“Why not give them what they will understand?”
“It’s just not in my nature,” John said, recognizing the truth in his words.
“Will you lose your job?”
“I’ve already lost it.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
“You are the only person I can tell,” he said, “the only one I know who I feel will be there. The rest of my life is like a bottomless pit that everything is dumped into but it never fills up.”
“That’s how I feel,” Senta said, “like one’a those ants we studied in science class, the one that hangs from the top of a tunnel while the other ants pour honey down her throat. Her bottom blows up to twelve times normal size filled with honey. Then in the winter the other ants touch a place on her throat and she vomits up food for them.”
“Yeah,” John agreed. “We studied those ants in school back in Brooklyn.”
“You could write a paper about us, John. The Professor and the Prostitute.”
“Why don’t you light up a cigarette?” John suggested.
“We haven’t had sex yet.”
“I know.”
Senta poured them both drinks while balancing a cigarette between her lips. They sat quietly, him at the edge of the bed, Senta on the hard chair.
“What will you do if you lose your job?” she asked at last.
“I don’t know.”
“Is there any way you can save it?”
“Maybe. The president likes me. Maybe I could get him to do something.”
“Ask him then.”
“The whole thing is a game anyway, like in Vegas, you know? There have to be stakes. If you lose, you lose. If you don’t feel the loss then you never took a chance.”
“You don’t care if they fire you?”
“I care. But there are many more important things on my mind.”
“Like what?”
“I did something... something wrong.”
“Against the law?”
He nodded.
“Are they after you?” she asked.
“Like Monday up Tuesday’s butt.” It was something his mother used to say.
“Could you go to jail?”
“Definitely.”
“So why do you even care about this paper?”
“Because you have to take a risk. You have to take the steps laid out in front of you because that is your destiny.”
Senta blinked and frowned.
“Will you spend the night here with me?” she asked.
“I will.”
“We don’t have to have sex if you don’t want.”
“Yeah. I know.”
11
Eight days later, at 11:49 on Wednesday morning, John Woman and Talia Friendly were setting up for the presentation in the main hall of Deck Rec. She had given him a Bluetooth earbud to hear her questions from up in the control room.
“You can either nod or shake your head or you can just call out to me over the house mike. I mean this is still a little informal.”
The stage was set so that there were three screen-like walls opened up behind an old oak lectern and a high table, upon which sat the Containment Report trunk.
The mostly empty auditorium was fitted to seat 999 souls.
“Remember that the upper part of the center screen should be running as they come in,” John said. “Then you just follow the cues we talked about, the lower part and the other two.”
“You got it, Professor,” Talia agreed. She was a blocky young woman with crew-cut black hair. “All you have to do is point at a screen and it’ll go. I got it all programmed perfect.”
At a quarter past twelve John was standing in front of the table facing the hall, his hands behind his back, a pose he’d adopted as a boy from a painting of Napoleon in exile. He believed that the deposed dictator struck this pose to overcome humiliation and fear so used it whenever he wanted to master his own anxieties.
The audience trickled in. Dean James came down the main aisle accompanied by President Luckfeld. They both wore dark suits and ties, hard leather shoes and short-brimmed Panama straw hats. They marched to the front of the middle section and sat together.
John was considering going down to say hello when a noisy group of students entered the auditorium. It was his class, almost all of them. Maybe, he thought, they wanted to see how his crazy ideas held up under the scrutiny of the other professors.
But then he saw Carlinda. He knew that she wouldn’t be part of any kind of hazing. On her right was Tamala Marman wearing bright red. To Carlinda’s left was a solid-looking young white man with wiry black hair and dark-framed glasses. He was holding her hand but when she saw John she pulled the hand free to scratch her nose. This move convinced John that he was looking at Arnold Ott, the young man for whom Carlinda professed love but not passion.
“Now, Professor?” Talia Friendly asked in his ear.
He nodded and then turned to look at the top half of the center screen. There the words She’s at it appeared — black letters against a yellowy background. John counted to ten and the words again. Had her replaced the first three words.
“You cue the puzzle too,” he said aloud.
In an upright rectangle of light, below the slow progression of words, tiny pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle flitted on and off at different places in the frame. Now and again, every ten seconds or so, a random piece would stick.
The screen reminded John of the silent films shown at the Arbuckle Cinema House.
There is no sound, Herman Jones often said. It is like trying to glean meaning from a partial experience, through faulty memory. Like those books you read me, son — not everything, but enough if you can suspend disbelief.
When John turned back to the auditorium more than a hundred people had entered. Eubanks and Carmody were there and most of the rest of the faculty from the history department. In the far left corner of the last aisle sat the gardener Ron Underhill.
The auditorium was filling up quickly.
John wondered why Ron would come to such an event, indeed, how had he found out about it? Meanwhile dozens more sauntered in. There were greetings and kisses, smiles and quite a few serious, even worried, looks.
John was elated. Behind him Brother of George’s journal was being parceled out three words at a time. Below that an as yet indefinable picture was taking form. There are moments in life, Herman Jones once said from his long-tenanted deathbed, when we can see clearly that every day, every second before now has brought us to a moment of grace. I feel it sometimes when you are reading to me, Cornelius. I hear your voice and know that we are together on this road.
Thinking about Herman’s lessons John felt his father standing next to him in front of nearly a thousand people waiting to see him rise or fall like a gaudy paper kite in an autumn wind.
John took seven long, slow breaths then spoke out loud and clear, his voice magnified by the tiny microphone attached to his shirt.
“The words appearing on the screen behind me were retrieved from a trash can. Some man, I call him Brother of George, wrote down a big piece of his life and then threw it away, or maybe he lost it. It could have dropped out of his pocket and a street sweeper gathered it up and tossed it — there for me to find and now for you to witness, three words at a time.
“The frame of light below the words is using specialized software that is a self-solving ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of a photograph that will be revealed in time. The trunk on the table is my Containment Report, the receptacle binding the data I’ve gathered for this Deconstructionist Historical Event.
“I was asked to present a paper detailing the approach to a branch of historical study that includes itself while excluding the potential of, the possibility of, absolute truth. It came to me one Saturday morning some months ago that asking for a paper in this day and age is tantamount to asking Charles Dickens to chisel a novel on stone. Language, in the form of a written paper, is the transmutation of the material into the speculative. And though this method is still in use the technological and cultural zeitgeist has evolved far beyond its limitations.