“You’re a liar,” said Cheryl, getting up from her seat, and looking down her nose at Quaid.
“Perhaps I am,” he said, suddenly the perfect gentleman.
After that the debates stopped.
No more talking about nightmares, no more debating the things that go bump in the night. Steve saw Quaid irregularly for the next month, and when he did Quaid was invariably in the company of Cheryl Fromm. Quaid was polite with her, even deferential. He no longer wore his leather jacket, because she hated the smell of dead animal matter. This sudden change in their relationship confounded Stephen; but he put it down to his primitive understanding of sexual matters. He wasn’t a virgin, but women were still a mystery to him: contradictory and puzzling.
He was also jealous, though he wouldn’t entirely admit that to himself. He resented the fact that the wet dream genius was taking up so much of Quaid’s time.
There was another feeling; a curious sense he had that Quaid was courting Cheryl for his own strange reasons. Sex was not Quaid’s motive, he felt sure. Nor was it respect for Cheryl’s intelligence that made him so attentive. No, he was cornering her somehow; that was Steve’s instinct. Cheryl Fromm was being rounded up for the kill.
Then, after a month, Quaid let a remark about Cheryl drop in conversation.
“She’s a vegetarian,” he said.
“Cheryl?”
“Of course, Cheryl.”
“I know. She mentioned it before.”
“Yes, but it isn’t a fad with her. She’s passionate about it. Can’t even bear to look in a butcher’s window. She won’t touch meat, smell meat —”
“Oh.” Steve was stumped. Where was this leading?
“Dread, Steve.”
“Of meat?”
“The signs are different from person to person. She fears meat. She says she’s so healthy, so balanced. Shit! I”ll find —”
“Find what?”
“The fear, Steve.”
“You’re not going to . . .?” Steve didn’t know how to voice his anxiety without sounding accusatory.
“Harm her?” said Quaid. “No, I’m not going to harm her in any way. Any damage done to her will be strictly self-inflicted.”
Quaid was staring at him almost hypnotically. “It’s about time we learnt to trust one another,” Quaid went on. He leaned closer. “Between the two of us —”
“Listen, I don’t think I want to hear.”
“We have to touch the beast, Stephen.”
“Damn the beast! I don’t want to hear!”
Steve got up, as much to break the oppression of Quaid’s stare as to finish the conversation.
“We’re friends, Stephen.”
“Yes…”
“Then respect that.”
“What?”
“Silence. Not a word.”
Steve nodded. That wasn’t a difficult promise to keep. There was nobody he could tell his anxieties to without being laughed at.
Quaid looked satisfied. He hurried away, leaving Steve feeling as though he had unwillingly joined some secret society, for what purpose he couldn’t begin to tell. Quaid had made a pact with him and it was unnerving.
For the next week he cut all his lectures and most of his seminars. Notes went uncopied, books unread, essays unwritten. On the two occasions he actually went into the university building he crept around like a cautious mouse, praying he wouldn’t collide with Quaid.
He needn’t have feared. The one occasion he did see Quaid’s stooping shoulders across the quadrangle he was involved in a smiling exchange with Cheryl Fromm. She laughed, musically, her pleasure echoing off the walls of the History Department. The jealousy had left Steve altogether. He wouldn’t have been paid to be so near to Quaid, so intimate with him.
The time he spent alone, away from the bustle of lectures and overfull corridors, gave Steve’s mind time to idle. His thoughts returned, like tongue to tooth, like fingernail to scab, to his fears.
And so to his childhood.
At the age of six, Steve had been struck by a car. The injuries were not particularly bad, but a concussion left him partially deaf. It was a profoundly distressing experience for him; not understanding why he was suddenly cut off from the world. It was an inexplicable torment, and the child assumed it was eternal.
One moment his life had been real, full of shouts and laughter. The next he was cut off from it, and the external world became an aquarium, full of gaping fish with grotesque smiles. Worse still, there were times when he suffered what the doctors called tinnitus, a roaring or ringing sound in the ears. His head would fill with the most outlandish noises, whoops and whistlings, that played like sound-effects to the flailings of the outside world. At those times his stomach would churn, and a band of iron would be wrapped around his forehead, crushing his thoughts into fragments, dissociating head from hand, intention from practice. He would be swept away in a tide of panic, completely unable to make sense of the world while his head sang and rattled.