The Black Hour (7 page)

“Nathaniel,” my roommate said. “What’s up with the horror show?”

I looked up. He meant the photo I’d pinned to my side of our bulletin board, a black and white of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. I craned my neck to see it again. If it had been in color, it would have been too much for the human mind to comprehend. Six dead, sprawled where the bullets left them, and one guy’s head opened up like a can of tuna. Another guy had lived long enough to get out of the photo and to a hospital. I felt a little sorry for that guy. He died anyway, and he didn’t get to be immortalized.

In black and white, it had a certain nobility. Horrible, sure, you could argue, but it hadn’t been a show. The massacre had really happened, had happened
here
. Well, not in our apartment or at Rothbert, but not too many miles away from where we were having this tedious argument, the real acts of history had played out.

My first day in town, I couldn’t wait to be a part of it. Back when I was a kid, my mom and I had watched all the gangster movies. On the way to school, she’d pretend we were on the lam, like Bonnie and Clyde. “Don’t tell your dad we drove this fast,” she’d said, laughing. Finally in Chicago, I wished she could have come with me, and that we were raging through town in her crappy old car. But two trains and something like sixteen panhandlers later, I stood at a wrought iron fence looking at a patch of grass where the St. Valentine’s Massacre had happened, alone. The garage was gone. The whole place had been scrubbed clean of blood, of history. People hurried past, and I could tell they didn’t know. They didn’t want to know. One day off the bus from Indiana, my things dumped into my new room, my schedule sorted out, and my first encounter with Al Capone’s Chicago already under my belt, I felt alive for first time in a while.

“Seriously,” Kendall said. “Even if we ever get a girl in here, she’s not going to stay.”

“We’d have to get two girls for me to care,” I said. I pictured the scenario until it broke wide open. “Or about twelve for one of them to look my way. A visit from twelve girls seems unlikely.”

“That’s your problem. You don’t know how to dream big. Or small.”

In the two days Kendall and I had lived together, he’d discovered at least six problems of mine. I didn’t have a sense of humor. I didn’t know enough girls. I didn’t have any cool T-shirts he could borrow. For a guy with a legitimate drinking-age ID, I was really lame. And now I didn’t know how to dream big. Or small. There had been other problems with me, but I couldn’t hold them all in my head at the same time. I had a lot to think about already, and my classes hadn’t even started.

“I have dreams,” I said, waving at the photo. As an artifact, the photo was a thing of beauty. Behind that shadow here or under this dead man’s hand there lay something I wanted to say about violence. A dissertation, hidden among the wreckage. But all I had to say about violence at the moment was that I wanted to understand it. I wanted to crawl into it and fight my way back out. I wanted—something that didn’t make any sense. “I have plenty of dreams, big ones.”

“That,” Kendall said, looking at the photo with disgust, “is a nightmare.”

Kendall studied business. He was a sophomore, lean and floppy-limbed like a marionette in too-big pants, full of energy and plans. From New York, he’d already rooted out the deficiencies of Rothbert University and its surroundings. As a roommate, he was fine. I hadn’t had much choice. By the time I enrolled, the only housing available were sublets and room-shares. With my lean budget, I’d been lucky to find anything within walking distance of campus. But now I was surrounded by undergrads. The guys upstairs drowned out each other’s music with louder music and raced their desk chairs down the hallway. They’d already broken one of the toilets in the house
skateboarding
. I shared a poorly outfitted kitchen with nine other guys.

Having dreams was not my problem. Being left behind so soon was. I hadn’t chosen the right place to live. I hadn’t brought the right things to wear. And now, living with Kendall and understanding all the ways I disappointed him, it was clear: I might not be the right kind of person.

I looked back at the photo. “I guess I could put it somewhere less visible.”

I got up and pulled the print down carefully, then turned to my side of our room. I had a single bed that was too short for me, a wooden desk and chair shoved into a corner, and about three feet of clearance in which to live my life. I could have tacked the picture to the inside of my closet, but in the end, I dropped it into my desk drawer.

“That’s a start,” Kendall said, and by this we both understood that I was a project. We would cover a lot of ground before I was deemed satisfactory. He leaned close to the mirror over our side-by-side dressers and checked his face. “Did you get that job?”

“The teaching assistant thing, you mean.” I thought about Professor Emmet banging past me on her cane, her hair swinging into my chest. The weird interview that hadn’t been much of an interview, the brush-off she’d been giving me. And then the crying and the pills in her purse. I’d been giving the assistantship some thought. Did I want to follow Dr. Emmet around, handing her tissues and shaking pills into her hand? “Sort of,” I said.

“You sort of got a job?” He gave up on his pores and started fussing with the architectural rise of the front of his hair. “Or you got a sort-of job? That sounds like the kind of job you’d get.”

“It’s a real job,” I said but then remembered how Dr. Emmet had given me something to do only after she’d gone pale and teary. “I think.”

“She’s hot, right? Your professor?”

“She’s—” In my desk drawer, under the photo I wasn’t allowed to put up, I also stored the beginnings of another project, a secret one: a file on Dr. Emmet’s shooting. I knew all the facts by rote, but sometimes the articles I’d collected seemed to call me from their folder, like they had more to tell me or something to ask. I lived in the city of Capone, of Dillinger, of Richard Speck’s eight nurses, of John Wayne Gacy’s murdering men and boys and second life as a professional clown—of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb’s murder of a little boy, just to see what murder felt like. If I wanted to know what violence was made of, I’d come to the right place.

Dr. Emmet’s hair, when she walked past me into her office, smelled like the beach. Coconut, maybe, and some kind of flower that didn’t grow anywhere near here. It was probably just her shampoo, but I wondered how much of it was her skin.

“She’s hot, or your face wouldn’t be Rothbert red. You going to get an A-plus in socializing with the teacher?”

“Sociology, not socializing,” I said. Kendall got a lot of things half-right, but he got my program completely wrong.

My dad always got my program wrong, too. He got me wrong. He worked as a factory mechanic and couldn’t understand why I needed another degree. Why couldn’t I stop studying and get a job, he asked. How was I supposed to explain to him that even after this degree, all I would ever do was study? That any job I’d get would be a job
studying
?

“Calm down, egghead,” Kendall said. “It was a joke. I meant, do you think she’ll want to tutor you? You know, on the side?”

I ignored the nudge-nudge in his voice. “Dr. Emmet is a truly fascinating scholar in my field. I’d be lucky—”

“Emmet?” He gaped at me in the mirror. “Are you serious?” He jumped for the backpack on his bed and pulled out a balled-up newspaper. “Do you mean her?”

He flattened the newspaper against himself and turned the front page toward me. Amelia Emmet, PhD, had made it back on the front pages, and this time simply for showing up to work. I took the paper from Kendall and studied the photo. Dr. Emmet, her weight shifted onto her cane, coming up the walk to Dale Hall. By the look on her face, the paparazzo—if you could call a photojournalism student shooting for the
Rothbert Reader
that—had surprised her. She looked fierce. She looked good.

“That’s her, right? Sheesh, what are you
thinking
? People get shot around her, dude.”

“She’s the one who got shot.”

“And that student,” he said. “Do you want to be next?”

“Did you even read the story?” But I knew how wrong and biased some of the stories had been. When Kendall reached for the paper, I held it away from him.

“He’s dead. What else do you need to know? You dig that kind of stuff,” Kendall said, waving his hand at my now-empty half of the bulletin board. “But you don’t want to be the guy leaking brains from your ears, am I right?”

“Violence is a really interesting sociological—”

“Forget what I said about after-hours tutoring, kid,” he said. “Do not park in the handicapped zone, if you know what I’m saying.”

And this was what my problem really was. I opened my mouth to tell Kendall how offended I was by his ableist joke, how wrong he was about the facts of the case, and what an absolute shit he was to call me a kid when I was three years older. Except all the thoughts pinged around my brain without anything falling into the right slot. Kendall shook his head and, taking a last look at himself in the mirror, left me gaping like a fish on land.

I waited for a while to make sure he was gone, then opened my desk drawer and returned the photo to the wall. It was my half of the bulletin board, and I didn’t really expect too many girls to be trooping through. Not for me. Not for him, either, since he was kind of a dick.

Of course that was the kind of guy girls liked. Better than they liked me, at least.

I reached deeper into the drawer, took out the file I’d kept for the last year on Dr. Emmet’s attack. Below it lay another photo I’d have liked to hang up: my girlfriend, Bryn. My ex-girlfriend, actually, in her bikini on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. She didn’t fill out the bikini all that well, and sunglasses hid her eyes, probably her best feature. She’d sent the snapshot to me while we were separated by a half-dozen states, and it had set me on fire. She lived down south, starting her first job, while I was in Indiana, in my dad’s house, waiting to hear from Rothbert while I printed stories from the web and trimmed articles out of newspapers mail-ordered from all over Illinois, giving myself the creeps, to be honest. I should have left it that way. The surprise trip down to see her turned out to be a mistake. The message Bryn had left out of her letter was that she’d already met someone else but hadn’t broken up with me, because of my mom.

I liked to think of myself as a thoughtful guy. On the drive home that very same night, I’d had plenty of time to think about what I had learned. About her, about me, about life. You can’t help who you love, wasn’t that right? She couldn’t help loving the other guy, and I couldn’t help loving her. I couldn’t help how angry I felt about my mom and how her death was mucking up my life. While she was sick, we’d watched a thousand hours of old black-and-white detective movies under an old green knit blanket with frilly edges. She was sick at home for a long time. Without her, I took to watching the news and developed a fondness for all the bad news going on in the real world. After the funeral, I’d pulled the old blanket toward me to watch TV. The yarn had taken on all my mom’s smells—her perfume, her medicine, her decay, her death. On the back of the couch it would stay. We could never move it. All of this was forever.

I couldn’t help how much I hated being inside my own skin, how desperately I wanted to cut myself open and let whatever was inside free.

I replaced Bryn’s photo in the drawer and took up the folder of clippings on Dr. Emmet. By now I’d wrung all the information from them I was likely to get, but still I sorted the pile. By timeline. By depth. By publication. Looking for the connections, making notes.

Sliding the clips around on my desk, I wondered what Dr. Emmet would say if she knew how much interest I took in her situation. If she knew that I had applied to Rothbert only after I’d heard about the shooting. That I had turned down a better financial aid package at another university to come here and study with her. To come here and study
her
.

I was sure she’d tell me to find another assistantship.

I was sure she’d tell me to go to hell.

I reached for my scissors and, taking my time, trimmed the article from Kendall’s paper to add to my file.

Someday, I hoped, I’d figure out what all of this meant and, maybe, what it meant to me.

My first class session as a graduate student was methodology—study methods, use of statistics, field research strategies. I sort of got a hard-on just thinking about it all.

But the professor turned out to be a thousand years old and kept dropping his chin to his chest as though we’d just witnessed his last breath. And then the chin would pop up again, half of what he had been saying lost in a mumble, and we were stuck there for at least a few more minutes.

A couple of cute girls sat next to me. I could already tell they weren’t my type.

My type—as though my type didn’t eventually take up with someone who was more her type.

These girls propped their laptops open, but instead of taking any notes, they typed instant messages to their friends and moved things around on some social networking site. Before class, I’d heard a few of the other students strike up a conversation about how much they’d drunk the night prior. In graduate school. I couldn’t believe it. I liked a good microbrew as much as anyone, but I couldn’t help thinking that these people didn’t understand something fundamental about graduate degrees. You didn’t go get one because you didn’t want the party to end. You pursued one because you found yourself lacking in some area of knowledge that was important to you.