by Susy Gage
“Well… there was the time your students spent a week at a five-star resort in the Bahamas.”
“I had made the reservation for myself and I couldn’t go. So what?”
“So, they got drunk as lords every night and bragged about how they could spend all the money they wanted. Sam flew home in First Class.”
“The grant didn’t pay for that,” he objected. “I had upgrade points.”
“Well, you’re not supposed to do those things. Then Sam didn’t want to teach, so you doubled his salary so he wouldn’t have to. That was from your grant.”
“He can’t do research if he has to teach full-time. No one told me I couldn’t do that.”
“They tried, but whenever the financial office calls, you tell them to eff off—or you pass them on to Marybeth. And speaking of Marybeth…”
He felt his face grow hot and he wished Abby under a bus. “She told me she was homeless,” he muttered. “What could I do? I wasn’t going to let her go hungry.”
“How much did she take you for before you figured out everything she said was a lie?” Abby smirked.
Now he was getting mad. “Everything she said was not a lie. Maybe your office should have cared less about where her salary was coming from and more about the fact that she was being harassed.”
“We had no reason to believe it was real.” Abby got a closed look, and he knew she knew things that she wasn’t telling. She was truly the dark side. Her office was the origin of the STI infamous coverups, and who knew but that she wasn’t the author of some of them herself.
If Hitler and Stalin had come in at the moment and sat on either side of Abby, Lou would have been hard pressed to say which of the three was the most evil.
“What do you know that you’re not telling me?” he hissed.
“Nothing I’m at liberty to talk about,” she sneered back, slurping the last drops from her plastic cup.
They read the paper in silence until the pre-boarding call, and Abby seemed relieved that they weren’t the only ones to pre-board. She hung back and helped a young mother with a toddler and a baby, which was good, because Lou knew he looked like a freak trying to get into the window seat. He’d got used to Barrow staring, but that was mostly OK because she was usually doing something equally clumsy at the same time. Abby would never crash into the rosebushes, or wallow in the mud, or pick her way through sand on rollerblades.
By the time the young family was settled, he had managed to at least make it into the seat and retrieve his cushion to sit on, deflating it a little so it wouldn’t explode in the reduced air pressure of the cabin. He was becoming quite the expert. Abby hesitated a moment, then finally sat down next to him, hissing into his ear, “What a repulsive spoiled brat. If it pulls my hair again, I’m going to put it over my knee and smack its heinie.”
He choked out a surprised laugh. Her evil was kind of funny when it was aimed elsewhere. “Since you’re so pissed to be here, and I’m such a loser, tell me why you agreed to do this,” he asked casually.
“Because Kuzno is a thousand times worse,” she replied as if that were obvious.
“In ways you aren’t at liberty to describe?”
“Certainly not. Got a pencil?”
He was a theorist—of course he had a pencil. Abby folded the New York Times crossword into a neat square and the conversation came to yet another end.
Lou was getting pretty sick of the silent treatment. He pretended to read a journal article for a few minutes, but then he could stand it no more. “Never mind Kuzno,” he dismissed. “It’s Rose who is up to something.”
Abby did a very unexpected thing. She burst into tears.
He had limited sympathy. If she was crying, it meant she felt guilty—and if she felt guilty, it meant she knew something she wasn’t supposed to.
“Everyone seems to know it but me,” Lou persisted. “He tried to recruit Gerson, who refused, and he’d been trying to get Barrow for years before she finally agreed to leave Canada.”
Abby pulled herself together quickly, shaking her head. “Not sure if that’s part of the pattern. She only agreed to leave Canada because of Roger.”
“Who’s Roger?”
“Who’s Roger? Oh my gosh. She didn’t tell you who Roger was?”
Lou listened, half in disbelief, as Abby told him that one of their old graduate school colleagues had been the only reason Barrow had gone to Canada and certainly the only reason she’d stayed, and that she’d left after he killed himself last winter by jumping into the St. Laurence river. So there was the suicide thing—why hadn’t she told Lou?
He sat speechless as the drinks cart came by, barely able to ask for orange juice.
“Roger was always manic-depressive and a little weird,” Abby explained, blowing her nose into her napkin before sipping her Diet Coke. “He’d tried to become a Catholic priest when he was a teenager, but they kicked him out when he ODed on psych drugs. Then he went to get a PhD, but he was always kind of ethereal and otherworldly, if you know what I mean. He did all sorts of volunteer work helping old people and sick children and things, and was a hopeless virgin, I don’t think he’d ever even been kissed. When he graduated he went back to Montreal to live with his family because he needed stability in his life. She didn’t see him for fifteen years, and then she showed up on the doorstep and wanted to be his friend again, but you can imagine that it was less than heartwarming—you don’t believe a word I’m saying, do you?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Lou addressed his cup. “I just think you’re attributing an awful lot of emotion to someone who, well, face it… has something missing in that department.”
Abby sprayed a mouthful of ice chips in a shriek of demonic laughter. “Finally someone says it! I can’t believe you can stand working with her.”
“Barrow’s a genius,” Lou said loyally.
“Bleah!” Absinthe made a cat-with-a-chicken-bone noise. “Let me ask you something,” she declared finally. “Did she ever express the slightest sympathy over what happened to you?”
“She’s very nice to me,” Lou said quietly. “She takes me on bike rides and to the climbing gym.”
“That wasn’t the question. Did she ever admit that your life was ruined by going to grad school in physics?”
“No, of course not.” He was scandalized. “You can’t expect that of her. This university is everything to her.” He had been waiting for a safer moment to bring up the story, but he couldn’t resist. “She did tell me that you left grad school because you were about six inches from being like me, or worse.”
“More like two feet—but yeah.” Abby snorted and crumpled her plastic cup. “Whose fault did she say it was?”
“The Missionary’s, I think.”
“Pfft! Typical. The Missionary was the one who died. He was a stuffed shirt and everyone hated him, but he didn’t deserve that.”
“Lori said you were blackmailing the Missionary,” he prompted.
“I wasn’t exactly blackma—oh, all right,” she acknowledged. “He had it coming. So we would always meet in this one room and sit on a bench, and the killer decided he could mount his hunting rifle outside the building to aim into the window and shoot me. Instead, as you know, it got the Missionary. I wasn’t looking at him, because he had this nasty little moustache and this annoying mouth like a cat butt, so I was looking the other way when I heard kind of a plopping noise and something wet hit me.”
“Eeew,” was all he could think of to say that didn’t involve taking the Lord’s name in vain. Barrow always said that you must never swear in front of Abby because of the things she had been taught in Sunday School.
“Worse than eew! I thought he’d spit at me or something, so I turned around to slap him and saw that there was a hole in his head, and that the wet stuff was some brains.”
“Tabarnak,” he exclaimed, trying out a way to blaspheme that couldn’t possibly offend her.
“Yeah. I just sat in shock for
a minute, and he put his hand up to his head, saw the blood, then grabbed the bench and slid down slowly, slowly to the floor. Then I started screaming.”
“Weren’t you afraid the killer was still there?”
“Of course! I thought if I screamed he might run away. I didn’t know the gun had been programmed and so the murderer was sitting in class when it happened. A fifth-year grad student found me—us—and called the police and the ambulance.”
“Did they catch him right away?”
“No—it took months. We went to class with him all the rest of the year, and then they let him finish his degree in prison!”
“Holy crap.” Lou started giggling hysterically. “Physics graduate school. I had no idea.”
“You think I did? I had flashbacks for years. Even now I still wake up screaming—but I don’t need to tell you,” she finished kind of sheepishly, not looking at him. “I don’t know how you stand it.”
Lou looked out the window at the relentlessly blue sky. “Sometimes denial can be a superpower,” was all he could find to say, as the plane dipped down to land with the horizon visible as far as the eye could see.
Thirty: SLAP-happy
Carol finally got her SLAP. It wasn’t one she would have asked for, but beggars can’t be choosers: she was supposed to take all fifty paper copies of the completed proposal, plus fifty CDs, on the red-eye from Los Angeles to Washington, DC to deliver the precious cargo in person. If she arrived one second past five pm EST on December the twenty-first, all of the lab’s hard work would have been for naught.
She couldn’t help thinking that there was an element of punishment in this task. It was one of the very worst. The completed proposals would weigh more than a hundred pounds and would barely fit, with massive effort, into the largest possible wheeled carry-on plus two smaller “personal items.” They greatly exceeded the carry-on weight limit, and so the designated deliveryman, if caught, was supposed to say “Urgent space research secret government business!”
Some people (Bob) enjoyed doing this, but Carol couldn’t imagine herself trying it, even less getting away with it. She wasn’t aggressive enough, or imposing enough, and—face it—didn’t believe strongly enough in what she was delivering.
How could she? It was riddled with embarrassing errors. Besides the ones she’d inserted for Bob, there were various other things that even she knew were ridiculous. “Organisms like those known to be found on Mars”? Were proofreaders forbidden to give scientific input? Still, how had that got past the scientific review?
Things between her and Bob had degenerated so much that she couldn’t even tell him where she was going. She wasn’t even sure if he was still on Unclean status. They passed like alley cats in the night, growling at each other.
She just wanted this all to be over so everything could get back to normal. She ordered a new hard drive for her microscope computer, hoping that the technical groups would be able to pay her as soon as the PIP ended. But then the scope itself started acting up—she suspected Bob had shocked it by yanking the cord out of the wall. She couldn’t get it to function reliably, and the LEPERs adamantly refused to take van Gnubbern off PNG status.
She knew she was riding the ragged edge at the LEPERLab, so she didn’t even dare call van Gnubbern from work. Instead she waited until she got home and had dinner. Bob had still not appeared, so she left a message on van Gnubbern’s voicemail and started packing her suitcase.
Her phone rang right away.
“Um, Dr. van Gnubbern?” Carol asked cautiously, afraid that Bob would return and interrupt their conversation. “I would really like to talk to you—about the microscope and, well, some other things. Are you free this evening for a coffee?”
Her spirits sank as he mumbled and muttered, but finally he said something that revealed he was a man after her own heart. “I’m actually trying to lose some weight,” he confessed, “and pastry always ruins me. I think the rain has stopped; what do you say to a hike up Henninger Flats by moonlight?”
He was a man after Lori’s heart, too, because he had no car and she had to pick him up from his house halfway down the hill and take him back up to the National Forest. It was kind of cramped in her car, with her stuff for the trip tomorrow—all but the proposals—but he tucked himself in amidst the baggage with a cheery grin.
Wigbert van Gnubbern was such a jolly, lovable old man that she didn’t even laugh at his walking stick and green lederhosen. He was definitely paunchy and jowly, but his legs were sturdy and he started up the incredibly steep slope at a faster speed than she could maintain, talking all the while. The microscope was the last thing from his mind; no doubt he was flattered to be asked his opinion about things at last. She didn’t even have to prompt him.
“You’re a friend of Lori Barrow’s? Good. I have always specialized in misfits and marginals, and perhaps you could say that she was my first. You knew her in graduate school? Yes? Well, the thirteen-year old Lori Barrow was quite another beast. And I mean that literally.”
Blessedly, he stopped for breath just over the first rise, waiting for her to catch up. Carol had never been here at night, and had never imagined it could be this beautiful. The steep east-facing slope was miserable and dusty in the morning, but in the light of a rising almost-full moon was pleasantly cool and refreshing. There were wildflowers opening all around her, ones that hid their blooms from the heat of the day and released their subtle scent as the sunlight faded. The yellow and lavender both stood out against the surrounding hills in the moonlight.
“She had been raised by criminals,” continued van Gnubbern, punctuating the word with a bang of his walking stick against a piece of granite. “Lie, cheat, steal, kill—why not, if they would benefit you? I can easily tell you that this is the only university where she would have survived. You were an undergraduate here?”
“No, of course not,” Carol exclaimed.
He understood that immediately. “Nor I. Not nearly intelligent enough. Well, STI is unique in two ways, both enabled by the fact that we accept only students in the top half of 1% of their graduating classes. The first is of course our House system, which was established in the school’s infancy when our first president decided fraternities were inappropriate. The second is our Honor Code. We have no exam monitors, no tests for plagiarism, didn’t even have locks in the gym lockers until the math department hired that kleptomaniac. There is only one rule for our students and faculty: ‘No member of the Superior Community shall take unfair advantage of another member.’ Well, this young Barrow could understand, and she learns quickly. We do not steal because it inconveniences others. We do not lie unless absolutely necessary. I also believe that she was aided by the calming effect of electron microscopy, which takes a good deal of patience and rather more creativity than you might imagine. Do you play an instrument?”
For once she wasn’t a total boson. “I play the flute.”
“Yes, so you understand. So, quite quickly Lori became a contributing and productive member of our Community. I am very proud of the way she turned out, by the way.” He paused again, breathed deeply, and bent to sniff a flower. “California lilac. Rather a stunted member of the species, I’m afraid. Do you know that the true lilac only develops its intoxicating scent if exposed to a winter frost?”
“I do,” said Carol. “I’m from the Midwest and it’s the thing I miss the most. That, and maybe a White Christmas.”
Their Christmas wasn’t white, but as they climbed the hill they passed from desert shrub into the beginnings of an evergreen forest, and Carol could forgive California its failings. Above them, they could see the peaks of Mount Hansen and the shadow of its radio astronomy array.
“I wasn’t so lucky with some of my others,” continued van Gnubbern solemnly. “I have been sued a total of fourteen times, and it is thanks to STI’s team of lawyers that I have only once had to appear in court. I have been punched twice and severely beaten once. I spent two weeks under the protection of a private
bodyguard.”
“Your students did those things?” Rather pointlessly, Carol found herself asking, “Why?”
“Why the misfits? I cannot tell you. Perhaps because I was so lucky with Lori. Perhaps because I am eccentric myself, and have always felt excluded because of my terrible name.”
That seemed like a very strange excuse, but Carol prodded gently, “And Jim Kalb?”
“Ah, yes. As you can see, nothing really out of the ordinary for me. I knew he had had serious problems in graduate school, particularly problems with women. But we had only one woman in our department—the unfortunate Marybeth, who even more unfortunately had an advisor who also had issues with the other sex.”
“Kuzno?”
“I can see that you are not a stranger to our intrigues. Yes, sadly our new Head has certain old-school prejudices that we have recently come to consider unacceptable. He does not believe that women should be physicists, much less theorists. However, there was no other advisor willing or able to take on Marybeth for the first two years that she was here. When Jim arrived, Sasha—Dr. Kuznetsov or, if you will, Kuzno—saw this as an opportunity to try to drive Marybeth away.”
Carol remembered what had happened to Abby in grad school, and a long shiver ran through her. The night no longer seemed refreshing, but cold, and clouds were beginning to shadow the moon. “What did he do to her?”
“That I’m afraid I cannot tell you.” Dr. van Gnubbern paused for breath again. “Not because I am not willing, but because I do not know precisely. I can tell you that none of us took it particularly seriously.”
Yeah, Carol thought, typical. “Why not?”
Van Gnubbern resumed walking, taking the steep left turn around the ridge onto a trail that was less well-illuminated by the moon. “Marybeth was special,” he said at last, picking his way slowly through the rocks. “We all believed she was exaggerating, if not downright imagining things. We had all seen such things before, and we knew how it would end—with a quick and quiet lawsuit, she would take a year or two worth of salary to depart quietly and pursue her career elsewhere.”