The World Doesn't Require You

by Rion Amilcar Scott

  • • •

  To: CAMPUS—ALL

  Sent: May 5, 2018, 4:00 a.m.

  From: Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, Assistant Professor—Department of English and Cultural Studies

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: I FEEL SO ALONE

  Attachment: LONELINESS EssayFINAL2.docx

  —

  Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, Ph.D

  Assistant Professor

  Department of English and Cultural Studies

  Freedman’s University

  x3725

  Verbo est gladio

  16.

  Such a roar rolled across campus that day, May fifth, the Day of Infinite Hate, that even deep in the morgue it was impossible not to hear. I had kept such a late night that I planned to sleep in, but colorful horns blared throughout the crowd as if to call on the Apocalypse and its Four Horsemen. When I arrived at the hatemyprofessor Moments of Hate™ and its undulating crowd of people, I did indeed find an Apocalypse and I did indeed see a beast. He lacked seven heads, his one was fearsome enough, and he didn’t sport ten crowns, instead he wore one cocked to the side on the enormity of his dome. I counted three horns blaring from behind him. If this was an Apocalypse it was a half-assed one.

  And ol’ Ulysses Sparks standing slump-shouldered in the center of the stage wearing a brown blazer on his back and before he spoke he removed the gold crown from his head—what a sight! Someone described him as a pile of sloppy shit sewn into a desiccated sack of flesh. You couldn’t convince me I wasn’t watching a decaying corpse swaggering about, mic in hand.

  To his right, the nominal master of ceremonies, Dr. Faison, the Aryan, though he looked more like Sparks’s hype man, responded to Sparks’s every word with shouted affirmatives—Yep! Okay! Yes! Yeaaaahhh! Skirrrr—a white-ass Flavor Flav. Professors from all around campus kept a silent vigil standing at crowd’s edge. The math professor in his clown getup. Kin Samson. The Adjunct. The history professor dressed as Harriet Tubman. The Women’s Studies professor who taught only physics. Mean Dean Jean Greene watched the stage stoically, her arms folded and her shoulders squared. No matter where I looked, though, I saw no trace of Chambers. The campus woke that morning with his essay in their in-box. Perhaps he stashed himself somewhere crumpled in shame. Perhaps he was walking about the rally, his face hidden by disguise.

  Sparks raised his arms and the shouts, the applause, and the chants roared all around me, a mix of fury and joy. On the stage, Sparks spoke: Your professors fear you because you have this power behind you. The power of hate!

  Screams of joyous hate rose from the crowd. Vultures ringed us, perched atop buildings, wires, light fixtures, and trees as if summoned by our collective hate.

  Look, I tried to come for them with humor. I did. I did! Five years ago was an idealistic time, that’s when I started rapemyprofessor.com with thirty dollars, a little moxie, and a whole lot of hope. And you know the rest. The mobs came for me, didn’t they? Swarms and swarms of humorless liberals, p.c. types. I promise you I will never bow down again. I will never compromise again. The hate is here to stay. They created it. They earned it. Are you ready for some hate?

  The crowd chanted—Hate! Hate! Hate!—animated by their rage as Dr. Faison bounced about on the balls of his feet, taking in their energy and spitting forth an ad-lib.

  Take that. Take that. Take that.

  Now, Sparks continued, to reveal the face of Freedman’s University’s most hated! The professor with the most hatemyprofessor postings—our guest of dishonor, the English Department’s very own Dr. Reginald Chambers! Give him two minutes of your very best hate!

  Chambers’s face towered over us as big as life on the bright lights of the screen that stood at Ulysses’s back. In red, FU flashed across Chambers’s forehead and the boos and the chanting erupted with a force that made the ground tremble beneath us.

  To the left of me: Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate!

  To the right: Burn in hell! Burn in hell! Burn in hell!

  A lone male voice: Fuck you, Chambers!

  Dr. Faison: Uh-huh. That’s right. Let’s get it!

  When I looked to the edges of the crowd I saw no sight of the professors who had stood observing. Satisfied they wouldn’t be the next contestant on that hatemyprofessor screen, the one held up for ridicule and hate, they all receded into the ether. I was prepared to do the same. Ulysses Sparks and his act were interesting, but it was just that, an act. He couldn’t scratch even the façade of academia’s brain rot, and even if he managed to take down the academy, he wasn’t capable of building something new its place as I was. I began to walk down the hill when I saw a commotion. A man being shoved back and forth, hand to hateful hand.

  No. The fool. What was Chambers doing here? Why would he subject himself to all this? More people began to notice and they rushed to join in. A woman shoved at Chambers’s back. Another at Chambers’s shoulder.

  The crowd’s chants became louder: Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate!

  Stop! he cried. I’m a man! I’m not a symbol! I’m a man! I’m a man! I’m a man!

  A large student, a bald mound of sculpted meat, grasped Chambers by the back of his shirt and lifted him high over his head like an offering. Dr. Chambers squirmed and shouted in the air as the people passed him forward from hand to hand, an involuntary crowd surfer.

  The chants became deafening as his flopping body approached the stage. I looked about and there was Chambers’s friend, the English Department chair, Dr. Jason Oliver, slinking away from the crowd. I caught a glimpse also of Dean Greene standing near me, up on her toes trying to get a better look at things. Her lips had congealed into a cruel little smirk. Chambers’s body sat stiff, but the people held his arms far part. The crowd lifted him up, a sacrifice in Ulysses Sparks’s name. This was the least Chambersian moment I’ve ever experienced, as it seemed all the loneliness in our little corner of the world had evaporated. Even I pumped my fist and chanted: Hate! Hate! Hate! Sure, we were each of us locked into ourselves, isolated with our own particular hate, but we were alone together, and this sort of aloneness, I realized, was the closest thing to oneness I could ever hope for.

  A great blast of purple-blue light shot forth from a fixture above the stage. It blinded me and I closed my eyes just a half moment too late. My eyes opened and I looked out on the campus and saw the blue-white expanse of it as I had never seen it before. And there out in the distance—Chambers, our professor of loneliness! The darkened image of him, blue and spectral, in the form of a cross burned forever as a shadow at the edge of my vision.

  * At this Chambers’s eyes widened. He sat at a student desk and leaned toward me. When I was squatting on the floor in my morgue home dreaming this up during spring break, I imagined the turns of Chamber’s expressions, the movements of his body language as I recited these words to him. Now he moved exactly as I envisioned he would, it was as if I had conjured Chambers somewhere in the recesses of my imagination.

  † The bluestream is another myth you’ll find widely accepted among Cross Riverians. You’ll see children on schoolyards trying to fly and turn themselves into smoke, street magicians fooling the gullible by pretending to enter the bluestream to levitate. Seeing as how Chambers fancied himself as a man marked by a water-woman, I figured it wouldn’t be a stretch for him to be taken by this particular legend. His face relaxed for a moment when I mentioned the bluestream, a look of delight mixed with intrigue. But he thought it better to play it cool and quickly righted his face into something more neutral.

  ‡ Here I wondered if Chambers was getting my message, if he could see himself in Jim. He needed a teacher, a master, and it was best he serve his apprenticeship under me. Any sort of rebellion, in fact, depended on our partnership. It was as if he were turning to smoke before me, though. He leaned back and crossed his legs. I could almost feel his mind wandering from me.

  § I wanted to shout: Again! The master-student dynamic! Chambers turned his head
from me. He peered into the hallway.

  ¶ Chambers chuckled.

  # You know, Chambers said, cutting me off. John Brown was a hero, but I bet he was also a hell of a whitesplainer.

  I stopped speaking for a moment and put my face in my hands. Chambers hadn’t been laughing at my story earlier, he had been conjuring this joke and waiting for the right moment to tell it.

  ** I don’t mean to equate passivity with queerness. My classmate, however, happens to be quite queer and quite passive. Except when he is on the football field. There he remains queer, but all traces of passivity fall away and he becomes like a vicious beast. I mention his queerness only because, though Dr. Chambers speaks the language of egalitarianism, his disrespect, in this case, carries with it the whiff of homophobia. Just as his condescension and scholarly interest often carries with it a whiff of sexism. And I don’t intend here to imply that Dr. Chambers has been particularly malicious to his queer and female students (he hasn’t), but casual homophobia and sexism (like their cousin, racism) can be especially pernicious.

  IV.

  An Epilogue

  Dust. Smoke and damned dust. That’s all Chambers is now.

  I don’t mean to say he has perished, is dead, has returned to the essence. I just mean that he is gone. I call and it rings. I email and there is nothing. I assume he’s out there existing, but I’m having trouble conjuring his face now, as if he had been imaginary all along. I told you early on that there would be no twist announcing Chambers and I were one and the same. I stand by that. He existed. Exists, probably.

  No, definitely. I received an email from him, actually. Everybody did. It came through on Thanksgiving during dinnertime, but I was eating, so I didn’t read it until Black Friday morning in the morgue over strong coffee and even stronger weed.

  But he’s—zap—dust, I thought. I didn’t even think about him very much these days. My mind had become polluted with other things: students, their yearning, their admiration, their hatred. No, I couldn’t at all think about Chambers, I had become him.

  Now there he was on my screen returned, the words of his email forming themselves into a moving image of his face.

  To: CAMPUS—ALL

  Sent: November 22, 2018, 4:00 p.m.

  From: Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, Assistant Professor—Department of English and Cultural Studies

  Cc: Reggie ; Jason Oliver ; Dr. Simeon Reece

  Bcc:

  Subject: One

  One

  As one of my heroes, John Henrik Clarke, said: “I only debate my equals. All others I teach.”

  Greetings. I write into your cruel silences. I began drafting this in the heat of the long Sunday that August becomes when you’re an academic. It wasn’t that for me, of course, and your fall semester hasn’t been a time of great intellectual leaps for me, instead it’s been a time of great anxiety. It’s mostly been a cell in which I waste slowly. Future uncertain. A new kind of dying.

  Let me get on with what I came to say.

  I paused to blow a smoke cloud, potent and grayblue. Chambers’s wordface frowned at my rudeness. Why should I entertain this? I thought. Chambers could never become the person he needed to be to blaze Freedman’s to ash. And in the end, neither could I. When Freedman’s posted the temporary lecturer position, Idra forwarded the job ad to me. Her email was devoid of her usual nonsense, her chastisements. Just the ad and nothing else. I stood outside my body watching myself apply. Reece, old chap, what are you doing? I replied: Destiny’s calling, Reece. My apparent destiny for the year (with the possibility of the position becoming permanent) was to teach the five or six composition classes a semester that Chambers couldn’t. One thing I couldn’t quit, though, was the margins, I couldn’t quit the morgue and sometimes the hole. As long as I continued to live on the edges, my rebellion still had breath.

  I continued reading:

  Jesus spoke in parables. Some speak in fables.* If that’s the language you know, then that’s the form my lecture will take, but please don’t consider this a debate. I come not to debate, but to teach. Please, you, lean in close—I’d prefer you hear this so I could ask you to listen carefully, but that’s impossible, so I urge you to do away with all distractions. Read carefully:

  I used to be a sharp dresser when I cared about such things. I had this black pinstripe suit with a vest. Got married to Christine in the thing. There is a picture of me in it, and beneath it I’ve captioned, “Freddy the Fly.”

  You know Freddy the Fly, of course. Every little boy or girl, if they come from the River, knows the story of Freddy the Fly. Him and all his little cousins. Sometimes they’re standing by the side of a road or a highway—maybe the North-South Parkway—scared to cross, sometimes it’s at the banks of the river.

  I like the river version best.† In the river Umar the Octopus surfaces his tentacles to snatch at all things that pass; Allen the Alligator sticks his snout out of the water to get a bite of every flying, swimming, or creeping thing; Danny the River Dolphin lets children ride his back; and most fearsome is Fearsome the Frog and his sticky tongue hunting to make a feast of all flies like Freddy. So Freddy and his little cousins sit in the soil at river’s edge or they hover just above the ground, flying in pointless elliptical arcs, contemplating whether or not to buzz over the water to that other side.

  What’s on the other side, anyway, huh? Freddy asks. His cousins watch him, confused. Shangri-la, Freddy, one says. A party with the most beautiful flies from all over, says another one. They greet you with gold necklaces. Says one cousin: You meet yourself past, present, and future in the journey. In the party you become one with the universe, Freddy. If only you have the courage, Freddy.

  And then the last cousin who spoke flies off greedily into the haze of the river. Freddy shudders with fear, calls his cousin’s name, but he’s gone. And soon flies another and another and another. They appear to Freddy, with the glow of the dusk moon making metallic light across their wings and their hard backs, like fireflies skimming the surface of the water.

  Eventually all the cousins fly away and Freddy sits alone in the dirt watching the river. He can’t see the other side in the dark. It seems so far. He makes to fly, but lands after a second. He thinks of the sea monsters of the deep, Fearsome the Frog, who always taunts with the thick of his tongue. Flies are not chickens. They don’t need to cross roads or rivers to get to the other side. As with all creatures, it’s their responsibility to die. Just give it a few weeks, is all. Flies don’t last too long and Freddy is no different. Poor lonely fly. In some stories a bird with a long beak roots about the dirt and picks him off, and down the throat Freddy goes. I prefer the simpler version: Freddy, dead from the passage of time, his six legs up in the air, slowly becoming a dried husk. Pieces of him carried away by enterprising ants. Poor Freddy, never again seeing his cousins, never seeing that other side.

  Careful what you call yourself, beloveds. I said I was as fly as Freddy, not knowing I had stranded myself at the river’s side, afraid to use the wings on my back.

  Chambers and I can agree on one thing, he did have wings and they were beautiful. Actually, our conceptions of the relative beauty of his wings is where we diverge. To me they were angel wings, silky with the span of a 747. To Chambers they were the thin disgusting silvery rainbow-tinged wings of a shit-eating housefly. No wonder it was so easy for the administration to take him down.

  The administration—led by Mean Dean Jean Greene—took Chambers’s porn essay as proof of his mental instability. Well, not just the essay—that was only the catalyst—the essay coupled with student complaints, and his behavior at Moments of Hate was enough to get him banished from campus. Suspended pending a firing.

  And where did Chambers go to put himself back together again? Well, I’ll let him tell it:

  When all came crashing on me and Dean Greene ripped my heart from my chest, I went to m
y source of fresh water, my life-giver,‡ my love, my Christine. I found her sitting in the dim, the quiet of our living room. Not alone, but with our son, sick and shallow-sleeping on her lap.

  Christine, I said. Christine.

  She shushed me, pointed to our child.

  Christine, baby, you know how I knew I loved you? She turned to look up at me. The expression on her face was intrigue mixed with disgust. I took that as a cue to continue. I knew because I wanted you to know everything about me, all my intimate thoughts. Before you, I never wanted a woman to know anything. They’d ask me about myself and I’d deflect with a joke or I’d ask them to tell me more about themselves and they’d comply. People like talking about themselves. I had their stories, Christine. I had so much of them. I was a vampire that way. But you, baby, you, I poured out all of me into you for a while. I never realized how difficult that was to maintain, though. Your eyes are like twin suns, Christine. You know that? You know what that heat on my skin is like? My skin is dark, but it’s sensitive to the sun and to heat. You see the number the summer does to me? Turning my flesh raw. I couldn’t stand naked in front of you anymore. I was afraid I’d get sunburnt and skin cancer and shit. So I put on sunblock and you put on sunblock. And then I put on a shirt and pants and then a layer over that and you put on a layer. And another layer and another. You and me sweating under the weight of all these fly clothes. I’m here now, Christine, though. I want to get naked with you. I mean, literally of course, but where it counts more, though. It’s the only way I get through this midnight, this Rebecca Montana shit, this hatemyprofessor shit, this Freedman’s kicking me to the curb shit. It’s fucking with me, Christine.

  I paused, let the silence of the moment hang. Christine shrugged. Moved the child from the pillow of one breast to the next.