* -1-
Professor Jeffrey Deepmere stands alone under the great sandstone arch at the entrance to the riverfront memorial park. He reaches for the crumpled pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his pilled wool overcoat and strikes a match. It’s a shameful habit from his experimental phase with Quinn, but the occasional nicotine rush puts him in a creative state of mind and fills him with a sense of euphoria. Unfortunately, after taking a few desperate puffs, he traces with one trembling finger the familiar names engraved on the arch for all time. It has become a ritual for him, and he begins to suspect that he may require a stronger type of medicine. As a self-respecting Humanist, he rejects the grossly superstitious beliefs of the well-meaning locals, but now, above the swiftly flowing current, he perceives the low moans of the restless spirits rumored to haunt the river’s muddy embankment. Four years ago, on a blustery night in late October, a riverboat casino christened the Miss Bordereau sank near the oxbow bend after colliding with a barge that carried in its massive hold twelve tons of iron ore. Some of the bodies were never recovered, and on nights like this, when the smoky autumn air stirs the leaves, Deepmere imagines he hears the dead as they place their final bets and lay their losing hands on the card tables.
From the corner of his eye, he senses movement. A well-fed possum clambers fatly from a sewer and waddles across the street to scavenge an overturned trashcan. Deepmere recoils from the sight. Suddenly the cigarette tastes foul, and he flicks it to the ground. After crushing the butt under the toe of one scuffed shoe, he begins walking back to his office on campus. Upon the completion of a new project, he leaves his desk to take these long contemplative strolls through the brick lanes of Sloperville, Ohio, a quiet college town nestled in the mist-shrouded Appalachian foothills. At this time of night, the coffee shops and dive bars along Prest Street have all gone dark, and even the rowdiest of undergraduates have returned with vampiric gloom to the dorms to await the dreaded sunrise.
An hour ago, while sipping his customary cup of herbal tea, Deepmere put the finishing touches on “International Episodes: The Real and Surreal in the ‘High’ Middle Period,” an exhaustively researched essay in which he argues that an uninspired Henry James, under his older brother’s medical supervision, had on a regular basis experimented with nitrous oxide. An entire month of these treatments resulted in The Aspern Papers, James’s indisputable masterpiece. Composed between fits of wild laughter and sustained bouts of inconsolable sobbing, the tale concerns the misadventures of a scholar who sets off on a doomed quest to Venice to unearth the private letters of a lecherous old poet. In his underhanded attempts to obtain the letters, the unnamed protagonist deliberately misleads a virtuous young woman only to learn that the young woman has dubious designs of her own.
This essay, like so many others Deepmere has submitted for publication, is sure to generate controversy when it appears in the next issue of Conclusions & Completeness, the leading journal of Guilded Age Studies. Deepmere anticipates the usual backhanded compliments from so-called friends and vehement demands from enemies that he immediately retracts the paper. Last spring, at a prestigious academic conference, an especially hostile critic, motivated more by professional jealousy than ideological zeal, took to the podium to publicly denounce Deepmere’s work. “I think we can all agree, can’t we, that we’ve indulged Jeffrey and his wild fantasies for far too long. His highly speculative claims and maddening baroque style have always bordered on self-parody. But now, with this latest essay, he is causing irreparable damage not only to his own reputation but to the reputation of our entire discipline.”
Deepmere rather enjoys the notoriety that comes from being such a polarizing figure. Thanks to his prolific output and appearances on public radio, there is a dedicated coterie of Deepmere enthusiasts who continue to cite his work in their own seldom read papers and who treat the appearance of a new Deepmere essay as a kind of literary event, no small feat in an age when serious scholarship is on the wane. “The important thing,” Quinn used to tell him, “is to let a little hot air out of that big fat head of yours.”
Even now, four years after Quinn grabbed the silver tea tin where he kept his drugs and secret stash of chips and stormed a final time from their house, Deepmere realizes that the best cure for an inflated ego is to concentrate on the blank pages of his notebook or to stare at the blinking cursor of a computer screen. Although he would never admit this, not even to Quinn, the act of writing now fills him with a sense of existential dread, and on lonely autumn nights, when the campus is deserted and the screech owls are calling from the trees, he is convinced he will never again have anything interesting and original to say.
He passes through the college’s imposing wrought iron gates, and because he has nowhere else to go, he returns to his third-floor office in Clairmont Hall. There he brews a fresh pot of strong black tea and sits at his desk where he pretends to reconsider dead-end ideas for future projects. Grateful for the view of the hills rather than the riverfront with its somber sandstone arch and the ghosts of those lost and luckless gamblers, Deepmere wonders if Henry James, an intensely private man, did his best work after midnight. It would certainly seem so, judging from the malevolent specters that so often disturb his characters.
With a chewed pencil in hand and tea kettle whistling in the corner, Deepmere leans back in his chair and watches the branches clatter against the windowpane, and within a few minutes he falls into a deep and dreamless sleep.
-2-
At two in the morning, according to the unreliable mantel clock on his shelf, Deepmere comes awake with a start. From behind the closed door, he hears the jovial murmur of voices and catches the unmistakable scent of marijuana. His left foot has gone numb, and when he tries to stand, he feels his knee start to buckle and nearly collapses to the floor. Like a medieval dungeon keeper, he drags his leg across the room and cracks open the door. At the opposite end of the corridor, a feeble light burns inside an office that, up until a few weeks ago, served as a kind of storage room and temporary shelter for adjunct faculty. This semester the office is occupied by Juliana Ryker, the new writer-in-residence described by fawning reviewers as “the foremost practitioner of revenge porn and literary smut.”
Deepmere, having been reprimanded in the past for his increasingly erratic behavior, no longer mingles with other faculty members, but at the beginning of the semester he made a point of attending a painfully polite cocktail party where Ryker read from Burn Your Life Down, her latest book of autobiographical essays. He was curious to meet a prolific local writer who, in one cheap paperback after another, romanticized these hills and hollers. In interviews and feature stories, she claimed to drink her whiskey straight and spent her free time in the company of notorious motorcycle gangs. Ignoring the stares and whispers of his colleagues, Deepmere tiptoed across the dean’s backyard patio and took a seat near the azaleas. When Ryker finally appeared, thirty minutes late, he could smell the booze on her breath. Under the soft glow of twinkle lights, she stood at a podium and in a stilted manner read the opening pages of a well-thumbed paperback. Aside from her appalling prose style and trivial insights into human nature, the only notable thing about her was her sleeveless red dress and a pair of blue dragons tattooed to each arm. She had a distracting habit of crossing her arms, creating a kind of reptilian double-helix that stretched from her wrists to shoulders.
“This is the story,” she read, “of how my older brother Miles lost his right hand during his third shift at Lambert & Sons Rendering Plant. He was twenty-five years old when the high-speed belt of a transit bin ripped the hand clean from his arm and whisked it away into a steaming kettle at the end of the line. My brother stood there like a drooling idiot and watched his own hand waving goodbye as it sank into the percolating gray sludge. Blood tests revealed that Miles had been drinking that night, and his co-workers testified under oath to having seen him nodding off at his station. Of course, what his co-workers didn’t say is that they’d been drinking, too. How could anyone stay sober in such a foul place? The smell alone could make your eyes water. Linus Lambert, the owner’s son and heir apparent to the Lambert fortune, was not sympathetic. ‘Gross negligence,’ he called it, and made sure Miles didn’t receive a single penny in compensation. So, one hot summer night, with my siblings as his accomplices, Miles decided to make the entire Lambert family pay dearly for this grave injustice. I was only five at the time, the youngest of eight children, and I’ve had to piece together my brother’s story from various sources, including police reports, court records, newspaper clippings, and late-night conversations with family, friends and neighbors. Some of the details are pure speculation on my part, but I’ve tried my best to convey the facts about Miles Ryker, the so-called Terror of Touchett Township, and how from the four small rooms of our clapboard house on Stackpole Lane he operated a brutally efficient criminal syndicate and became, for a few years anyway, the most feared citizen of our forsaken county.”
Deepmere could barely contain his laughter as he listened to Ryker describe this deranged freakshow of babbling lunatics and sex-crazed serial killers, and he wondered how anything so vulgar, so contrived, could garner universal acclaim from reviewers. Melodramatic trash designed to fly off the shelves, but his colleagues, from the way they applauded when she finished reading, seemed utterly enthralled by the story.
Now, marveling at the cloud of blue smoke snaking along the third-floor corridor of Clairmont Hall, Deepmere listens to Ryker speak in more natural tones.
“This is some seriously good shit, kid. I’m happy we finally connected.”
“Third generation sinsemilla. I call it Mellow Fruitfulness. In honor of the season.”
“The season?”
“John Keats. You like poetry, right?”
“Sure, kid. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed.”
Deepmere cracks open the door and spies a young man standing outside Ryker’s office. His red beard grows in patches on his pale cheeks and chin and his jeans hang loosely around his bony hips. Deepmere knows the type only too well, an underfed commuter kid who plays endless hours of violent video games in his trailer and survives on a steady diet of Ramen noodles, bong hits, and big bottles of caffeinated soda. Quinn, a sharp-tongued townie with a taste for draft beer and late-night poker tournaments, introduced Deepmere to the customs and manners of the locals, and this boy could easily pass for one of Quinn’s hundred cousins, could in fact pass for Quinn himself.
“Sorry to be in such a hurry,” says the boy with rustic simplicity, “but business always picks up after the bars close. I’m the only medicine man in town who makes house calls this late at night.”
“I get it, kid. In your line of work, you must deal with all kinds of interesting characters.”
“Well, I’ve never been hunted down by a redneck cartel, like in one of your books, but I have been chased through dark alleys by wasted frat boys. Trust me, you never want to piss off a two-hundred-pound meathead with a baseball bat in his hand. That’s why I only sell to people I can trust. And I never sell to faculty members. So far, you’re the only exception. But then how many badass authors do you get to meet in your life?”
Ryker laughs. “Don’t confuse the persona with the actual woman. I’m just someone who spends most of my time procrastinating at a desk. But your pharmaceuticals should provide plenty of inspiration. A beautiful example of how art and science can come together in meaningful dialogue.”
“Like I said, my weed is mellow, but as your physician I strongly advise you not to drink any of that tea tonight. I know you’re no amateur or anything, but with my shrooms you need to go easy. Start slow. Take a few modest sips until the desired effect is achieved. Took me a whole year to get the nutrients in the soil just right. Tell you the truth, I’ve always considered toadstools a sentient life form.”
“Potent, huh?”
“Let me put it to you this way. One of my buddies, a theoretical physics major, totally lost his shit after drinking a cup. He sat in the corner of his apartment and sucked his thumb for an hour. Convinced himself that existence was nothing more than a hypnotic light show. Said it was like a film flickering through a movie projector.”
“As good a guess as any, I suppose.” Ryker coughs and then says, “Well, I better keep this fancy tin right here in my desk drawer. If I bring it home with me, I might be tempted to sample a cup before I hit the hay. If it’s as good as you say it is, I’ll be sure to acknowledge you in my next novel.”
“You serious?”
“Perfectly serious. Your medicine makes you a potential collaborator.”
“No shit!”
“Just my way of thanking you for swinging by at such a late hour.”
“No sweat. Oh, almost forgot!” He adjusts the wire-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his acne-speckled nose and reaches into his duffel bag. “Would you mind signing a book for me?”
“My pleasure, kid. What’s the last name?”
“Archer. Iggie Archer. Guess you need to know that if you’re going to put my name in your next novel.”
“To my favorite botany major…”
“Wow, I can’t believe this. Loco Lady Ryker in the flesh. Smoking my weed and signing my favorite book. Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading your stories, Miss Ryker, it’s never to underestimate the power of meaningful coincidences.”
“A keen observation, kid. And don’t you dare call me ‘miss’ again.”
-3-
Thirty minutes later, after he is certain Juliana Ryker has vacated her office, Deepmere creeps along the gloomy corridor to retrieve the master key from the department secretary’s office. He approaches the life-sized black-and-white poster taped to Ryker’s door. A tall woman in her mid-thirties, she looks, at least in Deepmere’s estimation, like a deranged survivalist who has sidled out of the brackish waters of a gator-infested swamp. Sporting a pair of mirrored sunglasses and a camouflage hunter’s cap, she cradles a .50 caliber double-barrel shotgun and leans against a white 1957 Plymouth Fury, a bloated beached whale of an automobile with a cracked windshield. Above her head a bold-faced caption reads: “Burglars, please carry ID so I can notify next of kin.”
A handful of campus activists, outraged by the poster, have demanded the dean amend the university code of conduct to include language expressly forbidding “the valorization of firearms.” The dean, an obsequious little fellow with a nervous twitch in his left eye, has agreed to these changes but says the new rules cannot go into effect until after the faculty senate convenes in a month’s time. Deepmere shakes his head. Back in his day some brave soul would have ripped the damned thing down and burned it in effigy in the quad.
Now, just to be safe, he presses his ear against the door and gently knocks. When no one answers, he slides the master key into the lock and turns the knob. The door swings open with an alarming creek. Deepmere cringes and steps forward, his eyes darting around the room. The place smells like one of those hellish honky bars Quinn liked to frequent on Friday nights for happy hour. Aside from a manual typewriter and dirty ashtray on the desk, Ryker’s office is completely empty. There is no comfy ottoman draped with a crocheted blanket, as Deepmere has in his own office. No cast iron tea kettle, no golden bowl filled with individually wrapped mints, no framed lithographs by John Singer Sargent, no custom bookshelves lined with treasured first editions arranged alphabetically by author’s last name. There are no degrees or awards or commendations of any kind.
Deepmere flicks on the overhead light and gasps. Mounted to the wall behind him is an elk’s skull sporting a lethal pair of antlers. He lurches over to the desk and, taking care not to disturb anything, searches the drawers. Ryker seems like the kind of person who, just for fun, might place a mousetrap beneath a three-ringed binder. It doesn’t take him long to find what he’s looking for. In the top drawer, under a folder stuffed with ungraded term papers, he discovers a small silver tea tin. He pops the lid and takes an experimental sniff. The damp and earthy odor, like the forest floor after a gentle rain, is one he remembers quite well from his final confrontation with Quinn.
Deepmere waves the tin under his nose and lets out an explosive sneeze. He searches in vain for a box of tissues when he hears, or thinks he hears, the sound of creaking floorboards. His heart racing, he bolts across the room and switches off the light. He stands with his back pressed against the door and listens for footsteps and the heavy breathing of someone who has just climbed three flights of stairs. Except for the occasional groan and hiss of an ancient radiator, all is quiet.
Berating himself for his foolhardiness, Deepmere tucks the tin under his arm and takes a final look around the room to make sure everything is in its proper place. From the window facing the street, he sees a pair of headlights come on and hears the rumble of an ignition. A Plymouth Fury, its professionally polished bone-white finish gleaming under the streetlights, pulls away from Clairmont Hall. Even from a distance, Deepmere can make out a familiar face illuminated by the green dashboard lights and a dragon dangling from the driver’s side window. In an asphyxiating cloud of blue exhaust, the Fury makes a hard left on Miller Street, loose bricks clattering beneath its tires, and then vanishes into the night.
Deepmere stumbles from the office, slamming shut the door, and hurries to the secretary’s office to return the master key.
-4-
Early the next morning, while taking a stroll before his first class of the day, Deepmere is forced to stop and lean against a lamppost when a sensational idea for a new essay strikes him with physical force. He tries to dismiss it as mere folly, but he becomes so convinced of its essential truth that he dashes down the street and takes a seat at one of the sidewalk tables outside a corner cafe. Even at this early hour, a number of students sit inside at the counter, slurping their sugary drinks and paging through their highlighted textbooks. Surprised to see someone as austere as Professor Deepmere huffing away, they stare at him through the picture window. Ignoring their smirks and smiles, he reaches frantically for the notebook and pen he keeps handy in his coat pocket and furiously scribbles away until his wrist aches and his fingertips are stained with ink.
In the essay he intends to show how on a rainy afternoon in 1875, at a fashionable salon on the Rue de Bretagne in Paris, a young Henry James, then drafting his debut novel Roderick Hudson, met and became fast friends with internationally acclaimed fantasy writer Jules Verne. Although evidence for this theory is thin, it’s Deepmere’s contention that over the next few years, Verne exerted a profound influence on James’s creative output, particularly on his weird tales. Verne opened the master’s imagination to the possibilities of the mysterious, the unknown, and the unseen.
For once in his life, the work comes easily, intuitively, and an hour later, when he finally tears his eyes from his notebook, Deepmere finds himself gazing with awe at a panorama glowing with bold colors. The view of the Appalachian foothills feels strangely tutorial, as if each kaleidoscopic display of red and gold, and every virtuosic trill of birdsong coming from the treetops has something meaningful to teach him. In a kind of trance, he fishes for a cigarette and doesn’t immediately notice the white Fury parked at a meter across the street.
“Why, good morning, Jeff.”
Juliana Ryker, decked out from head to toe in denim, approaches his table and slaps him on the shoulder as if they’ve known each other for years.
“I had no idea you smoked.” Without waiting for an invitation, she takes a seat across from him, stretches out her long legs, and says, “I kind of hate to ask it, Jeff, but do you think I could bum one of those from you? Ran out last night.”
“They’re rather stale, I’m afraid.” Deepmere, who detests distractions and prefers to work in the impenetrable seclusion of his office, fails to disguise his irritation. “Tell me, Ms. Ryker, are you here to give a reading? Or have you been following me?”
She laughs. “Just trying to get my head straight, Jeff! I’m supposed to teach a workshop in an hour.”
Deepmere hands her a cigarette and notices that the dials on his watch have mysteriously melted away. Inside the coffee shop, several students point their phones and photograph them as if they are a pair of exotic animals on exhibit at a zoo.
“Admirers of yours, Ms. Ryker?”
“Oh, don’t be so modest, Jeff.” She flicks open a monogrammed butane lighter and ignites her cigarette. “You’re the one who is always giving interesting talks on public radio.”
“I assure you, Ms. Ryker, our students take no interest in obscure academics.”
“They take no interest in novelists, either. I have a few fans, sure, but have you ever given a reading to a roomful of empty chairs? The humiliation is sometimes more than I can bear.” She purses her lips and blows a series of expanding rings into the clean mountain air. “I suppose that’s why we’ve both been banished to this backwater.”
“Backwater, Ms. Ryker?”
“Well, you are the foremost authority on the brothers James. A man like you should be teaching in New York or Boston. A place where people pay attention.” She leans across the table and says with an audible strain of bitterness, “Let’s face the facts, Jeff. Pretty soon even the academy will banish us. We’ve become an embarrassment to them. In this age of mechanistic materialism, our way of doing things has been dismissed and discredited.”
“Our way of doing things?”
“Yes, we’re necromancers, aren’t we, conjuring up ghosts from the past.” She ashes on the sidewalk and, with an air of contended shrewdness, gestures to his notebook. “Take your work, for example. You don’t hide behind impenetrable academic jargon. You have a real talent for bringing people back to life. In your hands, the James boys seem like actual human beings.” She slaps a hand on the table and says, “Hey, do you think they referred to each other as Hank and Billy? Hell, with names like that, they should have hopped a train and gone out west. Imagine how that would have changed the course of American letters. Hank and Billy James, a pair of badass literary outlaws. While big brother Billy set up shop in the back room of a saloon and psychoanalyzed broken down old whores turning tricks in a boomtown brothel, Hank would sit by an oil lamp and crank out dime-store novels about Comanche raids and drunken gunslingers.”
Ryker, apparently excited by the idea, removes her denim jacket and rests her elbows on the table. Deepmere marvels at the blue dragons, equally excited, slithering around her exposed arms and trying to sneak puffs on the cigarette dangling from her fingertips. He has already forgotten the brilliant idea that, only a few minutes ago, had taken complete possession of him. Now in his mind’s eye, he sees a plump Henry James, his unshaven white jowls powdered in red dust, riding side-saddle along a treacherous switchback into a vast desert canyon of scrub oak, sage, and chaparral.
“Good morning, folks! What can I get started for you?”
A young man blinks bug-like from behind the smudged lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses and adjusts the black apron tied to his waist.
Deepmere stares at him for a moment and then, in his sternest professorial voice, says, “What is the meaning of this?”
“The meaning, sir?”
“Yes, is this your idea of a joke? Did the two of you plan to ambush me like this?”
Ryker lowers her cigarette and says with an inscrutable smile, “Ambush you, Jeff?”
“Oh, I see. You’d rather play games.” Deepmere leans back in his chair and sighs. “Very well. You both know I was working late last night in my office. Fine, I won’t feign innocence. But don’t think you can turn the tables on me. Perhaps you’re unaware, young man, that the penalty for cultivating and selling hallucinogenic mushrooms carries a minimum one-year prison sentence. And I’m quite certain that a college tribunal, once it finishes a thorough investigation into this matter, will recommend immediate expulsion.”
“Sir, I believe you’re confusing me with someone else…”
Ryker, extinguishing her cigarette on the pavement, regards him with growing curiosity. “Jeff, you should let me buy you a cup of coffee. Or maybe some tea. Yes, you strike me as the sort of man who appreciates a strong cup of tea.”
Deepmere scowls. “Just what are you insinuating, Ms. Ryker, eh?”
“I’m not insinuating anything.”
“Oh, I think you are insinuating something. I think you’re trying to devise an amusing story to share with your fans. The unfailingly sedate professor having a bad trip. You certainly are an imaginative storyteller, Ms. Ryker, albeit one with a rather twisted sense of humor. Some might argue a decidedly sick sense of humor.” Deepmere detects the sudden look of pain in her eyes and says, “By now I’m sure you’ve heard from our esteemed colleagues in the department that I’m a rather disagreeable person. That over the last four years or so I’ve been behaving in a most unusual manner.”
The waiter backs slowly away from the table. “Maybe I should grab some menus…”
“No!” Deepmere leaps from his chair and grabs the waiter by his left ear. He twists the ear until the waiter’s face turns red and then a rather lovely shade of purple. “Listen to what I’m saying. I don’t think you realize the serious danger you’re in. You should consider making a public confession, perhaps by writing a letter to the editor of the college newspaper, explaining how you sold drugs to this—degenerate. Students develop complicated feelings for their mentors, and these relationships can quickly spiral out of control. One day you may discover that your mentor is really just an overpaid charlatan desperate to keep a doomed relationship going.”
Deepmere, as he shouts and showers the waiter in spittle, suddenly feels a dozen arms crawling across his torso. At first, he believes he is being restrained by Ryker and her dancing dragons. Then he realizes that several students, all of whom seem to be wearing wooden masks with large, empty eyes and wild, diabolical grins, have rushed from the cafe. They wrestle him toward the street. An oncoming car, blaring its horn, comes to a screeching halt, and Deepmere uses the distraction to shake himself free of his captors.
He runs down Prest Street, his arms pinwheeling, his wool overcoat flapping behind him like a cape, but he doesn’t dare look over his shoulder to see if he is being pursued. He darts down an alley and nearly collides into a dumpster. At the riverfront memorial park, having run five blocks, he stops under the great sandstone arch. Trying desperately to catch his breath, he traces the names with his finger and then staggers toward the embankment of the muddy river where he drops to his knees.
From Henry James he has learned that a man does not see ghosts unless he has suffered greatly and gained some terrible knowledge. So why, as he stands ankle-deep in a pile of leaves pulsating with phantasmagoric color, doesn’t he see a familiar shade hovering like a thin mist above the water? Maybe he hasn’t suffered enough. Or maybe, on the anniversary of his fourth year of bereavement, his suffering has turned into something peculiar. Of course, had he possessed more nerve and joined Quinn on the riverboat casino that fateful night four years ago, he wouldn’t be standing here like this, staring dumbly into the depths and listening to the distant rumble of an old automobile. His only consolation is knowing that Quinn, lost among the dead, would have approved of his behavior today. And he certainly would have admired the enormous white Fury advancing like a ghost ship through the swirling leaves toward the riverfront.