Ian Caldwell - The Rule of Four

Judas thinks for a second.

He's going to piss. He laughs tipsily, then repeats, He's going to piss out the window.

Kelly storms after the Jesus figure.

What the hell's going on, Derek? she says.

The figure in the office appears, then vanishes. From his jerkiness I sense he's drunk. At one moment he seems to be pawing the broken glass, then he disappears.

I think there's someone else up there, Charlie says.

Suddenly the entire body of the man comes into view. He's backed against the lead panes of the window.

He's gonna piss, Judas repeats.

From the remaining apostles there arises a sloppy cry of Jump! Jump!

Kelly wheels on them. Shut up, goddamn it! Go get him down!

Again the man disappears from sight.

I don't think he's from T.I., Charlie says with concern. I think that's some drunk guy from the Nude Olympics.

But the man was wearing clothes. I look into the darkness, trying to make out the shapes. This time, the man doesn't return.

Beside me, the stewed apostles boo.

Jump! one of them cries again, but Derek pushes him back and tells him to stay quiet.

Get the hell out of here, Kelly orders.

Easy, girl, Derek says, and begins rounding up the stray disciples.

Gil watches all of this with the same inscrutable look of amusement he was wearing when the men first arrived. Glancing at his watch, he says, Well, looks like we've sucked all the fun out of thi-

Holy shit! Charlie cries.

His voice nearly drowns out the echo of the second cracking sound. This time I hear the report clearly. It's a gunshot.

Gil and I turn just in time to see it. The man explodes backward through the glass, and for a matter of seconds he stays frozen in free fall. With a muted thud, his body hits the snow, and the impact sucks all the noise and commotion from the courtyard.

Then there is nothing.

The first thing I remember is the sound of Charlie's feet as he dashes toward the body in the snow. Then a large crowd follows, converging around the scene, blocking my view.

Oh, Jesus, Gil whispers.

Voices in the huddle shout, Is he okay? But there's no sign of movement.

Finally I hear Charlie's voice. I need someone to call an ambulance! Tell them we've got an unconscious man in the courtyard by the chapel!

Gil pulls his phone from his pocket, but before he can dial, two campus policemen arrive on the scene. One of them presses through the crowd. The other begins directing the spectators back. For a moment I see Charlie crouched over the man, delivering chest compressions-perfect motions, like pistons stroking. How strange it is, suddenly, to see the trade tie plies by night.

We've got an ambulance on the way!

Faintly, in the distance, I can hear sirens.

My legs begin to shake. I feel the crawling sensation that something dark is passing overhead.

The ambulance arrives. Its rear doors extend open, and two EMTs descend to strap the man into braces and a stretcher. Motion stutters, spectators flickering in and out of view. When the doors swung shut, I can make out the impression where the body landed. The patch of flagstone has an unseemly quality, like a scrape on the flesh of a storybook princess. What I took for mud in the spatter of impact, I begin to see more clearly. Blacks are reds; the dirt is blood. In the office above, there is only darkness.

The ambulance drives off, lights and sirens fading as it shuttles onto Nassau Street. I stare back at the impression. It is misshapen, like a broken snow angel. The wind hisses, and I wrap my arms around my sides. Only when the crowd in the courtyard begins to disperse do I realize that Charlie is gone. He left with the ambulance, and an unpleasant silence has gathered where I expect to hear his voice.

Students are slowly disappearing from the courtyard with hushed voices. I hope he's okay, Gil says, putting a hand on my shoulder.

For a second I think he means Charlie.

Let's go home, he says. I'll give you a ride.

I appreciate the warmth of his hand, but I stand by, just watching. In my mind's eye the man falls again, colliding with the earth. The sequence fragments, and I can hear the crack of glass breaking, then the gunshot.

My stomach begins to turn.

Come on, Gil says. Let's get out of here.

And as the wind picks up again, I agree. Katie disappeared somewhere in the shuffle of the ambulance, and a friend of hers standing nearby tells me that she went back to Holder with her roommates. I decide to call her from home.

Gil places a gentle hand between my shoulders, and guides me toward the Saab that sits in the snow near the auditorium entrance. With that unfailing instinct to know what's best, he turns up the heat to a comfortable level, adjusts the volume on an old Sinatra ballad until the wind is a memory, and with a little burst of speed that assures me of our impunity before the elements, heads down campus. Everything behind us fades gradually into the snow.

Did you see the person who fell? he asks quietly once we're on our way.

I couldn't see anything.

You don't think… Gil shifts forward in his seat.

Think what?

Should we call Paul and make sure he's okay?

Gil hands me his cell phone, but there's no service.

I'm sure he's fine, I say, fidgeting with the phone.

We hang in the silence of the cabin for several minutes, trying to drive the possibility out of our minds. Finally Gil forces the conversation elsewhere.

Tell me about your trip, he says. I'd flown to Columbus earlier in the week to celebrate finishing my thesis. How was home?

We manage a patchy conversation, hopping from topic to topic, trying to stay above the current of our thoughts. I tell him the latest news about my older sisters, one a veterinarian, the other applying for a business degree, and Gil asks about my mother, whose birthday he's remembered. He tells me that, despite all the time he devoted to planning the ball, his thesis still managed to get written in those last days before the economics department deadline, when I was gone. Gradually we wonder aloud where Charlie has been accepted to medical school, guessing where he intends to go, since these are matters about which Charlie is modestly silent, even to us.

We bear south, and in the murky night the dormitories hunker on either side. News of what happened at the chapel must be spreading through campus, because no pedestrians are visible, and the only other cars sit silently in lots on the shoulder. The drive down to the parking lot, a half mile beyond Dod, feels almost as long as the slow walk back up. Paul is nowhere to be seen.

There's an old saw in Frankenstein scholarship that the monster is a metaphor for the novel. Mary Shelley, who was nineteen when she began writing the book, encouraged that interpretation by calling it her hideous progeny, a dead thing with a life of its own. Having lost a child at seventeen, and having caused her own mother's death in childbirth, she must have known what she meant by it.

For a time I thought Mary Shelley was all my thesis subject had in common with Paul's: she and the Roman Francesco Colonna (who was only fourteen, some scholars argued, when the Hypnerotomachia was written) made a pretty couple, two teenagers wise beyond their years. To me, in those months before I met Katie, Mary and Francesco were time-crossed lovers, equally young in different ages. To Paul, standing nose to nose with the scholars of my father's generation, they were an emblem of youth's power against the obstinate momentum of age.

Oddly enough, it was by arguing that Francesco Colonna was an older man, not a younger one, that Paul made his first headway against the Hypnerotomachia . He'd come to Taft freshman year as a bare novice, and the ogre could smell my father's influence on him. Though he claimed to have retired from studying the ancient book, Taft was eager to show Paul the foolishness of my father's theories.