John Woman

1

Far out in the high desert, fifty miles or so from Phoenix, stands a very large and circular five-story structure, the walls of which are plated with tile-like strips of white marble and broad panes of dark blue glass; its round, domed, and transparent roof is fashioned from thick, green-tinted, unbreakable polymer. This is Prometheus Hall, the main academic building of the New University of the Southwest.

There are twelve equally spaced double doors around Prometheus; opposite pairs of these doors open onto hallways that cut diagonally across the first floor of the building. Each of these pathways is paved with tiles of one of six colors: the three primary hues and their secondary complements. The tiled paths meet in and cross the Great Rotunda at the center of the huge building. This central chamber is the hollow heart of the desert university: where students, faculty, staff and visitors are welcome to stop and sit on one of eighty-six white marble benches — to read, contemplate or discuss, or merely to rest.

The four upper floors each consist of twelve equally sized pie-shaped classrooms. These forty-eight lecture halls are only eleven feet wide at the entrance but broaden to four times that width at the blue glass windows that look out over the Arizona desert.

Professor John Woman arrived at Prometheus fifteen minutes before one o’clock on the first Tuesday in September. He entered the building through Door Eleven, progressed down North Violet Lane to the periphery of the Great Rotunda where he ascended the zigzagging north stairwell to the fifth floor. He stopped, leaning his back against the triple-barred chrome rail overlooking the rotunda. There he watched as students went through the broad red-rimmed doorway of Lecture Hall Two.

The young associate professor stood exactly six feet tall with thick, curly brown hair; medium-brown skin; and generous, friendly features. Despite his slender build he gave the impression of quiet physical strength.

Professor Woman studied the young people entering his classroom. Some carried briefcases while others lugged big purses, shoulder bags, and backpacks. Three students carried nothing at all, just walked through the door to sit and listen, maybe trying to figure out whether or not to drop John’s challenging INTRODUCTION TO DECONSTRUCTIONIST HISTORICAL DEVICES. If they weren’t history majors, they might switch to a pottery class or Felton Malreaux’s POETRY APPRECIATION. History majors might transfer to Gregory Tracer’s HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR or Annette Eubanks’s FEMINIST OR REVISIONIST HISTORY?

John checked his father’s Timex wristwatch at one minute to one. He took a deep breath and strode toward Lecture Hall Two feeling both excitement and confidence.

He stopped at the doorway, blocked by a willowy young woman with fairly short auburn hair. Motionless at the threshold she seemed to be lost, as if maybe this was the wrong class. Her flimsy gold jacket was more like a shirt with sleeves that didn’t quite achieve the wrists. Likewise the legs of her turquoise-colored trousers hovered a few inches above the ankles. She wore straw sandals and the bag slung across her shoulder was white Naugahyde marked by a solitary blue ink spot, a few abrasions and a black skid-mark that ran along the bottom.

The young woman was tall but John was taller. Over her shoulder he could see the twenty or so students who had staked out the first three rows of the classroom that could have easily seated two hundred.

“Excuse me,” John said.

The young woman gasped and turned. While not pretty, she was, at least to his eye, handsome in the extreme. With butterscotch skin, a strong jaw and tawny eyes the crystalline hue of topaz marbles; she had the long fingers of a pianist. The eyes slanted up just a bit. Her thick hair was crinkled.

“Sorry,” she said taking half a step to the side. “You trying to get in?”

“Yes I am,” John said with a smile.

“You’re taking this class too?”

He shrugged, tilting his head to the side. It was no surprise the undergraduate hadn’t identified him as a professor. He was only a few years past thirty. His Asian-cut, soft-milled black cotton jacket and loose coal gray trousers were not professorial — neither was his slightly faded scarlet T-shirt.

“I heard it was hard,” the young woman said, anxiety eeling its way across her lips.

“New ideas seem hard at first,” he said, “but challenge is why we’re here.”

With that John crossed the red doorsill and went to the semitransparent emerald green polymer lectern at the front of the class. Any talking that had been going on petered out and, a few seconds later, the uncertain young woman made her way to a seat in the third row.

Professor Woman waited for the last gangly student to be seated before he started talking.

“I am Associate Professor John Woman,” he announced, “and this class is Introduction to Deconstructionist Historical Devices.”

A hand went up in the second row.

“You will be able to ask questions in a few minutes,” he said and the hand went down. “But first I’d like to explain what will happen, what you might learn and what you cannot learn, in this seminar.

“It is my position that history is an unquestionable certainty, the absolute outcome of an incontrovertible string of ontological events. It, history, reaches all the way back to the origin of the race and beyond through the chaotic unfolding of existence. In our history, our one indisputable history, are contained assassinations, inspiration, instinctual urges, friendships, conflicts, the multiplicities of gravity and material, black holes and supernovas. Our bodies are formed from the fabric of the universe and so consequently there is a touch of the divine in each of us. You and I are part and parcel of history, slaves of history, playing out our willing and unwilling roles — and so it has been for every living being, every species on earth and, quite possibly, life elsewhere.

“Accepting, for a moment, this position as accurate it is easy to see that the true understanding of history, or any major aspect thereof, requires knowledge that is currently beyond human ken. We are like the blind prophets guessing at the nature of an elephant — only the elephant is in another room, situated on the opposite side of the globe, while we still believe the world is flat.”

John stopped for a moment. He had not planned this lecture. He hardly ever worked from notes or predetermined arguments.

Our lives are just one long series of ad hoc debates, Herman Jones used to say. In the end everybody loses the argument.

“We cannot comprehend the vastness that is history,” the man called Woman continued. “Our capacity for knowledge is mortal even if our bodies are deified. We are incapable of knowing with certainty what has happened while at the same time we are unable to stop ourselves from wondering why we are here and from whence we have come. This is the stimulus, the incentive for the study of and the belief in history.

“We, you and I, have been propelled to this moment by nothing less than the conspiracy of eternity. The attempt to understand this scheme is the object of our study like a carrot is the goal of the work-weary mule dragging the plow and imagining something sweet.

“Those of us who crave the carrot of historical knowledge must be aware that we will never achieve this goal but that in our wake we will create something beautiful, fertile and, quite possibly, terrible. We must, as scholars of an impossible study, realize that while history is definite, the human investigation of the past can only be art, the one truly deconstructionist art — because the only way to capture the essence of history is to make it up.”

John stopped at that point not so much for dramatic effect as a natural pause in this improvised discourse.

“My first lecture is often brief. Later on we may go overtime. That said, are there any questions so far?”

Five or six hands went up. John studied the faces of his students. They seemed engaged.

“When you speak,” he said, “I’d like you to give us your name and any other information you deem pertinent. In this way I’ll get to know you and you will further identify yourself with your query.

“Yes,” he said, pointing. “The woman in the red blouse.”

“Star Limner,” said a twentysomething white woman whose black hair was heavy and damp from a recent shower. She sat in the second row on John’s right. “Second-year poli-sci major.”

“What’s your question, Ms. Limner?”

“Excuse me, Professor Woman, but it sounds like you’re saying that nothing has ever happened in the past and that we can’t believe anything we study.”

“Yeah,” a brutish young man from the third row chimed in.

“And your name is?” John asked the heavy-muscled student who was clad in overalls and a black-and-white-check T-shirt.

“Pete.”

“Pete what?”

“Tackie.”

Pete Tackie was also white with straight brown hair that came down to his ears. He wasn’t fat but rather beefy with small eyes and a frown that John imagined never relaxed, even in sleep.

“And what would you like us to know about you, Mr. Tackie?”

“I wasn’t askin’ a question,” the dour young man complained.

“I asked,” John said, “for anyone speaking to give us their name and anything else we should know.”

Pete Tackie rubbed his face with broad, strong fingers.

“I play rugby,” he said. “I came here from Dearborn.”

“Michigan?”

“Yeah.”

Smiling, the young associate professor held Pete Tackie’s gaze for a few seconds. He had learned how to keep order by sticking to the promises and requests he made.

“No to the first part of your question, Ms. Limner,” John said, still looking at the rugby player. Then he turned to her. “Quite the opposite — everything has happened. This much is apparent. So you’re right, I’m saying you cannot believe anything you study because it is, necessarily, incomplete speculation... albeit, sometimes quite convincing speculation.”

“But how can that be?” another young woman asked. When John turned toward her she shrugged and said, “Beth Weiner from Santa Monica, California. I haven’t declared a major yet but it’ll probably be business or maybe economics.”

“You were saying, Ms. Weiner?” John asked.

“We know that there was a Civil War, that all those people died.”

“Excuse me, but why was that war fought?”

“Over slavery,” a student in the front row said.

This was the only male student who was formally dressed. He wore a blue blazer, tan slacks and a white dress shirt. The only thing missing, John thought, was a tie. His hair was black and his eyes might have been green.

The young man smiled and said, “Jack Burns. I’m from right up the highway in Phoenix.”

“So, Mr. Burns,” John said. “You don’t subscribe to the notion that the war was waged over a disagreement concerning economic questions and the southern states’ sovereign right of secession?”

“Well,” a sweatshirted black student said. “Micah Short, here. Maybe the war had other causes, but they seceded because Lincoln was going to free the slaves.”

“But he said that he wouldn’t demand freedom for the slaves,” the professor argued, “only that new states could not be slaveholders.”

“But they thought he would.”

“I see,” the professor said doubtfully; “they thought... Let me ask you this. Was there a Holocaust in which six million Jews were exterminated?”

Voices sprouted among the class without identification and maybe, John thought, without volition.

“Yes.”

“Of course.”

“Sure there was.”

“Well maybe not all that many,” one dark-haired girl said.

“And who are you?” John asked gently.

“Tamala Marman. I want to be a history major.”

“What do you mean?” a girl in the second row challenged. She was Asian, possibly Japanese. “We know the number. The records have been counted.”

John thought of asking her name but didn’t want to slow the interaction.

“It was a big war,” Tamala Marman argued. “A lot of people got away. And people overreact when they see horrible things. Somebody could say that they saw a thousand bodies when really there were only a couple of hundred.”

“Only a couple of hundred?” Pete Tackie shouted. “What are you? A Nazi?”

“I’m just talking about the numbers. Maybe there were only three million dead. It’s possible. That’s all I’m saying.”

“No,” said a male student with a deep commanding voice. “There were more than six million killed. They have the names and Nazi records. The families have remembered them.”

Following this claim silence filled the room.

“And you are?” John asked the handsome young man in the center seat of the first row.

“Justin Brown.” He had a tanned complexion and steady gray eyes. “I’m a chem major, senior. This is an elective course for me.”

“And so,” Professor John Woman said after an appreciative silence, “we have learned from Justin Brown that the Holocaust really did occur and that the number, approximately six million, is an accurate count.”

One or two heads nodded. Every eye in the room was on John.

“What proof has he put forth?”

“The proof is in—” Justin Brown began.

“Please, Mr. Brown, allow some of the other students to reply.”

“Sandra Levy,” a walnut-haired woman chimed in, “transfer from BU. We believe him because he said it with conviction and passion.”

“That is correct,” John allowed.

“But what I say is true,” the chem major complained.

“Of course it is, Justin. Of course. It’s true on many levels. You know because of your reading of books, Allied reports, and the trials at Nuremburg. You know because of the state of Israel and its commitment to Jewish peoples around the world. But...” John Woman paused and gazed around the classroom. Through the bank of tinted windows that made the outer wall he could see the desert under cloudless skies. “But does that make it a true history or simply something that many of us believe? I say this to you not because I want to negate your beliefs. Really the opposite is true. I’m teaching this course because history is being rewritten, reenvisioned and reedited every day, every hour of every day. There are people out there who would like to tell you that there was no Holocaust whatsoever. They write books, give speeches, make arguments that sway especially those who have no passion for the subject. Deconstructionist history is not a spurious branch of study. It is what every enemy of everything you believe practices day and night. Who killed the two million Cambodians and the Argentine Aborigines? Who was responsible for the slaughter of the Hutu and Tutsi, Congolese and Somali? Who profited from the slave routes to the Caribbean, North and South America?”

“Those are things we don’t know,” Justin Brown said with disgust in his voice. “It’s not the same as Nazi Germany.”

A few mutterings agreed.

“I know the names of the men who assassinated Julius Caesar but I cannot know the companies, extant today, that profited from four centuries of slavery?”

The class went silent again. Even Justin Brown seemed a little daunted.

“The sugar companies,” Woman said. “The rum distillers, shipping lines and banks that underwrote thousands of slaving expeditions; the plantation masters, many of whose children today are wealthy landowners.

“You can’t have it both ways, Mr. Brown. You can’t pick and choose your way through history taking what you want to believe and relegating the rest to the limbo of ignorance. You must take a stand, commit yourself to the truth, while understanding that the ground beneath your feet is nothing more than shifting sand.

“One day America may be vilified in the annals of history. We may be seen as an aggressive imperialist nation bent upon the subjugation and domination of the rest of the globe. Our capitalism may be as reviled as Hitler’s anarchy. And who are we to say which version will make it into the history books, into futuristic vid-classes and, most dangerous of all, into the language we speak?

“Who remembers that the Vandals were a people before they became an evil noun?”

“So you don’t believe that there was a Civil War or a Holocaust?” Justin Brown asked.

“Belief, my friend, is the right word,” John Woman said. “History is only, is always little more than an innuendo, a suggestion that we decide to believe, or not. Of course you are right about the list of the dead read aloud day and night in Jerusalem. But in positing one thing you call another into question. Where is the list for the millions of Armenians slaughtered, the Cambodians, Nicaraguans or Vietnamese? If their names are not registered then did they really suffer and die? These questions are the ones we shall address in this class. Questions, I might add, that have no answers, no complete and certainly no permanent answers. We shall fail because history is that unsteady ground I spoke of. It is not a rigid truth but an ever-changing reality. If it were an ironclad actuality then we would be able to learn from it. But all we can do is learn about its edges, insinuations and negative spaces.”

Some of the better students wrote down this last quote.

“But, Professor,” the young woman he met at the door said.

“Yes?”

“Carlinda Elmsford,” she said. “I’m a second-year student and this is my third school.”

“Yes, Miss Elmsford.” John, for some reason, didn’t use the term Ms. for her.

“The name of the class refers to historical devices,” Carlinda said. “That would indicate you believe there are tools we could use to unlock the secrets of history.”

The question put the professor off balance. He was surprised, not only by the sophistication and insight of the query, but also by the gracelessly elegant student who, he now realized, he’d been wrong about. Because of her indecision at the doorway he assumed that she was unfocused, flighty. He dismissed her potential and now had to fight down the desire to start a completely new lecture on the rigor that any investigators have to go through to rid their minds of prejudices and cultural assumptions.

With Winch and Wittgenstein on the tip of his tongue he said, “You are correct. But the devices we shall use are not mechanical or theoretical. We will be the tools. Our minds and hearts, keen and necessarily faulty insights will, in this seminar, deconstruct the presumptions of historical thinking and, so doing, will partially free us from the knee-jerk, rote expectations that litter the field.”

“How?” Carlinda Elmsford asked.

“That’s the question I’ll be asking at every class and office hour,” John said. “It will be the inquiry you make of each other and of the mirror in the morning when you are brushing your teeth.”

John wanted to go on, to tell his students that the certainty of mortality and true creative thinking were one and the same. He would have continued but noticed a movement to his right. Glancing toward the door he saw Theron James, dean of the social sciences department.

“But,” he said, addressing the class, “we will have more than enough time for that. Right now I’d like you to check out two books that I have reserved for you in the library — The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, by Peter Winch, and Culture and Value, culled from Wittgenstein and translated by Winch.”

John waited while the students wrote down the information or entered it on their electronic devices.

“That’s all for today,” he said. “I’ll see you Thursday when we start in earnest.”

The students filed out through the red-rimmed doorway passing between the smiling dean and the history professor.

Pete Tackie, Star Limner, John said to himself. This was his technique for remembering names quickly. Justin Brown, Beth Weiner.

Carlinda Elmsford stopped at the door again, this time wondering, John surmised, if she should leave. She had more questions for him; he could see that in her strained expression. She almost lurched toward him but then moved through the doorway, maladroitly brushing against the jamb with her shoulder.

She was, it seemed, the last student to leave.

John wondered why her question had stirred him. He allowed a few seconds to consider his odd response, then looked up at Dean James.

“Theron.”

Instead of replying the dean made a gesture with his head. John looked behind and saw the young student, waiting for him to notice her.

“Yes? Tamala isn’t it?”

“I didn’t mean that I thought that there was no Holocaust, Professor Woman,” Tamala said without preamble. “I was only trying to show how I understood your lecture.”

She wore a lemon yellow sundress that contrasted perfectly with her light brown skin. Her eyes were a darker shade of brown and her features both delicate and classic — almost Persian, John thought, but probably not from Iran.

“Absolutely, Ms. Marman. You were trying to get at the heart of the argument. I appreciate that — very much.”

“It just seemed like people were mad at me,” she went on, “that they thought I was being anti-Semitic...”

“When,” the professor said, helping her sentence along, “you were actually underscoring the point I was trying to make.”

She smiled and breathed in deeply.

“You’re from Turkey?” John asked.

“How did you know?” She was surprised. “Yes, I mean, my father’s from there. But I was born and raised in Maryland.”

“You’re going to be a valuable asset in our class, Ms. Marman. You will help me show the class, over the next semester, how history is our intellectual culture. It passes through us, creating and abandoning us at the same time.”

John noticed the swelling of her chest and a slight shift of her hips as he spoke.

“But I have to go,” he added. “If you want to talk more about it come to my office any Tuesday or Thursday, four to six. That is, except today. I like my lectures to simmer after the first class.”

“Thank you, Professor,” Tamala said, looking down shyly; then she moved quickly past the dean and out the door.

Theron approached the lectern smiling.

“That was magnificent,” he said.

They clasped hands and held each other’s gaze a moment.

Dean James was the shorter by an inch or so but his shoulders were broad; his demeanor was more that of a car salesman than a scholar. His gray suit was of a business cut. There was a scar under the left eye making John suspect that Theron had a rough life before entering the halls of academe.

But, John advised himself, it might just be a trophy from a tough game of rugby at Oxford.

“Thank you, Theron.”

“You know they argued against us hiring you,” the dean said. “I was warned that you weren’t old enough, didn’t have the experience. Professors across the line tried to convince me that your brand of study would undermine the history department. But I knew you would engage the students in a way that no other professor could.”

“I do love it,” Woman said. “Students are ready for deeper thinking than they know. My job is to tease it out of them.”

“Teaching them,” Theron added, “that they will be the ones making history rather than just becoming aggrandized, half-blind scribes.”

As always John was impressed by the dean’s keen perceptions. He thought of an essay he’d never write — “The Subtlety of Car Salesmen.”

“You just passing by handing out compliments, Theron?”

That familiar huckster smile crossed the shepherd scholar’s lips.

“You haven’t published since coming here,” he said. “It’s only been two years but two can turn into ten before you know it.”

“Recently I’ve come up with an idea about academia and car salesmen,” John said. “Maybe that will be my first.”

“The history department review committee will be meeting soon,” Dean James posited, his smile gone.

“And I’m at the head of the list,” John said.

“They’ll want to hear about the paper you’ve already proposed.”

2

After the Dean left John sat in Justin Brown’s half-desk chair. Leaning back, gazing at the green lectern, he assessed the lecture, wondering what it was the students had learned.

No one can know what is in another person’s heart, Herman Jones said. This was not a memory per se, but was as if John’s father was somehow embedded in the emptiness of the classroom, there in spirit as a hopeless optimist might opine.

John put this thought aside because of Theron James’s warnings: you haven’t published and the history department review committee will be meeting.

Then there was Carlinda Elmsford. She was... unexpected. A student who easily engaged with ideas, so intent that the class felt threatening to her...

... to her soul, phantom Herman Jones said, completing the thought.

John sighed in his chair. He reacted similarly to the beginning of every semester. The first class was where he was the most lucid, certain and self-confident; but directly afterward he felt fragmented, unable to keep his mind on any one subject for long. He usually conjured his father at these times, though not so much as to actually hear a voice... And he’d reexperience delivering the third blow to Chapman Lorraine’s skull. That solitary act defied John’s deconstructionist prowess. Once again he was Cornelius Jones. Once again he was vulnerable, culpable... identifiable.

The exultation of life in the university was stalked by guilt, a dogged predator snapping at the heels of a noble elk — and John stood between the two...

You were a boy, Herman said without sound or substance. He was a man and should have shown restraint.

Twenty minutes later he stood up from the half-desk, walked toward the red outline and blundered out of the empty room into the sheltered hall, where students, and a professor or two, walked with purpose in the long passageway that circumnavigated the open inner wall.

He was thinking about Herman, about how his father should have been there instead. In that hermeneutical instant he felt his father’s smile.

What you have done is good, the elder said, momentarily free from the grave, but not yet (at the level of) Thucydides — not yet a man of his age documenting the world while participating in its unfolding.

John stopped there at the railing, in the middle of the great architectural achievement of NUSW. The ghost of his father had never spoken to him before. Herman Jones was a mild man who would not, even as a spirit, haunt anyone. He was too gentle and considerate to bring fear, pain or disorientation to the soul of another.

“I’m exhorting him,” John whispered. “No, I am calling on him because there is a danger somewhere.”

He looked down from the high floor of the hollow structure. Green light filtered through the roof, tinting the rotunda and the people laughing, eating and reading on the alabaster benches below. He could hear voices but an acoustic trick garbled the words, making them turn in on themselves so that although they still contained humanity, the meaning was stripped away.

And so language, sweet language, Herman had said years before, stays alive. All the so-called dead tongues survive in the words extant today. That is just another example of how you cannot know history but at the same time you will not escape it.

John wasn’t resisting his father’s presence now. He was exhausted from the desert heat, the self-imposed challenge of teaching without notes and the threat contained in the words of Theron James...

“Professor Woman?”

“Yes?” he said, turning.

It was a young woman in a dark red dress that was formfitting at the bodice but which flared out on its way down to her knees. It was an old-fashioned outfit reminiscent of the fifties TV shows John sometimes watched on late night.

She was a bright brown girl with almond-shaped dark eyes. The young professor did not know her.

“I looked up your class schedule and it said that Decon met in Hall Thirty-Six,” she said, her tone imparting an apology. “I was waiting outside but when the class was over it wasn’t yours at all.”

“I taught Decon, as you call it, in Thirty-Six my first two years,” John said.

“I guess they didn’t enter the new number in the semester schedule,” she said. And then, “I’m Tyne, Tyne Oliver.”

“And why were you looking for me, Ms. Oliver?”

“Oh,” she replied lifting her shoulders to express the recognition of her oversight, “sorry. President Luckfeld.”

John raised his eyebrows and turned his left palm up. He was enjoying the dysfunction of the conversation: her speaking in fragments and his resorting to sign language.

“He wants to see you,” she added.

“President Luckfeld does?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Right after your class,” Tyne replied. “I got there five minutes before it was supposed to be through but then it wasn’t you. Dean James saw me and asked why I looked so confused.”

“And he sent you to room two.”

Tyne Oliver smiled and nodded.

Herman Jones receded into the ether. John was aware of him as he was of the tinted sunlight and the television shows that were brought to mind by the cut of Tyne Oliver’s dress.

Walking in the desert sun Tyne talked and talked.

She was from Montclair, New Jersey, but hated the winter and came out west for school. That was two years ago. She hadn’t been back home since. Her father died in the first week of her freshman year and though she thought she should go to the funeral she didn’t.

“... He wasn’t my real father,” she explained. “I didn’t know my biological dad and Harold, my stepfather, never adopted me or my brother, and it was my first week at school. Harold didn’t have life insurance and all my mom owned was the house so she couldn’t pay for me flying out. My grandfather left a college fund for me and Toby, my brother, and mom said that I’d have to use some of that to come back home. But it was way expensive and Harold wasn’t my father and anyway it was only the first week of school and I’d miss so much that I finally didn’t come but sent flowers instead.”

John listened closely thinking about the concept of jabber: trillions of words squandered in air containing the emotional, organizational and social backgrounds of any and all eras.

“Here we are,” Tyne said.

The administrative offices of NUSW were opposite in many ways to the blue-and-white classroom building. The dun-colored bungalows were herded together in a compound surrounded by high adobe walls painted salmon pink. The office complex was accessible by only one gate, which was watched over by round-the-clock security guards. “Hi, Mr. Gustav,” Tyne said through a microphone mounted on the outside of the gate.

The guard, John knew, sat in a small air-conditioned booth watching the entrance through the iron bars of the green gate and on a bank of monitors that gave him a three-hundred-sixty-degree view around the fortress.

“Tyne, Professor Woman,” the sixtysomething white-mustachioed guardian said over an electronic speaker.

John imagined Mr. Gustav looking down at his monitors, then, when he was assured that there was no mischief afoot, he hit a button and the electronically controlled gate rolled noisily aside.

Tyne bounded in followed by the young professor. They each nodded at the guardian. John would have stopped to talk with Lawrence Gustav if he were unaccompanied. He liked talking, seeing each person as a historical repository that leaked secrets like so many corroded gas tanks.

The bungalows, laid out like a country village, were uniform single-story structures except for the president’s office. This two-story building was reddish brown and most resembled the shape of a naturally formed rectangular desert stone. It seemed to lean to the left and the windows were at an odd angle to the ground. The crenellated plaster walls were uneven with grooves and ridges like actual stone. The doorway was unobstructed whenever John had been there. He wondered if there was a door at all.

There might not be, he thought, knowing that NUSW was founded and run by members of the secretive Platinum Path, a self-described new age religion founded by the guru of meta-psychic-determinism — Service Tellman. The Platinum Path subscribed to Tellman’s theory that the manifestation of the universal unconscious could be controlled by certain strong-minded individuals working in concert. Only these individuals, Tellman taught, could guide the world to its full potential, that it was the destiny of such men and women to deliver the world from the suicidal Iron Path that it had been on ever since the Industrial Revolution.

Service Tellman died seven years before, leaving a group called The Dozen to keep the dream on course. The university president, Colin Luckfeld, was suspected to be a member of this committee; at least that was what John had read in a Wall Street Journal exposé. NUSW was Tellman’s pet project. Construction was completed eleven years before. And, considering the philosophical proclivities of the Platinum Path, John thought that there might be a wall, an iron gate and an armed guard but still no door barring entry once you’d made it to the inner circle. Such a design would be an apt totem of the elite cult.

“Go right on in, Professor Woman,” the chatty, anachronistically clad Tyne Oliver said. “He’s upstairs.”

“Don’t you work here?”

“No, sir, I’m in the bursar’s office this semester. President Luckfeld’s assistant called me because I’m a floater until my senior year. Floaters always do most of the foot-errands.”

John smiled. Tyne took this expression as a dismissal and left, walking down the cobblestone lane laid between the grassy lawns and various flowering bushes that stood out in front of the bungalows. The office facility had its own gardener but John had forgotten, or maybe he’d never known, the groundskeeper’s name.

John stood outside the possibly doorless doorway enjoying the specific language of floaters and foot-errands while feeling the desert sun’s heat filter through his dark clothes. He took in three breaths before he was prepared to enter the president’s lair.

3

The large room through the open door was a study in blues.

The floor had wall-to-wall indigo carpeting. Its six walls were cerulean; upon each wall hung a solitary oil painting depicting some oceangoing sailing ship forging its way across shoreless seas. The eighteen-foot-high ceiling was almost white — like a cloud-filled sky with only hints of a blue beyond.

Straight ahead, maybe twenty feet past the door, was a big metal desk painted crayon blue. Behind the improbable office furniture sat a bronze-colored woman who was easily twice John’s age. She wore a dark blue jacket and a bright orange silk blouse. The clothes looked bulky on her lean frame and her smile communicated neither humor nor warmth.

Her hair had already turned white and was now verging on blue, maybe in sympathy, John thought, with the color scheme of her workplace.

“Professor Woman,” she said, distaste for the designation on her lips.

“Ms. Whitman.”

“Mrs. Whitman,” she corrected.

“Mrs. Whitman.”

Behind Bernice Whitman were three evenly spaced entrances to hallways; the outer two at one-hundred-forty-degree angles to the central door. John was always surprised by the magnitude of the president’s complex. From outside the building seemed modest despite its extra floor.

“He’s waiting for you,” Mrs. Whitman said. “You’re late.”

“You should have somebody enter the right classroom number in the database,” John said, unable to ignore the bait in her words. “You’re lucky Ms. Oliver found me.”

Whitman grunted and John turned to his left where there was a blue-washed wooden ladder that led to the floor above.

“You can take the elevator or the stairs,” Mrs. Whitman offered.

But John was already climbing up through the hole in the almost completely white sky.

President Luckfeld’s office was not the size of the entire first floor but it was still the largest room that John had ever been in that wasn’t a hall, an auditorium or some other public space. The floor was paneled oak, the hall dominated by floor-to-ceiling windows interspersed with white walls sporting oil paintings of modern-day folks in pedestrian poses and garb.

There were open areas in the great chamber that approximated wall-less rooms. To the left were two yellow sofas that faced each other over a bloodred carpet. Behind one of the sofas was a large wooden bookcase. A little farther on, to the right, stood a two-foot-high platform containing an entire kitchen of blond pine and glistening chrome.

On the other side of the chamber, opposite the blue-washed ladder entrance, was a long table behind which sat the president. At his back was a seemingly solid glass wall that led out onto a deck that was twice again the size of the office.

“John!” the president called.

“Yes, sir.”

“Come in, come in.”

John walked toward Colin Luckfeld counting the steps as he went. By the time he reached the teak table he’d gotten to seventy-two.

The unorthodox desk was a small wonder in the amazing room. It was nineteen feet long and five wide, a single plank cut from the heart of what must have been a magnificent tree.

When John reached the table Luckfeld stood up. He was tall and hale with sun-burnished skin and brown hair that was like a tapered mane. In his fifties, the president had eyes that were olive green, sometimes tending toward brown; his hands were strong with long fingers and perfectly manicured nails. He wore a medium-brown two-piece suit and a black T-shirt.

“Thank you for coming, John,” he greeted him.

Everyone said Luckfeld’s eyes expressed unspoken knowledge. This was his advantage. But the gaze held no power over John — he felt safe behind an exhaustive facade that had taken him nearly half a lifetime to create.

“Sorry I’m late, Colin.”

“Mrs. Whitman says that the faculty database wasn’t properly updated.”

John could see the earbud in Luckfeld’s left ear. The dour assistant had called while John was counting steps.

“Would you like something to drink?” the president offered.

“Water if you have it.”

“Certainly. Why don’t you come around and sit here next to me.”

Seating in the president’s office was one of the many ritualistic elements Luckfeld employed. Most faculty members were directed to sit on hard wooden chairs across the table from the president. He had a seemingly endless number of these chairs which were always set out before his guests arrived.

A few feet behind the big yellowy table sat a camel-colored leather sofa and a matching chair. If Luckfeld asked you to come around and sit on one of these, it was said, he was extremely happy with you and your work.

John counted eleven paces around the table to his host.

“Sit,” Colin Luckfeld said, gesturing at the sofa.

John sat at the window end. The president sat opposite him.

John wondered what the superstition would be about Luckfeld sitting next to his guest on the couch rather than across from him on the matching chair.

“There’s a wooden chest behind you,” the president said. “I’ll have one too.” Professor Woman lifted up the lid and brought out two label-less plastic containers. He leaned over to hand his boss one of these.

“You’re looking well,” Luckfeld said. “Nice summer?”

“I stayed in faculty housing and caught up on my reading.”

“No vacation?” Colin asked as he cracked the seal of the water bottle.

“Life is a holiday if you enjoy the work.”

Luckfeld brought his left thigh onto the cushion and leaned back against the plush bolster arm. This posture made him seem somewhat boyish — very un-presidential. In Professor Woman’s mind this was simply another tactic employed by the high official of the worldwide cult.

“You enjoy history that much?” Luckfeld asked.

“More.”

Luckfeld brought the pad of his left thumb to press lightly on the indentation under his lower lip and stared with those knowing eyes.

John allowed the gaze to continue at least half a minute before saying, “Those portraits along the walls.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve always wondered about them.”

Luckfeld’s eyes relaxed. “Great men and women caught in everyday poses. The artist worked from snapshots taken at some point in the subjects’ past. You have a captain of industry standing over a barbecue; a woman who is the confidante of monarchs and prime ministers screaming on a roller coaster at Coney Island. My favorite is the one of a man who later in life became the leader of a revolution changing the diapers on his firstborn daughter. I find them humbling and revelatory.”

“Revealing what?”

“Humanity,” Luckfeld said. “The fragility of who and what we are.”

“There’s nothing more telling than a man’s mismatched buttons and a pretty woman’s slight limp,” John intoned.

“Where’s that from?”

“Something my father once said.”

“Sounds like a wise man.”

“He was.” John took a swig of water and realized that he was quite thirsty.

They sat there in the cool room, under the desert sun, effecting a natural span between niceties and the purpose for the summons.

“Annette Eubanks was sitting in a chair across the table from me just this morning,” the president said at last.

“And what was Auntie saying?” John used her nickname to show that he wasn’t afraid.

“That John Woman is both a Sophist and a charlatan.”

“Oh?”

“Is that all you have to say?” Luckfeld seemed a bit nonplussed.

“I don’t know in what context she meant. Who knows... maybe I’d agree.”

“Those are damning complaints against any professor.”

“Charlatan alone, maybe,” John allowed, “but sophism was an accepted form of education in ancient Greece and later in Rome. Without Sophists you’d have no Socrates or Plato, Aristotle or Cicero. I lecture, I challenge belief systems and I entertain. Nothing wrong with that.”

“Professor Eubanks says that you’re attempting to undermine the department by teaching that all, or most, history texts are fabrications designed to obscure the past rather than to elucidate it.” The president was smiling now.

“You see?” John said. “I do agree with her. I tell my students every semester that written history is an attempt to re-create so-called actual events according to the political, social or religious convictions of the author.”

“You make it sound like a conspiracy.”

“Conscious conspiracy is the best of it,” John said, his fragmented thoughts knitting together as he spoke. “The travesty is that a great many historians actually believe what they’re saying. Their motives are unconscious and cultural, based on prejudices and wish fulfillment. They create the ideal father as either a saint or an arch-villain; the mother is most often vilified and then relegated to the nursery. But truth... truth is in the distance. It might as well be a mirage because we see it, imagine it, but it’s a place we’ll never attain.”

“You think about these things a lot don’t you, John?”

“Day and night since I was a boy.”

“It’s rare to find an educator nowadays who sees his subject as both the beginning and the end.”

The young professor sipped from his water bottle, having nothing to say.

“I saw you on public access TV having a debate with Professor Carmody four months ago,” Luckfeld said. “I think it was from an earlier date.”

John smiled. “Poor Ira. He’s talks about Greek philosophers but he’s never taken the time to learn the language, relying instead on translators, most of them long dead. That never looks good.”

“You made a powerful enemy showing him up like that.”

John remembered sitting in the air-conditioned aluminum hut in the late afternoon at Lehman-Lawrence High School. Carmody, who looked something like Stalin, was so smug when they sat down. No one knew about the younger man’s facility with languages. It was one of his many secrets.

Every man is a Pandora’s box to someone, Herman Jones said. You shake someone’s hand risking eternal damnation.

The voice was so clear that John almost turned his head to see if there was someone sitting behind him.

“I didn’t expect a debate,” he explained. “I thought we were going to discuss simple phrases from Ira’s monograph.”

Colin Luckfeld took a swig from his bottle and stared.

John was happy that the college president and cult official had not offered him a glass. Then he wondered if maybe there actually was some kind of real insight in those mossy eyes.

“The history department review committee is going to call on you to deliver and defend the paper you proposed last September,” Luckfeld said. “What was that title again?”

“Written History,” John said: “Reconstruction, Deconstruction or Just Plain Destruction?”

The president smiled again. “Yes, that’s it.”

“When am I going to be asked to do this?”

“The committee is meeting tomorrow afternoon. They’ll set a date at that time.”

John gazed out at the deck. The president held parties out there when the weather was mild. The entire social sciences faculty had attended a get-together the previous spring.

“When are you going to settle on a specific subject?” Annette Eubanks, dean of the history department, had asked him. They were standing at the far end of the outside platform. Annette was around fifty with piercing eyes. Unmarried, she was rumored to have had affairs with young male and female students. Her hair was naturally golden shot through with barely perceptible strands of gray.

“My subject is the negation of the negation,” John answered.

“Nothing out of nothing,” the elder professor retorted.

John knew then he was going to have trouble with her.

“There’s something I’d like to ask of you, John,” President Luckfeld said.

“Certainly.”

“A man, an advisor to the board of directors, named Willie Pepperdine has asked to audit your Introduction to Deconstructionist Historical Devices. Mr. Pepperdine is an important fund-raiser for the school.”

“How does he even know about the class?”

“He takes his role with the university very seriously. After reading the entire course offering he came to me and asked this favor. I waited to make a formal request because Mr. Pepperdine was out of the country and wasn’t certain if he’d be back in time to attend classes.”

“I see. Well... There’s only been one meeting so far. Can he make this Thursday’s session?”

“Yes. But he might only be able to attend one class a week. His business has him traveling quite a lot. It’s only an audit; you won’t have to give him a permanent grade.”

“Anything else I should know about him?” John asked, he wasn’t sure why.

“He’s my age, very intelligent... dynamic. He’ll make a good addition I’m sure.”

“He’s an advisor to the board?”

Luckfeld nodded.

“Which board?”

It was an unspoken rule that no one asked Colin, or any other known cult member, about the Platinum Path — that just wasn’t done.

“Are you afraid of anything, John?”

“Everything.”

“How do you mean that?”

“I work mainly on instinct,” John Woman admitted. “My life, my lectures, my inquiries — all of these are reflexes of my body and my heart. I’m afraid of germs, German philosophers and jealous husbands — even when I’m not having affairs with their wives. But being afraid of something does not necessarily make me back off.”

“Most college professors I’ve met tell me that they live a life of the mind.”

“At best,” John said and then paused to consider; “at best they’re lying.”

“And at worst?”

“They’re fools.”

Colin Luckfeld stood up.

John followed his lead.

“It was good talking to you, John. I hope we achieved something here. And about Mr. Pepperdine.”

“Yes?”

“He sits on any board he chooses.”

“That includes the Platinum Path?” John asked, feeling out of control.

“Those lying historians of yours will one day claim that we conquered the world with little to no violence.”

4

Walking to his car John wondered why he’d asked about the Platinum Path. The cult or sect or philosophy, whatever it was, didn’t concern him.

“I asked because it makes me feel alive,” he said to no one. “Negotiating dangerous grounds is what we human beings are made for — body and mind.”

There were times John had to speak out spontaneously. Too much of his life had been conducted in secret — at least he could proclaim random truths in empty spaces now and then.

The words he spoke Herman Jones had once said about great generals, incurable sociopaths and most of the rest of humanity. Standing next to his car, on the third level of the parking structure, he thought about self-taught Herman Jones, who was smarter than anyone he’d met at any college or university. After appreciating the idea of his father a moment more, John got into his bright green 1957 Thunderbird convertible and set out for Spark City, some sixty miles off in the seemingly endless desert.

Along the way, John’s thoughts turned unexpectedly to a memory of his mother. She wore a little black dress and her favorite greenstone necklace, and she was sitting in the high-backed wicker chair that looked out on Mott from the big bay window of her tiny apartment. He felt a tingle in the heel of his right palm. Smart as he was, Herman Jones had been wrong. The acme of John’s life had been Lucia’s passion, alongside his father’s mind. He had loved her and lost her every day of his life.

He experienced the physical sensation just before tears sprouted but did not cry, because missing his mother kept her alive. Memories of her and his father were all the family he had.

This notion of kinfolk doubled back on Luckfeld’s declaration of fealty to the Platinum Path. Though it was no surprise that the Path owned and ran the university, none of its members, to John’s knowledge, had ever admitted affiliation. There was one professor who mentioned the organization in an article published in a local paper. That was Dr. Abel Morel, a zoologist from Luxembourg. Six days after the article appeared Morel quit the university and moved back to Europe.

That President Luckfeld entertained John’s question might mean that he was considered a useful foil, a dialectic that served them in some way.

Twenty miles from NUSW John said, “Okay, dad, if you’re with me then say something.”

He waited, half-expecting his father’s ghost to be conjured by the offering. But it wasn’t; was not.

John wanted to see his father again, to hear him, to sleep in his room at night and wake up to find Herman sitting at the breakfast table in front of a bowl of overcooked oatmeal.

“I like it slippery,” he used to say.

“But you’re not there are you?” John declared speeding across the vast desert. “It’s just me wishing that you’d get off a Greyhound bus and come on back home.”

Half an hour later Professor Woman reached the outskirts of the small town, Spark City. There, before the highway turned into Main Street, a quarter mile from the church that was the centerpiece of the town square, two lone structures stood across the highway from one another: Spark City Motel and Spark City Bar.

John pulled into the parking lot of the bar, climbed out through the roof of his car, then sauntered toward the dark maw of a doorway.

It could have been a noir movie set, John thought as he crossed the threshold; it had that perfect balance of malaise, air-conditioning and psychic squalor. The dozen or so weak lights used to illuminate the room were encased in deep green glass. The floor felt gritty through the soles of his shoes. The sour smell of beer was so strong it tasted like a mouthful of ripe buttermilk.

Under a slightly brighter green light at the far end of the longish room stood a pool table where a bearded man played against himself. To John’s left, seated at the wall in soggy wood chairs, were a man who looked to be in his forties and a girl no more than sixteen.

“... and Will and Catherine and Mallory, and, and, and, oh yeah... and Darla-Jean were at Mallory’s house and his father said that if we were gonna drink we’d better give him a shot too,” the girl said and then she laughed and laughed.

The man was smaller than the buxom blond girl, and was wearing the gray uniform of some kind of repair service. Her ample bosom bounced when she laughed. The repairman nodded along.

John went up to the bar and sat on one of the unfinished pine stools, cautious not to get a splinter through the seat of his pants.

“Dr. Woman,” the bartender greeted.

“Mr. Lasky.”

Lasky was pale, also in his forties, prematurely balding, with eyes that seemed world-weary but resolved to make it through at least one more night.

“I guess I owe you five hundred,” the down-market mixologist lamented.

“I told you that Danny-boy would beat Matthysse,” John agreed. “The Argentine has the power, sure, but he thought too much of himself and Garcia’s from Philly. You never bet against a good boxer from Philly.”

Lou Lasky sniffed as if suffering an insult.

“Senta in?” John asked.

After giving this question serious consideration Lou asked. “What you drinkin’?”

“Martell Gordon Bleu.”

The bartender frowned as if he’d never heard of that particular poison. Then he went through a door behind the bar, leaving John to listen to pool balls clicking and teenage ramblings.

“... my mother said that they used to only teach girls how to type and cook when her mother went to school. Back then it was only men who had jobs. I wish I lived back then so I could sit at home and not do nuthin’...”

After a while John heard the words as sounds alone like when he stood on the fifth floor of Prometheus. Now and then the man’s voice rumbled. It was surprisingly deep for such a small man.

“On the house,” Lou Lasky said. He’d set down a snifter with a measured dram of amber liquid and no ice. “Room twenty-six at seven-thirty.”

John placed three hundred-dollar bills on the bar.

As Lou gathered the cash he said, “Next time it’s the full eight.”

“If you don’t make any more ill-advised bets.”

For the next few hours John read Colonel Chabert, by Balzac, on an electronic tablet. There wasn’t enough light for a real book and John liked e-readers; they seemed somehow secretive to him. He’d read the novel years before but adhered to his father’s edict — real reading is rereading.

Herman usually added that there is more history, more truth in fiction than in most so-called history books. Our dreams and fantasies get it right even when they don’t know it.

While John read the bar filled up. The patrons were white and listless, sometimes loud but more often silent, rarely, if ever, smiling.

One woman, probably in her thirties, came up to where the repairman and the teenager sat. She said, “Lou-Ann, you got no business in here. You should go on home to your mother.”

“My mother is across the street, Miss Melbourne,” the girl said. “And I’m locked out the house. You wanna take me home with you and Jack Frank?”

Hearing this John finished his third cognac and climbed off the rough pine stool. His left hip ached from sitting too long. Despite the pain he felt as if he was floating.

Outside the sun was set. The stellar desert sky had a magical feel to it. But John didn’t stop to appreciate the glittering dome of night. Crossing the transitional highway he took the outside stairs to the second floor of the two-story, turquoise-plastered Spark City Motel. Ambling down the external concrete hall he came to the last door, number twenty-six.

“Who is it?” she said in answer to his knock.

“Me,” he replied, uncertainty informing the word.

Forty-four-year-old Senta opened the pale olive door. Tall with a womanly figure, she had white-blond hair.

She had once told John that this was her natural color but she dyed it to get even blonder.

“Hi,” she said. She wore a pink dress that came down to the middle of powerful thighs. The frock had no shoulders or shoulder straps. Senta’s proud chest was enough.

“Hey,” John said shyly.

“You gonna come in or just stand there?”

John took a floating step forward.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said as she closed the door.

“Come on then.” She took him by the hand.

The turquoise-and-white toilet was small for two people but Senta didn’t leave him. She pulled down his zipper and rummaged around until her cold fingers found his penis. She pulled it out and said, “Okay, you can go now.”

After relieving himself John said, “I don’t want to move too fast tonight.”

“Of course not,” Senta agreed, shaking the last drops at the commode. “Lou says we have all night. Do you want to be tied down to the bed or the chair?”

When Senta was on top of John she climaxed at unpredictable moments. He wasn’t sure if these were real or feigned orgasms. He’d told her she didn’t have to pretend.

“You don’t believe that a whore can come?” she’d answered. “Don’t you know I really like you, Johnny?”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because you talk real nice and you’re always a gentleman. Most guys don’t know it but good manners will make a mature woman come way more than all them gyrations they do in porn.”

There were things they did every time; Senta, for instance, would tie John down with leather restraints. She was inventive and sensually perceptive. That evening she decided to spend a good deal of time kissing her twice-monthly client. Her kisses were soft but definite; up and down his arms, legs and torso...

She kissed him for nearly a quarter hour before mounting his straining erection.

John started bucking under her and when Senta told him, “Calm down, baby. We ain’t goin’ nowhere...” he came so violently that she was thrown from the bed; after that he lost consciousness for a while.

When he came to Senta had loosened the restraints.

“Wow,” she said. “That was wild.”

She lit a cigarette and poured herself a shot of sour mash. There was a fifth of the whiskey sitting on the nightstand next to her side of the bed.

She inhaled some smoke, took a swig of whiskey and exhaled the cool misty breath over his chest.

“I was scared that you had a heart attack for a minute there,” she said.

“Not me,” he assured her.

“You don’t know. Sometimes a young man can have what they call a irregularity in the heart and all of a sudden outta nowhere he falls down dead. I went to high school with a football quarterback who died like that.”

John put a hand behind his head and groaned contentedly.

“You don’t mind if I smoke?” she asked.

“I mind.”

“Then why don’t you ask me to put it out?”

“You need to smoke and I need you.”

“You could ask Lou for a girl who doesn’t smoke.”

“She wouldn’t be you.”

Senta stretched out next to John, laying her fair hand across his brown chest.

“What’s your real name?” she asked.

“John.”

“I mean your last name.”

“I’m John Woman, no middle initial.”

“I never heard of the last name Woman.”

“What’s your last name, Senta?”

She froze and he smiled.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I need you, not your name.”

“You don’t need me.”

“Oh yes I do. If I didn’t know you were out here I’d have gone crazy two years ago. You are the glue that holds me together.”

“I’m just a whore.”

“That word doesn’t mean a thing to me. You are Senta, no last name, and I come here because I need something only you can give.”

“What’s that?”

“Intimacy.”

They didn’t speak again until Senta was finished with her cigarette.

“Why don’t you ever ask me on a date?” she said stubbing out the butt in a pink tin ashtray that she brought to their assignations.

“Isn’t this a date?”

“You know what I mean,” she complained. “A real date with dinner reservations and flowers... and clothes.”

“Could you pour me a drink?” he asked, sitting up. “Do your other clients ask you out?”

“Most of my regulars do at one time or other,” she replied, delivering the whiskey glass into his hand. “They want me to go to the movies or company barbecues. This one guy asked me if I’d go with him on vacation to Hawaii.”

“And what do you say to them?”

“No.”

“So,” John said with a grin, “you want me to ask you but you don’t want to go.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe I’d say yes.”

John frowned and Senta put a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t, baby, don’t,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m just tryin’ to let you know that I like you. It’s not marriage or some kinda boyfriend-girlfriend thing.”

“What is it then?”

“Why do you come all the way out here to spend the night with me?”

John almost said something and then didn’t. He took a sip, then another, got up and went to the turquoise-and-white toilet. When he returned she’d refilled his glass.

“For this,” he said.

“What?”

“So we can talk.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s why it’s a date... because you want to tell me what you’re thinkin’ and, and you listen to what I got to say too. It’s the listenin’ part that makes it a real date.”

The young professor put his hand on Senta’s thigh and sighed, understanding that what he said was true.

“What do you want to talk about tonight, baby?” Senta asked.

“It’s about my job.”

The conversation took them to the bottom of the whiskey bottle. Sitting cross-legged on opposite sides of the bed they were both tipsy and serious.

“Why can’t you just write that paper?” Senta asked. “I mean all you do is read and write about history, right? You should be able to do somethin’ like that, no problem.”

“I guess.”

“What’s so hard?”

“I, um... it’s like...” he said.

“You don’t know?”

“It’s like a pismire steeped in sap.”

“A what in what?”

“You ever see a piece of amber with bugs in it?”

“Sure.”

“Like that.”

“Oooooh,” Senta said, gazing somewhere past John’s left shoulder. “You’re stuck like when I wanted to go to college but never filled out the application form.”

“What did you want to study?”

“Bookkeeping and literature classes.”

“Did you ever go?”

“Something... something happened and I just couldn’t think about it anymore, like with your paper.”

“It daunts me,” John said.

“Haunts you like a ghost?”

John giggled and said, “I’d kiss you but I’m too drunk to crawl over there.”

“I like being kissed.”

This reminded CC of his mother explaining why the name Napoli was superior to Tartarelli.

At seven minutes past two John got out of bed. He pulled on his soft gray cotton trousers and lurched toward the door, kicking the night table along the way.

“Where you goin’, baby?” Senta said reaching out.

“Out on the walkway.”

A half-moon hovered above the stony landscape. Spark City Bar was closed. John breathed in Senta’s jasmine scent, rising from his skin.

“What’s wrong, John?” she asked from the doorway.

“I had a dream.”

“‘Bout what?” She put her arms around him pressing her nose against his shoulder.

“My father.”

“What’d he say?”

“That...” John saw a falling star, then he became aware of the sky full of stars.

“What?”

“He told me that I wasn’t writing my paper because I resented having to prove myself. He’s always saying things like that.”

“I thought he died.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh... Was he right?”

John turned to kiss her. Gazing into his eyes she returned the kiss.

“Yes,” he said, “dad’s right. He’s always right. I’ve never had one decent thought that didn’t come from him. He created me.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Write the paper.”

“You can do it now?”

“Because of you,” John said. “You and the goddess of history.”

“Who’s that?”

“The Greeks thought that it was Clio, one of the Muses, but I prefer to call her Posterity.”

“You wanna come fuck again to work off some’a that whiskey?”

At 3:56 a.m. John was fully dressed. Senta walked him across the highway to the bar parking lot. He climbed over the side of his topless T-bird.

“You want a ride?” he asked.

“My car’s right across the street.”

“I’ll wait for you to get in and drive off.”

“Ray,” she said.

“What?”

“My last name, it’s Ray, Senta Ray.”

5

The speedometer hovered around ninety. John didn’t feel the cold — only speed and wind. Ten miles from faculty-housing a shiny-eyed coyote darted into the road. It lowered itself on its haunches, yellow eyes glaring at the sports car’s headlights.

Without thinking John jerked the steering wheel to the left. The car skidded out into the desert, spinning uncontrollably as it went, knocking down several ocotillo trees. Finally the car raised up on its right side, almost rolled over, crashed down on its wheels, then juddered for long seconds while the metallic frame strained and creaked.

The radio came on. James Brown was singing, say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud, on an oldies station.

The right headlight winked out.

The stars, John thought, must be laughing at the crazy dance of the classic car. He also wondered about the meaning of the song. Though he’d learned his profession from Herman, his mother’s superstitions still held sway over his heart in much the same way that the hovering half-moon controlled faraway tides.

Twenty or so feet from the car the topaz-bright eyes of the coyote blinked. The creature, John imagined, had run away but then returned thinking that maybe there was some spilled food or, better, blood to lap up at the scene of the accident.

Gazing at each other over the desert span, both man and canine were motionless. John considered honking the horn to frighten away the sometimes deadly desert jester. But instead he climbed out over the side and stood there.

Illuminated by the single headlight the black-and-brown streaked beast sniffed the air. Maybe John had been wounded, the scent of his blood in the air.

The coyote yipped; hopped; and then, in the middle of a turn, disappeared.

John leaned back against the warm hood. There was a chill in the air. His mother would have said that this was all a single sign; he should see either a priest or a fortune-teller to decipher the meaning.

But he was afraid of seers and holy men, worried that their powers might be based on something real, that they’d find him out if he got too close. So he climbed back into the one-eyed green T-bird and drove the ten miles back home.

The faculty complex was protected by twelve-foot-high matte adobe walls. The wrought iron gate across the driveway was locked at night, attended by a uniformed guard. But the late-night sentry was not at his post.

John stopped at the barred entrance, sat back in the driver’s seat and fell immediately asleep.

He was sitting in a dark room. Fanciful pulsing light came through large industrial-like windows; the neon pulse was from a blinking sign somewhere outside. This light was blue and red; these colors refused to combine. Each time the sign flashed John saw something different.

The first burst revealed a bookcase filled with tomes, some of which were hundreds of years old while others were modern-day publications with gaudy book jackets promising things unworthy of the written word.

The second flare of blue and red illuminated a high wall where some mad painter had fashioned a huge ogre made mostly of thick black and brown brushstrokes, with hints of scum green here and there.

The third blaze slammed down on Chapman Lorraine’s corpse, a deep and bloody cleft in his temple. The dead man was seated awkwardly on a tarnished brass throne festooned with huge cool-colored man-made jewels that were both opaque and brilliantly striated with platinum radiance.

The light faded but John could see the afterimage of Lorraine quite clearly. There seemed to be some kind of intention in his unfocused eyes, in the crooked grasping of his powerful fingers.

He’s trying to hold on to life through me, Dreamer John thought.

The neon pulsed again. John was afraid that the new brilliance would bring Lorraine fully alive; that those dead hands might drag him back to pay for his crime.

But instead the light seemed to trap the dead man in its cloying glow. Chapman was stuck to his blackened throne. Dreamer John took in a deep breath that came out as a relieved sigh.

After two or three of these exhalations he noticed a sound, a gentle tapping.

The light went down and the tapping stopped. When blue and red filled the room once more, it started up again. John found himself walking down a long, dusty hall guarded by dogs sleeping beneath hanging candelabras. The candlelight flickered, forming and re-forming the walls into hallucinatory images; these possible/impossible subjects ranged from hummingbirds frozen in mid-flight to huge Soviet farm tractors that appeared to be breathing.

His father was there wearing a scuffed-up suit of armor, seated upon a brass-plated horse. John wore a shapeless straw hat and carried a rude rucksack fashioned out of simple calico cloth.

A column of tiny spiders marched in the opposite direction along the edge of the wall. Looking closer John saw that the spiders were actually little severed hands, their fingertips frantically stamping on the wood floor.

The tapping came again. John looked up. He was standing at a plain wood door.

“Who is it?”

“Me of course,” a woman said. She sounded older if not elderly.

It was a familiar voice but he couldn’t place it; like the first notes of a song on the radio — you know the tune but cannot name it.

He hesitated. After a few seconds he felt something wet and warm against his hand. He flinched then saw it was one of the guard dogs now awake and come to greet him. John smiled at the friendly gesture and pulled the door open.

The woman standing there was short, in her early fifties, thin but not skinny, with dark brown skin like chocolate fudge. Her full-length dress was made from natural canvas-like material printed with five or six rude images of blue and red roses. She wore a cotton hat that was round with a ridge along the brim. Half a dozen daisies grew out of the top as if from soil.

Her glasses had delicate pewter frames, surrounding large brown eyes that watched him closely.

There was a half smile on the woman’s lips. This smile tweaked his memory...

“You’re... a... a fairy godmother,” he stuttered.

Her smile deepened.

“You’re my fairy godmother,” he said, shocked.

“How are you, Cornelius?”

“Not too good,” he said. “I mean... nothing’s all that bad but it’s cold in here and my homework is so boring and I can’t get the man I killed out of my head. He’s back there in the living room. I don’t remember his name but...”

“Yes, yes, yes,” the children’s goddess said. She patted his shoulder and walked past him down the candlelit hall of dust, drowsing dogs and impossible images. “All that’s over now.”

When he turned to follow John felt burgeoning elation in his chest. After one step he was grinning, another and he began to laugh. Instead of a third stride he hopped, landed, then swung from the waist like doing the hokey-pokey dance when he was in kindergarten.

He stopped there watching the brown goddess traipse toward the flashing neon at the end of the passageway. He wanted to go after her but was suddenly afraid of the passion rising in him...

“What’s your name?” he shouted.

“Posterity,” she said not turning.

“Professor. Professor.”

Someone was shaking his shoulder; there was an intense light shining. John’s head hurt so badly that he wanted to tear out his brain.

“Professor!”

“Stop shakin’ me, Jasper,” John complained. “My head feels like it’s gonna bust.”

The big Hopi had a set expression that revealed nothing; not joy or glee, anger or love. He called himself Jasper because he liked the stone. Jasper Hutman was the name the university put on his paycheck but John knew his given name was Hototo.

Hototo believed that his tribesmen were put on earth to bring peace and harmony everywhere they went.

“Does that mean the Hopi people are here to save the world?” John asked Hototo early one Tuesday morning when he’d just returned from Senta’s motel room.

“No,” the big, brick red man replied. “There are too few of us and too many of everyone else. All we do is to carry a little peace here and there casting it on the waters and hoping for the best.”

Jasper shook John’s shoulder again and the history professor sat up straight.

“You shouldn’t sleep out here in your car, Professor, there’s all kinds of bad characters up and down this road. And you know they won’t think twice about people like you and me.”

The memory of a fairy godmother came into John’s mind.

“I was waiting for you and fell asleep,” he said.

“You were smiling,” Hototo remarked.

“I think I had a revelation.”

Jasper “Hototo” Hutman went through an iron doorway to open the larger driveway gate. John drove through but found the uniformed Hopi standing in the middle of the lane holding up a fancy beaded belt. The guard approached, handing the bright strap to John. The yellow, red, and blue beads might have been the scales of a fanciful viper. The silver buckle was quite large.

“For you,” Hototo said firmly.

“It’s very handsome,” John said.

The eight-inch buckle had a turquoise bird set at one side. The bird had a red eye and one greenstone feather.

“If you press the bird’s eye it releases a silver knife and handle,” Hototo informed him. “My father gave it to me but I’ll never use it.”

“What makes you think I would?” John asked.

“You’re a wild man, John Woman. I see it in your eyes late at night when you come from Spark City. A man like you needs a weapon.”

Having no reply John put the belt on the seat next to him then drove on feeling as if some kind of unwanted destiny had been foisted upon him.

I have seen you in a dream, he pecked on the virtual keyboard of his smart phone. This image my father would call a hermeneutic construct... an element of my mind that has become a separate entity. That’s what I would say if a potential employer asked me to explain but really you are Posterity, the goddess who embodies a future that will one day only dimly remember my foggy existence.

John was sitting in the window ledge of the second floor of his apartment, Cottage 16, upper level. Each structure of faculty housing was a four-story faux adobe building encompassing two two-story apartments with one big room per floor. The first level had a stove and refrigerator along the wall. John kept a table and desk on the kitchen level with only a low-riding Japanese platform bed against the north wall of the upper chamber. Through the large window of either room a red rock plateau could be seen in the distance. There was enough room in the recessed window to sit comfortably and write while the desert loomed beyond.

History is the world we live in, he wrote. It’s not a thing of the past, neither, in human terms, is it separate from the person witnessing it. History is not an external object that can be weighed or quantified by any extant measurements. Indeed, the study of history is much like the contradictory study of the human brain: a gooey mass that contains incongruous images which are affected by tides of emotions, instincts, indecipherable reminders and faulty memories, all of these elements being continually changed by time, trauma, interpretation, and, ultimately, by death.

I will always remember, Goddess Posterity, the moment of our meeting but I will most likely forget the day of the week, your face, the guard dog’s warm nose on my fingers. I’ll forget the exact words you spoke, what I replied. If I tell someone else about you they will misremember what I have told them. And when, and if, we ever speak of you at some future date (which will also be forgotten) our conversation will make you over yet again.

So history for human beings, rather than one undeniable unfolding of existence, is instead millions, billions, trillions of warped and faded images that morph into self-contradictions, false promises and unlikely convictions...

John wrote for hours that morning. When the battery icon turned into a red outline he plugged the cell phone charger into a wall socket. The wire being too short to reach the window, he had to sit on the blond bamboo floor with his back against the east wall; there he continued the one-way conversation with his private god.

He was reminded of his long-suffering father sitting in much the same pose in his deathbed. This memory contained the story he would tell Posterity, intended for the history professors’ tribunal to overhear.

The faculty at NUSW, he wrote in a footnote to Posterity, is asking for me to prove myself in concrete terms. This expectation is pandemic in the impossible study of what has gone before. To prove myself is like asking for proof of existence. I think therefore I cannot know. I can discuss with you because I know that you are the embodiment of that which transcends me. This is the only way for me to make certain that I am trying my best to come as close as possible to truth and not making up complex arguments for my faculty-tribesmen to be impressed by.

Just as he had finished this last sentence the doorbell rang.

John bounded down the stairs to his front door. There he stopped and smiled — welcoming the unknown.

“Who’s there?”

6

“It’s Carlinda Elmsford, Professor Woman.”

The door was yellow with a ceramic green knob. John saw the colors quite clearly wondering if would he would have been able to describe them before this moment. His digital thesis, desert accident and dream — all combined with the gangling girl thinker’s voice making his awareness more focused, present.

“Come on up,” he said, pressing the release for the downstairs entrance.

In the outer hall he listened as the double transfer student came up the first flight of stairs, then rounded the corner.

She wore a long blue dress that varied in hues, blending from light to dark. Her straw sandals had been replaced by black fabric dancer’s shoes. Her handsome features were permanent like those of a marble sculpture but her expression was flighty, almost frightened, liable to change at any moment.

“Miss Elmsford,” John said.

“I read the syllabus and course outline on the university website,” she said blinking as if he were a bright light.

“The entire document?”

“Yes.”

“That’s more than half the class will ever do.”

The sophomore tried to smile but only managed a halfhearted frown.

“I wanted to talk to you about it,” she said.

“My office hours are on the top of each section of the outline and syllabus. Tuesdays and Thursdays, four to six.”

He wasn’t sure why he was keeping her at the threshold. Maybe there was something about her and doorways... them and doorways.

“I know,” she said. “I would have waited but I might have to drop the course and the deadline is this Thursday, before the class meets.”

“Why would you have to drop?”

“The personal history assignments.”

“I see,” John said and then paused a moment. “Do you ever stop and wonder about the point in time you’re in right that moment?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“That whatever I’m doing will go echoing down the ages and maybe make a serial killer or help find a cure for cancer. Whatever I’m doing has to be important otherwise it just wouldn’t be.”

Hearing these words John stepped back, gesturing for her to enter.

She considered a moment then stepped through.

“Let’s sit at the table,” John offered.

Carlinda went to the table, pulled out a chair and sat with much more grace than she had previously exhibited.

“Would you like something to drink?”

“Water, please. This is a nice place. Are all the faculty apartments the same?”

“If they have a family with more than four members they get the whole building,” he said. “I think that’s right. It might be three but I’m pretty sure it’s four. My upstairs is one big room but they have prefabricated partitions to subdivide.”

He took a twelve-ounce bottle of Nouvelle spring water from his refrigerator, thought of getting his guest a glass then decided against the nicety.

He sat on the chair that abutted Carlinda’s side of the table. Her crystalline eyes opened wide for a moment, then squinted as she studied him.

“What’s your problem?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“With the personal history requirement for Decon.” John liked the word the floater had used to describe his course.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s too much... I mean even when I just think about it I get a headache.”

The first assignment in IDHD, Decon, was to take five steps toward creating a preliminary draft of the personal history document. He’d see what assignments arose from the work the students had done at the halfway mark, but the final personal history document (FPHD) would count for at least half of the student’s grade. The FPHD requested that:

“Maybe your headache is an indication that the work required is work you need to do,” John Woman suggested.

“No,” Carlinda said. “It’s intrusive and disturbing.”

“Certainly.”

“You admit it?”

“Of course,” John said with aplomb. “The study of history is not like going to the movies. It’s not even like a film critic giving her needless opinions. The very study of history is intrusive, invasive and ruthless...”

Carlinda gulped and John smiled.

“Most of my fellow faculty members would have you believe that historical analysis must be an objective exercise, something gleaned from old papers, letters and books. They discuss murder, sex and madness without the slightest idea of what state or states of mind are required. They are virgins giving advice about sex; pampered aristocrats striving to understand the starving poor.

“If you want to be a historian you have to know what it’s like to put as much of the truth as you can bear out in the light of day. You have to shatter your illusions, be willing to suffer revelation.”

John stopped because he felt a full-blown lecture coming on and that was not where he wanted this visit to go.

He noticed that there was a line of sweat across the ridge of the sophomore’s upper lip.

“But, Professor,” she said, “once you tell people the things you asked for they will look at you differently. Suppose I’m the only one to take the assignment seriously?”

“Then you would be the only student in the class who has a prayer of success.”

“Do you have to go through something like that just to write or teach?” she asked.

“Just?” John asked. “Have you ever been raped, Miss Elmsford?”

“No... and that’s the truth.”

“If you were to write a paper on the political use of rape throughout history, from the abduction of the Sabine women down to present-day conflicts in Africa, could you give me an accurate rendition by reading historical and official reports and interviews with the rapists and their victims?”

“I, I... don’t know.”

“If you were one of the women experiencing this crime would you have a deeper understanding of what was happening?”

“Possibly,” she said. “But... maybe that would put me too close to it.”

“Exactly so. Without proper training a victim of any crime or tragedy wouldn’t be able to have... perspective. But a researcher in a university library might not have the visceral experience to fully embrace the subject either. The paper I’m asking for will underscore this dichotomy. It will give you the ability to identify with the historical characters you wish to imbue with life. Without this simple self-exploration the contemporary historian may not have the awareness to understand the immensity of her or his study. Thucydides was a physician who contracted and survived the bubonic plague. Therefore he was able to render the experience with accuracy and acuity.”

“It wouldn’t be worth it to infect myself with the Ebola virus in order to understand it,” she said with abject certainty.

“What are you, Miss Elmsford?”

“I don’t know what you mean. A woman? An American?”

“Let’s start with race.”

“That’s kind of confusing,” she said.

“Confuse me then.”

“My, my mother’s father, Joel Pena, is Mexican, a descendent of the Aztecs he says. Mom’s mom is third-generation American Japanese. My father’s father is a black man from Ghana and my grandmother on that side is Danish.”

“So what are you?”

“A little bit of everything, I guess.”

“Where does the name Elmsford come from?”

“It used to be Prempeh but my father’s father changed it when he migrated with my mother to the U.S.”

“And so your name is a lie of sorts,” John said kindly. “A bit of deconstructionist history, if you will.”

“Okay,” Carlinda agreed. “I could say our real family name. I guess that would be interesting. But what if I robbed a bank and wrote it down? Then somebody might call the FBI and have me arrested.”

“Of course,” John said.

“It’s not worth destroying your whole life for a class paper.”

“You have to write down everything you know,” he said sternly, “every act and sin; every omission and mistake; every dark thought and belief... But you don’t have to share everything with the class.”

A sudden light emanated from the worried student’s eyes. John stifled an urge.

“You will be graded,” he continued, “on the quality and fearlessness of your work. It will be one of the few times in your experience of higher education that you will be rated on courage.”

Carlinda leaned forward, listing toward the young lecturer. He wiped the sweat from her upper lip with his thumb and then kissed her. She moved easily from her chair into his lap. There was no hesitation or clashing of teeth. Carlinda’s kisses were soft and somehow enduring. He leaned back in the hard chair. She caressed the side of his neck with both hands.

In the middle of the night, John was sitting up considering the sleeping Carlinda. The sex had been, as he expected, awkward, punctuated with hesitations and surprise. Her first orgasm brought tears to her eyes. When he asked her if she wanted to stop she shook her head, binding him in an embrace of extraordinary strength.

“Have you done this with other students?” she asked.

“No,” he answered truthfully.

They’d said a lot more but John couldn’t remember it.

How could that be? He remembered everything said or read in his presence, every word: obscure passages in Latin and Greek, the lectures of his father and the passionate revelations of his mother. John could recite word for word the sermon given by Pastor Lionel Rehnquist at Wanderers’ Baptist Church. He’d gone there by himself when he was a child of eight.

Young Cornelius asked his father what they talked about in church and Herman said, “It is your assignment to go there next Sunday and find out, an infiltrator in the house of their god.”

He could recite Rehnquist’s entire homily but the words he’d shared with Carlinda were lost.

He got up from the bed, took the smart phone from his pants on the floor and went to the deep windowsill to lounge under the desert moon.

If I am to teach history, he wrote to Posterity, then I must be history. If I am to know something I must live it. He stopped for a while to consider these words. After a few minutes he continued, Otherwise life would be like TV, like bread and circuses to the ancient Romans. Human life is a tactile experience. The mind, after all, is a physical thing no different from tomato cans or alley cats. We do not transcend physical experience; it surpasses us. Realizing this we understand that knowledge is secondary to the hunger for knowledge...

The soft sensation of her hand on the back of his neck held no surprise. She’d moved soundlessly across the room and reached out...

“What you doin’?” she asked.

She came around and sat across from him, naked and spread-legged so that he could make out the contours of her sex in the moonlight.

“I have to write a paper for the history department,” he said.

“Like personal history?”

“Just the opposite.”

“I have a boyfriend.”

“He’s a lucky guy.”

After a few moments she said, “You must have had a lot of experience.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The things you did.”

“You liked it?”

“I want to feel something,” she replied, not looking at him. “I want to be out of control, at least a little bit. I want to have to try to get away but not be able to...”

There was surety in the silences he experienced with Carlinda. He realized, with mild surprise, that he was aroused by their talk.

“I’ve never had a girlfriend,” he admitted.

“What do you mean?”

“If I were to write a personal history paper,” he replied, “one of the admissions I’d make would be that I never had a real girlfriend. Mostly I’ve just paid for what I needed.”

“But why?” she asked, turning her eyes to him. “You’re cute and funny and smart...”

“There’s not much room on my little island,” he said meeting her gaze.

“I’m not going to fall in love with you,” Carlinda warned.

“Okay,” he said, amused.

“This was just a physical thing,” she continued, “something I needed like a massage or a cold glass of water.”

John thought about his words to Posterity: his claim that the physical world was preeminent in human awareness.

“Me too,” John said.

“So you’re not going to try and be my boyfriend, my lover?”

“Things will be what they are.”

“You don’t want to get in my life and mess up things with me and Arnold?”

“You’ve already defeated me, Miss Elmsford.”

She reached over touching his erection lightly. “And what if I got on this right now?”

“We could sit face-to-face and continue our talk,” he said. “And in the morning I won’t even ask for your phone number.”

7

When John woke up the next morning Carlinda was gone. His phone read nine forty-seven. The desert outside was overcast. Downstairs he made coffee in a French press. Standing naked next to the ultramodern smooth-top stove John wondered about alienation intrinsic to technology and the immediacy of sex.

While watching the water in the clear Pyrex pot he felt a sudden chill at the back of his neck. He tried to ignore the sensation — as he should have ignored the sweat forming on Carlinda’s upper lip.

History is just as much superstition as it is study, Herman Jones once said when Cornelius was young and did not yet fully appreciate the complexity of abstract thought. As much as religion the study of the past takes a monumental leap of faith.

Savoring the strong coffee John picked up the smart phone to continue the dialogue with Posterity. He was about to engage the word processor app when he noticed the icon of an envelope at the bottom left of the screen. It was a message from his online news alert service.

He touched the little image with a baby finger. This called up a list of related topics that had recently been in the news.

Desiccated Corpse Found in Wall of Silent Screen Movie House was the lead headline from a New York newspaper. Dead Man Murdered and Sealed in a Wall for Over 15 Years, the Wayne Report Online declared.

There were seventeen news reports on the discovery of Chapman Lorraine’s remains. The Arbuckle Cinema House was undergoing internal renovations initiated by new owners. When the construction crew tore down a wall in the projection room they discovered a desiccated male corpse wrapped in garment bags and stored in a big aluminum trunk. In a public statement homicide officer Lieutenant Colette Van Dyne said that there was a suspect that the NYPD was actively seeking.

John supposed that Colette had taken her boyfriend’s name; that she had indeed married him. He was certain that the NYPD was looking for Cornelius “CC” Jones. France Bickman had to be dead after so long and there was no other possible suspect.

John went upstairs to don pants, shirt and shoes. Clothes were necessities for a man on the run. There was money in a safe-deposit box in Reno, Nevada. He’d created yet another identity — Reflex Minton. All necessary documents for Reflex were salted away in a safe-deposit box in LA.

Why hadn’t he called himself Robert or Bruce or even Omar? Did he want to be captured?

The clouds outside were lifting. Watching them part John thought about the chill he’d felt even before he knew what happened. The accuracy of premonition had a calming effect. He was probably safe. No one had his fingerprints. Even when he was taken by the police after the death of his father Colette made sure that he was in protective custody and not under arrest; that way they didn’t book him. The only photographs that possibly existed were from childhood, and those snapshots had most likely been lost. Lucia’s family didn’t claim him and Herman’s sister only met Lucia when she was pregnant.

His alienation from culture and community cocooned or camouflaged John in nonentity. He breathed in deeply and returned to the kitchen. There he sat, not writing or even thinking much. Now and again he’d run the tip of an index finger over the smooth finish of the cherrywood table. The sensation was almost imperceptible.

A solitary beam of muted sunlight struck the far end of the tabletop. John was thinking that light had mass, that there was weight even to that faint illumination on a plank of wood.

At 12:47 p.m. he was once again walking down North Violet Lane toward the Great Rotunda. The past two days were jumbled but not lost to him. There were touchstones of thought: Carlinda, Senta, Chapman Lorraine, the dark-skinned fairy godmother and his first lover, Colette Margolis — now his nemesis.

His misdeeds would be touted online and in tabloids for the next few days.

He took the stairs two at a time to the fifth floor of the gigantic canister of education. At 1:01 the entire class was in attendance, plus two more.

There was a serious-looking black male student sitting in the front row wearing a black T-shirt, army fatigue pants and five or six thick silver bracelets on his left wrist. At the far left in the otherwise unpopulated fifth row sat an older man in a gray suit. He had on a dress shirt but wore no tie, sporting silver, not gray, hair. His face was economical and somehow sculpted. This, John knew, was the professional board member Willie Pepperdine.

The young professor glanced around the class but when his eyes met Carlinda’s she looked down. This was no surprise. He wondered if she had confessed her infidelity to a girlfriend or maybe even to Arnold. It wasn’t a good time for that kind of notoriety.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I know I had you reading Winch and Wittgenstein but we’re going to put off discussing them for the time being. Instead I’d like to talk about the implications of the theory of a finite universe and the impact this might have on the study of history.”

With these words John Woman started his spur-of-the-moment lecture.

“Some physicists believe the universe to be finite, that this limited existence’s absolute god is gravity. Gravity explodes with love creating existence, then recoils in horror at what it has made. It draws back into the primal atom; then, forgetting revulsion, it explodes again...”

For the next fifty minutes or so he spoke of the ancient Hindu belief in reincarnation and Nietzsche’s dictum of eternal recurrence not only of life but of the entire physical world.

“Within this philosophy,” he lectured, “science is subsumed. History in its most absolute and unknowable form locks itself into a pattern of repetition and our ability to know it becomes an act of faith.”

“But Professor,” a young man with olive-brown skin said.

“Yes?”

“Claude Hernandez,” the student said, “from New Orleans, second-year student, majoring in American history.”

“Yes, Mr. Hernandez.”

“What use is this kind of thinking? I mean, if we can’t know history and are condemned to repeat it then what’s to study?”

John hadn’t considered why he’d decided on this lecture; it was one of many tools he used to break up rote thinking. But with this question he understood that his tenure as a professor was just an extension of the lessons his father had taught him; that his entire life, even the murder of Chapman Lorraine, was merely assignment.

“Amor fati,” he said to Claude Hernandez.

The student from Louisiana frowned and cocked his head to the side.

John looked around the room. The man he assumed to be Willie Pepperdine was grinning.

“Amor fati,” the professor repeated.

Carlinda made a sound.

“Yes, Miss Elmsford?”

“Love fate. It’s, it’s Latin.”

“And what does this Latin phrase mean to you?”

They could have been fucking on his window ledge under the protective lunar glow.

“It,” she said and paused. “It means that one has to accept fate but more than that, it means that you can, you should love what is meant to be.”

Carlinda exhaled as if she had been holding a breath.

“Exactly,” John agreed. “The elephant I spoke of Tuesday has now become the universe. Our limited ability to study this behemoth is informed not by knowledge but by our attitude toward the study.”

There were many questions after that. John bantered and argued, learned names and felt more and more relaxed. They quarreled over free will and entropy, the apparently obvious unfolding of the past into the future and the loss of faith that many feared they would have if they accepted the concept of amor fati.

In response to these fears he said, “My job has two main objectives. The first is to teach you how to think about history. The second is to dissuade you from following that path of study.”

“To persuade us, Professor?” Tamala Marman asked.

John smiled. “No, Ms. Marman — dissuade. It is my experience that the profession of history is a harsh taskmaster; that anyone embarking on that road should be aware of the tribulations they will encounter.”

“Shouldn’t we make those decisions ourselves?”

“Of course you should. But your resolve must be based on something. The lectures, class assignments and private meetings with every professor at this school will influence your decisions. It is my position that if you take your chosen vocation to heart you may, as many do today, experience the threat of heartbreak.”

Soon after John dismissed the class. They filed through the red-rimmed doorway looking somber. Carlinda faltered at the threshold, then passed through.

Soon the only students left were Willie Pepperdine and the young black man in silver bracelets and quasi-military dress.

The younger man approached John first.

“Do you have a minute, Professor Woman?” he asked.

“Office hours are from four to six at number eighteen Southeast Green Garden Path.”

The young man’s brow furrowed ever so slightly. He would have been good looking but somewhere along the way his confidence had transformed into anger and the delicate features of his dark face did not hold anger well.

“I was hoping we could talk,” the student said.

“What’s your name?”

“Johann Malik.”

“Pick any time between four and six, Johann. That will be your time.”

“What are you doing right now?”

“Or you could just drop by and take your chances. The first few weeks are usually pretty slow.”

“We could grab a coffee in the rotunda,” the glowering student offered.

“Between four and six.”

Johann Malik looked over at the elder white man in the fifth row, grunted, then stalked out of the classroom, silver bracelets clanking like manacles.

“Masterful,” the man in the fifth row said. His tone was strong and rich; baritone tessitura, John said to himself.

“Mr. Pepperdine?”

“You got me.”

John went to the fourth tier and sat.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“Willie.”

The Platinum Path board member, maybe even one of The Dozen, was handsome in a fabricated way. The face was perfectly balanced but his steel gray eyes spoke of the scars and indulgences of a mercenary or pirate.

“Willie,” John repeated.

“I want to learn from you.”

“Excuse me if I’m a little mystified, Willie, but I can’t imagine a professor in an obscure branch of study could in any way edify a worldly individual like yourself.”

“I don’t know. I learned something today.”

“And what is that?”

“Everything I believe instinctively has a basis as old as ancient India and Egypt; that an upstart nation like Rome had scholars who knew what I’d be thinking nearly two thousand years before I was born.”

John nodded while wondering about the man he faced. He could read most people simply by engaging with them for a few minutes, no more. But every now and then he ran across someone who defied his intuitive abilities.

“President Luckfeld says that you want to audit the class.”

“It would be an honor,” Pepperdine said. His skin had a platinum patina, not the drab worn color of gray age but a deep vibrancy that matched his bright smile.

“Have you studied history before?”

“Only as an elective in the school of hard knocks.”

“What’s your profession, Willie?”

“Distilling money into meaning.”

“Whoa,” the young professor declared. “I’ve never heard that particular phrase before. What does it mean?”

“I try to get people to see the world for what it is, not what they expect it to be. Once they know where they stand, what they can and cannot do, their choices often... shift.”

Pepperdine looked to be fifty so he was probably sixty. Both brutality and subtlety radiated from him. John wanted to ask if he’d ever killed someone but this, he knew, came from his own desire to share the guilt for Chapman Lorraine.

Two wrongs, he thought.

“You’re welcome in my class at any time, Willie Pepperdine.”

“The class description says that your students are expected to create a personal history,” the auditor offered.

“Yes.”

“I might not have the time for that. I can do the reading though. I read on long flights.”

“You travel often?”

Pepperdine nodded and stood up.

“I’ve taken up enough of your time, Professor. There must be a new class coming soon.”

“No. I, um, I always get a classroom that doesn’t have anything scheduled for at least an hour and a half after. My lectures often exceed the allotted time.”

“I should be going anyway, have to be in Ho Chi Minh City in thirty-six hours.” Pepperdine wasn’t a tall man, five eight at most. His shoes were made from red-brown leather and probably cost at least a week’s salary of any professor on the campus. He moved at a leisurely pace with no limp or hesitation.

John remained in his fourth-row desk-chair for long minutes wondering why a man like Pepperdine would pay such close attention to him and his class.

These thoughts led naturally to a life crafted to be undetectable. If he was a ghost then maybe Willie was a ghost hunter like they had on reality TV.

The idea of ghost hunters further distracted John. He thought that the sham television shows were little different from history classes. The history department was the ghost hunter of the university. Actually most researchers were in pursuit of knowledge even more unlikely than poltergeists.

“John?” She was standing at the doorway wearing a gray dress-suit that complemented her short gray hairdo. John found it impossible to imagine Annette Eubanks as either young or old. She seemed like the image, even the icon, of some human trait that had been minted on an ancient silver coin.

“Ms. Eubanks,” he said. “Are you lost?”

“I saw that your class was scheduled from one to five. I was just going to look in and wave but then there was no class.”

“It’s a seventy-five-minute Tuesday Thursday period but I try to find a time slot that allows me to go over.”

“You can’t organize your lectures to fit into the time allowed?”

Allowed.

“There is no such thing as equality or perfection,” John replied trying to sound as if the words were from a quote, “except in the theoretical disciplines of math and sometimes physics.”

“Some of us enjoy the illusion of order,” she said walking toward the rows of desks.

“What can I do for you, Annette?” John asked when she’d reached the first tier.

“You received the departmental summons,” she stated.

“Like a parking ticket?”

Annette Eubanks curled up her lip, maybe unconsciously.

“You shouldn’t make light of department procedure, Professor Woman.”

“I’ve never heard of a departmental summons, Ms. Eubanks.”

“We expect you to deliver your paper to the review board at some point this semester.”

“Written History; Reconstruction, Deconstruction or Just Plain Destruction?”

Eubanks’s lip curled again.

“That’s not much time,” John said.

“You’ve had a year.”

“Whitman worked on Leaves of Grass for years,” John offered, “and then spent the rest of his life rewriting.”

“You compare yourself to America’s premier poet?”

“Why not?”

Looking into the unfiltered hatred of her eyes John thought, not for the first time, that his character was not designed for the life he’d embarked upon. He should be making this professor like him, ingratiating himself with the faculty.

“We would also like you to present a preliminary talk about your paper at the next departmental brown-bag lunch.”

“Really? That’s tomorrow isn’t it?”

“You can’t pretend you didn’t know. These requests were put in your box.”

“My box?”

“Faculty mail.”

“Oh. I never pay any attention to that. I figure if anything is important enough somebody’ll tell me face-to-face.”

“Consider yourself told.”

He was standing in the doorway of 18 Southeast Green Garden Path when John arrived at 3:48.

“Mr. Malik.”

“Professor,” Johann Malik said.

“Nice to see you.”

John took out his electronic key-card and held it against the black ceramic pad under the doorknob. He heard the click, pulled open the gold-green door and ushered the sour-faced student in.

The room was small, the size of two broom closets, with a ceiling that was sixteen feet high. John kept no books, papers or knickknacks in his office. There was one metal filing cabinet painted drab green, a walnut desk with a reclining office chair and three hardback chairs for visitors. A green metal trash can sat in a far corner.

John went around the desk and sat in the fabric-padded black office chair.

“How can I help you, Mr. Malik?”

“I need to talk to you about your class.”

“What about it?”

“Why you want to lock us in a box like that? Like some prison warden.”

“Us? Box?”

“Black people, man. Here you gonna say that slavery was fate, then tell me to love it.”

John enjoyed this interpretation. The political activist angle was always a monkey wrench in the delicate gears of historical investigation.

“I merely provided one of many physical analyses of the past and future world. Would you have me tell you to walk into a room with men who hate you, men who could obliterate your soul, without a warning and at least some means to defend yourself?”

“You the one giving ammunition to them,” Malik argued. “You’re telling them that they’re not guilty by saying that destiny made us what we are.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“That’s the only way.”

“Then let me ask you a question.”

“What?” The solitary word bristled with violence.

“Imagine yourself on the edge of a high cliff. A group of your enemies happen by and throw you off the side. Then you’re falling, falling for what seems like forever. Instinctively all you can think of is how to back away from that moment in time, back to the hour before you arrived at the edge. But this is not a child’s game. You can’t take it back. The only hope you have is that you survive the fall. And, even if you live, you will never be able to go back.”

“That’s just some talk,” Malik said, disgusted.

“This is a university,” John said lightly. “That’s what we do here. We talk. Through discussion, debate and disagreement we come up with answers that, if we’re lucky, can be used as tools in the fabrication of our temporary survival.”

“There’s a world outside the university, Professor.”

“Don’t I know it.”

John’s tone had more effect than his words. Malik’s angry expression turned suddenly speculative.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“A very dark place, Mr. Malik,” John lamented. “A place from where you can’t take back a thing.”

“We didn’t deserve what happened to us,” Johann said, sensing a potential comrade in John.

“And if a young, white woman’s three-year-old daughter is kidnapped, raped, murdered... interred in an unmarked grave,” John replied, “if all that, did either mother or child deserve their fate?”

“That’s just two people. I’m talking about a whole race.”

“As am I,” John said. “Every human being faces tragedy. It’s coded into our blood. There’s no escape except through acceptance.”

“So I’m supposed to accept five hundred years of slavery?”

Nodding John said, “Then pick yourself up and battle for the future, not the past. The past is a battle you cannot win.”

“They stole our history,” Malik complained. “I’m just trying to get it back.”

“Not stole, Mr. Malik, but utterly destroyed. Where our people came from was ripped from the minds of our ancestors. We can rebuild but never retrieve. And there’s an even larger catastrophe intrinsic to that crime.”

“What’s that?”

John almost smiled then. The words passing between them were more or less meaningless. Malik was there to learn from him because of the common past that their skin implied. The student would trust his professor even if they never agreed on one thing.

“That in destroying our history,” John said, “they asphyxiated their own.”

Malik tried to come up with a rebuke but instead he shuddered. The hatred in his eyes could have easily been love.

“Are you German?” John asked.

“No.” It was a victim’s rote reply to the torturer’s question no matter what that question was.

“So your parents probably named you after Bach, one of the great geniuses of music. Your last name is Aramaic for king; the Genius King.”

“So what?”

“Those words propel you into the world.”

“Can you see any reason I shouldn’t drop your class, Professor Woman?”

“Because you are a sword and I a whetstone?”

Johann’s lip curled as Annette Eubanks’s had. He stood shaking his head.

“I’m outta here,” he said.

As he went through the doorway John called out, “If you want a permission slip to drop I’ll be unhappy but I’ll sign it.”

Johann Malik was the only student to visit him that day. John had hoped Carlinda would drop by. They’d reconnected talking about loving fate. It would have been nice to close the door and kiss her cheek.

But he didn’t need that kiss. Today there was a triumvirate that judged him: Pepperdine, Eubanks and Malik. He didn’t have to worry about the NYPD. His fate was laid out in front of him like a fall.

He’d fallen asleep early for the first time in years, lying there naked on top of the blankets with a window open to let the desert air in. His dreams were centered in a large room where people appeared in no particular order or context. His mother and father were on the periphery. Colette was there with France Bickman, Carlinda and President Luckfeld.

Strolling around John came upon a waitress who asked him, “Would you like to see my breasts?”

His erection was immediate and insistent but it wasn’t until he felt his sex enveloped by moist warmth that he opened his eyes.

Fully dressed, Carlinda straddled him, slowly rising and lowering on his erection.

“How did you get in?” he asked.

She smiled and shimmied.

“How?” he asked again.

“There’s some overgrown yuccas at the back wall. I climbed behind them. I turned the lock before leaving this morning. I figured you wouldn’t check it.”

“You wouldn’t even look at me when class started today.”

“That was before you said amor fati.”

8

John woke up alone, nestled among the rumpled bedclothes.

The scent of Carlinda’s lavender perfume rose from the sheets. She hadn’t worn perfume the first night they were together.

He sat up feeling that there was something he should be concerned about, something important. After drinking from the bathroom sink spigot and splashing a little water on his face he remembered Chapman Lorraine’s body behind the secret door. But Lorraine was dead, gone... history. The police were looking for Cornelius Jones, also a thing of the past. No... he had to do some kind of presentation on a paper that only had a title. He had to defend himself without the help of a heavy lug-wrench.

Downstairs he took out a pad of flimsy airmail paper, a brand-new yellow number two pencil and a penknife — all from the drawer in his table. He made coffee, closed the window, used the blue-and-silver penknife to shave the wood away from a quarter inch of lead and started writing.

When he was finished John picked out a deep ocher two-piece suit and a spring green T-shirt. He decided on white tennis shoes with no socks.

The history department was located in the president’s compound. John approached the gate at 12:52.

“Professor Woman,” Lawrence Gustav greeted him from behind the metal bars.

“Sir,” John rejoined.

“They’re waiting for you.”

“The meeting isn’t scheduled until one,” John said as the gate rolled open.

“The bigwigs had a powwow at noon.”

Walking down a cobblestone path that snaked between the lodge-like buildings John came upon the compound’s gardener.

An inch shorter than John the elderly man moved spryly. He had a full mane of salt-and-pepper hair, sun-squinted brown eyes and skin deeply tanned by years of working outside. He wore dark green gardener’s pants, a shirt that was an oddly clashing blue, and walnut brown, cracked leather shoes. He was trimming one of eight dark-leaved rosebushes growing in front of the Psych Bungalow.

John stopped and said, “Hello.”

“Hi,” the elder replied with some surprise in his voice.

“You’re the one who takes care of all these bushes and cacti?”

“I certainly am.” He took off his gardener’s gloves and reached out.

As they shook John said, “I’m John Woman. I teach here.”

“Ron Underhill,” the man said, maybe grinning a little at the professor’s name. “I’ve worked on these plants since before the school even opened.”

“So I guess you’ve always been a gardener.”

“No. Before I came here I was a businessman.”

“What kind of business?”

“Doesn’t really matter,” Ron said. “Most everything people do in business is just a waste of time. Now I tend to the plants that need it and every other month water those that don’t.”

“The flowers are beautiful.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“John.”

“John.”

“It must be a very different experience to be outside all day working under the sun and against it at the same time,” John observed.

“Like I said, some plants need a lot of care,” the landscape gardener agreed. “But often your delicate breeds bring forth the most exquisite blossoms.”

There was wonder in the older man’s voice. As if he discovered this truth every time he knelt down to work.

“I’d like to talk to you about that sometime,” John said. “But right now I have to be raked over the coals.”

“Education’s a business too I guess.” The gardener was now peering directly into the professor’s eyes.

John was struck by the obvious and yet oblique truth of this notion. He wanted to say something but realized he couldn’t enhance the older man’s assertion.

In contrast to the president’s building the history department bungalow had a door. It was pale pink with a blue knob and no bell.

John opened the door and walked in.

Kerry Brightknowles, a senior majoring in Eastern European history, sat behind the reception desk.

“Hi, Professor,” she greeted him, smiling.

Kerry was big. She had a large frame and plenty of flesh but only someone in the fashion industry would have thought her fat. Striated blond hair and freckles accented her fair face and arms. She was well formed and carried herself as lightly as a ballet dancer moving across a stage.

“How’s it going, Ms. Brightknowles?”

“Graduating this May.”

“Happy to be getting out of here?”

“Happy to be getting on with my career,” she said. “I’m going to graduate school at Harvard but even if I studied for a hundred years I don’t think I’d ever know as much as you do.”

“How much you know is of little consequence in our field. It is mastering the techniques of discovery that makes any researcher rise above the herd.”

Hearing this Kerry smiled... but that soon turned into a grimace.

“I’m sorry about what they’re doing to you, Professor. I tried to explain to Dr. Tracer how great you are in the classroom. He said, ‘I see you drank the Kool-Aid too.’” Her quote sounded like Tracer’s gravelly voice and John laughed. He liked Kerry.

“I guess you should go on in,” she said. “It’s in the conference room.”

There were eight offices, four on either side of the hallway that led to the glass-walled conference room. Secretaries and assistants behind the open doors glanced at John but looked away before he could greet them.

As he approached John could see the other professors through the glass: jurors facing each other across the long white table. Annette Eubanks had taken the head position. She was looking straight ahead as if she had no idea of his approach. Her dress-suit was shamrock green. Gregory Tracer in a faded blue suit sat to her right. He was in his late thirties. It was said that he’d been Annette’s protégé since he was her student and secret lover at the University of Chicago.

There were five other professors from the department, Theron James and Willie Pepperdine in attendance. Willie was seated not at the table but against the far wall. John went through the open door then stopped one pace into the meeting room.

“Hello, everyone,” he said cheerfully.

Willie Pepperdine saluted then leaned back in his metal-and-plastic chair until it was propped against the wall behind him.

“Professor Woman,” Annette Eubanks said. She was certainly the one in charge. “Have a seat.”

She motioned toward the foot of the judgment table where a solitary chair sat turned out slightly like an unwanted invitation.

John saw another chair placed in a corner behind the department head. He went to the empty chair, grabbed it by a slot in the red plastic back and dragged it over to Willie. He lowered into the seat and sighed, a man taking pleasure in a moment of rest.

“Why don’t you come to the table, Professor?” Eubanks directed.

“I thought this was a brown-bag lunch?” John replied.

“It is.”

“Brown-bag lunches,” John said, “are informal gatherings. Not even in the royal houses of classical China did informal gatherings involve seating charts... except, that is, for the emperor and his queen.”

John counted out Eubanks’s silence in four-four time. He made it through a few bars of this silent melody before she spoke.

“Again I must complain, Dr. James,” Eubanks said turning her attention to the dean. “It is irregular for a meeting of this sort, informal or not, to be attended by someone from outside the department.”

“Like I told you, Dr. Eubanks,” Theron said. “President Luckfeld wanted to be here but had other duties. He sent Mr. Pepperdine as his representative.”

“What are his qualifications?”

“I am advisor to the president of the board of directors of the university,” Willie said using every iota of authority in his deep voice.

Dean James smiled and gave a sideways apologetic nod to concur.

Annette Eubanks went through all the possible replies she might make, came up with nothing satisfactory and then turned to John Woman.

“Do you have something to share with us, John?”

The young killer from back east sat up straight trying to recall the posture that made him a good student in school before his father got sick. He looked around the table, took a deep breath through his nostrils and began to speak.

“I only found out yesterday that I was expected to speak at this monthly get-together,” he said. “So I’m glad that this is just a casual gathering among peers.

“I wasn’t able to create formal arguments about my paper which, I’m told, I am to present to the history review committee this semester. I couldn’t fabricate an argument but I did manage to write a letter.”

John tapped his right hand against the left breast of his yellow jacket.

“I have it right here but I don’t think I’ll read. Instead I’ll summarize the content.”

This introduction brought frowns to a few faces. Already the unofficially accused professor had abandoned protocol. At every other brown-bag lunch session the speaker started by introducing an argument about a little-known personage or event that influenced or elucidated what was already known.

John had such a story in his repertoire.

The summer before he came to NUSW he spent nine weeks reading about Lincoln in the Smithsonian archives. There he discovered a name — Elisa Borgone, an alleged prostitute who had been sent a letter by the president. The letter itself had been lost but it was mentioned in a journal entry of Lincoln’s White House butler, Peter Brown. Later in life Borgone became a fiery minister of an unaffiliated Baptist church in Baltimore. She had a tall and brooding son named Abraham but there was no father documented.

John could have made quite a career for himself following that possible liaison. He would have had the added satisfaction of eclipsing the resident expert on the Civil War — Gregory Tracer.

But John didn’t want to play the game of departmental one-upmanship. He didn’t care about presidential trysts or an illegitimate child who might have joined a circus but instead flew into a rage and killed a man named Booth in a St. Louis restaurant.

“The letter is addressed to someone named P,” he said. “P is, for lack of a better term, a hermeneutic device; but instead of me taking on her qualities I used her implied existence to confess my sin of knowledge. P is not an expert in our arcane field of study so I had to translate pretentious jargon such as hermeneutics, ontology and epistemology into more pedestrian terms like: pretend you are, the world and what people think is true. I believe that my slightly inaccurate language enhances the crux of historical analysis rather than minimizing its power.”

John stopped there a moment and smiled brightly.

“Dear P,” the professor intoned entering a fugue state. “I want to tell you the story of a man named HJ — a black man come to awareness somewhere in the earlier half of the twentieth century. He was raised in the Mississippi Delta but HJ was different from you and me because he was a man without history. I don’t mean to say that he had amnesia or that he didn’t have family or friends. HJ’s people lived inside the dream of another race. We’ll call this other group the meta-culture. HJ knew the meta-culture’s heroes, religions, languages and moral codes. He knew everything they did including the fact that he and his people were inferior to them in every way that was moral, sophisticated or intelligent.

“HJ couldn’t read and there was no school for him or his little black friends. He picked cotton for ten cents a day from the age of nine. Not only was HJ a child with no past; he, and his people, also had no voice. Don’t get me wrong; they could speak and yell, cry out and sing but the way the world unfolded around them fell upon their backs and there was no ballot box to express their dissatisfaction with the crushing weight of the meta-culture’s progress.

“HJ had no history but he believed that he could steal the meta-culture’s past, claiming it as his own. He suspected that books held the secret of becoming the meta-culture.

“In a deceitful move HJ convinced a local minister that he wished to read the word of God, that he wanted to serve the meta-culture’s deity so that he could better praise the world that was not his.

“He excelled at reading and was seen as the possible successor to the aging minister — a Negro named August Acres.

“But as soon as he could properly read the first few books of the Old Testament, barefoot HJ embarked on a long trek north, along the western bank of the Mississippi River. His destination was Chicago. Once there he got a job in a factory that took Mississippi cotton and wove it into fabric for poor people to make into work-clothes for factory workers and migrant farmers alike.

“Every week he took three books from the library and read them late at night by the light of a kerosene lantern in a room he shared with three other boys. It was there, in that stuffy attic room, that HJ slowly came to understand that the meta-culture’s history was a lie. By leaving his people’s history out of their records they had perverted the memory of their own past.

“As he grew older and learned more HJ understood that the crime committed against him and the people who oppressed him was enacted again and again throughout what might be called history. He understood that the only way to claim true knowledge of the past was to live outside its rubric.... When I say rubric, P, I mean rulebook. HJ came to understand that the only way to own the past was to live outside the rulebook of history in whatever form that structure took. He realized that he was not inferior to the oppressors, because they themselves were the victims of their own crimes.

“Armed with this rare form of anti-knowledge HJ began a lifelong study of the half-truths and lies that formed a world at once ignorant and arrogant about that ignorance. And though HJ was, admittedly, no one from nowhere, he took solace in the fact that he was that rare individual who knew his place in history.

“If this is not deconstructionist historicity in practice,” John said breaking out of his trance and addressing the men and women in the glass room, “I don’t know what is. HJ learned to read and later learned that all he read was lies — this made him a man outside history; a position that every historian must attain before she, or he, can lay claim to the past. HJ and his people had their story demolished by people who had no idea that they were committing cultural suicide by excluding members of their own society.”

John took a deep breath as if his talk had come out of one great inhalation. He felt a little dizzy, somewhat satisfied and curious as to what his peers would think of his mostly accurate rendition of Herman Jones’s journey.

For a few moments the room was silent.

Theron James’s face was blank but mild. His thoughts, John decided, were about the impact of the brief talk rather than its content. Willie Pepperdine smiled and nodded as if he were replaying the words in his head; Annette Eubanks’s head and neck juddered now and then, for probably the same reason.

“Is that it?” Abel George, the resident Middle Eastern expert asked. “I mean what are we supposed to acquire from this, um, this short story?”

George was hardly older than John; he was in his mid-thirties with black hair, and his skin was the color of pale straw. Tall and loose-limbed, George often reminded John of the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz if that fabulous being had become a somewhat less interesting mortal man.

“It is fiction certainly,” John replied. “HJ is an amalgam of people I’ve known and read about representing an entire so-called race whose past had been annihilated and who are simultaneously excluded from the scholarly awareness of the people that murdered their souls.”

“HJ was not murdered in your fable,” Lucy Orcell, the department’s Europeanist francophone, pointed out.

Lucy was fifty-one with mild features except for her large hands. Her skin was olive hued. She was from St. Louis — a graduate of Oxford.

John shrugged and gazed into the older woman’s light brown eyes.

“It is my stance,” he said, “that if you take away a human being’s anchor to the unfolding of his past then you effectively remove that person from society. And, as we all know, there can be no me without you and me. This crime is tantamount to murder, wouldn’t you agree?”

Orcell frowned, possibly realizing her assumption that history was always equally present in every human experience might need some... retooling.

“The question is,” John added, “if a person inside a culture has no knowledge of his place in the unfolding of that culture, or in the history of any other people, and if no one else among either the oppressors or the oppressed has that knowledge, can that person be said to be alive? Indeed on what plane could he possibly exist except as chattel whether he is a slave or not?”

“But you said that the minister could read,” Oscar Pine said.

Oscar was the senior professor of the two-member ancient history department. He was in his seventies, unusually tall, six five, and playful. He was the only other professor in the social studies department who could converse in both ancient Greek and Latin. Annette Eubanks did not intimidate him. He liked to banter with John.

“Yes he could,” John said. “I see this... this irregularity as a solitary beam of sunlight that somehow has found its way into a dark dungeon.”

Pine nodded his long head. His still mostly brown hair was tied back into a ponytail. His much younger Chinese wife, Su Yen, had once told John that she used the thick braid as her reins when she rode him around the bedroom.

“So,” Oscar said, “this light, if it encounters a seed in that dark environment, might engender enough growth to break down the walls from the inside.”

“This is prattle,” Ira Carmody exclaimed. “There is no basis for the argument. Actually there’s no argument at all.”

John liked Ira even though the political historian hated him. The little man with the thatch mustache was an expert on the Soviet satellites prior to the lifting of the Iron Curtain but he liked to dabble in ancient thought. He wrote tight scholarly monographs, usually with more footnotes than content, and gave lectures on obscure internal events that he claimed became a part of history whether they ever happened or not.

“You’re wasting our time,” Carmody added.

“If your time is at such a premium, Ira,” Willie Pepperdine said, “then maybe you should leave us and make better use of it someplace else.”

“Who the hell do you think you are to speak to me like that?” Ira dared Willie.

Oscar Pine’s eyebrows went up.

John smiled, softly appreciating that the focus of his lecture had been commandeered.

Willie let the front legs of his chair come down to the floor and then he stood.

“Come over here and ask me that,” the perpetual board member dared Ira.

“What?”

“I got two or three inches on you,” Willie said. “You have at least a decade and half on me. Let’s see if you can bully your way out of a ass beating.”

John expected Dean James to interrupt but he didn’t.

“Ira,” Annette Eubanks said.

“What?” The last thing in the world he expected was to be physically challenged.

“This meeting is over,” the department head said.

Willie was staring at Carmody. John had no doubt that the wealthy board member was ready to fight. But for what?

“Professor,” Annette Eubanks called out as John was walking down the concrete path toward the southern end of campus.

John stopped and turned. With heavy steps she walked a straight line. Just as she reached him automatic water spigots came on for the daily drenching of the lawn.

“Do you know that thug?” she asked.

“President Luckfeld asked me to let him audit my class.”

“Which one?”

“I only have one this semester. Last year I did double duty for Cynthia Grey when she had to go down to Florida to help her mom after the stroke.”

“This isn’t over,” Eubanks said. John had to admire her brevity in all things.

“That’s not quite right,” he replied.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean it hasn’t yet begun.”

“This isn’t a game, John.”

It was a game, he thought, a game that she was forcing him to play. He didn’t care about tenure. But there he was listening to her deny, and believe in the denial of, her own actions. It was like listening to an accident victim talk about her car insurance while blood flowed from an open wound in her chest.

At the far southern end of the campus sat Deck Recreation Center: a huge white-paneled, black-ribbed geodesic dome covering a deep crater. Deck contained restaurants, the student cafeteria, four auditoriums, recreation rooms and meeting halls.

John was just about to go through the double doors when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Professor.”

Willie Pepperdine stood there smiling beneficently as a steady stream of students flowed around them.

“I thought you were headed for Ho Chi Minh City, Willie.”

“I was. But then I heard about the inquisition that Carmody and Eubanks had engineered.”

“Why would you be concerned with that?”

“Same reason I’m taking your class,” Willie said. “I’m interested in how you perform inside your chosen environment.”

“But isn’t your vocation the transformation of currency into significance?”

Willie smiled at all the big words and John felt a little embarrassed.

“I’m a rich man, Professor. I can afford to do what I want, when I want.”

“Would you have really come to blows with Ira?”

“I’d’a stomped his prissy ass into the linoleum. Can’t stand bullies.”

“You’re the bigger man,” John reminded him.

“But,” Willie said with a grin, “Ira has a second-level black belt in Tae Kwon Do. He can bench-press one hundred eighty-seven pounds.”

“How would you know that?”

“Did you know that there’s an enormous underground lake below this campus?” Willie asked instead of answering the question.

“No.”

“There is. It’s populated by a wholly unique breed of large, blind, freshwater sturgeon, some of which weigh upwards of two hundred pounds.”

“Really?”

“I’ve seen them with my own eyes,” Willie assured John.

“How?”

“When the board of directors bought this property the lake was discovered. A team of private and state investigators had to study it to test for the environmental impact of the buildings we planned to erect. I went along on the dive.”

“What does that have to do with your knowledge of Ira’s strength?”

“I saw those blind fish, crayfish and albino water worms in their natural environment. The only way you could know those fish and other creatures was by getting down there with them. As you said in your very interesting lecture, Professor — in order to know a man you need to understand his environment.”

“And I’m the man?”

Pepperdine smiled and tilted his head to the side.

“Almost sounds like you’re stalking me, Willie.”

“So this fellow, this HJ,” Willie said. “What you were saying was that he alone knew the history of his world because he could see the lies that the people who thought they owned history were telling themselves.”

“Yes.”

“And that only a man in HJ’s situation can even hope to understand what has happened.”

“Absolutely,” John said.

“Not stalking, Professor, but learning. I’m learning how to articulate an argument as rare as those fish hundreds of meters below our feet.”

“Why, Willie?” John asked. He was captivated by the billionaire’s motives.

“Like you said, Professor, there is no me without you and me.”

9

When John got home he expected Carlinda to be there but instead there was a camel-brown envelope on the kitchen-level table.

He pulled out a chair and sat in front of the letter, not touching it at first. There was no writing, no stain, crease or irregularity in the rectangular fold. It lay at an odd angle. Just dropped there, John thought; exactly what Carlinda would do.

What Carlinda would do? Did he believe that he knew this young woman? How had she gotten so deep into him after only two nights and two classes?

He picked up the brown envelope and tore it open. He read it then read it again — a dozen times over.

The writing was educated; the hand unfamiliar. It posed no immediate threat but still there was the definite knowledge of his, John’s, guilt.

France Bickman? Maybe he was still alive. Or possibly the investigation turned up semen residue on the bedclothes beneath the trunk/casket. That didn’t make sense. No one could have located him within the last forty-eight hours. John’s mind felt like a mackerel flopping hopelessly on a pier. Maybe someone already knew who he was and somehow heard his name in connection with the murder investigation. But why not just turn him over to the police? Maybe someone had. Maybe Phoenix PD was coming to arrest and extradite him.

What most interested John about this letter was his response to it; he was confused by the implications but not worried, not even perturbed. Truth, he had often lectured, is never a threat. It is sometimes dangerous but all of life is danger. Only in death are we delivered from peril.

The interested party had transmitted truth.

He was still thinking about the letter, now in his pocket, when the hand touched his shoulder.

“I was expecting you to be here when I got home,” he said.

“I went to the Korean bathhouse in town,” Carlinda said, “to get a mineral oil enema.”

“Why?”

“For you.” Her fingers lifted from his shoulder to caress his ear. They had yet to face each other.

“I didn’t ask for that.”

“No. Arnold is always asking me. This morning we were fooling around and he asked me again. That’s when I decided to come do it with you.”

“Why?”

“Because you make me feel like I’m in charge.”

“It feels all greasy,” she said later that evening. They were lying naked on top of the blankets, a slight breeze wafting in from the window.

“You want to take a shower?”

“No. I like how it feels. It reminds me of you.”

“But I’m right here.”

“Yeah.” She reached out running her fingers across his right nipple. “You are here with me, here in my mind, and between my thighs. It’s like you’re everywhere and I am too.”

For a brief instant John caught a whiff of Senta’s after-sex cigarette. She was there too, he thought.

“What you thinkin’?” Carlinda asked.

“About you saying you won’t love me.”

“What about it?”

“If that’s so why are you here giving me what your boyfriend wants?”

Carlinda sat up, then sighed. She leaned over and kissed John’s forehead.

“Because I need a man,” she said. “A man that needs me.”

“Doesn’t Arnold need you?”

“You remember his name.”

“You talk, I listen.”

Carlinda leaned back on her elbows. “Arnold wants me. He wants me all the time. He wants my company, my ass, my attention. He was my boyfriend in high school in Trenton, and then when I applied to U Pitt he did too. I didn’t like Pittsburgh, transferred to NYU and he followed.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Not really. He always asked if he could come. He’s very sweet and I love him.”

“But you don’t need him because he doesn’t see you.”

“You’re very smart, Professor. You say things I know but can’t say.”

“That doesn’t explain why you think I need you.”

“I’m not talking about you. I’m in love with Arnold.”

“But you need me because, you say, I need you.”

“Yes.” She strummed his penis and he was immediately erect. “And what is it that I need?”

“Not this,” she said. “You don’t think about my body except when we’re having sex.”

“Making love?”

“Whatever. You give me physical love but then let it go. I like that very much.”

“You’re mature for a second-year student.”

“I have two younger sisters, one younger brother, an older brother who’s a loser, a father gone away somewhere forever, and a mother who has serious prescription drug issues. I don’t remember ever being a kid.”

“And what about me?” John asked. “How do I fit in all that?”

“Kerry Brightknowles,” she said to the ceiling.

“What about her?”

“She’s my dorm advisor.”

“And she told you about the meeting today?”

“What meeting?”

“In the history department.”

“Uh-uh. I haven’t talked to her since the night after orientation.”

“Then what could she have said that makes you think I need you?” John’s professional interest was now aroused also.

“Administrators and professors that have admin positions come to work two weeks before the semester begins,” she said. “Kerry had to be there because they needed someone to print their reports and get them coffee. She heard Annette Eubanks and Ira Carmody talking about how they were going to get you fired.”

“When did she tell you this?”

“Really she was telling my roommate Tamala Marman and I was there.”

“But you didn’t know me.”

“Not until class. I really was worried about that personal history paper but I could see how great you were and I just got mad about them trying to fire you. Then, when you wiped the sweat from my lip I knew we had to be... not in love but lovers.”

“It doesn’t really make a lot of sense,” John said.

“I need you. Does that make sense?”

“But I could never have you.”

Carlinda smiled and he was aroused again.

At four in the morning they were both wide awake and sated.

“What do I need you for?” John asked.

“What?”

“Yes... what.”

The young woman twisted her skinny, naked body and groaned, stretching like a satisfied house cat. She sat up in half-lotus and gave her professor a meaningful look.

“Natasha Bien.”

“Who?”

“My best friend in high school. Her boyfriend, this mechanic called Stitch, was banging her mother when Tasha was at school. One day she came home early and saw them on her father’s workshop cot out back. She saw ’em through a window. They were going at it like porn stars.”

“And?”

“She was crazy mad yelling about Stitch and then her mom betraying both her and her dad. She wanted to hurt them but didn’t know how.

“I told her that we could ditch school and sneak around to the window again and record them on my phone. After that all we had to do was release it on the school website.”

“You did that?” John asked.

“It took us a couple of weeks to catch ’em again. But when we did, it really fucked up Tasha’s mom and the asshole Stitch. Both of them left town.”

“Together?”

“Uh-uh. Stitch joined the Marines and her mom went to live with her sister. So I thought I could do the same thing for you — instead of my personal history paper.”

“You’re saying that I need you to do homework?”

“You need me to stop them from getting rid of you.”

“Even President Luckfeld can’t stop them from refusing me tenure,” John said. “What can you do?”

“What I did to Tasha’s mom. Me and Tamala and maybe Kerry could find out things about Eubanks and Carmody and then put it out around the school. They’d be too upset to mess with you and then I could jump the fence whenever I needed somebody to be with without them being in love.”

“Without you being in love.”

“You too,” Carlinda chided. “You don’t love me either.”

John experienced an unfamiliar urge.

“What?” she asked in response to his blank stare.

I murdered a man and put him in the wall of a silent cinema, that’s what he wanted to say, to break the silence he’d held since childhood. But swallowing the truth had become second nature; he couldn’t admit guilt even though he wanted to.

“What?” Carlinda asked again.

Cornelius was thinking about his days at Yale as the newly minted John Woman. That was when he started seeing prostitutes. They didn’t care about a name or the history attached to that name. He had very few school acquaintances and not one of them knew one true thing about him.

“John.”

“What?”

“What are you thinking?”

“That I like your proposal to do a personal history outing of my enemies.”

“Enemies?”

“Yes. But I don’t want you to do it. I don’t want you fighting my battle for me.”

“Okay,” she said reluctantly.

“But if you were to take on such a project, and I definitely don’t want you to, but if you took on this project you couldn’t just target Annette and Ira,” John said. “That would be too obvious.”

“What then?”

“You’d do six or seven professors in various departments. Find their hidden truths and then attribute them to another person. For instance if professor number one was a convicted sex offender and professor six was an embezzler then you would switch their crimes giving just enough information that the real malefactor would recognize him or herself.”

“It’d be so close; like a tooth feeling the sing of pain waiting for the full-on toothache,” Carlinda said. “That’s really devious. And, and, and Eubanks and Carmody would just be another two.”

“But I don’t want you to do it.”

“Of course not. I was just saying it because I want you to know that I really like you even if I don’t, you know, love you.”

“It would be fun though,” John admitted. “They’d be too afraid to blame me for putting out the information even though it’d be obvious.”

“I think that I need some more ass-fucking, Professor Woman.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t worry, you can’t.”

10

Later that morning John awoke, alone as usual. It was Saturday. John’s custom on Saturdays was to walk around the campus, especially near the dorms and through Deck Rec, to be among the students observing how they interacted. He liked to note their clothes and slight changes in language.

But that Saturday he was inclined to go into the little town annexed to the university — Parsonsville.

Before NUSW opened its doors, Parsonsville was populated by lettuce farmers who numbered fewer than two hundred families. The main street used to sport a general store, a diner, and Leonard’s Hardware Store, which sold tools, work clothes and tractor parts. The original residents were now relics in their own town. Since the influx of disposable cash Parsonsville had ballooned to a population of nine thousand permanent residents and half again that many students, faculty, and staff when school was in session. There were fancy restaurants and coffee shops, a modern movie theater with four screens, clothing stores and even a hotel — the Stafford Arms. Lettuce farms surrounded the school and town — like old castles on the outskirts of so many modern European cities. It was hot that morning so John wore a blue-and-red Hawaiian shirt and white trousers. The university crowd was still asleep so John found himself among farmers driving their pickups and walking into and out of the twenty-four-hour drugstore that sold everything from aspirin to cigarettes, fresh produce to bicycles.

At the corner of Prospect and Main he saw a small leather notebook that had been tossed into a bright orange public trash can. The black-bound journal had maybe fifty or so sheets of unlined paper, each of which had been scrawled over in mostly blue ink forged into letters that reminded John of tiny, frantic dancers making their way across the pages. Each sheet was written upon top to bottom, edge to edge, back and front. There were no paragraph breaks, dates or even spaces between sections of thought.

John sat on the university bus stop bench, reading, wondering how the diary found its way into the trash. It looked pretty old. The pages had been white but the edges were turning yellow beneath armies of bright blue and blue-black letters. It was mostly a litany of complaints — people who had crossed the diarist and situations that betrayed him (John was sure the memoirist was male).

The writer had taken his compulsive obsessions out on the pages of this book. Now someone had thrown it away. Maybe he did it himself as a kind of exorcism.

John thought that the man in the suit was probably Earl Vashon, the resident poet in the creative writing department. Earl always wore suits and usually had his nose in a book. He’d won a Pulitzer decades ago. Earl was from Mississippi like Herman and also like Herman he spoke in a cultured accent that didn’t exist anywhere but in him.

A big turquoise-colored bus trundled up to the stop and opened its door.

“You gettin’ in?” the old white bus driver said after five seconds had passed.

John looked up from the journal and shook his head.

“Bastard!” the driver shouted.

The door closed and the bus rolled off.

John walked across the street to the air-conditioned coffee shop, ordered a medium latte with two extra shots of espresso, sat down at a window table and continued to read.

He christened the diarist Brother of George (BOG) studying every word, phrase, idea and grievance BOG had to offer. Imagining he lived millennia in the future, John scrutinized his subject as if it was the memoir from a representative of an extinct ancestral branch of what humans had evolved into. From his lofty point of view John imagined that BOG was culturally insane but through that insanity might be uncovered intellectual and linguistic precursors of his highly advanced species.

For the next week John spent every spare moment reading, notating, and considering BOG’s journal. He wrote to Prosperity about his thoughts but shared them with no one else. He lectured, maintained office hours, made love (that was not love) to Carlinda, and effectively ignored the camel-colored letter, the discovery of Chapman Lorraine’s body and the paper he needed to deliver to the history department review committee.

On the morning of the following Saturday John awoke with the understanding of what his paper was to be. At the corner of Prospect and Main in Parsonsville he sifted through the orange trash can finding a set of white plastic dinnerware utensils, wrapped in a white paper napkin, a broken set of fancy headphones, and a list of some sort. These treasures he took over to the coffee shop for study.

The list was jotted down on a small sheet of lined notepaper, written in fountain pen blue-black ink that blobbed up now and then. Iron Man, Mandarin, Unicorn, Jack Frost, Sunturion and Stratosfire, the Stark... There were sixty-three entries on the paper front and back. It took John a while to realize that this was a list of comic book characters. It wasn’t until three days later he figured out that all these names were fictionally related to the first name on the list — Iron Man.

There were ecological and economic issues bound up with the slightly stained napkin wrapped around the plastic fork, knife and spoon. The broken set of headphones (made in China) presented a more advanced interpretation of the same issues.

Monday afternoon after the second Saturday at the trash bin, John drove to Spark City, not to see Senta but to buy an old traveling trunk at the used furniture store on the opposite side of town from the motel and bar.

That evening John placed BOG’s diary in a corner of the trunk. By Friday the comic book characters list, disposable dinnerware set and headphones were nestled next to what he called the First Find.

Every Saturday for the next few months John made his way in the early hours of the morning to the orange real-time capsule where he uncovered a trove of data-laden material which would become the reconfigured history of today.

He wrote to Prosperity that his discoveries were both exotic and pedestrian, the two main requirements for reconstituted history, like dinosaur footprints in stone-hardened mud or some obscure measuring tool from an ancient Egyptian architect.

There were nineteen installments in the Containment Report, the name which John ascribed to the traveling trunk. There was a cake, still inside its pink baker’s box, that read HAPPY BIRTHDAY SADIE in hardened pink sugar letters. The cake was frosted in thick white icing. No candles but there was a red sugary drawing of a clown hovering above the pink words. One corner of the cake had been slightly crushed in but other than that it was in perfect condition. There was a monogrammed light blue handkerchief stiffened with a goodly quantity of dried blood; the monogram was AKI and the blood still damp when John retrieved it. An envelope that had been mailed, read and discarded, all in Parsonsville, contained a letter from a lover who could not keep up the lie any longer. The letter was written to someone named JD and was signed Lynn. There were three shopping lists, one balled-up photograph from a pornographic magazine, a broken cell phone, a used condom, a wallet that at first seemed empty but, upon closer examination, had a secret compartment containing a snapshot of a face contorted by fright. There was a receipt from the twenty-four-hour drugstore that listed twenty-one items purchased by a shopper at a register manned by Andrew H and a nearly full pack of Camel cigarettes.

Finally there was a small black velvet sack containing a jury-rigged syringe made from a rubber-bulbed eyedropper and a hypodermic needle, a small plastic bag of white powder, a real silver spoon, four cotton balls and a box of wooden matches.

Every night, when he was alone, John studied his finds. He had a student in the IT department copy the contents of the journal and letter into a program that separated out the words as symbols and numbered them. There were one hundred sixty-three thousand two hundred forty-one words crammed into BOG’s diary.

Over the next four months John studied the materials and annotated his finds with sparing use of public records or the Internet. He interpreted the data and gave it meaning primarily by using the skills that any historians or anthropologists would have at their disposal.

“I want to tell you some things,” Carlinda said to John on the Monday after his final foray into the downtown public trash receptacle.

Drinking port at his downstairs table, they had not yet kissed or even touched.

“Talk,” John said

“Not like this.”

“Like what then?”

“Naked in the bed,” she said, “with me on top of you and you inside me.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you upstairs.”

It was difficult at first but they were finally able to achieve the position Carlinda required. She was breathing deeply and he felt distracted — the Containment Report was sitting on the window ledge with two padlocks keeping it secure.

“Arnold only knows how to make love one way,” she said.

John could feel his heart beating.

“You’re getting harder,” she told him.

“Uh,” John replied.

“He can only do missionary or he goes limp and if I talk while we’re doing it he loses concentration. He’s got a big one but it doesn’t get hard like yours is right now.”

“I don’t know what to say,” John muttered.

“The reason I like you is that your dick talks for you. I never knew it before but I like that in a man.”

“I thought you had other lovers.”

“I never went all the way with them because Arnold would find out and come back into my life.

“Last Wednesday I told him that if he wanted sex he’d have to let me chain him down to the bed. I used handcuffs from the new sex shop in town to shackle his wrists and ankles to the metal frame under his mattress.”

“What did you do then?” John asked shifting his position slightly.

“Stay still, Professor. I just want to feel it without you moving around.”

“What did you do then?” he asked again.

“I tortured him with pleasure until he could do it the way I wanted. He complained that the cuffs were too tight so I made them tighter. He said he couldn’t do it but when I got on top of him he could...” At that moment Carlinda began to shudder and moan. When John moved with her she slapped him. He stopped moving and she continued with her orgasm.

When she was finished she said, “I told him that any other night we could do what he wanted but on Wednesdays he had to let me have my way.”

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing.”

In the morning, alone again, John took digital photographs of the contents of his Containment Report trunk. These he e-mailed to Talia Friendly, his IT specialist. She would create the slide shows he wanted.

That afternoon he drove out to the Spark City Bar, nursed a club soda until 7:45 then went over to see Senta.

When she opened the door he walked past her into the room and sat on the bed.

“Do you have to go to the toilet?” she asked.

“No. I went in the bar before I came over.”

“Do you want to take off your clothes?”

“Not now, maybe later.”

Senta dragged a pine chair from the table over to the bed and sat down facing her john, John.

“What’s wrong, baby?”

“Nothing,” he said, gazing at the floor.

The dirty pink carpet was wall-to-wall and had probably been red at one time. He hadn’t remembered the rug. This simple fact disturbed him. He was an observer. He should know everything about every place he’d been.

Reaching over, Senta extricated his left hand from the right.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

He shook his head.

She smiled and asked, “Are you breaking up with me?”

In unison they brought all four of their hands together.

“I have sex with you because I want to,” he said.

“Well duh.”

“No, Senta, you don’t understand. I have sex with you because I want to but I come here because I need, I need you.”

“You need to have sex.”

“No,” John said.

“You’re hurting me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, letting go.

“What are you telling me, John?”

“I get pretty drunk with you sometimes right?”

“Yeah. We both drink too much. But I like it with you because you talk about things I never thought of before.”

“And I like you because you’re always here in this room when I come calling.” Senta smiled and then grinned.

“What?” John asked.

“When I was a little girl me and my sister would stay with my grandmother for the summers. She had a cabin on Lake Spofford up in New Hampshire. There was a picture of granddad on the mantel above the fireplace. He died before we were born so grandma’d tell us stories about him. She used to say about when he’d come calling. That’s what they called dating back then. Do you think you’re dating me?”

“I love you, Senta.”

She frowned and he took her hands again.

“I’m powerless,” he said. “I can’t ask you for anything but this room. It’s the only place where I don’t feel like I’m manipulating the world around me: here and when I’m doing my work.”

“Are you drunk?” Senta asked.

“No. I haven’t had a drink in a month or more.”

“Why are you saying all this to me?”

“Wednesday after next I’m supposed to deliver a paper for my department. My future at the university depends on how they respond to it.”

“You’re ready though, right?”

“I am. But they won’t understand.”

“Why not give them what they will understand?”

“It’s just not in my nature,” John said, recognizing the truth in his words.

“Will you lose your job?”

“I’ve already lost it.”

“And what does that have to do with me?”

“You are the only person I can tell,” he said, “the only one I know who I feel will be there. The rest of my life is like a bottomless pit that everything is dumped into but it never fills up.”

“That’s how I feel,” Senta said, “like one’a those ants we studied in science class, the one that hangs from the top of a tunnel while the other ants pour honey down her throat. Her bottom blows up to twelve times normal size filled with honey. Then in the winter the other ants touch a place on her throat and she vomits up food for them.”

“Yeah,” John agreed. “We studied those ants in school back in Brooklyn.”

“You could write a paper about us, John. The Professor and the Prostitute.”

“Why don’t you light up a cigarette?” John suggested.

“We haven’t had sex yet.”

“I know.”

Senta poured them both drinks while balancing a cigarette between her lips. They sat quietly, him at the edge of the bed, Senta on the hard chair.

“What will you do if you lose your job?” she asked at last.

“I don’t know.”

“Is there any way you can save it?”

“Maybe. The president likes me. Maybe I could get him to do something.”

“Ask him then.”

“The whole thing is a game anyway, like in Vegas, you know? There have to be stakes. If you lose, you lose. If you don’t feel the loss then you never took a chance.”

“You don’t care if they fire you?”

“I care. But there are many more important things on my mind.”

“Like what?”

“I did something... something wrong.”

“Against the law?”

He nodded.

“Are they after you?” she asked.

“Like Monday up Tuesday’s butt.” It was something his mother used to say.

“Could you go to jail?”

“Definitely.”

“So why do you even care about this paper?”

“Because you have to take a risk. You have to take the steps laid out in front of you because that is your destiny.”

Senta blinked and frowned.

“Will you spend the night here with me?” she asked.

“I will.”

“We don’t have to have sex if you don’t want.”

“Yeah. I know.”

11

Eight days later, at 11:49 on Wednesday morning, John Woman and Talia Friendly were setting up for the presentation in the main hall of Deck Rec. She had given him a Bluetooth earbud to hear her questions from up in the control room.

“You can either nod or shake your head or you can just call out to me over the house mike. I mean this is still a little informal.”

The stage was set so that there were three screen-like walls opened up behind an old oak lectern and a high table, upon which sat the Containment Report trunk.

The mostly empty auditorium was fitted to seat 999 souls.

“Remember that the upper part of the center screen should be running as they come in,” John said. “Then you just follow the cues we talked about, the lower part and the other two.”

“You got it, Professor,” Talia agreed. She was a blocky young woman with crew-cut black hair. “All you have to do is point at a screen and it’ll go. I got it all programmed perfect.”

At a quarter past twelve John was standing in front of the table facing the hall, his hands behind his back, a pose he’d adopted as a boy from a painting of Napoleon in exile. He believed that the deposed dictator struck this pose to overcome humiliation and fear so used it whenever he wanted to master his own anxieties.

The audience trickled in. Dean James came down the main aisle accompanied by President Luckfeld. They both wore dark suits and ties, hard leather shoes and short-brimmed Panama straw hats. They marched to the front of the middle section and sat together.

John was considering going down to say hello when a noisy group of students entered the auditorium. It was his class, almost all of them. Maybe, he thought, they wanted to see how his crazy ideas held up under the scrutiny of the other professors.

But then he saw Carlinda. He knew that she wouldn’t be part of any kind of hazing. On her right was Tamala Marman wearing bright red. To Carlinda’s left was a solid-looking young white man with wiry black hair and dark-framed glasses. He was holding her hand but when she saw John she pulled the hand free to scratch her nose. This move convinced John that he was looking at Arnold Ott, the young man for whom Carlinda professed love but not passion.

“Now, Professor?” Talia Friendly asked in his ear.

He nodded and then turned to look at the top half of the center screen. There the words She’s at it appeared — black letters against a yellowy background. John counted to ten and the words again. Had her replaced the first three words.

“You cue the puzzle too,” he said aloud.

In an upright rectangle of light, below the slow progression of words, tiny pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle flitted on and off at different places in the frame. Now and again, every ten seconds or so, a random piece would stick.

The screen reminded John of the silent films shown at the Arbuckle Cinema House.

There is no sound, Herman Jones often said. It is like trying to glean meaning from a partial experience, through faulty memory. Like those books you read me, son — not everything, but enough if you can suspend disbelief.

When John turned back to the auditorium more than a hundred people had entered. Eubanks and Carmody were there and most of the rest of the faculty from the history department. In the far left corner of the last aisle sat the gardener Ron Underhill.

The auditorium was filling up quickly.

John wondered why Ron would come to such an event, indeed, how had he found out about it? Meanwhile dozens more sauntered in. There were greetings and kisses, smiles and quite a few serious, even worried, looks.

John was elated. Behind him Brother of George’s journal was being parceled out three words at a time. Below that an as yet indefinable picture was taking form. There are moments in life, Herman Jones once said from his long-tenanted deathbed, when we can see clearly that every day, every second before now has brought us to a moment of grace. I feel it sometimes when you are reading to me, Cornelius. I hear your voice and know that we are together on this road.

Thinking about Herman’s lessons John felt his father standing next to him in front of nearly a thousand people waiting to see him rise or fall like a gaudy paper kite in an autumn wind.

John took seven long, slow breaths then spoke out loud and clear, his voice magnified by the tiny microphone attached to his shirt.

“The words appearing on the screen behind me were retrieved from a trash can. Some man, I call him Brother of George, wrote down a big piece of his life and then threw it away, or maybe he lost it. It could have dropped out of his pocket and a street sweeper gathered it up and tossed it — there for me to find and now for you to witness, three words at a time.

“The frame of light below the words is using specialized software that is a self-solving ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of a photograph that will be revealed in time. The trunk on the table is my Containment Report, the receptacle binding the data I’ve gathered for this Deconstructionist Historical Event.

“I was asked to present a paper detailing the approach to a branch of historical study that includes itself while excluding the potential of, the possibility of, absolute truth. It came to me one Saturday morning some months ago that asking for a paper in this day and age is tantamount to asking Charles Dickens to chisel a novel on stone. Language, in the form of a written paper, is the transmutation of the material into the speculative. And though this method is still in use the technological and cultural zeitgeist has evolved far beyond its limitations.

“The transmutation of the material into the speculative,” John repeated. “History is, first and foremost, a material thing or, from another point of view, a concatenation of material events that are interpreted through the human fallacy of time. And therefore, in order to present a cogent argument, I find that I must include the material bases of my so-called paper.”

John felt a cold drop of sweat trickle down his back. He took off his black jacket and placed it on the table. Then, slowly and deliberately, he used his keys on the padlocks and threw open the lid. He looked out at the packed house noting that there were people standing at the back of the hall. Everyone was looking at him as if he were a magician about to conjure a white tiger out of an old traveling case.

“I spent sixteen Saturdays visiting a real-time time capsule, what you would call a public trash can, and retrieved the base materials from which a glimmer of the notion of history might be garnered.

“There was Brother of George’s lost memoir and the magazine photograph which is being re-membered on the screen below.” He took the leather-bound journal and a balled-up magazine page from the chest, held them out for verification and then placed them on the table. “But this is only the beginning of our history-rich material discoveries...”

John then produced the comic book character list. When he gestured at the screen to his right the names (starting with Iron Man) began appearing one at a time at six-second intervals — slowly reconstructing the list.

“... This neo-mythology,” John said of the list, “may one day be used to study the people of this age by creating a window into this time as Gilgamesh, Hercules and Jesus allow us to understand the races and events of history — superheroes of a bygone era.”

He showed them the plastic cutlery set discussing briefly petroleum, derived from prehistoric plant matter, the napkin made from contemporary plants.

Indicating the broken headphones he talked about mass fabrication and how this process of making things in return creates the people as they practice the repetitive act of fabrication.

“Human history is the labor of men,” he said, “and women.”

After this pronouncement John turned to look at the progress of BOG’s diary. The words Nigers spicks and were on the screen. John smiled at the synchronicity and waited for chinks all over to appear before he continued.

He gestured at the other screen, and the short letter from Lynn to JD appeared in totality. John waited for the audience to read the beautifully rendered handwriting while BOG spewed overhead.

“They’re fucking,” an audience member said somewhat above a whisper.

The jigsaw puzzle was now allowing images from the pornographic magazine to become evident.

“Yes,” John agreed. “While Lynn talks to JD about lost or impossible love the recovered photograph represents desire.”

He presented the birthday cake, drugstore receipt and blood-crusted handkerchief as proofs of event... “without explanation or understanding.” The images of these items disrupted the comic book list for a few moments and then let the listing continue.

The talk continued and John produced items that, one after the other, appeared on the screen to his left.

“... was this nearly full package of Camels the attempt of some poor soul to stop that dangerous habit or was it a mistake? Maybe someone controlled their smoking by buying a pack, smoking one or two, and then throwing the rest away...”

John had been speaking nearly an hour. That put BOG’s diary at about word ten thousand. Below BOG’s rant the partially formed image was of a woman in a nun’s black habit. The floor-length hem had been raised above her buttocks; she was praying to a priest while a man penetrated her rectum from behind and others waited in line for their turn.

John raised the broken cell phone up and the auditorium’s speakers began to replay a recording of a man’s voice, Hey, Mo-man, I hope everything’s goin’ good with you and Felicia. I’m working on that project and I need electronic pictures of you, Felicia, the kids and grandkids. Hopefully Regine and I can see you guys in Seattle next month. The city is wonderful in the summer. Do you have state-issued ID? If so we can go up to British Columbia in Canada. It’s about two hours from Seattle. Talk to you soon...

“Using the tools available to me in faculty housing,” John said. “I was able to fix this broken, discarded cell phone. The data was more or less destroyed but I managed to cull this snippet from voice mail.

“A voice from out of the well of time speaking to us as though we coexisted. We’re given a few names and a nickname, a city and the possibility of travel to another. We know that they dealt in electronic data and felt some kinship over a distance that curtailed physical intimacy.

“This is history at its best. It’s not Abraham Lincoln’s brain suffering the indignity of John Booth’s bullet. It’s not Attila the Hun raping ten thousand subjugated women. This is the fragmentary grist of life; what we are all made of and at the same time indicative of the vast ocean of knowledge that is mostly unavailable, or only partially so. We pretend to know the story of humanity because we have agreed upon the information and people that are most important. But we cannot, with any degree of accuracy, define a single day in the life of a comatose quadriplegic in an isolation ward under twenty-four-hour audio and visual surveillance. There are just too many variables. The symphony of a single trash can gives us more than any computer could contain.”

John gazed out over the hall and was gratified to see that very few had left. The spectators were reading the angry laments of BOG, watching to see what new elements of the photograph would be exposed.

“The last two elements of my presentation bring a new wrinkle into the scope of our studies and ourselves,” he said. “Here we have a simple brown leather wallet that was discarded. It is empty. No money, credit cards, receipts or family photographs. Maybe it’s the castoff of some pickpocket or mugger. Maybe the previous owner bought a new wallet from the twenty-four-hour drugstore and moved the contents from the old to the new. Maybe... But on closer examination I found that there was a flap on the mass-produced wallet sewn shut by hand, not machine. When I cut the thread this photograph was revealed.”

John held up a tiny snapshot and instantly the blown-up image was displayed on the screen to his left. It was the portrait of a young man. He was grimacing through a bloody lip and a missing tooth. The subject was so frightened that the photograph evoked the depravity of the photographer.

One woman in the audience gasped. Murmuring could be heard among the spectators.

“An odd keepsake,” John noted. “And a find for any historian.”

The murmuring continued.

“Then we have this,” John said taking the black velvet sack from his Containment Report trunk. As he held up the little bag a photograph of its contents appeared on the screen to his right.

“All you would need,” John said, “for a night of opioid debauchery. A junkie’s fix thrown away. Maybe some concerned friend took it from him, or her. Maybe the police were closing in. Or possibly, as we speculated about the cigarettes, this was a last-ditch attempt to kick the habit and go cold turkey.

“But we don’t know any of that,” he said. “It’s not you and me here in this auditorium in December two thousand thirteen. No. We are another species evolved from humanity by technologic and biological means fifty thousand years in the future. We have ocelot genes in our eyes and elephant folds in our brains. Our socialized souls have been colonized by bee and termite DNA and our emotional hearts have been conditioned by the best fiction ever written. Every one of us has the same last name and the stars have replaced our monetary system. A poor man owns only a few suns while the wealthy count their hoards in galaxies. We don’t even know what a turkey was. Drugs are manufactured by synthetic, surgically implanted organs. Our condition has surpassed the archaic definition of life with physical hearts replaced by plasma cells and micro-robots, instead of blood, replenishing and evolving us.

“And when we look back on these items — shopping receipts, traces of blood and memoirs — we find that they are priceless touchstones to our onetime humanity. Abraham Lincoln is of no more importance than Andrew H the checkout clerk at the twenty-four-hour drugstore. They, Abraham and Andrew, were just two apes who used primitive sounds to communicate rather than the subtle manipulation of the ten thousand strands of gravity.”

John stopped there. He’d taken the sense of history beyond its accepted border. Six months later he would look back on this talk as intellectual flummery.

The faces in the auditorium were angry, rejuvenated and bemused.

A man who makes his stand, Herman had said of heroes past, is a man ready to dig his own grave.

“Questions?” John said in an upbeat tone.

He luxuriated as the seconds passed.

Then:

“Shouldn’t you have turned the drugs and photograph and maybe even the bloody bandanna over to the police?” The questioner was Arnold Ott.

“I’m a scholar not a policeman,” John said. “I don’t know what this white powder is. Blood alone does not indict and photographs without a pedigree mean nothing. I am simply a conduit for the partial knowledge allowed mortal human beings. In other words — a historian.”

“But,” a female voice chimed in, “isn’t it dangerous to get that close to your subject?”

“Exactly!” Professor Woman ejaculated. “The most important lesson to learn is that we are dealing with life in all of its beauty and peril. Our history is material but it is also subjective, experiential. It can be as dangerous as a blow to the head.”

“You’re saying that Abraham Lincoln, the greatest U.S. president, is no more important than a late-night checkout clerk in a small-town drugstore?” Gregory Tracer asked.

“Yes,” John answered.

“That’s ridiculous,” the Civil War professor said. He then intoned, “Great men made this world.”

“No,” John replied. “Unknowable historical fate created us.”

“That’s crazy!” Ira Carmody shouted. “The world would have been a vastly different place without Socrates, Aristotle and Plato.”

“And they themselves would have been different without mothers, fathers and lovers. What about the ancient Greeks? Where would they have been without their tongue? Beyond that where would they have been without their Egyptian forebears?”

The shouting match continued for long minutes. John had one or two allies in the crowd but most of his peers thought him a fraud and a fool. His scholarship was dismissed, his renunciation of the written word ridiculed; his comparison of the great works of history to a public trash can caused the greatest insult.

“That is what you want to do to our lifework,” Annette Eubanks said, “discard it in the garbage with maggots and refuse.”

John smiled at his tormentors, returning time after time to his theme of the impossibility of the project on which they had all embarked.

“History is the primary edifice of the universe,” he said in an attempt at a summation. “We are bit players in events that surpass the religions, sciences and philosophies of the world. There is nothing too small or insignificant to have a place in this tapestry. There is nothing that can exist without the collaboration of everyone and everything else. It is ecstasy beyond our imagination and truth exceeding our ability to comprehend or express.”

Soon after that Dean James ascended the stage and dismissed the audience. He wouldn’t allow any more questions or anyone to approach John, who now sat on the table between his jacket and the Containment Report trunk.

He was exhausted and exhilarated by the presentation, feeling that he’d actually accomplished something. He sat on the table looking at the polished pine stage unaware that the room had been emptied and the doors locked.

John went over the words spoken and questions asked. He was aware that he’d soon be fired, that maybe he’d be arrested and dragged off to prison, but none of that mattered. He stood his ground before bellowing barbarians ready to end him. That was worth a reversal or two.

“That was a pretty good talk,” a man said.

John raised his head. Ron Underhill was the last person he expected to see.

“You liked it?” the professor asked the gardener.

“Very much. It made me think about things. You know most people believe that they understand their world but really it’s not true. I mean, we know things that we do with our hands pretty much. But what happened in some other country or century or even behind a closed door while we slept, well, it’s all just speculation now isn’t it?”

“Have you always been a gardener, Mr. Underhill?”

“I told you before,” he said gently. “I used to work in an office. I started out shuffling papers and then it was computer files. One day my position became what they called redundant and I was unemployed. But that was okay because gardening was always my first love.”

“For me it’s history,” John said. “It’s like some mythological beast that preys on the souls as well as the flesh of men. I follow it through the battlefields of our defeats knowing that one day it will turn on me.”

There was concern in the older man’s mild features. In ways Ron Underhill reminded John of France Bickman.

“I only had one question, Professor,” Ron said. “I didn’t ask because I’m only just a gardener and this seemed like some kind of official thing.”

“What’s that, Ron?”

“Why do you bother trying to educate these people?”

“What do you mean?”

The gardener hopped up on the table next to the teacher. John looked up and out at the empty hall.

“You been studying this idea of yours for a very long time haven’t you?”

“Nearly my entire life.”

“But the people out there.” Ron gestured at the empty pews. “They haven’t spent two hours thinking about any of it. They came here to advance their careers not get down on their knees in the dirt and smell the droppings they grew from. They don’t want to hear about blood and hatred, about the junkyard that’s their history.”

“You did listen” John said.

“Talk like that takes a whole lifetime to understand, Professor. These people here are apprentices, tyros who can’t imagine what the war they’re marching to will be.”

“You’re well read, Ron.”

“I only got one room and no TV or radio. Once a year I go to a family reunion but other than that my nose is either in the earth or a book.”

“I don’t know why I feel like I have to say something,” John said answering the gardener’s question. “I guess it’s my duty.”

“Duty is any creature’s greatest virtue,” Ron said. “Most people have no idea what it means. They think they do. For them it’s badgering children to get good grades or making piles of money, making sure some dead religious leader’s ideas are made sacrosanct or simply that the world doesn’t change.”

“Maybe you should teach here, Ron.”

“I do, but hardly anybody ever listens.”

12

“I think Arnold knows about us,” Carlinda said later that night.

She’d climbed over the back fence but had to ring the bell because John locked the door.

She was ecstatic over his presentation and told him that she had to make love to him so as not to fall in love.

“What makes you think he knows?” John asked.

“It was the way I was looking at you during the talk. That’s why he asked you that question. And later on, at the cafeteria, he said that we could do whatever I wanted in bed. I forgot it was Wednesday. All I wanted to do was get away so I could see you.”

“And he got suspicious?”

“He came to my room one night last week when Tamala was in Phoenix with her parents. He knew I wasn’t there and when he asked me where I spent the night I just didn’t answer. I don’t want to lie to him.”

“Huh,” John grunted. “Well if he wants me he’ll have to get on line.”

“I should probably stop seeing you.”

“Probably.”

“But I don’t want to.”

“Why not? You say you love Arnold.”

“But I need you... right now anyway.”

Carlinda was gone when John woke up. That was 9:47 by the digital clock on the wall shelf next to his bed. He lay there feeling a little hungover but he hadn’t had a drink. The previous day’s talk was the best he could do and it certainly wasn’t enough. The history department would never accept his ideas.

It was time to move on.

There was another camel-colored envelope carelessly tossed on the kitchen table.

John read the letter twice. He was struck by the notion that there might be just one important moment in any human’s life. This concept was somehow reassuring.

“Yes, Ms. Marman?” John said calling on Tamala at the Thursday afternoon seminar.

“Do you actually believe that a president and, let’s say... a carpenter have the same level of importance in history?”

“The Christians certainly do,” John replied. “But really... how can any historic figure stand up under the weight and the scrutiny of centuries? Once this individual becomes a legend what possibility do we have to truly understand him?”

“Or her,” Star Limner corrected.

“Or her,” John agreed. “We’re like crows attracted to shiny objects strewn in the desert. We collect these baubles and stand guard over them. One day we die and the trove is lost, possibly to be found again, totally transformed in the eyes of a new being.”

Seventy-five minutes passed with John answering and not answering students’ questions.

Finally he said, “What you must understand is that the most important history is your own. Right now, here in this pie-shaped classroom, you are building yourselves, tearing down walls and adding halls, digging into the firmament seeking foundation. And at any moment you may pack up and move on.”

After class John went to the back row of seats and turned one of the desk chairs to face the blue-tinted desert. He felt that he had reached a barrier and was about to pass through. It was time to leave the university, to escape the not-love of multiracial Carlinda, and the persona of John Woman. He wondered if the brown envelopes would find him in LA.

“Professor?”

It was Johann Malik.

“Mr. Malik. Office hours are from—”

“Four to six,” the dark-skinned, military-clad student said with a forced smile. “I know. I just came to see if you were okay. I mean, I was waiting for you at the door but you didn’t come out.”

“Yeah,” John said. “I have a lot on my mind.”

“I finally get it,” Johann said.

“What?”

“This deconstructing stuff. You’re takin’ away their claim to history and putting it back in the hands of the people. You’re tellin’ them that Lincoln was no better, no more important than a Chinese ditchdigger. They want to put their face on everything that ever happened but you stick a pin in that. That’s revolutionary shit.”

The young Race Man’s compliments, John realized, were probably true. His attempt at the demolition of the sanctity of historical interpretation would surely disrupt the hierarchy imposed by bankers, so-called scholars and political parties. It wasn’t John’s intention to politicize his teachings but, just as history cannot be known in its totality, neither can any individuals fully define their roles.

“Thank you, Mr. Malik. That means a lot.”

“You wanna go grab a beer?” Johann offered.

“Another time, my friend. Right now I have a few things to think about.”

Malik held out a hand and John shook it. Then the young activist walked away, leaving the phantom professor to plan his escape.

Departing Prometheus Hall, maybe for the last time, John wandered around the desert campus following a path of habit rather than intention. He ended up at the real-time time capsule at the main intersection in Parsonsville. The trash can had been emptied. The streets were crowded with university people and others.

John leaned against a lamppost at the corner, considering his escape. He needed a mode of transportation that could not be traced and the alternative identity papers stored away. What kind of work could he do now that he’d lost his name and education?

Maybe he’d become a gardener.

Gazing without focusing through the window of the upscale coffee shop across the street John wondered how many people around him were living hidden lives. They could be murderers or thieves, terrorists or the homosexual husbands of suburban trophy wives, Christians without faith or racists working for public welfare...

There was a copper-haired woman wearing black, standing at the delivery counter inside the coffee shop. Even though she was turned away she moved her head in a way that caught John’s attention. He dismissed the image and thought about bigamists and so-called illegals, of women who slept with their best friends’ sons and husbands — maybe with their daughters too.

Maybe keeping secrets is our most human quality, John mused.

The woman with the copper hair moved again, this time taking her paper cup to the condiment shelf. She dumped sugar in her coffee from a glass container: one, two, three shakes, then she stirred.

One, two, three.

Secrets abound.

One, two, three.

Shocked to awareness John focused on the woman. He could see only her profile but... it could have been.

Just then the woman started moving quickly toward the back of the coffee shop. John took a step into the street and a loud car horn made him jump. Cars were coming fast from up and down the four-lane artery. He braved the traffic while horns honked and brakes screeched.

“Asshole!” a man shouted.

“What’s wrong with you?” a woman yelled.

By then he was going through the glass door of the coffee shop.

He didn’t see the metallic-tinted hair. Toward the back there were two restrooms — one for men, another for women.

A young, milk-chocolate-brown woman with a halo of curly, naturally red-brown hair stood at the women’s door. She was large but not fat, young but not a child. She noticed John looking.

“What?” she asked.

“Um, uh, nothing,” he said.

“Then why you lookin’?”

“My friend’s in there. I’m, um, waiting for her.”

The woman squinted and pushed her face forward.

“You’re that professor right?” she asked. “The one that used garbage to make a history lecture?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool.”

When the door to the toilet came open two tall and skinny blond girls came out.

John moved past them into the toilet and saw that it was empty.

“Hey, man, that’s the woman’s restroom,” the young black woman said.

John went past the men’s room through a door that opened onto the coffee shop’s parking lot.

There were seven cars parked out there.

“Mom?” John shouted. “Mom, it’s me, CC!”

But Lucia Napoli-Jones was nowhere to be seen.

At 7:57 that evening John approached room twenty-six of the Spark City Motel. She opened the door before he could knock.

“What’s wrong?” Senta Ray asked. She wore a simple and markedly unsexy maroon cotton dress that buttoned up the front and came down below her knees.

“Can I come in?”

“What is it, John?” she asked as he slumped into the chair at the little utility table. “Lou called me at my other job.”

“What other job?”

“I’m a sorter at the big Post Office facility outside Delby.”

“You work for the Post Office?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

“Health insurance.”

Grinning, John sat up straight.

“Join me,” he said, gesturing at the other chair.

“If I do are you going to talk to me?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

Senta smirked and sat down.

“You’re a piece of work aren’t you, John Woman?”

“How many days a week do you work at the Post Office?”

“I do three twelve-hour shifts a week,” she said. “You told Lou it was an emergency.”

“I told him that it was important,” John corrected her.

“But he said there was a crazy look in your eye. He didn’t want me to come.”

“He thought I was going to hurt you?”

“I’m supposed to call him ten minutes after you get here or he’s gonna bust in with Big Ben.”

“Who’s that?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

“Then you better call.”

Senta entered digits on her bright red cell phone while John watched. She reminded him of one of those few screen actresses who were pretty when they were young but beautiful in middle age. Her posture was easy, provocative and wholly unconscious.

“Lou?” she said. “Yeah. Yeah. No he’s okay. Something happened and he feels like I’m the only one he can talk to. No, baby, it’s just a onetime thing. Okay. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She disengaged the phone, put it into a blue purse on the bed then looked expectantly at her john.

“You and Lou have a thing?” he asked.

“Would that make you jealous?”

“I think I saw my mother today.”

“So?” Senta asked.

“My mother abandoned me and my father when I was a kid. She left town with this gangster guy when he got in trouble.”

“Where did you see her?”

“In Parsonsville.”

“What did she say?”

“There was traffic,” John explained. “I was across the street and by the time I got there she was gone.”

“Didn’t she see you?”

“Her head was turned away.”

Senta smiled.

“What?” John said.

“You’re still having the same troubles you did the last time you were here?”

“It was her. I know it was.”

“Okay,” Senta said, relenting only slightly. “Let’s say it was her. That sounds like a good thing. If she lives in the area you’ll probably see her again and you could look her up too.”

“My history talk didn’t go well,” John said looking down. “And, like I said before, I got bigger problems.”

“Legal problems?”

“Felony issues.”

“Then you need to get away from Arizona. You want me to give you a ride?”

“No thanks,” John said. “I would have already been gone if I hadn’t seen her head move and the way she put sugar in her coffee.”

“It could have been anybody,” Senta reasoned. “Maybe you just needed to see your mother right then.”

These words galvanized John. Suddenly he was certain. He looked up at Senta. Her eyes were hazel and she wore more makeup for the Post Office than she did as a prostitute.

“Your hair is different,” he said.

“I braid it when I’m at work.”

“Do you really have orgasms with me?”

“Sometimes.”

“Really?”

She nodded and smiled. “What are you going to do, John?”

“Sometimes...” he said. “Sometimes when I think about being with you I remember talking but I can’t recall what we said.”

“You get pretty drunk,” she agreed.

“What do we talk about?”

“You go on and on about what you call the idea of history.”

“Collingwood.”

“What?”

“Is that all?”

“Mostly.” Senta smiled. “Are we going to take off our clothes?”

“Retirement and health insurance, huh?”

“Yeah. A girl’s got to look out for her future.”

“Boys too.”

The next day, instead of taking a Greyhound to Los Angeles, John went to see Colin Luckfeld.

“Do you have an appointment?” tan, rattlesnake-eyed Bernice Whitman asked. That day the president’s sentry was wearing a big blue dress that would have looked good on her taller, fatter sister.

“I do not,” John stated.

“President Luckfeld is a very busy man.”

“Almost all men,” the professor opined, “even the busiest ones, fritter away most of their allotted hours.”

“Is that the kind of prattle you teach in your classes?”

“Call Colin and tell him I’m here.”

Mrs. Whitman flinched. John was sure that if they were at a cocktail party she would have splashed her martini in his face. She depressed a gray button on the phone and John wondered if some kind of security, maybe Mr. Gustav, would come to remove him.

“Yes?” Colin Luckfeld said over a small speaker.

“Professor Woman is here,” she said. “He doesn’t have an appointment.”

“That’s all right. Send him up.”

Whitman leveled her spiteful eyes at John. She couldn’t bring herself to speak.

“Professor,” President Luckfeld called from the opposite end of his huge office. He was on his feet, headed John’s way. “Wait there. We can meet in my little library.”

John went to sit on one of the facing yellow sofas. A minute later the president lowered onto the opposite couch.

“That was some speech you gave the other day,” Luckfeld said. “I mean I’ve never seen anything like it. Almost everything you said hit home.”

“That may be, Colin, but I don’t think my peers share the sentiment.”

“Oh no they don’t,” Luckfeld agreed energetically. “Eubanks and Carmody were here fifteen minutes after the talk was over. They say that the department voted telephonically to deny you tenure and request you be suspended from your post.”

“Suspended? Why?”

“The main reason they gave was the jigsaw photograph; said that it was irresponsible to show our students pornography. They also pointed out your slipshod scholarship, your contempt for the profession and the deleterious affect you have on students. If I am to believe them only two members of the department did not ask for your immediate ouster.”

“Damn. I knew the presentation was strong but not, not overpowering.”

“You need a drink?” the president offered. “I have a good whiskey.”

“No thanks.”

“Dean James was taken with the journal running through the entire session,” Luckfeld said. “I think for me it was the photograph hidden in a secret fold of the wallet. Annette was enraged by your dismissal of written papers. She said that comment alone should keep you from teaching at any university ever again.”

“How soon do I have to move out of faculty housing?”

The president sat back crossing his left leg over the right. John noticed that he was wearing a navy blue sweat suit. There was a light blue seam running down the outer edges of the arms and legs.

“They can deny tenure but the faculty cannot fire a teacher. They can suggest your removal but the final decision is mine: mine and Willie Pepperdine’s.”

“Why him?”

“Willie is the man next to the president of the board. Remember?”

“Oh. So... I still have my job?”

“Yes. They might be able to remove you from the department,” Luckfeld allowed. “I have to ask our lawyers about that. But appointing you a university professor will make departmental affiliation irrelevent.”

“Wouldn’t that cause a lot of trouble?” John asked. The starting salary for a university professor was more than that of any other member in his department.

“It is a rare thing, John, for a professor of history to end his presentation with postulation on a far-flung future. That’s the kind of scholarship we need. If you can make an even playing field between Abraham Lincoln and some counter clerk named Andrew then you’re my kind of teacher: the greatest example of an egalitarian.”

“So you’d really promote me just like that?”

“It’s already been done.”

“So I’m not out?”

“Not yet. Eubanks and Carmody can cause a lot of trouble. There may come a point when even Willie Pepperdine will decide to cut our losses.”

John smiled, thinking of his plan to disappear only a day before.

“I had an accident a little while ago,” John said.

“Car accident?”

“It was late and I was drunk. There was a coyote on the highway and I ran off the road rather than hit it. He, or she I guess, followed the wreck and came looking for a meal.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No. I climbed out and faced the prairie wolf.”

“What happened?”

“It disappeared.”

President Luckfeld considered a moment. He moved his head about like a photographer imagining his next shot.

“The thing about Lincoln and Andrew H...” Luckfeld leaned forward clasping his hands together. “Nameless individuals make up this world,” he said and then paused, looking into John’s eyes. After a moment or two he continued, “I’m going to tell you something, something that if it got out could hurt me and the people I answer to. Is that all right?”

John nodded. He was holding his breath.

“Carl Bova Tillman,” Colin Luckfeld intoned. “He owned the property around Prometheus Hall. We offered him six point seven five times the value of his property but he refused to sell; made himself an impediment in the Path. Our founder wanted this university and so we tasked a man to poison Tillman. The causes appeared to be natural and he passed peacefully, without pain or fear.

“There’s a wall we have, very far from here, and on that wall there’s a list of our heroes. Carl Tillman is among them. He made the ultimate sacrifice whether he knew it or not.”