Pandemonium: A Miltonian Murder

Copyright © 2017 Scott David Stine.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-0948-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-0947-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016918675

iUniverse rev. date: 01/20/2017

Contents

1 Thief of Youth

2 Discontent

3 Forbidden Fruit

4 Bad Angels

5 Where He Stood

6 Easy Intercourse

7 Illumination

8 Dark Materials

9 Frail Original

10 Moving Mistake

11 The Priest

12 Dinner

13 The White Horse

14 Sheri

15 The Arch of Stone

16 Harrison Archer

17 First Date

18 Wake

19 Second Date

20 Disclosure

21 Shopping

22 In Memoriam

23 A Time for Us

24 Confession

25 Pandemonium

Epilogue

1

Thief of Youth

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

Stol’n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

—John Milton, Sonnet 7

The lamp on my battered desk throws a putrid yellow stain over my dorm room. When dead week comes and we’re all supposed to be studying for exams, everything seems rank and shoddy—the ancient brick, the old plumbing, the withering ivy covering the outside. Besides the general feeling of discontent—What’s the damn line from Milton about the winter of our discontent? I’ll never pass English 104 this term!—I feel a highly personal frustration and uselessness.

Suddenly I am crying like a baby. I don’t know why, and it pisses me off. The last time I cried was nine years ago, when I was fourteen and a hockey stick bashed in two of my ribs.

Wait. That isn’t true. I suppose I do know why after all. I ordered my stupid roommate out this evening because he was borrowing this old book of mine, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and accidentally ripped a page. It’s a really old book and precious to me, and he should have been more careful with it. I was furious—it was my brother’s book—and I just barely kept myself from beating him up. It’s bad news the people you get stuck with when you’re in summer session trying to pass your incompletes so you can finally graduate.

My incomplete (read F) is, of course, English poets—Shakespeare through Milton. My brother would have been able to ace the class with no sweat, while I sit here half the summer with an utter ass for a roommate and try to piece together my brother’s notes in the margins into an essay I can turn in. However, it is not the frustration or my failure to graduate with my classmates or even the book that has me upset. These are merely the triggers.

I am crying because of my brother, damn him! And people like us—stiff upper lip, emotionally repressed, materialistically motivated, aesthetically pure—we don’t cry. However, these tears have been repressed now for many years. At this point, I can’t seem to stop them.

Growing up, my brother was the sensitive one, and I always marveled that he would have tears in his eyes at the reading of a passage or poem he thought was exquisite or at the sad scene of a tragedy. I’ve always been more stoic, to put it nicely.

A little later, I notice that the light is an ugly mustard yellow, making the green wallpaper seem uglier than its usual considerable ugliness. I’m frustrated because, despite the fact I can’t keep the Gloucesters straight, I have to figure out all the Sin and Death and Beelzebubs of Milton before I hit the hay. I open the book that my brother, Byron, gave me, and there’s the goddamned letter I stuck there, dated exactly four years ago today.

July 26, 1980

Dear Stupid,

Thanks for the racquet. It has made me the envy of the whole club. It has gotten a lot of use; I’ve been batting the ball about four hours a day.

Did I tell you that my best friend, Andrew, got married? …

It is here that I started to cry again, in earnest. My room swims in glowing mustard—the desk, the book, the letter. What’s the matter with me? Oh yeah, I really loved my brother.

* * * * *

I didn’t cry at Byron’s funeral. Everything was too weird. I guess I was kind of mad about it all. I couldn’t imagine how to get through the 1980s without him. Even though I’m his age now, I haven’t changed my opinion: the ’80s are bleak. Byron should have seen them through, as he’d have been the perfect one to comment on this particular époque of the muddled history of man. I feel lost without him telling me about it all, about how to think of it all.

Today would have been Byron’s birthday. He was born July 26, 1958; that makes him a Leo, for what it’s worth. Leos are supposed to be confident, ambitious, loyal, generous, encouraging. They say that people are attracted to a Leo’s zest for life. After Byron wrote the letter that I keep in his book, he killed himself.

I don’t remember much about that whole time. Byron was across the country, in Berkeley, California, when he threw in the towel. It freaked me out to get his letter a day after my mother called to tell me the news. How could your best friend be dead if you had just gotten a goddamned thank-you note from him? The funeral, the flowers, our mother being all drawn and tight-lipped and stoic—it was all unreal. It was summer, the season of our best times together. I felt mightily betrayed and monumentally angry.

I think of Byron now, remember my love for him. He had an attitude that I’m still trying to get a handle on. He was extremely perceptive, not to mention erudite. I depended on his good nature and sophistication to keep me from burning myself up inside about what was happening outside. I am an Aries.

For example, I went straight from high school senior at a prestigious prep school to political activist. I didn’t like Carter, but I had a terrible fear of Reagan. Whenever we got the polls for each of the candidates’ chances of success, I would storm home and terrorize my mother. I was eighteen and full of concern for humanity. Though Byron was going through a lot himself the summer of ’80, he never let on and was always there when I’d wake him up in California with my despair. He knew how to put things in perspective. Whenever I was fed up with the entire decade, my decade, which had barely begun, he’d tell me how to think about it all.

Byron’s talent was this balanced worldview. He was religious, and I suppose this helped him a great deal with things. He could pray; I just get angry. My mother sniffs an elegant, disdainful sniff; Byron laughed. I thought the world was ending November 1980, as, indeed, it had already ended for Byron. I left off trying to be calm and accepting when the crummy B movie actor got lost on an LA freeway and ended up in the White House.

At the time of Byron’s death, four years ago, I was getting ready for Brown University, which had opened its hallowed doors to me only because of my record as goalie on the ice of St. Mark’s. It wasn’t Harvard, as my mother constantly reminded me, but it wasn’t Berkeley either, as I reminded her. I don’t think she ever forgave Byron for leaving New England.

Byron left for Berkeley when I was a freshman living in the dorms at St. Mark’s. He left for the otherworld when I was packing for Brown.

* * * * *

I think now of Byron, of his influence, his presence in my life. My first memory of him is obscured by time and my last memory of him, in which over the phone he said in a voice as masculine and rich and reassuring as a good-guy baritone in an Italian opera, Brad, Reagan doesn’t matter. There will be no apocalypse, no holocaust. Forget it as far as you can—none of it really matters.

First, why did Byron play tennis for four hours a day? The school term was to begin in September; he was to enter the seminary. Wasn’t he supposed to be in prayer or consultation or conference? And why was it important that Andrew had gotten married? Andrew was Byron’s best friend in California—they had shared an apartment together on the north side of campus. Is any of this connected?

* * * * *

It is past midnight, and the lights outside glow steadily. The room begins to swirl, turning, slowly at first, like the sluggish waters of a hot tub just as the jets go on. For four years I have done my best not to think of Byron, not to puzzle it out, not to believe in the suicide. The room sucks me into its whirlpool; I’m getting dizzy, and my thoughts are disorganized and random—a symptom of depression. The wedding of a best friend, Byron’s own symptoms of depression: these are all I have to go on. I know now that Reagan will win the election, again, in November.

I wonder what Mother did with Byron’s stuff. Ever efficient, she had flown to California to identify the body, arrange shipping of Byron’s possessions, pay bills, and tell the dean at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. At which house are the crates from California? If I find them, will I know anything more? It was said that there was no suicide note, but I know different; I have it.

Dear Stupid,

Thanks for the racquet. It has made me the envy of the whole club. It has gotten a lot of use; I’ve been batting the ball about four hours a day.

Did I write you that my friend Andrew got married? It hurt a little not to be asked to serve as his best man, but he decided rather suddenly to marry a high school flame from Hollister. I didn’t know she even existed. He had never spoken of her.

That’s not strange, though. I’ve always been jealous of his way with women. I got the invitation a few weeks into the summer, after he had moved out suddenly, and I got back from the wedding two weeks ago. The wedding was pretty awful, but Californians do things a lot differently than we do, even the Episcopalians.

I’m closing for now. I haven’t felt too hot lately. Thanks again for the present.

Love,

Byron

* * * * *

It is late afternoon, and I am drinking my favorite international coffee, Suisse mocha. My roommate sneaked in early this morning, around two. Later in the morning, we both spared each other apologies and accusations. He slept off his study session turned beer bust; I went down to breakfast early. Somewhere, between waking and the end of breakfast, I decided that it is time to find out the truth.

Later, I talked to my professor and contracted to take my Milton incomplete on independent study. If I turn in a ten-page thesis on Paradise Lost by Christmas, I don’t have to take the exam. That’s all I need for the damn diploma.

After that, I phoned Mother, and she’s loaned me some more money. The lawyers can’t give me my trust until I finish my bachelor’s degree—Goddamn Milton!—but I only need enough to get to California. I have the money Byron left me somewhere, but I’m flying out Friday, tomorrow, and I don’t have time to go home to look for it.

It’s been a few years since Ordinary People came out, many years since Catcher in the Rye. Protagonist loses brother; reader figures it all out down the line. Screw that crap! This guy, me, I’m a narrator. So what was the motivation or reasons behind Byron’s demise?

Rephrase it, kid: suicide. This was no accident—your brother killed himself. From what I heard, and know already, he did it with a gas stove in a north-side apartment in Berkeley. I also know that Vivaldi’s Gloria was on the stereo in the adjacent dining room.

I am admitting these things to myself now in order to be very certain of the facts. My brother was, perhaps, the only person I have ever loved, besides our mother. I have tried for four years now to ignore my responsibility to Byron’s life—by hiding his last letter in a book I loathe, so I might remain in ignorance; by allowing my mother to so efficiently arrange the funeral, the trusts, the legal matters so as to be as uninvolved as possible; by not considering the information that only I possess, somewhere, in my selfish, self-centered mind that could answer the question, Why?

Now it is time to pull my head out of the sand. Byron was my age now when he killed himself. Was there something I should have seen? Was there something I could have done?

* * * * *

I have my ticket. Stopover in Chicago for forty-five minutes. I have two suitcases and a Macy’s charge card and my checkbook. I have a rental car reserved and a room at the Hotel Durant. I have been to Berkeley twice—once in 1976 with Byron to check out the town and campus, a time when water was not available except in hotels, and then in 1980 for Byron’s graduation, a horrible ceremony that included a brilliant and physically handicapped poetess of advanced years as speaker and a speed freak divorcée as valedictorian. It was an awful ordeal for Byron and for Mother: the Folgers coffee, fruit punch, stale cookies. I enjoyed the whole collapse of tradition. The first time Byron and I stayed in the Durant; for graduation, Mother and I stayed in the Claremont. I prefer the former, and it is cheaper.

So, purpose: to find out, four years later, why? So, purpose: because of guilt, to show my devotion to my brother?

The flight is taking off in fifteen minutes. Ticket holders may board. The why of my quest and the why of his suicide—I’m not smart enough to know. California, here I come! Back to the beginning, back to the Durant Hotel.

2

Discontent

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York.

—William Shakespeare, Richard III

I look out the window of my room on the third floor at all the college students striding their way purposefully somewhere. I had lunch in the ancient dining room downstairs, with the white tablecloths and the huge crystal chandelier. Facing Durant Avenue is a dark cocktail lounge with about five old geezers who are pretending it’s five o’clock when it’s half past two. Where are all these students going? This place is four times as large as Brown. It’s funny that both schools’ mascots are bears. The Van Wickle Gates look diminutive compared with Berkeley’s Sather Gate at the end of Sproul Plaza. I try to imagine Byron here in the last years of the ’70s.

My thoughts are jumbled, random, unordered. I wonder now what the hell I was thinking, to come out here with no plan. How do I investigate a suicide that happened four years ago? How do I locate Byron’s friend Andrew? Is there anyone at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific who would remember a kid who offed himself before classes even began? That’s