I Am Charlotte Simmons

32. The Hair from Lenin’s Goatee

What’s wrong?” said Beverly, seeing Charlotte sitting at her desk in front of her “new” computer and staring into space. “You look like a statue. You haven’t moved for the past fifteen minutes. You haven’t even blinked. Are you all right?”

So that’s the way it works, thought Charlotte. It was precisely because she had stood up to Beverly this morning for the first time, and been abrupt and sarcastic, dismissed her as a prurient schadenfreude-driven gossip, that Beverly was now asking an idle question, one roommate to another, about nothing special. Which is to say, open contempt had jarred the Groton snob who shared her room into treating her as an equal. Charlotte took a rueful satisfaction in this discovery about human nature, but it was no more than that, rueful and beside the point.

And brief. Nothing was likely to dislodge Charlotte from the foreboding that, as of half an hour ago, had metamorphosed from the larval stage into a catastrophe, official, documented, beyond fixing.

“I’m fine,” said Charlotte without turning her head so much as an inch toward Beverly, who was at her computer in the depths of her jungle of wires, knuckle sockets, and techie toys. “I’m just thinking.”

Beverly returned to her instant-message e-mail conversation with Hillary, who was all of three feet away, on the other side of the wall, in Room 514, amid a happy music of electronic-alert pings on the screen and Beverly’s giggles. The silliness of yakking away with your next-door neighbor via the World Wide Web seemed to be what made it fun.

Charlotte scarcely noticed, so deeply imprinted in her brain was the very image of what she had seen on her screen:

B

B-

C-

D

Plain B, not B+, in French; B- in medieval history; C- in modern drama; D in neuroscience…D in neuroscience…D in neuroscience…Like many another student before her, Charlotte had thought that if she was pessimistic enough ahead of time, if she steeped herself deeply enough in foreboding, the result couldn’t possibly be as bad as she had feared. Somehow the very act of thinking about it with such despair beforehand would be a form of magic that would ward off any truly ill fate. But there her grades had been on the screen, barely half an hour ago, flat out and explanation-proof. She hadn’t printed them out. She hadn’t clicked on KEEP AS NEW. She had immediately deleted it—which helped what? Nothing. It was just another exercise in magic—not that she had the remotest hope it might work.

B, B-, C-, D…So many things had been killed in her academic collapse, Charlotte had been sitting there paralyzed for at least thirty minutes, not just the fifteen Beverly had detected. D and C-minus—in fact any grade less than B-minus was tantamount to an F at Dupont these days, except that you wouldn’t be kicked out for having failed two courses and barely scraping by in the others. As it was, she would be on academic probation for the second semester, and her parents would be apprised of that fact. Fortunately, Momma and Daddy had no computer, and it would probably take two days for the news to reach them by mail. What was she to do? Why hadn’t she mustered up the courage to tell them over Christmas? They would have been ready for what they were about to learn. So now she had to call them—within the next twenty-four hours—to be sure the notification didn’t reach them by mail first. She should make that call right now! But she would have to recite those grades to them herself, in all their stony definitiveness. Right now…but right now she was still in a state of shock, and so she would make that call…but later. And Miss Pennington…Once Momma had the bad news, maybe she could revive her plan to ask Momma not to mention them to Miss Pennington. But what if Miss Pennington happened to call Momma? The thought of asking Momma to come up with a little white lie on the subject…it was beyond even imagining. D in neuroscience—and to think it wasn’t many more than ninety days ago that she had been in Mr. Starling’s office and he had offered her the keys to the kingdom, to the very laboratory wherein the human animals’ new conception of themselves was being created a full generation before they would realize it had happened. She could hear—she seemed to actually be hearing—the change in Mr. Starling’s tone of voice that day as he began to speak to her as something more than a student, as a young colleague in this, the greatest adventure in the life of the mind since the rise of rationalism in the seventeenth century—

The telephone rang, and out of sheer reflex she answered.

“Charlotte…this is Adam”—spoken with a note of breathless agony. “Something horrible has happened. You’ve got to help me. Please come over here…please! I need you! I need you right now—”

“Adam! Hold—”

“I’m having a—Charlotte! Please! It’s all so horrible!”

“What’s happened?”

“Please, Charlotte! I haven’t got the strength—I’ll tell you everything—just come—as soon as you can! Please! Do this one thing for me, before I—” He broke off the sentence.

“You want a doctor?”

“Hah.” A sharp, dry, bitter laugh, it was. “Skip to step three—get a coroner. Step four—organize a celebration-of-his-life committee.”

“I’m calling a doctor.”

“No! There’s nothing—the only person who can help is you! How soon can you be here?”

“You’re in your apartment?”

“Yeah.” Bitterly: “My little slot, my little hole.”

“Well—I’ll leave right now. I’ll be there—however long it takes to walk over there.”

“Please hurry. I love you. I love you more than life itself.”

They hung up. Charlotte sat still in her rickety wooden straight-back chair and gave the world another vacant stare. It’s all so horrible? She had her own catastrophe to worry about. The last thing in the world she wanted to have to deal with was Adam in an “I love you more than life itself” state of mind. But how could she say no?…after everything.

She put on her puffed-up hand-grenade jacket and left without a word to Beverly, who was still busy pinging and giggling and bouncing and blinging her instant messages to a relay station two thousand miles away in Austin, Texas.

Charlotte had barely reached the landing when Adam’s door swung open. He had obviously been waiting at the very peephole. He stood in the doorway with one of his synthetic green blankets wrapped around him like a cape. His cheeks were gaunt and ashen, and his eyes were a perfect picture of fear. Before she knew what was happening, his arms shot out from beneath the blanket. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt in unfortunate shades of hallway green, Rust-Oleum brown, and book-mailer-stuffing gray. He embraced her, causing the blanket to fall to the floor. It wasn’t the embrace a boy gives a girl. It was the one Studs Lonigan gave his mother in the doorway when he came home to die, as best Charlotte could remember the book.

“Charlotte…oh Charlotte!…You came…”

She was afraid he’d want to kiss her. But he put his head on her shoulder and made a moaning sound. He hung on for dear life. It was all awkward. Charlotte didn’t know where to put her hands. Embrace him likewise? Cradle his head? Everything she could think of, he might take the wrong way. So she said, “Adam…come on, let’s go inside. Let’s get out of the doorway.”

So they went inside, which at least got her free of the embrace. She took off her puffy jacket and sat down on the edge of the bed, which was a tortured mess. Adam immediately sat down beside her and began to put his arm around her. Charlotte jumped up and fetched Adam’s folding deck chair, the one with the aluminum frame and the wide bands of Streptolon webbing in a plaid pattern that looked even cheaper than his shirt’s. She unfolded it and sat down as fast as she could. Adam, still on the edge of the bed, stared at her as if she had abandoned and rejected him.

“Adam,” Charlotte said with just a touch of sternness, “you have to pull yourself together.”

“I know!” said Adam, close to tears. Then he hung his head. “I know, I know…I’m having a—I don’t know anymore!” He left his head hanging that way, his chin touching his collarbone.

Charlotte switched to talking as calmly, softly, tenderly, maternally as she could. “I can’t do anything, Adam, until you tell me what’s happened.”

Adam slowly raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were bleary with tears, but at least he wasn’t crying. In a morosely low voice he said, “I’ve been destroyed, is what’s happened.”

Charlotte stuck to tender and maternal: “How?”

Adam went into a long but reasonably calm and straightforward account of his blighted strategy and his disastrous appointment with Mr. Quat. He looked straight at Charlotte and fought back his despair with deep breaths and sighs. “He wants to make”—deep breath, sigh—“an example. That means he wants to”—deep breath, sigh—“have me thrown out of school. But even if I’m merely—” He looked away and said, “Hah. Merely…” He looked back at Charlotte. “Even if I’m suspended is all…‘all’…that happens, the result is the same. I’ll have a suspension—for cheating—on my transcript. There goes the Rhodes. There goes graduate school even, which was my last resort. There goes any decent job, even teaching high school. What’s left of me?” Deep breath, hopeless sigh. “There goes my big story in tomorrow’s Wave. It’ll be discredited, nullified, ignored. ‘Written by a plagiarist’…‘a despicable smear job’…They’ll hate me. That’s all I’ll get out of that story.” Utterly forlorn, he hung his head again.

Charlotte said, “What story, Adam? Who’s going to hate you.”

Adam looked at her again, this time with his brow contorted and his eyebrows lopsided. “It’s about Hoyt Thorpe.”

Charlotte felt her tender, maternal face jerk alert. She was so startled, it must have registered upon Adam, even in his current state.

“It’s about how the governor of California bribed him to keep his mouth shut about the Night of the Skull Fuck. I tell the whole story. One of the most powerful Republicans in the country will want my head. He can have it…That wouldn’t be as bad as having all of Dupont University despising me, students, alumni, faculty, administration, employees…”

“Why employees?” said Charlotte.

“Why?” Deep breath. With a profound collapsing sigh: “I don’t know…I don’t remember…so you agree about the rest of them, though. That’s what you really mean.”

“That’s not what I said,” said Charlotte.

“But that’s what you mean, obviously.”

In fact, she wasn’t even thinking about “all of Dupont,” only about Hoyt. She was frantically crunching this information to figure out what it would mean for him. Why? She couldn’t have come up with a rational explanation if she had tried. Who stood to get hurt was Hoyt…and Jojo. That gave her a start, too.

“What was Jojo’s reaction to all this?” she said.

Adam lowered his head again and put his fingers over his eyes and face. In a muffled voice: “I haven’t told him.”

“He doesn’t even know? You have to call him, Adam! You told Mr. Quat everything. Isn’t that true? You’ve—you’ve got to let Jojo know that.”

His head still in his hands, Adam began moaning. “Oh, shit…shit, shit, shit…Jojo…I was so sure Mr. Quat would drop the whole case. I thought I was doing Jojo a favor.”

“But you didn’t tell him about it ahead of time.”

Adam shook his head no with his hands still covering his face. “Oh, shit…shit…shit…How can I tell him? He’ll kill me. He’s done for, the big bastard. Even if they don’t kick him out, he’s…finished…” More moans. “He’ll miss this whole season, and if he doesn’t play this season—if he’s suspended for cheating—it won’t matter what he does in his senior year. He’ll kill me, he’ll kill me.” Moans…pathetic moans.

He was close to whimpering. Charlotte had the terrible premonition he was about to break down in some uncontrollable way. She got up from the deck chair and went to the bed and stood over him. She put her hand on his shoulder and bent down until her face was barely six inches from his, which remained slumped over to a morbid degree. In the softest, tenderest tone she could, she said, “Jojo’s not going to kill you. He’ll understand. He’ll know you meant only the best. He’ll know you were trying to help him, too. You took what you thought was a good chance, but it didn’t work. He’ll understand what you were doing.”

Adam began shaking his bowed head so rapidly and with such a pathetic chorus of moans, Charlotte couldn’t help but wonder if he had ever taken Jojo into consideration at all.

Adam took his hands away from his face, but if anything, he hung his head still lower, until his back was humped over like an arch. His eyes were shut tight. He began trembling. The trembling turned into the shakes. His teeth began chattering. You could hear them.

“Put your arm around me, Charlotte,” he said in a pitiful way. “I’m so cold.”

So she sat down on the bed and put her arm around him and wondered what was coming next. He didn’t look at her or at anything else. He began shaking terribly.

“Please…bring me a blanket. I’m freezing.”

Charlotte stood up, walked toward the doorway, and fetched the blanket from the floor. It was a sickly green. The material was so stiff, so unnaturally dry, so cheaply synthetic, so synthetically horripilate, she could scarcely bear to touch it. Nevertheless, she brought it back to Adam. Slumped over this way, he looked like the sculpture of that Indian, the sculpture called The End of the Trail. The Indian is on his horse at the edge of a cliff with nowhere else to go. Indian civilization has come to an end. The white man has exterminated it. That picture, which she had seen in an American history textbook, had always fascinated her…and made her so sad. She draped the blanket over Adam’s narrow shoulders. When he reached up to pull it closed over his chest, his hand touched hers. His was as cold as ice.

“Hold me—please hold me, Charlotte.” His eyes remained squeezed shut.

Charlotte put her arm around him again and pulled him close. He was shaking and chattering so violently, she thought he must have the flu. She put her other hand on his forehead…Whatever else he had, he didn’t have a fever.

“I’m—I’ve got to lie down.” With that, he let the upper half of his body flop onto the bed. His legs were twisted, but his feet still touched the floor. His eyes remained shut tight. Charlotte lifted his legs and swung them onto the bed. They were so light, his legs…She slipped his leather moccasins off. Now he was stretched out on a turmoil of wrenched and twisted bedclothes and blankets, a crumpled clear polyurethane bag from the cleaners with the bill stapled on it, abandoned underwear, socks, a T-shirt, the innards of a two-day-old copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Part of the blanket Charlotte had fetched for him was under his head and shoulders, but the rest was flopped down over the side of the bed and onto the floor. Charlotte retrieved it once more and made up the bed on top of him as best she could. Adam’s eyes were closed, and she hoped he was falling asleep; but with the next breath he said, “Charlotte, I’m so cold.”

“I’ve put your sheets and blanket on top of you. You’ll start feeling warmer.”

“No, hold me,” he pleaded. “You’ve got to hold me. I’m so cold. I’m afraid, Charlotte!”

Charlotte stared down at him for a moment. Adam was shaking and chattering to beat the band. That left only one thing. She took her Keds off and got under the covers with him, still in her jeans, socks, and sweatshirt. She embraced him from behind and pressed her body up against his back, just the way he had held her. He shook and rattled, but gradually his torment subsided.

When she got up to turn off the lights, he began pleading in a groggy voice, “No…no…Charlotte…don’t go away. I’m begging you! Don’t leave me alone. Hold me. You’re all I’ve got left.”

So she turned off the lights and got back into bed with him. As long as she held him, his breathing was regular. There they were in the dark. Both of her arms were around him. The circulation in the arm under him seemed to be cut off. She whispered, “Are you asleep?”

“No.” The voice of doom.

She knew he was staring wide-eyed and terrified into a black hole. She knew all about that.

She held him that way all night. She sank into naps now and again. Somehow he could tell. She would wake up to him saying, “Hold me. Please don’t leave me.”

After a while it became pretty tiresome being mother to someone like this. But she was repaying a steep debt. Adam had kept encouraging her, and he had brought her back from the depths. But Adam—she couldn’t think of anything to encourage him with.

She was holding a truly doomed boy—and then she thought of Jojo—and then she thought of Hoyt. This poor weak boy she held—he was like some kind of insipid Samson. He had brought the temple crashing down on everybody.

Hoyt came out of Phillips onto the Great Yard so angry, he was muttering to himself loudly enough for people to hear. At this particular moment, heading up the sidewalk that bordered the Yard, he had just become the prissy, fluty, faggoty, “sophisticated” voice of that little fucker Mr. Quat. “ ‘I’m not trying to cast doubt on your sincerity, Mr. Thorpe. I’m sure you’re all too sincere. I’m merely suggesting that unconsciously or otherwise you’ve cobbled together several rather weary nostrums of the religious right and presented them as an argument. And that would be tiresome coming from any one.’”

On a walkway that crossed the Yard diagonally past the Saint Christopher’s Fountain and in the direction of Mr. Rayon, he switched to his own voice: “Yeah? And I’m merely suggesting that you’re Jesus with his head cut off, flapping around squawking, ‘Tolerance! Tolerance! Tolerance for the meek so they can inherit the earth!’ and you don’t even know it. You think you’re some brave little intellectual Jew who’s above all this God shit.” That’s what he should have told him. But the fucker would hardly let him say any-thing…Mr. Jerome Quat and his “intellectual” “wit”: “ ‘We value freedom of speech and the play of differing viewpoints here at Dupont, Mr. Thorpe, but may I suggest that in the interest of time, we postpone this particular rant of yours? You can deliver it immediately after class, and I’m sure all who want to hear it will gather round.’ Fat, scarce-haired motherfucker…”

Students were staring at him as they passed by, but how would they know if he was talking to himself or not? Everybody on the whole campus sounded like he was talking to himself. Everybody had his head keeled over into the palm of his hand talking on his cell phone. The what?—four or five percent?—who didn’t walk around the campus with the usual cell phone had the kind with a microphone below the chin and an earpiece so small you had to look for it if you wanted to see it. They’d think that’s what he had, and if they didn’t—fuck’m.

Well, he had gone and shot himself in the ass again, hadn’t he…That obese, bald-headed little pisser Mr. Jerome Quat would have the last laugh. He’d give him a lousy grade. But how could the rest of them sit there and just listen to this PC shit and not say anything? Fucking sheep…they just swallow the sheep shit he gives them and regurgitate it every time he asks a question. If that’s all you do, it doesn’t matter whether you believe it yourself or not. It ends up being the only “proper” shit to say, and so you keep on saying it because why not be proper and not the kind of person you can’t invite anywhere because he might introduce a fart into a proper conversation.

As he passed the Saint Christopher’s Fountain—that magnificent piece of sculpture—what was the name of the Frenchman who did it?—a fucking genius that guy—was there another campus in the country with a piece of sculpture that great?—no, there was nothing even close—“I’m a Dupont man—I’m imbued with all the strength and all the beauty and all the traditions of that great figure—what’s it made of?—bronze, I guess—copper?—nahhhh—has to be bronze”—Hoyt cooled down. There was no way Quat could hurt him now. He wasn’t going to have to take a hopeless elevator up to every goddamn investment banking firm in the country trying to explain away his college transcript, which barked like a dog, so he could get a job. Miracles happen, his dad had once told him. “They happen to those who are already ready to roll. No lucky man is simply lucky. He’s the man who recognizes Fortune the moment he looks her in the face.” Hoyt Thorpe, a Dupont man, Hoyt Thorpe, a Saint Ray, had been ready, locked and loaded, and the miracle had come. Hoyt Thorpe had a job waiting for him, Mr. Jerome Quat or not, and not some flickering-fluorescent-lit cold-call boiler room in Chicago or Cleveland, either, but with the mightiest of the mighty, Pierce & Pierce, in New York. Ninety-five thousand a year to start—to start—with no limit in sight. It was hard for him to believe it himself…but he had it made.

It was cold out in the Yard whenever a gust of wind blew across the icy crust of the snow that remained. He buttoned up his overcoat. Given a choice, he preferred leaving it open. In the wintertime this was the Saint Ray look, the coolest look on campus: ankle-high boots, khaki pants with no crease, a bulky-knit crewneck sweater, a flannel shirt open at the throat—and on top of all that, a navy melton-cloth overcoat like this one, single-breasted, long, reaching down well below the knees, lined in navy silk, the kind of coat that would be perfectly correct with a tuxedo, too. It was the contrast between the casual stuff and the dressy look of the topcoat that made it so cool. You possessed the full give-a-shit freedom of youth, the MasterCard license, and at the same time you knew about the ultimate sway of the other world, an older world of money and power, two things that had excitements all their own. A coat like this one cost a thousand dollars at Ralph Lauren. Hoyt got his for forty-five dollars in a secondhand clothing store in South Philadelphia called Play It Again, Sam’s. Now, that was cool. The long, single-breasted coat gave you a tall, lean, glamorous silhouette. You were fairly bursting with the sexual power of the first ten years following puberty—and at the same time you already knew where the rice bowl was. Hoyt had once heard a friend of his dad’s, an old guy with a florid face, say that. Hoyt couldn’t have been much more than eight or nine at the time, but he always remembered the old guy saying, “I’m too old, too fat, and I drink too much—but I always know where the rice bowl is.”

This train of happy thoughts had just about brought Hoyt back to his old self. By the time he got close to Mr. Rayon, he was humming a disco song called “Press Zero.” He could remember only one line: “For additional me, press zero,” but he couldn’t get it out of his mind…“For additional me, press zero…For additional me, press zero…” By the time he reached Halsey Hall, he was moving his lips and singing the words under his breath. “For additional me, press—”

—he didn’t complete the line. What he saw in front of the entrance to Mr. Rayon was too strange. It was cold as hell out here, but there was a regular hive of students, twenty of them at least. Their heads were lowered, and they were silent…save for the random chortle by some guy or screamlet of laughter by some girl. What the fuck were they doing? Then he saw the newspapers. They had newspapers in their hands, poring over them…outside in the cold. A few others were rooting like maggots to get to one of those metal newspaper boxes with windows that were out front of Mr. Rayon. It was a taxicab-yellow box…That would be the Wave…A bunch of students standing out here riveted by the school newspaper? That was mega-weird.

Hoyt joined the throng. A girl piped up with one of those high-pitched shrieks you usually hear at parties. Guys were beginning to make comments. They were so excited, they were taking the Fuck Patois over the top.

“This fucking stuff is…too—fucking—much!”

“—fucking student! The fuck you talking about?”

“Where’s Jeff? Where’d he fucking go? I think he fucking knows this guy—”

“—didn’t know they could print ‘fuck’ in the fucking paper!”

“—opera house. Same fucking family!”

“—fucking name? I don’t know—Horatio Fucking Fellatio.”

“—same fucking one! I was fucking here!”

“—blow job! I don’t fucking believe this!”

Blow job? Hoyt felt like his brain was flushing. He began doing some accidentally-on-purpose body checks in a bid to get to the yellow box before the newspapers were all gone. “Sorry! Coming through! Gotta restock!” he said as he swung his left leg in front of the right leg of a guy slightly ahead of him, a guy in some kind of old military jacket with ghost shapes where chevrons and other insignia had been removed. Hoyt figured the cool authority of his seriously awesome topcoat would intimidate half of them. But the guy with the ghost jacket was stubborn. He gave Hoyt an accidentally-on-purpose shove with his hip. Hoyt battled back by accidentally extending the range of his left calf across the stubborn guy’s right shin on purpose. That made Hoyt turn slightly—and he saw a girl, a pretty girl, with that Norwegian look—straight, shiny blond hair a mile long and parted right down the middle—staring at him with big eyes. She nudged another girl, a dog, and they both stared at him. Then the mouth of the hot one—gorgeous!—he loved that Norwegian look, the blond hair, the bright blue eyes, the fine bones of the face, the rolls in the snow, naked, and then into the sauna, naked—her mouth fell open, her eyes widened. She gave him a stare that all but ate him up for two seconds, three seconds—and then she said, “Ohmygod…Ohmygod…aren’t you—you’re him! You’re Hoyt Thorpe!”

Unable right off the bat to think of any other cool response, Hoyt gave her his most charming get-something-going smile and said, “That is true. Had lunch yet?”

All at once, innumerable eyes were pinned on him. A general buzz swept the crowd. Bango! The students were in a circle around him, as if beamed there by intergalactic voyagers. A guy standing right in front of Hoyt, near the concupiscent Scandinavian blonde, a tall Chem-geeky-looking guy, with a long neck and an Adam’s apple the size of a gourd, said, “Awesome, dude! Did you really say to the guy, ‘You’re an ape-faced dick—’” He broke it off and turned to a guy with a newspaper standing right beside him. “Wait a minute, How’s it go? It’s better than that.”

Hoyt closed one eye and opened his mouth on that side, as if to say, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

The blonde, the fjewel of the fjords, had a newspaper folded over once, twice, in her hand. “Come on. You haven’t seen this?”

Hoyt shook his head no—but slowly, which is to say, coolly.

The girl unfurled the newspaper and held the front page up right in front of him. There was the biggest headline he had ever seen on a newspaper. Eleven fat white letters on a black band four inches deep stretched across the entire width of the page beneath the logo: WHAT ORAL SEX? Underneath that on the right-hand side:

POL BRIBES CHARLIE WHO

SAW HIS GROVE SEX CAPER

Underneath that, a smaller headline:

FRAT BOY WILL GET

$95K WALL ST. JOB

FOR “MEMORY LOSS”

Underneath that: “By Adam Gellin.”

Underneath that, a swath of paragraphs printed two columns wide ran to the bottom of the page, where a notation said, “See BRIBE, pages 4, 5, 6, 7.”

“Governor of California”…“Republican nomination”…“paid off Dupont senior”…“coed”…“of oral sex”…Hoyt’s eyes were in too much of a rush to do anything more than scan the first paragraph of the story. The left side of the page was pulling them like an imaging magnet. Other than the headlines, the byline, and the few inches of type, the entire front page consisted of a photograph of a guy. He was in the foreground, coming out of the I.M. with, slightly behind him, a little blond cutie-pie who, even though it was fiercely cold and she was wearing a bomber jacket and jeans, still managed to show a swath of bare belly. The guy, the guy front and center—he was one…awesome…dude…the boots, the Abercrombie & Fitch creaseless khakis, what you could see of them…the shirt open at the throat…and the coolest, longest single-breasted navy melton-cloth topcoat that ever turned up in a photograph…It made the guy look eight feet tall, slender, cool, and Serious Business. Out of the rakishly turned-up collar of the awesome overcoat rose a white, thick, dense neck—well, wide enough, thick enough, and dense enough, in any event—and a face—Hoyt couldn’t keep his eyes off that face—a face with wide square jaws, a chin cleft perfectly—guy looked like a combination of Cary Grant and Hugh Grant with a lighter, thatchier, thicker, cooler head of hair than either one of them—cooler because it had no part. There was a slight sneer on the lips, the sneer that says, “I’m money, baby, and you’re all fucked up”—a sneer, and maybe people don’t like to see a guy sneering, but this was one…cool…awesome…sneer, cool as sneers will ever get. Before the heavy-duty machinery of his brain could even gear up to figure out what this whole goddamn thing might mean, Hoyt thought of three people: himself, Rachel, the Pierce & Pierce succuba of the dream i-bank job; himself; that little nerdy, devious, cowardly, backstabbing, rat-faced weasel, Adam Whateverthefuckhisnameis; himself, himself, and himself. Even the subrational himself sensed trouble on the right-hand side of the page somewhere in all that big type. But that picture—that picture! Could any college boy ever look better than that?

It was now one o’clock in the afternoon, and Charlotte was going to some lengths to keep from admitting to herself that after fourteen hours, next to no sleep, one slice of stale whole wheat bread with jelly, a couple of sips of orange juice turning bad, and a patient with insatiable psychological demands, she was good and tired of being Millennial Mutant Adam Gellin’s nurse. She was also growing resentful, which she didn’t try to keep herself from knowing. For him, out of a sense of obligation, she had blown off two classes this morning, one of them being her history course for the new semester, The Renaissance and the Rise of Nationalism. That was sure a great start, wasn’t it—after the debacle of her academic collapse last semester. What was worse, in a way, was the fact that blowing it off no longer created in her the same sense of guilt and despair she had felt back in October when she first overslept a class after playing shepherd for a blitzed Beverly half the night. That she was aware of very clearly. Then there was the horrible Monday morning following the formal, when she as good as overslept—“as good as,” hah!—“worse than overslept” was more like it—and wound up sitting through the last half of her modern drama class a clumsy, sweating, panting, disheveled little fool, an object of ridicule for her classmates and an object of scorn for the T.A., who all but buried her final grade.

Final grade…a surge of dread…All over again she was smack up against it. There was no more avoiding it. She had to call Momma today—it would be infinitely more dreadful if Momma got it in the mail first—and break the news…her prodigy’s grades for the first semester: B, B-minus, C-minus, and D. Couldn’t she just neglect to get into the fine shading, the minuses? Bad idea; the minuses would be coming in the mail, too.

She checked out Adam. He was the same as he had been all day, lying on his side in bed, eyes wide open, staring fixedly at the wall opposite like a crazy person, seemingly out of touch with reality—but if she so much as moved a muscle, he came to life with fearful, anxious questions, beseechings, and guilt triggers, which he pulled expertly. She had to go through a negotiation, make a hundred promises, and provide an itinerary just to go out the door and to the bathroom in the hall. When he himself went, he shuffled out into the hall with that filthy, insane, flesh-crawling green blanket around him, head bent over like an old man’s—and insisted she stand in the hall until he was through. If any of the students who lived in the other three slots on this floor had shown up, she would have been mortified.

So how was she going to get time off from her patient to go back to Little Yard and call Momma on the telephone? But she had to.

Tenderly: “Adam?” No answer. “Adam?” Again no answer. “Please look at me, Adam.” No answer, big eyes still glued to the wall. Sternly: “Adam.” No answer. So this time she snapped it out, sharp with aggravation: “Adam!”

“Unhh, unhhh”—moan, moan—“Yeah…yeah…what?”

“Look at me, Adam.”

The wild eyes rotated slowly in their sockets. The mouth hung open.

“Adam…I have to go back to my room—”

“No! No! Not yet! You can’t! I’m begging you!”

“…back to my room for just a minute, and then I’ll be right back, right back, I promise you.”

A piteous moan: “Not yet…Oh, Charlotte…please, you can’t…Don’t leave me now…not now…” And so forth and so on.

He wore her down until she promised not to go. She would just have to make the call on Adam’s cell phone, that being the only phone he had…right in front of him…Well, he knew the whole story anyway…and in his current state he had become incapable of thinking about anyone but himself…

Adam had resumed shaking, moaning, staring at nothing…

“Adam, I’m going to make a call on your cell phone.” She picked it up off his little desk—

“No!” He fairly screamed it. “You can’t! No! I forbid you!”

Forbid? That truly did aggravate her. The nerve of him trading on his misery like that. So she opened the cell phone—

“No, Charlotte! I implore you!”

Implore? That was ridiculous. So she pressed the PWR for Power button. She knew that much from watching Beverly—

“DON’T! CHARLOTTE—”

Beep-beep—beep-beep—beep-beep—beep-beeps came popping out of the little device.

“CLOSE IT UP! CLOSE IT UP! YOU’RE KILLING ME!”

Killing you? Charlotte lost count after ten beep-beeps—

Groan groan groaning: “They’ll get me! They’ll get me!”

The beep-beeps—there was no end to them! Charlotte looked at the little screen, which said, “YOU HAVE 32 NEW MESSAGES.”

Charlotte had to talk right over Adam’s moans and protests. “Adam! You have thirty-two new messages! What’s going on? What do I push to get the messages?”

“NO!” howled Adam. His wild eyes were now staring at her from out of a head hung over the side of the bed until it was virtually upside down. “I’m not gonna tell you! They’re after me! I don’t want to hear them! I’ll die!” And so forth and so on.

“You can’t just ignore them, Adam. Somebody’s trying awfully hard to reach you.”

“Kill me, kill me,” said Adam with a lot of moans. “Don’t make me listen!” And so forth and so on. He wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t tell her the first thing about retrieving the messages. Then she saw his laptop.

“Adam,” said Charlotte, “I’m going to turn on your computer.” Protests, protests, protests. “I’m going to turn on your computer, Adam, and see if you have any e-mail.” Moans, moans, whines, whines, death, death. “Adam, if you want me to stay here, I have to find out what’s going on. I’m just not going to sit here in total ignorance. You won’t have to hear the e-mails, you won’t have to read the e-mails. They’ll be for my eyes only. Now, please give me your password.” Won’t won’t can’t can’t end of everything end of everything. “Well, then it’s the end of my staying here, too, Adam. You can’t treat me this way. I won’t have it. You’ll never even know what’s in them, unless you want to. Now, please…give—me—the—password.”

That went on for many rounds until Charlotte finally wore him down and he divulged it. She had to smile in spite of herself. She might have known. It was MATRICA, the first seven letters of “matrical.”

Charlotte hunched over the laptop while Adam kept busy moaning and groaning and announcing his impending extinction. New messages—there were so many from yesterday and today, the list ran to the bottom of the screen and beyond. She had to scroll down, down, down to reach the end. There were a lot from Greg, a few from Randy, others from Edgar and Roger, four from Camille, several from what looked like Dupont administrators, many from addresses she didn’t recognize and couldn’t decode—but one she very much recognized. She clicked on it.

Wails of lamentations from Adam as the printer began its own groaning and lurching and protesting as it came to life and then started stuttering out the message. Charlotte read it again in hard copy, broke into a big now-didn’t-I-tell-you smile, and held the sheet of paper in front of her patient.

“This one you’ll like,” she said. “I absolutely guarantee it. This one is not coming to get you. This one’s doing exactly the opposite.”

Adam still looked crazy, but he had shut up; not a moan, not a peep. Charlotte went over to him and took his hand, which hung off the side of the bed in a posture of abject surrender, palm up, knuckles resting on the floor. She lifted the arm. Adam didn’t resist. She folded the piece of paper in two, placed it on his palm, and clamped it with his fingers, manipulating them one by one.

He didn’t seem to be aware of it…but neither did he let go of it…

“I promise, Adam, you’ll like it. You’ll love it.”

It seemed to Charlotte as if minutes went by. Finally Adam turned his head toward his palm and looked at the piece of paper as if it were a small, harmless animal that had unaccountably hopped aboard. Slowly, still lying flat, he drew it toward his face, adjusted his glasses—a sign of interest in life at least—and began to read. Charlotte tried to imagine being inside Adam’s head as the news dawned:

Mr. Gellin,

I have not changed my principles or opinions concerning the matter we discussed. But given the way you have fixed the clock of that insidious ultraright demagogue and enemy of civil justice—I have been watching the CNN coverage for the last hour—I am not going to take any action that might compromise your excellent work. Thus you may consider the entire matter dropped, deleted, forgotten. Plaudits for what you have achieved. Strength for the fight ahead. Never stop battling the fire, which has not died out. Remember the prison-bound citizens. Be scrupulous in your academic work.

Jerome P. Quat

Adam propped himself up on one elbow. He gazed at Charlotte with wondering eyes. Then he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. Still looking at Charlotte, he allowed himself a wary, slightly befuddled smile, but a smile nonetheless.

Charlotte couldn’t remember how Lazarus looked when he rose from the dead or if the Bible even got into that, but it stood to reason he must have looked like Adam Gellin did at this moment.

It so happened that Jojo was in the main reading room of the library at about eight-thirty, after team study hall, reading about Plato as a “fitting and yet ill-fitting successor” to Socrates—and puzzling over why these people, these philosophy scholars, kept writing sentences in which the ending contradicted what they said at the beginning or else reduced it to mush—when his cell phone rang.

Oh shit! That wasn’t supposed to happen here in the library—you were supposed to put it on vibrator or else turn it off—and the fact that his ring was a digitized rendition of “The Theme from Rocky”—dah dahh daaahhh…daaahhhh duhh duh—made it worse. He hurriedly, furtively opened up the cell phone, hid it between his knees, swung his head about as if somebody behind him were the offender, then got down under the study table, as if he were looking for something, and said sotto voce into the phone, “Hello?”

“How’s my Greek friend who grew up Swedish in New Jersey?”

Coach never said “This is Coach Roth” or “This is Coach” or anything else to let you know who was calling. He didn’t have to, certainly not if he was calling anybody on the team or close to it. Jojo flinched instinctively—but Coach didn’t really sound like he was on his case this evening.

Jojo didn’t take any chances, nevertheless. “I’m fine, Coach.” He probably didn’t sound particularly fine, whispering from under a library table.

“Socrates,” said Coach’s voice, “you Greeks are one lucky fucking buncha people, that’s all I can tell you.”

“Whattaya mean, Coach?”

“Our friend Mr. Quat has dropped the whole thing. It’s over, Jojo. It never happened.”

Silence. Then: “How do you know, Coach?”

“The President just called me,” said Coach. “He said, ‘You can forget about it. Erase it from your memory,’ or words to that effect.”

“Wow,” said Jojo in a dull fashion, he was speaking so softly. “What happened?”

“I couldn’t tell you, Jojo. Mr. Quat is a mysterious fucking dude.”

“Wow,” said Jojo in the same flat way. “Thanks, Coach. I don’t know what to say. I appreciate the hell out of this. You’ve taken a load off—off my back, is what it feels like.”

“I’m glad to be the bearer of good tidings, Socrates. Now you don’t have to drink that hemlock cocktail.”

“Hemlock cocktail?”

“Jesus Christ, Jojo, you’re supposed to be the big Socrates scholar around here! I already told you about your boy and the hemlock. You don’t remember?”

“Oh yeah, sure.” Jojo attempted a sotto voce laugh. “Mr. Margolies mentioned the hemlock, too, Coach. I guess I just got confused about the cocktail part.” He attempted a prolonged muffled laugh to show Coach he appreciated him as a wit, too.

They said good-bye, and Jojo climbed up off the floor and back into his library chair and returned to Plato, the fitting successor to Socrates except that it turns out he was ill-fitted. Then Jojo lifted his head and leaned back in the chair and looked up at the room’s massive wooden chandeliers and reflected a bit. A smile stole across his face. Coach…The guy was too much. He could be rough. Nobody had ever treated him, Jojo, any rougher without having to roll in the dirt to pay for it. But Coach looked out for you. If anybody else started any rough stuff, Coach was right there by your side, and it was Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral for them that dared fuck with you.

Jojo shook his head and smiled at the same time. Old Quat had been around here for a while. You’d think he would have known. Nobody gave Coach any shit and remained standing afterward. Coach had talked about how both of them, coach and player, too, were examples, whether they wanted to be or not, for everybody on the campus. He hadn’t really understood what Coach meant at the time. Now he did. Coach was loyal…and he was a man.