by Zan, Koethi
“Wait, I should give you my info.” I reached into my bag and pulled out a scrap of paper. After writing my cell number, I handed it over to her, careful to make sure our fingers didn’t touch.
I looked back at her as I left the reading room. She sat perfectly still, watching me walk out, her eyes following my progress, her face as indecipherable as ever.
CHAPTER 19
As I crossed back over the campus and passed through the heavy swinging doors of the Greek Revival psychology building, I remembered my own days in college, the days after I had escaped and was starting over, this time at NYU, this time alone.
In retrospect it seemed that I hadn’t looked up from the ground the whole time I was there. I had spent three years in virtual solitude, cramming in a degree in record time by taking extra classes at night and during the summers.
That second time through, though, I hadn’t had the same desire for a normal college experience as I’d had before. I didn’t want to go to parties. I didn’t study in the library. In fact, I didn’t even want anyone to know who I was. I never spoke to my classmates, never ate at the school cafeterias, never went to a single extracurricular event. The school was large enough to disappear in, and I tried. How I tried.
It was also there that I first started using my new name, a name I would never grow accustomed to. I always had to pause for a second before I signed anything, training myself to write it. I never remembered to look up when professors used it in class. I was sure they thought I was dense. Until I turned in my tests, that is, and they realized I had one gift after all.
I majored in math, taking solace in the reliability of a field that offered nothing but solutions. I loved the way the numbers lined up in neat rows, a problem sometimes taking six or seven pages of my angled script, number after number, symbol after symbol, sine after cosine.
In my room, I kept all my class notebooks within arm’s length on the shelf by my bed. If I couldn’t sleep at night, I could pull one out and pass my eyes slowly over their ordered magnificence, admiring how these problems at least yielded the same answers every time.
Staying true to Jennifer in my own way, my concentration was in statistics. I finished a master’s degree in a year. The professors had begged me to get my Ph.D., but I’d had enough of sitting in classes with other students by then. At that point, the sheer volume of people I had to interact with every day had started to wear on me. My phobias had started to mount. Even the largest lecture halls felt claustrophobic. I could hear, with penetrating clarity, every cough or whisper or pencil dropped in the room, making me jump as the sound echoed in my head.
And when classes ended, there were suddenly too many bodies in motion, bumping into one another needlessly as they put on coats and scarves. I would always sit perfectly still after everyone else left, alone in the auditorium, as I waited for the hallways to clear enough to afford me a wide berth. So my body could float through space and time, untouchable, untouched.
Pulling myself out of the past, I looked down the long corridor of the psychology department. It was dotted with students, standing in groups or pairs, with a few lone stragglers at the margins. They looked so carefree, so alive. Some chatted, while others were wrapped up in their own heads, maybe thinking about their course work or the date they had last night. You couldn’t see behind the happiness to the traumas that must have loomed there. I knew statistically they had to exist, but you would never know it just by looking.
But there, with the sun streaming through the skylight in the renovated portion of the building, it didn’t seem as though trouble could have ever touched these students with their smooth skin and full-throated laughs. Here they were, almost at the end of the school year, preparing to go on to their internships, summer jobs, grad school. I would never know what they were getting over. Maybe no one would ever know, and maybe that was the way it should be. Maybe that’s what well-adjusted people do—they actually adjust. And that’s what it means to be young and poised for life—you put your past behind you, whatever it is, and you force yourself to be free.
I wiped a tear from my eye and walked by them all. The security guard at the front desk didn’t look up from his newspaper. I shook my head, thinking of all the dangers he could be missing, all the while grateful to be ignored. This time I noticed a small sign with neat type pointing out the direction of the faculty offices, and I followed it back to the hallway I’d been down earlier.
I passed the row of traditional oak doors, the upper half of each a panel of frosted glass marked with a name in black letters. Next to Adele’s, as she had said, was Professor David Stiller’s. His door was open just slightly, and as I pushed it gently, I could see no one was in there.
It was a large office, with tall windows facing the quad. An enormous oak desk stood in front of the window, and a bookcase covered the wall facing it, filled up and overflowing. I fingered the volumes, mostly psychology books on various arcane topics, and a few standard statistics manuals I recognized.
Then my eye happened to catch a low shelf behind the desk on the floor. The works there looked different, unlike textbooks. I leaned over to get a closer look and read the titles quickly. 100 Days of Sodom, Juliette, Story of the Eye, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. This was Tracy’s territory.
Just as I pulled out my notebook to write down the names to show her, the door opened behind me.
“Excuse me? Can I help you?” came a deep voice.
I jumped, dropped my pen, and watched it clatter to the floor and roll under the heavy desk. I turned to face David Stiller. He was tall, one might even say handsome, with brown hair and eyes so black, their pupils were indistinguishable within them. It had a disconcerting effect.
He looked at me expectantly, waiting for an explanation for who I was and what I was doing. Startled, I was having trouble collecting my thoughts, so I dropped to my hands and knees and awkwardly reached for my pen under the desk.
“Oh, hi …” I said, stalling as best I could. “I’m Caroline Morrow. I’m doing some research and wondered if you might have some time to talk to me.” I grabbed my pen quite easily in the end, so to gain time, I flicked it farther over to the wall.
“Wait,” he said, with slight irritation, I thought. “Allow me.” He walked over behind the desk, gracefully plucked the pen from the floor, and handed it to me in one swift gesture.
“You were saying?” he pressed.
“Yes, sorry.” I smoothed my shirt and pushed my hair out of my face, trying to regain some semblance of composure. “I was saying that I am Caroline Morrow.” I didn’t reach out my hand, and neither did he. “And I’m in the sociology department.” I motioned back toward the opposite end of campus, as though he wouldn’t know its physical location. “I’m writing my dissertation on Jack Derber, and I know you were starting out as a junior professor here back when he was arrested.”
Unlike Adele’s response when I mentioned Jack Derber, David Stiller actually seemed interested. His face broke into a sardonic smile, and he sat down, pointing to the chair across from him.
“Please. Have a seat. No one wants to talk about Jack anymore around here. I’m curious to hear about your project. Kind of surprised the department would sanction that research, but I guess times change. What’s your angle?”
“Angle? I don’t know about my angle. I just think there are elements of the story that have not been thoroughly explored. And I plan to do some original research, from a purely factual perspective. That’s why I picked this topic—you know, it all happened right here.” Here I was, vamping. I was impressed with myself. He was nodding encouragingly.
“I understand he was a friend of yours.” At this, the smile instantly disappeared from his face.
“Friend? No, no, no. I don’t know where you heard that. We were colleagues, but I barely knew the guy. Our work was at opposite ends of the spectrum. We were never even on a panel together. But he was definitely a star in his own right.”
“A star?”
“Come on. Surely you know by now that that’s how it works in academia. You have to be a star to get anywhere at all. Give a lot of talks, papers, symposia, you know, really make the rounds of the conference circus—I mean, circuit. You’re signing up for a demanding life.”
“And what about Adele Hinton?”
At that, his face darkened. “Oh, her. Talk about Jack Derber.” He shook his head.
“What do you mean?” I prompted.
“Well, after that whole business went down, let’s just say her talks were jam-packed. More for her notoriety than for her academic insights, if you ask me. I think everyone was waiting for some juicy tidbit about Jack Derber. Don’t quote me, but she owes her career to that case, frankly.”
“So she got a lot of attention?”
He laughed.
“I’ll say. The Portland Sun even did a profile of her back then. Ridiculously fawning. I mean, she is an attractive woman after all, so it’s not that surprising the reporter wanted to spend plenty of time with her.”
He leaned in a little closer, his eyes narrowing, looking at me to make sure I fully understood what he was suggesting. Then he went on, leaning back in his chair now and swiveling slightly to the left and right, ever so slowly.
“You know, if you really want to do some original research, there’s another angle you should consider. Jack worked a lot. He did a lot of research, had a lot of studies. Traveled constantly. His office was brimming full of papers. Files, binders. And he was incredibly protective of them. Only Adele had access to them. I know the FBI put a lockdown on all of that work pretty fast after they hauled him off. But I’m sure she got hold of something. I know it.”
He turned his chair to face the window and gazed out for a minute, thinking to himself.
Finally, he spoke, more to himself, it seemed, than to me, “Well, this has never been enough for her, of course. She wants Ivy League, doesn’t she? It only makes sense. She has a lot to live up to.”
He turned back to me.
“You probably don’t know this, but her father is one of the most prominent surgeons in Seattle. Very successful.” He smirked and shook his head, shifting forward in his seat.
“But I digress. Back to your paper. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure she’s using Jack Derber’s ideas and research. She’s the one you should talk to. There have to be a few facts there that haven’t been unearthed. I’d help you with that research in a second, if I could. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
He was barely trying to hide his jealousy of, and—it seemed to me—contempt for, Adele.
After a few more fruitless tries to get him back to Jack Derber, I stood up to leave, nearly falling over the chair as I backed out. Exiting as gracefully as I entered, I thought.
CHAPTER 20
I called Tracy several times that day but got no answer. Clearly, she was avoiding me. There was no way I could piece together what I had without her, so I decided to pay her a surprise visit, just as she had done to me.
I changed my flight that afternoon and flew into Boston rather than New York. It was good to be back on the East Coast, even if only for a few days. My real plans would take me even farther afield.
From Boston, I rented another car and took the scenic route to Northampton. I was impressed with myself for so much driving. I was no longer overtaken by debilitating panic when behind the wheel, only mildly discomfited.
I drove straight to Tracy’s apartment, whose address I had Googled earlier that day. If she could show up on my doorstep, I could show up on hers.
She lived in an old white clapboard house on a quiet, well-tended block that looked incredibly bourgeois for someone of her ilk. There were two doorbells, each with the names carefully typed out. Hers was on top. I noticed there were bars on the window of the door. Maybe Tracy didn’t feel as secure as she pretended to be.
I wondered if I would have to wait on her narrow front porch as she had waited for me, but after a minute I heard footsteps on the stairs inside. Tracy peered out at me through the window, and then the curtain flopped back into place. She hadn’t exactly looked pleased to see me, but after a brief pause I heard the lock click. An excellent lock. She opened the door quickly but not all the way.
“Now what?” she said, hand on her hip. She didn’t have makeup on and looked tired. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought she’d been crying.
“I have to talk to you. I’ve been back out to Oregon, and I have more information.”
“Well, if it isn’t the girl detective.” She shrugged her shoulders and invited me in, sounding resigned. I followed her up the stairs.
The first floor of the house was cheery, with the palest yellow on the walls and an old dark wood-framed mirror in the entryway. But as we ascended to Tracy’s apartment, the wall color shifted to a dull, muted gray. At the top of the landing I came face-to-face with a framed photograph of a man in chains. That prepared me a little for what waited on the other side of the door.
Tracy’s apartment was the antithesis of my own. The walls, which were high because the attic floor had been removed to create a huge cathedral ceiling, were painted the same gray as the stairs. They were covered in black-and-white photography and etchings. All the images were ones that would have given me nightmares if I looked at them too long. The overwhelming drabness made it seem as if Tracy had tried to make her apartment into a prison cell. And it worked. I felt trapped.
If it hadn’t been for the signs of homey disorder and the smell of brewing coffee, I might have turned to leave. One entire wall was covered with built-in bookshelves, crammed full all the way to the top, the larger hardcovers shoved in horizontally, the smaller paperbacks double-shelved. The volumes were so numerous, they spilled out onto the floor, on tabletops, in chairs, some of them open and turned upside down. Some had their places held with gnawed pencils, broken points jutting out of them.
The apartment was a single large open room, with a loft at one end for her bedroom. I could see the tip of her unmade bed from where I was, the black comforter spilling out a bit over the ledge. She had clearly been working, because in the front corner, her laptop was buzzing on the desk, and what looked like draft manuscript pages were scattered all around.
“Now you see why I was so stunned by your apartment. Have a seat,” she said.
She pointed to a chair next to her desk, which held a stack of books precariously leaning against the back of it. She walked over, lifted the pile all in one armload, and tossed it onto the plush couch. They slid across the velvet cushion, half of them landing on the floor. Tracy gestured again to the chair.
I sat down and launched into an update on my activities in Oregon. I was nervous. I wanted to sound as compelling as possible, since I hadn’t inspired much interest from Jim. Suddenly, winning Tracy over to my quest seemed like the most important thing I’d done in my life. I didn’t know if I could keep at it alone, and if she also dismissed the things I had found, I didn’t know if I had the heart to pursue the plan I’d formulated on the plane ride back.
Tracy listened quietly, raising her eyebrows with surprise when I told her about the S&M club, her eyes opening wide and her jaw dropping when I explained how I had followed the van to the warehouse. I couldn’t tell if she was surprised by what I had seen or by what I had done. Probably the latter. Finally, I told her about the books in David Stiller’s office. She shrugged that off.
“Everyone in academia reads those writers. It’s de rigueur. Foucault changed academic life forever. He gave everyone a new perspective to write about. Look, I have a whole section of my own library devoted to him. The indelible mark of too many years spent in grad school.”
She pointed to an area in the middle. I walked over. “Bataille too. I mean, he writes about sex and death. That’s all academics care about. Really all anyone cares about, as a matter of fact.”
“But doesn’t that directly tie into what Jack did to us?”
“I’m sure he
used it to justify his actions, like so many other men who want to subjugate women, while simultaneously giving it all an intellectual spin. I can easily see how he would have cottoned on to the idea of having a ‘limit-experience,’ living a life outside societal rules, et cetera. Foucault, Nietzsche, all of them. Excuse-mongers.”
I had gotten up and was perusing Tracy’s shelves as she spoke, and I found one filled with Bataille’s books. Her collection was even more extensive than David’s. I pulled out a few but froze when I saw one called The Bataille Reader.
I couldn’t believe it. There on the cover, in a white setting framed with a black border, was a drawing of a headless man. In one hand he held what looked like a heart with flames coming out of it, in the other a short knife. He had a skeleton drawn over his crotch, and his nipples were little stars. I took it over to Tracy, my hands shaking.
“Tracy, doesn’t this look like, isn’t this …”
She looked at me questioningly, clearly not seeing what I was seeing.
Finally, I spat the words out, “The brand. Isn’t this the brand?”
I pulled down the side of my jeans and underwear enough so that she could see it clearly on my hip. She looked at the picture and back at my scarred flesh. Admittedly, it was a little hard to tell, because the scar tissue had grown over the original mark, but the outline was definitely the same.
Tracy stared in silence for a moment before finally looking up to meet my eyes.
“I think you might be right. I never noticed it before. Maybe because I try to avoid looking at the goddamn thing—it’s not exactly a memento I treasure. But also, my brand is incomplete. I twisted hard to the right when the iron touched my skin, so my mark is only partially there. It makes it look very different.”
She stood up and showed me hers, in roughly the same place on her hip, though a little farther toward the back. I could see what she meant about it—half of the torso and one of the legs was missing entirely—but I also noticed that on her the imprint was a little more distinct on the upper right. I could clearly make out the knife held in the headless man’s hand.