The Faculty Club

What choice did I have?

They knew it was me. They knew.

That portal, that vision of family, the bliss of a normal life, suddenly collapsed like a dead star. I felt a hand on my shoulder, pulling me out of my thoughts.

“I’m trying to help you,” the old man said.

I followed him to the library. He was stumbling and muttering, taking swigs from his bottle, making less and less sense as we went. I tried to stop him from drinking, but he knocked my hand away. After a while, I had to help him walk. I held him by his thin arm, and the skin moved loosely under my hand, like a cocoon about to give birth to a skeleton.

We reached the front entrance of the library, with its grand columns, but he took us around back to a door I’d never seen before. He selected a key from a crowded ring, and we entered a loading bay and went down a spiral staircase two floors below ground level.

He looked at me.

“Turn around,” he said.

I heard him perform a complicated set of maneuvers: things being pulled and replaced, something large dragging across the floor. When I turned around, I found a door where a wall had been. He used another key, and we went through the door.

So these were the steam tu

“Don’t touch,” he muttered. He clinked his bottle on a pipe. “Hot.”

Humpty barreled forward with that head-down walk, swaying a bit, no noise but the occasional mumbled curse. We went several minutes in silence until he blurted out Fuck! and barreled on again.

We turned into a narrow side hall and stopped.

There were several metal panels on the wall. Humpty scrutinized them and finally tapped his finger on one.

Written on the panel, in neat print, were the small letters dm.

He gri

He told me to pull off the panel. It led into a tu

“Understand?” he snapped.

“I do.”

I started to climb in, but he stopped me. Something in his face broke a little, came into focus. For the first time, he actually looked like more than a bitter, addled old loon.

“What if I told you I was better than the things I’ve done?” he asked me. “Would you believe that?”

I thought, that’s impossible. But he looked so desperate, I just nodded.

“I saw you in the library. The night you helped your friend. I was watching.” He was trying very hard to communicate something. “I am not a bad man.”

His eyes were almost lucid.

“What have you done?” I asked him.

Humpty shook his head. Apparently he wasn’t ready to go that far.

“Just let me help you,” he said.

He urged me into the tu

Humpty Dumpty watched me start the crawl. Then he replaced the panel behind me, killing the last of the light.

I crawled on my hands and knees. Every so often I would come to a branch point, and one route would have another sign like before: dm. I felt like I was moving deeper into the belly of a beast; it grew warmer and moister. Eventually I came to a split in the tu

When I came to the corner, it was another fork. I left a small mark with my key pointing me back to where I started, and I took the turn toward the light.

It was stronger at the end of the tu

Another turn, another fork. I paused and listened. I looked back toward the other tu

A strange smoke was drifting down the tu

I stopped for a moment and let the smoke pass over me. I breathed it in, tried to isolate the different memories it evoked.

There was a square of light ahead of me now, a glowing box of pink-orange light through slits of a vent. I felt lighter now, as if that smoke were working its magic on the networks in my mind, slowing me down, lifting me up, placing me in a smooth, rocking pool, letting my vision shine and spread like a fan of cards. If I went all the way to the light, I would be at the end of a length of tu

I was high above, looking down on a scene of odd beauty. The salmon light flickered, lit the room then poof, darkness-then a flare and sunrise again. I let my eyes roam across the scene. There was a man with a long beard moving a metal canister around, plumes of salmon smoke pouring from its holes as he traced patterns in the air. I saw people I recognized: Bernini in a high chair, his chest exposed, white hairs curling out around a yellow silk gown that was luxurious and oriental. Nigel standing rigidly in front of onlookers, naked, the musculature of his thin body defined and illuminated by the strange light. The smoke was burning my nostrils. Everything was an electric version of itself, the colors u

I tore myself away. The smoke was burning my eyes. I heard a noise down the tu