Moo (5 page)

There were all physical types, from the blackest Africans to the palest northern Europeans (probably Nils Harstad, the dean of extension, who was a member of her church, defined this end of the spectrum), from the tallest—maybe seven feet—to the shortest, maybe three. They rolled through in wheelchairs, hobbled through on crutches, lifted their trays with hooks (farm accidents, most of those), carried white canes, followed guide dogs, watched her lips, wore hearing aids. They twitched and hunched and limped, or they seemed to dance. Breathtaking beauties of both sexes passed through the line. People who were quite the opposite of that did, too. There were girls who had shaved their heads and boys who had hair to their waists, and vice versa. A few had tattoos on their faces, more had them on their arms. People in thousand-dollar suits stood next to people in torn sweats and T-shirts, but everyone had on shoes and shirts. That was a health rule and the only sort of uniformity. Most of them spoke English, but probably she had heard, or even been addressed in, every major language in the world. She just kept smiling, because here exactly was her task, the task set by Jesus, to love the sinner even though you might hate the sin. Or, as she interpreted it, even though people were crabby and snappish and impolite and angry with each other and weird and hard to look at, being either enviable or grotesque, even though they were lusty and argumentative, and even though she had seen people eat some of the food that was supposed to be weighed at the checkout, stealing routinely, and right in front of her as if she weren’t there, she DID, mostly, love them as she knew she ought to.

What she really liked to think about was how far they had come to walk through her line—not only from all corners of the campus, but also from all corners of the world. She liked to think about them setting out, all on their own, one by one, from thousands of different spots, tracing meandering courses on their feet, in cars, on buses and trains, on airplanes of course. She liked to think how predictable it was, that at seven a.m. and eleven-thirty a.m. and five p.m., so many would be taken by the same urge, and then streams of them would converge on the commons, and in spite of all their differences, they would all be after the same appeasement of the same appetite, and then they would leave, no longer like converging liquids but like the dissipating atoms of a gas.

She worked hard and she didn’t like her job. She was tired of her coworkers and beginning to fear the sight of Jane and Amanda, two older women who’d been ladling food since the Second World War. She was so hungry to quit her job that she could taste it, but she didn’t see the people she had served over the years as participants in a secular humanist conspiracy. There were too many of them and they were too wrapped up in their appetites to be as focused as her brother thought they were. If secular humanism arose out of their activities—and surely it did, that was the evidence according to every preacher—it arose from a natural mixing of desires and appetites, the way an odor arises from a natural mixing of flavors. The secular humanists and the critical thinkers didn’t really offend her, maybe not as much as they should have. It was easier, once you were among them, to accept and even enjoy their flow.

G
ARY
O
LSON
positioned his desk a little closer than usual to the door of his room and turned off the CD player. Then he switched on his computer and opened a file labelled “CWASS.Doc.” Bob, he knew, was quietly working on statistics problems—he’d checked that with a trip to the bathroom. Lyle and Lydia, his quarry, were lounging on Lyle’s bed just the other side of the door. He could see their feet, hers bare, his sporting thin dark green socks that Gary thought typical of Lyle, whose idea of style was anything his mom sent from home. Gary himself wore only white athletic socks and Air Jordans. He turned the screen a little so that even if Lyle or Lydia looked in the doorway, they wouldn’t be able to see what he was writing.

He saved his file and printed it out, secreted it in his binder, turned off the computer. He didn’t feel too bad, not as bad as he usually felt, trying NOT to hear Lyle and Lydia talk. Maybe Mr. Monahan was right about how if you faced up to some horror and wrote about it, you felt better about it, you made it yours, and smaller than you. Horror was exactly the word for Lyle and Lydia. Bob said not to pay any attention, but Bob spent most of his time with a hog somewhere.

Lydia appeared in the doorway and smiled at him. She had a great rolling voice and beautiful smile, she was petite and her hair was thick and honey-colored. Given a choice, Gary would have put her in a much different story.

D
R
. L
IONEL
G
IFT
, distinguished professor of economics, was, as everyone including Dr. Gift himself agreed, a deeply principled man. His first principle was that all men, not excluding himself, had an insatiable desire for consumer goods, and that it was no coincidence that what all men had an insatiable desire for was known as “goods,” for goods were good, which was why all men had an insatiable desire for them. In this desire, all men copied the example of their Maker, Who was so Prodigious and Prodigal in His production of goods that His inner purpose could only be the limitless desire to own the billions and billions of light-years, galaxies, solar systems, worlds, life-forms, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles that He had produced. Perfect in the balance He incarnated of production and consumption, He represented a model that the human race not only COULD strive for, but MUST strive for. In this, his private theology, Dr. Gift felt that he had reconciled faith and relativity, self and the vastness of time and space. In fact, every time astronomers demonstrated that there was more out there, and that it was farther away than anyone had thought, every time a physicist successfully quantified vastness, or even minuteness, for that matter, Dr. Gift felt a genuine thrill, the thrill of toiling toward the holy.

At the same time, men were not perfect in their insatiability. While in the large, it never failed them, in the small, they tended to jump from one item to the other, wanting today a steak and tomorrow a tomato and the next day chicken Kiev. As far as insatiability was concerned, the spirit may be willing, but the flesh was weak, time was limited, the purity of desire was fettered by circumstances. You could say, though, and Dr. Gift often did say, that this was our very humanness, this was what made us interesting, from the point of view of economics, and even poignant, in a sense. And it certainly provided the avenue for getting ahead. Our differing desires put us into different markets, and that allowed for creativity, entrepreneurship, original thinking, progress. It was an inspiring cosmology that drew
Dr. Gift out of himself, spirit-wise. His clear and potent explanation of these and other principles of economics to beginning students (or “customers”—Dr. Gift felt that Bob Brown’s habitual appellation for the matriculators at the university was both subtle and inspired) had won Dr. Gift two university teaching awards, and he was always ready to remark that these meant more to him than all the other prizes and citations of his long career, more than the photographs of himself with presidents and prime ministers that were scattered around his office, more than everything except the money and consumer goods that the money had bought him over the years. To value those goods above all was, of course, in line with his deepest principles. Other universities were always after Dr. Gift, but he made the principled stand that as long as this university paid him the most money (enabling the consumption of the most goods), here was where he would stay.

Like God’s, Dr. Gift’s condition as a male was uncontaminated by any infusion of the female. He was unmarried, had never desired children, and devoted himself to teaching, research, and consulting. He was a busy man, and the highest-paid faculty member, by far, on the campus.

There were whole countries that Dr. Gift had made what they were today. So far they were small countries—Costa Rica was the only one most people had heard of, so he stopped mentioning the others because he always had to say what they used to be called or where they were near, which, he thought, diminished their importance and therefore his accomplishment, but Costa Rica everyone knew about. Costa Rica was a paradise, and in gratitude for what he had done for them, the Costa Rican government had given Dr. Gift a house overlooking a very nice beach on the western coast. This boon illustrated another of Dr. Gift’s principles, that gifts were consumption of another kind, but still consumption, still a manifestation of insatiable desire—payment for services already rendered, or down payment for services to be rendered later. The longer he lived, the better deal the house would turn out to be for the Costa Rican government, because the cost of maintenance of the property had been transferred to him, while the sense of obligation (or repayment) that he now felt and that they could assert both privately and publicly could be drawn upon for many years to come. It was true, as the Chinese said, that the acceptance of a gift should never be undertaken lightly. But Dr. Gift
felt that strong principles and a clear understanding of costs and benefits forearmed a recipient against economic surprises.

In addition to his other work, Dr. Gift had been chair of the university promotion and tenure committee for the last two years. It was the most sensitive committee on the campus, the one most fraught with politics. The benefits of every positive decision were modest, the costs of every negative one potentially disastrous. It was a small committee, but it needed a strong and principled leader. What repaid Dr. Gift for his time and hard work were the connections he made and strengthened with other important members of the university community, whose specialized knowledge could be had at lower cost if they felt a personal tie with him. Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.