“You know, you told me all of that already. Also your sister is getting divorced.”
“Please answer the question.”
Dawn took a second to think.
“Okay, you see here, now I’m getting a little bit mad, because it’s a bullshit question. You want to know if I ran home shouting, ‘Hey, hey, I just fucked a professor’? Or do you want to know if there’s a chance that one of the several friends that I was at that bar with, because of course I was there with friends, saw me leave with you? To the former I say screw you, and to the latter I say how the hell should I know?”
She didn’t yell or even get animated while she spoke, but her face took on a pointed fury that Oscar recognized as a kind of pugilism. She was enjoying this, in a certain way.
“And you know what, fine,” she said. “I thought maybe I liked you but this is me officially requesting that you leave me alone. Congratulations. Christ.”
Dawn got up and moved to the door and opened it. She stood in the doorway and turned back to him. She looked at the floor briefly and then back up at him. Her face had regained its normal rounded edges. She took a breath.
“I’m sorry I got mad. I actually think you’re a sweet guy. And I’m sorry your mom died. That’s terrible. Still though, fuck you.”
Oscar stared at a point on his desktop, wondering where to go from here. He crossed his arms over his chest and exhaled. Her eyes lingered on him for a moment and then she turned to go.
“Wait,” Oscar said.
She turned back.
“Listen, I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” Dawn said. “You’re a mess, but you’ll get some of this stuff figured out.”
And with that she left.
When Oscar got back home, there were two emails from Dawn in his inbox, sent five minutes apart:
Professor,
I realize now that I wouldn’t have said what I said in your office if I didn’t at least subconsciously consider myself as occupying some sort of privileged position re: you. For instance I couldn’t imagine saying the F-word in front of a prof under normal circumstances, or referring to them as “a sweet guy.” So I apologize for that.
Also I guess I was being a little disingenuous or evasive when I said that I didn’t know who knew about what happened with us. The truth is this: my friends saw me leave with you. Later they tried to find out what happened but I didn’t tell them anything, because I’m like that, contrary to what you might think.
Best,
D
The second email read:
I regret sending that last email. Let’s just please forget about it.
Oscar counted this as some kind of minor victory, for her to share at least a little in his discomfort.
As he sat there looking at his inbox, a new email popped in the top of the queue from the assistant to the chair of the philosophy department, with the subject line YOUR IMMEDIATE RESPONSE REQUESTED. Blood rushed to his face. With icy terror, already halfway prepared to accept his ignominious firing, he clicked on it, and there was so much text in the window that opened that he panicked and clicked out. He told himself that he would read this later, when he was in a better mental state. For the moment, he preferred to not know.
Under normal circumstances, these emails would have preoccupied him entirely. But for the rest of the day, he found that he could not stop thinking about St. Germaine.
He felt robbed in a deeply personal way that gnawed at him constantly. The fact was that there was a man out there somewhere who had taken his family’s money, money that was made by his parents’ honest and underpaid work, work that had overpaid for Oscar to pursue an interest that was, even for the Academy, the hardest to justify economically. But it wasn’t just the money; there was also something further, something about his mother’s death that he could not convince himself was coincidental. For her to have just died—he was, it turned out, unable to accept it. There must have been more to it. St. Germaine would have answers. He had to.
Oscar couldn’t name the resolution that he desired, exactly. He wasn’t feeling violent, although he was certainly filled with anger, and he had actually never been prone to acts of violence and so wouldn’t have been able to accurately say what the prelude to a violent act felt like. He just thought it might be good to know at least where the guy even was.
He pored over the search engine results again, the same low-activity message boards, the same outdated pictures. He even signed up for an account with one forum just so that he could leave a query asking if anyone knew how to contact St. Germaine. He found a phone number listed on St. Germaine’s website, but when he called it, it was out of service. There was no email or physical address listed.
Sitting there at his little table, Oscar’s hatred began to build. This guy, this fucking guy, who considered himself some kind of philosopher, thought he knew what was good for Oscar’s mother. He thought he was a philosopher because he tricked sad, vulnerable people into thinking he was smart? I am a fucking philosopher, Oscar thought. I know what it means to actually try to use nothing but thought to move closer to a description of reality. I am doing the real work of perception.
* * *
As he pulled the cap from a bottle of cheap bourbon that he had bought on the way home, he thought about how you go through your life hoping that you’ll sneak past the hounds of catastrophe without letting them get your scent, you hope you don’t get horribly burned, don’t drink two beers and then drive and obliterate a family in a wreck, don’t have a child and love it and then be forced to watch it die of some ingeniously horrific disease, don’t get framed for murder and rot innocent in jail. But sometimes people’s lives just up and go to shit. He could feel it beginning to happen now, his life listing into the tilt that would precede a topple.
Could the solution be something as simple as money? No, certainly not.
But it was a start.
He opened his laptop, and then a blank email.
Mr. St. Germaine, he began.
My name is Oscar Boatwright. You may remember my mother, Delia, who was a big fan of yours, I’m told, and who I believe met with you several times. I’m sorry to have tell you this, if in fact you do remember her, but she has unfortunately passed away quite suddenly. As you might expect, we are all quite broken up over losing her.
Like you, I am interested in the mind, and in free will in particular. I am in fact an assistant professor of philosophy, with a focus on metaphysics. I’ve been watching some of your seminars, and although I’m not finished yet, I have some questions. For one—do you have any degrees? I’ll be honest: I’m not sure that your premises support your conclusions. But what I’m more interested in is obtaining a better idea of what was going on in my mother’s head in what proved to be her last days—as I understand it, your methods were of great comfort to her. Can you tell me any of what the two of you discussed? What she said? Anything really.
I’d love it if you’d respond. You can call me at the below phone number at any time, or if you’re located somewhere on the west coast, I’d be happy to come find you.
Please, I do hope you get back to me.
Sincerely,
Oscar Boatwright
P.S. Can I have my inheritance back, motherfucker?
Oscar leaned back, took another swig of bourbon, and reread what he had written. After a moment of catharsis, he highlighted the text and prepared to delete it, but then he had an idea. He opened a blank spreadsheet and started listing possible email addresses: PSG, PSGermaine, Paul.St.Germaine. After a few minutes he had several dozen guesses. He then duplicated each one with an @ sign and the five biggest email providers he could think of offhand.
Acting quickly, before he could stop himself, he copied this list of hundreds of email addresses into the bcc line of the email he had composed, added the subject line For Paul St. Germaine, and,
after a moment’s circumspection, deleted the postscript. With one more drink, he hit Send and regretted it instantly, somehow in fact even one instant before his finger had clicked the button. He closed his laptop as the undeliverable notices began to flood his inbox, and went to bed, hating himself.
* * *
The next day, as he was standing in his kitchen making coffee, trying to focus on small things one at a time, his cell phone rang. Number unknown.
“Hi, Oscar?” she said when he answered. “I mean, Professor? I got your phone number from the campus directory. I’ve got something I’d like to talk about. Could you meet me somewhere? This is Dawn, by the way.”
“Can it not wait for office hours? What’s going on?”
“I shouldn’t say over the phone.”
13
One thing, at least, was perfectly clear: he should not be doing this. He should not be going to an off-campus address to meet with a student he had slept with and whose motives were still unknown to him, especially given that she had sounded additionally out of sorts on the phone when she told him that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow.
This he had taken as something of a threat. He decided that he would go, partly due to the worry that she could still easily ruin him if he were to make her unhappy and partly due to an embarrassingly earnest and inextinguishable impulse to aid someone who needed help. As he grabbed his bike helmet, he realized that there was a third reason: he might be trying to hide from himself an actual fondness for her. This was a terrifying notion.
The address was for a unit within a condo complex that, according to the sign at the front gate, was called Evergreen Estates. He had never seen it before. There were no evergreen trees in sight, and in fact the grounds seemed almost completely defoliated, in the manner of all hastily constructed suburban housing developments. The design was wooden faux-rustic but clearly very new, and the parking lot, which ringed the central hub of buildings, was only about 10 percent full.
He consulted with the house number that he had scrawled on a shred of paper and found the right unit, in the heel of the U-shaped building layout. He locked his bike to a lamppost out front and walked up the steps above the garage door.
The door was open but he knocked anyway.
“He’s here,” he heard a male voice say from within.
Dawn came to the door wearing a university sweatshirt and pajama bottoms, her hair in a bun. “Professor! Come in.”
The main room, which was connected to the kitchen, was appointed in an artlessly affluent style that indicated that the place had come pre-furnished by the real estate company. A black leather couch and loveseat formed an L around a glass and brushed-steel coffee table. On the wall were several framed prints of desert and alpine landscapes and an enormous plasma screen TV played sports highlights on mute. An ionizing fan swiveled its dumb head in the corner. On the loveseat sat a young man in jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Please, sit,” Dawn said, gesturing toward the couch. “Can I get you some water?” She went to the sink.
Oscar sat.
“Nice bike,” said the man.
“Thanks,” said Oscar, feeling more lost by the second.
“Professor, this is Ramos,” Dawn called from the kitchen. “Ramos, Professor Boatwright.”
“Hi, Professor,” Ramos said, not offering his hand. He looked to be about twenty-one, with a lean, angular face and jet-black hair down to his neck. His muscles were knobby under his T-shirt. He picked his nails with a folding blade not quite long enough to be overtly sinister, but almost. Oscar managed a smile in his direction.
Dawn brought a glass of water clinking with ice and set it down in front of Oscar and sat at the other end of the couch between him and Ramos. She curled her bare feet under her thighs on the couch.
“Ramos is the campus drug dealer. Well, one of them.”
Oscar spit some of the water he was drinking back into the cup.
“That’s me,” Ramos said.
Oscar forced a nervous laugh.
“Yeah, only I’m not kidding though,” said Dawn. “But it’s cool.”
“We know you’re cool,” said Ramos, folding the knife and returning it to his pocket.
Oscar had an animal instinct to bolt for the door, but his legs felt momentarily powerless. “I see,” he said, mind whirring.
“Right, sorry. So? Should we just get right into it?” She looked at Ramos and made a why not? face. “I had an idea,” she said. “Something we could do together. This is something that I think could help you big-time. But let me say first—I know you’ll keep an open mind.”
“Okay,” Oscar said, shifting in his seat.
“It’s not that hard of a thing,” said Ramos.
“Really kind of absurdly easy, actually,” she said. “All you’d need to do is drive somewhere, pick something up, and drive back.”
Oscar felt himself dissociate from the scene only slightly, so that everything pulsated with absurdity. Things had moved from confusing to scary to hilarious all in just a few seconds. He couldn’t think of anything to say. What the fuck was going on here? Who were these fucking kids?
“I don’t have a car,” he said.
Dawn and Ramos looked at each other.
“That’s your first concern?” she said. “We’ll get that figured out. We’ll get you a car.”
“How many gears on your bike?” Ramos said.
Oscar ignored him. He felt sweat form on his forehead, blood rush to his face, his vision of the future swing out wildly over a yawning gulf, his stomach cold and leaden.
“So this is like, I take it, a pretty much illegal thing you’re asking me to do,” Oscar said.
Dawn and Ramos shared a look.
“Let’s just stick to the when/where details for a minute,” Dawn said.
Ramos was playing with the knife again. “You’d just be going for a drive, my guy. Nothing so tricky about that.”
Oscar felt real fear now. He could guess the rest of this but some part of him would hold out against the truth until he heard it spoken.
Dawn continued, “I’ve been thinking about your financial situation. Your parents, your sister, student loans. I know they pay you shit here. And now an opportunity has come up, and I arrived at the conclusion that if there was thirty thousand dollars to be made in a weekend that you might be in the exactly correct position to be interested in it.”
Oscar hunched over. The entrance of money into this conversation had caught him off guard and he could not hide his immediate desire. “Holy crap,” he said.
“I know,” Dawn said. “Big number!”
“And this is the kind of thing that you’ve...done before?”
“Good question. Not exactly. But I will tell you, I do this because I’m smart and good at it and I don’t raise suspicions and this school is expensive.”
“Fuck a student loan,” Ramos said.
Dawn continued, “And I don’t want to go into specifics, but although Ramos and I are familiar with this industry, we haven’t yet required a drive of this distance, and I don’t have a driver’s license and Ramos is a brown man.”
“It’s fucked up but it’s true,” Ramos said. “I get stopped on my way to pick up my kid from school.”
“And what’s going on here, exactly?” Oscar said, gesturing between her and Ramos.
“I don’t think you need to know the exact structure of our relationship. Partners. Let’s focus on the proposition at hand.”
Oscar blinked and looked back and forth between them. He remained silent as he felt the inescapable gravity of very large things draw him closer against his will. Ramos lit a cigarette.
“I know,” Dawn said. “This is weird. You’re learning all kinds of things about who I actually am versus who I appear to be. Which is a little shocking. But there’s really nothing so craz
y going on. Currently, until I save up enough to cover my student debt and maybe grad school, I am what must be called ‘a drug dealer.’ Plenty of people are—I don’t run from the term. And like most things that I do, I’m good at it.”
“You know, I really wouldn’t have guessed,” Oscar said.
“That’s the idea.”
Some of Oscar’s critical faculties began to come back online. He sat up and brought his pursed fingers to his lips. He took a moment to laugh at himself for ever thinking that this person might have counted sleeping with her professor as an illicit thrill.
“Okay, so,” he said, “how are you so comfortable telling me all this? How do you know I won’t...tell someone?” As he asked, Oscar already knew the answer and that he would surely never breathe a word of this to anyone.
“Well, for one, you like me, and I know you wouldn’t want to ruin my life. But also, I think you know the answer to your own question. Please don’t make me say it. I’m honestly bringing this to you in your best interest. Do you know how many people would jump at this opportunity? I could be on the phone and find somebody in an hour, probably.”
“Blackmail,” Oscar said, mostly just to see how it would feel when describing the actual state of affairs.
“That’s the word I didn’t want to say, but, yes, sure, fine, you won’t go to the school or to the police because I never told anybody about what happened between us, but I could, and I could even elaborate. God, now I feel like such a dick. And anyway, I’m completely insulated from anything incriminating in ways that I won’t explain to you for obvious reasons. Suffice it to say that my hands, hard drives, et cetera are all squeaky clean. And the school doesn’t even know Ramos exists.”
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