On the hallway floor, three young women were seated, backs to the wall. Two were crying silently. The other one appeared to be asleep. Or—Naomi peered at her—drunk? Stoned? She was black and a tiny thing, and she wore a very oversized Webster sweatshirt marked VARSITY CREW. Naomi, without thinking, bent over her. “Are you okay?” she asked, but her voice didn’t register over the noise, even to herself.
“We gave her something,” the girl next to her said. “She just kind of lost it.”
“What kind of something?” Naomi said, eyeing the girl.
“Only a Xanax. She lives upstairs. She was the one who found it. She went down for toilet paper or something, and she found it.”
Naomi, who figured she’d know soon enough what “it” was, didn’t ask, and the truth was that she didn’t want to know just yet. “She lives here?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think we could get her upstairs. There’s too many people.”
“Who are all these people?” she asked, but the girl looked at her as if she didn’t understand the question and didn’t especially care whether she understood it or not. Naomi looked up. She was nearly within reach of Peter Rudolph now. He was waiting for her.
“Peter? Can you call health services? I want her to taken over to the infirmary.”
He reached, so slowly, for his phone. What was the matter with these people?
“I think she’s probably okay,” said Peter Rudolph. “She was just upset.”
And you’re a doctor too? Naomi thought unkindly.
“Nevertheless.” She got to her feet. “I’m President Roth,” she told the man beside him.
“Trevor.” They shook hands.
“You’ll take her outside,” she told him, and as she did, some part of her was watching, commentating: Well, aren’t you the bossy one? “Out to the sidewalk.”
He appeared unpersuaded, and this infuriated Naomi, who was still outside herself, narrating the occasion. “Shouldn’t I go downstairs with you?”
“No. Take her outside. You,” she said, grabbing the nearest male shoulder. “And you. The three of you, please help take this young woman outside and wait for health services. They’re on their way,” she said, looking at Peter. “They are, right?”
“Yes, of course.” He appeared, finally, to have grasped her sense of the occasion.
She stepped back as the three men—Trevor and the two students (she hoped and assumed that they were students)—reached down for the girl, who groaned but did not resume consciousness as she was lifted, first up and then overhead, like a bride. She was so light. Up she rose.
“And one of you,” Naomi said, eyeing other two girls, who had watched all of this as if it had nothing to do with them. “Who’s going to the infirmary with her?”
They looked at each other. “But we don’t really know her. She lives here.”
“So what?” Naomi shouted.
“Well…” one of the girls said, “what I mean is, she isn’t really a part of this, she just lives here. She lives upstairs. She was just…” She looked at her friend for clarification. “Wasn’t she going down to get toilet paper or something?”
“Yeah. Maybe paper towels. Something for the bathroom. But, like, we never saw her before tonight.”
“Oh, no,” her friend said. “I was in a class with her. Chem, freshman year. When I still thought I was going to medical school.” They both laughed, bizarrely. Naomi glared at them.
Naomi reached down for the one on the right and pulled her arm up so hard that the girl was standing in a flash. And taller than Naomi, she noted, defensively. “You gave her a pill. You are going with her to the infirmary. And I want your name.”
“I got her name,” Peter Rudolph said. At least he had done something.
“So go now. Please.” Naomi said, and the girls both went, picking a meandering route through the hallway.
Naomi shook her head. In the former living room, a drone of voices seemed to be rising, punctuated by staccato shouts. Anger. Someone was very angry. A lot of people were angry. “Peter,” Naomi said, taking a breath, “why haven’t we cleared the house? What are we waiting for?”
“I didn’t want to make that decision for the police.” He shrugged. “Far as I’m concerned, this is a crime scene,” he added.
“What’s down there?” She nodded at the cellar door. “Just tell me. Is someone hurt? Is someone…has someone been…harmed?” It was all she could manage.
“Not exactly. But it’s a mess.” She pushed past him, catching the tail end of sweat and a recent cigarette. The step, wooden and a tiny bit warped, gave a loud creak at her weight, and the string descending from a single lightbulb grazed her forehead, making her jump. There was no sound from the space below. Nothing, nothing. She stood for a moment, letting herself pretend that the unconscious girl, the campus police, the teary faces, the angry voices, were somehow unattached to anything—seeable, touchable, real. “Nothing is happening,” she spoke, aloud, sending the whisper of it down the stairs to whatever there was, whatever the reason for all this was. And then she went down after it.
First, the wetness, not underfoot but everywhere else: wet walls, wet ceiling. Wet with something brown and matted. What was it? Naomi frowned, consciously instructing herself to smell the wet thing. It was dull, but it was unmistakable. On the blanket, she thought, retrieving a term she’d heard often enough in the ’80s but seldom since, for the hunger strikers in the Irish prisons who’d painted the walls with excrement—their signature protest. Amazing how the exact words can lurk, waiting for us to need them. I need them now, she thought, taking it all in. On the ceiling and the walls, but not all of the walls. One of the four walls looked utterly undisturbed: cheap prefab shelves stacked with paper products, garbage bags, batteries, cleaning supplies, items of peaceful communal living. Had the person responsible for this left the Pine-Sol and paper towels in place as a way of saying, You’re gonna need these, pal? She stood, stuck in place on one of the lower steps, one forefinger and thumb pinching her nose. She had not set foot on the basement floor, which was glittery with broken glass, bottles from the upended recycling bin, most likely, green and clear and brown, the residue of cola and beer mixing freely with the fecal matter in a ferment of odor. She had not touched a thing, because it is a crime scene, she told herself, but the truth was more elemental, more visceral: disgust and horror and shock. It took a long, pulled-apart moment before she understood that there was order to the brown smears, and a message, so clear and so horrible that it exploded in her head. The words spelled: NIGGERS OUT.
Naomi stood, holding her nose, swaying a bit. She discovered, after a moment, that she had closed her eyes without quite noticing it. It was so peaceful with her eyes shut, but then she opened them to test this theory. NIGGERS OUT. Shit on the walls and glass underfoot.
Eyes open: the shit, the word.
Eyes closed: the darkness, the peace.
She released her nostrils and peered through her own fingers, and the reek assailed her, and then the nausea, and then the horror, because the world was going to see this, there was no way of stopping that. Frat boys chanting racist slogans. Confederate flags allowed to flutter over Southern campuses. Alcohol poisonings. Acquaintance rape. Drug overdoses. Cheating scandals. Everything that Webster had been above since Sarafian’s time. And then his successor’s time. And then his successor’s successor’s time. And, until now, her time. But she had broken the chain, all right. This—she regarded the walls and the floor balefully—had broken the chain. This would make another chain, linking Webster back through the years of evolution and revolution and all of the many gains and the comfort of their present position in the academic landscape of early twenty-first-century American liberal arts. Back to the 1950s, to Luther Merrion, the freshman who’d neglected to inform the admissions committee that he was not white. Luther Merrion, sent home to Indiana because he wasn’t welcome at Webster College. Niggers out. It was a tradition.
Behind her, the c
ellar door creaked open, and the light and the noise came shuddering down the steps. “You okay down there?” said Peter.
“Oh, sure,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “Peachy.”
“It’s a mess,” he suggested.
It was a mess, no doubt.
“You called the police,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I was waiting for you.”
Her first impulse was to be enraged. He was waiting for her? But then she was grateful; whether or not he had understood this himself, Naomi knew that she should be the one to call the police. She would report this herself. It was something. “I don’t want anyone to leave,” she told Peter. “I want everyone to be available to the police. And I want to speak to everyone in the living room.”
He considered this. He seemed to be trying to remember how this was supposed to work, but there had never been a “this” before, thankfully.
“I don’t think we’re allowed to force anyone. They can, but we can’t.”
Naomi was getting out her phone. “Do you have a contact, or do I use 911?”
He read her the number for his liaison officer, whose name was Werner.
“Werner what?” Naomi said, pressing the numbers.
“Bill. Bill Werner.”
“Oh.” The phone rang twice, and then a man with a high, quavering voice answered. “Werner?” he asked, as if it were up to the caller to say whether he was or wasn’t. From the corner of her eye, Naomi saw the front door open. People were starting to leave. No one should be leaving, she thought, in a panic.
“Stop them,” she told Peter. “Go to the door and make them stop.”
“Hello?” said Werner, or Bill.
“Hey, sorry,” Naomi said. “I’m Naomi Roth, at Webster. President Roth,” she confirmed, though he had not asked for confirmation.
“Yes,” he said. “What is it?”
Naomi opened her mouth, but found that the words had fled. What was it? What, indeed, was it? An act of brutal stupidity? An orchestrated statement? Whatever it was, in a moment it would be out—it would have escaped the artificial containment of the college, of its bright college days and auld lang syne, this Elysium lily pad between childhood and adulthood. What happens at Webster stays at Webster, or at least had, once. Not anymore. It was quite possible that Naomi herself was the only human being in the Sojourner Truth House tonight without a Facebook page or a Snapchat account, or an avid Instagram following. This…atrocity, this indictment, had already been seen by human eyes, and by young and early-adopting human eyes, which meant that it might already be on the web, or attached to a text, dividing and copying in the dark and endless incubator of cyberspace. Soon, the press would be dispensing this latest proof that the world was sliding back to the civil rights era and taking up residence on the other side, which was bad enough when it was other places, other colleges. How had it been allowed to happen here? How had she, personally, made it possible? She felt as if she might wail.
“We’ve had,” at last, she managed, “an incident. I would imagine that an investigation is warranted.” Even as she said it she was shaking her head at her own formality. So many words to say so little. So many police procedurals. So much Masterpiece Theatre.
“Incident,” he said, almost gently.
“I…don’t want to describe it on the phone. The basement of the Sojourner Truth House on Fairweather. Could you come right away, please? And there are a lot of people here. You’ll want to…”
“Is it an assault? Vandalism? What?”
“Vandalism,” she said quickly—too quickly. She was grateful for the word, and seized upon it as soon as it was spoken. It was so…innocuous. Vandalism! Like throwing toilet paper at a tree on Halloween! Nobody got in real trouble for vandalism. No college would earn fatal notoriety because of vandalism. Well, she would hold on to that for as long as she possibly could.
“Oh. All right.” He sounded almost disappointed. “Well, I’ll send someone over.”
“More than one,” she said sharply. “And quickly. I mean, technically vandalism, but…well, you’ll see. There’s…language. Involved.”
Suddenly, there were raised voices in the next room. “I need to go,” she told him, but it was so loud, suddenly, that she was pretty sure he hadn’t heard her. “Stay here,” she told Peter. “Nobody goes down there. Not one person. Understand?”
“Oh, absolutely.” He nodded, as if he had just figured this out for himself.
She turned and pushed her way back through the hallway. “Do you mind?” she asked one girl, no fewer than three times, when gentle pressure on her shoulder and then her hip did not shift her at all. The girl turned to her with a face full of bland resentment and slowly pivoted her body, which was thin and made a thin space that Naomi, who was not thin, nevertheless pressed through. The room was hot, she noticed now, and there was the faintest smell of ash. From the fireplace, it occurred to her. The notion of all of these kids in one building with a fire made her feel faint. “Excuse me,” she told a tall boy with a Chinese symbol etched in red behind his ear. “Excuse me, I’m trying to…” She reached out for the doorframe, honey oak and grimy with handprints, and actually pulled herself closer to it, and the doorway, and the living room itself, which was tight with people: on the floor, mashed against the walls, sitting on one another’s laps on—Naomi assumed—couches and chairs, so overladen that they could not be seen beneath the bodies. “Fuck that,” someone said, directly behind her. “I can’t hear a thing.”
“Well, shut the fuck up,” somebody else said. “Try that, why don’t you?”
She tried to turn to see them, but at just that moment she felt herself hoisted up, actually off her feet, and pressed forward into the already packed room. An entirely different scenario of horror and mayhem rushed through her, banishing the fire, and she thought of all of these students crushed to death, together, in the contracting living room of the Sojourner Truth House, their president along with them (going down with the ship), which would be comforting to exactly no one, Naomi gasped. “Wait,” she said, to nobody, but the sound disappeared in another surge of protest.
“Let him speak,” said a woman. “Everybody? Could we all…?”
Just get along, thought Naomi, automatically, amid her coursing panic.
“All right,” said a single voice, which, suddenly, strangely, now became the only voice she could hear. It was like a voice on another frequency, to which her brain had tuned itself in desperation, a last resort, and the blur it made seemed to descend from the ceiling, down over them all. “All right,” it said again. “Can everyone sit where they are? We will wait. We will wait.”
And then she felt first one and then both of her feet meet the blessed levelness, solidness, of the floor. The relief of that tumbled through her. Then she felt the bodies beside her begin to move apart, relinquishing her. She could breathe. Her lungs could take in breath. That was glorious. That was euphoric.
“Okay,” said the voice, which was male but not, somehow, overtly masculine. It was a high voice, a sweet voice, musical. “We’re almost there.”
The body in front of her suddenly went down. The body beside her—short, round, how had it held her up off the floor?—also went down. She suddenly felt conspicuous. She was standing. She was one of only a dozen or so in the room who were still on their feet. Then she was one of only a handful.
“Come on,” the short person said, looking up at her without recognition, but with familiarity, as if they had been introduced but jointly forgotten each other’s names. “There’s room here.” And she patted a miracle of open carpeting with her hand. It wasn’t big. But it was big enough.
Naomi sat, her legs folding into some position of temporary comfort. So great was her relief at returning to the earth that she had completely lost any sense of urgency about what was happening here, because as long as that person was speaking her only job was to listen, and how simple, blessedly simple was that?
“I just needed to
say this before we leave,” said Omar, because of course it was Omar. He had stepped up onto a chair exactly in front of the fireplace, and his slender form now stood directly before the abstract portrait of Sojourner Truth herself, which was large, unframed, and distinctly student-made. Sojourner’s eyes hovered, peering over his right shoulder, an endorsement across the ages.
“Louder, please?” said someone behind Naomi. But she said it hopefully. She truly wanted to miss nothing.
“I needed to say, before we all leave here,” said Omar, and this time the sound went out on phantom waves of amplification, “whatever has brought each of us here, it’s unimportant now, because now we are here together. We speak from our shared humanity, and we speak a shared truth.”
The Devil and Webster Page 17
