No, she didn’t see herself as a messiah. She saw herself as Mother Mary, holding the suffering, broken Christ in her arms. Given how lonely and confused Thaddy must have been to consider what he was considering, what could she have done to assuage his misery? Maybe she was at fault for assigning all those depressing books. For adding fuel to Thaddy’s worries about technology. Feeding him with statistics. But half the students she taught had parents worse than Thaddy’s. Parents who pressured them to earn good grades, to justify the sacrifices the parents had made as immigrants. A significant number were as lonely and starved for love. They were as anguished about the damage to the environment, the negative effects of industrialization and technology. But they hadn’t reacted by becoming terrorists.
And Thaddy hadn’t gone directly from her office to building bombs. He had remained on campus for another year, at least, finishing his degree. From what she could tell—she pulled out her laptop and googled Thaddy—he had been hired as an assistant professor at Berkeley. He taught there two years, then resigned. A year after that, someone left a package in the parking lot outside the Berkeley engineering school, with the return address of a professor in that department. A diligent employee returned it to the supposed sender; when the man’s secretary opened the box, a pipe bomb ripped off her arm.
Maxine barely remembers that first incident. But she does recall the second, which nearly took down a plane. And the third, which targeted Arnold Schlechter. And the fifth bombing, after which the FBI released that sketch. The man in the aviator sunglasses and hooded sweatshirt looked nothing like Thaddy. Never in a million years would it have occurred to Maxine to suspect her student. Until that morning, she would have had no more reason to associate the bomber’s manifesto with Thaddeus Rapaczynski than with a host of students and colleagues who entertained similar dissatisfactions. If not for the quote from Conrad. If not for the phrases that reverberated in her mind as Thaddy’s.
She goes back online and studies the list of computer experts, airline executives, oil company CEOs, and manufacturers of pharmaceuticals who have been the bomber’s targets. Slowly, he had progressed from sending simple pipe-bombs to devices with increasingly effective detonators, until he sent his first lethal package to a professor at Harvard who believed he could brainwash people into good behavior. Had this been the professor who used Thaddy as a guinea pig? She assumes it was. And yet nothing could justify the man receiving a bomb that blew off his hand and severely injured his wife and two young daughters.
Afraid she might pass out, she puts her head to her knees, then slumps to the bare wood floor where she and her husband made love. How did she allow her son to hang around with Thaddy? To continue hanging around with him, even after Thaddy revealed his plan to change his gender? Thaddy hadn’t gone through with his crazy scheme. But what he confided to Maxine that day proved how unbalanced he really was.
Her mother’s suspicion that Thaddy had sexual designs on Zach can’t be true. Can it? What Thaddy craved was a woman’s touch. Okay, if he was so desperate for sex he considered changing himself to a woman, he might have been willing to overlook her young son’s gender. Zach had never been effeminate. But he had been so gentle. So thin. So ethereally beautiful, as only an adolescent boy can be.
No. That never had been the danger. The two young men met right here in her office. Zach had been playing video games on her computer when Thaddy stopped by to discuss whatever text Maxine had assigned that week. Zach was, what, thirteen? He had given up hanging out with his childhood friends—he wouldn’t tell her why, just that he preferred playing on his computer, although she later found out the other boys had taken to using drugs, pressuring Zach to hide their stashes. The only boy he remained friends with was Norm, who was so far behind Zach in his emotional development they couldn’t talk about much except World of Warcraft. At thirteen, Zach considered himself too old for a babysitter, but he was too young to be left on his own for extended periods. She and Sam had been trying to figure out a solution, but Sam had flown off to Zimbabwe, and as usual, Maxine had been stressed by her obligations at work. Thaddy must have seen himself in her son. Or he saw Zach as a younger brother to replace the brother who had deserted him by getting married. Whatever his reasons, Thaddy offered to take Zach to the Arboretum.
“Come on, champ,” Thaddy said. “Let’s do something more fun than sitting in front of a computer.” Zach looked to his mother for permission. She shrugged and said why not, as long as Thaddy had Zach home for dinner. She saw no reason to be suspicious. Not then. This had been months before Thaddy confessed about wanting to change his gender. The Arb was walking distance from her office. So even though Thaddy and Zach hadn’t made it home until six-fifteen, she hadn’t been too upset. On the contrary, she invited Thaddy inside to join them. But he hung back. He might not have known Sam was out of town. Or he did know, and he figured he would feel out of place sitting at the table with Maxine and Zach, as if they were a mockery of a family. Or maybe he just felt shy.
At dinner, Zach prattled on about how Thaddy had shown him which plants were safe to eat and which were poisonous. How Thaddy talked to him about the reasons you were wasting your life if you spent your time playing make-believe games in a computer world. How, in most cultures, a boy, in order to become a man, needed to survive in nature. Maxine had never seen her son with such a healthy glow in his cheeks. Never had he gone up to bed without needing to be hectored into it.
She ought to be have been warier. But Zach begged her to let him camp out with Thaddy. This was the last warm week in October. Reluctantly, she agreed. Sam, who had returned from his trip, was all in favor of Zach spending more time outdoors. He pooh-poohed her concern that the city didn’t allow camping in the park. But the next morning, when Zach straggled home on his bike, he seemed filthy and ravenous. When Maxine demanded to know why, he blurted that Thaddy hadn’t brought a tent. Not only that, he tried to prevent Zach from eating the peanut butter sandwich and banana he brought from home, insisting they get by on the roots they foraged and the fish they snagged from the Huron River. Zach had the good sense to eat the sandwich and the banana. But when Maxine said she didn’t think Zach should hang out with Thaddy anymore, Zach had seemed incredulous. “Are you kidding? That would hurt Thaddy’s feelings! Thaddy and I are friends! He’s right about not wasting your life playing stupid video games. He already taught me an amazing amount of important stuff.” On and on, until Maxine promised they could keep hanging out after school.
Her mother was right. She ought to have been suspicious that a young man in his twenties would want to befriend a boy of thirteen. Now that she thinks about it, that was around the same time Zach began to argue with Sam, to protest that his father was bringing all the bad stuff from America to poorer countries that would be better off without factories that polluted their rivers and ruined their forests and isolated people from their families and homes. He must have picked that up from Thaddy.
Then Sam died, and her memory got even blurrier. Crippled by her own grief, she neglected her son’s. Had Zach still been hanging around with Thaddy? After Thaddy left for Berkeley, had he and Zach remained in touch? By the time Zach graduated from MIT and moved to Oakland, Thaddy hadn’t taught at Berkeley for, what, five or six years? Then again, Thaddy might still have been living in the Bay Area. Maybe he had shown up in Silicon Valley and gotten in touch with Zach. Maybe he persuaded Zach to quit his job and run away with him.
Unless they had been in touch the entire time. Which could mean Zach knew about the bombings.
No. That couldn’t be true. Thaddy had kidnapped Zach. Or blackmailed him into leaving. Maybe Thaddy had shown up and begged Zach for money, and Zach wasn’t willing to tell him no.
The room spins, the two young men blending with each other. Then they blend with a third young man, a character from Conrad’s novel, Winnie Verloc’s weak-minded younger brother, Stevie. So good-hearted, so idealisti
c, he couldn’t bear to see horses beaten, or hear about criminals being branded with an iron, or capitalists “nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and the warm blood of the people.” She thinks about Zach refusing to eat because children in Malawi were starving. Zach walking around Mexico City on a family vacation, picking up trash and crying because there was nowhere to put it. She remembers how Thaddy taught Zach to make a baking-soda rocket. How thrilled Zach was when the rocket cleared the house. Did Thaddy use the same ingenuity to teach Zach to make explosives? Did he pressure Zach to help him manufacture bombs, the way the older kids pressured Thaddy into setting off an explosion in their chemistry class, or the way Mr. Verloc manipulated young Stevie into carrying the Professor’s bomb to the Greenwich Observatory, where Stevie tripped on a root and blew himself up? Is it her fault if Thaddy and Zach took her ideas more seriously than she took them herself? Should she have been more freaked out by her son’s extreme compassion? Should she have taken him to a psychiatrist?
Maybe she and Sam had pressured Zach in the same unreasonable way Thaddy’s parents pressured him. Not only to succeed in school, but to demonstrate his empathy for those less fortunate than himself. Every morning, along with those decadent breakfasts, Sam had served up the day’s injustices. How many times had he recounted the Story of the Exploding Stove? After college, Sam had gone backpacking around the world. In Tanzania, he had become intimate with a family whose son had been grotesquely burned when their improvised stove blew up. Watching the boy writhe in agony, Sam realized that if God didn’t exist, and Sam was sure He didn’t, the child’s suffering didn’t matter. Of course it mattered to the boy and his parents. But in the context of infinite time and space, nothing that happened on this puny speck could be said to matter. The thought was so horrifying Sam had sunk to his knees and vowed that if the boy’s suffering didn’t matter to anyone but the boy and his family, it damn well better matter to him. He swore to spend his life finding ways to bring safe, low-cost technology—affordable, fuel-efficient stoves that wouldn’t explode—to people like this grieving family in Tanzania.
That her husband told this story once or twice made sense. But Sam couldn’t help repeating it to their son. Over and over. Compassion was fine. But they rubbed Zach’s tender heart raw. They opened him to infection by every passing stranger’s pain. To whatever Thaddy taught him.
She needs to alert the FBI. Whoever wrote that manifesto has sworn he will keep killing new victims until the revolution starts. What if Thaddy kills someone while she is dithering about what to do? But how can she turn him in if it means implicating her son? Even if Zach isn’t with Thaddy now, the FBI will want to find Zach and question him.
Oh, God. What if Zach is holed up somewhere with Thaddy, whether of his own free will or as a captive, and the agents go barging in, shooting, the way they did at Ruby Ridge and Waco? What if, in the course of a manhunt, Zach’s photo gets plastered across the news as an accessory to all those crimes? What if Thaddy is innocent and she ruins not only his life, but Zach’s? What if she gets one or both of these young men killed? The story she has been spinning might be nothing but a product of the human tendency to believe we have some relationship to whatever tragedy is playing out on the news. How can it be that of everyone in the world, only she has the power to stop the bomb ticking in the corner of the TV screen—the image of a metal sphere with a sputtering fuse on Channel 7, or the phallic stick of dynamite on Channel 2?
She gathers everything related to the seminar—Thaddy’s papers, the syllabus, the roster of students, her copy of The Secret Agent—and stuffs them in her backpack. She turns out the lights and locks the door. She finds her way through the ghostly corridors and, after a few confused circuits around the block, remembers where she parked the car. But she can’t go home. Like Thaddy, she might go mad if she can’t be comforted. If she can’t be held in another person’s arms.
She drives to Ypsilanti, turns down a modest cul-de-sac, and stops in front of Rosa Romanczuk’s one-story brick cottage. She switches off the ignition and sits watching her breath fog the windshield. Only then does she notice, parked across the street and a few houses down in a not-very-effective attempt to camouflage that its owner is spending the night at Rosa’s, a handcrafted yellow sports car with a vanity license plate that reads THWAITE.
… Opens a Package She Knows She Shouldn’t
The car grows cold. Ever since she inherited her mother’s Buick, the clock on the dash has refused to work. Still, she can sense the minutes pass.
How can Rosa, whose nose twitches at a whiff of insincerity, have become intimate with a man who, before he leaves his house, douses himself in Eau de Pretension? How can a scientist who prides himself on his advice to the nation’s presidents tolerate the beliefs of a woman who is convinced she can divine the powers that influence a person’s life by studying a pack of cards?
Then again, how moved Rosa must be, seeing a distinguished scientist like John Sebastian Mickelthwaite shorn of his defenses. Crying after an orgasm. Professing his gratitude in her arms. And Mick, relieved of the need to keep up all that pretense. Able to admit his disappointments. Heartbreaks. Failures.
Mick is in his seventies. Doesn’t Rosa worry she will be widowed a second time? Technically, Rosa and Mick ought to have let Maxine know about their romance. Probably, they were embarrassed. Or they wanted to spare her envying their companionship. If so, their assumption makes her feel even lonelier.
She ought to drive home. But her bones seem to be dissolving. She stretches sideways and closes her eyes. Time passes. The cold and damp wake her. Her legs and hips are cramped. The stopped clock—it reads 4:35—is close to being right. The yellow sports car is gone. Waking Rosa seems unthinkable.
Maxine walks up the sidewalk and rings the bell. A minute passes. Maybe she should leave. But the light comes on and Rosa opens the door. She doesn’t seem to have been asleep. Did Mick just leave? At work, Rosa wears voluminous skirts, embroidered vests, and beaded shawls, so when she comes to the door in a flimsy white nightgown that reveals a faded dove tattooed above her left breast, Maxine thinks her friend has been keeping this a secret, too—that she is a small, aging widow who is raising two sons alone.
“Maxine? You look like you got run over by a bus. Is it Zach? Come in.”
For all the times Rosa has been to Maxine’s house—in the weeks after Sam’s death, and to set up for departmental parties—Maxine has driven to Rosa’s house only once, when Rosa’s car was in the shop. The cottage, unassuming on the outside, reminds Maxine of Jeannie’s home inside the magic bottle on the television show she and her father used to laugh at (or rather, Maxine laughed while her father ogled Jeannie). She follows Rosa through the red-flocked foyer, then down the hall past Rosa’s sons’ bedrooms. Both boys are studying at Michigan State. They want to follow in their father’s footsteps, Dwayne in the music-producing business, Jamal as an entrepreneur who, like his father, wants to revitalize black-owned businesses in Detroit. Rosa must worry even more for their safety than Maxine worries for Zach’s. In marrying a man of a different race, Rosa had been trying to create a future that wouldn’t be defined by history. But her husband was killed by the blindness of that same history. Even with degrees from MSU, the prospects for two dark-skinned young men living in Detroit are grim.
Rosa fills the kettle. Her broad Slavic face radiates the same hope as the sunflowers on the tablecloth. She settles beside Maxine and rubs her back until Maxine is crying in her arms. That’s all anyone wants, isn’t it? To be held? Isn’t that the best Terror Management System any of us has devised?
Rosa offers Maxine a paper towel to wipe her eyes. “You can’t be this upset because you found out I’m fucking that jackass we both know no feminist in her right mind could fall in love with.”
Maxine takes deep breaths to stop her shaking. Then she tells Rosa everything she can think to tell her. Rosa makes all the r
ight noises. Expresses amazement, then concern, then shock that Maxine might hold herself responsible for her student’s violence. Or think Zach might be mixed up in this madness.
“You don’t know my son,” Maxine says. “Everything you’ve ever heard about Zach has come from me. I’ve been deluding myself for years.” Once, she says, she got a call from the principal at Zach’s elementary school. Her son tried to set another child on fire. Zach? Maxine had said. My son tried to set another child on fire? How could that be? For goodness’ sake, the boy was in kindergarten. What kind of kindergartener would set another child on fire?
The principal ushered her into his office with the gravity of a man about to tell a mother that her child, for the good of society, ought to be kept under lock and key. Zach had lit a match, held it out to another boy, and told him if he took another step, Zach would burn him.
Naturally, Maxine had been appalled. Her son did what? He threatened to burn another little boy? Where were the adults? Did this happen in a classroom? Where did Zach get the matches?
No, the principal said. The incident had taken place on the playground. Zach’s teacher hadn’t been present. But Zach didn’t deny his victim’s claims. Zach refused to divulge where he got the matches. But he admitted he had practiced lighting them in the boys’ lavatory, which, on its own, warranted his expulsion.
Maxine asked if Zach offered an explanation for what he did, and the principal glared and said, “Do you really think there is any possible justification for one child threatening to set another child on fire?” He suspended Zach and refused to allow him back unless Maxine took him to a psychologist.
Maxine had found a quivering Zach on the bench outside the principal’s office. She knew she should be horrified by what he’d done. And yes, she should make an appointment to have him evaluated by a child psychiatrist.
The Professor of Immortality Page 11
