Quoth the Raven(22)

“It’s hard to believe we’re only an hour and a half from Philadelphia,” Gregor said, and meant it. It was hard to believe they were still in the state of Pennsylvania.

Tibor brushed the palms of his hands against the sides of his robes, his customary gesture for getting on with it. “We will go down onto the campus,” he said. “We will leave the picnic baskets and ask some of the boys to come for them after lunch. The boys will not mind, Bennis. They are true Americans. Very obliging.”

“Is that what we are?”

“Yes, Bennis. That is what you are. Also very tolerant, very open-minded, very friendly, and very lazy. Especially intellectually lazy. Tcha. Such fine minds my students have and all they want to think about is Batman, The Movie. We will go now, Bennis, yes?”

“Yes,” Bennis said.

Gregor watched her walk across the tarmac to the van and slam the sliding side door shut, her hair whipping around her face in the wind and her jacket nearly falling off her shoulders. She was securing the sliders when he tapped Tibor on the shoulder and pointed across the parking lot at the shack.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“That is a shop for fixing cars,” Tibor told him. And then he grinned. “In Armenia, Krekor, when the Soviets came in—in my grandmother’s time this is—we had much trouble with a program that was to make us all comrades. In the end, the intelligentsia retreated into their offices and the mechanics into their garages and nothing was changed. Well, Krekor, here is capitalism for you. Here we have the cars for all the faculty. The Jeep over there is the car of a member of my Program, Dr. Crockett. They say maybe he would be the next Head. He has not a large reputation, but he is very local. But there, that black Mercedes, that belongs to a philosopher. A philosopher, Gregor, not a famous one, but still a philosopher. And like every other intellectual here, he fixes his own car!”





2


UP IN THE PARKING lot, it had been impossible for Gregor Demarkian to imagine that a full college campus—or a full measure of anything else artificial and civilized—was anywhere close. Once Tibor had led them down the narrow winding path that ended at Minuteman Field, it became impossible to imagine that the campus of Independence College could ever end. It wasn’t that the physical plant was so very big. Gregor had been a student at Harvard and a participant at conferences at Yale, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown. All those places had larger and more impressive collections of architecture, more inclusive and more diverse student bodies. Maybe the problem was that all those places were also set down in the middle of cities, so that they came to seem like just one more kink in an already tortuously convoluted urban landscape. Set down by itself, surrounded by nothing visible but trees and hills, Independence College defined itself—and its self-definition was distinctly eighteenth century. The redstone buildings were all Georgian and Federal in design. Even the ones whose shiny newness of material and lack of ivy indicated they must have been recently constructed maintained the artistic sensibility of 1778. Then there were the paths that had been threaded through the lawns from the door of one building to another, straight paths in straight lines, testimonies of symmetry to the triumph of reason. Lawns were lush but closely mown, hedges boxed and closely clipped. The statue of a Minuteman stood at the center of the largest quadrangle, at the place where all the quadrangle’s paths met. It had been cast in bronze and allowed to weather to green. Seen from halfway down the path from the parking lot, Gregor thought it radiated the confidence of self-control.

The campus had been built on what must have been the only piece of solidly flat land in this part of Pennsylvania, and at the moment it was crowded with students. Students in mummy costumes, students in Frankenstein costumes, students made up to look like undefined victims of bloody violence—in no time at all, Gregor began to feel shell-shocked by how many of them there were, and by how many of them seemed fascinated with death and gore. Obviously, Gregor thought, this must have been going on for some time. Tibor, usually the most squeamish of men, wasn’t fazed by it at all. Gregor caught a look at Bennis Hannaford and saw she wasn’t fazed by it, either. Maybe all those horror movies she watched with Donna Moradanyan had made her immune. Gregor refused to believe she had been inoculated by seeing her own sister dead on the floor.

When they got to the very bottom of the path, Tibor turned slightly sideways, and waved his arms in the air.

“There. There it is. Kings Scaffold and old King George. What do you think?”

Gregor didn’t know what to think. The Scaffold was impressive all by itself, a massive outcrop of rock jutting straight up from the ground, at least as high as a three-story building and maybe higher. The bonfire, though, was the kicker. It didn’t make a bit of difference that it was unlit. Hundreds of logs climbed up the rock face of the Scaffold, decorated here and there by bits of paper and cloth. At the top, regally seated on a plywood throne, was a straw-stuffed dummy that looked too much like a man. Only the jack-o’-lantern head, made it possible for Gregor to look at it without cringing.