The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  “I say we draw lots and the loser immolates himself under the first bulldozer,” Word Perkins cries excitedly.

  “We voted for militant action, not a suicide raid,” D.J. notes in alarm. She leans closer to the microphone. “I’ll accept motions on militant action.”

  The Baptist minister vaults off the organ stool and thrusts a fist into the air. “Let’s knock off this parliamentary crap, break up into committees and put the show on the road.”

  The crowd, with a bewildered Lemuel lost in its heart, roars approval.

  Science says us the core of our planet is molten iron and nickel, millions of degrees hot if not hotter. Empirical evidence contradicts this. Crouching behind a low fence at the edge of the field with what Rain called the B Team, with sunrise a good half hour off, I felt through the thick soles of my new Timberland boots (which cost the equivalent, I must have been out of my mind to buy them, of 79,990 rubles at the Village Store) a bone-numbing iciness emanating from the bowels of the earth. If there was molten anything between my feet and China, I could not feel a hint of it.

  Rain had warned me to dress warmly, which is how come I was wearing almost everything I owned: I had on long underwear over my short underwear, I had on two shirts, I wore the sleeveless sweater my mother knitted me after she was released from prison over my store-bought sweater with sleeves, I wore my khaki scarf wound around the lower half of my face, I had on my faded brown overcoat which fell to my ankles, I had on Rain’s ski cap with something called a pom-pom at the crown.

  I could have been wearing nothing for all the good it did.

  We had gotten there at four in the morning in order to “take up positions” before the state troopers blocked the highway. That was how the Baptist minister had phrased it. He had been an Army chaplain in Vietnam during the imperialist war waged by America the Beautiful to dominate southeast Asia. He spoke in military terminology and made taking up positions sound like the kind of maneuver a Roman legion might execute.

  I remember looking to my right and left to see if anyone in the B Team beside the Rebbe, who had not stopped whispering since we arrived, was still alive. In the silvery stillness of a waning moon, I spotted vapor seeping from the lips of Rain and Mayday and Dwayne and Shirley and Word Perkins, I heard muffled coughs and grunts farther down the line. These faint signs reassured me there was life on earth.

  “In classical Hindu mythology,” the Rebbe was lecturing me, he was frightened, it was his way of keeping the devils at bay, “the cosmos passes through three phases: creation, symbolized by Brahma; order, symbolized by Vishnu; and a return to disorder, symbolized by Shiva. This mirrors Creation, Eden and the Great Flood in Torah. The order of Vishnu and the disorder of Shiva, like the order of Eden and the disorder of the Flood, should maybe be seen as two sides of the same coin, two faces of the same God, two visions of the same reality. The way I read Torah, these visions coexist as they coexist in the theory of chaos, demonstrating, you want an unbiased opinion, once more—”

  Rain’s tight voice interrupted the Rebbe. “So here they come.”

  Her words were picked up down the line. “Here they come, angel,” Shirley echoed in a tense undertone.

  “Here they come,” said Word Perkins, and snorted.

  “Here who comes?” I asked Rain, but she was too busy peering over the top of the fence we were crouching behind to pay attention to me. Willing my joints to defrost, I rose to my knees and looked over the top of the fence. I could see the headlights of cars creeping slowly around a curve about a kilometer down the highway. Rain started counting out loud in a voice that indicated her jaw muscles were frozen. “One, two, three, four, Jesus, five, six, holy Christ, seven, eight, nine. Seven carloads full of goddamn cops! The big headlights behind must be the flatbeds with the bulldozers. Who do they think they’re going up against, Saddam Hussein?”

  The A Team was positioned between us and the headlights. The dozen or so kamikazes, the Baptist minister’s code name for the volunteers on the A Team, had chained themselves together, with the ones on either end chained to the stanchions of the bridge that straddled a frozen stream. We could make out the kamikazes silhouetted in the headlights as the police cars drew up, three abreast, on the far end of the bridge. We could hear car doors slam, we could hear the kamikazes shouting the slogans they had rehearsed in the church: “Backwater has no taste for nuclear waste,” or words to that effect.

  Suddenly a brilliant light flashed on, bathing the bridge in daylight. “That means the TV cameras are filming,” Rain announced excitedly.

  We could see old Professor Holloway striding back and forth in front of the human chain, his cane flailing over his head, as a phalanx of state troopers, some of them armed with what looked like shotguns, approached. Then a voice brayed over a battery-powered bullhorn, “I’m holdin’ here in my hand uh court injunction prohibitin’ you from interferin’ with the ‘dozers scheduled to break ground for the nuclear-waste dump. I’m orderin’ you to circulate. If you refuse to circulate, I’m gonna hafta go an’ arrest you for obstruction uh—”

  The rest of the warning was lost in wailing, sirenlike feedback.

  Rain pressed her lips against my ear. “Dudes who are armed also talk to dudes who aren’t in a peculiar way, right?”

  The state police made short work of the A Team. Troopers carrying enormous wirecutters moved in and severed the locks on the chains, and the kamikazes, gallantly chanting their slogan, were hauled off to a bus that had pulled up behind the flatbed trucks.

  I remember wondering if the bus would be heated; I remember thinking the sooner we were arrested, the greater our chances would be of living through the night.

  Our master plan, devised by the Baptist minister, the only one among us besides me (I spent my two years in the army picking cotton in Uzbekistan) with any serious military experience, was the same as Wellington’s at Waterloo. As the Baptist minister explained it, our strategy was one against ten, our tactic ten against one. The A Team was the key to success. As their chains were being clipped, the kamikazes were supposed to mislead the police into thinking the other members of the anti-nuclear-waste-dump movement (are you ready for this one, Raymond Chandler?) had chickened out.

  The state troopers apparently fell for the ruse, because they waved the two flatbed trucks on without inspecting the dump site. The first faint smudge of light gray mixed with streaks of ocher appeared in the east as the trucks pulled up parallel to the field, not fifty meters from where we were huddled behind the fence. Thinking that if more demonstrators turned up they would come from the direction of Backwater, the police parked their cars on the bridge, blocking it to traffic. The drivers of the two giant bulldozers, along with four men wearing plastic helmets over ski hoods, started winching down the ramps fitted onto the tailgates of the trucks.

  The winches squealed. The four steel ramps clanged onto the pavement.

  As if this was a prearranged signal, the Baptist minister stood up and bellowed “Onward, Christian soldiers!” With that, he leaped through a gap in the fence. D.J., a tentlike cape swirling around her ankles, plunged after him. Off to my right several football players started a flanking movement. I caught a glimpse of some nice asses as the cheerleaders, still wearing short skirts and tights, scrambled over the fence. I caught a glimpse of the Rebbe, in a coal-black overcoat and a coal-black fedora, rising with great dignity to his feet, carefully dusting the dirt from his knees before striding off toward the flatbed trucks.

  “Chazak,” he exclaimed more to himself than to those around him, so it seemed to me. “Be strong.”

  “Come on,” Rain yelled, pulling Mayday and me after her. Dwayne led Shirley through another gap in the fence. The next thing you know a wave of about fifty of us were dancing like American Indians around the six workmen and the two flatbed trucks.

  Our tactic—ten of us to one of them—had succeeded.

  One of the workers climbed up on a running board, reached into the cabin and leaned
on the Klaxon. From the bridge, a siren on one of the police cars answered. We could see the state troopers scrambling into their cars. Two started up simultaneously and collided. With a screech of tires, the other cars bore down on us. Close by, the motor of one of the mammoth bulldozers spurted into life; then the engine was gunned and the bulldozer started to crawl on its giant tank treads toward the tailgate ramp.

  “Kamikazes needed to block the ramps with their bodies,” roared the Baptist minister.

  “The kamikazes have all been arrested,” shouted Dwayne.

  “Oh, dear,” moaned the Baptist minister.

  Then state troopers in brown uniforms and brown Stetsons were spilling out of police cruisers and charging the cheerleaders, who bravely defended themselves with their batons. A blinding white light sputtered on, bathing the scene in daylight. I could make out two men with long, thin cameras mounted on their shoulders right behind the state troopers.

  Rain pulled Mayday and me around to the back of the first flatbed truck, the one with the enormous bulldozer inching toward the ramp. “Lie down on the ramp,” she shouted in my ear. “They won’t have the guts to squash anyone.”

  She was holding on to Mayday’s leash with one hand and my scarf with the other hand, as if the last thing in the world she wanted me to do was follow her instructions. Her voice said go, her hand on my leash said stay. Her seaweed eyes, as big as eyes get and brimming with fear, stared at me as if I was a potential victim.

  Suddenly I knew where I had seen those eyes before.

  Under the circumstances, lying down on the ramp was effortless. The fact is I was disappointed when I realized that this was all she expected me to do for her. I would have done anything. I would have leaped from a cliff with one of those long hemp cords that brings you up short centimeters from the ground tied to my ankle. It was a way of paying a debt.

  Here I ought to insert a footnote, I ought to put the story into time. I saw a demonstration in Leningrad once, it took place in 1968 the day the state television interrupted its programs to announce that Soviet troops had liberated Prague from the counterrevolutionaries. I happened to be driving in my Skoda past the Smolny Institute, which was the Communist party headquarters when there was still a Communist party and it had a headquarters, when six valiant souls unfurled banners denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They had barely raised the banners over their innocent heads when they were engulfed by a tidal wave of KGB agents spilling out of the doors and ground-floor windows of the building, as if they had been bottled up inside for just such an eventuality. The KGB agents were not gentle with the four young men and two young women: They tore the banners from their hands and flung the demonstrators to the ground and kicked at them with the thick-soled, steel-toed shoes that KGB men always wore. I saw one of the young women being dragged by her hair toward an unmarked truck. As she was pulled across the cobblestones past my car she gazed up at me, her seaweed-green eyes fixed on mine with an intensity only a lover can bring to the act of looking. She stared at me, I realized this later, as if I were a potential victim. In the time it takes a heart to beat, an eye to blink, a lung to suck in a thimbleful of air, I fell wildly, eternally, achingly in love with her. I am humiliated to say you this, but watching her being dragged away by her hair, dear God, this is a true detail, I did not go to the aid of my beloved. I did not get out of my Czechoslovak-made Skoda and walk up to the officer in charge and identify myself as the youngest candidate member in the history of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and lodge a protest. Here were the Fascists, here was a major river, yet I did not make a stand. I still had two signatures, you see, one for internal passports and pay books and visa applications, one for documents I might want to deny having signed.

  I wish to God it would be otherwise, but in my case what you see is not what you get. To my dying day I will never forgive myself for this cowardliness—which, I suppose, is why, when Rain said me lie on the ramp, I thought: What besides my life do I have to lose, since everything else I have already lost?

  Which is how I came to stretch out my hundred-and-six-year-old body on the ramp while the world went crazy around me. Shadowy figures were running in every direction, people were screaming, a tear-gas canister landed at Dwayne’s feet, rolled a short way, exploded under the short skirt of one of the cheerleaders, releasing a thin white cloud, the state troopers were fumbling with the gas masks, the Baptist minister was cursing and choking, D.J. was vomiting, the Rebbe, hatless, was holding her head. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dwayne’s main squeeze Shirley being dragged away by two state troopers twice her size, I could not see their shoes but I knew they had to be thick-soled, steel-toed, I could see Mayday calmly urinating in the middle of this madness, I could see Word Perkins, a crazy grin frozen on his face, letting the air out of a giant tire, I could see Rain dancing up and down under the cab of the enormous bulldozer rubbing her eyes and shrieking to the driver, “There is a human being lying on the ramp. So do you hear me, you goddamn motherfucker? You’re gonna murder a Homo chaoticus if you’re not careful.”

  It is hard to know whether the driver heard her over the chaos of the moment, or if he did, whether he simply did not believe her. Whatever the explanation, he continued backing the bulldozer toward the ramp. Twisting my neck, I looked up and saw the giant tread jut out over the end of the flatbed truck and begin to tilt down toward the ramp on which I was lying. I turned my head away. I was not going to move, but I certainly did not have the stomach to watch either. I felt my body grow hot and thought there might be molten iron and nickel between me and China after all until I found myself squinting into an incredibly brilliant light and heard someone yelling for everyone to get out of his way so he could shoot. It occurred to me that the state troopers were going to put a bullet through my heart before the bulldozer crushed the body it was beating in, which I interpreted as the American way of preventing cruelty to Homo sapiens.

  I heard an unearthly Mayday-like howl from Rain. “Get off the goddamn ramp!”

  I heard myself tell myself this was a major river, I was lucky to have found another one in my lifetime.

  Then suddenly the pandemonium gave way to a silence so profound the planet Earth seemed to me to have abruptly stopped rotating. I wondered if such a thing was possible, I wondered if this could be the pure, unadulterated random event in the history of the universe that I was looking for. Then I noticed the Rebbe’s eyes bulging out of his skull and I distinctly heard the words oy and vey spatter on the pavement like two swollen drops from a faucet and it dawned on me that I was able to hear the Eastern Parkway Or Hachaim Hakadosh because I could no longer hear the motor of the bulldozer. I turned my head to look back up the ramp but I could not see anything and then I understood why I could not see anything, it was because the tank tread was centimeters from my face and blocking my view, and I saw in my mind’s eye the girl being dragged by her hair across the landscape of my uncrushed heart and I thought, Whoever you are, I have paid my debt to you, I have been passionate about someone who did not exist, and then Rain was pulling at my feet and helping me squirm out from under the tread and climb off the ramp and clinging to me and sobbing hysterically.

  And then I fainted.

  Chapter Five

  The doors on the three large wire-mesh holding cages have been left ajar so that the sixty-eight people being detained for trial can use the toilets without bothering the sheriff, who can be heard through the open door that leads to the front office. He is trying to figure out where Jerusalem is.

  “When there’s sun, which isn’t uh everyday occurrence, it rises through that window,” the sheriff, Chester Combes, is saying, “which means by rights east oughta be somewhere over there.”

  “You got to take into account this here is a winter sun, sheriff,” cautions Norman, the rail-thin deputy sheriff who deftly fingerprinted the demonstrators when they were bused in by the state troopers. “Which means a hair south of east oughta be just about where the wat
er cooler is.”

  “You went’n asked my opinion, I’m givin’ you my opinion,” the sheriff tells the Rebbe with a hint of irritation. “Jerusalem looks to be to the lefta the water cooler, more near the middle row uh wanted posters on the bulletin board. You can take it, you can leave it, either way. I got other things to think about asides tryin’ to figure out where Jerusalem is, like findin’ uh serial killer.”

  “Uh-huh,” Norman agrees.

  “To be on the safe side,” Rebbe Nachman says diplomatically, “I’ll split the difference.”

  The Rebbe meanders back into his holding pen, converts a scarf into a prayer shawl, covers his head with an enormous handkerchief knotted at the four corners and, facing a putative Jerusalem, begins his evening prayers. Bowing and straightening and glancing over his left shoulder now and then to check for Cossacks, he intones in a singsong voice, Borukh atoh adoynoy, eloyheynu melekh ha’oylom, asher bidvoroy ma’ariv arovim uvekhokhmoh poyseyakh she’orim uvisvunoh makhalif es hazemanim …”

  The football players and cheerleaders, camping on mattresses supplied by the county from its stock of disaster supplies, fill the air with a slightly jazzed-up version of “We shall overcome,” but quickly get bored with it and drift into bawdy limericks. “There once was a cockney from Boston …” they intone in voices that become inaudible at the X-rated parts. Each limerick is capped by a burst of raucous laughter.

  Sitting on a bench outside the holding pens, the Baptist minister is reading Saint Mark from a small leather-bound Bible: “They came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?”

  In a corner of the middle holding pen, a dozen graduate students, along with Backwater U’s three librarians, D.J. and half a dozen teachers from the university sit in a circle around Professor Holloway, who is conducting a seminar on Etruscan votive art.