the reading once, finding it by far the hardest text he’d ever come across, despite his certainty that he didn’t understand it well, or possibly at all, a thought came to him, and he uttered it aloud: “Does the very fact that most people think something make it automatically wrong?”
Silence.
The crow, or another one, cawed nearby.
Then the bright girl from English 103 said, “Yeah. What is all that rising-above-the-common-herd stuff about? Sounds kind of elitist to me.”
Grace snorted.
Izzie said, “Maybe he is elitist, but there’s something almost… sweet about him at the same time.”
And someone else said: “Sweet? Nietzsche? He was a syphilitic, dangerous bastard.”
And they were off.
They talked about the fatalism of the weak-willed, the charm of the refutable idea, and how living things must vent their strength; about the will to power, Wagner, the Nazis and Hitler, and how the true and selfless may be inextricably linked, possibly identical to, the false and appetitive; they talked about the pressure of the herd and the courage of the original thinker; they talked about Friedrich Nietzsche. Professor Uzig hardly spoke, just sat in his captain’s chair-none of the other chairs had arms-still and neat in his white shirt, navy tie, charcoal gray tweed jacket, but he dominated completely by the intensity of his concentration. Nat could feel him listening, feel him judging, and was sure the others could too. But what judgments he was coming to remained unknown, with one exception. A bearded student wearing a tie-dyed shirt asked when they would be getting to Kurt Cobain, and Professor Uzig replied, “What’s the point of developing powerful analytical tools if all you’re going to do is waste them on popular culture?”
The bearded student said, “But I thought…,” and looked around for help. None came.
Just the same, Nat began to see the connection between Nietzsche and Kurt Cobain, not only Kurt Cobain, but so much of modern life, began to understand what Professor Uzig had been saying down on Aubrey’s Cay about Nietzsche’s influence. For example, hadn’t he read something in part one about how even the laws of physics might be subjective? He was searching for the quotation, leafing quickly through his copy of Beyond Good and Evil, when he heard Professor Uzig saying: “Until tomorrow, then.”
The chapel bell tolled. Class was over. Ninety minutes, gone like that. The sound of the bell, by now so familiar, seemed strange for a moment.
A foot pressed his under the table. He looked across at Izzie, writing in her date book, her golden-brown hair hanging over the page: dyed hair, he knew that now. His mind, already racing, began racing in another direction.
Grace, sitting beside Izzie, caught his eye. “I’m hungry,” she said.
The three of them ate in the lounge at the student union: yogurt for Izzie, chocolate cake for Grace, an apple for Nat, unable to afford much eating off the meal plan. He noticed the empty space where the high-definition TV had been, told them about Wags and the theft of the two TVs.
“Were you scared?”
“A ponytail?”
“He just disappeared?”
Nat took them down to the basement corridor in Plessey Hall. He showed them the padlocked doors to the storage lockers and the maintenance room, and the only unlocked door, the one to the janitor’s closet.
Grace opened it. They regarded the brooms, mops, buckets, cleansers.
“Wags did the same thing the year he was at Choate,” Izzie said.
“What same thing?” said Nat.
“The breakdown thing. Drugs.”
Grace was inside the closet now, rummaging around. Without looking, Izzie reached out and took Nat’s hand.
“Drugs?” he said. “I never saw him with any drugs.”
“The damage was done.”
Inside the closet, Grace said, “I’ve had an original thought.”
“Don’t scare me,” Izzie said.
Grace laughed, turned sideways-Izzie letting go of his hand the instant before-raised one foot high like a trained Thai boxer, and kicked the back wall of the closet with a force that startled Nat. The top half of the wall fell out in one solid panel, dropping into darkness on the other side.
They crowded into the closet, peered through the opening. Beyond lay a narrow unlit tunnel, narrow but tall enough to stand in, with one large-diameter pipe and several smaller ones receding into the shadows and finally disappearing into complete blackness.
“This looks like fun,” Grace said.
“Uh-oh,” said Izzie.
12
“You still have not learned to gamble and show defiance!”- Thus Spake Zarathustra. Fifteen hundred words on the importance of risk in Nietzsche’s philosophy.
“This,” said Grace as she stepped up and through the open rectangle high in the back of the janitor’s closet in the basement of Plessey Hall, stepping up and through as though it were some athletic event in which she specialized, “reminds me-”
“Of Alice,” said Izzie.
On the other side, Grace turned, made circling motions with her hands as though blocked by some barrier, a mime beyond the looking glass. She laughed, a little laugh, excited, like a giggle. “Where was that cave?”
“New Mexico.”
“The other one-the out-of-bounds one, where the bat flew into your hair.”
“Kashmir,” said Izzie.
“This is like that, only colder,” Grace said. “Nat?”
“Yeah?”
“Close the door behind you.”
Nat closed the closet door. Everything went black.
“Where the bat flew into Izzie’s hair,” Grace said in the darkness. “But I was the one who screamed.”
“Bats don’t bother me at all,” Izzie said. “And what makes you think you screamed? You’re not the screaming type.”
“I’m not?”
Nat reached into his pocket, took out a pack of souvenir matches from Pusser’s on Virgin Gorda, lit one. The sudden light captured a surprised look on Izzie’s face; and a terrifying one, unless it was some trick of the match light, weak and yellow-edged, on Grace’s. A terrifying look, as though she’d been reliving the bat experience, or making faces in the dark, practicing a silent scream. The terrifying look, if it was one, vanished at once, replaced by one of disapproval.
“You’re like a Boy Scout,” Grace said. “With those matches.”
“Or a pothead,” Nat replied. There were potheads at Inverness, but not nearly as many as at Clear Creek High.
Izzie laughed. She followed Grace through the opening, just as easily. Nat went last.
The match burned his fingers. He dropped it, lit another. The top of his head brushed the ceiling. “What is this place?” Izzie said.
Hard-packed dirt floor, damp air, a dripping sound, and the three pipes, the fattest one wrapped with
