The Night In Question (6 page)

Wiley had finished two whiskies and just bought a third when Kathleen and the little guy came out of the bar. They stopped in the doorway and watched the rain, which was falling harder now. They stood well apart, not speaking, and watched the rain drip off the awning. She looked into her purse, said something to him. He patted his jacket pockets. She rummaged in her purse again and then the two of them ducked their heads and started up the hill. Wiley stood suddenly, knocking his chair over. He picked it up and left the bar.

He had to walk fast. It was an effort. His feet kept taking him from side to side. He bent forward, compelling them to follow. He reached the corner and shouted, “Kathleen!”

She was on the opposite corner. The man was a few steps ahead of her, leaning into the rain. They both stopped and looked over at Wiley. Wiley walked into the street and came toward them. He said, “I love you, Kathleen.” He was surprised to hear himself say this, and then to say, as he stepped up on the curb, “Come home with me.” She didn’t look the way he remembered her. In fact he barely recognized her. She put her hand to her mouth. Wiley couldn’t tell whether she was shocked or afraid or what. Maybe she was laughing. He smiled foolishly, confused by his own
presence here and by what he’d said, not sure what to say next. Then the little guy came past her and Wiley felt a blow on his cheek and his head snapped back, and right after that the wind went out of him in a whoosh and he folded up, clutching his stomach, unable to breathe or speak. There was another blow at the back of his knees and he fell forward against the curb. He saw a shoe coming at his face and tried to jerk his head away but it caught him just above the eye. He heard Kathleen screaming and the shoe hit him on the mouth. He rolled away and covered his face with his hands. Kathleen kept screaming,
No Mike No Mike No Mike No!
Wiley could feel himself being kicked on his shoulders and back. A dull, faraway pain that went on for a while, and then ceased.

He lay where he was, not trusting the silence, afraid that by moving he would make it all start again. Finally he raised himself to his hands and knees. There was broken glass in the street, glittering on the wet asphalt, and to see it at just this angle, so close, so familiar, so perfectly a part of everything that had happened to him, was to feel utterly reduced; and he knew that he would never forget this, being on his knees with broken glass all around. The rain fell softly. He heard himself weeping, and stopped; it was a stagey, dishonest sound. His lower lip throbbed. He licked it. It was swollen, and tasted of salt and leather.

Wiley stood up, steadying himself against the wall of a building. Two men came toward him, talking excitedly. He was afraid that they would stop to help him, ask him questions. What if they called the police? He had no excuse for his condition, no explanation. Wiley turned his face. The men walked past him as if he wasn’t there, or as if he belonged there, in exactly that pose, as part of what they expected a street to look like.

Home. He had to get home. Wiley pushed away from the wall and started walking. He was surprised at how well
he walked. His head was clear, his feet steady. He felt exuberant, even exultant, as if he’d gotten away with something. Light and easy. The feeling lasted through most of the drive home, and then it broke; by the time Wiley reached his apartment he was weak and cold, seized by feverish trembling.

He went straight to the bathroom and turned on the light. His lower lip was cut and bleeding, purplish in color, puffed up like a sausage. He had another cut over his left eyebrow, the skin above it scraped raw all the way to his hairline. His chin was bloody and flecked with dirt. He could see a bruise beginning on his cheekbone. My God, he thought, looking at himself. He felt great tenderness for the person behind this lurid mask, as if it were not his face at all, but the face of a beaten child. He touched the hurt places. The raw skin clung to his fingertips.

Wiley took a long bath and tried to sleep, but whenever he closed his eyes he felt a malign presence in the room. In spite of the bath he still felt cold. He got up and looked at himself in the mirror again, hoping to find some change for the better. He inspected his face, then brewed a pot of coffee and spent the rest of the night at the kitchen table, staring blindly at a book and finally sleeping, slumped sideways in the chair, chin on his chest.

When the alarm went off Wiley roused himself and got ready for school. He couldn’t think of any reason not to go except embarrassment; and since other teachers would have to cover his classes during their free time, this did not seem a very good reason. But he gave no thought to the effect of his appearance. When the first students saw him in the hallway and started quizzing him, he had no answers ready. One boy asked if he’d been mugged.

Wiley nodded, thinking that was basically true.

“Must have been a whole shitload of them.”

“Well, not that many,” Wiley said, and walked on. He went straight to his classroom instead of stopping off in the teachers’ lounge, but he hadn’t been at his desk five minutes before the principal came in.

“Mr. Wiley,” he said, “let’s have a look at you.” He walked up close and peered at Wiley’s face. Students were filing in behind him, trying not to stare at Wiley as they took their seats. “What exactly happened?” the principal asked.

“I got mugged.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Not yet.”

“You should. That’s a prize set of bruises you’ve got there. Very nasty. Call the police?”

“No. I’m still in sort of a daze.” Wiley said this in a low voice so the students wouldn’t hear him.

Wiley’s friend Mac stuck his head in the doorway, nodding coolly at the principal. “You okay?” he said to Wiley.

“I guess.”

“I heard there were eight of them. Is that right, eight?”

“No.” Wiley tried to smile but his face wouldn’t let him. “Just two,” he said. He couldn’t admit to one, not with all this damage.

“Two’s enough,” Mac said.

The principal said, “Just let me know if you want to go home. Seriously, now, Mr. Wiley—no heroics. I’m touched that you came in at all.” He stopped at the door on his way out and turned to the students. “Be warned, ladies and gentlemen. What happened to Mr. Wiley is going to happen to your children. It will be a common occurrence. That’s the kind of world they’re going to live in if you don’t do something to change it.” He let his eyes pass slowly around the room the way he did at school assemblies. “The choice is yours,” he said.

Mac applauded silently behind him.

After Mac and the principal left, two boys got up and pretended to attack each other with kicks and chops, crying
Hai! Hai! Hai!
One of them drove the other to the back of the classroom, where he crashed to the floor and sprawled with his arms and legs twitching. Then the bell rang and they both went back to their desks.

This was a senior honors class. The students had been reading “Benito Cereno,” one of Wiley’s favorite stories, but he had trouble getting a discussion started because of the way they were looking at him. Finally he decided to give a straight lecture. He talked about Melville’s exposure of the contradictions in human law, which claims to serve justice while it strengthens the hand of the property owner, even when that property is human. This was one of Wiley’s pet subjects, the commodification of humanity. As he warmed to it he forgot the condition of his face and assumed his habitual patrol in front of the class, head bent, hands in his pockets, one eye cocked in a squint. He related this story to the last one they’d read, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” quoting with derisory, operatic exaggeration the well-intentioned narrator who cannot understand the truculence of a human being whom he has tried to turn into a Xerox machine. And this was not the voice of some reactionary fascist beast, Wiley said, jingling his keys and change as he paced the room. This was the voice of modern man—modern, enlightened, liberal man.

He had worked himself into that pitch of indignation where everything seemed clear to him, evil and good and all the sly imitations of good that lay in wait for the unwary pilgrim. At such moments he forgot himself entirely. He became Scott Fitzgerald denouncing the foul dust that floated in Gatsby’s wake, Jonathan Swift ridiculing bourgeois complacency by suggesting a crime so obscene it took your
breath away, yet less obscene than the crimes ordinary people tolerated without a second thought.

And what happened to Bartleby, Wiley said, was only a hint of things to come. “Look at the multinationals!” he said. And then, not for the first time, he described the evolution of business-school theory to its logical conclusion, high-tech factories in the middle of foreign jungles where, behind razor-wire fences guarded by soldiers and dogs, tribesmen who had never seen a flush toilet were made to assemble fax machines and laptop computers. A million Bartlebys, a billion Bartlebys!

Wiley didn’t have the documentation on these jungle factories; it was something someone had told him, but it made sense and was right in tune with the spirit of late-twentieth-century capitalism. It sounded true enough to make him furious whenever he talked about it. He finished his lecture with only a few minutes to go before the bell. He felt very professional. It was no mean feat, getting your ass kicked at two in the morning and giving a dynamite lecture at nine. He asked his students if they had any questions. None of them did, at first. Wiley heard whispers. Then a girl raised her hand, shyly, almost as if she hoped he wouldn’t notice. When Wiley called on her she looked at the boy across the aisle, Robbins, and said, “What color were they?”

Wiley did not understand the question. She looked over at Robbins again. Robbins said, “They were black, right?”

“Who?”

“The guys that jumped you.”

Wiley had always liked this boy and expected him to learn something in here, to think better thoughts than his FBI-agent father who griped to the principal about Wiley’s reading list. Wiley leaned against the blackboard. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Yeah, right,” Robbins said.

“I really don’t think so,” Wiley said. This sounded improbably vague even to him, so he added, “It was dark. I couldn’t see them.”

Robbins gave a great shout of laughter. Some of the other students laughed too; then one of them hit a wild note that sent everyone into a kind of fit. “Quiet!” Wiley said, but they kept laughing. They were beyond his reach; all he could do was stand there and wait for them to stop. Wiley had three black students in this class, two girls and a boy. They stared at their books in exactly the same way, as if by agreement, though they were sitting in different parts of the room. At the beginning of the year they’d always sat together, but now they drifted from desk to desk like everyone else. They seemed to feel at home in his class. And that was what he wanted, for this room to be a sanctuary, a place the rest of the world should be like. There was no other reason for him to be here.

The bell rang. Wiley sat down and rustled through some papers as the students, suddenly and strangely quiet, walked past his desk. Then he went to the office and told the principal he was going home after all. He was feeling terrible, he said.

He slept for a few hours. After he got up he looked through the veterinarians’ listings in the yellow pages and found a Dr. Kathleen Newman on the staff of a clinic specializing in surgery on exotic pets. He called the clinic and asked for Dr. Newman. The man who answered said she was in a meeting. “Is it an emergency?”

“I’m afraid so,” Wiley said. “It is sort of an emergency. Tell her,” he said, “that Mr. Melville’s cetacean has distemper.”

Wiley spelled out cetacean for him.

And then a woman’s voice was on the line. “Who is this, please?” It was her. But sharp, no fooling around. Wiley couldn’t answer. He’d expected her to pick up his joke, and now he didn’t know how to begin. “Hello? He
llo?
Damn,” she said, and hung up.

Wiley turned to the white pages. There was a Dr. K. P. Newman on Filbert Street. He wrote down the number and address.

Mac’s wife, Alice, stopped by that afternoon with bread and salad. She had been a student of Wiley’s, and one of his favorites, a pale, slow-moving, thoughtful girl he would never have suspected of carrying on with a teacher, which showed how much he knew; she and Mac had been going strong ever since her junior year. They got married right after she graduated. There was a scandal, of course, and Mac almost lost his job, but somehow it never came to that. Wiley found the whole thing very confusing. He disapproved and was jealous; he felt as if Mac had somehow made a fool of him. But eight years had passed since then.

Alice stopped inside the door and looked at Wiley’s face. He saw that she was shocked to the point of tears.

“It’ll mend,” he told her.

“But why would anyone do that to you?”

“These things happen,” he said.

“Well, they shouldn’t.”

She sent him back to the living room. Wiley lay on the couch and watched her through the kitchen doorway while she set the table and made lunch. He was happy having her to himself in his apartment; it was a wish of his. Alice didn’t know he felt that way. When they all went out to bars she sat beside him and leaned her head on his shoulder. She took sips from his drinks. She liked to dance, and when she danced with Wiley she moved right up close,
talking all the while about everyday things that somehow made their closeness respectable. At the end of a night out, when Mac and Alice drove Wiley home and came inside to call their sitter and drink a glass of wine, and then another, and Wiley began to read to them some high-minded passage from whatever novel he was caught up in, she would stretch out on the couch and rest her head in Wiley’s lap while Mac looked on benignly from the easy chair. Wiley knew that he was supposed to feel honored by all this faith, but he resented it. Faith had become an imposition. It made light of his capacity for desire. Still, he put up with it because he didn’t know what else to do.

Now Alice was slicing tomatoes at his kitchen counter. She had a flat-footed way of standing. Her hair was gathered in a bun, but loose strands hung in her face; she blew them away as she worked. She had gained weight over the years, but Wiley liked the little tuck of flesh under her chin, and the plumpness of her hands.