Desert Places

by Blake Crouch

  Walter pulled his Cadillac into the gravel parking lot adjacent to the sallow lawn behind the house. There were only seven other cars, and I felt relieved to be outside of Orson’s town. We’d almost stayed at a motel in downtown Woodside because of its proximity to the college campus, but the risk of running into Orson was too great.

  Hauling our suitcases up the front porch steps, we collapsed into a pair of rockers. The mountainside fell away from where we sat for a thousand feet, and the late-afternoon sun shone on the forest of bare trees in the valley below. Naked branches moved with the breeze, and I imagined that three weeks ago the sound of chattering leaves had filled the air. Across the valley, which extended twenty miles west, I could see into New York State, and the grander mountains of the Adirondacks that stood there.

  Wood smoke scented the forest, and sitting in the cold, listening and watching, I sensed Walter’s restiveness.

  After a moment, he said, “It’s too cold to sit out here. I’ll check us in.” He stood up and lifted his suitcase off the porch. “You just gonna sit there?” he asked, walking toward the door.

  “Yep.”

  Our room was at the end of a creaky hallway on the second floor. There were two double beds, placed on opposite sides of the room, a dormer window between them, from which you could view the mountains. The ceiling slanted up on both sides and met in a straight line, which bisected the room. Two paisley love seats faced each other in the center of the hardwood floor, a squat square coffee table between them. For seventy-five dollars a night, it was a lovely room. There were even fresh irises in glass vases on each bedside table. They made the room smell like an arbor.

  Walter sat on his bed, unpacking his clothes, and I lay on mine, my suitcase still unopened on the floor. Voices moved through the walls, and I heard the hollow clack of footsteps ascending the staircase. Someone knocked.

  Crossing the room, I stopped at the door. There was no peephole, so I asked, “Who is it?”

  “Melody Terrence.” I opened the door to a striking longhaired brunette, far too young and pretty to be an innkeeper.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  “You guys settling in all right?” she asked.

  “We sure are.”

  “Well, I just came to let you know that we’re serving dinner in thirty minutes, if you’re interested. Danny forgot to put the sign up again.”

  “Thanks for the invitation.”

  “Will you be joining us? There’s a cozy dining room downstairs, and Danny’s been smoking a bird all day. We’ll have fresh vegetables, homemade biscuits—”

  “It sounds wonderful,” I said. “We’ll see you there.”

  “Excellent.” She smiled and walked down the hall to the next room. I closed the door.

  Walter had placed a stack of shirts into a drawer, and, slamming it, he looked up at me, smoldering. “You call yourself a crime writer? Think we should go down and meet all the guests? What if someone recognizes you, Andy? If it ever got out that Orson, the Heart Surgeon”—he whispered the infamous title—“was your brother, and lived in Woodside, someone could put two and two together. They might remember that you were here in Vermont around the same time David Parker disappeared. And, you know, that’s all it’d take to put the FBI on our ass.” Walter moved into the dormer. His back turned, he looked into the woods, dark now that the sun had set. If the moon was up, it had yet to rise above the mountains and spread its meek light.

  I moved across the room to my friend.

  “Walter,” I said, but he didn’t turn around. “What? You scared?”

  “We can’t fuck anything up,” he said. “Not one thing.”

  Staring out into the Vermont night, the foreign darkness lodged a splinter of homesickness in my heart. A child again, I acknowledged the nostalgic pain, and then it passed.

  “Thank you for coming,” I said, my hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t have to do this, Walter. I’m never gonna forget it.”

  He turned back and faced me. “It has nothing to do with you,” he said. “Nothing.”

  On a cold, cloudy Thursday, at eleven o’clock in the morning, I parked Walter’s Cadillac in downtown Woodside and set out at a keen pace for the campus. Two- and three-story buildings lined both sides of the street, which was quite busy for a small town. People filled the sidewalks, sitting on benches, gliding along on Rollerblades, on gazing into storefront windows. Most were students, and they vivified the town, easily identifiable by their backpacks and the unbridled, merry apathy in their faces.

  I passed a drugstore, the Woodside General Store, the Valley Café, several apparel stores, and a coffee shop called Beans n’ Bagels, in front of which, canopied tables cluttered the sidewalk. It was the liveliest store by far, brimming with caffeine junkies and quirky music. The rich smell of roasted coffee beans mingled with the air outside the open vestibule. I would’ve bought myself a cup had I not downed two at the Woodside Inn, where Walter still slept in our room, drained from the previous day of driving.

  The buildings ended, but the sidewalk continued from the downtown toward the wooded campus. I could now see the mountains that surrounded the town, the highest slopes already white with early snow. I wondered how many students had skipped classes for a day of skiing. A steely wind made my eyes water and I zipped my leather jacket all the way up to my chin and dug my hands into the warm pockets.

  A brick walkway veered off from the main sidewalk toward a group of brick buildings. Heading up the walkway, I reached a hexagonal white gazebo within several minutes. It appeared to stand in the exact center of campus, as most of the buildings, each not more than forty yards away, surrounded it. Plaques had been nailed to each side of the gazebo, engraved with woodside college, est. 1800.”

  I passed beneath the portico of a stone-columned building, the largest of the ten or so in the vicinity, and walked up the steps. A great clock surmounted the roof, surrounded by scaffolding, its black hands stuck suspiciously on 4:20.

  Inside, the building was dim and stale. The floor was constructed of burnished marble, and the walls of the foyer, wooden and intricately carved, were adorned with large portraits of former deans, founders, and dead professors. A life-size statue stood in the center of the circular room, staring vacuously at me. I didn’t stop to see who he was.

  Glass double doors led into the office of the university registrar. I caught my reflection as I pushed them open—my hair and recent beard now brown, a pair of wire-framed spectacles on the bridge of my nose. In jeans and wearing a faded denim shirt under my jacket, I looked nothing like myself.

  In the bright windowless room, there were several open cubicles, each holding a desk and portioned off from the cubicle next to it. I walked to the closest one, where a woman typed fervidly on a computer. She looked up from the screen and smiled as I approached.

  “May I help you?” she asked. I sat down in the chair before her desk. The constant pecking of fingers on keyboards would’ve driven me insane.

  “I need a campus map, a class directory for this semester, and a campus phone book.”

  She opened a filing cabinet and withdrew a booklet and a blue pamphlet.

  “Here’s a map and here’s the phone book,” she said, setting the items on her tidy desk. “I’ll have to get a class directory from the closet.” She walked across the room, mumbling something to another secretary as she passed. I opened the phone book. It was only fifty pages thick, with the faculty listings in the first ten pages and those of the two thousand students in the remaining forty. I thumbed through it to the P’s.

  I skipped over the entries for Page and Paine, then spotted “Parker, David L.” The information given beneath the name was sparse—only an office number—Gerard 209—and a corresponding phone number.

  The woman returned and handed me a directory of classes. “Here you are, sir.”

  “Thanks. Are the students in class today?” I asked, rising.

  She shook her head doubtfully. “They’re supposed to b
e,” she said, “but this is the first cold snap of the season, so a fair number probably played hooky to go skiing.”

  I thanked her again, then walked out of the office and into the foyer, where I passed three college girls standing in a circle beside the statue, whispering to each other. Exiting the building, I walked through snow flurries to the gazebo and sat down on the bench that circumnavigated the interior of the structure. First, I unfolded the map and located Gerard Hall. I could see it from where I sat, a two-story building that displayed the same charmingly decrepit brick as the others.

  With hot breath, I warmed my hands, then opened the directory of classes, a thick booklet, its first ten pages crammed with mountains of information regarding registering for classes and buying books. I found an alphabetical listing of the classes and their schedules, and flipping through anthropology, biology, communications, English, and French, stopped finally at the roster of history classes for fall ’96. There was a full page of history courses, and I skimmed down the list until I saw his name:

  It appeared to be the only course he taught, and, glancing at my watch, I realized that it was currently in session.

  According to the building abbreviation key, HD stood for Howard Hall. I found it on the blue map. Just twenty yards away, it was one of the closest buildings to the gazebo. An apprehensive knocking started in my chest as I looked down the walkway leading to its entrance.

  Before I could dissuade myself, I was walking down the steps, away from the gazebo, heading toward Howard Hall. To the left of the registrar’s building, it made up the eastern wall of the quasi courtyard surrounding the gazebo. Two students smoked on the steps, and I passed them and touched the door, thinking, What if this isn’t him? Then I’ll go to prison, and Walter and his family will die.

  As the door closed behind me, I heard his voice. It haunted the first floor of Howard Hall, its soft-spoken intensity reeling me back to the Wyoming desert. I walked slowly on, leaving the foyer, where political notices, ads for roommates, and a host of other flyers papered the walls. In the darker hall, light spilled from one door. I heard a collection of voices, then an outburst of laughter. Orson’s voice rose above the rumblings of his students, and I turned right and walked down the hallway, taking care my steps didn’t echo off the floor.

  His voice grew louder, and I could soon understand every word. Stopping several feet from the doorway, I leaned against the wall. From the volume of laughter, I approximated the class size at thirty or forty students. Orson spoke again, his voice directly across from me on the other side of the wall. Though I wanted to run, to hide in a closet or a bathroom stall far from that voice, I remained to listen, trusting he’d have no reason to step into the hall.

  “I want you to put your pens and pencils down,” he said, and the sound of writing implements falling onto wood engulfed the room. “To understand history, you have to see it. It’s more than words on a page. It happened. You can’t ever forget that. Put your head on your desk,” he said. “Everybody. Go on. Now close your eyes.” His footsteps approached the door. He flipped a switch, the room went black, and the footsteps trailed away.

  “Megalomania,” he said. “Somebody tell me what it means.”

  A male voice sounded in the dark. “Delusions of omnipotence.”

  “Good,” Orson said. “It’s a mental disorder, so keep that in mind, too.”

  The professor kept silent for half a minute, and the room was still. When he spoke again, his voice had a controlled, musical resonance.

  “The year is a.d. thirty-nine,” he began. “You’re a Roman senator, and you and your wife have been invited to watch the gladiatorial games with the young emperor, Gaius Caligula.

  “During the lunch interlude, as humiliores are executed ad bestias before a rejoicing crowd, Caligula stands up, takes your wife by the hand, and leaves with her, escorted by his guards.

  “You know exactly what’s happening, and it’s apparent to the other senators, because the same thing has happened to their wives. But you do nothing. You just sit on the stone steps, under the blue, spring sky, watching the lions chase their prey.

  “An hour later, Gaius returns with your wife. When she sits down beside you, you notice a purple bruise on her face. She’s rattled, her clothes are torn, and she refuses to look at you. There are six other senators who’ve been invited along with you, and suddenly you hear Caligula speak to them.

  “‘Her breasts are quite small,’ he says, loudly enough for everyone around to hear. ‘She’s a sexual bore. I’d rather watch the lions feed than fuck her …again.’

  “He laughs and pats you on the back, and everyone laughs with him. No one contradicts Gaius. No one challenges the emperor. It’s pure sycophancy, and you sit there, boiling, wishing you’d never come. But to speak one word against Caligula would be your family’s certain death. It’s best just to keep silent and pray you never receive another invitation.”

  Orson’s footsteps approached the doorway. I stepped back, but he’d only come for the lights. The room filled with the sound of students shifting in their seats and reopening notebooks.

  “Next Tuesday,” he said, “we’ll talk about Caligula. I notice some of your classmates aren’t with us today, and that may or may not have something to do with the snowstorm in the mountains last night.” The class laughed. It was obvious by now that his students adored him.

  “There will be a quiz on Caligula next Tuesday. Know the basics. When was he born? When did he become emperor? When and how did he die? Read chapter twenty-one in your text, and you shouldn’t have a problem. I think you’ll find him to be one of the most complex, intriguing, yet misunderstood rulers in Roman history.” He paused. “Have a nice weekend.”

  I heard notebooks closing and backpacks zipping. Then the class seemed to rise all at once and dash for the door. Orson would be coming, too.

  Across the hall, a door was ajar. I pushed my way through the students and slipped unseen into a dark, empty classroom. Then, peering through the cracked door, I waited for him to emerge.

  22

  ORSON descended the steps and started down the walkway. I waited inside the foyer of Howard Hall, watching him through the window beside the door. Dressed in a beige wool suit, a red bow tie, and green suspenders, he carried a tan briefcase and wore gold wire-framed glasses. When he was beyond the gazebo, I opened the door and followed him as he strode quickly across campus and disappeared into Gerard Hall.

  As I approached his building, the light snow continued. The temperature had dropped as the day progressed, and the sky, only partly overcast this morning, was now completely masked by low gray clouds, which grazed the mountain peaks.

  Gerard Hall was one of the smaller buildings on campus—two stories and narrow. Its name was incised into the stone pediment above the door. I felt exposed standing out in front of Orson’s building in the cold. His office was on the second floor, but he could be anywhere inside, and while from a distance I felt safe, I knew that in proximity, my brother would instantly know my eyes.

  I sat on the steps for five minutes, until I’d worked up the nerve to go inside. But as I stood to reach for the door handle footsteps pounded on a hardwood floor, and looking through the window, I saw a figure appear from the hallway. I turned away and leaned against the black railing just as the door opened.

  I smelled her perfume before I saw her. An older woman, still beautiful, cascaded down the steps in high heels and a black overcoat. Her blond hair, streaked with silver, jounced as she walked away on a path leading to the town. I peeked again through the tall, slim window by the door, then, seeing only the empty foyer, pulled the handle and stepped inside.

  Without voices, or fingers on keyboards, the fluorescent lights hummed deafeningly overhead as they shone hard light upon the dusty floor. According to a glass-encased magnetic message board, this was the office building of the history department, and the last names of professors and their respective office numbers were displayed in white letteri
ng behind the glass. Looking down the hallway, I saw there were stairwells at both ends. Arbitrarily, I turned left and started walking to the stairs, passing four unmarked doors and a janitor’s closet.

  Jazz music poured softly from the second floor. I stopped at the top of the stairwell and looked into the hallway. All the flourescent lights were out save one, which flickered sporadically at the other end. The only constant light emanated from two open and opposing doorways, where voices rose in conversation above a moaning trumpet.

  In the shadows, I walked toward the first office along the corridor. It was closed, and a brass nameplate affixed to the door read stchykenski 206. Across the hall, someone typed inside of 207, where light and classical music escaped in slivers beneath the door.

  On the right side, fifteen feet down the hall, Orson’s door stood wide open, the wonder of Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” lingering in the doorway. I inched forward until I could see into Orson’s empty office, and hear the conversation in the room across from his.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Orson was saying.

  “David, there’s no rush. We just need to make the decision before Christmas. I think the deadline’s the twenty-first of December.”

  “That’s plenty of time,” Orson said. “I just want to finish a thorough reading of his publications. I like what I’ve seen so far, but I want to be sure, Jack.”

  “We all do,” Jack said, “and right now what I’m hearing from the others is that Dr. Harris would fit in nicely. Those of us who’ve read his work think he’s more than qualified.”

  Footsteps reverberated in the opposite stairwell, and I backed away.

  “Damn,” Orson said. “I’ve got to meet with a student. How about lunch tomorrow?”

  “Splendid.”

  A chair squeaked, and I ran down the hall. There was a men’s bathroom on my right that I’d unwittingly passed before, and I slipped inside as Orson stepped from Jack’s office into the hall. In the dark bathroom, a faucet dripped into the sink. Cracking the door, I glanced back into the hallway. Orson now stood in the threshold of his office, leaning against the door frame and speaking to a pudgy girl with walnut hair and a pale white face. She wore a backpack on the outside of her yellow rain jacket, and she smiled as Orson invited her into his office and shut the door.