That night.
The lecture hall at times seemed larger than it really was. Desks had been pulled into small, tight rows. They would arrive early and talk with one another about their studies, the social life at Jasper, the grad programs they had applied to. With only a couple of exceptions, they were not the best of friends. Over their three years at the college they had competed more often than not. A few of them, like Alex, were content to do their scholarship in silence; but others wanted nothing more than to work their way into the best grad programs and professorships in the country. When you came from a tiny place like Jasper, total dominance in your field was the only way to get noticed.
They were nine again. Daniel Hayden had returned.
“Couldn’t stay away, huh?” said Michael Tanner. “You miss him?”
“Yeah,” Hayden scoffed. “That’s it.”
As always, there was an uneasy silence just before the professor appeared. The screen wobbled and Aldiss was there again at his table, hands clasped and eyes straight ahead. He could have been anywhere, that concrete room was so nondescript. He could have been down the hall in an empty classroom for all they knew.
“Now,” he began, “are you starting to see the patterns in The Coil?”
“I’m coming to understand that the novel is a kind of allegory,” said Christian Kane. “The city—it’s so strange.”
“The New York City of the novel is very strange indeed,” said Aldiss. “This book is about Ann Marie, our heroine, breaking away from Iowa, coming into her own. Instead, what does she find?”
“She finds a kind of . . . labyrinth,” said Sally Mitchell.
“Very good.” Aldiss nodded, pleased. “That is exactly what the setting of The Coil is like for its last two hundred pages. Our reading so far just brushes the surface. Everything in this book is a mirror, a reflection of something else. Ann Marie doesn’t go off into a jungle so much as she walks into a house of mirrors. Everywhere she goes Fallows is throwing up obstacles for her.” Aldiss stopped, then cocked his head to the side as if he was thinking. “Obstacles, yes. But what is the writer really doing, class?”
No one answered. A few students looked down, as if they couldn’t even face the professor without an answer to his question.
“Come on,” Aldiss said, the tone of his voice getting sharper. “What is Fallows doing here?”
“He’s tricking her.”
It was Jacob Keller. He blinked slow-lidded at the screen, his look one of casual disinterest. But this was far from the truth; Keller was perfectly engaged. He always was.
“And why do you say this?”
“Isn’t it clear?” Keller asked. “He is trying to do everything in his power to keep her from succeeding. He’s the master and Ann Marie . . . well, she’s like a rat in a maze.”
“A rat in a maze,” Aldiss repeated, as if he had never heard the phrase used to describe this novel. But it was clear it worked: it fit the patterns and themes of the book perfectly. “I think you’re exactly right. The literary critics have said over time that the novel is a feminist text. But as you see Ann Marie struggling through this city-labyrinth, you begin to wonder if Fallows isn’t—”
“Trying to drive her mad.”
He swung his head to look at Alex. “Exactly, Ms. Shipley.”
“So what you’re saying,” put in Melissa Lee, her smoky voice barely audible in the room, “is that Fallows isn’t a feminist at all. In fact he is the opposite of that. He hates women and is trying to dominate his main character.”
“What I am saying,” Aldiss said, “is that Fallows is in no way a generous novelist.”
“Then what is he?”
“Haven’t you seen, Ms. Lee? He’s a trickster. This city of obstacles, all of these pitfalls Ann Marie must overcome—think of the crazy uncle who continues to hide himself from her in the rooms of his mansion—have an edge to them. All good novelists give their characters hurdles to overcome, but here it’s as if Fallows is teasing his heroine. As if he intends to drive her to the edge. And of course he does. But that is for another time.”
The class shifted; again, they had hung on his voice, his exegesis of The Coil, and now that he had moved on they were snapped out of their trance. The line that connected Aldiss and his students through the TV screen was severed again.
“What does all this say about Paul Fallows himself ?” he asked.
“It says the man was a liar.”
The class turned to face the student who had spoken: Daniel Hayden.
“Aren’t all novelists liars, Mr. Hayden?” asked Aldiss.
“Some are more accomplished than others,” the boy shot back. He spoke now with confidence; the uneasy, defiant kid from the last lecture was gone and had been replaced with somebody more brazen. Somebody with something to prove.
“Of course. But to accomplish a lie you need two things: the skill of the teller and the naïveté of the listener.”
“Skill,” scoffed Hayden.
“So you disagree that Fallows is good at what he did?” Aldiss’s eyes shined now. He was enjoying this back-and-forth. “At what he does?”
“I believe people should tell the truth.”
“Do you?” Aldiss goaded. “Always tell the truth?”
Hayden dodged. “Even in fiction there needs to be a context. Where is the context in these games Fallows is playing?”
“It’s in the texts themselves.”
“What texts?” asked Hayden, his voice rising. He held his copy of The Coil up, shook it like a doll. “This thing isn’t real enough to be a text. The author won’t even come forward and claim the damn thing. It’s like some kind of forgery.”
Aldiss began to speak, stopped. His tongue came out, swiped against his lips. The classroom had an intensity now, a pulse. It was as if Aldiss had drawn closer to them, as if he had stood in the front of the room and taken a literal step toward the boy.
“Well,” the man said, “in my mind a good lie is the same as a good story. Without embellishment there would be no artifice, and what is embellishment but—”
“Do you lie, Professor?” Hayden asked.
Aldiss drew back. “Pardon me?”
“It’s a simple question.”
“I do. I have. But it’s a habit, like many other habits I once had, that I have tried to break since I have come to this prison.”
“What kinds of lies did you tell?”
“Oh, come on, Daniel,” said Melissa Lee. “Let’s get on with it.”
On the screen Aldiss smiled. “No, no, let him talk. I find the boy interesting. My lies . . .” Aldiss’s eyes closed to slits as he thought back. “I used to tell my students at Dumant stories that were not quite true. In that way, I was like the great Paul Fallows.”
“What kinds of stories?”
“I told them that I had lived in Europe,” Aldiss said. “This is not true. The strangest place I have lived was Iowa.” The class laughed.
Hayden didn’t laugh. He looked at the screen and muttered something else. No one in the class caught it, or if someone did, they didn’t dwell on it. It was just two words: the Procedure.
But Richard Aldiss caught it. And he smiled.