(Page 2 of 2)
The boy blinks, presents a fairly decent poker face. “Just so you know, there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Vang had a lot of enemies, you know. Rivals. They were always talking shit about him.”
“Well, whatever the case, it’s pretty well-documented that he was a Nazi apologist, right? That he published anti-semitic pamphlets in the sixties and seventies. That he was involved with outlawed occult groups in Sweden. Norden Neopaganism — whatever the hell that is. That he was convicted of assaulting two of his female followers.”
“Yeah, there’s that stuff.” The boy nods unhappily. “Though we’re more interested in his writing and his ideas than his life, you know.”
“Can you separate those things?”
“We do with other writers. In your class back then I remember you told us how Ezra Pound was a fascist jerk, but we should read his poetry anyways.”
Paul is unprepared for this ready defense, hesitates. “James, I’m pretty sure from what I just watched that you’re not having literary discussions here. So what are you talking about then? What is this group about?”
“I mean we do talk about the novels. Sometimes. Though yeah, we mostly focus on other stuff these days.” The boy shifts his feet, looks almost bashful. “It’s hard to explain to someone outside the group.”
“Try.”
“It’s not the Nazi stuff. I promise. We’re not into that. I’m like a quarter Jewish.” The boy cocks his head. “I mean, in the beginning a bunch of us got into Vang’s novels, but then we got more into his ideas about the natural universe, about Norse ritual power, you know, sacred conduits, sources and destinations. We just thought it would be cool to meet and appreciate those ideas together.”
“What do you mean appreciate?”
James Pelish squints. “See, I’m not sure how much I can say. I guess we view ourselves as a secret society really. Sort of like the Freemasons.”
“Tell me what you can.”
“In a way, we’re just testing some things that Vang proposed. Experiments, you know. Different rituals. Incantations. Invocations.”
“You’re talking about magical spells?”
The boy scowls. “He never called them that.”
“What was the sticky stuff on the chalkboards?”
“Tree sap.” The boy looks sheepish again. “We only did that once. We tried to wash it off.”
“Why were you putting tree sap on the chalkboards, James?”
“You know, for special symbols. Sigils.” The boy shrugs. “Runes. You know, like there’s Sowelu. And triple Ansuz. Tiwaz ultimate.”
“Runes.” Paul sighs, nods. “Okay. James, I don’t think I want to hear anymore. It’s a free country. You can do whatever you want at home. But maybe a college campus isn’t the most comfortable fit for this secret society of yours. Especially given the political climate the last few years, I don’t think either the administration or the student press is going to be that understanding about Nordic neopaganism or Kristian Vang.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“And I do hope you’re thinking about Vang critically, what he believed, what he stood for. The kind of person he was. I mean, he definitely was on the wrong side of an awful lot of things. Right?”
“Yeah.” James nods. “Probably.”
“Also, I hope you understand that I can’t be involved further. I’ll admit this is somewhat my fault. For not looking into this as thoroughly as I should have. That’s on me. But I’m going to have to withdraw my sponsorship. Okay?”
“Sure. I just thought . . .” The boy squints. “I remember in your class when we talked about unpopular ideas, unpopular writers. That unit we did on banned books and censorship.”
Paul can remember those things when he strains, that unit taught all those years ago. Until some angry alumni parents made a stink about one of the banned books he’d assigned. And then his chair and dean didn’t leap to Paul’s defense in the way he’d expected. He remembers a stuffy conference room, a semi-circle of unhappy expressions focused on him. It seems so distant. The unrecognizable person he was then, the grinning face in the over-exposed photo on his faculty bookstore discount card, taken his first week here, thirty years old and fresh out of grad school. As remote now as that other, younger face of James Pelish.
Paul looks at the sad-eyed kid in front of him, toward the others in the room beyond, Daisy Mulgrew’s wan face peeking anxiously out the door glass. So they’ll go back to their comic book store now to perform their incantations, to whisper about supernatural forces so much more exciting than their lives. It’s depressing.
“Okay, James. I’m going to leave now. I guess it doesn’t hurt if you want to finish out whatever you’re doing tonight since you’re all here. Just promise you’ll leave the chalkboards alone. Okay?”
“Okay. Thanks, Professor Coronado.”
Paul starts for the parking lot, out into the still night, too late to do much but drive home and go to bed, an evening wasted on nonsense.
His name placard is finally installed, Paul sees with pleasure and a little disbelief when he turns the corner to his office the next morning, reminds himself to email his thanks, doesn’t notice until he’s closer that the new placard is askew, just a few degrees off horizontal though enough to offend the eye. He tries to straighten it by hand, but it’s fixed tight. Paul struggles a while, curses. So now he will need to call Muller and those idiots at physical maintenance again, submit another work ticket for them to ignore. And he doesn’t have time for any of this when he still hasn’t prepared for class, hasn’t even had time to check his email.
Paul senses someone behind him, feels the focused scowl before he turns and sees Irene Kotsovolos in her blocky cardigan at the end of the corridor. He starts to wave, but she’s already darting away.
Then Toni Larisse from next door has emerged, is beside Paul, smiling over her NPR mug. This alone is unusual. She’s migrated up to the fourth floor for reasons similar to his, to stay out of the fray. They usually respect each other’s solitude.
“Did they find you?” Toni asks, sipping her tea.
“Did who find me?” Paul continues yanking at the placard.
“The campus cops.” Toni gestures down the hall. “They were here looking for you.”
“For me?” Paul laughs, though he does recall a few troubling details now, the crowd of students milling around the main office on his way in, a few uniforms mixed in maybe, some hubbub he thought best to avoid.
Toni is still beside him, still sipping tea and eying him with hungry curiosity. Paul is about to brush her off, but her eyes are beyond him, on Irene Kotsovolos again, he sees when he turns, the young woman leading two uniformed police and a grim-faced woman in a suit.
“Professor Coronado?” the grim-faced woman says.
The conversation with the three police officers in Paul’s office is brief and baffling, cryptic questions about the meeting he attended the previous night, about James Pelish, about the boy with the missing tooth, who has the preposterous name Reynolds McMaster. The questions make more sense after the police have left and the campus alert email arrives.
The missing girl is more recognizable in the email’s photo than in the fuzzy driver’s license picture the detective showed him, is definitely the frizzy-haired girl from last night, the girl with the cold, Daisy Mulgrew. In this picture she’s a few years younger, smiling diffidently, standing beside an open car door in a baseball shirt and shorts. He recognizes the tangled bangs and upturned nose.
The text from the English department chair arrives while Paul is still studying Daisy Mulgrew’s timid, hopeful smile.
“paul it’s sharon come down here right away plz”
Paul does head down, ducking through the grim-faced crowds still crowded around the front office desk. Sharon greets him, tight-lipped, closes her office door behind them. Though Sharon’s a couple of years younger than Paul, she’s already taken on the haggard, burdened look of upper administrators, blonde bob gone dull silver. She takes off her reading glasses, massages her eye sockets.
“Paul, I’ve been directed to refer you to Megan Park — she’s one of the university’s attorneys — before you talk anymore to the police or the press or to anyone really. You’re welcome to retain your own representation as well.” She peers at him over her glasses. “I get the sense that might be a good idea.”
“Okay, just hold on. I have no idea what’s going on here. This girl, Daisy, she’s only been missing since last night, right? Is it possible she just stayed over somewhere? A boyfriend’s?”
Sharon licks her lips.
“It’s just, if you’d seen these kids at the meeting last night. They’re a bunch of weirdos, sure. But they didn’t seem dangerous.” Paul laughs. “I mean, don’t the police usually wait forty-eight hours before everybody goes apeshit like this?”
Sharon moves swiftly to her office door, peers out the glass before she turns back to him. “They didn’t release this to the press. And you can’t tell anyone. Some of Daisy’s personal belongings were found in the dumpster back of ESB. Somebody had tried to burn them.”
“Oh,” Paul says. “Oh, Jesus.”
“Look, I’m hoping she turns up too, that this is just some drama.” Sharon sighs. “But if you talk to anyone, you can’t talk like you did just now, right? So dismissive and . . .” She makes a face. “You understand that, don’t you?”
“Of course. I’m not an idiot.”
Sharon glances at him coolly, says nothing.
“I didn’t even know who he was, this Kristian Vang. I just signed their form because I felt bad about not returning an email. I had no idea what they were –”
Sharon holds up a hand. “I don’t think you should tell me anymore. Okay, Paul? I honestly don’t want to know anymore.”
The investigation, over the following months and through the winter break, turns up nothing. No Daisy Mulgrew. No charges laid though there’s talk for a time about persons of interest, photos of James Pelish and the boy with the missing tooth published in the city newspaper. Megan Park, as it turns out, is good at her job. After that initial police interview and one other brief talk with Megan present in which Paul is allowed to say virtually nothing, he isn’t called in again. Soon enough there are new scandals, new candlelight vigils. Embezzlement in the athletic director’s office. A star volleyball player dead in a car crash. The conquistador statue pulled down one night, replaced with a crude effigy of the University President in morion helmet. It’s amazing how quickly the whole thing passes, becomes just a footnote of departmental lore, a whispered joke in the back row of faculty meetings about Coronado’s murder cult.
It’s over then, except for the occasional dream, because, though he could never tell anyone, Paul has begun to dream about the girl, Daisy, a few times a week, usually the two of them sitting together in a long classroom.
“Troilus and Cressida?” he asks her one night. “That was it, right? Your paper?”
“Uh uh.” She shakes her head.
Someone unseen is lecturing at the classroom’s front, a dull monotone that nearly drowns out their whispers.
“I know it wasn’t The Tempest? Or wait. Was it?”
Dream Daisy shakes her head, blows her nose into her wad of tissue, stares sadly beyond Paul.
He’s about to ask then what he really wants to know, where exactly she is, if she’s all right, though he feels embarrassed, though his words keep getting swallowed by that droning, insistent voice. And then he’s either forgotten her name or else she’s become someone else, transformed into another, forgettable, frizzy-haired white girl he’ll have trouble remembering even while the semester is on. And so he doesn’t ask his questions, just wakes.
Paul is hurrying to the first meeting with his spring Thomas More senior seminar, is scanning a printout of the first day roster, sees the name near the bottom at the same moment he enters the classroom and nearly drops the page. He glances around at the kids staring glumly back at him over their new textbooks, hopes for a time he’s imagined the name on the roster until he spots the sunken, haunted eyes in the back row.
Paul goes through the first day business automatically, trying not to look more than he has to at the back, at the army surplus pack leaning into the aisle there. He rushes through the syllabus and the first assignment description, adjourns early, says he’ll see them all on Wednesday. The whole time he can feel that he’s sweating along his brow and upper lip, that he’s talking too quickly, that he can’t seem to draw a full breath.
And now, as the students file out, James Pelish is before him, waiting patiently, and though Paul would very much like to leave with the others, he waits too. Under the classroom’s harsh fluorescent lights, James looks older, or maybe simply looks his age: wrinkled around the eyes, sallow-skinned and dissipated from twelve years of undergraduate eating. His beard, thicker now, is threaded with grey.
“Hey, Professor Coronado,” the boy says finally, offers his familiar, timid smile.
“Hi.” Paul glances around. Though most of the others have left, a pair of girls are trailing, maybe spectating.
“Look, James –”
“Before you say anything, can I explain? So I only need one more required course for my major. But it’s got to be pre-1800 Brit lit. I already tried Professor DeLisle’s Milton class, but she dropped me. I think maybe she recognized my name from . . .” The boy shrugs.
“I can’t say I blame her.”
James Pelish smiles. “But see, I just need this one class. The reason I didn’t transfer away like some of the others is because I started here at SFTU, and I want to finish here. I was thinking, since you taught my first English class, it would almost be kind of fitting, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m sorry. I’m going to have to drop you too.”
“I mean, I’m hoping you’ll change your mind.”
“I’m not.”
The boy nods, sighs. “Well, I guess it’s going to take me a little longer to get out of here then. Though I don’t mind. I kind of like coming back to be honest.”
The curious girls in the doorway have left. The boy leans in now, and Paul smells stale tobacco and the sourness of unlaundered clothes. “Just so you know, I didn’t do anything, Professor Coronado. None of us did.”
Paul closes his notes inside his binder. “Okay, James, I have to get going.”
“They questioned us like nine, ten times. Different groups of cops and prosecutors. They held us overnight twice.
In the end, they had to let us go because we were telling them the truth.”
“Right.”
“We honestly don’t know where she is.” There is something imploring in the boy’s face, in his sunken eyes, along with something else, an even deeper need or burden. Paul wonders what exactly he will do if the boy confides, confesses, says something terrible. He would like to not be here, would like to be at home now, eating leftover lasagna and catching up on his DVR queue.
James leans in further. “I mean I don’t know where she is specifically.”
“James, if there’s something important you haven’t told the police, you should be talking to them. Not me.”
“I just thought you might want to know that Sidun’s okay. Sorry, that’s what we call her. In our group, I mean. Sidun’s a goddess, you know. A Norse –”
“Yes, I know.” Paul rubs his eyes.
“Anyways, I thought you might want to know too that she’s gone away because she chose to. That she’s the only one who can know the destination. Now that she’s a traveler, I mean.”
“What are you talking about? What do you . . .” Paul shuts his eyes. “Forget it. Just forget it.”
“Sure. Forget it.” The shy smile reappears, the boy watching him. “So, another thing. A lot of our group dropped out or transferred. But one or two of us plus a few new people are still meeting. At Stormcloud. You’re welcome to come by any time if you–”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. You seemed interested before.”
“Why did you think I’d want to know that? I don’t.”
James Pelish stiffens, licks his lips, nods finally. “You know, it takes me a long time to figure things out. Longer than most people. Maybe that’s why I’ve been at this place so long, taking all these classes. I mean, I’ve probably taken as many as you’ve taught by now, huh?” The boy’s laughter is dry and mirthless. “A lot of what you said back then, in that first class I took with you freshman year, it really did stick with me. How learning is a lifetime process. How there’s power in language, power in art. How art can point the way, show us how to question things. Question society. Question reality even.”
Paul sighs. “James, I was just doing my job. Trying to get kids excited about books.”
“I mean, sure. I can see that now. But it really did change the way I thought. It changed me.” The boy is staring downward, his brow furrowed in quiet consternation. “Though now that I’ve had all this time to think on it. To think about you. I wonder if I got it all wrong.”
“I want you to leave,” Paul says, and the boy does, thankfully, lifts his heavy pack, departs.
Back at his office, at his door with its still-slanted placard, Paul does what he should have done months ago, brings the flat-head screwdriver from his drawer, finds some give under the placard’s top corner and pries hard. The placard chips first, then gives entirely, though it’s still there, Paul sees, though it’s left part of itself on the door, a crooked remainder of plastic and epoxy.
Paul has the dream again that night. The tunnel-like classroom. The girl with her pink nostrils and her wad of tissue in her fist. Once more, they’re listening to someone lecture from the front of the room, a steady, inflectionless drone.
“It wasn’t one of the comedies, was it?” Paul asks Daisy Mulgrew. “Merry Wives?”
“No.”
“Much Ado?”
Daisy doesn’t respond, is staring beyond Paul at the podium, towards the endless, passionless drone. “God, so boring,” she sighs. “How can you stand it?”
The voice distracts Paul too, how it seems to rise in volume, a vibration he can feel in his skull and teeth. He wishes there was a way to tune it out.
“Where are you, Daisy?” Paul asks over the noise. “You need to let people know where you are. And if you’re safe. If you are safe.”
“I don’t know how it’s your business. Why you even care.”
“I do. I mean I don’t like to think about what might have happened. But I do care.” That noise again, the droning. “Just tell me. Are you happy at least? Where you are now? Where you’ve gone to?”
“This guy really is terrible, isn’t he?” She nods toward the podium, sighs.
Paul nods.
“It’s like torture.”
“Right.”
“Just the worst.”
“It’s me.” Paul says finally, unhappily. “That’s me that’s talking.” He says this because he only now recognizes it, his lecture on Thomas Wyatt. A talk from old notes he could do in his sleep, that he is doing in his sleep, some lucid part of him recognizes.
“I didn’t know.” The girl’s face shows neither embarrassment nor apology. She blows her nose again louder, her nostrils pinker.
“Was it MacBeth? Your paper. I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. Right? Girls like you always like MacBeth.”
Daisy shakes her head, is looking in the other direction now, where the door must be.
The droning voice continues, flattens, almost a chant. It no longer seems human. Is it really him? And how could he be both lecturing and listening? Though he doesn’t care, just wishes it would stop.
“Maybe if you just gave me the decade of the play, I could work it out from –”
“I’m leaving,” Daisy Mulgrew says and stands.
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“I’ve got to go. I can’t take any more of this.”
“Please wait,” Paul tells Daisy Mulgrew, tries to stand too, though he’s unable, fixed in place like in a dream, which is where he is, he somehow knows. He wishes Daisy wouldn’t disappear again, wouldn’t leave him alone in this place with this voice. But she is leaving, is nearly out of sight.
“You know, I’d like to leave too,” he calls after her.
“Sorry,” she says, gives a last snort into the tissue, heads off. “Really.”