by Ezra Sidran
Your contract is terminated effective immediately; please remove your personal effects from the campus within 24 hours (return all keys to campus security).
“Is this about Bill?” I asked, “I know I’ve missed some classes, but Bill was sick and we had to drive down to Champaign but I can promise you I’m never going to cancel a class again.”
“This isn’t about Bill,” Gilfoyle said looking not at me, not beside me, but somewhere underneath his desk.
“I won’t bring Bill to class, again. I promise,” I said.
“This isn’t about Bill,” Gilfoyle repeated and he picked up the sheet of paper with the gold embossed college crest and pushed it towards my chest as if he was performing some ancient ritual that transferred understanding, or legal serving of the document upon me.
I really didn’t understand my part of the ritual.
I just read the single sentence over and over and over again and then I looked up into Gilfoyle’s eyes and what I saw there wasn’t pretty.
What I saw was that the world, as I knew it, had turned inside out.
I think, maybe, for a flickering moment, maybe, I knew that everything from here on out, was just me going to hell in a handcart. I mean, Gilfoyle was my undergraduate advisor. Okay, that was bullshit. Gilfoyle and I were pretty close. We went out, got drunk, went to titty bars together, made sure neither one of us did anything too stupid, swapped maudlin poetry. We were friends, I thought.
I mean we were pretty close for chrissakes and here he was firing me, but he wasn’t firing me, he was handing me a letter from the president of the college. Actually, he wasn’t even handing me the letter, he just kept pushing the letter up against my chest. He just kept pushing the letter – with the gold embossed crest - up against my chest.
I finally got it; but I didn’t understand it all.
I said, “I’ll get my stuff and get off campus right away.”
“Yes, yes,” Gilfoyle agreed, “I think that would be best.”
Getting fired when you’re thirty-two in this bad economy really does feel like getting hit in the gut with a two-by-four.
“You were thirty-seven when Gilfoyle fired you,” the Authoritarian Man corrected me.
•
Much later, people, friends, my students, asked me, why I didn’t say something, do something, or even think something.
I’ve said this before: real life isn’t like one of my computer games. You can’t pause real life and think about your next move. You can’t go back and magically restore your life from a saved game file and put everything back the way it was just before you screwed up, knowing what you know now, knowing not to turn left at the fork in the road because there were a band of orcs over the next hill waiting to beat the crap out of you. I didn’t know that I shouldn’t have signed that contract with a game publisher who would later rip me off and split the country with my royalties. And I most certainly didn’t know that what had seemed like a sincere and genuine offer from Gilfoyle, my old friend and mentor, to teach at my alma mater until I could get back on my feet, wasn’t worth a damn. I was just getting back up when he kicked my legs out from under me.
If you want to know what I was thinking, what I was feeling, just then it was fear. Cold, nauseating fear.
Fear for me and fear for Bill. How would we survive?
I am no longer the fair-haired boy of the computer game world. I’m more the gray-haired old, wizard. Who am I trying to bullshit? I don’t have wizard status. I don’t have bupkis.
I haven’t had a Number One game in years; the market has moved on to console games – you know, PlayStation, GameCube, Xbox – and I don’t write for those platforms. Writing a console game costs at least fifty grand. And I don’t have the price of admission to the new dance.
And there is nothing left to sell.
The oil-burning Oldsmobile that had brought Bill and me back from Champaign wasn’t worth much. I’ve got a digital piano that I could sell, I guess, but I need it to play the bars on the weekends. It was going to be the only money coming in.
I was numb with fear. If I could have only paused this video game of my life and collected my thoughts I would have asked, I would have stammered, “Why?” Why did Gilfoyle throw me out of this job? I hadn’t taught before, but I was getting damn good at it. The students loved me and we were doing great work that was beginning to get national attention.
Why?
Nothing I thought of over the next two weeks even came close to the truth. Nothing even approached the monstrosity of the lie that I would discover.
•
I must have gone back to my class and told them I was “terminated effective immediately.” I really don’t remember much after that; not clearly; except Katelynn O’Brian and the look on her face and Bill with his snout between her breasts.
Nick - I think it was Nick - took Bill back to our little yellow house where I would be two months late on the rent on Tuesday. The rest of my students – well it’s all so jumbled and vague in my memory, really – formed some sort of bucket-brigade from my campus office to our home and removed my books and research papers. I was stunned, in shock. People moved around me. I probably answered.
Then my students – after they had moved everything back to our house – well, it became a party, really. They cranked up the stereo, tuned their laptops into the wireless network at my house and I seem to remember that they were playing the network version of the project that we were working on at the time, my Lords of Land & Sea game. I remember a keg of beer floating in a plastic tub full of ice. By midnight, I think half the campus was at my house. There was always beer in my cup and I did my best to empty it.
Bill likes a party. He was running about the backyard and dancing with the co-eds. I remember saying over and over again, “be careful of his Holter monitor,” and the co-eds said they were being careful and Bill was enjoying himself and the music was good.
I remember giving Nick my ATM card to buy more beer, so by midnight, I was officially broke. I didn’t care anymore and that was probably good. If I had stopped to think about it I would have done something stupid. I mean - look - I got shit-canned for no reason.
Well, you know how this all turned out.
Katelynn O’Brian and I were sitting on the back porch. She kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the porch rail. I noticed that each toenail was painted a different, seemingly random, color: green, purple, green, red. I stared at her toes.
“Katelynn?”
“Yes, Jakob? You can call me Kate.”
“Ahh… Kate… then, your toenails… they’re random, funny colors.”
“No they’re not,” she said wiggling her toes.
It had been a very long, weird day I was about to accept almost anything but I was very certain that Kate’s toes were a random rainbow of colors.
“They’re not random,” she insisted.
“They look random.”
“Nope. See that’s what you’re supposed to think. I had a U. S. History since 1865 test yesterday,”
“Uh huh...”
“The left little toe,” she said as she tried to wiggle just her left little toe, “is green.”
“Uh huh.”
“Green is for Grant the 18th president.”
“Uh huh.”
“Next is heather. That’s for Rutherford B. Hayes.”
“Uh, it’s purple.”
“Purple is heather.”
“Oh.”
“Next is green.” Katelynn tried to wiggle her third toe on her left foot.
“James Garfield, right?”
“Yup,” Katelynn answered, “The next one is red again.”
“Chester A. Arthur?”
“Auburn is red; yup, Chester A. Arthur.”
“And, then?” I asked.
“Cyan for Cleveland, heather for Harrison, mauve for McKinley, red for Roosevelt.” Katelynn smiled a smug smile.
“But Katelynn, er Kate, your last two toes are met
allic silver. How does that relate to Taft and Wilson?”
“They don’t. I just like the color. Besides, who can forget fat old Taft and Woodrow Wilson?” she shrugged, and then with that stretched her legs out over the back porch rail and wiggled her toes. Bill was romping in the back yard chasing giggling, inebriated co-eds who dropped their plastic beer cups that Bill caught in mid-air and drank the suds right down. At least his cardiologist said some alcohol was good for his heart.
I was drunk. Everything was wrong. Everything was right.
Katelynn said to me, “Jakob, now that you are no longer my advisor…”
“Now that I am no longer employed…” I interrupted, “Kate, I am unemployed and dead broke. The only money that I’ve got coming in is playing piano two nights a week and that won’t even pay the rent and keep Bill in kibble and beer.”
Katelynn persisted, “Jakob, now that you are no longer my advisor…” and she put her hand on my arm and looked at me in a way that left no doubt where she was headed.
I said, “You can call me Jake.”
•
I gotta take a break now. Can I have a cigarette?
“You know I can’t give you a smoke,” the Authoritarian Man said.
Okay, can I just rest for a minute? Is Bill okay?
“Bill’s fine. We just checked on him. Bill’s fine.”
“Don’t lie to me.” I don’t know if the words actually came out of my mouth or if I just thought them real hard. What I wanted to do was grab that sonofabitch Authoritarian Man by the throat but the instructions that my brain were sending to my hands were still being detoured somewhere north of the circumflex nerve and it didn’t matter anyway because the restraints held me fast to the bed.
I must have slept, now.
CHAPTER 1.2
When I awoke the shades were open in the room where I was being held.
I think it was snowing. There is a thick, white, dense feeling when it is snowing.
I couldn’t move my head much and I couldn’t see outside, but the light had that slate-gray translucence of sunlight passing through a heavy snowfall. It made me think that I was somewhere north of 45 degrees latitude. It could have been North America, Europe or Asia; I had no idea. But somewhere that it snowed.
Though I could not move and I did not know my location, the time, or much of anything else, the stentorian voice of the Authoritarian Man would not let me forget the terms of my new reality.
“It was the day after you were ‘let go’ from your teaching position,” he began today’s interrogation after the now obligatory injection of benzodiazepine, “what happened next?”
•
We had exactly four days and 15 hours of paradise before it all went to hell but I suppose you know that. I got fired on Monday about – what? – nine A.M.? The fucking package showed up on Saturday night. FedEx.
Day one:
When I awoke the next morning Bill was snoring to my right like a steam train. The CardioTronic 413 was obviously functioning up to spec. I thought, “I’ve got to send an email to Doc Farmer and tell him. Tell him that Bill is alive and well. Tell him - thank God – Bill is alive and well.”
And then I became aware of another presence in the bed, on my left. I slowly turned my hung-over head in the direction of the gentle breathing. It was the delicate freckled face of Katelynn, her lips turned up into a smile.
“Katelynn?” I whispered, “Kate?”
The lids over her iridescent green eyes fluttered twice. “Mmm, Jake?”
“Oh my God!” I thought it was a mental exclamation, but the words must have blurted out of my mouth.
I looked over to Bill’s gentle snoring face and then back, again, to Kate.
Oh, my God, I had slept with a student! My mind was racing; this was the only sacrosanct tenet that could never be broken: the penalty was immediate termination. And then I remembered: I had already been shit-canned from Mount Mary College. What were they going to do to me now?
I turned and looked at her and saw the most beautiful woman that God had ever put on this earth - or more importantly - in my bed. Burnt sienna ringlets framed delicate her face, as if a Hollywood stylist had spent hours positioning each curl that perfectly described the beginning of a Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233...
“I have this problem,” I turned to look at the Authoritarian Man.
“Go on,” the Authoritarian Man urged, “Go on,” and the Benzodiazepine said, “go on,” too. So I did.
I have this problem. Sometimes I see things. Mathematical things. Sequences. Obvious things. Sometimes I say that I have the ability to see the obvious.
You know of Leonardo Pisano?
He was a Medieval mathematician, more commonly known as Fibonacci, and posed the problem in his 1202 treatise Liber Abaci: “How many pairs of rabbits will be produced in a year, beginning with a single pair, if in every month each pair bears a new pair which becomes productive from the second month on?”
Do you see the answer spiraling forever outward? Look at the pattern: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233... The third number is the sum of the two previous numbers; the fourth number is the sum of the two numbers before it.
It is in the curls that frame Katelynn’s face; each red curl is part of that sequence. That is what I see.
Her skin was the color of twice-pasteurized milk. Each freckle was a vertex in a directed sparse weighted graph…
“We’re losing him. I told you that was too much benzo!” I could hear somebody arguing with the Authoritarian Man.
“No problem,” the Authoritarian Man replied as he began to slap my face. I retreated back to the warm bed with Kate and Bill…
“Jake, don’t panic,” Kate reassured me, “you were a perfect, albeit inebriated gentleman last night. Nothing happened. Now let’s get Bill his morning pill.”
Kate put her hand on the snoring dog, “Bill?” she said, “Rise and shine, pill time.” Bill shook himself, blinked twice, and looked at her. He stretched out to his full length of six feet and slowly dragged himself off of the bed and wandered out the door his nails clicking on the wood floor. Kate - graceful as a cat – left the bed. She was wearing one of my old dress shirts; and, it is true, there is nothing as alluring as a woman wearing one of your button down oxfords. From the kitchen I could hear her opening the refrigerator door, Bill’s tail swishing on the linoleum floor, and a loud cetacean gulp as Bill swallowed the Braunschweiger with the horse pill inside. If Kate thought the smoked liverwurst was as disgusting as I did she never mentioned it.
That day Kate and I took the Holter monitor off Bill; I swabbed the goop that Dr. Farmer had given me to detach the electrodes, and Kate distracted Bill by holding his head, scratching him behind his ears and talking baby-talk. I packed the monitor up in the bubble-wrap provided and overnighted it back to Champaign; later a team of cardiologists would go over the data at a conference in Dallas. I wonder what they would think of the readings during the party the night before.
We were dead broke and ecstatically happy. It was the best week of our lives. Of all our lives: Kate, Bill and me.
Kate never went back to wherever it was she used to live.
To Bill and me it seemed like she had always belonged in the little yellow house with us.
With no money, no job, all the time in the world and only a few distant clouds on the western horizon, it seemed like a perfect day for the three of us to go to a ballgame. I went to the bottom drawer of my dresser and pulled out two authentic River Rat jerseys. I handed Kate the smaller one with ‘12’ in blue felt numbers stitched to the back.
“You know who wore that jersey?” I asked.
“Sorry, Jake, I don’t have a clue,” she shook her head.
“Kate, the only clue you need is right on the back: number 12. He wore 12 his entire professional career; well, except for at the end when he was with the Giants. Dusty Baker already had number 12.” I was flabbergasted that Kat
e was clueless.
“I thought the River Rats were a minor league team.”
“Minor league is still professional baseball,” I replied. “That jersey you are holding was worn,” and here I paused for dramatic effect, “by Shawon Dunston!”
“Who?”
“Shawon Dunston! Number 12; shortstop for the Chicago Cubs! Back in the ‘80s we were the single A affiliate for the Cubs and Shawon started off here. He had an arm like a rocket, very wild as a kid. They had to put an eighteen foot high chain link fence behind the first base bag because of him. It’s still there, I’ll show it to you.”
Kate tried to act impressed. “Wow, I’m really impressed,” she said. “Are you sure it’s okay if I wear it?”
“Yeah, it’ll be fine. Shawon won’t mind. He’s doing other stuff now anyway. He retired a couple of years ago.”
Kate demurely turned her back to me, slipped off my dress shirt, put on Dunston’s old jersey and then made a graceful dancer’s pirouette. She looked drop-dead gorgeous in whatever she wore.
“Okay, baseball time, Bill!” I announced. Bill loves a good ballgame; or maybe just the hotdogs and the people and the smell of cut grass. I don’t know; but he loves going to a ballgame.
So, with a lot of help from Kate, I got Bill - who was now all antsy and hopping - into his shoulder harness, grabbed my faded blue River Rats cap from the hook by the door and we piled into the Olds and drove down the hill to the riverfront to Lou Weissman stadium.
Andy Grudzalanek, the vice president of baseball operations (AKA head groundskeeper) for the River Rats was an old friend and would sneak us in behind the left field fence. We parked in the dusty free lot under the on-ramp of the bridge that crosses the Mississippi and made our way behind the outfield advertising signs to the shed where Andy parked the tractor. I had called ahead on my cell phone and Andy was waiting for us.
