In Between Days (27 page)

“Is everything okay?” she’d asked Raja.

But he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was dark. I couldn’t see. But no, I don’t think so. I think it might be pretty bad.”

“Really?”

He nodded.

And that’s when he told her how he’d called up the campus police, and then the EMTs, from one of the emergency telephones on campus. It had all been anonymous, he said, but Seung had still freaked out, had tried to pull the phone out of his hand, and then later, after he’d hung up, had tried to wipe down the receiver with his shirtsleeve, removing their fingerprints. He’d called him crazy, he said. Seung had. Had chewed him out. Then he’d pushed him down on the ground, had tried to fight him, and that’s where the mud had come from. From their fight. After that, he couldn’t remember what happened. All he knew was that Seung had fled off into the shadows behind the Psychology Building, and that was the last he’d seen of him.

“Where do you think he went?” she’d asked.

But Raja just shook his head. Finally he said, “I don’t know, Chlo. I don’t know where the fuck he went. All I know is this is going to be bad. I think this is going to be really, really bad.” And then he stood up and walked over to the window and looked down at the quad, as if expecting to see someone he knew standing down there, waiting.

But to go back.

Months earlier, long before any of this had happened, Chloe had stopped by Raja’s dorm room one night while he was off at his job. This was the story she’d tell people later, when they asked, when she wanted to explain to them what had happened. He had been screening a series of short independent films that night for a group of senior English majors in the Drama Building, but she had begged off, claiming to be tired, and then had gone to his room to wait. She had her own key by then and had let herself in and then lay down on his bed and took a nap. This was something she did two or three times a week, a kind of ritual she had whenever he was working. She had lain there for a long time that night, sleeping, falling in and out of a dream, and then at one point there’d been a knock at the door, a loud knock that had woken her, and when she’d stood up to answer it, when she opened the door, she had seen a boy darting around the corner at the end of the hall. She couldn’t make out his face, but she could tell that he was tall, white, and athletically built. His hair was blond, and he was wearing baggy jeans and a navy-blue peacoat.

She hadn’t thought anything about it until she’d turned around and seen the noose, a small frayed noose thumbtacked to the door right above
the dry-erase board that Raja used for messages. Written on the board below were three words:
GO HOME JIHAD
.

She’d felt her entire body freeze at that moment, had almost wanted to scream, but instead had run back into Raja’s room and looked out the window. On the quad below, she could see the boy running back across the snow, his face buried in his jacket, his body silhouetted by the light from the lampposts along the path.

Her first thought had been to call up campus security, to let them know, but she had known how Raja would react if she did this, so instead she’d just gone back to the door, removed the noose, and erased the words the boy had written with the side of her hand.

It had been six weeks since that night in late November when they’d come home from the Cove and discovered the sign on Raja’s door, six weeks during which they’d taken their final exams, gone home to their respective families for the winter break, and then returned to campus for the spring semester. During that entire time, there hadn’t been another instance, hadn’t been another sign on Raja’s door, as far as she knew, and they had both come to believe that it had all blown over.

But now it was January, and it was starting up again. Or so it seemed. She felt sick with the thought of it. And as she lay there that night on his bed, waiting for him, she found herself debating whether or not to tell him. If it was only a onetime thing, she thought, maybe he didn’t need to know. Maybe she could spare him the pain and grief. But there was another part of her that seemed to understand that this wasn’t going to end. She wondered who this boy was, what he wanted, why he had chosen Raja. Anything even remotely racist was so frowned upon at Stratham that it seemed impossible to imagine that any one of her fellow classmates could have done something like this. But at the same time, she thought, how well did she actually know any of the people she passed on a daily basis? How well did she know what went on in their minds?

Lying on Raja’s bed, she stared at the noose on the floor beside her, wondering what to do. She felt something sour rising inside her, an anger in her gut. If she had that boy right here, she thought, if she had him right here, right now, what would she do to him?

Later that night, when Raja got home, she had tried her best to control her anger. In an even tone, she had told him what had happened, then showed him the noose. He stared at it in disbelief, then shook his head. She could see something like fear in his eyes. After a moment, he
walked over to the minifridge in the corner of his room and opened a beer.

“So what are you going to do now?” she asked.

He shrugged, then sipped on his beer.

“You’re not going to do anything?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said. Then he looked at her. “You said you got a good look at him?”

“I guess,” she said. “Not really.” Then she proceeded to describe what she had seen: the blond hair, the navy-blue peacoat, the way he had darted around the corner.

“How tall?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Like six feet or so.”

He nodded.

“You think you know him?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.” Then he put down his beer on the edge of the windowsill. “Remember that guy from the bar? That guy I got in a fight with?”

“Tyler Beckwith?” she said, staring at him. “You think it’s him?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I’ve had my suspicions, you know, for a while now.”

“So why don’t you report it?”

“What good would that do?”

“Well, it might make him stop for one thing.”

“We don’t have any proof,” he said. “No evidence. It’s my word against his.”

“What about fingerprints?”

“Come on, Chlo, this isn’t TV. We’re talking about campus security here.”

She looked at him. “Then call the police.”

“I’m not calling the fucking police,” he said. “And besides, they don’t like to touch anything that happens here on campus anyway. You know that.”

She stared at him, infuriated now, annoyed by his stubbornness. “Raja,” she said. “He hung a fucking noose on your door.”

“I realize that.”

“And you don’t see that as a threat?”

“I don’t know,” he said and looked out the window. “To be honest, it’s probably nothing.”

“Probably nothing?” she said. “How can you say it’s probably nothing?”

He stared at her, something in his face changing. “You think this is the first time in my life I’ve been threatened?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Is it?”

He walked over to the window, disgusted. “Forget it,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Why?”

“You just wouldn’t.”

She looked at him. “Why? You mean because I’m white?”

“Yes,” he said. “Actually. If you want to know the truth, yes, because you’re white.”

She stared at him. “I don’t think that’s fair.”

He laughed, and she could see now that he was angry. “Fair?” he said. “Do you really want to talk to me about what’s fair? I mean, is that really the conversation you want to be having right now?”

He was staring at her now in a way that frightened her, that made her realize it was time to stop. Up until this point in their relationship, they had rarely talked about race, at least not directly, at least not as it pertained to them, and yet now she could see that something had changed, a wall had gone up, and she was not going to be permitted to scale this wall. Not tonight.

“So, that’s it?” she said finally. “You’re just going to let it go? You’re not going to do
anything
?”

“I’m going to wait,” he said.

“And then what?”

“And then we’ll see.”

That night, she went home alone and slept by herself in her own room. She could tell that Raja needed some time alone, some time away from her, some time to process what had happened. As much as he’d tried to play it off like he didn’t care, she could tell that it had affected him, angered him, maybe even frightened him. She even thought he might actually try to do something about it this time.

But the next day, when she met up with him on the quad for lunch, it was like nothing had ever happened. He was calm again, even relaxed. He didn’t even mention it, didn’t even allude to it. He just sat there and talked about his classes, complained about a paper that was coming up,
a professor who was trying to screw him over, and so forth. It wasn’t until later that night, as they were sitting over drinks at the Cove, that he began to talk about it again, though even then he did so obliquely. It was strange, he said, strange that Tyler Beckwith would still hold such a grudge against him, strange that he would still be so angry. It was true that he had humiliated him in front of his girlfriend, and it was true that Tyler’s girlfriend had broken up with him shortly after that night, or so he’d heard, but was Tyler really blaming him for this? Did he honestly believe that Raja was responsible? It seemed absurd. There had to be something else, he thought. Something else he hadn’t considered.

The Cove was empty that night, or nearly empty, and they both had about five beers apiece. Chloe was nervous about speaking, nervous about reigniting their fight from the night before, so she mostly just sat there and listened, listened as Raja speculated about why this was happening, and by the time they’d ordered their final round, he was starting to get loose, talking about things he had never mentioned to her before, things that he claimed upset him: the stuff he’d had to deal with after 9/11, for example, the way people had refused to look at him in the hallways at school, the way they’d refused to sit next to him during lunch, even though he was Indian, not Arab, even though he had made it clear to them from the start that he had never had anything but utter fondness for the United States.

You have no idea what it was like to ride the subway or travel on an airplane after that happened, he said. The stares he got from white passengers, the terror in their eyes. And never mind the things he was called in school, behind his back, or sometimes to his face: rock chucker, rag head, camel jockey, jihad. For a long time they had nicknamed him Osama, a nickname that had stung him so deeply that he’d once filed a formal complaint to the principal, a complaint that had gone largely unnoticed. It was totally hysterical, he said. It was out of control. It was like living in an alternate universe.

At the time, he said, his only salvation had been the cinema. It was here that he could lose himself for hours on end, here that he could disappear from the world around him. In the dark, he said, it didn’t matter who you were or what you looked like. For a few brief hours at least, you could be anyone, and for a few brief hours, you could go anywhere. You could be transported to French-occupied Europe or to London in the sixties or to the rolling plains of east Missouri. Every Friday night, he would
go there by himself, to the Dollar Cinema in Newark, or sometimes, on the weekends, to the film festivals at NYU or to the special screenings they had at the Angelika Theater in New York. It was here that his education in film began, he said. It was here that he’d first discovered Godard.

It was strange to hear him talking in this way, strange to hear him talking so openly about things he had never mentioned to her before, and though a part of her wondered if he was finally losing it, another part of her found it strangely endearing, the fact that he was willing to open up like this. At one point she had asked him about his family, about his parents, and how they had handled it, and he had simply sat there, staring at her. The stuff he was dealing with in high school, he said finally, he never mentioned it. Not to them. It would have only upset them, he said. It would have only made his father feel guilty, guilty for bringing them here, for subjecting them to this. And besides, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He knew what his father would say, how he’d react. He’d tell him to keep his head down and his mouth shut, to not retaliate, to just ignore it. He’d tell him that violence would only bring him trouble. His father was a pacifist, he said, a pacifist through and through, and believed strongly in the notion that an eye for an eye left everyone blind. His father saw violence as a sign of human weakness, he said, a sign of moral depravity. It was the lowest insult one could pay to another human being.

“So that’s why you don’t want to do anything about it,” she’d said after a moment. “About the signs. You’re trying to respect your father’s wishes.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No,” she said. “But aren’t you?”

“I’m not my father,” he said and suddenly seemed angry.

“But you believe in pacifism.”

“I believe in pacifism to a point,” he said, staring at her.

“Okay,” she said, pausing. “So when, in your opinion, is violence justified?”

“It’s never justified,” he said. “It’s just sometimes necessary.”

“Like when?”

“Like sometimes.”

“Like when you defended Seung?”

“No,” he said and stared at her. “Like I said, that night was a mistake.”

• • •

For the next several days they kept a cautious distance from each other. In the evenings after dinner, she’d still go over to his dorm room to study, but more often than not, once she’d finished, she’d go home alone to sleep.

By then, the signs were becoming a daily occurrence. Signs full of racial slurs, allusions to 9/11, warnings to other students that a terrorist was among them. Raja had stopped hosting nightly parties in his dorm room, had stopped providing counsel to his fellow students. He kept his door shut at all times, shut and locked, and after a while, nobody even bothered to knock. It was like the person living inside had suddenly died.