DWINELLE HALL, A rectangular three-story building with red roof tiles in the center of Berkeley’s campus, would be ordinary, certainly unspectacular. But it seems to have gobbled up and embodied the spirit of the yells and protestors and one-man showmen who mount soapboxes and spew ideas or juggle them, or balls and knives—actual and linguistic—the quintessence of the stereotypical Berkeley politicized catcaller. Now absent.
The Dwinelle plaza stands eerily empty, something Jeremy barely registers along with a distant thought: must be spring break. His pause is instantaneous, just enough to take in the condensation coating the walls of the storied hall, and to feel the pain near his sternum. He’s missed his MRI. He thinks: I wonder if my mother felt this sensation before she got her diagnosis.
He strides forward.
“You want war, Harry,” Jeremy mutters, “you’ve got it.”
He descends to the basement, walks to the far right of the building, hearing his feet clop on the ratty tile floor. He’s got a full head of steam when he knocks on the door at the end, the one with the sign. “Harry Ives.”
No answer. The knock reverberates down the hallway. In an unusually self-conscious moment, Jeremy glances down the lonely corridor. He sees a man with floppy hair and a backpack exit an office at the far end of the building. Grad student or associate professor, Jeremy thinks, as the man looks his way, then turns and heads down the hallway and up the staircase. Feeling pity for the man, all these academics.
To Jeremy, there’s something deeply corrupted and corrupting about an environment like academia, where success is so purely subjective. Success depends on selling ideas, which requires convincing people of their merit but not actually asking them to spend money or hard-earned capital to purchase the ideas. It is, to Jeremy, the highest order of rhetorical gamesmanship.
And so, while the idea oppresses him, it also exhilarates him. It is a forum for endless potential conflict, debate, one-upmanship, backstabbing and, better yet, the barely disguised front stabbing.
And none a better foe than Harry, thinks Jeremy, as he nestles his knuckles on the old wise man’s door. He raps again, louder than the first time, and the brown door creaks open. It’s been left slightly ajar.
After modest hesitation, he pushes the door open.
He hears a footstep in the hallway, a cough. Peers back out, sees no one.
He sees that he’s got his iPad in his hand, and that it’s damp from sweat. He opens the cover, sees the countdown clock.
52:03:35.
He stuffs the computer into his backpack, and peeks back into Harry’s office. Rather, he’s looking into a classic anteroom of a professor of the highest esteem at a state university, meaning: drab and small and, to Jeremy, pathetic. It’s smaller than his own Embarcadero office, barely big enough to hold a cheap metal bookcase against the opposite wall, and, against the wall to his left, a desk, probably belonging to Harry’s graduate assistant. On a metal shelf attached to the wall over the desk, he sees a thick rectangular book that he identifies even though he can’t read the words on the spine: Conflict: A History. It is Harry’s well-worn and traveled bible on the subject. Piled on it, three books with titles Jeremy also can’t read, though he thinks he makes out the word “Mesopotamia.”
Next to the bookcase, another doorway, with a frosted square glass window, the portal to Harry War.
“Harry.”
No answer.
Another clop-clop of feet in the corridor.
On the desk, there’s a neat stack of folders, a blue plastic cup with the Cal Bear logo, holding a circle of pens. A laptop. Maybe the computer that Harry and some partner—a grad student, or Evan—are using to scam Jeremy.
He hears a thump from inside Harry’s office. The sound of the old man dropping a book or slamming down the phone.
It’s wartime.
Jeremy turns the handle, opens Harry’s door.
The smell hits him first. Sweet, sticky, fresh. His brain flashes on a piece of conflict trivia, the battle in the early-mid 1800s in South Africa in which ten thousand Zulus fought Voortrekkers. So brutal was the battle that it turned the Ncome River red.
The Battle of Blood River.
Blood. Rivers of blood. He’s standing in rivers of Harry’s blood.