Beet (7 page)

“Where are you?” Livi studied him. Peace shook it off.

The auditorium was swaying and murmuring like a synagogue in full daven. Not a seat was empty except for the two rows up front reserved for the English faculty and some selected students. With a magician's flourish, Smythe unhooked the red felt cord from its stanchion, and the professors and students took their seats.

Peace saw Manning a few rows behind him. “What are you doing here? This is literature”—pronounced with Manning's derisive emphasis.

“I'm doing what professors do. Stand and sit. Tonight I sit.”

Onstage, The Great fumbled with the arms of a green leather wing chair, turning the chair this way and that, and finally figuring out how to sit in it. Matha walked to the lectern and began her introduction of him as “one of the few male poets who really understood the female temperament.” Heilbrun whispered to Kramer that not only did he understand it, he incurred it. They shook with soundless chuckles.

Matha continued—one minute, four, five—evidently having decided beforehand that this would be an opportune occasion not only to detail The Great's place in the scheme of American poetry, but also to rail against the countless injustices at Beet College and call for the resignation of President Huey and the board of trustees as well as the immediate dissolution of the Committee on Curricular Reform, which was “illegitimate.”

“Close the college!” she said, hoping it would spark a chant. It did not, perhaps because the audience detected a logical contradiction in closing the college and sitting at the poetry reading.

But her remarks were met by the approving outcries of her radical band, along with the intense, noncommittal stares of most of the students and faculty. The bloodshot eyes of The Great rolled from side to side with impatience and Bushmills, as the rest of him tottered in his chair like a beach ball.

So worked up did Matha become, she began to lapse into her southern dialect.

“Ahm disgusted with this College! Ahm fed up! Bring the school down, Ah say! Bring it down!”

When she finally finished her introduction, she neglected to announce The Great's name, ending instead on a call to arms. As a result, there was no applause until the poet stood shakily, kicked off one of his woolly bedroom slippers, and with one good foot and the gouty one bare and pink-purple, limped and wobbled to the lectern, from which he cast a longing and sodden look at Matha's departing bottom.

“Thank you so very much, Mary,” he blurted into the mic, the blast causing several people to jump in their seats, his eyes never straying. “Your introduction was ferry vlattering.” He hiccoughed and wheezed asthmatically. “I felt like a real big shot. But you know,” he said, leaning forward and taking the audience into his confidence, “I'm really known as Fuckface to my friends.” Smythe laughed raucously. Others found their own ways to indicate their appreciation.

The Great opened three slim volumes before him, and began the reading. It was an effectively planned sequence of poems. Peace
cast off the earlier shadows of the evening, and he—and Livi, too, to her surprise—relaxed in the pleasure of good poetry read well, indeed beautifully. For twenty minutes or so, the audience seemed blown into by a verbal afflatus (afflatus being the word many would have used), each one, including Max Byrd, hoisted away from the banality of the occasion—a poet, a reading, a college—to that moment of the release of the poem itself, when the lines, long considered, hit the air for the first time. It was a particular treat for Max, who took to poetry less naturally than to his Apple, and thanked Peace for broadening his world. None of them suspected that The Great, drunk as he was, had been operating on automatic and was about to become creative.

For then, in mid-sonnet—a Petrarchan piece about love and loss that engendered tears in half the audience—The Great stopped cold, his bloodshot eyes searching the first rows and alighting at last on the idolatrous face of Matha Polite.

“I'm going to pause here,” he told the throng. “And instead of reading something old, I'm going to compose something new and original, right here, on the spot.” In the audience, frisson mixed with terror. “This will be a poem,” he continued, “no, an ode, no, a paean, no, an encomium, no, an epithalamion, no, a
hymeneal
to the young lady who introduced me this evening in so lovely a way, and who, incidentally, is a poet herself!” Matha broke into the widest smile in Dixie, showing every one of her teeth. Sandy also showed her teeth, though not in a smile. “For Mary, then,” said The Great to not a sound in the hall, not a clap, not a cough.

“An Ode to Mary's Ass,” he announced, and the gasps had not dissipated before he began to recite.

“Amen to that,” said Livi, who stood at once and stalked out of the auditorium. Peace was right behind her. And a dozen students and teachers did the same, including Manning. Livi saw him shaking his head.

“Hey, Manning,” she called out. “How'd you like his bottom line?”

Most of the crowd remained dead still, like bank clerks told to drop to the floor by a robber in a ski mask swinging a tommy gun, everyone expecting something even worse. The Great now clung to the lectern, which swayed under his weight, as though he were steering a ship in a typhoon. Matha was torn. On the one hand, he had treated her like a piece of meat in public, and got her name wrong to boot. On the other, the most honored poet in America had just composed a poem to little ol' her. She sat and stared. Everyone sat and stared, eyes swelling in their sockets. It may be said of that moment, with the possible exception of what remained of Nathaniel Beet himself, nothing in the history of Beet College had ever been so completely, definitely, quiet.

Outside, Livi stopped in her tracks, listening for something.

“What are you doing?” asked Peace.

And then she heard it. At that moment, as he did so often in his life, and with success assured by practice and virtuosity, Keelye Smythe rose to his feet, extending his arms in an incomplete circle, and the night exploded in a standing O.

WHILE NEARLY EVERYONE WHO WAS ANYONE AT BEET COLLEGE
had been sitting in the thrall of The Great in Lapham Auditorium, Akim Ben Laden was trudging across campus, about to put the final touches on furnishing and decorating his cave. Over the past two weeks he had scavenged in the trash bins of the school, which mainly yielded the books of scholars, inscribed copies thrown out by Beet faculty who were sent them by the authors as gifts and who had sent back complimentary notes including a phrase or two from the text to suggest they'd read the book before tossing it. There was little of value to Akim. Better hunting was available in the town of Beet, from whose castoffs he had garnered a ladder-back chair with three missing rungs; an orange Barcalounger circa 1965, whose color remained unfaded; a standing lamp made from a harpoon; a child's roll-top desk from F.A.O. Schwarz; and the lower berth of a trundle bed with a decal of
Apollo 11
on the side.

For decor, he took a few favorite possessions from his room in Fordyce—a photograph of Charles van Doren as he had appeared on the TV show
Twenty-One
, a plaster bust of Batman, a lute, a red scimitar he'd made of cardboard, and a computer-generated photo of his father the rabbi, sitting before a chessboard with his
white king toppled and his hands raised in surrender. Generally Akim eschewed material goods. His prize good he kept in his wallet. It was a Matha Polite villanelle, published in the radical broad-sheet
Scream
, with the repeating lines, “My phone is ringing off the hook / My cunt will not answer.”

Peace was leaving Lapham Auditorium with Livi when he noticed Akim, which was not difficult given the boy's outfit and the fact that he was both carrying and pushing a small mountain of stuff. Before him he rolled a grocery cart laden with books and pictures, an Etch-a-Sketch and a large stuffed panda, a childhood gift from his mother. He bore a backpack so overloaded, it spilled part of its contents every few steps. Under his left arm he tucked a laptop. And around his right shoulder coiled a great many extension cords, two hundred if one were counting, trailing behind him like a long tail and stretching back to Fordyce and up the stairs to his room.

“Wait a second, Liv. I see a student I know. I'm worried about him.”

“I can see why. How long will it take?”

“You go on ahead. Cindy has to get home.” They kissed, but she could tell he was still sore at her for her evaluation of his colleagues. She hoped it was because he suspected she was right.

Something about a New England college at night—the buildings blazing but deserted, the gaunt trees, the shadows, the puddles of light from the streetlamps covered with rime, the slap of the wind. If a murder or two did not occur in such a place at such a time—preferably by dagger—it would seem a waste.

“What have you got there?” Peace approached Akim as breezily as possible. He pointed to the boy's shoulder.

“Extension cords. I need to connect them to my room. There's no electricity in the cave.”

“You're living in a cave?”

“I'm moving in tonight. If it's good enough for Osama, it's good enough for me.”

“You admire Osama bin Laden.” It interested Peace how crazy people always dictated the terms of their conversations.

“Not the killings part. But the hat and the beard are awesome.”

“How's Homeland Security coming along?”

“Don't speak of it, Professor Porterfield. I'm taking three online courses, all taught by Billy Pinto, whom I've yet to lay eyes on.” He held up his laptop. “If I were still speaking to my father—may piranhas chew on his liver—I'd tell him what he was paying tuition for. Would you like to hear my fall line-up? A course called ‘Emergency Management: What If They Come by Sea?' Another called ‘Tunnel of Love or Death?' And a seminar called ‘If You're My Mother, Where's Your ID?' I can't even get through to the department by e-mail.

“Did you know,” he asked Peace, “that Pinto teaches a class called ‘Police Brutality—Is It Always Wrong'?”

He tripped over the straps of his talaria and lay spread-eagled on the ground, forcing him to cry out in, and then upbraid himself for, a Yiddish curse. Peace picked him up by the shoulders.

“The brochure calls the department ‘asynchronous,' meaning that students are not required to be in a particular place at a particular time,” said Akim. “Trouble is, I am in a particular place at a particular time. But who cares?”

Of course, Peace had not been privy to the conversations of the previous summer that put the Homeland Security Department in place. Not only had Bollovate and Huey made the virtual classrooms available to undergraduates, they also opened them to outsiders, for $5,000 apiece. When the revenue started pouring in, Bollovate squealed, “It's a cash cow!” Then he said, “A cash pig!” delighting himself with this singular example of wit. He'd asked, “Why couldn't we run the whole college online? From one building! From a Quonset hut! From a lean-to, for chrissake! An outhouse!” He was on a roll.

“You mean, no regular classes?” said Huey.

“No classes, no offices, no food, no services, no Pens, no overhead,” said Bollovate.

“There are schools like that now, Joel. But they're sort of low class. No college of Beet's reputation has ever gone online.”

“Ah! That's just the point, Lewis. Who wants an online degree from Podunk? Beet, on the other hand…Not only that. Let Beet actually prepare you for a job! Shorten the time it takes to get a degree! Get on the fast track!” Bollovate was approaching ecstasy. “The top of the line online. And money in your pocket, too! What's wrong with that?”

“Well, there's tradition,” said Huey, in whose oubliette of a mind a taper of decency could occasionally flicker before he snuffed it out himself.

“Tradition,” said Bollovate. “Oh, I see. The tradition of going under.” They had been sitting in Huey's office, with Bollovate stuffed into the president's chair behind the desk, and the president, hands in lap, on the visitors' side.

“It's hard to imagine,” said Huey. “Beet College without Beet College.”

“Isn't it!” said Bollovate. “What a shame! What ever would we do without the sniveling, complaining, lily-livered faculty, and that—what's it called?—dither of deans, and those darling children chasing their hormones until they graduate and drain the economy? What
would
we do?”

Once Bollovate got hold of an idea involving money, there was no stopping him.

“Why couldn't we get commercial sponsors for our online courses?” he'd asked/told Huey. “If everything else in America is ‘brought to you by' some shit or other, how about Homeland Security getting sponsorship from companies selling alarm systems, gas masks, weapons? You know, Lewis, if I'd been put in charge of this dump years ago, the History Department would be brought to you by the History Channel right now.”

“Are you being serious, Joel?” asked Huey, who was wondering if yet another adjustment of life principles was in order.

“Nah,” said the fat man. “It was just a thought.”

Peace walked on with his student. He tried to sound upbeat. “You know, Akim. I'm sure there's still time to change your concentration.”

“To what? Dominican and Video Games Studies?” In fact, the
concentration had appealed to him, not for the Dominicans, who had joined with the Jews and Arabs in his harassment in high school, but for the video games, one in particular that involved Crips and Bloods carrying pipe guns and chasing rabbis into alleys with no exits. But he'd applied too late.

“Why not take Government with Professor Manning?”

“I sat in on one of Professor Manning's courses last semester, and I actually learned something. But he scares me. He's Jewish.”

“So are you.”

“That's why he scares me. One day he looked me over and said, ‘When are you going to cut the crap, Arthur?'”

Peace accompanied the boy across the baseball diamond and toward the woods surrounding the college. He offered to help carry some of his load, but Akim insisted he could handle it all, just as a toby in the shape of Paul Revere's head fell from his backpack and smashed on a rock near second base. Peace was trying to ascertain just how cuckoo the boy had become since he'd seen him two weeks earlier in the library. Clearly the rejection by the How to Write for the
New York Times
course—and by Matha, too, he guessed—had taken its toll.

“Have you tried contacting Professor Pinto online?” he asked.

“I've been doing nothing else for two weeks. Every time I clicked onto Homeland Security, it showed
THIS SITE CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION, OR PLEASE TRY AGAIN, OR—WHICH DROVE ME UP THE WALL—MAKE SURE ALL THE WORDS ARE SPELLED CORRECTLY.
Then, the night before last, in a fit of exasperation, I hit the keys with my fist—bang bang bang—and something new appeared:
ENTER SECURE PASSWORD.”

“A secure password for a college department?” Peace wondered if Akim were making this up.

“That's what I thought. A little strange, huh? So I got myself an alphanumeric generator so I could hack into the department code. All it took was a phone call. I wrote a do-loop program. That way, I wouldn't have to watch the screen all the time. The letters and numbers would just keep churning. I dialed into the sign-on, and waited.”

“And?”

“Nothing yet, Professor Porterfield. There could be hundreds of levels of codes. But even if it takes weeks, I'll get in there. Don't you worry. And when I do, I'll find Professor Billy Pinto and look him straight in the eye, and tell him Homeland Security is bullshit! What do you think of that?”

What Peace thought of that was to walk the boy over to the infirmary. But in truth, Akim did not sound crazier than usual. Yet he was. He just didn't want to discuss a particular sphere of craziness with Professor Porterfield.

“I'm fine, Professor. You really don't need to walk me the whole way.” Peace stayed with him anyway.

Akim was trying to shake his companion because he had to concentrate on his other new mission—along with cracking Homeland Security—which was to blow himself up. A suicide bombing, he'd concluded, was the only sensible thing to do. The event, if intelligently plotted and occurring in the most advantageous circumstance, would gain him the attention that eluded him in life. He would not explode in a crowd, because he did not like crowds. This would be a solitary act, noteworthy and symbolic. And it would be filled with poetic justice, one of his favorite things, because by blowing himself up he would undoubtedly get in the
New York Times
, an opportunity denied him by Professor Joan A-minus, I-know-what-the-
New-York-Times
-is-looking-for Lipman. He would aim his act at her, at stupid Beet College, at the scornful Matha, and at Rabbi Horowitz. For the past few days he had been fiddling with a suicide note that made several puns on the word “pawn.”

Because of the nature of his intentions, he was afraid the Homeland Security faculty, under whose one nose he was plotting, would root him out. But since Pinto's nose remained virtual, he thought he might be okay. The problem (or Akim's interpretation of the problem) was that he knew nothing about making a suicide bomb. He did not know what explosives to use, he did not know where to acquire the ingredients, he did not know how to strap the contraption to his body, or what clothing to wear to conceal it, or
how to handle any of the other technical difficulties faced in similar circumstances by crazy people worldwide. At least he knew what he did not want, which was to become a suicide car bomber. He did not possess a driver's license, and the only vehicle he had ever driven was a bumper car in Coney Island when he was nine, and even that he did ineptly, never bumping into anyone.

“You can go back now, Professor Porterfield. I'm in good shape.”

By now the trees had grown so dark and thick, they disappeared into the sky, which was starless and moonless. A screech owl performed a nosedive very close to the two of them, causing Akim to stumble again and catch his robes on the underbrush. Yet he remained careful to unravel the extension cords.

“I'll go with you as far as the cave,” said Peace.

Akim breathed easy. He had a night of studying ahead of him. The Web site, kaboom.com, had not been all that helpful. It contained the biographies, albeit brief, of the more well-known suicide bombers, along with the long rambling prayers and speeches they delivered before blowing themselves up to Allah. In nearly all the cases cited, it was to Allah and an indeterminate number of celestial virgins that they propelled every last morsel of their existence, Arabs having pretty much cornered the market on suicide bombings. The basic information and the links were not only about Arabs, they were written in Arabic, which Akim could not read, except for the numbers.

It had taken some research, but little by little he'd acquired the necessary information for completing his mission. The weapon of choice for suicide bombers was acetone peroxide, which, he was relieved to learn, could be made from common household supplies—paint thinner (acetone), bleach or antiseptic (hydrogen peroxide), and one of the more powerful drain unblockers, such as Drano (85 percent sulfuric acid). One could secure these ingredients at any hardware store or beauty salon. In the proper mixture, they would produce white crystals of acetone peroxide—triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, for those in the know.

Yet how would he place his order, say, at Pig Iron Hardware in Beet? He would come in with a list of things to buy that included
the bomb ingredients, but also innocuous items such as a double-twist sugar bit, a spiral ratchet screwdriver, a ball-peen hammer, a cable ripper, a track and drain auger, a lug wrench, and an extended-pole branch trimmer. That's what he'd do. Then he would oh-so-casually add, “And give me some paint thinner and Drano, will you?” No one would suspect. And the Some Pig! Beauty Salon? Why would he be shopping there? He would be picking up things for his mother or his sister. A lip brush, an eyelash curler, a kohl pencil, cream blush, a brow brush and lash comb. That's what he'd tell them. He hoped they wouldn't think him effeminate—though he realized that upon seeing him, it was probably not the first thing people would think. Only he learned TATP is highly sensitive material and that its instability led to the deaths of forty terrorists handling the compound en route to blowing themselves up. The Web site compared these occasions to premature ejaculation, which would have made the boy laugh had he ever been inclined to. If there was one thing Akim Ben Ladin did not want to be remembered as, it was a sloppy suicide bomber.