The Traveller (11 page)

He had been in the darkroom, a small transistor radio that he’d purchased with his first paycheck playing in the corner, filling the room with Doors’ harsh lyrics and sound. Every time he switched on the radio ‘Light My Fire’ had flowed out. He had spent two blistering summer days walking an early beat with one of the city’s last foot patrolmen. He’d found the photos routine, too filled with softness. The policeman was popular, outgoing. Everywhere he went he was greeted, applauded, welcomed. Jeffers had snarled at the pictures. Where was the edge? Where was the tension? He wanted someone to take a shot at the cop. He prayed for it. and decided to spend another day on the street. Lost in

the music, the darkness, and his plans, he’d barely been aware of the voice of the photo editor yelling for him.

‘Jeffers, you lazy slug, get out of there!’

He’d carefully put his things down, moving deliberately. Jim Morrison was singing, ‘I know that it would be untrue …’ The photo editor, he had swiftly learned, existed in two states: boredom and panic.

‘What?’ he’d asked, stepping from the cubicle.

‘A body, Jeffers, one hundred per cent dead, right in the middle of the Heights. A nice white teenage girl in a rich neighborhood very goddamn dead. Go, go, go. Meet Buchanan at the scene. Go!’

He had paced, oddly nervous, on the edge of the police perimeter, standing apart from the other newsmen and television cameramen who were waiting in a knot, joking, trying to learn a little, but mostly willing to wait until a spokesman or a detective came over to brief them en masse. Where’s the shot? he’d demanded to himself. Moving right, then left, in and out of afternoon shadows, finally, when no one would notice, swinging up into a large tree, trying to get some clear vision. Stretched out like a sniper on a tree limb, he’d fixed a telephoto lens to his camera and peered down at the policemen working meticulously around the body of the young girl. He swallowed hard at the first sight of a naked leg, tossed haphazardly aside by the killer. Jeffers had strained to see, feverish, snapping off pictures, pulling the camera tightly on the victim. He needed to see her breasts, her hair, her crotch; he adjusted angle and focus and continued to fire the camera like a weapon, twisting it, manipulating it, caressing it to bring him closer to the body. He wiped sweat from his forehead and fingered the trigger again, swearing every time a detective moved into his line of sight, the motordrive whirring every time he had a clear shot.

He’d kept those pictures for himself.

The paper had run three others: a shot of fire-rescue personnel bringing the body-bagged-wrapped victim out on a stretcher, a ground-level long-lens shot of the detectives kneeling over the body, which was obscured by their position save for a striking thin young arm, flung back from the torso,

gently held by one of the policemen, and a picture of a tittering gaggle of teenage girls, drawn by fear and curiosity to the edge of the crime scene, staring out in tears and surprise as the body was carried out from the underbrush. He had liked the last shot the best, carefully approached the girls to get their names, sweet-talking the information out of them easily. The shot, he thought, spoke of crime’s effect. One girl’s eyes were wide in semishock, while the girl next to her had thrust her hands to her face, the eyes just peering over the edge of fingers stiffened with fright. A third girl’s mouth hung wide, while a fourth was turning away from the vision. It was, the photo editor said, the best of the bunch. It ran outside, page one. ‘There might be a bonus,’ the photo editor said, but Jeffers, still suffused with excitement, thought that his real bonus remained developing in chemicals back in the darkroom, and, as soon as he’d seen the crop and the layout, he’d hastened back to his solitude. He smiled.

He still had those pictures, almost twenty years later. He would always have those pictures. He heard laughter and turned toward a group of students sitting close by. They were teasing one of their own, who was taking it all good-naturedly. Jeffers could catch only snatches of the conversation, but it was about a term paper that the student had turned in, nothing of great import, a small, typical moment. Jeffers looked at his schedule and his map and decided it was time to start.

He cut rapidly across campus; it was just before 1 p.m. and he wanted to be in his seat before ‘Social Awareness in Nineteenth Century Literature’ started. He bounced up the short flight of stairs to the classroom building, sliding his sunglasses off as he entered the darkened hall, striding purposefully into Lecture Room 101 with a steady stream of students, some marching in singly, others in pairs. The lecture hall was filling rapidly; he quickly found a seat on the aisle, near the back. He smiled at the young woman sitting next to him. She smiled back, not breaking her conversation with a boy next to her. He looked about swiftly; there were a dozen or so conversations such as the one he was next

to, just enough noise to crack the silence of the hall. To his right he spied a student reading a newspaper, another flipping through the pages of a paperback. Others arranged notepads in front of them. He did the same, trying to read something into some piece of behavior, a small movement that displayed an attitude which would signal to him a person’s candidacy.

He spotted one girl, sitting alone, across the aisle and several rows down. She was reading Ambrose Bierce, bending head down over In the Midst of Life. Jeffers felt his eyebrows rise, thinking, What an extraordinary combination: the writer who may have sold his soul and a nineteen-year-old girl. Interesting, he thought. He determined to watch her during the lecture.

Sitting a few chairs away was another young woman. She ‘was sketching lazily on a pad. Jeffers could just make out the skilled shapes that were forming beneath her pencil. He thought for a moment, excited, about the intriguing possibility of the sketch artist. He wondered if she could sketch with words. He thought: Someone who can recreate reality in art — perhaps a good selection. He decided to watch her as well.

At a single minute past one the professor entered. Jeffers frowned. The man was in his mid-thirties, his own age, and glib. He started the hour with a joke about David Copperfield’s narration of his own birth, as if that were some quirk of Dickens’, some archaic piece of silliness. Jeffers suddenly wanted to rise and scream. Instead, he kept his seat, searching the auditorium for someone who failed to laugh at the professor’s witticisms.

There was one who caught his attention.

She was sitting just off to his left. She raised her hand.

‘Yes, Miss … uh …’

‘Hampton,’ said the young woman.

‘Miss Hampton. You have a question?’

‘Do you mean to imply that because Dickens was writing for serial consumption that he tailored his ideas and his style to fit the weekly newspaper form? Don’t you think the reverse is true, that Dickens understood implicitly the points that he

wished to make, and, using his considerable skill, fitted them into manageable segments?’

Jeffers felt his heart slow, his mind concentrate.

‘Well, Miss Hampton, we know that the form was important to Dickens …’

‘Form, sir, over substance?’

Jeffers wrote that down in capital letters and underlined

it: FORM OVER SUBSTANCE?

‘Miss Hampton, you misunderstand …’

Like hell, thought Jeffers.

‘ … Dickens was, of course, preoccupied with the political and social impact of his work. But because of the necessities of form, we can now see limitations. Don’t you wonder what his characters and stories would have been like if he had not been forced into the pamphleteer’s role?’

‘No, sir, I can’t say that I have.’

‘That was my point, Miss, uh, Hampton.’

Not much of one, at that, thought Jeffers.

He watched the young woman bend her head back to her notepad, scribbling some words on the page rapidly. She had dirty-blond hair which fell haphazardly about her face, obscuring what Jeffers thought was considerable natural beauty. He noted, then, that she sat with an empty seat on either side.

He felt his body quiver involuntarily.

He breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly.

Again, he thought, drawing in a great draught of air and letting it loose carefully, as if it were valuable. He surreptitiously placed his hand over his chest, speaking to himself: Be calm. You did not expect to find a biographer in the first class you visited. Caution, caution. Always caution. She has potential. Wait. Watch. He forced himself to study the other two young women he’d noticed earlier. He had a sudden image of himself as some small, dark, coiled beast, waiting, anticipating, curled in obscurity beneath a loose rock on a well-traveled path. He smiled, thinking with pleasure to himself: Progress.

3 Boswell

Afternoon sun filtered weakly through the library window. It struck the notepad open on Anne Hampton’s table, making the blue-ruled lines disappear, washed away in the glare. She looked down at the words she had been writing, staring so hard that the edges of the letters blurred and grew indistinct, the entire page becoming a floating, vaporous field. It made her think of snowfields in winter, back home in Colorado. She envisioned herself poised at the top of some long run, the sunlight exploding off the open expanse of snow, uncut as yet by skiers’ trails. It would be early morning, the sun would hold no promise of warmth, just a single cold light flooding the white. She thought to herself about the way the reflection seemed to reach up, tangible, blending with the freezing air and wind, creating a world without edges, depth, or height, a solitary great white hole in the world, waiting for her to suppress that momentary hesitation that is the border of fear, and then plunge outward, down, dizzyingly thrust forward, feeling the cold sensation of flying snow bursting like shells around her as she cut through the deep powder.

She laughed out loud. Then, remembering where she was, clapped her hand across her face in mock embarrassment and sat back in her chair, looking out the window across the quadrangle toward a stand of palms that rippled gently as she watched. The palms, she thought, can find a breath of breeze even when there isn’t one. They clatter their leaves together as if in greeting, feeling the slightest sway in the air, welcoming it, enjoying it, she thought with

an odd jealousy, even when she was unable to detect the meagerest motion of relief in the summer’s heat.

She looked back at the books spread about her. It must be easy to spot the literature majors, she thought. She separated her stack of books into two separate piles: Conrad, Camus, Dostoevsky and Melville on one side of her notepad, Dickens and Twain on the other. Darkness and light, she thought. She shook her head. She wasn’t even reading half of the books and did not really understand why it was so important for her to tote them around in her backpack. But she did, packing them in every day, next to current assignments, as if the weight of great words resting on her back would somehow permeate her vision and motivate her behavior. She wondered if she had some unconscious time limit for carrying once-read works. She imagined that she could develop a rating system for literature; books that she carried about more than a month after completion were true classics. Three weeks meant a lasting greatness. Two weeks, probably should be hauled about for their themes, if not their execution. A week reflected perhaps a great character, but not a great book. Less than a week? Pretenders.

But, she thought, there is an odd comfort in knowing great words are close.

She sometimes wondered whether books were alive; whether, after shutting the covers, the characters and the places and the situations didn’t change, argue, debate somehow, only to return to place at the moment the cover was flipped open. It would be fitting. She started at the Camus, lying atop her dark pile. Perhaps, she thought, Sisyphus rests when the pages are closed. He sits, breathing hard, his back slumped up against his rock, wondering whether this time the rock will teeter at the top and then, miraculously, stick. Then, feeling the pages of the book open about him, he climbs to his feet, puts his shoulder to the rock, and, feeling the comforting coolness of the hard surface, flexes his muscles, gathers his strength, and shoves hard.

She was suddenly tempted to reach out and snatch open the book, to see if she could catch Sisyphus resting.

She smiled again.

She looked up and her eyes momentarily caught those of

a man sitting across the room. He had been reading; she couldn’t make out the title. He had looked up, it seemed, at the same moment. He smiled. She smiled back. A young professor, she thought. She looked away, out the window, for an instant. Then she let her eyes return to the man. He had returned to his reading.

She looked at her books. She looked at her notes. She looked out the window again. She looked back at the man, but he had disappeared.

She thought suddenly of her mother’s complaint: ‘But you won’t know anybody in Florida!’

‘And her reply: ‘But I don’t need to know anybody.’

‘But we’ll miss you … and Florida is so far away.’

‘I’ll miss you. But I need time to get away.’

‘But it’s hot all the time.’

‘Mother.’

‘All right. If it’s what you want’

‘It’s what I want.’

It wasn’t hot all the time, she thought. Her mother had been wrong. In the winter there was an inevitable freeze, some wayward mass of cold Canadian air, lost in its pursuit of Massachusetts, tumbling down the midsection of the nation and landing squat and awkwardly on the Florida panhandle. It was a wretched cold, without any of the beauty or terrifying stillness of the Colorado mountains. It was simply irritatingly cold; the palms seemed to buckle, the buildings, lacking much in the way of insulation, seemed tenaciously to hold in the cold air. It was sweaters and overcoats underneath a sky that seemed to speak properly only of beaches. She thought it ironic that she had been far colder on a January day in Tallahassee than she ever had been at home.

. She looked at the sunlight hitting her desk. Thank God for the summer heat, she thought. She was struck with the odd observation that in three and one half years she had