Late-K Lunacy

by Ted Bernard

  “It depends.”

  “It depends? I don’t see that you’re in the driver’s seat.”

  “Tell me what you propose,” Adrienne relented.

  “Right. You feed him misleading information about our intentions tonight. Tell him we are backing down and are on board with the university’s energy plan, including Blackwood oil and gas, but that we want to shrink the timeline to renewables. Then come back to us with intel on his immediate movements and plans. If you do these things and deliver us timely and valid information, I will not pursue my inclination to have the cops look into your role in the break-in and fire. Nor will I bring up the marijuana trade.”

  “You’re asking me to continue to hang with that slimeball?”

  “Yes, I am, if you want me to forget about your felonies and trafficking.”

  “Seems like you’ve backed me into a corner.”

  “Ha. You backed yourself there, Adrienne.”

  Adrienne shifted her weight to her left foot, extending her hip in Lara’s direction, striking a provocative pose, or that’s the way Lara saw it. Typically an implacable fortress, Adrienne softened her voice as if to lower a drawbridge across her moat. “You know, when I stop to think about Blackwood Forest,” she mused, staring again into The Jenny, “I cannot understand why Morse is so intent on drilling there. He doesn’t need the income. For some reason, the man’s bent into a pretzel over Blackwood.”

  “We’ve been trying to understand that too,” Lara admitted and realized this moment of truth was a sort of catharsis.

  Adrienne moved a step closer to Lara. “And Lara, despite what you may believe, I do care about the warblers and your degree and career. I even feel sympathy for those nubile kids in there, not yet tarnished by this fucked-up world and possessing much nobler motivations than mine.” She spoke these conciliatory words carefully and deliberately, as if scrolling through a thesaurus to compile the least inflammatory phrasing.

  Lara listened, biting her lower lip. “Thanks,” she replied sweetly. “So here’s my last question: Can you think of a way to stop the man?”

  “Let me work on that,” Adrienne said, abruptly turning away and walking toward campus. She disappeared into the shroud of that dark night.

  14

  Stefan helped me here. Though a mole embedded in CNRD, I had neither the pleasure nor the pain of sitting in a faculty meeting of the School of Conservation and Natural Resource Development. This is an embellished second-hand account of a momentous, though certainly inglorious gathering.

  Faculty filed into Room 332. As the table could accommodate less than half the faculty, the rest were obliged to climb over each other into a second tier of chairs lining the walls. Per tradition, senior faculty gravitated to the table, leaving Stefan and the others as back benchers. Dr. Tulkinghorn, already ensconced at the head of the table, aimlessly shuffled a stack of paper, avoiding eye contact with his staff. The chairs on either side of him were vacant until he brusquely invited two of his energy toadies — economics professors Jennings and Pritzolf (Bland and Blander in Stefan’s mind) — to join him. The room was still but for the murmur of professors speculating about campus unrest.

  Also at the table were climatologist Burt Zielinski, idly doodling on a small notepad; Horace Lindford, a fifty-something hard rock geologist, staring out the window toward Block Hall; Katsu Tanaka, microbiology and epidemiology prof, who shuffled a stack of eight by ten photos of microbes; Paul Maynard, a thirty-something environmental geographer thumbing his smart phone; Patricia Mansfield, ‘Manny’, the environmental sociologist with seventeen years under her bejeweled concho belt who was responding to email on a tablet. Stefan noted that Al Jaggers, the environmental attorney who had enough seniority to sit at the table, was not present. He was in court that afternoon. Earlier in the day he told Stefan, “I don’t know which kind of torture I prefer. It’s like your inquisitor asking, ‘Would you like the rack or waterboarding today, sir?’ ”

  On either side of Stefan at the back of the room sat Sophie Knowles, who surreptitiously marked lab exercises, and Marilyn Shesky, Lara’s ornithologist advisor, scrolling up and down, left and right, across a spreadsheet on her laptop. Several other junior colleagues trundled in belatedly from classes.

  To start the meeting, Tulkinghorn monotonously relayed a dozen or so announcements in rather detailed succession. Anyone paying attention to their email, that is, everybody in the room, had already noted or deleted each item earlier in the day or last week. Stefan yawned. When Dr. Tulkinghorn paused, Horace Lindford sighed dramatically and said: “I remember the first director here, back in the eighties, Myrle Fish. This was before the Internet, of course. Myrle, why he’d sit there, right where you’re sitting Truman, and he would read the second and third class mail to us for half an hour.”

  The irony lost on him, Tulkinghorn raised his eyebrows. “There’s some interesting history.”

  An item on budget cuts finally animated the colleagues. This was well-tilled ground arising from the inherent paranoia that professors harbor about their perks. What will it be this time? Hiring freezes? Heavier teaching loads? Purging untenured faculty? Cuts in travel allotments, supplies, and equipment? Denial of sabbaticals? Only the cost of hang tags for parking would have induced more blather. In truth, October is a terrible time for responding to budget mandates. Provosts and deans are petty dictators in October, perpetually crying wolf. Year after year, threatened cuts come and go. Then, like magic, money is found or belts are tightened or the future is mortgaged on the prospect of tuition rises (Aargh!), all without encroaching appreciably on faculty prerogatives. The academic roller steams on. Everyone in the room, except Sophie and Stefan, understood this. The extended discussion was so much kabuki.

  Tulkinghorn barely reacted to the bellyaching and posturing. In fact, he seemed not to have been paying attention. His mind was frozen by the next item: GUO’s energy plan. And the very idea of trying to convince these idiots that it would be useless to oppose it filled him with nausea. Nodding toward Burt Zielinski, he said, “We need to move on. Burt, you have the final word on the budget.”

  Burt looked up sleepily from his doodles, which had loped across a second page. “I’m feeling suffocated in this stuffy room,” he said, uttering what seemed a non-sequitur. It wasn’t. “Like almost every building on this campus,” he continued, “McWhorter is overheated in winter and overchilled in summer. Money wasted on such inefficiencies might be dedicated to something academic, like scholarships, for example. But, to be honest, Dr. Tulkinghorn, budget woes bore me. If I were worried about my compensation, I wouldn’t be working for the State of Ohio. I’m happy enough to just live simply, teach my classes, and do my research.”

  “There you go,” concluded Tulkinghorn

  “What about those of us who are woefully underpaid women?” asked Patricia Mansfield, her hands clasping each other at chest height so firmly her knuckles went white. She stared expectantly at Tulkinghorn with her jaw protruding like an anvil and her eyebrows compressing her forehead into three north-south gullies just above her nose.

  “You’ll get yours,” Tulkinghorn replied, either with intention or without awareness of the insult. “Next item,” he said.

  Professor Mansfield abruptly stood up tipping her chair backwards with a crash. She stuffed her tablet and phone into a woven handbag. “I’m sick and tired of this male-sexist institution!” she screamed and stormed out, slamming the door behind her.

  As though a judge had pronounced a death sentence, the room went silent

  Out of the silence, from the far end of the table, a plaintive nasal tenor began to sing:

  Manny’s wearing strings and rags.

  Manny's gone away,

  Manny's wearing strings and rags,

  Manny's gone away.

  Manny’s gone to O-hi-o

  Manny’s gone away.

  Freddie Neysmith, an environmental philosopher nearing retirement fancied himself Pete Seeger, right down t
o the goatee. Following the chorus, he continued to hum, followed by an unearthly cackle, sucking still more oxygen from a room on the verge of implosion.

  As for Tulkinghorn, he ignored Mansfield’s exit and simply pursed his lips and shook his head at Neysmith’s antics. Stefan had never heard Neysmith sing and could remember no direct contact with him since his rebuff on the stairway back in August. Marilyn later told him that Freddie interrupted meetings at least once a semester. “Jeez oh man, those lame-brained men always coddle that flippin’ idiot and probably agree with his despicable misogyny”, she said. On this occasion, Neysmith had improvised from the traditional North Carolina folk tune, Jenny’s Gone to Ohio.

  Stefan could hardly keep his mouth shut and stay in place, but he realized he could not afford to aggravate Tulkinghorn further. Sophie also stayed put. From the look on her face, Stefan could tell that she wrestled with the same dilemma. Marilyn simply rolled her eyes and went back to scrutinizing her spreadsheet.

  “The university’s energy plan,” Tulkinghorn intoned, “was released by the president at a press conference yesterday. I had earlier reviewed the Environmental Impact Statements completed by Morse Valley Energy regarding the proposed drilling for natural gas and oil in Bartholomew County and found them to be in accordance with Ohio and Federal laws. With respect to that proposal, I believe the ball is now in the court of the Ohio Division of Mines and Mineral Resources. The energy plan, as you are aware, will move Gilligan away from coal toward renewable resources by the 2030s. In the meantime, natural gas will be the bridge fuel.”

  “I have been asked to explain and defend the plan in a series of meetings across campus in the next two weeks. It would help me and the university greatly if my own school could send me on this mission with a favorable vote of confidence.”

  Tulkinghorn distributed copies of the plan and walked his faculty through its main elements. Endless discussion ensued about the toxic legacy of coal, the economics of fracking for natural gas, fracking impacts on water, carbon footprints, alternative energy options, promoting energy efficiency because of the profligate waste Burt had earlier mentioned, solar panels on the roofs of several faculty homes (an irrelevant tangent), the student protest, and rumors about the brutal assault by protesters of the Dean of the Graduate College and the Vice-President for Research. Twice Dr. Tulkinghorn upbraided Paul Maynard, the geographer, for two-handedly slapping the table, throwing his head back, and screaming “What a bunch of bullcrap!” Finally, Maynard said, “I’m not an environmental geographer for nothing. I find this plan reprehensible and contrary to everything I believe about our need to move away from carbon-based fuels as soon as possible. Fracking will trash this region beyond recognition.” Shaking his head wildly, he concluded, “No way will I support this plan.”

  Tulkinghorn, as director had long ago demonstrated that he possessed the emotional equilibrium and impartiality of a pit bull, stared back at the geographer. He said, “Your world, professor, is nothing but fantasy and foolishness. The real one, my world, thrives on coal, oil, and natural gas and will do so for decades, if not centuries, to come.”

  Burt Zielinski stood up. He got everyone’s attention by flapping his hands in a calming motion. “Listen dear colleagues,” he began. “I have heard all the pros and cons and impressive perspicacity on this latest plan from the administration. I know the director would like our support. But truthfully, I’m afraid it falls seriously short of responding to the urgency of the moment with regard to reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In fact, I’m ashamed of it. I agree wholeheartedly with Paul on the madness and devastation of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas in this region. It is a net loser and it requires mega-gallons of water and nasty chemicals that then have to be put someplace.” He stopped, as if in mid-sentence. His silence stumped the room. Apparently without intending to say more and sweeping the room with his eyes to make contact with all his colleagues, he said simply, “I call the question.”

  The vote, as Tulkinghorn predicted, was fifteen opposed to the plan; nine in favor. Had Patricia Mansfield been present it would have been sixteen to nine. After blurting, “Bloody fools!” Tulkinghorn adjourned the meeting. With his head down like a blocking back, he busted his way toward the door. A manic jumble of angry curses and arguments ensued. As soon as they could, Stefan, Sophie, and Marilyn hustled toward their offices.

  “What a freaking circus,” Sophie said, shaking her head with disgust.

  “Goshamighty, though, it is the place we call home,” said Marilyn.

  15

  Stefan’s Journal

  Burt and Me

  After the meeting, Burt and I amble across Centennial Quad. We stop at the twelve-foot-high statue of Denis Pádraig Gilligan overlooking the northwestern corner of the quad. Widely recognized as one of Gilligan’s most avid campus historians, Burt has more Gilligan trivia than Dr. T. has curses. He reads aloud the phrase inscribed on a plaque at the base:

  Oh the glorious saunters over these Ohio hills in spring, the sallies into the woods in the quiet of winter, the excursions through the hollows on sultry summer morns, oh the gladness that pleases my soul more than all the paintings in the world’s museums.

  I gaze up at the dandy nineteenth century founding professor with his ruffed collar, frock coat, flowing locks, and books in hand. “Way ahead of his time.” I speculate. “Gilligan seems to have carried New England transcendentalism westward. How remarkable.”

  “You think?” asked Burt expecting no response. “Actually, the rogue spent way more time in the River Palace, a hotel slash brothel at the Shawnee confluence, than in the countryside. Gilligan was unquestionably a heavy drinker and a womanizer, and he reputedly missed many a morning class recouping his wits and calming his stomach. Not that it mattered to the seventeen male students at the Territorial Institute, who themselves had no doubt been sampling the night-time wares of this wild river town.”

  “So, this quote is laughable if not wholly misleading?”

  “Oh, the man may have staggered around in the woods, who knows? There’s no denying that the school is named after him and not some other Gilligan. Every university has its mythic founder. Harvard, John Harvard; Virginia, Thomas Jefferson; we’ve got Denis Pádraig Gilligan. And isn’t it somehow fitting that the country’s number one party school these days stands on the shoulders of one of the nineteenth century’s most notable drunks?”

  “Fitting, yes, but I’m crushed by this revisionism.” Shaking my head, I follow Burt out of the quad and across West Clayborne to dinner. At the Trattoria, I am anxious to tell him what Katherine had revealed on our date. I need guidance but I’m unclear how to get started. As I pour Lambrusco into our glasses and we are served our entrees, Burt resolves the matter. He talks of his late wife and the painful hiatus of her absence in his home and in the lives of his children and grandchildren.

  “She was only fifty-eight, but nature abhors a vacuum, you know, Stefan, and in the three or so years since her death, my grieving has been displaced by a calm gratefulness that comes brightly upon me like the way one feels on a spring day in May around here. As you know, I am an atheist, so I think about this sense of gratitude as the zenith of being human and having a human heart capable of boundless love. And my gratitude multiplies. My two daughters have rushed into the vacuum I felt so profoundly in the early months. I see them and their kids once a month or so. All in all, for a guy on the downslope toward Medicare, I have a life far better than most of my fellow humans. And friendships like ours are all part of my sense of rightness these days.”

  “I am honored.” With this, my heart cracks wide open. Tears well up.

  “What about you, Stefan? You must be the most eligible bachelor on campus, if that archaic notion still applies. Which of the legion of young women beating on your door might become the chosen?”

  Here is the opening. I smile. “Young women beating on my door? Not exactly, but I like the image. And frankly, you must be clairvoyant t
o have asked. I had intended to seek your guidance on a … what? … an apparently deepening relationship.” I detest this ambiguous locution while also realizing this is often the way the world unfolds. As Rumi wisely observed: As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears. And the way appears idiosyncratically in the voices of those you trust.

  “Okay, Burt. Let me flesh out a bit of background.” Briefly and without drama I tell of my life of serial shallow, short-term liaisons. I speak of the platonic relationship with Kate and the line we almost crossed. I fondly describe my sparkling sojourn with Gathoni Njema. I say that it is a struggle to pin down how I really feel about Katherine in the wake of just a few hours together. Maybe it is too soon to say. And then there is the fact that she’s my student.

  “What about Gath … what was her name? Would you be interested in striking up with her again?”

  “Ah, Gathoni. Well, since she was one of my better students in Kenya, I would certainly be pleased to see her. But getting back into a relationship, no, I don’t think …”

  “Without the romance of the open road, no deeper feelings, eh?”

  “None, really.”

  Responding to my revelations about Katherine, Burt is careful. “You know, the whole furor, belated furor I might add, about sexual harassment, rape, and sexuality in general on campuses these days casts a different light on the age-old Puritan inheritance of ‘thou shall not covet one of your students’. One must be cautious.”

  “I am aware and thus even more conflicted. To be candid, on that single date, we walked arm-in-arm and kissed twice. That was it. We did talk about how we’d both like to continue seeing one another and the risks of doing so. I told her that perhaps next semester would be easier when she would no longer be in my class. She replied that she did not know if she could wait. If anything, she was less reserved than I forced myself to be.”

  “Hmm. Patience is not exactly the behavior that comes to mind in those intense moments of early infatuation, if my memory serves me about how that worked thirty-something years ago.”