The Dilettantes (19 page)

He turned to Tracy, who was peeking between seats and trying to scribble notes as quickly as she could. A wave of adrenaline turned Alex’s limbs loose and warm, bringing an unfamiliar but welcome clarity of mind. “Where’s your cell phone?” he shouted to Tracy. “We need photos.”

“No good,” she yelled back. “It doesn’t have a camera. Where’s yours?”

“At the office.” At the time he’d been afraid it could be traced back to him. How could he have been so stupid? For nearly four years he’d been calling himself a journalist. Where were his
instincts?

He’d have to start building them now. “Okay,” he yelled. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Get down there, as close as you can, and record everything.” Two fire extinguishers erupted spontaneously, sending jets of foam spraying across the auditorium in tall, sloppy arcs. Professor Monahan had pulled a whistle from god knew where, and was blowing it as hard as she could.

“What are you going to do?” Tracy said.

Alex held out his hand. “Give me your phone. I’m going to get us some backup.”

She handed it over, then grabbed her recorder. “Damn,” she said, holding it up to her ear and shaking it. “Dead. After all these years. Well, looks like it’s all on you now—let’s just hope your tape doesn’t run out.” She threw the busted recorder over her shoulder, then crept out into the aisle, and was gone.

Holtz and the mystery actor were still hunkered down, near the projector screen. They managed to fend off a few of the more feral attackers with a barrage of chalk brushes and dry-erase markers; Alex noted how easily Holtz slipped back into his
Maximum Death
persona, delivering his character’s trademark “Believe it!” whenever a missile hit its target. Gilmartin stayed crouched behind the first row of lecture seats, and directed her troops with a flurry of quick nods and arm movements. They charged forward, using discarded film textbooks as shields.

From out of nowhere, Keith and Tyson appeared together in front of Holtz’s overturned table. They tackled two of the closest politicians while Chip yelled out a series of football plays and World War
II
–era attack codes from a few feet back.

Jostled by the crowd around him, Alex scrolled through Tracy’s phone for any
Peak
contacts. Steve. Suze. Rick. All either off the payroll or on bed rest.
Shit
, he thought, reciting another law of the internet.
Pics or it didn’t happen
.

Chip. Keith.
Shit shit shit
. Then he spotted it: Claude. Of course.
Time to prove yourself, kid
. Alex fired off a text, in all caps to prove he meant it, then surveyed the scene to plan his next move.

A second, reorganized group of politicians—combined with a few of the brawnier cinephiles—made a new attack on Holtz’s group on its weak side. Meanwhile, three or four others, each wielding a stray plastic chair, rushed from the opposite flank. A pincer attack.

But just as the two groups converged on the desk, Holtz’s celebrity friend burst out from behind the table, channeling his inner dystopian soldier, desperate and bug-eyed. Holding the T-shirt gun straight out in front of him, he took aim and pumped a dozen rounds of hot, purple cotton-polyester blend into the faces, chests, and kneecaps of his attackers. Alex was impressed. “Looks like he’s Method after all,” he said into the recorder.

Somewhere in the fracas Holtz’s laptop was hit by a stray arm or marker, and a PowerPoint presentation sparked to life on the lecture hall’s theatre-sized screen. It started with a clip from the climactic scene of
Maximum Death 2
, a kinetic shoot-out that obliterated a pristine snowy mountainside in slow motion. The flashing, ultra-realistic digital images bathed the real-life combatants, at times making the real Holtz look like no more than a pixie-sized sidekick to his gigantic, begoggled counterpart. Just off-screen, Tracy was tucked away behind the auditorium curtain, taking rapid-fire notes from the best seat in the house.

Alex looked back just in time to see the first wave of campus security pour into the room. Waving their batons around, they looked confused and shell-shocked. Behind them—Alex punched the air and actually whooped—burst a triumphant Claude, holding a high-end
DSLR
above his head and snapping away at anything he could get a shot of. And behind him, trying to shove his way through, was the
Metro’s
own Mack Holloway. He didn’t even have a notebook with
him. Another fire extinguisher went off in the background. The air bristled with
thunks
from the T-shirt cannon, wails from Tyson’s air horn, and panicked blasts from Professor Monahan’s emergency whistle. From the dozen or so speakers circling the classroom, in state-of-the-art Dolby surround sound, Special Agent Blair Williams yelled, “Believe it!”

Alex grinned up at Mack and wiggled his tape recorder, which now shuddered to a halt as the tape side finally ran out.

Outside the lecture hall, Alex was jittery with adrenaline. “I can’t believe what just happened,” he said. “Will we have to give a police statement? I’ve never given a police statement before.” He turned to Tracy, who was still writing notes as fast as she could. “How’d we do? Is there enough for a story?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, shaking her hand to fend off the cramping. “All I need is to get one of those
SFSS
guys on the record while he’s still nice and pissed off. They’re probably back at the office by now.”

He tossed her his recorder. “I think it’s safe to say Rachel will make this a priority.”

“She better,” Tracy said, shoving it and the notebook into her dummy backpack. “Okay. I’ve gotta get to work on this. I’ll probably have a draft ready by the time you get in tomorrow.”

“Don’t forget the debate,” he said.

“Jesus. This is going to be a miniseries by the time it’s all settled.”

“Oh, who cares,” said Tyson. He was panting and nursing a bruise on his cheek. His air horn had been confiscated. “The real scoop would be figuring out why Holtz treats his sex life like it’s goddamned classified information.”

“What?” Alex asked. “You mean—that make-up lady?
That’s
what you’re taking away from all this?”

Keith and Chip sat on a nearby bench, eating fistfuls of Sour Patch Kids. Claude stood a few tentative steps away, cradling his camera with both hands.

“It’s not like he’s campaigning on his virginity, is it? It’s like,
c’mon
dude. Spill the beans already.”

“I don’t know,” Alex said, watching Mack scurry through the crowd in the distance, trying to get some kind of coherent quote from anyone who would talk to him. Holtz, his manager, and the other celebrity were all nowhere to be seen. “Isn’t that kind of private?”

“Fuck
no, it is not,”
Tyson hollered. “I learned more about that guy in five minutes of googling than from anything he’s done since coming back here. The internet already showed me pictures of him filming at
SFU
. I saw his signed contract for
Maximum Death 2
, page by page, on
The Smoking Gun
. I even saw a picture of that make-up artist’s tits. It was decent, but kind of blurry. You could barely make out how big her nipples were.” Tyson sighed, then winced as his cheek muscles twitched involuntarily.
“That’s
the kind of knowledge I want dropped on me. Not all this political bullshit.”

Tracy looked up from closing her backpack. “You’re not a very likable person, are you?”

“I’m a pragmatist. If they’re not embarrassing themselves for my benefit, what are celebrities good for?”

She turned to Alex. “Thanks for your help back there. I hope I didn’t give you too much of a panic attack.”

“You wish,” he said.

Alex felt a little light-headed, and, in his endorphin binge, something that could easily be mistaken for powerful. He’d just been part of a legitimate
event
. Forget a piddly little police statement. Right now he could alter reality itself with a nod. Or maybe even just by showing up.

But first he needed a drink.

“Hey, Tyson,” he said. “When does Pub Night start?”

“I dunno. An hour. Why?”

Alex put his arm around his friend’s shoulder and playfully slapped the bruise on his cheek. “Let’s go drink a hundred beers.” He looked to the bench. “Keith, you’re in on this, too.”

“Actually,” Keith said, “I’ll have to pass. Sorry, dude. I promised Chip I’d go to his place and watch some
DVD
about Vimy Ridge if he came here with me.”

“DVD
set,”
corrected Chip.

“Yeah. But I don’t know. It actually sounds kind of cool?”

“Suit yourself,” Alex said. “Claude?”

“Me?” Claude said, fidgeting with his lens cap. “Really?”

“You better believe it,” Alex said. The three of them walked off toward the Pub. “One hundred beers. It’s happening.”

Sure, there were the rumours about suicide rates, supposedly brought on by residence kids looking out into nothing but fog and concrete for months at a time. Not to mention the hazy symbolism of the
AQ
Garden. But perhaps
SFU’S
greatest mystery was how the Pub—the only place where you could legally obtain alcohol on the entire mountaintop campus—consistently failed to turn a profit. Alex, Tyson, and Claude scurried into seats at the last empty table, only to realize that thanks to the Pub’s most recent round of budget cuts, there wasn’t a single server in sight. And the place was packed.

Alex got back to his feet. “Wait here,” he told them.

Behind the bar, Saul, the latest in a series of short-lived general managers, was rushing from side to side like a grocery-store crab. Alex liked Saul—and not just because he shared a first name with Alex’s literary hero. He carried himself like a gruff teamster, the kind of guy who liked nothing more than taking cheap shots at the establishment. As such, he’d always had a soft spot for
The Peak
, whose editorial cartoons, he’d told Alex more than once, if not exactly sophisticated, were at least unrelenting in their snippy disapproval.

Alex muscled through a handful of patrons who were already stationed there, snapping and waving their credit cards like cloudy Polaroids.

“If it isn’t the newspaper guy,” Saul said, lining up a string of glasses on the counter. “What can I do for you, buddy?”

“This is a big one, Saul. I need a hundred beers. It’s premature celebration time.”

He chuckled. “That’s good. Real good. You might have noticed that I’m a little fucked up here right now. A pint or two, I could maybe sneak you to the front of the line. But something like that? That’s gonna have to wait a minute.”

Under ordinary circumstances, Alex would’ve slunk away and accepted his fate. The fact that he’d even gotten a bartender’s attention would, on any other day, have been a miracle in and of itself. But now, thanks to the energy he’d siphoned from the Holtz fiasco, there was no stopping him. He was Wile E. Coyote, barreling over a cliff at full speed. As long as you kept your eyes on the horizon, nobody could touch you.

“Hey, what’s going on here?” the other guys at the bar complained. “We’ve been waiting for ten minutes.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Alex said to Saul, and he took the wad of emergency money out of his pocket. Combined with his loose change, a total of
$93
spilled out onto the counter. “How about you hold onto this, Saul, and write me up a cash tab.” He pointed. “In the meantime, pass me those pitchers. For the next few minutes, this bar is self-serve.”

With a bemused look, Saul pocketed the cash and stepped aside. Alex leaned over the counter and poured himself two frothy pitchers of Sleeman’s Honey Brown. Let those other guys—business majors, Alex figured—look on in awe. They thought bravado was supposed to be their domain, not some faggy book reader’s? Guess again.

Back at the table, even Tyson was impressed. “Shit, son,” he said, plucking some unused pint glasses from a nearby table. “Real nice work.” They each poured a glassful and pounded it back. With a little nudging, so did Claude. Then Tyson wiped his mouth and
started gathering his things. “One problem. I maybe forgot to mention it earlier. I have an exam in ten minutes.”

“Seriously?” Alex said.

“For really real. Thanks for the drink. Dare I even ask if you’ll be here later?” Alex could almost see the porn-lair scenarios reflecting off Tyson’s pupils. “Or will you be fucked out and unconscious in some
2
nd-year’s townhouse?”

“I’m just here to soak up some of this energy,” Alex said, leaning back in his chair. “Watch the booze and hormones smash into each other. Maybe breathe the fumes a little.”

“Whatever,” Tyson said. “When I come back I’m getting my balls chomped. Bet on it.”

Claude stood up next to him. “I actually have to go, too.”

“No,” Alex said in disbelief. “Not you, too.”

“Yeah. Just for a bit.” Claude patted his camera. “I have to get these photos uploaded and over to Rachel. Plus I promised Suze another
CD
review for tomorrow. And I need to have a clear head while I write.” Alex thought he already looked a little tipsy, but didn’t want to jinx him by saying so. “But I’ll come back soon, okay? An hour or two, tops.”

“Claude, you know
CD
reviews are only a hundred and fifty words, right?”

He nodded vigorously. “It’s just, I want them to be really good. It takes me a little longer than most people, I guess. I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay? Don’t leave.”

Once they were gone, Alex poured himself a second glass of beer. There was still a good pitcher and a third left on the table—and Saul was holding onto the rest of his money up at the bar. He couldn’t go back and get it now. The whole performance would be shattered. And he couldn’t leave
beer
unattended, especially on the cusp of Pub Night. He’d have to wait it out.

In search of something to do in the meantime, Alex hoisted his backpack onto the seat next to him and dug through the pile of decoy equipment he’d brought for the Holtz lecture. Nothing. No laptop, no iPod, no phone. He’d been so afraid of getting caught that he hadn’t even brought his real school binders, packed as they were with telltale course information and handwriting samples. The decoy binders held only packages of lined paper dumped in for effect. So he could write something, maybe—but his notebook, maybe a quarter full of ideas, was also safely stashed away in the
Peak
offices downstairs.

Then, stuffed at the very bottom, he found the Barbara Pym book he’d bought back in the fall. Alex took a sip of beer and studied the jacket copy again. This woman, whose fall to obscurity had so terrified and intrigued him, whose legacy would be defined more by her accidental proximity to a genius than anything within her control—she’d come to represent all of Alex’s insecurities about becoming a writer. So far he hadn’t been able to crack so much as the opening paragraph. He was actually afraid of solving the mystery of Pym’s talent. Hell, she might be bad—or, worse, boring. Where would
that
leave him? Could he live with being middlebrow, second-rate, a guy with more hustle than skill? Could he settle for anything less than being a timeless genius? And what right did he even have to hold himself to those kinds of standards?

He looked up and glanced around the bar again. So much was happening around him these days; it was all he could do to keep the different options straight in his head, let alone take charge and commit to one of them. He tried to feel that giddy, mountain-thin air of optimism again. What would a
man of action
do?

The answer came to him surprisingly quickly. Alex took a deep breath, bent the paperback’s spine hard in his hands, and started to read.

It turned out Tyson had the time wrong—Pub Night didn’t start until nearly two hours later than he’d thought. But it didn’t matter to Alex. He barely looked up from his book, pausing only to refill his glass and make the occasional sprint to the bathroom. The crowd in the bar grew steadily larger as new clusters of undergrads spilled in. They were even more jovial than usual, either celebrating the completion of some essay or drinking to forget those deadlines that still lay ahead.

By the time Alex registered just how much time had passed, he’d made it well over two-thirds of the way through the Pym book. In the meantime the sun had set, and social vultures were starting to circle his table, looking to snatch up the extra chairs. A
DJ
had set up shop on the little stage above the dance floor. He was playing a woozy, swirling, vaguely anthemic track from the new Animal Collective record.

Both of Alex’s pitchers were empty. Pub Night had begun.

With the beer sloshing through his head like a carpenter’s level, Alex felt the great magnetic pull of being drunk, non-threatening, and anonymous. He’d never lived in residence, and while he’d kept something like a public profile via
The Peak
, nobody had ever recognized his face from the little picture that ran alongside his byline (in which he was basically unrecognizable anyway, thanks to the novelty coffee mug obscuring the bottom half of his face). Here he could wander through and pinball off the rest of the crowd, basking in their exuberance.

The beer and the book had put him in such a convivial mood that the first thing he did, after jumping to his feet and feeling the added punch of a head rush, was march back over to Saul behind the bar and loudly order two more pitchers of Sleeman’s “for the room.” Everyone within earshot spun around, incredulous, and whooped.
Alex grabbed the pitchers and put them on the tables closest to him. He was met with a round of shoulder punches from cheery strangers, who all suddenly wanted to pull him into their respective groups’ conversations. Within seconds he was a hot commodity: this enigmatic, charmingly tipsy philanthropist who would huddle up to someone long enough to laugh gamely at their jokes, then float off to the next empty chair.

Alex revised his earlier philosophy.
Mystery is everything
, he decided. Thanks to this newly self-willed charisma, he didn’t even feel awkward anymore. Everything was perfect. What was that
song
, anyway? Fuck, man. So familiar, but just out of reach. He felt like air drumming along with it.

Mostly what he was thinking was:
These girls are all so beautiful. Where did they all come from?
The weather had been unusually warm for March, which meant there were artfully cut sundresses and bare legs as far as the eye could see.

Once Alex’s initial peace offerings ran empty, new rounds of drinks started to appear in front of him. Pints of hefeweizen, then whiskey gingers and a few medicinal-tasting shots of Jägermeister. The Pub was at capacity. Alex was talking to someone he was pretty sure hadn’t been at the table an hour earlier. Mini-expeditions were taken to the dance floor, but Alex made a lightly ironic broken-toe joke and was let off the hook. The first wave of beautiful girls was slowly replaced by a second, nearly identical one from a parallel dimension—one where the bangs were a bit longer, the lipstick a little more prominent, and where legs had to be covered up but shoulders most certainly did not.

For a while Alex could simply turn his head, find someone new sitting there, and off their conversation would go. He was willing to jump into any subject offered up to him: federal politics, gardening tips, whatever.

Some time later he found himself in the middle of a freewheeling argument about concert movies with two skinny guys in plaid and one of the parallel-universe hot girls, who looked weirdly familiar. She wore circles of eye shadow that made her eyes look attractively raccoon-like, and took greedy sips from a Long Island iced tea as big as her head.

“Come
on
, man,” one of the guys yelled to the other. “Van Morrison is the best
part
of
The Last Waltz!
All those sad little jump kicks he has to do? And so fat. God, he’s so fat.”

“You ever hear about the giant chunk of cocaine sticking out of Neil Young’s nose?” Alex said. “They had to completely chop it out during post-production—and this was the seventies.
CGI
wasn’t a thing yet. It cost four million dollars to remove it, it was so big.”

“Van Morrison had to do eight million jump kicks to pay it off.”

Alex turned to the girl. “What about you? Actually, no, let me guess: you’re more of a
Stop Making Sense
kind of lady.”

“Oh, I love that movie! How’d you guess?” she said.

“It’s a theory of mine, actually.”

“Really? What is it?”

“Well, girls today are into skinny, nervous, David Byrne types, right? And guys might act that way on the surface, but deep down, we all want to pretend we’re in The Band. We’re all just repressed lumberjacks, and
The Last Waltz
is our Bible. I think it comes from the fact that none of my friends even owns a toolbox.”

The iced tea swished around the cup as the girl laughed. “That’s funny,” she said. “I thought you were going to say something way weirder. Pub Night tends to bring out the plastic-bag lady in a lot of people.”

“Oh?” Alex leaned in conspiratorially, arms crossed, and she laughed again. “You’re speaking from experience. Give me an example of the mega-crazy.”

“Yeah?”

“Yep. C’mon. Let’s hear it.”

“Okay. Um …” The girl bit her lip in thought, her eyes darting off up and to the side, and Alex instantly gained half an erection. If this girl were to walk away right now, without even finishing her sentence, she’d be the one he would imagine in soft focus before going to sleep that night. It was something about that eye make-up. He pictured her putting it on in front of her bedroom mirror, so sublimely aware of how good it looked.

“Well,” she said, “there was this one guy who kept telling me about how every essay he’d ever written was about
The Tiger Who Came to Tea.”

“Wait—the kids’ book?”

“Yeah. Weird, huh?”

The riff appeared in Alex’s mind fully formed, as if by magic. He was really on a roll now. Everything he said was hilarious, his every look perfectly calculated. Just for tonight, he was physically and socially invincible.

“Makes perfect sense to me,” he said. “I can see it now: ‘Tiger Stripes and Cardigans: Sartorial Politics in
The Tiger Who Came to Tea.’”

She giggled and drank.

“How about ‘“It Can’t Be Daddy, He’s Got His Key”: Patriarchy and Domestic Trauma in the Literature of Post-War Britain’?”

“Riiiiight
…”

The ideas wouldn’t stop coming. “‘Tiger as Chaos Grenade: A Marxist’—wait. You don’t find any of this funny, do you?”
Shit
, he thought with a twinge. Keith would’ve loved that one. Or what about Anna, Tracy’s knockout Scandinavian pal? He’d have to remember it for later. No sense in letting such a good joke go to waste.

“No, no, I do,” the girl insisted. “I just can’t think of them that
fast.” She took another gulp of iced tea. “To tell you the truth—I don’t even know why I’m telling you this, but there you go—I actually think he might have been for real.”