The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  “He’s talking gibberish,” says one of the clones.

  “What I’m talking,” the Rebbe corrects him with a biblical gleam in his shining Talmudic eyes, “is Psalm 124:7. Selah.”

  Chapter Seven

  Dudes who’ve aced introductory psychology have told me there is more to shoplifting than meets the eye, but I honestly don’t see it. I don’t feel like I’m defying parental authority, lah-di-dah, when I score the odd item from a supermarket shelf (when my dad said he was minding the store, he was talking about a B-52 bomber), I don’t feel I’m expressing a death wish neither, if anything the contrary is the case, I am expressing a life wish inasmuch as I always eat what I steal.

  So I happened to be patrolling the aisles of the E-Z Mart, slipping the occasional luxury item over my lecherous shoulder into the hidden compartment in my cloth backpack, it was the day of the summer solstice, the single hand on my Swiss watch which tells the phase of the moon and the season was leaning against the “S” of “Summer.” The semester had officially ended right after L. Falk disappeared from the face of the earth three weeks before. I’d run into the Rebbe on the street and casually asked if his housemate had relocated to Miami-on-the-Euphrates. I suspected the Rebbe knew more than he wasn’t saying and crowded him, which is how I learned about my Hite Report winding up in the hot hands of the FBI.

  Where was I?

  In two days I was going to trade in my glad rags for a rented cap and gown and graduate with what Dwayne calls a summa cum softa degree, which is his way of reminding me of my straight C average. I’d more or less made up my mind to hang out in Backwater after graduation, I was even toying with the idea of adding a second chair to Tender To for washing hair, why not go with the flow, right?, and was scoring the makings of a feast to celebrate the decision. I had a tentative date with Zbig, the Polish-origin nose tackle, I’d been rehearsing his last name to get the pronunciation right, it’s something like Jed-zhor-skin-ski, give or take a syllable.

  Dwayne, with Shirley in tow, had moved on to a mother of an E-Z Mart in Rochester, it’s so huge customers go for vacation cruises in the aisles, which meant the E-Z back in Backwater had got itself a new manager. I was naturally concerned he’d be tighter than a duck’s ass on water when it came to shoplifting and tried to put the fix in with Dwayne.

  “Sure I know who my successor is, babe, I’m the one who talent-scouted him, but I’m not about to lay this information on you,” is all I could worm out of him. Shirley also wasn’t talking while the flavor lasted. “Dwayne’d kill me if I was to shoot my mouth off,” she giggled, “wouldn’t you, angel?”

  So you can picture what a bombshell it was, right? when this dude in a knee-length white medical-type smock came up the aisle behind me and jiggled my backpack. I whirled around so fast I caught his clipboard on the side of the head. “Yeooooow!” I howled. When it comes to defending frontiers, offense is the best defense, so I let him have a blast from both barrels. “You airhead—what are you trying to do, guillotine me for shoplifting? What ever happened to the goddamn punishment fitting the goddamn crime?”

  I wobbled back and batted my seaweed-green eyes as if I was having difficulty bringing him into focus, I rubbed my head more than it needed to be rubbed, I looked up into this grubby gray mask of a beard trying to decide if the person hiding behind it would figure me for someone with a lawyer friend up the sleeve who’d file a tort claim for her.

  I noticed the eyes above the beard smiling at me, I noticed the smile in question was two-thirds faintly amused.

  The beard moved. “Yo. What are you scoring?”

  It took a microsecond for the guttural tone of the voice to penetrate.

  “What are you scoring?” I shot back as if we were both reading from a script.

  “I can say you I am not scoring nothing. I am not even playing.”

  “Hey, don’t be a doorknob. Score something. Everyone knows supermarkets pad their prices to make up for shoplifting. Which means someone’s got to shoplift to make sure they don’t profit by people not shoplifting.” The freckles on my face felt like they were on fire. “L. Fucking Falk! What are you doing here?”

  “I am the new E-Z manager. Dwayne went and put the fix in. He convinced them I knew more about stocking the store than the computer.”

  Aside from the white coat and the beard, there was something different about him. His hair was longer, and flying off in all directions, he badly needed my professional services, but that wasn’t it. Hey, that wasn’t it at all. It was more the way he occupied his space, right? It was more the laid-back slope to his shoulders, as if a weight had been lifted from them.

  “What’s with the beard?” I asked.

  “You could chalk it up to experience,” he said. “I do not want to have the experience of being recognized if certain Mafia types turn up in Backwater looking for someone who can read FBI mail.”

  I meandered after him through the aisles while he ticked off things on his clipboard. “Quaker Oats, After Eights, Skippy’s Peanut Butter had a good run for their money in the last twenty-four hours. We could probably use more suntan and after-shave lotions, underarm and vaginal deodorants, sunglasses and visor caps. What a chuckle. In Russia we used to say the shortages would be divided among the peasants. Here we punch codes into the overnight order and the stuff turns up on the doorstep the next morning.” At this point he said something I will repeat even though I didn’t one hundred percent understand it. “American the Beautiful,” is what he said. “It turns out the streets are paved with Sony Walkmans after all,” is what he said.

  He yammered on about how easy it was to run a supermarket. It seems like L. Falk wasn’t plugging into the E-Z’s supercomputer to keep the store stocked; he was doing it with his super clipboard and his super pocket calculator and a natural talent for spotting shortages. The two hours of supercomputer time set aside for the Backwater E-Z Mart he was using, this is L. Falk talking, right? to spiral into the heart of the heart of something called pie deeper than anyone had ever gone before, deeper than anyone dreamed you could go, he was already at six billion five hundred million decimal places and the E-Z supercomputer was still spitting out numbers, plummeting toward infinity through pie’s inky depths where no light penetrated.

  Talk about knowing it like a poet!

  The way L. Falk described it, you’d think he was suffering from a terminal case of rapture of the deep. Seems like he’d given up trying to invent pure, unadulterous what’s-its-face, since what was missing from man-made randomness was randomness, but he still hoped to discover it on the horizon beyond the horizon. He said he figured if he kept at it a lifetime, he might be able to work this pie thing out to a trillion decimal places, why not? And as long as he didn’t stumble across traces of order, as long as he didn’t find a shadow of a pattern, as long as the repetitions were random repetitions, I ought to be getting this right, right? I heard it often enough, it meant pure, unadulterous you-know-what remained a distinct possibility. Here he added something about flirting with probability.

  By this time L. Falk was so wound up there was no stopping him. Accessing the E-Z’s supercomputer from his workstation the night before, he had calculated pie out another 250 million decimal places and come across twenty-three twenty-threes. This particular random repetition looked so hype he’d gone and torn off the printout and kept the paper, he happened to have it in his pocket, he’d be glad to show it to me. He held it up like it was a sacred scroll, I actually still have it, it was filled with numbers. Sure enough, sitting smack in the middle of the numbers were twenty-three twenty-threes:

  0142451845725522592245781906265283382895 84184755512154275945768524815465826366497 28358004256137933428104937232323232323232 32323232323232323232323232323237502154679 45484225874134679815594672863215542798641 21307726435654287849494578421643524612457

  3791255420299379

  Don’t ask me how, I finally managed to slip a word in edgewise. I pointed out that twenty-three was how old I wa
s, and half L. Falk’s age. Hey, I said to tease him, maybe someone’s trying to tell you something.

  The fact that I’d spotted it freaked him out, his words tripped over each other as they spilled from his mouth. It turns out each parent contributes twenty-three chromosomes to a baby. Ditto for DNA, whatever that is, where something called bonding irregularity occurs every twenty-three angstroms. Ditto for the tilt of the earth on its axis, which is twenty-three degrees. Also there are twenty-three axioms in geometry discovered, I remember L. Falk stressed the word discovered, by some Greek joker with the unlikely name of U. Clid. L. Falk started getting into things more up my alley. In something called Tantra, man’s sex cycle turns out to be twenty-three days, the number representing a woman turns out to be two, the number for a man, three. Do we chalk these all up to coincidence? he wanted to know. Or has God planted a coded signal six billion five hundred million places out in the decimal expansion of pie telling us He exists?

  I badly needed to change the subject, my head was reeling, I was getting high on twenty-threes, so I asked L. Falk where he’d been hanging out since he left Backwater, it was a detail the Rebbe had omitted.

  L. Falk took a chill pill. “You do not want to know.”

  “Sure I want to know, which is why I asked. Why don’t you come back to the loft and fill me in over potluck supper?”

  “I would like to see Mayday again.”

  I laid some bad news on him. “Mayday died in her sleep the day the Rebbe left for Brooklyn. I like to think she decided I didn’t need her anymore. Just before Dwayne moved to Rochester, he helped me bury her in the field where they were going to put the nuclear-waste dump.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. … About supper, are you sure I would not be interrupting anything?”

  At that moment in the history of the universe I couldn’t have pronounced Zbig’s last name if my life depended on it. “Like I got nothing lined up for tonight.”

  Over sunny-side-ups, which were not over easy for the first time in my culinary career, lah-di-dah, I finally got around to thanking him for removing The Hite Report before the sheriff showed up with his search warrant. “I knew it was you even before the Rebbe told me how you handed over my Hite Report to protect him.”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  “I found one of your two signatures—the clothes you folded over the back of the couch. You must’ve heard me and Dwayne going at it, right?”

  He nodded.

  “So?”

  Then he said something which took my breath away. “Just because I had the good luck to fuck you does not mean I get to fix you. Besides which, you are not broken.”

  We were into mango chutney and yogurt when he filled me in on where he’d been for the last three weeks. Turns out he’d been whisked by helicopter to some fortress in Maryland which had two, count them, two barbed-wire fences surrounding it and a rain forest of antennas on the roof and the longest corridor in the history of corridors, it was three football fields long if it was a centimeter according to L. Falk, which makes Dwayne’s E-Z up in Rochester look like a pocket playground for kids. Whoever it was that ran the joint had gone and set L. Falk up in a room without windows but with round-the-clock access to a Cray something or other, whatever that is, and then told him to break codes.

  Hey, I didn’t even know he could make codes.

  I asked L. Falk how he’d wormed out of it. Which is when he explained more than I needed to know about codes. At this fortresslike fort in Maryland, he’d mapped statistical vibrations in large samples of data, I think that’s what he said, and broken Russian and Syrian and Iranian and Iraqian codes and winged the messages on up the chain of command. It turned out he was telling the dudes in another fortress called the Pentagon what they didn’t want to hear, namely, that Russian submarines couldn’t submerge and Iraqian long-range missiles could only go short range and their short-range missiles couldn’t get off the ground and Syrian artillery shells had faulty fuses and the Iranian atomic bomb wouldn’t see the light for another fifty years, this was the optimistic view, and the economies of all of them were so screwed up they were crawling over each other to get American aid. The dudes at the Pentagon started sputtering like fuses when they read all this, L. Falk guessed it was not the kind of information they wanted circulating during budget-hunting season. They’d put the heat on some dude named Doolittle, who’d gone and started proceedings to extradite L. Falk back to Mother Russia, a process that would take six months, according to the lawyer L. Falk checked with.

  “You could stay in America if you wanted to.”

  “How?”

  “Become American.”

  He laughed. “I am allegoric to guns, buying one would make my eyes water.”

  “Don’t be a doorknob—there are other ways of becoming American besides buying a gun.”

  “Name one.”

  “Ask for sexual asylum. Marry someone who’s already American.”

  “Do you have a particular dude in mind?”

  I swear to God, the idea popped into my head at random, the words slipped out before I’d thought them, they amazed me as much as they amazed L. Falk.

  “There’s always the Tender To.”

  He looked at me very strangely. “So are you proposing?”

  I treated myself to a deep breath and let a “why” and a “not” drifted up through my naturally straight hair. I mean, I wasn’t completely against the idea even though I knew from personal experience that marriage, like sex, was what L. Falk would call chaos-related.

  “Look at it this way,” I remember telling him. “The first guy I lived with was a barber, right? He taught me how to cut hair, we opened a his-hers styling emporium in Albany, when clients started to wait for me even if he was free, he up and moved out. The second guy I lived with taught me how to fuck. When I became better at it than him, he moved out too. I’ll skip over my ex-husband, the less said about bird killers the better. In my experience men can’t stand being outperformed. One of the things I like about you is you can live with me doing some things better than you.”

  He let this percolate in his brain a while, I could tell from his expression he wasn’t buying a word of it, then he said, very slowly, very angrily, very quietly, I had to strain to hear him, “If you please, stop bullshitting me. Stop bullshitting yourself. If you are really ready to marry someone who is toast, say why.”

  He was right on, of course. I glanced at him, he was staring at me across the table with an anxious half-smile, so I decided to come clean, if there’s a better way of getting a consenting Homo chaoticus to consent, I’m not familiar with it. So here is roughly what I told him.

  “The way I see it, a dude who plunges toward infinity isn’t toast— how could he be when he’s doing something that’s never been done before? I don’t really follow all the dirty details, right? but what I do get is you’re on a trip with no hope of a getting there, which is the toughest kind to take, you need to be goddamn gutsy to get involved in something like that. Marriage, when it works, is also a trip without a getting there. It’s what the dudes over in the art department call a work in progress.”

  Suddenly, I don’t know why, I hadn’t done any dope in weeks, I had this weird feeling I was plunging toward infinity myself, picking up speed, pushing the limit on the Interstate, whooshing past a line of eighteen-wheelers with psychedelic twenty-threes splashed across their sides, I couldn’t’ve stopped if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t.

  “So I sorta thought, hey, as long as we’re going in the same direction, we might as well travel together.” He was teetering, he needed one last nudge. “In case you’re interested,” I remember adding, “I have a last but not least.”

  I could see he wasn’t not interested.

  “Okay, here it is, my last but not least. I never met anyone in your category before.”

  “What is my category?”

  “An erection is not the single most original thing you have going for you. … Jesus, d
o I have to go and spell it out?”

  He didn’t say anything, which I took to mean he needed it spelled out.

  I closed my eyes and took another deep breath and opened my eyes, I could see I hadn’t lost my audience, L. Falk was still hanging on my every word, which I took as an auspicious, even positive, sign. “The fact is … I love you to death, L. Fucking Falk.” The freckles on my face were burning again. “So what do you say we stop beating around the goddamn bush? Would you or wouldn’t you? Like to? Get hitched? With yours truly, the Tender To?”

  “You are asking me,” L. Falk must’ve been repeating the question to make sure he had decoded it correctly, “if I want to marry you, right?”

  I remember blowing air through my lips in exasperation. “Like do you or don’t you? Will you or won’t you? R.S.V.P.”

  He watched me like a bird ready to take to the wing at the first sign of second thoughts. After what seemed like an ice age, he cleared his throat.

  What he coughed up was a jubilant “Yo!”

  I can say you the first time I got married, the ridiculous overwhelmed the ritual. I remember standing there in a thirdhand suit with threadbare patches on the threadbare elbows, shifting my weight from foot to foot on a moth-eaten carpet, gazing up at the faded color photograph of the paramount Homo sovieticus hanging askew on the peeling wall as the ceremony, if that is what it was, droned on. I remember feeling Vladimir Ilyich’s cramps pinch my intestines. “Do you or don’t you?” the painted babushka doll presiding over the one-minute ceremony in the Leningrad Palace of Marriage insisted impatiently. I remember tearing my eyes away from V. Lenin. “Do I or don’t I what?” I asked. The woman who was destined to become the mother of my daughter, she was already twelve weeks pregnant, jabbed me in the ribs. Behind us, my future ex-father-in-law, the rector at the V. A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics, leaned forward and provided me with some stage coaching. His voice had an exasperated edge to it, I was not on his short list of prospective sons-in-law. “Do you or don’t you take my daughter to be your wedded wife?” is what he whispered.