Threading my way through our neighborhood in the predawn darkness, I turned onto Cherokee Boulevard, which was flanked on one side by mansions and on the other by a long ribbon of riverfront parkland. A low layer of fog, only a few feet thick, blanketed the fields and river; as I drove, my headlights created a luminous oval pool within the fog, but the air above the lights—the air up where I sat—was clear, so I had the odd sensation that my truck had been transformed into a boat, and that I was not so much driving as navigating, finding my way through a channel whose margins were outlined by the familiar hedges and streetlamps rising from the depths and piercing the surface. At the boulevard’s roundabout, the big, illuminated fountain—normally spouting from a waist-high round basin—had been transformed into a marine geyser, jetting up through the fog as if from some undersea vent or fault line. As I curved past it, I slammed on the brakes. A solitary runner, visible only from the chest up, was rounding the fountain. The bizarre image—a human-headed sea monster swimming past a waterspout in the ocean—haunted me for the remainder of the drive to campus. Signs and omens, I thought, but of what?
I parked my truck in the cool dark beneath the stadium’s south end, down beside the basement door leading to the bone lab. In the quiet of dawn, I could hear the truck’s engine ticking with heat, and the sound seemed to echo some ominous interior ticking I sensed but couldn’t pinpoint: the ticking of something about to explode. Satterfield? The Janus debacle? The backlash over the veterans? None of the above? All of the above? I couldn’t shake the feeling that in some soft blind spot, a creature with claws was clutching at me. Another unsettling image flashed into my mind, displacing that of the sea-monster man swimming through the fog: a naked man chained to a rock, a ragged wound in his side, a sharp-beaked eagle tearing at his liver. Prometheus, I remembered. But Prometheus—an immortal—had stolen fire from the gods. Had I committed some great transgression? Was I guilty of hubris, the arrogant pride that went before a fall, in both Greek mythology and Christian teaching? In seeking to unlock the secrets of death, was I guilty of overweening ambition—of trespassing in divine realms where mere mortals were not allowed?
The ticking—of the truck’s engine or of the more ominous cosmic machinery—seemed to grow louder, and just as I recognized the sound of footsteps, a face loomed in front of me. I jumped, and then realized, with a mixture of fear, relief, and embarrassment that the last, loudest ticking I’d heard—a split-second afer the footsteps—had been the sound of someone tapping on my window to get my attention. “Dr. Brockton?” I blinked, disoriented, then recognized the face of Steve Morgan, a former student who now worked for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
“Steve?” I rolled down the window. “You scared the crap out of me. Am I under arrest?” I said it as a joke—or thought I did—but in my skittish, spooked state of mind, it came out sounding more paranoid than humorous. I tried to smooth over the awkwardness with another joke. “Looks like I could learn a trick or two from the TBI. I never could motivate you to get to class by eight.”
This one didn’t fall quite so flat. He smiled, though in the watery light now coming from the eastern sky, the smile looked faint. “Doc, could I talk to you about something? A personal matter?”
I felt a rush of sympathy and relief. “Sure, Steve. I’m always happy to help a former student, if I can.” Rolling up the window and opening the door, I got out and shook his hand. For the first time I noticed the black Crown Victoria parked fifty yards away. “You been staking me out? Or did you just know I’d be up with the chickens?”
“I remembered you were an early bird,” he said. “But also, I couldn’t sleep. Figured I might as well come on down and wait for you.”
“You are in a state. Come inside.”
He frowned. “Mind if we stay outside? Walk and talk? I don’t want to bring this into your office.”
“Sounds serious. Sure, let’s go.” I clicked my key fob to lock the truck, then we started out along the narrow service road that circled the base of the stadium, weaving in and out of concrete footings and angled steel girders. We walked in silence a while; I didn’t want to press him, and he was in no hurry to begin.
When we reached the other end of the stadium—where an access tunnel led through the base of the grandstands to the playing field—I noticed that the chain-link gate was unlocked and standing open. Pointing to it, I walked through. We emerged at one corner of the north end zone. The transition—from the dark, narrow passageway to the vast bowl of the stadium opening before us—seemed to free up something in Steve.
“I don’t know much about marriage,” he began, stopping and leaning against the padding around the base of the goalpost. “Sherry and I have only been married three years. I’m still trying to figure out how it works.”
“Me, too,” I said, giving his shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. Sherry, his wife, had been my student, too; in fact, my osteology class was where they had met, and where Steve had first asked her out. “I’ve been married thirty years now, and sometimes I still find myself scratching my head, wondering what the hell just happened.” His only response was a ruminative grunt, so I went on. “What’s got you worried, Steve? Your marriage in a rough patch?”
“No, sir,” he said. “I think maybe yours is.”
I took a step back. “Excuse me?”
He turned to face me. “Do you know where your wife was day before yesterday, Dr. Brockton? What she was doing?”
I stared at him, baffled and filled with a sense of dread. “She was in the library at UT. Writing a journal article.”
“No, sir,” he said again, shaking his head with what appeared to be deep sadness. “She was in Nashville. At the Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel.”