The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  “I am not American,” Lemuel reminds the Rebbe.

  “That’s no excuse.”

  With the temperature running above freezing for the third day in a row, Rain can be heard in the garage under the apartment tuning up an antique Harley-Davidson. Come Sunday, she revs the motor and takes Lemuel for a spin on the narrow, winding unpaved road that meanders around the lake and through a forest of pines west of Backwater. Glued to the jump seat behind Rain, hanging onto her with his thighs and arms, the side of his head flat against the back of her worn leather aviator’s jacket, the wind whistling past his ears, the clouds flitting through the bare branches overhead, he experiences a curious elation … a letting go. He feels he is moving for the first time beyond the world of chaos toward … what?

  Toward something he has had no experience with, cannot quantify, much less identify.

  Skirting the lake on the way back to Backwater, Rain pulls the Harley off the road, cuts the motor, strolls down to the edge of the lake to study her reflection in the still water. “I really did get beautiful,” she observes as Lemuel comes up beside her.

  “You did not get modest,” he comments dryly.

  “Hey, don’t rag on me,” Rain fires back. “A girl needs to know what she’s got going for her.”

  They stretch out in the sun, which projects warmth as well as light for the first time since Lemuel’s arrival in the Promised Land. The sound of Rain’s voice droning in his ear makes him drowsy, and he drifts into a fitful sleep. The little boy is cringing in a corner … the faceless men wearing thick-soled, steel-toed shoes are taking apart an armoire. …

  Rain shakes him awake. “You’re not going to go to sleep on me!”

  “I was resting my eyes.”

  “Where was I? Like when they cremate people, right? the fillings in teeth disintegrate and eat away at the layer of ozone protecting us from the sun. The fancy name for this is the greenhouse effect.” Rain turns her head and spots a smug grin on Lemuel’s face. “So I don’t see how you can smile about something as serious as the end of the world. I read where in ten years’ time there’ll be no more ozone, which means no more winter. The polar ice caps are already melting. If it keeps up, every coastal city in the world will be under water.”

  “How do you know so much about the greenhouse effect?”

  “My ex-husband, the bird killer, grew marijuana in a greenhouse. You want some free financial advice, L. Falk—invest in companies making rowboats, canoes, inflatable rafts, things like that. I used to live in Atlantic City, but being a nonswimmer, I moved inland to Backwater.”

  On the way home Rain stops off at the E-Z Mart and scores two jars of imported gefilte fish. Passing the checkout counters, she gets into a long discussion with Dwayne and Shirley, her best friends in Backwater. Dwayne argues that the basic division in the world is between the haves and the have-nots and, by extension, between the largely white, industrialized countries in the Northern Hemisphere and the largely black, agrarian countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Shirley claims Dwayne has never recovered from his Harvard education. The world is divided, any idiot ought to be able to see it, she says, between males and females. Rain cracks everyone up by insisting the world is really divided into anal and oral camps. “Anyone who thinks different is out to lunch,” she says.

  “Which one are you, babe?” Dwayne asks with a leer. “Anal or oral?”

  “I’ll give you an educated guess,” Rain retorts.

  On the spur of the moment Rain invites them up for a pot luck supper. Shirley, chewing gum intently as she eyes Lemuel sitting on the Harley’s jump seat in the parking lot, asks, “Is your Russian squeeze gonna hang around to party?”

  “Your hard-on is showing, babe,” Dwayne taunts.

  Shirley actually blushes. “Only boys get hards-on.”

  “The plural of hard-on,” Dwayne informs her with a raunchy smirk, “happens to be hard-ons.”

  “There he goes again,” Shirley tells Rain, “opening his fly and exposing his Harvard education.”

  “Rain told me you dudes were tight,” Lemuel says as they pull folding chairs up to the kitchen table.

  “We go back a long way,” Dwayne says. “Isn’t that a fact, babe?”

  Rummaging in a drawer for a church key, Rain smiles at Dwayne. “I worked as a cashier at the Mart my freshman year,” she explains to Lemuel. “It was Dwayne here who bankrolled me when I came up with the idea of opening Tender To and cutting hair.”

  “And dealing drugs,” Shirley adds mischievously.

  “You go with the flow,” Rain says. “Dwayne saved my butt—he cosigned the lease and loaned me the money to buy the barber’s chair Shirley found in the junk shop in Rochester.”

  Dreaming away on her blanket, Mayday twitches in her sleep.

  “She’s chasing butterflies,” Rain explains.

  Lemuel says moodily, “Me also, I chase small winged creatures in my sleep. Along with pure, unadulterated rainbows.”

  Shirley pushes the jars of gefilte fish across the table to Lemuel. “I bet you thought she was swiping this stuff from the Mart,” she tells him. “Dwayne’s the last of the bleeding hearts—he lets all his friends score.”

  Lemuel remarks, “A bleeding heart can also be worn on the sleeve.”

  Shirley looks puzzled. “A what can be worn where?”

  Lemuel turns to Dwayne. “So you knew all along Rain was scoring things from the store.”

  “No skin off my nose,” Dwayne says. “I mark up everything to make up for what I lose to shoplifters.”

  Rain tosses the church key to Dwayne, who opens the beers. “Hey, I told you they padded the prices,” she says.

  Shirley says, “Rain likes to say we have got to shoplift every now and then to make sure supermarkets don’t profit from people not shoplifting.” She flings an arm around Rain’s ass and gives it a squeeze. “You are something else.”

  “I like you to death,” Rain laughs. She leans down and kisses Shirley lightly on the lips.

  “Oh God, me too,” Shirley says with an awkward giggle.

  Lemuel serves the gefilte fish. Rain deals matzos as if they were cards. “You being of Jewish persuasion,” she tells Lemuel, “I thought you’d dig this.”

  “It comes from Israel,” Shirley puts in brightly.

  “As long as you were scoring gefilte fish, you could have scored horseradish,” Dwayne complains.

  After supper Lemuel excuses himself to go into the spare bedroom and feed more bytes from the sheriffs files into his desktop workstation. The others drift into the living room. Shirley drapes herself over the back of the couch and asks Rain for a hit. Rain pulls a hollowed-out copy of The Hite Report from a shelf, opens it on the table, pushes aside the LSD tabs and packets of hash, helps herself to a joint, curls up in front of the television set, which has a Humphrey Bogart movie on without the sound. She lights up, takes a long drag, hands the joint to Shirley, who takes a drag and passes it on to Dwayne.

  “I don’t get it, babe,” Dwayne says to Rain in an undertone.

  “What don’t he get?” Shirley asks Rain. “What don’t you get, angel?” Shirley asks Dwayne.

  Dwayne toys with the silver ring in his ear. “I don’t get Lem and her. I see what’s in it for him, you’d need to be blind not to. But what’s in it for Rain?”

  “Lem’s a cutie-pie,” Shirley says. “I’ll take sloppy seconds any time.”

  “He comes from a country where there’s practically no Black Plague,” Rain explains with a defiant half smile. “Also he’s innocent—when’s the last time one of you dudes wore a bleeding heart on your sleeve? Also, he’s smarter than the three of us put together.”

  “Right as Rain,” Shirley says dreamily.

  “I have a last-but-not-least,” Rain adds. “Since I’ve been rooming with him, I don’t hear drums in my ear.”

  “But does he like yogurt?” Dwayne asks suggestively.

  “Dwayne here sure likes yogurt,” Shirley notes. �
�Don’t you like yogurt, angel?”

  “Rain is aware I like yogurt. Isn’t that the case, babe?”

  Rain watches Lemuel, hunched over his computer, through the open doorway of the bedroom. Halfway through the second joint, she jumps up, snaps off the television and motions for Dwayne and Shirley to put the show on the road.

  Shirley pouts. “You’re not gonna go and kick us out, are you? It’s still today.”

  “I was sorta hoping we could crash, babe,” Dwayne announces.

  “I was hoping to check out the merchandise,” Shirley, by now pleasantly high, admits.

  “Take a rain check,” Rain says.

  “We get off on Rain’s checks, don’t we, angel?” Shirley coos.

  “Rain’s checks don’t bounce,” Dwayne says with a knowing smile.

  Rain supplies them with a couple of joints for the road. Collapsing onto the couch, she kicks off a shoe and caresses Mayday with her toes. After a while she calls out, “Like being around you makes me feel inadequate, right? Can you hear me, L. Fucking Falk? I mean, I know beans compared to you. You know so much you even know what you don’t know. Where’d you learn all that stuff about chaos and randomness?”

  Lemuel ambles into the room, raises his brows when he notices the hollowed-out book filled with capsules and packets and joints. “What happened to Dwayne and Shirley?”

  “They packed it in.” She regards Lemuel suspiciously. “So like how does someone become a Homo chaoticus?”

  Lemuel sinks onto the couch next to her and rubs his eyes, which are redder than usual. “I picked up everything I know on the subway,” he explains. “I had a professor, his name was Litzky, he was an innovator, he lived, he breathed chaos before the rest of the world knew it was a science. He was expelled from Moscow University for antiparty tendencies after someone found a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle in his desk drawer. That happened in mid-term. Professor Litzky continued giving his lectures on the subway. He would phone up his students, name a Metro stop, specify a time. We all crowded into the car, the doors closed, Litzky would start talking about fractals as a way of seeing infinity, about the infinite cascades of bifurcations, about intermittencies, about periodicities. He would lecture for twelve or fifteen stops, some of us scribbling drunken notes as the subway lurched down the tracks. We would slip envelopes filled with rubles into the enormous pockets of his overcoat while he lectured. Scholarly articles written by Litzky were never published, books were out of the realm of possibility, but even today he is thought of as the father of Soviet chaos.”

  Lemuel shakes his head in despair. His voice thickens. “You should have seen us, hanging out on the subway, holding on for dear life to the straps, leaning toward him so as not to miss a word, a syllable, him in his two-sizes-too-big overcoat, pausing at each stop when the recorded announcement came on to say us the name of the station, then plunging back into chaos. Folded-towel diffeomorphisms I learned about between Aeroport and Rechnoi Vokzal. Smooth-noodle maps, between Komsomolskaya and Marx Prospekt. We relished the voyage, we dreaded the getting there. We never knew at what station the lecture would end. Litzky always waited until the last instant, leaping out of the train as the doors closed, once his coat got pinched in the door, we had to pull the emergency cord to free him. He would stalk off and disappear in the crowd, his head pulled in like a turtle’s, lost in his coat, lost in his thoughts. We would look at each other, bewildered by things he had not explained, had assumed we would understand, bewildered by a world where chaos was passed from hand to hand, like an old shirt, to passengers on a subway. Later, when we sat for orals we were asked to cite our sources, but no one had the courage to mention Litzky, so we lied and named papers by obscure Tran-sylvanians or Magyars.” Lemuel shakes his head, trying to digest his own story. “In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky has a character named Razumikhin say us how it is possible to lie your way to truth.” His voice chokes up, his eyes focus on something in his past. “I have, all my life, God help me, lied my way to truth.”

  Walking with one shoe on, one shoe off, Rain comes up behind Lemuel, pulls his head back onto her chest and massages his brow. “Russia,” she hears him mutter, “is an inner eyelid.”

  “Compared to America,” Rain says, following her own thoughts, “Russia is totally hype. The only interesting thing that ever happened to me on a subway was when this dude exposed himself. Go figure.”

  Insomniac, Lemuel patrols the cluttered living room into the early hours of the morning, contemplating the lack of whiteness to the night, scribbling differential equations on the backs of envelopes, trying to unravel the mystery of the serial murders, which keep coming up random no matter how many times he tosses the coin.

  Sometime after midnight Rain wanders through in search of a glass of water. She is wearing furry bedroom slippers with no backs and a T-shirt that has shrunk in the wash and barely covers her navel. The faded letters across the chest read: “Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.” Under the message is the name “T. Leary.”

  “Who is T. Leary?” Lemuel asks as Rain shuffles back from the kitchen.

  “I think he was a contemporary of L. Tolstoy.” She flops into the only easy chair in the room, her legs dangling over the arm. On her blanket, Mayday stirs, yawns, then closes one eye and watches Rain with the other. Glancing back through the open kitchen door, Rain notices the “y.y.a.y.t.f.h.r.m.c.o.m.a.a.t.i.o.h.f.m.” on the blackboard. “So I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she says with elaborate casualness, “how long are you signed up for at that chaos institute of yours.”

  “The visiting-professorship contract is for one semester.”

  The silence between question and answer is suddenly alive with electricity.

  “What happens then?”

  Lemuel shrugs.

  “Like did you ever think of staying? At the Institute? In America?”

  “What do I have to do to become American?”

  Rain manages a strained smile. “Hey, buy a gun.”

  Lemuel laughs, but his heart obviously isn’t in it. “Me staying on at the Institute depends on whether there is an opening as a resident scholar.”

  “So if you decided to stay in America, there might be other ways, right?”

  He grunts.

  “I mean,” continues Rain, annoyed, “do you want to stay in America?”

  “I have not given it much thought,” Lemuel says vaguely.

  “Maybe you ought to give it much thought,” she says. When he does not respond, she shrugs irritably. Her bare arm reaches out to flick on the radio. She catches the end of the WHIM news break:

  “… weather in the tri-county on this third day of March looks to be partly cloudy, which means partly not cloudy, with occasional showers in the afternoon and temperatures rising into the high forties or low fifties. If you’re staying indoors, you want to wear as little as possible. Are you taking notes, Charlene, honey? Ha ha! Okay, we’ll go and take some more calls now.”

  The host chats for a few minutes with a woman who is against abortion, then talks with a Catholic priest who is against contraceptive devices. “What justifies carnal knowledge,” the priest says, “is the possibility of procreation.”

  Incensed, Rain grabs the phone and punches in a number, which she seems to know by heart. “I have enough credits to get a goddamn bachelor’s degree in carnal knowledge,” she remarks. “Hello,” she shouts into the phone. “So it’s me again.”

  A staticky voice echoes back at her from the radio. “It’s me again.”

  “You’re up kinda early, Rain. Or maybe you’re up kinda late.”

  “I got woken up …” “I got woken up by the previous caller shooting off his mouth about carnal knowledge. Like is he out to lunch. He knows so little he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”

  “Can you play that back for me slow like.”

  “Like what do priests know …” “Like what do priests know about screwing? The reason I’m a practicing Catholic but Ca
tholicism is not what I’m practicing, right? is because organized religion is a conspiracy against women.”

  “Pay attention, Charlene, honey. Rain’s coming up with a new conspiracy theory.”

  “Fucking A. You want my opinion …” “Fucking A. You want my opinion, religion is a male plot to deny women multiple orgasms, which men can’t have, by making us feel guilty if we take pleasure from sex. And lets not beat around the goddamn bush. Everyone knows good orgasms come in twos.”

  “I take it you’re speaking from experience.”

  “Hey, I’ve had my share …” “Hey, I’ve had my share of experiences. The best ones were with people of the Jewish persuasion.”

  “What’s so great about Jewish lovers? What with me being a practicing Seventh-Avenue Adventurist, maybe it’d be better if you don’t listen in to this part, Charlene, honey.”

  “Like I’ll tell you …” “Like I’ll tell you what’s so great about Jewish lovers. First off, you stand less chance of getting cervical cancer, right? if your partner’s circumcised.”

  “Where’d you shop that pearl of wisdom from?”

  “I read it …” “I read it, it was either in The Hite Report or The Backwater Sentinel or National Geographic. The reason I know it was one of these three is because they’re the only things I read extracurricular.”

  “I always heard men who were circumcised had less feeling.”

  “I never had …” “I never had complaints along those lines.”

  “I’ll bet you haven’t. You want to leave your phone number with the operator before you hang up. Ha! Only kidding, Charlene, honey. Nice talking to you, Rain. For anyone just joining us, you’re listening to WHIM Elmira, where the elite meet to beat the meat. I’ll take another call.”

  “Hey, I could tell you a thing or two about priests,” Rain forges on. “Like the time I had to confess to kissing my cousin Bobby on the lips …” She notices her voice is no longer echoing from the radio. “How do you like that? The earlobe went and hung down on me.”