Stanford Church
I was secretly relieved we had an excuse to leave the exhibit early. While Scott relished the limelight, I preferred privacy. The showcase for my work was a nice ego rush, but that’s where it ended. At openings, it was me who was on display.
As the car raced down the freeway, Scott was silent. The car headlights illuminated a makeshift cross on the freeway shoulder. Someone died there, I thought. Maybe a whole family. The memorial flashed by in seconds, but the scene lingered in my mind. The ground had been spread with flowers. I flashed on the curved road that cut into Blain Mountain and the cracked trunk of that massive oak. I’d been just thirteen when I’d carved the names of my mother and father and my baby sister into the scars of its bark.
Scott stared straight ahead, motionless except for the repeated flex of his jaw muscles against his clenched teeth. Scott bordered on obsessive when it came to the confidentiality of his research. He even kept his desk at home locked and insisted his home office be off limits to anyone, even the house cleaners. On the few occasions that I’d entered the book-lined study, I’d felt like a trespasser.
Scott pulled off the freeway and gunned through the back roads of the university onto fraternity row. Mansions with Grecian columns lined the street. He pulled into the student union and made a fast stop in front of the campus security office.
“Wait here.” He touched my thigh.
Before I could protest, he was out of the car and headed for the security door. I pushed the stereo button. Silence. He’d taken the keys. Aggravated, I reminded myself that he was preoccupied. After four years of marriage, I was still learning to concede the benefit of the doubt.
Seated in the car alone, of course I’d spook myself and conjure up thoughts of the latest trip down the hole. Sometimes I only heard voices down the hole, desperate shrieks that hovered colorless in my memory. Sometimes I saw people shuffle in long lines, face after pallid face, listless, emptied, utterly silent. Through my work, I’d tried to give form to the disembodied, a black storm, a locust swarm, a self-portrait of me asleep in the wild, bound by a twisted garland of thorns. But nothing could exorcise the howling. When finished, those paintings left me with a wormy, unsettled sense. It was a stark contrast to the whole-body sigh I felt after I bore witness to the empty multitudes in hues of blue and bone gray.
The car felt both cloistered and exposed. Scott had been gone a long time. Too long. I grabbed my purse and bolted from the car.
Beyond the doors of the security office, the building had an orderly, antiseptic air, paperless. A young man in uniform sat behind a counter. He watched a bank of monitors that flashed views of the campus, Hoover Tower, the union library, the grand church flanked by a long tier of palms.
He saw me and stood. “Can I help you?” He stared at the space between my hem and knees.
“I’m looking for my husband, Dr. Stanton.”
The guard straightened. “Dr. Stanton is back there, ma’am.” He pointed down a corridor. “But I’m not sure...”
Before he finished his sentence, I headed down the hallway, heels tapping against polished tiles. Rows of windows looked into darkened rooms. At the end of the corridor, a light glared in the room beside the emergency exit. The office door was closed.
Through the window, I saw Scott seated on the corner of a desk with his back to me. He looked down at a man who sat rigid in a chair. Perhaps in his mid-twenties, the man was suntanned with an athletic build. He could have played lineman for the Cardinals, but there was something about him, something wrong. His eyes were wild. He looked petrified. My heart quickened as I drew closer to the window. Foam bubbled from the side of the man’s mouth. His khakis were soaked around the front and upper thighs. What would cause a grown man to wet his pants?
Scott drew a penlight from his inner coat pocket and leaned forward to check the man’s eyes. The guy lunged backward, his face contorted in panic. His chair screeched against the tile, and he fell to the floor. Scott seemed unmoved. He stared down at the pitiful hulk crumpled on the floor. The man sobbed in hyper breaths. A strand of mucus swung from his nose. I heard him moan and stutter but couldn’t decode the words through the glass. I tried to read his lips. You can’t? He gulped air to catch his breath, and I thought I heard him say, “You can’t go through with it.” Scott spoke in muted low notes impossible to make out. I pressed my ear to the window.
“I saw the report, you twisted son of a bitch.” The man’s words vibrated against the glass. “How long did you think you could keep it a secret?” Startled, I lifted my ear away from the window. The guy’s eyes bulged. His cheeks ballooned as he held his stomach and heaved. Vomit spewed from his mouth and splattered across the floor. I clenched my eyes closed and felt my own stomach churn.
“Excuse me, Miss, you’re not allowed back here.” Another security guard, older than the man at the front counter, stared down at me.
“That’s my husband.” As I pointed to Scott, my finger tapped the window. He turned and saw me and bolted toward the office door. As it swung open, fumes of vomit and urine filled the hall. The acrid smell mixed with the champagne and tranquilizer I’d downed earlier and formed a mud-colored cloud in my head.
“Mike, I want you to drive my wife home,” Scott told the security guard.
“Sure thing, Dr. Stanton.” The guard craned his neck to see into the office. “Is everything alright in there? Man, that guy is tweaking.” He fanned his hand in front of his nose. “Jeez.”
“Call an ambulance and have him checked into H-2,” Scott said.
“Hofmann,” the guard yelled down the hall. “Get a van. He’s going to the lockdown ward.”
Scott took me by the shoulders and looked in my eyes. “Chloe, I want you to go with Mike. I’ll be home later.”
“What’s the matter with that guy? Is he going to be alright?” I stared through the window. The man lay curled in a fetal position in the puddle of his vomit.
Scott turned my shoulders so I couldn’t see. “I’ll tell you about it when I get home. I want you to go with Mike now.”
“What did he mean when he said you can’t go through with it?” I searched Scott’s eyes. He remained stoic, scientifically detached.
“He’s psychotic,” Scott said. “He’s out of his mind.”
Metal screeched against tile. The crazed man staggered to his feet and slammed into a chair. Bile dripped from his clothes. He charged toward the threshold into the hall. Beneath his panic, I thought I recognized something else in his eyes. His stare locked onto mine. “Don’t let them do it,” the man wailed and made a rush for the emergency door. Alarms shrieked. He lunged through the fire exit and ran, arms flailing into the darkness outside.
Scott charged after him. He pointed to the guard before he disappeared through the fire door. “Mike, make sure my wife gets home.”
The guard who’d greeted me at the entrance peered slack-jawed down the hall. “What the—?”
“Hofmann,” Mike yelled over the clang of alarms. “We need backup here. Get that van. Now.”
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