Crying Wolf

3

The shortest day of the year and therefore the latest dawn, but still it came too soon for Nat. Hunched over his desk in room seventeen on the second floor of Plessey Hall, head almost touching the gooseneck lamp whose similar posture had been mocking him all night, he tried to read faster. The problem was that chapter nine of Introduction to Macroeconomic Theory: A Post-Keynesian Approach for a Global Polity, like all the chapters that had gone before it, resisted fast reading. Three times, each slower than the last, he tried and failed to take in “with or without ignoring the realization that a deficit or surplus in the current account cannot be explained or evaluated without simultaneous explanation of an equal surplus or deficit in the capital account.” What kind of sentence contained two withouts? The words quivered on the page, threatened to change into something else, mere shapes, although interesting ones: he found himself gazing at a z. An unreliable letter, threatening in some obscure way, even unforgiving, or was all that merely the result of its comparative rarity, or association with Zorro?

Association with Zorro? Nat sat back in his chair. What was going on in his mind? What was wrong with him? He’d never studied this hard, at the same time never had a shakier grip on the material, never felt his mind wandering so much. If at all, he began, then stopped himself, aware that he was about to wander some more. He rose, rubbing his eyes, and gazed out his window. Dawn, all over the place. He could almost feel the earth spinning him toward that economics exam.

“They’re shooting again,” he said.

No answer.

Turning, he saw that his roommate had fallen asleep on the couch, chem lab notes stacked high on his stomach. “Wags, wake up.”

Wags was silent. Nat went over to him. Wags looked terrible, face unshaven and blotchy, hair wild and oily, eyelids and the pockets under his eyes uniformly dark, as though he’d been using some sort of deathly makeup. But Wags’s instructions had been not to let him fall asleep under any circumstances. How long had he been sleeping? Nat didn’t know. He touched Wags’s shoulder. “Wags.”

Nothing. Nat shook his shoulder gently-Wags felt hot-and when gently didn’t work, harder.

Wags smiled, a silvery thread of drool escaping from the corner of his mouth. His eyes remain closed, but he spoke. “I was having the sweetest dream.”

“What about?”

“Can’t remember. Helicopters? It’s collapsing in little pieces down the sides of my brain.” Wags’s concentration on whatever was happening inside his head was so intense that Nat felt his own mind focusing too, without result. Suddenly Wags’s eyes snapped open and he sat up abruptly-Nat could smell him-scattering lab notes all over the floor. “My God. What time is it?”

“After seven.”

“After seven? In the morning? Then I’m totally fucked.” He plunged to the floor, snatching up lab notes by the handful, pausing once to glare at Nat. “You want me to flunk out, don’t you?”

“Right,” said Nat. “And then all this will be mine.”

All this: the cramped outer room with their desks, computers, the couch, the cigarette-scorched hardwood floor, and off it the two bedrooms barely big enough for the beds. Wags laughed, a single bark, brief and unhappy.

“They’re shooting again,” Nat told him.

Wags got up, went to the window. “Just getting some establishing shots,” he said. It was the fourth or fifth film crew on the quad since September-filmmakers in need of an ideal college campus came to Inverness-and Wags had become an expert on their movements, mixing with the crews when he could and even landing a role as an extra in a made-for-TV movie about a fraternity brother in need of a bone marrow transplant, scheduled for broadcast in the spring. “Wait a minute,” he said, leaning closer to the window, leaving another oily nose print on the glass. His voice rose. “Is that Marlo Thomas?”

Nat closed the economics book, shut off the gooseneck lamp, went down the hall to the shower. Wags stayed watching at the window, crumpled lab notes in both hands.

After the exam-it had gone better than he’d expected-Nat went to the gym and took his hundred free throws, hitting ninety-one, despite how drained he was. The best he’d done since coming to the school: no explaining it. As he sank the last one, swish, barely disturbing the net, he realized that his answer to the last question had been completely wrong. Monetarism had nothing to do with it, completely irrelevant; they’d wanted all that current and capital account stuff, the two withouts. An essay question, worth one-third of the total grade. The mark of Zorro: he’d done not better than he’d expected, but worse, much worse. He hadn’t pushed himself, not hard enough, not nearly.

Nat stood at the foul line, bouncing the ball. The workload, the speed, how smart everyone was. He thought of Arapaho State, where Patti was getting straight A’s, and where he could be playing on the team instead of entering data in the fund-raising office every afternoon for $5.45 an hour. He thought of the Inverness varsity, whose home games he had watched-they were now one and three-knowing he was good enough to play for them; not start, maybe, but get in for more than garbage time. He thought of his street, his house, the kitchen, his mom.

The sudden feeling that someone was watching him made him turn. Not only no one watching him, but the gym was empty. He’d never seen it like that before. No one on the court, jogging on the track above, lifting behind the glass walls of the weight room. He went into the lobby, also deserted, looked through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Olympic-sized pool. Empty too, the water still.

Outside the same thing: not a person on the quad except him, not a sound from the surrounding dorms-no hip-hop, no techno or industrial, no Lilith Fair. For a moment he felt light-headed. Was he coming down with something? Then it hit him. This morning was the last period on the exam schedule. The departure of the students, the teachers, even the film crew, all vanishing at once like characters in a fairy tale, probably happened just this way every Christmas.

The church bell-the top of the chapel tower visible over the gold-domed roof of Goodrich Hall, weathervane pointing north-tolled the hour. At the same time, a cold wind began to blow; from the west, Nat noticed, despite the weathervane. No snow had fallen yet, but everyone said the Inverness Valley was one of the snowiest places in the east. Nat looked up, saw a line of clouds closing over the sky.

He wasn’t going anywhere for Christmas. There’d been money for only one trip home that semester, and he’d chosen Thanksgiving, although it was shorter, because Patti’s birthday had been the day after. He crossed the quad and went into Baxter to check his mail. Standing before the rows of brass letter boxes, he realized he was still holding the basketball.

Nat put it down, turned the dial to J3, took out a letter.

Dear Nat I’m so sorry about that little insident at Julie’s party. I don’t know what came over me. I’ll never drink like that again. For sure. You were so great about it. At least that’s what Julie said the next day. Joke. Everythings ok but I miss you so much and not looking forward to Xmas at all. One other thing I think I missed my period-but don’t worry, I maybe just got mixed up. I love you soooo much. Patti ps-my present should be there by now.

Nat reached back into the box, found a small package. He took it back to the dorm. Wags’s lab notes still lay all over the floor of the outer room. Nat heard voices in Wags’s bedroom, glanced in the open door. No Wags. Clothes trailing over everything, and the TV on. One of those movie channels Wags liked to watch. An actor from the thirties or forties whose name Wags would know at once but Nat didn’t stared thoughtfully into his glass while an offscreen actress asked what they were doing that night. Nat smelled coffee, noticed a steaming cup on the windowsill, half full. He left the TV on, went to his own bedroom, put Patti’s gift on the bed.

Tacked on the wall was a list of what he wanted to accomplish during the holiday: clean room laundry write home work out get to know town and surroundings

›on next semester

That last one being the most important: Nat had registered for an American novel course that required reading a book a week, and he’d never keep up, would fall behind in everything, without a head start. Book one, Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories, already borrowed from the library, was waiting on the orange crate that served as his bedside table.

Nat sat on the bed, picked up the book, but first reread Patti’s letter. He tried to see what she’d crossed out, partially distinguishing only one word- kissed, pissed, or missed- but nothing else. He swung his feet up on the bed, overcame the urge to take off his sneakers. No time for sleep: two hundred pages of Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories before dinner was the goal. He read the letter one more time. There, in the center of all those unusual silences-his room, the dorm, the whole campus-he could almost hear Patti’s voice. What had happened at Julie’s party didn’t bother him at all; what bothered him was the spelling. That, and the way she dotted the i in her name with a heart. Had she always? If so, it hadn’t mattered before. Why should it matter now?

Nat opened Young Goodman Brown. The title page showed a woodcut of a young man striding down a country road. Someone had drawn a bottle of beer in his hand and a fat joint in his mouth. Nat turned the page.

Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem village…

Nat opened his eyes. It was dark. His gaze went to the window, but there was no window, at least not where he was looking. He’d forgotten he wasn’t in his bedroom at home. Rolling over, he checked the clock, read the numbers-11:37-but before he could make sense of them he heard footsteps in the outer room.

“Wags?” he called, but his throat was thick with sleep; he cleared it and tried again. “Wags?” At that moment he remembered that he’d been leaning out of a helicopter in his dream.

Silence from the other room. Then the door to the hall closed. 11:37 P.M. Wouldn’t Wags be home in Pittsburgh by now? Not Pittsburgh exactly, but someplace nearby called Sewickley, as Wags’s parents had mentioned a couple of times on the Parents’ Day visit in October, the significance lost on Nat at the time. Since then he’d learned that the country hid a network of Sewickleys with names like Greenwich, Chagrin Falls, Dover, Lake Forest, Grosse Pointe; that many students at Inverness came from those places; that Wags knew people they knew, and they knew people he knew.

He sat up. Had the door to the hall simply closed, or had it been something else, more of a slam? Nat rose, switched on the lights, peered into the outer room, saw everything as it had been earlier, Wags’s lab notes still strewn on the floor, the screen savers of both computers in motion. He opened the door.

A man was walking away toward the stairs at the far end of the hall, a big man carrying something heavy. Nat took in a ponytail swinging behind his head and an electrical cord trailing between his legs, two dangling things that his half-sleeping mind, still following the logic of dreams, tried to relate. By the time he realized there was no relationship other than the visual one he’d seen at first glance, the man had disappeared down the stairs. Nat went back into Wags’s bedroom. Wags’s TV was gone.

Nat ran into the hall, yelled, “Hey!” He kept running, fully awake now, down the stairs to the first floor. No one there, but he picked up the sound of descending footsteps. Nat followed, heard the clicking of hard shoes on the old brick floor of the basement corridor. He yelled “Hey” again, took the last flight in one leap, swung around the banister post into the basement corridor. No one there.

Nat went down the corridor, slowing because it ended at a padlocked steel door with the word Maintenance stenciled on the front. He walked back the way he had come, passing three other padlocked doors, all of which he knew led to storage lockers for the students, and came to another door, lockless. Nat stood in front of that door. He sensed someone on the other side, tried to think of a way he could summon security and stand guard at the same time. Then came a jolt of adrenaline, and he jerked the door open.

A janitor’s closet, full of brooms, mops, buckets, cleansers. Even empty, it wasn’t big enough for a man with a television, especially one the size of Wags’s. Nat closed the door, went back along the corridor, trying all the padlocks. Fastened, every one.

Nat stayed in the basement corridor for a minute or two, listening for a sound, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.

He went upstairs, along the first floor to the main entrance of the dorm. Had he imagined those footsteps on the brick floor, or misinterpreted some sound he had heard? It was one or the other. Nat opened the door to the quad. Surprise.

White. White everywhere: snow had fallen while he slept, fallen heavily, although it wasn’t snowing now, and the stars shone bright. A foot of snow, maybe more, deep, crisp, even. It bent the branches of the old oaks, gave the statue of Emerson a hulking, steroidal profile, rounded the dorm entry pediments and other architectural features whose names Nat was starting to learn: pure, unmarred whiteness, glowing under the old Victorian lampposts as though lit from below.

Nat called campus security from his room and was told to file a report in the morning. He locked the door to the hall, went into Wags’s bedroom, took in the disarray, no worse than before, and the coffee cup on the windowsill, still half full but now cold, satisfied himself that nothing else was missing. Back in the outer room, he picked up Wags’s lab notes and piled them neatly on his desk, even trying to arrange them in some sort of order.

Nat sat on the couch that Bloomingdale’s had delivered after the visit of Wags’s parents and reopened Young Goodman Brown. This time he followed Goodman Brown out of Salem to his meeting in the forest with what Nat supposed was the devil. He paused at the sentence “But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.” Nat read it several times and was reaching for his yellow highlighter when he thought: unmarred.

Snow unmarred. And therefore? Nat went downstairs, out to the quad. The night was cold and still, the only movement his own rising breath. He circled the dorm, snow up to his knees, sometimes higher. The only footprints were his, a shadow-filled trench he tramped around the building like a moat in miniature. His feet, still in the sneakers he’d slept in, got cold and then cold and wet. Other than that, no result. Back in his room, he called security again.

This time he reached a recording that gave him a choice between voice mail and an emergency number. Was this an emergency? No footprints except his own: didn’t that mean the thief was still in the dorm, and had been there before the snowfall? A student, then, some other student still on campus, like him, possibly a resident of the dorm, and therefore a freshman, like him, possibly without money to go home, like him. Better to find him in the morning, get him to return the TV without a fuss, without involving security. Nat hung up the phone.

Were there any freshmen who looked like that, big with ponytails? Nat couldn’t recall any, but there were five hundred people in the class, many he still hadn’t even seen. He flipped through the freshman directory, useless because he’d had only a back view of the thief. He came to his own picture-the graduation picture, wearing Mr. Beaman’s blazer-knew with certainty that he didn’t look at all like that anymore. He checked in the mirror and found that he did.

Nat thought of calling Wags in Sewickley, but it was almost one, and he could imagine Wags’s mother picking up the phone. He made sure the front door was locked, took off his wet shoes, put them on the radiator to dry, and went to bed.

Nat’s mother had a funny story she liked to tell about him. When Nattie was very young, before he could talk, he couldn’t bear to go to sleep if any of the dresser drawers in his room were open, even a crack. She didn’t always remember to close them, and would sometimes poke her head in the room to find him laboriously climbing out of his crib and crawling across the floor toward the dresser. Nat thought of this story about half an hour later when he gave up on sleep, unlocked the door, and stepped into the hall.

Plessey Hall had three floors, ten rooms on each, most of them doubles, a few triples, and a single for the RA. Nat started at number thirty on the third floor. He checked for light leaking under the door, listened for any sound, knocked, tried the knob. No light, no sound, no answer to his knock, door locked. All the rooms were just like that down to number one, except for seventeen, his own.

Nat went back to bed, first locking the door. He turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes. Once, climbing out of his crib, he’d somehow tangled the back of his Dr. Denton’s on the corner of the guardrail and hung there outside the crib, not strangling or anything, but helpless. He’d heard his parents shouting at each other in the next room. That was Nattie’s earliest memory.

Peter Abrahams

Crying Wolf