For this reason I decided I would keep the rod myself; find a safe place to hide it until I had something more tangible to present alongside it.
In a sense what I discovered on entering my room was precisely that. Unfortunately its tangibility was of a nature so violently unpleasant I couldn’t even consider becoming the means of disclosing it to another human being. If ever there was a message vile enough to warrant the execution of its messenger, this was it. It lay on the desk where I had left my offering for Trumilcik, surrounded by smeared, torn up pieces of paper. The money was gone: in its place, as if by some nightmarish reverse alchemy, a brown, pyramidal mound; raw and reeking, the nastiest gift one person can give another, so smolderingly dense in its physical reality it seemed to give the objects about it – books, papers, telephone, stapler – a quality of tentative abstraction.
Appalled; leaving the light off and the door open, I approached the coiled pile, which glistened horribly in the faint radiance of the campus lights.
It was on the blotter at least, this dollop of anti-matter; moveable without the need for direct contact. The soiled bits of paper scrunched around it like netherworld origami were Amber’s pages; what remained of them. I picked the blotter up; carried it steadily as I could so as not to be so much as fluttered against by the unclean crumpled scraps. To my left, the closed-together desks registered themselves on me with a dull pressure as I crossed back to the door and passed on into the corridor. If it is true that certain actions performed in the secular world have their true meaning elsewhere, in the world of the spirit, then this was surely one. I moved toward the men’s room, trying hard to induce a state of imperviousness to what I was doing. It seemed a matter of some urgency not to let this event secure a place for itself in my psyche. It was night; I was alone; in a moment all evidence of its having occurred at all would be literally flushed away. As good, I told myself, as if it hadn’t occurred at all. In the sepulchral dimness of the corridor, lit only by low-wattage nightlights at distant intervals, I could almost believe I wasn’t really here; was elsewhere, dreaming this, as I did sometimes dream of such things.
In the men’s room, between the rubber garbage bin and the toilet, I was able to dispose of everything, blotter included. I went back to my office. By now a heavy weariness had replaced my horror. I felt torn, demoralised. If Trumilcik was in there somewhere, then so be it. I turned on the light, opened the window to let out the lingering odor. Then I went to the desks, gave them a warning thump, and pulled them apart. He wasn’t there.
Nor, however, was the steel rod.
CHAPTER 7
The next day I went into the department office at lunch time to get my mail. Amber was there, working the photocopier. She looked at me drowsily. Her eyelids seemed literally weighted down by their brush of thick, cornsilk-colored lashes. For a moment I thought we might not have to speak. But under the surface torpor of her expression, a keener attentiveness began shoaling up toward me, and I felt once again the familiar agitated sense of having to account for myself as I stood before her.
‘Listen, I -’ I blustered, ‘I haven’t had a chance to – to read your thing yet…’
‘Oh no problem.’ Her voice was remote but soothing, like a phrase of otherworldly music drifting by on a breeze. She turned back to the photocopier.
There was a note in my mailbox. It was unsigned, and the words were in Latin:
Atrocissimum est Monoceros.
I didn’t know what it meant, but its obvious hostility (a tauntingly opaque follow-up, I assumed, to last night’s more crudely visceral assault) broke on me like a whiplash out from the dark, and I felt almost physically stung. I looked over at Amber; I wanted to say something, to whinny out an aggrieved protest and hear the reassurance of another human being’s sympathetic outrage. On reflection, however, I realised Amber would hardly be an appropriate recipient for such an appeal. I stood there in silence, dazed, regretting for a moment (even as I acknowledged its importance) this unremitting obligation to hold oneself in check. I was gazing at her back: the obverse of the gold coin of herself. Wings of fine down caught the light at her long neck. Her shoulders were trim and straight in the soft blue sheathing of her top, crisscrossed by the ocher halter of her brushed cotton dungarees. Her willowy figure barely curved at the hips, almost as expressive as her face of things yet to awaken into the full articulation of themselves.
She turned around, catching my eye before I could look away. I felt sharply annoyed with myself – not for failing to take evasive action fast enough, but for ogling her like that in the first place. I was about to leave the room when I heard her say softly:
‘So you did know Barbara.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You did know Barbara Hellermann.’
‘No…’
‘But you were in Portland with her.’
Amber’s blue-sleeved arm pointed languidly over to a poster on the notice-board. Distantly alarmed, I strolled across the room, as nonchalantly as I could.
The poster was for a week-long, interdisciplinary graduate seminar on Gender Studies, at Portland State. Among the fifteen or so guest lecturers listed were myself and Barbara Hellermann. Looking at it, I felt a distinct but as yet unlocatable feeling of danger, that I see in retrospect was my first intimation of the large antagonisms I had unwittingly aroused.
‘What’s this doing up here?’ I said. ‘It’s three years out of date.’
‘I have no idea.’
‘How strange. Well perhaps I did meet her. I don’t remember.’
‘She was my teacher here in my junior year.’
‘Oh.’
I was about to tear the poster down, when I thought that might strike Amber as odd. Instead I merely shrugged my shoulders and left the room.
Later, when nobody was there, I went back and discreetly removed the poster. Taking it into my office, I examined it closely. It looked genuine enough, not that I would have been able to tell if someone had forged it.
Perhaps, I thought, it had been left up there on the notice-board all this time, and Amber pointing it out to me today, the very day after I had learned of Barbara Hellermann’s murder, was merely a chance event; the kind that occurs when you learn a word you’ve never come across in your life, only to hear it repeated in an unrelated context almost immediately after. And perhaps, in that case, Barbara Hellermann really had been in Portland when I was there, and I simply hadn’t taken note of her. There had been an organised dinner, I remembered, and a muddy walk through a forest of wild salmonberries and Douglas fir to a spectacular waterfall above the Willamet. I had given my paper – part of a mini-symposium entitled ‘Engineering the New Male’. Other than that we’d been left to our own devices. I wasn’t very sociable – I spent most of my free time on the phone to Carol (who only wasn’t with me because she was so afraid of flying she never went anywhere she didn’t absolutely have to go), and wishing I was back in New York with her. So it was possible that Barbara had been there, and that we simply hadn’t registered each other. Possible then, that the poster was genuine, and that it had been up on the notice-board for three years without my taking it in. Possible.