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by Sameer Pandya

  Over the past year, Mansfield had grown many, many times over in readership and influence. Jack Mansfield, the young editor who ran it, had graduated from Berkeley with a degree in classics and a pure, uncontainable anger toward the left. He’d gone to Berkeley to please his liberal parents, and during his time there had rejected everything they believed in. He’d built his platform attacking universities, which he thought were dens of intellectual laziness, sexual freedom that oppressed those who were unable to participate, and anti-whiteness. His particular object of ire was tenure. At least in this, I was safe. But, of course, it also meant that I, inherently, was not safe.

  As the editor’s star power had risen, he’d been interviewed by the New York Times, where he’d said proudly, “When we put our fucking gun sights on you, your life is ruined.” He understood that a video clip could be judge, jury, and executioner all in one, no matter its veracity. Where Freedom Now, the first site I’d appeared on, dog-whistled, Mansfield was explicit in its distaste for most anyone with a background distinct from its founder’s. One story asserted that the death penalty acted as a deterrent to crime in black communities; another argued for the importance of a “Museum of White American History and Culture,” to be built on the National Mall.

  The link led to a page that didn’t have any story, just a video, with the headline “Have Our Universities Finally Gone Nuts?”

  I clicked. The video buffered and I appeared on-screen, walking through campus, avoiding eye contact with the students around me. And then I say, “Fuck the Christians.” There’s a subtitle for this, as if my English isn’t clear enough. I stop in front of the bulletin board, tear down the Haji flyers, and scream, “Respect me!” I look out at the students and the camera. I’m crazed, unhinged. And then a message appears on-screen: “This is Professor Raj Bhatt. He has a lot of fancy degrees, which he thinks give him the freedom to say all sorts of nasty, unfounded things about our great United States of America. You’re spending your hard-earned money so that your children can get educated. But instead they’re being abused, ridiculed. Your children are being radicalized, told to hate themselves and their history. Isn’t it time for us to examine what our youth are exposed to day in and day out in the Liberal University Complex?”

  I watched the video one more time and turned up the volume a little more. Eva woke up just as I began groveling for respect.

  “What is that?” she asked groggily.

  I started the video again.

  “Holy shit,” she said, once it was over.

  “I’m fucked, Eva. They spliced all this together. I actually said I don’t hate Christians. But it’s not going to matter. I tore down those flyers. I look insane.”

  “You just have to explain to Cliff what they’ve done. He’ll know that they’re targeting you.”

  Eva was describing the world as it should be: Cliff and the dean’s office and the university would see that I was being unfairly attacked, and they would stay in my corner, fighting for what was right. But I had a clear sense that, even though the video was doctored, they were not going to be able to defend me. The edges may have been spliced together, but at the center of it, I was still screaming like a madman. I could explain the reasons why, but it was ultimately my responsibility to be the adult in the group.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said, and kissed her on the forehead. “Go back to sleep.”

  A minute later, I could hear her faint snoring.

  I opened the second email from Dan. It was another link, this time to a Twitter page with the hashtag #FireDrRaj. There were hundreds of tweets, presumably from the many hundreds of students I had taught in the past, outlining all the things I had said and done that had offended them. “He stares too much #FireDrRaj.” “He has a thing for blondes. Ew #FireDrRaj.” What would Kim, my former student turned dermatology assistant, write? “He needs to work on his hygiene. Yuck #FireDrRaj.” And then there was this one, as if they had peered into my insecure, underpublished heart: “Where’s the book? #FireDrRaj.”

  The scope of the hashtag widened as the tweets went on. Now students from all over the country were using it—anyone who had a gripe against a professor. I had become a proxy for every allegedly bad professor in America.

  “I think I’m done,” I said, hoping Eva was still awake.

  She didn’t respond.

  I didn’t see myself surviving this. Even if the university wanted to defend me, there was going to be too much backlash from parents who didn’t want their children in a classroom with me. I had never felt so exposed. Not only was I pretty certain I was about to lose my job, but my cry for respect—which, as ridiculous as it looked in the video, represented my most fervent and private frustrations about my career—was being broadcast for all the world to hear. My deepest insecurities had become public property, something that could be shared among strangers.

  I put the phone away and tried to fall asleep, knowing that if I didn’t, the next day would be even longer and more miserable than it was already going to be. I don’t know how much time passed. Eventually I must have drifted off, but I awoke not long after and saw Eva reading something on her phone. I didn’t think she’d taken the video very seriously. Maybe, as she’d fallen back to sleep, she’d finally realized the gravity of the situation.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  She was flipping back and forth between stories on her phone. I couldn’t see what she was reading. Why had she turned the volume off in the video?

  “It’s insane, right?”

  She turned to me as if she had just realized I was awake. Without saying anything, she showed me her phone so I could see. At first, the details in the photo were unrecognizable. I stared at it for a few more seconds. It was a city street with nearly every building collapsed, looking like it had been carpet-­bombed.

  “Southern Mexico,” she said. “Earthquake. There are already a hundred dead and it only shook two hours ago.”

  Eva returned to her phone and then she was gone. She would be for the next several days, figuring out how to get the right help down there.

  I turned away from her, pushing my face into the pillow. All week, I’d felt like my life was crumbling. Now that an entire region was, in fact, crumbling, in the most devastating way, I felt foolish.

  There was little I could do to control what was happening at work. But I knew one thing I could do to make things better elsewhere. Tomorrow morning I would call Bill Brown and put at least one part of this whole thing to rest.

  Thursday

  “H I, RAJ.”

  “Twice in one week? I didn’t peg you as the phone type.”

  I was in the kitchen, cleaning up after Eva had left with the kids for school. She wouldn’t be back until late into the evening.

  “I loathe the telephone,” Cliff said. “In fact, I loathe most forms of communication. Except texting, which I now do with my children. I don’t think we’ve ever had a better relationship.”

  In the near decade I had known Cliff, this was the most he’d ever revealed to me about himself. As little as I knew about him, though, I’d always imagined him to be a caring, present father.

  “I wish we could have department meetings via text,” Cliff continued. Then he sighed. He had something to say to me that he didn’t want to say.

  “Is this about my star turn?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “When did you see it?”

  “Just now.”

  “I feel really bad about it, Cliff. You’ve known me for a long time. You know I never lose my temper like that. But they were pushing and pushing. I should have known one of them would have a camera on. I walked right into the trap.” My voice suddenly cracked. I wanted Cliff to rescue me from all this, to say that it was going to be OK.

  “Can you come in again this morning? I’m sorry to keep doing this.”

  “Of course.”

  “The conference room at ten.”

  I hung up the phone a
nd wondered why he wanted to meet in the conference room. He had never asked me to do so before. But then again, we’d never needed to. Trying not to think about it too much, I went to my computer and checked in on the dark, ghostly version of myself that continued to appear online. The mob calling for my firing grew with every passing minute. There wasn’t much I could do to stop them, it seemed to me; but I knew I had to do something. I had to feel like I was working in some way to fix the problems I was facing. I switched over to my email.

  “Dear Bill, if I may. I’m so sorry that I didn’t write earlier.” I sat for five minutes, trying to decide what to write next. I couldn’t find the right words to convey my apology. I wanted to tell him about myself, give him a sense of where I was coming from, without trying to justify my behavior. It was a difficult balance to strike in an email. The nuance of what I wanted to say seemed easiest to communicate in person. I wished I had been brave enough to talk to him when I went to the hospital.

  I finished cleaning the kitchen, took a shower, and got dressed in a button-down shirt and a thin, navy-blue corduroy blazer. It wasn’t as tailored as Bill Brown’s, but I liked how I felt when I put it on. I didn’t wear it nearly enough. I was always afraid that I would mess it up, afraid that people would know that I liked wearing the jacket. I hated for people to think I was vain.

  The landline rang. For a second I couldn’t figure out what the sound was, we so rarely used that phone. I went and picked it up, readying myself to say that we weren’t interested. I was hoping it was someone telling me that my computer had been infected, or the IRS demanding that I send them money. I needed an excuse to yell at someone.

  “Hello.”

  Nothing. Usually there was a second or two delay before a marketer came on. We had been getting solicitations for cruises lately. Eva and I were not cruise people, but sailing away sounded pretty good at the moment.

  “Hello,” I said again. I was about to hang up, but I wanted the pleasure of refusing the solicitation.

  “Why do you hate Christians so much?” a deep voice asked.

  “What? Who is this?” Throughout the week, the increasing swirl of craziness had remained outside our home. Now the line of safety had been breached, and I felt scared.

  “It’s a simple question.”

  “Don’t call here again,” I said, about to hang up.

  “You married a Christian, didn’t you? She certainly looks like one. Do you hate her too?”

  “Who the hell is this?”

  The caller didn’t say anything more and a few seconds later hung up. I was in the living room, looking out the window at the blooming yellow roses right outside. There was a sudden bang on the glass and a blur of brown. The phone fell out of my hand. A bird had flown into the window, bounced off, and flittered away. Sometimes the smaller birds didn’t survive the impact, but this one seemed to have done fine; my heart was still pushing up against my ribs.

  I locked every window and sliding door in the house. But really, how much danger could any of them actually keep out?

  * * *

  When I got to campus, I took a hopeful turn through the parking lot near my office. Sometimes, midmorning, I could get lucky with an orphan spot. And sure enough, there in the corner, under the cover of an enormous tree, I found one. I’m not big on signs, but this I would take. A shaded spot so close to my office? Maybe things would be OK after all.

  I entered my building and walked toward the elevators. When I had left campus the day before, the forty-plus group waiting for me after my lecture had dispersed. Now, only four students remained, all sitting on the floor on top of sleeping bags, haggard and exhausted. Alex and Holly, plus another young man and woman. A hunger-strike double date. Alex was surprised when he saw me. Or maybe he was just surprised that I was dressed up.

  “Have you been here all night?” I asked. They were there to protest me, to get me fired, but they were still my teenage students, who, if things were different, would be coming to my office hours to talk about how they were struggling to adjust to college, to figure out where they belonged in such a big place. Whatever they thought of me, my instinct was to engage with them. They had wanted to talk yesterday, but their approach had done nothing to open a space for that. Now, with the clarity of a new morning, I wanted to try to work through what specifically troubled them about what I’d said.

  “We have,” Alex said.

  “Go home. Eat something. Get some sleep. And then come by and we can talk. I’ll be in my office all day. This has gotten out of hand.”

  The anger and conviction were gone from Alex’s eyes, replaced by fatigue.

  “We’ll go home—and we’ll eat—once you leave this university,” Holly said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked Alex.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” he replied, his eyes saying what his mouth wouldn’t.

  I stepped into the elevator, and as I waited for the doors to close, all four of them stared at me.

  * * *

  “They’re in the conference room,” Mary said when I knocked on Cliff’s door. I’d been hoping Cliff had misspoken.

  “They?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, smiling. She seemed to be taking pleasure in all this. I couldn’t understand why.

  “Mary,” I said, feeling ready to voice all of the things I normally would be too embarrassed to say aloud, “do you dislike me?”

  She looked genuinely perplexed. “Raj. Why would you think that? I don’t dislike you.” Then she lowered her voice. “Not any more than any of the other overpaid and underworked members of this department.”

  “I wish I were overpaid and underworked.”

  “You come in two days a week. Two days, Raj. That’s it.”

  I hated being lectured by Mary. Despite all the years she had spent working with academics, she still didn’t understand that a majority of the work was done outside the office.

  “I’m just disappointed that you’ve never brought me back anything from your fieldwork. Clothes and jewelry from India are my favorites.”

  “I’ll bring you back something next time.” An empty promise. I wasn’t going to be doing any fieldwork in the near future. “But in the meantime, I know someone in town who makes Indian-inspired jewelry. I’ll get you some.”

  “I think every week should be Staff Appreciation Week.” She gave me a wink. “They’re waiting for you. Everything is going to be fine. The department needs you.”

  I was responsible for a large chunk of teaching in the department, so in that she was right. They did need me. But despite my gripes, I also liked teaching here. I needed them as well. And thus my nerves as I walked down the hall.

  The conference room, a totem to the long, illustrious history of the department, was dominated by an enormous table with twenty austere wooden chairs around it. One large wall was filled with framed, 8 x 10 photographs of every faculty member who had earned tenure in the department over the four decades since its founding. The first thirty or so portraits were of serious, unsmiling white men, many of them with crew cuts and thick, black-framed glasses. The more recent additions were women and two nonwhite men. On the other large wall were framed covers of the books published by the faculty through the years.

  Cliff was seated at one end of the table, along with a woman who taught in the English department. She was in her early fifties and had close-cropped brown hair. Once I had heard her give a talk on Tristram Shandy that was funny, incisive, self-deprecating, and ultimately just brilliant. She possessed a rare talent for making the eighteenth century come alive. She had made me want to read the novel, though I never did. She gave me a warm smile when I opened the door.

  “Raj, come in,” Cliff said.

  The two of them had been talking, but their conversation ended abruptly as soon as I appeared.

  “Let me introduce you to Cynthia Wood from the English department. She’s now the associate dean, and she’s in charge of this little issue we have.”

  I was reach
ing to close the door when someone came walking in behind me: Mr. Insecurity, with a friendly nod, as if we were old friends.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Josh said. “Why is parking so hard on this campus? We need a faculty-only lot.”

  “I’m sure you know Josh Morton,” Cliff said, ignoring Josh’s entrance. “Josh’s new research is on cyber witch-hunts. He got in touch with me the other day and has generously offered his help with all this.”

  “It’s such a pleasure to finally meet you, Raj,” Cynthia said. “You know, I happened upon your remarkable essay on second acts long before I knew you were here. God, it was terrific. I’m glad I was done with my second book when I read it. Did you actually write it as an undergraduate?”

  My belly felt hollow from regret. For the first time in I don’t know how long, someone was giving me a bit of intellectual respect, something I had stopped receiving from my peers and colleagues long ago. “I did. I was so much less self-conscious then. Not worried about what others might think. What I should have written about were the difficulties of finishing the first book.”

  “Oh,” Cynthia said, “you’ve already written the first book. It’s perfectly outlined in that essay. Let’s talk after all this is over.”

  That didn’t sound like someone who was getting ready to fire me.

  “Well,” Josh interjected. He didn’t seem like the type of guy who dealt well with not being the center of attention. “I’ve been following your case online since I heard about it. You don’t need me to tell you how bleak it is. These days, we have to be careful about what we say and when.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I want to be clear about something. There are two videos out there. One of me lecturing on Monday, which is a lecture I have been giving for the past decade without a problem. Students have often pointed to that lecture as the best part of my class. And then the other one, of me leaving class yesterday, which I’m guessing is the reason for this meeting today. The first one is real. The second one is completely doctored. I didn’t say ‘Fuck the Christians,’ on or off camera.”