From Chapter 2
What was he not quite accused of—an illicit quid pro quo? How many damning, overlapping ethical violations would that be? Sexual harassment, abuse of power, falsifying grades, lying to a supervisor... If he speculated too much, if he tried to plan more than a few hours ahead, he would be crushed. He would bang his head against his own stupidity and the straightjacket of the situation from which he foolishly had let himself believe he had wriggled free, until he had tortured himself long enough and it was time to turn outward, to lash out as he longed to do and simply piss off everyone possible with as much aggrieved self-righteousness as he could muster. Yet striking back as his primitive fight-or-flight hindbrain snarled for him to do would mean not victory but self-annihilation, a complete personal Gotterdammerung—the end of his career, his marriage, all of his friendships. If everything came to light— everything—and the knee-jerk judgment of Koryzwic’s drumhead court-martial went against him, he would be through in academia.
Fired from his assistantship, shunned by professors and fellow grad students alike, how could he ever finish his Ph.D. in this department? Yet even if he could somehow tough it out, if the mind in itself and in its own place really could make a heaven of hell—which even Milton’s Satan had not been able to do, Rick knew grimly, not really, Blake’s Romantic posturing aside, else he would not have been trying to escape the place—the disgraced doctoral student could never get a teaching job again. Rick read The Chronicle of Higher Education every week to keep eye on the job market and to see what was happening in the other chambers of the ivory tower, and every few months there was an article about some prof or other whose past indiscretions—sex, drugs, alcohol, embezzling, whatever—had come to light, leading to his dismissal. One of the big boys with a string of publications and a list of prestigious postings might be able to escape scrutiny for a few years here and there, but a kid like Rick, who had only one teaching position under his belt and whose supervisors thus were certain to be called by any prospective employers, was naked. A full professor in his situation would have a tough enough time of it, but a lowly teaching assistant in grad school...why, such a nobody was doomed.
He knew this intellectually, but he still couldn’t understand it in his gut, and maybe didn’t really want to. Eight years of college—almost a third of his life!—gone, all gone, along with the future he had imagined for himself. Friends and colleagues—gone. Wife and children—gone... How could anyone truly understand such a collapse of...of everything? People killed themselves for things like that, didn’t they? he asked himself idly.
The pressures of graduate school, Rick had discovered, were enormous. You played this game in academia, walking the crumbling wind-swept trails along some yawning existentialist chasm, neither a mere student nor an actual professor. Your whole life—along with the lives of your family, if you had started one—was wagered on the vagaries of individual classes, on the idiosyncrasies of the members of your doctoral committee, on the shifting tastes of the publishing industry that later would or would not publish your dissertation as a classroom text or a scholarly reference book. Sometimes some poor schmuck just went crazy.
You read about it in the Chron now and then, perhaps a desperate killing spree, more often a quiet, scarcely noticed suicide. Why, hadn’t somebody in his own department hanged herself a few years earlier? The incident occurred was while he was still an undergrad, but he almost thought he remembered reading about it in the campus rag. Occasionally in the halls of the English Department he still heard an oblique reference to it. Rick wasn’t foolish enough for such a thing, of course—didn’t have the guts for it was another way of saying it, perhaps—but still it was a sobering thought. When the slide that began with professional and personal ruin too easily could lead careeningly down to the precipice over the abyss, where the only way out was a heavy fistful of blue-black steel or a palmful of pretty pills...well, you had to step with care.
He didn’t want to have to think anymore today, didn’t want to have to see any of his friends and try to act normal, didn’t want to have to go back to his office and look like he still knew what he was doing. Yet if he heeded the creeping impulse to skip his office hours and turn his back and hike across campus to his apartment in Spartan Village at the very edge of the University, he feared he would want to just fall into bed and pull the covers up high and not come out again. He was vaguely afraid that, almost no matter what, that was where he was heading. He needed somehow to stave off the creeping depression that sapped his will and made his face feel numb and slack, that turned the very sky bleak and made the ground suck spongy and threatening at his feet like a bad dream...but he didn’t know if he could.
For months he had lived on a knife edge, tortured by self-doubt, by guilt, by fear. It was hard enough to juggle the two roles he usually played, that of scholar and teacher and that of husband and parent. He had to teach and grade, had to attend classes himself and study and write—and he had to find time for a family that probably needed twice as much attention as he could give it right now. And for those terrible, reckless, lonely months before the birth of his twins he had added a third, unacknowledged role...
Over the summer, however, he had broken away from that, he had thought. God, he had tried—so, so hard! And yet now, despite his best effort to straighten himself out, here came this disquieting reminder of the unburied past. The sinister pink message paper seemed oppressive on the flesh over his heart, uncomfortable as a lead weight. Rick needed a little luck, he knew, but perhaps to make that luck he needed to hold up, too, needed to find a quick way to prove the innocent truth before protracted investigation uncovered an affair...er, a matter, that is, which could not be explained away, and which in fact would seem to dovetail so neatly with Dr. Koryzwic’s unspoken suspicions. Yet exactly how he might do this...well, he could not say.
Brooding, Rick stepped past Olin Health Center and into the shadow of Morrill Hall, the building named for the patron saint of land grant colleges. Originally a women’s dormitory when built in 1900—and almost immediately dubbed Immoral Hall—the four-story structure now housed the departments of Philosophy, English, and History, their faculty and T.A. offices, and a few classrooms. He scarcely glanced at the dark red bricking, the ornate white cornices decked here and there with pigeon nests, or the ancient windows whose thinned panes sagged wavy and brittle and thin. He had been there too many years to notice the details anymore. He heaved open a heavy door and stepped into the familiar smell of academia—redolent wooden floorboards smoothed by the tread of generations of scholars and students, shelf upon shelf of fragrant old texts, mildew in odd corners where no light had shone in decades, the omnipresent dust sifting slowly down from lath and plaster construction, rusty steam radiators whose coats of peeling paint burned slowly off molecule by molecule.
Rick dropped listlessly down the shallow stairs three at a time without looking and went through the ill-lit basement corridor, following the overhead piping past Room 9 on the left—into which he did not look—past the little elevator on the right, past the old yellow Shelter sign, until he came to Room 7. Home again.
What was he not quite accused of—an illicit quid pro quo? How many damning, overlapping ethical violations would that be? Sexual harassment, abuse of power, falsifying grades, lying to a supervisor... If he speculated too much, if he tried to plan more than a few hours ahead, he would be crushed. He would bang his head against his own stupidity and the straightjacket of the situation from which he foolishly had let himself believe he had wriggled free, until he had tortured himself long enough and it was time to turn outward, to lash out as he longed to do and simply piss off everyone possible with as much aggrieved self-righteousness as he could muster. Yet striking back as his primitive fight-or-flight hindbrain snarled for him to do would mean not victory but self-annihilation, a complete personal Gotterdammerung—the end of his career, his marriage, all of his friendships. If everything came to light— everything—and the knee-jerk judgment of Koryzwic’s drumhead court-martial went against him, he would be through in academia.
Fired from his assistantship, shunned by professors and fellow grad students alike, how could he ever finish his Ph.D. in this department? Yet even if he could somehow tough it out, if the mind in itself and in its own place really could make a heaven of hell—which even Milton’s Satan had not been able to do, Rick knew grimly, not really, Blake’s Romantic posturing aside, else he would not have been trying to escape the place—the disgraced doctoral student could never get a teaching job again. Rick read The Chronicle of Higher Education every week to keep eye on the job market and to see what was happening in the other chambers of the ivory tower, and every few months there was an article about some prof or other whose past indiscretions—sex, drugs, alcohol, embezzling, whatever—had come to light, leading to his dismissal. One of the big boys with a string of publications and a list of prestigious postings might be able to escape scrutiny for a few years here and there, but a kid like Rick, who had only one teaching position under his belt and whose supervisors thus were certain to be called by any prospective employers, was naked. A full professor in his situation would have a tough enough time of it, but a lowly teaching assistant in grad school...why, such a nobody was doomed.
He knew this intellectually, but he still couldn’t understand it in his gut, and maybe didn’t really want to. Eight years of college—almost a third of his life!—gone, all gone, along with the future he had imagined for himself. Friends and colleagues—gone. Wife and children—gone... How could anyone truly understand such a collapse of...of everything? People killed themselves for things like that, didn’t they? he asked himself idly.
The pressures of graduate school, Rick had discovered, were enormous. You played this game in academia, walking the crumbling wind-swept trails along some yawning existentialist chasm, neither a mere student nor an actual professor. Your whole life—along with the lives of your family, if you had started one—was wagered on the vagaries of individual classes, on the idiosyncrasies of the members of your doctoral committee, on the shifting tastes of the publishing industry that later would or would not publish your dissertation as a classroom text or a scholarly reference book. Sometimes some poor schmuck just went crazy.
You read about it in the Chron now and then, perhaps a desperate killing spree, more often a quiet, scarcely noticed suicide. Why, hadn’t somebody in his own department hanged herself a few years earlier? The incident occurred was while he was still an undergrad, but he almost thought he remembered reading about it in the campus rag. Occasionally in the halls of the English Department he still heard an oblique reference to it. Rick wasn’t foolish enough for such a thing, of course—didn’t have the guts for it was another way of saying it, perhaps—but still it was a sobering thought. When the slide that began with professional and personal ruin too easily could lead careeningly down to the precipice over the abyss, where the only way out was a heavy fistful of blue-black steel or a palmful of pretty pills...well, you had to step with care.
He didn’t want to have to think anymore today, didn’t want to have to see any of his friends and try to act normal, didn’t want to have to go back to his office and look like he still knew what he was doing. Yet if he heeded the creeping impulse to skip his office hours and turn his back and hike across campus to his apartment in Spartan Village at the very edge of the University, he feared he would want to just fall into bed and pull the covers up high and not come out again. He was vaguely afraid that, almost no matter what, that was where he was heading. He needed somehow to stave off the creeping depression that sapped his will and made his face feel numb and slack, that turned the very sky bleak and made the ground suck spongy and threatening at his feet like a bad dream...but he didn’t know if he could.
For months he had lived on a knife edge, tortured by self-doubt, by guilt, by fear. It was hard enough to juggle the two roles he usually played, that of scholar and teacher and that of husband and parent. He had to teach and grade, had to attend classes himself and study and write—and he had to find time for a family that probably needed twice as much attention as he could give it right now. And for those terrible, reckless, lonely months before the birth of his twins he had added a third, unacknowledged role...
Over the summer, however, he had broken away from that, he had thought. God, he had tried—so, so hard! And yet now, despite his best effort to straighten himself out, here came this disquieting reminder of the unburied past. The sinister pink message paper seemed oppressive on the flesh over his heart, uncomfortable as a lead weight. Rick needed a little luck, he knew, but perhaps to make that luck he needed to hold up, too, needed to find a quick way to prove the innocent truth before protracted investigation uncovered an affair...er, a matter, that is, which could not be explained away, and which in fact would seem to dovetail so neatly with Dr. Koryzwic’s unspoken suspicions. Yet exactly how he might do this...well, he could not say.
Brooding, Rick stepped past Olin Health Center and into the shadow of Morrill Hall, the building named for the patron saint of land grant colleges. Originally a women’s dormitory when built in 1900—and almost immediately dubbed Immoral Hall—the four-story structure now housed the departments of Philosophy, English, and History, their faculty and T.A. offices, and a few classrooms. He scarcely glanced at the dark red bricking, the ornate white cornices decked here and there with pigeon nests, or the ancient windows whose thinned panes sagged wavy and brittle and thin. He had been there too many years to notice the details anymore. He heaved open a heavy door and stepped into the familiar smell of academia—redolent wooden floorboards smoothed by the tread of generations of scholars and students, shelf upon shelf of fragrant old texts, mildew in odd corners where no light had shone in decades, the omnipresent dust sifting slowly down from lath and plaster construction, rusty steam radiators whose coats of peeling paint burned slowly off molecule by molecule.
Rick dropped listlessly down the shallow stairs three at a time without looking and went through the ill-lit basement corridor, following the overhead piping past Room 9 on the left—into which he did not look—past the little elevator on the right, past the old yellow Shelter sign, until he came to Room 7. Home again.