“Hey, how’re you doin’?” Will had asked the kid while sprouting a big southern smile on his chiseled face. “How much ya weigh there, Mark?”
“One forty,” Mark answered suspiciously as he struggled to make eye contact with the boy towering over him.
“Well, I register at two twenty-five in my shorts. You sure you want my heavy ass a couple of feet over your head on that rickety old bunk bed?”
Mark had sighed deeply, wordlessly ceded his claim, and the pecking order was thus permanently established.
They fell into the random chaotic conversation of reunionites, excavating memories, laughing at embarrassments, dredging up indiscretions and foibles. The two women were their audience, their excuse for exposition and elaboration. Zeckendorf and Alex, who had remained fast friends, acted as emcees, ping-ponging the banter like a couple of stand-ups extracting laughs at a comedy club. Will wasn’t as fast with a quip but his quiet, slowly spoken recollections of their dysfunctional year had them rapt. Only Mark was quiet, politely smiling when they laughed, drinking his beer and picking at his Asian fusion food. Zeckendorf’s wife had been tasked by her husband to snap pictures, and she obliged by circling the table, posing them and flashing.
Freshman roommate groups are like an unstable chemical compound. As soon as the environment changes, the bonds break and the molecules fly apart. In sophomore year Will went to Adams House to room with other football players, Zeckendorf and Alex kept together and went to Leverett House, and Mark got a single at Currier. Will occasionally saw Zeckendorf in a government class, but they all basically disappeared into their own worlds. After graduation, Zeckendorf and Alex stayed in Boston and the two of them reached out to Will from time to time, usually triggered by reading about him in the papers or catching him on TV. None of them spent a moment thinking about Mark. He faded away, and had it not been for Zeckendorf’s sense of occasion and Mark’s inclusion of his gmail address in the reunion book, he would have remained a piece of the past to them.
Alex was loudly going on about some freshman escapade involving twins from Lesley College, a night that allegedly set him on a lifelong path of gynecology, when his date shifted the conversation to Will. Alex’s increasingly tipsy clowning was wearing on her and she kept glancing at the large sandy-haired man who was steadily drinking scotch across from her, seemingly without inebriation. “So how did you get involved with the FBI?” the model asked him before Alex could launch into another tale about himself.
“Well, I wasn’t good enough at football to go pro.”
“No, really.” She seemed genuinely interested.
“I don’t know,” Will answered softly. “I didn’t have a whole lot of direction after I graduated. My buddies here knew what they wanted: Alex and med school, Zeck and law school, Mark had grad school at MIT, right?” Mark nodded. “I spent a few years knocking around back in Florida, doing some teaching and coaching and then a position opened up in a county sheriff’s office down there.”
“Your father was in law enforcement,” Zeckendorf recalled.
“Deputy sheriff in Panama City.”
“Is he still alive?” Zeckendorf’s wife asked.
“No, he passed a long time ago.” He had a swallow of scotch. “I guess it was in my blood and the path of least resistance and all that so I went with it. After a while it made the chief uncomfortable that he had a smart-ass Harvard dude as a deputy and he had me apply to Quantico to get me the hell out of there. That was it, and in the blink of an eye I’m staring retirement in the face.”
“When do you hit your twenty?” Zeckendorf asked.
“Little over two years.”
“Then what?”
“Other than fishing, I don’t have a clue.”
Alex was busily pouring another bottle of wine. “Do you have any idea how famous this asshole is?” he asked his date.
She bit. “No, how famous are you?”
“I’m not.”
“Bullshit!” Alex exclaimed. “Our man here is like the most successful serial killer profiler in the history of the FBI!”
“No, no, that’s certainly not true,” Will strongly demurred.
“How many have you caught over the years?” Zeckendorf asked.
“I don’t know. A few, I guess.”
“A few! That’s like saying I’ve done a few pelvic exams,” Alex exclaimed. “They say you’re the man-infallible.”
“I think you’re referring to the Pope.”
“C’mon, I read somewhere you can psychoanalyze someone in under a half a minute.”
“I don’t need that long to figure you out, buddy, but seriously, you shouldn’t believe everything you read.”
Alex nudged his date. “Take my word for it-watch out for this guy. He’s a phenom.”
Will was anxious to change the subject. His career had taken a few nonsuperlative turns, and he didn’t feel much like dwelling on past glories. “I guess we’ve all done pretty well considering our shaky start, Zeck’s a big-time corporate lawyer, Alex is a professor of medicine…God help us, but let’s talk about Mark here. What have you been up to all these years?”
Before Mark could wet his lips for a reply, Alex pounced, slipping into his ancient role as torturer of the geek. “Yeah, let’s hear it. Shackleton is probably some kind of dot-com billionaire with his own 737 and a basketball team. Did you go on to invent the cell phone or something like that? I mean you were always writing stuff in that notebook of yours, always with the closed bedroom door. What were you doing in there, sport, besides going through back issues of Playboy and boxes of Kleenex?”
Will and Zeckendorf couldn’t suppress a yuk because back then the kid always did seem to buy a whole lot of Kleenex. But straightaway Will felt a pang of guilt when Mark impaled him with a barbed et tu, Brute? kind of look.
“I’m in computer security,” Mark half whispered into his plate. “Unfortunately, I’m not a billionaire.” He looked up and added hopefully, “I also do some writing on the side.”
“You work at a company?” Will asked politely, trying to redeem himself.
“I worked for a few of them but now I’m like you, I guess. I work for the government.”
“Really. Where?”
“Nevada.”
“You live in Vegas, right?” Zeckendorf said.
Mark nodded, clearly disappointed no one had keyed onto his comment about writing.
“Which branch?” Will asked, and when his reply was a mute stare, he added, “Of the government?”
Mark’s angular Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed. “It’s a lab. It’s kind of classified.”
“Shack’s got a secret!” Alex shouted gleefully. “Give him another drink! Loosen his lips!”
Zeckendorf looked fascinated. “Come on, Mark, can’t you tell us something about it?”
“Sorry.”
Alex leaned in. “I bet a certain someone from the FBI could find out what you’re up to.”
“I don’t think so,” Mark replied with a dram of smugness.
Zeckendorf wouldn’t let it go and thought out loud, “Nevada, Nevada-the only secret government lab I’ve ever heard of in Nevada is out in the desert…at what’s called…Area 51?” He waited for a denial but got a good long poker face instead. “Tell me you don’t work at Area 51!”
Mark hesitated then said slyly, “I can’t tell you that.”
“Wow,” the model said, impressed. “Isn’t that where they study UFOs and things like that?”
Mark smiled like the Mona Lisa, enigmatically.
“If he told you, he’d have to kill you,” Will said.
Mark vigorously shook his head, his eyes lowered and turning humorless. There was a reedy dryness in his throat that Will found disquieting. “No. If I told you, other people would kill you.”