were dark stains on his shirt, around the armpits and where the flesh rolled over the belt. His body stank of sweat, not the sweat of toil, but the sweat of negligence.
Jack couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, having to come to people’s houses and say the things he had to say, and for a moment he was able to see past the things he knew about Hopewell, the ambition, the hunger for the big time. He could see how frightened the detective was, he could even understand the fear. The look on the face might appear to be cold cogitation but it was really a look of desperation. Hopewell wasn’t thinking about parents of dead children. He wasn’t thinking about the dead children, either. He was thinking about his job and this case and the case waiting for him when this one was closed. He was thinking about the big-city department he craved to be a part of and the next ten years in his cramped little office on the Gilbert police force and all the things that held him back, all the things that had already passed him by. And Jack, the Coggins, even Marty, were only greasing the skids.
Hopewell rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Maybe this guy causes enough mental confusion to drive a boy to suicide, I can’t rule it out. I’m sorry to have to do this to you, Dr. Owens, but I’ve got certain protocol I have to follow, certain procedures. I need you to take a look.”
“You mean right now?”
“When you get the chance. Sooner rather than later.” He let out a loud sigh and leaned against the car. “Even if you don’t find—This guy might still try to contact your son, so I have to ask you to kind of monitor his e-mail from time to time and let me know if something turns up.” He straightened himself and opened the door.
“Wait a minute. You can’t just drive off like this without giving me some kind of assurance. You don’t really think Danny was getting into chat rooms with a child molester.” Jack thought about the days and nights last May when he wasn’t home. What was Danny doing all that time? And he thought about how he’d taught Danny not to talk to strangers and trusted him not to—
“There’s nothing I’d like bet
ter, Dr. Owens, than to tell you he wasn’t involved in this.” Hopewell slid behind the wheel. “All I can tell you is, check his e-mail and keep an eye on it. That’s the only way either of us will be sure.”
Jack watched the car pull away and drive down the road. “The son of a bitch.”
Stan was contemplating the bottom of his coffee cup when Jack came around to the back porch. Mutt was rolling in a rain puddle and snapping at his tail.
“Is there a problem?” Stan asked.
“The detective investigating Danny’s suicide,” was all Jack said, all he had to say to Stan. “I’ll be ready,” he assured him.
Stan put his hand on Jack’s arm. “If anything comes up in the meantime, if you need a sounding board or just someone to have a drink with and talk things over—”
“Of course,” Jack said absently.
He’d told his boss that a detective had just come to the house and he was sure Stan wanted to know all about it, he might even think he had the authority to ask, even if it went against his better judgment and high principles—there’s always that itch to get under the skin of someone else’s life, to lift the lid, to find out, for no other reason than the reassurance that someone is worse off than you, or someone’s got it better, or simply because he’s concerned. Or maybe Stan was just curious enough to want to dig in the muck of the human condition. But he didn’t ask.
The moment of panic came as soon as Stan’s car pulled away and Jack walked inside the house and up to Danny’s room, where it still felt of Danny’s presence, or the presence of his absence, the blank space. Any scenario that Jack hadn’t played out since the day Hopewell walked into his office played out in his head now with the same breakneck speed and calculation as when the car goes into the spin, the speed of the reflex to stop disaster from happening, the reflex to assure himself that Danny hadn’t been pushed to suicide by a pederast he’d met over the Internet, to assure himself Danny would never do that. But there was this too: Jack could always trust the living Danny, the Danny who never broke the rules. But the dead Danny obeyed no rules or else there was no reason to be here and no reason to be afraid. And it was also this: there was something about Danny that Jack didn’t know. The something that put the bag over Danny’s head and killed him.
The world can turn in on itself just so many times and then there’s nothing left to be afraid of. Jack wanted to believe that. He wanted to believe that the worst had already happened, while he sat at Danny’s desk facing the computer. He hesitated, like a man facing a strong wind and needing to muster all of his strength to walk the few more steps.
XVI
He wasn’t Jack. He wasn’t Dr. Owens, but the creation of Danny’s suicide, the creation of Hopewell’s suspicions, who had searched through Danny’s e-mail. He wasn’t the man Danny called Dad, who had sat at the kitchen table one of the mornings during finals when he and Danny managed to have breakfast together, before they made their respective rushes to school—was Danny already planning it? Was there already something in his face that Jack hadn’t seen? Could he see it now?
Danny looked tired. He pushed his food around the plate but he wasn’t eating. He asked, “Which is more important, Dad, honesty or loyalty?”
“Good question,” Jack answered, and Mutt started barking, the school bus driver honked the horn and Danny grabbed his books and bolted.
But that wasn’t the question right now. The question now was about faith and trust because Hopewell had asked his questions and those questions put faith and trust in doubt. Jack had thought the worst—he could make a convincing argument that his confidence was a fragile edifice these days like the shacks out by the river, where the air stank of cabbage and diapers and the sweat of despair. He was panicked and trembling as he sat at Danny’s desk and looked into Danny’s email—he might have been looking into his soul, for that’s how it felt—and if the rules did not apply to the dead Danny, they still applied to the living Danny. The Danny who did not disappoint. If Danny had his own deal, a deal whose end Jack might never guess and might never know, it had not allowed for pederasts and predators. Jack had known that. He’d never had a reason to doubt the living Danny, never before today. The trust and faith were understood. He never made Danny live up to anything he couldn’t handle. He’d been careful not to turn into one of those parents looking to catch his kid in a lie, rummaging through dresser drawers in hot pursuit of drugs or pornography or worse.
Now he stared at Danny’s computer screen, scrolled through the menus, looked down the columns, cautiously, as though he were tiptoeing into the room of his sleeping child—and would he awaken something much more dangerous than a sleeping child that lived within Danny? But Jack found no correspondences from pederasts. There were no vulgar messages, nothing of insidious intent and crude suggestions. Danny still did not disappoint.
Jack thought: Those rules still apply.
The living Danny had not been subverted by the dead Danny, but Jack had been. He’d been subverted by the last act of the living Danny, which itself was a subversion by the dead Danny.
And the following morning, Jack drove to campus and went to his screening room, as though he might breathe deeply and fill his lungs with all that had been lost, as though the essence of his past were contained, preserved, in the air of this place, who he was with Danny and to Danny, who he was because of Danny, as though Danny himself were alive here and could be inhaled. As though all of Jack, who had sat here as the complete man, could be inhabited again.
The screening room was still a piece of terra firma, where Irwin McCormick waited at the foot of the projection booth stairs and said, “She’s all ready for you,” nodding his head with proprietary sureness, for he was attached, anchored, to this same piece of terra firma and had been since the semester Jack was tenured and had him budgeted into the film department, on call to run the projector, serve as all-around handy-man and caretaker, and even carry a sleeping Danny out to the car on more than a few nights when Jack had to work late, the au pair had the day off and no babysitter was available. “You are one good little Danny,” Irwin always said. “One hell of a little man.”
Today, Irwin didn’t mention Danny by name as he gave Jack a thorough looking-over through pale, myopic eyes. His striated face showed neither too little nor too much sympathy, ever mindful of the social amenities he’d learned, the rules of comportment, Gilbert style, which say not to overstep the bounds of someone else’s personal sorrow. After all, Irwin was the son of an old-timer, who’d taught him those rules and, along the way, taught him to stay away from coal mining, another rule he obeyed, working twenty years on whatever shift they’d give him at the college’s physical plant and now, thanks to Jack, supplementing his pension with a bimonthly check. All he said was, “I know how tough times has been for you, but you’re where you belong now,” then hitched his gray overalls over his spare hips, one of them prosthetic and apt to give him trouble, and on which he was careful to put as little weight as possible while he emitted painful grunts and carefully climbed the stairs.
Jack walked down the aisle and took his customary seat in the fifth row. He’d come to the place where there was no doubt he belonged, the place where he existed, not as a memory, not as the ghost rattling his chains. This was his little theater, with the wide screen, two dozen seats and the podium off to the side. The little theater that Irwin kept polished, waxed and shampooed. But all he could do was go through the motions, the motions of being the college professor, he could perform an impersonation of that other man, show up for the fall semester, stand in front of the ten apprehensive faces, wondering if he could give them their tuition’s worth. All he could do was wonder if he could act like Dr. Owens when it counted.
But going through the motions can blur the line between the real and the facsimile, blur the line between who you are and who you are expected to be. The facsimile can never be as real as the genuine article. It will be too perfect. And the effort always shows. Although sometimes that’
s all there is. When there’s nothing left of the genuine article, you have to settle for the sorry little man sweating the choreography, fretting the song and dance.
Jack could watch his films and be merely the Dr. Owens of memory, following the old choreography. He could look around where nothing in this room was unfamiliar and find the terrain beyond recognition. Where he was just another shadow on the screen, all flickers and light. That’s what it’s like when you aren’t who you are.
He had come here to get lost in the dark, to watch films and make his notes and hope that it passed for normalcy, or an imitation of what passed for normalcy. But Jack was thinking about Danny, that he never should have doubted him. While Danny receded further away.
“You all settled in?” Irwin called down.
Jack said he was all settled in and the lights slowly dimmed.
When the film was over and the notes were written, when the lights came up and Irwin limped out to get himself lunch, Jack stayed in his little theater. He leaned back in the seat, closed his eyes and rested.
There were afternoons when he had imagined Danny grown up, traveling the world. “You should do some traveling,” Jack used to tell him. “See what other places look like and feel like, see how other people live and what they know and how they think, before making your decisions. You’ll have to make them anyway, so why not make them after you’ve been somewhere and had some fun.” That’s what Jack told Danny. “There’ll be time,” he promised him.
There was supposed to be time, and Jack would let nothing rush so much as one minute of Danny’s life. That was part of the deal. You make the deal, you keep it and hope everything falls into place, or nothing else falls apart. For ten years the deal stuck.
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