by Micah Nathan
He continued sorting his papers. “Have you finished for the afternoon?” he said, not looking at me.
“I just got here,” I said.
Cornelius sighed and closed his eyes. “Then go home,” he said. “There’s very little for you to do today.”
I could tell by his tone that he was tired, and by tired he often meant bored, and so I left, feeling embarrassed but unsure why.
I exited the library into a gorgeous day, crisp and bright, clear sun painting the patchy snow. The storm had stripped the trees in the Quad naked, their dead leaves scattered and bunched up around their trunks in sloping piles that I kicked through, on my way to Campus Bean.
Rationally, I had difficulty accepting any of what Art and Cornelius had shown me. But if I went deeper, past my everyday mind, my skepticism began to wane. After all, I figured, past notions of how the universe operated were once held as scripture, only to be blown away like straw in a storm with every new discovery. And paradigmatic shifts weren’t even needed—I knew change occurred incrementally. Accept gravity and you accept universal law. Accept universal law and you accept earth’s place in the universe as being part of a system. Accept that, and you then seek to know how the system works, and your view goes skyward, past what you can see and toward what you can only hypothesize. This is where hermeticism and science converge, the epigram of mystics and occultists ut supra, infra. As above, below.
But I didn’t believe in a universe of infinite possibilities. I knew there were rules that reality adhered to. As knowledge expands so do limits, always ahead, so that new phenomena are kept just behind its constraints. Alchemy seemed a reversal of this—here was a quantum leap in the truest sense, past the barrier of reality as I knew it and toward darker regions, places without rules. I knew what Art would say: It’s foolish to think you’re capable of seeing the pattern for what it is. In its enormity it becomes impossible for the average mind to comprehend…
Campus Bean was busy, and after a quick scan to see if I knew anyone there, I spotted Dr. Cade at the front of the coffee line, speaking with a young kid behind the counter. I hesitated a moment, torn between leaving immediately or walking up to him. But he made the decision for me—he saw and summoned.
We sat together at a table in a darkened corner, a cup of hot chocolate in front of me and a coffee for him.
“I have been impressed with your work,” he said, brushing unseen crumbs off the lapel of his suit jacket. “So much, in fact, that I’m concerned you may be neglecting your studies in favor of my project.”
“I’m pulling all A’s,” I said. This was true, although I wasn’t sure how my grades would fare after my latest round of papers.
Dr. Cade nodded. “I’ve spoken recently with Dr. Lang,” he said. “How are things going with him?”
“Fine,” I said.
“And the time commitment isn’t too strenuous?”
“It gets a bit tight,” I said, fidgeting in my seat. “But once I’m finished with Professor Henson’s econ course, I think—”
“Would you like me to speak with Professor Henson, perhaps? Ask him to lighten the load, in lieu of your other responsibilities?”
I stared at Dr. Cade.
“That’s okay,” I said.
“Very well.” Dr. Cade stirred his coffee. “You should know that Professor Lang informed me you’re in the running for the Chester Ellis Award.”
The Chester Ellis Award was a two-thousand-dollar grant given to freshmen with a perfect GPA. Later that day I tried to write a postcard to Nana to tell her about the award, but after the first few lines I stopped and tossed the postcard in the garbage.
“Winning would be an impressive accomplishment,” Dr. Cade said. He looked pleased, and my stomach leapt. “But if it’s the money you’re most concerned with, I have been known, on occasion, to provide grants for students with special financial needs. Your pursuit of a perfect GPA should not interfere with your work on our project, agreed?”
I nodded.
“And if you do find my work interfering with your classes, please let me know and I will make sure you’re given special arrangements. My colleagues, for the most part, understand how important this project is, and I can’t imagine them interfering with our schedule, seeing how quickly the deadline approaches. The administration appreciates the importance of the Pendleton Prize, not just to me, but to Aberdeen as a whole.”
He faded off, looking away for a moment, and then returned.
“Have you thought about what you are doing for winter break?”
“I was going to stay at the house, I guess.”
Dr. Cade hmmed and sipped his coffee. “I should have told you this earlier.” He set down his cup with a delicate clink. “I’m going to Cuba for four weeks and a friend of mine—an associate professor from Oxford—is staying in Fairwich for three weeks during vacation. I offered him the use of my house.” He put the next sentence as delicately as he could. “Sole use of my house. I thought I told you when you first arrived. My apologies—I merely assumed you would be going away, like everyone else.” He shook his head and slowly steepled his hands. “This is terribly awkward,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. I tried to suppress the blush that crept up my face. My options were limited—I had saved enough money, maybe, to stay in a hotel for a few weeks. There was international student housing that remained open during the winter, but I didn’t know what Aberdeen did, if anything, for domestic students who had no place to go.
“You have no family you can stay with?”
I shook my head. “I have some friends in Chicago. A couple of my old high school friends go to Northwestern.” An absolutely random lie. I knew no one in Chicago, or anywhere else besides Stulton and Aberdeen.
“And you don’t foresee it being a problem? Staying with them for an entire month on such short notice?” He sipped from the white cup. When I didn’t answer right away he continued. “It’s simply unfair of me to expect you to make these last-minute plans. Don’t worry—I’ll explain everything to Thomas. If you—”
“Please don’t,” I said. It was the first time I had ever interrupted Dr. Cade, but my discomfort was becoming unbearable. “I’ll be fine. Wherever I stay.”
He paused and stared at me. “You’re certain?”
“Without a doubt.”
Dr. Cade nodded, as if the matter wasn’t closed, as if I could change my mind if necessary, but there was a look of relief on his face, however subtle.
Art came into my room later that evening, well past midnight, a dark form sitting on the edge of my bed while the radiators clinked and moonlight spilled in under my drawn window shade. His late-night visits no longer startled me, as I’d been awakened by him in the same manner several times since moving in. Sometimes he’d have a medical question (What are the symptoms of appendicitis? How do I know if I have an aneurysm or just a migraine?) but mostly he just wanted to talk—he was a fellow insomniac, and suffered from it far worse than I—and I’d lie back and listen to him ramble about the most obscure of topics. Chemical warfare in ancient Greece. The Parnassian movement of late-19th-century France. The works of Chretien de Troyes. He was capable of speaking for hours, in hushed, excited tones that often invaded my dreams and I’d be sleeping even as he kept on, only I’d be dreaming of Lysander’s assault upon Haliartus, or of the quest for the Holy Grail, riding horseback through some mountainous forest, my armor clanging under shafts of brilliant sun.
I sat up and asked him what he wanted.
“I need your help bringing Dan in. He’s in the back, in the garden.”
“Why do you need my help?”
“Because he’s passed out.”
I clicked on my light and Art threw his hand in front of his eyes. He looked awful. His skin was pale and sweat-slicked.
“Have you been drinking or something?” I asked him.
Art stood, unsteadily, and smoothed his shirt. “Or something. Are you going to help me or
not?”
We carried Dan inside, from his spot on the stone bench in the garden off the study. Art had to stop at one point and throw up, concealing it in the shadows of the emptied fountain. He was sweating profusely, and looked as though he might faint at any moment, but he trudged on, helping me bring Dan upstairs and into his bedroom, where we lay him on his bed and left him there, mouth open, body slack as a corpse.
“Please don’t say anything to Dr. Cade about this,” Art said afterward. He slugged a glass of water and rinsed his face in the kitchen sink. “We were so amateur about the whole thing. We found some fly agaric mushrooms in the woods, little red caps speckled with white, just like in the fairy tales. Jabir ibn-Hayyan believed the secret ingredient in Paracelsus’s Philosopher’s Stone formula lay in the Vedic soma, and it’s my understanding that this soma has since been discovered to be fly agaric. So of course we tried it, and of course we got nothing more than hallucinations, and dizziness, and severe nausea, and Dan took too much and you saw what happened to him.”
Art filled the glass with more water and gulped it down.
“But let’s forget about Jabir’s obvious mistranslation of the source material,” he said. “Which I can’t blame him for. Maybe the Vedic soma isn’t fly agaric, but some other, as-yet-undiscovered plant, mineral, whatever. And maybe if Jabir had enough time, he would have discovered this. What I’m most interested in, however, is this important question, first posed by Edward Schultes in reference to the hallucinogenic drink yaga: how did all those primitive societies, with practically no knowledge of modern chemistry, ever figure out how to activate an alkaloid by using a monoamine oxidase inhibitor?”
I sat and stared.
Art set down his glass. “I’m going to bed.”
I decided to remain in the kitchen, seated at the breakfast nook. I knew there would be no more sleep for me that night.
On a blustery Friday night (fire crackling, Nilus sleeping in a curled-up ball near the couch), Dan and I sat in the living room, playing backgammon, while Howie was in the study, talking on the phone to his father, his loud, braying voice easily penetrating the closed French doors. Dan was a timid backgammon player, always running, never leaving blots back if he could help it, disregarding pip counts and simply moving his pieces toward home as fast as possible. He also had terrible luck—rarely getting the numbers he needed, falling behind because of ill-timed doubles or a low roll, getting hit in even the most improbable circumstances.
We were drinking club soda—I noticed when Dan and I were alone we spurned alcohol; only in the presence of Art or Howie did we succumb to their subtle, but overwhelming peer pressure—and eating stew Art had made, something with turnips and carrots and bok choy. Howie’s conversation echoed through the house, pieces of it spewing forth like snippets from some after-school special on dysfunctional families:
“I know that, if you’d just listen for a—”
“But what difference—”
“All right, then, why don’t you just direct my life and—”
“Uh-huh. No, I didn’t say that.”
“Aw, fuck you too.”
Silence. Dan and I waited for Howie to burst through the doors, cursing and ranting. He had these arguments with his dad often, and they were usually followed by a thirty-minute discourse on how lucky I was to be an orphan, and how fortunate Art was that his parents took such a laissez-faire approach, and how Dan’s mom was a model of how parents should be—sympathetic, unobtrusive, and financially supportive with no conditions attached. Howie’s arguments, as I soon discovered, were always about money. His dad had been pushing him to buy a home somewhere in Fairwich, something Howie could live in until graduation and then sell at a profit, or, if he wished, keep as a rental once he left Connecticut and moved back to Chicago. As far as parental requests go, it was a fairly innocuous one—I wish I had the resources to buy my own mini-estate, maybe a pillared, three-story mansion, and a garden with temples and statues like the Greek Revivals of the early 20th century. But Howie refused, telling his dad he didn’t want to manage a house by himself, that he was happy living with his friends, and that administration had “messed things up” and now he didn’t know when he’d be graduating. Dan said Howie had been playing that cat-and-mouse game with his dad for years, putting off having to confess he was no longer in school.
Naturally, Howie would begin each ill-fated conversation with his dad with a bottle of Famous Grouse close at hand. By the end, a third of the scotch would be gone, and Howie would be disgustingly drunk. From what Dan told me—he’d met Mr. Beauford Spacks last spring, and watched him consume eight double martinis in an afternoon—they were probably both drunk every time they talked, which partially explained the inevitable collapse of any decorum, and the inevitable escalation into screaming and swearing.
“That’s the last goddamn time,” Howie said, stalking into the living room. “Next time he calls tell him I’m not home.”
Dan glanced at me and threw his dice. They tumbled onto the board with a muffled clatter. He needed any combo of seven. Five-to-one odds. He rolled a three-two. Of course.
“Fuck it,” Howie said, not talking to anyone in particular. “If he calls back tell him I moved out and went to St. Croix. Tell him I’m living on the beach, with nothing but a hammock and a tan. Skipping stones and drinking cocktails and eating coconuts off the trees.”
He paced back and forth, running both hands through his hair. There was a dark splotch of sweat across the back of his blue button-down. He stopped and turned to me.
“Do they have coconuts in St. Croix?”
I looked at Dan. We both smiled quickly. “I don’t know,” I said.
Howie waved me away impatiently. “He wants to know when I’m graduating,” he said, with a shaking calmness that belied his panic more than hysteria would. “Said he’s been thinking about retiring. Retiring,” he said it slowly, as if trying to make sure he understood himself. “Can you fucking believe that? At his age? He’s in his mid-fifties and healthy as a draft horse.”
He fell into a chair and propped his feet up on the ottoman. “The jig is up. He’ll want me to take over the business, fresh out of school with my degree…” He faded off. “Say,” he stamped his feet on the floor and leaned forward. “Do you guys know anything about Fairwich Community College?”
“Oh, no. The situation can’t be that desperate,” said Dan.
“I’m afraid it is.”
“An associate’s degree? How will you explain—”
“I’ll tell him it was the most time-efficient way. Do you think he cares? As long as I have a goddamn piece of paper with my name printed across in black calligraphy. The old man didn’t go to college.” He lowered his voice in what I presumed was an imitation of his father: “I want my son to understand the value of education. I want him to have all the opportunities I didn’t.”
“Meanwhile, he’s making tons of money,” I said. “Pretty ironic, isn’t it?”
Howie stopped and stared at me. “Why would you say that?”
There was an awkward pause. Dan rolled his dice and fixed his attention on the board.
“I just mean that he’s obviously doing fine, without the degree and all.”
Howie still looked stunned, as if I’d slapped him across the face. “Tons of money? It’s not like we’re the fucking Rockefellers.” He sank back into the chair, still staring at me. Sweat was collecting at his hairline.
“Poor bastard like you,” he said, with a wicked smile and low voice, “never seen money, wouldn’t know the difference between a hard-working businessman and the Sultan of fucking Brunei.”
Dan stopped in mid-move, holding a blot between his thumb and forefinger. Howie’s gaze was unwavering, focusing on me with a drunken glare. A log in the fire popped.
“Poor bastard,” he said again, this time to himself, with a bitter snort that shook his body. He blinked slowly, stood up, steadied himself, and walked out, thumping up the stairs. Moments l
ater I heard his door slam shut.
Dan and I didn’t say anything for a few minutes, playing our game in silence. It had come to a race, naturally, and Dan was behind. I tried to focus but couldn’t, my face sweating from the flush of embarrassment.
“He’s just drunk,” Dan said, picking up his dice. “You know how crazy he gets when his father calls…”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Really, Eric…Howie’s quite fond of you.”
His attempts at comfort were more humiliating than Howie’s insults. I kept quiet and played the game to its finish, beating Dan easily with a double-four roll.
November passed quickly, snow fell often, and winter invaded in the hypnotic way it usually does. I discovered a motel on the edge of town that would let me stay the entire four weeks of vacation for a small fee, in a room located in the basement, but the television didn’t really work, there was no phone, the heat was spotty, and the water pressure varied from trickle to drip. The room was kept available for transients, a kind gesture on the part of the owner, Henry Hobbes, himself a former “bum,” as he claimed, who had worked his way up and now felt it was his karmic duty to return some of the good fortune he enjoyed. But the room was seldom used, since transients were rare in Fairwich, even on the outskirts of town, especially once the cold weather came. Nights were brutal, arctic air driving all but the hardiest of New Englanders indoors. My plan to stay in that motel room was, looking back, a foolish one, since I had more money than I knew what to do with (from my student loans and Dr. Lang’s paychecks), and I could have easily afforded a decent room in one of Fairwich’s nicer hotels. But I had been poor for so long, and thus my appreciation for the utility of money was severely underdeveloped. Cheap meant better, as far as I knew.
I spent the last week before vacation wandering around town, going to the movies with Dan at the single-theater movie house, and afterward the two of us would have dinner at Edna’s, the only two college students in a room of paper-mill workers. Dan and I had become fast friends ever since I’d told him that Art spilled the beans about their alchemy experiments and the cats (which Dan insisted he took no part in).
