Page 31 of An Academy for Liars

He didn’t respond.

“Would you have really done that? If Eileen had asked you to?”

“That’s the school policy, so yes.”

“And if you did that, I wouldn’t remember Drayton or the people I’ve met…or you?”

Dante—still staring at the rain—traced the filter of his cigarette back and forth along the line of his lower lip. “If I’d done my job right, yes. I would’ve taken it all.”

“How?”

“That’s a lesson for later in the semester,” said Dante. “It involves an application of persuasion that’s near surgical in its precision and as a result it’s incredibly dangerous. If done wrong, you can make a person’s mind forget how to execute basic functions like breathing and swallowing. That’s why it’s considered combative persuasion, the first stage of it anyway. It’s one of the ways we kill with the power we wield.”

Lennon wanted to ask if that was something Dante had done before—if he or anyone else at the university had killed with persuasion—but she bit the question back. “That sounds…a little sick.”

“It can be,” he said. “But I’ve seen it used in more merciful ways. There was a professor who taught here a few years ago, Dr. Gordon Meyers. He was dying of spinal cancer, one of the most painful ways a person can go. I and the other professors here took it upon ourselves to induce a state of memory loss, moment by moment—”

“Like laughing gas? Making him forget the pain?”

“Just like that,” said Dante. “But more efficient. It allowed him some lucidity in his final days, while also shielding his mind from the worst of the pain he endured. He died with a smile on his face. Imagine that: a man at the end stages of one of the most painful cancers known to man dies grinning. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You’re still trying to talk me out of my moral qualms?”

“It’ll make the rest easier,” said Dante. “You’ll deal with so much during your studies—neurosis, exhaustion, frustration, burnout, despair—why add guilt to the mix?”

“I can’t help it,” said Lennon with a shrug. “Symptom of a functioning conscience.”

Dante gave her a wry smile.

“There is something I wanted to talk to you about…but I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

“Go on,” said Dante, watching the rain.

“I saw you a few weeks ago and…you weren’t yourself.”

She had half expected this statement to trigger some reflexive response from Dante—a stiffening or a look of shock—but he remained placid. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean you were different.”

“How so?”

“You looked at me differently.”

Here Dante met her eyes, and it was everything Lennon could do not to cower under his gaze. “And how did I look at you?”

“In a way you shouldn’t have,” said Lennon, a little frustrated now, and embarrassed to even say this out loud though she knew she wasn’t the one who should’ve felt ashamed. “Or at least…in a way you wouldn’t have if you’d known what you were doing. And then you just smiled at me, so strangely, and the next day, during class, it was as if nothing happened. I realized then that you didn’t remember. That whoever it was I’d encountered wasn’t the same you who’s here with me now.”

Dante hung his head, looking for a moment conflicted. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I knew it wasn’t you. But I do want to know who he was.”

“I don’t know if I can answer that question in a way that will satisfy your curiosity.”

“Try,” said Lennon.

Dante seemed, for a moment, to search the rain for an answer. “There’s a cost for what we do here. That night, you saw that in the form of whatever—or whoever—it was you encountered. I try to keep him leashed, but it’s hard at night, when I’m tired. I wasn’t able to make it back to Irvine before he broke free of his tether and surfaced.”

“Who is he?”

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