Hardscrabble Road (49 page)

I
t had been bothering
her since Gregor Demarkian had come to see her the night before, and now it was impossible to keep out of her mind on any
level. Alison wasn’t even able to keep it out of her mind while she was teaching, and usually teaching was better than a memory
drug. She found it all too easy to retreat into the Middle Ages and to experience that as more real, and more immediate, than
anything in the present. Maybe that was because the Middle Ages were more real and immediate than anything in the present.
The passage of time did a lot of good things for whatever cultural periods it didn’t completely destroy. It washed away the
trivial and the dross. It eliminated the extraneous. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Hildegarde von Bingen’s music stood out
like shining beacons of culture, taste, erudition, and sanity next to the violent confusion of a world full of Madonna and
Beethoven, Steven Spielberg and Shakespeare, The Weekly World News and The Portrait of a Lady. But Chaucer’s world had been
a violent confusion, too, and on every level. It was a world where people died young of diseases we didn’t have the names
for anymore, where maiming and mutilation were par for the course in war, where the cultural landscape included hundreds of
truly execrable morality plays and drama from traveling troupes with no more thought to the artistic integrity of what they
were doing than for the feelings of the playwrights whose works they were plagiarizing. Then there was the really gruesome:
the art of religious relics, manufactured wholesale from bits and pieces of dead animals and, yes, dead human beings. There
was the art of the Chapel of Bones, with its facade made of human bones stacked one on top of the other and, in the sanctuary,
the bodies of a dead man and a dead child hung by hooks over the congregation, to remind them of the fleetingness of life.
There was the Plague, and there were the flagellants, monks who walked through the streets of towns and cities in formation,
scourging themselves with metal-tipped leather whips until their upper torsos spurted blood. Hell, Alison thought, give me
World Wrestling Entertainment anytime.

She looked up now at the building she thought was the one she wanted, and tried consulting the visitor’s map one more time.
It was astounding that she had managed to be at Penn for all these years and still not know where the Math Department was,
but she wasn’t in the Math Department, and she didn’t usually need them for anything, so that was the way that
went. The visitor’s map was more than a little surreal. It showed the university buildings as if they were made of Lego blocks,
but it didn’t show anything of the city that not only surrounded the campus but interweaved with it. It was disorienting.
People who came to visit here must feel as if they’d entered a virtual reality game, or exited from one.

This looked like the right building. She went inside and looked at the information board just inside the door. Not all buildings
had them. She was glad this one did. Maybe it had something to do with this being a science building, and committed to modernity
and reason. Or maybe not. The information board didn’t give much in the way of information. It didn’t list professors’ offices.
It did say that the Math Department was in “Room 217,” by which Alison supposed it meant that the office with the Math Department’s
secretaries was there. She wondered sometimes why academic departments always wanted to make having to deal with them something
that was very hard to do.

She found the stairs and ran up them. This building might have an elevator. It was hard to tell which ones did and didn’t.
On the second floor, she went down the corridors counting doors, looking for Room 217, and then she got lucky. She heard his
voice, sailing out into the corridor as clearly as if he had been speaking into a microphone.

“No more hegemonic discourse, Delmore,” he said. “I’m very, very serious.”

Alison was startled for a moment. She didn’t think math people talked about hegemonic discourse. She got tired just hearing
literature people talk about hegemonic discourse. She slowed down a little and tried to listen, but whoever Delmore was, his
diction was deplorable. All she could catch was mumbles.

“The revolution won’t be destroyed because you learn to speak in plain English,” Jig Tyler said then. “It might be destroyed
if you don’t.”

Alison went up to the door and looked inside. Jig was sitting behind his desk, with his legs up, wearing a ratty old crew-necked
sweater over even rattier khaki pants. “Delmore” was wearing jeans, but he shouldn’t have been. He was too fat, too round,
too soft, and far too earnest-looking.

Alison was just wondering if she should clear her throat, and knock, when Jig saw her there. He put his feet down and sat
up straight. “Dr. Standish,” he said. “Get yourself together, Delmore. This is Dr. Standish. She teaches in the English Department
and writes articles about the development of vernacular poetry and heresy.”

“Heresy is good,” Delmore said earnestly. “Heresy is inherently transgressive, and because of that it almost always has subversive
and underminic effects on the hegemonic—”

Jig cleared his throat. Delmore shut up. He had thin hair pulled awkwardly across the top of his head, over what was becoming
a bald spot.

“Well,” Delmore said. “I’ve got Dr. Markham’s seminar in about twenty minutes. I should go.”

“Good idea,” Jig said.

Alison watched Delmore leave the office and go down the hall. He looked dejected. She thought the oppression he most needed
to alleviate was his own.

“Do you always behave that way to him?” she asked. “Is it—I don’t know—some sort of tradition in the Math Department, like
it used to be at Chicago, when people said you were presumed guilty of stupidity until proven innocent?”

“I’d never presume anybody guilty of anything until proven innocent,” Jig said. “Delmore proved his stupidity long ago. He’s
an entirely mechanical actor. He’s flawlessly conscientious. He comes to every class. He does every assignment. He studies
for every test. He’s always prepared. It’s taken him this far, and that isn’t a small thing. Getting admitted to the graduate
program in this department these days makes getting elected God look like a piece of cake. But the mechanics are all Delmore
can do. He has no imagination, and he has less knowledge of the real world and how it operates. You don’t want to begin discussing
his problems understanding people.”

“Is that necessary in a mathematician? That he understand people?”

“Probably not. Lord only knows there have been enough mathematicians who don’t. And in some highly technical fields, a lack
of understanding and empathy could even help. You wouldn’t want a surgeon standing over you with a knife and feeling your
pain. But it’s necessary to a human being that he—or she, excuse me—understand people, and I’m afraid Delmore isn’t ever
going to be much of a human being.”

“But he does what you tell him to do, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, yes,” Jig said. “Delmore tries to compensate for his lack of interrelatedness with people by committing himself to what
he thinks are left politics and hero-worshiping me. In the beginning, I thought the hero worship was what bothered me. Lately,
it’s been the left politics.”

“I thought you had left politics.”

“I do,” Jig said. “I have real left politics. Delmore is sunk up to his neck in the intellectualized crap that’s become the
security blanket of the embattled academic class. A transgressive hermeneutics of grammar. Ad infinitum.”

This room, Alison thought, was exactly what you would expect the office of a two-time Nobel Prize winner to be like. There
were books everywhere, and not only books related to his field. There was Aristotle and Kant and Heidegger. There was Jane
Austen and James Joyce. There was a copy of
Einstein’s essays on society and politics. If they gave you something besides a check to mark your Nobel Prize—a plaque, or
certificate, or a statue— that wasn’t here. She folded her arms across her chest and looked back at Jig. He was exactly what
you would expect him to be, too. The intellectual giant as Brahmin WASP. The genius as preppie.

“I came,” she said, “to find out why you told Drew Harrigan I was discriminating against my students with conservative views.”

Jig didn’t even blink. “Why do you think I did that?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure you did. I don’t think you went to the administration, or the department. Once the accusation
is made, it takes on a life of its own. But I think you told Drew Harrigan that. I think you fed him the original story. That’s
why you came to my office the other day.”

“I came to warn you about Ellen Harrigan’s list.”

“I don’t think so,” Alison said. “I wasn’t in danger from Ellen Harrigan’s list. If I’d thought about it for two seconds,
I would have realized that. Gregor Demarkian came to see me. The police are no more interested in me than they are in the
Easter Bunny. And why should they be? I never met the man. Either man, I suppose it is now.”

“I was trying to be helpful to a fellow sufferer from Drew Harrigan’s allegations.”

“I don’t think you ever suffered from Drew Harrigan’s allegations,” Alison said. “You’re untouchable, really. You’d have to
rape a child to get into any real trouble on this campus. You’ve got the two Nobel prizes. You’ve got tenure. You’ve got the
political books, and they sell, which means they probably also make money. I went on the Internet and paid twenty-nine ninety-five
to join Drew Harrigan’s Web site. Then I listened to a bunch of the archived programs. It wasn’t just me. There was a woman
in the Spanish Department who got accused of teaching the Inquisition from a Marxist perspective, a man in the Philosophy
Department who got nailed for supposedly having said that the United States was the greatest danger to human life the world
has ever known, a man in the Sociology Department who was called out for supposedly saying that the family was obsolete and
ought to be abolished. Do you know what they all had in common?”

“What?”

“They were all pretty obscure, and the complaints came from their upper-level and graduate courses. In other words, the courses
with the fewest number of students in them.”

“So?”

“So the probabilities are low that it would have happened that way that many times,” Alison said. “The more you look at just
who Drew Harrigan
went after at Penn over the last year and a half, the more it looks like an inside job. We had Angela Davis come and speak
at this campus not six months ago, and Drew Harrigan never mentioned it. Do you want to tell me what it is you were trying
to do?”

“Why do you think it was me who was trying to do something? Even if your analysis is correct, and in my opinion it’s logically
weak to the point of feebleness—”

“—Oh, stop,” Alison said. “Nobody else came to me. Nobody else ‘warned’ me. Nobody wanted to find out how I was feeling. Of
course it was you. The question is, why was it you?”

“I was a victim, too, you know,” Jig said.

“Nonsense,” Alison said. “You throw your ideas out there for all to see and somebody attacks them; that’s not being a victim,
that’s being a part of the debate. I was damned near a real victim. I had an inquiry launched into my teaching, into my integrity—”

“—A secret inquiry,” Jig said quickly.

“I know.”

“But don’t you see, that’s the point,” Jig said. He got up so suddenly, Alison flinched. “Secret inquiries. Speech codes.
Star Chamber proceedings where the accused is presumed guilty until proven innocent and isn’t even allowed to know who is
testifying against him. Do you know how that looks in the outside world, how it looks to our students?”

“Yes, it looks terrible,” Alison said. “The speech codes should be abolished. More professors should do what I did when faced
with secret inquiries and threaten to sue. Why does that justify giving Drew Harrigan lies to spout on his radio program about
people who’ve done nothing wrong in the first place?”

“How do you know that they’ve done nothing wrong?” Jig said. “Cavellero, the man in the Philosophy Department, was one of
the principal architects of that speech code you think should be abolished. And during the water buffalo thing, he was one
of the biggest advocates of expelling the kid outright for daring to cause trouble. The woman in the Spanish Department helped
design the ‘Orientation’ program all new faculty hires are required to take. That’s after your time. Do you know what that’s
like?”

“I’ve heard rumors,” Alison said.

“Re-education camp,” Jig said. “Emotional bullying in the name of antidiscrimination. It’s insane. Do you know what we’re
doing, on campuses like this across the country? We’re raising a generation of Republicans, because we’re raising a generation
of kids who think it’s the Republicans who stand for freedom of speech and of the press. And do you know why that is?”

“Why?”

“Because on college campuses, it is the Republicans who stand for freedom of speech and of the press. It’s the Republicans
who fight against the shouting down of speakers, and against censoring campus newspapers, and against criminalizing speech.
The Campus Republicans are the single strongest force for civil liberties at Penn. What are we doing to ourselves? What are
we doing to the world when we send kids out of here determined to vote for right-wing nutcases because they mistake the campus
reality for reality in the real world?”

“And that justifies giving a nationally syndicated radio talk show host false information about my teaching and grading practices
so that he can call me a Communist and get me investigated by my department?”

“The investigation didn’t happen because of what Drew Harrigan said. It happened because a student complained.”

“Maybe,” Alison said. “But I’m going to look into that, too. Because I’ve got my suspicions.”

Jig sat down again. Everything he did was abrupt, Alison thought. Watching him sometimes was like watching jerky animation.

“We have to do something to stop it,” he said. “Just talking about it won’t help. I do talk about it. I talk about it all
the time. Nobody listens.”