The Demonologist (2 page)

Yet there has been nothing remotely inappropriate between O’Brien and me. Not a single stolen kiss before she boards her train on the New Haven line, not one flirty speculation over what might happen if we were to scuttle up to a room at some Midtown hotel and see what we’d be like, just once, in the sack. It’s not repression that prevents us—I don’t think it is, anyway—and it’s not entirely our mutual honoring of my marital vows (given that we both know my wife threw hers out the window for that smug prick in Physics, the smirky string theorist, Will Junger, a year ago). I believe O’Brien and I (she is “Elaine” only after a third martini) haven’t nudged things in
that direction because we fear it might befoul what we already have. And what do we have? A profound if sexless intimacy of a kind I’ve never known with either man or woman since childhood, and perhaps not even then.

Still, I suppose O’Brien and I have been carrying on an affair of sorts for the better part of the time we’ve been friends. When we get together, we talk about things I haven’t talked about with Diane for some time. For O’Brien, it is the dilemma of her future: fearing the prospect of single old age while recognizing she’s become used to being on her own, indulgent of her habits. A woman “increasingly unmarryable,” as she puts it.

For me, it is the dark cloud of depression. Or, I should say, what I reluctantly feel obliged to call depression, just as half the world has diagnosed itself, though it doesn’t seem to precisely fit my case. All my life I have been pursued by the black dogs of unaccountable gloom, despite the good luck of my career, the initially promising marriage, and the greatest fortune of all, my only child: a bright and tender-hearted daughter, who was born following a pregnancy all the doctors said would never come to term, the only miracle I am prepared to concede as real. After Tess arrived, the black dogs went away for a little while. But as she graduated from toddlerhood to chattering school age, they returned, hungrier than before. Even my love for Tess, even her whispered bedtime wishes of
Daddy, don’t be sad
could not hold them at bay.

There has always been a sense that there’s something
not quite right
with me. Nothing you’d notice on the outside—I’m nothing if not “polished,” as Diane described me with pride when we first started dating, and now uses the same term in a tone that bears scathing connotations. Even on the inside I am honestly free of self-pity or frustrated ambition, an atypical state for a tenure-track academic. No, my shadows issue from a more elusive source than the textbooks would have it. And as for my symptoms, I can tick few if any checkmarks beside the list of warning signs on the mental health public service announcements plastered above the doors of subway cars. Irritability or aggression? Only when I watch the news. Lost appetite? Nope.
I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to lose ten pounds since I left college. Trouble concentrating? I read Dead White Guy poems and undergrad papers for a living—concentration is my business.

My malady is more an indefinable presence than pleasure-draining absence. The sense that I have an unseen companion following me through my days, waiting to seize an opportunity, to find a closer relationship than the one it already enjoys. In childhood, I vainly tried to ascribe a personality to it, treat it as an “imaginary friend” of the kind I’d heard other children sometimes conjured. But my follower only followed—it did not play or protect or console. Its sole interest lay—and still lies—in providing dark company, malicious in its silence.

Professorial semantics, maybe, but it feels more like melancholy to me than anything as clinical as the chemical imbalances of depression. What Robert Burton called in his
Anatomy of Melancholy
(published four hundred years ago, back when Milton was first sketching his Satan) a “vexation of spirit.” It’s as though my very life has been haunted.

O’Brien has almost given up suggesting I should see a shrink. She’s grown too used to my reply: “Why should I when I have you?”

I’m allowing myself a smile at this when it is instantly wiped away by the sight of Will Junger coming down the Low Library’s stone steps. Waving my way as though we are friends. As though his fucking my wife for the last ten months is a fact that has momentarily escaped his mind.

“David! A word?”

What does this man look like? Something sly and surprisingly carnivorous. Something with claws.

“Another year,” he says once he stands in front of me, stagily breathless.

He squints at me, shows his teeth. It’s expressions like these, I suppose, that counted as “charming” in his first post–yoga class coffees with Diane. This was the word she used when I asked the always first, always useless, question of the cuckold:
Why him?
She shrugged, as though she didn’t require a reason, and was surprised that I might. “He’s
charming
,” she said finally, landing on the word as a butterfly decides which flower to rest on.

“Listen, I don’t want this to be difficult,” Will begins. “I’m just sorry for the way things have turned out.”

“And how is that?”

“Sorry?”

“How have things turned out?”

He rolls out his lower lip in a gesture of hurt. String theory. That’s what he teaches, what he talks to Diane about, presumably, after he’s rolled off her. How all matter, if you peel it down to the essentials, is bound by impossibly tiny strings. I don’t know about matter, but I could believe that this is all Will Junger is made of. Invisible strands that lift his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth, an expertly rendered puppet.

“I’m just trying to be a grown-up here,” he says.

“You have any kids, Will?”

“Kids? No.”

“Of course you don’t. And you never will, you selfish child,” I say, heaving myself full of damp air. “
Trying to be a grown-up here
? Fuck you. You think this is a scene in some indie drama you take my wife to in the Village, some pack of lies the guy at the
Times
said was so naturalistically performed. But in
real life
? We’re bad actors. We’re slobs who actually hurt.
You
don’t feel it,
you
couldn’t, but the pain you’re causing us—causing my family—it’s destroying our lives, what we have together. What we had.”

“Listen, David. I—”

“I have a daughter,” I go on, steamrolling him. “A little girl who knows something is wrong, and she’s slipping into this dark place I don’t know how to pull her out of. Do you know what it is to watch your child, your everything, come apart? Of course you don’t. You’re empty. A
summa cum laude
sociopath who talks about literally nothing for a living. Invisible strings! You’re a nothing specialist. A walking, talking vacancy.”

I didn’t expect to say all this, but I’m glad I have. Later, I’ll wish I could hop in a time machine and return to this moment to deliver a better-crafted insult. But for now, it feels pretty good.

“It’s funny you say that about me,” he says.

“Funny?”

“Ironic. Perhaps that’s the better term.”

“
Ironic
is never the better term.”

“This was Diane’s idea, by the way. That we talk.”

“You’re lying. She knows what I think of you.”

“But do you know what
she
thinks of
you
?”

The puppet strings are lifted. Will Junger smiles an unexpected smile of triumph.

“ ‘You’re not here,’ ” he says. “That’s what she says. ‘David? How would
I
know how David feels?
He’s not here
.’ ”

There’s no reply to this. Because it’s true. That’s been the death sentence of our marriage, and I have been powerless to correct the fault. It’s not workaholism, not the distractions of a lover or obsessive hobby, not the distance to which men tend to retreat as they drag their feet into middle age. Part of me—the part Diane needs—simply isn’t here anymore. Lately I can be in the same room, the same bed, and she reaches for me, but it is like trying to grasp the moon. What I’d like to know, what I’d pray to be told if I thought praying might work, is where the missing piece is. What did I leave behind? What did I never have to start with? What name is to be given the parasite that has fed on me without me noticing?

The sun comes out and all at once the city is bathed in steam, the library steps glinting. Will Junger wrinkles his nose. He is a cat. I see that now, far too late. A black cat that’s crossed my path.

“Gonna be a hot one,” he says and starts away into the new light.

I
HEAD PAST THE BRONZE OF
R
ODIN
’
S
The Thinker
(“H
E LOOKS LIKE
he has a toothache,” Tess once rightly said of him) and into Philosophy Hall. My office is on the third floor, and I take the stairs clinging to the handrail, drained by the sudden heat.

When I reach my floor and make the corner I’m hit by a sensation of vertigo so intense I scramble to the wall and cling to the brick. I’ve had, now and then, panic attacks of the sort that leave you momentarily breathless, what my mother would call “dizzy spells.” But
this is something else altogether. A distinct sensation of falling. Not from a height but
into
a borderless space. An abyss that swallows me, the building, the world in a single, merciless gulp.

Then it’s gone. Leaving me glad that nobody witnessed my spontaneous wall hugging.

Nobody but the woman sitting on the chair outside my office door.

Too old to be a student. Too well-dressed to be an academic. I put her in her mid-thirties at first, but as I approach, she seems older, her bones overly pronounced, the premature aging of the eating disordered. She looks to be starving, in fact. A brittleness her tailored suit and long, dyed black hair cannot hide.

“Professor Ullman?”

Her accent is European, but generically so. It could be an American-flavored French, German, or Czech. An accent that hides one’s origins rather than reveals them.

“I’m not holding office hours today.”

“Of course. I read the card on your door.”

“Are you here about a student? Is your child in my class?”

I am used to this scene: the helicopter parent, having taken out a third mortgage to put her kid into a fancy college, making a plea on behalf of her B-student Great Hope. Yet even as I ask this woman if this is the case, I know it isn’t. She’s here for me.

“No, no,” she answers, pulling a stray strand of hair from her lips. “I am here to deliver an invitation.”

“My mailbox is downstairs. You can leave anything addressed to me with the porter.”

“A
verbal
invitation.”

She stands. Taller than I expected. And though she is as worryingly thin as she appeared while seated, there is no apparent weakness in her frame. She holds the balls of her shoulders wide, her sharp chin pointed at the ceiling.

“I have an appointment downtown,” I say, though I am already reaching for the handle to open the door. And she is already shuffling close to follow me in.

“Only a moment, professor,” she says. “I promise not to make you late.”

M
Y OFFICE IS NOT LARGE, AND THE STUFFED BOOKSHELVES AND
stacked papers shrink the space even more. I’ve always felt this lends the room a coziness, a scholarly nest. This afternoon, however, even after I fall into the chair behind my desk and the Thin Woman sits on the antique bench where my students ask for extensions or beg for higher grades, it is suffocating. The air thin, as though we have been transported to a higher altitude.

The woman smoothes her skirt. Her fingers too long. The only jewelry she wears is a gold band on her thumb. So loosely fitting it spins whenever she moves her hand.

“An introduction would be customary at this point,” I say, surprised by the crisp aggression of my tone. It doesn’t come from a position of strength, I realize, but self-defense. A smaller animal puffing up to create the illusion of ferocity before a predator.

“My real name is information I cannot provide, unfortunately,” she says. “Of course I could offer something false—an alias—but lies of any sort make me uncomfortable. Even the harmless lies of social convenience.”

“This puts you at an advantage.”

“An advantage? But this isn’t a
contest,
professor. We are on the same side.”

“What side is that?”

She laughs at this. The sickly rattle of a barely controlled cough. Both hands flying up to cover her mouth.

“Your accent. I can’t quite place it,” I say when she has settled and the thumb ring has stopped spinning.

“I have lived in many places.”

“A traveler.”

“A wanderer. Perhaps that is the way to put it.”

“Wandering implies an absence of purpose.”

“Does it? But that cannot be. For it has brought me here.”

She slides herself forward so that she is perched on the bench’s edge, a movement of perhaps two or three inches. Yet it’s as though she has come to sit upon my desk, the space between us impolitely close. I can smell her now. A vaguely barnyard whiff of straw, of close-quartered livestock. There is a second when I feel like I may not be able to take another breath without some visible show of disgust. And then she begins. Her voice not wholly disguising the scent, but somehow quieting its intensity.

“I represent a client who demands discretion above all. And in this particular case, as you will no doubt appreciate, this requirement limits me to only relating the most necessary information to you.”

“A need-to-know basis.”

“Yes,” she says, and cocks her head, as though she’s never heard the phrase before. “Only what you need to know.”

“Which is what?”

“Your expertise is required to assist my client in understanding an ongoing case of primary interest. Which is why I am here. To invite you, as a consultant, to provide your professional insight, observations, whatever you may feel to be of relevance in clarifying our understanding of the—” She stops here, seeming to choose from a list of possible words in her mind, and finally settling on the best of an inadequate selection. “The phenomenon.”