My deepest condolences,
Elliott Morgan
So that was why the exact location and cause of death remained absent from the newspapers—Lily’s father had made a phone call, and the editors had done his bidding. But why keep this information secret?
Next I dug up Justin’s death certificate. It resembled the personal-info section of an application: Name, DOB, Permanent Residence. I imagined what would have happened if this death certificate had accidentally ended up with a bunch of admissions officers. Well, he went to a good high school, but I’m not sure his death is Harvard material. I grimaced and kept reading.
Severe fracture to the head, the certificate said. Victim died on impact.
But impact with what? The car didn’t crash into a pocket of air.
I flipped through more documents, and there it was: the police report. My blood pounded in my ears. The statement described Justin Kaplan driving a 1989 Peugeot down Church Street at approximately 4 a.m. when his car slipped on black ice, spun out of control on the severe slope of the street, and crashed into a large oak tree outside 95 Church.
Ninety-five Church was Lily Morgan’s address—my address. Justin had died outside my bedroom window.
I remembered seeing the tree when my mother and I first arrived at the Morgans’. I remembered its imposing size, its lofty, gnarled branches. In my mind’s eye I saw these branches waving erratically, as though dancing to a strange and sinister tune. A boy had died beneath them, only feet from where I’d been living.
With trembling fingers I pulled the next pages from the box. It was getting dark outside, and I held the papers up to the window to catch the last light. Now I was looking at a series of numbered sheets. Mathematical equations sprawled across the first few, but as I flipped through the packet, I began to see images too: quick sketches of a car on a hill; markers representing the hill’s slope; the hood’s angle against a tree; and the location of the black ice. I turned to the last page to find the complete image of the accident site: car, ice, tree—and, drawn in the middle of the page—the four-eyed demon of Prisom’s Party.
My brain felt like a hard drive at capacity. But the answer was there, in a few short words scribbled below. Face spooks J, car swerves, hits ice, loses control, impact.
Impact.
No wonder the four-eyed monster on the bathroom mirror had spooked Mr. Kaplan. No wonder he’d hurled his bag at the demon’s face on the Trench wall. Mr. Kaplan wasn’t afraid of Prisom’s Party at all; he was furious because their symbol had killed his twin.
I thought about all the things that linked Prisom’s Party across the generations. Their members were artists—painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and above all storytellers. The yarns they spun were like spider silk, sticky and ensnaring. Justin Kaplan had unwittingly wandered into their web.
I sat back and shut my eyes, watching a picture swirl up out of the dark and come into bright, digital focus. I saw Justin Kaplan speeding toward Lily’s house in the dark, the demon seeming to leap out of the road. I imagined his heart bursting with fright as his hands lost control of the wheel, as his tires hit ice and the tree rushed forward as though to greet him. Justin’s death itself had been a kind of performance piece, the climax of a nefarious drama. Was there a video of this too, I wondered, playing in some gallery in New York City or Berlin to audiences who didn’t realize they were watching something real?
Was Lily responsible for this? She’d refused to explain why Justin came to her house in the middle of the night. She’d disappeared after the accident. And then, there was Sacrificial Lamb: hard evidence of her betrayal. She could easily have drawn the demon on the street outside her home and lured Justin over, knowing the monster would be there to send him on a treacherous collision course. And maybe she had a motive, but maybe she just liked being part of a project, playing the role of creator.
The day I first arrived in Nye had seemed inconsequential, when in fact I’d fallen deeply into Lily’s world. It frightened me to look back at my former self and see all the awful ways in which I’d wised up. I didn’t want to be like Lily, a pawn of the Party. I was through with them.
But my investigation wasn’t over. My journalism was supposed to change people’s lives. A naïve goal, maybe, but Murrow had done it. Lieutenant Milo Radulovich was discharged from the Air Force because his sister read Serbian—i.e., “communist”—newspapers. Murrow’s first broadcast against McCarthy took up Radulovich’s case and led to the lieutenant’s reinstatement. Like Murrow, I would be an advocate. Mr. Kaplan and I harbored the same dark shadows, and I understood his grief. So I would uncover what really happened to Justin—accident, suicide, or devious plot—and in so doing, restore Mr. Kaplan to his pre-grief state. I would help him heal.
***
After I copied all the relevant documents from Mr. Kaplan’s car, I returned his keys and went to tell him everything. The Academic League competition was still in progress, however, so I headed across campus to study in the library and wait.
Sometime later, my phone buzzing in my pocket startled me. I looked up, disoriented. I was sitting in one of the library’s reading chairs, my book open on my lap. I’d been asleep for over an hour. Peter’s voice was urgent and quick. He’d be out front in fifteen minutes, he said. It was important.
I left the building and headed through the falling snow to Prisom Hall. I had just enough time to see Mr. Kaplan before Peter arrived. But the Hall was locked. I walked down the steps and looked out into the black and blurry white. Snow fell in the lamplight, forming impossibly thin drifts on the stair railings. I ran my finger straight down one of these drifts, imagining a kid sliding down a banister.
Just then, Peter pulled up and opened the window. In his wool coat and fingerless gloves, he looked like a scrappy, preppy mutt. I wanted to tell him he looked fetching, but I felt nervous and instead inspected the falling snow. It took me a moment to realize that Peter was staring at me. He took my hand through the car window. The wool glove was rough, his fingertips cold. “Get in, silly,” he said.
Peter snuck sidelong glances at me as we sped away from the school. He refused to tell me where we were going, so I launched into my confession. I told him about the kidnapping, the pigs, and the fake story of Edmond Dantes and Thelonius Rex. I told him about Lily and Sacrificial Lamb. And, finally, I told him about the police report and the possibility that Lily Morgan had been a member of Prisom’s Party and responsible for Justin’s death.
At the next stoplight, I showed Peter the Xeroxes and was about to announce my renunciation of Prisom’s Party when he reached out and put his gloved hand on my shoulder. I swallowed, my tongue paralyzed in my mouth. I was vaguely aware that the light had changed. “You’re extraordinary, Iris,” Peter said, shaking his head in amazement. “You truly are an original.”
The car behind us honked, breaking the spell. Peter gunned the accelerator.
“So,” I said, flustered, “what do you think the four-eyed demon is? Do you think it means something?”
“You never asked Prisom’s Party?”
My reporter’s instinct chided me. How could I have forgotten to investigate such a basic detail? Searching now on my phone, I learned that three-eyed skulls were associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead. I typed in “many-eyed monster mythology” and was flooded with sites about mythological Greek characters. There was the Cyclops, of course, as well as a litany of many-headed, and thus many-eyed, creatures: Hydra, Cerberus, Medusa. And then I found a site about Argus Panoptes. A quotation from Hesiod on the home page read: “The great and strong Argus, who with four eyes looks every way, was given unwavering strength by the goddess. And sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept sure watch always.” Apparently Hera had enlisted Argus to keep Zeus away from Io, the maiden cow. A mythological cock block.
I looked up at the rushing trees and falling snow. I didn’t recognize the road, and Peter kept swinging around curves, the car leaning left and then right like a boat slic
ing through water. “Argus Panoptes,” I said. “That’s the demon.”
“That’s right,” Peter said. “Same root as in ‘panopticon,’ a prison where the guards can watch the prisoners without the prisoners knowing it.”
I was about to ask Peter how he knew this, but abruptly the ground changed. We were on a dirt road that hadn’t been plowed, and Peter maneuvered us through a set of tracks in the snow. I couldn’t imagine who had been out here before us. We reached a clearing in the woods and pulled up beside two other cars. Before I could unbuckle my seat belt, Peter had jumped out and was opening the passenger door.
“M’lady.” He held out his hand.
“If you’re thinking about a picnic,” I said, taking his gloved palm, “this is the wrong season.”
“Come on!” he said with palpable excitement, and started leading me through the woods along a narrow, uneven path. Multiple sets of boot prints stretched ahead of us and disappeared through the trees, but to either side the landscape was pristine: snow, smooth as a sheet, punctuated by dark trees. My eyes stung in the cold, and for a moment the forest wavered like a heat mirage. I wiped my hand across my face, and the landscape stilled.
“Is this a joke?” I said, sniffing back my runny nose. “Are you a serial killer?”
The snow filled the dark with small shimmering flakes, but the cold was too bitter for romance. When I looked over my shoulder, I could barely make out the tracks behind us. I stopped walking. Peter stopped too, because I was still holding his hand. “I’m not going any further until you tell me where we’re going.” I clenched my teeth. Even my gums were cold.
Peter touched the crown of my head. “You’re all snowy,” he said.
“You’re all snowy,” I retorted. “Now where are you taking me?”
“I’ll tell you if you let me kiss you.” And then Peter’s face was hovering over mine. His lips touched down. They were so much larger they could have fit over two of my mouths, and their heat spread up through my face and into my scalp.
Peter pulled away, and immediately I blurted, “You didn’t use your tongue!”
“Is that a problem?”
“No. I mean, not that I don’t want you to or anything, but I—”
Peter put his hands on my shoulders. The snow fell around us and between us. “Do you still want to know where we’re going?”
I nodded.
“Iris Dupont . . .” He reached out his index finger and gently swept some snow from my eyelashes. “We are going to your initiation.”
V
Psychrophiles
These extremophiles thrive in conditions of extreme cold by producing a special chemical that keeps their cell membranes from freezing. A frozen membrane can neither allow nutrients in nor expel waste; eventually, such a cell will shrivel and die.
—Marvelous Species: Investigating Earth’s Mysterious Biology
Jonah
December 2012
AFTER THE ACADEMIC LEAGUE scrimmage was over, I headed back to my desk. My colleagues had gone home, and the science department was pleasingly quiet and warm. I graded a stack of tests and prepared for the next day’s class. Outside, snow began to fall. By seven thirty, large, fat flakes descended in dizzying spirals past the window. We were used to heavy snows in Nye and the plows did a decent job, but sometimes a monster storm blew through that rendered everything immobile. Tonight, I could not afford for that to happen.
After finishing up my work, I spent a long time watching the snow fall on the faculty parking lot out back. Ten years ago this space was filled with balsam firs and towering red spruces that pressed in against the building, close enough to scratch the windows. When a budworm parasite defoliated a large hunk of the forest, the school mowed down the trees. According to Rick Rayburn, the faculty was elated; fewer trees meant more parking.
Back in our day, my friends and I would have vented our frustration over such selfishness by plotting a rumor about faculty-perpetrated ecoterrorism. We would have filled one of the many notebooks we kept locked in our team file cabinet with scenarios about how Elliott Morgan or maybe Pasternak had deviously released the budworms, knowing they’d get parking from the deal. It seemed juvenile now, but it was how we spent much of our time in the Trench. We knew the popular legends about Mariana’s secret society: how Charles Prisom had organized a group of stewards to protect the Community Code, and how they’d battled Thelonius Rex. At the end of my freshman year we decided to exhume Prisom’s Party and obliterate all traces of hypocrisy from the Community Code. Like Frankenstein, we constructed our creature from disparate bodies: fantasy, religion, and myth. We conjured gods to serve as our guardians and brainstormed methods through which we might target Mariana’s rigid, stratified culture. Our makeshift secret society appealed to us the way science fiction did, letting us envision a world in which the forces of good combated the forces of evil. But we weren’t fighting for anything; we were simply railing against a social order that didn’t want us.
What separated us from the current iteration of Prisom’s Party, of course, was the fact that we never put a single idea into practice. We were cowards, fearful of getting caught and ruining our precious academic records. In this way, we were as susceptible to the school’s culture as the students we claimed to despise.
Then the locker vandalism happened. Hazel and I had plotted a million coups, but they—whoever they were—had actually pulled one off. They forced us to consider that Mariana’s secret society was real. And if it was, then the kids in the Trench—the social outcasts who should have been running such a club—had found ourselves excluded yet again.
We vowed to one-up the locker vandals with the perfect act of sabotage. But the situation had become precarious. Those were the days of Columbine, and the administration was keeping special tabs on me, trying to assess the extent of my malcontent with Mariana and whether I was capable of violence. (Everyone, down to the school nurse, suspected that I’d been the locker vandal.) If we were going to compete with the actual vandals, we’d have to be extra careful to keep our activities hidden. Unfortunately, it was at just this time that my brother and Lily started dating. One word to her father could have upended everything. Justin promised to keep our activities secret, but we didn’t fully trust him. “How,” I asked him once, “can you maintain an allegiance to us and to Lily? That’s a paradoxical state of being. An impossibility.” But Justin only shrugged. “Negative capability,” he said. “Ever heard of it?”
The locker vandals were never caught. Nobody could figure out how they’d snuck in and out of the school undetected. Meanwhile, the Academic League continued plotting, searching for the perfect putsch.
Had the vandalism been less vicious, it could have been a great symbol to highlight the hypocrisy of a segregated locker system in a school that professed total equality. But the vandals were interested only in retribution—We’ll show you how it feels to be cut down. At fifteen, I didn’t understand that students had no place designating themselves taskmasters over their peers. I believed the world was divided into two camps—the weak and the strong. In such a world, you exercised power over others when you had it, or you didn’t survive. Today, Prisom’s Party was acting under a similar misconception.
Much of my revolutionary fervor died with Justin. I’d always existed as half of a pair, but when he vanished from the world, I could no longer define myself in relation to somebody else. I wasn’t any better or worse than my twin, any smarter, any stronger, any less lovable. I was alive, full stop. Out in California, I’d collapsed in on myself, because I’d lacked substance. It took coming home and, in a certain sense, starting my life over to evolve from a shadow into a man.
So I knew Prisom’s Party and I understood their tactics. They built an identity based on comparison: stronger than and smarter than. And they weren’t alone. Every teenager in every corner of the planet, aside from maybe Iris Dupont, used this approach to combat loneliness and isolation. But not every kid took it to such extre
mes.
At eight thirty, it was time to get moving. The janitor had finished his rounds and I had half an hour until the automatic timers shut off the lights. I stood up from my desk and stretched. Then I walked down to the first floor. I kept thinking some faculty member or dilatory student would materialize and demand to see a hall pass. But Prisom Hall was empty. Not even my brother’s silent eyes followed me from the AL picture in the lobby’s display case, because weeks before, I’d removed it. I’d also removed his articles from the Oracle archives and the library’s copy of the yearbook with his memorial page. Maybe I was feeling guilty because I’d told Rayburn that I didn’t have a brother, or maybe I was anxious because I knew Iris was snooping around in my past. Whatever the reason, I suddenly couldn’t bear having evidence of Justin scattered around the school. I felt better—safer somehow—knowing that the relics of my brother’s life and death were hidden in my desk drawer. There was just one piece of evidence that I could not collect, because it was painted on the wall in the Trench. One of these days I was going to get a can of paint and erase it.
I entered the school lobby, where there was, in fact, someone looking at me: Jimmy Cardozi. “Hi, Jimmy,” I said, walking toward the cardboard figure. “I’m really sorry about this.”
Jimmy grinned, as though to say, Hey, Mr. Kaplan, it’s all good.
I nodded back. “Thanks for understanding,” I said.
Iris
December 2012
YOU’RE WINSTON,” I said to Peter, though I was so stunned that the words felt like lumps on my tongue. Tears welled behind my eyes, and my mouth collapsed into a frown.
“I had to pretend,” he said. “I had to make sure you were fully on board.”
“‘On board’ is a cliché,” I murmured.
The Year of the Gadfly Page 29
