He slows to figure what she can possibly mean.
And slams back into the trap of thought. He rears up, rolls off her like she’s burning. She calls out, “Spock?” and the word scalds him. He curls up into a fetus on her carpet, moaning like a thing trying to be unborn.
Mid-November, the semester’s home stretch, and the city drops into real chill. The sky molds over, and even the two-block walk from the El to the college cracks Russell Stone’s skin. Now the lake effect begins to work against this place, and the vanished autumn is just a tease that he should have known better than to trust.
The security guard stops him in the lobby, flanked by two policemen. Someone has invented the scene just to create rising action. Harmon: story starts when a character’s core value no longer suffices to stabilize his world.
Stone is ready to confess, even before he hears the charges. They take him into a first-floor conference room to talk about two of his students. There’s been an incident. The officers are vague, cagey. Law and procedure everywhere. It seems that John Thornell-Mr. Spock, the icy conceptual artist whose most emotional journal entries read like commuter-train schedules-has attempted to force himself on
Stone already knows the victim. He’s known since before he heard the crime. It’s Generosity, who escaped the maiming of Algeria in order to be raped in the States. The moment he laid eyes on the Kabyle woman he knew someone would need to violate her.
Russell sits still and listens to the officers. Thornell has turned himself in. Wandered in a daze into the station on South State and demanded to be put away. By his own account, the American got the Algerian to let him up to her room on false pretenses, then sexually assaulted her. But when the police talked to the alleged victim
Stone knows this already, too, without hearing. When the police went to question Thassadit Amzwar, she denied that anything like rape took place. Yes, she invited Thornell up to her room after an evening out with the other students from their Journal and Journey class. Yes, he did become inappropriately excited. He did tear her skirt and blouse. But that’s where things ended. By her account, she talked the man down without much effort at all. Thornell was crying by the time he left. She was afraid to let him go, afraid he might hurt himself. She was relieved to hear that he’d arrived safely at the police station.
The lead cop can’t figure it. “She knows this case had no bearing on her student visa. She knows she’ll have the full protection of the law if she takes action. But she refuses to file charges.”
The second cop is as mystified as the first. “She actually apologized for giving us unnecessary trouble.”
The police ask Stone if there’s anything important they should know before they release Thornell over his own protests. They grill him about sexual tension, aggressive statements, any part of the classroom dynamic worth reporting. Do the man’s journal entries suggest anything unusual?
They are filled with art at its most inexplicable. Plans for mailing Christmas cards to total strangers, to see how many baffled receivers reciprocate. Plans for selling tickets to the next rain shower, with a stiff surcharge for the good seats. Hand-drawn re-creations of bar codes. Long poems composed of song lines sampled at random intervals off Internet radio. Powerless art in a confidential medium offered up in complete trust to a supportive community. By a would-be rapist.
An image of the man’s cock between Thassa’s thighs cuts through Russell, and he shudders. The man should rot in prison, raped by others. “No,” he whispers. “I wouldn’t say anything unusual.”
And the woman: Any anxious behavior? Any reason why she might be afraid of pressing charges?
They’ve met her. They’ve talked to her. Surely they must have seen. “No,” he tells them. “No reason.”
“We’re afraid this may be some kind of Muslim cultural thing. Many Muslim families will disown a rape victim.”
Christian families, too. “She’s not Muslim,” Russell tells them.
“Arab, then. You know: where the woman gets punished if-”
“She’s not ”
The cops perk up. “Not what?”
“Nothing,” Russell says. She wants her assailant free.
Now the police are all attention. They ask if there’s anything about the woman-any health conditions, behavioral quirks-anything that he should mention.
Well, there’s a set of careful notes sitting in a psychologist’s office just a few floors up. There’s a telephone call-perhaps recorded by conscientious antiterrorist agents listening for references to students of Algerian origin-where a psychologist says that the woman should be studied in a lab.
Stone doesn’t know what is confidential anymore and what the state owns. He hasn’t a clue what he owes to professional discretion, what to justice, what to Candace Weld, what to Thassa Amzwar, and what to basic truth. But it’s pointless to hide from the Informational Oversoul. Everything in the full digital record will be discovered. An hour of digging in the likeliest place and they will find him out.
“It’s possible she might be hyperthymic.” And to their inevitable, blank stares, he explains: “Excessively happy.”
He only answers what the law asks. The policeman with the notebook asks him how to spell the word.
Then he’s supposed to teach the class. He’s known from the start that he’d never get through the semester without disaster. He climbs the seven flights, buying time. He’s buried deep in the Vishnu Schist, forcing his way back up to the present, and every ten steps is a mass extinction.
He hears the group pleasure, from down the hall. Thassa’s voice weaves some goofy solo, and the rest of them laugh in adoring chorus. He rounds the doorway, his anemic frame coiled for pain. They’re all there, huddled in the dingy room, listening to her read from her journal. All except the animal, still in police custody. She’s told no one.
Thassa breaks off in midsentence. The group looks up, caught red-handed in enjoyment. Stone’s eyes search the Berber’s. For an instant, she’s ready to minister to whatever tragedy has hit him. Then she remembers: she’s the injured party. Their faces rewrite each other twice before anyone else in the room realizes anything’s wrong.
And just as quickly, Thassa returns to the clause where she broke off. Russell Stone stumbles toward the mocking oval, book bag to his chest. Soon everyone is chuckling again at her story, about an Algerian and an Indonesian in a Chicago Mexican grocery, neither able to understand two consecutive words of the other’s English. And all the while that her pliant face encourages her audience’s laughs, she’s coaxing the mute teacher, begging him to be okay, as okay as she is. In the sparkle of her glance, she reassures him: John couldn’t help himself, you know. The problem was inside him. The man just couldn’t help.
Back in her snug, cinnamon, Edgewater apartment after nine and a half hours in the counseling center, Weld began her real day’s work. First came forty-five minutes in which her son, Gabriel, gleefully destroyed her at every known flavor of computer game-battles of skill and strategy all rigged to favor the ten-year-olds whose thumbs had already inherited the earth.
Then she conscripted him into fifteen minutes of light housework. After that, she parked the boy in front of the plasma screen as she fixed dinner. She rationed him to an hour of fiction a day, but allowed all the informational programs he could stomach. Recently, the boy had discovered that the early Chicago StreetSharp News was almost as diverting as the average role-playing game. Four stars, Mom; highly entertaining.