by Chase Novak
But after emptying this sewer of invective and seeing that no matter what she says she cannot incite Cynthia to use that knife, Leslie sinks back into her chair, closes her eyes. In the sudden silence, both women hear the distant muffled howls from the cellar below.
“Come on,” Leslie says, “follow me. I’ll show you how bad it’s gotten.”
Davis Fleming paces his office, silently mouthing the words of the address he will give next week at the Berryman alumni dinner, which, in what strikes him as a kind of kick-up-your-heels, devil-may-care snubbing of Berryman tradition, will be held downtown at a newly opened Italian restaurant called Trattoria Gigi. Normally, this dinner is held at a venerable Upper East Side venue called Wittenborg’s, but even the most dyed-in-the-wool Berryman traditionalists have begun to notice and discreetly complain that Wittenborg’s food has become somewhat tired, and some would say inedible. This downtown Italian restaurant has garnered enthusiastic reviews and it serves the kind of trendy delicacies the younger alumni seem to crave. The tuna carpaccio has garnered a great deal of praise, and one food writer has remarked that no one in town can foam a Jerusalem artichoke quite like the chef at Trattoria Gigi. Fleming could not care less. His only concern is making up some of the school’s battered endowment, which is still depleted in the aftermath of hideous stock-market fluctuations. So if the younger alumni crave Jerusalem artichoke foam, then Jerusalem artichoke foam it shall be. These fresh young zillionaires have weird tastes—in parenting, in clothing, and in food. And my God, do they fret over food. It is so odd to Fleming how much emphasis some people put on what they eat.… He himself goes for the basics, just like his father and his father before him. Give him a piece of meat, a half a potato, a green salad, and a glass of ice water, and he will be fine. Maybe a scoop of strawberry ice cream, a cup of coffee—and never mind if it has been organically shade grown!
Thinking of ice cream and coffee somehow eases Davis into a kind of reverie, and he stands now in his office, holding a triple-spaced copy of his remarks, gazing out his window, seeing without actually seeing the familiar view of the wrought-iron fence surrounding the school and the sidewalk and pedestrians and street and cars beyond. Then something does jolt him out of his dreamy, slightly sleepy state: he sees Michael Medoff walking slowly toward the school, his face stern and unshaved, his gloved hand holding a coffee in a to-go cup.
“Oh no,” Fleming says. How can this be happening? He thought he and this idiot had an agreement.
He drops his prepared remarks onto his desk and charges out of his office, putting his coat on in the quiet corridor as he races for the front entrance.
“Mr. Medoff!” he calls as soon as he is outside. Fleming’s voice is rich with bonhomie, but his smile has all the warmth of a hacksaw. Medoff is lurking near the entrance, though he shows no sign of intending to actually enter the building, which somehow makes his presence near the school even worse, and more irritating.
“What are you doing here, buddy?” Fleming says, slowing his pace as he approaches the young teacher.
“Doing?” Michael says. He looks around, as if just now realizing where he is. His hair is tousled; the whites of his eyes show little lightning bolts of red. “I’m… just walking.”
Fleming glances up at the dank gray sky that looms above them like a chilly platter of raw fish. “Really? Out for a walk?”
Michael nods.
“I thought we had an understanding,” Fleming says. He gives Michael’s shoulder a couple of vigorous pats. “I thought you understood what’s at stake here.”
“I have done nothing wrong, Davis, and you know it. The Twisdens are making me the issue when the issue is clearly them. Have you called CPS yet?”
“The point is, Mike—”
“Don’t call me Mike. Okay?”
“The point is that in a school atmosphere—especially an elite institution—where there is smoke there is fire.”
“Did you just come up with that?”
“You know what I’m talking about. The Twisdens are going to make this about you.”
“Yes, you’re talking about me being a h-o-m-o.”
“I’m talking about allegations of misconduct.”
“I repeat: h-o-m-o.”
“I’m not going to play little PC games with you, Michael. We’re both professionals. We both understand what’s involved in protecting this place as a learning environment.”
“That boy is terrified. Have you even asked why?”
“What occurs in families is often difficult for outsiders to understand. But here’s something everyone understands—he was in your apartment. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble that could cause—not only for you, but for the whole of Berryman Prep? We are days away from a major fund-raising event. We don’t need this shit, okay? You understand? We do not need this shit. Am I talking your language?”
“Are you talking my language? Because you said shit? What the fuck is the matter with you, Davis?”
“There’s not a mark on these children. They do well in school. There’s no sign of distress. Believe me, I’ve been in the kid business for a long, long time. What did the boy say to you that’s made you so determined to make everyone’s life miserable? Did he say that he was being beaten?”
“No, he did not.”
“Sexually abused?”
“No.”
“Anything?”
“Yes.”
“What, Mr. Medoff? What?”
“He said that their parents were…” Michael breathes a long sigh. “He thinks, they both think, that their parents are going to eat them.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“And you believed him. You are willing to put the reputation and possibly even the financial health of this institution on the line because a ten-year-old boy came to your apartment in the middle of the night and told you his parents were going to eat him up, yum yum yum.”
Before Michael can say another word, little Adam Twisden-Kramer rushes to him and throws his arms around his teacher’s waist.
Michael, exhausted and brittle with tension, almost loses his footing from the force of the collision, but when he looks down and sees the boy, his dark hair damp, his face pressed into the wool of Michael’s coat, his eyes squeezed shut, there is nothing to do but pat the kid lovingly, hoping to impart some small comfort with a touch.
“Hey, hey, what’s going on?” Michael says. He sees Alice standing a few feet away, looking on, her face pale and fearful. He looks at her questioningly as Adam continues to hold on to him.
“Do you see this?” Fleming says, his eyes wide, his head shaking back and forth, as if he has just discovered incontrovertible proof of a crime. “This is not a teacher-student relationship here.”
Adam appears oblivious to what Fleming is saying and implying and, in fact, doesn’t even seem to hear his voice. His grip on Michael only tightens.
Michael pats the top of the boy’s head. His hair feels half frozen, thick and a bit oily. At his teacher’s touch, Adam looks up, his eyes wild and frightened.
“Hi,” the boy says, his voice shredded by uncertainty.
“Are you coming to school?” Michael asks.
Adam shakes his head. Alice tentatively steps a little closer.
“People are looking for you, Adam,” Fleming says. “Your parents are worried sick. All of us are. Where have you been?” As he asks this, Fleming reaches for Adam, takes him by the arm. But Adam yanks himself free of Fleming’s grip.
“Leave him alone,” Alice says. It’s almost impossible to believe that voice—grave and harsh and full of threat—could come out of the willowy little girl shivering on the sidewalk.
Fleming is unnerved by it for a moment but he regains control of himself and raises a finger and slowly points it at Alice, a gesture that in the course of his career as an educator may have frightened many a ten-year-old into submission but that on this cold morning has absolutely no effect on Alice.
“I wish I was grown up,” Adam says to Michael in little more than a whisper.
“It’s not all that it’s cracked up to be,” Michael tells the boy, stroking his hair. Suddenly, Michael brings himself up short: How will it look to people who see him petting this beautiful ten-year-old boy? What will people make of it? What will they assume? What frightened, hateful thoughts will form in their minds? How is it that heteros, with their long history of savagery toward children (Abraham’s willingness to run God’s bloody errand was only the beginning!), with their centuries of raping, exploiting, slaughtering, and starving children, have managed to project the propensity to harm onto gay people? Fuck it all. He puts his arm around the boy.
But the boy resists. He sees something. And Alice sees it too.
“I am going to need you two to come inside and we can call your…” Fleming is saying.
Michael has followed the trajectory of the twins’ frightened stare and now he sees what they see—Alex Twisden, his shoulders hunched, his head down, his hands jammed into the pockets of his long leather coat. He is rapidly approaching Berryman Prep, and those he passes on the sidewalk step quickly to one side. It would be best not to be jostled by this glowering man, in whom anger and energy seem to sizzle like meat on a grill.
Fleming senses that the twins are about to bolt, and he has the presence of mind to grab Adam by the wrist and Alice by the lapel of her autumn jacket. It is like grabbing a trout under the water or somehow getting your hands on a rabbit in the wild—the smallness of the creature in no way prepares you for its strength and its will to escape your clutches, a will completely undiluted by manners or any hope that you might somehow be merciful.
Adam makes a sound—it’s like a quick exhalation of breath, with a guttural dragging noise in it—and twists away from Fleming, while Alice tucks her chin in, takes a quick sniff of Fleming’s hand, and then bites it—not so hard as to draw blood, but with enough force to make him relinquish his hold on her.
“Hey!” is all Fleming is able to say. As the twins take each other’s hands and run in a westerly direction, he shouts at them, “Welcome to suspension, you two!” He turns, glaring, toward Michael, as if this turn of events were Medoff’s fault too.
Michael tosses his to-go cup into the nearby trash can and sets out after the twins—he doesn’t know why. Perhaps to bring them back, perhaps to learn why the very sight of their father—Twisden is just now crossing the street at a diagonal, seemingly blind to the traffic—would make Adam and Alice run for their lives.
“Bring them back!” Fleming calls out after Michael. “Bring them right back here.”
Fleming watches for a moment as Michael races after the two children. And now they have stopped—they see him coming. Adam reaches out for his teacher with both hands, as if Adam is on a ship that has just left the pier, and Michael, a moment late, must now leap over the freezing waters to get on board.
Suddenly, Fleming feels a powerful thud against his shoulder, and he has to grab onto the fence to stop himself from losing his footing and falling onto the sidewalk.
“You idiot,” Twisden says through clenched teeth. “You had them in your hands!” And without another word he speed-walks past Fleming, a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet behind the twins and Michael. “Kids!” Twisden calls. “Come back! Kids? Come on. Please. I’m not going to—” He stops himself from saying hurt you, and in the momentary silence of the suppression, his mouth fills with the imagined taste of blood. His hand goes to his throat and he takes a deep, shuddering breath. Oh no, no no no, he thinks. Please don’t let this be happening.
Without realizing it, Alex has stepped into the street, and his moment of remorse is suddenly invaded by the flat, brutal sound of a car horn. A taxicab has come to a screeching halt a few inches from him, and the driver, a dark young man with little round glasses and a ponytail, is leaning on his horn.
Alex walks to the taxi and opens the door. The driver is reaching for the billy club he keeps wedged between his seat and the door precisely for moments like this. He raises the club to strike Alex, but Alex catches it in mid-arc, pulls it out of the driver’s hand, and sends it skittering across the street, where it disappears beneath a parked van.
“That honking hurts my ears,” Alex tells the driver before setting off down the street after his children, at first in a kind of easy lope, and then faster and faster. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and dials Leslie as he runs.
Leslie has gone—as soon as the call from Alex came in, telling her that he had found Alice and Adam, she grabbed her coat and raced out. Alone again in the house, Cynthia sits on a falling-apart sofa in front of the fireplace, the cracked tiles of which open into a hidden highway for the countless rats that live within these walls. She has been sitting there immobile for—who knows how long? She is in a state of shock, trying to understand what has happened to her sister while at the same time trying desperately to expel it from her mind. The conflict between these two contradictory impulses has filled Cynthia’s head with a swarming, incoherent chaos that sounds like the buzzing of a hive. She claps her hands over her ears, and the drone of her confusion is louder, more insistent.
And now the miserable commotion from deep within the house rises up through the floors like the smell of rot. Cynthia gets up from the sofa, cocks her head, listens. She hears the high hopeless yipping of what she guesses is a small dog, and the whimper of puppies, and the deep, exhausted woof of what sounds like a large hound. The key! She remembers it all of a sudden, jams her hand into her pocket—and there it is. She feels its sharp jagged notches, and the steely cold of it somehow accelerates her heart. She pulls the key out, tightens her hand around it, and wonders if she is going to faint.
But her fear is not as great as her will to survive, and she holds on to her perch of consciousness, sensing that if she succumbs to the inner darkness that beckons her, all will be lost. Slowly, deliberately, with every fiber of her self-control, Cynthia forces herself to the stairway and makes her way to the cellar’s locked door, all the while clasping the key so tightly that when she opens her hand to look, it is as if the shape of it has been branded onto her palm.
The animals below sense her presence—at first they go silent, as if experience has taught them that the approach of human footsteps can sometimes bring food and attention and sometimes terror. But soon the sound of the key trembling and scraping its way into the lock excites them—their hunger triumphs over the flickering memories of the terrible things they have already seen, and they begin to vocalize, making beseeching sounds from whimpers to howls.
Cynthia turns the key. The lock is resistant, but then with a heavy clunk it turns. Her hand grips the handle, the cold, greasy brass of it. She pauses—mixed in with the cacophony below is… a human voice. Can it be true? Can there be a person down there? Yes, the sound is unmistakable. A man. But what is he saying? At first it sounds like a threat—like, Don’t come near. Stay where you are. But that’s not it. She listens more closely. She pulls the door open—just a crack. She raises her knee up against it, in case someone or something comes rushing forward.
Hi, Diane, that’s what the voice is saying.
“Hello?” Cynthia calls down. “Hello?” She opens the door wide and peers into the damp darkness below. What could she do for a man locked in a cellar who is calling for Diane? Who could he be? Why would he be lurking down here? And who in the name of holy hell is Diane?
She feels along the wall near the door and finds the light switch, turns it on. One dim, bare lightbulb comes on, hanging from its fixture about halfway down the wooden steps. Light seems to leak from the bulb with the weakness and uncertainty of water dripping from a faucet. How can a light make everything seem darker? The plank right below the light shows dark gray, but all that seethes beyond it has been plunged into the blackness of a moonless, starless winter night.
“Hello?” Cynthia calls down again, and hearing the trembling fear in her own voice, she cle
ars her throat and repeats it, forcing herself to sound more capable, less afraid. The dogs respond to her voice with wild, piteous barks and yowls, and she hears the crash and rattle of their cages as they throw their bodies against them. Suddenly, there is a moment’s pause in the canine clamor, and in this brief silence she hears the human voice again. And he is not saying Hi, Diane. Would that he were! He is saying over and over and over again, with a kind of mindless insistence, like a prisoner beating a tin cup against a stone wall, “I’m dying, I’m dying,” his voice dull and hopeless.
Cynthia takes hold of the light fixture and tries to aim the bulb down toward the bottom of the stairs. The bright chrome of a cage winks briefly in the glow and then recedes into the darkness again, to be replaced by the staring needful eyes of a dog. A line of knives hanging from something… The fixture is finally too hot to hold on to any longer and with a little yelp of pain—which sets the dogs off once again, louder than ever—she lets it go, and the light swings back and forth, casting dizzying, maddening shadows everywhere.
Cynthia’s consciousness is now all but split in two. What is most reasoned in her mind counsels her to turn, go back upstairs, and close that heavy door behind her. But her instinct urges her forward, into the darkness and the noise of that cellar, and step by step she approaches the bottom of the staircase, to the ever-increasing passion of the caged dogs and the bleating, pathetic sound of the human being who also awaits her, who is only able to repeat over and over: Dying dying dying. And, finally, Please help me.
The floor of the cellar surprises the bottoms of her feet—she was expecting wood or cement, but it’s dirt, packed and hard, and so cold that the chill of it goes right through the soles of her shoes and into her bones. Her legs tremble and nearly buckle; she reaches blindly at nothing to steady herself. And then, a surprise: she stumbles forward, hears a faint click, and suddenly the entire cellar is illuminated—the lights have been switched on by a motion detector, and now the cellar is as bright as an operating theater. Cynthia reels, blinks back the brightness.
