Noah's Turn (15 page)

Hopwood met Noah at the station's reception area and walked him up to his office. “I watched some of the TV shows you wrote on DVD. Pretty good. I don't watch much TV but I could see you had a different angle than most of the writers.”

“I try.”

Noah wondered why Hopwood had taken the time to watch his old shows unless he was looking for something.

The lineup was no different from the TV version. But why all the drama? Noah wondered. They knew the student was there that night. Was the lineup really “just
a formality,” as Hopwood had described it, or was something else going on?

Hopwood placed photos of six men on his desk. “Second from the right,” Noah said without hesitation. “Him.” He pointed at the photo.

“You're sure?” Hopwood asked.

“Yes. That's who I pushed into the water.” And with this, at least for now, Noah had convicted an innocent man.

He left the station and walked home. Thinking about what he had done seemed futile. What was done was done.

He decided to count his footsteps between the station and his apartment, anything to stop his mind from running through this new complication. But after a few hundred steps counting seemed like the mental activity of a crazy person, or at least an obsessive-compulsive. The only thing that could save his soul—not him, but his soul, he thought—was to bring all of the suspicion and doubt and duplicity to an end. Oh my god, he thought, I'm looking for closure! His snorting laugh
snapped him out of yet another bout of useless torment. This could be the real price I will pay, the unexpected hell, he laughed to himself. I could become one of those people on TV “seeking closure.” Noah despised this media invention picked up by so many damaged people clinging to the hope that their troubles can be resolved. As if “trouble” was an infection and “closure” was the antibiotic. He knew from watching enough CNN that closure could never be reached; it could only be sought. The seeking is what gives closure its legs on shows like Larry King. And one can only seek it as a celebrity of tragedy on TV. Closure cannot be sought in private. Noah could hear the producer in the control room, watching his televised confession to murder and yelling at his switcher, “Give me the McEwen photo on his desk drowned in blood! Go to Noah Douglas crying! Give me more fucking tears, Noah!”

There was no closure. There was only the gratification of the viewer's appetite for
schadenfreude.
I don't think I'll go public, he thought, with a smirking satisfaction that he alone could deprive the entire CNN audience of its pornographic fix. “Seven million with one blow!” He took a well-balanced kick at a rock in his path
that finished with his right leg extended and both arms out. Ronaldo!

That's why they go nuts in Brazil, Noah realized. That kick. The Saviour on the cross with one leg in your face. Christ with attitude!

I
t occurred to Noah that the student suspect was in one of McEwen's courses and could end up in the class he was going to teach. McEwen had taught creative writing for five years, and this last year was also given a course on the short story. Noah emailed the department secretary for a class list. She emailed back a response one seldom gets electronically from a bureaucrat: “Why?” He mailed back that he took public speaking very seriously and wanted to know exactly to whom he would be speaking and that if this was not possible, perhaps they should get another guest lecturer. She emailed him the class list. The suspect's name was absent, but there was The Hobson Girl, “Mary Hobson.” He stared at the two words on his screen. “What a perfect name.” It may
have lacked the erotic quality Noah remembered of Nabokov's description of “Lolita”: three tongue movements; two against the back of the front teeth, and one against the roof of the mouth. Lo-li-ta. But “Mary Hob-son” had its own quality. Two marble pillars: “Mary” and “Hobson.” This name had no need to explain itself. It was confident and spoke of history. It was a name, Noah imagined, that would live its own life on its own terms. It could choose to carry on a tradition or, like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, commit suicide and ring the bells of the human condition.

His creative writing class was three days away, and since the subject was TV, Noah thought he should watch some. He had never watched the shows he had written, or any other one-hour dramas. So he rented a few episodes of the best-rated drama series, ones that got numbers and critical acclaim. No matter how cynical he was about TV, he still had secretly imagined that the top shows just might be good, or at least okay. They weren't. They were trite and predictable, stuffed to the gills with clichéd characters, morality and philosophy—pop-culture allegories.
Every character symbolized one of a narrow range of types who supposedly populate all hospitals, all police stations and most law offices. Every story had the same idea, the triumph of the human spirit. The individual who rises above the system that grinds us down. But it was the bad guys who caught Noah's eye. The irredeemable bad guys. The psychos. And Noah was one. They had the sexy parts. Noah had always enjoyed the bad guys, but it wasn't until now that he had understood how false they could be, how little the writers and actors and directors and producers knew about those characters. What Noah now knew was that in real life they were not necessarily monsters or madmen or aberrations in the midst of normality. They could also be part of normality, another personality within its parameters. In fact, the difference between a priest and a jockey might be more profound than the difference between a priest and a killer.

As Noah walked across the campus to the English department and the classroom where he would guest-lecture for the man he had killed, he thought of how strange this circumstance might appear to an outsider
and how, at the same time, it felt quite normal to him. He thought that “strangeness” must be a function of proximity. When he had seen on a
Believe It or Not–type
of TV reality show conjoined adult twins with separate heads and a shared body, he was, as the show wanted him to be, both intrigued by the weirdness and surprised by how normal the twins thought they were. Now he understood why he didn't feel like a freak doing what he was doing today. If the story of his guest appearance at McEwen's class broke on the news, he could imagine that viewers would see him not only as a killer but as a weirdo as well, who could behave as if nothing had happened. But from Noah's side, what he was doing seemed, if not normal, at least logical. Was he simply learning how to live with his crime? he wondered. And if he was, could this mean that there are other apparently normal, well-balanced and well-integrated members of society walking the streets and travelling the subways and handling our bank accounts and taking our blood pressure and monitoring our stress tests and cutting our hair and selling us shoes and scanning our bowels during colonoscopies, who have raped or killed?

Noah had never taught a class of anything but had also never had a problem speaking in public. He liked being the centre of attention. The more people in the room, the sharper he felt his mind became. He was a performer. He was at his best when the audience had a good proportion of younger women. Women in a room added something to Noah's rhythms, like background music with a solid down beat.

When he entered the classroom there were already half a dozen students seated and Mary Hobson wasn't among them.

“I don't like repeating myself,” he said, “so I'll wait for the rest to get here before the introductions.” He had brought a couple of books and pretended to scan through them when he was, in fact, nervously awaiting The Hobson Girl and worried that her absence would wreck the day. Mary Hobson then turned up with two male students, all of them talking together about something as they took their seats. She looked up at Noah as if she had never seen him before in her life. Was this an act or was this how twenty-year-olds behaved? He didn't have the time now to pull this one apart.

Noah clasped his hands together and placed his forearms on the table, forming a triangle. He leaned forward
and scanned the room, suggesting that he was going to begin. The students stopped talking among themselves. “My name is Noah Douglas. I was a friend of Patrick's, and before his death he had asked me to be a guest lecturer. I didn't know him as a teacher, but I knew him very well as a writer and he was a remarkable talent. I'm not a writer like Patrick. I'm, let's say, pretty far down the writer's evolutionary ladder. If you look at a continuum of writers like that lineup through evolutionary history beginning with chimps and advancing through Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons and cavemen up to the modern writer, I'm the guy carrying the club. I'm the TV writer.” He got a laugh from some and a smile from The Hobson Girl. No one was looking at him as a killer, and this made him feel better than he had felt since the act.

“I want to talk about what I think is the basic repetitive theme of all TV drama. First, does anyone have any idea what that might be?” No one responded. One guy muttered, “Money.”

“That's a network theme. There's no doubt about that. I was thinking more along the lines of a dramatic theme.” Again, no response. “It's a bit of a trick question, and I'm not really looking for an answer. I want to talk about ‘the triumph of the human spirit.'”

Noah delivered his ideas about how this concept had corrupted drama. He talked about its political expediency and how it supported the American myth of the individual. He talked about its ability to leave the viewer feeling good at the end of an episode and therefore having a positive association with the product being advertised. He impressed the students. But he had not challenged them. It was Noah's nature to take a combative stance. He finished his TV lecture and paused. He looked at them like a lion scanning a herd of wildebeests for her prey. He felt a need to raise the stakes.

“Who's read Crime and Punishment?”

Not a hand went up.