Beginning at the back of the room near the eyewash station (he was tempted to use it), he distributed the syllabus, which the students, apparently too polite to mention his disfigurement, accepted as if taking communion. After explaining due dates and assignments—and quickly calculating the number of student pages (700–800) he would have to correct—he went over his standard classroom policies: eating (no), drinking (no), late arrivals/early departures (no), sleeping or cuddling (no, and no), cheating (just try it), and the use of technology (other than mechanical pencils, not permitted; students should leave all gleaming gewgaws at home and take notes by hand, as god intended) during class.
There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by a voice softly murmuring, “Is he just talking about our cell phones?”
No, he was not. He was talking about iPhones, iPads, laptops, desktops, earbuds, tape recorders, DVD players, Game Boys, mini-fridges, pocket pets, laser pointers, calculators, e-readers, slide rules, astrolabes, and—unless they could supply a note from a medical professional—iron lung or dialysis machines. Were there any questions so far about the syllabus?
One of three students named Sam (this sort of redundancy occurred almost every semester; Fitger wondered if some joker in admissions deliberately funneled students with the same name into his classes) politely asked if, in written assignments, “you’ll be grading us on how we write or on our ideas.”
“Excuse me?” Fitger briefly wondered whether it might be possible to ask one of the Sams to shave his head, and another to attempt, if at all possible, a beard.
“We want to know if you’ll be grading us on our ideas or on grammar,” another student helpfully said.
“Aha.” At the front of the room, Fitger nodded, leaned back, and settled both hands in the white debris-filled tray of the chalkboard. He so enjoyed these first, early encounters with the incoming freshmen, who were as tender and unsuspecting as asparagus tips. Pushing off from the chalkboard and immediately impressing cloudy white handprints on the seat of his pants, he explained to Sam & Company that transparency of meaning and lucid expression traveled hand in hand, like Hansel and Gretel through the terrible woods; and furthermore, that carelessness in language—syntactical clumsiness, boneheaded usage, confusion of affect and effect, lie and lay—betrayed a dubiety of purpose, threatening to detract not only from the grades they would receive on their essays but from the aggregate of human knowledge, a transgression that was, on a personal level, extremely painful to their instructor, Professor Jason T. Fitger, who suffered the death of a thousand cuts when forced to confront these myriad insults to the written word.
He clapped his hands, releasing a puff of grayish white dust. “All clear then? Is everyone with me?”
There was no response. Fine. He distributed two dozen copies of a suitably grim little work of dystopian fiction and, beginning with the first row, asked the students to take turns reading it aloud. The first student—one of the Sams—gargled his way through the opening paragraph as if reciting a dirge underwater. Fitger stood him up and started him over, twice, correcting pronunciation and posture and expression, and leading him word by word through the passage with a conductor’s flair. “Next!” The second student stood at her desk and read more fluidly, but in such a faint voice that Fitger, only a dozen feet away, could barely hear. Striding forward, he was getting ready to interrupt her and to ask if he should order twenty-four hearing aids and a megaphone but, once within glowering distance, he noticed how severely her hands were trembling. Unlike most of the young women in the room, who dressed as if stopping by class on their way to a nightclub, she wore a homely denim skirt and white buttoned blouse, and her entire body was shaking as if she were standing over an earthquake that measured at least 6.5 on the Richter scale. The page from which she was reading nearly shimmied out of her grip and onto the floor.
“All right,” he said, when her whispered monologue was finished. “Let’s keep going. Paragraph three!” The next student tried and failed to pronounce the word “tragic.” Fitger glanced at the clock. At the back of the room, under the pull chain by the shower, a student was dribbling hot sauce onto a taco while checking his phone.
* * *
—
This first edification session complete, Fitger released his hostages and returned, bearing twenty-four handwritten writing samples, to Willard Hall. He paused by the door of his old office, now inhabited by the visiting Norwegian, and heard a flurry of typing. Farther down the hall, he came to a stop at the double doors to the conference room. He peered through the glass in one of the doors: the room was empty, unlit. He tried the knob, then noticed the newly installed plastic panel with a blinking red eye. Though the university had no money to hire faculty or supply them with working telephones or computers, it could apparently afford a security system allowing professors to be locked out of conference rooms. The corridor was relatively quiet, only a handful of students, presumably exhausted by an hour of intellectual labor, arrayed like garden slugs on the floor.
He took a credit card out of his wallet—all things apparently for sale at Payne—and swiped it over the blinking red surface. Nothing. Perhaps he could use the card to nudge the metal toggle between the two doors…He knelt on the floor (his knees would punish him severely later) and attempted to jimmy the—
“Shit.” The credit card leapt out of his hand and fell through the gap between the double doors, landing faceup, his full name and Visa card number available to passersby for immediate use. A few moments of physical violence against the door, though somewhat cathartic, proved ineffective. He went back to the main office for advice but Fran was out—perhaps attending an instruction session regarding CPR for chipmunks or squirrels. He considered the idea of a wad of chewing gum affixed to the end of a coat-hanger spear, but ultimately decided he had no other recourse but to beg the use of an electronic key-card from a department in possession of clout and a budget—i.e., Econ.
Fitger climbed the steps to the second floor and paused outside the OFFICE OF ROLAND GLADWELL, PH.D., PROFESSOR AND CHAIR, allowing the sweat to congeal on the back of his neck. Econ epitomized everything that was wrong with higher education. It was the crassest form of financial training, a networking program for would-be tycoons. On the wall to his left, as evidence, a massive bronze plaque displayed the names of donors to the department, apparently sorted according to available millions, beginning with the DIAMOND JUBILEE CIRCLE and funneling resplendently along through platinum, gold, silver, emerald, ruby, sapphire, and pearl. (If English had a plaque, he reflected, the donor categories would begin with Styrofoam and end with tin.) These corporate benefactors weren’t only contributing funds; they were calling the shots, making decisions about research and curriculum. It was a deeply cynical and pecuniary model, the selling of intellect and faculty labor. Fitger sighed, then opened the door to the inner sacrarium, coming face-to-face with four efficient young women, all of whom appeared to have the same fitness trainer, dietician, and personal stylist.
“I need to get into the conference room on the first floor,” he said. “May I borrow a key?”
One of the women (he noted the nameplate on her desk—Marilyn Hoopes) appraised him with a flicker of her eyes as if to remind him of the chalk and sweat on his clothes and the incipient, purplish horn on his forehead. “Your name is…”
“Fitger.” This was gratuitous harassment; she knew who he was. “I work downstairs.”
“Have you reserved the room?”
“No. But the room is empty, and I need to get in it. I left…a personal item there.”
“And you don’t have a key?”
“Do you think I would be here if I had one?”
Marilyn Hoopes responded with a taut little smile and consulted her computer. “It looks like the room is reserved right now.”
“That may be,” Fitger said, while stepping closer—ominously, he hoped�
��to the side of her desk. “But whoever is using it is either delinquent or invisible, and I need to retrieve my missing item.” He held out his hand.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she said. “The room is reserved.”
Fitger pictured a conga line of undergrads queueing up by the conference room door, charging a year’s worth of alcohol to his Visa account. “Would you let me know who might have reserved it?”
She glanced complacently at her screen and said no, she could not.
Fitger lunged for her computer, but before he could get a good look at the screen she exited the document. “That’s our goddamned room,” he said. “No one’s in it; it’s been dark all day. Who would reserve a conference room on the English floor and then not even…bother…” He stopped.
The office had gone quiet. None of the women were typing.
“May I speak to Roland?” he asked.
No; he was out.
When might he be back?
Ms. Hoopes didn’t know. She referred Fitger to P-Cal, where he could check on Professor Gladwell’s office hours and request an appointment.
Fitger scratched himself and gazed, almost mesmerized, at her computer, which had begun scrolling through a slide show of university photos: Payne in the winter, spread with a tablecloth of snow; Payne in the spring, with crocuses foregrounding Bynmarlen Hall; Payne in the summer…How much of his life had unfolded against this reiterative backdrop? “I don’t use P-Cal,” he explained. “And I would like to speak to Roland for five minutes, without the intercession of a machine. Therefore I am hoping you will let me know when I can find him here. In the meantime”—he held out his hand—“I would appreciate your giving me the key to the conference room, so that I can retrieve an item left therein.”
Ms. Hoopes cleared her throat. “I can’t give you the key, and I don’t make Professor Gladwell’s appointments.” That was what P-Cal was for, she said. It was a university-wide system, which every member of the Payne campus was required to learn.
Fitger was reminded of one of the shorter works from his apocalypse class, with its depiction of mindless automatons marching across a continent in lockstep as if the planet were a prison yard. “Here we are,” he said, taking another step toward Marilyn Hoopes so that he was peering down at the top of her unresponsive head. “Two human beings, inches apart, and yet what you’re telling me is that I need to go back downstairs to my own office, to my computer—except that I don’t have a working computer—and spend thirty minutes searching for a website that will allow me to send a message that you could simply write down with a pencil on a piece of paper, right there on your desk. Do you find that strange? No? You might as well send me to Western Union for a telegram. Or suggest that I pound with a broom on the ceiling: a message to Roland in Morse code. Perhaps I’ll send him a smoke signal from the hall outside the conference room, by pouring a can of gasoline over my head and setting myself on fire.”
Ms. Hoopes refused, steadfastly, to give him the key.
But ten minutes later, two uniformed officers of the campus police did manage to open the conference room door and retrieve Fitger’s Visa card. They waited while he tucked the card into his wallet, and then escorted him past the new TAs and instructors who had gathered outside room 102B for orientation (“We’ll be rescheduling,” Fitger told them), ultimately delivering him to the university’s Office of Mental Health and Wellness, where over the next hour and a half he assured one and all that he was not in danger of self-immolation.
Late that afternoon at home, after pouring himself a sizeable drink, Fitger picked up the phone to call his ex-wife, Janet Matthias. He probably owed her an apology: the campus police, using outdated information, had contacted her as next of kin, asking her opinion of his mental well-being, including his likeliness of wanting to burn down Willard Hall. She had apparently vouched for him, though one of the campus officers had later told Fitger that she seemed “remarkably unsurprised” about the questions they’d posed.
He let it ring five times; Janet didn’t pick up. Was she avoiding him? Only a week or two earlier she had put a copy of the Campus Scribe—folded to the article about Econ—in his campus box. There was no note attached, but he knew that Janet was its source: even before the divorce, she took time to celebrate his humiliations.
He topped off his drink. Outdoors in the alley, his elderly neighbor was engaged in a weekly, inexplicable ritual: washing his garbage bins with a scrub brush, bucket, and a hose. Probably a post-retirement hobby, Fitger thought. Wearing fishing waders and suspenders, the neighbor appeared to be talking to himself; he circled the second, already immaculate container, then wiped the bottom of the upended bin with a cloth.
The fading daylight stretched itself across the sky like a band of spun sugar. When the neighbor shielded his eyes and looked up, Fitger waved from the window. “Nice night,” he called.
By way of response, the older man scowled in the direction of Fitger’s two garbage bins, which were mismatched and usually smelled of the spoiled remnants of takeout food.
Fitger picked up the phone and hit redial for the pleasure of listening to Janet’s message. (“You know what to do at the beep.”) He suspected—after nearly a dozen years of marriage, he knew his ex-spouse’s tactics and foibles—that she was probably home and deciding whether to answer. Even if she didn’t pick up, he thought, this was a form of communication. She would understand that he wanted to reach her. She would know that he was enjoying the sound of her voice, that he was thinking about her, and that he had called.
FOUR
In the southernmost corner of the Willard Hall basement (the building was shaped like a giant letter E), Zander Hesseldine, literary theorist and scholar of postcolonial film, scrutinized the agenda for the English Department’s first faculty meeting of the year. As usual, the department appeared to be committed to a semester’s worth of milquetoast conversation devoid of substance or import. At a time when education and the pursuit of knowledge had become the objects of a sneering disdain, when most Americans seemed eager to ship intellectuals—especially anyone with a PhD in the humanities—out to break rocks in the countryside, the English Department’s course of action was to tinker with documents that mattered to no one. When they should have been manning the barricades, they were scheduling a vote on that meaningless treatise, the Statement of Vision.
Disgusted, Hesseldine unbuttoned the top of his shirt—his office was as hot as a kiln—revealing a thick pallet of chest hair. He refreshed his browser. He had sent Fitger half a dozen P-Cal messages in the previous two weeks in an effort to include on the agenda a number of more urgent items that did not appear: Hesseldine’s stagnant salary, which had risen less than 1 percent in the past four years; the annual incursion of mice beneath the basement vending machines near his office; the time and location of his sophomore seminar (Hesseldine’s theory class met on Wednesday and Friday afternoons above a bowling alley); and the renewal of his intention to transfer, as soon as possible, to the Film Studies Program. He had received no response.
Ten more minutes until the start of the meeting. Hesseldine imagined he could sense, throughout the building’s first and basement floors, the weight of a collective demoralization. Like chorus members in a poorly scripted bohemian opera, his colleagues, in their separate dressing rooms or offices, were engaged in last-minute preparations: a gathering of documents, a clicking of pens, a chewing of breath mints, a slamming of file drawers, a cursing at the state of ever-flickering overhead bulbs, a shaking of crumbs and other detritus from computer keyboards, and a searching for shoes discarded in the muggy heat beneath a desk.
In her windowless office across the hall from Zander Hesseldine, Jennifer Brown-Wilson (British Romanticism) also consulted the meeting’s agenda, noting with a muffled cry of despair that she had been assigned to a committee with both Albert Tyne and Franklin Kentrell—a doubly punitive con
vergence. Tyne, it was said (Brown-Wilson had no reason to doubt the rumors), preserved his own urine as if it were wine, in a row of amber bottles in his office; and Kentrell had an innuendo-filled manner of speaking, and thick yellow fingernails that he wiggled in her direction when they met in the hall. At forty-two, Brown-Wilson was the youngest and most junior member of the English faculty, and she had spent the morning silently giving herself a pep talk: she had a tenure-track position, she had published two excerpts of her thesis (On Ecstasy and Desire in William Blake), and she had been invited to speak at an upcoming conference at Kansas U—i.e., she was fortunate, so much more fortunate than many of her graduate school colleagues, one of whom taught at a “liberal arts college” where it was no longer possible for students to major in English or, in fact, in literature of any kind. And yet: Albert Tyne (there were additional rumors about poorly taxidermied animals in his office) as well as Kentrell…Could she appeal to Fitger? No: she couldn’t afford to seem uncooperative with her tenure vote only two years away. Dusting off the popsicle-stick-framed portrait of her eight-year-old twins, she wished she had availed herself of her husband’s Xanax. She texted him quickly: Please renew X prescription on your way home.
Two doors away, near the basement elbow of the letter E, Franklin Kentrell (nineteenth-century American literature), who had printed but already lost the agenda, was searching through his trash can for an article about intestinal polyps, which he had last seen in the mailroom while making forty double-sided copies of Thoreau’s “A Walk to Wachusett.” Kentrell scratched his head. Might he have left the article, downloaded that morning, on the table next to the copy machine upstairs? In fact, he had. It was now in the hands of Helena Stang, who, it was rumored, bore a near-life-size tattoo of Alice B. Toklas on her left thigh. Stang, twentieth-century feminist literature, was at that moment perusing the article’s scatological details and wondering whether someone had deliberately left it in the copy machine as a joke in poor taste, or—worse—was using it as a text in the classroom. (Tyne, she thought, was a distinct possibility.) Stang glanced at the faculty meeting agenda and the committee assignments, which she ignored. She did not serve on committees. She left the mailroom with the article—“Polypectomy Snare for Serrated Adenoma”—under her arm.
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