“She’s gone,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
Jade lifted her head and pressed a hand to her chest.
“I’m having a heart attack,” she said.
“No, you’re not.”
“It’s possible. My family has a history of heart failure. It happens just like this. Out of the blue.”
“You’re fine.”
“I feel a tightness. Here. That’s what happens when you’re having pulmonary embrosis.”
I stared out the window. Where the sidewalk twisted out of sight around Love Auditorium, a lone tree stood guard with a thick black trunk, its shivering, thin limbs with the tops bent backward into tiny wrists and hands, as if feebly holding up the sky.
“That was really strange, huh?” Jade made a face. “How she called your name like that — wonder why she wasn’t calling my name.”
I shrugged, trying to act nonchalant, though in truth I felt ill. Maybe I had the gauzy constitution of a Victorian woman who fainted because she heard the word leg, or perhaps I’d read L’Idiot (Petrand, 1920) too attentively with its lunatic hero, the sickly and certifiable Byron Berintaux, who saw in every upholstered armchair his upcoming Death waving at him enthusiastically. Maybe I’d simply had too much darkness for one night. “Night is not good for the brain or the nervous system,” contends Carl Brocanda in Logical Effects (1999). “Studies show neurons are constricted by 38 percent in individuals who live in locations with little daylight, and nerve impulses are 47 percent slower in prison inmates who go forty-eight hours without seeing the light of day.”
Whatever it was, it wasn’t until Jade and I crept our way outside, sneaking past the cafeteria, still lit but silent (a few teachers lingered on the patio, including Ms. Thermopolis, a dying ember by the wooden doors), hightailing it out of St. Gallway in the Mercedes without encountering Eva Brewster, roaring down Pike Avenue past Jiffy’s Eatery, Dollar Depot, Dippity’s, Le Salon Esthetique — when I realized I’d forgotten to return the Blackbird book to Hannah’s desk. I was actually still holding it and in my haste, confusion, the darkness, only dimly aware I’d been doing so.
“How come you still have that book?” Jade demanded as we swung into a Burger King drive-thru. “She’s going to know it’s gone. Hope she doesn’t dust for fingerprints — hey, what do you want to eat? Hurry and decide. I’m starved.”
We ate Whoppers drenched in the acid light of the parking lot, barely speaking. I suppose Jade was one of those people who flung handfuls of wild accusations into the air, smiling as they rained on everyone’s head, and then the festivities were over and she went home. She looked contented, refreshed even, as she jostled fries into her mouth, waved at some scab making his way to his pick-up balancing a tray of Cokes in his arms, and yet, deep in my chest, unavoidable as the sound of your heart when you stopped to hear it beating, I felt, as deadbeat gumshoe Peter Ackman (who had a weakness for the chalk-tube and flutes of skee) said at the end of Wrong Twist (Chide, 1954), “like the bean-schnozzle been jammed far up my lousy, threatening to sneeze metal.” I stared at the wrinkled cover of that book, where, despite the faded ink, the creases, the man’s black eyes rose off the page.
“So these are the eyes of the Devil,” Dad remarked thoughtfully once, picking up and scrutinizing his own copy. “He looks out and sees you — doesn’t he?”
Sweet Bird of Youth
There was an anecdote Dad recounted like clockwork whenever he had a colleague over for dinner. Having a guest was rare, occurring only once every two or three towns in which we lived. Customarily, Dad found it difficult to withstand the echoing howls of his associates at Hattiesburg College of Arts and Science, the displays of chest-beating rampant among his Cheswick College cronies or professors at the University of Oklahoma at Flitch, eternally absorbed with feeding, grooming and being territorial to the exclusion of all else. (Dad regarded silverbacks — professors over sixty-five who had tenure, dandruff, rubbery shoes and quadrangle glasses that bugified their eyes — with particular disdain.)
Once in a while, however, under the wild oak trees, Dad bumped into his own kind (if not his exact subspecies or species, at least the same genus), a compatriot who’d made his way down from the foliage and learned to walk on two feet.
Naturally, this person never was as sophisticated an academic as Dad, nor as handsome. (The man was almost always saddled with a flattish face, an extensive, slanted forehead and an awning brow.) But Dad would cheerfully extend a Van Meer dinner invitation to this uncommonly advanced lecturer; and on a quiet Saturday or Sunday night, big, fig-eyed Professor of Linguistics Mark Hill would turn up, with his hands enduringly tucked into the patch pockets of his shapeless dinner jacket, or Associate Professor of English Lee Sanjay Song, with his quince-and-cream complexion and teeth in a traffic jam, and somewhere between the spaghetti and the tiramisu Dad treated him to the story of Tobias Jones the Damned.
It was a straightforward tale about a nervous, pale-skinned chap Dad encountered in Havana working at OPAI (Organización Panamaricana de la Ayuda Internacional) during the hot rum-soaked summer of 1983, a British kid from Yorkshire who, in the span of a single luckless week in August, lost his passport, wallet, wife, right leg and dignity — in that order. (Every now and then, to elicit even more extreme cries of amazement from his audience, Dad reduced the tragedy to a neat span of twenty-four hours.)
Never one for paying attention to physical details, Dad was disappointingly hazy on what the face of the Exceedingly Ill-fated looked like, but I was able to discern, out of Dad’s poorly lit verbal portrait, a tall, pale man with stalklike legs (after he was hit by the Packard, leg), maize-colored hair, a clammy gold pocket watch repeatedly removed from his breast pocket and blinked at disbelievingly, a propensity for sighing, for cufflinks, for lingering too long in front of the chrome metal fan (the only one in the room) and for spilling café con leche on his trousers.
Dad’s dinner guest listened in rapt attention as Dad narrated the beginning of the ill-starred week, which found Tobias showing off his new fiesta linen shirt to his coworkers at OPAI while a pack of gente de guarandabia ransacked his bungalow back at Comodoro Neptuno, all the way to the tale’s miserable end, a mere seven days later, with Tobias prostrate in his lumpy bed at el hospital Julio Trigo missing a right leg and recuperating from an attempted suicide (fortunately, the attending nurse had been able to pry him off the window ledge).
“And we never knew what happened to him,” Dad said in closing with a thoughtful sip of wine. Professor of Psychology Alfonso Rigollo stared dolefully at the edge of the dinner table. And after he muttered, “Shit,” or “Tough luck,” Dad and he would discuss predestination, or the waywardness of a woman’s love, or how Tobias might’ve had a chance for canonization if he hadn’t tried to kill himself and had stood for something. (According to Dad, Tobias had definitely performed one of the three miracles required for sainthood: back in 1979 he’d somehow convinced the ocean-eyed Adalia to marry him.)
Within twenty minutes, though, Dad would twist the conversation around to the real reason he’d brought up Tobias Jones in the first place, to detail one of his favorite theories, “The Theory of Determination,” because his final position (related with the intensity of Christopher Plummer murmuring, “The rest is silence.”) was that Tobias was not, as it might appear, a defenseless victim of fate, but a victim of himself, of his own “sallow head.”