Gods of Aberdeen

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Micah Nathan

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Julie Schroeder

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nathan, Micah.

  Gods of Aberdeen: a novel / Micah Nathan.

  p. cm.

  1. Young men—Fiction. 2. College students—Fiction.

  3. New England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3614.A86G63 2005

  813’.6—dc22 2005042514

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint lyrics from

  “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone”

  Words by Sidney Clare, music by Sam H. Stept

  © Copyright 1927 (Copyright Renewed) and assigned to Bourne Co. and Remick Music Corp. in USA

  All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7437-1

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-7437-7

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  Acknowledgments

  This book exists because of my parents’ belief in the value of creativity, and because of my sister’s love for stories.

  Thanks to Marly Rusoff, agent extraordinaire, and the incomparable Marysue Rucci, my editor at Simon & Schuster. I am indebted to Henry Morrison, Larry Block, Arthur Phillips, Chuck Adams, and Pat Withrow, all of whom played pivotal roles in this book’s genesis. I am also indebted to Tara Parsons, the Nathans, the Kanes, the Cohens, the Bickoffs, and to my three brothers: Jake Halpern, Brian Smith, and Jonah Dayan. Thank you all for your support and optimism. It helped more than you know.

  My deepest debt is to my wife, who believed when I did not, and who nurtured this dream as her own.

  To Rachel, who holds my heart

  Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge, on the one hand into the past…on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

  —CARL JUNG

  A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.

  —GEORGE GURDJIEFF

  Prologue

  I remember Aberdeen College well—even now I could tell you what it looks like, on any particular day, at any particular time. I could tell you how the air tastes and how long the shadows are that run from the silver maples in the Quad, streaming over the grass like rivers of ink. I could tell you about winter in Aberdeen, sloping ice-sheathed drifts, tall, naked trees painting the snow black. How the wind sounds when it darts through the forest, how the sky looks at night, white dots spattered across a shadowy canvas.

  Not too long ago I returned to Aberdeen, to Dr. Cade’s house, walking to the back, to the pond, which I expected to see as I remembered it most fondly: jagged reeds along its edge; kites of gnats looping endlessly above a mirrored surface crinkled by the wind; nets of hornwort and duckweed hugging the shores. But despite the years the flash of memories was still too vivid, and I couldn’t dip my fingers into the cool water for fear of seeing something bubble up from the unknown depths and greet me with hollow eyes and bared teeth. And as for Dr. Cade’s house, the house that had seduced me away from my freshman year at Aberdeen, it now looked abandoned. Its windows were covered in grime, the paint was peeling, and the driveway didn’t wind through the eons of time, as I’d once imagined, but ended where it always did, at a small walkway where the grass poked between the flagstones.

  I drove into town and saw that Aberdeen itself had also withered; time diminished it into what it always was—a stately old college necessarily blind to the outside world. The H. F. Mores Library, where mysterious forces once loomed, was now only a stuffy crypt of books. The hills and forests surrounding the campus, where we’d spent those bitter winter mornings searching for our lost friend, had regained their anonymity, towering copses of spindly trees dissolving into a dark blur. There were a few students milling about the Quad, those who’d returned early from summer break, and I glided among them, unseen, under Garringer’s spire-tipped shadow, to the black oak at the edge of campus. On its trunk, amid puckered scars and cracked bark and an obsidian trail of ants, I looked for the remains of the initials Dan and I had carved into the wood, many years ago on a warm October day. I knew where Dan was, but the other friends I’d made during those days had long disappeared within the folds of time, swallowed like old wounds on the trunk of that black oak.

  I went back to Aberdeen because I hoped it could return something of mine it had taken long ago. But I realized such places never give back what they take. It’s a toll they exact, and when the debt has been paid, you know your time is done not by the clang of any bell, but by the soft rustle of apathy. Nostalgia becomes a dark lens, the promise of immortality sheds its skin, and you find yourself gliding, unseen, under the shadows of the giants in your life, who have grown too tired to take notice.

  Part I

  Aberdeen

  Chapter 1

  I arrived in Fairwich at dusk, and with my arrival came the rain. The clouds had been threatening all day, from New Jersey to Connecticut, and when I stepped off the bus there was a gust of cool wind, the clouds rumbled softly, and the rain began. I called for a cab from a payphone booth and waited in the booth, watching the sidewalk darken and the leaves drip. Down the street a little boy dropped his bright yellow bike on his front lawn and ran into his house.

  The storm had worsened by the time the cab arrived. The cabby wore a green baseball cap, frayed around the edges, the plastic backing of the cap dug into the tanned, black-hair-bristled rolls on the back of his neck. A limp cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. I asked him to take me to Aberdeen, and he asked me if it was my first year. I said it was. He nodded, one hand on the wheel, the other draped over the top of the passenger seat.

  “Where you from?” he said.

  “New Jersey.”

  “I used to date a Jersey girl,” he said.

  I leaned my head against the window and stared at the trees, letting them whip by in a brown and green blur. The road didn’t have any shoulder, just a thin line where the blacktop ended and spiky weeds began. It reminded me of my old home in West Falls, riding into town with my mom, staring at the road edged with dusty, dark earth.

  “First time in the country?” The cabby eyed me in his rearview.

  “I’m an American,” I said.

  He looked at me in the rearview again. “You serious?” He laughed. “I mean out here. In the country. Farms…forests…”

  “Oh,” I said, “I haven’t been in the country since I was ten.”

  “Parents don’t take you camping anymore?”

  “I’m an orphan,” I said.

  “No shit?”

  I nodded.

  The cabby took the cigarette out of his mouth, stared at it a moment, and flicked it out the window.

  As the cab rounded the bend of the brick entranceway, behind the thinning maples and pines, there stood Garringer Hall. It looked less like a student union than a medieval castle, and I imagined a dragon, with green scales and membranous wings and eyes like glistening rubies, circling down from the gray sky and perching on the largest of the three spires. I pulled out th
e tri-fold map that had been sent to me in my acceptance package. Two smaller structures flanked the hall, with a covered brick and wood causeway joined to the western-most building. This was the H. F. Mores Library—where I would be spending two mornings per week, according to my work-study assignment—not as tall as Garringer but longer, made of the same rough-cut granite blocks and topped with mullioned dormers. The easternmost building was all ivy-covered dark stone with a turreted roof, a massive clock sitting atop the center turret, and I recognized this structure as Thorren Hall, the main classroom center on campus. We drove slowly up the gradually sloping hill, students hurrying around us with their gray umbrellas and brown book bags and black shoes shiny from the rain.

  I don’t remember exactly what I expected of my housing, though I imagined it would be similar to every image I’d seen on TV of college dorms: small, carpeted, and a bed with a sagging, stained mattress. I was surprised, however, when I opened the heavy wooden door to my room in Paderborne Hall. Inside was a gracious space, with an eleven-foot peaked ceiling, a scarred parquet floor, and a dark-stained desk, set against bookshelves still showing the litter of students past—gum wrappers, pens, and paper clips. Ivory-colored drapes fluttered in the breeze from an open window. I dropped my bag and sat on the floor, listened to the soft thunder, watched the sable-colored clouds rolling over the swaying trees with their pale leaves turned up against the storm.

  Affinity for open spaces is in my blood; I was born and spent the first ten years of my life in West Falls, Minnesota, in a small house on a farm. My father left when I was five, and my mother died of cancer when I was ten, and I was sent to live with her second cousin Nana, in a two-bedroom apartment in one of Stulton, New Jersey’s “urban renewal” zones. It was a prison sentence. Nana didn’t seem too fond of me, and her husband Leon and their two sons were downright hostile. My classmates at my new school didn’t like me because I was too young, having skipped a grade in grammar school.

  There was something suffocating about Stulton, like a wet, gray blanket had been dropped over the city and we were all trapped underneath. Summers were the worst—the squall of dripping air conditioners, hot bus exhaust, heat shimmering off the sidewalks. During summer I missed my childhood home the most. I felt if I could just return to West Falls and sneak back into my house and live like a stowaway in the crawlspace or under the attic eaves, that everything would be okay again, that I’d slip back into my former life and it would be as if my dad had never left and my mom had never died. But going back home was just as impossible as my mom’s resurrection. West Falls had died with her, and Stulton was all I had left.

  But eventually I adjusted, and I made the high school into my sanctuary, the only place where I could read in peace and not have to listen to the blaring TV or the barking dogs or the arguing neighbors. I’d stay in the school library after hours, reading my books until the janitor noticed and sent me home. Sympathetic teachers gave me paper and pens, notebooks and a calculator, and I won academic awards every year up until graduation. I displayed an affinity for languages, especially Latin. By senior year I’d made some good friends, and even though I missed West Falls, I’d developed a sort of hardened loyalty to where I was. It was misery, but it was a misery I knew well.

  After graduation my friends scattered like seeds in the wind. I was the only one who stayed. I took a job as a stock boy at a convenience mart across the street from our apartment. Every month college brochures arrived, and every month Nana told me I was too poor to afford college. Slowly I felt myself catching her apathy and resignation about life. My friends were gone. My sanctuary—high school—was gone. So I lowered my head and kept working and stashed the money from my paychecks in a hole in our bathroom floor. And then one Sunday night, while taking out the trash, I saw the dark outline of a brochure with ABERDEEN COLLEGE printed across the front in gleaming white, peering at me through the garbage bag’s translucent plastic. I ripped open the bag, took out the brochure, and read it while sitting in the dim light of the stairwell.

  Aberdeen College. Located in Fairwich, Connecticut. Established 1902. Its motto, printed beneath:

  EX UNGUE LEONEM

  From the part we may judge of the whole. Literal translation: from the claw we may judge of the lion. The glossy brochure photos promised it all: gently sloping hills, lush trees, a shadow-speckled country field. Centered on the front of the brochure was Garringer Hall, looking like a Gothic cathedral with students standing on its front steps. The blonde women were smartly dressed with plaid bows in their hair, and the men had leather book bags and preternaturally confident smiles. Ex Ungue Leonem. Every student a representative of Aberdeen College, for now and the rest of their days. The tang of New England countryside will seep into your skin, snake its way into your bones, and there it will remain, tendrils of ivy forever enshrouding your limbs.

  The seduction was brief and complete. Everything else was a formality—the application, the pleas for financial aid and scholarships, the letters of recommendation from my teachers and my boss at the convenience mart. The day I received my acceptance letter I took my money from the bathroom floor hole and bought a bus ticket and a leather book bag. Three months after reading that brochure in the dirty stairwell of my Stulton tenement, I finally escaped. Aberdeen College was my deliverance.

  A day after I arrived, as I walked past the H. F. Mores Library on the way to meet with my advisor, the library’s front door banged open and a tall student stumbled down the stairs. His light brown hair was a tumble of cowlicks and his blue shirt was half-tucked-in. He stopped on the path, adjusted the pile of books under his arm, took off his glasses, and held them to the sky. He was taller than I, a little over six feet, with broad shoulders and a small, symmetrical face.

  “Do you have the time?” he said.

  I didn’t say anything, not sure if he was speaking to me because he was still looking at his glasses.

  “The time,” he said patiently. “Do you have it?”

  “Quarter past.”

  “Past what?”

  “Nine.”

  He put his glasses back on. “You ever get insomnia?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “It’s like a dream,” he said. “Staying up all night. The day comes and everything feels like a dream.”

  I just stood there.

  “What’s your remedy?” he asked me.

  “I read,” I said.

  He laughed. “There’s the problem,” he said. “Reading keeps me up.” He turned and walked away, clinging to his books. I watched as he disappeared down the path.

  My academic counselor, Dr. Henry Lang, was a bald, thin-lipped, portly man, awkward as a horse fitted into a chair. His office in Thorren Hall was small and meticulous; everything had a holder—his pens, his glasses, his pencils with separate erasers, and even his umbrella, snugly confined to a wooden tube near the coatrack.

  Dr. Lang took off his glasses, placed them in their brown leather case, and looked at me, papers in hand. “You’ve done quite well on your placement examinations.” He took a thick gold pen from its holder. “Although I didn’t find any record of Latin classes on your transcript.”

  “They weren’t offered,” I said. “I taught myself. Mr. Suarez the Spanish teacher helped me out sometimes after school.”

  Dr. Lang raised his eyebrows. “Well, then, I’m sure Mr. Suarez would be happy to know I’m recommending you start in Latin 301. Dr. Tindley is an excellent instructor. You’ve chosen history as your major, correct?”

  “I have, sir.”

  Dr. Lang almost smiled—his upper lip struggled to curve itself, but the weight of his forehead and his flat, broad nose pushed it back down. “As you may already know, our history department is one of the finest in the nation. I, myself, am an esteemed member of the faculty…”

  At the conclusion of his exegesis he leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight.

  “So you see, Mr. Dunne, while you may have done well in high school, le
t me caution you against hubris. For someone of your economic standing, such opportunities should not be squandered. As for your work-study position”—he glanced at the papers on his desk—“you will be working for Mr. Graves, the head librarian.”

  Dr. Lang lowered his voice, leaning forward against his desk. “Most of the students at Aberdeen find Mr. Graves a bit difficult. I assure you he is eccentric, nothing else. A normal consequence of the aging process.”

  He leaned back in his chair and rested his hands on his stomach.

  “We had a boy like you, a few years ago,” he said. “Came from a broken home in the city. Father was a drug user, mother had gone to prison for something awful, I can’t recall what it was.” He pursed his lips as if he’d tasted something bad. “I told that boy if he needed anything at all, to please just let me know. You may find this hard to believe but I do appreciate the difficulties of adjusting to a new culture.”

  Dr. Lang shook his head. “The boy dropped out, nevertheless. I believe drugs had something to do with it. You grew up in the city, correct?”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Were illicit drugs readily available to you?”

  “No,” I said. “My foster parents weren’t junkies, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Goodness, no. I wasn’t implying that at all.” Dr. Lang shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I’m just concerned with the consequences of raising one’s children in an urban environment. My niece lives in New York, and I worry about her constantly. She told me a classmate of hers is pregnant. Can you imagine?”

  I heard some people in the hallway complaining about the student parking on campus. Dr. Lang sighed deeply and plucked his gold pen from its holder. “Adjustments are difficult. There’s no shame in admitting that, and I’ll tell you the same thing I told that poor boy: Should you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, please do not hesitate to let me know.”