He stood still not turning. He was wondering if he was about to be killed or arrested, in some way pulled out of this particular iteration of his hapless, rudderless and yet repetitive life.
She put a hand on his shoulder.
“CC.”
“Yeah?”
“Turn around.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Turn around.”
Colette Margolis Van Dyne wore a floral dress dominated by reds and oranges with cobalt blue pansies undergirding the dense design. Her yellow pumps denied the winter outside.
John thought about the man he’d slashed. In another circumstance he’d have been sure that she’d found out about the attack and was investigating him.
But the dress told another story.
“I didn’t have anything to do with it, Colette,” he said.
“I’m willing to believe you.”
The foyer of the building was filled with students coming in and going out but CC and Colette just stood there, looking at each other, jostled by the bodies moving around them.
“Is there somewhere we can go?” the policewoman asked at last.
John’s office was in a professional building across the street from the school. The eight-story, block-square edifice was mainly tenanted by insurance salesmen and dentists.
There were two visitors’ chairs facing the desk, behind which a double-wide window overlooked the college.
John took the guest seat facing Colette.
“You’re so beautiful,” John said.
“If you didn’t tell him then who did?” Colette asked.
“You knew I became a history professor.”
“So what?”
“In the modern world history is contained almost completely in language. Other modes of recording exist but the written word is still the accepted way to pass on knowledge.”
“Okay. So?”
“In your journal you recorded that you loved me and that I was Chris’s father.”
“Oh... shit.”
“You should be talking to him, not me.”
“I’m so sorry, CC.”
“For what?”
“We all used you. Me, your father, your mother. You were so honest and hardworking, trying to keep everybody happy. I should have seen what you needed. I should have waited for you.”
Two days after John took up residence on her sofa Dawn began a two-week intensive course called The Psychology of Women. The class met every evening until nine so John would take walks in nearby Prospect Park armed with his belt-buckle knife and the .22 he’d gotten from the mugger.
That evening he was thinking about what might have been if Colette had left her man for him. Even just the possibility made him happy.
“I know you’ve all written your essays about the contradiction of there being two most important things in your life,” he said at the beginning of the next class. “But hold on to those thoughts for a bit. First I want to pose another notion. It’s not a question exactly but something to wonder about in those moments when you’re free from the false limitations placed upon you by the unbearable weight of the history of our kind.
“Imagine there are modern-day kings and queens, admirals and spies that seek to govern your every act, thought and feeling: people vying to control the forces of history in order to make your lives... different.”
“Like a conspiracy?” asked Jeremiah Jones, whose family had lived in Brooklyn since before Brooklyn was a borough.
John looked at the fiftysomething onetime carpenter who was now unemployed because of an injury he’d received on the job.
“I’m not sure,” the professor said. “Whether or not a secret plan is a conspiracy depends on how you feel about it. The Catholic Church might be blamed for conspiring against its members but what if most of them agree with the religion and its edicts, actions and sometimes secret goals?
“No, not necessarily a conspiracy. I was once told that a nationwide chain of grocery stores had studied the shopping habits of their customers so closely that they could train left-handed people to shop in the same grooves that were set up for right-handers. They seek to control our behavior for profit. But even with this knowledge we would be shopping anyway, buying anyway, spending our lives in the rat-maze aisles of our own design.”
John stopped an unbidden thought from taking over his mind.
After a moment he said, “Dawn.”
“Yes, Professor Woman?” she said from the back of the room.
“Do you file a report on every class?”
“Um... Yes I do. The president’s office asked the dean to make reports about the lectures. Why? Do you want me to stop?”
“No. I want you to make sure you get this one clearly.”
“Okay.”
“This is the story about an organization called the Platinum Path,” Professor John Woman began.
36
Three evenings later Dawn was at her class. John went out for his evening walk in the park.
There had been a cold snap so he wore a heavy sweater over his long-sleeved black cotton shirt.
He’d been thinking about leaving New York. After all, he had given the most important lecture of his life. He’d explained the Platinum Path and its intentions. He revealed that Service Tellman had faked his death and now worked as a gardener named Ron Underhill; that board members Willie Pepperdine and NUSW president Colin Luckfeld did Ron’s bidding.
“Melville’s cook preached to the sharks that they would be angels if they could control their appetites,” he had said. “He was chumming the waters and the sharks went into such a frenzy that they began tearing chunks out of each other. There was a chance, the cook said, that they might ascend from the waters on fins turned to wings and fly to the heavens, creatures that had overcome their natures...
“But instead they experienced a paroxysm of lust and sank deeper into the only nature they could know.”
“Why you sound so sad, Professor Woman?” Maya Thoms asked.
“Because the people that want to save everyone will now murder me for telling their secret.”
“But their secret is that they want a better world,” Christian said.
“No,” John said shaking his head the way his father used to before delivering a sad pronouncement. “What they want is to make the world in their own image. They want to be God and here I am the Woman holding out an apple.”
Alone on the nighttime path in the park John turned a corner and came upon Ron Underhill sitting on a dark green bench wearing an army surplus trench coat and a wool knit skullcap pulled down around his ears.
“Professor,” he said when John approached. “It’s so good to see you again.”
“What are you doing here, Service?”
“Do you mean why am I sitting on this bench at this hour just when you happen to be walking by?”
John grinned, approached the older man and sat down next to him.
“No,” he said. “You’re sitting there because I walk past this spot every night at one time or other. I want to know why you felt that my class was important enough for you to meet me.”
“I like you, CC. I’d like for you to one day take my place.”
“That wouldn’t be me at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a leader and I’m a troublemaker.”
“You are many men, Cornelius, there’s probably room in there for a few more.”
“What possible threat could I pose to you?”
“You have the strength to discredit us.”
“And you’d kill me for that?”
Service Tellman shrugged and stood up.
“You know I can’t help what I am, Mr. Tellman.”
“Nor I, dear John, nor I.”
John’s hand drifted toward the pistol he’d inherited from the would-be mugger.