LEE RETURNED IN DREAD TO CAMPUS THAT MONDAY, to launch those last downslope weeks of the term that in previous years he would have bounded ecstatically through, as if his sixty-five-year-old chest held the heart of a freshman. This time he had writhed without sleep the whole night before, and sliced into his face while attempting to shave, and then drunk a pot of coffee, a vice he’d given up several years earlier for the sake of his bladder, and though the coffee he’d brewed had been stale, it still burned in his gut as if he’d swallowed ammonia. He was going to be scrutinized—as the survivor, or as the hospital nonvisitor, or perhaps simply as the most senior member of the department who still foolishly taught and showed up for meetings. Whichever role had been pressed upon him, he was sure it was somehow ignoble. He pulled in to his space in the faculty lot doubled over his acid-gnawed stomach, shoulders hunched to his ears, his ragged margin of platinum hair prickling into his eyes. It was remarkable he didn’t lock the keys in the car, that he’d remembered his briefcase; as he gathered these objects carefully, tremblingly, to himself, he seemed to watch from aloft, as if he were the dead man. He forgot that the last time he’d been in this space he’d been holding the letter, dotting it with his tears.
And so he felt, if not relief, at least a sense of reprieve when he arrived finally in his department and learned that the college was implementing a hastily drafted Grief Plan. It must have been the result of all-night, frantic effort, of committees swiftly cobbled together along the branches of the telephone tree, of the news relayed—no time for tears—Friday night, the plan drafted—no time for dissent—Saturday, its components amazingly hauled into place on Sunday, so that now, Monday morning, the campus was hushed and composed, like a church. Or perhaps it had been in the works for three weeks; perhaps only Lee had been naïve or selfish enough to make no preparations for Hendley’s demise. In the course of his short drive to campus, Lee had struggled, with rising panic, to compose a few remarks appropriate to the disaster for his ten-thirty class; now he learned that all instructors were to preempt their original plans and instead read a brief text, imparting the news and directing the students to an unprecedented all-college assembly that afternoon in the stadium. In the meantime professional “grief counselors,” scores of them, were holding casual “talk-outs” with students in groups, and meeting “one-on-one” with grieving students in private.
“Who did all this?” Lee murmured when he had finished the memo. He was only just managing audible words, in the same way that his knees were only just managing, with much wobbling and strain, to hold him upright. When he had inched into view in the department doorway, holding his briefcase by both ends as if he expected to need it as a shield, though in truth he’d forgotten in the course of his tunnel-like walk from his car that it had a handle, Sondra had rushed toward him from the place where she’d already been standing, beside her desk—she had not been sitting in her chair, a chair to which she’d been fused, in Lee’s mind’s eye, for the fifteen-odd years he’d known her. Sondra took the briefcase from his hands and tried to press him into the chair that sat under the bulletin board, for visitors waiting to see the head of the department, but he bullishly resisted her efforts. Little worms of light swarmed in his vision, from exhaustion. The department, he finally noticed, was silent and empty. All four secretarial desks were abandoned. Emma Stiles’s computer, which in repose usually showed a continually morphing geometrical figure of colorful lines, was dead gray, not asleep but extinguished.
“…emergency committee,” Sondra was saying, in response to his question. “Lee, I’ll say it again. Please sit down. You look the way we all feel, terrible.”
“But why?” he said, looking into her face for the first time. Her eyes were horribly swollen—their rims were almost like pink lips—from weeping. “Why didn’t anyone ask me to help? I could have helped, I could have helped make this plan—”
“Don’t you think that you’ve been through enough? Sit down, Lee, I want to tell you—”
All this while, since rushing toward him and prying loose his briefcase and failing to seat him in the chair, she’d been holding his arm, attempting, through what she might have thought was a subtly constant application of downward pressure, to sneak him into the chair anyway. He knew she was in the grip of bereaved mania, that she’d been standing when he entered the department not because on the lookout for him but because she couldn’t force her own body to sit, and that she was trying to force him to sit for the very same reason. But he was fevered as well. He shook her off, with surprising force and with a sound of anger that was almost a bark. “I’m the last person who deserves to be treated so kindly,” he said, in the same barking voice, but which formed into words was for some reason uglier. They stared at each other a moment, Sondra frozen in an attitude of fright and Lee, he imagined, contorted like a madman. He sank into the chair, disgusted with himself. “I’m sorry, Sondra,” he said.
After a moment’s hesitation, Sondra said, in a tone not entirely certain, “You don’t need to apologize to me.”
“Yes, I do. I do because…” And here the spectacle of himself the past twenty-four hours—riven by insomnia, too tremored to shave, rehearsing phrases of wisdom and solace in an anxious whisper on his drive to the campus, as if any student would come to him seeking his help, when there were grief counselors and all-college assemblies and then of course all the Hendleys-in-waiting—rose up and smote him, with his deluded belief in his relevance. He knew he was about to grow maudlin, as if there were nothing to do in the face of his foolishness but to act like even more of a fool. “I do because I am ridiculous,” he said.
“Lee.”
“I am ridiculous,” he repeated, with more conviction.
“All right. You are.” Sondra went to her desk and returned pushing her own wheeled chair, which she settled on once she was opposite Lee. “You’re also in shock. I know you and Hendley weren’t the greatest of friends, but that doesn’t mean you’re not affected by this horrible thing.” Sondra’s voice, after she’d seated herself, had assumed a brisk, let’s-get-down-to-it tone, but with “this horrible thing” her voice started to climb, and her swollen pink eyes filled again. “I mean, I know he could be an arrogant son of a you-know-what some of the time; who knows better than me? But that was just him, that was Hendley.”
“What do you mean, not the greatest of friends?”
It took Sondra a moment to be able to speak; she’d retrieved a hard, gray ball of Kleenex from inside her sleeve. “Just that you butted heads with him, thought he was full of himself—who didn’t? He was a young Turk, and he knew it. But we loved him.” She was crying again.
“I didn’t butt heads with him,” Lee protested. His gut was roiling again; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. “My work hardly overlaps with his! What would we butt heads about?”
“Lee, it doesn’t matter. What I’ve been trying to say is, even the kids here who never had him, who never met him, they need to talk to someone. I need to talk to someone. And you, you were right there—”
“I disagreed with him about Kalotay’s tenure,” Lee said. “Is that it? But I was right! Everyone sees now we should have denied it, even Hendley should see it.” He realized he was repeatedly speaking of Hendley in the present tense, but Sondra did not seem to notice. “Everyone in this department argues!” Lee cried.
“What I’ve been trying to say is, they’ve gotten grief counselors for us, particularly for us, who aren’t on that memo. For those of us who really…knew Hendley. And I’ve been waiting here. To see if you wanted to go.”
“Waiting?”
“I’m nervous for some reason.” Sondra scrubbed her eyes with the ball of Kleenex. “I just thought we’d walk there together.”
“No,” Lee said, abruptly standing up. The Grief Plan had let him briefly forget his dread of being scrutinized, so much so that he’d begun to feel oddly left out of the collegewide program for grieving and healing. But for the past several minutes, with Sondra, he’d felt increasingly under a lamp. He’d never gone to the hospital, and she certainly knew this, she who had probably been there every day for the maximum number of hours allowed. She was looking at him with concern, but he could almost have said she was using the look as a mask, from behind which she was judging him sternly, and finding him lacking.
“I really think,” Sondra resumed carefully, “that you need to talk to someone.”
“No,” Lee said, “I need to teach class.” Except that his class had been canceled, and replaced by the memo he held. He thrust it at Sondra, with its official grief text—It is with enormous sadness that—and picked up his briefcase. “Please, Sondra, make the announcement to my ten-thirty for me. I have to go home. I didn’t sleep well. I have to go home.”
“I’m going to call you later,” she said—threatened?—as he rushed off. “I’m going to check in with you….”
He encountered no one else down the length of the corridor back to the stairs, no one on the stairs, not even a sole wandering student on the first floor in the lobby, where the stairway emerged beside the elevator bank and a bulletin board whose rectangular shape was entirely lost beneath the countless aggressively colorful banners of undergraduate life. It was twenty past ten, a time of the morning at which this lobby was usually lively with students running to ten-thirty classes. But Lee’s building belonged entirely to the kingdom of science; none of its four floors housed any branch of the arts or humanities, and it was the rare student of science, he reminded himself, who didn’t begin the day with an eight-ten or a nine-twenty. By now only a radically out-of-touch straggler would be left to be notified of Hendley’s death. Lee’s flight from his class hadn’t been necessary. Sondra was in his classroom upstairs adding layers of nasal lacquer to her ball of Kleenex, on the alert for footsteps, but there wouldn’t be any.
He had left the department without having gone to his office; he hadn’t even turned the corner of the corridor that led to his office, and which would have shown him whether crime tape still sealed Hendley’s door and whether a policeman was still posted there, dozing off in a chair. Lee suddenly felt something akin to the homeland longing of an exile for his office, with its impoverished décor that to the outsider must bespeak lack of personal feeling, but which for Lee was precisely the opposite. The very few objects Lee had placed in his office, the old lamp and the photos of Esther and her scuffed baby shoe—partner of the shoe in his desk drawer at home—were personal in the extreme, and the disproportion of their mass when compared to the ranks of generic-looking, unadorned mathematical textbooks; the gray metal utility shelves; the university-issue gray desk and bland bulletin board with its very few bureaucratic reminders dutifully displayed, all four corners secured by pushpins, did not, for Lee, render them atmospherically powerless but rather increased their potency to the utmost degree. For Lee the ordered space of his office was indelibly stamped with significance; what did it matter that Esther’s decades-discarded, heroic little white shoe was concealed in a drawer? It was for no one but him. He yearned to be in his office right now, with the door locked and that invisible atmosphere of his innermost heart sitting calmly around him, and at the same time he was newly aware of contamination. Hendley had been murdered next door. Lee would have to move offices, and while he had never felt sentimental about that particular junction of walls, floor, and ceiling—his office was the lamp and the shoe and the outdated photos—he walked out of the building almost overwhelmed by his feeling of loss.
Outdoors was, perversely, the sort of pulsing spring day that could erase cluttered decades, pluck them out of his way and take him back, not to Aileen or even his first years in this country but all the way to boyhood, to that narrow collection of disjointed glimpses and pangs. From his very early childhood, he recalled a pear orchard, and like someone emerging again in a past incarnation, he could see, for a moment, the hills of white blossoms descending to a faraway sea. This must have been the mid-1930s, before the arrival of war, even in its first form as a distant event to which his father made occasional reference. Lee no longer remembered where that orchard had been, to whom it had belonged, why he’d been there, alone, he feels, moving resolutely on very small legs, and he no longer had any way to find out. Nobody to ask. An ocean of blossoms, in humped waves and boiling with bees, and in the distance the line of the actual sea, like the rim of his warm silver cup. Perhaps in recollection the orchard was vaster, the hills steeper, the sea’s gleam more explicitly signaling him—in compensation for the plain diorama of American campus he’d occupied for the past three decades. The West Quad, which he crossed walking back to his car, was thinly scattered with students, but instead of walking or sprawling they stood huddled in small groups, as if holding councils. There was no trace of the immature, inappropriate, completely understandable attitude of celebration at classes’ having been canceled that Lee had expected, and even hoped for, in minute quantities. They were teenagers, after all—they were children! What should they care about death? But they were solemn as priests, gathered into their secretive huddles, and Lee was reminded abruptly of a different day, in a different season, the November day when he’d emerged from his library carrel his first semester in graduate school to find the quad eerily dotted with just such small, motionless groups. Then he’d noticed a noise, the compound drone of numerous, widely spaced transistors, and realized that each group of hunched wool overcoats had formed around the small grain of a radio. Running up to the nearest, he’d heard low sobs as well and thought, War.
“What is it?” he’d cried.
“Kennedy’s been shot,” someone told him.
He’d taken off running again, still thinking, There will be war. They’ve shot the president, there will be war. But here today was only sun, delicious warmth to the breeze, and grave children—less traumatized, Lee decided as he passed them, than elevated by the sense of a drama in which they played roles. He recognized none of his department’s students, the only students he felt would be justified in any real demonstrations of grief, and even then he was aware he was finding the prospect of such demonstrations distasteful. For Emma Stiles it might be warranted. She had idolized Hendley, unfortunately. But for the students of Hendley’s persistently oversubscribed lecture, the hundreds of students who had watched him perform from a distance, who sat cross-legged and patient, a long line of them, in the hallway outside his office every week waiting for a bantering word with him, for the students who didn’t even have their laborious papers evaluated by him, but instead by his lackeylike teaching assistants—were these students suffering genuine grief? Wasn’t there something out of proportion, not just about the stricken solemnity of the student population but about the official solemnizations of the college itself? The collegewide assembly, the batteries of grief counselors, the suspension of classes all began to strike Lee, now that he was free of the chastising presence of Sondra, as sanctimonious and self-important, as if the single death of a popular professor of dubious talent, however inexplicable and unjust it was, was on the same level as the death of John F. Kennedy. And he was not a victim of envy to think such a thing, although he was a coward, because he knew he’d never say it aloud, even to Fasano. It took moral courage to acknowledge that some humans merited more, were worth more alive—or more dead—than the rest of their kind. Kennedy’s life had been worth more than Hendley’s and would certainly be worth more than Lee’s, whatever miracles Lee might accomplish before the end of his days. And Hendley’s life had been worth more than Lee’s; since he’d talked to Fasano, Lee understood that with calm clarity. Someone, whether with reason or not, had found Hendley and Illich, and perhaps all the others Fasano had mentioned, more substantial, and hence more threatening, than Lee ever would be.
Somehow this self-diminishing acknowledgment helped him to think of Gaither’s letter, and his own swift reply, with some degree of internal composure. After long consideration he had mailed the letter to Gaither in a departmental envelope; though he had demanded Gaither’s telephone number, he hadn’t reciprocated. This wasn’t to preserve an advantage, as Lee knew he had none. Gaither could find Lee at home as easily as he’d found him at school; he probably already had his number from the telephone book. But Gaither had initiated the correspondence to Lee’s school address, perhaps in sardonic homage to their shared past as students. Whatever the case, Lee expected Gaither’s reply, if there was going to be one, to find him at school, the way the first letter had.
By now he’d returned to the faculty lot again and caught sight of his car, parked diagonally with its left front and right rear bumpers almost touching its neighbors. Lee hadn’t been aware of this when he’d left the car forty minutes ago. In its crookedness his generic Nissan had been transformed into something extremely pathetic, like the scarcely driven old-model Chevrolets and Lincoln Continentals plied waveringly to the grocery store by nearly sightless and hunchbacked owners and left in the lot as haphazardly as boats washed onto land by a flood. Apart from the college, this town possessed nothing to set it apart from the rest of the Rust Belt and as a result had grown gray and enfeebled; all its young people had left or succumbed to drug use. Living on the gown side of the town/gown divide, though, Lee no more felt a kinship to these town geriatrics than he would have to horses or cows. Academic life demanded that reflexive belief in exemption from sorry surroundings, as if being a tenured professor at a second-rate school were like being an American diplomat in the Third World—unless you had luck, like Fasano, and got Cornell and UCLA, or unless you were actually brilliant, as none of Lee’s immediate colleagues had been since Donald Whitehead in graduate school. But what if twenty-five years in the same place had filled with time’s silt the dividing abyss, so that now Lee was less a grand Gownsman than another old Townsman who should give up his license? Approaching the car, he stopped short of the point at which any observer would see he was the owner and looked around anxiously, as if he’d run the car into someone’s front yard. University Station lay on the far side of the lot, and it was as much to restore distance between himself and his car as to pursue his vague instinct of having a letter that he resumed walking, in that direction. First delivery to individual departments rarely occurred before noon, even later on Mondays because the weekend’s backlog of mail took longer to sort. If the trundling mail cart, pushed along carelessly by a work-study student, were to emerge from the station right now, he could intercept it. He wouldn’t set foot again in his department or its mail room today.
To his surprise, the same spiky-haired boy whom he’d questioned before was at the window again. “I’m beginning to think you and I are the last people alive on the planet,” he said.
“Um, yeah,” the boy said, scrubbing his hand through his hair in a gesture of defense against the baffling statement. The boy’s scowling, suspicious expression was exactly like past expressions of Esther’s at that same thorny age. Though Esther’s had been a torment, this boy’s prompted in Lee an upwelling of misty benevolence. And the dread he had felt earlier, when he’d thought he would have to teach class, was giving way to a truant’s elation at the prospect of freedom. He felt able to back his car out of its space. If he did have a letter from Gaither, he wouldn’t read it right now, or even today. After three decades, what was the rush? When he got home, he’d brew a pot of green tea and take a very long nap, and when he woke up, he’d drink a cold beer and make a strip steak for dinner. He would skip the all-college assembly, he would soak in the bath with the Emperor Concerto playing, then he’d sleep like a stone, for the first time in weeks, and in the morning—the perfumed light of Tuesday, with no class to teach—he would open the letter.
As he’d expected, the mail cart for Mathematics and Computer Science hadn’t yet departed, although it was loaded and ready to go. “This’ll be the only delivery today,” the boy said as he wrestled the cart forward. “Second delivery’s canceled so everyone can attend the assembly. Um, I need to see a photo ID if you want to take mail from here. It has to be a valid driver’s license or, um, a passport or something like that.”
“You do? Why?”
“It’s just a new policy, for security.”
“But,” Lee said, smiling tolerantly at the boy, “my mailbox in the department doesn’t have to show you my ID for you to give it my mail. Does it? So what sense does this make?”
“If you don’t have ID with you now, we’re just about to fire this cart off, Professor. Your mail’ll be in your mailbox in about half an hour. Maybe forty-five minutes.”
“But I don’t have time to wait,” Lee lied. His aversion to returning to his building had become absolute; he knew that it would ruin his miraculously restored mood.
“And you don’t have ID? Because that’s the only way. I don’t know, you can talk to the guy in charge if you want. It’s not like I make the rules.”
Lee had almost imagined the entire mail-room apparatus under the desultory control of the spiky-haired boy, but of course there were full-time workers, actual United States postal workers, concealed somewhere behind the long wall of student mailboxes, each with its small window to show mail to someone looking in or, as one small aperture in a vast compound eye, to show the station’s patrons, like Lee now, to someone looking out. “No, that’s all right,” he said. “Of course I have my driver’s license. I only question this policy, because it seems very random to me.” He wrested the license from his wallet with clumsy fingers and then proffered it haughtily, because now the boy was looking at him with another of Esther’s former trademark expressions, the undisguised incredulity of a teenager forced to contend with a doddering parent. This time Lee did not feel as nostalgic in response.
“Okay,” the boy said, taking the license. “I’ll be right back.”
But the person who returned with Lee’s license was not the boy, or even one of the thick-legged, dull-eyed, full-time uniformed postal workers. It was a middle-aged man, perhaps in his late forties, casually dressed in loafers and pleat-front khaki pants and a bomber jacket over a button-up shirt with no tie. He was not very much taller than Lee and not even, on close examination, very much heavier, but he somehow denoted a looming presence, seemed to refer to a previous hugeness, like certain aged football players Lee recalled from TV, earnestly endorsing deodorant. This man’s earnestness seemed to arise not just from oversize shoulders, restrained and uncomfortable-looking in the snug bomber jacket, but from his face, which was even more paradoxically striking than his unaverage body. The face was appealingly ugly, sensitively crude, dominated by a shadow-casting shelf of a brow beneath which small yet bright eyes seemed to peer with particular keenness. Lee had the fleeting impression not of an unhandsome man but of an amazingly handsome gorilla, an impression deepened by the man’s helmet of coarse black hair, going gray at the temples, and his matching eyebrows further darkening his shelf-shadowed face, and his arms, as powerful as the shoulders and perhaps very slightly too long; Lee was aware of their length because the man was extending both hands in what seemed an unusually warm show of welcome. The right hand was empty, and instinctively Lee reached to meet it, while his gaze was entranced by the left: it offered Lee what at first seemed to be a small billfold, held open, the interior busy with typescript of various sizes in varying shades of blue, teal, and gray: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIONU.S. Department of Justice By Order of the Attorney General the individual pictured herein… The small photo of the man who had now grasped Lee’s hand failed entirely to capture its subject; it was clearly the same man, but at the same time it could have been anyone. An illegible signature climbed up one side, vertical to the rest of the text. “Special Agent Jim Morrison,” he was saying. “Professor Lee? It’s my pleasure to meet you. I have to correct our friend here: I’m not in charge, not at the post office. Your school’s administration and the United States Postal Inspectors are working together to implement changes for all of your safety, and I’m doing my best to help out. Thank your Postal Service; they’re watching out for your welfare. All right,” he added over the bulk of his shoulder to the boy, who was gaping behind him.
“No way,” the boy said. “Your name’s Jim Morrison? Are you serious?”
“For the next little while, the post office will be screening your mail on arrival to ensure it contains nothing dangerous,” the agent continued, ignoring the boy’s interruption. “But they’re also concerned no one tampers with your mail, once it’s here. Let’s say someone not you comes here claiming he’s you, gets your mail on the strength of his word, and then tampers with it in a manner that’s dangerous to you. But you’re you, Professor: that’s all we wanted to know. And let me add that I’m sorry for your loss.”
For a moment Lee didn’t know what loss was meant. He had flushed to the roots of his hair, and his overwrought gut had reactivated; the sensation he felt, inapt as he knew that it was, equally mixed apprehension with guilt. He had no reason to feel guilty apart from his being alive; but he’d long known that in the face of a cop, all grown people feel guilt, no matter how spotless their hearts.
By contrast, the boy showed no unease at all. After rooting through the bundles of mail in the cart, he handed one to the agent without a tremor: a large bundle, held together with two rubber bands, which the agent removed. The agent sorted through the bundle swiftly, was satisfied, resecured it, and gave it to Lee. Lee had watched this without seeing; he still did not know if the bundle contained a letter from Gaither. He dimly registered that it was the most mail he’d ever received in one day.
“So much,” he murmured.
“The post office has been holding on to mail while departments install keyed mailboxes. You should have gotten some notification; I apologize on your department’s behalf if you didn’t. They’ve had to come into compliance with a lot of changes in not a whole lot of time, and of course the stresses in your department have been greater than anywhere else. Just to save you some time, Professor, as you’re sorting through all of that mail, let me go ahead and tell you that one item will be a request that you make an appointment to come in and talk, either to me or to one of my colleagues, in the next couple days.”
“About what?”
“We’re speaking to everyone in the math/sci departments, as a matter of routine,” the agent began soothingly, and from his tone Lee realized that his own had been shrill. His benevolent mood, his momentary truant’s elation, had been misfired neurons, a glitch; he was the same trembling wreck he’d been when encountering Sondra. He struggled to master himself and wound up sounding brusque.
“Of course,” he interrupted. “I’d be very glad to. I’d be very glad to help.”
“Thank you, Professor. I look forward to speaking with you.” And when the agent extended his hand once again, but with the left hand withheld in a pocket this time, Lee, like a marionette, extended his once again in response, so that they both felt, when their palms made contact, that Lee’s was clammy with sweat.