Interlude 4 Gwen, Under Attack #5
angry, though these days she mostly saved her fury for her podcast. Gwen had read somewhere it was one of the ten most downloaded
podcasts in the world. She was angry about new things now. She raged about her usual bugbears, the globalists and the elites . . .
but she had also come out hard against the incarceration of Black men for the personal possession of marijuana, boiled with
disgust about pesticides on crops and GMO foods, was vituperative about the domestic surveillance program begun under George W.
and continued under Barack Obama. When she talked about legalizing weed and outlawing genetically altered strains of produce,
Gwen thought she sounded like Donovan, although Van never would’ve expressed himself with such malice. Maybe that faraway
sound Donna sometimes seemed to be listening for was Van’s voice. Gwen supposed she wasn’t the only one who trafficked with
the ghosts of those she loved.
As for Allie, she had never wanted to choose, had been glad to let others decide for her.
So Colin made her selections as well. Allison had come back to Podomaquassy at last, like all of them, had accepted a teaching position at Rackham College in the Department of Statistics.
As the survivor of a famous air disaster, her course “Plane Crashes, Shark Attacks, and Falling Coconuts: The Odds of an Interesting Death” was the single most popular class on campus.
It didn’t hurt that she was beautiful, that most of her male students and probably a quarter of her female students had crushes on her.
She had rejoined the campus choir, as well, and sang in the chapel every Sunday morning, attended every service .
. . when she wasn’t too hungover, anyway.
Now that Gwen thought about it, Colin chose for all of them, except her. She didn’t know whose turn it would’ve been that
year, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t hers, so it was his.
“They were bad people, weren’t they?” she asked, and then realized she had spoken aloud and was glad for the roar of the snowblower.
“The people we offered to King Sorrow?”
“You could find out,” Arthur said. He had returned to her, was blowing on his mittened hands. “Easier than finding out if
he stabbed me.”
It jellied her insides, to think of going back over the dead. Of taking another look at the kill list. Of what she might learn.
“How do I find out what Colin did when he was down in that hole with you?”
“Look for proof.”
“What proof? You think he kept notes? You think he kept evidence against himself?”
Arthur rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “You won’t know if you don’t look.”
She slowed the snowblower at the French windows, wondering where Colin kept the things that mattered most to him in the world.
Then she turned her head and stared through the glass, past her reflection, at the Cabinet of Curiosities, behind Llewellyn’s
old desk.
And for the first time noticed there was a new lock on the doors.
5.
Gwen parked on campus in the student lot adjacent to Arundel Hall.
It still didn’t feel right to her. In the old days—in the years when she picked up summer work at Rackham, in the employ of her father—she had only ever parked in the lots for custodians, cafeteria workers, and groundskeepers.
She always half expected to be asked if she was lost. It took a conscious act of will to shoulder her messenger bag and leave her pickup parked where it was.
She had, after all, as much right to be there as any student.
She had, at forty-two, enrolled in Rackham College at last. She had gone back because Arthur had wanted her to, had wanted
it badly enough to pay for it himself.
They had declared him dead two years ago. Seven years after he went to Tintagel. Although he did not have so very much to
give, what there was he had left to her: twelve thousand dollars in savings, fifty thousand from the insurance, and three
file boxes of notebooks. The boxes were shoved under her bed. She had tried to look at them—she had really tried. He had seven
chapters and some unfinished bits and pieces for a book titled Toolkit for the Well-Prepared Dragonslayer. It was, she thought, an attempt to present some of his ideas about Arthurian legends and folktales to popular readers. But
the margins were littered with notes written directly to her. The first she saw was, “G., is this too academic?” The second
was, “G., be honest: Does this make me sound like a pretentious jackass?” The third was, “G., I hope you will tell me when
I’m being boring, you can’t be afraid to hurt my feelings,” and that was enough, she couldn’t read anymore, her vision was
blurring, and she could taste tears in the back of her throat. There were thousands of comments like that in his notebooks,
and each one was like losing him all over again.
The day the check cleared, she had called admissions at Rackham and told them she had been accepted to the college as a freshman in 1990.
She was wondering if her acceptance still held.
It was three weeks before they replied by email to say it was the opinion of the entire admissions department that yes, as the offer had never been withdrawn, her original acceptance remained valid.
Twenty-two years was an uncommonly long deferment but not disqualifying.
Gwen thought Allie had done some work behind the scenes to ease things along.
Colin too. Colin had a lot of pull at Rackham College.
He was one of its biggest donors, was building the college a computer center.
In A. A. Milne’s stories about Winnie-the-Pooh, the titular bear liked to retreat to what he called his “Thotful Spot” when
it was time to do some serious pondering. Gwen had a Thotful Spot of her own: the Brooks Library, with its towering stone
halls and stained-glass windows, its stillness and calm, its smell of books. She was grateful for it every time she stepped
through the doors, grateful for the glow of the desk lamps in their glass shades, the worn and nicked walnut tables. It always
made her think of Arthur, who had been all stillness and calm himself, who seemed happiest when he had an eighteenth-century
book open in front of him, paper flaking from the browned and hand-cut edges. It pained her to think he had been forced to
steal from a place he loved. She was never closer to him than when she was here and they could talk without being shushed,
since the conversation was in her head.
It was just beginning to snow—white flower petals, thrown at a wedding. Her path took her past the glass box of the new computer
center, all but finished now. Rows of computer monitors—a phalanx of blind obsidian mirrors—waited on glass tables that seemed
to float. The official opening was in a few months; Colin would be coming by to cut the ribbon himself. She had never told
him she hated it, this building that looked like an Apple store, which appeared to have been dropped by accident among the
nineteenth-century halls with their arrow-slit windows. The old buildings were places to think, to read, and to remember.
Colin’s glass tomb of a computer center made her think of a jar, something a brainy child would use to trap bugs.
She left the future behind, in the gathering gloom, and went on into the Brooks Library, where the past was as near as the
closest bookshelf. She sat at a long table in the western hall, laptop open, probably looking to the other kids less like
another student, more like a professor here to do personal research. Her mousy brown hair had a big streak of gray in it.
Age had drawn a pale brush across it in one swoop, falling from her brow.
Gwen began to work her way through the names on the Enemies List .
. . the names they had crossed out over the years.
A colonel in Boko Haram who locked children into suicide vests and then pointed them at military checkpoints and crowded marketplaces.
A Naxalite-Maoist judge in India who kidnapped bureaucrats and their families and sentenced them to slow deaths by impalement.
She despised them and felt grimy reading about them—there was a reason she had not wanted to look too closely at any of Colin’s selections.
When she couldn’t stomach anymore, she took a break to be with Arthur. Not the version she carried around in her head, but
the one on her laptop. She put on her headphones and pulled up the video Colin had sent her by way of a Christmas present,
the year Arthur had died. In two clicks, Arthur appeared on the screen against a backdrop of an improbably warm October evening.
He whirled around and around on roller skates, laying about him with a lacrosse stick, fending off the barbaric hordes with
a look of peace and even amusement on his face. Colin’s voice floated in from off camera to say, “This right here, this moment
is forever,” and it was. In the final seconds of the video, Arthur spun to a slow stop and seemed to look into the camera,
holding his stick out almost as an offering. His face breaking into a slow, sure smile. His lips moved but it was impossible
to discern the words coming out of his mouth. Let’s split? Beat feet? Crazy shit? Something like that.
“What the hell were you saying?” Gwen wanted to know.
“Dead men tell no tales,” said the Arthur in her head. “Although they can roller-skate, so. You take the good with the bad,
I guess.”
She went back to her Google search results, continued working through the names they had plucked off the Enemies List. A serial
rapist in California. A Middle Eastern poisoner. She was at it another forty-five minutes when she came across something that
made her straighten unconsciously in her chair.