Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  And all of this came to nothing, a void that grew around the hole that Fritz had left behind him, a hole that exerts its pull on us still.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I did not intend to start looking into Fritz’s disappearance. I’m not a detective or an investigative reporter; I’m a novelist, and novelists are given to flights of imagination, to what-ifs and conjecture and spinning tales. Writing stories is a game I play with myself, an enjoyable one. At least, it used to be. But it isn’t real, not like Fritz’s disappearance was real. Poking around the meager facts would be hard enough nearly a decade later. I had simply come to believe that many things in the world did not make sense. They happen and we are left in the aftermath to deal with the new reality in which we find ourselves.

  In retrospect, dating Michele had been my aftermath, my deliberate decision to break with the past. I had tried to bury Fritz as I tried to bury any secret—sealed him off in my heart with a thousand distractions. In college and grad school, it was easier to erect a barricade of books and essays and novels to write than it was to forge relationships. And then Michele. She didn’t know me before Fritz disappeared. She knew me only afterward, and so I could reinvent myself for her as a cool brooding author. The problem was, I couldn’t entirely fool myself. I was attracted to Michele not just because she was gorgeous and good in bed, but because of what she represented: a life of drifting through New York, cocktail glasses in hand, with beautiful people who were all apparently famous in fashion and who all promised to read my novel. We thought we were in love—and maybe we were, but more with the idea of ourselves than the reality. The truth is that we were both damaged people incapable of sustaining each other. I had run away from Fritz, but I couldn’t run away from my own dysfunction. That was my narrative, for better or worse. And now I had come full circle and returned to the start of my story, to Blackburne, which I had never really left behind after all.

  AFTER MARCHING MY FOURTH formers through our first text, Oedipus Rex, I was about to start teaching a short poetry unit, and as an introduction I had assigned some Anna Akhmatova. It was clear that many of them had little to no experience with poetry, outside of waiting for the teacher to tell them what a poem meant, as if it were a secret code, and then writing that down and later regurgitating it on a test. I had suspected—and a subsequent conversation with Sam Hodges confirmed my suspicion—that it might be better for me to guide them toward figuring it out on their own. I had always enjoyed reading poetry, although it’s a very different thing to teach others how to read it. My students felt that poets were weird, which had actually been true of some of the poets I had known at NYU. They had scared me a little, to be honest—at parties, the poets were the ones swinging from the light fixtures and trying to get the faculty, or their spouses, into bed, whereas we fiction writers leaned against walls, drank early, and snuck glances at our watches. That hadn’t kept me from sleeping with two of the poets. Beth was blond and warm and wrote Whitmanesque verse about rivers; Giselle was dark haired and dark spirited, with fingernails bitten to the bone, and wrote tight, acidic poems about death and betrayal, as if she were the love child of Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. Beth said I was a lost soul while Giselle called me a fucking asshole, both of which, when you think about it, are pretty much the same thing.

  Now I arranged my class of fifteen boys into a circle, and they looked down dubiously at the photocopies of Akhmatova’s “The Muse” as I read it aloud:

  All that I am hangs by a thread tonight

  as I wait for her whom no one can command.

  Whatever I cherish most—youth, freedom, glory—

  fades before her who bears the flute in her hand.

  And look! she comes . . . she tosses back her veil,

  staring me down, serene and pitiless.

  “Are you the one,” I ask, “whom Dante heard dictate

  the lines of his Inferno?” She answers: “Yes.”

  After I finished reading, silence held for a few beats. Stephen Watterson seemed to be bowing his head over his photocopy out of respect. Paul Simmons blew his nose loudly into a tissue. I frowned at him and he raised his eyebrows—who, me?—before tossing his used tissue into the trash can.

  “Okay,” I said. “So what do you think?”

  “Kinda crazy,” Rusty Scarwood said, one hand in his curly yellow hair.

  “I like the muse,” Stephen Watterson said. “It just sort of shows up. Like the Greeks thought the Muses did.”

  Terence Jarrar looked at the poem like a man considering how to remove a stump. “What’s a muse?” he asked.

  Stephen answered. “It’s like your own personal goddess who inspires you. The ancient Greeks thought the Muses were the source of knowledge.”

  Paul Simmons, who was slouched in his chair so his legs stuck far out underneath his desk, glanced at Terence as if he were about to say something, but he saw me looking his way and went back to staring out the window.

  “Okay,” I said, “so how does the speaker here seem to feel about the muse?”

  Stephen raised his hand. Everyone else pretended I hadn’t spoken. Terence continued to look at the poem, possibly waiting for his own source of inspiration. Ignoring Stephen’s hand, I addressed Paul. “Any ideas, Paul?”

  Paul looked at me, startled, and then reluctantly studied his copy of the poem. “She likes it?” he said.

  Stephen raised his arm farther into the air.

  “A little more than that,” I said to Paul.

  This time Paul looked at me coldly, as if I had just insulted him. I looked back with what I hoped was a warm smile and not a nervous grimace. What if none of them would answer my questions? I knew I would rush to fill the silence with my own words. And then what if they simply sat in their seats, inert as clay, as I talked on and on?

  Then, ever so slowly, Paul cast his glance back down to the poem and reread it. “She’s anxious,” he said finally. “About the muse.”

  Thank you, baby Jesus, I thought. “Where do you see that?” I asked.

  Stephen could no longer constrain himself. “She says everything is hanging by a thread,” he said.

  “He was asking me,” Paul muttered, looking at Stephen with heavy-lidded eyes.

  I had gotten Paul Simmons to participate in class, and I wasn’t about to let him quit now, even for Stephen. “Thanks, Stephen, but I want to hear from Paul first,” I said, and then turned to Paul expectantly.

  Suspicious, as if I had tricked him into learning something, Paul gathered his thoughts. “The speaker’s anxious about the muse coming because she can’t command her,” he said. “So maybe she wants to control her, but that’s not how a muse works. It just comes.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s good, Paul.”

  Rusty Scarwood raised a hand. “What’s up with the flute?” he asked. “The muse has a flute. Why a flute?”

  Stephen raised his hand again, and I nodded at him. “Poetry is a lot like music,” Stephen said. “They both have rhythm, repetition, lots of emphasis on sound . . . If this is Akhmatova’s muse, and Akhmatova is a poet, then it fits. The muse is going to inspire Akhmatova to make her own kind of music.”

  Paul shook his head. “But the speaker says her muse stared her down. She’s pitiless, without pity. She’s not playing some pretty song in the poet’s ear.”

  “Not all inspiration has to be pretty,” Stephen insisted.

  Paul picked up the poem and waved it in the air. “Hello, she’s talking about Dante and the Inferno. Going to hell and seeing people burning or being eaten alive. Is that the kind of inspiration you’d want to get? I think the muse terrifies her.”

  “This is great, guys,” I said, immediately regretting it—I sounded like a cheerleader urging my students to fight—go team, win!—while they huddled up to argue over their next play.

  Then Terence sat forward in his chair. “Hey,” he said, and Paul stopped in midsentence to stare at Terence. Everyone else stirred in their seats, like an
audience before a stage play begins. Terence rarely participated in class, and now he’d spoken twice in a space of five minutes. Slowly, unaware of the rest of the class looking at him, Terence said, “When the speaker asks the muse if she dictated the Inferno to Dante, the muse just says, ‘Yes.’ Which is weird.”

  “Exactly,” Paul said. “She’s not helpful. Her muse is a nightmare.” Across from him, Stephen Watterson humphed and glared at his copy of the poem.

  Terence looked at me. “Didn’t you say that . . .” He trailed off.

  “Go on, Terence,” I said, encouraging him.

  Terence hitched his shoulders nervously. “Well, didn’t you say that Akhmatova had to visit her son in prison? And that she was under lots of surveillance?”

  Rusty nodded in recognition. “Yeah, and her ex-husband was arrested and shot, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, in my best deadpan voice. It took them a second to get that I was echoing Akhmatova’s muse. Even Paul Simmons smiled, although he rolled his eyes as he did it. “Okay, Terence, so what are you thinking?” I said.

  “Well,” Terence said, “maybe she wanted the same muse that helped Dante. Maybe she thought she was living in a kind of . . . hell. And she needed help describing it.” Terence picked up the poem and then laid it back down on his desk.

  I nodded my head, smiling. “That’s about as good an interpretation as I’ve read, Terence. What do the rest of you think?”

  Rusty Scarwood leaned over and offered a fist bump to Terence, who blushed but returned it. “That’s good,” Stephen Watterson said. The others murmured similar comments, but I saw Terence glancing at Paul sitting next to him, as though waiting for his friend’s approval. Paul remained slouched in his seat, but he saw Terence looking at him and smiled a little. “Exemplum de simia, quae, quando plus ascendit, plus apparent posteriora eius,” Paul said to Terence.

  It was as if someone had struck a large bell behind my head. Paul’s Latin saying evoked a memory so strong, it seemed to physically manifest itself and threaten to overwhelm me. No one seemed to notice as they were focused on Paul, but the memory pulled at me like a powerful current, and for a brief moment, sitting in my classroom, I let it carry me back, to Fritz.

  DR. JUSTINIAN BOOTH TAUGHT us European History in our fourth form year, one floor above the room where a decade later I would be teaching Anna Akhmatova. Dr. Booth was a short, dapper, dark-haired man who always wore a bow tie and a blazer, whether it was snowing or humid as a hothouse. He beat facts into our brains with the single-mindedness of a monk instructing us in catechism, and then with equal fervor he pressed us to find connections, patterns, links between historical events and figures. Aside from assigning stunning amounts of homework, Dr. Booth would deliver engaging lectures on a wide variety of topics—Martin Luther, Henry VIII’s “wife problem,” the execution of the Romanovs, the tulip mania in seventeenth-century Holland, the fall of Constantinople.

  One day Dr. Booth was holding forth on the rise of the European nation-state, emphasizing its reliance upon codes of law, when a pudgy kid with curly hair held up his hand. “Excuse me, sir?” the kid said with a placid smile. “Wasn’t Justinian the Roman emperor who established an important code of law?”

  “The Byzantine emperor,” Dr. Booth said, though his tone was kind. “But you are correct—he is credited with commissioning the Corpus Juris Civilis, or the Code of Justinian as it is sometimes known. It serves as the basis for much of modern civil law.”

  Fritz glanced at me from one seat over and rolled his eyes. We all knew Dr. Booth had been named after Justinian the Great. It was one of the first things we had learned in European History. The kid who had asked the question was a third former named Kevin Kelly. Third formers took Ancient and Medieval History, but apparently Kevin Kelly had taken that course prior to attending Blackburne, so the school had allowed him to take European History with fourth formers. Some fourth formers, like Fletcher Dupree, treated third formers like dirt, but I was generally kind to them—after all, I had been in their shoes just one year earlier. However, I didn’t like Kevin Kelly because he was smug and manipulative. Clearly he was sucking up to Dr. Booth by mentioning our teacher’s namesake. He knew very well that Justinian had been a Byzantine emperor, but by purposely mistaking him as Roman, he had given Dr. Booth an opportunity to both correct a student and demonstrate his vast knowledge, something he enjoyed immensely.

  “Douche bag,” Fletcher Dupree hissed quietly at Kevin Kelly from two seats back. He wasn’t above sucking up to teachers himself, but Fletcher felt Kevin Kelly was overstepping some boundary.

  “Mr. Dupree,” Dr. Booth said languidly, “that will earn you a detention, as well as a five-hundred-word monograph on the etymology and historical significance of the term douche bag, due to me by Monday.” He raised an eyebrow until Fletcher mumbled an apology. I glanced at Kevin Kelly, who was looking down at his textbook as if engrossed by something he was reading, but then I saw him smile, briefly.

  Later that day, Fritz and I were sitting in the Brickhouse drinking Cokes and sharing a large paper cup of fries when we saw Fletcher and Diamond, sitting about ten feet away at a corner table half-hidden by an ancient pinball machine. I avoided Fletcher the way you would avoid walking through a mud puddle, but Diamond was a different matter. He was in our history class, too, but we acted as if we didn’t see each other. We had hardly spoken since the end of our third form year, never really getting past the water buffalo incident. I wanted to fix our friendship, but I was too awkward and clueless to know how. I felt an ache like a sour tooth whenever we saw each other and he cut his eyes away from me. Now he was sitting in the Brickhouse, talking with Fletcher. In a moment of paranoia, I wondered if they were talking about me.

  “Well, if it isn’t the Huns,” someone said, and I turned to see Kevin Kelly leaning back against a nearby counter and smiling. Two other third formers were with him, grinning at us.

  Fritz nodded in greeting, then turned to me. “Want to study tonight for the Euro test?” he asked. “Booth said it’d be easy, which means two essay questions instead of three.”

  “Sure,” I said, popping a french fry into my mouth. “We oughtta—”

  “So how’d you get a nickname like ‘the Huns’?” Kevin Kelly asked.

  In a sad tone, Fritz said, “By slaughtering those who interrupted us.”

  “Our fallen foes are many,” I added, taking a sip of my Coke.

  Kevin smirked. “How alliterative,” he said. “Very Beowulf.” Next to him, one of his sidekicks chortled.

  I looked at Fritz. “Methinks he is trying to impress us.”

  “With the emphasis on trying,” Fritz said.

  “As in trying too hard?”

  “Or that he’s being very trying.” Fritz glanced over at Kevin’s sidekicks, who were looking back and forth between him, me, and Kevin. “That means difficult to deal with, or severely straining the powers of endurance,” Fritz told them.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Impressive.”

  Fritz shrugged. “Latin class,” he said, reaching for another fry.

  Kevin wasn’t so easily put off. “Tum podem extulit horridulum,” he said to Fritz.

  “I get horridulum,” I said. “I mean, I guess it means ‘horrible,’ right? What?” I said as Fritz shook his head. “You know I take French.”

  Fritz grinned. “He just told me I’m talking shit,” he said to me. Then Fritz raised his hand, fingers together as if he were a food connoisseur tasting an excellent dish, and said to Kevin, “Exemplum de simia, quae, quando plus ascendit, plus apparent posteriora eius.” This one I knew, if only because Fritz was fond of this saying of Saint Bonaventure and would repeat it often in our dorm room: Just like an ape, the more one climbs, the more one shows one’s ass. I laughed when I saw Kevin’s face darken as he translated the Latin in his head. He licked his lips.

  “I don’t think ‘Huns’ is really the right epithet for you two,” he said, loudly enough for those at a f
ew nearby tables to look our way.

  I nodded. “It doesn’t really capture our intellectual acumen, no.”

  Kevin said, “I was thinking more like ‘the Nazis.’ ”

  His sidekicks laughed at that, one of them high-fiving Kevin, who continued to look at us. There was something hard in his smirk, a cruel intelligence that took pleasure in scoring points off a target. And he had scored with the Nazi reference—Fritz was angry. “Watch who you’re calling a Nazi,” Fritz said, his tone brittle. “My grandfather fought in World War Two.”

  Kevin’s eyebrows rose in mock admiration. “My grandfather was a swimming coach who liked little boys,” he said. “Not all of us have rich daddies or war heroes in our families.”

  “What is your problem?” Fritz said, his voice rising on the final word so it nearly cracked.

  “Oh, that stings,” Kevin said softly, his eyes on Fritz. “Don’t like that, do you?”

  “Shut it, Kelly,” I said, my voice sharp.

  “Or what?” he asked in the same soft voice. “You’re going to punch me in the face in front of all these people?” His eyes on me, Kevin gestured around the room at the students now openly staring at us. I realized Diamond and Fletcher were among them. Fletcher was turned around in his seat to face us, while Diamond looked on impassively.

  “I don’t like being made fun of,” Kevin said. “Or having people look down on me.”

  “We don’t look down on —” I started.

  “Oh bullshit,” Kevin said. “I’m a freshman—sorry, a third former who’s got the balls to take your fourth form history class. Of course you look down on me, just like Fletcher Dupree does.”

  Made uncomfortable by this bald assertion of what was basically the truth, I glanced at Fletcher, who glared at me as if I were the one who had just accused him of being a snob. Loudly, Fletcher said, “The hell is wrong with you, Glass? You gonna let this pissant keep jerking you off?”

  My general irritation with Fletcher flared at this, but then Kevin spoke. “Interesting choice of words, Fletcher,” he said coolly, “considering how you jerk off every night in the upstairs bathroom in Rhoads.”