Sticks and Stones

by Janice Macdonald

  “You’re Professor Craig?”

  Maybe I was just ultra-sensitive this morning, but there seemed to be a shift in his demeanor. I wasn’t sure but I thought he seemed relieved that I had turned out to be a woman.

  “Yes, can I help you with something?”

  He recovered his equilibrium and stuck out his hand, then drew it back when he noticed that my hands were full.

  “My name is Rod Devlin. They told me my wife, uh, Gwen, was a student in your English class.”

  So this was Gwen’s former husband. I still wasn’t sure what he wanted with me.

  “Yes, that’s right. I’m sorry.” My words sounded wrong somehow. What was I sorry about? Perhaps they were the right words, after all, though, as I saw him nodding in agreement. We were all sorry, in some way or other.

  “Well, I was here picking up her things, and I figured I’d try to talk to people who knew her, and maybe pick up anything of hers you still had.”

  “I’m not sure what I could tell you, except that she was a good student. I didn’t really get too much of a chance to get to know her. It’s a lecture course, not a seminar.” This didn’t seem to register with him, but then again why should it? I tried to find something to say that would help this bear of a man. He just seemed so out of place and lost. “The police have her papers, I think.”

  He nodded, but I wasn’t sure whether it meant that he knew the police had Gwen’s effects or that he had assumed as much. He looked at me, and his eyes were like fog lights, trying to cut through everything to get to some clarity. I ­shivered and slopped coffee onto my thumb, causing me to wince.

  “You don’t have any idea who could have done it, do you? I mean, did she hang out with any weirdos in your class?”

  Steve had asked pretty much the same things of me, although couched in much more diplomatic language. Answers, we all needed some sort of answers, or we were never going to get to any form of closure. I grimaced and shook my head, wishing I had something I could tell Rod Devlin. It was odd, even knowing that Gwen had left him and that he had presumed university would be too much for her, I couldn’t automatically dislike this man. He just looked wounded. Besides, he was so big, he seemed more like a force of nature than a human being.

  “Mr. Devlin, I’m not aware of who Gwen spent her time with. I really don’t know what I could tell you that could be of any help. It was a terrible tragedy, and I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “Well, I’ll be in town for a couple more days. If you think of anything else, I’m staying in the Varscona Hotel on Whyte.” He turned and swung the door wide, letting it slam behind him as he clomped down the stairs.

  Steve was off the phone when I got up to the office.

  “They’re sending your photos and copies of ours over to me here, if that’s okay with you. They should be ready in half an hour. I want you to go over them with me. Meanwhile I’m having someone go through the files on the five men who had their doors defaced. Maybe they’re closet feminists or something.”

  “So you want to camp out in my office all morning? I’ll never get to Greenwoods at this rate.”

  “I’ll drive you there afterwards.”

  “Will you put on the siren? Will I have to sit in the back?”

  Steve laughed. “It’s an unmarked car. Sorry about commandeering your office. You didn’t have to leave, you know.” He took a slurp of his coffee. “You could have come back sooner, too.”

  “I had to talk to someone at the door.”

  “Oh?” He didn’t sound interested. Probably he thought I meant a student.

  “Yeah. Rod Devlin paid me a visit.”

  Now he looked interested. “I wonder who guided him your way?”

  I told him the gist of Devlin’s talk with me. Steve didn’t look happy. “It makes you wonder, his showing up on campus this morning of all mornings.”

  “Steve, you don’t think Devlin defaced the doors, do you?”

  Steve looked alarmed. “I shouldn’t have said that. Forget I even said anything.”

  I felt insulted. While even I could see that knowing someone enough to spend an evening necking wasn’t necessarily a guarantee of their utter discretion, I had hoped that Steve would know me a bit better than he was implying. I never said logic was my strong suit, though.

  “I’m not about to go spreading rumors and wrecking ­investigations,” I retorted, archer than even I realized.

  To my surprise, Steve laughed. “You look like a porcupine with its prickles up. Sorry, I overreacted.”

  He reached out his hand. I took it, meaning to shake it, but he pulled me close, sending my heart going far faster than it ever had on a cold Monday morning in my spartan little office. I was beginning to think there were better things in this world than coffee and chocolate after all.

  14

  THERE WAS A LOUD RAPPING AT THE MAIN DOOR of the House about ten minutes later. Steve checked his uniform for uniformity and ran down the stairs. He was right in assuming it was for him. I think they must teach door knocking in the police academy. Even I knew it had to be the law at the door.

  Steve returned with two packets of pictures in plastic bags. Without opening them, he handed me one.

  “Here are your pictures.”

  I admired his delicacy. For all he knew I might have umpteen shots of old boyfriends on the roll, but even if there were, I had the feeling that, at the moment, I wouldn’t be able to remember their names. He was looking through his ­photos, so I shook off the urge to crawl onto his lap and opened my own plastic bag.

  I whipped through nine or ten shots of my summer trip to the Tyrrell Dinosaur Museum in Drumheller, and came to the morning’s pictures. Denise had made me take two of each door, which was just as well, since the flash had reflected off a couple of the nameplates, creating a paler version of the bloody lettering. Even so, I could read each malignant ­message.

  I laid them out like a solitaire game, with the best shot on top of each pair. Steve did the same on his side of my desk. Even upside down, I could see that his prints were better. Feeling competitive, I searched my pictures for something revealing.

  It was Steve who noticed it.

  “Randy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do all the office doors have peepholes?”

  “No. I asked about that once. Apparently a few years ago there was some problem with some guy harassing profs and students studying at night in the building, so Campus Security installed them in the office doors of female staff. There was a bit of a ruckus about it, because instead of making women safer, it just highlighted which doors belonged to female professors. We figured it must have been a cost-saving measure.”

  “How often do people change offices?”

  “Well, the north-facing offices are more prized because of the view of the river valley, so when someone retires from one of those offices, the next person in line jumps to one of them. New professors get inner offices or south-facing offices with a glorious view of the parking lot and Law Building. Grad students who are teaching share inner offices.” I thought a minute. “I’d say there’s a bit of a shuffle every year, but no one moves from the north-facing offices, unless they turn Emeritus.”

  “Why aren’t you in one of the offices in the Humanities Building?”

  “We’re the peons of the department. We have to have office space, since we need to have somewhere to see our students, but since we’re not taking classes we are more dispensable. Actually, some people working on their dissertations prefer the House for the quiet. Not as many students want to trek over here to argue their marks, and people aren’t always dropping by to lure you to HUB for coffee.”

  I realized I was speaking to the crown of Steve’s head; he was once again staring at the photos in front of him. I looked down at my set. The answer was suddenly just as clear to me.

  “All the doors here have peepholes.”

  Steve grinned. “You got it, Sherlock.”

  “So that means
whoever did this didn’t know the professors by name, and thought that he was targeting women because of the peepholes.”

  Steve shook his head. “I’m not sure about that. Would someone who didn’t know who was who in the English Department know about the peephole business in the first place?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What about this: the perpetrator knew at least one of the names on the doors, and extrapolated from the presence of a peephole on her door and not on all doors, that peepholes represented women's offices.”

  “Are you saying that one person is the target, and the ­others were done on impulse?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying yet. Let me drive you to Greenwoods, and then I’ve got to get back to work.” Steve swept his pictures into a deck, knocked them into order and slid them back into their bag. He stood up and shrugged his jacket on.

  “You don’t really have to drive me. I should go by my place to drop off my camera, anyway, and I’d hate to stand in the way of an official investigation.” I could imagine McNeely wouldn’t be too happy about it either.

  Steve and I walked downstairs and left by the front door. I locked it behind me since no one else seemed to be in the building. Steve touched my arm on the steps. I was hoping for a kiss with that adolescent belief that public displays of affection somehow cement the seriousness of a relationship, but Steve seemed more maturely aware of the public nature of where we stood. Not that anyone was around to watch, but what the hell. We agreed to meet for dinner on Wednesday, since Saturday’s jazz concert seemed a long way off.

  He was halfway across the street when I called to him.

  “Do you want to take my pictures, too?”

  “Don’t worry, we’ve got another set of them still at the lab.” He waved, and headed back to Humanities.

  So much for my earlier theories about his discretion. I headed for home, thinking I really didn’t mind how far he saw into my personal life. I shivered, not sure whether it was the weather or the unusual sense of vulnerability I was allowing into my cloistered little life.

  15

  THE GRAFFITI HAD BEEN EXPUNGED BY MONDAY noon, but the words might as well have been carved in the stone facing of the Tory Building. Everyone, including the coffee servers in HUB Mall, seemed to have heard about the event. Three students came to my office before class with ­feeble reasons to see me. I figured they had just come to see if my door too showed recent signs of scrubbing.

  The air was electric in my Tuesday morning class. I thought I might as well hit it head on, or we’d never get any work done. If they’d been a grade two class, I would have had them do the Bunny Hop around the room for five minutes. Instead, I thumped down my briefcase and hoisted myself onto the edge of the table at the front of the lecture hall.

  “I gather you all have heard of the graffiti on the English Department doors.”

  Vigorous nods all around.

  “It occurs to me that this is something worth discussing, in that it makes a case for the importance of the written word in our increasingly visual and electronic lifestyle.”

  A few of them looked as if they’d have rolled their eyes at me if I weren’t in a position to fail them. I could read their faces: typical English prof, take some juicy gossip and turn it into an essay topic. I soldiered on, thankful for my status as suzerain. The best way for them to forget all about the ­incident would be to make them responsible for it on a future exam.

  “There are theorists who believe that the novel is dead, and that indeed, nothing useful can any longer be written since people have become too sophisticated to be swayed by the rhetoric of fiction. This theory doesn’t explain certain things, though. It neglects the aspect of human nature that makes us listen to and believe campaign promises; it eliminates from its viewpoint those members of society who subscribe to tabloid newspapers; and it forgets the activities of literary ­terrorists. To me, graffiti falls into this category.”

  I jumped off the table and turned to the blackboard. Leo had once told me, after observing one of my classes, that I didn’t use the blackboard enough. I didn’t admit to him that I had a phobia about writing on the blackboard when ­students were in the room, since I figured that, of all my ­muscles, my gluts were the least likely to obey and probably jiggled to their own drummer as I scribbled. Instead, I tried to make the most of the “ultimate teaching tool,” as he called it, on days when I was either wearing a long jacket or control-top pantyhose. Today it was a combination of oversized pullover and leggings.

  Blessing the inventor of Lycra, I wrote a modified timeline across the length of the board, starting with: WRITER with an arrow pointing left toward (AGENT) and then another arrow to EDITOR. Another arrow led to PUBLISHER with another to REVIEWER, with yet another to (TEACHER) and a last arrow to READER. As I turned to say, “You don’t really have to write this down,” I saw I was too late. Forty-three heads were bowed in obeisance, scribbling furiously in their notebooks. I bit off my words. Writing notes used to keep me awake in undergrad, too.

  “This is the path any contemporary work of fiction will follow before it comes into your hands. The factors in brackets are possibles rather than essentials, but I’m putting them in there to show you how many gates there are between you and the approved written word. Now, I’m not saying that everything you read is destined to be of classical value, or that everything that gets stopped at any of these junctures would be harmful to you. What I am trying to say is that a great deal of thought, some of it mercenary, some of it aesthetic, goes into the publishing of written material.

  “That doesn’t hold true for the writing on bathroom walls, anonymous letters, chain letters, Internet homepages, self-publishing or vanity press, promotional pamphlets or hate mail. Technically, of course, the same holds true for your journal entries to me. Those things accost you straight from writer to reader, with no quality control checks along the way. Sometimes they’re innocuous, harmless or funny. Sometimes they’re provocative, insightful and philosophical. Sometimes they’re corrosive.”

  I went back to the table and leaned against it, rubbing the chalk dust off my fingers.

  “Words are the most powerful tool ever invented by mankind. Forget the pulley, never mind the microchip. Without words, ideas cannot be transmitted efficiently. The question is, do we have a right not to receive those ideas? I’m not talking censorship, although that”—I gestured back at the blackboard—“publication path effectively censors most unnecessary, ineffectual or downright bad writing for you already. I mean hatred. There are actual laws against the transmission of hate-mongering material through the postal ­system. There are laws against the defacement of public ­property. Laws of slander and libel protect against defamation of character. Whenever anyone tells you that literature ­doesn’t matter, that the written word doesn’t stand a chance in the twenty-first century, think again. If the written word wasn’t so powerful, do you think a death warrant would have been taken out against Salman Rushdie?”

  I was winging it, and the little editor in my brain was ­tsking away, telling me that any hopes of turning them on to the cavalier poets was shot if I didn’t get back on schedule, but I was on a roll.

  “One of the reasons that fiction is, to me, so much mightier than didactic prose is that it insinuates its message rather than preaches it. Our minds, if we keep them open and ­educated, are able to detect the hidden agenda behind a politician’s speech or an evangelist's sermon. We can take in what they say and hold it up for reasoning, accepting it only once it has passed through our critical scanners.

  “Literature, on the other hand, pulls us into a false reality, and we read what is written through that lens, the lens the writer has pre-determined through his choices of voice, point of view and environment. We are easier prey, since we read with our emotions rather than with our critical minds. In a nutshell, that is what a literature course is trying to impart to you: a way of reading literature with both your emotional and your critical f
aculties at work. Yes?”

  Myron looked thoughtful. “I take your meaning for ­literature, but how does that relate to graffiti? Are you suggesting it is like fiction?”

  “Good question. No, I wouldn’t liken graffiti to literature, because literature, of course, has that filtering system I was speaking about.” I motioned to the board behind me. “In a way, though, I would claim graffiti as akin to advertising. Commercials, too, have an insidious way of working on us. The object is to lodge a product name into our brains. Persuasion is often used, attempts to convince us that the product is the best of its kind. Jingles are created to ring in our heads. Downright bombast is used by the used car ad approach, where the pitchman just shouts the name of the store or product over and over. The overall effect is the same, whatever the means. Graffiti plays on that same tendency for our minds to absorb even that upon which we’re not ­concentrating. It bothers us more, in the sense that it is an anarchic act, but that is societal conditioning rather than brain patterns, I think. Most of us were brought up to color on the paper, not on the walls. Some of us rebel against that authority, if we feel we don’t have the aptitude to rebel against authority in any other way.”

  I glanced at the clock on the wall, and realized I’d better start wrapping up this diatribe. Most of the time I managed to get my class up and out with a few minutes to spare before the class change. I was running right to the dot today. A couple of students with back-to-back classes somewhere across campus were already discreetly packing up and edging out of the back of the class.