We make our way down the slope and into the crowd. I unknot my tie and take it off. Nico laughs. “There you go, Starsky,” she says. “Deep cover.”
“Shut up,” I say. “Where are we going?”
“We gotta find my man Jordan,” says Nico. “He’s got this place wired.”
“Okay,” I say. “And where’s Jordan?”
“In Dimond,” she says. “The library. If his committee is sitting. Follow me.”
I follow her down into the wonderland, trotting a few paces behind as she picks a route through the crowded tents and revelers. Nico pauses here and there to say hello to people she knows, ducking into one tent to hug a fine-boned girl in a miniskirt, jog bra, and elaborate Native American headdress.
At the far end of the main quad the crowd thins and we pick up a narrow winding path and follow it into and out of a stand of thin sapling elms. After a few minutes of walking, the noises of the drums and the singing have faded, and we are wandering through the campus, passing nondescript low-slung brick academic buildings—Geology department, Kinesiology, Mathematics. After ten minutes or so we come out onto a plaza where there’s just a single drummer, tapping away all on his own, wearing sweatpants and a Brooklyn Dodgers jersey. The chiseled brick cornerstone says PERFORMING ARTS, and a sandwich board is propped up at the base of the wide steps, between the columns, advertising a lecture: “The Asteroid as Metaphor: Collision, Chaos, and Perceptions of Doom.”
Nico peers at the sign.
“Is this where we’re going?” I ask.
“Nope.”
“Do you know where we’re going?”
“Yup,” she says, and we keep walking. I’m picturing Brett Cavatone making his way through the campus in his heavy policeman boots, looking for Julia Stone just as I am now. How did he circumvent the perimeter guards, I wonder? If I had to guess, his stratagem was more tactile than mine, more direct. He would have cased the campus, selected the least-defended of the various checkpoints, and employed overwhelming but nonlethal force to get past one of these skinny twenty-somethings playing tough guy.
I keep following Nico, who is still lugging her heavy duffel bag, deeper and deeper into the bewildering campus. The paths roll back on themselves, the woods grow thick, then thin out again. On a volleyball court outside the athletic complex is a row of young people clutching Civil War–style bayonets, practicing their form: someone yells “Charge!” and they charge, sprinting full bore, lunging with bayonets extended, stopping on a line, laughing, retreating.
I’m growing more and more concerned about Nico’s sense of direction every time she pauses at a forking path and chews on her lip for a moment before plunging forward.
“Here, wait,” I say. “Here’s a map.”
“I don’t need it,” she says. “I know where I’m going.”
“You sure?”
“Stop asking me that.”
It doesn’t matter; the map, when I look closer, has been imaginatively graffitied, the place names all crossed out and replaced: “Perdition.” “Deathtown.” “Dragons Here There Be.”
“We’re fine,” says Nico, taking a seemingly arbitrary left turn onto a narrower path with a light handrail. “Come on.”
We cross over a brown, bubbling creek and pass one more building, a dorm, with loud insistent music pouring out along with a series of modulated groans. There’s a man on the roof, naked, waving to passers-by as if from a parade float.
“Holy moly,” I say. “What are they doing in there?”
“Oh, you know,” says Nico, looking down, blushing, uncharacteristically. “Fucking.”
“Ah,” I say, “right.”
And then, thank God, we get to where we’re going.
In Dimond Library, on the way to the basement stairs, I see a pale boy hunched over the desk in a carrel, sipping from a Styrofoam cup, surrounded by books, reading. His face is gaunt and his hair a greasy mass. On the ground beside him is a clotted leaking pile of discarded teabags, and beside that a bucket that I realize with horror is full of urine. There’s a tall stack of books on one side of him and a taller stack on the other: out pile, in pile. I stand for a second watching this guy, frozen in place but alive with small action: muttering to himself as he reads, almost humming like an electric motor, his hands twitching at the edges of the pages until, with a sudden flash of motion, he turns the page, flings it over like he can’t consume the words fast enough.
“Come on,” says Nico, and we continue down the hall, passing four more of these carrels, each with its quiet intent occupant—earnestly, frantically reading.
In the basement, Nico slips in through a pair of green double doors marked BOOK REPAIR and I wait outside, until a moment later she emerges with a friend behind her. Jordan, presumably. In the few seconds before the door swings closed I glimpse a big workshop with the tables pushed to the sides, people sitting cross-legged on the floor in loose concentric rings. As the door opens, someone is saying “Agreed, with reservations…,” and the rest are raising their hands in the air—two hands up, palms out—and then the door closes all the way.
“So this is the brother, huh?” says Jordan, sticking his hand out. “I seriously don’t think I’ve ever met a real cop before.”
“Well,” I say, shaking his hand, and I’m going to say that I’m not a cop anymore, actually, but then he says, “What’s it like to shove a nightstick up someone’s ass?”
I let go of his hand.
“I’m totally serious,” he says. And Nico says, “Jordan, don’t be a moron.”
He looks at her, all innocence. “What?”
I just want to find my missing person. That’s all I want. Jordan and Nico lean against a wall in the hallway, and I stand across from them. He’s short, baby faced, fatuous, with a pair of Ray-Bans pushed back high on his head. Nico pulls out a cigarette and Jordan gives her an expectant expression, and she lights one for him, too, on the same match.
“How’s Ars Republica?” she asks.
“Boring. Stupid. Ridiculous. As usual.” Jordan looks over his shoulder at the BOOK REPAIR door. “Today it’s immigrant policy: take ’em or leave ’em, basically.” He talks fast, taking quick little puffs of the cigarette between choppy sentences. “Crowd mood is definitely take ’em, especially now with this quarantine jazz. How’d you get him in, by the way?”
“We told a story.”
“Nice.” Then, to me, “Like that outfit, by the way. You look like a funeral director.” He keeps chattering, hyper and self-important. “Not that many of ’em are making it up here. The CI’s I mean. Coasties must be doing a bang-up job of rounding ’em up and taking ’em camping. Oh, wait, not camping. Internment camp. My bad.”
He smirks, then leans his neck one way till it cracks, and then the other way. “Okay, what do we need?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“Someone specific, jackass,” says Nico, and sticks out her tongue at him.
If it turns out that my sister is romantically involved with this man, I might actually have to murder him.
“A former student here,” I say. “Would have been a senior last year, when all of this started up. Whatever this is.”
“‘Whatever this is’?” Jordan’s face becomes serious. “I’ll tell you what this is, asshole, this is the apex of civilization. Okay? This is what democracy looks like, real democracy, you fucking Nazi cop asshole.”