Walking in the desert sun Tyne talked and talked.
She was from Montclair, New Jersey, but hated the winter and came out west for school. That was two years ago. She hadn’t been back home since. Her father died in the first week of her freshman year and though she thought she should go to the funeral she didn’t.
“... He wasn’t my real father,” she explained. “I didn’t know my biological dad and Harold, my stepfather, never adopted me or my brother, and it was my first week at school. Harold didn’t have life insurance and all my mom owned was the house so she couldn’t pay for me flying out. My grandfather left a college fund for me and Toby, my brother, and mom said that I’d have to use some of that to come back home. But it was way expensive and Harold wasn’t my father and anyway it was only the first week of school and I’d miss so much that I finally didn’t come but sent flowers instead.”
John listened closely thinking about the concept of jabber: trillions of words squandered in air containing the emotional, organizational and social backgrounds of any and all eras.
“Here we are,” Tyne said.
The administrative offices of NUSW were opposite in many ways to the blue-and-white classroom building. The dun-colored bungalows were herded together in a compound surrounded by high adobe walls painted salmon pink. The office complex was accessible by only one gate, which was watched over by round-the-clock security guards. “Hi, Mr. Gustav,” Tyne said through a microphone mounted on the outside of the gate.
The guard, John knew, sat in a small air-conditioned booth watching the entrance through the iron bars of the green gate and on a bank of monitors that gave him a three-hundred-sixty-degree view around the fortress.
“Tyne, Professor Woman,” the sixtysomething white-mustachioed guardian said over an electronic speaker.
John imagined Mr. Gustav looking down at his monitors, then, when he was assured that there was no mischief afoot, he hit a button and the electronically controlled gate rolled noisily aside.
Tyne bounded in followed by the young professor. They each nodded at the guardian. John would have stopped to talk with Lawrence Gustav if he were unaccompanied. He liked talking, seeing each person as a historical repository that leaked secrets like so many corroded gas tanks.
The bungalows, laid out like a country village, were uniform single-story structures except for the president’s office. This two-story building was reddish brown and most resembled the shape of a naturally formed rectangular desert stone. It seemed to lean to the left and the windows were at an odd angle to the ground. The crenellated plaster walls were uneven with grooves and ridges like actual stone. The doorway was unobstructed whenever John had been there. He wondered if there was a door at all.
There might not be, he thought, knowing that NUSW was founded and run by members of the secretive Platinum Path, a self-described new age religion founded by the guru of meta-psychic-determinism — Service Tellman. The Platinum Path subscribed to Tellman’s theory that the manifestation of the universal unconscious could be controlled by certain strong-minded individuals working in concert. Only these individuals, Tellman taught, could guide the world to its full potential, that it was the destiny of such men and women to deliver the world from the suicidal Iron Path that it had been on ever since the Industrial Revolution.
Service Tellman died seven years before, leaving a group called The Dozen to keep the dream on course. The university president, Colin Luckfeld, was suspected to be a member of this committee; at least that was what John had read in a Wall Street Journal exposé. NUSW was Tellman’s pet project. Construction was completed eleven years before. And, considering the philosophical proclivities of the Platinum Path, John thought that there might be a wall, an iron gate and an armed guard but still no door barring entry once you’d made it to the inner circle. Such a design would be an apt totem of the elite cult.
“Go right on in, Professor Woman,” the chatty, anachronistically clad Tyne Oliver said. “He’s upstairs.”
“Don’t you work here?”
“No, sir, I’m in the bursar’s office this semester. President Luckfeld’s assistant called me because I’m a floater until my senior year. Floaters always do most of the foot-errands.”
John smiled. Tyne took this expression as a dismissal and left, walking down the cobblestone lane laid between the grassy lawns and various flowering bushes that stood out in front of the bungalows. The office facility had its own gardener but John had forgotten, or maybe he’d never known, the groundskeeper’s name.
John stood outside the possibly doorless doorway enjoying the specific language of floaters and foot-errands while feeling the desert sun’s heat filter through his dark clothes. He took in three breaths before he was prepared to enter the president’s lair.
3
The large room through the open door was a study in blues.
The floor had wall-to-wall indigo carpeting. Its six walls were cerulean; upon each wall hung a solitary oil painting depicting some oceangoing sailing ship forging its way across shoreless seas. The eighteen-foot-high ceiling was almost white — like a cloud-filled sky with only hints of a blue beyond.
Straight ahead, maybe twenty feet past the door, was a big metal desk painted crayon blue. Behind the improbable office furniture sat a bronze-colored woman who was easily twice John’s age. She wore a dark blue jacket and a bright orange silk blouse. The clothes looked bulky on her lean frame and her smile communicated neither humor nor warmth.
Her hair had already turned white and was now verging on blue, maybe in sympathy, John thought, with the color scheme of her workplace.
“Professor Woman,” she said, distaste for the designation on her lips.
“Ms. Whitman.”
“Mrs. Whitman,” she corrected.
“Mrs. Whitman.”
Behind Bernice Whitman were three evenly spaced entrances to hallways; the outer two at one-hundred-forty-degree angles to the central door. John was always surprised by the magnitude of the president’s complex. From outside the building seemed modest despite its extra floor.
“He’s waiting for you,” Mrs. Whitman said. “You’re late.”
“You should have somebody enter the right classroom number in the database,” John said, unable to ignore the bait in her words. “You’re lucky Ms. Oliver found me.”
Whitman grunted and John turned to his left where there was a blue-washed wooden ladder that led to the floor above.
“You can take the elevator or the stairs,” Mrs. Whitman offered.
But John was already climbing up through the hole in the almost completely white sky.
President Luckfeld’s office was not the size of the entire first floor but it was still the largest room that John had ever been in that wasn’t a hall, an auditorium or some other public space. The floor was paneled oak, the hall dominated by floor-to-ceiling windows interspersed with white walls sporting oil paintings of modern-day folks in pedestrian poses and garb.
There were open areas in the great chamber that approximated wall-less rooms. To the left were two yellow sofas that faced each other over a bloodred carpet. Behind one of the sofas was a large wooden bookcase. A little farther on, to the right, stood a two-foot-high platform containing an entire kitchen of blond pine and glistening chrome.
On the other side of the chamber, opposite the blue-washed ladder entrance, was a long table behind which sat the president. At his back was a seemingly solid glass wall that led out onto a deck that was twice again the size of the office.