“Now, let us begin.”
The image of Dr. Richard Aldiss on the television screen seemed to wobble a bit and then right itself. Nine faces stared at him, waiting for the professor to begin his lecture. They wondered if he would tell them about what he had done twelve years ago. The two murders (an axe, it was believed, but the murder weapon was never found), the grisly scenes on the Dumant University campus . . . no one knew if it would be a point of discussion. He wasn’t supposed to speak of the crimes, but Aldiss didn’t seem like a man who would play by the rules.
“What is literature?” the professor asked now.
No one in the class spoke. The silence hummed.
Aldiss smiled a bit, leaned forward. His eyes, furtive and black and bearing a hint of dark humor, flitted from side to side, searching them.
“Mr. Tanner,” he said, reading softly from a class roster that must have been off camera. “Please tell us what you believe literature to be.”
The boy named Michael Tanner spoke up. His voice cracked as he addressed the screen.
“Literature is an assortment of books,” he said. “The canon.”
“And what is the canon, in your opinion?”
“Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf. Mostly the modernists.”
A shadow passed across Aldiss’s face. “The modernists killed so many good things.”
The boy shrank back.
“Mr. Kane,” Aldiss said. “What is literature?”
“Literature is the feeling you get when you read a book,” said Christian Kane, a slight boy in the second row. He wore a denim jacket with grunge patches dotting the sleeves. He tried to make himself larger than he was, bring himself to the height of those who always towered over him. It worked, but only barely. It worked because Kane was brilliant.
“Ah, a man of feelings. I like that, Mr. Kane. And tell me—what feelings come over you when you read Isaac Babel? Or Boris Pilnyak, who couldn’t be rehabilitated and was killed by a firing squad and left for the birds to pick apart? Or Dostoyevsky? What do you feel when you read the scenes of Raskolnikov’s axe in Crime and Punishment?”
Axe. The word rang out in the lecture hall, vibrated around them. Everyone sat still, waiting for the other shoe to fall.
It did not. Richard Aldiss didn’t flinch, did not appear as if he had even made an error. Perhaps that one word, that casual axe, was meant to be dropped there. Perhaps he had planted it in his lecture beforehand, written the word into his notes. Was he this sort of man? they wondered. Was he the sort who would play mind games with his students?
“I feel repulsed,” Kane said. “As does everyone else.”
“Everyone?”
“Everyone who feels any empathy for the sane.”
Aldiss laughed. A quick, biting pshaw.
“Do you know what I felt when I read Dostoyevsky for the first time?” Aldiss said. “I felt a solution. For Raskolnikov doesn’t go unpunished for his crimes against his metaphorical sister and mother. He is indeed not a superman. This thing I felt when I first read that book, this emotion, was one of sadness. I too was destined not to be superman. I too was not meant to go unpunished.”
The professor appeared to frown, that pale shadow crossing over his face again. The two guards behind him shifted.
“Ms. Shipley,” he said. “Can you tell us what literature is?”
A girl in the second row hesitated. The rest of them watched her, this pretty, mysterious Vermont girl. Alex Shipley had long, straight hair that glinted in the classroom light. She was opinionated, razor sharp, and if you did not know her she could disarm you with her honesty—as was her intent. She had told no one yet (she liked to keep secrets until it was impossible not to), but she was bound for grad school at Harvard in the spring.
“Literature is love,” the girl said.
“Do you believe in love, Ms. Shipley?”
“Yes.”
“And so you must believe in literature.”
“Very much so.”
“What about the possibility of literature, like love, to hurt?”
The girl shrugged, undeterred. The camera that was trained on the students caught this, and Aldiss’s eyes flicked upward to where he must have had his own monitor to view the basement classroom. He smiled: he liked this indistinct, almost rebellious, gesture. “If literature can make us feel anything,” she said, “then why couldn’t it make us feel pain?”
“The book as knife.”
“Or arrow.”
Aldiss leaned back, even more impressed. “Flaming arrow.”
Another shrug from Alex. “Or axe.”
Then something happened.
Aldiss’s face went crimson. He straightened in his chair as if a jolt of electricity were pouring through him and clasped his hands around his throat. Then he began to writhe, still sitting upright, chair legs knocking frantically beneath him. It appeared that he was being strangled, invisibly, from behind.
The guards moved quickly. They surrounded him, both of them reaching out, only their arms and hands in the shot, trying to still him. But the professor could not be stilled. He flailed and bucked and flung himself around, the chair shrieking against the floor, Aldiss’s figure shifting almost totally off camera. A tiny parentheses of foam crept from his mouth and down his chin. He was misframed now, the faceless guards at the right edge of the screen fighting with him, trying to save him. “His tongue!” one of them said. “My God, he’s swallowing his tongue!”
For a few moments the students in the lecture hall sat silently, waiting. No one seemed to know what to do. They looked at one another, shock and confusion on their faces. The screen popped with static.
“What do we do now?” a girl named Sally Mitchell asked.
Then the sound, the electronic tone from before, returned. Everyone looked toward the TV screen.
Aldiss returned, his hair wild, his eyes racked by pain.
“I’m sorry,” he slurred. “I have these . . . these episodes sometimes. I’ve always had them, ever since I was a small boy. Not to worry. My minders here are trained medics—they won’t let me expire on you.” He said nothing more.
The nine stared at the box. Somehow his admission did not calm their nerves. A few of them would dream of him that night. Dreams of only sound and blurred movement: the rake of chair legs, the gargle of pain in the professor’s throat.
“You have said,” Aldiss went on when he was fully composed, “that literature is defined by its place in the canon. It is defined by emotion, by love. What if”—his cracked gaze swung around the room, falling on them all; and even this, this simple movement, showed the students in the night class why he was such a powerful teacher—“literature is a game?”
None of them knew how to take this. They stared at the screen, waiting for the man to continue.
“What if what just happened to me was nothing but a trick?”
The students were confused. Someone laughed nervously.
“I do indeed have a neurological condition,” he told his class. “But if I did not, if the spell I just suffered was indeed a hoax, an act—would you have believed I was in pain?”
No one answered.
“Come on. Was I convincing, class?”
“Yes,” a boy named Frank Marsden said from the back row. Thin, handsome in a classical way, Marsden was a drama student with a lit minor. Of all of the students in the classroom, he could tell truth from playacting.
“Absolutely,” said Alex Shipley.
“What if literature were like this?” Aldiss continued. “What if a book, a novel, tricked us into believing it was real, but when we actually got into it—when we really read it, when we truly paid attention—we began to see that there was a whole world behind the pages? A universe of deeper truths. And all it took was our ability to find the rabbit hole.”
He paused, let the cryptic information he had just given them settle in. “How many of you have heard of Paul Fallows?”