Dreamcatcher

2001: JONESY’S STUDENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE

We don’t know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well. On the day that will change his, Jonesy is in his third-floor John Jay College office, looking out at his little slice of Boston and thinking how wrong T.S. Eliot had been to call April the cruelest month just because an itinerant carpenter from Nazareth supposedly got himself crucified then for fomenting rebellion. Anyone who lives in Boston knows that it’s March that’s the cruelest, holding out a few clays of false hope and then gleefully hitting you with the shit. Today is one of the untrustworthy ones when it looks as if spring might really be coming, and he’s thinking about taking a walk when the bit of impending nastiness just ahead is over. Of course at this point, Jonesy has no idea how nasty a day can get; no idea that he is going to finish this one in a hospital room, smashed up and fighting for his goddam life.

Same shit, different day, he thinks, but this will be different shit indeed. That’s when the phone rings, and he grabs it at once, filled with a hopeful premonition: it’ll be the Defuniak kid, calling to cancel his eleven-o'clock. He’s gotten a whiff of what’s in the wind,

Jonesy thinks, and that is very possible. Usually it’s the students who make appointments to see the teacher. When a kid gets a message saying that one of his teachers wants to see him… well, you don’t have to be a rocket-scientist, as the saying goes.

“Hello, it’s Jones,” he says.

“Hey, Jonesy, how’s life treating you?”

He’d know that voice anywhere. “Henry! Hey! Good, life’s good!”

Life does not, in fact, seem all that great, not with Defuniak due in a quarter of an hour, but it’s all relative, isn’t it? Compared to where he’s going to be twelve hours from now, hooked up to all those beeping machines, one operation behind him and three more ahead of him, Jonesy is, as they say, farting through silk.

“Glad to hear it.”

Jonesy might have heard the heaviness in Henry’s voice, but more likely it’s a thing he senses.

“Henry? What’s wrong?”

Silence. Jonesy is about to ask again when Henry answers.

“A patient of mine died yesterday. I happened to see the obit in the paper. Barry Newman, his name was.” Henry pauses. “He was a couch man.”

Jonesy doesn’t know what that means, but his old friend is hurting. He knows that.

“Suicide?”

“Heart attack. At the age of twenty-nine. Dug his grave with his own fork and spoon.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He hasn’t been my patient for almost three years. I scared him away. I had one of those things. Do you know what I’m talking about?” Jonesy thinks he does. “Was it the line?'Henry sighs. It doesn’t sound like regret to Jonesy. It sounds like relief “Yeah. I kind of socked it to him. He took off like his ass was on fire.”

“That doesn’t make you responsible for his coronary.”

“Maybe you’re right. But that’s not the way it feels.” A pause. And then, with a shade of amusement: “Isn’t that a line from a Jim Croce song? Are you all right, Jonesy?” “Me? Yeah. Why do you ask?” “I don’t know,” Henry says. “Only… I’ve been thinking about you ever since I opened the paper and saw Barry’s picture on the obituary page. I want you to be careful.” Around his bones (many of which will soon be broken), Jonesy feels a slight coldness. “What exactly are you talking about?” “I don’t know,” Henry says. “Maybe nothing. But…”

“Is it the line now?” Jonesy is alarmed. He swings around in his chair and looks out the window at the chancy spring sunlight. It crosses his mind that maybe the Defuniak kid is disturbed, maybe he’s carrying a gun (packing heat, as they say in the mystery and suspense novels Jonesy likes to read in his spare time) and Henry has somehow picked this up.

“I don’t know. The most likely thing is that I’m just having a displaced reaction from seeing Barry’s picture on the all-done page. But watch yourself the next little while, would you?”

“Well… yeah. I can do that.”

“Good.”

“And you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

But Jonesy doesn’t think Henry is fine at all. He’s about to say something else when someone clears his throat behind him and he realizes that Defuniak has probably arrived.

“Well, that’s good,” he says, and swivels around in his chair. Yep, there’s his eleven-o'clock in the doorway, not looking dangerous at all: just a kid bundled into a big old duffel coat that’s too heavy for the day, looking thin and underfed, wearing one earring and a punky haircut that spikes over his worried eyes. “Henry, I’ve got an appointment. I’ll call you back-”

“No, that’s not necessary. Really.”

“You’re sure?”

“I am. But there’s one other thing. Got thirty more seconds?”

“Sure, you bet.” He holds up a finger to Defuniak and Defuniak nods. But he just goes on standing there until Jonesy points to the one chair in the little office besides his own that isn’t stacked with books. Defuniak goes to it reluctantly. Into the phone, Jonesy says, “Shoot.”

“I think we ought to go back to Derry. Just a quick trip, just you and me. See our old friend.”

“You mean-?” But he doesn’t want to say that name, that baby-sounding name, with a stranger in the room.

He doesn’t have to; Henry says it for him. Once they were a quartet, then for a little while they were five, and then they were four again. But the fifth one has never exactly left them. Henry says that name, the name of a boy who is magically still a boy. About him, Henry’s worries are more clear, more easily expressed. It isn’t anything he knows, he tells Jonesy, just a feeling that their old pal might need a visit.

“Have you talked to his mother?” Jonesy asked. “I think,” Henry says, “it might be better if we just… you know, orbited on in there. How’s your calendar look for this weekend? Or the one after?” Jonesy doesn’t need to check. The weekend starts day after tomorrow. There’s a faculty thing

Saturday afternoon, but he can easily get clear of that.

“I’m fine both days this weekend,” he says. “If I was to come by Saturday? At ten?”

“That’d be fine.” Henry sounds relieved, more like himself. Jonesy relaxes a little. “You’re sure?”

“If you think we ought to go see…” Jonesy hesitates. “… see Douglas, then probably we should. It’s been too long.”

“Your appointment’s there, isn’t he?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay. I’ll look for you at ten on Saturday. Hey, maybe we’ll take the Scout. Give it a run. How would that be?”

“That would be terrific.”

Henry laughs. “Carla still makin your lunch, Jonesy?”

“She is. “Jonesy looks toward his briefcase.

“What you got today? Tuna fish?”

“Egg salad.”

“Mmm-mmm. Okay, I’m out of here. SSDD, right?”

“SSDD,” Jonesy agrees. He can’t call their old friend by his right name in front of a student, but SSDD is all right. “Talk to you I-”

“Arid take care of yourself I mean it.” The emphasis in Henry’s voice is unmistakable, and a little scary. But before Jonesy can respond (and what he would say with Defuniak sitting in the corner, watching and listening, he doesn’t know), Henry is gone.

Jonesy looks at the phone thoughtfully for a moment, then hangs up. He flips a page on his desk calendar, and on Saturday he crosses out Drinks at Dean Jacobson’s house and writes Beg off-going to Derry with Henry to see D. But this is an appointment he will not keep. By Saturday, Derry and his old friends will be the furthest things from his mind.

Jonesy pulls in a deep breath, lets it out, and transfers his attention to his troublesome eleven-o'clock. The kid shifts uncomfortably in his chair. He has a pretty good idea why he’s been summoned here, Jonesy guesses.

“So, Mr Defuniak,” he says. “You’re from Maine, according to your records.”

“Uh, yeah. Pittsfield. I-”

“Your records also say that you’re here on scholarship, and that you’ve done well.”

The kid, he sees, is actually a lot more than worried. The kid is on the verge of tears. Christ, but this is hard. Jonesy has never had to accuse a student of cheating before, but he supposes this won’t be the last time. He only hopes it doesn’t happen too often. Because this is hard, what Beaver would call a fuckarow.

“Mr Defuniak-David-do you know what happens to scholarships if the students holding them are caught cheating? On a mid-term exam, let us say?”

The kid jerks as if a hidden prankster under his chair has just triggered a low-voltage electrical charge into one of his skinny buttocks. Now his lips are trembling and the first tear, oh God, there it goes down his unshaven boy’s cheek.

“I can tell you, “Jonesy says. “Such scholarships evaporate. That’s what happens to them. Poof, and gone into thin air.”

There is a folder on Jonesy’s desk. He opens it and takes out a European History mid-term, one of those multiple-choice monstrosities upon which the Department, in its great unwisdom, insists. Written on top of this one, in the black strokes of an IBM pencil (“Make sure your marks are heavy and unbroken, and if you need to erase, erase completely”), is the name DAVID DEFUNIAK.

“I’ve reviewed your course-work, David; I’ve re-scanned your paper on feudalism in France during the middle ages; I’ve even been through your transcripts. You haven’t exhibited brilliance, but you’ve done okay. And I’m aware that you’re simply satisfying a requirement here-your real interests don’t lie in my field, do they?”

Defuniak shakes his head mutely. The tears gleam on his cheeks in that untrustworthy mid-March sunlight.

There’s a box of Kleenex on the comer of Jonesy’s desk, and he tosses it to the boy, who catches it easily even in his distress. Good reflexes. When you’re nineteen, all your wiring is still nice and tight, all your connections nice and solid.

Wait a few years, Mr Defuniak, he thinks. I’m only thirty-seven and already some of my wires are getting loose.

“Maybe you deserve another chance, “Jonesy says.

Slowly and deliberately, he begins to crumple Defuniak’s midterm, which is suspiciously perfect, A-plus work, into a ball.

“Maybe what happened is you were sick the day of the mid-term, and you never took it at all.”

“I was sick,” David Defuniak says eagerly. “I think I had the flu.”

“Then maybe I ought to give you a take-home essay instead of the multiple-choice test to which your colleagues have been subjected. If you want it. To make up for the test you missed. Would you want that?”

“Yeah,” the kid says, wiping his eyes madly with a large swatch of tissues. At least he hasn’t gone through all that small-time cheapshit stuff about how Jonesy can’t prove it, can’t prove a thing, he’d take it to the Student Affairs Council, he’d call a protest, blah-blah-blahde-blah. He’s crying instead, which is uncomfortable to witness but probably a good sign-nineteen is young, but too many of them have lost most of their consciences by the time they get there. Defuniak has pretty much owned up, which suggests there might still be a man in there, waiting to come out. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

“And you understand that if anything like this ever happens again-”

“It won’t,” the kid says fervently. “It won’t, Professor Jones.” Although Jonesy is only an associate professor, he doesn’t bother to correct him. Someday, after all, he will be Professor Jones. He better be; he and his wife have a houseful of kids, and if there aren’t at least a few salary-bumps in his future, life is apt to be a pretty tough scramble. They’ve had some tough scrambles already.

“I hope not,” he says. “Give me three thousand words on the short-term results of the Norman Conquest, David, all right? Cite sources but no need of footnotes. Keep it informal, but present a cogent thesis. I want it by next Monday. Understood?”

“Yes. Yes, sir.”

“Then why don’t you go on and get started.” He points at Defuniak’s tatty footwear. “And the next time you think of buying beer, buy some new sneakers instead. I wouldn’t want you to catch the flu again.”

Defuniak goes to the door, then turns. He is anxious to be gone before Mr Jones changes his mind, but he is also nineteen. And curious. “How did you know? You weren’t even there that day. Some grad student proctored the test.”

“I knew, and that’s enough,” Jonesy says with some asperity. “Go on, son. Write a good paper. Hold onto your scholarship. I’m from Maine myself-Derry-and I know Pittsfield. It’s a better place to be from than to go back to.”

“You got that right,” Defuniak says fervently. “Thank you. Thank you for giving me a chance.”

“Close the door on your way out.”

Defuniak-who will spend his sneaker-money not on beer but on a get-well bouquet for Jonesy-goes out, obediently closing the door behind him. Jonesy swings around and looks out the window again. The sunshine is untrustworthy but enticing. And because the Defuniak thing went better than he had expected, he thinks he wants to get out in that sunlight before more March clouds-and maybe snow-come rolling in. He has planned to eat in his office, but a new plan occurs to him. It is absolutely the worst plan of his life, but of course Jonesy doesn’t know that. The plan is to grab his briefcase, pick up a copy of the Boston Phoenix, and walk across the river to Cambridge. He’ll sit on a bench and eat his egg salad sandwich in the sun.

He gets up to put Defuniak’s file in the cabinet marked D-F. How did you know? the boy had asked, and Jonesy supposes that was a good question. An excellent question, really, The answer is this: he knew because… sometimes he does. That’s the truth, and there’s no other. If someone put a gun to his head, he’d say he found out during the first class after the mid-term, that it was right there in the front of David Defuniak’s mind, big and bright, flashing on and off in guilty red neon: CHEATER CHEATER CHEATER.

But man, that’s dope-he can’t read minds. He never could. Never-ever, never-ever, never-ever could. Sometimes things flash into his head, yes-he knew about his wife’s problems with pills that way, and he supposes he might have known in that same way that Henry was depressed when he called (No, it was in his voice, doofus, that’s all it was), but stuff like that hardly ever happens anymore. There has been nothing really odd since the business with Josie Rinkenhauer. Maybe there was something once, and maybe it trailed them out of their childhoods and adolescence, but surely it is gone now. Or almost gone.

Almost.

He circles the words going to Derry on his desk calendar, then grabs his briefcase. As he does, a new thought comes to him, sudden and meaningless but very powerful: Watch out for Mr Gray.

He stops with one hand on his doorknob. That was his own voice, no doubt about it.

“What?” he asks the empty room.

Nothing.

Jonesy steps out of his office, closes the door, and tests the lock.

In the comer of his door’s bulletin board is a blank white card. Jonesy unpins it and turns it over. On the flip side is the printed message BACK AT ONE-UNTIL THEN I’m HISTORY. He pins the message side to the bulletin board with perfect confidence, but it will be almost two months before Jonesy enters this room again and sees his desk calendar still turned to St Patrick’s Day.

Take care of yourself, Henry said, but Jonesy isn’t thinking about taking care of himself. He is thinking about March sunlight. He’s thinking about eating his sandwich. He’s thinking he might watch a few girls over on the Cambridge side-skirts are short, and March winds are frisky. He’s thinking about all sorts of things, but watching out for Mr Gray isn’t one of them. Neither is taking care of himself

This is a mistake. This is also how lives change forever.