A Dark Matter (6 page)

When the pulse became brighter and more distracting, Mallon began to move through the stacks, looking for its source. It is important to note here that none of the graduate students roaming the stacks observed the pulsing, orange-pink glow. The glow led him across the stacks in the direction of the elevators, growing more vibrant as he went, and finally brought him to the closed metal door of a carrel. There could be no doubt that the carrel was the source of the glowing color, for it streamed out over the top, around the sides, and beneath the bottom of the metal door. For once in his life, Mallon was uncertain of his mission. It seemed to him that he had drawn near to the defining mystery of his life—the great transformation that alone could give to his existence the meaning he knew it must possess—and the sheer importance of what he had come upon paralyzed him.

Two students coming down the narrow passage outside the carrel looked at him oddly and asked if anything was wrong.

“You maybe see a trace of color in the air around that door?” he asked them, referring to the pulsing, wavering waterfall of radiant orange-pink light that streamed toward them.

“Color?” asked one of the students. Both of them turned to look at the door to the carrel.

“Something bright,” Mallon said, and the waterfall of radiant light seemed to double in intensity.

“You need to get some sleep, bro,” the young man said, and the two of them left.

When they were out of sight, Mallon summoned his courage and gave the door a feeble rap. No response came. He rapped again, more forcefully. This time, an irritated voice called, “What is it?”

“I have to talk to you,” Mallon said.

“Who is that?”

“You don’t know me,” Mallon said. “But unlike everyone else in this building, I can see light pouring out of your carrel.”

“You see light coming from my carrel?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a student here?”

“No.”

Pause.

“Are you on the faculty, God help us?”

“No, I’m not.”

“How did you get in this library? Are you on the staff?”

“Someone gave me a fake student card.”

He heard the man in the carrel scrape his chair back from the desk. Footsteps approached the door.

“Okay, what color is the light you see?”

“Kind of like the color of cranberry juice mixed with orange juice,” Mallon said.

“I guess you better get in here,” the man said.

Mallon heard the clicking of the lock, and the door swung open.

That’s it? The story ended when the guy opened the door?

You’ll see. Everything stops when you open the door
.

About a week later, on Saturday, October 15, 1966, the eight of them—Mallon, the Eel, Hootie, Boats, Dill Olson, Meredith Bright, Hayward, and Milstrap—went out to the agronomy meadow at the end of Glasshouse Road, climbed over the concrete barrier, and went through a rehearsal that seemed to satisfy Mallon. That night, they all trooped off to a party at the Beta Delt house, home to the fraternity Hayward and Milstrap belonged to. I wasn’t invited and heard about it only later. That night, I finally got through to the Eel around midnight, and she had reached a stage of drunkenness well past incoherence. The next day she was too hungover to talk to me, and that evening, she and all the rest of that doomed bunch followed Spencer Mallon back to the agronomy meadow.

Then there was only silence; there came rumors of a “black Mass,” of a “pagan ritual,” nonsense like that, given heat by the disappearance of one young man and the discovery of another’s hideously mutilated corpse. Brett Milstrap had vanished from the earth, it seemed, and the cruelly mangled corpse had been Keith Hayward’s. For a while, policemen stalked through our houses, through our school, everywhere we went, asking the same questions over and over. In their wake came reporters, photographers, and men with dark suits and tennis ball haircuts who hung around the edges of the action, watching and taking notes, whose presence was never explained. Lee stayed at Jason’s house for a week or two, refusing to speak to anyone but Hootie and Boats and those who could force her to talk to them. Mallon had fled, all three parties agreed on that point, and Dill Olson had followed in his wake; Meredith Bright had taken off at a dead run, packed up her clothes, and camped out at the airport until she could get a flight back home to Arkansas, where police questioned her for hours, day after day, until it was clear that she had almost nothing to tell them.

The police never did catch up with Mallon and Dilly, who evaded questioning without even really trying to: after recuperating for a short time in Chicago (actually, in the same Cedar Street apartment I bought many years later, located in a building across the street from my present house), they hit the campus trail as a double act. Mallon took Dill
over
, he somehow
incorporated
him, of course with his victim’s full cooperation. Olson loved Mallon, too, as much as my girlfriend and Boats did, and I guess he was content to follow his idol around the country, doing whatever he was asked to do. My information about Dill Olson’s fate came from Lee, who had some sort of intermittent, flickering, but nonetheless reliable connection to him. I was never to know any of the specifics about this, of course, as I had missed the boat, definitively, and so had been spared the mysterious experience that came to define their lives. There was a magic circle, and I stood beyond its periphery.

Here’s who was inside the circle, and this is what they wound up doing:

Hootie Bly, we learned, had become a permanent resident of the psychiatric ward at the Lamont Hospital, where he spoke only in quotations from Hawthorne and outbursts of unknown words from Captain Fountain’s dictionary.

Before graduation, Jason “Boats” Boatman left school and became a full-time professional thief. Was that enough, could that have been enough for him?

Dilly Olson had surrendered his life to the man he had unofficially adopted as his father, and this was what he gained from his surrender: a secondhand imitation of a life, a weary existence as the magician’s apprentice, subsisting on scraps that fell from the master’s hand, being clothed in the master’s cast-offs, and sleeping on strangers’ couches with the brokenhearted girls his master discarded. Years later, Lee told me that Mallon had retired, but Don Olson was carrying on as the mage’s replacement, or the new, improved model, or something similar. He had learned a lot in the intervening years, he had digested the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
, the
I Ching
, and the works of Giordano Bruno, Raymond Lully, Norman O. Brown, and God knows who else, and the trade of traveling guru, after all, was all he knew. But still. When I think of the heroic boy he once was …

Of Meredith Bright and Brett Milstrap I knew nothing, but presumably they each had a story to tell, should I be able to find them.

And of course the final figure left standing within the circle was my wife, Lee Truax, the most beautiful woman in any room she happened to enter, blessed with intelligence, courage, excellent health, a stunning house, a wonderful career as board member, counselor, and troubleshooter to the noble ACB. Her husband loved her, however imperfect his literal faithfulness, and the basis of his not inconsiderable success, his breakthrough book,
The Agents of Darkness
, had been his attempt to deal with the unfathomable event in the meadow and could therefore be seen as a tribute to the woman to whom it was dedicated. (Nearly all of his books were dedicated to his wife.) Thanks to this husband, myself, she had and always would have enough money never to worry about her finances. However, Lee Truax had been afflicted, too, cruelly, and although her affliction had first made itself known only in her early thirties, since when it had darkened and deepened, she had understood immediately that its origin had been Mallon’s great event in the meadow.

There they were, my wife and onetime friends, still in their sacred circle; and here was I, on the outside, after all the intervening decades still baffled by what had happened to them.

A well-known voice on NPR had brought Hawthorne to me, and after Hawthorne, Hootie Bly, still interred in that damned mental hospital. Because of Hootie, everything else had flooded in. The lean hound coursing through the snow, the peeling lacquer on our sleds, the whole townscape of Madison’s west side, a glass of water shining like the epitome of everything that could not be known, all that eluded definition … The faces of those who had been my most intimate friends, who had shared everything with me until the moment I refused to follow them into discipleship: their beautiful faces blazed before me. Half of their incandescence was what we had meant to each other, and the other half came from precisely what I had never known, never understood.

Why had they, each in his or her own way, not only jumped off the rails but jumped into such distorted lives? For a second, the room wobbled and everything in my life seemed at stake.

I needed to know: as soon as that recognition struck me, I knew that I feared whatever might turn up in the effort to know what had really happened out there in the meadow. Yet,
I needed to know
, and my need was stronger than the fear of whatever might crawl out of the knowledge I might turn up. All this time, I admitted to myself, I had been jealous of them for whatever they had
seen
out there, no matter that it had screwed them up, each in a different way.

Her Level Gaze
had just withered away beneath my hand, and although I had become fascinated with Detective Cooper’s fearsome revelations about the Hayward family—Two dark stars! Direct genetic transmission of a dreadful psychopathology! And this poor old brutal detective, taking his secrets to a beer-sodden grave!—I didn’t really want to give a year or more of my life to writing about it all.

Honestly, I thought it was beyond me. My agent and my publisher were making tactful noises about a nonfiction book, but as I stood in my kitchen and wiped startled tears from my face the last thing on my mind was the possibility of writing about my lost world, my lost ruined friends, and whatever my wife might have hidden from me. (Hidden to protect me, even.) No, I realized, I didn’t have to write about it. In fact I really did not want to put this warm and breathing material, only just glimpsed, through all the familiar, sometimes laborious gestures demanded by writing. Right then, all of that effort felt mechanical and factory-like, industrial. What I glimpsed had sped away into invisibility, like a white hare tracked through deep snow … I wanted the experience of following the ever-vanishing hare, not the experience of turning the pursuit into writing.

So, fine. Maybe I didn’t have a book. What I did have, a project that had come wrapped in necessity, felt infinitely better.

The first thing I did, once I had calmed down sufficiently to use a keyboard, was to e-mail Lee in Washington. It was her past as well as mine, and if I intended to open a curtain she had insisted on keeping closed, she deserved to know about it. For the rest of the afternoon, instead of pretending to work I caught up on my Netflix movies
(Wall-E
and
The Dark Knight)
, and about once an hour checked my cell phone for e-mail. I did not actually expect Lee to reply immediately, but at 6:22 my time, 7:22 hers, she responded by telling me that it would be interesting to see how far I got. (Lee uses various speech recognition systems, and while her early attempts resulted in a lot of typos and mistaken words, by now her messages are generally free of errors.) And she was writing back so quickly, she explained, because she had just learned something that might be useful to me. Donald Olson had run into some trouble a couple of years ago, and in fact she had heard that he was just being released from jail in a day or two and would undoubtedly be grateful for a place to stay on his first few nights of freedom. If I liked, I could meet him for lunch somewhere in Chicago, and if he passed muster, invite him to use our guest room. It would be all right with her, she assured me.

I e-mailed back, thanking her for the information about our long-ago friend, and said that if she truly would not mind, I would probably do as she suggested. How, if I dare ask, had she learned of Olson’s situation? And how could I get in touch with him?

You know I have my sources
, she wrote back.
But don’t worry about writing to Don. I gather that he prefers to get in touch with people rather than the other way around
.

I’ll wait to hear from him then
, I told her.
How are things going, anyhow? Are you enjoying yourself?

Busy busy busy
, she wrote back.
Meetings meetings meetings. Sometimes the mills grind exceeding small, but I have a lot of ACB friends in the DC area who seem willing to listen to me complain. Please let me know what happens with Don Olson, will you?

I typed,
o.c. o.c.
, using our ancient code that meant of course, of course.

Then for a couple of days I read, watched movies, took walks, and waited for the phone to ring. One day it did.