John Woman

13

At the beginning of the next semester John was still teaching, a nominal member of the history department. There had been a warrant issued for the arrest of Cornelius Jones in connection with the brutal murder of Chapman Lorraine. Jones was being sought in and around the five boroughs and beyond. Anyone with information was to report to Lieutenant Colette Van Dyne, homicide detective in charge of the investigation.

President Luckfeld had pushed back against Eubanks and her allies saying that pornography was a matter of perspective, that the context of the magazine photo projected was an attempt to validate new and innovative research techniques on the part of Professor Woman.

Eubanks was interviewed by the Parsonsville Investigator, a paper started by graduates of the NUSW School of Journalism. In the interview she claimed that John Woman was a charlatan and a fraud.

John hired a local contract lawyer, Buddy Farr, to sue Eubanks and the history department for defamation of character.

“You do know that I’m a contract lawyer for farmers who live on federal subsidies,” Farr told John. The lawyer was a white octogenarian who was four foot nine and bone thin.

“I don’t expect to win the suit,” John said. “I only want them to feel what they’re doing to me.”

John spent his spare moments wandering the streets of Parsonsville hoping to see his mother. On good days he walked around feeling like a fool, on bad ones he worried that he might be losing his mind.

How can the confluence of so many seminal aspects of a life occur at a single nexus? he asked Posterity in one of his daily writing sessions.

Even with these problems, an emotional calm descended upon John Woman. His life, crazy or not, had a purpose and that was enough.

“There are many ways that we can interpret our world’s story,” he said to the second semester of Introduction to Deconstructionist Historical Devices. “The simpleminded view sees history as a verifiable set of events that occurred, that were somehow recorded and that come to us mostly untarnished and nearly irrefutable.

“Our history, we are often told, is pure objective fact unsullied by the human heart. Richard the Third was a scoundrel and Caligula a man of pure evil. All contemporary historians must do is work out the details by culling from dates, records, contemporaneous events, etcetera. In short, a pig with a good vocabulary and a decent memory could be teaching this seminar.”

That got a few snickers from the room of sixty-eight students. Since the Trash Can Lecture John had gotten requests from students across campus to sit in on his lectures. He had said yes to one and all knowing that would enrage Eubanks.

“But, Professor,” Justin Brown said.

“Yes, Mr. Brown?”

“How can people know anything if they doubt everything?”

John smiled at the handsome, self-assured chemistry major.

“Doubt is what makes us inquisitive, Justin. Doubt about the world we believe in is what brought the philosopher out of his cave. But truth is a slippery fish, easier to observe than it is to catch.”

“But you admit,” Pete Tackie said, “that there’s a real history just as much as there are laws in science.”

“Yes, of course, Mr. Tackie, but you have to remember that even the so-called laws of physics can be overturned. We live by these laws all the while knowing that our understanding is at best partial — and sometimes simply wrong.”

“But how can we do work in any field,” Doris Heckerling, a frost-headed daughter of Minnesota, asked, “if we are constantly questioning what we know and believe?”

“That, Ms. Heckerling, is the purpose of history. What we know, or what we think we know, is always in the present, here and now. But the future, almost contradictorily, is where the past will change. We might for instance learn that Richard the Third was vilified by the landowners of his time because he wanted to empower the peasants. What was evil for the ruling body then becomes heroic for us today. Because of the natural limits of our perceptions we come to understand that history is always changing. This transforms a static study into a dynamic engine of thought and investigation. It is the process of continual reinvestigation itself that defines and ranks our work.” The students, John thought, were looking into themselves. Willie Pepperdine smiled broadly.

“I think that’s enough for today,” the young professor said. “Next Tuesday we’ll have Justin present a ten-minute talk on how the study of a so-called hard science is at odds with the notion of historical investigation. Read some of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions to prepare for the discussion.”

John was walking down the northern stairwell when he turned a corner and came face-to-face with Carlinda and Tamala. The latter was wearing a formfitting full-length dress composed of bright blue and charcoal squares. Carlinda wore a pearl gray taffeta dress the hem of which covered the upper half of her knees.

“Professor,” Carlinda said.

“Miss Elmsford, Ms. Marmon.”

“We have to talk to you,” Tamala said.

“Here?”

“We could go to the rotunda and take a bench,” Carlinda suggested.

Tamala gave Carlinda a hard stare.

“What, Tam?” Carlinda said. “Nobody’s gonna listen.”

“The rotunda then,” Woman agreed. “It will be my pleasure.”

They took a marble bench that was partly hidden behind a large potted fern. The professor sat dead center. The young women perched themselves on either side, their knees listing toward John. Restrained excitement exuded from their faces and fidgety hands.

“So?” John asked.

“We don’t want you to get upset,” Carlinda said. “We haven’t really done anything yet.”

“Anything about what?”

“Pete Tackie is majoring in computer science,” Tamala said. “He’s really very smart even if he’s kind of a jock.”

“Okay.”

Carlinda reached into her big white bag coming out with a dun-colored plastic folder. This she handed to her secret boyfriend.

The first page contained a list of eighteen professors down the left side — eight women and ten men. Three of these were from the history department and the rest ran the gamut of the school. On the right side of the page was a list of felonies, criminal investigations and other improprieties attributed to the teachers. There were acts of drug abuse and smuggling, predatory sex acts and even a case of suspected manslaughter. One professor made extra money by selling weapons of questionable pedigree at gun shows across the southwest. The following pages provided further descriptions of the crimes, redacted trial transcripts and other documents.

For the next half hour John read through the sixty-two-page collection of names and accusations.

“Where did you get the police reports?” he asked.

“Most of them were public record,” Tamala said. “The rest Pete hacked from computers and police databases over the Christmas break.”

“We didn’t want to tell you before now,” Carlinda said. “We knew you’d tell us to stop.”

Carlinda had stayed in the international dorm over the winter break. They saw each other almost every other day. But she’d given no hint of this... study.

Gesturing with the folder John asked, “Why?”

“You’re the best professor in the school,” Tamala said, “and they’re trying to run you down just because you don’t think like them.”

“And how’s this supposed to help me?”

“That’s what’s so great,” Carlinda said. Her eyes, John noticed, were glistening. “Kerry Brightknowles’s boyfriend is a printmaker in Pine Bluff. He knows how to make these bright yellow posters that have an epoxy base. Once you slap them up on a wall they won’t come down and it’s almost impossible to mark them.”

“So you’re going to put this page up on the wall and destroy these people’s careers to help me?”

“No, silly,” Tamala said. “We’re going to say that the killer was a drug dealer and the rapist a thief; then we’ll change the place and date of the crimes so that only the perpetrators will know it’s them, like you said. Nobody’ll be able to prove it has anything to do with you because you’ll be out of town the night we put them up.”

“But won’t the authorities be able to trace the yellow posters?” John asked. “I mean there probably aren’t that many made.”

“They don’t come from the U.S.,” Carlinda said with a smirk. “They’re fabricated in China and the U.S. can’t demand the files.”

John stared at his students wondering why he hadn’t seen that they could actually enact the theories he espoused.

“I’m sorry I called you silly,” Tamala said, misinterpreting his gaze.

“Can we do it, Professor?” Carlinda asked.

“Are you sure everything you have in here is verifiable?” He had no intention of agreeing to the crazy plot but he found the notion... interesting.

“Yes,” Carlinda averred.

“But even if they aren’t all exactly right,” Tamala added. “The ones against Eubanks, Orcell and Carmody are incontestable.”

“So one of the crimes was committed by Auntie Annette?”

“Yes,” Carlinda said. “She was arrested for embezzlement when she was eighteen. The Kansas City prosecutor indicted her but then came up with a deal with her parents and employer. There’s a big article about it in a Sunday paper, all about teenage middle-class criminals.”

“What if they find you guys out?” John asked, still thinking he should say no. “I mean what if Kerry’s boyfriend leaves a print on some computer or Pete develops a conscience?”

“It won’t matter,” Carlinda said with conviction.

“Why not?”

“Because nobody on this list or from the school would want to have all this come out in public.”

John saw the fever in his young lover’s eyes. It was a look his father got when thinking about his beloved books. With that John was drifting again. His father would have called the students’ plan an example of the uses of history. He would say that real historians are the ones who edit, embellish and reinvent the details of myths mistaken for facts.

It was his father, and not the young women, who changed his mind.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

“Really?” Tamala screeched grabbing his biceps.

“Yeah. It’s the best student project I’ve ever seen: taking more or less verifiable facts from the recent past and using them to change or attempt to change the future — where those facts will be judged.”

At 4:27 John was sitting at the desk in his Prometheus office trying to remember word for word the Bard’s sonnet number seventeen. Who will believe my verse in time to come?

It was his father’s favorite poem about history and the human heart.

John had quoted the sonnet four times when the tapping came at the door.

“Come in.”

Arnold Ott stood five nine but looked shorter because of his box-shaped physique. His thick, black-framed glasses had rectangular lenses and his black hair grew in tight curls. Ott wore a tan jacket, dark green trousers and a button-up shirt the color of natural cream. But it was the student’s eyes that arrested John. They were a green that seemed removed from the rest of him, beautiful, passionate — the word that occurred to John was holy.

“Can I help you?” John asked.

“My name is Arnold Ott and I’m here to talk to you man-to-man.” This curt introduction, John was sure, had been practiced many times.

“Come in, Mr. Ott, have a seat.”

With clenched fists and lips compressed Arnold sat down hard, taking his anger out on the chair.

“How can I help you?” John asked. “Um... Arnold you said?”

“You know damn well who I am.”

“I do?”

“I’m Carlinda’s boyfriend.”

“Oh? Miss Elmsford mentioned that she had a boyfriend but if she said his name it was only in passing.”

“What is it between you two?”

“I’m her professor.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“Because I thought that maybe you were, um, like her lover.”

“There’s no love between us,” John said confidently. “Physical or otherwise.”

A tremor went through Arnold’s boxy frame. He brought his fists up then slammed them on his knees.

John wondered if he’d have to kill Arnold as he had Chapman Lorraine. This errant thought started as a mild buzzing, a background noise, but, John knew from experience, it could become a roar.

“What are you doing with Carly?”

“Like I told you, Mr. Ott, I’m her teacher. She’s considering me for her senior thesis advisor so we meet and talk about her checkered educational history and her fear of what her studies might bring to the surface. She’s a very serious student.”

“I know she stayed on campus over the break. Was she seein’ somebody?”

“We haven’t discussed her love life,” John admitted. “But if we had I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Are you lyin’ to me?”

“Arnold, you said you want to talk man-to-man but I’m still a professor while you are a student. You asked me if I was your girlfriend’s lover and I told you that there is no love, physical or otherwise, between us. I answered your question because you seem distressed but I am not answerable to you. If you suspect her of having some kind of liaison you’ll have to ask her.”

“I think it’s you,” Arnold said in a vulnerable, pleading tone.

“Why? Have you seen us together? Has someone told you that we’re having an affair?”

“I saw the way she looked at you when you gave that Trash Can Talk.”

“And how was that?”

Arnold flinched, lifting his fists again.

“She leaves her dorm room some nights and doesn’t come back till the next day. One night I parked out in front’a faculty housing and called her dorm room. She was there at first but then she went out. I stayed in front of where you lived until midnight but she never came. She didn’t go home either.”

“Doesn’t that prove it’s not me?” John asked.

“It’s not you?” Arnold’s holy eyes bothered John. He imagined that a deity in such close proximity could obliterate a mortal soul.

There came a knock at the partially open door.

“Come in,” John said.

Willie Pepperdine stuck his head out past the door looking in.

“Should I come back?” he said.

“No. Mr. Ott and I have finished our meeting. Haven’t we, Arnold?”

“I, I guess.”

“Then if you’ll excuse me...”

Arnold’s steps had a wooden quality as he lurched toward the door. Willie stepped aside allowing the boxy, brooding, beautiful-eyed youth to go past.

When he was gone Willie closed the door and sat without asking.

“That kid looks like an explosion waiting to happen.”

“Hormones rage well into the twenties for young men.”

“He looks like a jilted lover. That virus can hit man or woman at any age.”

“What can I do for you, Willie?”

“It’s what I can do for you.”

“And that is?”

“I’d like to offer you, on behalf of the board of directors, one million dollars.”

John heard the words clearly but they failed to achieve meaning. It was like a familiar phrase in a foreign tongue that he barely knew.

“Come again?”

“It’s about the suit Mr. Farr has brought on your behalf.”

“And, and... and you want me to drop it?”

Willie smiled and nodded.

“It was a good countermove,” the self-described philosopher of currency acknowledged. “Eubanks has been begging the school to retain a lawyer for her defense.”

“Why not do it? I mean, that would cost a lot less than a million dollars.”

“If we won,” Willie allowed. “But if we associate ourselves with the case Farr could conceivably expand the suit to include the entire school. Our lawyers believe that he, you could win.”

“And so...” John stopped to appreciate the progression of the hour since the end of his class. “And so you’ll pay me a million dollars to save money?”

“We want the faculty to know we stand behind them. Refusing to retain representation would look bad.”

“So this is the path of least resistance.”

“Exactly.”

“A Platinum Path.”

“Precious,” Willie said with a smile.

“One million dollars.”

“It’s not as much as it used to be. A million dollars in today’s world is like a, a small nylon pillow on a business class cross-country flight.”

“Why’d you decide to audit my class, Mr. Pepperdine?”

“Because you are by far the most interesting lecturer at the school. We knew that years ago when President Luckfeld asked the regents to allow you the position.”

“The board okayed me?”

“They were impressed with your credentials. I was excited about your take on history itself. We all know that without a past there is no future but no scholar I knew of has said that by re-forming the past we change the future.”

John tried to wrap his mind around the immensity that Willie and Carlinda, Tamala and Arnold Ott had to offer.

“Keep your money, Willie,” he said.

“You’re going to continue with the suit?”

“I’ll call Buddy in the morning and tell him to drop it,” John said. “I’d call him right now but he goes to bed in the afternoon and gets to work at three in the morning. Says it’s a habit he developed working for farmers.”

“You’re going to drop a multimillion-dollar lawsuit just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Why?”

“It’s those cave fish.”

“The blind sturgeon?”

“Sometimes, when I can’t get to sleep because my mind is racing, I think about those fish gliding in cold water, knowing things no sighted creature could imagine. Just the thought exhilarates me and then, suddenly, I’m asleep. That was one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given. And you know I’ve led a fortunate life.”

Willie sat forward, elbows on knees, fingers laced together. Resting his sharp chin on the crest of knuckles he gazed into the young man’s eyes, slowly allowing a smile to form.

“You’re something else, Professor. I haven’t met many men who would turn down that kind of money.”

“I got what I need, Willie. I might not want it but I have it just the same.”

14

There was no recent reference to Lucia Napoli anywhere on the Internet, neither was she in any local area phone directory. John became a regular at the coffee shop but she never showed. His search was a daily, futile effort. He considered retaining a private detective from Phoenix but the name Napoli would almost certainly be associated with the New York investigation of Cornelius Jones and bring him to the attention of Colette Van Dyne née Margolis.

He found a photograph of his mother in an online photo album that Christopher Anthony Napoli III had put up for family and friends to appreciate and add to. The best photograph was taken with Filo Manetti. They were standing arm in arm, their backs to a guardrail on the deck of a cruise ship somewhere where the water was cobalt blue. Filo smiled into the lens as if projecting his entire essence. John thought he looked familiar but couldn’t place the face. Maybe he’d seen him with his mother before she was gone forever.

It was a good likeness of Lucia but the hair was black, not copper as it was at the coffee shop.

Lucia smiled as she always did when posing for the camera, enough to look happy. He blew up the photo, asked Kerry Brightknowles to make copies on the history department printer, cropping his mother’s smiling face.

He took the picture to every shop in Parsonsville asking people to imagine her with bright metallic hair. But no one recognized her.

Maybe he’d been seeing things like Senta said.

During the same period John was trying to find out who had left those camel-brown letters on his table. He ruled out Carlinda because the handwriting was not hers and he didn’t believe she’d take on a confederate to destroy him.

Jasper “Hototo” Hutman, the night watchman, assured him that there had been no break-ins.

“Only that girl who jumps over the fence and goes to your apartment,” the severe Hopi said.

“You know about her?”

“Sure. That girl can climb.”

“That’s all?”

“Now and then a student named Arnold Ott parks across the street looking at the gate.”

“Did you question him?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know his name?”

“Student vehicles are registered with the administration. I looked up his license on the database.”

John decided to expand his search for his anonymous pen pal. Only his mother and France Bickman came to mind. He failed to find Lucia but, after a week of searches, he located France Bickman, who had moved to Cavaliers Retirement Home in Portland, Oregon. At ninety-seven years old he was the editor of a weekly blog dedicated to spreading knowledge about quirks in the social welfare system. The blog page led to a social network website called The Graying Alliance. This was an Internet site devoted to the dissemination of information for and about the well-being of people who have achieved elder status. France’s webpage contained a picture album of him and his daughters (all three of whom were divorced and living in Portland), their children and one great-grandson — Herbert Manville.

On his Facebook page France gave tips on cooking, physical exercise for those over eighty years old, reviews of books he liked and a rambling autobiography that was broken up into chapters identified by month and year.

John spent many hours reading through France Bickman’s online memoir. The ex-ticket-taker had served as an ensign in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War and married his wife, Matilda Hadfield, in 1964. He’d done things that he’d regretted all through his years but there were good moments also.

John liked the historical approach to memorializing a life. The truth of the document, he thought, was its honest attempt to impose order on memory.

There was an entry especially interesting to John in the section titled 1993.

Cornelius was rereading the entry when the doorbell rang. It was late on a Friday afternoon and he resented the intrusion.

“Who is it?” John said into the intercom.

“Police, Mr. Woman. Can we come in?”

France Bickman and his digital musings vanished. The police were at the front door and there was no back exit, no window he could creep through. Why hadn’t he run when he heard about the discovery of the body? Why had he conjured up his mother and used her apparition as an excuse to stay?

“Mr. Woman,” the policeman said.

John took his finger from the intercom panel.

His cell phone sounded. The glass panel read, Front Gate.

“Yes?”

“Professor, it’s Hototo. The police are coming to your door.”

“They’re already here.”

John disconnected the call and pressed the intercom button again.

“Yes?” he said.

“Is this Mr. John Woman?”

“Professor John Woman.”

“I’m Officer Hernandez of the Granville police, sir. Can we come in and ask you a few questions?”

John tried to think of options. What if he said no? Maybe he could keep them off long enough to call Carlinda; she might be able to talk him through jumping over the fence.

“What’s this about?” he shouted at the microphone holes.

“Just a few questions, sir.”

A few questions. Years of work, mountains of duplicity and now a faceless cop threatened to take it away with some words and punctuation.

“Questions about what?” he asked.

“Can we come in and talk to you, sir?”

John took a step back. He tried to remember what he had been thinking before the doorbell rang but could not.

The bell sounded again — three short rings and then a longer, more insistent tone. Like Beethoven’s Fifth in the throat of a small child tonelessly humming.

John smiled at this thought and pressed the lock-release.

He opened his front door listening to them tramping up the stairs. A moment later they were there before him on the third-floor landing. Two men, one tan and the other bronze, both in mostly black uniform and armed with pistols in holsters.

It surprised John when the darker man spoke first.

“Professor Woman?”

“Yes.”

“Can we come in?”

John considered making them stand in the hall.

“Okay,” he said, stepping back. “Come have a seat.”

There were only two chairs but the table was placed next to the deep-set window and so he took his seat on that ledge.

The uniforms looked around the room. The white officer noted the stairs and asked, “Someone upstairs?”

“No. I live alone.”

The policemen then sat down looking pleasant enough. John wondered why they weren’t reading him his rights, putting him in restraints as they did on TV.

“I’m Officer Hernandez,” the bronze cop said. “This is Officer Mulligan.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Do you know why we’re here, sir?” Hernandez asked.

John’s throat caught before the word could come out. “No.”

The young men — they looked to be in their mid-twenties — glanced at each other.

“Did you give a lecture at the main hall of Deck Recreation Center?”

John wondered what had happened at the presentation. Had someone recognized him there? Mulligan, he noted, had had stitches on an old wound at the left corner of his mouth. The small scar was crosshatched where it had been sewn.

“Professor,” Hernandez said.

“Yes?”

“Did you speak at the main hall of Deck?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Did you,” the Hispanic cop asked, taking out a small notepad, which he read from, “present a bloody rag, the photograph of a possible victim of violence and a small bag of heroin at that presentation?”

John wondered when the questions would get to Chapman Lorraine.

“Professor?”

“Yes?”

“Did you?”

“That was last semester,” John said, treading water in an underground lake filled with giant blind-eyed fish.

“Did you present evidence of one or more crimes?”

“I don’t, I don’t think so.”

“Do you have those items here?”

“No. Is that why you’re here, because of my talk?”

“Are they at your office?” Hernandez would not be sidetracked.

“No.”

“Where then?”

“After the lecture was over I threw the trunk away. Everything was in there. I treated the event in the spirit of the Yoruba mask; that is, it was only alive as the spirit of the talk. After that it was simple detritus.”

Hernandez’s frown reflected John’s.

“You threw the evidence away?”

“I found everything in a trash can,” John said. “I just put it back there. Was it Annette Eubanks that informed on me? No... no, it would have been Gregory Tracer. He’s her creature.”

“It’s against the law to destroy evidence of a crime, Professor.”

“I am aware of no crime, Officer” John said. “I just pulled trash out of a receptacle then postulated on the idea of history.”

“The possession of heroin is a crime.”

“I don’t know that I handled heroin. It could have been powdered sugar. Maybe that’s why it was thrown away.”

“Why didn’t you want to let us in?” Hernandez asked, now unsure of his evidence.

“I’ve never had the police come to my door,” he lied.

“Do you have some reason to be afraid of the police?”

There it was, his chance to confess. Yes, officer, I murdered a man years ago and the police are after me. That’s why I didn’t want to let you in.

“No, Officer, of course not. I’m a university professor but when authority comes calling the everyday citizen has learned to fear the worst.”

“Do you have anything to fear, Professor?”

John smiled, then grinned. “Men with guns sitting at my table.”

Mulligan had been quiet while Hernandez asked again and again about the disposition of the trunk. Where did he get it? Where did he dispose of it? Who else did he work with? Who told him about the trash can? Before departing Officer Hernandez said they might return after reexamining the video recording of the lecture.

“You’re pretty excited tonight,” Carlinda said as they lay side by side looking up at the ceiling.

“Your boyfriend came to my office hours the other day.”

“He did?” She sat up.

“Uh-huh. He thought we were having an affair because of the way you looked at me at the Trash Can Lecture. He also told me that he’s waited outside the gate here to see if you came by.”

“What did you say?”

“That there was no love, either physical or emotional, between us.”

“You lied to him?”

“Do you love me?”

“Um, no.”

“Have you had sex with me because you love me?”

“I guess not.”

“Then I didn’t lie. I merely interpreted our relationship in such a way as to keep Arnold out of jail for either assault or murder... or worse.”

“What worse?”

“It occurred to me that I might have hurt him.”

“Do you think he could have followed me here tonight?”

“Did you jump the fence?”

“Yes.”

“Then no. Arnold strikes me as a front door type of guy.”

Carlinda laughed, showing her teeth. “You’re funny.”

“If you don’t lie to him about us he’ll do something violent,” John warned.

The smile faded. “Yeah.”

For a while they were lost in their own thoughts, looking anywhere but at each other.

“I’m going away for a few days next week,” he said.

“Where?”

“Up north and down south. I have some people I want to interview.”

“For what?”

“I’m going to write a book. If I lose my job I’ll need it to prove that I’m a serious scholar.”

John closed his eyes and Carlinda said, “Okay.”

15

Morning sun through the deep-set window woke him. John showered, shaved, packed and then drove his green T-bird to Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport. There he bought a ticket for Portland, Oregon. By two that afternoon he was at the front desk of Cavaliers Retirement Home, a rambling mansion set on a hill across the road from a cemetery that admitted its last tenant more than a century before.

“May I help you?” the broad-faced receptionist asked. She had red, red lips and white powder on her white skin. Her nameplate read Lois Q. Lucerne. John wondered if her middle name was Queenie.

“France Bickman.”

A hint of distaste dulled the middle-aged woman’s attempt at friendliness.

“You’re a reporter?”

“No, ma’am. A friend.”

“One of those agitators?” The smile was now completely gone.

“I don’t understand,” John said.

“Mr. Bickman is always causing trouble,” she asserted, “complaining to the press, making the other residents unhappy, telling the attendants how to do their job.”

“Oh,” John said. “I don’t know anything about that. My wife’s father was a friend of his and he asked me to stop by and say hello if I was ever in town.”

There was a library on the fourth floor of the villa-like rest home. An Asian orderly — a short man with generous tawny features, dressed all in white — walked John to the open doors and left him there. The two occupants of the many-windowed room were an elderly white woman and an even older white man. The woman was sitting in a chrome and green leather wheelchair under a large window. John suspected she sat there out of habit seeking sunlight to illuminate the paperback pages she was reading. But the sky was cloaked with dark clouds allowing precious little solar glow.

The man was France Bickman. He stood before a dictionary lectern thumbing through the pages of a fat, hardback Webster’s. John walked up to his father’s only real friend and stopped there. A minute passed while France searched for his word.

The young professor studied the old man’s face. When John was a boy France had looked even older. Now, with France at ninety-seven, they were closer on what Herman Jones once called the mortality scale. France had a full head of hair and his faded eyes were no less inquisitive.

Not satisfied with what he was reading France looked up. Those ancient orbs squinted, the head tilted ever so slightly to the right.

“CC?”

“Hey, France. How are you?”

When France moved from the lectern John could see that he tottered a bit. He staggered toward his young visitor grabbing the biceps of both arms in greeting but also to hold himself upright.

“How are you, son?”

“Fine, fine. Do you want to sit down?”

Holding on to each other the men jostled over to a long mahogany bench.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately,” the impossibly old man confided.

“Oh? What about me?” John asked pleasantly.

“I felt bad that I didn’t keep in touch after Herman died. Maybe I could have helped out. You know money alone doesn’t do everything.”

“I’m fine. Went to college. Got a job. I hear that you’re a real rabble-rouser around here. Your blog is wonderful.”

John glanced at the woman by the window. She didn’t seem to be bothered by their talking. Maybe she couldn’t hear them.

“You read it?” France asked.

“Yes, that and the autobiography you posted on your website. I like that you broke it up by yearly chapters and monthly subsections.”

“Your father used to say that time and its passage was all we had to take our own measure.”

That started the men on a long laudatory talk about Herman Jones and the old days at the Arbuckle. Some of France’s memories seemed a little off to John but those days were long ago; the younger man wasn’t sure if his own recollections were any more accurate.

At some point the woman in the wheelchair began snoring softly. Soon after the orderly came to wheel her away.

“Has anyone been asking about me, France?” John asked when they were alone.

“What do you mean, CC? Like bill collectors or something? Do you need money?”

“No, no, I’m doing all right. I was just wondering if anybody mentioned me. I’ve been getting these letters but I can’t make out the signature. They seem to know a lot about me. You know the only people I was ever close to as a kid were mom, dad and you. Dad’s gone and I haven’t heard from my mother in years.”

“Anonymous letters?” France winced. “Are they bad? Threatening?”

“No. They’re signed but the handwriting is mostly flourish. Postmark is from Arizona. They talk about the old days and I thought it might be someone you know.”

“No,” France said. “I haven’t spoken to anyone about the old days. I had a girlfriend for a while, Alison Dawson. I did talk to her about you and Herman but she died five years ago and didn’t have any friends but me. No, CC, it’s probably somebody knows your mother. She always had lots of friends. She liked to talk if I remember right.”

“That she did,” John said.

“It was probably her.”

“Probably so, France,” John agreed. “It’s not important anyway. I was on my way to Seattle for a job interview. I read about you on the web so I thought I’d drop by.”

“What do the letters say?”

“Not much. Just about the Arbuckle and dad. I can’t read the signature is the problem. Postmark is from Arizona so I knew it wasn’t you but I thought maybe it was someone we both knew.”

“No... You want to stay for dinner, CC?”

Meat loaf with mashed potatoes made from a powder, broccoli spears and unseasoned apple pie made up the meal. The coffee was decaffeinated and there was no salt shaker in evidence.

France talked about prejudice against the elderly and how when so many people got old they lost heart.

“It’d be better if they offered us suicide alternatives,” Bickman said at a table with four of his men friends and John. “We could go out with good liquor, cigarettes and watching movies with naked girls while they pumped a sleeping gas in real slow. Maybe two or three of us could pass on together talking about the olds days.”

“That sounds grand,” Timor Parker, a retired plumber from Redwood City, said. “Maybe we could have music too... and dancin’.”

Two orderlies on duty watched the table closely. John thought that if he wasn’t visiting they might have tried to separate the men.

“If I had my old twenty-two they wouldn’t fuck with us,” France said when John shared his notion. “Bethy, my youngest, took it out of my suitcase when she put me here. But you know if I had my pistol those apes would show me some respect.”

“I have to get going, France,” John said, realizing that his presence was exciting the older man to these protestations of violence.

“You go on, son,” France said. “And don’t you worry about those letters or nuthin’. I got it all covered.”

“Covered how, France?”

“Just don’t you worry. As long as there’s breath in this body I won’t let them hurt you.”

The next morning John boarded a flight to Miami. The acronym for the airport was MIA. The idea of travel and being missing in action tickled the history professor.

He took a bus into town, found a Cuban diner and ordered a meal that consisted of a pressed ham and cheese sandwich with pickles, Caesar salad, and beer from a local brewery. He asked the waiter if there was a pay phone anywhere around. After a moment of consideration the copper-skinned mustachioed man said, “Down at the library. Not too many booths anymore. But they have them inside the library: the old kind with levered doors, wood seats and everything. Two blocks up and half a block over on your left.”

John had gotten two rolls of quarters from a bank in Portland before driving his rental car to Cavaliers. Donning cotton gloves he broke open a roll of quarters and called the operator, directing the woman to dial a Manhattan phone number. She asked for three dollars and he dropped twelve quarters into the old-fashioned pay phone. Each descending coin conjured a gong.

Before the phone could ring a man announced, “Hotline.”

“May I speak to Lieutenant Van Dyne.”

“She’s not here at the moment. Can I help you?”

“Not really. I can only speak to her.”

“Then you’ll have to leave a message.”

“Tell her that Cornelius Jones called.”

After a brief pause the man asked, “Who?”

“The man she’s looking for.”

“Hold on.”

Four minutes passed on John’s father’s Timex when a woman said, “This is Lieutenant Van Dyne.”

“I recognize your voice, Lieutenant.”

“Who is this?”

“The first time we met was in the basement office of the old Arbuckle. You were Detective Margolis back then.” John had designed the sentence to convince his ex-lover of his identity without referring to the intimate nature of their relationship. He thought the call might be recorded and didn’t want to cause her trouble.

“Cornelius Jones.”

“Yes. I heard that you were looking for me and I remembered how nice you were, how understanding. I thought I’d call and say hi.”

“I’d like it if you came in for a talk, Mr. Jones.”

“That would be nice but I’m out of state now.”

“Where?”

“Minnesota. Been working as a salesman out here for the last few years.”

“I could come to you.”

“No. That would be way too much.”

“We want to talk to you.”

“Yes, something to do with Chapman Lorraine I heard.”

“He was murdered.”

“That’s awful.”

“Killed in the projectionist’s booth of the Arbuckle.”

“You don’t need to go out of your way, Lieutenant. I don’t know anything about Lorraine. That’s what I called to tell you.”

“We have to meet, Mr. Jones.”

“The next time I’m in New York I’ll call.”

“This is serious.”

“I’m sure it is. But as I said, I have nothing to do with it. It’s been nice hearing your voice again, Detective Van Dyne. Bye now.”

That evening John boarded a flight to Houston. He stayed there in an airport hotel for three days writing a monograph titled The Inescapable, Unavoidable Democracy of Culture. On the fourth morning, the handwritten first draft of the sixty-page essay completed, he flew back home, arriving at midnight.

It wasn’t until the next morning that he saw the bright yellow broadside pasted up on the external plaster wall of faculty housing.

The lettering was bloodred: VILLAINS IN OUR MIDST! The list of names and crimes, collected by Carlinda and her coconspirators, were laid out like the cast and characters in a movie or play. Someone had tried to rip down and deface the poster but the epoxy sheet resisted most attempts to mute its accusations.

The list consisted of nine professors down the left side of the document including Eubanks and Carmody; opposite each name was a crime that they had, supposedly, committed. There was a wife-beater, an ex-member of a revolutionary cult in Detroit, three fake degrees, an embezzler, a female physical education teacher who was born a man, a convicted felon and a pederast. At the bottom of the poster was the promise that future revelations about the perpetrators of desertion, robbery, theft, hate crimes and assault among others would be made.

On his walk to Prometheus Hall John saw seventeen yellow broadsides pasted up on walls, palm tree trunks and announcement boards. In each instance there had been attempts to rip down, deface, cover up and/or write over the offending document but these attempts had more or less failed.

The damage had already been done. Cell phone cameras had certainly disseminated the image around the school and beyond.

He followed his usual path to the great hall and up the stairs to his Tuesday seminar.

Nearly two hundred students were there to meet him.

16

“The class has grown since last Thursday,” John said from behind the semitransparent green plastic lectern.

“We want to know what you have to say about the posters,” a young woman called out.

John looked around but could not locate the speaker. He didn’t recognize the voice.

“This is a history class,” he said, “not a course on current events.”

His declaration elicited some groans.

“I just got back,” he added. “You guys know more than I do.”

“But you’ve seen them,” Beth Weiner said. “Haven’t you?”

John frowned and nodded. “When did they go up?”

“Late Saturday night.”

“And were there arrests made on Monday?”

“No.”

“Have any of the professors mentioned been put on academic suspension?”

“No.”

“Then I think that it’s a cruel hoax perpetrated by angry and immature minds. That’s personal opinion, not professorial authority or knowledge.”

“But it does mean you think they were wrong,” Star Limner proposed.

“I think,” John said, and then he paused, looking around the room for words that momentarily eluded him. “I think... this broadside, this salvo, this pretense at a cry for justice is simply an attempt to alarm students, faculty, parents and even the people of the town of Parsonsville... this compulsion to destroy is both cowardly and misguided.”

“But what if they’re right?” Jack Burns said.

“They are not,” John replied. “And even if someone is guilty of, or at least culpable for, a crime, do we have a right to murder the person?”

“No one tried to kill anybody,” a voice shouted from the back of the room.

“No?” John asked the blue desert beyond the speaker. “What if you had built an entire life dedicated to learning and service? What if any of you had but one love and then the object, the possibility of that love was taken away in a manner so violent and so public that you might never recover? What if you had a pistol in one hand and the long fall before you?

“But it is not simply the callous threat against a few individuals that we’re facing. Each of you is suffering from the passions roused, passions that have no anchor and no proofs. You came here to find answers. You want to know that your world socially, intellectually and spiritually is not falling down around your ears.

“Has anyone not in my regular class heard the term hermeneutics?”

A young black woman standing at the wall to the left of the lectern raised her hand. John recognized her. She was the woman who had complimented his Trash Can Lecture when he was searching for his mother at the coffee shop.

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s like the study of the meaning of scripture,” she said, almost as a question.

John smiled and nodded. “In ancient times it was. But in modern philosophy, philology and some branches of history it takes on the meaning of a kind of rigorously applied empathy with the experience of others. In a popular song from the sixties a singer asked his self-avowed enemy to, ‘walk a mile in my shoes.’ This is what your yellow journalists have left out of their cowardly diatribe. They threaten, condemn and destroy giving no evidence that they understand the human condition.”

“What is that, Professor?” the black woman from the coffee shop asked.

“Have you ever done something you wouldn’t want others to know about?” The woman hesitated. John noticed she was wearing a butter-colored dress that complemented her dark skin.

“What does that have to do with anything?” she said.

John turned to the rest of the class, looked around a moment and then asked, “Have any of you here committed a crime or misdemeanor that you want kept secret?”

A visible tremor went through the assemblage.

“I have,” said a young man in a white T-shirt seated in row seven or eight. “I stole something once. It was a long time ago but I still feel bad about it.”

“Me too,” said Justin Brown. “It was the last time I ever got drunk.”

John allowed seventeen confessions, most without pertinent detail. Theft, violence and silence were the most common offenses. Each admission, John felt, was a brick removed from the walls of their tombs.

“I cheated on my boyfriend,” Carlinda Elmsford said. “And I liked it. I liked it a lot.”

That’s when John took over again. “I suspect that every one of you in this room has done something you consider wrong at one time or another, things you’d never share with anyone. Maybe it’s a crime; maybe just your nature.”

“So are you saying that these accusations are false?” Carlinda cried out, her voice strained and cracking.

“I am absolutely sure of the professors’ innocence,” John declared. “But at the same time I don’t care about allegations because I live by the rule of law, not rumor.”

For some reason this statement cast a hush over the crowded classroom.

John looked around at the faces. He saw a hunger for understanding in most.

“I have an assignment for you,” he said. “I want you to get a pad of yellow legal paper and to go to a place where you are completely alone, a place where no one can see what you’re doing there, to write down a true statement. Something you’ve done that would get you fired from your dream job or a crime you committed. In the space that’s left you can explain the circumstances or give excuses if you wish. You should not sign the document. Then decide whether or not you would pin this confession on a wall near the yellow broadsides. Would you do to yourselves what the yellow journalists say they have done to others?”

The eyes of many of the students turned inward then.

John recited the Bard’s sonnet silently, then said, “Go.”

“John,” she called as he was going down the south stairs.

He waited for Carlinda to catch up to him.

She was wearing a gray-and-gold full-length dress that might have been a ball gown in some medieval hamlet.

When she reached him she kissed him on the lips then stared him in the eye. It was almost a dare.

“Hi,” he said.

A feeling assailed him like a stiff wind; it was the distance he felt when Colette told him that she was marrying her boyfriend. Even though Carlinda was standing before him she was far, far away.

“Did my confession scare you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why not?” she seemed disappointed.

“I asked the question. I can’t complain about an answer.”

Carlinda searched deeply into John’s eyes. Whatever she was looking for — it wasn’t there.

“You got to watch out for Pete,” she said at last.

“Why?”

“He was real mad at the things you said in the lecture.”

“What did he expect?”

“I think he kind of sees himself as a hero,” she said with a single shoulder shrug. “He thought you were going to say that the people who put up the broadsides were brave and true historians.”

“Damn,” John said and then he sucked a tooth.

“What?”

“Nothing. I mean... I should have seen that coming.”

“Me and Tamala will talk to him but don’t go to your office hours and stay out of his way until we tell you it’s all right.”

“How did you guys finally decide to divvy up the crimes and criminals?” he asked, neither distance nor Pete Tackie being of any concern.

“Um,” Carlinda hemmed, “uh, we gave Eubanks’s embezzling charge to Randolph Cordell in economics and Carmody’s pederast charges and trial to Dov Pomerantz in the art department; like that with all of them.”

“You really did it,” John said.

“You don’t sound very happy about it.”

“I guess not. I mean I know how it feels to be vilified, to be aware of your own guilt and there’s nothing you can do to change it.”

“What’s changed in you?” she asked.

“I think I might have lost my mask.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I’m not sure, but... I have to go.”

“Just stay away from your office.”

“I will.”

17

John noticed Annette Eubanks waiting outside the door as he approached his office at four. She wore a maroon dress. Even from the back he could see that her hair was mussed. She clenched a shiny black purse under her right arm, like a football player about ready to go for the touchdown.

The department chair was looking the opposite way down the hall and so did not see his approach. John wondered if it might be a good idea to retreat before she noticed him. He wasn’t bothered by the prospect of facing Pete Tackie’s rage but Eubanks might have a nervous breakdown and suddenly pull a pistol out of her bag.

“Hello, Professor,” he said, coming up behind her.

She spun around, her shoulders pulled back in surprise. There was a wilted spray of violets pinned over the left breast of her dress.

“Hello, John.”

“You here for my office hour?” he joked.

“Yes. Yes I am.”

“Come on in then.”

When the department head was ensconced in the visitor’s chair John said, “This is a terrible business.”

Annette’s unreadable stare reminded him of the coyote stalking him in the desert. She was, he thought, a woman ripped from her place, torn from the comfort of her fate.

“I’ve done an awful thing,” she said.

John worried that the broadside had broken her will. Fretting thus he realized that he didn’t actually dislike the officious educator. Her experience in life was limited and so she fought battles in an imaginary arena called the history department of NUSW.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I sent one of my students into your class today with a camera hidden in his briefcase. Before the class began he put a tiny microphone on your podium.”

“You were spying on my class?” he asked, his tone making light of the breach. “Annette, you are always invited to attend with no need for subterfuge.”

“I believed that you had sabotaged me,” she said not heeding or maybe not hearing his gentle words. “I was sure that you would start to spread poison about me and Ira. I thought that damned poster was your idea. I wanted proof. I wanted to catch you on video trying to destroy us.”

Eubanks shuddered and moved her hands around, reaching for words and reasons that did not exist. Her jaw jutted on both sides and then, suddenly, a short burst of tears cascaded down her cheeks.

“Then,” she choked. “Then, when I heard what you said, I realized you had no animosity toward us. It was us, always us attacking you. Our fear of you created what we saw when you were simply following your own muse, your own beliefs. We brought those damned yellow broadsides down on ourselves.”

“You don’t have to worry, Annette,” he said. “I’m sure you and everyone else on that list are innocent and I’m just as certain that the university will back you.”

“Why don’t you hate me?”

“That’s a very good question,” he said. “It’s true that the worst thing you can do to a person is to take away their ability to make a living. Better take a man’s wife and children than his job.”

“Because he can get a new family?” she asked.

“Because he doesn’t need a family but no American can live without a paycheck.”

“So?”

“What?”

“I was trying to take your job and blacklist you too.”

“Yes.”

“Then why not fan the flames of distrust against me?”

“Sometimes it’s just easier to tell the truth,” he said. “The broadside is a cowardly attack. If any of it was true then the president would have had to put those culpable professors on academic suspension. And, anyway, all of us make mistakes along the way. There’s no value in persecuting someone for overcoming their history in an attempt to forge a better future.”

Annette Eubanks’s roaming hands settled in her lap as Arnold Ott’s had done.

“Dean James has provided for a public forum tomorrow at Deck Rec at four,” she said. “He’s left it up to me to organize the gathering. The entire student body and teaching staff will be urged to attend.”

“How will it be structured?”

“I didn’t know until I saw your lecture,” she said. “But now I believe that you should give the address.”

John thought of asking why him but decided that asking the question would only serve to reopen her wounds.

“I’d love to,” he said. “That way injury might be turned into something good.” Her silent smile was filled with pain. Her hands raised up from her knees and she seemed to expand like an animated character in a Bugs Bunny cartoon — about to explode.

“The department has made a request that you be terminated,” she said — her words delivered rapid-fire.

“I know. President Luckfeld offered me a university professorship in recompense.”

“Of course he did.”

Eubanks shook John’s hand at the door and then walked away. He watched her for a moment then turned. Before he could close the door he was pushed from behind so violently that he stumbled across the room. He didn’t try to regain his footing, instead allowing himself to stagger forward until he was close enough to his desk drawer so that he might reach Hototo’s knife — the totem intended to keep him safe.

When John turned he saw Pete Tackie slamming the office door with his big left hand. His other fist gripped a baseball bat. Pete then took the bat in both hands and slammed it against John’s lone file cabinet.

He hit the metal box again and again, denting the sides and cracking the dark green paint.

John took that moment to sit in his chair. As he drew himself forward he used his left hand to pull open the top drawer from its underside.

“Is there something wrong, Mr. Tackie?”

“Why the fuck you say all that shit about us, man?” Flecks of spittle popped from his lips.

“What did you expect me to say?”

“You called us immature and evil and cruel.” Pete slammed his bat against the cabinet to punctuate each claim.

“You called me a coward,” he added.

“Yes.”

“You admit it?”

“Does anyone other than Carlinda and Tamala know about your part in making those yellow broadsides?”

“Kerry and her boyfriend.”

“Do any of them think you a coward?”

“No.”

“You did this to help me didn’t you, Pete?”

“I guess.”

“And if I said that the professors named should be fired and the people who put up the posters should be seen as heroes then I would have been suspected of being part of the posters’ origins — no?”

“But you coulda said that we were real historians who knew how to use our studies to change the way things happen.”

Pete slammed the bat down on the desktop. With his knee John closed the drawer; the belt-buckle knife was in his left hand.

“So you did this for praise and not the restructuring of social context?”

“We really liked you,” Pete said lowering into John’s visitor’s chair. “We did this so that they wouldn’t fire you. And then, and then you called us names and said that we were stupid. We’re not stupid.”

“No you’re not.”

John peered into his would-be attacker’s eyes.

Pete dropped his bat.

“Then why did you say it?”

“Because my role was to pull everything together after you tore it apart. It has, so far, worked. You and Tamala and Carlinda created an atmosphere that will make a difference.”

“But I feel like shit.”

“When you play against a really good rugby team,” John said, “go into overtime and fight as hard as you can, how do you feel afterward?”

“Sore as hell,” Pete said. “Sometimes there’s bones broken and all kinds of bruises and shit. Sometimes the girls that hang around wanna take us home but we hurt too bad.”

“It’s the same thing here. We’re doing work that will make a difference. It’s hard work and when it’s over we’re exhausted. You’ve made a difference and nobody but your friends can know about it.”

“Then you don’t really think all those things you said?”

“Of course not. I’m merely playing my part. Without you I couldn’t do it. And you will gain invaluable experience that will serve you well for the rest of your life.”

“I was gonna kill you,” Pete admitted. “I was gonna beat you to death with that bat.”

Something about the young man’s confession was a balm to John’s restless mind. He was certain that he would have killed Pete before the rugby thug knew there was a knife. The fact that he came so close to murder brought back a long-dormant memory: moments after killing Chapman Lorraine Cornelius felt completely at peace.

“Go on back to your dorm, Pete,” John said. “You did good.”

“Maybe I’ve done it all wrong,” John said after Pete had gone.

He was talking to, or at least looking at, the discarded bat in the corner next to the empty chair.

His father’s Chapman Lorraine was Jimmy Grimaldi and his Excalibur a heart brave enough to stand unarmed against an unbeatable foe.

John read the same books as Herman, had tried his best to disappear into stories that were both true and indecipherable. But rather than a king in exile he’d become a kind of Tallyrand agitating between the ruling classes, the workers and the revolutionists. Where Herman had been heroic John was just a scarecrow, forgotten in a barren field that had once been flush and fruitful.

Remembering that true self-abnegation was possible only for a man willing to die he replaced the knife and took from the drawer a yellow legal pad and a number two pencil. It took hours to write, erase, write again, reject and finally decide upon the first few words of his second Deck Rec lecture. He didn’t trust himself to deliver an impromptu talk this time. His life had been a long series of spontaneous acts — it was time for a change.

We have come here today not to be lectured to or addressed but rather to look into ourselves and see what it is that makes us possible. After writing these words Professor John Woman sat back in his chair and read them over and over until he was satisfied that this was the right beginning for the rest of his life.

18

John spent the night at his Prometheus Hall office, writing.

There were so many cross-outs and erasures that at around three in the morning he redrafted the speech. As he rewrote, new ideas formed. What he had written lost its power, so he was compelled to begin again. A few minutes past six he began practicing the speech, making notes and rewording, changing sentence structures and adding asides. By eight he was finished. An hour later he lay down on the hard floor behind his desk and slept. A dream brought him to the secret room in the projectionist’s booth. He became Chapman Lorraine sealed away, nearly forgotten. In that stasis there was no guilty conscience or demonic elation. He simply took Lorraine’s place for a short while, affording his victim some relief.

When John awoke he felt stiff but exonerated. He’d done penance for the murder and accepted that he and his father were not the same. They loved each other but these loves did not encompass a singularity. They were different men: Herman a teacher and Cornelius an unaffiliated samurai. The elder Jones suffered the curse of physical weakness with superior moral strength in a world that sneered at the first and could not believe the second. John was a trickster, a coyote gratefully licking the bloody wounds of his savior.

On the walk over to Deck Rec John noticed flimsy yellow flags flapping in the breezes around the damning broadsides. It wasn’t until he investigated that he remembered the assignment he gave the two hundred or so attendees of the previous day’s class.

One sheet read:

The fourth confession was more cogent:

The sixteenth revelation made John stop and think:

There were hundreds of sheets tacked, pinned and pasted to the walls and trees, announcement boards and lampposts near the broadsides: many more confessions than there had been people in the class.

John realized that his assignment had started an instant craze among students who were already deeply disturbed by the allegations against their professors.

Very few were out and about on the campus that day. John could hear the whisper of sheets in the breeze calling out to whoever would listen: testaments of young people finally able to admit secrets that were worms in their hearts.

“Professor,” Theron James called when John came through the automatic doors of the student recreation center.

“Dean James,” said the deconstructionist killer.

“Are you ready?” James asked, taking John by the arm.

“Absolutely.”

This was the first time he and the dean had touched except to shake hands. The intimacy was the broad-shouldered academician’s way of explaining the importance of the situation.

“The president will be introducing you,” James said.

“I thought this was Eubanks’s show?”

“It was decided that since she was listed on the broadside her introducing you might taint the way people heard your words,” Theron said guiding John by the elbow. “There are monitors set up throughout the center, in the library and in all the offices. Almost everyone on campus will hear you.”

“And the Platinum Path?” John asked.

Theron stopped, his fingers clenching John’s biceps. The scarred scholar looked his protégé in the eye and said, “Yes... that’s right.”

They continued their walk toward the auditorium.

John noticed that the aisles and halls of the recreation center were crowded with people. Students and faculty, administrators and maintenance staff were standing around talking and watching.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m going to say?” John asked Theron as they approached the closed doors of the auditorium.

“Certainly not.”

“Why?”

“This is your battle to win or lose, Professor Woman. I wouldn’t dare interfere.”

Saying this, the dean knocked on the auditorium door. A burly student looked out, then admitted James and his charge. John recognized the big sophomore, he’d taken D-History 101 in John’s first semester at NUSW.

“Carlyle,” John said, reaching for the name. “Francis Carlyle.”

The glowering student suddenly smiled.

“Glad you’re doing this, Professor,” he said. “People need something to hang on to.”

Down toward the stage, on the right side of the center row, sat the college president and Willie Pepperdine. Luckfeld wore an off-white gabardine suit and Willie a close-fitting midnight blue sports coat and jeans. His yellow shirt was buttoned to the neck but he wore no tie.

When John and Theron approached both men stood.

“Glad you decided to do this, John,” Luckfeld said holding out a welcoming hand.

Willie patted John’s shoulder. “I’m surprised Eubanks had the smarts to deal you in.”

“She didn’t have much choice,” John said.

“We were thinking that you should wait backstage until the room fills,” Luckfeld suggested. “I’ll do the introduction and then you can come out.”

“I don’t think so,” John countered. “I should be up onstage waiting for them and then, when everyone is seated, I’ll just get into it.”

“That sounds right,” Luckfeld agreed after a moment’s meditation, “more immediate.”

“One thing, Colin,” John said to the president.

“What’s that?”

“Any truth to these allegations?”

“No,” he said, with a grin. “Not a one.”

John nodded and moved toward the side-stair that led up to the stage.

This time there was an oak lectern again but no table or Containment Report trunk; no three-screen slide show or slow-moving message from Brother of George.

John took his place behind the lectern and said aloud, “You can let them in,” to the four young men who had taken their places at the doors.

As the audience filed down the aisles John thought about the walk across campus, the yellow confession sheets, Chapman Lorraine (of course), his father and how Detective Colette Margolis would wrestle him to the floor in a secret room the police kept for recreation. He wondered how he had maintained sanity in a life that was almost completely separate from the world in which he lived.

People made their way among the aisles and pews. There were students alongside the faculty and others. A few men and women with telephoto cameras stood at the back of the auditorium and a student camera crew was there to film the talk.

When a shadow moved above his head John saw a microphone boom lowering. It was like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle dropped into place at the end of a rainy afternoon.

The obedient audience went directly to their seats in hushed anticipation.

He looked out upon the thousand and more faces and the hush turned to silence.

“We have come here today not to be lectured to or addressed but rather to look inside ourselves to see what it is that makes us possible,” John said without referring to the speech that was still folded in his breast pocket. “That’s how I was going to start this address, with words that were smart and vague enough to be a balm for the problems that bring us here, words to deflect the recriminations brought to bear on the walls and halls of this institution. If I could get us to look at our own needs and failings then maybe we could forget.

“But in truth we will not disremember anything or absolve anyone. Human beings hold grudges long past their expiration dates. They wage wars in the names of their great-great-grandfathers and over borders long ago redrawn, yelling out battle cries in languages that are not the tongues of the original combatants.

“We are, all of us, ready to hate and fight back. We despise in free form, casting our gaze from one poor victim to the next. Thieves, child molesters, murderers and liars fill social media platforms and newspapers, TV reports, talk radio and rumor. We remember who murdered Julius Caesar and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. We hate people even after they have died and this spite lives on past our own deaths.”

John stopped for a moment to look at his audience.

“We tell ourselves that we are better, that we would stand up against oppression and die for the rights of our fellow citizens. Most of us wouldn’t but even if we did who would profit by it? Our fates were written long ago in our stars, our trilling blood. There’s no escape, no justice, no respite.

“We have seen on shiny, indestructible yellow posters the accusations against members of our community. If you believe what they say, our university is a den of thieves, especially the professorial class. But how could this be true? Even if you forget that every employee of this school is vetted by the institution, the state, and the departments they serve. Even if you forget that the first rule of law in this United States is innocent until proven guilty. Even if you ignore the fact that you have been given no proof of wrongdoing — still it is unbecoming of you and the perpetrators of this assault to question a fellow traveler who, through no fault of his or her own, is following the same mortal and imperfect path as the rest of us.”

The written speech now forgotten, John stopped again to look from side to side. The origin of this talk brought a smile to his lips. He was a killer, a guilty man defending the accused. The contradictions felt right.

“Are the allegations true?” he asked. “Of course not but the issue is not resolved by this answer. The problem is not innocence or guilt but the poison of suspicion. We, the lifeblood of this institution, have been poisoned by faceless, voiceless charges. This is terrible but not a permanent problem because there is a three-pronged cure: cold logic, bright hope and personal truth.

“I slept most of the day on the hard floor behind my desk after a long night of preparing for this address. When I woke up I walked here. The campus was empty because everyone was already here or sitting in front of a screen somewhere. On the way I saw hundreds of confessions penned by students learning humility by revealing their own truths and failings. Rather than leave the indictments to stand alone they put up their own confessions and shortcomings because this juxtaposition is the closest we will ever come to forgiveness.

“We cannot know, understand or, ultimately, judge history. In the same vein we cannot know, understand or judge another human being’s soul. We can never be sure of what went before. Certainly we must strive for truth; but that’s all we can do — strive. And even though these accusations are baseless we do know that we have done things that we’re not proud of, that might be seen as wrong. We recognize guilt because we are all guilty. That’s what the Bible tells us; the Old Testament that is the foundation for many of the warring religions of today.”

John exhaled and didn’t take a breath for a few seconds.

“That said,” he continued, “this event is a good thing. We do not naturally seek truth in ourselves. We don’t want to be faced with our mortality, limited awareness or inferiority, or God’s wrath. We’d much rather inebriate ourselves and condemn, get high on carnal pleasures, hone our fears and guilt into barbs and arrows aimed at our fellows. But every now and then we see our reflections in some glass. At that moment we see that we are the enemy. This is the only truth that abides. Those yellow posters are that glass. These baseless claims echo in our lives.

“Poisoned by suspicion we see ourselves, and if we take the time to work through this convoluted and spiny reaction we might see the hope of building a community of conscience and character.

“We know the charges against us. We know that if the truth came out it would take us along with it. We know about silence. That’s what the broadsides are telling us. And so if we wait a moment before condemning others we might find absolution and breathe easier.”

John took in a great draft of air. He was ready to continue the oration but found that there were no more words to say. For a moment he was confused by this unexpected dead end.

Finally he nodded slightly and made his way down to the first row of seats.

“Thank you, Professor Woman,” Theron James said over the microphone. Somehow he had made it to the stage. “We appreciate your hard work and good words. We will take your talk with us through this difficult time.”

There was some applause and then the hushed rustle of people rising and filing out.

A few people shook his hand muttering words he didn’t understand. He was thinking about the sudden loss of language and the feeling of release that came with it.

“John,” someone said stridently.

Ira Carmody was standing before him, his bearing assertive, even aggressive. John remembered that Ira was a black belt in something. Looking to the left he saw Pepperdine watching closely.

The angry professor’s hand jutted out and John took it. They shook, nodded and then released. Before John could say any more Annette Eubanks rushed forward and took him by both hands.

“That was beautiful,” she said. “And true.”

19

Walking up the stairs to his apartment John wondered if Carlinda would be waiting there. When he came in she was sitting at the small kitchen table.

Feeling a wrenching spasm in his chest John said, “Mom?”

At first she just looked at him with equal measures of mirth, wonder and something triumphant. No longer youthful, Lucia Napoli still maintained an aura of beauty. She wore a brown dress with images of violet ribbons writhing upon it. When she stood her breast expanded with an emotion they shared.

She was barefoot: at home in her son’s desert hideout.

Tears flooded her eyes. They came together kissing each other’s faces. Then, gently pushing him away, she said, “I have to get a Kleenex.”

She lifted a green purse from the kitchen table taking out a tissue and lowered into the chair, dabbing her nose and eyes.

“Sit, CC. Sit.”

“Mom?”

“That was the first word you ever said. You were eighteen months and followed me everywhere. If you turned around and couldn’t see me you would holler.”

“You’re really here?” her grown son asked.

“And then one day instead of crying you said, ‘Mom,’ and then a whole lotta baby talk. Your father called it gabbling.”

“I don’t understand,” John said, thinking of his mother and his father together.

“Sit.”

“I saw you in Parsonsville but I knew it wasn’t really you. I wanted it to be so bad but, but... you have the same red hair.”

“Sit, CC.”

Overwhelmed by the impossible appearance of Lucia his mind recoiled toward Herman. He tried to imagine what history would say about his mother’s magical reentry into his life.

History, he wrote later that day, is what is left after all living memory is erased... A living, breathing datum — like my mother for instance — is outside history: an undigested record, a preformed fact...

“Sit,” Lucia said again.

John nodded, moving to the chair opposite her.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“I can’t tell you that. I mean I was staying in Phoenix for a while before coming here. I was in town one day.”

“You can’t tell me because of the gangster?”

“Filo and I got married six years ago. He’s really a very wonderful man, CC. He was only in with those terrible men because that was all he knew. But that life is behind him now.” With these words she was finished talking about her secret life. “How are you?”

“How am I? I’ve lived my entire life trying to figure out how I got here.”

Lucia took in a deep breath, then she began to speak. “I know it’s been hard, baby. I wasn’t a good wife or mother. That’s why I’m here... to try and make up for some of it.”

“How did you even know to come here?”

“I been living in Venice Beach, California, with Filo the last eleven years. He doesn’t sleep much and watches the TV in the living room pretty late: all these crazy cable-access shows. He says that he likes to see regular people saying things they really believe. I don’t know when he ever started talking like that... Anyway, one night he sees this show with you and an older man. He said that you were a teacher but with a new name and you made mincemeat outta that other guy.”

“He recognized me?”

“I know, right?” Lucia Napoli said. “He only seen you a few times but the minute the camera hit your face Filo knew it was you.”

“That was a year ago. When did he see it?”

“About then. I wanted to come right here but Filo said that we had to be careful because the FBI was lookin’ for him and if they knew you and I were related then maybe they’d have some kinda eye on you. Not like surveillance or anything but just a look now and then.”

“So you’re a fugitive?”

“We live a good life. We got friends, go on vacations. It’s not like me and Jimmy Grimaldi.”

John reached across the table and touched his mother’s forearm wanting further proof that she existed. The yellow posters, public address, the defeat of Annette Eubanks and Ira Carmody were long-ago dreams.

“How did you get into my apartment?”

“I went to the front gate and asked the nice Mexican guard if he would let me in.”

“Hopi,” John said.

“What?”

“Hototo is a Hopi Indian.”

“A real Indian? It’s a wonder out in the west isn’t it? You know me and Filo walk down to the beach every day — every day, even in the rain.”

“What happened to you, mom? You disappeared. I went to your house and you were gone.”

If he could have seen his face the way his mother saw it CC would have observed the pain embedded in his eyes. If he had seen through her heart he would have felt the hurt it brought her.

Lucia took one of his hands in both of hers and peered deeply into their shared ache.

“I love you, baby,” she said. “I might not have been a good mother but I love you, always have.”

“But you didn’t even know about when dad died.”

“I knew, honey. I was there when you buried him.”

“No you weren’t. I put out a chair but you never came. Violet Breen came, France Bickman came but you weren’t there.”

“I was.”

“No.”

“Listen to me, CC. When I heard about Herman I came back to New York. Filo went with me even though he might have been arrested or killed. Your father broke my heart when he kicked me out. I was willing to come take care of both of you. I knew he couldn’t work, that you were doing his job. I was proud of you but what could I do? I knew he’d’a never changed his mind. And if I took you away it would have killed him.”

“You were saying something about the funeral,” John said. Looking at Lucia he felt that she was moving away: that familiar distance.

She must have intuited this feeling because she squeezed his hand very hard. With the pain this distance was quashed.

“I was there but I stayed across the street. I loved Herman, I did, but he was right — I betrayed him. I abandoned you because he needed you more than I did. So when a stool pigeon in Filo’s crew fingered him for the cops I decided that at least I could do something for somebody. I ran with him, stuck by his side through reconstructive surgery, got a job at a movie studio as a makeup artist while he reorganized himself. I’ve tried to be a good woman... I have been.”

“If you were there why didn’t you say anything to me after the funeral?”

“I went to your father’s house and waited,” she said. “But you never came home. I waited three days then went to see France at the Arbuckle. He said your father left you some money and you had probably gone out to start a new life.”

John pulled his hand away but Lucia did not fade.

“Can you forgive me?” she pleaded.

“If I ever said the slightest thing wrong you’d kick me out the house,” he said. “I never wanted dad to know so I slept on the floor of the projection room.”

“I was wrong. Your father and you were the best things that ever happened to me but my heart had a mind of its own. Red wine and bad men were my downfall.”

After long minutes of silence he said, “I can probably get us double-decker apartments and we could live together for a while.”

“All right, CC, whatever you say.”

“Will your husband get angry at you for not coming home?”

“Filo understands me, baby. He wants me to be happy.”

20

The next couple of months were nearly idyllic for young Dr. John Woman. With the help of President Luckfeld and Dean James he and his mother moved into a full family unit in faculty housing. He occupied the top apartment.

Carlinda stopped coming by. He saw her in class but she avoided eye contact and spoke to him only to ask questions about his lectures. Her papers were excellent. She had come up with a powerful theory about the interplay between dialectics, technology and the interpretation of historical events. It was her notion that the present was always struggling with the past because of technology’s impact on understanding. People in the now see the past through an ever-changing, never-repeating kaleidoscope of technological experience, she wrote. How can we hope to understand what went before, even in our own nation and language group, if the ability to perceive and empathize has been altered through technology and its attendant technique?

Attached to one of these papers was a handwritten note which read:

The words rang true.

He had stopped going to see Senta. His sexual drive, he came to believe, had been in response to loneliness and isolation. Now that he had coffee with his mother every morning he no longer felt alone.

In the evenings Lucia, whose new name was Rosa Pitkin, made dinner for John and sometimes guests from the school administration and history department.

President Luckfeld and his Panamanian wife, Marte, ate with them four times in as many weeks.

“You are very lucky to have your mother in your life,” blue-eyed tawny-skinned Marte said one evening when Lucia had made lasagna filled with linguica and shiitake mushrooms. “Most Americans, I find, run away from their blood and then wonder why they’re unhappy.”

“He’s a perfect son,” Lucia agreed. “I don’t deserve him.”

John found that he spoke less and concentrated even more on his deconstructions of the interpretations of what went before.

The history department vacated his ouster then voted him department chair when Annette Eubanks suddenly decided to step down. Ira Carmody was his opponent receiving only three votes.

On the evening after John was elected chair he took his mother to a restaurant called the Country Road Diner located on the outskirts of Parsonsville. It was an old place patronized mainly by old-time locals. John liked to think that the Brother of George ate there, that maybe they had sat side by side at the counter now and then.

That evening John and his mom sat in a corner booth served by Esther Simmons, whose mother’s family had lived in the county for six generations; her father’s people had been there even longer.

John ordered chicken-fried steak while his mother had country beef stew cooked in a red wine sauce. Lucia wore a thick silver necklace and rose gold earrings studded with miner’s diamonds.

“My son the college man,” Lucia said raising her third goblet of wine. “Here I barely made it out of high school, your father never saw the inside of a classroom and you are the boss of a department... you could be university president one day.”

“Yeah,” he intoned, “I’m a real success story.”

Ordering her fourth glass of wine she touched the baby finger of her son’s left hand.

“You don’t think I get the news from home, CC?”

He noticed the concern in her face.

“I read about the old silent theater and the body and who they’re looking for,” she said.

“So you think I did it?”

“I know it.”

“How?”

“Because you were the bravest man I ever knew when you were no more than ten. Because most men need to be stronger or better armed to feel brave but you had your father’s courage.”

“The bravery that women have in a world dominated by men,” John said.

“Just like that,” Lucia agreed, slurring her words slightly. “But better because you wouldn’t hide behind anybody. And if that Chapman Lorraine came in the projection room and found you, you wouldn’t have no choice but to kill him; either that or have you and your father throw’d out on the street. I know that as sure I’m breathing.”

“You...” John said. “You actually see me sitting here in front of you?”

“You’re my son, my blood.”

John felt her claim on him. This drunken passion somehow daunted his intelligence.

“My entire life I missed you, mom.”

“I only left New York when you were sixteen, baby.”

“But even before then you’d be gone in the morning and dad would be so sad that I couldn’t make him smile.”

“I’m a terrible human being.”

“And still I love you more than anything.”

“I’m going away for a few days,” Lucia told her son seven weeks, three days and thirteen hours after she’d miraculously reappeared in his life. “I need to go see Filo.”

“Why doesn’t he come here?” John asked, trying to push down the panic in his chest.

“It’s that if the FBI is watching thing,” Lucia replied. She was dicing onions in his third-floor kitchen.

“How long will you be gone?”

“Three days.”

“Could I come?”

“You have that president’s lecture.”

“Oh... right.”

“But Filo would like to meet you one day,” she said. “He’s a very busy man too.”

“Busy doing what? I thought he’d retired from being a crook.”

“He did... he has. Now he works for charities and public groups.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” John asked wanting to keep the conversation going.

“I told you that he’s had plastic surgery and his name was changed. As long as he’s no place anybody is looking for him it’s okay.”

“What is his new name?”

Lucia looked at her son a moment, her eyes filled with tears from the pungent onion.

“I better let him tell you that,” she said. “You know just a name could put him away for life, maybe get us both killed.”

“Oh... okay. I’d really like it if you stayed until after the lecture, mom. Then we could go together.”

“Next time.”

Heartbreak was a familiar feeling, even older than the guilt over the death of Chapman Lorraine. He remembered clearly when his father was in the hospital and his mother sent him away.

“It’s okay, honey,” Lucia cooed. “I’m never leaving you again.”

“Except to go see Filo.”

“Only for a few days.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

The next afternoon was the first time he considered calling Carlinda. The apartment felt empty. He could say that he wanted to discuss Carlinda’s paper. Instead he turned to the lecture he was supposed to give the next day — History: The Art of Living with Death. Pencil in hand he sat before a stack of blank paper. He promised himself that if he didn’t write anything by seven he’d call Carlinda.

At 6:51 his landline rang.

“Hello?”

“Hello, John.”

“Marte?”

“You sound surprised.”

“No, no. I just... It’s nothing. What can I do for you?”

“Colin was called away to Chicago overnight,” she said. “And I don’t want to eat alone. What are you and Rosa doing?”

“My mother had to go to LA for a few days.”

“Oh. Then you’re alone too. Why don’t we meet at that French restaurant in town?”

“La Reine?”

“That’s it. Seven-thirty?”

“So what you’re saying is that you have been studying history your entire life,” Marte Crespo-Luckfeld said after ordering frogs’ legs as an appetizer and mushroom pasta for the main.

Marte was a handsome woman in her late thirties, with delicate russet-color skin, and eyes a shocking crystalline blue. Her face was long and sympathetic while her mouth was set with determination that John had not remembered from their previous meetings.

“I guess,” he said, “at least from the time I could read long words.”

“But there seems to be something missing.”

“What do you mean?”

Marte gazed at him. In her eyes, on her lips there seemed to be lodged a question. “Colin has told you that he... we belong to a unique and very confidential organization,” she stated.

John became very still.

She smiled and nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “You are right not to answer. The Platinum Path is destined for a glorious future but with this ambition come danger and death.”

At that moment a waiter came with her frogs’ legs and John’s onion soup.

When the server was gone she said, “You are on the radar of the senior officials.”

“Why?”

“They need young and vital leadership: men and women who are willing to act regardless of law, love or outmoded ethics.”

“And they think I’m lawless, loveless and amoral?”

“Be prepared to answer the call.”

John sat up that night thinking about people watching him from synthetic shadows.

“Was that a threat?” he asked the walls and then fell fast asleep.

In the morning John concentrated on the talk he was slated to deliver. Truth, for the historian, was like sand: seemingly whole from a distance but on closer examination it broke down into particles so fine that their forms and natures, not to mention their incalculable number, were beyond human comprehension.

He ascended the stage at Deck Rec auditorium wondering at the previous hour or so: the shower and the dark blue suit over a yellow T, the long walk in strong sun and the hot wind against him. On the way he’d said hello to students and faculty members, strangers and the gardener — Ron Underhill.

“Professor Woman.”

“Mr. Underhill.”

“How are you today, sir?”

“Going to give a talk about how the architecture of human certainty is built on graveyard soil.”

The older man smiled and nodded. “I heard about that,” he said.

“You did?”

“They put out a weekly announcement so the staff can avail themselves of what the school has to offer.”

“I didn’t realize that,” John said.

Underhill gave John a big smile. One of his two front teeth was missing.

Looking out over the mostly full auditorium John thought about Underhill. He was a bright man and completely, it seemed, his own.

Carlinda was in the third row in the rightmost tier of pews. Seeing her John decided on the construction of the talk he’d give.

President Luckfeld and Marte were front and center. Colin nodded at John and smiled. Marte was smiling too.

The digital clock on the back wall read 1:58. John felt the sweat from the hot sun turn cold under the air-conditioning. The IT specialist Talia Friendly, wearing khaki overalls, gave him a thumbs-up.

The spectators were still greeting each other when John said aloud, “We don’t really learn from history.”

People stopped their talking and dropped into seats.

“Take the thumbs-up gesture,” he said making the sign with his left hand. “In ancient Rome, at the gladiatorial games in the Colosseum and Circus, that gesture was a death sentence for the loser. It meant to give an upthrust with the sword and end his life. Thumbs-down meant to sheath your sword and let the conquered live. This is as close as we can get to a fact. Thumbs-up is bad, thumbs-down is good. But will you, now that you know the truth, change the way you sign? Of course not. You’re not communicating with Latin sign language in twenty-first-century America. You know what the gestures mean today and that’s that. We know what is true and will die to defend that truth.

“History is most similar to a feud,” he said. “There are sides. One family says that it was started by the murder of an uncle or the theft of some property. The other clan identifies an earlier insult; and so on. Natural law, morality and God himself seem to take sides in the conflict. From this come decades, sometimes centuries, of bloodshed and animosity, misinformation and the steady deterioration of truth.

“The historian has to choose sides. He, or she, makes a choice as to what sequence of events and intentions to highlight. Even while affecting objectivity the historian has secretly, maybe even unconsciously, taken sides. This is the human condition and, whatever else we might achieve, we cannot abandon it.”

John kept on talking even though his mind wandered from the lecture. He was thinking of his gone-again mother and Marte’s warning. He wondered if Carlinda would see the comparison between technique and nature and if knowledge, like Buddha said and Socrates said, was often the enemy of awareness.

He did not see the three men, led by Officer Hernandez of the Granville police, go around Talia Friendly as they approached the stage.

When they came near, John wondered why. Had they found some proof concerning the Trash Can Lecture?

Maybe this part of the story is over, he thought.

“Cornelius Jones,” Hernandez said, “I am arresting you until such time that your case with the state of New York has been resolved. Please turn around, sir.”