Flee Page 2

  But then it looked too sedate: Sure, all the windows were dark – to be expected – but there was like no one walking around the quad, and no one parked in the lot by Mansfield House – where I left my vehicle – and when I walked over to Wills Hall, its door was locked, brutishly so. I kootchied the little trigger-like opener on the door what, ten times?, but: stolidity. And no one was jogging around Central Campus and no one was coming out of Bailey/Howe Library and there wasn’t a single body stepping from Cook Commons tongue-sucking seitan debris from teeth, and when I brazenly cut across the lawn straight to the front of the Waterman Building, its main door, the huge heavy oak one, had grown a goatee! Its two big old wooden handles – little sculpted harps mounted column to column and so looking like a large petrified butterfly – were wrapped in a chain. So I—

  —Yes, sir, the walk-in gates by Trinity Campus are open. But the bicycle rack in front of Billings is gone. And they’ve let ice build up on the pavement-way over to Redstone – and, I mean, the bicycle rack—

  —The whole place, I mean, not a single person in a uniform—!

  —And the poster’s still up by the entrance to Votey Hall for that intro to the Intel-based Xserve – that was three weeks ago—!

  —And like from outside, all the halls just look asleep … All dark and spooky-unmoving and—

  —I called, you know, I called the general information number, and the message says don’t leave messages—

  —And I suppose, hm, this’ll put paid to Rick Pasternak’s energy project. Sure seems likely. And that is surely too bad: now the guy’ll have something else to mope about. I heard Rick’d asked a couple of fellows from Electrical Engineering to help out with specs and design and such, and now, well, I can’t think they’ll have quite as much interest in pro bono work. When they’re already working pro bono for themselves, hunting their next job—

  —And he had gotten the U to agree to contribute an office – with a telephone line – and computer time, and access to copiers and printers and all, and now—

  —Now he didn’t say one word about this, but it seems to me that Rickie boy was hoping to use all this to get a position at the university. That’s right. Raise his profile, raise his chances. Get on Pitkinson’s good side and watch a door pivot. It’s opportunism, but hey, you know, makes perfect sense.

  If Rick could hold a job.

  —So what am I supposed to …? I have a half a truck of bread and bread products to deliver to the university three days a week. And my suppliers – I have a contract—!

  —And in February – the viola series …?

  —Will I have to give up the house? Is faculty housing – and Anna just now stuttering her first steps without holding on to my—?

  —I have kept the floors sparkling clean in those halls for twenty-two years. More times than I can begin to remember, I have gotten down on my knees to scrub the yellow tiles they kept in 438 College Street from before the renovation. And this, this is what they—

  —No thesis! No thesis!

  —And what: now my electricity bill’s going to go even higher? Because you know, demand is totally gonna drop, and the company, the C-Whatever-Os, they gotta make up for it somehow, they ain’t gonna lighten their pockets, they’re just going to use this as an excuse to—

  —Serves ’em right. Teaching all that open our borders and benefits for everyone and take it away from them that earned it, and Frantz Fanon and Jeez, Malcolm X – my neighbor’s son brought home a book with a fist by Malcolm X – and class after class of nothing more than anti-American liberal … Man, you don’t like it here, you leave – at least you can produce that. And all this crud taught by guys who no longer have to worry about working any more, they got their jobs, they’re guaranteed their jobs, why do you think they can say all that—

  —My God. Every version of my CV, there must be six of – and all the e-mails from Alicyn, they’re on that computer—

  —But I have to return two books …! They’re cruel with their late fees for town-people over there. The library at Pitki—

  —Yeah, it’s been pretty rude. All the faculty and support staff – fired. All the students – don’t come back. Pitkinson says it’ll refund unused tuition, and will compensate staff to the tune of thirty-five percent of spring-term salary. Well, good luck. The University is by no means bankrupt – they’ve been cruising along very nicely, thank you, on research for Eli Lilly and Monsanto and the Navy and quite a few others. Sure, they were outbid on the Alberta oil sands project, and they weren’t entirely flush in all their budgets. Join the club. Point is, nothing concerning the exchequer, or faculty morale, or their US News and World Report ranking should have lead to—

  —I heard they filed for de-accreditation with the State!

  —And it sure means shit for Carol. Damn that girl gonna take it hard. She so into Rick’s thing, putting them cherry-red signs up all over everywhere and gladhanding everyone she can grope onto in front of Mayor Farina’s office, you ask me that’s what really got Rick into gear – and what am I saying …? Shihht, Carol been working the last six months over at Hendersons, those guys goin down. What – fifty, eighty percent the coffee they sell go to people from the university? Shoo. For any size business that be a tragedy. Damn. Now’s I can see another kinda sign going up in Hendersons front window. Sorry to hear it, C.

  —And you think Rick’s gonna provide for her? Can provide for her …?

  —Check this out: The U’s selling the grandstand from Centennial Field. They found a private high school in Waltham that wants to—!

  —And all the chem-lab equipment and the Ethan Allen collection and—

  —And chalk. Our university is now in the business of selling yellow chalk. I mean little sticks of—!

  —I heard Sotheby’s wants to sell everything off—

  —Though I heard next week, students’ll be allowed to pick up what they left in their rooms—

  —From Monday to Saturday, they have to register online, then they’ll be given a number and fifteen minutes when they can go in and get their—

  —Then, I heard, liquidators are coming through and—

  —The U has hit the stripping point—

  —And ho, you know, ho: what is going down round here? Me bud Julius, he told me Pitkinson said we can just keep all the books and journals and such we’d checked out of Bailey/Howe, and that the university’s going to expend some of its exceedingly scarce resources to post, online, a museum of amputees – our transcripts – and so, like, ho. I mean, like, holy shit …

  Who knows what comes next, you know what I’m saying?, my parents, like, they are totally having kittens, and we’re local: who knows how the folks who’ve got to travel from Cleveland or Santa Cruz to gather up their pasts – and to see how these aforementioned pasts are seriously futzing their futures – are handling this. So I figured it’s just a sterling idea to remove myself from Mom’s downstream, and so decided I’d pay a visit to Professor Gray and see what he makes of the sitch. He lives just up on South Willard and I’ve been there a bunch of times, mostly when he invited a few students to his place for, his words, an extended session, which meant he wanted to have his usual teaching assistant, a small slim scholar named Pinot Noir, contribute openly. The seminar was called Dis-identity Politics, which I thought was about the cultural ascent of the impersonal and so would seriously luster up my law-school application, though I soon found out the course was less about politics and more about dissing. But I liked Professor Gray and kept in touch, and his house has a nice creak-step porch out back, looking upon a really raw, grassless lawn, as well as one fine selection of Phil Lesh memorabilia both stored away and shown off on a shrinelike living-room shelf, and he, my words, is cool.

  But he wasn’t Wednesday night. Guy who told me that knowledge is made for cutting didn’t seem too happy about where one blade had fallen. Guy who pressed me to cat-drown all institutions in cynicism was huffing like a ’51 Vespa two-stroke about having to
find another mothership to barnacle himself to. He sat in his living room’s one comfy chair, on the Curtin-clan oval rug above the long floorboards, his usually buoyant demeanor gone submergent. Short-crop red-brown beard growing tufty, belly beerier, and those high-shine eyes, once trenchant, now all elsewhere. He looked up to an inside-reflecting dark window, exhaled jowlily, spoke unprovoked.

  Age makes us all into Buddhists, he muttered/rasped. And, after a swig: Tenure laugh-track.

  That’s to say, this was not Wally’s – first name – top day. I sat on a wooden chair that had a sunrise-slat back – seminar revenant – and asked what he knew about events on campus.

  What campus?, he said. He rubbed his beard, chinward. Sure, I know about it, he said, and then slowly looked down to his lap, as if he’d spilled something, which he hadn’t. Then he continued: All came about because some kid asked to take a course in Sociology.

  He put elbows on thighs.

  Hunh?, I said.

  Yeah, Wally said.

  Sitting up, he pushed his hair back with both hands. He then spoke straight ahead, not to me.

  Just before the start of the year, Professor Gray said – August 12, if you prefer rigor – some kid from Rutland signed up for undergraduate sohsh class number fourteen, Deviance and Social Control. A general, entry-level survey of the subfield, taught by Nat D’Angelo. Mondays and Wednesdays from 1 to 2:30 p.m. All standard issue.

  But the Rutland kid got an e-mail in return, maybe three days later, that the course wasn’t available last fall, Professor Gray continued. So, OK, the globe holds more gumballs, and the kid e-mailed back that he’d take course thirty-two, Rationalizing Inequality, instead. Soon, though, same reply. Class cancelled. In an e-mail that was quick, courteous, professional, but not exactly explanatory.

  This time, though, the kid experiences the Hmmm reflex, Professor Gray said. And so he starts to nose around. Making calls and visiting buildings. Checking hallway trafic and lightly knuckling doors. Waiting, then knuckling again. And guess what he finds. Nothing. And I mean that literally. Not a de Brogliesque absence of presence but a Tertullian presence of absence. And the kid’s research was correct. Astute, even. Sociology at Pitkinson doesnt exist. It’s a phantom on the loose. A vacuum unabhorred. The course listings? All just words. Scratches in the catalogue. No meetings no teaching no assignments. The classrooms are nonexistent numbers in Lafayette Hall. The secretary is an answering machine. The professors and the administrative minions – names from a phonebook.

  For how long has it been like this?, Wally continued. No one is too inclined to say. But the reason? Simplicity itself. All these soft – in quotes – academic departments are supported, at both the State and the national levels, by massive apparatuses of funding. For history, geography, Romance languages – for all of sociology’s unjustifiable kin – the grant-, research-, subsidy- and development-sluices never shut down. Foundations, divisions, metastatic bureaucracies, public and private, continue to sprout all over the place, ardently dedicated to keeping these humanistic – in big, thick quotes – traditions alive. They’re prestigious, they’re patrimonial, they’re vestiges of past whatevers. They’re headed by pedigreed men in bow ties – scholars, dispensers and beggars. Sociology brings close to six figures into Pitkinsons coffers every year. Reparations in the culture wars, guilt gelt paid by educational assassins. No one, of course, ever asks to see any of the research that’s supposed to result from all this largesse. Publications in the febrile scheme of Sociology are read as much as those produced by all the other softies. No one is looking.

  So the silent abduction of Pitkinson’s sohsh department seemed sustainable, Professor Gray went on. Eminently, endlessly so. All was coordinated from high up in Pitkinson’s Humanities faculty, with the full blessing of U brass. The requisite entries in the catalogue continued to be made, pages upon pages of intricate listings for a department that, to those inside, came to be known as Ghost Sociology.

  And then this kid from Rutland wants to take a course in it. He has, he claims, interest. But rather than being put off by the usual brief rebuff – detours from sociology are usually accepted quite gratefully – he comes back and declares a major in the subject. He wants this as his chosen field. In an e-mail, he sets out his intentions, and lists a hypothetical program of eight courses that he would like to take over the four determining years. Eight courses that he knows are weighable in air, in a department that – he knows – is no more than letterhead.

  And there’s more: In a PS, the gallmeister suggests that he is so aswarm with love for the noble discipline that he’s weighing continuing on for a Master’s degree. Even a PhD.

  The e-mail lands like a mortar in the Hum suzerainty. Wobbles. Warbles. Unmonitored refills of latte. And, of course, deliberations.

  The administrators, the enablers, Wally continued, all of them wondered out loud: Why? Why would a student elect to do this? Why make so counterintuitive a choice? What manner of reasonable being opts for such a selection, when the Computer Science building is so orthogonal and sleek, so very well provisioned?

  Answers came: Maybe he wanted to challenge us – the free flow of ideas, etc. Maybe he was angling for a job. Maybe he wanted to shake us down.

  And then Martha Dayles – our biology co-chair – had the forehead-tapper: the kid from Rutland was fabricating the perfect college experience. The summum of modern education. Ghost Sociology was a dream major. The kid would attend no classes and take no exams. Never would he, arms thrust under the desk, furiously perform micro-calculations to keep his crown from the sweeping beam of a vengeance-bent instructor. He could sleep and roister as his heart saw fit. He need not read a thing. And, cowed, the department – of course in quotes – would reward him with a weight-bearing degree. With honors. And with a GPA that would delight the eye of the most seen-it-all gatekeeper to B school.

  A gorgeous plan, Wally said. Clever and profitable. Hats – big, tall Stetsons – off to the guy.

  Wally put his hands on his thighs while holding elbows up – a posture of awed appreciation. Holding silence, he turned time into praise.

  But eventually he went on. Yet maybe the plan was too crafty for its own good, Wally said. Both overly and insufficiently subtle. Inadequately far-seeing. The Rutland kid had not anticipated how fragile the balance – not only of the department, but of the whole university. How tenuous the superstructural perch. Pull one red thread and the sweater ravels.

  The Professor stood. He winced and widened. Then he spoke, deliberately, straight to the windows – a series of abyss-black rectangles – across his warm room.

  Yes yes yes, he said. Parasites beware. Bacteria should understand their place in the gut. Maybe that kid should have taken some sociology courses after all.

  Professor Gray disappeared into a rear part of the house. No door closed. I wasn’t sure when he’d be back.

  —Though I heard they’re accepting bids.

  —Alread—!

  —Shit last week, they already got three bids to—

  —A Body Shop. That’s what I heard. They want to set up a big production administration complex in—

  —Also North Face is proposing, for the full campus, and—

  —So I – great as a gated community—

  —Ach. Not the time.

  —Market not robust—

  —Did they know? It’s like they knew.

  —How could they, so quickly—?

  —OK, so all this is going on, right? So how did I – how did we not—?

  —Nothing about any of this. Not a thing written anywhere. Where was WCAX? Where was the Free Press?

  —Pitkinson is there for what, two hundred and fifteen years? And then suddenly—

  —Like how Dean Miller is at a conference on St. Croix—

  —With his family—?

  —Why didn’t we hear?

  —Why didn’t we, here—

  36,551

  And shit. Shhhiiit. Look, at, what, is, g
o, ing, down … A Norelco SensoTouch with anti-slip grip for twenty-four ninety—?!

  —Ah – good, craigslist’s got someone looking to do algebra tutoring—

  —So, yeah, you know, there we were, settling in, settling down, waiting for the side fixtures to slow dim, we must have been fifty, fifty-five people in the Black Box Theater, all waiting, coats on or coats scrunched up over laps – or the biggest coats open and just being sat on – and all of us giddy because James, you know, he’s just really good. You know, so interesting and funny, witty and kid-y like Jonathan Winters used to be, you’ve just got to smile, and his stories take off with all the background he gives, and his little asides – Oh, yes: no less than its sister, Venice, Stockholm is entirely built on islands – and his slides are just so full of color and beautiful. Every year he goes someplace wonderful – he’s been to San Francisco, and Mesa Verde, and St. Petersburg, and Maccu Piccu, Terra del Fuego – and he shows, gosh, it’s got to be two hundred slides each time. And he brings back brochures and souvenirs and sample menus, and he gives them out while he talks – we can keep them, they’re for free! – it lets us, you know, it’s really nice, we go away with him a little, the menus usually have pictures, one from Lisbon had the faces of grilled sardines that looked like they were smiling, but there must have been thirty seats vacant in the hall last night. And Caria, you know, she tried to get a ticket but she was told it was sold out, she called all over and even contacted someone she knows in City Hall. But her friend said there was nothing she could do, and she – Caria – accepted that, you know, because James’ lectures are always sold out, there are usually people waiting outside, so what’s he doing, why’s he waiting, his slide projector’s just sitting there on the little metal table they put above a chair in the middle of the third row—