Arsonist

CHAPTER 30

Emma Lyon stood at the head of the classroom and watched the clock. The exam was the second of the year and it was the most difficult one she gave. On a first exam the students would be frightened enough; by the third and final exam apathy and a full semester of work would wear them down; but the second exam was the great test. They would be overconfident from the first exam, assuming they knew what was coming next, and then be thrown off by the difficult and esoteric questions. They would be unsure what was coming and the apathy of the third exam would be shaken away.

The exam was focused around entropy and Gibbs energy. The topic made her uncomfortable; she was never one to see science as a closed system and applying entropic principles to daily life was a frightening prospect. According to thermodynamics, thermal energy always flows from regions of higher temperature to regions of lower temperature. This process reduces the state of order in the initial system so, in a manner of speaking, entropy is the measure of chaos in a system. And as the second law of thermodynamics has shown, entropy only increases or stays the same; it is never reduced.

When she first learned this principle, images of empires laid to waste, of entire species gone extinct, of space stations destroyed, of planets made uninhabitable filled her mind. She saw humanity as a species that was born, reached its apex, and began its slow decline into chaos and then extinction. It was a thought that stuck with her and made the actual subject much more difficult than it needed to be.

“Time,” she said, “please put your pencils down.”

Groans of joy and frustration from the class of twenty-eight. A few mumbles came up about the pure difficulty of the exam and more than one person was certain they had failed.

“You can turn in your scan-tron sheets on my desk. I’ll see you guys next week and we’ll begin modules fourteen and fifteen so make sure to have those read.”

The class filed out and she sat down at the desk, waiting for a few stragglers as they gathered their items and placed the sheets down on the desk in front of her. When they had left, she gathered the sheets together and placed them in a folder. For just a moment, she considered throwing them away and assigning grades randomly to stress entropy’s point. It would be poignant and humorous at the same time, but she felt few of her students would find it amusing and instead she just placed the folder in her bag and walked out of the classroom.

She decided she wasn’t going to pick anything up from her office and would instead just head home.

It was a long drive on a freeway that was congested to the point of immobility. The radio announced that four separate accidents had occurred and officers were trying to clear them both up as quickly as possible. She rolled down her window and leaned back in the seat, trying to calm herself as wafts of exhaust came into her car. Eventually she had to roll the window back up.

Her cell phone rang. It was Steve Cutler, the dean of the college of science.

“This is Emma.”

“Emma, it’s Steve. Didn’t catch you at a bad time, did I?”

“No.”

“I need you to cover that symposium next Thursday and Friday up there in San Francisco.”

“What? Steve I told you I can’t do that. I have several labs and a research thesis that’s due for publication in just-”

“No excuses. Just do it.”

“This is the third time you’ve sprung something like this on me. I don’t see too many other tenured professors getting that.”

“No one else can do it. Just suck it up and go. You might like San Francisco.”

“What is all this about, Steve? Is it because I told you to go home to your wife?”

“I was drunk when I did that. Pussies like yours are a dime a dozen out here. Don’t flatter yourself. Now go to that fucking symposium and quit being such a pain in the ass.”

He hung up before Emma could say anything else. She felt like throwing her cell phone out the window or punching her steering wheel. Instead, she decided she would have to go to the symposium and suck up the humiliation. She had played with the idea of a lawsuit and now it seemed inevitable: Steve Cutler should not be supervising anyone, much less young women looking to rise up the career ladder.

By the time she got home it was already dark and the street lamps were on. She parked in her garage and went inside the house. The home was near the beach and the air always had a salty tinge to it that at first she had hated, but now had grown accustomed to.

The house was warm and she opened a couple of windows before kicking off her shoes and getting a bottle of wine out of the cupboard. She poured herself a full glass and sat down on the couch. She turned on the television and it was turned to Channel 4 News. They were running a story on a pile-up accident on the freeway, involving six cars. She was about to change the station when the next story came up; it was about the arson investigation of two homes.

She saw the reporter standing in front of a burned-out shell that used to be a home. Police were combing the area behind her. She was speaking about the family: the Humbolts and their six children. Jon Stanton came on screen and spoke of this occurring again and the helplessness of the police. There was a photo on the screen now: a mother, father, and six children. The youngest was one and a half and she was smiling and holding a stuffed animal. Then an elderly woman came on; she was weeping uncontrollably, holding a family photo, trying to describe the last time she had seen her grandchildren. She kept repeating a phrase: “my babies, my babies.”

Emma noticed a sensation on her cheek. She thought perhaps she had an itch but felt the sensation go further down. She put her hand to her cheek and realized she was crying.