Crying Wolf

11

“Did you bring a sample of your writing?” asked Professor Uzig.

Second semester, first day back at Inverness, 8:00 A.M., Professor Uzig’s office in Goodrich Hall. Nat, petitioning to enter Philosophy 322, Superman and Man: Nietzsche and Cobain, handed Professor Uzig several essays from the first term, as well as the prize-winning “What I Owe America.”

Professor Uzig flipped quickly through the school essays, came to “What I Owe America,” paused. His eyes darted back and forth, scanning with a speed and intensity that Nat, sitting across his desk, could feel. Professor Uzig glanced up.

“Do you believe this bilge?” he said.

“Which part, specifically?” Nat said; a composed reply, perhaps, but his face had grown hot at once, a change he hoped his fresh tan concealed.

“Here, for example,” said Professor Uzig, turning a page. He seemed so much harsher than the dinner guest at Aubrey’s Cay, didn’t even look the same. He wore a charcoal gray tweed jacket, white shirt, and navy blue tie, his hair was combed, and his tan, which had been much deeper than Nat’s, had almost completely faded. “Where you write, ‘The nation is like a monument continuously under construction and the job of the citizen is to make it better.’ ”

The question: did he believe that? Professor Uzig watched him, the papers steady, absolutely still in his hand, almost an extension of his fingers. It struck Nat that no written material presented any challenge to Professor Uzig, that all texts were instantly transparent to him. “What’s the alternative?” Nat said.

“To your metaphor, or to the action of the citizen, the metaphor accepted?”

“The latter,” said Nat.

Professor Uzig didn’t move, didn’t speak, just watched Nat over the papers in his hand. After a while Nat couldn’t stand the silence any longer, and said: “I meant what’s the better alternative.”

Professor Uzig laid the papers on his desk, aligned them neatly, squarely, and sat back in his chair. “You used continuously in the proper manner,” he said. “And you can write a periodic sentence. Admission is granted.”

“Thank you,” Nat said.

“The first class is today at one-thirty. You will have read the first part of Beyond Good and Evil. ”

“By Nietzsche?”

Oh, how Nat wished he could have that question back.

A s for continuously, he’d used it by chance, having no clue that it differed from continually until that moment. It was also the first time he’d heard the expression periodic sentence.

Back at his desk in room seventeen on the second floor of Plessey Hall, overlooking the quad, Nat had just begun reading the preface to Beyond Good and Evil — “Supposing truth to be a woman”-when he heard a knock at the door. Unusual, because almost everybody simply walked in.

“Come in,” he said.

A woman in a long fur coat entered. For a moment he didn’t recognize her. Then he did: Wags’s mom. He rose. “Hi.”

“Hello,” she said. “Nat, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She glanced around the room, then back at him. “Nose to the grindstone, I see.”

“Just trying to keep up. If you’re looking for Wags-Richard-he’s not in right now. I haven’t actually seen him yet.”

“You won’t. Richard won’t be coming back, at least not this semester.”

“But… but we don’t even have the results yet. And he was doing fine. Better than me.”

She gave him a look that might have been cold; but why? They didn’t know each other at all. She took off her black kid gloves, snagging one for a moment on a ring. “He needs rest.”

“Why? What happened?”

“You’d know better than I.”

“What does that mean?”

A cold look, beyond doubt. “No one is blaming you, but it might have been nice if you’d drawn our attention, or the college’s, to the kind of shape he was in.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? Richard should have been under a doctor’s care. He is now.”

“But for what?”

She regarded him in puzzlement, slightly exaggerated puzzlement. “You act like someone not very bright, yet Richard says you are most emphatically the opposite. Are you really saying you had no idea of the mental state he’s been in?”

“Everyone’s under a lot of stress here.”

“I’m sure. But not everyone is driven to a breakdown.”

“Wags had a breakdown?” Nat wasn’t even sure what the word meant, not in practice.

“Wags, as everyone calls him for some reason, had a breakdown.”

“Is he all right?”

“Just dandy.”

She stood over Wags’s desk, gazing at something he’d scratched into its surface: Help! We’re prisoners of the future! or something like that, as Nat remembered. Her eyes moistened, but nothing leaked out. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its edge. “He’s a little better, in fact, and thanks for asking. They’re probably letting him come home next month.”

“From where?”

“A very nice place, not far from here.” Her hand went to Wags’s chem lab notes, stacked neatly on the desk by Nat before vacation; squared the way Professor Uzig had arranged Nat’s papers on his own desk not long before.

“Do they allow visitors?” Nat said.

“They do,” said Wags’s mom. Her eyes moistened again. Nat looked away.

Nat helped her pack Wags’s things and carry them down to her car. On the last trip, she came out of Wags’s bedroom holding his pillow, and said: “Wasn’t there a TV?”

“Oh,” said Nat.

“The guest room TV, I think it was.”

“Damn it,” he said.

“What?”

Nat told her about the theft before Christmas, his call to campus security, and how he had forgotten to file a report the next day.

“You forgot?”

The cold look was back. How to explain about the twins, the shattered aquarium, Lorenzo? “I’m sorry,” he said.

She was already on the phone. Someone from campus security appeared five minutes later. Nat recounted waking up, seeing the thief run off, losing him in the basement corridor. The security officer took notes and said: “Know anything about the TV in the student union?”

“The TV in the student union?” said Nat.

“The high-definition one in the lounge. It disappeared three days ago.”

“No,” Nat said, “I don’t know anything about it.” He felt the gaze of Wags’s mom. “Why would I?”

The security officer was watching him too. All that scrutiny made Nat feel like he’d done something wrong, not just forgetting to file the report, but really wrong. And he hadn’t. He’d never stolen anything in his life, not even a pack of gum. Anger, an uncommon feeling, rose inside him; and he rose with it: a tall kid, and strong. He wanted an answer to that question: why would I? No answer came, but in the silence, Nat got past the uniform of the security guard, the implacable expression on his face, even noticed a resemblance to his next-door neighbor back home, the weekend clerk at the hardware store. His anger subsided. “I was away over Christmas,” he said. “I got back late last night.” He sat down.

The security guard closed his notebook. “A big guy with a ponytail, you say.”

“Yes.”

The security guard turned to Wags’s mom. She was wringing the kid gloves gently in her hands. “We’ll do what we can,” he said.

“I don’t really care,” said Wags’s mom.

“Beyond Good and Evil — part one,” said Professor Uzig. Philosophy 322 met in the small domed room at the top of Goodrich Hall, one floor above the professor’s office. Windows all around and lots of wood-mahogany molding, wide-plank pine floor, oval cherrywood table, and sitting at it Professor Uzig, Nat, Grace, Izzie, and four other freshmen, only one of whom, the top student in his English class the previous semester, Nat knew. “Who wants to go first?”

Everyone looked at everyone. No one spoke. Outside, Nat saw a crow fly by, and beyond it a black plume of smoke rose from somewhere in the lower town, an area he’d not yet set foot in. The flats, they called it, probably where the security officer, and all the hardware clerks, maintenance people, gardeners, secretaries, receptionists lived. He looked back across the table, found Izzie gazing at him. Grace too. They both gave him a little nod, the same nod exactly, and at exactly the same instant. And despite the fact that he had barely had time to get through the reading once, finding it by far the hardest text he’d ever come across, despite his certainty that he didn’t understand it well, or possibly at all, a thought came to him, and he uttered it aloud: “Does the very fact that most people think something make it automatically wrong?”

Silence.

The crow, or another one, cawed nearby.

Then the bright girl from English 103 said, “Yeah. What is all that rising-above-the-common-herd stuff about? Sounds kind of elitist to me.”

Grace snorted.

Izzie said, “Maybe he is elitist, but there’s something almost… sweet about him at the same time.”

And someone else said: “Sweet? Nietzsche? He was a syphilitic, dangerous bastard.”

And they were off.

They talked about the fatalism of the weak-willed, the charm of the refutable idea, and how living things must vent their strength; about the will to power, Wagner, the Nazis and Hitler, and how the true and selfless may be inextricably linked, possibly identical to, the false and appetitive; they talked about the pressure of the herd and the courage of the original thinker; they talked about Friedrich Nietzsche. Professor Uzig hardly spoke, just sat in his captain’s chair-none of the other chairs had arms-still and neat in his white shirt, navy tie, charcoal gray tweed jacket, but he dominated completely by the intensity of his concentration. Nat could feel him listening, feel him judging, and was sure the others could too. But what judgments he was coming to remained unknown, with one exception. A bearded student wearing a tie-dyed shirt asked when they would be getting to Kurt Cobain, and Professor Uzig replied, “What’s the point of developing powerful analytical tools if all you’re going to do is waste them on popular culture?”

The bearded student said, “But I thought…,” and looked around for help. None came.

Just the same, Nat began to see the connection between Nietzsche and Kurt Cobain, not only Kurt Cobain, but so much of modern life, began to understand what Professor Uzig had been saying down on Aubrey’s Cay about Nietzsche’s influence. For example, hadn’t he read something in part one about how even the laws of physics might be subjective? He was searching for the quotation, leafing quickly through his copy of Beyond Good and Evil, when he heard Professor Uzig saying: “Until tomorrow, then.”

The chapel bell tolled. Class was over. Ninety minutes, gone like that. The sound of the bell, by now so familiar, seemed strange for a moment.

A foot pressed his under the table. He looked across at Izzie, writing in her date book, her golden-brown hair hanging over the page: dyed hair, he knew that now. His mind, already racing, began racing in another direction.

Grace, sitting beside Izzie, caught his eye. “I’m hungry,” she said.

The three of them ate in the lounge at the student union: yogurt for Izzie, chocolate cake for Grace, an apple for Nat, unable to afford much eating off the meal plan. He noticed the empty space where the high-definition TV had been, told them about Wags and the theft of the two TVs.

“Were you scared?”

“A ponytail?”

“He just disappeared?”

Nat took them down to the basement corridor in Plessey Hall. He showed them the padlocked doors to the storage lockers and the maintenance room, and the only unlocked door, the one to the janitor’s closet.

Grace opened it. They regarded the brooms, mops, buckets, cleansers.

“Wags did the same thing the year he was at Choate,” Izzie said.

“What same thing?” said Nat.

“The breakdown thing. Drugs.”

Grace was inside the closet now, rummaging around. Without looking, Izzie reached out and took Nat’s hand.

“Drugs?” he said. “I never saw him with any drugs.”

“The damage was done.”

Inside the closet, Grace said, “I’ve had an original thought.”

“Don’t scare me,” Izzie said.

Grace laughed, turned sideways-Izzie letting go of his hand the instant before-raised one foot high like a trained Thai boxer, and kicked the back wall of the closet with a force that startled Nat. The top half of the wall fell out in one solid panel, dropping into darkness on the other side.

They crowded into the closet, peered through the opening. Beyond lay a narrow unlit tunnel, narrow but tall enough to stand in, with one large-diameter pipe and several smaller ones receding into the shadows and finally disappearing into complete blackness.

“This looks like fun,” Grace said.

“Uh-oh,” said Izzie.