All at once, innumerable eyes were pinned on him. A general buzz swept the crowd.
Bango!
The students were in a circle around him, as if beamed there by intergalactic voyagers. A guy standing right in front of Hoyt, near the concupiscent Scandinavian blonde, a tall Chem-geeky-looking guy, with a long neck and an Adam's apple the size of a gourd, said, “Awesome, dude! Did you really say to the guy, âYou're an ape-faced dickâ'” He broke it off and turned to a guy with a newspaper standing right beside him. “Wait a minute, How's it go? It's better than that.”
Hoyt closed one eye and opened his mouth on that side, as if to say, “I don't know what he's talking about.”
The blonde, the fjewel of the fjords, had a newspaper folded over once, twice, in her hand. “Come on. You haven't seen this?”
Hoyt shook his head noâbut slowly, which is to say, coolly.
The girl unfurled the newspaper and held the front page up right in front of him. There was the biggest headline he had ever seen on a newspaper. Eleven fat white letters on a black band four inches deep stretched across the entire width of the page beneath the logo: WHAT ORAL SEX? Underneath that on the right-hand side:
POL BRIBE$ CHARLIE WHO
$AW HIS GROVE $EX CAPER
Underneath that, a smaller headline:
FRAT BOY WILL GET
$95K WALL $T. JOB
FOR “MEMORY LO$$”
Underneath that: “By Adam Gellin.”
Underneath that, a swath of paragraphs printed two columns wide ran to the bottom of the page, where a notation said, “See BRIBE, pages 4, 5, 6, 7.”
“Governor of California” ⦠“Republican nomination” ⦠“paid off
Dupont senior” ⦠“coed” ⦠“of oral sex” ⦠Hoyt's eyes were in too much of a rush to do anything more than scan the first paragraph of the story. The left side of the page was pulling them like an imaging magnet. Other than the headlines, the byline, and the few inches of type, the entire front page consisted of a photograph of a guy. He was in the foreground, coming out of the I.M. with, slightly behind him, a little blond cutie-pie who, even though it was fiercely cold and she was wearing a bomber jacket and jeans, still managed to show a swath of bare belly. The guy, the guy front and centerhe was one ⦠awesome ⦠dude ⦠the boots, the Abercrombie & Fitch creaseless khakis, what you could see of them ⦠the shirt open at the throat ⦠and the coolest, longest single-breasted navy melton-cloth topcoat that ever turned up in a photograph ⦠It made the guy look eight feet tall, slender, cool, and Serious Business. Out of the rakishly turned-up collar of the awesome overcoat rose a white, thick, dense neckâwell, wide enough, thick enough, and dense enough, in any eventâand a faceâHoyt couldn't keep his eyes off that faceâa face with wide square jaws, a chin cleft perfectlyâguy looked like a combination of Cary Grant and Hugh Grant with a lighter, thatchier, thicker, cooler head of hair than either one of themâcooler because it had no part. There was a slight sneer on the lips, the sneer that says, “I'm money, baby, and you're all fucked up”âa sneer, and maybe people don't like to see a guy sneering, but this was one ⦠cool ⦠awesome ⦠sneer, cool as sneers will ever get. Before the heavy-duty machinery of his brain could even gear up to figure out what this whole goddamn thing might mean, Hoyt thought of three people: himself, Rachel, the Pierce & Pierce succuba of the dream i-bank job; himself; that little nerdy, devious, cowardly, backstabbing, rat-faced weasel, Adam Whateverthefuckhisnameis; himself, himself, and himself. Even the subrational himself sensed trouble on the right-hand side of the page somewhere in all that big type. But that pictureâthat
picture
! Could any college boy ever look better than that?
Â
Â
It was now one o'clock in the afternoon, and Charlotte was going to some lengths to keep from admitting to herself that after fourteen hours, next to no sleep, one slice of stale whole wheat bread with jelly, a couple of sips of orange juice turning bad, and a patient with insatiable psychological demands, she was good and tired of being Millennial Mutant Adam Gellin's nurse. She was also growing resentful, which she didn't try to keep herself
from knowing. For
him
, out of a sense of obligation, she had blown off two classes this morning, one of them being her history course for the new semester, The Renaissance and the Rise of Nationalism. That was sure a great start, wasn't itâafter the debacle of her academic collapse last semester. What was worse, in a way, was the fact that blowing it off no longer created in her the same sense of guilt and despair she had felt back in October when she first overslept a class after playing shepherd for a blitzed Beverly half the night.
That
she was aware of very clearly. Then there was the horrible Monday morning following the formal, when she as good as oversleptâ“as good as,”
hah
!â“worse than overslept” was more like itâand wound up sitting through the last half of her modern drama class a clumsy, sweating, panting, disheveled little fool, an object of ridicule for her classmates and an object of scorn for the T.A., who all but buried her final grade.
Final grade â¦
a surge of dread ⦠All over again she was smack up against it. There was no more avoiding it. She had to call Momma todayit would be infinitely more dreadful if Momma got it in the mail firstâand break the news ⦠her prodigy's grades for the first semester: B, B-minus, C-minus, and D. Couldn't she just neglect to get into the fine shading, the minuses? Bad idea; the minuses would be coming in the mail, too.
She checked out Adam. He was the same as he had been all day, lying on his side in bed, eyes wide open, staring fixedly at the wall opposite like a crazy person, seemingly out of touch with realityâbut if she so much as moved a muscle, he came to life with fearful, anxious questions, beseechings, and guilt triggers, which he pulled expertly. She had to go through a negotiation, make a hundred promises, and provide an itinerary just to go out the door and to the bathroom in the hall. When he himself went, he shuffled out into the hall with that filthy, insane, flesh-crawling green blanket around him, head bent over like an old man'sâand insisted she stand in the hall until he was through. If any of the students who lived in the other three slots on this floor had shown up, she would have been mortified.
So how was she going to get time off from her patient to go back to Little Yard and call Momma on the telephone? But she
had
to.
Tenderly: “Adam?” No answer. “Adam?” Again no answer. “Please look at me, Adam.” No answer, big eyes still glued to the wall. Sternly: “Adam.” No answer. So this time she snapped it out, sharp with aggravation: “
Adam
!”
“Unhh, unhhh”âmoan, moanâ“Yeah ⦠yeah ⦠what?”
“Look at me, Adam.”
The wild eyes rotated slowly in their sockets. The mouth hung open.
“Adam ⦠I have to go back to my roomâ”
“No! No! Not yet! You can't! I'm begging you!”
“ ⦠back to my room for
just
a
minute
, and then I'll be right back,
right
back, I promise you.”
A piteous moan: “Not yet ⦠Oh, Charlotte ⦠please, you can't ⦠Don't leave me
now â¦
not
now ⦔
And so forth and so on.
He wore her down until she promised not to go. She would just have to make the call on Adam's cell phone, that being the only phone he had ⦠right in front of him ⦠Well, he knew the whole story anyway ⦠and in his current state he had become incapable of thinking about anyone but himself â¦
Adam had resumed shaking, moaning, staring at nothing â¦
“Adam, I'm going to make a call on your cell phone.” She picked it up off his little deskâ
“No!
” He fairly screamed it. “You can't! No! I forbid you!”
For
bid
? That truly did aggravate her. The nerve of him trading on his misery like that. So she opened the cell phoneâ
“No, Charlotte! I implore you!”
Im
plore
? That was ridiculous. So she pressed the PWR for Power button. She knew that much from watching Beverlyâ
“DON'T! CHARLOTTEâ”
Beep-beepâbeep-beepâbeep-beepâ
beep-beeps came popping out of the little device.
“CLOSE IT UP! CLOSE IT UP! YOU'RE KILLING ME!”
Killing
you? Charlotte lost count after ten beep-beepsâ
Groan groan groaning: “They'll get me! They'll get me!”
The beep-beepsâthere was no end to them! Charlotte looked at the little screen, which said, “YOU HAVE 32 NEW MESSAGES.”
Charlotte had to talk right over Adam's moans and protests. “Adam! You have
thirty
-two new messages! What's going on? What do I push to get the messages?”
“NO!” howled Adam. His wild eyes were now staring at her from out of a head hung over the side of the bed until it was virtually upside down. “I'm not gonna tell you! They're after me! I don't want to hear them! I'll die!” And so forth and so on.
“You can't just
ignore
them, Adam. Somebody's trying awfully hard to reach you.”
“Kill me, kill me,” said Adam with a lot of moans. “Don't make me listen!”
And so forth and so on. He wouldn't give in, wouldn't tell her the first thing about retrieving the messages. Then she saw his laptop.
“Adam,” said Charlotte, “I'm going to turn on your computer.” Protests, protests, protests. “I'm
going to
turn on your computer, Adam, and see if you have any e-mail.” Moans, moans, whines, whines, death, death. “Adam, if you want me to stay here, I have to find out what's going on. I'm just not going to sit here in total ignorance. You won't have to
hear
the e-mails, you won't have to read the e-mails. They'll be for my eyes only. Now, please give me your password.” Won't won't can't can't end of everything end of everything. “Well, then it's the end of my staying here, too, Adam. You can't treat me this way. I won't have it. You'll never even
know
what's in them, unless you want to. Now, please ⦠giveâmeâtheâpassword.”
That went on for many rounds until Charlotte finally wore
him
down and he divulged it. She had to smile in spite of herself. She might have known. It was MATRICA, the first seven letters of “matrical.”
Charlotte hunched over the laptop while Adam kept busy moaning and groaning and announcing his impending extinction. New messagesâthere were so many from yesterday and today, the list ran to the bottom of the screen and beyond. She had to scroll down, down, down to reach the end. There were a lot from Greg, a few from Randy, others from Edgar and Roger, four from Camille, several from what looked like Dupont administrators, many from addresses she didn't recognize and couldn't decodeâbut one she very much recognized. She clicked on it.
Wails of lamentations from Adam as the printer began its own groaning and lurching and protesting as it came to life and then started stuttering out the message. Charlotte read it again in hard copy, broke into a big now-didn't-I-tell-you smile, and held the sheet of paper in front of her patient.
“This one you'll like,” she said. “I absolutely guarantee it. This one is not coming to get you. This one's doing exactly the opposite.”
Adam still looked crazy, but he had shut up; not a moan, not a peep. Charlotte went over to him and took his hand, which hung off the side of the bed in a posture of abject surrender, palm up, knuckles resting on the floor. She lifted the arm. Adam didn't resist. She folded the piece of paper in two, placed it on his palm, and clamped it with his fingers, manipulating them one by one.
He didn't seem to be aware of it ⦠but neither did he let go of it â¦
“I promise, Adam, you'll like it. You'll love it.”
It seemed to Charlotte as if minutes went by. Finally Adam turned his
head toward his palm and looked at the piece of paper as if it were a small, harmless animal that had unaccountably hopped aboard. Slowly, still lying flat, he drew it toward his face, adjusted his glassesâa sign of interest in life at leastâand began to read. Charlotte tried to imagine being inside Adam's head as the news dawned:
Mr. Gellin,
I have not changed my principles or opinions concerning the matter we discussed. But given the way you have fixed the clock of that insidious ultraright demagogue and enemy of civil justiceâI have been watching the CNN coverage for the last hourâI am not going to take any action that might compromise your excellent work. Thus you may consider the entire matter dropped, deleted, forgotten. Plaudits for what you have achieved. Strength for the fight ahead. Never stop battling the fire, which has not died out. Remember the prison-bound citizens. Be scrupulous in your academic work.
Jerome P. Quat