A Murder of Crows (7 page)

These kids had been working at being perfect since they could walk—maybe before they could walk.

The other 5 percent would have some obvious errors since their authors would have been too drunk to notice that they'd skipped some questions—maybe even puked on the booklet so that they couldn't see the question.

At Ancaster College, even on the freshman level where he was relegated to teach, there were few mistakes made on exams no matter how hard professors made the questions, because Ancaster College rejected more than seven thousand applicants every year coming from the very best prep schools in the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Any less than the very best were cordially invited to not apply. The college accepted fewer than three hundred new students into each freshman class. Three hundred of the very brightest maths, science and computer students in the world.

He poked at the pile of exam booklets with the edge of his tattered sandal and wasn't unhappy to see the booklets slide off his desk into the wastepaper basket.

If only I could just leave them there,
he thought. Then he remembered his meagre salary, his diffident supposed colleagues, and finally his overdue rent, and he picked up the topmost of the booklets—naturally from a Bengali or maybe it was a Pakistani, who could tell the difference or cared to, Ibrahim Mohammed something or other—and began to read.

By noon he'd finished marking 17 of the 291 exams and was ready for a diversion, so he flicked on his video of the last committee hearing where a busty student named Marcia had complained about the “unwarranted attentions”—he just loved that euphemism, “unwarranted attentions”—of one of Ancaster College's janitors.

He fast-forwarded the tape to the part where he told her, “Look, Ms. Lavin, even the cat is allowed to watch the king.”

Her perplexed look so pleased him that he replayed the section, several times.

But he knew that he owed Ms. Marcia Lavin.

Without this bitch's complaint he'd never have met the young janitor who microwaved human shit—Mr. Walter Jones, Esq.

He turned to the window and stared at the neatly manicured campus and remembered when the idea first came into his head.

Popped in—God given, actually.

He was adjusting his girth in his theatre seat at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as the lights were going down. They evidently made theatre seats narrower now than they used to. Must be so they can stuff more seats into the theatre, even though the prices they charged were outrageous. He couldn't believe it when they told him it was $140 a seat to see the RSC!

But as the play began, he found it glorious to hear Shakespeare spoken by his countrymen. And
Julius Caesar
had always been a favourite of his.

He'd played Cassius in college and had for a while considered a career on the stage, but he'd been rejected by RADA, the Central
School and the Old Vic—no doubt Jews were in charge of those places then. No doubt. Then there were those ahead of him: Ralph Fiennes, Kenneth Branagh, Timothy Dalton, et al.
They put me in the shadows, and now they're famous and rich and have women for the choosing
.

His reverie was broken by a familiar speech about brilliance hidden beneath the shadow of Caesar.

Know how you feel brother. You tell 'em
.

And what did he do to ol' Caesar—ate two—is what he did!

Ate two—why stop at two?

How's about six or sixty or six hundred? In for a penny . . .

Ouch—the damned seat pinched him!

Show them all. All of them
.

A smile crept over his face.
Yeah, time to get back at every one of them who put him in shadow, who rejected his brilliance. Who refused him admission to their damned club. Well, I'll grant you all admission—admission to hell.

And as he watched the third act he thought of how simple it was to make an explosive device—kid's stuff really. But where to put it? That was the question: where to put it?

Then he saw the mob gathering onstage to hear Anthony's speech over Caesar's dead body—and he knew. A mob gathered to listen.
Oh, yes. Universities have such gatherings once a year. We surely do.

He ran the three necessities for a crime in his head:

Motive: in spades

Means: you bet

Opportunity: he'd have to work on that. Bombs need to be planted. And what would a professor be doing digging in the ground or lifting platforms. No, he'd need an assist with that.

Then he remembered the janitor who had given “unwarranted attentions” to bouncy Marcia and smiled . . . and to his surprise he felt comfortable in his theatre seat. He had lots of room; it fit just fine.

WALTER APPLIED THE HOT WAX TO HIS CHEST AND GASPED. THE
smell almost made him puke. He counted to twenty then ripped the wax off—with his body hair. He hated body hair.

He waited for his breathing to slow down then he applied more hot wax to his upper thigh. This time although he gasped he also smiled—because things were going along just fine. Better than things had ever gone for him. And soon, so soon . . .

He peeled off the hot wax, then pried open a can of soup and put it on the hot plate. “Dinner,” he said aloud to the emptiness of his basement apartment. That used to piss him off—him eating soup out of the can while those students had the choice of more than ten different things to eat at their dining halls.
And people like me to clean up after them,
he thought.

But that didn't bother him now.

Cause this will show her and that snot-nosed professor who thought he was just so fucking clever. Well, Mr. Professor, nobody uses me. I use them. And you, Mr. Bigshot, you don't get it. Or the rest of them who think they're so much smarter—so much better—than me.

He put on an oven mitt and picked up the can of bubbling soup and took a long swallow. It was hot—and it burned—but Walter Jones didn't care. Not a bit.

DECKER TAUGHT IN THE MORNINGS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAPE
Town, a school that religiously followed his teaching methods and had even produced two PhD theses based on his unique approaches to acting.

More importantly, the school was now producing some of the finest young actors in the English-speaking world. The students were bright, ambitious and talented. But almost every white student eventually approached Decker about the possibility of working in Canada, since they realised that the sins of their parents were being visited upon them in a fairly draconian fashion. To be blunt, South Africa's affirmative action policy was unapologetically driving many whites from the country. NGO hypocrites always defended affirmative action with the blather of “Yeah but would the whites rather be in their position or in the position of the blacks?”

Only those who don't have to suffer the brunt of discrimination would talk this way. It's the talk of the self-righteous who stand to lose nothing themselves.

Decker felt it was wrong to visit the sins of the parents on their children—period, full stop.

In the afternoons he rehearsed the two short plays and was excited by what he found in the pieces and by the raw talent of some of the students.

Several professional actors (almost all of whom were University of Cape Town Drama grads) sat in on his classes and rehearsals. At first
the university had objected, but Decker had insisted that the pros be permitted to audit his classes. Shortly he organised evening classes for the pros—well, actually, for a specific pro, an extraordinary creature named Tinnery who had shown up to watch his third class.

She was a graceful Afrikaans beauty—strong of body, strong of heart, and strong of head—and she was talent that walked and talked.

Decker turned in profile to the attentive actors and pointed at his nose. “Your nose is attached directly to an ancient part of your brain. Modern man doesn't use his nose much except to steer clear of cesspools and the like. But modern man is only the end product of all the creatures who have come before him. And those men and women used their noses, and the knowledge that they gained is still stored in our brains.

“The human brain consists of three parts. Up here the frontal lobes, which in fact make us human. The frontal lobes control the middle section—the mammal portion of the brain—which in turn controls the most ancient part of our brains, the reptilian part.

“When we sleep it's the frontal lobes that sleep. That's why we have nightmares. With the frontal lobes resting the other two parts of the brain tell us what they saw that day—somewhat different than what the frontal lobes saw.

“Have you ever been in the middle of a nightmare and suddenly you pop up and say, ‘That's enough, you're scaring me?'

“Well, who exactly are you talking to?

“Your frontal lobes are talking to the reptilian part of the brain. You may have seen an indifferent casting director that afternoon. But your reptilian self saw a huge cobra, its hood wide open, ready to strike. A nightmare.

“And the reptilian part of your brain understands smell.

“Scent helps merchants sell things. Popcorn hasn't tasted good in a hundred years—but the smell of it still prompts you to buy it.

“Same for burgers and other foods.

“But smell is also an extraordinary tool for the actor. It's the most accurate key for recalling an event, a person, a place or most
importantly a state of being.” As he spoke he felt an odd resistance. In his mind? He thought so. Then the thought came clean. We apparently only use between 12 and 13 percent of our mind's capacity. What's the rest for? Evolution never creates gratuitously. Backup systems sure, but not excess. Useless limbs fall off. Things without function disappear. Still there's a full 87 to 88 percent of the brain that is never used. Why? Then he thought of the Rothko Chapel—of the paintings there. Were these visions drawn from the other 87 percent? Visions of the rest? Perhaps portals to the rest. A path to the rest?

“Can you go over the keying thing again?” Tinnery asked.

Her question brought him back to the present. “Okay. So I used to work for a theatre in Indianapolis, Indiana, for a fabulous director named Tom Haas. And because I was the only Canadian director he knew, he found it fun to always offer me really American American plays.

“Well, he wanted me to direct the one Eugene O'Neill fun play,
Ah, Wilderness!
, which centres on a fifteen-year-old boy getting his first kiss on the dock from a sixteen-year-old girl in the moonlight at the end of a long summer.

“So he sent me his offer on this fabulous rice paper stationery that they always used. I think the company was a sponsor of the theatre. And in the offer was a request for me to come to Indianapolis and audition this real fifteen-year-old boy for the lead.

“Well, I trusted Tom, so I hopped on an airplane and headed out. And sure enough the boy was blond, blue eyed, had good shoulders and could repeat well enough, so I agreed.

“Then Tom wanted me to cast a real sixteen-year-old girl from Indiana, but I refused, telling him that I would go back to New York and get what we, at the time, openly referred to as a midget. A twenty- or thirty-year-old actress who was small enough to get away with playing teenagers on the stage. Every director I knew had a few midgets he used. And I had a few so I got in touch with one of them and in two weeks she and twelve other New York actors piled onto a plane and we headed out to Indiana.

“Well, that first night as we sat around the table to read the play
it became obvious that this fifteen-year-old boy from Indiana was really quite struck by this thirty-one-year-old—and very sexually active—actress from New York City.

“So much so that every time we rehearsed the scene on the dock leading up to the kiss we would stop just before the kiss and jump to after the kiss.

“We did it for weeks.

“Then one day the scene was on its feet and the stage manager came in and put one of those beautiful pieces of rice paper on the table in front of me.

“It said, ‘Your father called.'

“Well, it was before long distance was cheap and my father never called so I was emotionally out of the room when I heard the actress shout, ‘Decker, Decker!'

“And I looked up and they had done the kiss—and the boy had fainted dead away in her arms, and she was holding him.

“Well, it was an interesting moment for me. It was the very first time in my life that I realised that I was no longer young. That I would never again feel the glory that boy felt kissing that girl. And I can get that incredibly complex left-handed primary state of being by just saying the words ‘rice paper.'

“The rice paper had nothing to do with the event. But the rice paper was the tactile key to open the door to the event.” He paused.
The portal, the path to the event,
he thought.

“Did the rice paper have a smell to it?” Tinnery asked.

Decker just smiled and told her to get her scene partner. “Time to act.”

And even as he directed her through her first scene, the two of them had connected. Although she played lover/lover to her scene partner (professional actors reduce all relationships to those within a family unit: father/son, older sister/younger sister, etc. The only exception is lover/lover in opposition to husband/wife) she was clearly in lover/lover with him. And that night she knocked at his Garden Centre apartment door and without preamble and very little talk she'd bedded him, her strong back arching to the heavens to find her joy.

Looking back on it, it was one of the happiest times of his life. But Decker knew that there was always a price for happiness, and it came on his sixth day of rehearsal—his third day with Tinnery—in the guise of four large men in suits who identified themselves as working for the ANC—“And if you wish to continue to work in our beautiful country, you will come with us.”