Visiting Professor (11 page)

I heard an unearthly Mayday-like howl from Rain. “Get off the goddamn ramp!”

I heard myself tell myself this was a major river, I was lucky to have found another one in my lifetime.

Then suddenly the pandemonium gave way to a silence so profound the planet Earth seemed to me to have abruptly stopped rotating.
I wondered if such a thing was possible, I wondered if this could be the pure, unadulterated random event in the history of
the universe that I was looking for. Then I noticed the Rebbe’s eyes bulging out of his skull and I distinctly heard the words
oy
and
vey
spatter on the pavement like two swollen drops from a faucet and it dawned on me that I was able to hear the Eastern Parkway
Or Hachaim Hakadosh because I could no longer hear the motor of the bulldozer. I turned my head to look back up the ramp but
I could not see anything and then I understood why I could not see anything, it was because the tank tread was centimeters
from my face and blocking my view, and I saw in my mind’s eye the girl being dragged by her hair across the landscape of my
uncrushed heart and I thought, Whoever you are, I have paid my debt to you, I have been passionate about someone who did not
exist, and then Rain was pulling at my feet and helping me squirm out from under the tread and climb off the ramp and clinging
to me and sobbing hysterically.

And then I fainted.

The doors on the three large wire-mesh holding cages have been left ajar so that
the sixty-eight people being detained for trial can use the toilets without bothering the sheriff, who can be heard through
the open door that leads to the front office. He is trying to figure out where Jerusalem is.

“When there’s sun, which isn’t uh everyday occurrence, it rises through that window,” the sheriff, Chester Combes, is saying,
“which means by rights east oughta be somewhere over there.”

“You got to take into account this here is a winter sun, sheriff,” cautions Norman, the rail-thin deputy sheriff who deftly
fingerprinted the demonstrators when they were bused in by the state troopers. “Which means a hair south of east oughta be
just about where the water cooler is.”

“You went’n asked my opinion, I’m givin’ you my opinion,” the sheriff tells the Rebbe with a hint of irritation. “Jerusalem
looks to be to the lefta the water cooler, more near the middle row uh wanted posters on the bulletin board. You can take
it, you can leave it, either way. I got other things to think about asides tryin’ to figure out where Jerusalem is, like findin’
uh serial killer.”

“Uh-huh,” Norman agrees.

“To be on the safe side,” Rebbe Nachman says diplomatically, “I’ll split the difference.”

The Rebbe meanders back into his holding pen, converts a scarf into a prayer shawl, covers his head with an enormous handkerchief
knotted at the four corners and, facing a putative Jerusalem, begins his evening prayers. Bowing and straightening and glancing
over his left shoulder now and then to check for Cossacks, he intones in a singsong voice,
Borukh atoh adoynoy, eloyheynu melekh ha’oylom, asher bidvoroy ma’ariv arovim uvekhokhmoh poyseyakh she’orim uvisvunoh makhalif
es hazemanim …”

The football players and cheerleaders, camping on mattresses supplied by the county from its stock of disaster supplies, fill
the air with a slightly jazzed-up version of “We shall overcome,” but quickly get bored with it and drift into bawdy limericks.
“There once was a cockney from Boston …” they intone in voices that become inaudible at the X-rated parts. Each limerick is
capped by a burst of raucous laughter.

Sitting on a bench outside the holding pens, the Baptist minister is reading Saint Mark from a small leather-bound Bible:
“They came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from
the door of the sepulchre?”

In a corner of the middle holding pen, a dozen graduate students, along with Backwater U’s three librarians, D.J. and half
a dozen teachers from the university sit in a circle around Professor Holloway, who is conducting a seminar on Etruscan votive
art.

Word Perkins, half-dozing on a nearby mattress, props himself up on an elbow, smothers a yawn, adjusts his hearing aid and
listens to the lecture for a while. “Can anyone ask a question, huh, Professor?” Perkins interrupts. “It’s interestin’, what
yaw savin’, I don’t mean to infer otherwise, but I don’t follow how these trashcans was able to vote whit art.”

“America is a country where anyone can ask a question,” D.J. murmurs dryly. “Anyone has.”

In the holding pen nearest Jerusalem, not far from where the Rebbe is praying, Lemuel and four fellows of the Institute for
Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies discuss chaos theory in low, animated tones. “Every time I read an article
tracing the origins of chaos to the origins of the universe,” one of the fellows complains,
“I am left with the queasy feeling that the exercise is pointless. What’s the difference whether chaos came into existence
before or after the Big Bang? Surely the point is that it’s here.”

“Shema yisro’eyl, adoynoy eloheynu, adoynoy ekh-o-o-o-d
…” the Rebbe intones, covering his eyes with a hand, drawing out the last syllable of the word “one.”

“There once was an orphan from Killarney …”

“And when they looked,” the Baptist minister mumbles, “they saw that the stone was rolled away.”

In the middle holding pen, Word Perkins sits up and addresses D.J. directly. “The trouble whit eggheads is they think once
they know something, they own the thing they know.”

“The
origins
of chaos,” Lemuel tells the Institute fellows, “can tell us a great deal about the
nature
of chaos. Did the Big Bang, in a microsecond of quirkiness, beget chaos? Or was the Big Bang itself determined but unpredictable,
and hence chaotic from the start? What was the sequence?”

“Adoynoy eloheynu emes …”

“There once was a wrestler from Baltimore …”

“Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.”

Word Perkins snatches the hearing aid out of his ear in disgust. “I hate folks who own what they know. …”

“Sequence can be elusive,” one of the Institute fellows remarks to Lemuel. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“I tend to agree,” says the fellow who raised the original question. He nods toward the Baptist minister. “Some things
appear
to come before other things. But do they really? Did Jesus disappear from the sepulchre before the stone was rolled away
from the mouth of the cave, in which case we could conclude He was resurrected? Or did He disappear afterward, in which case
we could conclude He somehow survived the crucifixion and walked off on His own two feet?”

Lemuel turns to look at Rain, who is sitting on a nearby mattress cradling Mayday in her lap, deep in whispered conversation
with Dwayne. Shirley squats behind Rain, braiding her ponytail. Rain’s face is drawn, her eyes dark and damaged, as if she
is seeing what might have been. Her sucked-in cheeks still bear the traces of a river of tears, so it seems to Lemuel.

He turns back to the fellows. “It is true that choices made now, today,
have a way of projecting themselves backward in time,” he says, massaging his brow with his thumb and third finger to keep
a migraine at bay. With a self-conscious grunt he paraphrases Einstein: “It is the theory which decides what we observed.”

“Mi khomoykho bo’eylim adoynoy, mi khomoykho ne’edor bakoydesh, noyroh sehiloys oysey feleh …”

“There once was a lady from Tulsa …”

“And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized
shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”

“Do you consider it possible to observe something independent of all theory?” one of the fellows asks Lemuel.

“I can say you the fact that you consider observation a useful technique,” Lemuel tells the fellow,
“is
a theory.”

“We are the prisoners of theory,” another fellow says dejectedly.

“Hey, what we’re the prisoners of,” Rain calls, scratching Mayday’s ragged ears, gesturing with her chin toward the deputy
sheriff who has appeared at the door, “is the military-industrial dudes who think they can palm off their goddamn radioactive
garbage on us.”

“Right on, babe,” says Dwayne.

“Borukh atoh adoynoy, goy’eyl yisro’eyl …”

“There once was a scout from Milwaukee …”

“As I was saying,” Professor Holloway tries to pick up where he left off, “the Etruscans, and most especially the early Etruscans
of the 900-to-800-B.c. period, considered votive pieces—”

Carrying a clipboard, the deputy sheriff comes into the cage area. The prayers, limericks and discussions break off. “This
is the last call for McDonald’s,” he announces. “To recapitulate, I got thirty-seven burgers, sixteen with cheese, twenty-one
without. I got fourteen medium fries—”

Shirley raises a hand. “Hey, Norman, can I still switch from medium to large fries?”

“Uh-huh,” the deputy sheriff acknowledges the change. With infinite patience, he scratches out one medium and adds one more
to his column of large fries.

After dinner, Lemuel goes around collecting the garbage in a plastic sack, then wanders into the front office to have a word
with the sheriff.

“I was just now asking myself if you got my message the other night,” he says.

The sheriff, a balding, middle-aged man with a potbelly spilling over a wide, tooled-leather belt, is writing in his logbook.
“What message are we talkin’ about?”

“It concerned the serial killer.”

The sheriff turns back a page, verifies an entry, flips the page, starts writing again. “What do you know about the serial
killer that I don’t know?” he asks without looking up.

“I telephoned a radio talk-show host to say him the serial murders were not random. He said me he would pass the information
on to the sheriff’s office.”

The sheriff slowly raises his eyes. “How would you know the murders wasn’t random?”

“These crimes may look random, but this seeming randomness is nothing more than the name we give to our ignorance.”

The sheriff purses his lips. “What are you, some kind uh criminologist?”

“I am a randomologist who has never found pure randomness, for the simple reason it probably does not exist. I can say you
there is a pattern to the crimes, you only have to find it.”

Sheriff Combes, who is nobody’s fool, closes his logbook and sizes up Lemuel. In the trade he has a reputation for being able
to reckon a man’s height and weight within one inch and two pounds. “I figure you for five nine ‘n’ uh half, uh hundred seventy.”

Lemuel quickly converts inches to centimeters, pounds to kilos. “How did you know that?”

The sheriff ignores the question. “You gotta be from that Institute over at Backwater … the Advanced Confusion-Related Studies,
whichever.” When Lemuel nods, he adds, “I happen to be old-school law enforcement, which means unlike some uh the hotshots
workin’ for the State Bureau uh Criminal Investigation, I don’t rule nothin’ out when it comes to solvin’ crimes. I wouldn’t
want this to get around—the state police would laugh me outa the county—but I got me uh gypsy in Schenectady who reads entrails,
I got me uh stone-blind Rumanian lady in Long Branch who reads tarot cards, I got me uh defrocked Catholic priest in Buffalo
who dangles uh silver ring over uh map. They’re all workin’ on the case, so why not uh randomologist? Tell me something, Mr.
…”

“Falk, Lemuel.”

The sheriff cocks his head. “So you’re the Falk everybody’s talkin’ about. I ain’t personally had uh opportunity to catch
you on the tube yet. So tell me, Mister Falk, what makes uh random event random?”

“An event is random,” Lemuel explains, “if it is not determined and not predictable.”

The sheriff’s eyes stretch into a professional squint. “Let’s say you was to find uh pattern to the crimes, it might lead
to uh motive, uh motive might lead to uh perpetrator. Hnnn. If I was to fix you up with photocopies uh the files, would you
be willin’ to comb through ‘em with an eye to ascertainin’ whether or not the crimes in question was genuinely random?”

Lemuel says, “I have never done anything like this before. It could be an interesting exercise.”

Later, before putting out the lights for the night, Norman, the deputy sheriff, threads his way around the mattresses in the
holding pens and distributes plastic cups and thermoses of scalding herb tea brought over by the wives of several of the professors.

“Hey, thanks, Norman.”

“Yeah, man, thanks a lot.”

“Why, how thoughtful of you, Norman.”

“Uh-huh.”

Sitting cross-legged on a mattress in the third holding pen, Rain fills two plastic cups and passes one to Lemuel, who is
on the mattress next to hers, his back against the mesh of the cage, a blanket pulled up to his neck.

“D.J. told me what all those letters you wrote on my blackboard meant,” Rain remarks. “I scored points for asking the question.”
She takes a sip of herb tea, finds it too hot, rolls it around in her mouth before swallowing.

“I’m gonna hafta turn out the lights now,” Norman calls from the doorway. “I’m leaving the lights on in the cans and the doors
open, okay? Breakfast will be at eight. The trial starts at nine. On behalf of the sheriff and the other deputies, I want
to say we’re as much against putting nuclear-waste dumps in the county as you are. We hope you don’t hold it against us, getting
arrested. We was only following orders. Anyways, we want to wish you all good night and sweet dreams.”

“ ‘Night, Norman.”

“ ‘Night, Norman.”

“ ‘Night, Norman.”

“Uh-huh.”

In the darkness, Rain reaches under Lemuel’s blanket and caresses his knuckles. “Hey, you don’t really believe L. Tolstoy’s
coded message to Sonya, right?” Touching her lips to his ear, she quotes: “ ‘Your youth and your thirst for happiness remind
me cruelly of my age and the impossibility of happiness for me.’ “

“I believe it,” Lemuel mutters after a moment. “You are a figment of my fictions.”

Rain leans her head against his shoulder. “Like how did L. Tolstoy and Sonya finish up?”

“Badly. They fought like wildcats for most of their married lives.”

“Oh.”