“Yes.”
“I might not have the time for that. I can do the reading though. I read on long flights.”
“You travel often?”
Pepperdine nodded and stood up.
“I’ve taken up enough of your time, Professor. There must be a new class coming soon.”
“No. I, um, I always get a classroom that doesn’t have anything scheduled for at least an hour and a half after. My lectures often exceed the allotted time.”
“I should be going anyway, have to be in Ho Chi Minh City in thirty-six hours.” Pepperdine wasn’t a tall man, five eight at most. His shoes were made from red-brown leather and probably cost at least a week’s salary of any professor on the campus. He moved at a leisurely pace with no limp or hesitation.
John remained in his fourth-row desk-chair for long minutes wondering why a man like Pepperdine would pay such close attention to him and his class.
These thoughts led naturally to a life crafted to be undetectable. If he was a ghost then maybe Willie was a ghost hunter like they had on reality TV.
The idea of ghost hunters further distracted John. He thought that the sham television shows were little different from history classes. The history department was the ghost hunter of the university. Actually most researchers were in pursuit of knowledge even more unlikely than poltergeists.
“John?” She was standing at the doorway wearing a gray dress-suit that complemented her short gray hairdo. John found it impossible to imagine Annette Eubanks as either young or old. She seemed like the image, even the icon, of some human trait that had been minted on an ancient silver coin.
“Ms. Eubanks,” he said. “Are you lost?”
“I saw that your class was scheduled from one to five. I was just going to look in and wave but then there was no class.”
“It’s a seventy-five-minute Tuesday Thursday period but I try to find a time slot that allows me to go over.”
“You can’t organize your lectures to fit into the time allowed?”
Allowed.
“There is no such thing as equality or perfection,” John replied trying to sound as if the words were from a quote, “except in the theoretical disciplines of math and sometimes physics.”
“Some of us enjoy the illusion of order,” she said walking toward the rows of desks.
“What can I do for you, Annette?” John asked when she’d reached the first tier.
“You received the departmental summons,” she stated.
“Like a parking ticket?”
Annette Eubanks curled up her lip, maybe unconsciously.
“You shouldn’t make light of department procedure, Professor Woman.”
“I’ve never heard of a departmental summons, Ms. Eubanks.”
“We expect you to deliver your paper to the review board at some point this semester.”
“Written History; Reconstruction, Deconstruction or Just Plain Destruction?”
Eubanks’s lip curled again.
“That’s not much time,” John said.
“You’ve had a year.”
“Whitman worked on Leaves of Grass for years,” John offered, “and then spent the rest of his life rewriting.”
“You compare yourself to America’s premier poet?”
“Why not?”
Looking into the unfiltered hatred of her eyes John thought, not for the first time, that his character was not designed for the life he’d embarked upon. He should be making this professor like him, ingratiating himself with the faculty.
“We would also like you to present a preliminary talk about your paper at the next departmental brown-bag lunch.”
“Really? That’s tomorrow isn’t it?”
“You can’t pretend you didn’t know. These requests were put in your box.”
“My box?”
“Faculty mail.”
“Oh. I never pay any attention to that. I figure if anything is important enough somebody’ll tell me face-to-face.”
“Consider yourself told.”
He was standing in the doorway of 18 Southeast Green Garden Path when John arrived at 3:48.
“Mr. Malik.”
“Professor,” Johann Malik said.
“Nice to see you.”
John took out his electronic key-card and held it against the black ceramic pad under the doorknob. He heard the click, pulled open the gold-green door and ushered the sour-faced student in.
The room was small, the size of two broom closets, with a ceiling that was sixteen feet high. John kept no books, papers or knickknacks in his office. There was one metal filing cabinet painted drab green, a walnut desk with a reclining office chair and three hardback chairs for visitors. A green metal trash can sat in a far corner.
John went around the desk and sat in the fabric-padded black office chair.
“How can I help you, Mr. Malik?”
“I need to talk to you about your class.”
“What about it?”
“Why you want to lock us in a box like that? Like some prison warden.”
“Us? Box?”
“Black people, man. Here you gonna say that slavery was fate, then tell me to love it.”
John enjoyed this interpretation. The political activist angle was always a monkey wrench in the delicate gears of historical investigation.
“I merely provided one of many physical analyses of the past and future world. Would you have me tell you to walk into a room with men who hate you, men who could obliterate your soul, without a warning and at least some means to defend yourself?”
“You the one giving ammunition to them,” Malik argued. “You’re telling them that they’re not guilty by saying that destiny made us what we are.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“That’s the only way.”
“Then let me ask you a question.”
“What?” The solitary word bristled with violence.
“Imagine yourself on the edge of a high cliff. A group of your enemies happen by and throw you off the side. Then you’re falling, falling for what seems like forever. Instinctively all you can think of is how to back away from that moment in time, back to the hour before you arrived at the edge. But this is not a child’s game. You can’t take it back. The only hope you have is that you survive the fall. And, even if you live, you will never be able to go back.”
“That’s just some talk,” Malik said, disgusted.
“This is a university,” John said lightly. “That’s what we do here. We talk. Through discussion, debate and disagreement we come up with answers that, if we’re lucky, can be used as tools in the fabrication of our temporary survival.”
“There’s a world outside the university, Professor.”
“Don’t I know it.”
John’s tone had more effect than his words. Malik’s angry expression turned suddenly speculative.
“Where you from?” he asked.
“A very dark place, Mr. Malik,” John lamented. “A place from where you can’t take back a thing.”
“We didn’t deserve what happened to us,” Johann said, sensing a potential comrade in John.
“And if a young, white woman’s three-year-old daughter is kidnapped, raped, murdered... interred in an unmarked grave,” John replied, “if all that, did either mother or child deserve their fate?”
“That’s just two people. I’m talking about a whole race.”
“As am I,” John said. “Every human being faces tragedy. It’s coded into our blood. There’s no escape except through acceptance.”
“So I’m supposed to accept five hundred years of slavery?”
Nodding John said, “Then pick yourself up and battle for the future, not the past. The past is a battle you cannot win.”
“They stole our history,” Malik complained. “I’m just trying to get it back.”