Colin Luckfeld took a swig from his bottle and stared.
John was happy that the college president and cult official had not offered him a glass. Then he wondered if maybe there actually was some kind of real insight in those mossy eyes.
“The history department review committee is going to call on you to deliver and defend the paper you proposed last September,” Luckfeld said. “What was that title again?”
“Written History,” John said: “Reconstruction, Deconstruction or Just Plain Destruction?”
The president smiled again. “Yes, that’s it.”
“When am I going to be asked to do this?”
“The committee is meeting tomorrow afternoon. They’ll set a date at that time.”
John gazed out at the deck. The president held parties out there when the weather was mild. The entire social sciences faculty had attended a get-together the previous spring.
“When are you going to settle on a specific subject?” Annette Eubanks, dean of the history department, had asked him. They were standing at the far end of the outside platform. Annette was around fifty with piercing eyes. Unmarried, she was rumored to have had affairs with young male and female students. Her hair was naturally golden shot through with barely perceptible strands of gray.
“My subject is the negation of the negation,” John answered.
“Nothing out of nothing,” the elder professor retorted.
John knew then he was going to have trouble with her.
“There’s something I’d like to ask of you, John,” President Luckfeld said.
“Certainly.”
“A man, an advisor to the board of directors, named Willie Pepperdine has asked to audit your Introduction to Deconstructionist Historical Devices. Mr. Pepperdine is an important fund-raiser for the school.”
“How does he even know about the class?”
“He takes his role with the university very seriously. After reading the entire course offering he came to me and asked this favor. I waited to make a formal request because Mr. Pepperdine was out of the country and wasn’t certain if he’d be back in time to attend classes.”
“I see. Well... There’s only been one meeting so far. Can he make this Thursday’s session?”
“Yes. But he might only be able to attend one class a week. His business has him traveling quite a lot. It’s only an audit; you won’t have to give him a permanent grade.”
“Anything else I should know about him?” John asked, he wasn’t sure why.
“He’s my age, very intelligent... dynamic. He’ll make a good addition I’m sure.”
“He’s an advisor to the board?”
Luckfeld nodded.
“Which board?”
It was an unspoken rule that no one asked Colin, or any other known cult member, about the Platinum Path — that just wasn’t done.
“Are you afraid of anything, John?”
“Everything.”
“How do you mean that?”
“I work mainly on instinct,” John Woman admitted. “My life, my lectures, my inquiries — all of these are reflexes of my body and my heart. I’m afraid of germs, German philosophers and jealous husbands — even when I’m not having affairs with their wives. But being afraid of something does not necessarily make me back off.”
“Most college professors I’ve met tell me that they live a life of the mind.”
“At best,” John said and then paused to consider; “at best they’re lying.”
“And at worst?”
“They’re fools.”
Colin Luckfeld stood up.
John followed his lead.
“It was good talking to you, John. I hope we achieved something here. And about Mr. Pepperdine.”
“Yes?”
“He sits on any board he chooses.”
“That includes the Platinum Path?” John asked, feeling out of control.
“Those lying historians of yours will one day claim that we conquered the world with little to no violence.”
4
Walking to his car John wondered why he’d asked about the Platinum Path. The cult or sect or philosophy, whatever it was, didn’t concern him.
“I asked because it makes me feel alive,” he said to no one. “Negotiating dangerous grounds is what we human beings are made for — body and mind.”
There were times John had to speak out spontaneously. Too much of his life had been conducted in secret — at least he could proclaim random truths in empty spaces now and then.
The words he spoke Herman Jones had once said about great generals, incurable sociopaths and most of the rest of humanity. Standing next to his car, on the third level of the parking structure, he thought about self-taught Herman Jones, who was smarter than anyone he’d met at any college or university. After appreciating the idea of his father a moment more, John got into his bright green 1957 Thunderbird convertible and set out for Spark City, some sixty miles off in the seemingly endless desert.
Along the way, John’s thoughts turned unexpectedly to a memory of his mother. She wore a little black dress and her favorite greenstone necklace, and she was sitting in the high-backed wicker chair that looked out on Mott from the big bay window of her tiny apartment. He felt a tingle in the heel of his right palm. Smart as he was, Herman Jones had been wrong. The acme of John’s life had been Lucia’s passion, alongside his father’s mind. He had loved her and lost her every day of his life.
He experienced the physical sensation just before tears sprouted but did not cry, because missing his mother kept her alive. Memories of her and his father were all the family he had.
This notion of kinfolk doubled back on Luckfeld’s declaration of fealty to the Platinum Path. Though it was no surprise that the Path owned and ran the university, none of its members, to John’s knowledge, had ever admitted affiliation. There was one professor who mentioned the organization in an article published in a local paper. That was Dr. Abel Morel, a zoologist from Luxembourg. Six days after the article appeared Morel quit the university and moved back to Europe.
That President Luckfeld entertained John’s question might mean that he was considered a useful foil, a dialectic that served them in some way.
Twenty miles from NUSW John said, “Okay, dad, if you’re with me then say something.”
He waited, half-expecting his father’s ghost to be conjured by the offering. But it wasn’t; was not.
John wanted to see his father again, to hear him, to sleep in his room at night and wake up to find Herman sitting at the breakfast table in front of a bowl of overcooked oatmeal.
“I like it slippery,” he used to say.
“But you’re not there are you?” John declared speeding across the vast desert. “It’s just me wishing that you’d get off a Greyhound bus and come on back home.”
Half an hour later Professor Woman reached the outskirts of the small town, Spark City. There, before the highway turned into Main Street, a quarter mile from the church that was the centerpiece of the town square, two lone structures stood across the highway from one another: Spark City Motel and Spark City Bar.
John pulled into the parking lot of the bar, climbed out through the roof of his car, then sauntered toward the dark maw of a doorway.
It could have been a noir movie set, John thought as he crossed the threshold; it had that perfect balance of malaise, air-conditioning and psychic squalor. The dozen or so weak lights used to illuminate the room were encased in deep green glass. The floor felt gritty through the soles of his shoes. The sour smell of beer was so strong it tasted like a mouthful of ripe buttermilk.
Under a slightly brighter green light at the far end of the longish room stood a pool table where a bearded man played against himself. To John’s left, seated at the wall in soggy wood chairs, were a man who looked to be in his forties and a girl no more than sixteen.