John Woman

32

The first month after the charges were dismissed reporters hounded John whenever he left his Soho apartment.

“Is your name Jones or Woman?” a journalist asked the first day. He decided to keep the name John Woman because that was the name he’d answered to his entire adult life. He enjoyed the irreverent, unnatural feelings it caused. Much like Lucia preferred Napoli to Tartarelli.

“Did you kill Chapman Lorraine?” a stout woman from the Post wanted to know. “How could you have not at least known? He was sealed in a wall next to the projectors.”

“Hidden,” John said because he was stuck next to her at a DON’T WALK light.

“Didn’t you wonder what happened to the closet?” she offered. “Maybe there were smells.”

“If someone sealed off the closet what could I do about that? And what odors did you encounter twenty years ago in the middle of the night when you were working a silent film projector, doing homework and worried about your father who was slowly dying?”

“That never happened to me,” said the thirtysomething reporter. Her face was pudgy and her copper-rimmed glasses magnified impudent eyes.

“And I never knew about the dead man until just this year,” John stated when the WALK sign appeared.

John usually ignored the reporters though he didn’t mind engaging them. Oddly, the more they asked about the murder the further he felt from the crime.

One older black man calling himself Sharkey Lewis claimed to be a freelance journalist and offered to do an in-depth profile in which John could tell his story the way he wanted to.

“That way you can make sure the public has your side of it,” Sharkey claimed.

As a rule Lewis wore a green-and-black herringbone jacket and dark brown slacks. He was short and probably hadn’t gained a pound since he was a teenager.

“There’s no further story I wish to tell, Mr. Lewis,” John said. “I went to school every day, ran a projector most evenings and then read to my father before we both went to sleep. He died and I left those jobs and responsibilities behind me.”

One day there were no reporters waiting outside. The restless thirst of the public for news had moved on to a hockey player who had beaten his wife’s sister in an out-of-town motel; a troop transport aircraft that was downed by militant jihadists in Iraq; and finally to a billionaire landlord in Cincinnati who had called a group of striking tenants a bunch of ungrateful niggers.

John’s story got shuffled out of the news deck.

The reporters were gone but there was still hate mail from dozens of sources. Letters with no return addresses came to his mother’s mailbox, most of them forwarded from Parsonsville, Arizona. Angry, anonymous citizens condemned him for being a murderer, a liar, pretending he was something he was not. They cursed and threatened him, invoked God’s name to sentence him to hell.

Not all of these were unsigned.

Arnold Ott wrote once a week making various complaints. In one rambling condemnation he claimed that John’s perfidy (the actual word the cuckolded boyfriend used) caused him to rue his education. In another letter he said that Carlinda wanted to sue John for giving her herpes.

John wondered if his ex-lover had made this complaint because he hadn’t exhibited symptoms of the STD.

But even Arnold’s vituperations ran their course. One day he received a short note from Carlinda.

John read the letter over and over. He felt a sense of loss inside those overly formal, haplessly passionate words. Though he and Carlinda never loved each other they were, in his estimation, the same breed. They understood the world they lived in with almost pure objectivity. This understanding was like a sturdy fishing boat afloat on a sea of many passions.

Her visit in the Phoenix jail plus this letter effectively ended their connection, making him a dog without a pack. This sense of loss sent him into a depression that lasted for many weeks.

He went to the Strand Bookstore after there was no more he could glean from Carlinda’s Dear John letter. He bought for the third time in his life The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant: eleven thousand pages or so of erudition unrestrained by obsessive scholarship — a long, long story of the western world bereft of proof but filled with the truth of culture.

He read the pages out loud, before an empty chair, imagining Herman installed therein. He’d read for hours, feeling loss with every word and re-revelation, to the apparition of his father sitting there, nodding despondently, wondering why Cornelius wouldn’t let him go to be one with the phenomenal universe: the true history of everything.

At night he wandered the streets of Soho hoping to see the half-Asian prostitute again. He always wore the belt that Hototo had given him in another lifetime.

One night, when John had walked until his feet ached, a young man came up to him. The stranger had swarthy skin and straight black hair.

He punched John in the chest and then grabbed him by the cloth shoulder of his windbreaker.

“Give me your money or I’ll kill you,” he said.

Not thinking John unsheathed the belt-buckle knife and slashed the mugger three times: on the wrist, across the chest and then down the center of his face.

The man screamed and blood spurted from the cut that ran from his forehead past the nose to the chin. Something clattered to the sidewalk and the man ran off screaming, calling out for help.

It was after three a.m. and there was no one out on Greene. John watched the mugger run a zigzag path dripping blood, trying to run away from his wounds. On the ground was a sleek blue-black pistol next to a few spatters of fresh blood. John picked it up and walked away.

“Three times,” he said to himself. “I cut him three times just like I hit Lorraine.” There was no objective insight in this equation. Three blows and someone either lived or died. John was not culpable. He was the crime but not necessarily a criminal.

The next day John no longer felt like looking for the prostitute or reading to his dead father. He washed the mugger’s blood from his hands and clothes, cleaned the belt-buckle knife and examined the pistol he’d won.

It was a .22 caliber revolver with bullets in four of the chambers. John didn’t know guns but he looked this one up on his cell phone browser. After unloading it, he made sure that he understood the safety and the resistance of the trigger.

He sat in the window looking down on Mott and feeling nothing in particular.

The phone rang only once on its little table before John answered.

“Hello?”

“Johnny?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Senta, baby. How are you?”

“Uhm, uh, fine. How did you get this number?”

“Nesta works for the phone company. I was so sad about you being in trouble that she set up her computer to get news alerts on you, both names. Then when we found out that you were free she used her access to get your mother’s number. You remember... you told me your mom’s name.”

“And this phone is still listed under that?” John said. “Of course — in case she ever wanted to go back to her old life.”

“Huh?”

“How are you, Senta? How’s Nesta?”

“She’s a wonder. Every day I thank God we’re together again. I don’t work for Lou anymore. That was just too weird. Taking classes for my real estate license. But I’m calling because I wanted to know if you needed anything.”

“This call is the best thing you could give me.”

“That’s sweet,” Senta said. “I’d come out there and tie you down but Nesta and me are working on the house. You could come stay with us for a while if you wanted. We have a room for visitors.”

“Um... that’s really nice, Senta. Actually it’s a wonderful offer but I should probably stay put for the time being. How’s the house coming along?”

John sat back, closed his eyes and for the next hour listened while Senta told him about her dream house. Every ten minutes or so she’d say, “But what about you, baby?” He’d tell her that it was too soon to talk about it.

When John hung up the doorbell sounded. For a moment he felt that these two events must have been connected.

“Who’s there?” John asked through the door.

“Morton Brown,” a man said.

“What do you want, Mr. Brown?”

“May I come in, Professor Woman?”

“Maybe after you answer my question; maybe not.”

“I’m dean of the social sciences department at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn.”

“City College?”

“It’s in that system.”

“What do you want with me?”

“To offer you a job.”

33

“... Felton Lewis teaches journalism at Medgar.” Morton Brown and John faced each other in the chairs at the bay window.

“He said that he’d talked to you,” the dean continued, “and studied online recordings and videos of your lectures at NUSW. He’s very impressed with your process, taking on the function of the study of history as well as the meaning of historical forces in everyday life.”

“I don’t know anyone named Felton.”

“He calls himself Sharkey when he’s working.”

“Oh.”

Morton was a tall, fleshy man with gray-brown skin and murky gray eyes. His hair comprised the colors dark copper, dull gold and lusterless gray. John wondered how many races it took to create the academician’s features.

“And what kind of job did you have in mind?”

“A visiting lecturer.”

“A temporary resident deconstructionist historian?”

“Exactly.” Morton Brown smiled revealing a space between his front teeth. “We’ve already asked the best students in the department. They are very excited.”

“I faked my records in the City College system in order to get into Yale,” John said. “I can’t imagine that I’d be welcomed with open arms.”

“We’ll be hiring you as a guest. The central bureaucracy has nothing to say about that.”

“But why would you want me, an accused murderer, in the classroom?”

“We believe that you will be a valuable addition to our curriculum,” Morton said with emphasis.

“But you don’t know me.”

“I know Professor Lewis and I’ve also seen your lectures. I was especially intrigued by the Trash Can Talk.”

John thought about the man he had slashed a few hours before. He was bleeding heavily; maybe he’d died. It was clearly self-defense even though John was unaware of the pistol in his attacker’s hand. Because of this ignorance he was morally culpable if not legally so.

And now there was a man offering him a job...

“Is there a community newspaper that serves the neighborhoods around your school, Professor Brown?”

“Yes. The Clarion.”

“You know I confessed to the crime of manslaughter?”

“Of course I do,” Morton allowed. “You’re a kind of hero among us.”

“Us?”

“Black college teachers, men and women, who want to, want to actualize the education we’re giving our students. I bet even white professors like you. I mean how many teachers since Socrates actually lived what they taught?”

“Socrates wasn’t a murderer.”

“Neither are you.”

“I would have thought I’d become a pariah at places like Medgar Evers.”

“No, sir. For many of us you are a herald.”

John thought again about the man he’d slashed, about the violence seething in himself. Maybe he needed the protection of a university. There the world might be safe from him.

“I will agree to teach a course I had been thinking about before my troubles out west,” he said. “The name of the class is The School of Suspicion.”

“What is it about?” Brown asked.

“The subject is suspect.”

“Is it how one interrogates their world?”

“More how they fail to understand the world — even as they create it.”

“And what does that have to do with the local paper?”

“I will admit thirty students to the class,” John said. “Fifteen can come from the student body but the other fifty percent needs to be people from the community who will have to apply directly to me.”

“What will be your criteria for acceptance?”

“I won’t know until I’ve read what they have to say.”

“You’ve been thinking about this for some time,” Professor Brown concluded.

“Not at all. I do have a question though.”

“What’s that?”

“Are you acquainted with an organization called the Platinum Path?”

“That rich man’s cult?”

“Yes.”

“What about it?”

“Are you a member?”

“Do I look like a rich white man?”

“Your race eludes me, Professor Brown, but that’s not what I asked you.”

“No, I wouldn’t even know how to find them.”

“Good. It is now July,” John said. “I’d like my class to start in the spring term.”

By late September John had received two hundred eleven applications from community members wanting to attend the infamous professor’s class. The college students would go through the same admission process.

There were one hundred eighty-six student applications but only one of these interested John.

The class was titled The School of Suspicion: The Interpretation of the Formation of the Modern World, Created by Forces Unknown and Undeniable.

The application form consisted of just one request: In one page please write, type or word process a thumbnail biographical statement of your life as it pertains to your desire to take this course.

John spent October alone in his mother’s old apartment poring over the applications. Any document over one page was automatically discarded.

Mary Freeman at thirty-one years of age had five children and no husband. She’d been a straight-A student through high school and expected to go to college, there to become some kind of great thinker. Instead she fell in love with a boy named Alonzo. Twelve years, three arrests, one conviction, two addictions (not including love) and one restraining order later she requested admission to John’s class in hopes of finding her way back.

William Bluebland was a twenty-one-year old part-time drug dealer. Bluebland was born in Arkansas. He left there for New York because he didn’t see anything changing down home. He had little faith it would be different in NYC but maybe, he wrote, what was what down home could be something else in Brooklyn.

At sixty-three Maya Thoms had lived in Brooklyn since the age of two when her parents emigrated from Jamaica. She said that she now knew everything she’d been taught had in one way or another been a lie, from the newspaper to her job description, from the minister’s sermon to politicians’ promises, from the television to the words coming out of her own mouth. Because she had read in the newspapers that Professor Woman had made it his life study to understand this world of lies she said that she’d like to study with him to maybe get a hold of what it is they’re lying to hide.

Talib Mustafa gave his age as most probably forty-two. His application claimed that he was a self-rehabilitated criminal. He’d robbed at gunpoint, was arrested, convicted, sentenced and saved — in that order. Now he wanted to sit in the presence of another black man who might have some idea of why nobody seemed to understand his story.

Amber Martins identified herself as an eighteen-year-old high school dropout. Hers was the one photograph application that John read. She printed a full-page image of her face and superimposed the essay over that. Amber’s brassy skin had many piercings and tattoos. She’d lived with her grandparents her entire life. She wanted to do well in school but found it hard to concentrate because she didn’t care about half of what they were teaching. She wondered why most older black people disapproved of her music, her tattoos and the way she talked. They remember the civil rights days like they were better than we are today. They get mad because I take things like freedom for granted. It’s like they want you to spend your whole life kissing their ass because they marched and protested and got beaten, bitten and hosed.

Student essays were similar and yet different.

I want to know why I’m here in this world, Martinique González wrote. I study and fuck and get high every day and none of it really means anything.

I want to know why I turn right rather than left, Mister Price of Tampa wrote. I think that there must be a reason, a fate, but I’m beginning to doubt that this has anything to do with the God my mother loves so much.

I live with my grandmother, Tom Brawn wrote in pencil. She read about your class in the Clarion and told me that your course description sounds like the only thing in the whole school that was about really learning something. She’s half blind and in a wheelchair but she told me that if she had just one good leg that she’d use it to get down to you once a week. I want to take the course so my Grandma Mary and I can talk about what you said.

The shortest application John accepted read: My name is Christian Van Dyne. I am a first-year student and my mother is Colette Van Dyne, born Margolis.

34

On January 15 the Brooklyn streets were covered by a thin scrim of snow.

John Woman stood at the front of an empty classroom on the second floor of the main building of Medgar Evers College. He’d been there since 11:38 a.m., eighty-two minutes before the first student arrived — half an hour early. Dark-skinned, short and stout, she carried a walking stick but did not use it.

“Welcome,” the professor said to his first class member. “I’m John.”

“Maya Thoms, Professor,” she replied walking up to the front of the class. “I got a question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“Are we going to have reading assignments?”

Two young men entered the classroom through the back door.

“All books on the syllabus will be in the library,” John said, and then to the men, “Come on in, gentlemen.”

“Because you know,” Maya said. “I’m not too good at readin’. I mean, I can read words and stuff but if you asked me later on what they meant I might not be too clear on that.”

“Not to worry, Ms. Thoms. I will ask you what was said, the words you read. It will be the object of the class to make those words make sense.”

Over the next twenty minutes the classroom filled up. College students and community members sat among each other in the blond chair-desks that furnished the bare linoleum-tiled, neon-lighted room.

John stood behind the nicked and scarred dark-wood lectern provided by Professor Brown’s assistant, Dawn Langthorpe. Twenty-three years old, Dawn was a senior with near-black skin and hair dyed platinum blond. She wore bright blue contact lenses and a plastic necklace with a perfect white circle against her dark chest.

“That’s an interesting look,” John said the first time they met.

“I got it from a novel,” she said. “The woman protagonist looked like this before she discovered, or maybe recovered, herself.”

“And this is your gesture toward the road to recovery?”

“I’d like to observe your class, Doctor Woman,” she said, smiling. “Professor Brown asked me but I wanted to anyway. I applied but you turned me down.”

John remembered the first sentence of Dawn’s application. It read, “I believe you should accept me in your class because I have studied the uses of history for my entire college career...” This alone was enough to make him reject her. Regardless of the fact that she started with a personal pronoun the subject of the piece was her education and not herself. Added to this she minimized the size of the font and pitch of the document condensing three normal pages into one.

Dawn sat at the back of the room as they had agreed the day they met.

The thirty members of the class were there on or before the appointed hour; all but one of them black, otherwise nonwhite, or biracial. Not for the first time John considered the random fortune of being a black historian chosen by his own people to teach. This, he believed, was a fitting beginning of the life he’d run away from. He’d been a fugitive, a murderer and a liar. Now like Nesta, the woman he never met, he’d been retrieved by a twist of fate.

Having these thoughts John smiled at the class.

There was Maurice Middleton, the openly gay architectural student who was working his way through school as a middleweight journeyman opponent for those pugilists trying to make their way to contender status; Lena Oncely, a fortysomething black woman who lived three blocks from campus and worked on Madison Avenue in Manhattan giving hand jobs through a hole in the wall at a massage parlor called the High End.

Seventeen-year-old Christian Van Dyne came in exactly on time and sat in the third row at the far left, as far as he could sit from John while remaining connected to the class.

With the final member seated John felt the jolt of adrenaline he’d experienced at NUSW when a semester began.

“Welcome to The School of Suspicion,” he said. “In this class we will learn what we don’t know, what we can’t know and how to navigate in a world that the senses, the intellect and the heart deny. I am a history professor by training and this is a class of ideas but I feel qualified to teach it because everything people think and do, say and reel from is in response to the forces of history. From the circumstances of your birth to the primal explosion of the universe there is a story to everything, even those things that most people do not, cannot, will never suspect.

“I have personally chosen each of you for this class. There were hundreds of applications. You are students from the college and members of the community capable of using personal experience to understand the broader world. The only way to comprehend our history is through empathy. How you interpret your environment is more distinctive than a fingerprint. The matter that your body comprises makes you matchless, impermanent and irreplaceable...”

A hand went up. John was about to give his usual admonition that questions would be entertained later then decided that he was no longer that man.

“Yes,” he said. “And please, everyone, give your name and any other pertinent information the first time you speak.”

“Antonio Gargan.” He was a long and lanky septuagenarian with red brown skin and a fifty-seven-year membership in the welders’ union. He kept his hand in the air as he spoke. “I don’t know if this matters, Professor, but I don’t understand what you’re sayin’.” This got a few laughs from the class. John himself smiled. “When you’re reading a book you often come across passages that don’t immediately make sense,” John said. “Isn’t that right?”

“Like the Bible,” Gargan offered.

“Or the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the writings of Confucius — even the remembered teachings of the illiterate Buddha. I will, we will say many things in here that might at first seem confusing, even meaningless. That’s why we’ll have to back up murky assertions with real examples.”

“Like what real?” Antonio Gargan asked, finally putting his hand down.

“Recently,” John said, “in a plea deal I admitted to the murder, bargained down to manslaughter, of Chapman Lorraine. I confessed to the crime and accepted the fifteen- to twenty-year sentence the district attorney offered. I hadn’t shared with him the intimate details of the crime nor did he ask for them. He was convinced that I was the killer and that there was no other viable suspect. But in the courtroom the next day it turned out that there was another man who could have committed the crime. This man had also confessed and provided damning details. He also had a reasonable motive.

“I withdrew my confession and the prosecution found it convenient to abrogate the charges against me. I stand before you an innocent man... but is that true?”

“Did you kill him?” a young woman asked. “Marla Robbins. I’m a student here.”

“The answer to that, and a thousand questions like it, will be the subject of our class.”

John the Professor allowed this last statement to settle in.

“Why did they suspect you?” Christian Van Dyne asked. “Christian. I’m a freshman at CCNY but I’m taking this class.”

“Suspicion fell upon me because of the discovery of a corpse and very good, very diligent police work,” John said.

“Couldn’t be too good if they found you innocent,” a young woman noted. There was a perpetual, cynical twist to her lips and unsinkable mirth in her tone. “Um... Mary Freeman. I live around here.”

“Bereisheet,” John said, “the Hebrews’ word for the beginning, tells us that there is no such thing as innocence in the human breast. From the judge to the condemned to the executioner we are all complicit in the crimes of humanity. It is one of the objectives of this course to map out an approach that will accurately define these connections.”

“But did you do it?” Christian Van Dyne asked.

“A valid question,” John allowed, “seeing that I brought up the example. But before we get there I have something else to ask the class — something that will illuminate our purpose here.”

Christian frowned, slamming his spine into the backrest of his desk-chair.

John eyed his son a moment and then turned to take in the rest of the class.

“The question I wish to pose is simple,” he said. “Who is the most important person in your life? I don’t want you to answer immediately. Think about it as we discuss other topics. Ruminate on it.”

“What do you mean by important?” another young woman asked. “I’m Cheryl Nord, a senior here at Medgar.”

“Good question,” John said. “I’m defining importance as need. A person of primary importance in your life must also provide something you need, something you can’t live without.”

Again John paused.

Morton Brown’s eyes and ears in the class, Dawn Langthorpe, was staring at John, smiling broadly.

“The school of suspicion,” he said, looking the class monitor in the eye, “in a formal sense can be explained by the works of four great scientists, all of whom lived and died in the last century or just before. These men are representative of the processes that we are trying to understand but their work is not what we are here to learn about. Their methods and their sense of the world are all we need understand.

“These thinkers are Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin. All of them western thinkers, so-called white men. Scientists who eschewed the obvious in an attempt to address those moments in our lives that were hitherto relegated to the realm of the inexplicable.

“Don’t be afraid to take notes,” John advised and half the class reached into their backpacks and briefcases, coming out with papers, laptops and tablets. “Freud realized that there was a force beyond consciousness that drove the human heart: things we don’t know, material that we forget and then forget that we forgot. This unconscious material rules our lives just as surely as the governmental and religious laws we both evade and obey.

“Marx tells us that a similar force, the economic infrastructure, organizes our daily lives more than any religion.

“Einstein, like Plato before him, says that we live in darkness and that the true nature of the universe is transparent to our senses.

“Finally, and originally, Charles Darwin, while believing in God, proved that we came not from a moment of divine inspiration but from billions of years of happenstance genetic experimentation practiced by tiny cells whose only goal was survival.

“These thinkers, thoughts, methods and ideas are what we’ll use to interrogate and understand that which we do not understand.”

A hand went up.

“Yes?” John said.

“Amber Martins, high school dropout,” the tattooed and pierced eighteen-year-old said. “The most important person in my life is my great-grandmother Mirabelle Curson from Kentucky. She’s the only one interested in what I want and not what everybody else wants me to be.”

“Me too,” a short and muscular wallet-brown young man agreed. “I’m Tom Brawn and my grandmother is the reason I’m in this class. I’m here learning for her.”

“My name is William Bluebland,” another man said, “And I don’t get what you mean by important exactly. But I do know that I’d lay down my life for my dog Little Blue. And that’s not true for anybody else in the world.”

Other students spoke up identifying themselves and explaining who was most significant to them and why. There were parents and ministers, historical and religious figures, lovers and children. One young man claimed that it was a sergeant in Afghanistan who had carried him on his back for seventeen miles through hostile territory.

“That’s all very interesting,” John said when more than two thirds of the class had responded. “We have mothers and grandmothers, children and teachers, heroes and historical leaders.

“I’m not here to argue with your feelings. Love, fealty and even nationalism can be wonderful things. But I’d like to try to make an argument that will bring all of your answers together while refuting your beliefs.”

“Say what?” Bright Saunders, a bricklayer from Queens, asked.

“I hope to disprove that your mother is, at this moment, the most important person in your life.”

“The hell you wanna hope somethin’ like that?”

“That is our purpose, Mr. Saunders: questioning the validity of what we believe is true.”

“That may be,” the thick-handed bricklayer intoned, “but you should leave my mother out of it.”

“I did not bring her into the conversation, sir; you did.”

Now both Christian and Bright Saunders were giving John the evil eye.

“Awareness of the school of suspicion tells us that while we think one thing something completely different might be the truth. Who lied to us? We did. Why? Because we want to believe something else; because our passions tell us one thing while our unexamined experiences have a different story to tell.”

“So you think that there’s one person who’s the most important to all of us?” Tina Pardon, a junior in the psychology department, asked.

“Yes,” John replied.

“Like God or somethin’?” the aging sex worker, Lena Oncely, chimed in.

“I submit,” John said, “that the most important person in anyone’s life, in this modern world, is the man or woman who signs our paychecks.”

The entire class — even Christian, Bright Saunders and Dawn Langthorpe — seemed taken aback by the assertion.

“More important than my mother?” Maya Thoms wondered out loud.

“As I have said,” the impudent professor lectured, “the word important in this circumstance tells us what is significant, vital or crucial in our lives. Your mother can disown you, your dog will die, your children can go off and join a cult somewhere. In any of these circumstances you don’t have to replace them. If you loved them you might well think that they are irreplaceable: not vital, not crucial to your continued existence. Importance is here and now — immediate. It is the reason we turn left rather than right, reach into our pockets or run away; why we say yes when we think no, do what is asked of us when we’d rather be with one of those loved ones. There are many important people and systems in your life but the one you cannot live without is the man or woman that signs your paycheck. That may be a parent but your need of them is that signature, not blood or familial connection. If you lose that source of revenue it will have to be replaced in short order.

“If this is true, if the most important person in your life is someone you have never met, then the world we live in is vastly different from the world we thought we knew: a fantasy that we have always believed was bedrock.”

Silence lay over the class like the layer of snow covering the streets and cars, trees and sidewalks outside the second-floor window of the lecture hall.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Christian Van Dyne said after the long silence. “I found out recently that the man who raised me, the man I called father, was not that at all. He loves me and he raised me and he believes that he’s my blood but none of that is true. My mother had a lover and I am that man’s son.”

35

“I’m gay,” Dawn Langthorpe stated simply a few hours after the first School of Suspicion seminar. She and John were seated on the couch, looking out at Mott Street from Lucia’s old apartment.

He had put a hand on her exposed thigh expecting her passion for his lecture to morph into the release he had come to rely upon.

“Oh,” he said, stumbling over the word.

Later they were sitting at the round two-person table set in the corner of Lucia’s kitchen. John had made meatballs from spicy Italian sausages with a sauce of basil, plum tomatoes, garlic and red cooking wine. This sauce he ladled over vermicelli.

“At first I was angry at you,” Dawn said by way of explaining why she’d agreed to come home with him.

“Angry about what?” John poured thick red Chianti into her artfully misshapen green glass goblet.

“I wanted to argue about the thinkers you chose and the arrogance that you believe you know what’s most important to me. I wanted you to answer that kid who said that his father wasn’t his blood when instead you ended the lecture. But I knew I was mad because that classroom was the most real thing I ever experienced in school. It wasn’t synthetic, you know? Not some kind of preparation for another plastic-wrapped experience that we think one day might make us real. You were telling us that the man signing our check was most important because you wanted to free us from that chain or at least to get us to see we were enslaved.”

“Some of you work for a living,” John said at the top of the class on the following Monday. “Some of you were beaten by loved ones. Some have run from what you were while others go to church every Sunday with mothers and grandmothers who have been going to that same house of worship for the last fifty years. When this class is over you will probably return to those lives. But, hopefully, when we are through here, some of you will feel a little release from the cage of certainty.

“After decades of study the only truth I know is this: we stand on a mound of human corpses that is at least ten thousand years deep. Our language, our genes, our beliefs, our joys and sorrows rise from that soil. We will never fully understand it but that mound of soil is the best and worst of us. We can never see the whole picture but if we close our eyes we might be able to know it.

“Those dead ancestors live in our words, our blood, in the stories we tell over and over again, never tiring of the repetition of love and war and tragedy. We are, more than anything else, the process of spiritual evolution — each of us the embodiment of truth without any conscious knowledge of that truth.”

“What’s all that supposed to mean?” Craven Marsters, the only white member of the class, asked. Craven was a veteran of the most recent Afghan war and married to a black woman, Osa Chalmers, who also attended Medgar Evers and planned to become a registered nurse.

“It means that any veracity, any truth in your life, is in your actions, not your convictions.”

“Are you saying that truth exists but cannot be known?” Mister Price, a student of the mathematical sciences, asked.

“Exactly, Mister,” John acceded appreciating the trick Mister’s parents had engineered in his name. “What do you think when you ask someone a question and they tell you something that might be the truth?”

“Like what?”

“You ask your girlfriend if she had ever been intimate with a friend of yours and she says no... or she says yes.”

“I think I’d question the first and believe the second,” Mister said.

A few students laughed.

“But if you found a letter in her bureau drawer where this friend had confided that the greatest sorrow in his life was that they had never been lovers, then you would know a truth beyond whatever answer she gave. Because she saved that letter, the penned emotion of your friend and the fact that their intimacy was beyond any mere physical act would be something that could not be questioned.”

“Yeah,” Mister said nodding in tiny arcs, “that’s true.”

“That’s how I found out about my father,” Christian Van Dyne said aloud. “I found a journal in a suitcase at the back of my mother’s closet. My real father was a teenager when he impregnated her. She said that he was just a boy but that he was also the first man she’d ever loved.”

“Do you want to come have dinner?” John asked Dawn on the phone that evening.

“No,” she said.

“Why not? I won’t put my hand on you again.”

“I know, but...”

“What?”

“I never thought my life was fake until your class,” she said. “I mean I suspected it but no one had ever put it into words. It’s wonderful, like reaching into your pocket and coming out with twenty dollars you forgot you had. But it hurts me to think the way you do. It feels like something tearing inside. That’s what it feels like in class and when we’re together too.”

“But what if I said I needed you?” he asked.

“You have my phone number. You can call me anytime, day or night.”

The next Monday the class discussed socialism and capitalism. John proposed that only bees, termites and ants were true socialists and that, fundamentally, capitalists got it wrong because the one true fact about wealth was that it was finite like the material universe; and therefore the accrual of wealth did double duty as an engine of poverty.

He tried to engage Christian after the class but the young man, his son, said, “I can’t talk to you.”

“Then why are you taking the class?” John asked.

“I only want to learn about you,” Chris said. “I want to see how you talk and think. But if I get to know you — personally — then everything I know will... I just can’t.”

“I’m afraid,” John said to Dawn Langthorpe on the phone at 3:47 the next morning.

“Afraid of what?” the drowsy class monitor asked.

“I’m coming to realize that this class has a purpose for me, something I hadn’t planned.”

“What kind of purpose?”

“A lecture I’m building toward. A lecture that could kill me.”

“How could a lecture do that?”

“Ideas are the most dangerous products of humankind,” he said. “What we think and what we say are the foundations of our demolition.”

“But how?”

“There are people who don’t want me to identify them in public. They want to hide in plain sight.”

“Then don’t do it.”

“I don’t know if I can avoid it,” he said. “The one thing I’m sure of is that our purposes are not necessarily our intentions.”

“You mean you can’t help yourself?”

“Exactly,” John said. “We, all of us, are following a path that is as certain as the history we can neither know nor escape.”

“Do you want me to come over?” Dawn asked.

“No. I called because I needed to tell someone I was afraid, in order to know it myself. But if you came here fear would turn into friendship.”

“Maybe that would be better.”

“It would be like treating cancer with heroin.”

“At least you’d get rid of the pain.”

“When you’re about to die the pain is all you have.”

“I have been studying history since before I can remember,” John said to the full complement of the SOS seminar (the acronym arose out of class discussion). “My father was an autodidact—”

“A what?” Talib Mustafa blurted.

“He taught himself to read and then followed a wholly unique path to learning.”

“How you teach yourself how to read?” the ex-con challenged.

“How does a man who lived by violence see one day that he doesn’t have to do that?”

“That’s not the same,” Mustafa argued.

“Everything inside the sphere of human perception is expressed by instincts, symbols and words,” John said easing into the sidetrack. “Even those things that we don’t yet understand. Whenever my father saw a written word he asked what it sounded like. He collected these sounds and meanings like a crow stealing shiny trinkets lying in sunlight.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” Mustafa asked.

“You lashed out again and again until someone expressed to you by imprisonment that you were wrong. You gathered this lesson to your heart and it nestled there like my father’s words.”

Mustafa, who had not spoken until then, sat back with a puzzled look on his dark, scarred face.

John waited to see if the man had more to say. When he didn’t the professor returned to his spur-of-the-moment lecture.

“As I was saying, my father was an autodidact who lectured me every night on his chosen field, history. I was studying Vico and Herodotus, Toynbee and Marx before I could read. Knowledge has been colonized by the university but a college degree has no claim on information much less understanding.

“Mr. Marsters,” John then said to the solitary white member of the SOS.

“Yes, Professor?”

“I am about to broach a topic that might make you uncomfortable. But understand that you are not the subject of what I have to say.”

“Okay,” the veteran said with a questioning note in the word.

“I do not believe in the existence of white people,” Professor John Woman said. “I don’t believe in race in general. The French, I know, come from France and the Pygmies from down around Congo. Likewise the Swedes, Danish, Spaniards and Slavs have specific geographic and cultural origins. The Jews, Catholics, Muslims and Buddhists have sacred texts that name them giving a notion of mystical historicity to their claims on identity. But what about so-called white people? Do they come from Whiteland? Do they have a more or less specific genesis, language, religion or culture that defines them? Or is it just the fact that a group of people found themselves slaughtering red and brown natives while living off the fruits of so-called black slavery?”

The class took up the lecture from there and John mostly listened.

“I’m not white,” Craven Marsters announced. “This sheet of paper here is white. Zombies on that TV show are white. My father told me that I’m Anglo-Saxon. Where he came from the Irish people were another race.”

“Yes,” Dawn said on the phone that night, “you can stay with me for a while. There’s a foldout bed in the sofa in the living room. Maybe you could explain to me why you think your words are going to kill you.”

John’s next lecture was on the nature of love.

“Love changes us,” he said to twenty-eight of the thirty SOS crew. “We meet someone who seems to know us, wants to know us or maybe doesn’t care about what everyone else thought we were. We feel more alive, less afraid, drunk on the feeling of forever.

“That’s personal love, one-on-one love, the passion of a mother for a child that knows only her. But the emotion runs deeper than that. As a matter of fact this poorly defined inescapable and incomprehensible emotion is one of the few touchstones that push our awareness back beyond the border of humanity.

“My communist bees feel a love for their queen beyond any care for their own survival. The wild dogs of India will hunt down a tiger without concern for any individual’s safety. The migration of geese is constructed of the ecstasy of flight not as the one but as the many on a journey the magnitude of which dwarfs our space stations or flights to the moon.

“Our history, in part, lies in these alien creatures’ genes.”

“I thought you said that the most important person in our lives was the one who signed our paychecks,” Elle Claude, a twenty-year-old Medgar Evers junior, said.

“She most definitely is,” John agreed.

“But what you’re saying sounds like love is more important, not only for us but for all creatures.”

“I am.”

“But how can both things be true?”

John smiled and then opened his mouth to answer. But the words did not come. He looked around at the students and at Dawn. His son was staring at him.

“That is such a good question I’d like to stop the lecture there. Go home and think about what Elle has asked. Go home and write a three-page essay in reply. Next week we’ll finish what we started today.”

“Cornelius,” she said from somewhere behind him as he was about to go out the door of the main building.

He stood still not turning. He was wondering if he was about to be killed or arrested, in some way pulled out of this particular iteration of his hapless, rudderless and yet repetitive life.

She put a hand on his shoulder.

“CC.”

“Yeah?”

“Turn around.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Turn around.”

Colette Margolis Van Dyne wore a floral dress dominated by reds and oranges with cobalt blue pansies undergirding the dense design. Her yellow pumps denied the winter outside.

John thought about the man he’d slashed. In another circumstance he’d have been sure that she’d found out about the attack and was investigating him.

But the dress told another story.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it, Colette,” he said.

“I’m willing to believe you.”

The foyer of the building was filled with students coming in and going out but CC and Colette just stood there, looking at each other, jostled by the bodies moving around them.

“Is there somewhere we can go?” the policewoman asked at last.

John’s office was in a professional building across the street from the school. The eight-story, block-square edifice was mainly tenanted by insurance salesmen and dentists.

There were two visitors’ chairs facing the desk, behind which a double-wide window overlooked the college.

John took the guest seat facing Colette.

“You’re so beautiful,” John said.

“If you didn’t tell him then who did?” Colette asked.

“You knew I became a history professor.”

“So what?”

“In the modern world history is contained almost completely in language. Other modes of recording exist but the written word is still the accepted way to pass on knowledge.”

“Okay. So?”

“In your journal you recorded that you loved me and that I was Chris’s father.”

“Oh... shit.”

“You should be talking to him, not me.”

“I’m so sorry, CC.”

“For what?”

“We all used you. Me, your father, your mother. You were so honest and hardworking, trying to keep everybody happy. I should have seen what you needed. I should have waited for you.”

Two days after John took up residence on her sofa Dawn began a two-week intensive course called The Psychology of Women. The class met every evening until nine so John would take walks in nearby Prospect Park armed with his belt-buckle knife and the .22 he’d gotten from the mugger.

That evening he was thinking about what might have been if Colette had left her man for him. Even just the possibility made him happy.

“I know you’ve all written your essays about the contradiction of there being two most important things in your life,” he said at the beginning of the next class. “But hold on to those thoughts for a bit. First I want to pose another notion. It’s not a question exactly but something to wonder about in those moments when you’re free from the false limitations placed upon you by the unbearable weight of the history of our kind.

“Imagine there are modern-day kings and queens, admirals and spies that seek to govern your every act, thought and feeling: people vying to control the forces of history in order to make your lives... different.”

“Like a conspiracy?” asked Jeremiah Jones, whose family had lived in Brooklyn since before Brooklyn was a borough.

John looked at the fiftysomething onetime carpenter who was now unemployed because of an injury he’d received on the job.

“I’m not sure,” the professor said. “Whether or not a secret plan is a conspiracy depends on how you feel about it. The Catholic Church might be blamed for conspiring against its members but what if most of them agree with the religion and its edicts, actions and sometimes secret goals?

“No, not necessarily a conspiracy. I was once told that a nationwide chain of grocery stores had studied the shopping habits of their customers so closely that they could train left-handed people to shop in the same grooves that were set up for right-handers. They seek to control our behavior for profit. But even with this knowledge we would be shopping anyway, buying anyway, spending our lives in the rat-maze aisles of our own design.”

John stopped an unbidden thought from taking over his mind.

After a moment he said, “Dawn.”

“Yes, Professor Woman?” she said from the back of the room.

“Do you file a report on every class?”

“Um... Yes I do. The president’s office asked the dean to make reports about the lectures. Why? Do you want me to stop?”

“No. I want you to make sure you get this one clearly.”

“Okay.”

“This is the story about an organization called the Platinum Path,” Professor John Woman began.

36

Three evenings later Dawn was at her class. John went out for his evening walk in the park.

There had been a cold snap so he wore a heavy sweater over his long-sleeved black cotton shirt.

He’d been thinking about leaving New York. After all, he had given the most important lecture of his life. He’d explained the Platinum Path and its intentions. He revealed that Service Tellman had faked his death and now worked as a gardener named Ron Underhill; that board members Willie Pepperdine and NUSW president Colin Luckfeld did Ron’s bidding.

“Melville’s cook preached to the sharks that they would be angels if they could control their appetites,” he had said. “He was chumming the waters and the sharks went into such a frenzy that they began tearing chunks out of each other. There was a chance, the cook said, that they might ascend from the waters on fins turned to wings and fly to the heavens, creatures that had overcome their natures...

“But instead they experienced a paroxysm of lust and sank deeper into the only nature they could know.”

“Why you sound so sad, Professor Woman?” Maya Thoms asked.

“Because the people that want to save everyone will now murder me for telling their secret.”

“But their secret is that they want a better world,” Christian said.

“No,” John said shaking his head the way his father used to before delivering a sad pronouncement. “What they want is to make the world in their own image. They want to be God and here I am the Woman holding out an apple.”

Alone on the nighttime path in the park John turned a corner and came upon Ron Underhill sitting on a dark green bench wearing an army surplus trench coat and a wool knit skullcap pulled down around his ears.

“Professor,” he said when John approached. “It’s so good to see you again.”

“What are you doing here, Service?”

“Do you mean why am I sitting on this bench at this hour just when you happen to be walking by?”

John grinned, approached the older man and sat down next to him.

“No,” he said. “You’re sitting there because I walk past this spot every night at one time or other. I want to know why you felt that my class was important enough for you to meet me.”

“I like you, CC. I’d like for you to one day take my place.”

“That wouldn’t be me at all.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a leader and I’m a troublemaker.”

“You are many men, Cornelius, there’s probably room in there for a few more.”

“What possible threat could I pose to you?”

“You have the strength to discredit us.”

“And you’d kill me for that?”

Service Tellman shrugged and stood up.

“You know I can’t help what I am, Mr. Tellman.”

“Nor I, dear John, nor I.”

John’s hand drifted toward the pistol he’d inherited from the would-be mugger.

“You could kill me too,” Service Tellman said. “But I’m already dead. See you later, John.”

The high priest walked around the corner that John had come from.

Taking a deep breath the son of Herman Jones sat back on the bench and began to think.

It wasn’t until after midnight that Dawn called the police.

“He went out for a walk and just didn’t come back,” she said to the sergeant on duty.

“Call back in three days,” the woman said as kindly as she could. “He’ll probably be home by tomorrow.”

But Detective Les Freeling showed up at Dawn’s door the next morning because of two seemingly unconnected events. One was the sound of gunfire in Prospect Park at 11:58 the night before: three shots. And the other was the discovery of the body of Seldin Rico in a crawl space beneath a building under construction not far from Mott and Grand. Rico had been dead for many months. The coroner thought that he died from blood loss due to wounds caused by a sharp object — probably a knife.

“There was blood on a bench near the children’s playground,” Freeling told Dawn. “We collected fingerprints and your missing friend’s were among them.”

“Oh,” the student said, now wondering if she should help the police.

“You reported him missing not long after midnight,” the detective prompted.

“He went out and didn’t come home.”

“Not later on?”

“I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. How much blood?”

“Enough that we’re worried,” the detective said. “More than one type. So you’re saying that you haven’t seen him since before reporting him missing?”

“Yes.”

“Yes you haven’t seen him?”

“Yes. I haven’t seen him.”

She never saw him again.

In his investigation Les Freeling found that the last person to have seen John Woman was a restaurant worker who was coming home, taking a shortcut through the park.

“My husband always tells me not to go in the park at night,” the fifty-eight-year-old waitress told Freeling. “But I tell him most people are decent and that the police statistics say most violent crimes happen between people who know each other. Isn’t that right, Detective?”

They were sitting in Freeling’s office at around noon.

“So you say you saw the man in the poster we put up?” he asked.

“Yes. I was walking around a corner and he was sitting on the bench. He looked like he was thinking about something serious — like he was trying to figure out a problem. When I passed by he looked up like maybe I was going to hurt him or something. I know it’s kinda crazy that a tall young man like that would be scared of woman my age but that’s what it looked like. I thought he might be crazy so I walked a little faster but just before I was away from him he said, ‘Ma’am, you dropped something.’ I looked on the ground and saw that it was my wallet. It had fallen out of my purse. My tips were in there. He picked it up and handed it to me.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“That it was pretty cold out and I said yes it was. I was feeling kinda bad about being scared of him and then he saved my money.”

“Was that all?” Detective Freeling asked.

“I said if he was cold then why was he outside sitting in the park?

“He told me he was sitting there thinking that he should go back to where it was warm.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. He was a strange young man but he seemed nice.”

“And you didn’t hear any shots?”

“No, sir. I hope he’s all right.”