Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

She liked the bigness of him, on top of her and inside her. He’d been a football player in college and he still had that athleticism that was part of the sex. She liked the feel of him and the contrast of their skins against each other, black and white, like piano keys. It made her think of great jazz chords. Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell-and memories of Princeton and the night she learned who she was.

Her junior year. The year of Near East studies and learning Arabic and John, her professor-lover. They had spent the night at his apartment, smoking weed and listening to his jazz CDs and having sex in every position they could twist themselves into. In the morning, breakfast was espresso, potato chips, chocolate chip cookies and Billie Holiday.

“I was a kid,” he told her. “This was the sixties in upstate New York, right? Vietnam. Rock ’n’ roll. The Stones. Creedence Clearwater. I was a lonely kid, up late at night listening to the radio in my room. They were playing Billie Holiday. This song, “Strange Fruit,” which I swear, Carrie, says more about being black in America than all the books and documentaries you’ll ever see, and I realized it was all in the music. All you had to do was listen.”

Only she wasn’t listening because it had already started. She was feeling light, like she was made of helium and if something didn’t hold her down, she would float straight up into the sky and never come down.

That night, he was supposed to take her to a party, but he didn’t show. Pissed, she went alone. Everybody was drinking and dancing and she was downing tequila and feeling like nothing could hurt her. They were talking about The X-Files, the TV show, and Dolly, a sheep that had been cloned from another sheep.

A good-looking Ivy guy in a preppy sweater who made sure she knew in the first three seconds that he belonged to the Colonial, one of Princeton’s elite Eating Clubs, asked her if she thought people would be cloned and she just opened like a grenade exploding. Talking about how infinite repetition is impossible so cloning would inevitably degenerate and how it all started with Charlie Parker and jazz and you could see it in Islamic art in mosque mosaics. Talking nonstop, feeling beautiful and charming and to hell with John and not noticing how Colonial Club and all the other people were edging away from her. Until she saw two girls talking to each other and looking at her and their look wasn’t like wow, she was finally the pretty girl who was charming and funny, but what the hell is going on with her, mingled with a touch of pity, and she just got up and ran back to the dorm as fast as she could.

Back in her room, she ripped off all her clothes, everything. Sitting stark naked on her bed, she started writing furiously in a notebook. Page after page, as fast as she could. It was about the music and how the laws that underpinned the universe were a musical score. By the time she was finished, nearly seven hours later, it was morning and she had a forty-five-page manifesto she’d titled “How I Reinvented Music,” explaining the connections between jazz notes and Jackson Pollock and mathematics and quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Because it was all connected. Like John, that shit, had said: “All you had to do was listen.”

And when she was done, she grabbed her jacket and the notebook and, still naked except for the jacket, ran out into the hallway and down the stairs and into the street. She ran barefoot in the snow, nearly knocking over a small Hispanic-looking man with glasses she’d never seen before. But he was obviously a professor. She grabbed his coat, thrusting her manifesto at him.

“You have to read this, publish it. It’ll change the world. Everything is music, but the old way is hopeless. It’s a dead end. I’ve reinvented it. Don’t you see? It’s all connected. This is the mind of God, damn it,” she said.

“Are you all right, miss? Are you from Butler?” the little man said, looking around. There were students who had stopped to watch.

“You have to read this, now! It’s the most important document in the world. Look!” she said, showing him the first page.

“Does anybody know this young woman?” the professor asked. Nobody moved or said anything.

“She’s naked,” a girl said.

“And barefoot,” a male student added.

“What are you talking about?” Carrie shouted. “Don’t you understand? What Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk did for music was free it from the dead hand of European bullshit. They got a glimpse of the underlying mathematics. This is the damn universe you’re holding!”

“I’m Professor Sanchez. Some of you help me,” the professor said to the students. “Let’s get her to McCosh.”

They took her, still babbling nonstop, to the Student Health Center, where they gave her carbamazepine, which didn’t do anything except make her throw up. Then they sedated her big-time, wiping the rest of the day and almost two weeks from her memory forever.

Afterward, lithium in a private hospital brought her back. Time had gone by. She was at home in Maryland.

“You flew,” her father said to her. “I’m sorry, Caroline. Maybe now you understand. Sometimes I think it’s the best and worst thing in the world.”

“I got it from you, you son of a bitch,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see you or feel that way again.”

“What makes you think you have a choice?” he said.

A few days after she came back to Princeton, John called her.

“What happened? I heard you had a breakdown,” he said. “I want to see you.”

“Go away. I don’t want to see you.”

“What’s going on? Let me come over.”

“No. Don’t call again. Please.”

“Why? At least tell me. You owe me that at least.”

“That girl, the nice-looking girl you can have sex with and feel how smart you are, forget her. She’s gone.”

“Carrie, talk to me. What’s happened? Is it your family?”

“In a way. Genetics. Look, John. You’ve got your routine down pat. You’ll find another cute undergraduate girl to impress the shit out of. Tell your stories about Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker to. Do us both a favor. Forget about me.”

“I think I’m in love with you.”

“Bullshit! You loved how I made you feel about yourself. It was all about you, a kind of masturbation, not me.”

“You had fun too, didn’t you?” he snapped. “Admit it.”

“Yes, I did. Now leave me alone. I mean it,” she said, and hung up.

Back in her cubicle, she started with a single realization that hadn’t left her: Dima wouldn’t be alone. So the question was, who was coming with her and how did they plan to take out the Veep and the people at the fund-raiser?

First she got Joanne to help her, but that wasn’t enough. They were running out of time. The attack could come any day. She marched into Yerushenko’s office.

“What is it?” he said, looking up.

She told him. All of it. Dima and Nightingale in Beirut. Julia’s warning. The missing files. Dima coming to the Waldorf under the cover name of Jihan Miradi and the fund-raiser for the veep and the others. They talked for two hours and when they finished, he mobilized his entire department and allowed her to use his office to start sticking up photos and notes on a big whiteboard.

“You surprised me,” she told him. “I thought after the way I was transferred and everything, you wouldn’t support me.”