by Tim Johnston
THE CURRENT
A NOVEL BY
TIM JOHNSTON
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2019
For Uncle Rick & Tante Kathy,
for showing a grateful Nef how it’s done:
with wit, laughter & love all the way.
And for my mother, Judy Johnston,
who continues to lead our little clan with
such grace, good humor, constancy & love.
He whispered this last so low that it was inaudible
to anyone who did not love you.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Across the River and Into the Trees
Contents
PART I
Chapter 1
PART II
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
PART III
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
PART IV
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
PART V
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Acknowledgments
Also by Tim Johnston
About the Author
PART I
1
The two girls, young women, met for the first time the day they moved in together, first semester of that first year of college, third floor of Banks Hall, a north-facing room that overlooked green lawns and treetops and streams of students coming and going on the walkways below. Roommated by mysterious processes, perhaps a computer algorithm, perhaps a tired administrator plowing his way through a thousand folders, the girls tried at first to become friends, then tried simply to get along, and finally put in for reassignment, each without telling the other, and by the end of the winter holidays had both moved into new rooms with new roommates. If they saw each other on campus after that, they pretended they hadn’t; they looked away, they looked at the sky, they received phone alerts of highest importance. They seemed to have made a pact of mutual invisibility, and this pact might have gone on forever, all the way through college at least, if not for a literature class in the fall of their sophomore year.
The class—The Romantics, it was called, like the band—was crammed into a too-small classroom, a space not much bigger than those dorm rooms, and yet neither girl wanted to be the one to drop, but instead kept coming to class and taking her seat. Three weeks into the semester one of the girls, arriving late, had no choice but to sit next to the other, and from then on they made a point of it: sitting shoulder to shoulder, nearly, in the crowded classroom, eyes on the professor, notebooks open . . . a game of academic chicken that neither girl felt too great about, to be honest, but felt even less great about losing, and so on it went. Until, one day, one of the girls—the one named Caroline—turned to the other girl, whose name was Audrey, and asked to borrow a pen, setting off a backpack search of such intensity that the professor herself, prowling her narrow track of floor at the head of the class, halted, one eyebrow cocked, while the girl hunted, and dug, and at last fetched up from the very last place it could have been a plain blue Bic with bite marks on the cap. The pen passed from hand to hand, and in this simple way the girls started over. Their story reset itself, and they became friends.
On February 4 of that same school year, Caroline Price turns twenty, and two days later at the Common Grounds Café her friend Audrey Sutter is telling her that her father is sick, and she needs to get home and she doesn’t have a car, and the Visa her father gave her is maxed out on tuition, and so she’s wondering, what she wanted to ask is, could she possibly borrow $150 for bus fare, she can pay Caroline back when . . . well, as soon as she can? And Caroline Price, sipping black coffee, shudders at some inner picture—perhaps the interior of that bus: God-knows-how-many miles up to the Arctic to see your sick—your dying?—father and nothing to keep you company but the smell of diesel and the cold, droning miles and probably some mullet-headed yahoo with halitosis just waiting for you to take those headphones off, like you would ever take them off!
It’s not the Arctic, Audrey could remind her, it’s Minnesota, but to a Georgia girl like Caroline it might as well be. Even Memphis, less than a three-hour ride north from her hometown, is too much. An ice storm last week, a tree limb snapping the power line behind her apartment, and all weekend in Troy’s dorm room with its stink of boys, or in the library, or right here in the café, before the city got the power line repaired . . .
Audrey sitting meanwhile across the table, holding Caroline’s image in her wet blue eyes—those pale, Arctic eyes—waiting, until at last Caroline says, Sure, of course, what time does your bus leave, I’ll drive you to the station, and like that the storm lifts from Audrey’s face, and wiping the tears from her cheeks she says, like one who has just regained her senses after a blow to the head: “Caroline, you look so nice today. What’s going on?”
Because, as Caroline herself would be the first to admit, unless she’s off to see Troy on a Friday night, or unless she’s going out dancing with her volleyball girls, she tends to look like what she is: a sweats-and-sneakers kind of girl, a big, loose athlete, on her way to or from practice. But when she decides to look good? When she hits the shoes and skirts and makeup? It’s like she swooped down from some other world, a sudden alter-Caroline of extreme beauty and dazzle.
But it’s nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning and Caroline is on her way to class, so—what gives?
A good question, a fair question, but Caroline must fly—running late again, always running late, Audrey watching through the glass as her friend fast-walks toward campus in her short jacket and short skirt and her tights, leaning into a cold headwind that seems to push at her with actual purpose, as if to discourage her, stop her even, turn her back—Go back to your room, Caroline Price, go back to your bed, curl up under the heavy quilt the old women of home sewed just for you, no warmth like that in the world, not even a boy’s . . .
Caroline’s boot heels clock-clocking on the sidewalk, her long fingers stuffed as far as they’ll go into the fake pockets of her jacket, batting tears from her thickened lashes and asking herself too, perhaps, what’s going on. A meeting with a professor, that’s all. After class, if she has time, said the email. So, OK. Lose the Adidas and the
hoodie for a change, but that’s it, effortwise.
It’s not anything sexual, this looking nice—she has a boyfriend, after all.
And the professor is old—like, forties-old.
But there are girls she knows who want that A so badly, who learned in middle school—hell, grammar school—how these things worked. The world. Power.
But that power is a false power, girl, says her memaw. With her dentures and her bent little body. That power will turn on you like a stray dog.
And the profs themselves, these older men, these wise and fatherly teachers; you could always tell who they had their eye on. And you watched it progress over the semester, the favored girl bringing it for a 9 a.m. class: the clothes, the hair, the earrings, the lashes.
But that’s not what this is. Caroline would wear a damn Snuggie to class if she felt like it, and she would earn her grade according to her performance, just as she’d earn a win on the volleyball court where there are no grades and no flirting, only muscle and sweat and the unambiguous counting of points.
As for the perfume . . . well, a girl wanted to smell nice when she looked nice. Just a touch, a fingerpint, on the neck. That was for you and not for anyone else. Certainly not for some forty-year-old man who wanted to see you after class, if you had time.
But it was the good stuff, Audrey knew, having caught its scent over the smell of coffee even before her friend sat down: the little French bottle Caroline bought on her trip to New York City last summer, and the scent of which Audrey now associates with Caroline almost as intensely as the potent green slime she’d rub into her legs before practice and before each game and sometimes, in those old dorm room days, before going to bed. And it’s this weird remix of scents—French perfume and overpowering muscle gel—that Audrey smells as she, too, leaves the café, stepping into that same cold wind but the wind pushing at her back as she moves in the opposite direction of Caroline—a wind not to stop her but to hurry her along home, the sooner to pack, the sooner to be ready when Caroline comes to get her, the sooner (though she knows this is not logical) to get home to her father, who of course has told her not to come, to stay in school, nothing to see here, says he, just a little touch of the inoperable cancer is all, nothing that won’t keep until you come home in the spring . . .
And with such thoughts fluttering within her it seems actually a piece of these thoughts, like an escaped fragment, when the air itself bursts into violence just above her head—a sudden flurry and a kind of shriek as a bird nearly crash-lands on her head, close enough to fan her with wingbeat, low enough to sweep something soft and alive along the part line of her hair; it’s the plush tail of a squirrel, she just sees, a juvenile, who rides like a pilot in the bird’s claws, this bird and rodent combo descending with flaps and cries to earth behind a low wall of hedges, a troubled landing that no one—she looks: students plodding head-down, locked into phones, ear-stoppered—no one but her has seen or heard.
And she steps around the hedges slowly, coming all the way around before she sees the bird—a hawk, sure enough—standing with its back to her, wings fanned out on the dirt like the wings of a broken craft, great riffling wings that become arms, crutches, here on earth, keeping the hawk upright atop the body of the squirrel; young, round-eyed squirrel, unsquirming in its cage of talons.
The hawk rotates its head halfway round, puts two black eyes on Audrey and opens its sharp beak soundlessly. Audrey standing there doing nothing. Saying nothing, just watching. A passive but rapt witness to this instance of wildness on a college campus. Predator and prey. The hawk watching her with those black eyes, that sharp beak, considering her—Audrey’s—intentions here, the pros and cons of waiting it out, until at last in a single high note the hawk says, You little bitch, and lifts the great wings and unhooks the talons and with one windy beat is aloft again, and with another is gone.
The young squirrel remains, wide-eyed, belly to the ground; in a state of rodent shock maybe. Or maybe it’s the dead-like stillness prey is said to adopt when all hope is lost, when it’s time simply to die. But then, suddenly, the squirrel leaps to its feet and flies into the hedges and there’s nothing where it had been, where the hawk had been, but a random patch of ground—and no one sees any of this but Audrey, and she will tell no one, not even Caroline; it’s her own personal event flown down from the sky—some kind of sign, surely, some kind of message: a last-second reprieve from death.
And so enlivened—so incited—by this vision, she takes the four wooden porchsteps of the little gray rental house in two bounds, then likewise flies up the staircase that leads to the two upstairs bedrooms and begins tossing things onto her bed like one making her own escape. Like one whose own reprieve has just been assured.
After class, as per his email, Caroline follows him down the hall and into his office and watches him close the door behind her but not all the way, no click of latch, just enough gap to keep it private but not too private in the cramped little room—“Have a seat, please.” Two old leather chairs from somebody’s yard sale. Books everywhere. Authors on the walls: old dead white men in offhand moments, as if he’d known these men himself, snapped the shots himself between cigars and whiskeys in the sepia past.
She sits, crossing her legs, and he takes the other leather chair and crosses his too, showing her a length of brown dress sock and a light-brown wingtip, the nose of the wingtip so close to her knees the decorative perforations seem olfactory, almost, like pores by which he might sniff her. The office is so small she can smell the French perfume like there’s another girl in the room, and her heart thuds with embarrassment.
He doesn’t look anywhere below her throat, his eyes a light clean steady blue, and so it’s surprising when he says, “You look nice today,” and keeps his eyes on her face. “Is it a game day?”
“No,” she says, “it’s Tuesday.” As if everyone, including an English professor, knows the women’s volleyball schedule.
“Ah,” he says, and nods, and she nods too in the silence that follows.
“So,” he says, turning to lift a sheet of paper from the desk, then turning back. “I just wanted to ask you about your response to last week’s reading.” And holding the paper before him he reads: “‘Highly accomplished work of the post-9/11 epoch, incorporating multiple points of view to great effect, but to what end? Empires, entire civilizations vanish, so what matter these living few? These little human lives?’”
He holds the paper, his eyes on the sentences. As if with patience they might replicate. Spawn others. She thinks about recrossing her legs and decides against it. Audrey Sutter’s flushed, wet face comes to mind. The way a tear dove through the latte foam and left its neat tunnel.
The professor floats the paper back to the desktop, turns back again, and fixes her with those eyes.
“So—what’s the deal here?” he says, and Caroline glances down at her knees, brushes at the topmost one, and when she looks up again he looks up too, just an instant late.
What is the deal here, Prof? she thinks. How do these things generally work? Who makes the first move? In the movies, in a book, how would it go? Would I click the door shut or would you?
“What do you mean?” she says finally.
“I think you know what I mean,” he says. “Why do you make so little effort with these responses? You are a smart, articulate young woman, and I . . . well, I—” He falters, and just then a group of students pass by the gapped door—boys, laughing and cussing down the hall. Shit, they say. Motherfucker, they say.
The professor clears his throat. He folds his hands together and rests them on his knee. He looks her in the eye again.
“Caroline,” he says, drawing the name out like it’s something sweet and melty in his mouth. “Come on, now. Am I asking too much?”
What are you asking? she’d like to ask. What do you want from me?
But in the end she’s only sorry—very sorry, she says. She understands. She’ll try harder next time, she says, even as sh
e feels pretty certain that what he really wants is another excuse to call her into this little room. That what he really wants is to open up one of those folded hands and let it fall through space, through every kind of alarm going off in his heart, and place it, under the eyes of the dead authors, smack onto her knee.
And then what, girl? What happens when the ol’ dog wants a bite?
After that it’s back across campus for Caroline, to Troy’s dorm—she is dating a boy who still lives in a dorm—and ten hard bangs on the door before it unsticks like a gummy eye and there stands Phil, the roommate, in nothing but boxers. Annoyed and bony and pale as any cadaver, giving her the up and down—the skirt, the tights—and saying finally, “He’s not here.” A fact she already knows by the smell coming off him, the stink of burned weed among several notes of stink. Because Troy does not abide smoking of any kind in the dorm room, most especially weed, which just a whiff of on his clothes could get him kicked off the team. Good-bye scholarship. Good-bye college. Good-bye warm Caroline in his bed.
“Where then?” she says, checking her phone again for the time. For the text reply that won’t come; she knows his class schedule, his practice schedule, his feeding schedule. As he knows hers.
Bony shoulders rise and fall and Phil says, “Cannot say, man, as I am not his keeper.”
She looks beyond him, and Phil opens the door wide for her to look. Beds and desks and clothes and pizza boxes and socks and Troy’s gym bag and his Nikes, and she knows just by looking, just by smelling, that he did not spend the night here. And there it goes, inside her chest: her heart stepping up to a ledge and tottering, dizzied, ready to fall. It’s the sensation of losing at the net, of rising up for the block and knowing she’s failed even before the ball goes sizzling by her ear to boom against the floor—a sound for her heart alone. Beaten, it says. Outplayed, schooled.
“You’re welcome to come in and wait,” Phil says. “Smoke a little bud, if you like.”
Weighing his chances, she thinks. Liking the look of her legs in those tights. She sees herself in the skirt and tights and understands she’s come not to see Troy but to be seen by him, at this hour, looking good.