Anyway: Margaret and Mildred and I were awakened by the explosion, which demolished the main gate of the prison. There was no way we could have imagined what was really going on.
The 3 of us were sleeping in separate bedrooms. Margaret was on the first floor, Mildred and I were on the second floor. No sooner had I sat up, my ears ringing, than Mildred came into my room stark naked, her eyes open wide.
She spoke first. She used a slang word for hugeness I had never heard her speak before. It wasn’t slang of her generation or even mine. It was slang of my children’s generation. I guess she had heard it and liked it, and then held it in reserve for some really important occasion.
Here is what she said, as sporadic small-arms fire broke out at the prison: “Do you remember that humongous fish I caught?”
11
At one time I fully expected to spend the rest of my life in this valley, but not in jail. I envisioned my mandatory retirement from Tarkington College in 2010. I would be modestly well-off with Social Security and a pension from the College. My mother-in-law would surely be dead by then, I thought, so I would have only Margaret to care for. I would rent a little house in the town below. There were plenty of empty ones.
But that dream would have been blasted even if there hadn’t been a prison break, even if the Social Security system hadn’t gone bust and the College Treasurer hadn’t run off with the pension funds and so on. For, as I’ve said before, in 1991 Tarkington College fired me.
There I was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor. Where to go? What to do?
The man who got me fired was Jason Wilder, the celebrated Conservative newspaper columnist, lecturer, and television talk-show host. He saved my life by doing that. If it weren’t for him, I would have been on the Scipio side of the lake instead of the Athena side during the prison break.
I would have been facing all those convicts as they crossed the ice to Scipio in the moonlight, instead of watching them in mute wonderment from the rear, like Robert E. Lee during Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. They wouldn’t have known me, and I would still have seen only 3 Athena convicts in all my time.
I would have tried to fight in some way, although, unlike the College President, I would have had no guns. I would have been killed and buried along with the College President and his wife Zuzu, and Alton Darwin and all the rest of them. I would have been buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun went down.
The first time I saw Jason Wilder in person was at the Board meeting when they fired me. He was then only an outraged parent. He would later join the Board and become by far the most valuable of the convicts’ hostages after the prison break. Their threat to kill him immobilized units of the 82nd Airborne Division, which had been brought in by school bus from the South Bronx. The paratroops sealed off the valley at the head of the lake and occupied the shoreline across from Scipio and to the south of Scipio, and dug in on the western slope of Musket Mountain. But they dared not come any closer, for fear of causing the death of Jason Wilder.
There were other hostages, to be sure, including the rest of the Trustees, but he was the only famous one. I myself was not strictly a hostage, although I would probably have been killed if I had tried to leave. I was a sort of floating, noncombatant wise man, wandering wherever I pleased in Scipio under siege. As at Athena Prison, I tried to give the most honest answer I could to any question anyone might care to put to me. Otherwise I stayed silent. I volunteered no advice at Athena, and none in Scipio under siege. I simply described the truth of the inquirer’s situation in the context of the world outside as best I could. What he did next was up to him.
I call that being a teacher. I don’t call that being a mastermind of a treasonous enterprise. All I ever wanted to overthrow was ignorance and self-serving fantasies.
I was fired without warning on Graduation Day. I was playing the bells at high noon when a girl who had just completed her freshman year brought the news that the Board of Trustees, then meeting in Samoza Hall, the administration building, wanted to talk to me. She was Kimberley Wilder, Jason Wilder’s learning-disabled daughter. She was stupid. I thought it was odd but not menacing that the Trustees would have used her for a messenger. I couldn’t imagine what business she might have had that would bring her anywhere near their meeting. She had in fact been testifying before them about my supposed lack of patriotism, and had then asked for the honor of fetching me to my liquidation.
She was one of the few underclasspersons still on the campus. The rest had gone home, and relatives of those about to get their Associate in the Arts and Sciences certificates had taken over their suites. No relative of Kimberley’s was about to graduate. She had stayed around for the Trustees’ meeting. And her famous father had come by helicopter to back her up. The soccer field was being used as a heliport. It looked like a rookery for pterodactyls.
Others had arrived in conventional aircraft at Rochester, where they had been met by rented limousines provided by the college. One senior’s stepmother said, I remember, that she thought she had landed in Yokohama instead of Rochester because there were so many Japanese. The thing was that the changing of the guard at Athena had coincided with Graduation Day. New guards, mostly country boys from Hokkaido, who spoke no English and had never seen the United States, were flown directly to Rochester from Tokyo every 6 months, and taken to Athena by bus. And then those who had served 6 months at the gates, and on the walls and catwalks over the mess halls, and in the watchtowem, and so on, were flown straight home.
“How come you haven’t gone home, Kimberley?” I said.
She said that she and her father wanted to hear the graduation address, which was to be delivered by her father’s close friend and fellow Rhodes Scholar, Dr. Martin Peale Blankenship, the University of Chicago economist who would later become a quadriplegic as a result of a skiing accident in Switzerland.
Dr. Blankenship had a niece in the graduating class. That was what brought him to Scipio. His niece was Hortense Mellon. I have no idea what became of Hortense. She could play the harp. I remember that, and her upper teeth were false. The real teeth were knocked out by a mugger as she left a friend’s coming-out party at the Waldorf-Astoria, which has since burned down. There is nothing but a vacant lot there now, which was bought by the Japanese.
I heard that her father, like so many other Tarkington parents, lost an awful lot of money in the biggest swindle in the history of Wall Street, stock in a company called Microsecond Arbitrage.
I had spotted Kimberley as a snoop, all right, but not as a walking recording studio. All through the academic year now ending, our paths had crossed with puzzling frequency. Again and again I would be talking to somebody, almost anywhere on the campus, and realize that Kimberley was lurking close by. I assumed that she was slightly cracked, and was eavesdropping on everyone, avid for gossip. She wasn’t even taking a course of mine for credit, although she did audit both Physics for Non-scientists and Music Appreciation for Nonmusicians. So what could I possibly be to her or she to me? We had never had a conversation about anything.
One time, I remember, I was shooting pool in the new recreation center, the Pahlavi Pavilion, and she was so close that I was having trouble working my cuestick, and I said to her, “Do you like my perfume?”