He folded the letter and put it in his pocket, because it wasn’t something he would want to risk having fall into the wrong hands. The wrong hands: the police, whom law-abiding adults were supposed to respect; his wife, presumably his closest confidante. Maybe he would present the note later to McCallum, reveal his own vulnerability by letting McCallum see how he nearly got sucked in, empathize with McCallum a little. Not on screen, he thought, as he walked down the corridor. Technology was now supplying metaphors faster than poets ever had.
On the stairs, two girls he didn’t know began whispering the second he’d passed them. It should have come as no surprise to him — though it did — that the local newspaper had a story about McCallum on the front page. He saw it in a vending machine at the entrance to the faculty parking lot, dropped in his quarter, and took the last copy from the box. He stared at the fuzzy picture of a younger, bearded McCallum. He read the report of what had “allegedly” happened in his own house. The adverb made his life seem absurdly like a TV police drama. On the jump page there was an equally fuzzy photograph of one of the angry-bull cops, standing in front of what he immediately recognized as his own couch, overturned. He, himself, he read, was “alleged” to have been out of the house at the time, as was his wife “alleged” to have been gone. He sat in the car with the overhead light switched on and read as much of the article as he could. It was a long article, and he found it terribly annoying, perhaps any assessment of this awful situation would be terribly annoying, but every fact seemed to miss the point, the story had no shape, the writer moved through official opinions and paraphrased or unattributed speculations (“Yes, she seemed strange, Mrs. McCallum”) like an overwrought person navigating a minefield. Halfway through the piece, he read that his wife was a real estate agent, and that he was currently up for promotion (in fact, the promotion had been given him the previous spring). A neighbor was quoted as saying they were very quiet, pleasant people (he didn’t recognize the name; neighbors on his street? did Sonja know them?), as if that were at all to the point. As if, had he and Sonja been big party givers, a madwoman crashing through their house might have been entirely comprehensible. He stopped reading when he got to the paragraph talking about “the early hours of dawn.” He had not left the house until about nine-thirty, leaving behind a note for McCallum saying he would soon return, and driving to school to teach his morning class. A little drive before his life changed rather dramatically, it turned out. No good deed without punishment — as the uninspired reporter would have been happy to write, if she had been able to make contact with him. He could have given her clichés; she could have dully recorded them. The thing was, the situation really had to do with pent-up emotions, grievances, people’s personal pain, their breaking points, and those who found themselves churned up in other people’s storms, everybody suddenly as vulnerable as airborne particles, some chilly, uncontrollable wind propelling them. The real story was about storms that came without warning.