Basket of Reeds
Below is the first chapter of my first novel. Originally conceived as a satire on academics, it grew into something else as well - a discourse on the divisions we have made between the rational and the sacred. It thus presaged the themes in my other novels. This one is the best for the wit - I have to say so myself - of the protagonist, Ben Solomon, a cynical, egotistical graduate student of cultural anthropology. What I enjoy most is how his own self-conceived brilliance gets him into situations which force him to alter his actions, attitude and beliefs. To be published maybe in 2024
Chapter One Lacey’s Labyrinth
We all thought of him as an egotist, a deluded clod with a superiority complex or, in the vernacular of our progressive era, an asshole. After his death, these thoughts made me feel disrespectful, even guilty, if such bourgeoisie sentiments were still possible for me, until I reminded myself of who “we” were: academics. Academics, particularly those trapped in such insular and impractical fields as cultural anthropology, think everyone’s an asshole. They could not exist without such objective condescension, for their professions make them so ruthlessly introspective that they could not tolerate themselves otherwise. It is an unspoken fact that every soft-bellied, eye-strained, aloof intellectual so despises himself that without a countering expression of scorn, without the equalizing force of outward cynicism, his ego would implode like an empty pop can under a garbage truck. He could never consider for long that humility might make such introspection a doorway to compassionate wisdom. He knows, rather, that any generosity of spirit would signal the end of his career.
Still, we had a special hatred for Steven. Somehow we could tell, by the way he walked, by the small gestures of his hands, by his unwavering tone of argument, that his disdain for humanity was not rooted in an inherent struggle for self-preservation, but rather in the firm belief that he was the only truly sentient being in the universe. While it was abundantly clear that the hatred from us, his fellow graduate students, did not concern him one wit, the antagonism he generated among the faculty gave him no end of trouble. To our delight, he had been denied scholarship money, forced to retake his exams, shuffled from the TA list, and had been rejected from one thing or another on minor technicalities and omissions. Steven’s arrogance had broken the fundamental rule of the graduate student: that one must submit like a Chinese concubine to one’s senior benefactors. Steven’s inability even to conceive of quivering before a professor nearly disqualified him from academia. He could not grasp that professors had gone through the whole humiliating process themselves and now used their position to exact revenge on a world that had so debased them. To deny them the power to inflict on others the scars they bore sent them into a ruthless, although outwardly contained, fury.
Of course, Steven also had our grudging admiration, for our cowardice was our greatest wound and the engine for our fantasies of revenge, the same sentiments that had driven our professors to sadism years before. We were fortunate that the Teaching Assistants’ offices were securely placed on the first floor of the Arts and Science building, where only a few other non-tenured professors shared our hall. There we could live our lives with some dignity. But when we had to go to the second floor, the bottom would drop out. There, door after door concealed the lair of a tenured professor, each a tortured god in his own right, a crippled Loki seeking to ease his pain through the suffering of others. There we would walk stiff-legged to our destinies, eyes riveted ahead so as not to catch the glare of some vengeful deity who had opened his door to practice his perverse art. There, should one of Them so choose to engage us, the twists and turns and ambiguities in the conversation would force us to repeat the exchange in our minds again and again, combing our performance for errors that would lower our rating among the faculty. The enterprise had driven more than one aspiring scholar to drink, but not Steven. He would, more often than not, curtly end any hallway discussion by letting the speaker know that he was interfering with an important mission which, since it was Steven’s, was always more important than the business of said speaker. If any emotion would be evoked in Steven, it would be one of annoyance. The school, the teachers, the program only concerned him insofar as they brought him closer to his objectives. As much as I despised him, I could not help but envy that aloof conceit.
As I have said, none of Steven’s qualities leant for an oiled career path, but finally his perseverance, tempered by the firm belief that his outstanding genius could not be denied, bore fruit. At last the professors seemed to give up on stopping him at this phase of his career and allowed him to obtain a grant large enough to start on the fieldwork that would, in theory, lead to his Ph.D. While his first choice had been to live with the aborigines of the Borneo rain forest, which was still largely intact then in 1980, he was forced to follow his back-up plan. Far cheaper in every way, Steven would live with the peyote eaters of the high Sierra Madre mountains of central Mexico.
I can’t remember the day, or even the week, that he left for the field. I do recall now in hindsight that this was about the time that Lacey moved from nervously plucking her eyebrows with her thin, white fingers, to plucking the top of her head. This led to one of the stranger results of obsessive-compulsive disorder that I have seen. Within a few weeks of Steven’s absence, one could clearly see a bright pink circle of flesh shining through her straw-blond hair. Within a few months she simply gave up on any attempt to conceal the peak of her scalp that now was perfectly clean of hair in a pattern that was identical to the tonsure of a Catholic Monk.
If one knew Lacey, this held no small bit of irony. As with most of us in the social sciences, she could not believe in the possibility of a supreme being. She might give credence to the effectiveness of belief in a simple or traditional society, but she could not believe in the object of belief and would argue with righteous venom against the prospect that spiritual beliefs might have any beneficial effects in our own society. Hers, ours was a belief in the circle of logic, and that she would have a wreath or halo, a mark of a holy man, plucked into her head by her own hand seemed to point to the existence of a god with a sense of humor. Her conclusion that the universe was an intricate machine born from infinite time and random chance was so strong that when she finally had her nervous breakdown, I was puzzled by the details of her background.
I should have seen it coming, of course, etched as it was in her pulpy monk’s cap, but my peers were all so neurologically challenged that it was impossible to cull the dead from the dying, so to speak. It would hurt to find afterwards that her girlfriends had seen it coming all along and had deigned me unworthy of their insights. This, too, should have been obvious, for they had clustered together like a tribe of nervous Amazons since the first year of graduate studies, but I had felt, as a fellow TA and inmate, that we shared a bond beyond gender. That a locus such as gender could exist after years of deconstructive philosophy was a surprise, but I digress. The point is that after her breakdown and subsequent departure, her girlfriends unleashed such a flood of startling information about the woman that it was difficult to believe she was the same Lacey who had graced the department for the last three years.
She had once mentioned that she had come from somewhere in New England, which, as a Midwesterner, I pictured in conflicting images of bright autumn leaves and grimy, old factories, but it had never occurred to me that she was of the Old Establishment. I had read of this long before in a poem about the Cabbots and Lodges of Boston and how one only spoke to the other, and the other only to God, but that whole system was so foreign that it seemed mythical. So it was surprising to find that Lacey had come from one of those families who spoke to both the Cabbots and Lodges, and even more surprising to see that her girlfriends were in awe of that fact. How could those who identified with the exotic and powerless become so breathless before archaic notions of pedigree and old money? And how could a woman who came from such impeccable Episcopalian roots be so aggressively atheistic?
The real shocker, however, was the news, well known to all the girls for over two years, that Lacey and Steven were, or had been, an item. This was almost impossible for me to envision, something on the order of picturing a male mastiff breeding with a toy poodle. Of course Lacey’s attachment to Steven explained her decline and fall, but nothing could explain their attraction for one another. Steven was big, brisk, forceful, a loudspeaker in a hall of whispers. Lacey was self-contained, ordered and subtle, at home among the nuances and plotting of the department. Steven was broad and beefy, shaggy and ill-dressed and a devout conserver of water, while Lacey was neat and clean and properly and unostentatiously dressed for every occasion. To picture the two of them together in rut, the big, beefy, hairy, odorous man on the pale, hairless, antiseptic woman, was beyond the comical imaging of the dogs. It was almost sacrilegious.
Let me shake off that picture and get back to the point: Lacey’s coming undone would allow me to inherit her desk, which would lead me back to Steven. Like everything else about Lacey’s life, her leaving of the university would come to my knowledge only well after the fact. On a day just like any other, I would walk into the TA office and hear the girlfriends discuss her tragic departure. It was then that I heard of her involvement with Steven, and then that the reverence the girlfriends had for blue blood was revealed. I would say nothing, but was left to wonder how anyone could envy another who was so panicked about her place in life that she pulled out her hair. It then dawned on me that with the girls, her breakdown added to her charm. Whereas when the poor collapse they end up in a welfare motel or an alley behind a bar, when the rich “come undone” they receive the intensive care of a wounded monarch. The care somehow accentuates their importance. To the girlfriends, Lacey’s tortured psyche elevated her recounts of sailing on the lake at Wellesley or summering on the Cape to romantic heights. In their talk they drew a picture of an elegant Lacey, of a woman in a loose cotton tunic that flowed with the breeze as she paused at the porch railing to glimpse with pathos the welling of the infinite sea. Never mind that this was the same woman who gossiped and flattered and trembled before her masters like the rest of us. Like a eulogy for Joe Everyman, her departure for Massachusetts had turned her into something of a saint, too high on a pedestal for reproach.
While the girls’ talk made it impossible to avoid picturing Lacey in an ancestral mansion surrounded by fussing maids and frilly pillows and genteelly concerned suitors, it also led to the deduction that her desk would now be open for the first taker. It was one of three in the back-office, where one could talk without being overheard, work without being disturbed, or drink and smoke and curse if one so chose. The back office was not everyone’s aspiration, but it was coveted enough so that its occupancy was decided by seniority privilege more than serendipity. With news of Lacey’s tragic departure, I quickly volunteered my name for the vacant desk, and the girlfriends could not refuse: I had the seniority, and such a rush to take the pennies from Lacey’s eyes would seem gauche to them. They gave me a few hard stares, but they were as wind on stone. As I have said, it hurt to discover that they had closed me out of the loop for so long. It seemed to me that the desk in the back room was my due.
Still, three long years in the department had cautioned me to never stick my neck out unless it could be done without detection. There would only be a few101 courses to teach and a mid-afternoon seminar to attend the following day. I could afford to make a late night of it that very evening and move my files and notes and papers and knickknacks and Far Side jokes and secret good luck charms to the back room without the baleful looks of the girlfriends.
I began the process around 10:00 PM, when a few lights were still on in the hall, and didn’t look up for another hour, when every item from my former worksite, every little thing that might have given something away of myself, had been stacked on the gray steel desk of my good fortune. On the wall above it, pale squares were all that remained of Lacey’s comic strips and calendar and bric-a-brac that had been removed quickly, perhaps a little too quickly, by the girlfriends. Their impatience triggered a cynical smile. But when I tried to open the doors to the desk and store my own articles, it shocked and angered me to find that they had apparently re-locked them for my inconvenience. I pondered their cupidity for a few seconds, then scanned the offices for a solution. To admit defeat was not an option. It would be too humiliating to be met, defeated, by their knowing and scornful glares the following morning.
Looking for nothing in particular, my eyes fell on the desk of a man who had just finished fieldwork in Haiti. On the wall in front of it, and above some kind of voodoo fetish, hung a good, useable machete, the kind meant for hard work in the cane fields. I briefly considered the damage it might suffer for my purpose, and the reaction of the owner, and then figured, what the hell. The machete was made for punishing labor, not a museum. Anyway, the owner was a fool. I took the tool from its nail hangers and shoved the blade forcibly into the top drawer. The lock bent and finally gave when the blade was wiggled up along the length of the edge. The same was done to the other drawers, after which the artifact was placed back on the wall, hardly worse for wear. If he should later detect the few dents and scratches, it would be suggested that someone might have knocked it from its pegs by accident, and that it would be best for us all if he hung the weapon more securely. It then came time to examine the interior of the desk.
I opened the top drawer. Surprised, I opened a side door, then another, then another. Each was filled much as mine had been that morning, the only difference being the feminine handwriting that covered the familiar papers and forms. A sudden panic of trespass engulfed me, causing me to look around instinctively to see if anyone had been a witness. Then my eyes returned to the pile of papers, many of which undoubtedly held personal secrets and private thoughts, and I wondered what to do. In the same instant it came to me how fatuous a thought that was. The right thing to do was obvious. That it had been sidestepped signified just how far my moral compass had strayed. Clearly, all the material should be taken out and stacked neatly so that it might be boxed and sent to Lacey’s home, without anyone ever having taken a peak.
Of course I couldn’t do that, and my mind immediately assured me that a man of the social sciences, especially one with my particular gifts, should not pass up this wonderful opportunity to view the spontaneous records of a human profile. With the vestigial remnants of my conscience satisfied by that shallow sophistry, the real reasons for my need to pry then tumbled in. On one level, I felt a voracious hunger to find the limits of her professional adequacy. I wanted to know how smart she was, really, so that my abilities might be favorably compared with hers. Regardless of any show of affection or solidarity to the contrary, we were all in a desperate competition for a handful of jobs, even the girlfriends. The dog-eat-dog mentality was never far from the surface.
On another level, a much darker one, lurked the voyeur. It was not that I had any particular attraction for Lacey, even before her ordeal with the hair, or for the girlfriends either, for that matter. We played a constant game of intellectual chess with one another, a game equally suited for males and females, which lent a highly charged sense of androgyny to the air, like that between quarreling brothers and sisters. Still, I felt a glow of forbidden sexual pleasure when viewing her private papers, akin to that of an adolescent boy staring through a peephole into the girls’ locker room. My rationalization had provided the hole in the wall for my lust, and once my target was in view, there was no stopping. Having resolved to go through with the crime, all my intellectual powers would then be turned to the cover-up.
While it was now apparent that the drawers had been locked all along, it was also probable that the girlfriends knew this and so had rightly assumed that there were still items within that should be protected. Still, we are creatures of habit and continue to take customary precautions when the dangers cannot possibly be present, just as we close the bathroom door when we have the house to ourselves. So, one might be convinced that the doors had been emptied first, then locked from habit. Not too much of value would have to be left to simulate this scenario. Some academic notebooks and references and outlines would be set aside to provide a sense of bulk along with a dozen or so innocuous greeting cards from relatives and some useless little keepsakes to give it the personal touch. These would be taken from the desk and stacked against the wall, where they would be casually brought to the girlfriends’ attention the next day with a wave of the hand and a suggestion that they might want to send these things back to Lacey. Whatever else of use would stay with me. To begin with, a box would have to be salvaged from the building dumpster to hold the selected items which would be spirited to my living quarters via the campus shuttle bus.
I went out the back door into the night to the docking area, and had to return again with a broom to poke out the raccoon that was pawing through the rotting food in the dumpster, fast food throwaways being man’s greatest gift to nature. Rummaging through the debris, I discovered a strong box that had carried bulky introductory textbooks and brought it back to the office to tape the end flaps together again, looking about now and then with the alacrity of a cat burglar for any potential witnesses. I dropped it on the floor before the desk and dug into the drawers with my hands, noticing briefly that they were trembling. They touched on the birthday cards, the notebooks with labels like “Paleo Genetics” and “Post-Structuralist Thought” and a slew of notes for papers past and present, all of which were pushed against the wall for public viewing. Juicier items like a bulky first draft of a term paper and a mass of material for an NSF grant were tossed into the “take-out” box. I rummaged with greater speed and efficiency through one drawer, then another and then the next like a man going through the bases on a hot date, unlatching the bra, the belt, then….until my fingers came to rest on home plate in the bottom, right-hand compartment. The mother lode was luridly conspicuous, not just a hot date but a baboon in estrus, a big bundle of envelopes and papers and letters tied together by a wide, purple ribbon bowed with the elegance of a Christmas gift. I tried to pull it out with one hand, but was forced to use two as envelopes slipped out. Before the bundle was even placed on the desk it was obvious that many, perhaps most of the correspondence had come from Mexico. There were big patriotic portraits of Hidalgo y Costilla and Zapata and Carranza on the postage, rubber-stamped with the deceptive designation, aero postal. My eye measured what must have been a dozen letters, and I could only imagine the wealth of information, of personal insights and field notes, that the bigger folders contained. Lacey’s core, her emotional intersection of sex and bonding, dreams and desires, family and career, had been unearthed. So, too, most certainly, had been a dead man.
I prepared to take the bundle home, discarding much of the rest from the box as tangential bait, but within minutes of walking into the cold, black air of the Michigan winter night a sensation of disgust crept over me. While Lacey had never stirred me with desire, she was still a young woman and her personal life was tantalizing. But Steven. Had he been the stranger, the mystery man in a romantic novel, it would not have mattered, but I knew Steven. I detested Steven. I had no more interest in knowing Steven’s private life than I had in seeing my parents entwined in passion. Even less. Theirs’ was, at the core, a wholesome relationship. There could be little wholesome about Steven.
My conflicting thoughts continued on the bus home, the box bouncing on my lap all the while, shaking the sweater and backpack that were stuffed on top to conceal the treasure. As the rhythmic jostling measured time, the sense of the lurid wore off and more analytical thoughts coalesced in its place. As a new concept formed and assumed domination, it brought with it the certainty that this colder path would lead to more lasting satisfaction than the former jumble of urges. It told me that what was balanced on my knees, held in the fluorescent lights of an empty bus on its final run of the night, was power. As my professors liked to joke with an allusion to wisdom, Knowledge is Power. In my possession lay not just the lives of two people, but two people intimating their lives and experiences and contacts within my department. This was not just knowledge. This was knowledge that could lead to the greatest power of all: the ability to consummate revenge, to blackmail.
I left the bus at the top of North Campus with a new urgency and scuttled like a crab over the invisible ice that had refrozen since the salt pellets and sun had melted it several hours earlier. The box had to be dropped before the door of the Co-ops where I lived, then a glove pulled off with my teeth so that my fingers could search in pockets for the key needed after 11 at night. I tumbled through the outer doors into a hallway obscured in shadows and bumped an elbow on my neighbor’s door handle, receiving all the customary pain of the “funny bone.” Biting down on my urge to swear, the box had to be dropped again to open the door. I stumbled against my desk, nearly falling, then reached the table light. With the push of a button, the world again was under my command and the paper captives ripe for plunder.
Sitting down at my chair, it became apparent that the stress and late hours of the day had robbed much of my energy. The happy vision of myself delving into other’s private lives for days on end would not be actualized this night, and with that realization came the thought that this is how it should be. As with all efforts that were worthwhile, this one should be afforded its due time, savored piece by piece at the appropriate moment. That would be easy. If I could wade through the muddy waters of Noam Chompsky and Jaques Derrida for three long, rough years, this little stream could be forded without effort. The temptation to have it all now was no temptation at all; in the great halls of the arcane, we had learned to delay gratification to the ends of time, if necessary.
It seemed right, though, that my evening struggle should be rewarded with one morsel, one little sweet fruit before sleep, one that most likely would be found in the stack of personal letters. Dumping the lot of them on the table, it occurred to me that they should be read chronologically, according to the dates on the postage, so that they would be experienced in the natural order, and it pleased me to note that they had already been sorted as such.
I looked to the first, sent from Laredo, Texas, May 5, 1980, took a deep breath and slipped a finger under the flap that had become resealed with dampness and age. Inside were several pages torn from a classroom notebook, scrawled by a sloppy but legible hand. I snickered. This was obviously the mark of a sloppy, shallow man. Steven. This was going to be fun.
Chapter One Lacey’s Labyrinth
We all thought of him as an egotist, a deluded clod with a superiority complex or, in the vernacular of our progressive era, an asshole. After his death, these thoughts made me feel disrespectful, even guilty, if such bourgeoisie sentiments were still possible for me, until I reminded myself of who “we” were: academics. Academics, particularly those trapped in such insular and impractical fields as cultural anthropology, think everyone’s an asshole. They could not exist without such objective condescension, for their professions make them so ruthlessly introspective that they could not tolerate themselves otherwise. It is an unspoken fact that every soft-bellied, eye-strained, aloof intellectual so despises himself that without a countering expression of scorn, without the equalizing force of outward cynicism, his ego would implode like an empty pop can under a garbage truck. He could never consider for long that humility might make such introspection a doorway to compassionate wisdom. He knows, rather, that any generosity of spirit would signal the end of his career.
Still, we had a special hatred for Steven. Somehow we could tell, by the way he walked, by the small gestures of his hands, by his unwavering tone of argument, that his disdain for humanity was not rooted in an inherent struggle for self-preservation, but rather in the firm belief that he was the only truly sentient being in the universe. While it was abundantly clear that the hatred from us, his fellow graduate students, did not concern him one wit, the antagonism he generated among the faculty gave him no end of trouble. To our delight, he had been denied scholarship money, forced to retake his exams, shuffled from the TA list, and had been rejected from one thing or another on minor technicalities and omissions. Steven’s arrogance had broken the fundamental rule of the graduate student: that one must submit like a Chinese concubine to one’s senior benefactors. Steven’s inability even to conceive of quivering before a professor nearly disqualified him from academia. He could not grasp that professors had gone through the whole humiliating process themselves and now used their position to exact revenge on a world that had so debased them. To deny them the power to inflict on others the scars they bore sent them into a ruthless, although outwardly contained, fury.
Of course, Steven also had our grudging admiration, for our cowardice was our greatest wound and the engine for our fantasies of revenge, the same sentiments that had driven our professors to sadism years before. We were fortunate that the Teaching Assistants’ offices were securely placed on the first floor of the Arts and Science building, where only a few other non-tenured professors shared our hall. There we could live our lives with some dignity. But when we had to go to the second floor, the bottom would drop out. There, door after door concealed the lair of a tenured professor, each a tortured god in his own right, a crippled Loki seeking to ease his pain through the suffering of others. There we would walk stiff-legged to our destinies, eyes riveted ahead so as not to catch the glare of some vengeful deity who had opened his door to practice his perverse art. There, should one of Them so choose to engage us, the twists and turns and ambiguities in the conversation would force us to repeat the exchange in our minds again and again, combing our performance for errors that would lower our rating among the faculty. The enterprise had driven more than one aspiring scholar to drink, but not Steven. He would, more often than not, curtly end any hallway discussion by letting the speaker know that he was interfering with an important mission which, since it was Steven’s, was always more important than the business of said speaker. If any emotion would be evoked in Steven, it would be one of annoyance. The school, the teachers, the program only concerned him insofar as they brought him closer to his objectives. As much as I despised him, I could not help but envy that aloof conceit.
As I have said, none of Steven’s qualities leant for an oiled career path, but finally his perseverance, tempered by the firm belief that his outstanding genius could not be denied, bore fruit. At last the professors seemed to give up on stopping him at this phase of his career and allowed him to obtain a grant large enough to start on the fieldwork that would, in theory, lead to his Ph.D. While his first choice had been to live with the aborigines of the Borneo rain forest, which was still largely intact then in 1980, he was forced to follow his back-up plan. Far cheaper in every way, Steven would live with the peyote eaters of the high Sierra Madre mountains of central Mexico.
I can’t remember the day, or even the week, that he left for the field. I do recall now in hindsight that this was about the time that Lacey moved from nervously plucking her eyebrows with her thin, white fingers, to plucking the top of her head. This led to one of the stranger results of obsessive-compulsive disorder that I have seen. Within a few weeks of Steven’s absence, one could clearly see a bright pink circle of flesh shining through her straw-blond hair. Within a few months she simply gave up on any attempt to conceal the peak of her scalp that now was perfectly clean of hair in a pattern that was identical to the tonsure of a Catholic Monk.
If one knew Lacey, this held no small bit of irony. As with most of us in the social sciences, she could not believe in the possibility of a supreme being. She might give credence to the effectiveness of belief in a simple or traditional society, but she could not believe in the object of belief and would argue with righteous venom against the prospect that spiritual beliefs might have any beneficial effects in our own society. Hers, ours was a belief in the circle of logic, and that she would have a wreath or halo, a mark of a holy man, plucked into her head by her own hand seemed to point to the existence of a god with a sense of humor. Her conclusion that the universe was an intricate machine born from infinite time and random chance was so strong that when she finally had her nervous breakdown, I was puzzled by the details of her background.
I should have seen it coming, of course, etched as it was in her pulpy monk’s cap, but my peers were all so neurologically challenged that it was impossible to cull the dead from the dying, so to speak. It would hurt to find afterwards that her girlfriends had seen it coming all along and had deigned me unworthy of their insights. This, too, should have been obvious, for they had clustered together like a tribe of nervous Amazons since the first year of graduate studies, but I had felt, as a fellow TA and inmate, that we shared a bond beyond gender. That a locus such as gender could exist after years of deconstructive philosophy was a surprise, but I digress. The point is that after her breakdown and subsequent departure, her girlfriends unleashed such a flood of startling information about the woman that it was difficult to believe she was the same Lacey who had graced the department for the last three years.
She had once mentioned that she had come from somewhere in New England, which, as a Midwesterner, I pictured in conflicting images of bright autumn leaves and grimy, old factories, but it had never occurred to me that she was of the Old Establishment. I had read of this long before in a poem about the Cabbots and Lodges of Boston and how one only spoke to the other, and the other only to God, but that whole system was so foreign that it seemed mythical. So it was surprising to find that Lacey had come from one of those families who spoke to both the Cabbots and Lodges, and even more surprising to see that her girlfriends were in awe of that fact. How could those who identified with the exotic and powerless become so breathless before archaic notions of pedigree and old money? And how could a woman who came from such impeccable Episcopalian roots be so aggressively atheistic?
The real shocker, however, was the news, well known to all the girls for over two years, that Lacey and Steven were, or had been, an item. This was almost impossible for me to envision, something on the order of picturing a male mastiff breeding with a toy poodle. Of course Lacey’s attachment to Steven explained her decline and fall, but nothing could explain their attraction for one another. Steven was big, brisk, forceful, a loudspeaker in a hall of whispers. Lacey was self-contained, ordered and subtle, at home among the nuances and plotting of the department. Steven was broad and beefy, shaggy and ill-dressed and a devout conserver of water, while Lacey was neat and clean and properly and unostentatiously dressed for every occasion. To picture the two of them together in rut, the big, beefy, hairy, odorous man on the pale, hairless, antiseptic woman, was beyond the comical imaging of the dogs. It was almost sacrilegious.
Let me shake off that picture and get back to the point: Lacey’s coming undone would allow me to inherit her desk, which would lead me back to Steven. Like everything else about Lacey’s life, her leaving of the university would come to my knowledge only well after the fact. On a day just like any other, I would walk into the TA office and hear the girlfriends discuss her tragic departure. It was then that I heard of her involvement with Steven, and then that the reverence the girlfriends had for blue blood was revealed. I would say nothing, but was left to wonder how anyone could envy another who was so panicked about her place in life that she pulled out her hair. It then dawned on me that with the girls, her breakdown added to her charm. Whereas when the poor collapse they end up in a welfare motel or an alley behind a bar, when the rich “come undone” they receive the intensive care of a wounded monarch. The care somehow accentuates their importance. To the girlfriends, Lacey’s tortured psyche elevated her recounts of sailing on the lake at Wellesley or summering on the Cape to romantic heights. In their talk they drew a picture of an elegant Lacey, of a woman in a loose cotton tunic that flowed with the breeze as she paused at the porch railing to glimpse with pathos the welling of the infinite sea. Never mind that this was the same woman who gossiped and flattered and trembled before her masters like the rest of us. Like a eulogy for Joe Everyman, her departure for Massachusetts had turned her into something of a saint, too high on a pedestal for reproach.
While the girls’ talk made it impossible to avoid picturing Lacey in an ancestral mansion surrounded by fussing maids and frilly pillows and genteelly concerned suitors, it also led to the deduction that her desk would now be open for the first taker. It was one of three in the back-office, where one could talk without being overheard, work without being disturbed, or drink and smoke and curse if one so chose. The back office was not everyone’s aspiration, but it was coveted enough so that its occupancy was decided by seniority privilege more than serendipity. With news of Lacey’s tragic departure, I quickly volunteered my name for the vacant desk, and the girlfriends could not refuse: I had the seniority, and such a rush to take the pennies from Lacey’s eyes would seem gauche to them. They gave me a few hard stares, but they were as wind on stone. As I have said, it hurt to discover that they had closed me out of the loop for so long. It seemed to me that the desk in the back room was my due.
Still, three long years in the department had cautioned me to never stick my neck out unless it could be done without detection. There would only be a few101 courses to teach and a mid-afternoon seminar to attend the following day. I could afford to make a late night of it that very evening and move my files and notes and papers and knickknacks and Far Side jokes and secret good luck charms to the back room without the baleful looks of the girlfriends.
I began the process around 10:00 PM, when a few lights were still on in the hall, and didn’t look up for another hour, when every item from my former worksite, every little thing that might have given something away of myself, had been stacked on the gray steel desk of my good fortune. On the wall above it, pale squares were all that remained of Lacey’s comic strips and calendar and bric-a-brac that had been removed quickly, perhaps a little too quickly, by the girlfriends. Their impatience triggered a cynical smile. But when I tried to open the doors to the desk and store my own articles, it shocked and angered me to find that they had apparently re-locked them for my inconvenience. I pondered their cupidity for a few seconds, then scanned the offices for a solution. To admit defeat was not an option. It would be too humiliating to be met, defeated, by their knowing and scornful glares the following morning.
Looking for nothing in particular, my eyes fell on the desk of a man who had just finished fieldwork in Haiti. On the wall in front of it, and above some kind of voodoo fetish, hung a good, useable machete, the kind meant for hard work in the cane fields. I briefly considered the damage it might suffer for my purpose, and the reaction of the owner, and then figured, what the hell. The machete was made for punishing labor, not a museum. Anyway, the owner was a fool. I took the tool from its nail hangers and shoved the blade forcibly into the top drawer. The lock bent and finally gave when the blade was wiggled up along the length of the edge. The same was done to the other drawers, after which the artifact was placed back on the wall, hardly worse for wear. If he should later detect the few dents and scratches, it would be suggested that someone might have knocked it from its pegs by accident, and that it would be best for us all if he hung the weapon more securely. It then came time to examine the interior of the desk.
I opened the top drawer. Surprised, I opened a side door, then another, then another. Each was filled much as mine had been that morning, the only difference being the feminine handwriting that covered the familiar papers and forms. A sudden panic of trespass engulfed me, causing me to look around instinctively to see if anyone had been a witness. Then my eyes returned to the pile of papers, many of which undoubtedly held personal secrets and private thoughts, and I wondered what to do. In the same instant it came to me how fatuous a thought that was. The right thing to do was obvious. That it had been sidestepped signified just how far my moral compass had strayed. Clearly, all the material should be taken out and stacked neatly so that it might be boxed and sent to Lacey’s home, without anyone ever having taken a peak.
Of course I couldn’t do that, and my mind immediately assured me that a man of the social sciences, especially one with my particular gifts, should not pass up this wonderful opportunity to view the spontaneous records of a human profile. With the vestigial remnants of my conscience satisfied by that shallow sophistry, the real reasons for my need to pry then tumbled in. On one level, I felt a voracious hunger to find the limits of her professional adequacy. I wanted to know how smart she was, really, so that my abilities might be favorably compared with hers. Regardless of any show of affection or solidarity to the contrary, we were all in a desperate competition for a handful of jobs, even the girlfriends. The dog-eat-dog mentality was never far from the surface.
On another level, a much darker one, lurked the voyeur. It was not that I had any particular attraction for Lacey, even before her ordeal with the hair, or for the girlfriends either, for that matter. We played a constant game of intellectual chess with one another, a game equally suited for males and females, which lent a highly charged sense of androgyny to the air, like that between quarreling brothers and sisters. Still, I felt a glow of forbidden sexual pleasure when viewing her private papers, akin to that of an adolescent boy staring through a peephole into the girls’ locker room. My rationalization had provided the hole in the wall for my lust, and once my target was in view, there was no stopping. Having resolved to go through with the crime, all my intellectual powers would then be turned to the cover-up.
While it was now apparent that the drawers had been locked all along, it was also probable that the girlfriends knew this and so had rightly assumed that there were still items within that should be protected. Still, we are creatures of habit and continue to take customary precautions when the dangers cannot possibly be present, just as we close the bathroom door when we have the house to ourselves. So, one might be convinced that the doors had been emptied first, then locked from habit. Not too much of value would have to be left to simulate this scenario. Some academic notebooks and references and outlines would be set aside to provide a sense of bulk along with a dozen or so innocuous greeting cards from relatives and some useless little keepsakes to give it the personal touch. These would be taken from the desk and stacked against the wall, where they would be casually brought to the girlfriends’ attention the next day with a wave of the hand and a suggestion that they might want to send these things back to Lacey. Whatever else of use would stay with me. To begin with, a box would have to be salvaged from the building dumpster to hold the selected items which would be spirited to my living quarters via the campus shuttle bus.
I went out the back door into the night to the docking area, and had to return again with a broom to poke out the raccoon that was pawing through the rotting food in the dumpster, fast food throwaways being man’s greatest gift to nature. Rummaging through the debris, I discovered a strong box that had carried bulky introductory textbooks and brought it back to the office to tape the end flaps together again, looking about now and then with the alacrity of a cat burglar for any potential witnesses. I dropped it on the floor before the desk and dug into the drawers with my hands, noticing briefly that they were trembling. They touched on the birthday cards, the notebooks with labels like “Paleo Genetics” and “Post-Structuralist Thought” and a slew of notes for papers past and present, all of which were pushed against the wall for public viewing. Juicier items like a bulky first draft of a term paper and a mass of material for an NSF grant were tossed into the “take-out” box. I rummaged with greater speed and efficiency through one drawer, then another and then the next like a man going through the bases on a hot date, unlatching the bra, the belt, then….until my fingers came to rest on home plate in the bottom, right-hand compartment. The mother lode was luridly conspicuous, not just a hot date but a baboon in estrus, a big bundle of envelopes and papers and letters tied together by a wide, purple ribbon bowed with the elegance of a Christmas gift. I tried to pull it out with one hand, but was forced to use two as envelopes slipped out. Before the bundle was even placed on the desk it was obvious that many, perhaps most of the correspondence had come from Mexico. There were big patriotic portraits of Hidalgo y Costilla and Zapata and Carranza on the postage, rubber-stamped with the deceptive designation, aero postal. My eye measured what must have been a dozen letters, and I could only imagine the wealth of information, of personal insights and field notes, that the bigger folders contained. Lacey’s core, her emotional intersection of sex and bonding, dreams and desires, family and career, had been unearthed. So, too, most certainly, had been a dead man.
I prepared to take the bundle home, discarding much of the rest from the box as tangential bait, but within minutes of walking into the cold, black air of the Michigan winter night a sensation of disgust crept over me. While Lacey had never stirred me with desire, she was still a young woman and her personal life was tantalizing. But Steven. Had he been the stranger, the mystery man in a romantic novel, it would not have mattered, but I knew Steven. I detested Steven. I had no more interest in knowing Steven’s private life than I had in seeing my parents entwined in passion. Even less. Theirs’ was, at the core, a wholesome relationship. There could be little wholesome about Steven.
My conflicting thoughts continued on the bus home, the box bouncing on my lap all the while, shaking the sweater and backpack that were stuffed on top to conceal the treasure. As the rhythmic jostling measured time, the sense of the lurid wore off and more analytical thoughts coalesced in its place. As a new concept formed and assumed domination, it brought with it the certainty that this colder path would lead to more lasting satisfaction than the former jumble of urges. It told me that what was balanced on my knees, held in the fluorescent lights of an empty bus on its final run of the night, was power. As my professors liked to joke with an allusion to wisdom, Knowledge is Power. In my possession lay not just the lives of two people, but two people intimating their lives and experiences and contacts within my department. This was not just knowledge. This was knowledge that could lead to the greatest power of all: the ability to consummate revenge, to blackmail.
I left the bus at the top of North Campus with a new urgency and scuttled like a crab over the invisible ice that had refrozen since the salt pellets and sun had melted it several hours earlier. The box had to be dropped before the door of the Co-ops where I lived, then a glove pulled off with my teeth so that my fingers could search in pockets for the key needed after 11 at night. I tumbled through the outer doors into a hallway obscured in shadows and bumped an elbow on my neighbor’s door handle, receiving all the customary pain of the “funny bone.” Biting down on my urge to swear, the box had to be dropped again to open the door. I stumbled against my desk, nearly falling, then reached the table light. With the push of a button, the world again was under my command and the paper captives ripe for plunder.
Sitting down at my chair, it became apparent that the stress and late hours of the day had robbed much of my energy. The happy vision of myself delving into other’s private lives for days on end would not be actualized this night, and with that realization came the thought that this is how it should be. As with all efforts that were worthwhile, this one should be afforded its due time, savored piece by piece at the appropriate moment. That would be easy. If I could wade through the muddy waters of Noam Chompsky and Jaques Derrida for three long, rough years, this little stream could be forded without effort. The temptation to have it all now was no temptation at all; in the great halls of the arcane, we had learned to delay gratification to the ends of time, if necessary.
It seemed right, though, that my evening struggle should be rewarded with one morsel, one little sweet fruit before sleep, one that most likely would be found in the stack of personal letters. Dumping the lot of them on the table, it occurred to me that they should be read chronologically, according to the dates on the postage, so that they would be experienced in the natural order, and it pleased me to note that they had already been sorted as such.
I looked to the first, sent from Laredo, Texas, May 5, 1980, took a deep breath and slipped a finger under the flap that had become resealed with dampness and age. Inside were several pages torn from a classroom notebook, scrawled by a sloppy but legible hand. I snickered. This was obviously the mark of a sloppy, shallow man. Steven. This was going to be fun.