Arkansas (7 page)

A third possibility was to talk about xenophobia: for if the Ripper suspects could be categorized, then the last rough category (after doctors and aristocrats) was immigrants.

And as I mulled over each of these angles, the one thing I could not get out of my mind was a police photograph I'd seen of the corpse of Mary Kelly, the last of Jack's victims and the only one to be killed in her room. Her body had been found on the bed, quite literally split down the middle. The nose had been cut off, the liver sliced out and placed between the feet. The kidneys, breasts, and the flesh from the thighs had been dumped on the bedside table, and the hand inserted into the stomach.

Even in my own epoch of serial killers and snuff films, of Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer, I'd never seen anything quite like that.

Three days passed in research. Each morning I'd wake vowing to conclude the afternoon with a decision, and each afternoon I'd go home having failed. Then only a week remained before Ben's paper was due, and I hadn't even started writing. It felt as if something had seized up in me, the way the screen of a computer will sometimes freeze into immobility. Nor did it help when Ben stopped by my carrel one afternoon to give me a book I'd already read and returned. “It's called
The Identity of Jack the Ripper,”
he said. “And according to this guy, at first they thought the Ripper was a Polish barber who went by the name of George Chapman, but then they found out that he had a double, a
Russian
barber, and that this double—”

“Also sometimes used the name Chapman. I know.”

“Oh, you've already read it? Well, never mind, then. I just thought in case you hadn't—”

“Thanks.”

“Say, you want a Seven-Up or something?”

I said why not.

We repaired to the vending machines, then taking our drinks outside, sat on a bench in the library courtyard. It was a warm spring day, better than most only in that the air was unusually clear. A breeze even seemed to carry the scent of mountains.

For a time the only noise in that courtyard, aside from the buzz of yellow jackets, was the pop of our drink cans opening. Then Ben said, “Strange, all this.”

“What?”

“Just ... our sitting together.”

“Why?”

“I'm not sure quite how to explain. You see, in the church—did I tell you I'm a Mormon?”

“No.”

“Well, in the church we have this very clear-cut conception of sin. And so I always assumed that if I ever committed a really big sin, like we're doing now ... I don't know, that there'd be a clap of thunder and God would strike me dead or something. Instead of which we're sitting here in this courtyard and the sun's shining. The grass is green.”

“But what's the sin?”

“You know. Cheating.”

“Is cheating really a sin?”

“Of course. It's part of lying.”

“Well,” I said, “then maybe the fact that the sun's shining and the grass is green means God doesn't really care that much. Or maybe God doesn't exist.”

Ben's face convulsed in horror.

“Just a possibility,” I added.

Ben leaned back in disillusion. “So you're an atheist,” he said. “I suppose I should have expected it. I suppose I should have guessed most homosexuals would be atheists.”

“Oh, some homosexuals are very religious. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to find out one or two were actually Mormons.”

“Ex-Mormons.”

“A lot more than two of those. But to get back to what you were saying, I wouldn't call myself an atheist. Instead I'd say I'm a skeptical lapsed Jew, distrustful of dogma.”

“Tony's Jewish too. Last night he was telling me about his circumcision—”

“His
bris.”

“—and how in Israel they use the foreskins to make fertility drugs.” He shook his head in wonder.

“Are you circumcised, Ben?”

“No, actually.” Blushing, he checked his watch.

We got up and walked toward the library. “Well, back to the salt mines,” Ben said at the main doors. “By the way, I hope you realize I'm working my butt off too. I really bit off more than I could chew this quarter.”

“Oh, I'll bet you can chew more than you think.”

“Probably. Still, I wanted to make sure you knew. I mean, I wouldn't want you thinking that the whole time you were sweating out this paper, I was playing pinball or something.” He wiped his nose. “By the way, have you decided who did it yet?”

“Not yet. The problem is, everyone has a different theory about the Ripper, and every theory has a hole in it.” Which was true. Indeed, looked at collectively, the theories ramified so far afield that the actual murders began to seem beside the point. For if you believed them all, then the Ripper was Prince Eddy
and
Walter Sickert. The Ripper was Frank Miles
and
M. J. Druitt
and
Sir William Gull. The Ripper was an
agent provocateur
sent by the Russian secret police to undermine the reputation of their London brethren. The Ripper was a Jewish
shochet,
or ritual slaughterer, suffering from a religious mania. The Ripper was a high-level conspiracy to squelch a secret marriage between Prince Eddy and a poor Catholic girl. The Ripper was Jill the Ripper, an abortionist betrayed by a guilt-ridden client and sent to prison, and therefore bent on avenging herself on her own sex.

Not to mention the black magician and the clique of Freemasons and (how could I forget him?) Virginia Woolf's cousin (and possibly Prince Eddy's lover), the handsome, demented James Stephen.

But which one? Or all of them?

Saying goodbye to Ben, I returned to my carrel. As it happened I'd left the photograph of Mary Kelly's corpse lying open on the desk. And how curious! As I sat down, that “butcher's shambles” no longer made me nauseated. Perhaps one really can get used to anything.

And upon this degraded body of the late nineteenth century,
I thought,
some real demon swooped, ransacking its cavities like a thief in search of hidden jewels, and finding instead only a panic, an emptiness, a vacancy.

But what demon? Who?

I looked up.

Modernism and espionage, Diaspora and homosexuality, religious mania and anti-Semitism and most vividly
—
to me most vividly
—
desire and disease, gruesomely coupled.

“Fantastic,” I said. For all at once—sometimes inspiration really is all at once—I saw who Ben's Ripper had to be.

The Ripper was the spirit of the twentieth century itself.

 

I worked fast those next days, faster than I'd ever worked on anything else. Looking back, I see that the pleasure I experienced as I wrote that paper lay in its contemplation as a completed object, like the Bailey bridge novel I was sure I would never begin. Or a Bailey bridge, for that matter. Bank to bank I built, and as I did a destination, a connection, neared. It was the same end I'd hoped to reach in my Somerset book: a sort of poeticization of that moment when the soul of my own century, the soul of vacancy itself, devoured the last faithful remnants of an age that had believed, almost without question, in presences.

After that, from the unholy loins of Jack the Ripper, whole traditions of alienation had been spilled, of which I was merely one exemplary homunculus. Eric was another: Eric with his cheerful, well-intentioned immorality. And Hunter. Even Ben. We were the nightmare Mary Kelly had dreamed the night she was murdered.

I finished, to my own surprise, three days early. That same afternoon my agent called. “Congratulate me,” I said. “I've just done the best work of my life.”

“Congratulations,” Andrew said. “Now when do I get to see pages?” To which request I responded, rather unconvincingly, “Soon.”

How could I have explained to him that the only thing that made it possible for me to write those pages was the knowledge that they would never bear my name?

I called Ben. He sounded happy and surprised at my news, and as before we arranged to meet on the third floor of the Beverly Center parking lot.

He was waiting in his car when I pulled up. “Nice to see you, Mr. Leavitt,” he said.

“Nice to see you too, Ben.” I climbed in. “Beautiful day, isn't it?”

“Mm.” He was staring expectantly at my briefcase.

“Oh, the paper,” I said, taking it out and handing it to him.

“Great,” Ben said. “Let's go up to the roof and I'll read it.”

“Read it?”

“What, you think I'm going to turn in a paper I haven't read?” He shook his head in wonderment, then inserting the key in the ignition, drove us up into sunlight. To be honest, I was a little surprised: after all, none of the other boys for whom I'd written had ever felt the need to verify the quality of my work. (Then again none of the other boys had been remotely scrupulous in the second sense of the word, either.) Still, I couldn't deny Ben the right to look over something that was going to be turned in under his name; in addition to which the prospect of seeing his astounded face as he reached the end of my last paragraph did rather thrill me; even in such a situation as this, I still had my writer's vanity. So I sat there, my ripper's eyes fixed on the contoured immensity in his polyester slacks, and only balked when he took a pen from his shirt pocket and crossed out a line.

“What are you doing?”

“I just think this sentence about Druitt is a bit redundant. Look.”

I looked. It was redundant.

“But you can't turn in a paper all marked up like that!”

“What, you thought I was going to turn in this copy? Are you kidding? No way! I'll type it over tonight on my own computer.”

He returned to his reading. Periodically he jotted a note in the margin, or drew a line through a word or phrase. All of which made me so nervous, he might have been Michiko Kakutani sitting in the next seat, reviewing one of my novels while I watched.

Finally Ben put the paper down.

“Well?” I said.

“Well...” He scratched his head with his pen. “It's very interesting, Mr. Leavitt. Very ... imaginative. The only thing is, I'm not sure it answers the assignment.”

“How so?”

“The assignment was to make a case for someone or other being Jack the Ripper. And basically, what you're saying is that it doesn't matter. That any of them, or all of them, could have been Jack the Ripper.”

“Exactly.”

“But that's not what Professor Robinson asked for.”

I spread my hands patiently on my lap. “I understand what's worrying you, Ben. Still, try to think about it this way. You have a murder mystery, right? A whodunit. Only there's no clear evidence that any one person did it. So the B student thinks, I'll just make a case for the most likely suspect and be done with it. But the A student thinks, More is going on here than meets the eye. The A student thinks, I've got to use this as an opportunity to investigate a larger issue.”

“I can see all that. Still, this stuff about twentieth-century modernism—I have to be honest with you, Mr. Leavitt, to me it sounds a little pretentious.”

“Pretentious!”

“I mean, very intelligent and all. Only the spirit of twentieth-century modernism—that can't hold a knife. That can't strangle someone. And so I'm afraid Professor Robinson will think it's—I don't know—off-the-wall.”

Clearly Ben had the limited vision of the B student.

“Well, I'm sorry you're disappointed,” I said.

“Oh, I'm not disappointed exactly! It just wasn't what I expected.”

“Fine. Then I'll go home this afternoon and rewrite it. You just have to tell me who you think actually did do it—”

“Mr. Leavitt—”

‘Was it M. J. Druitt, or James Stephen, or Dr. Pedechenko? Or how about Jill? It could have been Jill.”

Ben was silent.

Then: “Mr. Leavitt, you can't blame me for being worried. A lot rests on this paper for me. You, you've got nothing to lose.”

Was that true?

“And
you
don't risk expulsion if you get caught.”

“Well, naturally, and that's exactly why I'm offering to rewrite it.” (My anger had dissipated.) “After all, Ben, you're the customer, and the customer's—”

“Do you have to make it sound so ... commercial?”

“Isn't it?”

“I'm not sure,” Ben said. “I never have been.”

Once again he took out his pen. From the bottom of his breast pocket, I noticed, a tear-shaped blue ink stain seeped downward. “You must have put your pen away without the cap,” I said.

“Did I? I guess. I do it all the time.”

“Me too.”

With my forefinger, I stroked the stain. Ben's breathing quickened.

“Look,” he said, “about the paper. You don't have to rewrite it. I mean, if I didn't appreciate it, it probably says more about me than about you, right?”

“Not necessarily—”

“And anyway, I didn't come to you to get a B paper, I came to you to get an A paper. And if I don't recognize an A paper when I see one, all that points up are my limitations.”

“Maybe.” I moved my finger downward, to brush the cleft of his chest. “Or maybe it only points up the fact that I have a wider experience of these things. Remember, I've never gotten anything less than an A on a paper in my life—for myself or anyone else.”

“Mr. Leavitt, please don't touch me like that. Someone might see us.”

“I'm sorry.” I took my hand away.

“Thank you,” Ben said, clearing his throat. “And now I guess I owe you something, don't I?”

“Oh, don't worry about that. For that let's just wait until you get your grade. Then we can—”

“No, I'd rather get it over with, if you don't mind. Not have it hanging over my head.” He played with his collar. “Obviously we can't do it here. Where can we do it?”