Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008

Suchness by Rosemary M. Magee

Rosemary Magee is Vice President and Secretary of Emory University, but she still finds time to write short stories and critical essays. Her literary stories have appeared in Porcupine, Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Sanskrit, and Eclipse. This is her first venture into the world of popular fiction and her first crime story. We think you’ll agree that it’s a promising debut.

Tatum jotted down her thoughts on a notepad, just like the one her mother used to have on hand for shopping lists. She also kept a daily journal in her composition book, because she knew the truth: All feeling is really a memory. If you write down the feelings, the memories turn out to be true.

When the school security guard came to her room asking for details and a description of the strange man she’d reported on campus, Tatum pulled out her notes and read aloud: Tall and smart-looking. Shoulders rounded. His jacket, a windbreaker, dark green. In the library, at the computer near me, then in the coffee shop in town reading the New York Times. He looks alone, maybe even lonesome.

“I’ve also seen him outside the dorm window,” Tatum informed the security guard. “He looked right at me. After I closed the blinds, I peeked once more in between the slats, and he stood there as if searching for something he’d lost.” Tatum and the security guard both turned toward the still-darkened window.

“There have been other times,” Tatum added quietly.

The security guard, who shifted her gaze back to Tatum, wore large glasses that made her eyes big and blurry. She wasn’t very old; it didn’t seem quite right to Tatum to call her Officer Reynolds, which was written on the silver badge on her chest. Her first name was Cathy, but that didn’t seem right either.

“You’ve seen him other times recently on campus?” Officer Cathy probed.

“Oh yes,” Tatum replied. She was named after Tatum O’Neal, the child star her mother liked to watch over and over again in a movie about a young girl and adventures with her father. “I see the man often when I’m alone. He’s always by himself, too.”

“Has he said anything to you, gotten in your path, or tried to touch you in any way?”

“Oh no. He just follows me around and stares.”

Officer Cathy stared at her too, through those thick glasses. She was short, shorter than Tatum. Her shoulders were broad, like a boy’s, and her shoes were black and heavy. Tatum wondered if she had to run fast sometimes, and if she knew how to use a gun, even though she didn’t wear one. Tatum liked having her nearby.

“I may follow you around a bit on campus, so don’t be alarmed,” Officer Cathy informed her. “That’s just SOP.” When Tatum blinked blankly in response, Officer Cathy explained on her way out the door, “You know, ‘standard operating procedure.’”

Tatum lay back on her bed, satisfied. She didn’t write in the same journal for this part. She pulled another one out from underneath the special satin pillow her mother had made for her.

What does it feel like to have the Secret Service around you all of the time, like presidents, their wives, and their children? SOP.

Officer Cathy asked me more questions. I think he has green eyes, or maybe blue, not brown. But no glasses, except for reading. He usually has a spiral notebook and the newspaper all folded up.

Going to class now felt more interesting to Tatum. She thought she might see the man, because she had written and talked about him, or she might run into Officer Cathy on her rounds. With the early, powdery pollen of springtime floating in the air, she felt lighter somehow. The pudgy weight she wanted to lose to make her mother happy didn’t hold her back so much. Tatum felt less shy, too. Back at home, she’d worn black jeans with dark tops and had frowned intentionally at anyone who came her way. Now it was easier to smile — because she knew someone was watching her.

On her daily walks, Tatum wore the long, striped, colorful scarf that belonged to her roommate. Jen, who was studying Eastern religions, had renounced materialism; she’d tossed the scarf in a pile of woolens after the last snowstorm. Tatum kept it wrapped around her neck. She liked recycled things. Her favorite store in town was the All Souls Thrift Shop. Expensive clothes that the other girls discarded cost just a few dollars there. She didn’t care if her classmates recognized their designer clothing on her. It meant they had a bond. In the evenings, for dinner, she wore some of her mother’s cast-off blouses, shiny ones bought for parties before she got too sick to go out anymore.

On Tuesday, Officer Cathy left a message that she had additional questions for Tatum. They met in her dorm room again. Tatum showed her what she had written in her journals, the main one. There was just one entry from the weekend.

Yesterday he sat on a bench by the pond. I think he knows my schedule, even weekends. His pants are khaki, and they look like someone ironed them. But his shoes are brown and scruffy.

Then on Monday, she had written:

He was not on the bench today, but I think I saw him in the hallway of the Hayes Building. He looks tired to me, as if he couldn’t sleep.

“You saw him inside Hayes?” Officer Cathy probed.

“That’s where my history course is,” Tatum explained. “I was working on my class project. Mine is on the British Museum, and whether or not the collectors stole ancient artifacts from Greece and Italy.” Tatum knew they did, which was not just a feeling; it was a fact.

“How close were you to him?” Officer Cathy asked in a tense voice.

Tatum’s parents would not be pleased to learn that a tall man in a green jacket was following her around campus. They were counting on her staying safe while her mother had chemotherapy treatments. She was losing her hair, even her eyebrows.

“We brushed by each other in the corridor,” Tatum replied. Officer Cathy made a note on her small spiral pad in a red pen. Just talking about him gave Tatum stomach flutters.

After curfew she told Jen about the man. Jen sat on the floor in a lotus position, wearing only bikini underwear and a tank top. Tatum lounged on the bed, her entire body covered by a long T-shirt, one that had been discarded by her father. Jen listened so quietly that Tatum thought she might have fallen asleep while meditating.

The next day a notice in Jen’s cursive handwriting appeared on the hall bulletin board: “Watch out for stalkers! Report anything suspicious to school security.” She decorated it with a border of peace symbols. Tatum liked the way it looked. When Sara from the school newspaper called her up and asked for a description, Tatum held her cell phone against her ear and closed her eyes. She lay back on the bed.

“Yes, he’s about forty, I’d say. Not nearly as old as my father,” she guessed. “His hair hangs down in his eyes like somebody even younger, though. Somebody who doesn’t think to comb it every day.”

Sara assured Tatum that she would not identify her source in the story, but news travels fast in a small place. On Wednesday, when the paper came out, several people asked Tatum to sit with them at lunch. She hoped that Officer Cathy would notice all of her new friends. Tatum planned to bring her a cappuccino from the coffee shop in town, the one where the man watched her from behind his newspaper.

That afternoon Tatum worked on the British Museum project in the library. From the school computer, she downloaded images, cutting and pasting them with Superglue on a poster board. The pictures were of ancient artifacts taken from the Mediterranean. The British Museum is a thief, she wrote in the heading. In smaller print, she added: The English exploited other people in distant countries, even after they had given up colonization, stealing their history from them and claiming it as their own. Famous museums in America also knowingly took donations from rich people who bought stolen goods from Greece or Italy. They knew what they were doing. They couldn’t help themselves. They let the facts of the situation get all tangled up with their desires.

Tatum wanted to tell the tall man about these illicit acts. Maybe he was someone who used to teach here, or the husband of one of her teachers who wasn’t even aware that he came on campus, because he was supposed to be working at the Corner Bookstore or in City Hall, defending criminals. That was it. He defended criminals, and he needed to conduct research in the library on campus in order to understand the criminal mind.

Jen had started talking to Tatum about all kinds of things. That night she described her paper topic for the Eastern religions course.

“Suchness,” she stated matter-of-factly. “It’s Buddhist.” When Tatum took off her glasses, Jen looked small.

“Suchness,” Jen repeated from her distant bed. “It means something like being present.”

“Whatness?” Tatum asked. She’d been reading Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for literature, and they’d learned about James Joyce and his kind of crazy epiphanies.

“No, it’s Suchness. Which is what you need,” Jen stated in a superior voice. “We all do,” she added softly.

She read from her textbook: “For Buddhists, truth and acceptance are the pillars of faith. ‘Suchness’ is a term used to describe life as it is, the truth as it is. A flower is a flower. Without the knowledge of Suchness, we find ourselves trying to make life into something that it is not through false desires and illusions.”

Jen stared into space, looking thoroughly pleased with this idea. She took a bite out of a peach her mother had sent in a basket from South Carolina with matzos. Being the Southern Jewish girl on campus who studied Buddhism gave her an air of importance.

“This peach is a peach — nothing more, nothing less,” Jen added solemnly.

“Suchness,” Tatum repeated. It sounded like a kiss. The word made her think about the tall man.

She wrote in her journal, while Jen took her shower.

Today he sat on the bench by the lake. I frowned at him rather than smiling. He moved slightly closer, then watched me when I got up and walked away.

For her very private satin-pillow journal, she added, I could tell he wanted to follow me. I want him to know about Suchness, about the feeling of being inside a kiss, of expecting to be kissed.

Tatum stopped by the security office the next day after classes. She’d hoped that Officer Cathy would ask her more questions and read from the composition journal that Tatum carried with her. But she needed to make late-afternoon rounds on campus.

“Would you like to come with me?”

Tatum nodded agreeably.

“Let me know if you see anyone who looks like the man who is following you,” Officer Cathy instructed. “You can signal to me by tugging on my sleeve. No need to say anything.”

There were not many men on campus, just the headmaster, who always walked in a big hurry, along with some teachers and maintenance workers. No green windbreakers.

They checked doors and looked behind buildings. Tatum liked being seen with Officer Cathy. She thought she’d like to have a job that required wearing a uniform. But not a nurse. Tatum did not like the sight of blood or even being around sick people. That was why she had been sent to the boarding school in the first place. When her mother got sick and had chemo last year, her father said it was time for Tatum to go to prep school, where she wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of sick people.

She and Officer Cathy circled around the pond. They picked up trash along the way. Everyone in the school was supposed to do that. “We’re all responsible for where we live.” That’s what the headmaster said at convocation every term. Peppermint candy cellophane, paper cups, and a small, green, rectangular wrapper were in her path near the bench where she liked to sit. Tatum knew about the green wrapper from health class. The teacher had passed out condoms last semester and told the girls to open them up and to put the smooth latex on their thumbs, making them look like sad puppets with no ears or eyes or hair.

She threw away the other trash but kept the condom wrapper in her jeans pocket. Touching it made her feel grown-up, more knowledgeable about the secrets of life.

Officer Cathy didn’t ask too many questions along the way. They walked briskly, checking the locks on the doors in the main buildings. It was after five o’clock, and the administrative offices were closed. Together they secured the back and side doors to the residence halls. Students were supposed to use the main entrances after 5 p.m. When they got to Buckley, Tatum’s dorm, the basement door was propped open with a brick.

“This is not a good idea,” Officer Cathy pointed out, as if accustomed to giving lectures on safety. “Anyone could get in here. Anyone at all.”

Tatum nodded in agreement. She took the brick from the security guard, placing it behind some bushes. “Nobody will be able to find it there.”

“I’m going off duty for today. Stop by to see me tomorrow, or call me on your cell phone if you see him again, if he bothers you.” Officer Cathy’s large, blurry eyes fixed on Tatum’s for a solid moment before she turned away. Tatum wished she would hug her. Officer Cathy’s arms and chest were strong, not fragile and tight like her mother’s had become.

After Officer Cathy disappeared down the sidewalk, Tatum went to the front entrance to the dorm and headed down to the basement side door. She retrieved the brick and propped open the door once more. “Life is transient,” Jen had told her. “There is no such thing as security.”

Tatum changed into a clean silk blouse, another hand-me-down. On the way to dinner, she checked her mailbox. There was nothing there, not even a postcard from her mother, who sent one almost every day, collected from faraway lands where she’d traveled with her father before he retired from the newspaper — places like Hong Kong, Croatia, India, and the Big Sur. Her mother stored the postcards in a small wooden box along with her formal stationery. She wrote little wobbly messages, sometimes quotations, all across the postcard with no room left for the address. Then, she placed them in an envelope and mailed them to Tatum. Sometimes she sent several postcards in a single mailing with sequential, numbered messages, like those Tatum had received yesterday: “(1) There is a new robin making a nest in the bushes. I hope that she will lay her tiny blue eggs there. (2) And the skinny, hungry babies will be here when you come home. XOXOX your Mother.” The postcards provided different views of the glimmering Taj Mahal, which the caption said had been built for love.

Tatum stuck the postcards to her wall with Superglue that would get her written up once the residence counselors realized what she had done. But she didn’t care. And Jen didn’t seem to mind either. Sometimes she posted them with the writing side exposed, where there were quotations written in her mother’s hand from Alice in Wonderland or Little Women. She had wanted a new picture of her mother, even if she didn’t have hair anymore. But her father would not send her one, not even by e-mail. At spring break her mother had worn a lovely Asian scarf around her head, maybe from Hong Kong, with interwoven Oriental colors. When Tatum returned to campus, she’d begun wearing Jen’s striped scarf; soon afterward the man started following her.

“Do you want to sit with us?” These were the pretty girls who liked to have hush-hush parties with beer in the study room of the dorm. Jen was always with them, and she scooted over to make another place. Tatum sat down next to her, and Jen adjusted the scarf around Tatum’s neck.

“Like that.” She loosened the ends. “So it doesn’t look like it’s strangling you to death. Now you can breathe.” Tatum felt Jen watching her closely as she took a deep breath.

“Have you seen him again?” one of the pretty girls asked her. Tatum thought she might like to get some new glasses like Officer Cathy’s so she’d look extra smart, and they’d ask her opinion on all kinds of things. She could explain everything she knew — about how feelings can become whatever memory you need them to be.

Tatum shook her head. She was not supposed to talk about him with the other girls. Officer Cathy said she would do the talking as part of her investigation. Rumors on campus can rage out of control.

“My sister once had some people follow her at the mall. They stole her purse. She never got it back again,” one of the girls at the end of the table volunteered.

“We thought my younger brother got kidnapped once when we couldn’t find him,” another girl stated. “But he’d fallen asleep in the car.” She paused to chew on a cherry tomato. “Good thing the windows were open, or he might have suffocated.”

“Did you know that they might let that guy John Hinckley out of jail?” Jen volunteered. “Or I guess he’s in a loony bin. He’s the one who tried to kill Ronald Reagan. He’s crazy.” Reagan had been President before Tatum was born, before they all were born. Everyone, even Jen with her Suchness, wanted to tell a scary story.

“I found something down by the pond, near the bench.” Tatum pulled the condom wrapper out of her pocket and tossed it onto the table next to the butter. All of the girls gazed at it as if it were a sacred relic.

“You touched it?” Jen whispered incredulously.

“It’s just the wrapper.” Tatum replied. The dark-green rectangle was ripped carefully along the top. One of the girls pushed at it with her fork. Someone snickered. “Maybe that should go in the school paper, too. Under lost and found. You’ll be famous, Tatum, one way or another. Just you wait and see.”

Tatum picked the wrapper back up and stuffed it in her pocket. She tugged on the scarf as she stood up. “I need to get to the library to finish my history project.” She didn’t want to be the last one left at the table.

Some of the other girls grabbed their backpacks. Tatum walked out first. She liked being at the front rather than the back of the group. She fingered the torn wrapper in her pocket.

On her way to the library, Tatum called her mother on her cell phone. Usually, she got up out of bed for dinner. They ate late at home. Her father answered.

“She’s still sleeping,” he stated quietly. Tatum would not ask how she was doing. Her father sighed on the other end of the phone as if he, too, had just gotten up from a long nap. “I’ll tell her you called.”

“Dad.” She paused. Her father was older than her mother by a lot, maybe twenty years. He was the one who was supposed to die first. “Yes, Tate?”

“There’s a man following me on campus.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “Again?” he added quietly.

“They wrote about it for the school newspaper. The security guard, Officer Cathy, she’s on the lookout for him.” Her father was silent for a minute.

“SOP,” Tatum added.

“Well, Tatum, it sounds like you’re doing the right thing. Notifying the authorities.” He paused to swallow. “I’ll call the headmaster in the morning.”

His voice sounded crackly, like that of an old man. He was not as tall as he used to be. His gray hair had grown wiry and wild, not cut short like when he traveled for the newspaper. As the foreign correspondent, he had seen the world, both its good and bad parts. Newspapers were his source of reality. What got printed there was what had actually happened.

“Dad?” She wanted to tell him something else, something that would make a memory for her mother, too. But he’d already hung up. She wanted him to tell her mother about the colorful, striped scarf she wore around her neck. Tatum wanted her mother to know that she was letting her hair grow extra long. And that she washed it every other day. She wanted her mother to know that she was taking walks with Officer Cathy and about the history project. And she wanted her mother to know about Suchness, about everything that was happening, even as her own world was slowing down.

Instead of going to the library, Tatum headed back to her room. She removed her bed comforter, satin pillow, and secret notebook. Down in the basement, the door was no longer propped open. Tatum recovered the brick from behind the bush and placed it in the doorway again. She walked to the pond, to the bench near where she had found the condom wrapper. Lying down, she tucked the comforter all around her. The sky was dusky, nearly dark, with the wind making tiny, turbulent waves on the lake. The air smelled fresh, like the first hope of springtime.

Officer Cathy, Jen, her father, the headmaster, the pretty girls, or anybody else who bothered to look would find her on the bench. And Tatum would tell them about the man — about how he had been there too, his arms holding her tight, his legs tangled up with hers, his face close, breathing hot breaths on her chest. When morning came she’d write down the memory, that feeling of Suchness, all deep and hard inside of her.

© 2008 by Rosemary M. Magee