The gym is lovely, dark, and deep, she thought. She had never been out here in the locker room level. She was amused at how much it turned her on. It was a schoolgirl fantasy, to be sneaking around in the place where boys took off their clothes and splashed around in the showers. Past the locked glass doors of the darkened locker rooms, past the coaches’ offices and the training room, she approached the stairs at the opposite end of the hall. Two doors on the far wall had clumsy signs taped at eye level. MCPHEE APT., KNOCK 1ST, the door on the left said in black Magic Marker. The other, fifteen feet to the right, said in different writing, BOILER. RED FLAG. KEEP OUT. It was signed ANGUS. Cynthia’s fatigue had disappeared. She felt privy to all sorts of secrets, roaming here in the bowels of the gymnasium. At the same time she felt guilty. Was this why she had insisted upon taking this duty? Did she have some unconscious urge to pry?
It was time to move upward into the airier spaces.
The stairs were dark too, lighted faintly at the landings by windows, through which a dim glow from the campus sidewalk lights filtered. One flight up, at the basketball court level, Cynthia saw nothing. Up another flight and she was at the weight room and the practice room for the wrestlers. A padlocked chain secured the door to the weight room.
The door to the wrestling room was open.
She did not know that this was the room where Russell Phillips had been killed earlier in the week. She was not even sure of whether the room should have been locked or not. What attracted her was the sight of the soft foamy mats across the floor. A floodlight outside the window threw a soft reflection onto the dark blue vinyl of the mats. Inside the room, other mats, rolled and stored vertically like columns, lined the walls. Three ropes hung from beams on the ceiling, and attached to one wall she saw a pegboard. She felt tired again, now that she had climbed some stairs and had dissipated the adrenaline surge of exploring the lower depths.
She was unaware that someone was in the room with her. Cynthia took off her plastic scarf and raincoat, folded the coat, and used it as a pillow as she stretched out supine on the mat, facing the window, leaving the door and the rolled columns of mats behind her. Little black scarabs of blindness floated skyward in front of her. She began to weep, not gradually, but at once in one surprising sob. It was so unfair, this waxing and waning of the life force in her. There was so much she wanted to do, and her body was betraying her. She retained the urges but lost the energy, kept the will but lost grip of the means. Self-pity surrendered to anger. She would not succumb to a virus. She would play Desdemona, and she would finish her dissertation, and she would continue with student activities here at Montpelier. Fumbling in the coat folded under her head, she found her handkerchief and dried her face.
Pulling herself up to her knees, she faced the window as if in supplication, arms out, pleading. She no longer saw spots in front of her eyes. Instead she imagined Othello, advancing on her, carrying a lantern and also a determination to kill her. She spoke her lines from memory:
That death’s unnatural that kills for loving.
Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip?
Some bloody passion shakes your very frame:
These are portents; but yet I hope, I hope,
They do not point on me.
Behind her she thought she heard a noise. She turned to see what it was.
“Angus?” she said.
SCENE 25
Richard Blackburn sat in demerit hall in the basement of Fleming Hall with two books open in front of him. The book visible to an onlooker was a Dick Francis thriller, still number one on the best-seller list and a perfectly respectable volume for him to be perusing on this Saturday evening.
It was not, however, the book he was reading. Tucked inside was The Fuck Book, which Richard had found over the Thanksgiving break in the bus station and snagged to bring back to school. It was all about sex, some of it stuff that Richard had never even heard of before. It made him a little uncomfortable.
It was five minutes until 9:00. Another thirty-five minutes to go. The wooden seat was uncomfortable, and the ancient graffiti carved in the desk in front of him was as familiar as his own fingernails. There were twelve boys in D-hall tonight, a small number. Since it was just after a holiday and the beginning of a new term, fewer people than usual had had the opportunity to build up enough demerits to qualify for Saturday night detention. They were spread over the large study hall room, six rows of desks, twelve desks in a row, all desks bolted to the floor, all facing the proctor’s desk in the front of the room, all perfectly visible under the bright neon lights.
He looked up from his books at the dark windows splattered with rain. Immediately he heard Chuck Heilman clear his voice at the front of the room. He turned to see Heilman staring him down and shaking his head. They were supposed to study for two solid hours and not behave like normal people and look out the windows. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment. And then they pick the geekiest, stupidest teachers to be the supervisors, so if you do look up, you have to look at somebody like Heilman, whose fat fingers delicately flipped through a book of famous quotations as he worked on tomorrow’s undoubtedly tedious sermon.
Richard was angry at Landon Hopkins for crying about his stupid Shakespeare book and angrier at Daniel Farnham
