The Never List

update on my activities in Oregon. I was nervous. I wanted to sound as compelling as possible, since I hadn’t inspired much interest from Jim. Suddenly, winning Tracy over to my quest seemed like the most important thing I’d done in my life. I didn’t know if I could keep at it alone, and if she also dismissed the things I had found, I didn’t know if I had the heart to pursue the plan I’d formulated on the plane ride back.
    Tracy listened quietly, raising her eyebrows with surprise when I told her about the S&M club, her eyes opening wide and her jaw dropping when I explained how I had followed the van to the warehouse. I couldn’t tell if she was surprised by what I had seen or bywhat I had done. Probably the latter. Finally, I told her about the books in David Stiller’s office. She shrugged that off.
    “Everyone in academia reads those writers. It’s de rigueur. Foucault changed academic life forever. He gave everyone a new perspective to write about. Look, I have a whole section of my own library devoted to him. The indelible mark of too many years spent in grad school.”
    She pointed to an area in the middle. I walked over. “Bataille too. I mean, he writes about sex and death. That’s all academics care about. Really all anyone cares about, as a matter of fact.”
    “But doesn’t that directly tie into what Jack did to us?”
    “I’m sure he used it to justify his actions, like so many other men who want to subjugate women, while simultaneously giving it all an intellectual spin. I can easily see how he would have cottoned on to the idea of having a ‘limit-experience,’ living a life outside societal rules, et cetera. Foucault, Nietzsche, all of them. Excuse-mongers.”
    I had gotten up and was perusing Tracy’s shelves as she spoke, and I found one filled with Bataille’s books. Her collection was even more extensive than David’s. I pulled out a few but froze when I saw one called The Bataille Reader .
    I couldn’t believe it. There on the cover, in a white setting framed with a black border, was a drawing of a headless man. In one hand he held what looked like a heart with flames coming out of it, in the other a short knife. He had a skeleton drawn over his crotch, and his nipples were little stars. I took it over to Tracy, my hands shaking.
    “Tracy, doesn’t this look like, isn’t this …”
    She looked at me questioningly, clearly not seeing what I was seeing.
    Finally, I spat the words out, “The brand. Isn’t this the brand ?”
    I pulled down the side of my jeans and underwear enough sothat she could see it clearly on my hip. She looked at the picture and back at my scarred flesh. Admittedly, it was a little hard to tell, because the scar tissue had grown over the original mark, but the outline was definitely the same.
    Tracy stared in silence for a moment before finally looking up to meet my eyes.
    “I think you might be right. I never noticed it before. Maybe because I try to avoid looking at the goddamn thing—it’s not exactly a memento I treasure. But also, my brand is incomplete. I twisted hard to the right when the iron touched my skin, so my mark is only partially there. It makes it look very different.”
    She stood up and showed me hers, in roughly the same place on her hip, though a little farther toward the back. I could see what she meant about it—half of the torso and one of the legs was missing entirely—but I also noticed that on her the imprint was a little more distinct on the upper right. I could clearly make out the knife held in the headless man’s hand.
    “What does it mean?” I asked her.
    Tracy sat down, and I did too, my hands clutching The Bataille Reader .
    “It was an image created for a publication that Bataille was involved with, but as I recall, it was also the symbol for some sort of secret society. A bunch of these intellectuals back in the thirties formed this group just before the war. They were all looking for a mystical ecstatic experience or something. I’m not sure, I only took one class on surrealism, but I vaguely remember it had something to do with human sacrifice. I think it disbanded pretty quickly. We’ll have to look it up.”
    “I may not be up to date on the literary crowd from the thirties, Tracy, but I do know something about math. And ‘society’ implies more than one. Do you think this means Jack created some sort of secret society at the university, maybe based on this group? Maybewith David