The Elliptical Quality of Speech
Syl lived in a condo. Having never visited one, and on the basis of Syl’s high-energy, dumb-jock persona, Amy had expected some kind of bachelor colony, a warren of wet bars, whatever they were, and gyms and pool rooms, and a parking lot full of Hummers and sleek little sperm cars. But the building was genteel running to seedy, a white stucco two-story scribbled with bougainvillea, no doubt magenta (the common San Diego variety)—it was hard to tell in the dark—and what cars she saw were for the most part well-kept sedans, some junkers, and a few vans with handicap plates. She didn’t recognize a single car and checked her watch. She was five minutes late for class. Where were the others?
“Where are the others?” asked Syl, peering beyond her as he let her into his place.
He sat her down in a worn brown velvet La-Z-Boy and poured her a Diet Coke, pausing at a window on his way back to scan the parking lot. “I don’t get it,” he said. “We can’t both have the wrong night. Can we?”
Amy didn’t see how. “I called Ginger last Sunday, right when I called you. She said she was coming.” Amy had called them both because neither one had mailed her a story to discuss. Both apologized and promised that they’d have copies to pass out on Wednesday, and that they’d read from them out loud, and take whatever instant feedback they got. Amy hated this and would ordinarily have insisted on rescheduling; but this was not an ordinary group, and discipline had obviously broken down because of the Sniper’s shenanigans. She’d left it up to both of them to make the necessary calls to the other group members, and Syl was now insisting that he’d called his half of the list, and Ginger had assured him that she’d called hers.
“I just talked to Marvy on Monday,” Syl said. Syl was distraught. He had obviously cleaned up his living room—Amy could see vacuum tracks on the carpet—and there were three huge bowls of fluorescent popcorn and nachos side-by-side on his coffee table. The condo was roomy, underfurnished, and impersonal. There was nothing hanging on the walls, no photos propped up on the cherry veneer Target workstation (identical to Amy’s own). On the floor, arranged in a semicircle at Amy’s feet, were large plaid pillows, obviously brand-new. If it weren’t for the crumbs the vacuum had missed and the smell of old burned pizza and beer, Amy would have wondered if he’d moved in today, just for the occasion of the class.
Syl’s place was familiar to Amy, in a way that reminded her of the taunting tape recording of her own voice. It wasn’t her place, but a rough facsimile, and recognizable once you adjusted for the absence of books and basset. He must be divorced, she thought, divorce being the only reason she could come up with for a physically fit though balding man in his late thirties, with what sounded like a decent job, to be living like an undergraduate. The only thing sadder than Syl at this moment was the prospect of making conversation with him. “Something’s up,” Amy said. “We should call Carla. She knows everything.”
“I just did,” said Syl. “Her phone is busy.”
Amy got out her class list and phone, and dialed Frank’s cell. It rang unanswered. “Try Chuck,” she told Syl, and she herself dialed Edna’s home phone. Edna was the only member of the class, and possibly the only citizen of San Diego County who didn’t own a cell phone. Edna’s phone rang and rang.
“She’s not answering,” said Syl.
“I know,” said Amy. “I mean—Chuck’s not answering?” They stared at each other for ten seconds. “Something’s up,” said Amy.
“You think it’s—”
Amy’s cell phone rang, a tune she’d actually selected and downloaded, in less unsettling times, for her own amusement: the Twilight Zone theme. Nee-nee-nee-nee, Nee-nee-nee-nee. Syl stared at her with that constipated look that people get when they’re forced to process too much information in too short a period of time, and even though he wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, Amy could hardly blame him. It didn’t help that by the time she’d fished the damn phone out of her pocketbook she was giggling uncontrollably. She couldn’t even say hello.
“What’s so funny?” It was Carla. “Did you do this on purpose?”
“Do what?” Amy asked, trying to settle down.
“He’s not home! Plus nobody else was there either, so I went to your house, because it’s only a few miles away, and—”
“Who’s not home?”
“Chuck! Who do you think?”
“You went to Chuck’s?”
Carla swore. “Of course I went to Chuck’s! What do you—” There was a sharp intake of breath. “Oh no.”
“Look, Syl and I are sitting here, and nobody’s—”
“Syl? Oh! I get it! I get it! Christ, I am so freaking clever I can’t believe it.”
“What?”
“You didn’t send the e-mail, did you? Telling us to meet at Chuck’s?”
“Wait a minute. You got an e-mail from me? How is that possible?”
“So let me get this straight. You’re at Syl’s, and who else?”
“Nobody.”
“You’re alone with Syl.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Carla remained silent. Syl regarded Amy like a drowning man, then looked at his cell phone with the same expression, as it suddenly played the theme from Peter Gunn.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Amy said.
“Give me a minute,” said Carla. “I’ll round up everybody and get them to Syl’s pronto.” Amy could hear screeching tires as Carla took off, probably backing out of Amy’s own driveway. Amy sincerely hoped that poor old Mrs. Franz wasn’t wandering the street. Probably not—it was winter, and she usually figured out where she lived by the time the sun went down. “Carla, watch out for—”
“Sit tight!” Carla rang off.
Meanwhile, Syl was nodding into his phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Just a minute.” He looked up at Amy. “Chuck says that everybody except Carla’s at Carla’s, and the old bat just threatened to call the police.”
Amy sighed. It was really kind of scary that she basically understood what Syl was saying. Chuck and “everybody” (except, apparently, Carla) were milling around Carla’s house, having been directed there by the Sniper. No doubt the doorbell had been rung many, many times. “Tell Chuck,” Amy said, “to tell them to come here.”
“But that’ll take—”
“About an hour. I know. But we’ve got to regroup.”
“Guacamole?”
It felt as though they had been sitting in excruciating silence for fifteen minutes, which meant that it had probably been only a few. Five, maybe.
“I got guacamole, green salsa, red salsa, and bean dip.” Syl seemed a little happier, or less anxious, now that, in theory, people were actually coming to his condo. “Also Pete’s Wicked and Miller Lite.”
Amy said, “The Sniper e-mailed everybody, making believe it was me. I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out how.”
Syl crunched on a giant corn chip. “Who’s your provider?”
“I have no idea what that even means.”
“What’s your e-mail address?”
“It’s—oh, I see. It’s a Hotmail address. So that means that anybody can just get online and—?”
“They’d need your password.”
“I give up. Is this guy psychic or what?”
Syl got up and left the room, returning in a minute with his three-ring binder, which he always brought to class but hardly ever, Amy noticed, wrote in. He opened it and glanced at something. “MonstrousW,” he said. “MWomen. FiercerH.”
“Those are the titles of my—well. No, I don’t use the titles of my novels for my stupid password.”
“How about a title and a publication year?”
“Nope.” It had never even occurred to Amy to do that. “You’ll never get it,” she said confidently. “There are just too many possibilities. Nobody, not even the Sniper, is going to waste hours going through every permutation—”
“Alphonse,” said Syl.
“What?”
“That’s it, isn’t it?”
“How the hell did you do that?”
Syl smiled, with pity. “Pet names. Oldest trick in the book. I should have gone there first.”
“But I never talk about Alphonse.”
“You talked about him during the first class. Carla was asking about him, and you told us all about basset hounds, how they have these huge feet.”
Amy was shaken. “And you wrote that down?” My god, she thought, how she blathered on about her private life.
“No! Why would I do that? I just remembered it. It’s a cute name.” Syl crunched. “We had a cocker once, named Joe.”
“When you were a kid?”
“No, me and Eileen.” Syl clapped the salt and grease off his hands and stood up. “I’m having another beer. Want one?”
Amy accepted beer in the bottle and was quiet for a while. That the Sniper had been able to impersonate her online was somehow more upsetting than that he, or she, had screwed up the entire evening. “Are you good with computers?” she finally asked.
Syl shrugged. “It’s getting to you, isn’t it?” He stood up and walked over to the parking-lot window. “Hey, if it really bothers you, you could get online and check out your mailbox.” Syl switched on his computer monitor and beckoned to Amy.
She didn’t see what good it was going to do, but she signed on anyway. “I never save my sent mail,” she said, “so I don’t know what’s going to look different.” Sure enough, when she took a look at her Hotmail inbox, it was full of the usual spam, Viagra and hot stocks and computer dating services. Somebody, the Sniper, had seen this. How pathetic. She was about to sign off when Syl, hanging over her shoulder, pointed out that there were three “sent messages” listed. The Sniper, apparently, wanted Amy to view his handiwork, and had saved the messages accordingly.
There were indeed three Sniper letters. One had been mailed to Pete, Ricky, Ginger, Tiffany, Chuck, Surtees, Edna, Harry B., and Marvy, from, of course, <gallopingamy@hotmail.com>:
Sorry—there’s been a change of plans. Syl’s going to be out of town, so we’re all meeting at Carla’s, at the usual time.
See youse all there!
“Youse?” What the hell was that? A second letter was sent to Carla, worded exactly the same, except that it told her the meeting was at Chuck’s. And a third letter was sent to Frank, telling him that the class was meeting at Dot’s. Amy printed out all three and stared at them. “My head hurts,” she finally said. “What could possibly be the point of all this? Why not send everybody to Carla’s?”
“There’s one missing,” said Syl. “There’s thirteen of us, right? Now, according to this, eleven people got phony e-mails, plus me, that’s twelve.”
“Dot,” said Amy.
“No, Dot’s here.”
“Her house is here. Frank’s supposed to go to her house. But the Sniper didn’t send her an e-mail. Or if he did, he didn’t save it. I hate this.”
Amy excused herself and went to the bathroom. Syl had thick brown towels and a matching brown rug and toilet seat cover, and he used some personal aerosol product called “Axe.” Jesus. Who would put something named “Axe” on his bare skin? There was a pile of Maxims on a wall shelf painted brown. Story idea: bathroom tours of lonely single guys. Amy herself was hit with a wave of loneliness so sudden that she closed her eyes against it. Through the door she could hear Syl talking to someone on the phone.
“That was Marvy,” Syl said, popping two more beers and handing one to Amy. “They haven’t left yet. They’re waiting for Carla.”
“We ought to just call it off.”
Syl shook his head.
“Seriously. By the time they get here it’ll be way after nine. We’ll never get anything done.”
“Sure we will! Besides, everybody’s psyched.”
No, you’re psyched, Syl. You poor lonely brown-toweled bastard. “While we’re waiting,” she said, “why don’t you give me a copy of your story?”
John Blovio had a huge problemmo. His slabonast was jammed, there were six Raggmots on his tail, he had a hangover the size of Phimiander IV, and Cinnamon Sominoid was on the rag.
Amy flipped through the pages, of which there were barely four, triple-spaced. Blovio apparently had, or at least used, a silver thrummox, which clanged against the spaceship’s floor like the Belles (Bells?) of Cumberling whenever he cursed and threw it down, which he did twice in the first two pages.
“Does this have a title, Syl?”
“Well,” he said, blushing, “it’s got a working title, but it’s kind of silly.”
Sillier than what? “Hit me,” she said.
“Close Encounters of the Worst Kind.”
“Funny,” Amy said.
“No, it’s not,” said Syl. He slumped back into his brown sofa module thing. “Can I be honest with you?”
“Please do.”
“I’m really not interested in writing.”
Thank God. “Trying to get back in the swing, huh?” Syl looked startled. “Look, this is an extension course. At least a quarter of the people in any given class are just looking to hook up with somebody.” Amy took a swig of ale. “They’re usually pretty easy to spot because they don’t turn anything in. You’re a good sport, Syl. You actually bothered.”
“Sort of. Are they ever, you know, successful? Hooking up?”
“No clue.”
“How about you?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You married?”
What was the man asking? Amy had been attractive once, but she hadn’t been propositioned in so long that she felt, suddenly, like a huge rusted mechanism. You have made, she wanted to say, a category mistake. “Twice, actually,” she said.
“Divorce,” said Syl. “It’s a killer. Eileen and me were married for ten years. Two kids.”
“Actually, I was widowed the first time.”
“One day she wakes up and tells me, ‘I want to go on with my life.’”
“As opposed to…?”
“Well, yeah! Two kids, five and eight, plus this great house in Del Mar.”
“Which she’s living in now?” Syl wasn’t interested in her. Syl was just emptied out. Amy had a pretty good idea why Eileen had wanted to get on with her life.
Amy tried to recall the last time she’d listened to the life story of a relative stranger. She’d been a hermit for so long that it was hard to recall the details of the conversational life. It was coming back to her now, though, and quickly: she had never had the patience for listening to the life stories of relative strangers. This was small talk, and small talk used to make her break out in cold sweats. She remembered now leaning up against a stuffed Moose in some restaurant in Bangor, one of Max’s hangouts, enduring the chatter of some businessman, the father, she now remembered, of one of Max’s friends. A carpet salesman, and he went on forever about the crummy mileage he got on his Monte Carlo, on account of he had to lug around a ton of carpet samples. “I got carpet samples up the wazoo,” he said. His name was Carmine something, and when she complained later, bitterly, to Max, he said what he always said. “So use it, Amy. Use it all. Write a cool story about Carmine and his great wazoo.” Max knew she never did that. She never used people in her fiction. She never wrote, for instance, about Max, his happy life, his terrible death, and the kindness that passed for love between them. “My first marriage,” she told Syl, “was a Vietnam marriage. I married Max to save him from the draft.”
“He was Vietnamese?”
“He was from Augusta, Maine. We were best friends. He was gay.”
Syl got that intense, constipated look again. “Was he a U.S. citizen?”
“Yes, a gay American citizen, from Augusta, Maine. See, in the sixties, there was this brief window of opportunity, where married guys were actually exempt from the dreaded Greeting.” Syl’s gaze turned ever blanker. “He and I were close friends in high school, and he was looking down the barrel of—”
“How did he get citizenship? Wasn’t it hard for those guys?”
“What do you mean? He was born in Maine.”
“But his parents were Vietnamese?” Syl, apparently hearing something, sprang to his feet and went over to the window. “Nope,” he said.
“He died of AIDS in 1989.”
“Huh,” said Syl.
Amy fought back the sudden urge to tell somebody, even Syl, about Max. How comfortable she had been with him. Not happy—Amy had never been happy—but peaceful. What had begun strictly as a marriage of convenience had soon turned into a utopian living arrangement. To the surprise of both, they were perfectly compatible in all respects but one, and the house they rented in Waterville had many bedrooms. She learned to cook and he to keep house, and their house was always open to friends and lovers. They lived together for seventeen years and didn’t have a single serious argument. Amy did secretarial work while Max got his doctorate, and then he supported her, more or less, as a professor of Romance languages without portfolio, working untenured at Colby and Bowdoin and U. Maine, while Amy wrote a raft of stories and then a novel, and then two more, and sold them all, for modest sums, with very little effort. Everything was so easy.
Too easy. Max said they were cheating life, the way some people cheat death. She managed to bypass all the drama and heartbreak of faltering affairs and marriages begun in delirious lust, those couples whose wedding receptions were already haunted by the ghosts of their older disappointed selves. She and Max valued each other, delighted each other, leaned on each other when the ordinary world let them down. She slept around, not as much as Max, but enough to keep herself satisfied. She was cheating life, yes, but she was also young and talented and lucky, and there would be time, later, if she wished, to fall in love. Time ran out, of course. Max got sick in 1985, and she cared for him until he died, four years later.
“You know what’s funny,” said Syl. “I can’t raise Frank. I keep getting voice mail.”
Amy consulted her e-mail printouts. “He’s supposed to be at Dot’s. Did you try Dot?”
“It’s ringing.” From across the room, Amy could hear Dot saying hello. Syl, apparently prepared only for busy signals and voice mail, stared at the phone.
Amy grabbed Syl’s cell phone and said hello. “Is Frank there?” she asked.
“Frank who? Frank Waasted? Why would Frank be here?”
“Because—” Amy looked at her printouts again and closed her eyes for a moment to concentrate. “Dot, did I send you an e-mail?”
Dot apparently didn’t think this was an odd question. She also didn’t sound very happy. “Yes, and at the last minute, too, and I finished my mystery play in a rush and spent all night last night at Kinko’s getting ready to pass it out in class. I guess I can mail it out for next week, but it’s going to cost me a pretty penny, I can tell you.”
“Dot, bear with me for a minute. What did I tell you about tonight’s class?”
“Only that it was canceled. You didn’t say why. And I wouldn’t mind knowing, actually—”
“Go ahead and mail them out.”
“What? I don’t understand why—”
Amy didn’t either, but she needed to get off the phone. “Mail them out tomorrow, okay? And I’ll call you and let you know where we’re meeting next.”
“But—”
“Dot, I’m sorry. I’ll chip in on the mailing costs. I have to go.” Where the hell was Frank?
It was almost ten o’clock by the time they showed up, making a huge racket in the parking lot, arriving in a caravan, slamming car doors and calling out to one another. Carla, jumping up and down like a little kid, waved at Amy standing in the window. “Ma went completely berserk!” she yelled.
“Oh, man,” said Syl, “most of my neighbors hit the sack at eight thirty.” He ran down the stairs, shushing people as they climbed.
“Here’s the deal,” announced Carla, plopping herself on one of the big floor pillows, while Syl passed out beer and diet soda, and got everybody seated. “Dot never came. And neither did Frank.”
“Where’s Ginger?” Amy asked. Ginger was bringing the other story for tonight.
“Ginger came, but then she bailed,” said Carla.
“Well, did she leave copies of her story with somebody?”
Edna, the last to make it up the stairs, sat next to Amy. “In my opinion,” she told her, “Ginger hadn’t brought anything to leave.”
Amy slumped back in her chair. “Then what the heck are we here for?”
“We’ve still got Syl, right?” said Marvy.
While Syl passed out his half-assed four-pager, Carla leaned forward and whispered to Amy. “I think Ginger’s gone for good. She made a big thing tonight, shaking her head and all, tons of body language, about how this was turning into a waste of time because of the Sniper and all. But I’m with Edna. I think she froze up and didn’t write anything and left without admitting it. Good riddance, right?”
“Cool!” said Marvy, looking at Syl’s pages. “It’s science fiction!”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Amy. She had to repeat it three times before everybody shut up. “Loath though I am to encourage the mass exploration of feelings—”
“Hear, hear,” said Edna.
“I am compelled to find out how tonight’s alarms and excursions have affected you all as a group. It seems to me that, what with Ginger giving up, and Frank who-knows-where, not to mention Dot Hieronymus—”
“Mention away!” said Chuck, to rowdy applause.
“On top of the fact that we’ve wasted most of the night, and God knows how much gasoline—”
“What did I tell you?” Carla had turned to face the others. “Didn’t I say she was going to do this?”
“Hell, no!” This from Dr. Richard Surtees, hail-fellow-well-met, newborn regular guy and then some. Richard “Hell, No!” Surtees. Amy had liked him better when he was a pompous ass. “We’re not quitting! In fact—and we were just talking about this before the drive over—we’d like to extend this class past the semester limit, and on into the New Year!”
Amy closed her eyes and listened to the huzzahs. Edna leaned in and said, “I think you may be outflanked.”
Yes, Amy thought, but by whom? “All right,” she said. “We’ve got exactly four pages here to talk about, unless anybody’s got something ready. And while we’re at it, who brought something for next week?”
“I’ve got a revision,” said Edna, “but it won’t be ready that soon.”
Harry B. said he too had revised and expanded his vampire thing. Tiffany and Ricky both said they were working on something. Surtees, of course, “always had a chapter ready,” although, curiously, he had stopped bringing shopping bags full of copies with him.
“Never fear,” said Amy, “because Dot will be mailing out her mystery play, and you should all have a copy by midweek.”
“Oh, that’s priceless,” snorted Harry B.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Amy, who knew perfectly well what he meant. It was time they brought it out into the open.
Harry B. exchanged looks with Carla and Marvy and Surtees. The rest glanced down. Nobody spoke for a full half minute. Amy was reminded of First Class, those awkward moments when nobody wanted to stick his neck out and everybody waited for someone to step up. Nobody, everybody, and someone. Idea for a story: three pronouns in desperate search of an antecedent.
In the end, it was Tiffany who spoke out. “We think it’s her,” she said.
“She,” said Edna.
“The Sniper,” said Carla.
“On the basis of…?”
“Rampant weirdness.” Tiffany had enough class to look ashamed. “Okay, that doesn’t mean anything, but look at what happened tonight. Where is she? Everybody else gets called out and sent on a wild goose chase, and there’s Dot, holed up in her house. Probably giggling away in the dark.”
“Ewwww,” said Carla.
The playground phenomenon. Amy had seen it countless times, though never under such peculiar circumstances. If you got a group of adults together in class, and the class coalesced, worked together successfully as a group, sooner or later there would emerge an agreed-upon patsy, rampantly weird, or maybe just rampantly untalented, or rampantly something else that didn’t fit in. Usually all that happened was that the outsider’s stories weren’t taken seriously, or were routinely patronized. This was worse. They were ganging up on Dot.
“The Sniper,” Amy said, “is a complex, tricky individual whose next moves have so far proven, at least to me, unpredictable. Does that sound like Dorothy Hieronymus to you? Any of you?”
“No,” said Carla. “But then you’re always talking about how surprising people are. About how, ultimately, nobody is predictable, least of all to himself. You say there wouldn’t be any point in writing fiction otherwise.”
Did Carla come to her classes with a tape recorder? There was an unsettling thought, for more reasons than one. “My point is, if she’s so brilliant and cunning, why is she home tonight, when everybody else is being sent all over San Diego County?”
Chuck said he’d been thinking the same thing. “Maybe,” he said, “she’s been set up.”
“Hey! I like that!” This from Syl, who indeed looked delighted.
“And where the hell is Frank?” said Chuck.
“Yeah!” said Syl. “Maybe it’s Frank!”
Tiffany raised her hand. “Carla says, and I agree, that the Sniper seems to be morphing into a less angry, much more playful state of mind.” Everybody seemed to agree, except possibly Chuck, who looked thoughtful. “I mean, look at tonight. Okay, we all wasted a lot of time and gas, but it was sort of fun. And the gag was clever, too, as though the person were showing off—for all of us. It just doesn’t seem so personal any more, and it doesn’t seem nasty at all. Not like before.”
Amy thought about her phone call the other night, her own taped voice razzing her in the dark. The tireless way in which the Sniper had dialed and dialed and dialed. That had seemed both personal and nasty. These people were enjoying themselves way too much. “Would somebody please try calling Frank again?”
“I’ve been trying every ten minutes,” Chuck said unhappily. “I talked to him just yesterday. He was definitely coming tonight, because he’d finished something, and he was going to bring it with him.”
“You guys hang out, right?” asked Tiffany. “I mean you knew each other before?”
“Actually, no. I only know Frank through class.” Chuck looked at Amy. “Actually, he said he was bringing something interesting. I couldn’t get him to talk about it. I was kind of surprised, because I figured Frank for a looky-loo.”
So had Amy. Frank Waasted was bright and an asset to class discussions, but he struck her as way too guarded to stick his neck out. He had signed up to bring in something for Last Class. Lookyloos often did that, and then deferred, at the last minute, to class members who wanted a second go-round.
“This is what we know,” said Carla. “The Sniper told Frank to go to Dot’s. But Frank didn’t go to Dot’s.”
“According to Dot,” said Tiffany.
“Oh, what’s that supposed to mean?” Chuck looked really put out. He seemed to agree with Amy that some of these people were treating Frank’s disappearance, along with the other nonsense, as some kind of mystery romp. “The woman has a husband, for Christ’s sake. Do you think the two of them have Frank stowed in their fruit cellar, like Mrs. Bates?”
“Ewwww—”
“Carla! Everybody!” Amy had had enough. “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to read Syl’s piece, silently. Unless Syl wants to read it out loud?” Syl did not. Syl didn’t even want his piece discussed, which was too damn bad. “Then we’re going to discuss it. Then we’re going to discuss, briefly, whether we’re meeting next week, and if so, where. Then we’re going home. It’s late, and I’ve had it.”
For ten minutes the only sound was paper scraping on paper. Chuck, she noticed, used his cell phone periodically, apparently re-dialing Frank, but he was discreet about it. Edna, Chuck, and Dr. Surtees marked up their copies. The rest read with almost identical expressions of sullen boredom, the teacher, what a poop, having ruined their good time. When Amy called for discussion to begin, the silence persevered. It wasn’t just sullenness, she realized—without Dot there to start off with her usual encomium to the writer’s use of metaphor, no one knew quite how to begin.
Pete Purvis cleared his throat, startling Amy. She hadn’t noticed him. In fact, she seldom noticed Pete. He had a way of blending into the wallpaper. “I’m going to go out on a limb here, Syl, and guess that you aren’t really a big sci-fi fan.”
Marvy, standing in for Dot, announced that he thought “Close Encounters of the Worst Kind,” though just a fragment, was a “really great, high-energy start,” and that he hoped that Syl was going to finish it soon.
“Why?” asked Pete. “All he’s done is made up a bunch of words. Blimmix. Thrombocopter. He doesn’t even show you what a thrombocopter is.”
“You’re right,” said Syl.
“Raggmopp!”
“Actually,” said Dr. Surtees, “it’s “raggmot.”
“Who cares?”
“I’m with you,” said Syl.
“What do you mean, ‘I’m with you’?” Carla waved her copy in his face. “It’s your story, for God’s sake.”
“Yeah,” said Syl, “but I’m not really serious about it. I just wrote it, you know, because it was my turn. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“Well, it matters to me,” said Edna, regarding Syl censoriously. “I just spent ten minutes reading it.”
“And it’s vulgar,” said Pete. What an odd word for Pete to use. “The way it talks about this girl, Cinnamon, like she’s just some bimbo. It’s disrespectful.”
Pete Purvis seemed genuinely angry. He was talking like a feminist, which apparently he was, which shouldn’t have surprised Amy. She thought back to Pete’s story, its essential sweetness. Pete wrote very well from a child’s point of view. In Amy’s experience, writers who could do that were often innocent themselves, and sometimes in a creepy way. But Pete was likable. He lived, she now recalled, with his dad.
Amy let Pete and Edna bat Syl around awhile longer, and then closed discussion without adding to it herself. This was the first time she had ever done so, but she felt no guilt. The evening, like Syl’s idiotic story, had been a complete waste of time. “Where are we meeting next?” she asked.
“My place,” said Carla. “Everybody knows where it is.”
“But your mother!” said Amy. “The poor woman. We can’t impose—”
“You’re not imposing,” said Carla.
“But it’s her house,” said Edna. “She has a perfect right not to have strangers tramping around—”
“The hell it is!”
“Well, half hers, then.”
“No, it’s not. It’s all mine. I paid for the whole thing. I let her live in half the house, but it belongs to me. I can have class there every week if I want.” Carla looked and sounded like a truculent thirteen-year-old.
Amy wasn’t crazy about the idea of returning to the Birdhouse, but since no one else was offering she didn’t argue. “Is everybody clear on what we’ll be reading for next time? Dot will be mailing out her mystery play.”
“But we’ve already done one of Dot’s things,” said Tiffany.
“Yes, but none of you has brought anything for next week. We’ll be lucky to have the play. Besides,” Amy said, packing up her stuff, handing Syl back his execrable piece without so much as a scribbled word, “maybe we can act it out. Put on a show in the old barn.” Collective groans, led by Carla. “Or,” Amy said, “we could disband right now.”
“Wait a minute,” said Marvy. “Nobody wants to give up. Right?” The rest nodded.
“Why on earth not?” asked Amy. “Don’t you see what’s happening? Discipline has broken down completely. Everybody’s on edge. Even if you all hadn’t been sent to the wrong place tonight, we only had four pages to talk about, and even they were, according to their own author, not worth the effort. No one brought work to take home and read. I’m not used to working like this,” Amy said.
“And good for you,” said Edna, with a smile that was almost warm. “That’s why we value your leadership.”
Traitor, thought Amy. Edna, of all people, should have let her go. Edna was a real teacher. Edna would never have put up with the Sniper, or with Carla, either.
Amy sighed. “Ground rules,” she finally said. “No more e-mails. If there’s a change in plans, I’ll call you each personally. Now, who’s bringing copies of something next time, to pass out for Last Class?”
“But wait,” said Carla, “it’s not going to be Last Class, remember? Because we’re extending—” Amy glared at her, and she had the good sense to shut up. “Okay. I’ll bring something.”
“Me too,” said Chuck. “And I think Frank has something also.” He fired up his cell phone again.
“Hey, everybody,” said Syl. “Just because the class is over doesn’t mean you all have to leave.”
He might as well have fired a starter pistol. Instantly they were all on their feet, gathering up bags and notebooks. They hadn’t touched the nachos, or any of the dips. The expression on Syl’s face was openly sad, and nobody but Amy was looking. And then Amy looked away. She was fresh out of sympathy.
“Bad night,” said a voice in her right ear, and a hand lighted on her left shoulder. It was Dr. Surtees, standing behind her, his arm actually around her, as if they were old friends, or worse. It took effort not to brush him off like a spiderweb. Amy hated to be touched. “Listen,” he said, oblivious, “I can send out a chapter this week, if you think it would help with morale.”
Whose? “If you like,” Amy said, speeding up, joining the line clogging Syl’s stairwell. She tried to move past Marvy and Pete and widen the buffer between herself and Surtees, but there seemed to be a serious clog in the line. “What’s the holdup?” she asked.
“Hello? Frank? Hello?”
Chuck had apparently gotten Frank on the phone. What had people done before cell phones? When exactly had it become so damn important to keep in touch?
“I’m Chuck Hes—Who are you? Where’s Frank?”
Amy muscled her way down the echoing stairwell to Chuck and began to pass him, but he put a hand on her arm. What the hell was going on? Why was everybody touching her?
“Frank Waasted,” Chuck was saying. He looked alarmed. “Who is this? Hey, buddy! Would you please hand the phone to Frank?”
Chuck tightened his grip on Amy’s arm. Apparently he wasn’t going to let her go, and they were all going to stand in this wretched stairwell all night. Amy grabbed the phone and held it to her ear.
“—wasted, all right! He’s hammered, man.”
The speaker sounded pretty hammered himself, or else baked, and also very young. “Hello?” Amy said, momentarily unsure of herself, about to make demands of a complete stranger. Then she pretended to be Edna Wentworth. “Young man! Where are you, and where is Mr. Waasted?” All she got back was laughter and scraping noises. She could hear a girl’s voice in the background, in front of another constant sound, like hissing. Then she heard the girl say, “Why don’t you…?” in a querulous whine, and then more hissing, and then the girl began to scream.
The scream wasn’t loud, because she was too far away from the phone, but it was prolonged and high pitched. Not a squeal, but a scream; and then the boy’s voice, shouting, “Are you sure?” and “How do you know?” And then, after a minute or so, nothing but that hissing.
“What is it?” asked Chuck.
Amy shook her head and didn’t look at him. She focused inward, on the hissing sound, which was beginning to remind her of something. A conch. The cell phone was like a conch shell. I’ve got the conch! said poor Piggy, and he was right, too, for all the good it did him. She was listening to the ocean surf.
“Lady!” The boy’s voice was at once stronger and less sure. “Your friend’s got something wrong with him.” “He’s dead!” the girl was screaming. “He won’t move, Lady. His neck—” “He’s dead!”
“Where are you?”
“Moonlight Beach. Lady, your friend is definitely probably dead. We gotta take off.” The conch went silent.
She had to say something. She should ask where Moonlight Beach was. She should ask if Frank had family. She should dial 911. Amy held up the conch. “Would someone please take this goddamn thing away from me,” she said.