Skin Deep

by Sung J. Woo

  43

  A life-sized cardboard cutout of a beach-ready buxom blonde woman, that is. A flashing Rolling Rock sign, a Salvador Dali print, a young Arnold Schwarzenegger tight-lipped in his Terminator shades—half of this room was filled with such typical male collegiate decorations that I wondered if Beaker was being ironic. There was even a lava lamp on a desk, white goo sticking and unsticking inside neon-yellow liquid.

  The other half of the room—which must be Christopher’s as it looked neat and undisturbed—was like something out of a New Age bookstore. A trio of framed pictures hung on the walls: a triptych of three blades of grass. In the corner was a literal shrine, a bronze sitting Siddhartha on a pedestal and cones of unburned incense in a white dish. A gold plate with a scoop of white sand and a tiny rake was the prominent decoration on his desk.

  “You guys got along?” I asked, disbelieving.

  “You’d think we were from different planets, but we’re total buds. If not for Christopher, I would’ve transferred out of here my freshman year to Syracuse. Lenrock’s a great school and we’ll all be doctors or lawyers or engineers when we leave, but I’m from California and all this rain really brings me down.”

  “I’d like to search Christopher’s side of the room.”

  “For clues?”

  I smiled. “Yes, for clues. It’d be good if you were to stick around, so you can make sure I’m on the up and up.”

  “Sure.”

  Nothing out of the ordinary in his drawers: underwear and socks at the top, t-shirts and sweatpants in the middle, and nicer t-shirts on the bottom. There was some room in each drawer since he must’ve packed them up, but not a whole lot. So either he wasn’t expecting to stay that long at Krishna or he left in an emotional frenzy that he didn’t think that far ahead. While I moved onto Christopher’s desk, Beaker filled me in about the summer session, which was when Christopher and Penny got together.

  “I was back home during break to work with my dad—he runs a landscaping business—but Christopher stayed at Lenrock to take a couple of philosophy courses. I came up on the July Fourth weekend, and that’s when I saw Christopher and Penny together. In this very room, actually, because this is where Christopher stayed for the summer.”

  The desk was like a twin of the one in my office, a gray metallic behemoth. There were three drawers on the left side, all impeccably organized, the top one for supplies like staples and Scotch tape, the middle for medium-sized notebooks, and the bottom for larger notebooks. Christopher was one neat guy.

  “That’s the first time you met Penny, I presume.”

  “First and only. They spent most of their time at her dorm in Llewellyn, but because I was gonna be around for the weekend, they came here. She was really into him, I remember. When he spoke, she’d stare at him like every word was gospel.”

  “Was Christopher as into her and she was into him?”

  Beaker sat on his bed and ruminated over the question. His little twin bed made him look even taller, like a giant visiting regular folks. “I’d say so. They made out a lot, I remember that. Kind of made me feel bad, because I was home for the summer and my girlfriend was back in Long Island and hadn’t seen her for a couple of months.”

  I was rooting through the middle drawer when I came upon something you don’t usually find in a college dorm room: a sealed test tube, the kind you see at a diagnostic lab for blood tests. A yellow plastic screw-on cap was on the head, and the label was blank except for the logo, a lowercase “i” inside the empty wedge of an uppercase “P.” Park Industries. I showed it to Beaker.

  “That is kind of odd,” he said. “He’s taking organic chemistry right now, but that doesn’t look like the test tubes they use.”

  “Is Christopher sick? Does he get his blood drawn every so often?”

  Beaker shook his head. “Never eats red meat, only snacks on organic trail mix, drinks unsweetened soy milk, he’ll probably live to a hundred.”

  “I’ll take this, if you don’t mind. I promise to bring it back.”

  Beaker shrugged, which was assent enough for me.

  While I searched through Christopher’s closet, Beaker told me he didn’t think Christopher and Penny were a great match.

  “I saw them together for just a couple of days. They were so alike, too much. Like I said, Christopher is super sensitive. Like we have to be careful what we say to him because he can take it the wrong way and then he might not talk for a week. It’s just the way he is. I understand him and accept him, but he can be a pain in the ass. And with Penny, it was like this sensitivity thing was doubled because she’s the same way. Worse, actually. It was like they were constantly offending each other, but then they’d have this super philosophical discussion and, I guess, make up? It was all beyond me, what they were talking about, something to do with the self. The outer self, the inner self, whatever. I’ve never had a problem that a six-pack can’t solve.”

  The closet was like everything else under Christopher’s domain: stacked, filed, aligned with a ruler. Every clothes hanger faced the same direction, and each shirt was ironed and buttoned at the top. It was like a department store rack in here. I felt bad about moving his stuff around because I knew I was messing it up.

  “So what happened? It sounds like they were really together.”

  “I haven’t a fucking clue. That’s why I confronted Grace, because after Christopher came back from visiting her and Penny like two weeks ago—this was the end of September—he was a wreck. That’s when Christopher found out Penny disappeared to Krishna, and he rushed after her. And here we are, you going through his stuff with mad abandon.”

  “Sorry.”

  Beaker waved me off. “It’s okay. If it helps you find out what happened my roommate and brother, then a little mess is more than worth it.”

  The only thing I saw in his closet that perhaps wasn’t for anyone else’s eyes was a dog-eared copy of the Kama Sutra underneath a sheaf of manila envelopes. I might have had the same edition at some point in my life. Nothing wrong with a little sexual experimentation in college.

  “Penny suffers from hyperthyroidism, and she has to take a pill on a regular basis or she gets pretty sick…” I said.

  “Heart palpitations, or fast heartbeat, that’s it. I remember she had a freak out one time, but then again, she freaked out about a lot of stuff. Christopher had to run back to Grace’s to get Penny’s pills, and after she took one, she was fine.”

  “Thank you, Beaker, for everything. Is that okay that I call you that?”

  “Sure. That was my pledge name and it kind of stuck.”

  “Why Beaker?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a chem major. I don’t have a beak for a nose. Do I?”

  I took a step back, then another because of his height.

  “No, you have a fine, distinguished nose.”

  This seemed to make his night. “Yeah? Cool.”

  As he led me back to the entrance, he mentioned how this was the third night of the fall rush and they had gotten just two prospective pledges altogether. “The other night, I saw like six guys walk by, then for some reason, turn around. I think they were laughing.”

  “Maybe it’s the butt on your sign,” I said. “In place of the Beta character.”

  “What?” Beaker asked.

  We walked out into the night and I pointed.

  “Jesus,” he said. “We must’ve walked by it like a hundred times and didn’t see it. Oh man, it’s Krazy Glue or something because this isn’t coming off.”

  I wished Beaker luck and walked back to my car. As I drove past him, I waved but he was too busy scraping away the butt picture with what might have been a rock. Holding onto the edge of the wooden sign with one hand and scratching with the other, Beaker’s silhouetted profile was somewhat simian.

  Ah, college. Whenever I think I miss you, I actually don’t.

  44

  I hadn’t heard back from Craig si
nce I sent him that one-word email (Okay!) about dinner. Today was Friday, and he’d said he’d be back from wherever he was, but when I walked by his office on the way to mine, his door was locked. I was relieved. And then disappointed.

  What was the next step, me drawing little red hearts on the margins of my notebook? Asking Suzy in math class if he liked me or like me liked me? This was pathetic. I was pathetic. I closed the door to my office and got to work. I fired up the old beast of a computer, which made an even worse noise than before, like metal grinding against metal, but then it warmed up and the noise disappeared.

  I opened up the browser and went to Llewellyn’s website, then clicked around until I found the “Partnerships” link. On the first page were two cosmetics companies and one perfume manufacturer, so Wheeler was already on her way to remake Llewellyn in her model image. After a list of scholarships (one sponsored by Jimmy Dean, the sausage people, given to a student who excels in “meat and meat-related studies”—no, it wasn’t a joke), I found what I was looking for. Krishna Center for Yoga and Wellness, featured for its summer programs for students and retreats for faculty and employees. Clicking deeper into the website, there were forms for students to apply to the “Krishna Experience” and earn credits toward their degree. I saw no information about anything during the fall or spring semesters. Beaker had mentioned a volunteer program, so I opened up another tab and punched in Krishna’s URL when my phone rang. I looked at the clock on my computer and saw it was 10:30 in the morning.

  “I knew you’d find her,” Josie said.

  I’d left her a voicemail last night.

  “How about we wait to celebrate until I’ve actually seen Penny with my own eyes?”

  “It’s just nice to get some good news for a change. I’m at work, by the way, on one of my two allotted cigarette breaks.”

  “You’re smoking again?”

  “No, that’s just what we call it, us mindless drones at this lovely office. I’m just glad to get away from the desk and the headset for fifteen minutes. What’s up? You said you had a question or two.”

  “Did Penny have any boyfriends in high school?” I asked.

  “Not really. She went to her senior prom with friends, a group thing.”

  “So Christopher was her first boyfriend.”

  “I don’t…who’s Christopher?”

  I told her all I knew about Christopher Vachess, mostly what Beaker had told me, plus a little background I’d done on my own. He was from New York City, an English major, and his parents ran a hedge fund. He’d never been fingerprinted and he’d never even gotten a traffic ticket, so at least according to his lack of a record, he was a good kid. When I mentioned Tau Beta Alpha, I heard the change in Josie’s voice.

  “The guys I met, they’re nice kids,” I said.

  “I guess all the nasty stories I told her about frats didn’t scare her one bit.”

  “It’s not like we were angels when we were in school, Josie.”

  “She never once told me about this Christopher in all our phone calls,” she said.

  No doubt there was a lot more that Penny had not told her, but that was something Josie would have to realize on her own.

  “She’s just trying to find herself. Figuring out who she is,” I said. Platitudes and empty words, but Josie seemed to appreciate them nonetheless.

  “I understand, but more than that, I hope she’s taking care of herself. She can lose weight pretty fast with Graves if she doesn’t maintain her medicine. She’s just a little girl…”

  I promised her I’d call again as soon as I found Penny at Krishna.

  45

  Back in front of my computer, I moved the mouse to wake up the screen, but nothing happened. I clicked on the mouse. Nothing. I banged on the keyboard. Still black. The little orange LED glowed on the monitor’s status light, so there was power going in. But when I dipped down below the desk, the computer was silent. I pushed the power button and the hideous grinding noise started again, but instead of plateauing to an acceptable hum, the racket abruptly halted. Pressing the power button again did nothing.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Knock, knock,” Craig’s voice said behind my half-closed door.

  I walked up to the door and flung it open, and there he was, my guy.

  “Craig!” I said.

  “Yes!” he said.

  Here we were, the two of us, at the threshold of my office door.

  “I think we should hug,” Craig said.

  “I think we should, too.”

  We hugged, and it was glorious.

  “I believe my computer just died,” I said.

  Craig walked around to my desk and crouched down to take a closer look, which gave me a chance to notice his very nicely shaped head. I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a weirdo, but really, it was so very pleasantly round.

  “Do you smell that?” he asked.

  Now that he did mention it, I did. “Like burnt rubber.”

  Craig kneeled and leaned further under the desk so he could turn the big black tower around. Now the smell was even stronger, and I could see the problem. Underneath the power switch was a vent, except this vent was so filled with dust that it wasn’t a vent anymore. In fact, it looked like a disgusting hairy stuffed animal, stringy, gray tufts jutting out of the metal grille.

  “It must’ve overheated,” Craig said. “It’s probably been overheating for a while. Were you trying to look at something on the computer?”

  “This Krishna place up in Hawthorne. According to my latest intel, that’s where my missing girl is.”

  “Grace Park is missing?”

  “No, a friend’s daughter, who seems to have gotten mixed up with Grace in some way.”

  “I have a working computer and I’m doing paperwork for pretty much the whole day, so you could come to my office and use it.”

  I offered him my hand. He took it, and I leaned back and pulled him up. Not that he needed my help to rise, but I liked our symbolic teamwork. It was effortless being with him. Too effortless.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. So not only was he thoughtful, he was perceptive, too.

  “Not a thing,” I said, “which is what’s wrong.”

  He stared at me, and I stared back. Why wasn’t this strange or awkward? It should be. Grown people don’t stare at one another like this.

  He squeezed my hand. I’d forgotten that we were still holding hands.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  Craig’s office was half the size of mine, but it felt bigger because there was virtually nothing in it. The desk was long and oval and white, like a surfboard. There were no drawers, just four spindly metallic legs. No filing cabinet, an ergonomic chair for himself and two black leather armchairs for his clients. It felt more like an office model than a real one.

  “Do you have all your client files in the cloud?” I asked.

  He pulled out his chair for me to sit in front of his aluminum sliver of a laptop. He dragged over one of his client armchairs and placed himself at the end of his plank-desk.

  “I used to have a normal office,” he said, opening up his briefcase.

  “When you used to be…larger,” I said.

  He tilted his head, then smiled. “You really are a private eye, aren’t you?”

  “I try.” There were ties from Llewellyn to Krishna, so I wondered if there were any that traveled in the other direction. I brought up Krishna’s website on Craig’s laptop and typed in “Llewellyn” into the search engine.

  “I topped out at 280. Lost more than a hundred pounds since. What else have you figured out about me?”

  There were three hits, but not what I’d expected. All links pointed to the profiles of the staff. The Director of Programming, the Director of Development, and the CFO were all from Llewellyn.

  “You were married,” I said. “But you aren’t anymore.”

  “Wow.”

 
“Please call Beaker for me.” I said. “Inform him I do have some detecting skills.”

  “Who?”

  I recounted my visit to Tau Beta Alpha, which Craig found amusing. He found a lot of things amusing. He laughed a lot. He had a nice laugh, not loud but deep, taking time to come up from his belly.

  For the next hour, we worked together, and it felt like we’d been doing it for years. I clicked and read while Craig jotted on little yellow stickies and peeled them and stuck them on the pages of his documents. He’d look up from his work every so often to look over at me, and I did the same. Sometimes this occurred simultaneously; other times, not. Either way, I was happy, and I think he was, too.

  Krishna, for all of its talk of spirituality and oneness, looked like a serious business, with a corporate org chart, an investors page, and even a mission statement: “To empower people and communities to realize their full potential through the transformative wisdom and practice of yoga.” Scouring through their photo stream, I saw one where Vera Wheeler and Cleo Park were standing by an impressively tiered cake, some sort of a fancy anniversary party.

  There were several choices for the types of rooms, ranging from a bare-bones barracks-style twin bed to a fancy 100% renewable-energy-run suite with its own bathroom. If I had a client who paid me, I would’ve gone for the private bath, but since I was on my own dime, I opted for a single with a shared bath. From the description I read, it almost felt like a college dorm, except for the ten o’clock curfew, no alcohol, and silent breakfasts. So actually, it was almost the exact opposite of a college dorm.

  I was punching in my credit card number to finish up my reservation when my stomach growled like a tiger.

  “Is your tummy trying to tell us something?” Craig said.

  “Me want food.”

  “That means we’ll be having lunch and dinner. Is that too much Craig for one day?”

  “Or is it too much Siobhan?”

  We stared at one another. Our smiles could light up a city.