The Natural Order of Things (16 page)

Edmund smiles. Soon he will be the master, the person in total control of the situation, and it is he who will dictate the terms. The sensation of triumph is so alien to him that, for one terrible second, he feels nauseous, but he controls his stomach long enough to snap several pictures in quick succession, one after another until the inevitable, hideous finish.

The Jesuits have their spies everywhere; this is something every student understands implicitly, and when Edmund races from the main building, he is hardly surprised to see a half dozen figures smoking cigarettes under a streetlamp like a cadre of secret police. In the dread silence they walk toward him, the entire staff of the school newspaper.

“Where have you been, Campion?” they ask.

“Up in Batya’s belfry?”

“Tell us, has the bitch gone batty yet?”

“Were you busy reciting from your masturbatory magnum opus?”

“Drowning her in the roiling river of your powerful prose?”

“Plundering the putrid pink petals of Pinter’s pussy?”

“Or is it purely platonic between you and the supreme priestess of poetry?”

As they unfurl their gaudy banners of alliteration, his friends snicker, but beneath the rush of words there is real venom.

“We’ve been observing you, Campion.”

“You can’t hide from us.”

“We’re the press, the paparazzi.”

“We know what you’ve been up to.”

“You lust for accolades and awards.”

“And the favors of the quintessential literary slut.”

Edmund turns away without answering them. He must escape this wicked labyrinth of hunger and ambition. As he passes the chapel he hears voices. The priests are holding their vigil for the football team. He wants to cast stones at the stained glass window of Jesus who dares him to do it with His sweet mocking eyes. If it’s true that God punishes talented people for their hubris, what does he do to the mediocrities of the world when they behave in the same way; how does he rectify their arrogance? But Edmund knows the answer to this, has always known. He has the uncanny sensation that the whole universe is just a thin sheet of paper, a delicate piece of parchment, and that at any moment it can be ripped apart, and everything—every word, every letter, every trace of meaning—will slip from the page and tumble into the void. Things that now seem imperishable are no more real than some poorly told story composed in vanishing ink.

“Why do you look so pale!” his friends shout from a distance. “Guilt is written all over your face!”

Edmund opens the carrying case slung over his shoulder and examines the camera. Clutching his head, lurching along the slick cobblestones, he bemoans his nightmarish fate, that for the rest of his life his own unceasing stupidity will follow him around like a curse. He concedes defeat, and though his friends fail to understand the meaning of his words, he repeats them over and over again.

“The lens cap!” he cries. “The lens cap! It’s still on the camera!”

Unlike the other faculty members, Batya Pinter doesn’t live in the city but in a cottage of timber and stone located at the end of a long stretch of gravel road far from the violent protrusion of the school’s gothic tower. Late at night, alone in her bed, her head pounding, her back still aching from her peripatetic strolls up and down the rows of desks, she leafs through the latest batch of term papers and drinks her medicinal tea. So far only one essay has captured her attention. The prose is more than merely refined; it’s positively Nabokovian, and she finds herself laughing out loud at many passages. In the empty house, her soft sardonic laughter sounds a bit sinister, slightly loony. It can’t be helped. She knows plagiarism when she sees it, twenty years as an educator have sharpened her powers of detection, but this student is so bold and so utterly contemptuous of her abilities that he has cited Claire Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom as his sources. At the bottom of the cover page, in big block letters, Batya gives the boy this ultimatum: “If you wish to pass my class, you must submit a new paper!” Here is the bait, the lure. Tomorrow there will be a reckoning.

She sets aside the essay and, before turning off the lights, forces herself to swallow the dregs from her third cup of tea. At what point, she wonders, does medicine become poison? When does it pull the fretful insomniac down a dark tunnel of sleep, dreamless and black as oblivion? She won’t have to wait long. The stuff makes her lightheaded and a little queasy. Her breathing becomes shallow, her skin slick with sweat. Her body is in revolt. The bedroom walls slowly converge and seal her inside a tomb that alternately gleams with hoarfrost and glows with embers—cold and hot, hot and cold. She throws off the blankets and listens to the insistent scratch of branches against the windowpane, the faint rustle of dead leaves tumbling across the ground, the quavering howls of coyotes in the valley.

The coyotes—outsiders, interlopers—are foreign to these parts, and have trekked vast distances, some from the pine forests in the southern part of the state, others from the lonesome prairies further west. Now, as the moon crests the treetops, they bound up the steep slopes to spar under the gas lamps in the village square and to plunder the nearby farms where they feast on abundant livestock—goats, alpacas, and bleating longhaired sheep. Police warn residents to keep their pets indoors after sundown, but their advice often goes unheeded. Little remains of the unfortunate Pomeranians and toy poodles. Along the edge of the sandpit lake the police find scattered bits of bone sucked of their marrow and hides so bloody and mangled that no one can identify them with any certainty. Trying to keep their burning guilt at bay, the owners lead their sniveling children into backyards where they place simple stone markers next to hastily dug graves. From the window of her den, Batya sometimes watches these rites, such as they are, but feels no sympathy for the mourners. What do they know of loss?

The coyotes are very close, but their infernal baying is abruptly silenced by the banshee shriek of a siren, the crack of a gunshot. Batya sits up, her hands shaking. She reaches for her tea but knocks the empty cup off the nightstand. It hits the hardwood floor without shattering. She leans forward, her mind suddenly clear, more focused than it has been in weeks. The hinges begin to squeak, and the bedroom door swings slowly open.
She catches her breath, bunches the blankets in her fists. A spectral figure hovers at the threshold, filling the room with a smoldering lavender light.

Batya knows why he is here and can sense his deep displeasure. She
tries
to reason with him, tries to explain how she needs the heat and hunger of a young man, how she still aches for something tactile, raw, carnal. It has been over two years since that horrific day when she found him slumped over his desk in the den, and it’s time he stop haunting her, let her get on with her life, but her husband remains unconvinced, incommunicative. His eyes are hooded with indifference, his injuries vast and eternal.

He floats into the room and lingers near the bed, the scene of so many crimes of passion, but he does not speak to her. In life he was always a stoic man whose passions were confined to and restricted by his compulsion for the most arcane books on botany. In this regard he hasn’t changed much. Nothing, not even the boundless rewards of the sweet hereafter, can alter the monumental edifice of his brooding demeanor. Only the sad exterior remains—the stooped shoulders, the weak chin, the wrinkled hound’s-tooth sport coat, the paisley bow tie, the black flannel slacks. He refused to wear the things she bought him in the city—cashmere sweaters, colorful dress shirts, mother of pearl cufflinks—but if he had no sense of style, he certainly had no pretensions either. Few men were more genuine or more stubborn. She adored this about him; she also found it infuriating.

Overwhelmed by grief, she reaches out to embrace her husband, but before her fingertips can caress the angry wound where the bullet blasted through the right side of his skull, she feels him recoil from her touch. He places the teacup on the nightstand. Then without warning, without saying goodbye, without delivering some ominous portent, he vanishes into the moonlight, and once again Batya finds that she is stranded in this house, frustrated and alone. Where does he go when he leaves her? To some celestial theme park? To a fiendish pit of suffering? Or does he simply retreat to that cold mahogany box in the ground, his head still wrapped in cotton gauze? And why, she wonders, are the dead permitted to haunt the living and not the other way around?

But these mysteries do not trouble her too terribly because she has learned that to vanish, whether by slow degrees or all at once, in an instant, is the only enduring and natural fact of the world.

An hour before daybreak she pulls on her jeans, a fleece jacket, a sturdy pair of hiking boots that she laces up to her ankles. She grabs a full bottle of tea from the refrigerator and then takes out her husband’s .38 revolver from a kitchen drawer. She glides her fingers along the handle of polished ivory. Made from the tusks of African elephants. Harvested by poachers of unimaginable cruelty. A gun of devastating political incorrectness.

With flashlight in hand and cigarette clamped between her teeth, she stumbles along the trail that she and her husband cleared with hatchet, rake, and hoe two summers ago. Now overgrown with giant hogweed and big clumps of bluestem flowers, the path winds between boulders glittering with quartz and curious glacial formations until it reaches the valley floor. Along the way, Batya traverses a narrow ledge of soft gray shale and walks beneath a precipitous wall of bog iron and jagged siltstone bejeweled with sea
lilies and brachiopods and mysterious things yet to be named by the scientists who come here to excavate the great armored fish and razor-toothed leviathans, monsters imprisoned in these rocks for eons and all but erased from the memory of the world and the imagination of man.

After battling her way through the brush with her walking stick, Batya finds the partially uprooted stump of a sycamore where her husband carved their initials in careful Gothic script, the B and P of her name now beginning to fade, the letters almost indistinguishable from the whorls of wood. The massive tree that once stood here was an ancient one. The rings indicate that it was already two hundred years old when the Whittelsey Indians briefly settled in this valley in the seventeenth century. After walking around the stump three times, the magic number, Batya sits down, crushes out her cigarette, and uncorks the bottle of tea. Through the creaking limbs of oaks and elms she can make out Venus and Mars rising just before this Halloween dawn.

Across the river, in the rough grass at the edge of a meadow, a dozen eyes stare at her with curiosity and desperate hunger. Batya turns the alien lance of light on them, but the coyotes do not scare easily. They stand their ground and paw at the dirt and clay. She recognizes them for what they really are, medicine men and shapeshifters, still reeling from their magic potions. After many centuries of exile they have returned to this spot to perform their sacred ghost dance.

When they lived here in this river valley, the Whittlesey would emerge from their wigwams after nightfall and form a sacred circle. To the accompaniment of drums, rattles, and flutes, the shamans would whirl before the evening fires and chant tales about the trickster Coyote: obsessed by his painfully engorged penis, Coyote devised clever schemes to penetrate the nubile and slick-skinned maidens who bathed in the beaver marsh or in the clear waters of the rushing river. Standing perfectly still in the swaying yellow reeds, he would wait for the maidens to float by and then suddenly pounce. Few girls evaded capture. Although he initially enjoyed numerous conquests, Coyote soon encountered trouble. For not everyone approved of his dalliances. Deep in the forest, there lived a lonely old crone who spent her days gathering wood and fetching water from the river. Though cursed with poor eyesight, the old woman had a keen sense of smell, and whenever she sensed Coyote lurking about, she clubbed him over the head with her cane of polished hickory. With a sharp cry of pain, Coyote jumped into the brambles and retreated to the safety of his small hollow. As he licked his wounds and pulled thorns from his backside he chuckled at the woman’s brave spirit and planned a most malicious revenge. On a moonless evening, amidst the flutter of bats and the chirping of crickets, he sidled into the old woman’s tent while she slept and, letting out a howl of unbridled merriment, slid between her withered legs. The next morning, the old woman awoke with a vaguely familiar sense of fulfillment. She laughed and sang, not unlike those beguiling maidens, and for many nights after this encounter, she left strangled hens and geese outside her tent, hoping these prizes might lure Coyote back to her bed. But he never returned. Indeed, he ignored her altogether, delighting in her solitude and desperate yearning, and in the years that followed, the woman faded away into bitter old age without ever again experiencing the pleasures of youth.

Batya knows the tale well, a fragment of a much larger storytelling tradition that by some miracle survived the expurgation of the Jesuit missionaries who conquered this land for Christendom. Legend has it that in the early 17
^th
century the pope’s foot soldiers,
bearing shields emblazoned with gold crosses, battled their way through the unaxed wilderness to this very spot, but the Indian holy men, by drinking magic tea and transforming themselves into various woodland creatures, managed to evade capture, conversion, slavery, and death. Mesmerized by the sound of the river, Batya daydreams of such liberation—to dissolve into a green vapor, to metamorphose into a black rat snake, a red-tailed hawk, a fat waddling opossum …

Above the rim of the valley, a thin band of steely October light stretches across the eastern horizon and turns the leaden clouds into hazy pink ribbons that look like chalk gently smeared on a blackboard. She finishes the last of her tea, but before making the arduous climb back to her house, she draws the .38 from her pocket. She unlatches the safety, lifts the gun above her head, and fires once into the air. Across the river, still watching her from the meadow, the crafty coyotes yelp and bolt into the woods.