When the Day of Evil Comes

by Melanie Wells

  But I made it to class on time, with about four seconds to spare, and found myself standing in front of thirty-seven freshmen, all of whom had signed up for my Intro to Psychology class at Southern Methodist University.

  I should say a few things about SMU. Though the “M” stands for “Methodist,” SMU is a liberal arts school. Not a church school like some other universities that have churchy words in their names. No theology or religion classes are required, and you can get through your entire academic career on campus and never hear a word about God or the Methodist church, either one.

  That worked for me. It is an atmosphere for free thinkers (unless you are a Democrat, but that’s another conversation), and I like to keep my theology and religion to myself, thank you very much.

  And where my colleagues at other churchy-named schools are regularly getting themselves called before boards to defend their beliefs (or lack thereof), my superiors are happy if I can get my students to use their actual brains and get myself published on a regular basis. I am rigorously faithful to both of these tasks. Faculty events, thankfully, are optional.

  I like to start the semester off, especially when I have nice fresh, green minds in the seats, with an exercise in the psychology of assumptions. It throws the students a curve, gets the semester started out right.

  I stood in front of the class and tried to look authoritative, which is a stretch for me, since I don’t look much older than my students do.

  “Everyone look at me,” I said sternly. I am not terribly stern, in actuality, but they didn’t know that yet.

  They all looked up at me like they were in trouble.

  “Keep your eyes on me,” I said, “and clear your desks. Do not look down at what you’re doing. No pens and paper allowed on your desks.”

  They shuffled around with their stuff, trying to maintain eye contact with me, but dying to look at one another. They wanted to pass the question around the room with their eyes—“What’s up with this psycho?”

  After a minute or two, the desks were clear. I took out a tennis ball and held it up for everyone to look at, as though it had some sort of cosmic importance.

  Without saying a word, I tossed the ball to a kid in the first row He caught it, and I said, “Name, please?”

  “Jeremy,” he said, and tossed the ball back to me.

  I tossed it to another kid and raised my eyebrows, as though I were asking him a question.

  “Darin,” he said without prompting, and threw the ball back to me.

  I repeated the exercise until everyone had caught the ball, recited his or her first name, and thrown the ball back to me. It happened, like magic, thirty-seven times.

  “Now,” I said, “what did you learn?” I looked over the faces. “Lauren.” I called on a girl in the second row. By the look on her face you’d have thought I’d punched her in the gut.

  She turned to her left and right. “This is Stephanie,” she said. “And that’s Chris.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember any of the others.”

  I looked disappointed and called on another kid. He remembered six or seven names. I asked around the class, prodding them all to tell me what they’d learned. One after another, they listed all the names they could remember.

  Finally one kid sitting near the back raised his hand.

  I called on him.

  “I learned something,” he offered.

  I liked the look of him. He was scruffy and seemed slightly disreputable. He had an ankh on a leather rope around his neck and earrings in both ears. His hair was bleached yellow-white and his clothes could have been purchased at an Army surplus store. Or stolen from one, maybe.

  “And what might that be?” I searched my memory for his name. “Gavin?”

  “We’re all a bunch of sheep.”

  People turned around to look at him.

  I grinned. “Go on.”

  “You never told us to say our names.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Positive. You asked the first guy what his name was, then everyone else just went along. We all assumed that’s what you wanted. But you never said that at all.”

  “Good observation. Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Come to think of it, you never asked us to throw the ball back either. We just did it. Every last one of us. like sheep.”

  “Gavin, you are a genius.” I threw him a bite-size Snickers bar, my standard reward for creative thinking. “You get the first candy of the semester.”

  I turned to the class and began clapping. Everyone clapped along.

  “See?” Gavin said, when the clapping had died down. “Sheep. Everyone clapped. Just because you did.”

  “Good point.”

  I threw him another Snickers bar. He opened it up with a rattle and popped it into his mouth, staring at me while he chewed.

  I spent the rest of the hour leading a discussion about perception versus reality. How we all make subtle, unspoken assumptions, sometimes in unison, and allow those assumptions to govern our thinking and our behavior. By the end of the hour, I’d knocked some holes in their concrete brains and, I hope, planted a few seeds for nonconformity and creative thought.

  I could tell it would be a good semester. I began to feel myself being drawn into the school year, and remembered once again how much I love teaching. It happens every fall, usually after I’ve spent the entire summer thinking about changing jobs.

  I left to grab an early lunch at my favorite sub sandwich place across the street, spent a little time sitting outside working on my skin cancer, and then did my afternoon lecture.

  As the students got up to leave, I was surprised to see Gavin walk into the classroom and stand by my desk.

  “Good work this morning,” I said to him. “Is this your first semester at SMU?”

  “Yep.” He picked up my book bag to carry it for me. My hands were full with my mug and a stack of notebooks, so I was grateful for the help. “You have another class now?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Office hours.” I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was 3:35. My office was two floors up and I was supposed to be there five minutes ago. I started up the stairs, Gavin tagging along.

  “Mind if I follow you to your office?” he asked.

  “Of course not. Are you one of my advisees this semester? I give lousy advice. Scheduling conflicts are complete nightmares for me.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t need that kind of advice.”

  We wove through student traffic and found our way to my office. I unlocked the door and shoved it open with my hip, dropping the stack of notebooks onto a chair and clearing another one for him to sit in.

  I like my faculty office. It’s full of things that inspire me. Rocks I brought back from a mission trip to Guatemala. Pictures of my grandparents when they were still optimistic. Shelves and shelves of books written by my favorite smart people—Eudora Welty and Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis. People like that.

  The office is tiny, since I have no status at all in a fairly weighty department. But it has a window and it’s cozy and it’s mine. It’s a good place to settle in and think.

  I fixed myself another cup of tea—the last cup of a half-gallon this day, it seemed, and offered Gavin one. He declined.

  He looked nervous, so I settled in behind my desk and asked him what was on his mind.

  “I read your bio,” he said.

  “My bio? I have a bio?”

  “On the Internet. The university has a website and each department has faculty bios and pictures.”

  “Tell me there’s not a picture.” This could be bad. I’m always the one with the eyes closed and the mouth open.

  “It’s a pretty good one,” he said. “You look a little drunk, is all.”

  “Well, I probably wasn’t, but I might want to be after I take a look at the picture.” We had a laugh. “Anyway, you were saying?”

  “The bio. It said you have a theo
logy degree.”

  I nodded. “Guilty as charged. A master’s in systematic theology, actually. I went to school here in Dallas.”

  “Yeah, I saw that.” He shifted around. “Why’d you do that?”

  “What? Go to grad school in Dallas or get a theology degree?”

  “The theology part. Are you really religious or something?”

  “Actually, no. The theology degree was personal. I wanted to learn some things.”

  “What brand of religion are you? Methodist?”

  I laughed and followed his metaphor. “Generic. The kind that comes in the plain black and white box.”

  My mind zoomed back to the boxed gifts from the day before. I’d forgotten about them for a few hours.

  “Why? Are you Methodist?” I asked.

  “No, I’m not anything, really. But something weird happened to me yesterday I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  I resisted the temptation to compete over weird yesterdays. I was certain I would win. Instead, I sat back and picked up my cup, waiting for him to tell me. It’s my therapist posture. I do it automatically when I’m listening to someone. I can’t seem to have a clear thought in session without a mug of tea in my hand.

  “I have this friend who’s pretty religious,” he began. “I’ve known him for a long time. You remind me of him a little bit. Something about you … he thinks like you do, I guess it is. He always challenges me to think about things differently.”

  “He sounds like a fabulous human being,” I said, grinning.

  “He is. But yesterday he gave me a Bible. A real nice blue leather Bible with my name stamped on it. Probably cost sixty or seventy bucks.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It made me mad, for one thing. We’d never talked about him getting me a Bible. I thought it was sort of pushy. So I’m like, ‘Hey thanks for the book. Looks real nice and expensive, and I hope this doesn’t offend you, but I’m not into it. I’ll probably never read one word.’”

  “What did your friend say?”

  “He said fine. He just wanted me to have it. I mean, where does he get off, doing that? I never asked him to save me.”

  “Sounds to me like he meant it as a good thing. Not an insult.”

  Gavin nodded. “I know. But I was still mad. It was like he backed me into a corner or something. I took the Bible—I didn’t want to hurt his feelings—but I threw it in the backseat of my car and drove home.”

  “So what’s the problem?” I asked, stirring my tea. That’s the other thing I do. I stir. Slowly. Like I’m trying to mingle my thoughts together and come up with something cohesive. “Sounds like he was a sport about it.”

  “The problem is, I got scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know, just scared. And not ordinary scared. It started out ordinary, when I was driving home. But then I got to my dorm and parked my car, and by the time I got to my room I was shaking. I could barely put my key in the lock.”

  “Go on,” I said. Stupid, therapist cliché. I hate it when things like that pop out of my mouth in civilian conversations.

  “I’m talking about terror, at this point. Like, serious terror. I climbed straight into my bed and crawled under the covers. I was afraid to even leave my foot hanging over the edge of the bed. Like something was going to grab it from underneath. Monsters under the bed or something, like I’m a little kid.

  “My roommate comes home and I’m lying there shaking and sweating with my teeth practically chattering. He asked me what was wrong and I told him I had food poisoning. He left to go to some party and I stayed there the rest of the night afraid to move. Literally. Afraid to move.” He looked up at me. “I think there was something in the room with me.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Do you believe in demons?”

  I stirred my tea again. It was getting cold. “Do you?” I set the cup down.

  “I do now. I think it was a demon.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I had a dream last night.”

  Now we were in familiar territory I could probably gain some insight from the dream.

  “Tell me about the dream.” Another psychology cliché. Oh-for-two.

  “I was at a lake. Some lake. I don’t know what lake, but a lake. Sort of a rocky lake. And there was this guy. He was white. Sick white. Like he had cancer or something.”

  I felt my skin begin to prickle.

  “He was bald,” he continued. “And made me really nervous for some reason. He got into the water with me. And when I told him to go away, he just stood up where he was. On the water. I swam to the shore and got out of the lake. Someone handed me my new Bible. I picked it up and threw it at him, and he screamed and turned around and ran.”

  “Go on.” I knew there was more. I knew what it would be.

  “He had a big cut on his back.”

  “Up and down or side to side?” I asked.

  He looked surprised. “Side to side. Why?”

  I bluffed. “It makes a difference in the interpretation. What happened next?”

  “I woke up. I was sopping wet from sweat. I was shaking. I was too afraid to move. So I prayed.”

  “What did you pray?”

  “I said that I didn’t know if God was real, but that if He was there, I wanted Him to come and protect me from evil. I didn’t want to be afraid anymore.”

  “And?”

  “And I felt it go away. Immediately. All that fear just evaporated. And I felt peace. I fell asleep. I slept so hard, I barely made it to class this morning.”

  I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table. He was still holding something back.

  “Why are you telling me this? Because of the theology degree?”

  He met my eyes. “No. Because you were in the dream.”

  “Where? It was just you and the bald white guy, right?”

  “You were the one who handed me the Bible. The one standing on the shore.”

  He looked at me with bright eyes. Waiting for my reaction.

  “You probably just associated me into the dream because you’d read the bio,” I said.

  “No.” He shook his head emphatically.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’d never seen you before.”

  “I thought you just said you looked me up on the web.”

  “I did that today. After class.”

  I felt myself get cold. Barton Springs cold. “And you’d never seen my face before this morning?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Not once in my whole life.”

  “How do you explain that?” I asked.

  “I think you believe in demons, too,” he said.

  3

  IF THIS WERE A MOVIE, my next move would be to visit a priest. But since this is not a movie, and since I do not personally know any priests, I called my friend Bob.

  Bob Follet teaches at the seminary where I got my master’s degree. It is a conservative school, both theologically and socially, and I was in trouble most of the time I was there. Which isn’t surprising, given my aversion to herd activities and to hoop-jumping. Seminaries, even more than other graduate schools, tend to require a lot of hoop-jumping.

  Bob is a rebel too, but is better at conformity than I am, and thus had managed to stick around long enough to get his doctorate in theology. He was still sticking around, in fact. He’d landed himself a spot as an assistant professor in the systematic theology department.

  Bob is a very good egg. Also to his credit, he still has most of his hair and his sense of humor. Two of my favorite qualities in a man.

  I was relieved when he answered the phone and said he could meet me after his first class the next day.

  I ventured onto the seminary campus the next morning cautiously, as I always do.

  Since I teach in the “secular” world, I get to wear whatever I want. Academics are supposed to be strange and eccentric, and everyone knows psychologists
are just this side of the loony bin, so I happily dress the part. I wear jeans with beads on them and funky shirts and hats I buy in thrift shops.

  The seminary has a dress code (“professional attire required”), and no one there dresses like I do. But I was determined not to give in to the peer pressure, convinced as I am that if Jesus were walking around today, he would be wearing ratty jeans too.

  Bob was not in his office, but the door was standing open, so I let myself in and helped myself to a cup of coffee. I hate coffee. But I was desperate. I needed the caffeine. I poked around his office while I waited for him.

  I’ve always thought you could learn a lot about a person by studying his bookshelves. People who buy their books by the yard, with matching leather bindings, always seem like phonies to me. Like they’re trying too hard. But Bob’s bookshelves let me into his creative, critical-thinking mind. He had C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer too, along with Langston Hughes, Kierkegaard, and a bunch of people I’d never heard of. Since Bob is my intellectual hero and I want to be like him when I grow up, I got out a pen and paper and copied down a few titles.

  “Analyzing my bookshelves again?” Bob’s voice startled me.

  I turned around, busted.

  We hugged and he offered me a seat, settling himself in behind a very tidy desk.

  “You look good, Dylan,” he said, loosening his tie. “Satan invented neckties, I’m convinced.”

  “And panty hose,” I added.

  “How would you know? When was the last time you wore a pair?” I thought about it. “November ’99. My brother’s wedding.”

  “He still married?”

  “Guthrie? Oh yeah. They’re moving to Seattle.”

  “Any kids yet?”

  “No, they’re trying to get it right with the cats first.”

  “Absolutely.” Bob nodded and checked his watch. “You didn’t sound too good on the phone.”

  “Well, I’m not too good, to tell you the truth. I’ve got some pretty bizarre stuff happening.”

  I told him my story. Both of them, actually Weirdo Peter Terry and the jewelry, and then Gavin and his dream.