Orpheus Lost (4 page)

S
LAUGHTER HAD THE
woman taken directly to the interview room. She was locked in and left there alone. A recessed spot in the ceiling cast harsh light on the chair where she sat; the rest was shadowy. Unseen, he watched closely. She did not know where she was, not precisely. She knew only that she must be somewhere in the western suburbs of Boston. She did not know why she had been brought in, but she was not afraid. Not yet. She had never been afraid, as far as he knew, and all his life he had wanted to make her afraid. His reasons were honorable.

Once, back in Promised Land, South Carolina, when they were both what?—fourteen probably, maybe fifteen—and she was still known to all as Leela-May, he’d dreamed they were impaled on thin wooden skewers on a grill. You look like a corncob, she told him. You’ve got a stick coming out of your head. So have you, he told her. You’re a pointy-head know-it-all. In his dream, she couldn’t stop laughing, and this enraged him. He shouted with a mouth full of basting sauce: You won’t think it’s so funny when we’re burned to a crisp. His skin was blistering. The roof of his mouth was on fire. His father, the barbeque chef of all nightmares, wore an apron that said
Hot Devil
and his father kept squirting starter fluid—quite superfluously—on the coals. Clouds of flame,
mushroom-shaped, rose in layers. They gave off popping sounds and sharp plosive bursts. Even as she roasted in his dream, in
his
dream, Leela couldn’t stop making jokes.

Can’t you be serious about anything? he demanded.

She should be burned at the stake, his father said.

Leela thought this hilarious.

Shut up! Cobb ordered her. He looked sideways at his father and caught his father’s slow smile. Shut up! he said again for the pleasure of pleasing his father. You’re non-stop trouble, Leela-May, but you never get punished and I do. It’s not fair.

Instantly, within his dream, he regretted the outburst. He regretted the self-pity and the transparent wish. He knew he would pay for both. It was another of her thoughtless crimes: the way he lost dignity in her presence. She had no understanding, she had not the remotest inkling, of the differential: what recklessness cost her, compared with what it cost him. This was not right. Certain things should be required of all or required of none. She should be required to know fear the way he did: as enveloping fog. She should be trapped in it. She should flounder in soupy air so thick and heavy that it settled wetly in the very bones and turned them soft. She should feel the down-suck.

This time, he warned her in his dream, we’re both going under.

Going
up
, I’d say, she said. Up in smoke.

Together
, he emphasized.

He was almost glad, imagining the headlines:
DUAL DEATHS IN BARBEQUE PIT
. Or possibly
TWIN TRIAL BY FIRE.

There’s no escape, he told her; this is the end.

This is the beginning, she laughed, and I know what you’re after. You’re on fire. You’ve got smoke in your eyes. So here’s what we’ll do: I’ll pull out your stick if you’ll pull out mine and
you can baste me with hot sauce and eat me. But first we piss on anyone who doesn’t like us, especially anyone who’s fanning our flames.

What did I tell you? she said. See how it douses the fire?

And indeed, when the dream-smoke cleared, they’d slithered free of the skewers and onto the coals, and she was sitting on the edge of his bed. He was aware, with shame, of sodden sheets and of the sordid mess of his room. There was a sharp and dreadful smell. Socks? Wet shoes? He prayed he was dead.

“Your father let me in,” she told him. “I brought lavender for under your pillow. It’s out of our garden and it cools you down.”

He pulled a blanket over his head.

“You’re burning up with a fever, Cobb. I’m going to get wet washcloths for your forehead and your neck—”

“Don’t touch me.”

“You’re on fire. You need sponging down.”

He burrowed under. He wanted the wet mattress to eat him.

“You’ve missed school for a week,” she said.

“He’s gone and wet the bed,” Cobb’s father growled, exasperated, from the doorway.

“Mr. Slaughter, Cobb’s dreadfully sick. He needs someone here to look after him.”

“You mind your own business, girly. Boy’s fine. A fever never did anyone harm. Purifies the blood, is what, and burns off the trash in the brain. He needs sleep, is all, and more self-control.”

“He needs praying for,” Leela said. “My Daddy will come with the elders for the laying on of hands.” She leaned down and whispered in Cobb’s ear: “But I’m gonna call Dr. Rabon too.”

“Needs self-control is what he needs,” Cobb’s father said. “You get on outta here, girly. He’s stunk up the room.”

Thus Cobb had legitimate reasons for wanting Leela to know the wet suck of fear. His motives were moral. He believed this. There were two kinds of people in the world: those who took safety for granted and those who never could because they knew on a visceral level that safety was a rare and capricious thing. The former often—and carelessly—put the latter at unconscionable risk. Survival lay in forcing the careless ones to understand. Cobb wanted to hold Leela’s head under water (metaphorically speaking), let her gasp for breath, let her splutter, hold her under again. This is what abjection does to people, he wanted to say. Now you know. Now you can begin to understand.

From the control booth outside the interview room, he watched her for an hour through one-way glass.

“Just like old times,” he murmured softly. His words settled as mist on the partition and he erased them with a sweep of his sleeve. In Promised Land, South Carolina, sometimes he had been the watcher, sometimes she had. Nevertheless, he could not have anticipated the present turn of events. It was a coincidence so huge that it was eerie. It was a provocation. What could he make of the sheer symmetry of chance?

This time Cobb Calhoun Slaughter was the one on the outside looking in and Leela-May was the one in the cage.

“Let her sweat,” he told the handlers. “Let her stew.”

So far, she showed no sign of sweat.

What she showed was the kind of curiosity that had led her into endless close shaves as a child. She still had, in fact, the birdlike demeanor of a child, tugged by a million stimuli. Sometimes he thought she did not know how to switch her nerve ends off. She pecked and darted. Sounds, scents, shapes all pulled at her. Her eyes flew about, she touched things, she
smelled her fingertips, she was rarely still. She examined the bright light in the ceiling through half-shut eyes. Apparently this told her something. Apparently all splinters of data were of interest. She assessed the heat of the light on her upraised palms. She pressed her palms against her cheeks.

Now, as in childhood, Cobb envied and was afraid of her kind of indiscriminate curiosity, her
rapacious
curiosity, the kind that had exasperated teachers and rattled neighbors and made them all want to throttle her and made them love her, the kind that had made her own father and the entire congregation of the Church Triumphal of Tongues of Fire—Southern, white, and Pentecostal—hold all-night prayer vigils on her account, the kind that had ensured—to his chagrin—that her school projects were more attention-grabbing than his. In spite of this, in spite of his own fierce need to win, Cobb himself adored her in secret back then and she kept on gate-crashing his dreams.

He remembered their first year in high school when the Math Prize consumed them. His own project on Civil War firearms had demonstrated—with cross-sectioned diagrams and dioramas and hundreds of hours of work and with his father breathing down his neck—that the change from smoothbore muskets (and their paltry 100-yard range) to rifled muzzle-loaders that could kill from a half-mile away was the reason for casualty lists of such frightful dimensions, without precedent in the annals of war. In the lamentable Bloodshed Between the States, the kind of shoulder-to-shoulder Napoleonic charge that smoothbore small-arms required—and this he showed with toy soldiers and the firing of miniature guns, as well as with bar graphs and trajectory equations—was catastrophically retained as a battle technique though technology had gone marching on. The resulting slaughter of such close formations was worse than Waterloo.

He won second prize.

Her project, on the other hand, had involved mathematical pyramids (strange diagrams of numbers, dashes, greater than/lesser than symbols, digits in triangular formations, lines tipped with directional arrows) all of which connected two streams of descendants of the great cotton and rice plantations. One stream listed the black descendants of the white patriarchs and their sons; the other stream listed the descendants of the plantation slaves (that is, those descendants who had two black progenitors). Though both streams of descendants bore the plantation-family name—the Calhouns, the Slaughters, the Boykins, the Hamiltons and Hamptons and such—their paths in life had greatly diverged. Leela was thorough. With the help of the school librarian and of military historians and of black clergymen and schoolteachers, she tracked the offspring of slaves who enlisted (both of those who wore blue and of those who wore gray). She wrote to genealogical societies. She traced descendants of those who escaped and of those who stayed; of those who crossed the Ohio and of those who kept on keeping house for Confederate generals and brigadier-generals, kept on wet-nursing their wedlock children, kept on bearing them other ones too. She won first prize.

Her relentless curiosity
, read the citation…
and especially her highly original “probability statistics” linking past family history with present occupation and welfare…

In short, the judges had been dazzled and bemused.

Her numerical creativity
, the citation continued,
is one more tribute to the extraordinary mathematical foundation laid down by the late Corinne Slaughter, a gifted teacher whose loss to this county some years ago is still greatly lamented by fellow teachers, and by parents and students
alike—
though not mourned on this particular occasion, the citation might have added, by her mathematically gifted son, since Cobb forgave neither Leela nor his mother for his own second prize.

Cobb’s father, a descendant of Confederate Brigadier-General James Slaughter, nephew to President James Monroe, had been incensed and had punched out two of the judges. “Which side are you turncoats on?” his father had shouted. His father stank of corn whisky at the time.

“You should have won, Cobb,” Leela-May told him. “You’re an engineering genius. These miniature muskets are unbelievable.” Her eyes were shining. “Do you have statistics on all this? D’you have the number of smoothbores? Number of rifles? Did only white regiments have the rifles, and black ones the cast-off muskets? D’you know the percentages used in each battle? D’you have deaths from each kind of firearm at each battle? Will you let me see the statistics?”

There was something weird about the way that numbers turned her on. Numbers turned Cobb on too, but only after he had applied them to moving parts and tangible structures. Leela, on the other hand, seemed to find numbers themselves—the ciphers and cryptic symbols—strangely beautiful and full of narrative mystery. Cobb thought that she was slightly and seductively insane, the way his own mother had been. His mother had taught Cobb and Leela and everyone else in Promised Land their earliest math.

Listen to the cicadas, his mother—chalk-smeared and frail—used to urge the second- and third-graders. She would make the children beat out cicada-time with the palms of their hands on their desks. That rhythm is based on prime numbers, she would tell them. She showed them how math could describe the way leaves spiraled around a twig, and could predict how
pine cones would fall from a tree, and how waves would make patterns on the sand. Math makes the world go round. Math is the Wizard of Oz, she would say. Math’s the magician who pulls secrets out of his hat, but the best of all is, you can learn what his secrets are.

Math was Leela’s favorite subject and in the second grade she would hang around after school to talk to Cobb’s mother. In later years, in middle school and high school, Cobb began to do better in math than Leela. He had made a vow. He stayed after school and asked Miss Morrow for extra help, though the arrangements were complicated because Miss Morrow had spent years in the North.

“I can’t ever let my father find out you’re helping me,” Cobb explained, “because he knows you taught school in Boston.”

“I understand perfectly,” Miss Morrow had said. “Your mother was an extraordinary math teacher, Cobb. I know you want to do her proud.”

“We could do graphs for each battle, Cobb,” Leela suggested on the night of the Math Prize in high school.

The school photographer nudged them closer together. “In front of your battle diorama,” he said to Cobb. “Closer. Tilt your heads inwards. Closer. Yes, touching, like that.”

Leela draped her arm around Cobb’s shoulders. “We could write the Mathematics of the War Between the States,” she suggested. “What do you say?”

He wanted to say: “You’re nuts,” but he could not afford such bald statements. This was the very big difference between them: she could blurt out whatever stray thought crossed her mind; he had to think first. He had to think very carefully. He had to assess consequences. In any case the words would have come out—he was afraid they would have come out—as shamefully thick with worship.

“One more time,” the photographer said. “Cobb, put your arm around the winner.”

Cobb’s father was shambling toward them. Cobb was so nervous, so overcome by Leela’s closeness and her praise, that he said the last thing he wanted to say. “You’re a Yankee-lover and a nigger-lover, Leela-May. You won because you’re full of liberal crap, and Miss Morrow loves that.”

“What?” Leela said. “I don’t believe you said that. You’re nuts. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nuts like my father?” he warned, his voice low. He tried to indicate the looming shadow.

“You’re nothing like your old man. You’re way too smart and way too nice. You’re like your mother. You’re a math genius like she was.”