GARY J. HACKNEY, professor of law, is twinkly, in general, when you meet him by chance around the campus. But that is deceptive, I’ve been told. Students whine that he is brutally demanding in class and savage, it is said, in litigation on those few occasions when he climbs down the long, winding ivory tower stairs to the brawling screech of real-life courtrooms.
He has a mostly bald dome, shaped like an egg, with a fringe of gray hair, which starts, on the sides, just above his rather large ears. When it’s dry it’s quite wispy and stands out in the wind. Right now it was wet and it hung down like strands of rice noodles.
He has a slender frame, which I’d always known, and skinny shoulders. I’d known that too, but not how bony they are or that he has a small potbelly that looks like it’s stuck on. He plays squash for exercise and I knew that he had a regular 10 a.m. game.
Here it was 11:07 and I was lurking around the men’s locker room. His partner, an English grad student in organic chemistry, rushed off and as soon as he did, I stripped down, with some relief I must say, as I was stinking, filthy, and bruised, and my clothes were worse, and I sidled into the showers.
“Gary, Gary,” I hissed.
“Huh, huh,” he said, turning to the sound of my voice. He wiped the water from his eyes and peered in my direction, squinting, half blind without his glasses. “Who, who?”
“It’s me, David Goldberg,” I said. “The librarian.”
“Ah David, I’ve never seen you so out of focus before.”
“Yeah,” I said, and stepped beneath the shower next to his. Gym showers are the best, high nozzles with tons of water. I sighed with pleasure.
“Good workout?” he asked.
“Oh God, I needed that,” I said.
“Know what you mean,” he said.
“Did you have a good game?” I asked, trying to be polite, make contact.
“Yes, indeed. Fucker is forty years my junior and I whipped his pasty English ass. It’s good to kick ass, David, it’s good.”
“I need to talk to you, Gary,” I said.
“Talk away, talk away,” he said, scrubbing with enthusiasm at all the parts that rarely see the sun.
“I think I have some legal problems.”
“Have you got money?”
“I don’t know. I have twenty or thirty dollars on me,” I said.
“David, my boy, when I step out of my role as befuddled academic and into the world of law, I charge four hundred and fifty dollars an hour, outrageous, I know, but I like it like that.”
“Dammit, dammit, please, Gary, I need help.”
“What, what kind of help?” he asked, and then sort of hummed to himself as he gave his genitals a thorough scrubbing.
How to begin? How to explain? What could I say? “I’m in the wrong movie,” I blurted out. Then I babbled on about how I’d thought it was a Woody Allen film, a neurotic love story, but then it turned into a crazy thriller, with sadists chasing me. “Every time I see one of those movies, at some point I always think, ‘Come on, you asshole, just call nine-one-one.’ So I thought, hey, why don’t I go to the police? But they are the police, or at least Homeland Security, which are, actually, some of them, police, federal police? And she told me they’re the police. So I thought the next best thing to do was to go see a lawyer. Actually, a better thing, because you should never talk to the police without a lawyer. But the only lawyers I know are the real estate guys, who were at the closing when I sold my house and the divorce lawyer who took all the money from selling it and handed it over to the lawyer who represented my wife. Help me, please.”
“Well, we can certainly talk about it,” he said, with a certain squinty interest, and turned around under the spray, rinsing at last. “Come on up to the office.”
“I can’t,” I said, desperately. “They’re watching!” I was sure I sounded insane. “Or maybe they’re watching, and you’re right across from the library. I think they’re watching the library.”
“All right,” he said. I knew that tone of voice. I’d used it myself with the professor of physics emeritus who had to sit underneath the steel girders in the library because they broke up the alien radio waves.
After we dried off and we started to dress, he looked at my clothes and wrinkled his nose and I said, “I told you. They’re watching. My house, too. Or maybe not, but I can’t take a chance.”
“Wait here,” he said, pulling up his pants.
“How long?” I said, panic-stricken.
“A couple of minutes.”
I hid in the toilet until he came back. He had a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and a hooded sweatshirt for me. The first two he had snatched from the lost and found. The sweatshirt was new, a college sweatshirt that he’d bought at the desk. I put them all on with gratitude.
I just threw out my torn pants and filthy shirt. “I’ve been afraid,” I said, “to use my credit cards or my ATM. They can track by that.”
“Probably, David, if they want to,” he said, still quite patronizing. Then he said, in a much kinder tone, “Maybe we should get something to eat.”
“Yes,” I said, oh my God, the last thing I’d eaten had been vending machine peanuts at dawn, “Yes, yes, yes,” going on like Molly Bloom in that last orgasmic scene in Ulysses.
“Pull up your hoodie,” he said, conspiratorially.
We drove to a diner about fifteen miles down the road. Hungry as I was, my paranoia wa and worse and I suddenly said, “if this is as bad as . . . I mean if it’s crazy it’s crazy, but if it’s not, you don’t even want to be seen with me.”
He said, “How about I go in get us a couple of sandwiches and we eat in the car.”
“Good idea, that’s fine, and a milk shake.”
We drove out onto the highway and parked in a scenic overlook, which I thought was a good idea, very natural; no cop was going to make a casual, what’s wrong? what’s up? what are you doing here? kind of stop. I told Gary everything as it had happened. The food brought me down and smoothed me better than any of the benzodiazepines could have done.
When we were done, he said, “Let’s say it’s all true. That’s sort of the worst-case scenario. It seems to me that if you survive until Tuesday, which is not too far away, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, say, when the election is over and someone has conceded, you’re safe. That shouldn’t be too hard to do.”
“I don’t have money and I’m afraid to get money.”
“Hmm,” he said. “I’m not going to give you money in case it turns out to be aiding and abetting . . . bank . . . no, you’re probably on a list there . . . hey, you a member of the university credit union?”
“Yes.”
“Go to the credit union. Cash a check, a couple of thousand even. They’ll do that for you. Tell them a story if you feel you need to, a great deal on a boat or car or something, but you need cash, more than you can get at the ATM, whatever. It’s Friday. It won’t go into the system until at least Monday. And not to your bank until Tuesday, at the soonest, maybe Wednesday. I’ll help you get on and off campus; that I can do. Get on a bus, cash, go somewhere; hang with a friend.
“What I will do, I will file a complaint. I’ll put it on my desk for my secretary to mail, but she won’t get to it until Monday. No mail moves on Tuesday, I don’t think, so you have the virtue of having made your complaint immediately, gives credibility, went to an officer of the court, that’s me, more credibility, not fleeing, blah, blah, blah, but it doesn’t land anywhere until at least Wednesday. And, and you were so shaken up you said you wanted to get away for a couple of days at some vacation spot, you mentioned a lake, whatever, mention a lake, would you?”
“A lake,” I said.
“There you go.”
“Swimming,” I said.
“It’s late for that.”
“A little sailing, fishing, too,” I said.
“Very good,” he said. “That’s where you went and you told me you’d be back, which I have no reason to doubt and as far as I know you’re not fleeing anything. You are the injured party.”
“You know,” I said, “this is a really good milk shake.”
We gathered up the containers and the wrapping and stuffed them in the bag and I took them out to the waste bin. When I got back in the car, he started it up and we headed back to the campus. Gary looked thoughtful. Finally he said, “The other thing you better do is find out what this secret is. I have a feeling that in the end, that might be your only line of defense.”
“Gary,” I said, panicked all over again, “how the hell am I going to do that?”
“You’re a librarian,” he said. “Do research.”
It was hard for me to take that much money out. It seemed like an act of excess. I dithered. Then I saw Parks walking down the path. He was giving some tender adolescent the evil eye. I never before saw a man look at a woman like he wanted to fuck her until she bled to death and it was the blood and the death that would be the sweetness in his heart. I saw it as clearly as a movie special effect, one of the ones where the flesh melts away and some grim skeleton is revealed. I took it to be a hallucination brought on by stress and fear and lack of sleep.
I ducked inside the credit union, quick before he looked from her to me. Once inside I walked up to the woman at the desk and said the first thing, the only thing, I could think of: “Short term loan, two thousand dollars.” It was all moving too fast and too far off normality for me to be making many decisions of my own, so I just said what Gary J. Hackney had said. The woman who worked there, whose name I had known for years, whose name I could not, in that moment, remember at all, had me sign some papers and she gave me all that paper money in return.
Once I had the money, I was overwhelmed with confusion. Was it too much or too little? And where the hell was I going?
I couldn’t stay, but I was terrified to leave, terrified both that he would be out there and that I would have to make decisions. Out that door were a hundred thousand choices, an infinity of choices, and how was I to make them ?
Then I heard the voice of the credit union women—what was her name?—asking if I was all right. I said, “Yeah, sure . . . just . . .” something or other, and it seemed like I did have to go. So I opened the door, slowly, peering out, and I didn’t see either Parks or Ryan, so I kept at it and made it out the door and pulled it shut behind me as she said, “Bye, David.”
I pulled up my hoodie and headed for the bus stop. There were six or seven other people waiting.
Then the bus came and I hunched my way into the middle of the line, a few people in front of me, a couple behind me. The big step up and then two more small steps to the driver, then, as I looked toward the back of the bus, there was the big man with the white hair, looking square at me. There were three people on the steps behind me. I couldn’t go forward or back. I was trapped.
I dropped my money so I could get down on my knees pretending to collect it, but really to hide from him, and then crawl backward between the legs of the people behind me. But then the damn people started helping me. Picking up the coins for me. Then some irritatingly strong undergraduate put steel hook fingers into my armpits and hoisted me like a crane and as I was coming up I was certain that this spook was coming forward and would be standing right there and we’d be nose to nose and I’d be hauled off with a USA PATRIOT Act warrant and disappear to Guantanamo, never to be heard from again. The power of the human crane was irresistible and the motion inexorable and he stood me up on my feet and I looked and, yes, there was a man with whitish hair and he was at least seventy-eight, more likely eighty-eight, and he was, indeed staring at me, but it was the vacant wonderment of Alzheimer’s, the mind behind the eyes wondering, What am I looking at? and Have I seen it before?
I said, “Thanks.”
“No problem, bud.”
I paid my money. I walked back to an empty pair of seats and took one by the window. The bus started. I slouched down, but peered across the bottom of the window frame. We rolled, slowly, 15 mph limits on the university streets and speed bumps, too. I didn’t see Parks or Ryan. I saw various other people I knew, quite a few of them, and I wanted to wave. I wanted to tell them what was happening to me. I wanted to say good-bye, just in case. We stopped a few more times. Someone took the seat next to me. As we left the campus I fell asleep.
“Hey, buddy, buddy.” A hand was shaking me awake.
“Where are we?”
“End of the line, buddy.”
I panicked until I realized that it was the driver and his words were a simple literalism, not a colloquialism or a metaphor.
“Thanks,” I said.
It wasn’t much of a station, a shabby old storefront and parking along the side and back for five, maybe six buses at a time and a yellow line on the curb with a NO PARKING CABSTAND sign, one lonesome driver hanging in. The first bus out, leaving in nine minutes, was an express to D.C. Next bus, which would have headed west, wasn’t for over an hour. I wasn’t in the mood to hang about. It was nineteen dollars one way and thirty-seven round-trip. Not much of a savings. I bought the one-way. A bus depot is the kind of place where there’s nothing suspicious about a one-way ticket out of town. A lot of people who take the bus don’t plan on ever coming back.