Chapter Five
“And Then There Were Ten”
“What?"
"He." Cecil repeated, pronouncing each word quite slowly and clearly. "Did. Not. Do. It."
"Excuse me," said the girl framed in the doorway. She had shoulder-length brown hair and a bright red t-shirt. "Do you know where, uh…" Losing momentum, she stared at the bloody wall across from her.
"Yes?" prompted Dave, smiling in the special way that he found was especially unsettling to young American girls. This one was no exception.
"Do you…oh…" managed the girl, before losing track once again.
"Do we what?" asked the Chief of Campus Security, not unkindly.
"Do you know where Albert, uh, Feinstein is?" she finally asked, adding unnecessarily: "This is his room."
"Mr. Feinstein is currently—" began Youngjack, his long and worn face lighting up a little—this, at least, was a question he could deal with—when Cecil, loudly, cut in.
"Look at this room!" He swept his arm in a grand arc that accidentally swatted the President of Herschberg University on the cheek. Cecil paused, sniffed his fingertips, and then continued: "Have you ever," he fixed a steely gaze on the assistant security person who had just walked in, "ever," switching said gaze to the University president, who involuntarily put a protective hand over his cheek, "seen a mess that was so utterly organized?"
It was true. The seemingly random posters on the wall, the clutter on the desk, the ketchup stains on the steel-wool-like carpeting, even the pile of generic student garbage formally placed in the middle of the room—it was all somehow tidy and systematic. A moment's further study, and it became clear that all of these things were, in fact, perfectly symmetrical.
"Someone who decorates," Cecil went on, "his room in such a manner could never murder someone with a sharpened piece of piano wire."
Everyone in the room took a moment to absorb and consider this statement.
"Yeah!" said the assistant security person. "Even the posters are ruined!"
The Chief of Security glared at the assistant. The girl in the red t- shirt murmured that the 'Pink Floyd the Wall' poster might be saved, but no one paid her any attention.
Silence reigned a few long moments more.
"That is," began the President, "without question, the most idiotic thing I have ever heard." Cecil opened his mouth to object, but the President, who was warming to his topic, would have none of it. "You are saying, sir, that because this boy is methodical in his room-keeping, it is therefore not possible for him to have murdered his girlfriend, and you look at us proudly as if you have just said something with any sense in it whatsoever!" The President shoved his face to within six inches of Cecil's and waggled his eyebrows in a way that indicated, to those who knew the President well, that he considered his point to be well and truly made.
Cecil found this waggling unaccountably fascinating, and although he had been planning a withering reply, he found himself instead staring at two objects that resembled two fuzzy worms formally bowing to each other before fighting. He stared so intently at the President's forehead, in fact, that that gentleman found himself wishing to be elsewhere; he turned to the Chief of Security and declared that, as far as Herschberg University was concerned, this matter was over, the boy should be expelled immediately, and that would be the end of it.
Suddenly Cecil bore down on the President, his nostrils flaring. "You," he intoned (the only word for it), "have brains made from shit." There was a grave silence in which everyone in the room considered the implications of this statement, broken only by the very slight sound made by President Hoover's lower lip trembling. "You see that a girl is dead; once you read in a book that love leads to murder; and right away you decide that the boyfriend is guilty? You know nothing of human nature, sir!"
"You think…she didn't have a boyfriend," said the girl in the red t- shirt, who was still in the doorway, apparently not certain she was permitted to enter.
"Albert Feinstein," the Chief said imperiously, "was her boyfriend, young lady. Please don't try to tell us…"
"Albert is my boyfriend!"
Dead. Silence.
The President opened his mouth to speak, but only a dry hissing noise emerged. Giving up, he went back to his familiar lower-lip tremble, leaving it up to the Chief of Security to ask the question. Which, after several false starts, he did.
"Young…" he said, pausing to lick his lips. Retirement is only three years away, he thought. "…lady, what is...what is your name?"
"Jill Mankevich," she said, pulling down on her t-shirt. The "Coke" lettering was momentarily distorted.
Gathering the situation from the nearly identical expressions on the faces of the President, Chief, and assistant security person, Cecil collapsed in silent laughter against the outer wall, heedless of the still-damp blood.
Suddenly, the wall vanished—like POOF! The blood-spattered posters formerly blue-tacked to the wall fell from the building wrapped around the very surprised form of Cecil Graves, who landed with a soft "thunk" on the grass below.
"I'm fine," he reassured the row of confused faces looking down at him from Albert's room, not even half a second before the couple who had been making out up on the fifth floor landed on him. Even underneath the sound of dying undergraduate romantics, the clear snap of Cecil's neck breaking could be heard.
•
Albert Feinstein sat morosely in the small chair. The chair was cheaply manufactured, covered with a low-grade vinyl which was textured in a way that theoretically resembled leather. Beneath the vinyl was some foam padding which completely failed to keep the unevenly-molded iron (aluminum, more likely) bars that formed the skeleton of the chair from pressing uncomfortably into the bones of Albert's buttocks.
Albert wished very much that there was someone in the room for him to yell at.
He picked up a piece of paper randomly from the papers strewn with no order whatsoever—very ugly, really—on the fiberboard desk in front of him and attempted to read the text, but instead found himself studying the typeface. Clearly no one had thought to clean the typewriter used to write this for many years: all the hollow letters were filled in with ugly blotches of black ink. For some reason, Albert found the lower case "a"s to be particularly irritating. Each one stabbed into his eyes like an angel quitting its dance long enough to prick him in the eye with the pin upon which it had formerly tripped the light fantastic.
Albert began quickly sorting through the papers on the desk, taking care to ensure that none of them remain in their current sequence. He was pleased to note that the pages were unnumbered—someone would have a bitch of a time reordering these. The sorting done, he next divided the papers into two piles, twenty-three pieces of paper in one pile, twenty-four in the other. There were two irregularities. The first was a piece of legal-sized paper, three inches longer than the others. Locating a pair of scissors in a the upper right-hand desk drawer, Albert solved this problem easily enough. He threw the extra three inches of paper into the wastebasket. The second irregularity was a piece of letter-sized paper made from a somewhat thicker stock than its peers. Albert buried this in the pile of twenty-three sheets, between sheets eleven and thirteen.
He placed the piles on the desk in front of him, one in the center of the left half of the top surface, the other similarly centered on the right. Placing a hand firmly on the top sheet of each pile, he moved his hands in soft curves away from each other, still pressing down. The result of this action was two identical arcs of papers on the desk, each a mirror image of the other. Putting a hand down on the center of each arc, he drew his hands slowly towards himself, creating an identical warp in each arc. He then moved the second sheet in from the end of each arc to opposite corners of the desk.
When he was done, he stood up and walked to the window, which was painted permanently shut, presumably to keep the likes of Albert from affecting a daring escape. Whoever had painted the window and wall around it had used odd circular strokes, so that if one looked closely at the window frame, one could see hundreds of small, eggshell-white rainbows playing the child's game of "King of the Hill." The wood itself was poorly joined—
Albert Feinstein's mind suddenly stopped making noise—something that almost never happened when Albert was not organizing a mess. He stared out the window.
The forty-three dead rabbits scattered across the lawn outside stared sightlessly back at him.
•
There was some sort of commotion in the room on the other side of the door. From far off, somebody yelled that he was fine. A minute after that, everyone suddenly ran out of the room. Sighing with relief, Matilda opened the closet door and, staggering a bit on her legs, stiff from keeping still so long, slipped out of the room.
•