John Woman by Walter Mosley

Author:Walter Mosley [Mosley, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802146410
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

11

EIGHT DAYS LATER, at 11:49 on Wednesday morning, John Woman and Talia Friendly were setting up for the presentation in the main hall of Deck Rec. She had given him a Bluetooth earbud to hear her questions from up in the control room.

“You can either nod or shake your head or you can just call out to me over the house mike. I mean this is still a little informal.”

The stage was set so that there were three screen-like walls opened up behind an old oak lectern and a high table, upon which sat the Containment Report trunk.

The mostly empty auditorium was fitted to seat 999 souls.

“Remember that the upper part of the center screen should be running as they come in,” John said. “Then you just follow the cues we talked about, the lower part and the other two.”

“You got it, Professor,” Talia agreed. She was a blocky young woman with crew-cut black hair. “All you have to do is point at a screen and it’ll go. I got it all programmed perfect.”

At a quarter past twelve John was standing in front of the table facing the hall, his hands behind his back, a pose he’d adopted as a boy from a painting of Napoleon in exile. He believed that the deposed dictator struck this pose to overcome humiliation and fear so used it whenever he wanted to master his own anxieties.

The audience trickled in. Dean James came down the main aisle accompanied by President Luckfeld. They both wore dark suits and ties, hard leather shoes and short-brimmed Panama straw hats. They marched to the front of the middle section and sat together.

John was considering going down to say hello when a noisy group of students entered the auditorium. It was his class, almost all of them. Maybe, he thought, they wanted to see how his crazy ideas held up under the scrutiny of the other professors.

But then he saw Carlinda. He knew that she wouldn’t be part of any kind of hazing. On her right was Tamala Marman wearing bright red. To Carlinda’s left was a solid-looking young white man with wiry black hair and dark-framed glasses. He was holding her hand but when she saw John she pulled the hand free to scratch her nose. This move convinced John that he was looking at Arnold Ott, the young man for whom Carlinda professed love but not passion.

“Now, Professor?” Talia Friendly asked in his ear.

He nodded and then turned to look at the top half of the center screen. There the words She’s at it appeared—black letters against a yellowy background. John counted to ten and the words again. Had her replaced the first three words.

“You cue the puzzle too,” he said aloud.

In an upright rectangle of light, below the slow progression of words, tiny pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle flitted on and off at different places in the frame. Now and again, every ten seconds or so, a random piece would stick.

The screen reminded John of the silent films shown at the Arbuckle Cinema House.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.