The meeting stretched on a while longer, and it was past seven by the time it ended. I left my things in my office and took the stairs down to avoid sharing the elevator with any colleagues and having to talk to them. I was tired and didn’t really know what I was going to do that night. The snowstorm was getting worse. I crossed the campus and went out the door that led to Palmer Square. On one side, sitting on a bench by the taxi stand, was Orion, wrapped up in a sheet of plastic and sheltered under the bus stop. He’d acquired a large portable radio, one of the old kind with round batteries and large speakers. He was listening to it attentively, putting his ear up to the device. I realized that he wanted to hear only music, because whenever a human voice appeared he’d get anxious and immediately change the station. Sometimes he lifted the radio up or moved it around, placing it strategically to fix the reception. I stopped in front of him, but he just stared at me indifferently; he too had his moments and segments of life.
Chapter Four
1
The next morning I was awakened by a call from the department. Could I please come to a meeting with the chair? The entire assembly of professors had gathered in the main office. There was an anxious, unsettled atmosphere. In a grave voice, Don D’Amato, who looked overweight and also overcome by the situation, summarized the official version of events, almost as if he were reading us a medical report.
Ida had left the parking garage, but the storm traffic alert diverted her from her usual route, and she decided to take Bayard Lane and skirt around the south side of town. No one saw anything, but it was there that everything happened. They found her car stopped at the end of Nassau Street, facing the slow traffic signal ordering the detour toward Route 609. Her seat belt was still fastened, but she was in a strange position, half-bent, with one arm outstretched and the hand scorched as if she’d been burned while searching for something on the floor. The crash—or whatever it was—had killed her. The burn on her right hand was the strangest piece of evidence in the case. No one saw anything, no one heard anything. Only the car alarm, which went on blaring for several long minutes because the police technicians didn’t want to alter any of the details crystallized in the moment of her death. But can you say “her death” when someone dies by accident? (“We all die by accident,” she would have said with irony.)
The news left me stunned. All I could see was the tic on Don’s face. A nervous blink that undercut his impassive air. A slight idiotic tremor in his right eyelid. Unreality is made out of details, and, as I tried to conceal my shock, I heard, like a kind of music, the slow progression of useless facts and explanations that always accompany unbearable things. In the car seat, to one side, there were several unopened letters. Was someone else there with her? Had someone attacked her and then fled? Or did she pass out and lose control of the car? The accident had taken place at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 14, because her watch was stopped at that time. The department’s receptionist had seen her come into the office to collect her mail and then take the elevator down.
It was necessary to inform the students. Classes would be suspended, but fortunately we had the respite of spring break. The evening newspapers and TV would spread the news, and a scandal was inevitable. He asked us for our discretion. No statements to reporters; he didn’t want the university to fall under the storm of a scandal. We must limit the facts to the Department of Modern Culture and Film Studies. The administration’s hypothesis, of course, was that it was an accident being investigated. He paused. It is my duty to notify you that the police will be coming to conduct interrogations this afternoon. We should expect the agents in our offices (especially those of us who were on the same floor as Professor Brown).
After a while, the dean of the faculty, Doctor Humphry from the Department of Physics, came in. He was honest and likable, and he had the obsession—or precaution—of photographing everyone who requested to see him. As a way to remember them, maybe, or so that he could make an exhibition of the portraits when he retired. He looked at people from the literature departments like a bunch of lunatics and eccentrics who were always bringing in foreign luminaries that no one could understand. He spoke now in the same way he would speak in committee meetings when he had to make budget cuts to the humanities programs. Subtly, he placed suspicion on the victim. What
