Chesapeake Crimes: This Job Is Murder!

TO ADJUNCTS EVERYWHERE, by Ellen Herbert

I was sitting in my van in a dark corner of faculty parking, looking up at his windows-the only lit windows in Edgar Allen Poe Hall, home to George Henry University’s English Department. The night was cold, and clear, and so far delightfully free of the usual roaming zombies.

“Tonight’s the night,” I whispered to the sole Nobel Laureate in Literature ever lured to GHU. Closing my eyes, I could see Kaplan Kossek, a Polish Jew exiled in this suburban Virginia gulag, sitting in his office. I imagined him composing his lyrical gory stories about life in Krakow the old-fashioned way, with fountain pen on vellum paper. Every so often he would glance out at the misty woods separating Poe Hall from the parking lot and know I was out here, waiting to shiver and thrill at his next book. I was his reader.

Not that he knew me, not personally. I wasn’t so presumptuous. Still Kappy was a great writer with a huge heart and could perhaps sense me out here. I was a homeless adjunct professor living in my van ever since I received my master’s of fine arts degree from GHU five years ago. I read Kappy’s wondrous works by flashlight, existing on a diet of microwave Ramen Noodles, clothing myself from the campus Lost and Found.

Of course, as an English adjunct, I accepted that I was the lowest form of life at GHU. This state university’s caste system was more severe than India’s. My fate was to teach three composition courses a semester so the Tenured Ones could kill more trees publishing their books at academic presses, books no one cared about, books no one would ever read. Books the Tenured Ones hoped would propel them not to fame or fortune, but to the next rung on GHU’s promotion ladder.

Not that I had a shot at fame or fortune. On the contrary, as an English adjunct, I was an anonymous cog in their education factory and had taken a vow of poverty as well. My GHU salary was so small I couldn’t afford an apartment. On the bright side, I made enough to pay for my campus parking space and a membership to the university gym, where I could clean up and shower. Still I didn’t look forward to another winter sleeping in my van. Yet I felt warm when I remembered I slept under Kaplan Kossek’s windows, his golden lights burning into the dawn, his work ethic and dedication to his art inspiring me to perhaps write a lyrical horror story of my own some day.

And tonight I would meet him at last, because I had something important to say to him, something I hoped would give him peace of mind.

Opening the van’s door, I stepped out and looked around campus, silent and deserted as usual. Acres of asphalt parking lots surrounded GHU, a commuter school, meaning everyone commuted the hell away as soon as classes ended. Neither students nor faculty could stand to be at GHU a moment longer than necessary. Maybe they sensed the campus was haunted. Yes, haunted, though only I and-perhaps Kappy-knew its haunting wasn’t so bad. In fact, once the students and faculty left, GHU turned magical, almost unicorn-leaping magical.

Pine needles crunched underfoot as I walked to Poe Hall, careful not to step too close to the burial mounds. GHU’s younger tenure-track faculty regularly killed tenured profs and buried them here. If they didn’t, the geezers would soldier on into eternity, shuffling to class on walkers, wearing their Depends, Fixodent oozing from their clattering dentures, since their egos wouldn’t allow them to retire. But the lazy junior faculty often buried them in graves too shallow. So shallow the oldies managed to claw their way up and out and go on to class, where they cut off their hearing aids and sawed on about Victorian vulgarities or postmodern feminist theory in literature of the Pacific Rim.

In U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings, GHU was known for having the largest percentage of zombie faculty, especially in our famous Economics Department, in which they were almost the majority. Many of the undead regularly appeared on CNN or Fox News, where they un-ironically advised that we must cut Medicaid, Medicare, cut everything except the Defense Department’s budget.

I started and whirled when I saw movement from the corner of my eye, but it was only Phoebe, my favorite ghost, emerging from the hillside’s rainy mist like a vision.

“Madam, where are you sallying out to this evening?” she called to me. Closing her yellow silk parasol, she drew closer.

As usual I marveled at her beauty, especially since she’d died in 1861 soon after the Battle of Bull Run. Her dewy skin was the color of coffee, and she possessed a grace unknown to women of my century. If not for her slight transparency, hardly noticeable in tonight’s dim light, you would never have guessed she was a ghost.

“That dress is stunning on you,” I said. “Did George give it to you?”

Phoebe had been a thirteen-year-old slave when George Henry took her as his mistress. While the great patriot Patrick Henry was famous for saying, “Give me liberty or give me death!” his younger brother George, also a patriot if a self-interested one, was remembered for saying, “Give me free markets unfettered by tariffs or regulation!” Hence he was not only the university’s namesake but also the capitalist saint of GHU’s Econ Department, where they had a life-size statue of him.

“Kindly refrain from addressing Mr. Henry by his given name,” Phoebe said and walked beside me, her petticoat rustling, her basket of herbs swinging from her wrist. The land on which GHU stood was once George Henry’s plantation, so Phoebe knew all the flora and fauna here and often gave me potions for my colds and flu. I couldn’t have survived winters in my van without her herbal medicine since the university provided no health insurance for adjuncts. If we fell ill in the hallways or classrooms, our bodies were tossed into Dumpsters and sent off to landfills in Lorton.

“I meant no disrespect, Phoebe. I assure you.” I took her arm. The nineteenth century was an era of formality and manners. Phoebe would brook no criticism of George Henry, who had given her a better education than any of the students here, undergraduates or grads, were likely to receive-better than I’d gotten with my MFA. Upon his death Master Henry had freed her, so she remained grateful even though I pointed out to her that today he would have been classified as a pedophile.

Phoebe and I had met the night a zombie econ professor reached out of his grave and latched onto her ankle. Phoebe was attempting to turn herself into mist and get away when I hacked off the zombie’s hand with the spine of my thick Pelican Shakespeare.

“I’m much obliged to you,” Phoebe had said with a curtsey. I’d helped pry his cold dead fingers from around her ankle, and we’d been close friends ever since.

We reached Poe Hall, where Phoebe stopped me. “Nora dear, it’s unseemly for a young lady to call on a gentleman.”

We often sparred about the manners and mores of our respective centuries. “Maybe if you’d called on your Robert, you wouldn’t have to haunt these woods for eternity searching for him,” I said.

She sighed and glanced down at the frilly gloves on her hands. “Perhaps so.” I knew she didn’t like to talk about the afterlife or the man she had loved and lost when good ol’ George Henry sold him down the river.

“Wish me luck,” I told her and stepped toward the dark doorway.

“Forget about that old writer and come ride the big dumbwaiter with me.”

She meant the elevator in Ayn Rand Hall, home of GHU’s hotshot Econ Department. The odd ten-story building sat on the hump of a hill, where its big glass elevator was connected to the structure’s only wing, one that went off to the right, the far right. In their lobby, beside George Henry’s statue, was a solid gold plaque on which their motto was engraved: Avaritia est bona. “Greed is good,” Phoebe had translated the first time we saw it.

Smoothing my jeans, I said, “I have to meet Kaplan Kossek tonight.” I’d worked up my courage and had to go through with it. “I have something important to tell him.”

She shook her head, opened her parasol, and vanished into the starless night. She could appear and disappear at will, an advantage the dead have over the rest of us.

I entered Poe Hall, a mere four stories tall, with nary a working elevator or grandiose motto in sight. English majors needed to be a hardy lot. My life could attest to this. I trudged up the stairs to the top floor.

Kappy always worked late at night. I knew he did this to avoid contact with GHU students. From old photos I’d seen of him in Poets & Writers, he was always surrounded by students at Warsaw University. In Europe, students actually read books and treated great writers like rock stars, following them around, wanting to discuss literature and life with them, hanging on their every word.

I came to Kappy tonight to apologize for the fact that this was not the case here in the United States. A recent campus survey showed that ninety-nine percent of GHU students thought Kaplan Kossek was a preparatory course for medieval history. Not that Kappy should be insulted by this-a similar percentage had never heard of William Shakespeare or that the Earth was round.

GHU students were extremely focused. They cared only about their grade-point averages. All of them had double majors in badgering and harassing. Like predators, they could smell adjunct faculty across campus. They made sure to sign up for courses we adjuncts taught, knowing we weren’t paid well enough to fight off their badgering and harassing over grades. Perhaps it was just as well that Kappy wasn’t expected to teach any classes, only give the occasional guest lecture or reading.

I pushed through the doors of the English Department, everything dark around me, except for the honeyed beam of light coming from Kappy’s office.

Following his light, I went down a long hallway past the offices of the Tenured Ones. Even though they were seldom on campus, the Tenured Ones got rooms with windows, the only windows in Poe Hall. Classrooms were pushed to the building’s dark interior, where plastic moveable curtains served as walls. While classrooms in Ayn Rand Hall were outfitted with individual computers and overhead projectors, the English Department made do with dusty blackboards and stubby bits of yellow chalk.

When I saw the name, Kaplan Kossek, on his door, my heart began to drum. I knocked softly. Through the door’s frosted glass pane, I could sort of see him from the back sitting just as I had imagined, slumped at his desk, hard at work.

When he didn’t answer, I knocked harder, my knocks mirroring the pounding in my chest. “Mr. Kossek,” I called but still no answer.

Maybe he had fallen asleep. I paused, wondering if I ought to wake him. He was in his eighties and not in good health. During the year and a half he’d been at GHU, he was forced to cancel all his lectures and readings due to illness. And the publication date of this latest book had been postponed twice. No one seemed to care about his health or these cancelations, except for me.

What if he had gotten sick tonight? What if he needed CPR or to be taken to the hospital? I had to get in there and check on him. But when I tried the knob, the door was locked.

Rushing to the English Department’s central office, I slipped behind the high counter where the clerks sat, a place lowly adjuncts were forbidden to go. But I knew their secrets. From a hidden place beneath the head flunky’s desk, I took the master key and ran back to Kappy’s door.

Unlocking it, I hurried in. “Mr. Kossek, are you all right?”

At last I came face-to-face with him. It took a moment to register what I saw.

“Ahhhhhh!” I screamed a scream so loud it almost lifted Poe’s roof. I ran out of the office and down four flights of stairs, not stopping until I reached the dark woods, where Phoebe caught me in her arms.

She held me until I calmed enough to say, “He’s dead. Completely dead. He’s nothing but a skeleton in a custom-made suit.”

“Why does that frighten you so?” Phoebe asked. “Surely one with your experience with ghosts and zombies…”

“I’m not frightened-I’m grief stricken!” I replied. “And furious. Couldn’t the Tenured Ones have made Kaplan Kossek into a zombie like so many of them? Then we’d still have his genius!”

She patted my hair. “The gentleman was dead when the Tenured Ones brought him to GHU from Poland. They compensated his family for his bones. You know how they revere bones. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you.”

To zombies, bones were special. A zombie’s flesh got eaten away, the reason many favored the bandage or mummy look. But their bones never changed. Zombie honor, however dubious, allowed them to say Kaplan Kossek resided on campus because his bones were here.

I nodded at Phoebe’s words. She often haunted the faculty dining hall and eavesdropped on the Tenured Ones. She knew more about what was going on here than I did. And I should have realized that her propriety would never have permitted me to go unchaperoned for a tête-a-tête with Kappy if he were still alive. She was solicitous of me like that.

“But why would they want to bring him to campus dead?” Then a light went on for me. “This reminds me of Kappy’s novel about an elderly villager who wins the national lottery and promptly dies of delight. The other villagers put forth an imposter to claim the winnings, which they intend on dividing among themselves. But in the end the villagers murder each other to increase their shares.”

Nodding, Phoebe said, “The Tenured Ones are dividing Kaplan Kossek’s substantial salary as the Edgar Allen Poe scholar.” She smiled her devilish dimpled smile.

“Avaritia est bona,” we said in unison. It was our private joke.

But later that night I wasn’t feeling so jolly. I had always been suspicious about why the English Department brought Kappy to GHU in the first place. The Tenured Ones looked down on genre fiction-mystery, romance, anything people actually read, especially horror fiction. No lyrical gory stories for them. But none for me either now that I knew Kappy was dead. I’d wanted him to inspire me to write. How would I write the great American zombie novel without Kaplan Kossek?

I couldn’t stand to remain beneath his windows, so I moved my van to the Economic Department’s faculty parking.

Before I went to sleep, I sneaked into Ayn Rand Hall and emailed the chair of the English Department, an androgynous person named Rutledge Browne, Rutty to his/her posse. (The English Department Tenured Ones were so politically correct they refused to gender identify themselves or others, so everyone was a s/he.)

Normally Rutty would never read a lowly adjunct’s email much less answer it. To get his/her attention, I wrote in the subject line: KAPLAN KOSSEK IS DEAD! In the body of my email I let him/her know I intended to alert the Washington Post about their fraud.

Along with their scheme’s dishonesty, what they were doing would surely harm Kaplan Kossek’s literary legacy and thus had to be unmasked. Who better to blow the whistle on them than Kappy’s greatest fan?

The next morning as soon as I stepped out of my eight a.m. class, my cell phone vibrated. “Nora, dear, Rutty here. Don’t be hasty. I’m sure we can come to some arrangement. How would you like a term appointment?”

At those words-term appointment-hope flooded me. This was what I always wanted. A term appointment meant I would have a full-time job for a year, which was good. It also meant I would be required to teach four comp classes a semester, not so good. But I would be paid almost a living wage, just enough to rent an efficiency apartment and get out of the cold.

“We’re so impressed with your…tenacity, Nora,” Rutty said. “Come to dinner this evening at the faculty dining hall, and we’ll discuss your term appointment.”

“Oh, thank you, Dr. Browne.” I hated the eagerness in my voice. “I’ll be there.”

“But until then, Nora, no Washington Post. Is that understood?”

That night I walked through the woods to the faculty dining hall wearing high heels and a dress I’d bought at a thrift shop especially for the occasion. I was so excited.

Although finding Kaplan Kossek dead discouraged my writing ambitions, perhaps it would turn out to be my big break in academia. I didn’t fool myself, though. I knew I would have to agree to keep their secret in order to get my term appointment, which would be a bargain with the devil.

Rutty was waiting for me at the door. “Tonight just the English Department’s tenured faculty members are here,” s/he told me and ushered me into the large room lit only by candlelight. All the tables were pushed back against the walls, and the Tenured Ones were seated around the periphery.

For the first time in all my years at GHU, I was greeted by name by English Department luminaries, some human, some zombie, but all experts in subjects such as Shakespearean feminist deconstruction theory, the metaphysical bisexual symbolism in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and the rhetorical pedagogy of heuristics made algorithmic.

Rutty led me to the center of the room, where something crinkled under me. I looked down and noticed I was standing on a large piece of heavy plastic.

Rutty slid away from me.

Gazing around the room, I saw that the Tenured Ones had all come to their feet. I smiled back at them until I noticed that every one of them held a large stone in one hand. A killing stone.

I had always said this job would kill me. Being stoned to death wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was about to happen if I didn’t escape.

I started for the door, but Rutty jerked me back. When I tried slipping between the tables, the Tenured Ones closed ranks. I was trapped.

I realized they’d put the plastic sheet under me so my blood didn’t stain the carpet woven in gold and green, GHU’s colors. How carefully they had planned my death. For the first time ever, they set aside all their bickering and backbiting to act as one. Eliminating me had brought them unity, but I found cold comfort in this.

So I turned to face them, preparing to meet my fate when I noticed a beautiful woman in a maid’s uniform going among them, filling their wine glasses. Phoebe! A trickle of hope opened inside me.

“Before we attend to the business at hand, let’s toast to Adjunct Nora.” Rutty looked out at his/her colleagues. “We owe a debt of gratitude to Nora and other minions who want to teach at universities so badly they’re willing to do it for free. Well, almost free.” This evoked a smattering of chuckles. “Because of these lesser ones, we avoid the unsavory task of teaching in order to dedicate ourselves to intellectual pursuits.”

“Here, here,” they said in unison. “To Nora and adjuncts everywhere!” They lifted their cups and drank.

As I looked around at their shadowy forms in the candlelight, I realized they all had similar physiques. They were stubby, big-footed, and broad-shouldered from jumping on each others’ backs to get ahead. How mighty and powerful they appeared, this tribe of Tenured Ones.

But like Rome, they fell. All around me, they began to fall-even the zombies. In fact they fell faster than the living. What a glorious sight! Tossing their tumblers, slumping onto the floor, or back into their chairs, cracking their heads on the tables, they went down. Rutty sank into a puddle near me, the stone s/he had been hiding sinking with him/her.

In a flash Phoebe appeared beside me and took my hand. “We must make haste and leave this unholy place!”

I followed in her wake as we wound our way around the tables and bodies.

“My sleeping potion doesn’t last long on folks who imbibe spirits the way some of these do,” Phoebe said.

Behind us, we already heard moaning. Rutty was coming around.

Outside the dining hall’s glass doors, Phoebe uprooted the FACULTY ONLY sign. “Help me,” she said. We threaded the sign through the door’s handles.

“Surely that’ll hold them,” I told her.

She didn’t look convinced and urged me to run with her. The blanket of darkness covering campus didn’t slow us down. We knew this place by heart. We were halfway up the winding path to Ayn Rand Hall when we heard them breaking open the glass doors.

From a burlap sack, Phoebe took two bottles of canola oil. “Pour,” she said, handing me one. Streams of oil flowed down the path, making it as slippery as Rutty’s promises.

We were almost home free when Phoebe presented me with a pouch filled with hundred-dollar bills-Ben Franklin, my favorite patriot, smiled from their centers. “This ought to sustain you until you can find suitable employment for a young lady of your talent,” she said.

“But where did you get…?” I looked up into the lobby of Ayn Rand Hall, where the life-size statue of George Henry stood beside an empty wall. The Econ Department’s solid gold plaque was gone.

Phoebe was smiling her dimpled smile. “Avaritia est bona!” we said in unison.

The Tenured Ones were getting closer. We could hear them chanting, “Nora! Nora!” They were carrying fiery torches and marching up the path toward us.

“Never fear. George will stop them.” Phoebe went inside the lobby and grabbed George Henry’s statue. She was a strong ghost. I held the door for her.

“Now get in your metal carriage and go.”

We hugged. I wasn’t sorry to leave this place or this job, but I hated to leave her. “Me too,” she said without me having to say anything. She shoved me toward the parking lot.

I ran to my van, started the engine, and took off for the exit.

I was pulling out of campus when I took a last look in my rearview mirror. At the top of the hill, Phoebe had turned George Henry on his side and given him a good push. He was rolling down the path, bowling over those in the front of the mob. When their torches hit the canola oil, they burst into flames. Their screams filled the night. How ironic for a penniless adjunct to owe her life to George Henry, the patron saint of greed.

I drank in the scene and realized that perhaps now I could write my lyrical gory story after all.

Ellen Herbert’s short stories have been published in First for Women, the Sonora Review, and other magazines and have won more than ten awards, including a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize and a Virginia Fiction Fellowship. One of her stories was read on NPR’s “The Sound of Writing.” Her short story collection, Falling Women and Other Stories, will be published by Shelfstealers Publishing in 2012. Ellen’s personal narratives have appeared in the Washington Post, the Rambler, and other magazines. Ellen teaches fiction at Marymount University and creative nonfiction at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.