Chapter 9
“I CAN’T SEE SHIT,” SIMON GRIPES as he and Dez share the map from Dez’s folder on their way to orientation.
They’ve left their residence hall, traipsing down an astonishing ten flights of circular stairs to reach the bottom of the Towers.
Now they’ve pushed through a heavy wooden door and find themselves at the entrance to the tri.
Dez is dressed in jeans, a luxe white cashmere sweater, and a bone-colored parka with a fur-rimmed hood, all found in her new closet. She feels like an imposter, but at least she’s comfortable in the lightly falling snow.
“Just because they can make it midnight perpetually,” she says as the two of them start trudging across the triangular courtyard, “doesn’t mean they should. What about our circadian rhythms?”
“Were you not at that party last night?” Simon says. “I think the only rhythm anyone cares about is getting pounded. Hard.”
“Did you hear Yael this morning, too?”
“Twice today, twice last night. She almost gave me a heart attack with that scarf this morning.”
“How’d you end up at Acheron, Simon?” Dez asks, half smiling. “Where are you from?”
“Cherokee Nation, northwest Oklahoma. Small town, huge family,” he says, catching a snowflake on his tongue. “I already miss them, you know?”
“I miss my family, too,” Dez says, and takes a breath. “My brother’s in the hospital.”
“Shit. What happened?”
“He was in an accident,” Dez says, looking down at her boots.
“He gonna be okay?”
“I hope so.”
“And you came here in the midst of all that?” Simon says, looking over at her. She feels like he’s getting it. Not all of it, but some of it.
“I guess it seemed like …” Dez starts to say.
“A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?”
“Right.” She pulls up the hood of her parka. She needs to change the subject. “So, did you apply to other programs?”
“About a dozen. Nowhere else for film. When I got the letter in the mail, I was shocked.”
Dez blinks at him as they come to the end of the tri. To a dark, windowless building made of cold gray stones. “What else did you apply for?”
“Peace Corps,” he says, holding open the door for Dez. “A Shamanic initiation in Peru. Internship at an aerospace engineering startup, total lunatic CEO. This underground music promotion in Tokyo. I’m basically looking for the most fucked-up thing to do at any moment.”
Dez nods as they enter the building, but she’s confused that Simon might have studied so many other things, taken any number of completely different life paths. Dez would be a filmmaker anywhere, even if she hadn’t gotten into a single school. She would be a filmmaker in the afterlife.
They’re standing in a foyer lit by candles wedged in severe wrought iron wall sconces. The chill feels heavy, ancient. There’s a closed door labeled LECTURE HALL, and from within, a rich, baritone voice booms:
“There are two types of Acheron students. Who can tell me what they are?”
“We’re late,” Simon says, and scrambles for the door. “I got the low-down from some last-years at the bar last night, and we’re never supposed to be late to Zarlengo’s class.”
“Who’s Zarlengo?”
“Teaches film theory,” Simon says. “Apparently, everyone hates him.”
By the time he and Dez slip inside the lecture hall, every marble desk seems to be taken. The professor, a weathered man in his sixties, paces a raised dais in the center of the huge room.
Zarlengo’s harsh expression seems to support this reputation. His raven-black suit matches the classroom’s heavy drapery, and his black suede cowboy hat shades all his features but a narrow silver beard.
He glances in Dez’s direction—just as Simon claims the last available seat.
“Would you like a gold leaf invitation to join orientation?” Zarlengo says to Dez.
Dez is horrified that these are the first words an Acheron professor says to her, but before she can protest that there are no available seats, Zarlengo asks:
“What kind of Acheron student are you, Ms. Rae?”
Fuck, and he knows her name. How does he know her name?
Every eye in the lecture hall stares at Dez. Some she recognizes from the bar last night, before she blacked out. Shame creeps over her shoulders, knitting them tightly together.
“Right now,” Dez starts, “I’m an Acheron student who’d like to sit down.”
A smattering of embarrassed laughter sounds in the hall.
“I think we all join you in that aspiration,” Dr. Zarlengo says.
Seeing no other option, Dez sinks down into the aisle next to Simon, who gives her a pitying wince.
In her fantasies of her first day as a graduate student, Dez was a heroine, not the class clown.
But maybe it’s a good thing to be so hideously out of her depth, so repeatedly humiliated, because all this constant scrambling interrupts her thinking about Mo.
She takes out the orientation folder, flipping through to find her schedule for today.
6:00 a.m.
Work Study Breakfast Shift, Enoch Dining Hall Kitchen
Already fucked that one up.
9:00 a.m.
First-Year Orientation, Kohenet Building, Lecture Hall
On her way to fucking this one up, too.
12:00 p.m.
Lunch, Enoch Dining Hall, table 16
3:00 p.m.
Coupling Ritual, Diamond Slope
7:00 p.m.
Dinner, Enoch Dining Hall, table 16
9:00 p.m.
Evening Program: Introduction to the Vault, Goliath Building
Before Dez can nudge Simon with raised eyebrows about the Coupling Ritual, Zarlengo bellows from his dais.
“Someone else!” He stares at the ceiling of the lecture hall, emblazoned with the school’s monogrammed logo. “Anyone else! Two types of students! This is not a trick question.”
“The two types of students,” says a woman with long red hair in the back row, “are those who think in words and those who think in images.”
Zarlengo stops pacing. Is silent for a moment. It gives Dez a chance to breathe.
Words and images. She’s never thought about classifying her thoughts in this way. She isn’t immediately sure which one she is.
“Two tracks at this institution,” Zarlengo says, holding up two fingers. “Those who think in words are our Scribes. These students enter the screenwriting track.”
Dez watches students shift in their seats, considering if this term refers to them.
“Those who think in images,” Zarlengo continues, “are our Visionaries. These students enter the editing track.”
Dez does all of the above and more on her films. She looks around the room, wondering how anyone can be only one kind of artist. But here, in just a moment it seems, she and everyone else in this room will be juxtaposed as one type of person over another, in a more or less permanent way.
“What about directors?” someone asks from the front of the room. “I’m a real Scorsese nerd and I came here to pursue—”
“That won’t be necessary.” Zarlengo puts his hand up with a cold smile.
“Dr. Moriah is our school’s director. Its only director.
And regardless of what you came here thinking you would ‘pursue,’ you are not in charge.
Acheron is not like other institutions. We have strict policies on everything from your course of study to your communications, on and off this campus. ”
Dez’s fingers curl around her folder, bending it in half, remembering what Yael said about the phones, about the outside world. She needs to be able to talk to and visit her family. Rafe promised her she would.
“You’ve just left a world wholly dependent on this type of ‘connectivity,’” Zarlengo continues. “You’re entering a world wholly independent of it.”
He puts his hands on either side of his podium, casts his gaze around the room.
“While I’d prefer you approach your studies in an open spirit of learning for learning’s sake, I know that many, if not all, of you want to know what happens after your last year. What will Acheron do to get you gainfully employed?”
Dez leans forward, hanging on his words. This is why she’s here—to learn, yes, but also to set herself up for the future.
“If I tell you,” Zarlengo says, “that we have a one hundred percent success rate at securing gainful employment for our graduates, will you exhale and allow yourself simply to learn and perform? Because it’s true. Dream jobs await each of you.”
The lecture hall collectively exhales. Zarlengo drops his voice.
“Very soon, you will not find yourselves sitting in classrooms. Instead, you’ll learn by doing.
And you’ll do what we direct you to do. Each of you has already been placed into one of two filmmaking categories according to your innate predilection.
No request to be reassigned will be entertained. Am I clear?”
“Yes, Dr. Zarlengo,” the students around Dez respond.
“Both kinds of filmmakers face challenges,” Zarlengo says in rhythm with his pacing. “Scribes will battle the distracting whisper of your inner voices. It is your job to shut them up so that you can tune directly into the inner voices of your subjects. If you can’t do that, you’re out.”
Someone laughs nervously. Zarlengo bows his head. A troubling silence hangs over the room.
“As for you Visionaries … you’re in danger, too. You probably came here thinking you’re entitled to any aesthetic judgment that streaks across your hippocampus. But at Acheron, films aren’t about you.”
At this, his focus falls on Dez. The John Wayne performance is ridiculous—but why is a chill spreading down her spine?
“Close your eyes!” Zarlengo commands the class.
Dez does.
“If I asked you to tell me about home,” he continues, “about where you come from, what would you say?”
Dez inhales slowly, and she’s there. Death Valley. The house she shared with Moses and her mom for her entire life until now. She left so suddenly, with such little preparation, under shocking duress.
It’s painful to see her home so clear in her imagination.
She’s in the galley kitchen, which smells like rosemary from the two planters on the windowsill.
She’s sitting cross-legged on the counter next to the sink.
She’s reaching into her mom’s cold cannister of frozen coffee crystals, pinching some between her fingers, popping them in her mouth.
She’s watching Mo lick burger grease off his finger while impersonating some friend who’d fallen off a diving board at a party he’d been to that night.
Dez can see the blue clock over her brother’s shoulder, ticking toward two a.m. She can see the dishes in the sink Mo was supposed to wash before he went out tonight but didn’t.
She can see her mother’s current cross-stitch project featuring yet another Christmas tree, spread out across the chair under the good lamp.
She’s trying to finish before the holidays, but they usually end up as Easter presents.
It’s one of those utterly mundane moments from Dez’s life. So common it could have happened a hundred times. But suddenly Dez knows this scene will never happen again, because—
She sees the guy in the mask pushing past her into the Dairy Barn.
She sees the scattered Styrofoam cups behind the sink when she leapt over the counter to reach him.
She sees her hands around his throat, the threads in the fabric of his hood.
She sees the eyeball in her hand.
The deep fryer filled with oil.
Mo, scalded. Disfigured.
Loaded like a corpse into her car.
The haze of the night when she’d chased him.
She sees Rafe on his motorcycle, how she’d felt in her whole body like she knew him from somewhere before.
She sees it all, down to the sketched expression in her eyes on the napkin Rafe gave her.
She sees the rooftop at the hospital where he first told her about Acheron.
Her mom’s face reading her acceptance letter.
The cops circling the hospital, looking for her.
The obsidian jet carrying her far away from Death Valley, from her joy and troubles.
And that first sight of Acheron, like a dream. Like a movie.
“Open your eyes,” Zarlengo commands.
Dez is crying when she opens her eyes. She wipes them quickly, blinks until she can see straight.
From his jacket, Dr. Zarlengo produces two thick stacks of sealed white envelopes. He hands the first stack to one side of the room, the second stack to the other.
“I imagine,” he says, “that each of you now suspects which type of student you are. Which type of track you might be on. Scribe or Visionary. These envelopes will confirm your path. Open them.”
Simon passes Dez an envelope. Desdemona Rae reads the inscription in small, precise script. Dez slides her thumb under the seal of the envelope and pulls out the white card inside.
In the center of the thick white stock is a detailed, black embossed lithograph of an eye. She stares at it, feeling it stare at her.
The iris is nearly as dark as the pupil. It’s unnervingly similar to the eyeball in her pocket now. She feels a creeping certainty that this is an indictment. That everyone at Acheron knows what she did on her way here. She can still feel the eye’s taut density. She thinks she might throw up.
“What’s your secret?” Simon asks, leaning over his desk to look down at her.
Dez flinches.
Her card. Simon only wants to know about the card. He flashes his in her direction—an ornately calligraphed ABC is stenciled in the center. He’s a Scribe.
She shows him the eye on her own card.
She’s a Visionary.
Which means even in the darkest hours, somehow she’s going to have to figure out how to see.