Table of Contents
Title Page
Book Details
Plato for Plumber
About the Author
Plato for
Plumbers
Francis Gideon
The week before an important philosophy conference, Kenneth is struggling to finish both the last chapter of his book and the paper he's writing for the event. His efforts are thwarted by a leaky faucet—and his life as a whole is turned upside down by the plumber who shows up to fix it.
Book Details
Plato for Plumbers
By Francis Gideon
Published by Less Than Three Press LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.
Edited by Amanda Jean
Cover designed by Natasha Snow
This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.
First Edition September 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Francis Gideon
Printed in the United States of America
Digital ISBN 9781620046012
Plato for Plumber
Doctor Kenneth McLaughlin (the PhD kind, not the medical kind) woke up at five in the morning. It wasn't a willing exercise. He had set his alarm for five-thirty the night before. And because he knew he had done that, his body had obviously woken him up ahead of the alarm so he could start work early. He groaned as he turned over under his large flannel sheets. Birds chirped just outside his window. In a huff, he tossed the sheets off his body but remained in bed.
He didn't want to admit it, but his morning rituals always reminded him of Immanuel Kant. Kant was a moral philosopher and a really, really uptight guy from the 1700s. It was definitely too early in the morning for Ken to think about moral objectivism and whatever else Kant espoused in his long tomes. No, what reminded Ken of Kant this morning was Kant's airtight schedule. Except for a few months during the revolution, Kant would always wake up early, write for a few hours, and then go for his afternoon walk. He became so predictable that the townspeople even set their watches by him. Ken often imagined a make-believe scenario where the city dwellers in Kant's hometown had discussed their favorite recluse.
"What time is it, Jimmy?"
"I don't know, Mum. Almost half-past Kant's walk."
"Oh, my! We're running late."
Ken turned over again in bed. Light filtered in through the blinds in his bedroom. He had first told the Kant anecdote to his 100-level philosophy class when they got to the transcendentalists. It was always so much easier to humanize the philosophers so the students could recall their small quirks and foibles and keep the theory attributed to each thinker straight in their minds. He often told his favorite Kant story with a smile on his face, joking about Kant's predictability.
"Kant must have been a devil at the bridge table," Ken had lectured. "So stoic and focused, with a million thoughts going through his head. But as soon as you got used to someone like him, they became so transparent."
Ken sighed. He really didn't want to think he had become that transparent or predictable, either. At forty-five, he still lived alone in his small condo, where bookshelves and papers lined every last surface. His kitchen was full of take-out containers; his fridge held nothing but white bread, lunch meat, and mustard. Dust lined his dining room table. Ken had spent so much of his career making sure he published before anyone else among his grad school cohorts that he missed becoming good friends with any of them. He took up so many extra teaching positions that he got used to grading on Friday nights. He had even read all the great classics in philosophy for more than just the sound bites of theory, but for the philosophers' quirks as well.
All of that hard work had paid off. Ken had tenure at a prominent university, a good job, and a sizable income, but what else? He tossed and turned in the mornings, his body ready for its job before Ken was. The annual philosophy conference, two hours away in another state, was in a week. Ken knew he needed at least three days of waking up early during the March break to write his conference paper, which he then hoped to turn into a chapter of his philosophy book. He had written one chapter a year, always based on the conference paper he had presented, for the past seven years. This routine, as much as Kant's daily walks, was ingrained into Ken's very body.
So why does everything hurt? Ken asked himself. He had only another twenty minutes of solace in the bed before anything was expected of him. He ran his hands through his dark brown (but turning gray) hair and over his weak limbs. Academia didn't provide a lot of opportunity to get out and about. He used to be a runner but had stopped in graduate school. Now he wondered if he would ever start again.
"What time is it, Jimmy?" Ken repeated the dramatic scenario in his mind, only he swapped out the village children watching Kant for himself.
"Oh, I don't know. It looks to be like a quarter to Ken. I see him now, coming over the hill."
Ken sighed. He waited another ten, fifteen minutes before he finally got out of bed. May as well face the inevitable. He turned off his alarm clock before it even had a chance to ring.
*~*~*
Ken sat at his desk and focused on the small quotation pinned above his laptop from Plato's The Phaedrus. The small anecdote, like the many Ken kept close by, was something he used when teaching first years in philosophy. In the dialogue, one character stated that if people relied much too much on writing, their memory would fall apart—or so went the argument. We would get dumber as a collective species if we relied on the written word and our tablets to do the work for us.
He liked to tell this story anytime someone brought up the idea that everything was "falling apart" or wasn't as good as it used to be; basically, anytime a student attempted to romanticize a time period before their own.
"Kids with their cell phones and video games. It's just a huge downside of this generation!" one student, usually the hippie-type white student with dreads, who was vegan and had given up on watching TV, would often complain within the first week of classes.
Ken would reiterate the dialogue of The Phaedrus and how Plato thought, years ago, that the same fate would befall men because we wanted to write down words instead of remembering them.
"See? That's exactly what I mean."
"But surely," Ken would argue, "if this feeling has always been around, always been looming over our consciousness, then our period in time is really no different than before. Then it means we're all stable. That there was no golden age."
This notion—that there was no golden age—was usually the hardest for a student to comprehend. They often idealized the nature of philosophy and higher education to the point where it exuded from them like an aura. Ken's job as a professor was to get his students to see that, like Kant, everything was the same. Hard work and perseverance got you ahead in life, but eventually, all you were known for was the fact that people could set their watches by you. Not because you changed a lot of minds, but because you were consistent more than anything else.
Ken sighed as he sipped his cup of coffee in front of his laptop. He pulled up a blank Word document. To his left was his sturdy notebook with blue and yellow cover, where he kept most notes for his classes. His conference paper's outline was there, in bits and pieces, and he knew he would spend much of the morning typing out and reorganizing it. From there, he would work on turning those jumbled bullet points into a speech rather than a scholarly article. That was the point of a conference: you charmed the audience with your rhetoric and were sure that you could answer questions later. A week after the conference,
Ken would take these pieces and feed them together again, adding end notes and footnotes, and voilà: a new chapter of the book.
The last chapter too, Ken thought. There would be no more writing—at least, nothing like this—after he had completed this final paper. Maybe that was why he was so reluctant to begin. Beginning meant that he had to finish it, and like The Phaedrus quotation warned, there would be a loss of a golden age when Ken finished. There would be nothing to wake up for in the morning anymore. Even if his body had pretty much accepted his fate.
Ken pushed his glasses down his nose as he began to type. He got to the second page of the outline before he lost his wording. Squinting hard, he tried to figure out his messy handwriting. Was that historical or theoretical? He ran his fingers over the words just as he heard the sudden noise.
Drip drip drip.
Fuck, Ken thought. He had meant to call a plumber last week about the leak under his bathroom sink. Normally, he used the master bathroom for his day-to-day routines and not the one closer to his office down the hall. He had been at his office on campus so much the past few months, he'd completely forgotten about the leak. But now its drip was overwhelming, like a never-ending and overexcited knock from a small child.
He could ignore this, right? It was just a little water. He turned back to his Plato quotation and tried to focus. The tap had always been there and always would be. Nothing had changed.
Drip drip drip.
He gritted his teeth. He knew he shouldn't let the tap bother him, but writing was hard. Ken pawed through some of his pages and decided that the word he was after was 'historical'. He began to type again, hoping he could be gripped by an idea so that nothing could ever—
Drip drip drip.
Ken got up. He walked into his bathroom and crouched under the sink. He stared at the pipes for fifteen minutes before he finally conceded that he had no idea what he was doing. Pipes were a maze, a labyrinth. Although he could think of a dozen quotations about the labyrinth and their impenetrability from Borges—or even about staring into abysses from Nietzsche—Ken knew that none of his philosophical nonsense was useful in stopping the noise.
Ken stared at himself in the mirror, his tired eyes looking back. The tap continued to drip drip drip, as if it was teasing him. If he wanted to get his paper done, he needed to get this fixed.
He picked up the phone and called the plumber before the abyss could take him any further.
*~*~*
The man on the phone assured Ken that a worker from The Pacific Plumbing Company would be at his place somewhere between eight and eight that day.
Great, Ken thought as he hung up. Not like I don't have a deadline or anything else.
He tried to sit back down at his computer, but the nearly empty Microsoft Word page stared at him like a parent's disappointed gaze. He opened up Google Chrome instead. There were lots of apps for people's phones or laptops that prevented them from browsing online—or apps that kept it contained. Ken had never bothered with any of those. There was only so much taboo someone could enforce before everything backfired. Ken might as well browse if he wasn't quite sure what to do with his paper.
He checked his Facebook feed, Buzzfeed, Twitter, and a few other forums he frequented without finding much to distract himself. He played Bejewelled for another hour, and then figured that was enough. He wrote a couple more sentences down from his notebook, cringing each time he heard the drips. Ken normally needed complete silence to write in, but now he was willing to consider anything else to drown out the incessant dripping. He was about to counter the water dripping with some music—maybe classical, like Shubert—when his phone rang. He jumped up from his desk and grabbed the receiver to his ear right away.
"Hello?"
"Ken? Hi!"
His old graduate supervisor, David Lethbridge, was on the other end. Ken felt his heartbeat quicken in his chest. David had supervised Ken's doctoral thesis almost fifteen years ago now, but the sudden agitation and fear Ken felt from hearing his voice never really went away. David's presence was the quickest way Ken could feel young again—and also terribly, terribly afraid.
"Hi, Professor Lethbridge."
"David, please," he corrected. "We're colleagues now, remember? My memory couldn't have gotten so bad already, has it?"
"No, no, sir," Ken said, leaning back in his chair. "But you know what they say? Grad school is forever."
David laughed a little. "See, I didn't expect you to say that."
"Oh? What did you?"
"What was that old Plato quotation you kept around…?"
Ken rolled his eyes. "Oh, don't toy with me. You know Plato has a lot of sound bites."
"Then why do I bother calling?"
"I don't know! What do you want? Another carpool to the conference?"
There was more muffled laughter. "So I suppose I will be seeing you this weekend?"
"As ever," Ken said. "You know I wouldn't miss it for the world."
"I think you might, just given the right world."
Ken swallowed hard. It was so hard to tell what academics really meant through their veiled references, let alone philosophy majors. All things considered, Ken was a fairly straight-laced guy. Predictable, boring. That was normal to see in science professors, but not for philosophy. One of Ken's profs in undergrad never wore shoes to class; others had beards that would make Gandalf envious; and a couple dropped out of academia altogether to go on Buddhist spiritual quests. There was really no telling what a philosophy professor really meant.
"I guess you're right," Ken finally said. He took the next few moments of silence on the other end as indication that he had given the right response.
"You know, I miss you, Ken."
"What do you mean? Once a year at the conference isn't enough?"
"No, not that. I miss the old Ken. The grad school Ken."
"I'm pretty sure we're still the same person. And if not, then we all evolve at the same rate."
"Don't give me that post-humanist garbage," David said. Ken imagined him waving his large, age-spot-riddled hand in the air. "You know I was much more into Plato."
"Even Plato has his moments of—"
"Shhh. I'm talking. I miss you—the student you—when the world was still fascinating."
"I still think it is…"
"You're hearing me but not listening to me, Ken. I'm talking about wonder."
Ken sighed. He knew what David meant now, all right. Ken was different than his grad school self, but that change was inevitable. Every student went into school with high hopes—and then the admin department seemed pretty much determined to beat it out of them. Some people called it hazing, some called it middle-child syndrome, but Ken knew it all related back to the same thing: breaking hopes and idealism in order to produce better scholarship. If David was lamenting the loss of vigour in Ken's life, then it was partly David's fault.
"I still have lots of wonder, David," Ken said, his voice quiet. "It's just more contained in footnotes and by citing my sources. I can't exactly perform a sermon on the mount and expect that to go over well. That's just not… scholarly."
"I'm sure," David replied, his sarcasm not hidden. "What's this book on again?"
"The moral philosophy of…"
"I'm already tired. Snoring, Ken! I'm snoring over here."
Ken rolled his eyes. David Lethbridge was a professor emeritus now. He could get away with researching whatever he wanted, since none of it really affected his career or grants anymore. Ken was convinced that David would have been all over his new moral philosophy book twenty years ago. He might have even helped to co-write it.
"What do you suggest I do now? Positive psychology? I hope you know I have more scruples than that!"
They both laughed, though Ken's was strained.
"I do know, Ken, don't worry. But what about your first paper?" David asked after a moment.
"My first one ever?"
"No, the one you showed me just after I became your
advisor. On the ideals and nature of love?"
"Oh. That." Ken was quiet. He thought of the boyfriend who had inspired him to dive deep into the beauty and ideals that Plato spoke about in The Symposium, and how that particular professor had torn the work apart. It had been Ken's first terrible grade he had ever received, and he had taken it to Professor Lethbridge when he couldn't figure it why it had happened. "I thought it was wrong?"
"It wasn't wrong, per se. You were just… not quite getting it completely."
"Okay, fair enough. I'm used to that by now."
Ken waited for David to explain himself more. Though he had written the paper two decades ago, the memory of it was still fresh in Ken's mind. In Plato's Symposium, the prominent poets or philosophers of the time (such as Socrates and Agathon) all gathered around to talk about what love really was. In one dialogue, Aristophanes told the origin story of love wherein people started out as beasts with four arms and four legs. They were never lonely because they had someone around at all times, but they never knew love. Threatened by their power, the Gods split the people apart and separated their mates with a large storm. This origin story was supposed to explain soul mates and that overwhelming feeling we often got when we were in love. As if, a long time ago, we had been part of one another.
He had written an entire paper on this, espousing how wonderful the soul mate idea was, and what it could mean for current consciousness. Ken blinked now, remembering the sea of red he had gotten back from the professor. One comment in particular stuck out in his mind: You never consider that Aristophanes was a satirist. When he told his origin story of love, it was supposed to be a joke. So how am I to take this paper seriously? F.
Ken had blistered under the sudden criticism, especially about something so close to the surface of his skin. He had tried to bury the paper and forget about it entirely. Not because he didn’t believe in the paper, but because it was always far easier in graduate school to bury the failures and focus on the successes. This tactic had worked for a years, but now David wanted to talk about that first paper again as if it was some great milestone of Ken's achievement. Ken waited longer for David to explain himself, but he never did. He just sighed, full of nostalgia, while all Ken could hear was the dripping from his sink.
Plato for Plumbers Page 1
