My World Turned Upside Down

 

When I got back to the dorm room, Francis was pacing around highlighting cut-out newspaper articles and writing notes on a legal pad. He was mumbling something about a pattern and didn’t notice my entrance.

            As ignorant to reality as Francis is, eventually he noticed my expression of fear. It was a fear he knew himself; an alloy of paranoia and bewilderment.  He questioned me. Slowly, I began to explain my peculiar findings, but it didn’t seem to surprise him. He reacted as if all I had told him was corroborating some theory he was formulating.

            Before responding, he turned away and began to feverishly flip through the legal pad until he reached a sketch of ten people standing in cloaks. He held it up to me. They were doing what I had described. I nodded to him weakly.

            He told me not to tell anyone, and I knew from my movie watching experience that no one could be trusted, so I trusted no one. Francis’ boat was so far from the dock that no one would believe him anyway.

 That night, strangely, I awoke around three and Francis was sitting in the corner of his bed leaning against his wall. The only illumination was the moon cracking through the drapes and the glowing embers of his cigarette. He looked at me and said “I’ll look into this cult business. It need not concern you,” as he took a final long drag of his cigarette and turned his head to the sky and exiled a cloud of white as I drifted off back to sleep.

            (I didn’t notice it until a few weeks later but there was an ominous certainty of those words. The syllables almost tinged with a sad awareness of what had to be done.)

            The next day I went to class and hoped Snovil wouldn’t remember our meeting so he wouldn’t connect the cell phone he heard to me. I was the most likely candidate, so to assuage my paranoia—and maybe his—I told him I was unable to make it, and I tried to schedule meeting which I did not plan on attending.

            When I got back to the room Francis was still in his pajamas with a large cork board posted up on the wall with pictures of all the professors and assorted colors of yarn drawn from one picture to the other.  He told me he was building a conspiracy web.

When I asked if he had been to class, he said no, “This is too important…no-time-for- class,” slurring the end of his phrase into one word. “See the only way to understand what you saw is to start at the top. I know a girl whose mom is the Dean’s secretary, if I can get to her before they do, I could get a look at his appointment book and see what it says about last night. Then cross-reference it with Snovil’s appointment book because we all know they’re old chums. That’s what I suspect it is. Did you get a good look at anyone there? Maybe approximate height, ethnic group, speech patterns, shoe size, anything of significance, anything at all?”

            I began to say something then he interrupted me to add “favorite color maybe? That can even help.” I told him no. “Hmm, now that they know someone knows they’ll probably switch up their meetings of whatever it is. Listen; can you do me a favor to help with the investigation?”

            “We don’t even know what it is alright, so just calm down,” I said trying to alleviate my fear and seeking his concurrence, but not receiving it.  

            “Well, would there be any other reason other than malfeasance to meet in such a dimly limited room down a hidden staircase?”

            “Maybe it’s a support group for erectile dysfunction. Or maybe they’re all recovering alcoholics who happen to participate in role-playing games involving cults. I don’t know.” The last sentence came out of my mouth so frail and weak the words nearly disintegrated in the air before they reached Francis. My fear was growing—for both of us.

            Francis sat me down on my bed and gave me the Little League pep talk about courage, right and wrong, and hanging in there. I was a little cheered up, but I was ill at ease.

***

Over the next few weeks Francis increasingly began to disappear randomly, and reappearing with stacks of paper in his hands. He said he had been systematically breaking into professors and upper administrator’s offices, looking for files which may be relevant to the situation. Apparently, he never found any papers that were irrelevant because I kept finding shopping lists and sushi receipts.

He began to keep a leather bound journal and make a lot of notes and sketches in it. Once, when I was coming back from class, I saw him put a manila envelope into a hole in an oak tree, all Boo Radley like. When I opened it all it had was cut-up puzzle pieces. I didn’t know what to make off it. I no longer knew where insanity ended and the truth began. Everything began to merge and mix into swirls of a thousand paints.  It was becoming too much.

Then he died. And I was lost. He “committed suicide” by jumping out a window on the top floor of the library and landed in a tree, hitting every branch on the way down. Conveniently, I was the first to see his body lying bloody, broken, and bruised in the wet grass. He had called me ten minutes before and told me he found something in some old newspaper clippings. Something about the Dean’s involvement in a terrorist organization called ROYALTY when he used to go here, but I didn’t learn what the letters stood for. As I was struggling to revive him, his notebook fell out of the window with the pages torn out and it landed threateningly open near his body.  

At the funeral, I heard a man whisper behind me “there’s nothing sadder than a man dying young” almost in my ear then slink away into the dark crevices of solemn faced crowd.  I didn’t know what to make of it or make of anything. The police told me it was suicide and I let them believe he was crazy so they wouldn’t search the room and find his research. I didn’t know how far this would go, but I knew it went higher than just a few run of the mill professors and maybe a dean. No organization could infiltrate a prestigious university like John Smith U without a government contact or two. I swore his death was not to be meaningless.

I needed help on this one. I’m too young, I said to myself. Maybe I could get a private eye. No. I needed someone that existed outside the conventional system of investigation, but someone who could provide some muscle or back up in tight spot, which at this rate was due up soon. I considered a body guard, but it was out of my budget of no dollars and no cents.

No funds and no resources, up against presumably an entire secret organization that did who knows what, but they were powerful. They had doctorates. They had tenure. I had an eight by eight foot dorm room and a mini fridge. But I then again unlike them I had no role to pretend to fill, I could go as far as I had to.  I always had the carte blanche of a dead roommate and college alcoholism, that’s a hallmark special on the USA network all ready. Realizing I had no rules, I decided to throw myself into the investigation that killed my roommate because if I didn’t, who else would?

            What to do first, hire an intern.

            I needed some underclassmen to sort through Francis’ files and then organize, categorize, and collate them into neat carefully labeled binders. He would handle the paper trail, I’d handle the end that requiring cunning, secrecy, and testicles.

            The interns name was Billy Baldwin, he was a criminology major and I told him this was a practice in investigation and it would earn him six credits. Hopefully, upon revealing the conspiracy, the new administration would reward him with those credits, but I wasn’t betting on it.

            We began sorting through his papers about a week after the funeral and all the information seemed only to complicate the labyrinth forming from Francis’ hurried notes and paranoid journal entries. I made a mental note to check back with the Dean’s secretary.

I needed an informant; someone who had been wronged by these men after a period of being in their confidence. Old employees wouldn’t work, because as movies have taught me, they’d just say they knew nothing, or “this was bigger than you and me,” or “give it up, you’ll end up like your friend.”

Then, I had a breakthrough idea. Old men with money must have a mistress I thought to myself, and by chance maybe they used them as their alibi for one of their meetings. I put the intern on it right away sifting through their appointment books for times that matched the night I saw the séance or whatever the hell it was. He found in a Professor Macintyre’s book a seven o’clock meeting labeled “MSTRS” a clever code for mistress. His agenda said they met nearly everyone Thursday at a motel downtown called the Red Heart Inn. The intern and I went out on a stake out right away in my rundown station wagon, being in such a seedy part of town it would blend in like military fatigues in a jungle. (By the way, the intern in fact does not talk, that was one of the job requirements in the hiring process).

We sat in the dark, cold, for two hours, the steam from my coffee thermos scarring the frost of the windshield. The rain came in vicious torrents. The only light in the car came from the reflection of the red and pink neon arrow underlining the Red Heart Inn.

The professor came out first, in a trench coat pulled up to his ears and black fedora angled towards the ground like armor from the rain. As he was driving away, we pulled Billy’s bike out of the trunk and I put him on his trail. I would stay with the mistress who was sure to come out sometime. So, Billy left pedaling off into the rain behind the vanishing taillights.

            I waited for the mistress, but no one came out. After an hour I began to think about the possibilities. Based on my experience, there was one of two chances either she was dead and my going in would only incriminate myself, or there was no mistress. Against my better judgment I went to their room and knocked on the door.

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