Displacement (2 page)

—No. Even children have a sense of revenge. It’s a basic instinct. But
Justice
requires a sense of art. Like art, Justice has to challenge. It has to intrude on preconceived notions.

—I don’t follow.

My words fell from my mouth as would stones.

—I killed those people in ways that reflected how they’d killed me, or ways that reflected fundamental Truths . . . Truths from On High or from deep within those I killed . . . that could cut through their senses of comfort. That would let me reclaim the hijacked power they’d asserted over me. I had to challenge what they’d imagined to be safe for them, because they’d challenged and warped my sense of being safe in my own body.

—I . . . very much . . . need an example. Please.

His judgment-less request
obliged
me to speak of how I’d passed Judgment. My throat clotted. This was much harder than I’d thought it would be, no matter how many times I’d prepared to cross this threshold, when I would have to make known and then cast aside the turmoil that had driven me to reap lives. Strong emotions
hurt
as they are released. Even emotions like love hurt. Yet unless I purged what was inside me, I’d never be free of it. It would latch to me beyond my pine-coffin escape in Potter’s Field. If I escaped still burdened, I’d not truly be free.

Doctor Johansson wished to understand my trespasses . . . the mask I wore, the avatar I’d become. Invading the senses of safety of others is unsafe for the trespasser as well. To explain all would lead Doctor Johansson into these unsafe places with me. Did I have the right to do this, to a man who held no ill will toward me?

I choked down the blood-warm scree in my throat.

—All right, Doctor. I’ll give you an example. Professor Molino was a two-faced son of a bitch. He was a liar and a fraud and he could have better served us both by telling the truth. But because he was such a manipulative, shifty-eyed snake he ruined two years of my life. Just took them away from me, for
nothing
. Nothing but his own niche in that Political Science department he thought he ruled.

Sickness, outrage, as Molino greased me with that half-living gaze of his, his left eye never fixing on me, but afloat, drifting in the welling of clear gel that congealed under his lids. His one dead eye was less animated than were the smooth, stone and metal eyes of the Great Western Thinkers whose busts adorned the shelves of his office along with gimcrack Doric column bookends of plaster.

“I’m recommending you be dropped from the program, Dean.” Each word is like a blow. Not random, like the blows I’d landed on a face more like my own than that of any child I might father. But precise as those of a martial artist.

“
Dean
.” How fucking dare he use my first name now? As a weapon?

For two years it’s been “Mr. Garrison,” and now as he brings down the axe, he wants to be a friend? All his reassurances amounting to a mouthful of shit, the scalding flood of memories of his “grooming me” to be one of his prized students making me loathe myself for being so gullible. Molino is throned before me, sitting in complete comfort into his own paunch. Even his face sits.

“
Why?
” The word is a choked whisper. As a choked whisper spoken by another, the word would haunt me in a way that would rewrite this moment.

“You’re not qualified to be a student here, certainly not in the graduate program. It’s doubtful you’d be qualified to be an undergraduate at this university. For two years, you’ve been conning this department into thinking you’re a competent scholar. But competence is beyond you. You demonstrated that when you first came here.”

I stand in this arena of career execution, the rules of this terminal game unknown to me. Livy and Lorenzo Valla look down in disdain from their perches behind Molino. With his affected Noel Coward diction, Molino refers to the grades of my first semester, when I’d come to this university exhausted, having had a full class load throughout the summer while working forty hours a week. For a year and a half, he’s told me these grades would have no bearing on my career. Now he’s done with me, and this ace comes into play.

I’d been given warning letters to improve my performance, which I had. But now, according to the head of the Graduate Division, these improvements weren’t enough . . . despite Molino’s hand-on-my-shoulder assurances that he’d gone to bat for me at the academic review sessions.

I know he’s betrayed me, and I feel like cackling. The man’s academic specialty is Machiavelli, whose bust presides over the infamous overstuffed leather sofa that dominates the wall to my left. It’s the sofa on which a number of female grad students and undergrads had come to deeper personal and intellectual understandings with Molino. It’s the sofa on which desperate prospective new faculty members were invited to sit during campus interviews; once the candidate had sunk deeply into the cushions, Molino would invite the paschal lamb to help himself or herself to coffee from the porcelain service baited across the room. Molino and the other Inquisitor faculty would judge the suitability of the candidate based on how gracefully he or she could rise from the sofa.

It’s too sick to acknowledge, this man’s nature and his field of study. But why am I worth the effort of crushing
now
?

“This department does not have any more time to waste on you. You are a distraction and a liability.”

My mind screams: “THEN WHY HAVE YOU TOLD ME THAT I’M YOUR GOLDEN BOY?! WHY THE FUCK HAVE YOU STARTED GUNNING FOR ME AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY?”

I instead bow to the totemic power of this office. This chapel. I genuflect to the Great Tomes on his shelves. The staid Ivy League mustiness of the carpet. Even the yellowing rolls of thick newsprint he’s placed among his books to suggest Roman scrolls. He wears the place as a cloak of earthly and spiritual power the way that Borgia popes wore their robes.

My voice defies my screaming mind and whispers: “I think I understand, sir.”

“I’m glad of that. There’s no reason to protract this unfortunate situation. It should not be more complicated than it need be.”

His upper lip does not move as he speaks words of cutting emptiness; his still lip and shaggy moustache make him look vaguely like a rabbit. His dripping eyes float with his gaze, and I realize I hate his eyes. Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart” murmurs to me of how an unsightly eye can drive someone to murder. With that thought, the fine wood clock in the corner beside Petrarch ticks in my awareness with the rhythm of water dripping in a pan.

“Will I be awarded the master’s degree?”

“You’ve earned the master’s. In theory. It’s reflected on your transcript. In spring, you’ll have it as a consolation prize.”

The clock’s metronome dirge continued as I turned and passed under the guard of Dante by the door.

I signed for a letter the next week informing me I’d not be awarded the master’s degree. I was numb as I read it, too dazed to feel Molino’s
coup de grace
.

Later, in the kind of sympathetic exchange tinged with gloating that is the jellied backbone of academia, I was told by one of the younger faculty members that at the last meeting of the year, Molino had urged I not be granted the master’s, that to award it to me would invalidate the credibility of the department and the university. The young faculty member, in his tenure-track largesse, paid for the coffee at the end of our meeting. I stared at the brown rings dried in my cup long after he left.

To compound the humiliation, I couldn’t pack up and leave; I had to linger through the exam period to come away with credits for the courses I’d paid for. I dangled. Inert as the Hanged Man in a Tarot deck.

I was deadwood in Molino’s reign. Disowned. Errant. Over my last weeks at the department, I figured out, through asking the right questions and eavesdropping at the right moments, that Molino had big plans: he’d petitioned the University to hire away from Harvard a Professor Herliman, a grad school friend of his who’d become a luminary in Early Modern political theory. News of Herliman’s move virus’ed through academia, and sterling applications to the Political Science department flooded in.

Molino would lap up Herliman’s overflow. Therefore I, and his other chaff-students doing unorthodox research at his behest, had to be jettisoned in favour of the new crop. Each of us he cast aside were unable to secure the letters of recommendation needed to go on.

Two years of my life made ash in a graduate program with nothing to show for it. Two years of my life exiled in a shithole college town with nothing to show for it, all for a petty tyrant’s inflated ego. A man who’d lied to me, knowing I was expendable, that if the research I did proved unfashionable, he could be rid of me. But if it turned out well, he could cry to the world how he’d fostered my brilliant young mind.

A man who knew I could be flushed when better prospects to jack his reputation came along.

I carry defeat like lead beside my liver.

* * *

—And when you killed Molino, you reflected his two-faced nature? No trace of tension in his voice. In his position, I don’t know that I could be so calm.

—
Brought forth
might be more accurate than
reflect
.

—By taking a machete and giving him two faces, literally?

He spoke as one would ask,
May I come in?
I granted him entry to my trespasses.

—No. Splitting his face gave him two halves of a face. What I’d tried to do was fit a two-sided mirror in the wound, so each half-face would find a whole in the reflections. But I couldn’t get the mirror to stay in the bloody groove.

After hours near the campus, on an errand in the college town I hated. It was twilight: a time not defined by the setting of the sun, but by the shift from the vespers-shuffle of students bearing spine-curving book bags to the chugging of fortress-like SUVs, their rear windows reflecting the flicker-glow of backseat DVD players sedating trophy kids just picked up like laundry parcels from daycare.

I walk familiar streets unburdened by thick tomes, just a small valise. I worry I’ll be recognized. But though I see people I’ve taken classes with, I’m unnoticed. The face of one tossed out of grad school is a sight resented by other grad students. Bit by bit, the offending sight is pushed into invisibility, much like the long-vacant house of a suicide on a sunny street.

Sandwich shops I used to frequent are now grooming salons for men and women. Massage and aromatherapy suites have replaced a used bookstore. The wheeled suburban homes that are minivans thin out as I catalogue the changes to the town. I babble to my cancer, muttering things like, “
Soon I’ll have some payback for you
,” and “
I’m going to set right the reason you exist, yes indeedy
,” to distract myself, to keep from backing out. I walk the streets, full of the deep-gnawing uncertainty that has caused my very cells to shark my flesh. I half hope that I might get lost in my thoughts and miss Molino in his office, and thus recuse myself from vengeance.

I carry the doubt in my marrow, until I come to a reliquary of that which will keep me safe throughout my crusade of Justice and righting of Karmic wrongs. Over the span of a breath, doubt bowed in reverence to my new certainty as I tranced to the window display of a chain bookstore that doubled as a corporate coffee shop, a place like one in which I’d worked as a humiliated puppet in another life, when a future with options still seemed to stretch before me. I looked at the high-end hardbacks and paperbacks laid in a carefully posed jumble. There was no stated theme to the display, beyond the fact that all the novels had been released in the past week. Yet the cover of each book is a prayer. An idolatry to fear and sainted worry. Fear that the sacred home, and all the home implies and the goods it contains, might be violated, might be depreciated by the stigma of a bloody boot-print on its white carpets. The razor-wielding apes and speckled bands swollen with poison that stalked the sitting rooms of more than a century ago are reborn as diabolical killers, Dark and Shadowy Men given new expression as fiends suitable for defeat by Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd or Angelina Jolie in the inevitable film adaptations. These killers don’t merely kill. Mere killing is
vulgar
, suitable for dank bars that are shown on the evening news to be full of lowlifes who might deserve to die. These mythic killers disrupt. They crack foundations. Their power to induce sweat-sweetened worry is as primordial as their capacity to induce delight. The books in the window are a sacred pandemonium. A wallow of bourgeois trinkets intended to be taken home and ultimately reaffirm the home’s safety and sanctity. But only after an investment of anxiety is offered, like the church testimonial of a hypocrite, to the shadowy figures on the books’ covers . . . ominous as the silhouettes on Neighbourhood Crime Watch signs. Lush homes with single lights left on in attic windows adorn several covers, hinting of victims inside awaiting the arrival of the Mythic Killer the same way a lascivious old aunt in an Edwardian melodrama would await her lothario. Other covers show family photos with the glass of their frames cracked, dashed to lovely hardwood floors cluttered with the remnants of violence. A bloody handprint on the window of a country cabin. A young woman whose frightened eyes are held in the sliver of light that strikes the ornately moulded closet door behind which she peers.

The stimuli of the covers are Pavlovian as the glowing, gaunt-cheeked faces on magazine covers that beam next to article teaser-lines like “Pathogens in Your Handbag?” The books nurture a loving blend of envy and worry: envy for their comfortable settings and the lifestyles of their protagonists, and worry that those settings and lifestyles might be invaded. The delicious treat awaiting the buyer is the reassertion of normalcy after the Shadowy Men have accepted the adulterous invitation to trespass. The books are narcotics, as carefully marketed and tested as the soothing greens of the carpets between the bookstore shelves and the opiate greens on the logo of the coffee mugs sold in the adjoining cafe.

The sight of the books, totems of what I would channel, crystallized a kind of armour around me. I felt safe—a walking vessel of potential. Where doubt had been, the dark angel of our times now entered, much in the way New Age charlatans are said to take their Atlantean and Alien “Walk-Ins.”