The World Doesn't Require You Page 17
At that moment, he felt everyone staring at him as if he were the absurdity. Their eye sockets were widened so that their eyeballs protruded from their heads like the eyes of cartoon characters.
Rick felt his own eyes widen as he glanced at his hands: they were covered in white gloves and, as much as he tried, he couldn’t remove them. A top hat rested atop his head. A poorly fitting tuxedo smothered his joints, high-water pants choked his crotch, and the jacket’s tails flapped about with every movement.
Rick dashed across the plantation, struggling to pull off the jacket or the hat, but they wouldn’t budge. The only thing he could think to do was keep running, so he did, moving stiffly, careful not to split his new pants.
He burst through the Big House doors and stumbled into the great room, where he peered into a huge mirror that hung from the far wall. Staring back was a face like fresh tar, bulging white eyes, and protruding red lips twisted into a smile not his own.
SPECIAL TOPICS IN LONELINESS STUDIES
I’ll probably have a future of stress, be depressed and stay alone. But as far as the present time, it’s on.
—STIC.MAN, “THE PISTOL”
It’s terrible to be alone with another person.
—T. S. ELIOT, HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES
I.
The Fall
1. FALL SEMESTER, 2018
Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, flustered and red-cheeked, looked from left to right at the campus police officers clutching his arms. He wanted to shout, Unhand me! as a character in an old movie might shout, but the most he could muster were soft, breathy clicks from the back of his throat.
Should we still do the reading from the Hudson book for next class? a student called as the officers escorted Dr. Chambers through the doorway. He wasn’t sure if he should regard the remark as a joke or a moment of idiocy, so he replied, As always, check the syllabus. The woman officer to his right shoved him hard as if to say, Shut the fuck up!
Before Chambers could get his bearings, he was pushed out the double doors into the bright early September and deposited chest-first onto a sidewalk in front of the Meratti Business Building. The street—Freedman’s Place—was a strip of public land cutting through the private but open campus of Freedman’s University. Dr. Chambers looked up at the barrel chest of the male officer and then at his face. He remembered suddenly—as if memory were a hot bluish white beam striking his brain—that the man had been his student many years ago. This, Dr. Chambers thought, this is what this man has chosen to do with my teachings?
I’m sorry, Dr. Chambers, the man said. I’m just doing my job.
Dr. Chambers remembered the man’s voice. The man was but a boy back then, recruited for his size to perform gladiatorial feats on the football field. The boy’s mind—so beautiful in the way it dissected Shakespeare’s poetry. He came to class one day shaking and nearly wilted into a ball, a simple-minded gentle giant. The complex and thoughtful sentences of his essays replaced by spare and artless proclamations.
This concussion, Doc, the boy had said. I’m trying, Dr. Chambers. I love this class. I’m not blowing off the work. Really, I’m not. I love this class and I’m really, really trying.
Dr. Chambers remembered the kindness he showed those many years ago, giving the boy the A he was on target for before the concussion, rather than the C his addle-headed work had truly earned him.
Now the male cop left the sidewalk to stand firmly on campus grounds in front of the Paul Robeson Theatre with his arms folded next to a sculpture—a metal black monolith whose top half turned to fingers reaching skyward.
The female cop bent toward the sitting Dr. Chambers and handed him a flimsy yellow sheet of paper. Please remember, she said, you are suspended from campus until further notice. This is the second time, Dr. Chambers, that we’ve had to escort you from in front of your class.
Second time? he thought. I don’t remember the first. Ah, Monday. The start of the semester. It was a different class, an early morning class; the students looked so fresh-faced.
If this happens a third time, she continued, we will be forced to arrest you, and that will result in further administrative and criminal charges. The entire campus community has been notified to call us if they see you.
The woman pointed to a picture of Dr. Chambers taped to the front doors of the Meratti Business Building, his face blown up like a criminal on a wanted poster. Even he had to admit he looked sinister.
Frankly, I would have arrested you today if it weren’t for Lamar. Dr. Chambers watched the woman blankly. She sighed. Officer Smith. Your former student! She sighed again.
In the distance, the bell in the library tower tolled ten times.
May I rest here awhile? Dr. Chambers asked.
You can sit here or on any public street adjacent to campus as long as you want, but if you stick a toe on my campus, I will arrest you. Do you understand?
Dr. Chambers nodded. The female officer lumbered off, like a dinosaur, he thought.
Hey, he called. Hey. Who’s going to be teaching my classes?
English, right? She turned and smirked and snickered a bit. Anybody. Some homeless guy off the street.
• • •
The officer wasn’t far off, actually. Dr. Simeon Reece lived in the basement of the Communications Building. It had once been the morgue when the building was the school’s teaching hospital. Campus security generally turned a blind eye to Dr. Reece, but when police swarmed the school, say when a dignitary visited or if the cops just felt like doing their jobs, Dr. Reece had a hole near the Chemistry Building he could climb into undisturbed. It was warm most of the time, but could become frigid in the winter. Once, near his hole, he actually burned his three diplomas for warmth.
Look, this is all bullshit. How do I know so much about Dr. Reece? Slip the mask. It is I, Dr. Simeon Reece. How do I know so much about Dr. Chambers? No, I am not also him. There will not be a twist at the end revealing us as one and the same. I am an academic at heart. I am an intellectual. I live and die and learn through careful research and study, and here I present my findings to you, dear reader. Cool, right? So pull up a chair, grab a cracker, a coffee, a biscuit, a tea, a cookie, a cold twenty-two- or forty-ounce bottle of Crazy Ninja Malt Liquor, or a cool Cross River Rush energy drink and listen as I tell you of the Tragedy of Dr. Reginald Chambers.
2.
To: Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, Assistant Professor—Department of English and Cultural Studies
Sent: September 28, 2018, 9:54 a.m.
From: Dr. Jason Oliver, Chair—Department of English and Cultural Studies
Cc: Dr. Sarah Bridge, Provost
Bcc:
Subject: Grade Appeal and Employment Defense Documents
Dear Dr. Chambers,
It’s been three months and six days since I requested materials related to your teaching of last spring semester’s ENGL 101: Special Topics: Loneliness. As you know, this theme was never properly submitted to the Faculty University Committee’s Departmental Activities Team for Scholarly Honors & Independent Themes and your surreptitious teaching of the course was wholly unauthorized. As I’ve noted previously, several students have lodged complaints, both formal and informal, about your teaching methods, classroom style, and grading, most notably Rebecca Montana, a freshman English major. As you know, the university has initiated proceedings to strip you of tenure and to revoke your employment. We are nearing the end of our review period and have not received a single document in response from you.
By now you should have received Ms. Montana’s complaint and supporting documents as well as a memo from the provost outlining the administrative charges against you. It’s imperative that you submit all materials (syllabi, writing prompts, copies of Ms. Montana’s assignments, and any other documents you created for students over the course of the semest
er) to my office by COB on Friday. If you fail to do so I have been instructed by the provost to direct the Committee to begin deliberating on all complaints against you without your input. It is in everybody’s best interest that we avoid such a scenario.
Respectfully,
Dr. Jason Oliver
Chair
Department of English and Cultural Studies
Freedman’s University
x3202
3. FALL SEMESTER, 2017
I suppose there is a beginning, and that’s where I should start. This was many months—a whole lifetime—before Dr. Chambers’s legendary Special Topics in Loneliness course. Just a lovely and blisteringly cold fall semester. Red ivy crept all along the buildings; from a distance, when the sun struck just right, it appeared as if someone had set the structures ablaze.
I was there when he conceived the class. You could call me the Catalyst—that would be my name if I were a rapper instead of a scholar; but, alas, I’m no rapper. I’m cursed with an academic life. The spark was lit, I think, not the moment in his office when he cried fat tears and I spoke him back from the abyss and he left determined (by my encouragement) to teach the course he had always dreamt of—no, the true spark was lit the first moment we met.
I was teaching in a classroom across from Dr. Chambers. We walked into the hallway at the same time one day, and when he squinted upon seeing my face, I figured the jig(aboo) was up, my cover blown all to hell. Thinking quickly, I stuck out my hand to meet his.
Hey, brother, I said. How the hell are you? Name’s Reece. Just started here. Love the family vibe of this campus. Has it always been like this? When the job opened up I applied with the quickness. I’d been teaching over in Port Yooga, but this is closer to home. Glad as hell to be here.
What I said was true enough, I suppose, though I wasn’t really new to the Freedman’s campus, quite the contrary; I taught my classes here frequently, usually in a different building. I worried about the administration catching on to me, so I hopped buildings frequently, crisscrossing the campus. Each semester I was also on the hook for two courses at Cross River Community College and one at the University of Port Yooga. I never went to them and entered bogus grades at the end of every semester. The schools paid me (very little) just as they would if I had shown up. No one complained, so I figured no harm done. It would be me who’d be truly harmed if I actually journeyed to those campuses clutching books to my chest ready to teach. With the low pay and travel involved—I’m no mathematician, but some back-of-the-envelope computations revealed that I’d actually lose money if I got on the bus and trudged to those classes week in, week out. It was better for everyone this way.
Hi, I’m Dr. Chambers—uh, Reggie, I mean. He shook my hand vigorously. I been here about eight years. The family vibe is nice. Students are kind of zoned out sometimes, I guess. I was like that as an undergrad, I guess. I teach composition and some lit.
Nice, nice. I’m teaching lit as well.
Oh, so you’re in English?
No, Interdisciplinary Studies. I get to teach any way I want. Hey, I’ll see you around.
I nodded and walked slowly away. More talking, and I risked blowing down my house of cards. Somehow I always had students, even though my courses weren’t officially offered by the university. No idea where they came from. I just set up shop every semester in an empty classroom and start lecturing. Meanwhile, wide-eyed students slowly bubble in. Four, some semesters five, full classes a day, which can be a bitch because it involves grading so, so many papers. I teach standard texts alongside excerpts from long imaginary works I write myself. I tell my students the works are lost semi-mystical and transformative Cross Riverian texts. I speak of them with reverence and awe. Great fun all around. I’ve been doing this for a while now. I’ve pulled it off mainly by keeping my profile low around campus and speaking only to my students. There was something about Dr. Chambers’s sad, sad eyes, though. Made me talk to him even when it made no sense at all to do so.
4.
To: Reggie
Sent: September 28, 2018, 10:18 a.m.
From: Jason Oliver
Cc:
Bcc: Dr. Sarah Bridge, Provost
Subject: (No Subject)
Reg,
I just sent a message to your campus email. I know you are on “sabbatical” and I know professors tend to rarely check their campus email while away . . . look, Reggie, of course this is difficult for you, but I don’t think you realize how difficult it is for me too. You have to defend yourself and you must submit the documents. There is no way I can help you if you ignore us and ignore the process. I’m writing you as a friend, not as the Chair.
I’d rather you be on campus doing what it is you do best—I’m sure you feel the same way—but trust in the process.
When this nonsense is over and things are back to normal for everyone, we can catch us a game or a show and we’ll drink some beers like we used to. Please take care of yourself. And for god’s sake get yourself a fucking lawyer. Geez.
J
5. FALL SEMESTER, 2017
I couldn’t help but peek in on Dr. Chambers sometimes. If he had a class and I had a free period I would spend that time lurking outside. He reminded me of myself maybe ten years previous. I thought of back then as the time my soul became bent. The future no longer stretched out ahead of me a long bright road to the Emeraldest of cities. The Wizard had not yet been exposed, but the flying monkeys swarmed, and I should have known we would all soon recognize him as a fraud. The Wizard in this metaphor is me, but it’s also Freedman’s University, and also the educational system as a whole. The Wizard is everyone. The Wizard is everything. The Wizard is everywhere.
Dr. Chambers often began class low-energy and thick-tongued. He’d end class rejuvenated and quick-witted, springing to life in the last minutes. I knew this pattern well. I used to teach here at Freedman’s, you know. I mean, I once taught legitimately on the payroll and everything. I taught a 4/4 in those days. The joke we had was that our teaching load also doubled as the type of gun we dreamt of shooting ourselves with by the middle of the semester. I was on a year-to-year contract then. The school dangled hope of a tenure-track job out in front of me like a candied carrot, all the while shoveling student after student atop my head, burying me in students—just raining them down on me like cemetery dirt, packing them into my classroom like sardines. And that’s how they looked to me eventually, headless and greasy.
When my family got evicted from our apartment—because, you know, Freedman’s didn’t pay me shit even when they did pay me—I wandered campus alone with a bag full of stuff, bleary-eyed from tears (you see, stupidly I still gave a fuck), and I stumbled somehow into the Communications Building late one night. I found it unguarded and the old morgue abandoned. I dropped my bag like an anchor and made my nest.
• • •
When your eyes are truly free you can see the academy for the dystopian wasteland it truly is. The place where they throw so much light into your eyes that your vision is rendered as useless as if you’d stared directly into an eclipse.
It would have taken years for Dr. Chambers’s blindfold to fall away, had I left him to his own derangement. He was tenured then, but I knew he’d eventually lose it. He was dumb enough to think his little lectures on literature and loss would do some good, brilliant enough to eventually realize he was a pawn, a cog, a gear; so much rested atop his back making him unable to truly stand, unable to really make something good happen. Soon he’d know that his intellect meant nothing in the face of the world’s amoral indifference. I know and I strike, therefore I am. I heard the waver and crack of disillusionment in his voice every time I managed to catch one of his lectures. He was starting to bend. I didn’t make it happen. I just accelerated it. Actually, I wasn’t even the most important accelerant.
It was near midterms in late October—blackface season at the white universities—when I decided that Chambers would become my student.
His hangdog cheeks drooped as if he could no longer control both sides of his face. I became a little sad myself, because I knew he was soon to become even sadder and more thoroughly frustrated, desperate, and even enraged—pushed to the brink and then over into a kind of mental deformity. It was the only way for him to transform into his final and highest incarnation, the man I was priming him to be.
He held a black valise as he walked the hall that day. When I brushed by and knocked it from his hand, scattering papers everywhere, I managed to make the act look casual and accidental, even as I stood frozen at the pictures fluttering through the hallway like a weird snowfall. Screengrabs: naked woman atop naked woman; naked woman licking the spread pink folds of another naked woman; naked woman sucking like a baby the doughy breast of another naked woman; naked woman covered in oil wrestling another naked woman in oil—and on and naked woman on.
Eventually I bent to gather the papers with Dr. Chambers. My plan nearly in ruins by the shock of it all.
My God, Reggie, I’m so, so—
Just give me the papers! His voice a sharp and angry whisper.
I’m so sorry, Dr. Chambers, I mumbled over and over, looking only to the floor.
I thought myself incapable of shame at this point but I felt my sin* burning red.
Here we were, two men, both desperate to draw no attention to ourselves, on our hands and knees crawling upon the nude inviting bodies of porn actresses.
It’s for my research, he muttered as a response to each of my sorries and to every passerby who handed him a sheet of scattered naked woman paper.
Look, I said, let me take you to lunch in the caf.