Waxwings

by Unknown

  When Tom tried to type into the address bar on the computer monitor, his fingers seemed to have drifted out of contact with his brain. He got wsw, wwe, and wqw before he managed to get even the w’s in line. The site took a maddeningly long while to assemble itself on the screen, in shivering bricks of text and picture that eventually resolved into the police artist’s sketch, alongside the old Jerry Bauer photo from the dustjacket of The Few, and a caption in thick black letters designed to resemble prison bars: BURDEN OF PROF. The table of contents added a subtitle: In Search for Missing Child, Finger of Suspicion Points to Famed UW Writing Teacher.

  “Oh my Christ.”

  He clicked on the link. Behind the arrow and hourglass, the pixels reconfigured into yet another photograph, in rather poor focus, showing Tom apparently caught in the act of burgling his own house. A tubby figure in a long coat, bent forward in a posture of clownish stealth, was in the middle of taking a giant step across the deck to the front door—an image utterly incomprehensible to him. Had they faked it in a photo-lab? Then he realized they’d snapped him unawares while he negotated the joists of the unplanked deck, stepping high to clear the cat’s-cradle of Chick’s red tape. But in this context he might as well have held a pistol in one hand and toted a sack of swag over the shoulder of his villain’s overcoat.

  He scrolled through the text that ran beside the picture, vile phrases jumping out at him from the cascade of moving type. UW’s Euroweirdo po-mo writing prof with a regular spot on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Christ! Pretentious—that was an unnamed student speaking, and here was pompous from another. Labored Victorian parodies . . . Known to favor female students with uninvited extracurricular attention. That was outrageous; they couldn’t say that, he’d bloody sue them. Somehow they’d got hold of his never-used second name, Bódog, which they translated as Lucky, and used in the next bold subhead: Lucky Tom. Impudent bastards.

  Suspect.

  Two-year manhunt for Sammamish slayer.

  Suspect again.

  . . . . behind his affected manner . . .

  Nothing in his experience came near to preparing Tom for this, and the sheer appalling novelty of it made him giddy. Only in fantasy could he find even a remote precedent. On transatlantic flights, after the tepid dinner and second miniature of brandy, all blinds pulled down for the movie and the light from the overhead reading lamp splashed meagerly on his open book, Tom regularly imagined that the washing-machine churn of the engines would suddenly be interrupted by the captain’s voice over the intercom, saying, in the laid-back midwestern drawl of his trade, “Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that the aircraft has developed a serious mechanical problem. Please immediately adopt the braced position, as shown in the card in the seat-pocket in front of you, and say your prayers. God bless all of us. Thank you.” This was somewhat like that, except that this couldn’t be banished by returning to one’s book. This was—as it were— it.

  . . . behavior students characterize as “inscrutable.”

  Frantically scrabbling through the contents of his wallet, spilling over the floor, he found Nagel’s business card and dialled the number. The detective answered on the first ring.

  “This is insane,” Tom said. “It’s insane beyond belief.”

  “These things happen with the media,” Nagel said, sounding much like the airline pilot. “It’s an unfortunate development for you, of course, but we’ve issued a statement, which is all we can do.”

  “Who did you issue it to? What does it say?”

  “Hang on, I’ll bring it up on my screen . . .”

  On his own screen, Tom read: One clue may lie in the Victorian Lit course that Prof. Janeway taught two years ago. The reading list for that course includes The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by noted Brit author of the 1800s, Robert Lewis Stephenson . . .

  “Okay. I got it here. It’s short. I’ll read it to you. ‘King County Sheriff’s Department wishes to make it clear that, contrary to allegations in local media, Thomas Bódog Janeway is not considered a suspect in the disappearance of Hayley Jane Topolski (6), although he remains a person of interest in the continuing investigation.’ I can e-mail it to you if you want.”

  “Although? What do you mean—although?”

  “I’m not following you, Thomas.”

  “It’s an adversative conjunction! It means that whatever you said before, you’re taking it away, or taking part of it away, or modifying it. That bloody although means, ‘He’s not a suspect, but,’ and it’s the but that everybody hears, not the not. Don’t you see? Anyone who reads this libellous shit in the Stranger is going to think, ‘Well, of course he’s a suspect really—they just haven’t got enough evidence on him yet.’ You have to change that statement. Right now, before it gets around. Instead of the although, you need a full stop, I mean a period, and—”

  “You have an issue with the grammar.”

  “It’s not just grammar—it’s the whole implication of the thing.”

  “What it says, Professor, is that you are not considered a suspect.”

  “Although. Not just but, but although, which is even worse.”

  “It could’ve said ‘is not yet considered a suspect,’ or ‘is not considered a suspect at this point in time,’ That’s commonly used terminology in statements like this, but in your case we made the decision not to use it. Because of that Stranger article. Because this department is being proactive in counteracting a false impression created in the media.”

  “Person of interest!”

  “Yeah. That wasn’t my call. That was like a departmental decision. If it was down to me, I’d most likely said witness. It’s a fine line. We’re dealing with bureaucracy here, and the question went all the way up to the sheriff.”

  “It’s just another way of saying suspect!”

  Tom heard slow breathing coming down the line. Not friendly.

  “A person of interest is a person of interest. Means we may need to talk to them further. Means there could be still things we got to find out about them. Means—”

  “What words mean is what people think they mean, and what people think person of interest means is suspect!”

  “I’m a reasonably patient guy, Professor. I got a low metabolism. I don’t blow easy. But talking with you now, I’m beginning to see what those creeps at the Stranger are getting at.”

  “You don’t understand. I’m sorry, but I’m just trying to explain that language is what we—”

  “This department has gone out of its way—way out of its way—to accommodate you in your concerns, Thomas. Soon as that article appeared, before it’s on the street, even, we issued a statement. A factual statement. A statement that says you’re not regarded as a suspect. Now you tell me we got a comma where we ought to have a period, and person of interest doesn’t mean ‘person of interest,’ it means ‘suspect.’ We’re not in your composition class. Professor. We’re not asking you to critique our goddamn statement. Are you hearing me?”

  “But how am I supposed to live with this?” Tom’s voice was cracking. “I mean, my whole reputation.”

  “A little girl has gone missing. We’re in the middle of a criminal investigation. Probably—though I hate to say this, and don’t quote me on it—a homicide investigation. And you seriously think, pardon my French, that this department gives a rat’s ass about your personal self-esteem?”

  Waxwings

  7.

  A visored biker in damson-colored leathers delivered the cellophane-sheathed envelope from—Tom read as he signed for it—the Department of English, University of Washington. Only urgent Shiva Ray business could possibly account for the extravagance of a messenger service, and while the letter inside did indeed mention Shiva, he was not its main subject.

  Dear Tom,

  It falls to me—regretfully—to let you know that an emergency departmental meeting was held this morning, at which it was resolved that under present circumstances your presence in the classro
om would prove a “distraction,” and that you should therefore be placed on temporary paid leave of absence.

  Allow me to tell you (in confidence) that this motion was passed by just one vote, and that I was not myself in the majority. In fact, I argued as strongly as was within my power that any such action would be in violation of your basic civil rights, and that it would bring discredit on the department and on the university. However, my voice was not, alas, heeded.

  My thoughts, as well as those of many of your colleagues in the department, are with you at this difficult time. I hope very much indeed that you will be able to return to the classroom in a matter of weeks, if not days. Your courses here are highly regarded by students (pace the obnoxious screed in the Stranger ), and your teaching will be widely missed for the duration of your absence.

  If I may put some positive “spin” on this unfortunate affair, it may be that you can use this period of leisure to tie up the loose ends of the Ray Foundation Fellowship arrangements (have you spoken to him lately?), as well as to make progress on your (long-awaited!) next book.

  Cordially yours,

  The signature looked like a small explosive device trailing a long fuse. Below it was a translation: Bernard S. Goldblatt, Chair, Department of English.

  And chair, Tom thought bitterly, was a good word for plump, bland, velveteen-upholstered Bernard, though banquette would have been better, since he could comfortably accommodate so many people at one sitting. Argued as strongly as was within my power would mean that he’d let out a mild whinny of surprise, as when the Milton course was dropped from the core undergraduate syllabus. The evident distress in his letter surely arose from the embarrassment of having to write it, not from any principled unhappiness with the motion. Violation of civil rights wasn’t at all Bernard’s line of country; that question would have been raised by political types like Russ Van Strand and Greg Weems, both of whom would have pitched in energetically on Tom’s behalf. Typical of Bernard to slyly claim for himself any available kudos, after presiding over the vote with the expression of mild, studied quizzicality intended to make you see his shallows as ironic depths. As a graduate student, Bernard had spent a year at Oxford, where his chief academic acquisition, Tom suspected, had been that Gioconda smile.

  Bernard wouldn’t have lifted a finger. He was certain of it.

  Tom thought vengefully of his fogeyish edition of the poems of Gray and Collins, which a PMLA reviewer had praised as the “indispensable” successor to the Austin Lane Poole edition of 1917. “Editions” were Bernard’s specialty: he was a besotted collector of books with a mild, touristic interest in their contents. Tom thought of his curly silver hairpiece, and his addiction to the tag mutatis mutandis—which he no doubt trotted out after counting the hands raised around the table. Feeble, ingratiating, fraudulent Bernard!

  Was he in fact the architect of this whole thing? Tom wouldn’t put it past him. He would’ve seen the Stranger, panicked, called a meeting . . . No, that would have been out of character, for Goldblatt had never instigated anything: he’d waited to see which way the wind was blowing, then gone with the wind. Behind his cowardly letter, Tom detected the shadows of those perennial callers of emergency meetings, Lorraine Cole and Yolanda Bunche, who’d had it in for him ever since he first arrived. Having backed Camilla Taruk Sanchez for the Weyerhaeuser job, they’d always treated Tom as an illegitimate pretender. The Stranger article gave them the chance they’d been waiting for, and gutless Bernard would’ve played along, as was his bloody wont.

  He looked out longingly across the water to the great glass eyesore that hid the Klondike building from view, and had the phone in hand before he heard, in vivid premonition, the weary flatness of Beth’s tone when she recognized his voice. He hung up without dialing.

  If only he had Finn—but he could imagine all too well the stares at Treetops, and the principal calling Beth, “just to make sure it was all right” for Finn to go off with his father. Tom knew he wasn’t man enough to brave such gross humiliation.

  It occurred to him that it was nearly three in the afternoon, and he’d eaten nothing all day. On his way down to the kitchen, passing the new window on the stairs, he saw a car drawn up behind his VW, and two pale moonlike faces gazing out, clearly hoping to catch a glimpse of the man who was not regarded as a suspect. He shrank into the shadows, a fugitive in his own house.

  The fridge was bare. He found two elderly eggs, a single stick of butter, the hollowed remnant of a pint tub of mint chocolate-chip ice-cream, a cracked nub of parmesan, three cartons of yogurt, all past their sell-by dates, one Jell-O chocolate pudding, a doubtful package of Bunny-Luv baby carrots, along with a hefty mass of decaying organic matter, much of it rotted beyond recognition. Tom ate an eccentric lunch, then went on to the Internet. After visiting the BBC and downloading the Guardian crossword, he found himself prowling the aisles of HomeGrocer.com, where he aroused no curiosity as he loaded up his trolley with enough supplies to see him through a lengthy blockade. With no neighbors to dodge in the produce section, no check-out girl who’d once babysat for Finn, the online store was a haven of solitude and leisure. He enjoyed the luxury of indecision, picking up items and putting them back again. Camembert or Brie? Or both? He settled for both. In a surge of bright optimism, he laid in Froot Loops and Apple Jacks, Gold Fish and Triscuits (and to hell with blue-green algae and Beth’s crackpot diet). He lingered in the wine department among the Oregon Pinot Noirs, finally choosing three bottles of Ken Wright and three of Cristom. All in all, Tom spent an hour at HomeGrocer, his most nearly happy hour in recent memory.

  He had become—as he put it in a tart e-mail to Beth—a virtual Alexander Selkirk. Downstairs, all the curtains were drawn against snoopers. Encouraged by his grocery shopping, he’d moved on to MyLackey.com. His uniformed lackey had arrived in a primrose-yellow van, bearing copies of Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans and Franz Kafka’s The Trial from the Elliott Bay Book Company, a bottle of Teacher’s from the liquor store, nicotine chewing gum from Bartell’s, and, from Blockbuster, videotapes of Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, The Fortune Cookie, and The Lost Weekend.

  The lackey—who looked barely old enough to have bought the whisky on Tom’s behalf—had to go around to the back door to make his delivery, where he seemed determined to keep his distance. Tom signed his form, thanked him, tipped him ten bucks and, trying to break the ice, asked him how things were going.

  “Going okay.”

  “And you’re quite comfortable with your job-title?”

  “What?”

  “You know, ‘lackey.’ ”

  “It’s fine. We get stock options,” he said, then fled.

  Selkirk, marooned on Juan Fernandez Island in the South Pacific, was said to have occupied his first weeks of isolation by carving his name on trees. Tom wrote e-mails—to the president of the University of Washington, to the editor of the Stranger, to the King County sheriff. Though the emphases in each message were different, the theme was the same: Tom had taken an innocent walk along a much-frequented public footpath—no, “trail”—and by “mere contingency” had passed the scene of a child’s tragic disappearance. No one had seriously suggested that he had spoken to, much less abducted, that child. So far as he understood, the only thing that distinguished him from other hikers was the fact that he had been seen to smoke cigarettes (“an unwise habit, but not as yet a criminal one”) and, naturally, that he resembled himself and no one else. For this, he had been vilified in the press, had lost—even if temporarily, and with pay—the job which had brought him here from England, and been rendered an object of public contumely and derision. His house was under siege, his family life thrown into chaos. He had, so he wrote, come to this country as an immigrant, inspired by the Jeffersonian ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and was now seeing these inalienable rights alienated beyond likely hope of recall. As the father of a young child, he, too, grieved over the fate of Hayley
Topolski, and had willingly assisted the police as much as he could. Yet as an immigrant, and as a student of America, he was shocked to learn how very fragile was the essential framework of fairness and decency on which he had always believed this country was founded.

  There were rather too many grandiloquent flourishes, he feared; and as he finished each letter—sharpening the phrasing with every successive message—he filed it in Drafts, for later revision. While writing, he had to hang up on three anonymous callers; and once, from the bathroom, he saw another carload of looky-loos drawn up outside the house.

  Surprised by the spring in his step as he went back up to the study, Tom realized how strangely energized he’d become by the drama of this situation. Far from the blank depression and despairing languor he was expecting, there was a liberating fizz of adrenalin in his blood, and he felt a couple of stiff drinks above-par. The keyboard was calling: there was work to be done.

  Writing about war in The Few, Tom had often teased himself with the question: how did soldiers do it? Did they brush their teeth out of automatic habit on the eve of battle? How did they manage to get a wink of sleep? If Tom himself ever had to face the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air, he was pretty sure that his bowels would give way and that he’d cower in a whimpering heap, waiting for the bullet with his name on it. Yet the most ordinarily timid people were called up to fight and some came back covered with decorations, like his history master at Ilford, a gentle, snuffly man, like a tame hedgehog, who’d won a Military Cross for outstanding bravery at Anzio. How had old Willy Wadsworth done it? Come to that, how had Tom’s parents made their flight—with his infant self in tow—from Budapest in ’56? That was another mystery, for his parents clammed up whenever he raised the subject.