If you’re interested in why I started writing Gods of Aberdeen the answer is simple: it was a story I wanted to read.
But it didn’t begin that way. It began as a mental image, one thirty-second scene conceived sometime around my junior year of college. A young boy, dressed in a threadbare coat, carrying a duffel bag with all his possessions, trudging across a snow-covered lawn. All the usual gothic imagery applies – swirling winter sky, bare trees clacking in the wind, ahead a massive stone building with towers and arches and stained glass. It’s the student union for Aberdeen College, and the boy stops at the base of its front steps and all he can do is look up and stare.
From that scene sprouted my story; a coming-of-age novel that squeaks between the Scylla of The Catcher in the Rye and the Charybdes of A Separate Peace. I know comparisons are dangerous, especially with those two behemoths, but their shadows fall across every coming-of-age novel I’ve read, and they most certainly fall across mine. I’ll be the first to confess.
My narrator is Eric Dunne, a brilliant 16 year-old orphan who leaves his foster family and their New Jersey tenement, and begins his search for an identity at Aberdeen College, a wealthy liberal arts school in Connecticut. His intellect can’t rescue him from alienation – it makes it worse, actually, a 16 year-old whose intelligence is only matched by his naiveté – but he soon finds acceptance into a small circle of students, all of whom live off-campus with a Medieval history professor in his country estate, helping him complete his three-book series on the Middle Ages.
What follows? A charismatic professor obsessed with his legacy, Eric’s reluctant foray into alchemy, the seductions of an older woman. An old librarian who claims he’s immortal, and a cocktail of students too wealthy and too intelligent for their years. If, as the saying goes, a path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom, my novel illustrates what happens when one sets out on that path without a moral compass.
I chose alchemy, and specifically the Philosopher’s Stone, for its metaphorical power. Alchemists were learned men who spent their lives searching for immortality, unaware their quest took the very life they worked so hard to prolong. They believed in both empiricism and faith, in the sacred and the profane, and somewhere along that continuum walked alchemy on the thinnest of ropes. I found it fascinating; man pitting his mortality against his intelligence, as if he could outthink death. And how apt, I believed, to set this within the academic milieu. “Publish or perish” can be interpreted in many ways, including in its most literal sense.
Although I started writing this novel for myself, it quickly evolved into something less narcissistic. I wanted to tell a good story, and it didn’t matter if I knew how it was going to end, because in many ways the story never ended. A good tale is organic and always changing, and if the reader can’t see the mirrors and false bottoms then the story works. To that end, I hope I’ve succeeded.
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Gods of Aberdeen
Prologue
I remember Aberdeen College well—even now I could tell you what it looks like, on any particular day, at any particular time. I could tell you how the air tastes and how long the shadows are that run from the silver maples in the Quad, streaming over the grass like rivers of ink. I could tell you about winter in Aberdeen, sloping ice-sheathed drifts, tall, naked trees painting the snow black. How the wind sounds when it darts through the forest, how the sky looks at night, white dots spattered across a shadowy canvas.
Not too long ago I returned to Aberdeen, to Dr. Cade’s house, walking to the back, to the pond, which I expected to see as I remembered it most fondly: jagged reeds along its edge; kites of gnats looping endlessly above a mirrored surface crinkled by the wind; nets of hornwort and duckweed hugging the shores. But despite the years the flash of memories was still too vivid, and I couldn’t dip my fingers into the cool water for fear of seeing something bubble up from the unknown depths and greet me with hollow eyes and bared teeth. And as for Dr. Cade’s house, the house that had seduced me away from my freshman year at Aberdeen, it now looked abandoned. Its windows were covered in grime, the paint was peeling, and the driveway didn’t wind through the eons of time, as I’d once imagined, but ended where it always did, at a small walkway where the grass poked between the flagstones.
I drove into town and saw that Aberdeen itself had also withered; time diminished it into what it always was a stately old college necessarily blind to the outside world. The H.F. Mores Library, where mysterious forces once loomed, was now only a stuffy crypt of books. The hills and forests surrounding campus, where we’d spent those bitter winter mornings searching for our lost friend, had regained their anonymity, towering copses of spindly trees dissolving into a dark blur. There were a few students milling about the Quad, those who’d returned early from summer break, and I glided among them, unseen, under Garringer’s spire-tipped shadow, to the black oak at the edge of campus. On its trunk, amid puckered scars and cracked bark and an obsidian trail of ants, I looked for the remains of the initials Dan and I had carved into the wood, many years ago on a warm October day. I knew where Dan was, but the other friends I’d made during those days had long disappeared within the folds of time, swallowed like old wounds on the trunk of that black oak.
I went back to Aberdeen because I hoped it could return something of mine it took long ago. But I realized such places never give back what they take. It’s a toll they exact, and when the debt has been paid you know your time is done not by the clang of any bell, but by the soft rustle of apathy. Nostalgia becomes a dark lens, the promise of immortality sheds its skin, and you find yourself gliding, unseen, under the shadows of the giants in your life, who have grown too tired to take notice.
Aberdeen
Chapter 1
I arrived in Fairwich at dusk, and with my arrival came the rain. The clouds had been threatening all day, from New Jersey to Connecticut, and when I stepped off the bus there was a gust of cool wind, the clouds rumbled softly, and the rain began. I called for a cab from a payphone booth and waited in the booth, watching the sidewalk darken and the leaves drip. Down the street a little boy dropped his bright yellow bike on a front lawn and ran into his house.
The storm had worsened by the time the cab arrived. The cabby wore a green baseball cap, frayed around the edges, the plastic backing of the cap dug into the tanned, black-hair-bristled rolls on the back of his neck. A limp cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. I asked him to take me to Aberdeen and he nodded, one hand on the wheel, the other draped over the top of the passenger seat. He asked me if this was my first year. I said it was.
“Where you from?” he said.
“New Jersey,” I said.
“I used to date a Jersey girl,” he said.
I leaned my head against the window and stared at the trees, letting them whip by in a brown and green blur. The road didn’t have any shoulder, just a thin line where the blacktop ended and spiky weeds began. It reminded me of my old home in West Falls, riding into town with my mom, staring at the road edged with dusty, dark earth.
“First time in the country?” The cabby eyed me in his rearview.
“I’m an American,” I said.
He looked at me in the rearview again. “You serious?” He laughed. “I mean out here. In the country. Farms…forests…”
“Oh,” I said, “I haven’t been in the country since I was ten.”
“Parents don’t take you camping anymore?”
“I’m an orphan,” I said.
“No shit?”
I nodded.
The cabby took the cigarette out of his mouth, stared at it a moment, and flicked it out the window.
As the cab rounded the bend of the brick entranceway, behind the thinning maples and pines, there stood Garringer Hall. It looked less like a student union than a medieval castle, and I imagined a dragon, with green scales and membranous wings and eyes like glistening rubies, circling down from the gray sky and perching on the largest of the three spires. I pulled out the tri-fold map that had been sent to me in my acceptance package. Two smaller structures flanked the hall, with a covered brick and wood causeway joined to the westernmost building. This was the H.F. Mores Library—where I would be spending two mornings per week, according to my work-study assignment—not as tall as Garringer but longer, made of the same rough-cut granite blocks and topped with mullioned dormers. The easternmost building was all ivy-covered dark stone with a turreted roof, a massive clock sitting atop the center turret, and I recognized this structure as Thorren Hall, the main classroom center on campus. We drove slowly up the gradually sloping hill, students hurrying around us with their gray umbrellas and brown book bags and black shoes shiny from the rain.
I don’t remember exactly what I expected of my housing, though I imagined it would be similar to every image I’d seen on TV of college dorms: small, carpeted, and a bed with a sagging, stained mattress. I was surprised, however, when I opened the heavy wooden door to my room in Paderborne Hall. Inside was a gracious space, with an eleven-foot peaked ceiling, a scarred parquet floor and a dark-stained desk, set against bookshelves still showing the litter of students past—gum wrappers, pens, and paper clips. Ivory-colored drapes fluttered in the breeze from an open window. I dropped my bag and sat on the floor, listened to the soft thunder, watched the sable-colored clouds rolling over the swaying trees with their pale leaves turned up against the storm.
Affinity for open spaces is in my blood; I was born and spent the first ten years of my life in West Falls, Minnesota, in a small house on a farm. My father left when I was five, and my mother died of cancer when I was ten, and I was sent to live with her second cousin Nana, in a two-bedroom apartment in one of Stulton, New Jersey’s “urban renewal” zones. It was a prison sentence. Nana didn’t seem too fond of me, and her husband Leon and their two sons were downright hostile. My classmates at my new school didn’t like me because I was too young, having skipped a grade in grammar school.
There was something suffocating about Stulton, like a wet, gray blanket had been dropped over the city and we were all trapped underneath. Summers were the worst—the squall of dripping air conditioners, hot bus exhaust, heat shimmering off the sidewalks. During summer I missed my childhood home the most. I felt if I could just return to West Falls and sneak back into my house and live like a stowaway in the crawlspace or under the attic eaves, that everything would be okay again, that I’d slip back into my former life and it would be as if my dad had never left and my mom had never died. But going back home was just as impossible as my mom’s resurrection. West Falls had died with her, and Stulton was all I had left.
But eventually I adjusted, and I made the high school into my sanctuary, the only place where I could read in peace and not have to listen to the blaring TV or the barking dogs or the arguing neighbors. I’d stay in the school library after hours, reading my books until the janitor noticed and sent me home. Sympathetic teachers gave me paper and pens, notebooks and a calculator, and I won academic awards every year up until graduation. I displayed an affinity for languages, especially Latin. By senior year I’d made some good friends, and even though I missed West Falls, I’d developed a sort of hardened loyalty to where I was. It was misery, but it was a misery I knew well.
After graduation my friends scattered like seeds in the wind. I was the only one who stayed. I took a job as a stock boy at a convenience mart across the street from our apartment, and every month college brochures arrived and every month Nana told me I was too poor to afford college, and slowly I felt myself catching her apathy and resignation about life. My friends were gone. My sanctuary—high school—was gone. So I lowered my head and kept working and stashed the money from my paychecks in a hole in our bathroom floor. And then one Sunday night, while taking out the trash, I saw the dark outline of a brochure with ABERDEEN COLLEGE printed across the front in gleaming white, peering at me through the garbage bag’s translucent plastic. I ripped open the bag, took out the brochure, and read it while sitting in the dim light of the stairwell.
Aberdeen College. Located in Fairwich, Connecticut. Established 1902. Its motto, printed beneath:
Ex Ungue Leonem
From the part we may judge of the whole. Literal translation: from the claw we may judge of the lion. The glossy brochure photos promised it all: gently sloping hills, lush trees, a shadow-speckled country field. Centered on the front of the brochure was Garringer Hall, looking like a Gothic cathedral with students standing on its front steps. The blonde women were smartly dressed with plaid bows in their hair, and the men had leather book bags and preternaturally confident smiles. Ex Ungue Leonem. Every student a representative of Aberdeen College, for now and the rest of their days. The tang of New England countryside will seep into your skin, snake its way into your bones, and there it will remain, tendrils of ivy forever enshrouding your limbs.
The seduction was brief and complete. Everything else was a formality—the application, the pleas for financial aid and scholarships, the letters of recommendation from my teachers and my boss at the convenience mart. The day I received my acceptance letter I took my money from the bathroom floor hole and bought a bus ticket and a leather book bag. Three months after reading that brochure in the dirty stairwell of my Stulton tenement, I finally escaped. Aberdeen College was my deliverance.
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