Visiting Professor (25 page)

“Are you seriously suggesting it’s safe to put fluoride in drinking water?”

“Are you for or against family values?”

“What’s your position on infidelity?”

“What is your position on incest?”

“If God was really against incest,” I started to explain, “He would have created two Edens within commuting distance of each
other,” but I might as well have been whistling into the wind.

“Do you agree with those who claim that serial murder is a search for serial orgasm?”

“Speaking as an expert on chaos, do you think premature ejaculation can be cured?”

“Does theoretical chaos hold out hope for men who can’t achieve orgasm?”

I could barely speak; I felt the words catch in my throat. “It is a matter of getting a jump start,” I managed to say, “of
being downwardly mobile. … The next thing you know, whoooosh, you are pushing the speed limit on the Interstate.”

“Are you saying you’re against the fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit?”

“He fielded that question last time we interviewed him,” an anchorwoman noted.

A siren wailed in the distance, its pitch rising as it approached. The heads of the journalists craned toward the sound. “Thank
you for the interview, Mr. Falk,” one of the reporters called through the open window. The television lens zoomed back until
it was nesting in the camera. The journalists scurried away to film the arrival of the white truck with the pulsating light
that sent tiny orange explosions skidding across the rain-soaked road.

The sight of the orange light released in me a flood of memories. I thought of the truck spewing sand onto the icy road the
night I arrived in Backwater and the tiny orange explosions on the ice-lacquered pavement, I thought of the ice storm that
had been caused by the Siberian night moth, I thought of Occasional Rain jump-starting my battery, I thought of her warm mouth
closing over a part of me it had not been to before.

Could it be, was it within the realm that I had fallen wildly, eternally, achingly in love with a girl who actually existed?

Shaken, shaking, I stumbled away from the sheriff’s cruiser. Drifting between the used cars in the lot toward the street,
I heard Word Perkins’s demented cackle reverberating in my brain.

In the beginnin’ was the Woid …

The rain had let up, a damp darkness shrouded the scene. Down the block the journalists thronged around the white truck. Norman
and Bobby and Bubba, looking like ghostly angels in the harsh white light of the kliegs, pushed through the crowd with a stretcher
containing the perpetrator gift-wrapped in the sheriff’s yellow slicker. They came up behind the tailgate and folded back
the wheels under the stretcher and maneuvered the corpse into the back of the truck and closed the doors. Norman rapped his
knuckles twice on the side of the truck.

The siren started wailing again, at first feebly, then with an intensity that reminded me of my mother’s inhuman shriek. I
pressed my palms against my ears, dampening the sound. At least Word Perkins would not be disturbed by the noise, I thought.

… the Woid was whit God
.

As the truck pulled away from the curb and started down the street toward me, I caught sight of letters gleaming over the
windshield. They read:

I racked my exhausted brain, but could not recall anything even remotely resembling this in my
Royal Canadian
Air Force Exercise Manual
or my other English sourcebooks. Nor did it strike me as being Lilliputian.

Which meant it was a new language.

The King’s English had slipped into chaos.

The sheriff detonates
the head of a match with his thumbnail and holds the flame to the tip of the cigar jutting from his mouth. “I’d go an French-kiss
uh horse’s arse,” he allsows, interrupting himself to suck the cigar into life, “just to see the faces on the Criminal Investigation
boys when they catch the evenin’ news.” He exhales, bats away the smoke. “You gotta hand it to the perpetrator,” he rambles
on. “Killin’ hisself the way he did went’n saved the county the expense of uh trial, not to mention eventual incarceration.”

Norman is unusually subdued as he wheels the sheriff’s cruiser onto the Interstate, direction Backwater. “Believe it or not,
I never seen no one blow his brains out before,” he announces.

“I seen uh perpetrator once,” the sheriff says, sinking back into his memories, “it was up in Boston, I was only uh depety
sheriff at the time, he got wind he was gonna get arrested an’ rigged uh garden hose from the exhaust into his car, then locked
hisself in an’ started up the motor. He went’n killed hisself listenin’ to uh Judy Garland tape.” The sheriff’s eyes screw
up into a nostalgic squint as he hoarsely croaks the words. “ ‘I’m al-ways chay-sin’ rain-bows …’ That song was still playin’,
back ‘n’ forth, back ‘n’ forth, when we busted into the car. Funny how a tune can stick in your head.”

Sheriff Combes twists in his seat belt to talk to Lemuel, who is lost in the darkness in a corner of the backseat. “You bein’
un-American an’ all, I don’t expect as how you’re familiar with rainbow chasin’.”

Lemuel says moodily. “I have chased a rainbow or two in my day.”

Norman says, “If rainbow chasin’s anything like ambulance chasin’, it’s against the law.”

They cruise the Interstate without a word for half a dozen miles. Norman breaks the silence. “Word Perkins rubbing the dumdum
with garlic before he shot himself to death proved the perpetrator was the perpetrator.”

“Garlic, hell, goin’ an’ killin’ hisself is what proved he was the perpetrator,” the sheriff says. “Perpetrators who didn’t
perpetrate don’t blow their brains out.”

“There are exceptions to your rule,” Lemuel remarks darkly.

“Why would a perpetrator kill himself if he’s not the perpetrator?” Norman asks innocently.

Before Lemuel can respond, an eighteen-wheeler coming from the other direction blinds Norman and the sheriff with its brights.
Norman flicks his headlights several times, then raises an arm to shade his eyes. “Son of a bitch,” he swears.

Bubba’s voice, crackling with static, bursts over the car radio. “What’cha say I hang a U and nail the fucka?”

The sheriff glances at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. “We’re late already,” he says into the microphone. “If we don’t
show up at the Kampus Kave before they polish off their lasagnes, the state cops’ll go an’ arrest the perpetrator theirselves.”

Lemuel catches a glimpse of Norman’s eyes in the rear view mirror. The deputy sheriff is peering into the mirror, trying to
penetrate the darkness in the backseat. “I just thought of somethin’, “ he says, “namely, old Lemuel back there used to share
an apartment with the broad who cuts hair in Backwater.”

Lemuel realizes Norman is on the verge of putting two and two together, realizes also that the deputy sheriff is simple-minded
enough to decide it equals four. “What’s-Her-Face and I broke up in April,” he says quickly. “I have not seen … hide nor hair
of her since.”

“Lemuel here is a bona fidee hero,” the sheriff says, trailing after his own thoughts. “I’m gonna go ‘n’ put him in for uh
citizens’ medal for assistin’ the law enforcement authorities.”

The cruiser speeds past the sign planted at the spot where the countryside ends and the village of Backwater begins. Lemuel
catches a glimpse of it through the car window. “Backwater University—Founded 1835. Home of the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary
Chaos-Related Studies.” Underneath someone has spray-painted the words “Chaos sucks!”

Could it be … Is it within the realm … Has he stumbled across another, until now unsuspected, property of chaos? Or was the
graffiti merely a chapter heading in
The Greenhorn’s Guide to Polite Oral Sex?

Norman spots the Rebbe’s house and starts to slow down. Lemuel leans forward. “Can you drop me downtown?” he asks casually.
“I am scheduled to access the supercomputer over at the Institute until midnight.”

A minute later Norman eases the cruiser up to the curb behind the
two state police cars parked in front of the Kampus Kave. The cruiser with Bobby and Bubba in it pulls up behind them. The
sheriff corkscrews in his seat and offers a three-fingered handshake over his shoulder.

“I’d give uh hell of a lot to know what you do on that computer of yours when you’re not solvin’ serial murders.”

Lemuel, pushing open the door, says, “It is a relevant question, I am glad you asked it. What I do is plunge through the decimal
expansion of pi toward infinity.”

“Uh-huh,” Norman grunts.

“Don’t it make your head swim?”

One foot out the door, Lemuel says, “Compared to the high you get from infinity, marijuana is kids’ stuff.”

Lemuel starts down the block toward the Institute, glances back to make sure the coast is clear, doubles back and peeks through
the “e” of the “Kampus Kave” on the window. Molly, all smiles, is distributing toothpicks to the four state troopers and a
television cameraman as they slide out of the booth and shake paws with the sheriff and his deputies.

Lemuel realizes he does not have an instant to lose. He lumbers diagonally across Main Street, passes the twenty-four-hour
laundromat, turns into the unpaved alleyway, takes the steps of the narrow wooden staircase two at a time. His chest heaving,
he presses his ear to the door. Hearing nothing, he feels for the key hidden over the cement lintel. When his fingers close
over it he feels a surge of relief. His hand trembles as he tries to fit the key into the lock. He fills his lungs with air,
steadies his right hand with his left, inserts the key and opens the door.

The room is awash in the eerie light cast by the projector with the piece of mauve silk over it. Mayday, curled up on her
blanket, stares at Lemuel with unblinking eyes filled with cataracts and reproach.

Lemuel bends down and strokes the dog’s head. “Hey, it is me, L. Fucking Falk,” he whispers in the dog’s ear. “I did not go
to Miami-on-the-Euphrates after all.”

On the phonograph, a needle is scratching in the end grooves of a record. Lemuel spots garments flung carelessly over the
back of the couch and instinctively begins to fold them—a pleated miniskirt, a body-hugging ribbed sweater, sea-green tights,
gray Calvin Klein underpants. His hearts, the one in his chest, the one on his sleeve, skip
several beats as he folds a pin-striped button-down shirt, a pair of designer jeans, silk boxer shorts.

From the bedroom come the soft gasps that originate in the back of the throat of someone fucking.

Lemuel listens for a moment, then stepping silently over the dog, snatches
The Hite Report
from the shelf. Grasping it in his suddenly clammy hands, he backs out of the room, locks the door behind him, puts the key
back on the lintel.

He just has time to duck between a garage filled with Spring Fest floats and an abandoned building before headlights appear
at both ends of the alley. Twisting and turning to avoid potholes, four automobiles crawl slowly toward each other along the
unpaved road and meet under the staircase leading to Rain’s loft. The headlights snap off. Car doors slam. Metal taps echo
on the wooden steps. Knuckles drum on the door.

“Anybody home?” The voice has Norman’s unmistakable twang.

“Call again, Norman.”

“You in there, Rain?”

A naked electric bulb flickers on over the lintel. The door opens. A familiar voice reacts to the presence of the law enforcement
contingent. “Z’up, Norman? Z’up, Sheriff?”

“Miss Occasional Rain Morgan,” the sheriff intones, “we got us a signed, sealed warrant to search the premises.”

Norman adds, “You could save us all a lot of pain by handing over the hollowed-out sex book called
The Weight Report.”

From inside the loft, a man’s voice calls, “What’s the deal, babe?”

Rain can be heard groaning, “Oh, shit, this is all I needed.”

The sheriff, his three deputies, the four state troopers and the reporter filming the scene with a shoulder-held camera crowd
into the loft.

Gripping
The Hite Report
under his arm, Lemuel disappears down the dark alleyway.

Lemuel lets himself
in the front door of the Rebbe’s house, wipes the soles of his shoes on a shabby carpet in the vestibule before making his
way into the living room. He hears the sound of a radio coming from behind the closed door of the kitchen. Still clutching
Rain’s hollowed-out book, wondering if
The Hite Report
has the sacred name
of God buried somewhere in its pages, he looks around at the Rebbe’s waist-high leaning towers of books stacked, spine outward,
snaking along the walls of the room and on up the stairs. Back in the alleyway, he flirted with the idea of flinging the book
and its contents into a garbage bin, but decided against it; the book, which surely had Rain’s fingerprints all over it, might
be discovered and turned over to the police. Better to hide it, but where? The last place anyone would look for a book, he
reasoned, was in a pile of books. And the first pile that leaped to mind was the Rebbe’s collection of books with the name
of God in them.