A Good Day for Seppuku

THE PROFESSOR’S WIFE

It’s a brisk, wind-thrashed morning in early April and Professor Malcolm McCarty is riding his bicycle along Maple Ridge Road toward campus. His bike is winter gray and weathered, with a wire basket attached in the back and front. It’s ideal for transporting books. He purchased it from a Sorbonne classicist during his first graduate school sojourn in Europe, and despite the shipping expense, he knew he would cherish it.

Malcolm has an intuitive sense of his emotional parameters, his range and repertoire. It’s an unwavering internal mechanism of measurement that gives the impression of confidence. Some perceive it as arrogance. It’s not. Rather, it’s a trick of the genes he was born with, a small gift, like absolute pitch and eidetic memory.

Not that he knows himself, of course. Who can purport to possess that gift? Still, Malcolm McCarty exercises a consistent ability to articulate and prioritize the morphology of his sensibility. In a millennium of inchoate folly, even rudimentary self-awareness is considered impressive.

There’s ice on the road from a recent snowstorm, and with characteristic lethargy, the town of Allegheny Hills has not sent out plows. If he was the sort of man who shrugged, and he isn’t, he might be tempted to do so now, to convey his indifference to the condition of Maple Ridge Road. As a man of implacable aplomb, insignificant external details do not affect his fundamental purpose.

Professor McCarty is completely disinterested in the exchange of verbal banalities and displays of conventional gestures. That’s the sort of behavior junior faculty refer to as body language. Body language, he thinks derisively during faculty meetings, wondering if any of the new boys have read a Shakespearean sonnet. Or more accurately, any sonnet.

He remains calm. He conceals his contempt for the assistant professors from California and eastern seaboard cities. It’s the principles of the institution he’s devoted to, not the transitory personalities. Let them come and go. Milton and Chaucer are permanent like the universal law of gravity, the force fields and the speed of light.

Malcolm McCarty believes universities are akin to the monasteries of Europe’s Dark Age, the last repository of illumination in a barbarous era that lasted a thousand years. During particularly offensive curriculum discussions, where the canon is autopsied and body parts assigned to what is indisputably the province of women’s studies, ethnic sociology, film appreciation and abnormal psychology, Professor McCarty maintains his restraint. He has an appreciation for grace and the discipline of modulation.

In the third decade of his academic service, Malcolm recognizes that bureaucracy eventually reduces and degrades. He’s become strategic. Junior faculty present passionate justifications for Hip Hop: The Poetry of the Present. They’re not arguments, but clearly rehearsed theater pieces. It’s a charade with syllables intended for another format entirely. Twitter? YouTube?

Given these rules of engagement, a monosyllable is appropriate. A simple no. He has a reputation as the man of the no. He’s their anchor, their barricade, their unrelenting referee. He instinctively recognizes where the borders of civilization are and when there’s an incursion. His sense of violation is absolute. He’s been department chair for two decades.

Invariably these boys and, increasingly girls, move away. On, they call it, as if Boston and Los Angeles automatically conferred clarity and vision. He can define them with the elegance of a simple equation. Movie theaters with ornate facades + plazas selling the paraphernalia of diversity + concoctions with curry from Cambodian villages = an unassailably better destiny.

During their last faculty meeting, he glanced across the Formica table in the conference room. Their oak table disappeared one weekend and the replacement appears to have come from the student cafeteria. It’s leached beige plastic, no doubt assembled by teenagers in Malaysia or the Philippines who have no concept of what a conference table looks like or what its purpose might be. They don’t know much about the Imperial Examinations, either.

Malcolm McCarty was looking for Bob Lieberman, his staunchest ally. They came to the College of Northern Pennsylvania at precisely the same time. It was spring and nearly thirty years ago in the placid era before the vulgarization of culture. There was a before, when the knowledge of literature was a necessary attribute of the intelligentsia. Books were discussed at dinner parties where wit and controversy engendered a verbal choreography similar to performance art.

Malcolm McCarty wasn’t alone. Bob Lieberman can bear witness. They saw the delegitimizing of the experimentalists and the subsequent round-up of the stylists, the stilt dancers who parachuted for locomotion. When asked for proof of authenticity, the stylist held out his palms and smiled. There it was, stigmata on demand. Then the critical apparatus, the intellectual’s compass, collapsed.

This was before the college was called CON PA. Or as the students say now, without irony, the Con.

An excessively thin, completely bald man is occupying Bob Lieberman’s regular chair, the one with wheels and torn leather upholstery decorated with masking tape like bandages. The stranger is picking his nails with a Swiss army knife. Malcolm will have him removed by security. He reaches for the department phone and simultaneously realizes that it is, in fact, Bob Lieberman. It’s a maliciously vandalized rendition. The sixty-six-year-old version of his former colleague and confidante is unrecognizable. He’s progressing through his collection of miniature instruments with intense concentration. He’s a slow moving chameleon extracting a filing tool.

Their recent conversation was disappointing. Bob Lieberman had taken to staking out his office and ambushing him. He’d suddenly spring from a nook in the corridor as Malcolm walked toward his office.

“You can have the 49ers on Sunday. Give me eight points,” Bob proposed.

Was this an attempt at appeasement? The official line was ten. Malcolm was suspicious.

“Why this generous offer?” Malcolm asked. “What do you want?”

“The spring grad seminar,” Bob admitted.

“Have a topic?” Malcolm didn’t want to know.

“The genius of Bob Dylan.” Bob Lieberman offered a partial smile so small, it seemed purely conceptual. He looked feral and wizened and his skin was dull gray.

“Take it to the curriculum committee,” Malcolm said. He reached his office and pulled the key from his pocket.

“You are the curriculum committee,” Bob pointed out, following him.

“What did I say last time?” Malcolm was annoyed.

“I believe you said not in this life time or any other,” Bob recalled.

“Correct,” Malcolm replied, his key in the slot; he opened his office door. Bob Lieberman was still there. Then Malcolm shut and locked the door.

Bob Lieberman succumbed to a student, an older student, a returnee as they currently phrase it. He was exculpated by technicality. Malcolm considers Bob’s behavior an ethical violation. His fall from grace occurred in broad daylight and slow motion. Bob Lieberman defiled his principles and vows. He ignored logic and loyalty and, in his defining moment, he didn’t go down with his ship.

Bob divorced his wife, the daughter of a celebrated Israeli cellist for Christ’s sake, and married a woman with a spawn of grandchildren from various sons and daughters, half-children, stepchildren and assorted offspring from implausible liaisons with adoption complications. Some children kept returning to the screened porch at sundown like hungry dogs, and after a year they were considered found.

Bob Lieberman stopped writing. He said he didn’t feel the urge anymore. He was making furniture with his soon to be bride. He’d bought a pick-up to transport his pine benches and square squat tables to craft shows.

“I have no regrets. Make a novel. Make a bench.” Bob shrugged.

His new wife draped herself in floral housedresses resembling tents. Her grandsons in the army had phrases from Corinthians tattooed to their arms. The granddaughters were in jail or missing. She had given them the names of gems and intoxicants, as if intentionally scarring them from birth. Amethyst, Jade and Crystal. DUIs, possession with intent, and burglary were considered routine events. Then the multiplicity of in-laws with tawdry soap opera lives, passing around photographs of a half-child’s grandson from three liaisons past. Hadn’t Patricia in one of her Women’s Club scholarship activities sponsored that returnee?

Naturally, there were repercussions. Bob Lieberman began teaching Literature of Cinema. His students viewed movies based on marginal novels and were encouraged to write one book critique a semester — down from the original six. Encouraged was the operative word. Not required. They weren’t even middle school book reports. The latest crop of barely literate students was evidence of the College of Northern Pennsylvania’s extreme bottom-feeding strategies.

Patricia assumed they would continue including Bob in their social activities — their dinner parties with the deans, barbecues for visiting scholars, the President’s Tea, and their annual excursion to the theater in Philadelphia. It was surreal to envision Bob and his new bride at a flute recital, sitting on one of the white linen sofas in the President’s living room, drinking beer directly from the bottle. The new President from Yale, no less. Not to mention his Wellesley wife.

“Things happen,” Patty said. It was an assertion, and she didn’t cushion it.

“Things don’t happen to a disciplined man. That’s the point. Discipline.” Malcolm stared at her.

Was that complaint on her face, he wondered, that puffing around her mouth? His wife was losing her moral resolve as she was her skin tone. There were no gradations, only a universal softening. No one was responsible. That’s the collective mantra. Everyone was damaged and inevitably must stall, collide, derail. Relapse was the consensual norm.

“People change. He wanted a family,” Patricia offered, carefully. She was controlling herself.

“He has a family,” Malcolm reminded her.

“Rachel lives in Tel Aviv. The boys are in yeshiva. Then they go in the army,” Patricia replied.

In the monolithic void of political correctness, communication is labored and deliberately vague. Spontaneity and improvisation are no longer acceptable conversational implements. Awkward silence is preferred. Between predictable statements, there’s a pause for the constant evaluation of potential areas of offense. Fear is the variable of state. We are losing our vocabulary, and our ability to differentiate, Malcolm thinks. We’re losing our sense of obvious distinctions the way we’re losing our collagen and flexibility.

“What should he do? Stitch a scarlet letter to his chest?” Patricia asked, her face a mask, her voice shrill.

“He should return his pension and resign,” Malcolm replied. “He should carry bedpans in a UN refugee camp.”

Malcolm McCarty vividly remembers Bob Lieberman in his previous incarnation. In that version, indelible as a recurring nightmare, Bob Lieberman was an impassioned artist in the midst of what would be a seven-year ordeal culminating with his second unpublished 689-page novel.

Bob’s wife, Rachel, telephoned Patricia. She was hysterical, Patricia reported. Yes, again. Apparently Bob had moved into the barn, and no longer ate or slept. He was emaciated, naked and incoherent. Rachel was threatening to leave him. Patricia insisted he intervene.

Malcolm rode his bicycle slowly to the Lieberman house and considered the metastasizing situation. This wasn’t his first rescue mission. Last year, he’d accompanied Bob to open mic readings in Scranton and Penn State. There was a winter blizzard on each occasion. Malcolm drove and Bob practiced reading his material out loud.

“I only get five minutes,” Bob explained. “But all the big-shots will be there.”

The venue proved to be a shabby basement room under a biker bar. Schedules for AA and NA support groups were tacked to the walls. LIVE AND LET LIVE and ONE DAY AT A TIME were nailed into the plaster and formed a continuous horizontal line at eye level, like a bar. The script was rendered in black block letters with curious curves suggesting South Pacific tattoos and something vaguely gothic. It was an insistent male hand and misguided, Malcolm thought, a shabby attempt to use repetition as a method to disguise a renegade nature. It was unconvincing.

The eight or nine attendees were talkative college students dressed entirely in black who looked like professional mourners. Their long fingernails were lacquered and resembled the backs of certain beetles. They chatted into gadgets and rarely glanced at the podium. Bob trembled as he read. He was inaudible.

An egg timer was set at the five-minute mark. Bob was startled and confused when it rang. He’d only read two pages, badly and much too fast. He glared at the bell like it was a guillotine.

There was punch in plastic cups and a paper plate of stale crackers. The bigshot, an undergrad in a black hoody who’d published an underground journal called Scranton Scribes, said, “Terrific words, man.”

Bob executed an abstract bow and hunched further into himself. He leaned close to Malcolm and whispered, “I need my eyeglasses next time.”

On the way back, the highway was almost impassable. There was only the black of the ice covering the road and the deeper black of the dark.

“Writing is a criminal act. Artists employ the methods of professional criminals. We have the same repertoire.” Bob began. He was earnest and attempting to be reasonable. “We trespass, break and enter, burglarize and rob. We assume aliases and engage in fraud. We lie, omit and impersonate. We collect family history for the purpose of unmasking them. The only reason we talk to anyone is to practice dialogue. Tell me that’s not true,” he looked at Malcolm.

“Autobiography is traditional,” Malcolm observed.

“We call these entities composite characters. Bull shit. We’re arsonists and assassins. We lure and trap. We’re mercenaries. We violate and desecrate. We autopsy the living, and exhume the dead for interrogation. Then we deny everything,” Bob concluded.

“Original and well-stated,” Malcolm managed. This was not the first time Bob Lieberman had articulated his theory of the artist as outlaw. Malcolm was gripping the steering wheel and he couldn’t see the painted lanes on the highway.

“Artists invented home invasions,” Bob posited. “We’ve been doing it for millennia. Some confections demand intrigue and a clarity possible only by obsession. To master the page is to know origami. We are the shifting tectonic plates. We are the calamitous disruption that causes seismic ruptures.”

Bob Lieberman tended to speak sporadically. When he broke the surface, like a diseased whale about to beach himself, his words came in a rush, energetic, wind-charged and inflamed. He favored improvisational epiphanies and driving loosened him up. It was unfortunate. Bob’s literary theories were painful. But his rhapsodic descriptions of the creative process were tortuous.

“A poem is like a one-night stand, unexpected and exotic. It happens in Katmandu or Vienna, or on a train or ship. Objects and gestures are heightened and indelible as they happen. Exaggerations demand and receive permanence. Are you following me?” Bob asked.

“Absolutely.” Malcolm was enthusiastic.

“A poem is neurosurgery. It’s a blood sacrifice. You amputate your limbs with a dull penknife and no anesthetic. That may bring you a single stanza. Maybe.” Bob paused, presumably to allow Malcolm to fully comprehend his concept.

Malcolm couldn’t distinguish a separation between the ground and sky. The pavement was glistening, glazed and scaly like crocodile hide.

“Anyone can write a poem,” Bob unexpectedly said, contradicting and negating himself. “I prefer the short story. It’s like a love affair that distills and sanctifies.”

Malcolm steeled himself as Bob described the russet fluttering of October dusk. Maples were citadels of light and nothing was peripheral.

“On the other hand, a novel is a marriage.” Bob hesitated. “It can consume and gut a lifetime.”

Malcolm McCarty agreed.

“No one is born a novelist. The deformations of the personality necessary to achieve the artist’s altitudes are not intuitive. The sacrifice and solitude. You must make yourself a fertile wilderness before you can be a breeding ground,” Bob clarified. His tone suggested confession.

“I see,” Malcolm tried.

Bob Lieberman laughed. He was on the edge of hysteria. “You can’t possibly understand,” he immediately replied. “You’re just an academic.”

“Right you are,” Malcolm agreed. Then he skidded off the road into a long shallow ditch, barely missing a frozen maple tree. Snow was up to his thighs as he examined the damage. The fender was bent nearly in half. It would have to be replaced.

Malcolm took two shovels from the trunk. He handed one to Bob and began digging.

Bob Lieberman leaned against his shovel and directed his words to the dark. “I know the moth kiss of the page that both denounces and saves. I’ve had a spiritual intercession. It’s remarkable, incalculable. I know what resides in the vast aubergine corridors of fall. That’s where our bridges and mirrors are, our biographies, diaries and footnotes. That’s where our real selves are, in the aubergine corridors where streetlights suffocate the night.”

Bob described his transformation while Malcolm dug the car out of the ditch. Artists cast shadows that have nothing to do with their bodies. Bob admitted he was merely an apprentice. When he’s an adept, levitation and spontaneous combustion will be unremarkable frequent occurrences. Artists are clairvoyant and instinctively know procedures for invisibility and seduction. One must avoid the debris of the ordinary to be purified by solitude. Bob’s neurons twisted as lines and paragraphs deposited themselves on the page like shells sea-swells swept onto sand. Channels beneath his flesh ignited. He was beginning to cast spells and translate languages he didn’t know. He was aware of the risks, the toxins and ancient fevers and plagues he exposed himself to. Artists accommodate lethal agents and come to crave them.

“We are the absolution we see,” Bob concluded. He handed Malcolm the shovel, sat back in the car, and let Malcolm drive him home.

Later, Malcolm drove Bob to an open mic night at Penn State. Bob claimed he was having an anxiety attack. He took two tranquilizers and changed his outfit several times in front of a mirror. He finally selected his stylish Barney’s black gabardine funeral suit, a black shirt and black tie.

It took five hours and the highway was closed, roads barricaded and wind brutal. They climbed stairs and walked the corridors of two buildings before finally locating the basement room. SNOWED OUT was taped to the door and the door was locked. Bob turned the handle anyway and threw his shoulder against it. Then he cursed for an hour.

Malcolm was forced to stop in Maple Corner’s. Two trucks had collided, several cars were involved, and the vehicles were surrounded by police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances with flashing red lights. It was an updated version of the protective circle wagon trains used. Paramedics passed with stretchers and gurneys.

Malcolm managed to maneuver to the shoulder and navigate into the parking lot of a closed coffee shop. They’d probably be there all night.

Bob was sullen and agitated. Malcolm wanted to turn on the radio but feared Bob would call it polluting noise and cause an argument. Then he noticed Bob was leaning against the car door, sleeping, his inaudible pages between his fingers.

The landscape reminded him of a black-on-black Rothko painting from the mid-60s. But it lacked the nuances and sense of luminous immanent tragedy. It didn’t even have the promise of suicide. Malcolm fell asleep, rehearsing his speech for in court when he sued Bob Lieberman for the twisted fender.

Malcolm slowly pedaled to the Lieberman house, leaned his bicycle against a side gate, and walked directly to the barn. He was resolved. He pounded his fist against the raw wood. Then he knocked again.

Bob Lieberman opened the door half an inch. A khaki wool blanket was draped across his shoulders, but he was, in fact, naked.

“Did I wake you?” Malcolm inquired, casually.

Bob Lieberman squinted in the sunlight, glanced behind Malcolm as if he expected more and worse, and edged back into the barn. He was furtive and already retreating. He resembled a small mammal — a harp seal or otter — sensing capture.

“I don’t sleep.” Bob was offended. Clearly, sleep was too trivial a state for an artist.

He motioned Malcolm into the barn with two stiff fingers. It was a reluctant invitation. Malcolm glanced at his living quarters. Bob had painted the barn wood black. The room was Spartan. Malcolm noticed a desk with a small lamp, his Smith Corona typewriter, and a metal folding chair. A sleeping bag was on the ground. Papers in the shape of fists and plates of decayed food were scattered randomly across the ground.

“I can’t talk now,” Bob said. “I’m working. Obviously, this novel should be written in Africa.”

“Making progress on the void?” he ventured, cheerfully. Bob’s novel was set in the void of a century that could be the past or future.

“There is no void. That’s the point of my novel. The void is festooned with orphans, runaways, and skeletons of drowned babies.” Bob was angry.

There was no obvious place to sit. Malcolm leaned against the barn wall and realized the barn wasn’t entirely empty. Photographs of goats, elephants and zebras were tacked to the wood walls. Bob had constructed a sort of altar with crates and burlap, and random objects were placed on the top — two oranges, glossy opera programs and a red hawk feather. Perhaps they were offerings.

His desk was cluttered with assorted items — a bud vase with a bouquet of calligraphy pens and sharpened pencils, a magnifying glass, sequins in a glass bottle and a crystal candy dish with fragments of debris that might be gravel or seashells. A cocktail glass was filled with erasers and paper clips and surrounded by dozens of thumb-sized bottles of white correction fluid and extra typewriter ribbons.

Reams of blank paper and a box of black and white magazine photographs were under the desk — children alongside railroads who looked abandoned, high-rise apartment buildings with balconies where sheets and T-shirts hung drying on ropes strung across an alley in a favela, and city plazas with cathedrals and pigeons on smooth gray stones seemed familiar.

The wall beside his sleeping bag was decorated with photographs of elephants and savannah sunsets. Bob had apparently attached squat candles to a pine branch and hammered it into the wall. A rusty iron cowbell, two marimbas, gourds and a tambourine were near his sleeping bag. Bob was still inhabiting his poet as shaman persona.

“Are you engaged in voodoo?” Malcolm decided to ask. “What are these objects?”

“Talismans. I’m a method writer. I told you, this book should be written in Tanzania. I’m compromising and it’s dangerous,” Bob said.

“Sure,” Malcolm replied. “It’s a slippery slope.”

Maybe the barn was an attempt to represent the pre-verbal Paleolithic cul-de-sac of Bob’s void. His faux escapement was designed to evoke a primitive era. Fire was a recent invention, and cave painting, glyphs, prayer and barter didn’t yet exist. There were no permanent myths, but only transitory seasonal entities with inconsistent affections and powers.

Bob’s protagonist was two-foot-high and clawed. Zubo, Master of Meteors, invented flight and wildfires. He carried an acetylene blowtorch, and rode on four-humped camels and the backs of disabled satellites and deserted space stations. His hobby was scorching cities. His consort, Zima, ruled rivers and inland seas, and derived pleasure from drowning children. She lured them and wrapped them in strands of red kelp. Strangled children washed up on shore, drained and weightless. At nightfall, the tribe gathered their dead daughters and sons and praised their generous gods.

“They’re hundreds of mutations and thousands of generations from triangular arrowheads. They don’t even have fishing nets and drums,” Bob had clarified.

His novel’s scientific premises were fallacious. Bob was a technical illiterate and absolutely ignorant of the principles of basic physics and anthropology. His fundamental concepts were irredeemably offensive, ridiculous and unpublishable.

“Do you believe words clarify and redeem? Treaties and vows? Alliances? The Geneva Convention? Covenants and promises,” Bob abruptly asked.

“Yes, Bob. I certainly do,” Malcolm replied.

“Words are tadpoles and microscopic worms. They’re eons from vocal chords, grammar and vocabularies. The growls of hyenas are superior. Hyenas come in after the jackals and before the kites. Autumn brings wolves in packs of forty. They’re hungry.” Bob shuddered. His eyes were unfocussed and mottled with a filmy residue like storm clouds. He should definitely be checked for glaucoma.

Bob Lieberman took off his eyeglasses. When he was intensely passionate, he often removed his glasses. When he assumed the guise of an artist, and fueled from within, the external world was a foul and unnecessary distraction. On several occasions, Malcolm had seen Bob pull off his glasses with a wild, awkward flourish, toss them to the floor and step on them.

“I’m not sure anymore. Syllables are ashy pebbles escaping from some hole in your face. They’re transient and insubstantial, peripheral and irrelevant.” Bob paused and evaluated the elephant pictures. “They’re how to fill rooms with ghosts.”

Bob was his closest colleague and, as department chair, he was responsible. Malcolm leaned against the barn wood and sorted through his options.

“Do you know what’s at the end of the universe?” Bob asked.

“No,” Malcolm said. “I do not.”

Bob Lieberman told him the universe was immensely vast but ultimately finite. There’s a river at the end, sliding slow and dense with chunks of gray agate behind the obscure insult of smoke. The last bend of the river unexpectedly ends and there’s a final colossal but graceful trestle, above ridges of sweet William, Geraniums and ferns. Spring is bold and unrepentant and scented with terror.

“We’re always crossing bridges, losing our wallets and waiting for planes. We pretend we know where we’re going. We attend to our watches, springing forward and falling back. We’re aching for lamplight, a pier, an alley or mooring we recognize. We all need a cot for the night.” Bob’s voice was soft.

They considered the end of the universe in silence.

“Your wife stole Rachel’s gold compact and tennis bracelet,” Bob told him. “She takes things whenever she visits.”

“I’ll look into that,” Malcolm offered.

“Rachel said she’s a kleptomaniac,” Bob Lieberman revealed.

Malcolm nodded his head.

“Something’s stirring in the electronic soup. An emerging patois that isn’t codified. We don’t know its morphology or sensibility,” Bob observed. “Or what it wants. Don’t assume progress is benign. I’ll tell you this. It’s birthing itself and it’s savage.”

“I’m following you,” Malcolm said.

Bob Lieberman suddenly leapt from one foot to the other. “When I merge with my persona, I’ll birth royal lepers,” he announced.

Malcolm looked at his watch. “Time to get dressed,” he decided. “There’s a new open mic on campus. Got your car keys? OK, let’s take a short drive.”

Bob Lieberman immediately acquiesced. He clapped his hands and spun around several times in a circle. Professor Malcolm McCarty found a towel on the floor and wrapped it around his waist. Then he drove Bob Lieberman, barefoot and hallucinating, to the Briar State Hospital. They held him in a locked ward for 30 days.

It was never right between them again.

After tea and before dinner, Malcolm McCarty typically spends forty-five minutes on his stair stepper. He listens to the NPR feed from Pittsburgh when the wind is right. He used to find All Things Considered entertaining. Then he realized all things were not considered. Or perhaps all things were considered in all the same ways. He suspects topics are selected alphabetically. Farming in Finland and France. Faulkner. Fire fighters. Freud. Futurism.

“Isn’t there personal evolution?” Patty demanded. She had followed him to his study. She’s still talking about Bob Lieberman. “Do you accept that possibility?”

“I accept entropy and the effort to battle it,” Malcolm answered, no longer engaged.

“Let’s not even go there,” Patricia said to his back. She slammed the door shut.

This is a slogan she repeats with regularity. Let’s not even go there. His students also say this. It’s a global idiom. Verbal contagions suddenly appear. A TV celebrity utters a colloquialism and it becomes the coin of the realm.

Certain moments loiter in the dusk and do not dissipate. That awkward conjunction when he failed to recognize Bob Lieberman is one of a series of misidentifications. He had a similar experience at a conference in China three or four years ago.

Malcolm McCarty was in the hotel restaurant, weighing the nuances of the menu, the possibilities of twice-rinsed bird nest soup, sea moss and eel with river fish, snake and infant pigeon. A woman sat next to him. Her tangy metallic perfume was an unexpected intrusion and he recoiled. The scent permeated her skin. He thought of rancid cooking oil rising from woks in hundreds of millions of muddy alleys. Her overly painted mouth was the red of a degraded calligraphy rendered in that so-called Shanghai coast prosperity. The encrusted lips parted and he was startled to hear Patty’s voice.

Patricia’s hair had been darkened in the hotel salon and festooned with pearls. They protruded from her skull on shiny black sticks. She wore an inordinately red silk dragon scarf around her neck. An odd whitish powder was lacquered into the crow’s feet around her eyes. It reminded him of lime in gullies and trenches and uncountable pots of spoiled broccoli and spinach. He considered the pollution of the Yangtze and Yellow River under a moon the Han have charted for six thousand years. He managed to say, “Good evening, dear. Come to me, my dragon lady.” He bowed and kissed her hand.

They had just returned from a two-day journey on the Perfume River. A fiercely painted red and yellow barge in the shape of a dragon had taken them to a village in the mountains. It was puerile and redundant but they remained moderately festive. In the town square, vendors with crutches offered counterfeit cashmere shawls and enormous pear-shaped melons with dagger-like spikes were sold from a 70-year-old flatbed army truck. The neon was graceful; pinks lingered on the water like lotus blossoms. Translation was possible, he decided, but it’s drained, anemic and ghosted. The difficult was discarded and the ambiguous omitted. Simplification was the global standard. We can cross the great fluid expanses but there’s a price.

After wars and cholera, plagues and harvests and string quartets, we arrive at our penultimate destination. In between, we manage to recognize our wives. We smile, take their hands, noting that their fingernails are painted like a butcher’s. We tell them they look like a warlord’s concubine. We remember we are returned from the sea. We have cheated death again.

In mid-morning few vehicles are on the approach to campus and there are no pedestrians or bicycles. Professor McCarty has the reputation of being both the first and last man on the road. It’s said you can use him as a calendar. His daily bike rides begin in March and continue until Thanksgiving regardless of storms and wind chill. Weather is an insignificant external phenomenon like fashion, like the long hair, strident turquoise jewelry and buckskin-fringed jackets of his graduate years.

Now the exaggerated baggy pants and body piercings of his current students. They dye blue and magenta streaks in their hair that accentuates their absurdly white skin. Apparently the take-home message of the millennium is to avoid the sun. This they can do, hoops sprouting through their noses and eyebrows. They take buses to Erie to have bolts driven into their tongues. Their faces often swell and require antibiotics. They crucify their mouths as if intuiting they have nothing to say. They veer toward silence and shade and concentrate on the gadgets in their palms. They’re albino zeroes.

Recognizing the universe mathematically is an ability Malcolm was born with. It’s precisely these instincts one must nourish and protect. It’s a curious paradox. In the service of authenticity one is labeled recalcitrant and eccentric.

Professor McCarty earned his undergraduate degree in physics. Then he realized the divisions of most unusual derivation came not from numbers but syllables. They were orders of magnitude more unpredictable and dangerous. The ferocious recklessness of a pen and mouth deserved the astonishment awarded delinquent asteroids. No celestial body compared to the delirious, high-wire, no-net orbits of a poet. By then, he’d discovered Keats, Byron and Shelly.

In the Allegheny Mountains of northwest Pennsylvania, April is still winter and ice smells of a permanent absence without the impulse of invention or revision. The air is odorless and bleached. It’s what a terminal man dreams when all sensation is removed. There are no lavender Crocuses pushing up from snow, no Tulip necks or frail Hyacinths. No daughter arranges snow flowers in a basket. There are no flowers or daughters or baskets. There’s only the cut of cold. In the end as in the beginning, the knife. And the curriculum committee thought the Elizabethan Period was irrelevant.

Patricia McCarty watches Malcolm ride confidentially down Maple Ridge Road. The day is Attica gray with a texture suggesting metal, bad food, child abuse and felonies.

In the Allegheny foothills where Pennsylvania becomes New York State, they call the border Penntucky. Here the erasure of possibility has the sheen of aluminum shedding, losing its edges and purpose, elegance and nerve. Surfaces are like ditch-water in night rain where you can’t see your face. Corroded swingsets tilt above punctured tires, cars rust in backyards and the daughters don’t return. The boys come back between tours in Iraq and prison. They’re bums with palms outstretched for money.

There’s an ashy arithmetic to explain this geography and how it creates its own self-perpetuating stain. Thirty-five-year-old women have emphysema, can’t comprehend email, and spend $500 a month on satellite TV. They leave their babies in the same diapers for weeks.

“Why do they do that?” Malcolm wondered.

“They like to hear them cry,” Patricia replied.

“And the TV bills?” he asked.

“What should they be doing?” Patricia demanded, angry and defensive. “Prepping for their MCATS? Their bar exam?”

Malcolm thinks character is constructed from consistent decisions. And the women of the hollows and trailer parks deliberately make malevolent choices. He is completely wrong. Volition is not a component. Their circumstances are an inevitability within the system itself. Is there a hierarchy of ignorance? Is the inability to evolve aesthetics criminal? Is it a sin or a felony? What is their punishment? Imprisonment? The stake?

Malcolm is accustomed to pronouncing judgment from his elevated perch. Of course everything he touched responded. He planted their garden, along with the garden each successive college president’s wife held the Spring Tea in, along with the Trustee Luncheon, and the barbecue for the rare stray Pulitzer novelist. Malcolm tracked the sunlight effortlessly, laying out the first plots, digging holes for Lilac trees and Ornamental Plums. Malcolm made vegetables appear. With a roll of twine and two consecutive Sundays, he planted seeds for tomatoes, peppers, corn, carrots, and pumpkins. He supplied some off-hand, barely conceived weekend formula and solved the problem. Abracadabra.

The following spring, he built the gazebo and granite fountain. He filled the car with stones from the Genesee River. He cut and pruned. Later, he added on the sunroom and restored the fireplaces.

“How do you know all this?” she wondered.

“I was an Eagle Scout,” he replied. He spread his lips into a sort of smile. When he laughed, it was curiously without sound. He produced a sort of translation from where he really lived. It was distorted by distance and impossibilities and his face stalled in a ghastly mime, as if he had palsy.

Patricia had three brothers but she was the one they called professor. Adjunct as it turned out, despite Malcolm’s efforts. Adjunct. Without the office or letterhead, prestige or pension.

They could have retired to Florida. Malcolm had almost agreed. There was a moment, a window they call it now, and then the window closed. The door shut. The entire room was erased.

It was after the unfortunate business with Bob Lieberman and his sordid divorce. Then his lurid remarriage in the disco lounge of Flint & Bow Indian casino.

“How did he meet her?” Malcolm was driving home.

“She was a server in the cafeteria,” Patricia said.

“They bonded over Jell-O?” he asked.

Patricia looked at him.“What do you really think?”

Malcolm didn’t hesitate. “He should commit seppuku.”

Malcolm doesn’t realize that personal catastrophes strike the distinguished and the negligible. Honor is not a factor. Some devastations aren’t reported on the evening news. That’s why she avoids headlines. What’s important are the back pages, the obituaries in small print and the corrections in pale gray.

Celestial aberrations can assault you as you bend to adjust a lamp. Uncharted comets leave trails of dust like shed feathers. Some phenomena can’t be described on a chalkboard. Conventional symbols are inadequate. They’re not like the fundamental significance of triangles or how to manufacture machine guns. Everyone comprehends the principles of the obvious.

In Allegheny Hills, it’s said things come easily to Professor McCarty. His first interview provided an immediate position. Provost Kruger, with his chapped lips and shredding in pieces like tiny fish scales, was making what would be his final appointment.

“I want you to stay,” the Provost revealed. “It’s personal.”

“Well, of course I’ll stay,” Malcolm replied. It was an unusually warm May. Maples budded on hills in patterns of red nubs like fallen constellations. It was a forest of kissed mouths north and south for three hundred miles.

“Winter is difficult. Locals are a fifth generation underclass and profoundly mean. No employment since the oil wells. We don’t have a movie theater. There’s no restaurant.” Provost Kruger paused. “But, for the self-contained man.”

“Yes, of course,” Malcolm said immediately, though it went without saying.

Patricia was in her back-to-the-land phase. They brought the retiring engineering dean’s house on Maple Ridge Road. That summer, Mac constructed a gazebo in the meadow. Patricia was twenty-four and wore long gingham print skirts that weeds and grasses stained. Not stained, but rather embossed with a pale green filigree.

Malcolm painted the gazebo white. He built two benches by the stream and scattered wildflower seeds. But it was Patty’s garden. Patty, barefoot, carried baskets of tomatoes individually wrapped in newspaper like swathed infants.

The house was encircled by a hundred-year-old apple orchard, most of them twisted and feral. Late spring was honey yellow. The afternoon air contained something ancient, with complicated properties like grainy amber and the barely detectable imprint of wings.

In mid-summer, the ring of apple trees was a gold circle promising everything. The sweetness of inflamed, seductive yellows gave him a sort of vertigo. He looked at Patricia and thought, This is a yellow I’d go to hell for, sin for, lie for and marry. It’s what he imagined late summer afternoons could be, subtle and refined like rarities in antique shops. The air was a vagrant intoxicating dust.

There was a particular moment Malcolm uses as a reference point. It was an August afternoon in a sudden warm rain. He was watching Patty kneeling on the ground. Afternoon was glazed and fragrant, intricate as a gold locket in which you engrave the names of your daughters. Patty was moistened like a European movie star shot through a Vaseline lens. He realized it could be Thursday in England or Italy. In rain all landscapes are vulnerable and slow. Rain renders history manageable. Events are compressed to the size of a canvas or a door.

And Patty became all women who walk chestnut lined boulevards and city parks. She was a synthesis of all women eating oranges imported from Portugal who sit in meadows beside statues of composers, princes and poets.

Hummingbirds came — so many the air churned with propellers and tiny buzz saws. Cardinals and enormous iridescent blue jays resembling dwarf peacocks appeared. He was professor of the air and he conducted the elements.

He meant to say birds churned the air, but instead he wrote churched in his journal. And hadn’t they been, if not happy, some version so close as to be nearly identical?

Patricia McCarty remembers that particular summer as a relentless fragrant ache. Its extravagance, its garlands of gold-hued embellishments flaunted themselves and made her dizzy. Possibilities for both absolution and ravishment rose on their own accord. Her body was awkward and shuttered. She was a fever of mutually exclusive impulses. She had found her own inland sea. She knew herself as a solitary, but she was afraid to be alone. The mewling of red fox woke her and the autumn moon was an unadulterated silver that burned.

That summer she was pregnant. She didn’t tell her husband. In early autumn, she took a bus to Pittsburgh alone and aborted it.

Patricia recognized her urge to escape and disappear. There must be schematics with details of the necessary phrases and gestures, and anecdotal accounts and stories in small print at the end of newspapers. She suspected it was a process. Each year, at CON PA or a neighboring college, St. Joseph’s, Allegheny Tech or even Penn State, a young woman inexplicably vanished during spring or Christmas break.

Lydia Kepler, 21, an attractive brunette from Baltimore, went to the campus library and inexplicably vanished. She was a nursing student with a graduate school fiancée and an affection for cats. She was on the tennis team and twice weekly volunteered at the animal shelter. She had no record of delinquent or promiscuous behaviors.

Denise Kaplan, 19, went to the Pittsburgh Macy’s to purchase winter boots and didn’t exit the building. Her boyfriend, Ricky, was waiting for her in his car. He waited until the store closed and then called the police. Her sorority sisters were shocked and her desperate parents posted a reward for information. Denise, a popular sophomore, was a member of the chorus and the Sierra Club. She was an avid skier. The Pittsburgh police were “mystified.”

Ruby Marie Johnson, 22, a senior pre-med student from Philadelphia, was last seen walking to her part-time job at Brenda’s Bakery. She was the oldest of six siblings and an honor student with a full scholarship. She planned to work with disabled children in the inner city. She tutored biology students, and had the role of Miss Hannigan in the campus Theater Arts Society’s production of Annie. The production was cancelled and detectives described her disappearance as “disturbing and inexplicable.”

Patricia wondered where the lost women were. Perhaps they were under the ground, speaking in a language with fluid syllables of rain and creeks and damp chimes. It was a local dialect of tinny trinkets and rumors. It was said there was an ocean to the east, vast, implausible gray, pre-human and incontrovertible. The vanished women don’t believe this. They can select their beliefs and devise their own hierarchies of necessity. They’re a-historical and immune.

Patricia kept a scrapbook of stories about missing women. She also collected obituaries of the murdered ones. When her scrapbook was full, she threw it into the Genesee near Hamilton Bridge.

Patricia wasn’t convinced that all the unaccounted for women were kidnapped or trafficked runaways. They weren’t abducted by extraterrestrials. They didn’t have amnesia. Some women chose absence, and Patricia suspected shedding an identity was liberating.

That fall she makes an appointment with the psychologist in Wood’s End. Dr. Hernandez has a suspicious reputation including allegations of statutory rape and numerous suspensions. But he’s the only psychologist in the county. Dr. Greg Hernandez is a handsome man, forty, with an auburn beard and striking sea-blue eyes that don’t quite focus. He wears dark tinted glasses and chainsmokes.

“I want a divorce,” Patricia begins. It’s the first sentence she speaks.

“Do you have sole and separate assets?” he asks, reaching for his lighter. “Bank accounts and credit cards in your name only?”

She shakes her head no.

“How will you buy a plane ticket? Or hire a lawyer in Philadelphia? What are your skills? How will you earn a living? Can you type and use computers?” Dr. Hernandez inquires. “And where will you go?”

Patricia stares at him. Then she looks down and examines her shoes.

“Has your husband physically abused you?” he asks. “Broke a bone? Sent you to ER?”

Patricia shakes her head no.

“Does Professor McCarty hurt you?” the psychologist tries. It’s a simplified version of his previous question. He thinks she is stupid. Patricia is tempted to explain that the mere existence of her husband is intolerable. She doesn’t.

Then Dr. Hernandez asks insipid questions from a notebook. Where and when was she born? She names the month of her birth; he smiles, encouragingly.

“I’m winter born, too,” he tells her.

Does she have siblings? What are their names and occupations? Is she a conservative or progressive? What’s her opinion of politicians and capital punishment? Does she go to church and vote? Does she have a pet? A hobby? A child? Insomnia, nightmares, and eating disorders? Does she believe in damnation and redemption?

Is he proselyting? Is he taking a poll? Is he a census taker? Will he recommend her for jury duty? His questions are designed to induce sleep. She realizes he’s trying to hypnotize her. Patricia considers leaving the office, going home and getting in bed. He’s just another passing snake oil salesman and she has all the right answers. Still, one must veer on the side of caution. Diminutives and mediocrities can stumble on a rare inspired intuition. It can happen by accident.

Dr. Hernandez holds a pen, makes a brief notation in a notebook, and offers her another smile. Patricia notices his teeth are white and even. He enjoys showing them off.

“When were you last arrested?” he asks, looking at his pen.

“Arrested?” Patricia repeats. She laughs. She has good teeth, too. “Why ask me such a question?”

“You look guilty,” Dr. Hernandez replies. “Tell me about your lover.”

Patricia is startled. “You think I’m unfaithful?”

“It’s possible,” he says.

“I’ve been married nineteen years,” Patricia informs him.

“But not successfully. You want a divorce,” Dr. Hernandez reminds her.

“Yes,” Patricia replies. “I do.”

“Why are you angry?” the psychologist wonders.

“I’m not angry,” Patricia replies. She feels completely composed.

“I think you’re hostile,” the psychologist decides.

They sit in silence. The leather on her last pair of black high heels is worn and shabby. She needs to go to Pittsburgh and buy a new pair. If she lived in Florida, she wouldn’t have to bother with boots and the cedar winter closet with its stacks of gray cashmere sweaters, down jackets, scarves and gloves and all the tedious rest. She’d just wear sandals.

“I suspect you have a secret,” Dr. Hernandez says. “Tell me. You’ll feel better.”

Patricia assesses the condition of her shoes. She’ll replace this pair and buy another and then red stiletto heels.

He stands up abruptly and walks from his desk toward her. He takes long aggressive strides and positions himself above her. “What’s your other name?” he suddenly demands, his voice raised, forceful and direct.

“Other name?” Patricia repeats. She’s completely alert.

“Who else lives inside you?” he persists.

“I beg your pardon,” Patricia says.

She watches Dr. Hernandez retreat. He reaches for his gold lighter and lights another cigarette. He needs to conceal himself with smoke. He’s an amateur.

“Why does your husband laugh without sound?” Dr. Hernandez wonders.

Patricia shrugs. She finds it impossible to form a sentence.

“Don’t you find it curious?” Dr. Hernandez persists.

Patricia says no. Out the window, roadside cemeteries of corn stalks and piled husks are littered. In the Allegeny mountains we navigate by tombs, she thinks.

“Maybe somebody punched him in the mouth,” the psychologist suggests. “You might think about that. We’ll explore that next week.”

She agrees and thanks him. On the highway, she considers the legions of untraceable women, solitary in towers of light, in stucco and in brick tenements, in trailers and farmhouses. Soon autumn will turn tawdry. Then the freefall vertigo of winter dusk. Perhaps the discarded were hiding in shoulder high grasses and Russian Thistle. They’re taking the pulse of thunder and memorizing varieties of grey — antique pewter, tin, pebbles beneath a rot of fog, and the sly silver of a bread knife. The women recite the incarnations of erasure in six languages. No one knows what the men do and no one cares.

When Patricia approaches Maple Ridge Road she stops the car. Other name, she thinks. She allows herself to laugh out loud. What a fuckhead. She rips Dr. Greg Hernandez’s appointment card into pieces and throws them out the car window.

One winter, when blizzards were virulent, car crashes epidemic, and the college suspended classes, Malcolm taught himself Mandarin. On journeys to conferences in China, he engaged in constant conversations with colleagues, waitresses and taxi drivers. Malcolm asks bartenders where they were born and if their fathers farm with water buffalo. Mac’s at his best with strangers he won’t encounter again. Professor McCarty, the part-time landscaper and ethnographer.

Patricia finds herself drawn to calligraphy. She has a desire, small as a shiver, to write in an Oriental script composed of symbols telling stories of ruined fortresses and crossing bodies of water. They’re creation myths that explain how the universe began and why it continues. If she had special pens, ink sticks and an apprenticeship in brush strokes, she might know the answer. She could have scrolls made from rare woven fibers and moth wings, and the core would be comprehensible.

Patricia thinks everything in Chinese sounds brutal and enraged. It’s all harsh threats and hoarse insults. Malcolm asks a janitor to describe his childhood and if he’ll be able to find a wife. She wanders museums alone, devising her own idiosyncratic translations. They’re not literal but rather inspirations. It’s nothing she would soil a paper with or dare spoil the air with her mouth, not even if she whispered.

She runs her hands across the archetypal hieroglyphics etched into three-thousand-year-old stones. They’re the original Braille, she decides, and closes her eyes. Some knowledge can only be transmitted tactically. Patricia only memorized a few characters — woman and man, big, market, heaven, sea, fish and baby. It was enough.

She prefers hieroglyphics to calligraphy. Characters resemble fishhooks and litters for concubines. Bent trees struck by monsoon lightning recur in a rash like seasons. She recognizes elephants and canoes, and a woman in a typhoon.

Hieroglyphics are more primitive and comprehensible. Their narratives are urgent. They’re the headlines of history. They’re like fossils in amber.

“You have theaters between your fingers,” Malcolm observes. It’s the tone he employs for undergraduates. He must be preparing for his office hours. And he means he’s given her this, defined the perimeter and secured the borders. Constellations rise from the ground and vast star systems replicate themselves on the sides of rocks. Self-contained men and women recognize and appreciate this.

“Yes, of course,” Patricia replies, prepared to kneel in dirt. In truth, she thinks gardening is boring and back-breaking. Today is bolts of steel or a river of washed rags. Malcolm says she should prepare beds for Tulips and Daffodils.

She could put on her jacket now and walk through mud and patches of ice into the forest of striped trees, curiously nude and obscene. The self-contained know miniature cities float where you stand and villages lit by votive and prayers grow under your watering can. Patricia stands at her front door. Then she realizes she doesn’t want to go there.

Malcolm McCarty is in his office, examining a hundred-year-old book he chanced to find at a rummage sale. The book is leather-bound and surprisingly heavy. The pages are composed of a paper not currently in use. The cover is engraved with the names of the author’s family in gold letters. His children and siblings and their occupations and locations are also listed. In this aspect, the book of another century possessed the qualities of a family bible. There was nothing disposable about it.

Malcolm McCarty planned to bring it to his senior seminar, to pass the book around the room and encourage his students to respond. Yes, touch it, feel the ebb and flow of the hand-set typeface. Books have oceans inside them, yes.

The content is unremarkable. But he wanted to show his students that books were once designed to endure like artifacts — an ivory inlaid table, a grandfather clock or gold charm meant to be worn at the throat. In the previous century, a book was an heirloom.

Now he realizes his students would be indifferent. They prefer books bound with glue that dissolves and composite paper of inferior substances that yellow and shred. A writer can anticipate outliving his books; he had planned to note this and pause, allowing his senior seminar to consider the implications, the irony and tragedy.

His students don’t expect books to alter the orbit of worlds or be memorized. They don’t believe a book can change a single molecule of their lives or give them one second thought. The shoddy construction of modern books asserts they’re of the moment and don’t need glass cases for protection. They aren’t distillations of personality or character in the monumental chaos of unforeseen events and complex ambiguous circumstances. They won’t be reread or gifted to children. In fact, his students donate or discard them. They leave them on beaches and in airport terminals. They toss them in trash cans. His students share an aversion for trash and they’re careful not to litter.

It’s the first tentative knocking on the door of his official office hour’s morning. Professor Malcolm McCarty glances at the door. He relishes the ritual of this, the sound of a hand against wood, uncertain but determined. It’s a gesture ancient as fertility dances, bare feet on mud under a full moon, and men drumming. He knows his assigned part, walks to the door and stops. It’s the arrested moment of expectation before the grotesque tedium of student indifference and obfuscation. This pause is like a signature in pencil on a lithograph or a single voice reciting on stage. It’s an intimacy that demands obedience and complicity. As he opens the door, he senses spring in the ice under Hadley Hall, differentiating and assembling itself.

“It’s Cindy Carlson. Candy’s sister,” the stranger says. She calls herself it. “You know. C.C,” it says.

“Yes?” Malcolm feels an imminent irritation.

He knows C.C. She’s one of the middle-aged locals they’ve rounded-up to enroll. She’s what they term a returnee. C.C is fifty-one and working on an undergraduate English degree. She’s been a sophomore for three years. They choose English because they suffer from the delusion that they speak the language. They believe it’s easier than that compendium of border wars called history. Or the math you need a protractor for. That’s called geometry. But they can read headlines in scandal sheets, recipes and satellite TV schedules. They assume Conrad and Melville will be similar. Words. More words. Many pages of words.

Obviously, C.C. sent her sister to deliver the inevitable excuse. She’s been in a car crash. A limb was unexpectedly amputated. Thieves stole her purse at gunpoint. As fate would have it, her final exam was in it. Or one of her wayward spawn is in an institution and the police, social workers and doctors have mandated her presence.

“She can’t come no more.” The woman takes a breath. “She got the pneumonia. Got put in the hospital.”

Malcolm McCarty must adjust his vision to clarify this current generation. He sorts through piercings and tattoos, noting how white they all are, the boys tall and the girls soft and heavy. They have pale skin like porcelain that accentuates their vicious out-breakings of acne. They wear the universal uniform of blue jeans and bulky navy sweatshirts with attached hoods concealing much of their faces.

“I’m sorry,” Malcolm McCarty says. He leaves the office door wide open.

His secretary glances up from the computer she doesn’t know how to use. He spent six hundred dollars of his dwindling Visiting Lecturer funds to enroll this perpetual sophomore English major in computer classes and she can’t put headers on documents. Cut and paste is a dangerous wilderness she won’t enter. It’s her version of Hawthorne’s dark forest.

“Sit down.” Malcolm indicates the one chair in front of his desk. “Please.”

He remembers Candy Carlson. C.C. lives in Harmony Hollow. It’s six miles from campus as the crow flies. And that’s the one thing that does fly in Allegheny Hills.

He’d been there once before at the request of the enrollment committee and Women’s Club. Patricia had repeatedly requested he visit. Then finally and officially, in her capacity as secretary of Women’s Club, she had insisted. Patricia, liaison to the perpetually unfortunate.

His wife collects what crawls out of the hills and hollows — the disabled, amputees, women born with legs of different lengths, and schizophrenics. Her last project was an Iraq vet tractor repairman with a limp and stutter. Patty was stirred by the man’s momentary desire to acquire sufficient grammar to procure a contractor’s license.

“Is that a dream?” Malcolm inquired. “Do we differentiate inspiration from banal aspiration?” Not even an aspiration, he decided, but an impulse such as the severed arm feels. A few random neurons flicker and spasm, and his wife was sharpening pencils and baking pies, her face alert and prepared for her latest squalid enormity.

“Chris has PTSD,” Patty informed him.

The vet, in dirty jeans and a wildly stained Sex Pistols T-shirt, reveals a shabby impulse to improve the self he doesn’t have. He borrows money and doesn’t return it. He offers to do Patty’s grocery shopping in Wood’s End and skids into a ditch. One side of the car collapses like smashed tin and oak branches crack the windshield. He doesn’t call but hitchhikes home instead. He schedules lessons and doesn’t come. He has to bail out his ex-brother-in-law. His girlfriend’s in a diabetic coma. His grandfather has Parkinson’s. A horse stepped on his stepson’s foot.

Patricia waits with her posture adjusted, her hair just washed and brushed, and pencils ready. Malcolm assumes her tutoring missions will continue indefinitely. One summer night when rosehips have infiltrated the air with the unmistakable scent of cinnamon, Chris honks from a pick-up. He’s drunk and high on meth, and drives up and down Maple Ridge Road, shooting out their windows with a deer rifle.

Malcolm McCarty telephones Sherriff Murphy in Wood’s End. Patricia protests, pulls at his arms, moans and falls to the floor screaming, “Hang up. O god. Hang up.”

“She’s improving the world one hillbilly felon at a time,” Malcolm says.

The sheriff laughs. He’s amiable, a sturdy man, tan, with an athlete’s build. He moves with graceful assurance, comfortable within his body. Probably ex-military. Women are no doubt drawn to him. He has the quiet certainty of a man who has been tested and recognizes his capacities and limitations. A straight shooter, Malcolm decides, unhurried and attentive.

“Your wife’s a nice lady. But she can’t treat country folk same as faculty. They’re accustomed to abuse. If they don’t get it, they’re suspicious and resentful,” the sheriff explains.

Malcolm is surprised when the sheriff accepts tea in a floral porcelain cup. Patricia has gone to bed.

Sheriff Murphy, casually taking inventory of their living room — the piano with a silver candelabra Patricia found in the flea market at Clignancourt is beside a bluish art nouveau vase with yesterday’s roses. The walls are decorated with scrolls of muted Yangtze River landscapes — fishing boats, huts at the sides of rice paddies and bridges in fog.

The sheriff glances at the carpets. Malcolm carried the rugs back from Kashmir in rolls like twin boa constrictors around his neck. He went to the Philadelphia airport to retrieve the cobalt blue chandelier Patricia bought in Prague. It was rush hour and custom agents interrogated him for three hours and threatened a full body search. He brought the box home and the directions were in Russian. He remembers. It took him an entire weekend to hang it.

“This all insured?” Jim Murphy asks.

“Yes, of course,” Malcolm says.

Sheriff Murphy stands up. He’s wearing black polished boots. He takes a small notebook from his pocket. “Want to make a formal complaint?”

Malcolm says no.

“I’ll arrest him anyway,” the sheriff decides. Then he extends his card. “You may want to call me.”

“Why?” Malcolm is puzzled.

“Can’t insure the future,” Sheriff Murphy observes. “You might need a hand some time. I’m a good person to know.”

Malcolm McCarty entertains the notion that Jim Murphy is threatening him. Maybe it’s the prologue of a shakedown. There’s something wrong but he can’t quite determine what it is. He dismisses the idea and lets it drift into the night.

Patricia’s new project is a farmer’s wife who can’t read. She’s dyslexic and somewhat deaf. Her father considered her too retarded for school. Her stupidity enraged him and he took out her two front teeth. She’s been at River’s Nest Motel in Belleview since she was 11. She has attention deficit disorder and they make her do all the laundry. Patty lists a litany — misogamy, physical and verbal abuse, and predatory lawyers. Malcolm nods and excuses himself.

Her current pupil cancels lessons, naturally, claiming car problems. Her boyfriend demonstrates his rage at her uppity disrespect by breaking her arm in three places. But she’s persisted and become Patricia’s triumph. The woman can now awkwardly sound out rumors about movie stars with morning sickness and divorces.

Malcolm McCarty objected to the forced visit to her residence. C.C. in her natural state, so to speak. In situ. Then he relents. He drives a staff car, listening to the wind and remembering Patricia in graduate school. She’s crossing Strawberry Creek at Sather Gate carrying sequined bags of strawberries and miniature sunflowers. At this precise moment, thousands of women are crossing bridges carrying parasols and net bags of fruits and breads, orchids and pastries called moon-lit doe and spring angel. Women walk on riverbanks beneath redwoods, frangipani and palm trees. He was studying Chinese poetry, and realized all constellations are in alliances, haunting and elusive — Afternoon of the Woman Lost at Sea, Night of the Burned Boy, Squall Morning after Falling Stones, Feast of Old Man Feeding Demons.

Candy Carlson waits outside. She’s a washed-out blond with a manipulative whine and a hallucinatory sense of her poetry and its place in human consciousness.

“I’m better than Plath,” C.C. informs him, hand on her hip. “I got more experience. I’m wiser.”

Sometimes a monosyllable is unnecessary. In fact, it would be excessive. Malcolm nods his head.

Her trailer rests uncertainly on a low muddy rise surrounded by rusting bicycle and appliance parts. Gutted mattresses and plastic bags of rags decorate the yard. It’s returned to its original condition, reedy weeds and shoulder high thorny thistle cover the scarred metal remains of what might have been a playground. She wears a mini skirt, red stiletto heels, lipstick and perfume. Chickens pass blindly near her right foot.

“Free range,” C.C. says, laughing heartily.

Chickens poke through the corroded swingset tilting above punctured car tires, rusting wires and pieces of children’s toys. Afternoon is like dusk. It’s an unusual demarcation of the day and it contains an austere gravity. C.C. leans against a slat of barn, smoking, and beckoning him into the trailer with her fingers.

“Beer?” She studies him. It’s abstract, but not entirely impersonal. “No. You’re a coffee man. And you’re on duty.”

She produces an inappropriate smile. Her lips are distorted from Botox injections and emphasize her sullen pout. Despite decades of cynicism and disappointment, real and imagined, her mouth is prepared for the kiss that isn’t coming.

She puts a spoon of instant coffee in a Star Wars mug and fills it with warm tap water. He places her application form on the table. The Women’s Club secretary has filled out the difficult areas, like social security number, date of birth and address. All C.C. needs to do is sign. Yellow post-its are attached to the signature lines.

“My ship’s come in,” C.C. says, immediately turning to the financial aid package page.

Yes, it’s your ship, dear, Malcolm thinks. But it hasn’t anchored. It’s on the horizon. Contagion stalled it at sea. It’s abandoned but for caskets in rows like April Hyacinths.

C.C. applies her signature and recites her list of difficulties. She must be transported to and from campus by car. There’s no bus service in the hollows. She doesn’t have a phone and her electricity is shut off. Naturally, it was someone else’s mistake. She uses her hands for emphasis as she speaks. Malcolm notices her fingernails. They’re broken and discolored.

Some women are like old lamps, stained, discarded in thrift stores and attics. Two bucks. Professor Malcolm McCarty knows these women. They have insomnia, run red lights drunk and collect divorces and abuse. They’re bad swimmers with a diabetic’s thirst. They swallow bilge, oily kelp, and a colossus of salt. Bloat shuts them up. He wants to stitch her lips closed.

“I got books of poems already done,” C.C. informs him. She points to a stack of three-hole binders. Eight, Malcolm guesses, maybe more.

“Patricia told me. Women’s Club is sponsoring you.” He takes a symbolic sip of tepid coffee. “Proudly. Everyone is delighted to have you on board.” Malcolm replaces his mug on the table and stands up.

“You don’t look all that pleased,” C.C. notes, stabbing out her cigarette and lighting another.

She drinks beer from the bottle. Typical aggressive confrontational tilt of the hip. Too much noise in the eyes. She falls asleep with the TV on. She never turns it off. It’s her sole companion, the one pal who doesn’t let her down.

Some women scar everyone like radiation. Husbands. Neighbors. Infants. Failure makes them narrow and raw. Some women smell like cancer. Their skin is the texture of disaster. Rashes. Lice. That’s what Patricia brought home from her volunteer year at Wood’s End Hospital. But there was something intangible that couldn’t be scrubbed off — a sense of ruined linoleum, of trailer park faux wood plastic paneling, and food from a can like a dog.

“See, you don’t know me like Women’s Club,” C.C. begins, voice simultaneously a rebuff and a plea. “I was married up to a soldier twelve years. I lived in Okinawa. Texas. Germany. I’ve seen things.”

“Yes, of course you have.” Malcolm is almost at the car. He keeps walking.

“Hey, mister professor,” C.C. calls. “I was global from the jump. Think the bang’s in Bangkok? Wrong. They got porn in Berlin you wouldn’t believe. Think Plath knew that?”

It’s a rhetorical question, he decides. He drives recklessly fast and Harmony Hollow is behind him.

Professor McCarty is holding office hours. C.C.’s sister extends four more notebooks. “She wanted me to give you this,” the sister says. “It’s her final paper.” The sister pauses. “Women’s Club’s coming to visit. They sent a real big flower arrangement. You know, real flowers, not plastic. She’d sure appreciate you visiting.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll be out of town.” Malcolm picks up his calendar and manufactures an obstacle. “A conference in Chicago.”

He rides his bike home to Maple Ridge Road. Afternoon settles on him like a soiled blanket. He isn’t prepared for Patricia. How could he be? Patricia is suddenly agitated and abrasive. He’s twice repeated the story of Candy Carlson’s epic journey to campus. She was walking in snowdrifts with her Norton’s Anthology in a plastic bag and her grade school rhymes printed in pencil. She doesn’t know cursive or how to type. He feels cold. His hands. Perhaps he should start wearing gloves.

“C.C.’s in the hospital?” Patricia is stricken.

“Yes, C.C.,” Malcolm McCarty clarifies, wondering how well his wife knows her and the extent of her misguided emotional involvement. Good old C.C. She expected him to drive her to campus, as if he were a bus service or butler. Her condition was so exceptional it necessitated private squiring. This after the Lieberman affair, when no male faculty would even have a brief conference with a female unless a secretary was stationed on watch.

“These women feel themselves coming apart like the landscape,” Patricia informs him. “They have a capacity for lyricism”

Malcolm nods his head. The table is set for tea. He sits down.

“C.C. was transcending her circumstances,” his wife says.

“Transcending her circumstances? I think not. In point of fact, she was walking an icy road in high heels. Smoking, no doubt.” He replaces his teacup carefully in the saucer’s floral center. Another domestic bull’s eye.

“She was hiking to your class. She was carrying your books,” Patricia raises her voice and glares at him.

“Transcending her circumstances,” Malcolm repeats, annoyed. “That’s a soundbite. Her situation required decades. It’s a process, for Christ’s sake.” All at once he’s unexpectedly frightened.

Malcolm walks into his study. C.C. needs more than decades. She needs divine intervention and electric shock. He’s unsteady and angry. This is the new order. One wishes to be a singer, a TV show hostess, an architect or engineer, and the whole mechanism of struggle and revelation is extinguished. The planet is succumbing to magical thinking. He’s seen the global village. It’s a millennial cargo cult under an atrocity of lurid neon.

“You were born with a stick for a spine,” Patricia says, pushing his study door open without knocking. “That stick is up your ass. Don’t mistake it for a backbone.”

Malcolm is stunned. He hasn’t heard Patty say ‘ass’ before. He thought her genetic code precluded forming a certain strata of words. The inexplicable vulgarity was shouted with intensity.

“Is it focus, Malcolm? Or are you blind?” Patricia positions herself next to his desk and leans into the wall. She’s obviously prepared to stay.

Malcolm McCarty remembers graduate school, the books, the eyestrain in libraries with inadequate light, and the relentless deprivation. How hungry he was, filling his pockets with crackers and packets of ketchup from cafeterias. He ate this later, reading, underlining and memorizing. What did he fail to notice?

His mother was in the hospital that last semester. Each weekend he drove a borrowed car to San Diego. He underlined passages while she slept. He was revising his dissertation. His mother was hideous. Choking and sobbing sounds released themselves from her body, as if she were already buried and now lived underground. His mother, with her feline mews and growls. Then the weeks of strangling, as if the individual events of her life had coalesced and formed a rope. In the act of breathing, she was hanging herself.

All Things Considered is coming from Pittsburgh, battered by static. It sounds feeble and distant, partial and disabled. It might be posthumous. What are they saying? Tractors in Thailand and Tunisian Theater? The tumultuous tale of Tin. Tsunamis in Taiwan?

Malcolm McCarty is losing his linearity. He’s thinking about blueberries and Patricia in the anointed yellow summer of creeks and bridges and sly moons. He doesn’t know why he’s lying on his study floor in what is now inexorably night. Something is cleanly and queerly pounding in his head. Not an aneurysm, he decides, but a newly formed, uncharacterized disease.

It’s a retrovirus, a hybrid mutation hatched from the millennium itself. It’s come from the juxtapositions of travel that should never have been taken conjoined with alien objects, texts and sacramental vases stolen from tombs. Some artifacts have glyphs that explain everything. Why the Buddha came and went and what he thought when he pretended to smile. You can trace the first characters with your fingers, but you’re holding this stone under the eerie distorted neon of Shanghai dusk. The air is humid and soiled and his hands are violently shaking. Hands so cold they’re turning his arm numb.

“You don’t know women,” Patricia screams. “You fucking asshole.”

Can his wife be saying this? He studies her mouth. He tries to read her lips. A huge 0 is forming. Is it another vastly inappropriate anatomical reference? There’s a buzzing in his ears, not insects, but birds in cages. It’s the Hong Kong market, warehouses the size of airplane hangars, boxes and crates and bamboo cages of canaries and parakeets stacked to the ceiling, all a glistening sordid yellow as if they had swallowed torches.

A disciplined man does not drop to the floor like a wind-ripped maple leaf. First they decay, infected and jaundiced. They’re contagious, spread to the pines, and it becomes a forest of hepatitis.

“Call 911,” Mac instructs. “Now.” Each word is a stone, carried on his back across snowdrifts, and mortared with his blood. He isn’t talking but building pyramids, one enormously heavy boulder at a time.

Why isn’t this woman placing his head on her lap? Why isn’t she dialing the telephone and taking his pulse? Can’t she see he needs a blanket? Why is she turning away, walking past him and staring out the window?

“Mac, all those spelling tests and optional extra credit essays. All those book reports and book reviews and book revisions that always come at Thanksgiving. What did it get you, really?” She turns and stares at his face.

His wife is a stranger who purports to understand calligraphy and claims an affection for gardening. She’s entirely false. He’s observed her in the orchard and she rarely prunes a branch. She feels revulsion for the ground and her headaches are a too convenient camouflage. Patricia is a fraud with a collection of cripples and illiterates she captures and enslaves. She’s a pathological liar with a secret agenda, scrapbooks he’s forbidden to touch and dresser drawers that are locked. That’s where Rachel’s bracelets are. How has he come to this juncture with such a person?

Patricia is doing something with flames. Perhaps it’s a ritual of propitiation. She’s removing a paper from her pocket. It’s a document. She’s setting it on fire.

“The results of your echocardiogram,” she reveals. “Seems you have a bit of a valve problem.”

Patricia lights a cigarette with the flame that’s charring the paper. A vault problem? Her cigarette is infecting the air, making the individual molecules harder to gather and trap.

He realizes the sheriff wasn’t threatening him. It was a warning. “Sheriff Murphy.” Malcolm tries to sit up. He’s resting on his elbows. “Call. Now.”

“Sheriff Murphy? The Romeo of Wood’s End? You’re so Elizabethan,” Patricia muses, inhaling and exhaling streams of silvery smoke. “Let’s not even go there.”

She expels flames because she’s a dragon. She’s Zima, the river goddess who drowns children. She rides a camel with four humps and wields an acetylene torch.

“You’re MacBeth’s wife,” Malcolm McCarty realizes.

“You’re a pompous little prick,” Patricia laughs. “I’m Medea.”

Professor Malcolm McCarty is having auditory and visual hallucinations. It’s from the sickness pitching him to the floor that’s rocking like a vessel at sea. Of course, such diseases are inevitable. He’s simply the first to encounter this particular virus or spasm or whatever it is taking his breath absolutely.

Bob Lieberman knew something was coalescing in the electronic stew. A global patois rose from the verbal graffiti and smiley yellow faces. It’s savage. Flames come out of its mouth.

His arm is numb. He can’t he feel his hands. An enormous aviary is puncturing his jaw and exiting through his forehead. All the stone steps, temples and bronze bells, carved wooden bridges, rivers and orchids, blueberries and gazebos are losing their clarity and dissolving.

Professor Malcolm McCarty knows he has the right to define and name this phenomenon. But it’s virulent and accelerating. In the sky, an armada of zeppelins pass trailing banners announcing Feast of Old Men Feeding Demons, Night of the Burned Boy and Woman Lost at Sea. He watches them glide by. How will he assemble the data, derivation and trajectory? Jesus Christ. He will die first.