Noah's Turn (9 page)

Noah picked up another glass of wine and wandered through the heavy glass and wood doors of the fifties modern building that opened onto an inner courtyard where a running pool dribbled under large slabs of shale. A few people were standing in the mild night air smoking cigarettes. Noah heard what sounded like an angry commotion and noticed that someone who looked like a student was arguing in a slightly threatening way with a man and his wife. Noah moved closer. He could see that the student wasn't a danger. It was clear that he was attacking the author's reputation rather than the couple, but he was drunk and seemed slightly unpredictable.

“He's a fucking fraud!” the student spat, jabbing a finger at the couple.

“Maybe you should leave,” the man said.

“Fuck off. I have as much right to be here as you do. I go to this fucking college and I take a fucking course from the great writer being honoured here tonight and
he is not just a fraud but a fucking liar who's jealous of my work. This prick is competitive with his best students, mainly male students, not the pretty little girls, because we make him look like the fucking mediocre hack he really is. So fuck you! And fuck him and his fucking event!”

At this point the student moved closer to the couple. Noah, feeling quite drunk, stepped in.

“I think you better leave.” Noah tried to say this without slurring his words.

“Fuck you,” the student replied with a contemptuous drawn-out “youuu.”

“I said, you should leave,” Noah repeated more aggressively, slurring “should.”

“And I said, fuck you,” the student replied, poking a finger into Noah's chest.

The finger triggered an explosive and inappropriate rage in Noah that had nothing to do with the circumstances. It came from somewhere else, somewhere deep inside. It was the need to hit, to punish. Noah dropped his glass of wine and with both hands pushed the student as hard as he could, sending him backwards, tripping and falling into the shallow water and landing against one of the slate slabs.

“Get the fuck out of here, asshole!” Noah shrieked with perfect articulation, making the onlookers take a step back. The student crawled out of the water and left through the garden gate. There were murmurs to the effect that “someone had to do something,” but it was clear that Noah had gone too far. After all, these were literary people, who worked out their differences with words, not with fists. There had been too much rage in Noah and no one wanted to get too close. The smokers went back inside. Noah stood in the dark, his head spinning. Had he defended that scumbag McEwen? Or was this about something else he didn't understand? He felt sick and decided to walk home to get some air.

T
he next Wednesday, McEwen called to set up a squash game at the university for eight o'clock that night. He had already booked a court. Noah was pissed off at McEwen's assumption that he could set a game without any notice and wanted to pass, but he didn't. They arranged to meet at McEwen's university office at seven-thirty and walk to the gym from there.

Noah arrived at the building with his racket, shorts, sneakers and T-shirt rolled into a bundle. The main door was open until eight and he took the elevator to the fourth floor. This was a staff office building and no one was around at this hour. He found his way to McEwen's small office and knocked. McEwen opened the door holding a portable phone. He was on a call.

“Come. Sit,” McEwen whispered, covering the mouthpiece. He indicated one of two guest chairs in the cramped, book-filled space, then sat and swivelled away from Noah to face his desk, which was pushed up against the wall beneath a large double-pane window with the blind down for nighttime privacy. You wouldn't want to interview female students at night with the lights on and blind up, Noah thought. That would be like fucking in a fishbowl. The door swung closed by itself. Noah imagined McEwen's first one-on-one with The Hobson Girl in this space. She would have been sitting where Noah now sat and McEwen would have swung around and away from his computer on the desk, crossed a leg, leaned back and talked to her with his patronizing grin. You didn't score with these girls by being honest or self-deprecating, as Noah had been. You score, he thought now, by being controlling and self-assured. They all wanted to fuck a father figure.

McEwen wasn't trying to maintain any privacy with his call. In fact, Noah could tell that he wanted Noah to hear every word. McEwen was one of those people who talked to everyone within earshot when he was on his cellphone, especially when the conversation was about his own business or literary endeavours. Strangers waiting
for a bus or in line at Safeway all had to know that McEwen was a player.

“That's good, that's very good. It's all very good news. And you've done a terrific job. You have. The
New York Times
is better than a poke in the eye. I'm late for a squash game and I will read it online as soon as I'm finished. Take care.”

McEwen quickly stood up and ran both hands through his hair. His cool telephone demeanour evaporated. Noah started to stand but McEwen held up a hand to stop him.

“No. No. Sit. Sit.” He was frantic. Noah had never seen this side of him. “I have to cancel! I can't play! But I want you to wait. You have to wait. That was my book agent in New York. The fucking
New York Times
reviewed my book for next Sunday's book-review section and they loved it. She just emailed it to me. They fucking love me. And she's talking to the U.S. publisher about a big advance for the next book. When it fucking rains it pours, Noah. When it fucking rains it fucking pours.”

McEwen dropped back into his chair and swung around to his computer. Noah sat staring at McEwen's back and didn't say a word. He sensed that McEwen wouldn't hear him anyway. After all, he had lied to his
agent that he was going to play squash and would read the review later, and it didn't appear to bother him for a second that Noah had heard the lie. It felt strange to Noah to remain silent, not even a perfunctory “sounds good” or “congratulations.” He just sat there not knowing what to do or say. He found himself looking at McEwen from a distance as if he were watching some kind of wriggling bug in a jar. He could tell McEwen didn't care whether he was there or not. In fact, it was clear that Noah had just moved from the endangered list in McEwen's world to extinct species. He was now invisible.

McEwen ran his hands over his computer keyboard, calling up his email in search of the review while Noah glanced around the room at the signs of a methodically invented life. He had been in the office once before but all he had taken in was “professor's office.” Now things were coming into a finer focus. The bookshelves not just full but stuffed in an unruly way as if to denote a mind that was everywhere at once. The massive anthologies; the well-worn volumes of poetry; the classics shuffled randomly amongst the contemporary thinkers, every important name visible; the framed photos from trips to Africa, South America, London, Moscow, Tiananmen Square, jammed with a studied clutter into the small
areas of available wall space; some remaining Christmas cards; his squash and tennis rackets; a bottle of Dom Pérignon, a gift from someone who could obviously afford it; and the clicheéd trinkets from his travels, which included pieces of Inuit and African art as well as a machete with a decorative handle that dangled from a leather strap.

“You have to hear this, you have to hear this,” McEwen chirped like an excitable parakeet. He had the review up. “This is the first line—‘Few comic novelists dive into the cold, dark waters of truth with the abandon of Patrick McEwen in A
Horrible Night.'
”

Noah sat there looking at McEwen's back, listening to his distant voice read what Noah's mother used to call “supercilious drivel.” It wasn't until later in life that he had understood how she used the expression to refer with contempt to a conversation that bored her or was over her head or that she found self-serving. But when he was too young to know what “supercilious” meant, Noah still liked all of its s's and syllables. It also sounded adult and sophisticated, and he imagined it had something to do with the brain or brainy people and he had a picture of their ideas as they slid from their brains, through their nasal passages, where they
collected mucus and continued down into the back of their throats, where this mixture combined with their words and formed a thick dribble called “drivel.” And at this moment, things all made sense to Noah. His life had recently felt to him like it was adrift across some featureless white plain lacking any points of reference. He had once driven across the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where there was no road, nothing growing, just a flat white surface for miles on end in all directions. But he was now staring at a secret door that had miraculously appeared on that plain, a door beyond which lay something completely different and completely unknown and all he had to do was step through and he would change his life forever. He was sure no one had seen him enter the building and take the elevator up to McEwen's office. It all seemed so easy. He simply had to open the door and step through. It was logistics, not the right or the wrong. He felt as if the decision had been made for him by someone else, someone he couldn't see, a being or thing who was in the room with him. Noah took the T-shirt from his bundle of squash stuff and wrapped it around his right hand. McEwen kept reading aloud. Noah reached for the machete. It didn't have the heft of his baseball bat and wouldn't have the
momentum, but he calculated that the blade would make up the difference. He knew where the jugular ran down the front right side of the neck from a biology class at university. He was surprised by his state of mind, a state quite foreign to him. He was capable of doing what was about to come. This wasn't him, he thought. This was how cold-blooded killers think, how psychos think. Or was it how the highly trained Navy SEAL marksmen in the U.S. forces think when they are about to take down a target that is threatening the free world and its way of life? He had reached a point of style and had left morality far behind. He was exhilarated by his cool, by his lack of fear. He raised the machete to the level of his hip as McEwen continued to read aloud from his computer. Noah had focused on a point between the jaw and the base of the neck when McEwen raised his left hand and hooked it over his left shoulder to scratch the left side of his neck. Noah lowered the machete and waited for him to stop scratching, as if it was wrong to interrupt this attempt to satisfy an itch. McEwen finished scratching and continued reading, and Noah stood up and with an allarm tennis swing, not a squash swing from the wrist, brought the machete down hard across McEwen's neck
with enough force to cut at least four inches into him. McEwen plunged forward and to his left, grabbing his neck with his right hand. The only sound he made was a muffled gag. The jugular had been cut and blood pumped out of him like a ruptured water main. Noah didn't expect that much blood that quickly and almost vomited. He wanted to run and have someone else finish what he had started but he knew he had to keep going. The damage was done and to stop now would be insane. He swung again and again in the area of the first cut, slashing at McEwen's neck until his body collapsed forward onto his desk, blood gushing onto his computer in horrible rhythmic spurts, each one draining more life from him until the gushing and spurting slowed and his body lost all resilience and lay flaccid on the desktop. Noah found it hard to breathe and gulped for air. He was, at this point, not a human being but an animal struggling to survive. He pulled the T-shirt from the machete and dropped the weapon on the floor. He rolled the T-shirt into the rest of his squash stuff and took off his jacket, which was blood splattered, turned it inside out and folded the squash stuff into it. With his sleeve over his hand, he opened the office door and walked to the fire exit again, using
his sleeve over his hand to open the door onto the grey-painted cement stairwell. He hurried down the four flights, checking his clothes and wiping at his face for signs of blood. He exited through a one-way door, kicking the bar with his foot. It opened into the dark at the building's rear next to an empty parking lot. No one had seen him and he was satisfied there was no blood splattered on his face or clothing. He walked quickly toward the gym and dialled McEwen's office on his cellphone. He left a message on the machine when it picked up. “I'm at the gym and it's eight o'clock. Just wanted to know if you're on your way.” He hung up and walked as quickly as he could.

He arrived at the gym in less than five minutes. He went down to the towel counter in the area outside the weight room and squash courts and asked the student attendant if a “Patrick McEwen” had arrived for his court. She checked her court schedule and said, “Not yet.” Noah said he was supposed to meet him for an eight o'clock court and could he take the court and wait for him inside. She looked at her watch, saw it was an hour from closing, smiled and let him in without a guest pass. He took a towel and thanked her for trusting him.

Noah sat on the floor of the empty court, his legs outstretched, his back against a side wall which was streaked with ball and racket marks. He was in a place where nothing bad happened, a place of sportsmanship and camaraderie, and for the moment, he felt safe. His breathing slowed, but his feet and hands were still shaking—the slaughter's aftershock. He dialled McEwen's cellphone and left another message, that he was on the court and waiting and knocking the ball around by himself, and that if McEwen couldn't make it, it was no big deal—he had his cellphone with him and McEwen should call if something else had come up. Noah waited twenty minutes, changed and walked home.