The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  Failure, that familiar feeling, settled all around Noah. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  When did you first know you were a fag? he wanted to ask.

  Or, If you are a fag, then what exactly do you want from me? And what am I supposed to get from you?

  Tracy stood watching him. He had a good strong jawline, a super chin; he should be a model or an actor. And he must be thinking thoughts in that high forehead of his, but nobody ever let you know their thoughts. They were too afraid you’d use it against them. That was what was so depressing. For just once, two people standing in the middle of the night should be able to say what was on their minds, no matter how weird or fucked it was.

  “Do you think…?” Noah said, but then, afraid, he hesitated. It really was incredibly hard, wasn’t it, to try to talk to another human being. Not the free kind of talk that happened around the dorm room but talk that cost you, talk you staked not twenty dollars but your life on.

  “Yes?” Tracy still was studying him. No, Tracy Parker was longing for him. Probably he was dead wrong, but he felt it anyway, strong and disquieting and attractive. That night in South Carolina, when he and A. J. had sat out on the pier after everybody else had gone to bed and his dad’s friend admitted he’d drunk too many cocktails: the bull was raging then, for sure. Surprised, Noah had brushed away—more than once—that insistent, roving hand, the sloppy lips and aggressive mouth, till it became a sad kind of game between them. Does my dad know this about you, he’d wondered with what he hoped was contempt but suspected might be more like awe. Never in his life had he felt the strong beam of longing directed his way before, how it trapped you in its scary glare, stopped you dead in your tracks.

  Would he welcome a roving hand if it came his way right now? Summoning up all his recklessness, he asked, “Do you think people are afraid to say what they really think?”

  Tracy Parker remained imperturbable, seemingly preoccupied with the beagle at the end of the leash straining to nose around in yet another smelly patch of mess she’d sniffed out. “Probably,” he said. “Most of the time.” His voice turned wary, he shifted his stance—and suddenly, just like that, the wave of longing that might have been passing through Tracy Parker was gone, vanished up into the night like a tease of starlight. Or was Noah looking in the wrong place? Because he had the strangest feeling it was still there, only ducked under cover, prudently out of sight but lurking very near, ready at any moment to return.

  Tracy had bent down to wrest from Betsy’s mouth a wet hunk of tree branch. “Nasty,” he said, while Noah watched the top of his teacher’s head, where the indifferent streetlight caught in his brown hair. I’m the waterlogged rat trapped in the maze, he thought. Funny that a whole encounter that could go nowhere had started out with him running. Already they were on the far side of the lake. The path curved back toward the campus buildings. Believe me, I have my ways, his dad had said, and though it had only been some businessman from Africa in way above his head, his dad had completely meant those words.

  Noah spoke quickly. “We’re all gonna die,” he said. It wasn’t what he’d thought he was going to say, but a powerful desperation had seized him.

  “One day,” Tracy amended philosophically, though the wariness in his voice raised itself up a notch. They were all going to die, and in the meantime would stand here talking and talking till it happened. But even talk would be okay, Noah thought, if they could just talk about what was in his head that he couldn’t get any other relief from. If they could talk about the Fatwa, about Gary Marks, about a dull gray pigeon dangling from a string against the dark wood of a door.

  Very probably he was totally wrong about Tracy Parker.

  “I can’t believe it,” Noah said again, the desperate animal in him talking out loud. His voice was almost a shout. “We’re all gonna fucking die.” If you couldn’t talk, at least there was this. He loved it—the surprise of shouting like he did, how wild it was. And with that he was off again and running. Even Betsy was too startled to follow. A strange elation carried him like the wind. He thought he heard Tracy cry out after him “Wait!”—but instead of stopping him in his tracks, it only made him run that much faster.

  V

  On a downtown sidewalk a woman lay dead. Pooled blood made an odd halo around her head; a trickle ran down into the gutter. She wore a dark sweater, a light skirt. At her side a string bag spilled onto the pavement two loaves of bread, three or four cucumbers, one tomato. Knowing full well the danger from snipers in the hills above the city, she had made a foray out to buy food. Her face registered grim resolve, as if even in death she looked forward to no less than she had had to face in life.

  Louis folded the paper so that he would not have to look at the news from Sarajevo, and set it on the kitchen table as he went about his morning ritual.

  Claire allowed herself few luxuries, but breakfast in bed was one of them. It had started years ago as a joke, a frivolity. After nights that were by turns awkward and tender, mornings had presented a problem for the newlyweds—what to do with themselves? Before marriage, Louis had always taken a particular satisfaction in making his own breakfast, and finding himself one morning up and about earlier than usual, and at loose ends, he had hit upon the idea of surprising his new wife. She had received the breakfast tray with a bit of irony—he supposed that was expected, even necessary—but did little to conceal the real pleasure it gave her to be waited on like this first thing in the morning. He always thought of something he’d once read: if you pray regularly and consistently, eventually you will believe. The success of their marriage, not only its survival, but its flourishing, had been built to a great degree upon the quiet, humble exercise of certain forms of prayer.

  On the stove, water boiled in two saucepans. Into one he dropped a cool white egg. The other he poured into the teapot, where her favorite tea, delicate oolong, lay waiting. For himself, strong coffee percolated in the clever little machine on the counter (a gift two Christmases ago from Susan, his eldest). From the toaster he plucked crisp slices of bread, then resumed preparation of the fruit salad he devised nearly every morning from the bounty to be had at the local supermarket (he was thinking of that poor woman in Sarajevo). This morning he cut up cubes of watermelon and honeydew, sliced an apple and a peach, tossed in a few red grapes. He drizzled the whole with honey and a spoonful of brandy. Macédoine, they called such a salad in Germany: from Macedonia, that volatile Balkan mix. Dividing his more harmonious macédoine into two bowls, Louis set one on the breakfast table, next to the newspaper, and the other on a tray. The timer dinged on the stove, and he removed the egg, its innards, he hoped, still mushy the way Claire liked them. A little silver eggcup, one of a pair picked up at an antiques fair, received the pleasingly perfect oval. His own breakfast never included an egg, and though he somewhat disapproved of Claire’s daily craving for one, at the same time he enjoyed adding this extra touch to her meal, as if to distinguish it from his own more spartan repast. He couldn’t help but feel, secretly, just a little virtuous.

  She was awake and sitting up in bed; more than that, she was already at work, her practice being to grade four or five student papers before rising. How she could stand that, first thing in the morning, was beyond him, and it struck him as another example of her truly remarkable devotion to the drudgeries of her work. Paper grading, when his own routine had included that odious prospect, was something he’d tended to put off till a herculean effort would be necessary to get through the daunting pile that had accumulated. A bad work habit, and less than ideal pedagogy, the endless production and consumption of student prose being, he supposed, a necessary evil, though one that Socrates, for example—no shirk of a teacher—had managed to dispense with altogether, and with no apparent detriment to the education of his articulate flock of pupils. Louis thought he would be all for a back-to-the-basics drive in education: a teacher, an olive tree, a bit of midday wine (the ancient Greeks had watered theirs down to keep their heads lucid), and, l
ast but not least, six or seven eager and receptive youths seated at one’s feet. It still disappointed him that he had found modern Greece, the one time he’d visited it, so unlovable, its landscape bleak and forbidding, its cities and villages a disillusioning overlay that—for all practical purposes, and those of a dreamer as well—effectively obliterated nearly every trace of its classical predecessor. Even the Greeks themselves these days were virtually indistinguishable from the Turks and Slavs whose invasions had all but absorbed the noble Hellenes of ancient times.

  “I came across something that will amuse you,” Claire said, looking up at him with a smile. “Let me find it. I should compile a book. It would be very funny and just too sad. Oh, here it is. ‘It’s a doggy dog world.’” She spelled out the offending phrase.

  “Pretty good,” he told her, setting the tray on the bed beside her. “A doggy dog world. That’s really very good. I should tell Lux, in case he doesn’t already know—though I suspect he does.”

  Her reward for all those conscientiously marked pages, he knew well, would be a few chapters of a murder mystery. Then, often still in bed, she would work diligently for a couple of hours on one of the essays that, unlike himself, she occasionally finished and, to his mild chagrin, published in this or the other feminist journal. Of course, teaching only part time did free her from the consuming worries of a job like his: the distracting case of Christian Tyler, for example; also the undeniable fact that Goethe Hall would need to be reroofed before winter set in, an expenditure he had altogether failed to foresee when putting together the year’s perhaps too-thinly-cushioned budget—and these just two of many problems bedeviling his mind this morning. Despite all that, he had the nagging suspicion that such responsibilities had really nothing at all to do with his writerly constipation.

  “You have your class tonight,” he said, not so much a question as merely a statement, a confirmation of what he knew perfectly well to be the case. But it was how they spoke to one another in the mornings. There was some sense of order to be found in reciting each other’s schedules.

  “I’ll be gone before you’re home,” she told him. “I’ll leave your dinner in the oven before I go out.”

  “Fine,” he said. “You’re all set then?”

  She nodded as she poured her tea. What was the curious word he had heard from Tracy the other day? Enabler. It was the language of pop psychology that Louis particularly despised; nonetheless, it came to him now that perhaps, in such small moments as these, this was precisely what they had been for one another, he and Claire—enablers.

  In the kitchen, seated before his toast and fruit salad, he unfolded the newspaper and could not resist studying more closely the photo on the front page. Death fascinated him. He knew it was a fascination one should resist with all one’s heart, a temptation resolutely to be looked away from, and yet he felt the overriding compulsion to look. The photo had, after all, been printed for all the world to see, and though it was somehow shameful to print such a thing, to assail unsuspecting people over their morning coffee, at the same time he was glad they had done that, whoever had made the editorial decision. It was certainly no more shameful than what happened daily on the streets of that beleaguered city. Before this corpse he felt a terrible wonder. What bound people together was so fragile, he thought as he paged through the rest of the paper, and their barbarity so enormous.

  Yes, he thought. The savagery would arrive here as well—not tomorrow, perhaps, but the day after tomorrow. And when it came, it would come quickly; it would take everyone by surprise. A sniper would pick him off as he stooped to retrieve his morning newspaper from the floor of the front porch. He could see it so clearly.

  Now, now, he told himself. It was all too easy to let one’s thoughts roam unduly first thing in the morning. It could trigger a funk that might last the whole day. For several minutes he concentrated on a dull article about the county’s recycling woes. But just as he was congratulating himself on his self-discipline, a small item at the bottom of the page caught his eye: EX-TEACHER CONVICTED ON SEX COUNTS.

  Despite his better judgment—and yet he had something of a professional responsibility, didn’t he?—he read on. A highly respected teacher at a New Hampshire prep school (of far more distinguished lineage than the Forge School, it must be said) had been arrested some months earlier for trying to lure a twelve-year-old boy into his car. Now a jury had convicted him on more than three hundred misdemeanor counts of possessing child pornography, fifty-three felony counts of exhibiting child pornography, and one count of attempted felonious assault. For each misdemeanor charge he faced a maximum of one year in prison, and up to seven years for each felony.

  Like a whisper, some ghost sensation passing through him, Louis felt an unaccountable surge of something not unlike panic, no less powerful for being utterly groundless. Why on earth should he feel even a hint of such a thing? He had never in his life come remotely close to any act that could, by the farthest stretch of the imagination, be construed as having a connection with such derangement as this. The scant details the article offered were bizarre, pathetic.

  When he was stopped with the boy and questioned by police officers, he was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned Camp KYO and carrying a knapsack containing more than 500 photographs, mostly of naked people. The bag also contained a pumpkin mask and a handwritten price list titled Pay Scale for Pumpkin, which listed dollar figures along with acts like “allowing pumpkin to lotion you.”

  Louis did not like to think too much about such a person. And yet—certain dark fascinations the mind fixed itself on, unable to resist. When he put down the newspaper, he found himself staring once again at a woman lying dead on a sidewalk in Sarajevo.

  Even before he stepped into the office Louis could tell that Eleanor Osterhoudt was in a state. Ostrichlike—had her last name somehow influenced the association that always sprang to mind?—she sat behind her desk in a black turtleneck with a gold crucifix pinned to the throat, pink wool sweater draped around her shoulders (he had never seen her, even in the warmest of weathers, without it), and with furious concentration enjoyed her cigarette.

  Smoking was against the rules, of course. No one was allowed to smoke on campus, and the headmaster’s office, of all places, should abide by that sensible legislation. Nonetheless, with a slow, luxurious intake of breath the headmaster’s secretary sucked smoke deep into her lungs, held its exhilarating toxins inside herself for a full ten seconds, then with great reluctance released the spent pleasure.

  Louis mustered his most insinuatingly cheerful voice to wish her “Good morning.” She looked up at him, eyes narrowed, so he amended his greeting: “Or perhaps not so good.”

  She held out to him a piece of paper.

  “I know, I know,” he said guiltily. “It came in yesterday afternoon after you left.” Just as well she’d had to go for her doctor’s appointment; he wouldn’t have relished her receiving in person the offending document, a petition from the awkwardly titled Coalition of Concerned Students Unleashed Concerning Cancer, or COCSUCC, as their more-to-the-point acronym announced. Behind the sophomoric joke—whose high spirits, boys being boys and all that, he easily forgave—lay a deadly serious complaint. How disheartening students were these days. Of course it was wrong for Eleanor to “pollute the environment and cause unacceptable risk to the health of all concerned.” Louis had tried to explain to yesterday afternoon’s delegation of rosy-cheeked lads that Eleanor was a colorful relic from a bygone era, a time when smoking, believe it or not, was simply a given, a fact of life. In those long-vanished days, one smoked or did not smoke, he told them, but no one paid the slightest heed one way or the other. It was clear they found that very hard to believe. How to tell them that what mattered was not Eleanor’s habit of smoking, and the infinitesimal risk it might cause to anyone but herself, but rather her much vaster habit of loyalty, her almost fanatic devotion to the school? That pardonable hyperbole of Jack Emmerich’s, “Without our dear Eleanor, the Forge
School would cease to exist,” had more than once, over the years, revealed itself as literal truth.

  It took him a moment to realize that the paper Eleanor held out to him was not, in fact, the petition from COCSUCC, but rather her resignation.

  “This will not do,” he said simply.

  “The time has come,” she told him. “I’ve outlived my usefulness here. I’m a liability.”

  “Ridiculous,” he countered. “You’ll never outlive your usefulness here.” Though he realized, even as he said it, that one day, sooner rather than later, she would in fact retire. She must be close to seventy. Her health was bad; smoking had ruined her lungs, her heart. And where would he be—where would the school be—when that happened? Reluctantly he had to admit that it might be time to begin to think a little more about the future; if, that is, he wanted to ensure that there was to be a future for the Forge School’s venerable legacy.

  “Now put that away,” he told Eleanor. “This is just nonsense. I’ll take care of it with no more ado.”

  He’d find Doug Brill, whose heavy hand, Louis had no doubt, lay behind all this, even as that acronym had been smuggled right past his ever-vigilant gaze.

  Like some terrible mark of punctuation, she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “If it keeps up like this,” she observed dryly, “we might as well be living in Russia.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Russia. My impression is that people in Russia smoke and drink to their hearts’ content.”

  “I’ve got my passport somewhere,” she went on. “I even own a fur hat. Maybe I’ll emigrate. By the way, your nine o’clock appointment is here,” she told him.

  He had utterly forgotten his nine o’clock appointment, put it right out of his head.

  Seated in one of the office’s two seldom-used armchairs, Christian Tyler did not seem particularly ill at ease, and Louis hoped that he, likewise, gave off no sense of edginess. Considering the circumstances, he felt it somehow inappropriate to give even the appearance of hiding behind his fortress-like desk.