The Danger of Being Me (20 page)

The man smiled, offered a hand.  "Nice to meet you."

I brushed the crumbs off my fingers and shook his hand.  Mrs. Kraven said, "this is Professor Chambers.  He teaches Lit down at Temple's main campus."

"It's Matt," Chambers told me as he shot Mrs. Kraven an apologetic glance.  "Unless you become a student," he added.  Then he smirked.  "Then it's Matt."

He grinned at his own joke.  I smiled, and Chambers asked, "Any relation to Carl?"

I nodded.  "We're eighth cousins on my father's side."

Chambers' eyebrows shot up.  "Really?"

I grinned at him.  "No."  His eyebrows dropped, but his lips twitched into what might have been an appreciative smirk.  "There are no famous people in my family."

I considered, and added: "Yet."  Chambers laughed.

Mrs. Kraven gestured to the scrawny woman flanking her, and said, "Rosalie Capra."

"No relation to Frank," Capra said as she shook my hand, glancing to Matt.  "I've read all the entries several times.  There are some real treasures in there."  Then she looked over my face, still holding my hand between hers.  "I get the feeling one of them might be yours."

I flashed an awkward grin, tried to respond, failed.  She seemed to like that.  Her smile widened as she watched my face.  She finally broke her grip as Mrs. Kraven broke the silence.  "Rosalie edits the literary magazine
Strophe
."

"Biggest little journal in Philly," Capra told me.  She sounded almost apologetic.  As if the journal's integrity were somehow diminished by its popularity.

I nodded, and the next smile came more easily.  "I have a copy of the Woodrow Sykes special issue."

"Summer `94," Capra confirmed, grinning broadly.  To Mrs. Kraven, she explained, "that was the issue entirely devoted to the 216-page poem Sykes had just completed."

"
I Am
," I said, nodding.  "I got mine autographed when I interviewed Sykes back in January."

Capra leaned toward.  In a conspiratorial undertone, she said, "I'll tell you a secret.  I'm going to print today's top three poems in a special section of my May issue.  I'm calling it
Incipit
."  She winked at me, and I felt a scarlet flush creeping out of my collar.  "What do you think?"

"Magnificently abstruse," I said without thinking too precisely on the event.

The answer seemed to delight her.  She nodded, as if that settled a matter that she hadn't been able to decide for herself.  Then she turned excitedly to Chambers, and asked him what he thought of Stephen Cain's
dyslexicon
.

I heard Chambers say something about the influence of the Language movement, and then I tuned out the rest of the conversation.  Mrs. Kraven, apparently as interested in Canadian poetry as I was, left the editor and the professor to their discussion.  She crossed to Dr. Lombardi, and he tapped his pages into a neat stack, laying on the table.

I turned toward the bay-window over the courtyard, looked to that weed-strewn brick island at the center of the concrete.  It really was a shameless eyesore.  I smiled.  I had to appreciate that.  Mellow light filtered in through the glass, lighting up an arc of the reading section where only the narrow lectern stood.  It really was a damn-near poetic staging.  Then I took three steps across the carpet.

I felt my heartbeat quicken inside my throat.  I had to remind myself that these two dozen chairs were empty.  Even then, looking out at an audience that wasn't there, I felt the cold thrill of adrenaline, of being put on display before a jury of my peers.  Of being judged.  Except that there was no one here to judge me.  I looked from one vacant seat to the next, I thought that this might be so much worse.  I wrote to be read, after all.  To be heard.

Because it was always me, in the end, who was never satisfied with the words on the page.  Always me who read them back and found them irredeemably flawed.  It had never really been the audience that terrified me at all, and it had taken these two-dozen empty seats to make me see that.  It had always been my own inadequacy that I couldn't face.  It was why I bothered to write at all.

I drew in a long breath and looked out over all those waiting seats.  I felt that trickle of adrenaline still, the machine gun rattle of my heart beating against my chest I smiled.  I saw my shadow thrown out crookedly in front of me, and I felt a sense of purpose settle over me.

Except that that wasn't really true.  I dropped my eyes to the lectern, laughed, shook my head at myself.  It wasn't purpose that had settled on me at all.  What I felt then was myself settling on a sense of my own purpose.

Writing to be read.  Speaking to be heard.

That was the choice that I made every time I set out to fill the empty places with words, because it was not the solace of the empty places of the world that thrilled me.  It was the untold promise of that infinite emptiness.

"Getting comfortable?"

I looked up, searched for this new female voice, and saw nothing by a dark outline.  Then my vision sharpened, and I found Helen picking over a tray of assorted pastries.  She settled on the pignoli, took two, bit into one as she rounded the table and settled into a seat in the back row.  She carried her minicassette recorder in her left hand, and held it up as she stuffed the rest of the pastry into her mouth.  "Gimme a couple lines to test this thing."

"Life's but a walking shadow," I told her, "a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage."

Helen laughed, clicked off the recorder, and said, "I've heard a few tall tales told by idiots."  I stepped out from behind the lectern, headed toward the empty rows, and crossed out of that arc of light.  Helen rewound her tape and pressed PLAY.  I heard her voice and then my own issue from the small speaker.  Even with the distortion of overuse, the sound was perfectly audible.  I winced as I took the seat beside her.  "Do I really sound like that?"

"`Fraid so."  She rewound the tape.

"That's alright," I said, turning back to the soft light of the afternoon.  "You sound like Fran Drescher."

She faked a nasally Flushing accent. "In your dreams."

"Nah," I said, laughing.  "In my dreams, you sound like Shohreh Aghdashloo."

She answered with a laugh of her own about a second before she reached across my shoulder, flicked me hard on the earlobe.  I flinched away, then sat back, refusing to rub the stinging out of my ear.  A few moments later, a pair of chattering freshmen girls passed us and took seats in the front row.  I thought I recognized them.  They might have been Regina's friends from the Writers Club meeting.

I glanced at Helen.  "I didn't know you entered."

"I didn't," she told me.  "I'm just here to write it up."  She held the recorder up to my face, grinning as she pressed RECORD.  "Care to give me a quote?"

I bent toward the tiny microphone.  "
Eppur si muove
."

"Smartass," she said, clicking off the recorder.  But she didn't rewind the tape.

A moment after that, Lucas Archer passed me, stepped into the second row of seats, taking the chair in front of Helen.  "Hey," I said, leaning forward.  He turned.

"Hay's for horses," he said with a smirk.

"Fair enough," I admitted.  "You seen Amber?  She was supposed to meet me."

Archer watched me.  Helen looked from me to Lucas and back before he finally said, "Nobody told you?"

I glanced at Helen.  She shrugged.  I looked back to Lucas.  "Told me what?"

He hesitated briefly, then said, "She's at the pool."

I blinked.  "We have a pool?"

8.

Prophecy Creek High School does not, in fact, have a pool.

Wenro County Community College does, and the two campuses nestle against each other along a border marked by a walking path behind the lacrosse field.  The parking lots of the two schools connect by way of a single curving two-lane, and the high school's swim-team has used the college's pool as its home venue for half a century.

Fourteen minutes after slipping unnoticed out of the high school's library, I climbed the stone portico of Lockey Hall and pushed through the doors.  The lobby was empty, and I stepped to an abandoned check-in desk to find a clipboard with a pen tucked under the hinge.

I scribbled my name onto the bottom of the list, then rounded the desk and cut through the men's locker room, coming out into a massive room.  The sterile smell of chlorine clawed at my face as I followed the border of the pool, scanning the bleachers against the far wall.

I spotted Amber sitting alone halfway up the stands next to the deep end.  She made no move as I approached, and I made no attempt to catch her attention.  My sneakers squelched on the tiles, and the water murmured serenely.  I crossed behind the high-dive tower standing at the deep-end, and the bleachers groaned as I climbed to the ninth row, where Amber sat staring out at the water.

She still gave no indication that she knew I was there.  But that was fine.  I watched her for a long moment, then slid onto the bench beside her.  The seat jostle; she sighed, and seemed about to say something.  I looked sideways at her, waited for her to speak, watched the shadows shift across her face like unknowable thunderheads.

She said nothing.  I accepted her silence, turning back toward the pool.  The water lay smooth, at rest, a sheet of glass with a scummy film smeared across the surface of the deep-end.  I glanced to Amber, and at this close distance, I could see her eyes burning a furious crimson.  She still didn't look at me, and I wasn't sure she was even talking to me when she said, "you're missing your luncheon."

Somehow that uninflected observation felt like an accusation.  "That's okay," I said, considering that curious smudge on the water.  "The sfogliatelle was stale."

She finally turned to me and blinked.  The she coughed out a loud, startling laugh that sounded like a vodka bottle shattering on asphalt.  My mouth twitched into a guarded smile as the sound leveled out.  She had laughed so hard that caustic tears went tumbling down her cheeks.

I had to look away from her face.  Her expression made my gut clench.  She was two women at once, experiencing contradictory reactions to the same sick discovery.  The fading afternoon sunlight broke through the cloud cover, rifled through the skylights, cast a dazzling heliograph off the slick surface of the water.  That was when I saw the shape huddled at the bottom of the pool.  An icy horror settled into my chest as the light hit the silver paintjob and the exposed undercarriage eight feet under the water.

My breath went out in a rush.  It took a long time to get it all back.  "That's not—" I started, but of course I knew it was.  I could climb down off the bleachers and confirm it, but that was needless.  Amber had told me she was just running out to her car to get her camera, sure that I was about to be named Prophecy Creek High School's first Poet Laureate.  But then she hadn't made it to the library by the time the luncheon started, and now she was here.

Amber sniffed, swiped her sleeve across her face.  The tears disappeared.  Her mad laughter had worked itself out, and I heard her whisper from beside me.  "Yeah."

How?
I mouthed, but the sound never came out.  There were no words.  Because I could see how, if I let myself see.  Behind the high-dive tower stood a pair of broad double-doors that would be more than wide enough for a silver 1980 Porsche 930 if they were both propped open.  Along the lip of the deep-end, water gleamed in the gouge-marks left behind as the car took the final spectacular plunge into a watery grave.  The Porsche had tumbled head over heels in elegant slow motion, down on its nose, and finally come to rest almost gently on its roof.

It was indecent, like a mutilated body left naked on a playground.  That sweltering scarlet veil swirled around me like a bloody thunderhead, and I tasted brimstone and cordite in the back of my throat.  But for all the fury and hatred I felt toward the fuckin degenerate that had done this, I couldn't ignore one inescapable fact.  I was a liar.

I had told Amber that it would be okay, and of course it wasn't okay.  She had known it then, even as she let me tell the lie.  I had lied to her, and I had lied to myself at the same time, and that made it even worse, because at least Amber had had the sense to see the lie for what it was.  But I had convinced myself that my words had the power to protect her.  I had been so arrogant that I had told her that a situation I didn't understand would be okay.

My knuckles creaked.  I unballed my fists, shook out my hands, flexed my fingers, wiped the sweat off my palms against the legs of my pants.  I looked out over the grimy water, and wondered at the incomprehensibility of a Porsche at the bottom of the deep-end, leaking its fluids like a bleeding corpse.  "How'd you know it was here?"

It was a lame, irrelevant question.  Amber pretended not to know that.  "When I got out to where I parked, it said
WENT SWIMMING
written in chalk in the space."  Then, in an afterthought, she added, "If it hadn't been here, I probably would have checked up at Silver Lake."

I smirked at her.  "That's four miles from here."

She sighed.  "That's why I looked here first."

I nodded.  It was perfectly reasonable.  I glanced to her again, and this time she reciprocated, and whatever it was she saw in my face brought out a tragic, ephemeral smile.  It vanished in a flash, but I saw it, and it was engraved into the archives of my memory.  A platoon of rogue tears escaped the corners of her eyes and embarked on the slow march toward her chin.  She didn't bother to wipe these away as she turned back to the serene water.

"My father gave me that car," she said.  Another of those uninflected observations, these words rang with a pitiful sadness.  "For my sixteenth birthday."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing.  Because there were no words.  "It's a 1980, born the same year I was," she told me.  I heard her breath hitch, but she continued because this was something that she had to do for herself.  "He bought it used in 1986 from a kid who'd been pretty rough on it, and then him and his brother worked on it at my uncle's house up in Sylvan Springs."