Authors: Will Lavender
Dominance (2 page)
âThe Descartes Circle'
Excerpt
“The heart of the matter is that in this gentleman's article all people are divisible into âordinary' and âextraordinary.' The ordinary must live obediently and have no right to transgress the lawâbecause, you see, they're ordinary. The extraordinary, on the other hand, have the right to commit all kinds of crimes and to transgress the law in all kinds of ways, for the simple reason that they are extraordinary. That would seem to have been your argument, if I am not mistaken.”
Raskolnikov smiled again.
âDostoyevsky,
Crime and Punishment
Oh, what we once thought we had, we didn't
And what we have now will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain
âNick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “We Call Upon the Author”
Unusual Literature Course Rocks Small Vermont Campus
by Ethan Moore, Jasper
Mirror
Staff Writer
January 9, 1994
The Jasper College Faculty Board has approved a controversial night class on a vote of 5 to 4.
LIT 424: Unraveling a Literary Mystery will be taught by famed professor and literary scholar Dr. Richard Aldiss. Aldiss contacted the Jasper administration late last year and was adamant that this campus was where he would teach if he did return to the classroom. He will teach via satellite from the Rock Mountain Correctional Facility, where he is serving consecutive life sentences for the brutal 1982 murders of two female Dumant University graduate students. He will be prohibited from speaking about his crimes and from using his victims' names. The class will be open to nine undergraduate students, each of whom will be specially chosen from the literature honors program.
There are those who adamantly oppose the course and its professor. Dr. Daniel Goodhurn, a Virgil scholar at Dumant, claims that Jasper College is making a horrible mistake by bringing Aldiss back into the classroom.
“Is Richard Aldiss a genius?” Goodhurn asked. “Of course. But what that man did to two innocent women at this institution goes beyond evil. I ask you: What will the students at Jasper learn from this monster? Richard is a twisted, deceitful individual. I assure you that teaching literature will not be his intention in this class. His true mission will be revealed very late in the semesterâand by then it may too late.”
Those in favor of the night class, however, are just as unwavering.
Dr. Stanley M. Fisk, professor emeritus at Jasper College,
says that Richard Aldiss will “inject life into a program of study that has become very stale. The man and his work, especially his research on the reclusive novelist Paul Fallows, is truly ground-breaking. Our students here at Jasper will be reenergized by the great professor. In my mind it is as simple as that. Aldiss will revolutionize how they think about books.”
The class will begin on the first evening of the winter term. The nine students have been chosen and will be allowed to turn down the invitation if they so desire.
1994
1
Just after dark they rolled in the television where the murderer would appear. It was placed at the front of the lecture hall, slightly off center so the students in back could see. Two men wearing maintenance uniforms checked the satellite feed and the microphones, then disappeared as silently as they had come. It was now five minutes before the class was to begin, and everything was ready.
This was the first class of its kind, and its noveltyâor perhaps its mysteryâmade it the most talked-about ever offered at tiny Jasper College. As mandated by the school president, there were nine students in the classroom. They were the best of the best in the undergrad literature program at Jasper. Now, on the first night of the semester, they waited anxiously for their professor to emerge on the screen.
The class was LIT 424: Unraveling a Literary Mystery. It had been offered at night because this was the only viable time, the only hour when the warden would allow the murderer free to teach. He would teach, if you believed the rumors, from a padded cell. Others said he would be in front of a greenscreen, with special effects to replicate a lectern before himâan illusion of a classroom. The rest claimed he would simply be shackled to his chair in an orange jumpsuit because state law prohibited anything else. They had to
remember what this man had done, these people said. They had to remember who he was.
The room was warm with the closeness of bodies. The chalkboard seemed to glisten, even though the Vermont night outside was bitterly cold. The quads were mostly silent, save for the protesters who stood the stipulated two hundred yards from Culver Hall, where the night class would be held. The class met in the basement of Culver for this reason: the powers-that-be at Jasper did not want the protesters to be able to see what was happening on that TV screen.
The few students who were out at that cold hour witnessed the nervous candlelight of the protest vigil from a distance, through the copse of beech and oak that dotted the woodsy campus. A light snow fell, flakes rushing upward in the January wind like motes of dust. Not far away, Lake Champlain purred in the wind. It was as if, one freshman said as he looked down at the scene from a high dormitory window, someone were about to be executed.
Just beyond the protesters, in a building that was dark save for a few bottom-floor lights, a pair of state policemen sat in a room the size of a broom closet, drinking coffee and watching their own blank feed on a tiny screen.
Unraveling a Literary Mysteryâthis too had been contested. The president of the college chose the title because it sounded to him fitting for what the professor had in mind. But in fact the president did not know exactly what the class would entail. He
could not
know; the murderer had only hinted at a “literary game” his students would play in the class. About his syllabus he had spoken to no one.
It was this inability to even guess at what was about to happen that silenced the classroom now. In the weeks before the semester had begun, when they went home to their families on Christmas break, the students who had registered for LIT 424 had time to think. To weigh their decision to take this strange course. They wondered if something could go wrong in that lecture hall, if their professor could somehow . . . it sounded crazy, yes. Most of them did not say it aloud, or if they did, they spoke only to their roommates or their closest friends. Slight whispers, torn away by the wind, carried off into nothingness.
If he could somehow get out.
This was what they were thinking in those final seconds. Some of them talked about their other classes that semester, flipped through textbooks and highlighted paragraphs in trembling arcs of yellow. But mostly they sat, saying nothing. They stared at the dead television screen. They wondered, and they waited.
Finally the television went to a deeper black, and everyone sat up straight. Then the box began to hum, an electrical, nodish oohing, a kind of flatline that moved left to right across the room. Their professorâthe MacArthur-winning genius, once a shining star at nearby Dumant University and the closest thing to celebrity a professor of literature could possibly be, the same man who had viciously murdered two graduate students twelve years beforeâwas ready to appear.
Then the blackness dissolved and the noise died away and the professor's face came to them on the screen. They had seen pictures of him, many of them preserved in yellowed newsprint. There were images of the man in a dark suit (at his trial), or with his wrists shackled and smiling wolfishly (moments after the verdict), or with his hair swept back, wearing a tweed jacket and a bow tie (his faculty photograph at Dumant in 1980).
Those photographs did not prepare the students for the man on the screen. This man's face was harder, its lines deeper. He was in fact wearing a simple orange jumpsuit, the number that identified him barely hidden beneath the bottom edge of the screen. The V of his collar dipped low to reveal the curved edge of a faded tattoo just over his heart. Although the students did not yet know this, the tattoo was of the thumb-shaped edge of a jigsaw puzzle piece.
The professor's eyes seemed to pulse. Sharp, flinty eyes that betrayed a kind of dangerous intelligence. The second the students saw him there was a feeling not of surprise, not of cold shock, but rather of
This, then. This is who he is.
One girl sitting toward the back whispered, “God, I didn't know he was so . . .” And then another girl, a friend sitting close by, finished, “Sexy.” The two students laughed, but quietly. Quietly.
Now the professor sat forward. In the background the students could see his two prison guards, could make out everything but their facesâthe legs of their dark slacks, the flash of their belt buckles, and the leathery batons they carried in holsters. One of them stood with
legs spread wide and the other was more rigid, but otherwise they mirrored each other. The professor himself was not behind a pane of glass; the camera that was trained on him was not shielded in any way. He simply sat at a small table, his uncuffed hands before him, his breathing slow and natural. His face bore the slightest hint of a smile.
“Hello,” he said softly. “My name is Richard Aldiss, and I will be your professor for Unraveling a Literary Mystery. Speak so I can hear you.”
“Hello, Professor,” someone said.
“We're here,” said another.
Aldiss leaned toward a microphone that must have been just out of the camera's view. He nodded and said, “Very good. I can hear you and you can hear me. I can see you and you can see me. Now, let us begin.”
Present Day
2
Dr. Alex Shipley got out of her rental car and walked to the front door of the silent house. She'd worn heels, goddamn it, maybe on the notion that the people at Jasper College would be more impressed with someone who showed up to a crime scene dressed unlike the academic she was. Now she was ashamed of the choice. Ashamed because the professor would surely notice, and this would give him an advantage in the mind game they were about to play.
Above her a flock of winter wrens exploded from a tree, and she flinched. It was then that Alex realized how terrified she was to be back here, to be near him again. She urged herself to focus. The professor was one of the most brilliant men in the world, but he was also deceitful. He would have fun with thisâif she let him.
She must not let him.
“They lie. All birds are death birds.”
Alex looked up. He leaned against the open screen door, staring at her with dead eyes. His mouth was frozen in a cruel smile. The stroke had taken his features, polished his face into a mask. One side was completely lifeless, the pasty skin stippled with reaching blue vessels, the lip curled upward into a tortured grin. The other side, the living side, had learned how to do the sameâhe had trained himself in a bathroom
mirror. Now he always smiled,
always,
even when there was nothing to smile about. Even when he felt pain or sadness or rage.
“Alexandra,” he said. Not
Professor,
not
Dr. Shipley.
(She, too, noticed these things.) He did not invite her in. In true fashion, he would make her stand there on the cold front porch, suffering a bit. Always a challenge, always a test. Alex would not give him the pleasure of seeing her put her arms around herself for warmth.
“Good morning, Professor,” she said.
“I was told about what happened to our mutual friend. How . . . tragic.” The smile touched his eyes. “I knew they would send you to me in due time.”
“No one sent me,” she said.
He was amused by the lie. “No?”
“I came here on my own accord.”
“To see me, then. Like old friends. Or perhaps old lovers.”
Something caught in her throat. She stared at the destroyed face, the wind slicing against her exposed neck.
Damn him.
“Would you like to come inside, Alexandra?”
“Please.”
Inside the small house there were books everywhere. Piles of them, mountains of them leaning in the dark. No artificial light in the tiny, not-quite-square rooms, just the natural dishwater seep of the morning sun. Through a window she could see the dark fingerprint of a half-frozen lake behind the house.
He led her to a back room and sat in a frayed armchair, facing that window. More books here, studies on dead writers, an Underwood on a small desk buried beneath a landslide of ink-crowded paper. Above that a poster depicting a man's face, one solitary word scrawled across his eyes, nose, mouth. The word was
Who?
, a pencil dusting barely visible in the weak light. The face was that of the mysterious novelist Paul Fallows. Below, in a fierce red font, the poster's caption read:
WHO IS FALLOWS?
He did not offer her a chair. She stood in the center of the room, watching the great professor breathe. Even there, with his back turned to her,
he emitted a kind of ferocity. It was worse now. Worse, she figured, because he knew they needed him. She needed him.