Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

What a stupid movie – about as real and interesting as a cereal commercial. But it solved a big problem for Sarah because it showed her how to save all of the wizard's money and still get to Chicago.

She was thinking of the railroad train.

There were no railroads in New Lebanon. But there was a truck. It was a big one that looked sort of like a train and it passed the house every afternoon. The truck had a platform on the back that she thought she could hold on to, and it went past the house real slow. She could catch the truck easily and then climb onto the back and sit there. When he stopped for the night she could ask the driver where to find another truck going to Chicago.

Sarah packed her Barbie backpack. She took Mr. Jupiter her shooting star bank, pairs of Levi's and sweatshirts and socks and underpants, her toothbrush and toothpaste, and a skirt and a blouse, her Walkman and a dozen books on tape. Of course Redford T. Redford the world's smartest bear would be traveling with her. And she took some things from her mother's dresser. Lipstick, mascara, fingernail polish and panty hose.

It was now five-thirty. The truck usually went past the house about six. Sarah walked around her room. She suddenly realized she'd miss her father. She started to cry. She'd miss her brother some. She thought she'd miss her mother but she wasn't sure. Then she thought of the wizard telling her, "I'll look out for you," and she thought about school.

Sarah stopped crying.

She lifted the window, which opened onto the backyard of their house. She tossed the backpack out, hearing the coins in Mr. Jupiter ring loudly. She climbed out, hanging from the ledge, her cheek pressed hard against the yellow siding, then she let go and dropped the few feet to the soft ground.

When he hung up the phone Brian Okun recognized a contradiction that would have made a tidy little philosophical riddle. As the black receiver started downward he thought, He's got no right to talk to me that way. As it settled in its cradle: He's got every right to talk to me that way.

Okun was lanky as a cowboy and his face was obscured by the strands of black beard that weaseled unevenly out of his wan skin. Inky Brillo hair hung over his ears like a floppy beret. He sat in his tiny cubicle overlooking the quad, his tensed hand still clutching the telephone, and developed his thought: He has no right because as a human being I'm entitled to a mutual measure of dignity. John Locke. He has every right because he's in charge and he can do what he fucking well pleases. Niccolo Machiavelli cum Brian Okun.

The man he was thinking of was Leon Gilchrist, the professor for whom Okun worked. When Gilchrist joined Auden two years before, the horde of eager PhD candidates seeking jobs as graduate assistants largely bypassed him. His reputation preceded him from the East – a recluse, a foul temper, no interest whatsoever in campus sports, politics or administration. While this put off most grad students it merely upped the ante for Okun, who was as intrigued by Gilchrist's personality as he was impressed by his mind.

Any doubts that remained about the professor were obliterated when Okun read Gilchrist's The Id and Literature. The book changed Okun's life. He stayed up all night, zipping through the dense work as if it were an Illustrated Classics comic book. He finished it at exactly three-ten in the afternoon and by four was sitting in Gilchrist's office, being obnoxious, insisting that Gilchrist hire him to teach the seminar sessions of his famous Psych & Lit course.

Gilchrist asked a few innocuous questions about the subject matter then grew bored with Okun's answers and silenced the grad student by hiring him on the spot.

Okun, almost as quickly, regretted the decision. The professor turned out to be more reclusive and odd and aggressively prickish than rumoured. Narcissistic and anal expulsive, Okun observed (he too, like Gilchrist, was dual-degreed: psychology and English lit). He gave the man wide berth and had to improvise his professor-handling techniques like a doctor developing new antibiotics to meet particularly virulent strains of bacteria.

Gilchrist was impossible to outflank. Okun was not surprised to learn that he was more savvy than he seemed and had pegged Okun early as having designs on his job. But by now, after two semesters of continual jockeying if not outright combat, Brian Okun, chic, moody, himself brilliant, an enfant terrible of the Modern Language Association, Brian Okun had nothing but wounds to show from the run-ins with his scholastic Wellington.

Today, for instance – the phone call.

The professor had left for San Francisco last week to read a paper at the Berkeley Poetry Conference and had been expected back tonight, in time for tomorrow's lecture. Gilchrist had called however to say he would be staying another week to do research at San Francisco State. He abruptly told Okun to have another professor prepare and deliver his lecture tomorrow.

The session was entitled "John Berryman: Self-Harm and Suicide Through the Poet's Eye." Okun considered himself a Berryman scholar and fervently wanted to deliver that lecture. But Gilchrist was on to him. He ordered Okun, with a tinny insulting laugh, to find a full professor. He used that phrase. Full professor, a painful reminder of what Okun was not. Okun agreed, extending his middle finger to the telephone as he did so. Then he hung up and the interesting philosophical dilemma occurred to him.

Okun now paced – to the extent he was able to do so in a cluttered eight-by-eight room. As his mind leapt backward, zigzagging through time, he found he was picturing vague scenes of Victorian tragedy (Charles Dickens had given a lecture in this very building as part of his US tour in the 1860s, a fact Okun had collected and cherished) but the image that he arrived at was not from one of Dickens's books; it was of a girl wearing a white layered nightgown, her long hair spilling like dark water on the pillow. A girl with a pallid face. Mouth curling outward. Eyes closed. Her name was Jennie Gebben and she was dead.

At only one point since his graduation from Yale had Brian Okun ever doubted that he would be a Nobel Prize winner. There was some question as to whether he would win for nonfiction writing – some quantum-leaping analysis of, say, the relation between Yeats's haywire obsession with Maud Gonne and his art. Or whether he would produce a series of showy, anxious quote Updike Coomer Ford quote New Yorker novels ridden with quirky characters and heavy with the filigree of imagery and dialect-laden talk. Either was fine. Only twenty-seven, on the verge of doctorhood, Brian Okun felt mastery of his scholarly self.

He also believed however that his right brain needed more life experience. And like many graduate students he believed that life experience was synonymous with fucking. He intended to fill the next five years with as many female students as he had the stamina to bed and the patience to endure afterward. Eventually he would marry – a woman who was brilliant and homely enough to remain utterly devoted to him. The nuptials would have happened by the time the Swedish girls, hair glowing under the blaze of the burning candle wreaths, woke him up in Stockholm on the morning of the award presentation.

But these dreams were disrupted by a particular individual.

Jennie Gebben had been a curious creature. When he'd first read her name in class he'd paused. His mind had tricked him and he misread it. He thought he'd seen Jennie Gerhardt, one of Theodore Dreiser's tragic heroines and a character that Professor Gilchrist discussed at length in his famous paper in which he psychoanalyzed Dreiser. Okun had looked at Jennie across the U-shaped classroom table and held her eyes for a moment. He knew how to look at women. After a moment he commented on the name error. Several people in class nodded in self-indulgent agreement to impress him with their familiarity with Naturalistic writing.