It Will Come to Me (28 page)

“No no. Just as chair.”

A little crestfallen, she gave him her usual game smile. “Ah well, good for you,” she said, and then she was headed down the
hall, walking rapidly in her duck-footed way, pulling the depleted Big after her.

Now he was out in sultry daylight. Buildings and Grounds—what busy beavers they'd become lately—had spent the half hour he'd been closeted with Mitten-Kurz hanging a long line of Lola banners from the ceiling of the breezeway between the Administration Building and Horace Dees Hall. These were forked brown-and-orange things, emblazoned with Dreddle's new university motto,
“TAKE THOUGHT.”
For a moment, Ben's eyes were tricked into seeing them as an endless regress—
“TAKE THOUGHT, TAKE THOUGHT, TAKE THOUGHT
.”

Now he was in Horace Dees Hall, climbing the back stairs with their familiar trapped-toxin smell, and in a moment he was walking down the hall that led to his own office, glancing as he passed into the offices of a few of the department's most vulnerable denizens. There they were, as always, engaged in innocently characteristic behaviors. Ben thought of the Early Man dioramas he'd seen on elementary-school field trips to the Museum of Natural History—shaggy hominids behind glass, squatting to rake the coals of a fire or flay the hide from an antelope.

Muriel Draybrooke was sitting at her desk, holding the
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
three inches from her nose and steadily pushing a boulder of angel food cake into her mouth. Two offices down Stuart Dilbert was standing at the window with his back turned. He was thinking, Ben happened to know, about voting schemes. This was a practice he pursued for hours at a time. Nothing much had come of this thinking—he hadn't written a word in decades—and Ben suspected that he didn't do it particularly well. Even so, it was remarkable that he did it at all.
Active thinking—thinking as an activity, structured and directed toward an end—was a rare ability, growing rarer. Watching Stuart Dilbert as he thought was like prowling the alleyways of a carnival and catching a glimpse of an off-duty sword-swallower, rehearsing his act in solitude.

And there, on the other side of the hall, sitting in a monk's cell of an office playing video blackjack on his computer, was Banyan Naparstak. He was a young metaphysician, the department's most recent hire. In his first year of graduate school he'd written a seminal paper called “Parts of Parts,” which had been the subject of mereological symposia in Reykjavik, Vancouver, and Bled. He would be up for reappointment next year, and Ben had been assembling a collection of arguments for retaining him. Each of these would have to follow a strategic concession: Yes, Banyan's teaching left much to be desired, but with supervision it would no doubt improve. Yes, he hadn't published much since he'd arrived at Lola, but he was only thirty-two and with patience and support, he could still be expected to realize his early promise. Yes, his social skills were underdeveloped, but Bruce and Sissy Federman had been taking him in hand, referring him to their dentist, helping him assemble a suitable wardrobe, offering him pointers on table manners.

What would happen to Banyan's reappointment case now that Ben had quit? What would become of Dilbert and Draybrooke? Would the dean install some lackey, as she had in the case of the English Department? Would Muriel be named graduate director? Would Banyan be appointed to the hospitality committee? Hard days would be in store for the hapless. But no doubt Hayley would be instantly reassigned. That, at least, would be good for the department.

He was coming into the anteroom of his office now. Hayley, of course, had not yet arrived, but the light on the desk phone was still blinking, reminding him that he couldn't in good conscience simply pack up his briefcase and leave. He sat down at Hayley's station, elbowed aside a few desk-dwelling fairies, picked up the receiver, hit the button. A long silence ensued, interrupted by a scatter of soft hiccuping sounds Ben took to be a disturbance on the line. Just as he was about to hang up he heard a faint voice—Hayley's voice. “Professor,” Hayley said, “I am so terribly … terribly …
terribly
sorry.” Her voice gained volume on each “terribly” and on the third, it broke. She began to sob and continued to do so for thirty seconds.

“I'm here,” she said at last—now she'd switched to her dead-prophetess voice. “I'm in a motel in Meridian. Mississippi. I was trying to make it to Birmingham, but my kids were wiped so we stopped. I'm on my way to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where my sister lives.”

In Ben's mind, a map of the eastern half of the United States unscrolled itself. A Matchbox-toy version of Hayley's gold Oldsmobile skidded across it, fishtailing from Meridian to Birmingham to Harrisburg.

“I'm so tired. I've been on the road since eight o'clock last night and I
know
I've got to get some rest but first I had to call you and let you know …” Another silence, broken only by a ragged intake of breath. “I feel so awful about this. I feel so guilty about leaving you and Rhoda there with no support …” More sobs. Ben held the phone six inches away from his ear, wagging his head from side to side and doing things with his tongue and facial muscles he hadn't done since latency. He looked down to see that his feet were moving jig-wise on the carpet. He stood,
reached up, grasped a fairy by its slender plastic ankles and tore it from the ceiling.

“I hate it, Professor. I absolutely hate this. I like to think I'm not the kind of person who just … bails … when things get tough. My kids could tell you how I get when the chips are down. But after what I saw out there in that hallway … It brought everything back. I was so frightened. I was crying and shaking and I couldn't stop and I walked right over to the Counseling and Testing Center and they took one look at me and bumped me up to the front even though the waiting room was full. It was a gentleman who helped me, a tall gentleman with a mustache.”

That would be Brett Something-or-other, C&T's chief facilitator and glad-hander. Ben had momentarily forgotten his last name. Ruth called him Mr. Butterscotch.

“He was so kind. I'll never forget. I told him I felt so guilty about just walking out of the office in the middle of the day and he said, ‘Now, hold on a minute, Hayley. Don't you go beating up on yourself. I'm sure you had your reasons,’ and when I got into my history he said to me, ‘Hayley, you are absolutely doing the right thing. Your first duty is to yourself and your kids.’ You see, I have to stay away from violence because witnessing violence can trigger a recurrence of my PTSD. For me, it's poison. He told me I shouldn't go to the movies. I shouldn't even watch certain shows on TV. He said I needed to pack up my kids and get myself to safety right away. So that's what I'm doing, and I hope you understand.”

Another pause, a faint click and whirr. Hayley was lighting a cigarette. “So I guess it's goodbye, Professor. Just a minute. Can you hang on just a minute?” A series of flutterings and scratchings followed and then Hayley's voice, low and soft, a little distance
away. “BJ, get back in that bed right now. I said
now.
Count of three, young man, and I will come in there and tear a new one for you. I said one. I said two …

“Hello, Professor? Where was I? I was going to ask: Would it be too much trouble to mail me my fairies once I get settled? And will you tell Rhoda I'll miss her? Are you there, Rhoda? I hope you hear this message because I want you to know I'll never forget you, and Professor, it's so sad and it's so ironic because the Philosophy Department is the gentlest place in the world and it's just about the safest place I ever found in my whole life …”

Gently, Ben hung up the phone. He rose and left the office, neglecting to lock it, walked down the hall and jogged down the stairs. He was out of the building before he realized that he seemed to be gripping a plastic fairy in his right hand. He jammed it into a trash basket and continued along the breezeway He'd left Mitten-Kurz's office what, eight or ten minutes ago? Surely it wasn't too late to say that he'd thought better of his decision. Surely she hadn't had time to inform the provost.

T
here they were, one hundred and fifty words suspended in the blue medium. Were her tired eyes deceiving her, or was the paragraph pulsating on the screen?

Was it good? Impossible to judge, but somehow it struck her as promising. She had an intuition that left overnight it might reveal itself to be something that would grow like a culture of cells in a petri dish. She'd check on it tomorrow morning. Waiting, after all, was the true job of writing.

In the meantime she retreated to the screened-in porch and lay back on her chaise. She felt relaxed and dilated, content just
to look out on the afternoon. What time was it? Two? Three? She had misplaced her watch and had no idea. For all she knew it might be close to five, time to think about starting dinner. Odd that the light gave her no clue. Strange color, wasn't it? Greenish.

S
omething was happening. As he approached the Administration Building, he saw that B&G workers were emerging from the propped-open back door in a steady stream, carrying large objects. When he got closer he understood that these were office furnishings. Great potted plants passed in review, hoisted on burly shoulders. Ben stepped aside to make way for the monstrous fern-thing that had menaced him every time he'd sat in Mitten-Kurz's visitor's chair.

On they came. Now they were carrying minor plants and hangings and paintings and coffee tables and wicker chairs and rolled-up rugs and humidifiers and dog beds and Mitten-Kurz's portable refrigerator and microwave. How much longer could this emptying-out go on?
Sic transit gloria mundi.
So it must have been to witness the barbarian lootings of ancestral hoards. Ben wouldn't have been surprised to see a Buildings and Grounds man emerge from the building leading a bedizened elephant on a golden cord.

But instead it was Mitten-Kurz who brought up the rear, hobbling along haltingly on a single crutch, clutching her brass samovar to her stomach, her face slack and vacant. Ben approached her, but she struggled past him without giving a sign of recognition. Marcy was standing in the doorway, holding one of the dogs by its collar and speaking softly but vehemently into a cell phone. Ben edged over to her. “Wait a minute, Tracy,” she said—she'd
been talking to her counterpart in the president's office. To Ben she said, “Would you believe it? He fired her. He holds her responsible because she hired Charles Johns. He sent a crew over to move her out. No heads-up, no phone call.” Into the phone she said, “She's absolutely in shock. You should see her color. She's not a well woman. I may have to call an ambulance. Excuse me, Tracy, I think I'd better—”

Just then, Baby—Ben assumed it was Baby, because Big was not a well dog—began to pull away from Marcy's restraining hand, shaking and tugging violently. In a moment he'd popped out of his collar like a cork from a bottle. Marcy lunged, but Baby was whipping across the green. Soon he'd made it past the two great oaks in the center of the quadrangle and now he'd taken a turn toward the West Oak parking lot. Beyond that were the hedges and beyond that, humming continuously even if everyone had learned not to hear it, was the freeway. Ben and Marcy stood rooted in place, watching in helpless dismay as Baby diminished to a traveling dot. Mitten-Kurz, still clutching her samovar, still moiling along the breezeway, hadn't noticed.

T
hose outer bands'll just keep rolling on in for a while,” Roush Spanier was saying. “Rolling rolling rolling. We've got landfall estimated for just about seven o'clock tonight, and we're projecting her arrival as a Category Four.”

Ben and Ruth were sitting in wicker chairs on the screened-in porch, watching televised coverage of the approach of Hurricane Heather. The light was even greener today than it had been yesterday. Early that morning Ben had stepped out to pick up the paper and noticed that several of his neighbors were standing on their front steps in bathrobes, sniffing the still air like domestic animals.

“Like we've been saying, that's based on the very very rapid decrease in pressure in the eye that frankly came right out of the blue and upset all our projections and got us scrambling to adjust
our models. That's why we all woke up to a brand-new story this morning. Not a good story for the folks on Survivor's Island …”

Roush Spanier was seated on a high stool across from Mirielle Poirot, who had opted not to display her cleavage today, though her long crossed thighs were visible through the clear Lucite of the anchor pod. Roush Spanier had made his own concession to the occasion by leaving off his trademark red beret and smoking jacket. He was a small, roosterish man with an advanced case of tonsorial baldness. In shirtsleeves he looked diminished, but also authoritative, like a somber doctor called to a late-night bedside. The studio lights seemed to be troubling his eyes; wincing smartly, he took off his dark-rimmed glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose.

“So how does it look right now, Roush?” asked Mirielle. “What's the take-home for our viewers?”