I’m not sure why Reese or any of the other adjuncts come to this proceeding. I attribute their presence to schedenfreude, the pleasure derived from seeing the great ones squirm as their herd gets thinned by one.
Snyder Carrboro, the star of Arts and Sciences, the biggest fish in our little pond, makes his grand entrance, his graying hair moussed to perfection, wearing a black close-fitting jacket and black t-shirt, trying to achieve Upper East Side but coming off as resoundingly bridge and tunnel.
He comes right up to me and pats my balding beige corduroy. “Ned, my man,” he says, “another lottery. How swift the passage of time.”
I give him a curt nod then sigh with agreement. At St. Peter’s, semesters flow into semesters, punctuated by graduations, summer sessions. University work is like quicksand, hard to find but once you’re in it, hard to get out. After my first gruesome lottery, only Mac’s assurances that seldom did a professor resist as Sam Adler had, and the fact that I had gone to the Modern Language convention resume in hand and gotten not a nibble, convinced me to stay.
Now Amber keeps me here. Our goal is for her to get a term appointment, too, so that we can afford to get married. I fear she thinks she has to sleep with Snyder to make this happen, but there is another way.
At 8:00, I nod at Dr. Marrianna Von Hoff. Now that Mac is gone, Marrianna is the oldest faculty member of the School of Arts and Sciences, so she will officiate. She is a woman of regal bearing except for her height. At 4’10 she’s technically a dwarf and looks it tonight because wisely she’s chosen not to wear high heels.
As she moves toward me with the good book under her arm, I recall the last lottery when Mac drew his own name. By that time his shaggy mane was gone, and he was bald as a newborn. Of course Mac, ever the considerate gentleman, put his slip of paper into his jacket pocket, ran to the edge, and leapt straight into the Chesapeake Bay, so there would be no need for me to rappel.
Afterward when I sat in his office shredding the names, step eleven on my laminated Lottery Duties list, I realized that Mac, having been seriously ill for a few years, had pulled a fast one on me. His name was still in the urn. He had made his own slip then dropped it out of his sleeve like a magician.
“Welcome all to St. Peter’s seventeenth lottery,” Marrianna says in a croaky voice that does not project.
I fear she sounds like this in the classroom, as well. St. Pete’s may sneer at us state college grads, but at least we had to take courses in public-speaking and teaching methods.
“We’re all a bunch of old bores,” Mac used to say, “sawing on about Chaucer or the Peloponnesian Wars.”
Marrianna reads the scripture about a time to sow, a time to reap.
I place the urn on a small table always used for this purpose and stride to the edge of the roof, where there’s a gate in the wrought iron balustrade.
As I open the gate and secure it to the balustrade, a brisk wind rises from the Bay, ruffling my hair. I avert my eyes from the immense darkness below, but I can hear the water’s slap against the cliffs’ base as if there were a monster down there hungry for the blood of a tenure track one.
I return to the urn.
Marrianna, who may be remembering that Mac drew his own name last year, has begun to shake as if she’s chilled.
I never told anyone the truth about Mac. “The integrity of our lottery must always be maintained,” Mac often said to me. I would dishonor his memory to do otherwise.
“It is time to draw the name,” she says in a voice little more than a whisper, but I can tell that everyone on the roof hears her.
I lower the urn to her.
She reaches in and pulls out a name. Her hand is trembling uncontrollably.
She offers the slip to me, while her other hand goes to her throat as if she’s been stricken with laryngitis and can’t speak.
I sense Mac in the wide sky above me. I can almost hear him say: When you take the C out FACULTY you get FAULTY.
How displeased he would be with Marrianna for mucking up our sacred ceremony. Academia has a caste system as strict as that of India. I, a lowly term appointment, ought not to be the one to read the name of a tenure track faculty member.
Still I proceed.
I take my glasses from my inner pocket, carefully unfold the slip of paper, and proclaim, “Dr. Snyder Carrboro.” At the same time, I will myself not to grin.
The crowd gasps for he is the department’s star.
Amber shrieks and throws her arms around his neck.
He peels her off and hands her his jacket. Turning, he begins to run toward the opening in the balustrade.
Amber follows him at a slower pace, wobbly in her heels.
My heart thumps into my throat. “Amber, don’t,” I call.
“Snyde, Snyde, what about Little Bighorn?” she yells. “May I finish your manuscript?” My girl is ambitious.
Just before leaping into the darkness, he appears to assent.
She turns her ankle and grabs for the wrought iron railing.
“Careful, Amber.” I rush to her, afraid she might topple over into the Bay.
I put my arms around her and kiss her deeply. She pulls away and gives me a reproachful, “Neddie.”
I understand. Faculty romances are frowned upon. We here at St. Peter’s adhere to a strict moral code. After all, we’re a Catholic institution.
But I keep my arm around Amber as we turn to face the group. It is a moment of pure happiness and triumph for me. My rival is gone. No longer can he call her from our bed to proofread his opus.
Everyone is murmuring about how brave Snyder has been.
“Dr. Carrboro was like his hero, General George Custer,” Amber tells the crowd. Many nod in agreement.
“Hear, hear,” Charlie says.
In my hurry to get to Amber, I jostle the table. The urn turns on its side, and some of its slips of paper fall out. A gust of wind lifts the papers into the air above our heads.
People grab at them.
“I need all those back,” I yell. “Do not open them. I repeat: do not open them!”
As usual, the adjuncts, the department’s loose cannons, don’t listen. Reese and several others begin to unfold the papers as if they are fortunes inside cookies.
“Hey, this one says Dr. Snyder Carrboro,” Reese says.
“So does mine,” Riley says.
Others chime in.
Amber lets out a shriek, steps away from my side, and turns on me. “Ned, how could you?”
I begin to walk backward toward the edge of the roof, my eyes on the faculty, who are coalescing into a fighting unit, coming together as they never do in faculty meetings when they argue endlessly about university by-laws governing tenure, raises, and their health insurance co-pay.
I’ve seen them like this only once before when they stampeded Sam Adler off the roof.
I’m at the edge now. In thirty seconds they’ll rush me. I squat and drop down, holding onto the bottom of the wrought iron railing.
There is a ledge below the roof, known only to those who have scaled this cliff. My right foot slips as I try to balance on it. I’m wearing old loafers, their soles so thin they have no grip whatsoever.
I kick them off. They make a sound far below as they hit the rocks. I release the railing, slink down beneath the roof, and crouch on the narrow ledge, glad for my slender boy body. My fingers find rocks I can hold. Darkness covers me like a blanket.
Faculty members gather directly above me at the railing.
I am so close I could reach up, take hold of someone’s ankle, and yank her or him into the abyss. What fun it would be to do that, but I restrain myself.
“Anyone actually see Ned fall in?” Riley asks.
“I heard something hit the water,” Reese says.
Marrianna clears her throat. “With Snyder’s departure, you’re head of history, Riley.”
Riley thanks her and accepts congratulations from others.
I hear the whine of the gate be
ing closed. They bid each other good night and walk away, grumbling about losing their star, Dr. Snyder Carrboro and his PBS specials.
I lift my head slightly and see that two shadows remain. The two exchange whispers.
Riley clears his throat. “You’ve had a tough night, Amber, honey. Let me just unhook you here and give you a little massage.”
I hear the rub of fabric and prepare to lift myself back up to the roof, where I’ll flatten Riley that big fat letch.
“Don’t,” she says in a tearful tone. “I can’t go on without Neddie.” With that she flings herself over the railing like a shooting star, a flash of shimmering white, here then gone.
I must…join my love, so I leap and begin my descent to join the woman who gave her life for me.
Falling through the air, I hear Amber’s voice above me from the roof, “Now that Ned’s gone, you’ll be hiring another term appointment, right?”
At that moment I meet my end, directly on top of the white shimmering dress Amber tossed, a picnic blanket on Styx’s last port of call.
I should have known. She always was an ambitious one.
Ellen Herbert’s personal narrative essays have been published in The Washington Post “Style” section, Sonora Review, The Rambler, Alimentum, and other journals. One of her personal essays, “Orphaned Alligators,” won The 2006 Flint Hills Review Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her short fiction has been published in First for Women, The Sonora Review, The Iris, and other literary magazines and has won over 10 awards including a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize and a Virginia Fiction Fellowship. One of her stories was read on National Public Radio.
Words, Words, Words!
Gary Brandner
Hamilton Baxter sat behind the table piled with fresh copies of Mischief Afoot. It was his latest book and featured a nice garish dust cover and his name spelled correctly. The dozen or so youngsters across from him in the bookstore were not a Stephen-King-size autograph line, but they were, he supposed, better than nothing.
Baxter pulled his long, lean face into what he hoped was a convincing smile. When one of the young wannabes presented a book he scribbled his practiced autograph, adding some meaningless dedication if requested. Most of these kids, he knew, were English majors hoping to someday see their own name on a book cover. They had sat patiently through his reading aloud of chunks of his prose. It was a drill he hated, but which seemed to be expected. At the end of the day maybe some of these dipshits would actually come up with the $24 to buy his overpriced hardcover.
Amid the babble of fawning praise and trite questions from the fans, Baxter waited patiently for the inevitable “Where do you get your ideas?” While other writers, real writers, groaned at this chestnut, Baxter enjoyed it. It gave him a chance to bloviate and pontificate all the meaningless slogans and shibboleths spouted by writers since, well, probably since Plutarch. All the crap about using your life experience, writing from the soul, distilling the one true word from random thought. Empty words, but they ate it up, these writer groupies. So on this occasion when he opened his mouth to lay some platitude on the eager young faces, he was as surprised as any of them to hear what came out.
“Where do I get my ideas? I steal them.”
There followed a moment of stunned silence in which it seemed you could hear the non-ringing of the cash register. Then the laughter began as the group of youngsters concluded that the semifamous writer was making a joke. A beat later Baxter joined the general merriment, hoping his own laughter did not ring as false as it was. For what he had just told the assembled fans was the truth. He was a thief.
It was in his freshman year at one of the California state colleges that Hamilton Baxter discovered his knack for taking the work of other writers, changing some of the words, restructuring a few sentences, and rearranging paragraphs. He could then present the piece as his own and be assured of an acceptable grade. As his skill at word thievery grew, Baxter sailed through college and graduated with a degree in English without producing a single piece of original writing.
On graduation Baxter discovered the career opportunities for English majors were severely limited. He had but one real skill, and he concentrated on some way to use that in making a living. It did not take long for him to settle on fiction writing. There were untold millions of stories in long-forgotten books just waiting to be lifted. Baxter was careful never to use the work of an author whose name people might know, or a story too familiar to the public. He haunted the back shelves of used-book stores and the dusty stacks of unread works in the library. He avoided the Internet as a source because there were too many ways an inquisitive geek could nail him there.
For fifteen years now he had made a comfortable, if not sumptuous living, using the words of others. He was content to be a midlist writer, never breaking into any bestseller list, winning no prizes, selling his work moderately and occasionally playing Author for small groups like the one at the bookstore today.
Shaken now by the inadvertent blabbing of the damning truth to his young fans, Baxter excused himself, pleading a meeting with his publisher. No such meeting was scheduled, but he felt the need to escape before he revealed any more embarrassing facts.
***
An hour later, in his library refuge, Baxter inhaled the bookish air as a diver might suck in oxygen on emerging from the depths. The smell of the pages, the bindings, and the words themselves invigorated him. The building was new and bright, but the warm musty smell was as old as literature. The friendly middle-aged woman at the desk greeted him with a smile.
“You’re later than usual today, Mr. Baxter. No problem, I hope?”
“No problem, Claire. I had to stop off and sell a few books. The artist’s curse.”
The woman laughed dutifully as Baxter headed for one of the little cubicles at the rear. He was relieved to see that his favorite space was not occupied. He laid his worn briefcase on the desk between the shoulder-high partitions and headed back among the shelves. He was to begin a new book today, and he planned to search among some old material for inspiration. He picked out a volume of stories from long-out-of-print pulp magazines. The writing was rudimentary, but those old penny-a-worders came up with some solid plot ideas. A volume of twentieth-century biographies would provide background for a cast of characters. Play scripts from the 1920s and ‘30s would juice up his dialogue. An anthology of pretentious fiction from obscure literary magazines would impart a touch of class.
With an armful of stealable literature Baxter returned to the cubicle and settled in. He opened the first book and snatched his hand back with a yelp of pain. A fresh paper cut sliced his forefinger. Damn, on his writing hand, too. He sucked at the wound, blew on it, swore at the drop of blood that oozed out and plopped onto his shirtfront.
Baxter looked around quickly to see if he had disturbed any of the other patrons. Not that he cared, but in his position it did not pay to attract attention. He was relieved to see that no one had looked in his direction. He picked up the book for a closer look at the page that had cut him. Puzzled, he frowned. The paper was old, soft, and pulpy, not the kind of slick linen that inflicted a cut. Whatever the cause, he had a deep nick in his finger that throbbed in time with his heartbeat.
With his left hand he opened another of the volumes. Emitting a strange grunting sound, the heavy cover slammed shut on his hand with bone-cracking force.
“Ow, goddammit!” He tried to pull back, but the book kept his hand clamped where it was. Only when he jammed the book under his right arm and pulled did his hand come free and let the book snap shut. He examined his bruised knuckles and looked around. Again, no one took notice of his outburst. These idiots had to be dead, or too immersed in their own stupid reading, or maybe they were deliberately ignoring him. Baxter found himself unreasonably angry with these people for not acknowledging his irritation.
All right, to hell with them. Get some work done.
Baxter opened the book, cautiously this time. He was relieved that no page sli
ced his finger, no jaw-like covers snapped shut on him. It was just an ordinary old book. Relaxing a little, he turned to the title page. The letters there blurred as though he were trying to read through Vaseline. Automatically he touched his temple to be sure he was wearing his glasses. He was. He took them off, huffed on the lenses, and wiped them vigorously with a clean handkerchief. He replaced the gasses and looked down again at the page. No longer blurred, the letters stood out in bold black type:
jzsopkn jsrekk poknjjnsd
mw
ljkhodss pnn sijemdoj
“What the holy hell?”
Baxter realized he had spoken aloud, but he didn’t care. Nor, it seemed, did anyone else in the library. Had he somehow picked up a book in some foreign language? No, those random letters looked like no earthly language. He flipped through page after page. Nothing on them but the apparently random scattering of letters, sometimes in wordlike clumps, sometimes in solid blocks down a whole page. Not a bit of it made sense. Crazy.
He pushed the book away like some venomous creature and opened another. It held the same meaningless jumble of letters. The remaining books were just as indecipherable. Baxter sat back in the plastic chair, sweat seeping through his shirt at the armpits. He had carefully chosen each of these volumes from the shelves, checked their pub dates and flipped through the pages before selecting them. Everything was as it should be. There were real words on the paper that had formed themselves into meaningful sentences and paragraphs. Now nothing had meaning.
Baxter closed his eyes and forced himself to draw in four deep breaths and hold them as he had learned to do while plagiarizing a book on relaxation. When he looked again at the pages they were the same incoherent mess.
He lurched up from the little cubicle and stumbled back into the stacks. At random he pulled first one volume then another from the shelves, riffled through the pages, and dropped them one after another to the carpeted floor. Not a one of them was remotely readable. Am I going mad? He thought. Or am I the victim of some dreadful cosmic joke?
HELP! WANTED: Tales of On-the-Job Terror Page 9