Obedience

by Will Lavender

  “No,” Brian said. “I’m not. I’m sorry but I have to go.” He stood up again, gathered his things and, with his head down as if he were going to get sick, walked out of Seminary East.

  “Go on, Detective,” Williams instructed the man when the door was closed.

  “We never found that missing girl. Of course the father chopped her up, we all knew that, but we never could prove it. One common theory was that some of the Creeps’ rivals took her out to the desert and left her there as a sort of blood capital. But uh-uh. No. You can’t convince me that it wasn’t Daddy.

  “I still think about Deanna. When I retired I would drive the streets down in Cale, looking for that girl. After Star Ward took his family and left for California, they didn’t get too many leads about Deanna down at the station. One day I followed the boyfriend—you have to understand, now, that I was off duty by this time and could have gotten in some severe trouble if I’d been found out. He went out to eat. Got gas at the Swifty. Went home and watched TV, and I watched him through the window of his apartment. Nothing. It still haunts me to this day. That one grand failure.”

  Detective Thurman stopped talking. His eyes were still moist, glinting in Seminary East’s steady light. He took another slug of the Dasani. “Questions?” he asked, his voice choked and raw.

  The students spent a few minutes asking questions. Thurman answered them clumsily, his language leaning heavily into cliché. When asked why he had gone into the force, he told them that police work was “noble,” and that he was just carrying on the legacy of his brother and father, who were also cops. He told them that the key to detective work was “keeping your eye on the ball” and not getting “trapped in a corner.” When asked if he had ever fired his gun, he said yes, but only as a last resort. Dennis Flaherty tried to bait him into a question about Polly, but Professor Williams jumped from his seat and announced that time was up.

  When the detective had shuffled out of the room, Williams shut the door behind him. Mary braced for an important bit of information.

  “There is, you’ll be happy to know, some edutainment scheduled for this weekend. There is going to be a—how shall I put this and not offend the Square Guard up at Carnegie?—a party at my house on Sunday night.”

  “A soiree?” asked Dennis jokingly.

  “A bash. Montgomery and Pride. Eight o’clock. You can bring a friend.”

  As usual, a few people convened in the hallway after class. “Are you going?” Dennis asked the girl who sat beside him. “No way,” said the girl sharply. It was agreed upon by the group that no one would go to the party, that it was entirely too bizarre a proposition. “He’ll get us in there and murder us all,” a boy said, laughing, but it was a strangled laugh, nervous and pitchy. “You going?” Dennis asked Mary.

  “Of course not,” she said. But she was lying. She had already made up her mind about what to wear.

  17

  It was like she was afraid she was going to reveal herself.

  Later that afternoon, Brian was down at the kilns, in the forest of heat. He was thinking about what the detective said, how similar the girl in the story was to the girl he’d met. Polly. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew that he couldn’t go back to that class. Were they trying to break him? Make him go crazy? Were they trying to embarrass him? Well, fuck that; he wasn’t going back.

  Like she was afraid…

  No.

  …she was going to reveal herself.

  Had Brian met the girl the detective was talking about, the one who’d gone missing—Deanna Ward—at the kilns that night? It was impossible. Why had the girl called herself Polly? Had Williams sent her to him to lie? Another one of his mind-fucks, another cruel twist. It was beginning to haunt him, to tear at him until he felt that he was going to be pulled into two directions by it, one Brian walking toward and one Brian walking away in fear.

  What the fuck IS THIS?

  He was making his mother another vase, even though she had a house full of them. The last time he had gone home he had found them in a little-used closet, dusting over and untouched. But still—it was the effort that mattered.

  The Doors blared from the speakers that were mounted in the corners of the kiln room. The building was referred to on campus as Chop Hall, named for the Chinese American sculptor who was the head of the Art Department at Winchester. Dr. Lin was said to practice judo in the building when it emptied every evening, though Brian had never seen him do it. Thus the name “Chop,” the suggestion being that if your art was subpar Dr. Lin would have your ass.

  Now Dr. Lin was assisting Brian at the kiln. Brian had the blowpipe and he was gathering the chips of color, greens and blues this time to match his current mood, one of those September hazes he always fell into before the term’s end. “Turn!” said Dr. Lin, and Brian spun the pipe and began to blow into it, pushing at the glass, bubbling it into a sphere of fiery orange.

  The heat seared at his bare chest. He was covered in grime and sweat. The kiln roared and sucked in the air from the room. Brian found that he could scream, literally scream, when the process reached this point and no one would hear him.

  “This is the end,” Jim Morrison sang above the roar, “beautiful friend. This is the end.”

  When he had puntied up the vase, Dr. Lin left him. Brian tapped on the pipe and the thing stayed in one piece. There were no crazes or skeins running through it. And it was ugly, fierce, more mass than shape. It was perfect. He would call it Exodus: the act of leaving, of escaping en masse.

  There were so many problems at home. Katie, for instance. She still called him most every night, sent him chintzy postcards from Vassar. She would sign every card LOVE YOU! and her aggression had begun to wear Brian down. The tyranny of distance. They had changed him, the nearly seven hundred miles separating Winchester and Vassar College. New York now felt like some distant land, a dreamy place that existed in the beiges and soft greens of Polaroid photographs taken in the 1980s. Since he had been away, his perception of home had changed, become more rigid and obscure. At times, he couldn’t even remember his mother’s face.

  How many girls had there been? Ten? Twelve? It was hard to tell. Some of them he couldn’t remember. Some hadn’t mattered. A few of them, like the girl he’d met last weekend, the girl who had called herself Polly, hadn’t even made sense given the circumstances surrounding the hookup.

  He thought of that girl now. She was why he had left class today. Williams was fucking with him, that much was clear. The girl was part of the professor’s ruse, part of the whole puzzle. Brian wouldn’t even have to tell Katie about her when he got back to Poughkeepsie, so he might as well mark her—this Polly—off the list. Anyway, nothing had happened between them. He could write Katie a letter and explain it all to her. Dear Katie, he’d write. You won’t believe what happened to me this weekend.

  It would all be a joke. Yes, he’d kissed that girl. But Katie had kissed a boy last year, a boy named Michael, and Brian didn’t care. It happened and he’d gotten over it. Same with this, except…

  Except what would Williams want to prove by doing that? What was he supposed to do with the information the girl had given him? The more he thought about it, the more pissed off he became. It was his private life that Williams was screwing around with, after all. Was Williams fucked up, some sort of psycho who liked to play with his students’ heads? Was he trying to expose Brian somehow, set him up, or possibly—

  “House?”

  Brian turned around and saw the guy he had seen that night in Chop. “That’s me,” he said.

  “Were you in here last Friday?” the guy asked. Brian remembered: the guy had been drinking coffee; steam had come out of the cup in little wisps.

  “I might have been.”

  “Who was that girl you were with?”

  “I have no idea. Just some girl.” Brian thought he knew where this was going. “Look, man. We were really drunk. I don’t even remember what I said. I—”

  �
�I think I know that girl.”

  “Oh yeah?” Brian was intrigued now.

  “Yeah. She…It’s funny. This is going to sound crazy, but that girl is dead.”

  Brian stared at the boy. “What are you talking about?”

  “At least that’s what they told us. She went missing from my hometown a long time ago, back in the eighties, and when I was in school they found her remains out in California somewhere. Near San Francisco. Murdered, you know. Her family had all moved away by that time. But I swear to God, dude—she looked just like the pictures I’ve seen of her. But the girl you were with was…younger. It couldn’t have been her. The girl from my town would have to be almost forty years old by now. I wanted to stop her, you know, but she looked pretty upset.”

  Brian, embarrassed, looked away. But then something else occurred to him. “Where you from?”

  “Cale, Indiana,” the boy said. “Home of the Blue Hens. You know us?”

  “No,” Brian said, thinking.

  “Jason Nettles,” the boy said, putting out a color-streaked hand for Brian to shake. “Call me Net. Painting, with a minor in glass.”

  But Brian had already drifted off. Those tumblers in his mind were falling into place, one by one by one.

  Cale. Where the detective had worked. The detective had told a story about a missing girl. Could the girl that Brian brought to the kilns be connected in any way to the detective’s story?

  Williams, he thought. Williams is planting it. Setting it up.

  Before he knew it, Brian was jamming his shirt over his head and brushing past the other boy, on the way out of Chop and into the crooked world.

  18

  That night Mary was back into City of Glass. Quinn was decoding Stillman’s steps through the city into letters that read the Tower of Babel. Mary was finally intrigued by the story. Auster had her, and she was beginning to worry about Quinn’s sanity—how he was going to cope with this addiction to Stillman, this obsession for not necessarily solving the puzzle but for the puzzle itself.

  It was all familiar to her. Even though she knew now that cracking the code of Williams’s class—really cracking, really solving it completely—was going to be impossible because there were too many twists and turns and inconsistencies and false leads, she was going to have to decide on a theory and go with it. Run with it, headlong. There was no other way to placate her mind. Two years ago she had told herself that Dennis had simply changed. (Boys just change, Mary, Summer McCoy had told her.) That allowed her some peace, finally.

  Now she was going to have to decide on a plan and work through it. Damn the consequences if she was wrong. She had to start working, had to put her mind to the task of finding Polly. Dithering now would only cost her time, and with only three weeks left to find the missing girl, time was something Mary couldn’t waste.

  “A note to himself?” Quinn was thinking in the book. “A message?”

  The phone rang.

  “This is Brian,” the voice on the other line said. “I’ve found something.”

  “Why did you leave class today?” Mary asked.

  “Personal reasons. Look, I didn’t know who else to call. I found you in the campus directory. I—I thought you would want to hear it.”

  “Hear what, Brian?”

  “That detective? Thurman? He was a fake.”

  Mary let it sink in. For a second she thought that Brian might be trying to fool her by playing some nasty trick on her. Or, worse, that Williams had somehow gotten to Brian and they were in on the deception together. Perhaps the game—the class, the professor, the students, the Summer McCoy photo—was all some clever hoax at Mary’s expense. All this flashed through her mind so fleetingly that she could not grasp it, any of it. It had come and gone before she had had time to register its impact, and then Brian was talking again.

  “I called the Cale Police Department. No one had ever heard of him down there, Mary. I checked around. Bell City. DeLane. Shelton. Nothing. No Detective Thurman. No record of him anywhere.”

  “What does this mean?” she asked. The world was at a roar now on each side of her, whooshing across the plane of her perception. So much chaos out there. So much disorder. Randomness.

  “It means that Williams is toying with us. It’s part of the class.”

  “It’s not against the law, Brian,” she said. Taking up for Williams now. Protecting him.

  “Not against the law, no, but there must be some ethics regulation. Some policy on the books that prohibits this kind of thing.”

  He was breathless, ragged, nearly desperate.

  “I called around, tried to see what I could do. To—to stop this bullshit. The people in Student Services told me to call Dean Orman, so I did,” he said.

  “No,” she said. Later, she would wonder why she had said it.

  “Told him all about it: Polly. The detective. The fake story Thurman had given us. He seemed…disturbed by it. Told me that he would have it taken care of. Told me not to meet with Williams if he asked me to his office. If I saw him on the sidewalk, keep walking. Orman sounded as if he had maybe had some thing with Williams in the past. It was like he wasn’t even surprised by what I was telling him.”

  Mary told Brian about the plagiarism issue. She told him all that she knew, about the note on Williams’s desk and her meeting with Troy Hardings, about the weird phone call she had received from the campus police that night, even how strong Leonard Williams had been blocking her at the classroom door. She could hear his labored, quick breath on the other end of the line following her through the story.

  Brian said, “If you saw a note about her and this guy, his assistant—”

  “Troy.”

  “If you saw a note about her, then that must mean—”

  “It’s true. I went through the EBSCOhost database and found an old article about her. Written by—I’ve got it printed out here. Written by a guy named Nicholas Bourdoix. August nineteen eighty-six.”

  “My God, Mary,” Brian said. “Why would Williams do this?”

  “I really hadn’t thought about it,” she told him. But that wasn’t true. She had given the question considerable thought ever since she’d found the Bourdoix article. Did Williams have something to do with Deanna Ward’s disappearance? She found herself thinking about Williams’s awful strength again, his tremendous weight pushing against her.

  Stay.

  “My question is why,” Brian said, snapping Mary out of her reverie. “Why is he still at Winchester? Don’t you think there’s something wrong with him, Mary?”

  She didn’t answer. She thought of Dennis, for some reason, about when he had gone back with her to Kentucky for Thanksgiving two years ago. Her father had found her late that first night, watching television alone. Don’t you think there’s something wrong with him, Mary? he’d asked. When she had castigated him for saying it, turned her face so that he couldn’t see that she was crying, he had softly apologized. A month later Dennis was with Savannah Kleppers.

  “I mean, he’s mysterious,” Brian went on. “The way he talks. The way he acts. There’s something forced about him, Mary. Scripted. I know it. I’ve seen it before. My brother—”

  “What?” Mary asked. Something was holding Brian back, some internal boundary he was afraid to cross.

  “My brother was an actor. He did Shakespeare, mostly. Some local stuff up in the Hudson Valley. He was brilliant. He’d just landed a commercial when he shot himself.”

  Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Their silence was broken when some girls screamed with delight out on the quad in front of Brown. It was Friday night, and Mary suddenly had a great urge to be back in Kentucky, at home. It came up on her so quickly she had to choke it down. She was into something, she thought, for the first time, something larger than herself.

  “Anyway,” said Brian, “I’m not going back to his class.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Hell no. That class scares the shit out of me. I made up my mind
as the good detective was giving his spiel. They can have it. I’ll take the F. Polly is just a game anyway, deception on a mass scale.”

  It’s just a game, he’d said. But she’d known that. Hadn’t they known that all along? Williams had admitted that it was a logic puzzle on the first day, designed to teach them rational thinking skills. What had changed? A fake detective, a false story? A story about another girl who had gone missing? It was possible that the real world had encroached too far into the ruse and scared them both away. Mary thought of Quinn in City of Glass. The mystery had become his life, had turned into something as tangible as a red notebook that he held in his lap and scribbled wild entries into. Ceaselessly, confoundingly, those entries went into the notebook until they made up a record of his obsession and his fall.

  “Brian,” Mary whispered. And when he didn’t answer, she said it louder.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m still here.”

  “I think Williams is…” She closed her eyes, unable to find the word.

  “I know what you mean,” Brian said.

  19

  Mary showed up at Professor Williams’s house early on Sunday. It was a warm night, and she had walked across the Great Lawn, in front of the Orman Library, and cut back onto Pride Street. It was only a block up. Mary had passed his house many times on her jogs around campus. An unassuming house, nothing really, just some dark brick and a gravel driveway with a pickup truck parked in the front. A dog barking out back, running along a clothesline. It was all normal, quaint even—not in the least what she had expected.

  Dennis had called and asked Mary to meet him there. He had spoken to Professor Williams, he told Mary, and there were going to be surprises at the party. Mary imagined it as extra credit, a leg up on the rest of the class. Williams was worried that no one would come, Dennis told Mary, and so he had lined up an exciting evening pertaining to Polly.

  Oh, she had fought the urge. With everything in her she had fought it. She thought about Brian House, how distraught he had sounded on the phone. She knew better. As she walked across the lawn that evening, she knew she was wrong and he was right. She was like the girl in the horror movie, opening the door although no one was home. She was exactly like that girl. But still she walked, her heels digging in to the moist grass, the leaves above her rattling and dropping into her hair.