Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

“Do they allow visitors?” Nat said.

“They do,” said Wags’s mom. Her eyes moistened again. Nat looked away.

Nat helped her pack Wags’s things and carry them down to her car. On the last trip, she came out of Wags’s bedroom holding his pillow, and said: “Wasn’t there a TV?”

“Oh,” said Nat.

“The guest room TV, I think it was.”

“Damn it,” he said.

“What?”

Nat told her about the theft before Christmas, his call to campus security, and how he had forgotten to file a report the next day.

“You forgot?”

The cold look was back. How to explain about the twins, the shattered aquarium, Lorenzo? “I’m sorry,” he said.

She was already on the phone. Someone from campus security appeared five minutes later. Nat recounted waking up, seeing the thief run off, losing him in the basement corridor. The security officer took notes and said: “Know anything about the TV in the student union?”

“The TV in the student union?” said Nat.

“The high-definition one in the lounge. It disappeared three days ago.”

“No,” Nat said, “I don’t know anything about it.” He felt the gaze of Wags’s mom. “Why would I?”

The security officer was watching him too. All that scrutiny made Nat feel like he’d done something wrong, not just forgetting to file the report, but really wrong. And he hadn’t. He’d never stolen anything in his life, not even a pack of gum. Anger, an uncommon feeling, rose inside him; and he rose with it: a tall kid, and strong. He wanted an answer to that question: why would I? No answer came, but in the silence, Nat got past the uniform of the security guard, the implacable expression on his face, even noticed a resemblance to his next-door neighbor back home, the weekend clerk at the hardware store. His anger subsided. “I was away over Christmas,” he said. “I got back late last night.” He sat down.

The security guard closed his notebook. “A big guy with a ponytail, you say.”

“Yes.”

The security guard turned to Wags’s mom. She was wringing the kid gloves gently in her hands. “We’ll do what we can,” he said.

“I don’t really care,” said Wags’s mom.

“Beyond Good and Evil — part one,” said Professor Uzig. Philosophy 322 met in the small domed room at the top of Goodrich Hall, one floor above the professor’s office. Windows all around and lots of wood-mahogany molding, wide-plank pine floor, oval cherrywood table, and sitting at it Professor Uzig, Nat, Grace, Izzie, and four other freshmen, only one of whom, the top student in his English class the previous semester, Nat knew. “Who wants to go first?”

Everyone looked at everyone. No one spoke. Outside, Nat saw a crow fly by, and beyond it a black plume of smoke rose from somewhere in the lower town, an area he’d not yet set foot in. The flats, they called it, probably where the security officer, and all the hardware clerks, maintenance people, gardeners, secretaries, receptionists lived. He looked back across the table, found Izzie gazing at him. Grace too. They both gave him a little nod, the same nod exactly, and at exactly the same instant. And despite the fact that he had barely had time to get through the reading once, finding it by far the hardest text he’d ever come across, despite his certainty that he didn’t understand it well, or possibly at all, a thought came to him, and he uttered it aloud: “Does the very fact that most people think something make it automatically wrong?”

Silence.

The crow, or another one, cawed nearby.

Then the bright girl from English 103 said, “Yeah. What is all that rising-above-the-common-herd stuff about? Sounds kind of elitist to me.”

Grace snorted.

Izzie said, “Maybe he is elitist, but there’s something almost… sweet about him at the same time.”

And someone else said: “Sweet? Nietzsche? He was a syphilitic, dangerous bastard.”

And they were off.

They talked about the fatalism of the weak-willed, the charm of the refutable idea, and how living things must vent their strength; about the will to power, Wagner, the Nazis and Hitler, and how the true and selfless may be inextricably linked, possibly identical to, the false and appetitive; they talked about the pressure of the herd and the courage of the original thinker; they talked about Friedrich Nietzsche. Professor Uzig hardly spoke, just sat in his captain’s chair-none of the other chairs had arms-still and neat in his white shirt, navy tie, charcoal gray tweed jacket, but he dominated completely by the intensity of his concentration. Nat could feel him listening, feel him judging, and was sure the others could too. But what judgments he was coming to remained unknown, with one exception. A bearded student wearing a tie-dyed shirt asked when they would be getting to Kurt Cobain, and Professor Uzig replied, “What’s the point of developing powerful analytical tools if all you’re going to do is waste them on popular culture?”

The bearded student said, “But I thought…,” and looked around for help. None came.

Just the same, Nat began to see the connection between Nietzsche and Kurt Cobain, not only Kurt Cobain, but so much of modern life, began to understand what Professor Uzig had been saying down on Aubrey’s Cay about Nietzsche’s influence. For example, hadn’t he read something in part one about how even the laws of physics might be subjective? He was searching for the quotation, leafing quickly through his copy of Beyond Good and Evil, when he heard Professor Uzig saying: “Until tomorrow, then.”

The chapel bell tolled. Class was over. Ninety minutes, gone like that. The sound of the bell, by now so familiar, seemed strange for a moment.

A foot pressed his under the table. He looked across at Izzie, writing in her date book, her golden-brown hair hanging over the page: dyed hair, he knew that now. His mind, already racing, began racing in another direction.

Grace, sitting beside Izzie, caught his eye. “I’m hungry,” she said.

The three of them ate in the lounge at the student union: yogurt for Izzie, chocolate cake for Grace, an apple for Nat, unable to afford much eating off the meal plan. He noticed the empty space where the high-definition TV had been, told them about Wags and the theft of the two TVs.

“Were you scared?”

“A ponytail?”

“He just disappeared?”

Nat took them down to the basement corridor in Plessey Hall. He showed them the padlocked doors to the storage lockers and the maintenance room, and the only unlocked door, the one to the janitor’s closet.

Grace opened it. They regarded the brooms, mops, buckets, cleansers.

“Wags did the same thing the year he was at Choate,” Izzie said.

“What same thing?” said Nat.

“The breakdown thing. Drugs.”

Grace was inside the closet now, rummaging around. Without looking, Izzie reached out and took Nat’s hand.

“Drugs?” he said. “I never saw him with any drugs.”

“The damage was done.”

Inside the closet, Grace said, “I’ve had an original thought.”

“Don’t scare me,” Izzie said.

Grace laughed, turned sideways-Izzie letting go of his hand the instant before-raised one foot high like a trained Thai boxer, and kicked the back wall of the closet with a force that startled Nat. The top half of the wall fell out in one solid panel, dropping into darkness on the other side.

They crowded into the closet, peered through the opening. Beyond lay a narrow unlit tunnel, narrow but tall enough to stand in, with one large-diameter pipe and several smaller ones receding into the shadows and finally disappearing into complete blackness.

“This looks like fun,” Grace said.

“Uh-oh,” said Izzie.