The Faculty Club

36

I pushed Miles off me and ran to the edge of the door. I expected to see Sarah, to figure out some way to help her. But what I saw instead was a hole in the floor, and a giant trapdoor hanging down. And below that, emptiness. Just a vast hole that sloped down at a steep angle into nothing. The false floor was long. She would have made it several feet into the room before it collapsed below her and sent her spiraling down.

I tried to see down into the hole. I got on my hands and knees and let myself hang over it. Cool, earthy air hit my face. But I couldn’t see more than a few feet. The chute just disappeared into blackness.

I felt my world start to unravel. There was a gnawing sensation in my brain that made me want to start shaking my head like a wandering lunatic. I shouted Sarah into the hole. My voice echoed down and back again and mocked me. But nothing real came back. No call for help. Not her soft voice, calling my name. I yelled again. Nothing.

That’s when I felt Miles’s hand on my shoulder.

“Jeremy.”

I was hanging too deep into the hole, holding on with my hands and trying to see something, anything. Miles pulled me back.

“You’re gonna fall,” he said.

The room was tiny. Just big enough to get the three of us to the middle, on our way to a door at the far end, before the trap sprung. There were candles burning in holders on the walls, the room flickering between shadows and light.

Miles asked how I realized it was a trap. I told him about the puzzles, the way each one was designed for one of us. Like they wanted us to solve them.

Miles shook his head. It was a gesture I’d seen before: a mix of surprise and admiration for the V &D and their tricks-except that this time, there was less surprise, less admiration, crowded out by something I’d never seen in Miles’s face before: defeat. He looked defeated.

“It was a test,” he said. His eyes were sad. “A final warning. If we were smart enough to get it, we were smart enough to turn around and honor our deal. And if not…” He looked at the trapdoor. “Then they’d have to handle us another way.”

I stepped toward Miles.

“What are you saying?”

“Jeremy…”

“What are you saying?”

“You know what I mean.”

He said this surprisingly gently.

“You don’t know that,” I told him.

“Think about it.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“Remember Chance? Remember Sammy Klein?”

“Shut up.”

“We didn’t listen. We went back on our deal.”

“Shut up.”

“They even gave us a last chance. She didn’t-”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“She didn’t see it.”

I went for him. All I felt was rage. I wanted to tear him to pieces-stupid fucking know-it-all. He grabbed my arms and twisted me around. He overpowered me and forced me down.

“Jeremy, stop. Stop. This isn’t going to help anything.”

“We have to go get her.”

“We can’t.”

“We have to. We have to save her.”

“How? How, Jeremy? How could we save her?”

“We go after her.”

We both looked at the hole in the middle of that flickering room. The hole was impossibly dark. Inestimably deep. I tried to imagine what was at the bottom. Given the deviousness, the ghoulishness of what we’d seen so far, the possibilities seemed limitless. Would we fall at breakneck speed into a pit of random spikes, where a dozen skeletons were already impaled? Or maybe we’d land in a pit of half-starved dogs, creeping toward us, snarling, mangy fur glowing faintly with moonlight. Would they throw in a sword and shield to reflect the stars and add some excitement?

We looked at that hole for a long time. It occurred to me that if we wanted to save Sarah’s life-if we wanted to even have a chance-we had to go now.

Miles spoke softly behind me.

“Jeremy, if you were going to jump, you would’ve done it already.”

He walked back across the blade room to the door we’d entered a hundred years ago. He tried the knob, and it opened. He waited for me at the door.

I turned back to the hole.

If this were a movie, I would’ve jumped. I would’ve said something heroic, or at least clever: I’ll be back! Hasta la vista, baby! All in a day’s work!

But it wasn’t a movie.

And I didn’t jump.

God help us, we left her there.

I felt a strange buzzing in my head. It was a giddy feeling. My body was pumping me full of joy, excuses, illusions, distractions. We sat in Miles’s apartment on the red futon, flipping channels and trying not to look at each other. We ordered Chinese food and waited for it to come. There was nothing on TV. We passed Hogan’s Heroes, an infomercial for a gym machine, a Steven Seagal movie dubbed in Spanish, reruns of classic game shows. The badness made it almost impossible to pretend we were actually watching. Miles lit a joint and took a long drag. He offered it to me. I’d never smoked pot before. Never even wanted to. But right now, all I wanted was to stop the feeling of pointlessness that was creeping around the edges of my awareness, looking for a way in. I took the joint. It was wet on the tip. I sucked in and let the raw smoke go into my mouth. I held it there for a second. I knew what to do next. I’d tried cigarettes once in high school and mastered the art of letting the smoke go down my trachea and bloom into my lungs. I wanted that peaceful look I’d seen on potheads’ faces. I wanted to find truth in Pink Floyd. I wanted to find my own hand hilarious. But I didn’t inhale. I just held the smoke long enough to fake it and let it out a moment later. I passed the joint back to Miles.

I couldn’t stand the silence. I asked Miles a question I’d been saving for a late-night chat. I asked it now, just to break the tension.

“Hey Miles.”

“Yeah?”

He didn’t look at me.

“Why’d you quit law?”

He took another hit. He didn’t say anything.

“You had an offer from the best firm in the country,” I said. “People would kill for that. And you turned it down. Why?”

Miles closed his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it was a mistake, in retrospect.”

“You must’ve had a reason. Do you remember?”

Finally he sighed.

“It’s gonna sound stupid now.” He shook his head. “Something I heard on the first day of class, in Torts. It always bothered me. A man sees a baby on some train tracks. He’s just walking by. No one else is around. There’s a train coming. It’s way off in the distance. All he has to do is move the baby, right? Just pick it up and move it off the tracks. But he doesn’t. For whatever reason, he keeps walking. And Professor Long told us: the law has nothing to say about that. Remember? Because there’s no duty between him and the baby. Not in the legal sense.”

“That’s it? That’s why you quit?”

“No. I started thinking. Say we all get mad. We pass a law that says you have to move the baby or you go to jail. Next time, the guy moves the baby.”

“That’s good. The law worked.”

“Sure it worked. But the guy hasn’t changed. See? He didn’t want to move the baby. He just didn’t want to go to jail.”

“So?”

“So? So it’s not free will. He’s just a slave. The law didn’t make him good.”

“The law’s not supposed to make him good. It’s supposed to stop him from being evil.”

“So where does morality come from, then?”

“I don’t know. Religion.”

“Fine. He moves the baby because God wants him to. Isn’t that just a different kind of law? Maybe he’s scared of going to hell. Isn’t that just another kind of prison?”

“Parents, then. Culture.”

“More rules. More law. When does it come from inside, Jeremy, absent anything else…” Miles shook his head. “I turned to philosophy. I studied Aristotle and virtue ethics. I studied Kant and Mill and Rawls and Nozick. I mastered communitarianism, egalitarianism, utilitarianism, structuralism, deontology, Straussianism, postmodernism, objectivism, contractarianism…”

I started laughing. I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t control myself. It was an unhappy sound-the worst laughter I’d ever heard. I felt like the last hinges in my brain had sprung open. I just laughed. At first Miles thought I was laughing with him, and he smiled uncertainly, but then he heard the edge in it and stopped. He looked at me, his mouth half-open. I just laughed until I thought I’d go insane.

“You’re talking about goodness,” I said. “You’re talking about goodness, and she’s down there.”

Miles looked startled.

“You asked about my career.”

“We left her down there.” I was shouting. I couldn’t stop. “Miles, you’re talking about goodness and WE LEFT HER DOWN THERE.”

“It’s just philosophy.”

“It’s nothing-if you don’t get off this couch. I want you to shut your big fucking mouth because it’s all bullshit.” My head was going to explode, the blood was rushing so hard. “Get up. Get off your fat ass and get off this couch because we are going to save her. We are going to get her out of that dark place and make her okay. Do you hear me, Miles? Do you?”

He didn’t say anything. He blinked a couple of times. His eyes were red from the pot. He scratched at his beard.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he said.

He left the room. I wanted to move. I wanted to go after her. But my legs wouldn’t budge. And suddenly I realized what my legs already seemed to know: if I went down there after her, I might die. If I went alone, without Miles, it was virtually guaranteed. Let him take his shower. Ten minutes under the hot water and he’d come around.

This was Miles, I kept thinking over and over. My mentor. My protector in high school. I remembered the time we walked down the hall together, and this guy who used to pick on me passed us and said something ugly. In one motion, Miles had him up in the air, and he held him there with one arm for a long time. No words, no threats, no violence even-just the gentle lifting, like a father lifting a child. Miles was valedictorian of his class, and he could lift a bully with one arm. For me. Miles was my hero.

When the water stopped, he stepped out of the bathroom. He was wrapped in a towel. His massive frame, somewhere between fat and muscle, was pink from the hot water. But the thing that shocked me had nothing to do with his colossal size or his bareness. He’d shaved off his beard. His face looked naked, almost babylike. I barely recognized him at first, and then suddenly he looked just like the Miles from high school, like he’d traveled back in time seven years. As if you could reach inside yourself and produce the person you used to be, just like that.

But when I saw his face, I knew.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Miles said. “But I can’t help you.”

He walked into his bedroom and shut the door.

I heard it in his voice. There wouldn’t be any discussion. Not this time.

I walked to the entryway and picked up his satchel. I strung it over my shoulder.

As I left his apartment, for some reason I thought of Miles proposing to Isabella-one giant kneeling before another.

I walked the campus one last time. I passed the music school with the statue of Beethoven outside-larger than life and cast in black metal, his eyes and hair blazing. I passed the bridges over the river and saw the line of bell towers, one red, one blue, one green. The campus was quiet. The crew teams still had an hour before first light, when they’d practice on the river, rowing as a unit like an eagle pumping its wings. I passed the library with its massive columns and the statue of our founder with his three lies, and there I flashed back to that first day, passing the tourists on my way to Bernini’s class. I wondered what had gone through Sarah’s mind, down in that hole, if she wondered why I hadn’t tumbled down after her. Then I found myself past the yard, facing Centennial Church.

The bell tower was shingled with chalky shades of blue, red, and brown, striped like snakeskin. Spotlights went up the sides of the tower and ended in the clouds. I felt an unbearable sense of need rattle me, and I fell to my knees and looked up. When I saw the cross, for the first time in my life it meant something new-no longer did I see a symbol of membership, of fraternity or conversion. Now it was something internal: the intersection of my spine and shoulders. It was a cross inside me, a steel frame, holding me up against the unstoppable urge to crumble. I wanted a religious experience. I wanted a voice and I was instead consumed by an almost infinite silence. The harder I begged that building to speak, the more quiet, the more alone I felt, kneeling in an empty lawn and looking up at a silent building. And yet, in that moment, I had the truest religious experience I believe there is: for I was suddenly filled with the desire to be good, even if no one was watching.

I did one last thing. I wrote a letter to my dad and put it in the mail. It’s hard to even call it a letter-it was just one line. It said:

You are not small to me.

I retraced my steps from Bernini’s office to the steam tunnel door with eyes above it. I passed through the three rooms. The doors were all open now. The mechanisms were silent. It felt like an abandoned movie set. Or, even better, it felt like something I remembered from my childhood, an amazing, unexplainable feeling that was new to my generation, since we were the first generation to grow up with computers. It felt like a computer game, after you’d solved all the puzzles and done everything you were supposed to do for that level. All that was left was to move on. But if you postponed that-if you walked around that world just a little bit longer-it took on an uncanny feeling. The characters were still there, little animated men running through their programmed routines, tending bar, sweeping porches, working the docks of the pirate shipyard. But it no longer felt like a real world, because your tasks were done and the characters had nothing left to say to you, and you saw through the illusion of their activity.

I found myself past the last room and standing above the hole where the trapdoor still hung open. I let my feet stick out over the edge.

I took a deep breath, and I jumped.