His most important accomplishment had been spiritual, if that was the word. He’d realized that California was not for him. That meant it was time to regroup, to center himself. Spiritual, centering: his mother’s lingo. She’d been popping into his mind all day. Was there a reason for that? He thought for the first time of going home. He’d told himself he never would, but how could a week or two hurt? Home cooking, lying up for a while, sleep: what was wrong with that?
In Vegas he picked up a schedule. He’d flown out to California on a coast-to-coast one-way ticket from his mother-high-school graduation present, although a few lost credits kept him from walking with his class. The bus route back wasn’t as simple: Vegas to Denver. Denver to Omaha. Omaha to Chicago. Chicago to Cleveland. Cleveland to Buffalo. Buffalo to Albany. Albany to Pittsfield. Pittsfield to Inverness.
Freedy caught the midnight bus to Chicago and soon fell asleep. He awoke to the sound of low voices, speaking Spanish across the aisle.
“Hey,” said Freedy.
“Yes?”
“Is there some word, sounds like hermano?”
“Si. Hermano.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Brother.”
Had Estrella ever mentioned a brother? Now that he thought about it, maybe she had; an accountant, or something surprising like that, in Tijuana. In case there’d been a misunderstanding, Freedy decided not to dime her out to the INS, which had been his plan. That was his sensitive side coming into play again.
Peter Abrahams
Crying Wolf
3
Nietzsche says of the New Testament: “a species of rococo taste in every respect.” Using the Christmas story as text, attack or defend in an essay of no more than two double-spaced pages.
The shortest day of the year and therefore the latest dawn, but still it came too soon for Nat. Hunched over his desk in room seventeen on the second floor of Plessey Hall, head almost touching the gooseneck lamp whose similar posture had been mocking him all night, he tried to read faster. The problem was that chapter nine of Introduction to Macroeconomic Theory: A Post-Keynesian Approach for a Global Polity, like all the chapters that had gone before it, resisted fast reading. Three times, each slower than the last, he tried and failed to take in “with or without ignoring the realization that a deficit or surplus in the current account cannot be explained or evaluated without simultaneous explanation of an equal surplus or deficit in the capital account.” What kind of sentence contained two withouts? The words quivered on the page, threatened to change into something else, mere shapes, although interesting ones: he found himself gazing at a z. An unreliable letter, threatening in some obscure way, even unforgiving, or was all that merely the result of its comparative rarity, or association with Zorro?
Association with Zorro? Nat sat back in his chair. What was going on in his mind? What was wrong with him? He’d never studied this hard, at the same time never had a shakier grip on the material, never felt his mind wandering so much. If at all, he began, then stopped himself, aware that he was about to wander some more. He rose, rubbing his eyes, and gazed out his window. Dawn, all over the place. He could almost feel the earth spinning him toward that economics exam.
“They’re shooting again,” he said.
No answer.
Turning, he saw that his roommate had fallen asleep on the couch, chem lab notes stacked high on his stomach. “Wags, wake up.”
Wags was silent. Nat went over to him. Wags looked terrible, face unshaven and blotchy, hair wild and oily, eyelids and the pockets under his eyes uniformly dark, as though he’d been using some sort of deathly makeup. But Wags’s instructions had been not to let him fall asleep under any circumstances. How long had he been sleeping? Nat didn’t know. He touched Wags’s shoulder. “Wags.”
Nothing. Nat shook his shoulder gently-Wags felt hot-and when gently didn’t work, harder.
Wags smiled, a silvery thread of drool escaping from the corner of his mouth. His eyes remain closed, but he spoke. “I was having the sweetest dream.”
“What about?”
“Can’t remember. Helicopters? It’s collapsing in little pieces down the sides of my brain.” Wags’s concentration on whatever was happening inside his head was so intense that Nat felt his own mind focusing too, without result. Suddenly Wags’s eyes snapped open and he sat up abruptly-Nat could smell him-scattering lab notes all over the floor. “My God. What time is it?”
“After seven.”
“After seven? In the morning? Then I’m totally fucked.” He plunged to the floor, snatching up lab notes by the handful, pausing once to glare at Nat. “You want me to flunk out, don’t you?”
“Right,” said Nat. “And then all this will be mine.”
All this: the cramped outer room with their desks, computers, the couch, the cigarette-scorched hardwood floor, and off it the two bedrooms barely big enough for the beds. Wags laughed, a single bark, brief and unhappy.
“They’re shooting again,” Nat told him.
Wags got up, went to the window. “Just getting some establishing shots,” he said. It was the fourth or fifth film crew on the quad since September-filmmakers in need of an ideal college campus came to Inverness-and Wags had become an expert on their movements, mixing with the crews when he could and even landing a role as an extra in a made-for-TV movie about a fraternity brother in need of a bone marrow transplant, scheduled for broadcast in the spring. “Wait a minute,” he said, leaning closer to the window, leaving another oily nose print on the glass. His voice rose. “Is that Marlo Thomas?”
Nat closed the economics book, shut off the gooseneck lamp, went down the hall to the shower. Wags stayed watching at the window, crumpled lab notes in both hands.
After the exam-it had gone better than he’d expected-Nat went to the gym and took his hundred free throws, hitting ninety-one, despite how drained he was. The best he’d done since coming to the school: no explaining it. As he sank the last one, swish, barely disturbing the net, he realized that his answer to the last question had been completely wrong. Monetarism had nothing to do with it, completely irrelevant; they’d wanted all that current and capital account stuff, the two withouts. An essay question, worth one-third of the total grade. The mark of Zorro: he’d done not better than he’d expected, but worse, much worse. He hadn’t pushed himself, not hard enough, not nearly.
Nat stood at the foul line, bouncing the ball. The workload, the speed, how smart everyone was. He thought of Arapaho State, where Patti was getting straight A’s, and where he could be playing on the team instead of entering data in the fund-raising office every afternoon for $5.45 an hour. He thought of the Inverness varsity, whose home games he had watched-they were now one and three-knowing he was good enough to play for them; not start, maybe, but get in for more than garbage time. He thought of his street, his house, the kitchen, his mom.
The sudden feeling that someone was watching him made him turn. Not only no one watching him, but the gym was empty. He’d never seen it like that before. No one on the court, jogging on the track above, lifting behind the glass walls of the weight room. He went into the lobby, also deserted, looked through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Olympic-sized pool. Empty too, the water still.
Outside the same thing: not a person on the quad except him, not a sound from the surrounding dorms-no hip-hop, no techno or industrial, no Lilith Fair. For a moment he felt light-headed. Was he coming down with
