event, practiced what to do — for Mike couldn’t help but notice a certain expertise, a way of drawing the standing boy’s engorged penis toward her so that it seemed she might painfully stretch it before gently swooping forward and seeming to swallow it whole. The slender boy came with an explosive adolescent sound, as if taken by surprise. The cameraman or ? woman (it was difficult to picture a girl behind the camera) swung the lens up to capture the boy’s face, which, with a start, Mike Bordwin recognized. He had assumed, when Kasia had solemnly handed him the tape just an hour earlier, saying to him in an extremely sober tone, I think you should take a look at this, that the tape was simply confiscated pornography (not that the tape wasn’t pornographic) — something a dorm parent might have dealt with. The idea that there would be recognizable people attached to the action — students he had seen in hallways, in the cafeteria, and on the basketball court — did not really occur to him until he saw the face of the boy, contorted as it was in a paroxysm of pleasure and therefore somewhat grotesque to the outside observer. He thought, Rob, and It can’t be. The Rob he had known was a polite, hardworking student who also happened to be an outstanding forward on the basketball team. And was that how Mike had seen his students, he wondered then, even as he was observing the moment of coming on Rob’s face, as excellent student or promising actor or pretentious brownnoser or good arm? Because it was perfectly apparent that such descriptive tags were entirely inadequate. The Rob whom Mike had known seemed to be but an embryo of the full-fledged sexual being on the tape. There was a kind of seizure then in Mike’s chest as he suddenly, from different parts of his brain, received alarming and unwanted bits of information, not unlike an air traffic controller watching several blips on his radar screen inexplicably about to collide. The girl hardly seemed to come up for air when she turned to the other standing boy, whose face had not been visible during the first pan but which now clearly was, jolting the headmaster and causing him to cry out the name of the boy— Silas — and to emit a groan of his own, entirely unsexual. Silas and the girl lay down on the floor with Silas on top and went at it in an old-fashioned though frenetic way, the girl’s body thudding lightly onto what was clearly now a dormitory floor, dotted with a half-dozen beer cans. Mike closed his eyes, not wanting to watch this particular boy have his own paroxysmal seizure. When he opened them again, the camera was on the face of the girl, who was either experiencing the heights of pleasure or giving an excellent imitation of same. It was then that he saw the girl was very young — very, very young: the number fourteen floated through his brain — though he didn’t at that time know her name. It was not unusual for the headmaster not to know all of the students by name, particularly the underclassmen who hadn’t yet distinguished themselves, which Mike was pretty certain she had not. He suddenly wondered how many other persons — faculty or students — had watched this performance on the tape, this particular worry marking perhaps the worst moment of his life to date (though far worse was yet to come).
Groping for the camera, he found and pressed the pause button. He was on his knees in his empty house, his breath tight, causing him to put his hand to his chest as if an angina attack might be coming. That any number of people might already have seen the tape was creating in Mike what felt like a temporary heart stoppage but what was really a temporary brain stoppage, his neurons refusing to fire, or whatever they did — connect — because he couldn’t process another thought, the last having been too awful to contemplate, with its attendant images segueing into the words police and rape and alcohol and press, none of which any headmaster wanted in any sequence in any sentence. It seemed important then to focus on the girl to determine how willing a participant she had been in this… this thing that he was witnessing. Since he didn’t have the heart to rewind and review what