The Black Hour (3 page)

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You can sit down.” I leaned my good hip on the corner of my desk and used the cane to keep balance. I swung my bag over my head and onto the floor. “What’s your name?”

“Nathaniel Barber.”

The student watched me get settled but didn’t say anything. He finally helped himself to the guest chair. Good boy.

“Did Dean Perry send you?”

My voice was sharper than I’d meant it to be, and the slap showed on the student’s face. “No.”

“You’re new? Just starting the program?”

“Yes.”

“So how am I your advisor?”

“I talked to Dr. Woo.”

Ah. There it was. “Dr. Woo sent you to me. Today.” I looked at my watch. “Before nine a.m.”

“He said you might need some help.”

Again with what I might need. “Did he now?”

J. Benjamin Woo and I had started at Rothbert the same year, reached tenure together. Which he couldn’t stand, because I’d gone to a state school. He could barely utter the words
state school
. He had a year on me now.

The kid’s knee started to bounce. “Dr. Woo said there might be an assistantship. Or a TA position?”

I took a closer look at Nathaniel.
Nathaniel.
Not Nathan. Not Nate. Unwrinkled clothes, clean-shaven. His backpack was all zipped up, and so was he. Just that one swipe of unruly hair across his eye, and now I could see that it was not an affectation as much as a bad haircut. He was too wide-eyed to be anything but sincere.

I sighed. My conspiracy theories and I needed to part ways.

“Bring me your resume and a copy of your transcripts. I don’t have any idea what I need yet, but there might be something.”

He nodded sagely, but I saw the childlike excitement as he reached for his backpack again. Of course he would have the paperwork with him. I watched his hands closely until he’d retrieved a sheaf of papers.

The only high-functioning enthusiasm I’d seen in the last year belonged to the lawyers, the reporters, and the nosy civilians at the grocery store when I could finally leave my apartment. I could think of a lot of reasons, unsavory reasons, why a student might seek me out right now, today, first thing. “What’s your research area, anyway? Anything pre–World War I, you have to go back to Dr. Woo.”

A flicker of concern crossed his face as I shifted my weight on the desk and found a knot of pain waiting for me. I might have made a noise.

Nathaniel watched me pant it out. “I’m sort of . . . Prohibition,” he said. “Through Great Depression.”

I’d been having one of those myself. Or I’d start another, if I didn’t get off this desk and into my pain meds. I glanced uneasily at the bag at my feet, a terrible fear landing with a thud in my gut.

Had I left the bottle on the bathroom sink?

Once the thought was in my head, I couldn’t think of anything else. The pills—large orange pills made of magic and moonbeams that gave me the courage to be alive for another few hours. Orange, fluffy clouds on which I could rest my weary body.

The silence in the room had grown long. “Sort of?” I said.

“Well, I’m interested in poverty and—are you OK?”

“Sure. Of course. Why not?”

He leaned over his backpack again, unzipped one of the pockets, and pulled out something. I couldn’t be anxious—my nerves jangled five-alarm, already fully engaged. The image of the bottle of pills on the bathroom sink clawed at me. I wouldn’t make it. I wouldn’t make it, even if I took the elevator and didn’t mind who the hell saw me. Even if I could
run
all the way home.

Nathaniel held out his hand. In his palm sat a little plastic packet of folded tissues. “You’re crying.”

I swiped at my cheek.

He flicked a tissue out of the pack and handed it to me.

“Poverty and what?” I said, my voice strangled and whimpering, the mewl of a kitten. I hated myself, I really did. The pills, orange. On the sink.

He watched me sniffle into the tissue, and there it was again: the barest flash of something shifty and unexpected on his boyish face. It could have been discomfort. I was breaking down in front of him—who would want to be a part of that? But I didn’t think that was all.

“Out with it.”

“Crime,” he said at last. “That’s my focus. Particularly violent crime.”

“That’s my favorite, too,” I said through clenched teeth. I was pleased to know Woo’s game at last but distracted to the point of delirium.

The pills. If they were at home, I’d need some assistance. And even if. And even if they were in the bag, here in the bag. Even if. I would need help. Lots and lots of help.

“This assistantship,” I said, gripping the edge of my desk. “It might be a little different than what you expected.”

The boy genius found the pills in my bag and dropped two fat specimens into my trembling hand. There was a bottle of water on my desk from the last time I’d sat there. I didn’t stop to think that the cap had been off for nearly a year. I washed the meds down with whatever was in the bottle and stood against the desk with my eyes closed, waiting for the pills to take me somewhere I could stand to be.

“Do you need—”

“Please shut up,” I said.

I heard him stowing my bag behind my desk, then his retreat to a safe distance. He stood there for what must have seemed to him a long, silent time. From my perspective, that time raged with white pain pulsing under my skin. At last the pills started to chip away at the maelstrom. I could feel the desktop under my good hip, my fingers tight on its edge, and my good foot solid on the ground.

When I opened my eyes, the kid was gone. I had crumpled the business card from the bin in my fist. I pitched it at the trash.

The door was closed, the prim pack of tissues left behind. I had no idea how long I’d stood there, or if Nathaniel would ever return.

The thing was, I wanted the door open.

I hadn’t come all this way to sit alone in a dusty office. All this way, and not just up the stairs and down the hallway and before that, the long walk from the parking lot.
All
this way.

My mind snapped like a rubber band back to the last time I’d been in this building, the rush of the dark red carpet coming to meet me, then—snap—forward to waking up in a white room and a man’s hand lying heavy on my chest. I’d never figured out whose hand that was. Someone who believed in God might say it had been an angel or Jesus himself, that the white room was heaven. But the white room was only a corner of the ICU, and the hand probably belonged to the nurse’s assistant named Gordy who sometimes came down and watched
The Price Is Right
with me after I moved to a different floor. Maybe Gordy shouldn’t have been touching me, but I hadn’t minded. It had already been a while since a man had laid a hand on me.

And then the memory faded, the weight of the hand lifting.

The pills had done their good deeds. I could stand and tap to the door. For a second I thought I was locked in, but no, just the usual difficulties with the heavy, sticking door compounded by my inability to put any muscle into it. Finally it squawked open, and I stood in my doorway with no one at all to witness how far I’d come.

It was too early for students. If they were awake, they were in class trying to keep their eyes open and their text messages hidden. And the faculty—even the early risers weren’t rushing into the first day of another year. The only people around were those of us too eager. Nathaniel, to get his assistantship settled. Me, to sneak in without a news crew escort.

In the quiet hall, all the other doors were shut. I had remembered the second-floor hall as a dark place, more of a natural place to be assaulted, but that wasn’t true. The walls glowed a creamy butter yellow, and there were some nice frames filled with bright playbills from student theater productions, black-and-white campus scenes, and tinted photographs of long-gone classmates. Truly, I didn’t remember any of it.

I concentrated on the frame across the hall from our door. Surely this was one I’d remember. The painting featured a dewy, soft-focused young woman. She was pretty, with pastel pink lips and her hair pin-curled into a ’40s-specific coif. Her sweater was a frothy powder blue. In old photos and paintings, young people always seemed older than I was, though they were often much younger. The girl encouraged me to remember.

I’d never seen her before.

This was serious. Straight out of the trauma unit, I’d known my name, my age, the year. I’d known as much history as any American could be expected to remember, could count by tens and fives and threes. I could recall who was in the White House and whether or not I’d helped him get elected. To end the tests, I’d bored the neurologist with a little Sociology 101, plus a dash of social deviance theory, which probably hadn’t bought me any new friends. But the point remained: I could recall almost anything I wanted to. Couldn’t I?

I reached into my memory, pushed past the white room, the warm hand resting on me, the ambulance, the red carpet rushing toward my face, the dark outline of the student, the gun rising out of the shadow—past that, past that. Past the stuff I couldn’t quite remember into the stuff I didn’t want to. And then I had it. Doyle. The fight I had with Doyle when we’d broken up, and the sad way he’d flipped his keys in his hand as we said good-bye. That ridiculous little question-mark curl that wouldn’t lie flat on his head that day—

A different kind of pain.

OK, then. I could remember that day. That day was pre-bullet. Pre-bullet and deep in the locked files. If I could remember that curl, the swing of the keys, then surely I could remember this woman, this yellow, this Persian rug under my feet.

I glanced down at the rug, at the gleaming wooden floorboards visible at its edges, and then around at all the frames and the bright walls behind them. Of course.

It was all new. The lemonade walls, the frames dredged up from some dusty special collection in the library. The bright, patterned rug without a stitch of red replacing the worn, red wall-to-wall carpet. It would have been ruined by blood or, if not ruined, then a cruel reminder.

And now that I thought about it, those electric sconces on the wall hadn’t been here before, either. The whole place had been gutted, rewired, redrawn in a well-timed renovation to wipe our collective memories. Except that I had come back, and now no one could be fooled by a coat of paint and the likeness of Miss Whatsherfanny smiling into the office in question. A public relations plan was underway, and I was ruining it.

I checked for the spot anyway. It wasn’t there. The floors had been refinished.

“Did I miss the ribbon-cutting?” I said to the chick in the frame.

“They skipped the grand opening,” a voice said.

I jumped. I couldn’t help it. For just a tick of the clock the voice had belonged to the kid in the shadows. But the man standing at the top of the stairs was—

“Woo,” I said, relieved that my memory could be counted on after all. I could remember the competition, at any rate.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

Jesus, no one had told my department I’d be back. Why did they think I’d gone through all that recovery and therapy? To take up someone else’s life? All I wanted was the one I’d almost lost. “Teaching, Ben. Our job, remember?”

“I meant—” His mouth clamped shut. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry I got shot?”

He looked sorry now, his narrow shoulders folding in on themselves. He wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches, his black hair slicked back in a way I couldn’t approve of. “Sorry. I mean. I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Never know what to say at weddings and funerals—”

“No funerals here,” I said.

We looked at one another, then away. There had been a funeral, I remembered too late. No one had ever mentioned it, but it must have happened. Here or in the kid’s hometown, wherever that was. Who would have gone? Doyle? I would ask Corrine.

“So,” he said finally. “So, you’re doing great.”

I was glad he hadn’t seen me when I thought my meds were at home. “Sure. Have you met my new friend here?” I thumped the cane on the new carpet. It was metal, silver. There were fancier styles, but I’d refused them. I didn’t plan to use it for long.