Читать книгу When Demons Float - Susan Thistlethwaite - Страница 16

People shouldn’t call for demons unless they really mean what they say.

—C. S. Lewis, The Wisdom of Narnia

Tuesday afternoon

After class ended, I went to my office and just sat behind my desk. The grey skies kept most of the daylight behind clouds, but I didn’t turn on the lights. Aduba wasn’t there, and I was glad to be alone. I wondered briefly if he was already using Hercules Abraham’s office for prayer. Of course, I had only a vague idea of when Muslim prayer times would be. Again I was just astonished I had given no thought to the practicalities of having a Muslim colleague. Neither, apparently, had Adelaide.

I leaned back and pressed my hands to my eyes. Big mistake. Behind my eyelids I could see again the twisted, charred, but still human forms of the victims of lynching, and the gloating, even glorying, faces of the watching crowds. I shuddered. The white skin and teeth of the watchers had gleamed in the firelight like something summoned up from hell.

A loud knock on the door made me jump in my seat.

“Yes?” I called out sharply. “Who is it?”

“It’s Jordan, Professor. May I come in?”

“Sure,” I replied in a more civil tone. “The door is unlocked.”

Jordan. The class clown. I was so not up for his smartass act right now. His “they lynch cows?” snarky question still rankled with me.

He opened the door, and I immediately saw this was not Jordan the clown coming to see me. His pale, nerd face was even more pasty than usual and his lips were compressed into a solid line of tension.

“Have a seat,” I said neutrally.

Jordan dropped his backpack and sat down heavily. He didn’t look at me. He looked down at the floor, his narrow shoulders hunched in his worn T-shirt. I waited.

He cleared his throat.

“Well, I just wanted to explain about John, see? And I don’t know for sure.”

He looked up and peered at me through the thick lenses of his large, dark framed glasses, his eyes magnified like those of an insect. He seemed think this remark might make sense to me. In a peculiar way, it did. Just not in the way he was pretending. Jordan knew something, and he didn’t want to admit how much he knew. The trick in this kind of thing is to keep quiet. Cops know that well. Give a witness enough silence, and they’ll say more than they planned. I just nodded slightly. He looked back at the floor, his large glasses sliding down his nose a little.

“It’s just that this Muslim guy and his lecture got him going, you know?”

“Professor Abubakar, you mean,” I said quietly.

Jordan realized he’d made a mistake.

“Yes. Yes. That professor.” He paused. “That’s why John left the class, you know. He texted me. I think he’ll drop. He was already pissed, I mean angry, that the department had hired a Muslim, and then in class you went on and on about that stupid rope. He’s a Christian, you know, and since you called the class ‘Social Gospel,’ he thought it would be about Christians.”

“It is about Christians,” I said dryly. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll follow up with John, Jordan.”

He didn’t reply right away and just picked at holes in the knees of his jeans for a while. They already had large tears in them. If he kept going, he’d turn them into shorts before he left my office. I just watched him.

Finally he looked up again, and spoke.

“I can’t really say I know anything, but like people talk online, and well, I mean, John, he was really pissed off, and like he takes this religion stuff so seriously. Not like us in computer sciences. We just write code, you know, and don’t pay attention to that stuff so much.”

He smiled his lopsided smile, back to being the clown.

“Is that a nerd thing, ignoring reality?” I inquired, playing along.

“At this school, it’s more of a geek thing, really. Geeks are the more academically inclined nerds,” he said, mimicking a lecturing voice.

“How can you tell the difference?” I asked, continuing the game.

“You have to be dork to tell,” Jordan chuckled. Then he grabbed his backpack and stood up. The legs of his jeans remarkably still held together, but jeans shorts were clearly in his immediate future.

“Anyway, I gotta go.”

“Okay,” I said, mildly. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“Sure,” he said, by way of farewell, and he slouched out the door. He didn’t shut it. Typical.

I went around my desk and walked slowly to the door to shut it, thinking about Jordan’s motive for coming in to see me. He thought John had hung the noose. But just John?

I crossed back to my desk and sat. There had certainly been rumblings around the campus for about a year now, maybe even longer, by people arguing about identity, and race, and so forth. We had more than our share of young, white guys who’d be very vulnerable to a “white is right” kind of message.

My phone rang. I looked at the display. It was Rev. Jane Miller-Gershman, the University Chaplain. I liked her a lot. Jane was a “take me or leave me” kind of person. She was married to a woman rabbi at a local synagogue. She had been a great help on an investigation last spring.

I reflected, as I reached for the phone, how much the uproar on campus created by the noose and flyers would have affected the students and their groups she advised.

“Hello, Jane,” I said warmly. “Good to hear from you.”

“Hello, Kristin,” she said in a serious voice, and then she didn’t say anything else. I waited. This was my day for waiting people out, apparently.

Finally she went on.

“Listen, Kristin, I just got off the phone with a pastor from Michigan, Rev. Ethan Dunn. He works with parents of white, teenaged boys, mostly, boys who are getting lured into this whole white supremacist ideology. Given what happened with that noose, I thought I’d invite him to come speak on campus.”

“Well, good idea, Jane. Do you need me to help with that in some way?”

“No, that’s not why I’m calling.” She paused again. “The thing is, he said something interesting about how these young, white supremacist guys are recruited, and then how they communicate. I thought you should know and maybe pass it on to campus police colleagues. See somehow if that could be going on here.”

I grabbed a pad to take some notes.

“Really? That could be helpful, Jane. What did he say?”

Jane went on.

“Well, he said they use the chat rooms of violent video games. The kids go on the games, and then they go to the chat rooms and there are these guys waiting there, and they lure them in.”

Made a horrible kind of sense.

“Jane, did he say which games?”

“Well, the most popular one is called ‘Revenge,’ but there’s another one called ‘Hitman,’ and he also mentioned one called ‘Death Rally.’”

Nice names. I wrote them quickly on my pad.

“Jane, thanks. I’ll check this out.”

“There’s one more thing,” she said hurriedly before I could hang up. “He said everybody who plays these games and goes on the chat rooms uses fake names, creepy names, and the creepier the better. So it’s not going to be easy to figure out if students here are doing this.”

“Well, I’ll pass this along to my colleagues in the campus police, and then we’ll check it out. Tell Rev. Dunn thanks, and I look forward to meeting him.”

“Sure, Kristin. I’ll let you know when he can come.”

Even as she was saying good-bye, I had my computer open, and I searched “Revenge, video game.” Many links appeared. I clicked on the first one. “Revenge” was a first-person shooter game by an international group of designers appropriately called Carnage Inc. From the description, it seemed like there was one guy who wants revenge on everybody, and so he kills indiscriminately, wiping out both civilians and law enforcement. I read further. Ah. The game was designed as a “reaction to video game political correctness.” Well, that figured. Can’t be politically correct and a lone shooter at the same time, can you? No. Certainly not.

I decided to open the trailer, and I watched the game. A grainy, urban landscape appeared and a scruffy white guy with “sociopath” all but written on his forehead, wearing the trench coat garb so beloved of mass shooters since the Columbine High School mass shooting, started walking toward a group of people. Good gad, he took out a flamethrower and burnt up dozens and dozens of people. I shuddered, thinking about the lascivious, white faces watching African American bodies burn in the lynching photos. Then the weird, white guy (called “the Archenemy,” I had read) pulled out his AK-15 (helpfully labeled) and shot at people running away. Then he used his big knife to finish off any survivors by cutting their throats.

After the initial shock, though, the game seemed boring to me, but then again, I was not the target audience. In scenario after scenario, the trailer showed the Archenemy doing the same flamethrower, AK-15, knife thing. The backgrounds changed, but the actions were pretty much the same. He committed mass murder at political rallies, the waterfront, the train station, and he even killed gun dealers. I guessed he really did want revenge on everybody. All through this, there was a creepy, atonal voice that rasped a nihilistic voice-over. I replayed it, listening to the voice again. What did it remind me of? Oh yes, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies. There was a teaser in the trailer that you could play in “God mode.” Sure. Which “God” was not specified. Probably Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead or something equally appropriate.

I felt like I needed to shower.

I imagined students playing this game and then coming to class. Now I was the one who felt like speaking in a creepy, raspy voice. “Don’t be assholes, don’t be assholes” would be a good voice-over message for these gamers.

I closed the computer. Time to call Alice. Maybe John Vandenberg was pissed, but Alice was really going to be pissed.

✳ ✳ ✳

I reached Alice on her cell and just said I’d gotten some information that might lead us to who hung the noose. She didn’t even acknowledge that, but just growled that she was on foot patrol on campus and could meet right away.

“The university coffee shop,” she specified in a rasping monotone, eerily like the Voldemort voice.

That was Alice’s favorite coffee shop as it was centrally located, brightly lit with overhead fixtures that emitted a fake, sunny glow, and kept at a consistent 72 degree temperature year-round. That counted a lot with Alice as she had to be outside so much, enduring the ridiculous Chicago weather extremes, and maybe she liked the pretend sunlight as there was almost never actual sunlight in Chicago. I preferred that basement coffee shop across the quad. It was located near the steam pipes and was usually uncomfortable and dimly lit with fluorescent lights. But the coffee was better, and I didn’t feel like I was on the set of Baywatch, getting a fake tan. Alice called the coffee shop I liked “that dump.”

When I got to the brightly lit, pleasantly warm, but not too warm, coffee shop, I stopped and got a cup of French Roast. It was the least offensive of their coffee blends. Today’s other featured coffees, I saw with horror, were “Maple Bacon” or “Spicy Taco.” I slapped a lid on my French Roast before it could get contaminated by bacon or taco flavoring. I looked around for Alice, and I spotted her back through the window. She had abandoned the fake interior and was sitting at an outside table, smoking. Nicotine was her go-to stress response like caffeine was mine. We had each promised the other to cut down on our drugs of choice. We were not succeeding.

I walked up to the table. Like all good cops, she was aware I was behind her, and she just said, “Don’t” without looking around.

She got up and took the half-smoked cigarette over to one of those black, outside cigarette disposal units that looked like an upside-down sledge hammer, ground it out and shoved it into the slot. She turned and clumped back toward the table, her sturdy cop shoes crunching the dry leaves littering the flagstones.

She sat back down, took out her notebook, and only then did she look up at me, her deep brown eyes opaque. She was still shut down.

“What you got?”

“Hello, Alice, glad to see you too. How are you? How are Shawna and Jim?”

“Always so damn cute,” she muttered, but her heart wasn’t really into pushing back at me. Then her shoulders relaxed a little under her dark, uniform jacket, and she softened her tone as I knew she would whenever I brought up her daughter, Shawna, who was six.

“Last spelling test, 100 percent,” Alice bragged. “She purely loves school.” She glanced at me under her fringe of dark hair. “Must be you rubbing off on her.” She paused and then went on more seriously, “And Jim is good too, I mean, now that he’s driving that truck and out of the house. Hard to have him gone so much, though.” Then she stopped, I assumed not wanting to share too much. But I thought she knew I understood.

Her husband, Jim, had been a firefighter in their south suburban town, but budget cuts had eliminated his job, and he’d been out of work for almost eighteen months. Then he’d gotten a truck driving license and, it seemed, a good job. But I bet it was hard on them, his being on the road. I knew Alice had family around to help with Shawna, as her hours were no picnic either. As a widow now for six years, I knew well what it was like to have to do solo parenting. And Alice knew that I knew.

“Sounds like it’s tough,” I replied neutrally. “But hey, 100 percent on the spelling is great. The boys do okay in spelling, but they complain that it is so dumb now that there’s spellcheck.” Yes, at seven they knew spellcheck on the computer.

Alice hmphed, opened her notebook, and clicked her pen. She was done with chit-chat.

I took her cue and just summarized what Jordan had said when he’d come to my office about John Vandenberg. Then I went on to Jane’s call with the information from Rev. Dunn about white supremacist wannabe’s using the chat rooms of violent video games to recruit and also to communicate. Perhaps they had used a chat room to plan the hanging of the noose. Jordan had implied John Vandenberg had acted alone, angry at the hiring of a Muslim professor in Philosophy and Religion and then at the title of his planned lecture.

“I don’t know, though, Alice, if that’s right, either that John Vandenberg hung the noose, or if he did, that he did it alone. There’s some white guy students here who even tried to get Richard Spencer to come speak. It could be a larger group,” I finished.

“Who’s he?” Alice said, pausing in her writing and looking up quizzically.

“You know, that neo-Nazi, rich idiot who’s always quoting Germans and saying ‘Heil Trump’ and so forth?”

Alice looked blank for a minute.

“White guy?”

“Yeah. Sort of a professional white guy, really, with rich parents so he doesn’t actually have to do anything to support himself. He keeps claiming ‘America belongs to the white man,’ and tries to get on to college campuses and talk about stuff like that under the banner of ‘free speech.’”

“And you think I pay attention to mess like that? Give a little shit like that any space in my brain? Do you think I’d let that filth come near me and mine?” Alice sat up straight and glared at me, her whole body rigid with anger.

“No. Of course not,” I said. “I’m just saying we need to know who the enemy is.”

Oh, hell. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized I’d made a huge mistake. Alice’s face went from anger to blank like someone had pulled the blinds closed. And someone had. Me.

“You think I don’t know who the enemy is?” she ground out between clenched teeth, her lips barely moving. “You think I haven’t known that all my life, had it shoved in my face every day, on the street, on a bus, in school, in this damn job for this ‘oh we’re so liberal, white people we don’t see you’ school? Do you?”

“Yes, you do know that. I shouldn’t have said what I did. It was stupid and blind. I’m sorry.”

She looked away, taking deep breaths.

I just waited.

“Try to think before you open your damn mouth, okay?” she said, still not looking at me.

“Yeah. Okay.” I wanted to say “sorry” and “I feel awful for what I just said,” and a bunch of other white, guilt-type phrases, but I figured the least I could do was shut up and not make it worse.

Alice opened the zip on her jacket and took out a little metal case that I knew held her cigarettes and lighter. She tapped the tip of a cigarette on the stone-topped table, put it between her lips, and lit it. She took a big drag, inhaling like this was her first gasp of air after having been choked. Then she took another short pull. She glared up at me, daring me to say anything.

I continued shutting up.

“They use these video games to plan stuff?” Alice said, puffing again while looking down at her notebook.

She was all business.

“That’s what Jane told me Rev. Dunn had said,” I replied evenly. “Yeah, in short, they go online, play the game, and then use the chat room to communicate. And they all use screen names, weird ones, Jane reported, though God knows what they consider weird. We can’t just look at the chat rooms of these games and see that it’s students.”

I paused, thinking. Alice took another drag.

“But we might be able to tell from what they’re saying to each other. I mean if they sound like they’re talking about our campus.”

She paused, looking at her notebook.

“So what’s the name of the student who ratted out the other student?”

“Jordan Jameson is the guy who came to see me, and John Vandenberg is the name of the student Jordan said was all upset about Dr. Abubakar’s lecture and so forth.”

Alice wrote that down. Then she took another deep drag, got up without comment, and took the half-smoked cigarette to the outdoor container. She ground it out, pushed it in, and came back.

She sat, drumming her fingers on the hard surface of the table. I wondered where she had gone in her mind. I realized I had no clue. I had my own ideas, but knew continuing to shut up was best, at least right now.

“Mel,” she said, looking up at me.

“Mel?” She was referring to her colleague and often partner, Mel Billman. Mel had been on the quad when Alice had cut down the noose, I recalled. He was a tall, mixed-race guy who rarely said anything, but when he did it was best to pay close attention.

“Mel’s a gamer, is that what you mean?” I asked.

“Yeah. Think so.” She tapped her pen on her teeth. “Last year, maybe it was, he went to some convention here in Chicago, think it was about these game things. Excited about it.”

She took her pen and jotted something down.

“Mel was excited?” I said, disbelief in my voice.

Alice actually grinned a little.

“For him, yeah. Ten more words than usual.” She rooted in her jacket pocket, took out her phone and started scrolling.

“Today’s duty roster shows he’s on. I’ll tell him about what that pastor from Michigan said and the mess they could be making with these crap games. What’re the names he gave Jane?”

“Revenge,” I said, the word coming out in a grim tone, “as well as ‘Hitman,’ and ‘Death Rally.’ ‘Revenge’ is the most popular, apparently.”

Alice looked up from writing.

“Yeah. Right.”

She made another note, put the notebook away in another pocket, and stood up.

“Alice,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah. I know you sorry as hell, but you gotta think first.” She paused. “You know that stunt you pulled yesterday?”

I just nodded.

“Me? If I’d done it, I’d be dead today.”

She put her hands on the table surface and leaned over so our faces were closer. I could smell the cigarette smoke on her breath.

“You wanna be brave and hell, you throw yourself at stuff scares the shit out of me. But you brave enough to walk around in a black woman’s skin? You brave enough for that? They want us purely dead, Kristin. Every damn day.”

I took a breath.

“If I could, Alice, I would.”

She stood back up.

“Yeah. That’s why I can just about stand to know you. But you can’t. You purely can’t.”

She turned and walked away, head high.

I just sat there and thought. Some popular historian had written a book on our current, what Alice would call “mess” in America, and blathered on about “summoning our better angels.” It wasn’t the angels we needed to be concerned with. It was the demons that lurked right below the surface, demons created by the kinds of hatred that had festered in our history. And this demonic legacy was bubbling up through the cracks now, cracks opened wider by these white supremacist yahoos. I gazed across the lawn toward the tree on the quad in the distance. How long before we had another noose? Or worse?

I walked slowly back to my office, thinking. When I got there, Abubakar wasn’t present. Then I remembered he had a class this afternoon.

I opened my computer and started researching identity-masking software. Maybe I couldn’t live in a black woman’s skin, but I could become someone else online and get these bastards.