The Ghost Apple

by Aaron Thier

  Soon we were sitting on the window seat, laughing and drinking our beers and talking about all kinds of interesting things. They asked me about the Vietnam War, and I told them a little about it. I hadn’t seen much fighting, but I’d been stationed in Saigon in the late sixties. It was nice to speak freely with people who were amazed by stories that someone my own age would have heard thousands of times.

  “Hey, man, listen, hold on,” said Burke, suddenly growing very serious. “It’s really cool that you made the decision to come to school and finally get your degree.”

  Lehman nodded, and continued nodding, and took a sip from his beer. I knew that sometimes he simply ignored most of what we said, but I didn’t mind. I understood that this was “just his thing.”

  “I don’t care if I get my identity stolen,” he said. “What I say is take it.”

  Lehman wanted to go to a party his friend was throwing over at Farrier Hall. At this, the dean in me shook himself awake: Here was an opportunity to see more of the real Tripoli. I was feeling so comfortable at that point that I didn’t even worry about running into someone who might recognize me. We put some beers into our coat pockets and headed down into the courtyard, where there were lots of students laughing and talking and rushing off in large groups.

  Although Farrier Hall was just across the street, it seemed to take an enormously long time to get there. We had to stop every few feet to talk to some people Lehman knew, and then we ran into Akash, who had a beautiful young woman on his arm. He said a quick hello as the two of them hurried away.

  “He gets all the girls,” Burke said as we watched them go. “I’ve got to ask him what’s his trick.”

  “Step one,” Lehman said. “Be about a million times more handsome than you are.”

  “Well, he’s also pretty unscrupulous. He’ll say anything. He’s like, ‘Oh, okay, I’m Akash, I was born in a flapjack restaurant at the top of a runaway-truck ramp. I failed the drug test at the National Spelling Bee.’ ”

  “Step two,” Lehman continued. “Be another maybe fifty thousand times more handsome.”

  Then we were at the convenience store, where Lehman bought some cigarettes and I bought a few cigars. For some reason, I chose the cheapest I could find. Don’t ask me why! They tasted like coal dust and stove polish, and later Burke remembered me saying that I enjoyed the “heightened reality” of their flavor.

  “Am I really so much less handsome than Akash?” he asked me when Lehman was distracted.

  I told him that his features were just a little small for his head. They weren’t so bad on their own.

  Everything seemed to be happening at once. One moment, someone was saying very earnestly that he preferred Mickey Mouse to T. S. Eliot, and when I turned to ask him what he meant, I discovered that I was standing arm in arm with two other students and we were all singing “Old Man River.” I wondered what my wife would have said if she could have seen me then!

  Then we were at a party in a small, hot room, where we drank warm wine and liquor from plastic cups. It was incredibly dark (much of the undergraduate experience takes place in darkness), and disembodied faces seemed to wobble toward me in the gloom. The conversations were incredible and sometimes almost meaningless. Students spoke in a flippant, ironic, highly abstract style. Even so, I soon felt that I was getting the hang of it. For example, one student asked, “What’s the ingredients of happiness?” Another began to chant his answer, “Sex money fame . . .” But I startled myself by cutting him short and saying, “Power.” I spoke in a leaden, portentous voice. And I didn’t mean it!

  Later, a member of the Tripoli police department showed up. He identified himself as Officer Crenshaw and he was not interested to know why I, an old man, was up here drinking with these kids. At first, his presence made everyone very agitated, but when it became clear that he wasn’t going to stop the party or check anyone’s identification, nobody paid any attention to him. After all, everything was under control. But then he asked me if I knew Malinka West—by coincidence, one of my professors this semester, as well as a colleague—and when I said yes, he walked me into the bedroom and started asking me questions.

  “Can you state whether she’s mentioned my name?” he said. “When and where did you see her last?”

  I decided not to answer truthfully. I guess I heard a worrisome note in his voice. I told him that I hadn’t seen her in a few months.

  “Neither have I.”

  Then he began to walk in small circles, clenching and unclenching his fists. I asked if I could help in any way and he said he’d like a beer, if it wasn’t too much trouble. Then he said he wouldn’t like one and that he shouldn’t be drinking, especially on duty, and then he said he wanted a beer.

  I was having trouble following these reversals, but at that moment a few students bustled into the room and began passing around a bottle of white rum. Officer Crenshaw announced that he was going to “secure” the bottle, by which he apparently just meant grab it, which is what he did. Then he climbed into the tight crack between the bed and the wall and began sucking on it like a baby. Lots of students at Tripoli drink white rum because the most popular brand is manufactured on the island of St. Renard, which is where our branch campus is located.

  At the end of the night, I was talking to a young African-American woman whom I will call “Megan.” She was very angry about the proposed agreement with Big Anna® Brands. One of the arguments against the partnership, which Megan articulated in no uncertain terms, was that the company was frequently in the news in connection with possible labor violations on St. Renard, where it maintained large factories and farms. I myself was also concerned about a potential conflict of interest: I knew that at least one Tripoli professor was a major Big Anna® shareholder.

  “You want to let these businessmen tell you what happens on campus?” she said. “You’ll see how it goes: ‘Assignment for Monday is kidnap a Guatemalan boy. Assignment for Tuesday is poison his mother.’ ”

  I lost no time in expressing my own reservations about the partnership. What I didn’t say was that I had actually opposed it in a meeting with trustees. At the same time, I tried to help her see the other side of the argument. I explained that it was sometimes necessary to make concessions in order to preserve other features of college life. The Vocational Writing Program, which is a distinct departure from our traditional liberal arts curriculum, was an example of this. Many professors had objected to the creation of the VWP, but it did leave the English department free to offer a wider range of classes.

  I thought I was handling myself pretty well, but now she said something that caught me off guard.

  “I’ve got this friend who had to take a VWP class with Professor P——. He showed her his penis.”

  I was shocked, and more than shocked. If Megan’s friend had reported this incident, I definitely would have heard about it.

  “So that’s what you get,” she said casually. “You get perverts.”

  I asked her to clarify. Had this professor actually exposed himself?

  “Maybe. She was pretty drunk when it happened.”

  This was troubling not just because Professor P——’s transgression, if substantiated, was very serious in itself, but also because the student in question had not decided to report it. Why? This was just the kind of question I’d gone undercover to answer. Unfortunately, now was not the time to press the point.

  “Let’s put a pin in that,” I said. “Let’s make sure to come back to it.”

  She crossed her arms and leaned casually against the wall. She was a very striking young woman.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I’m taking this class with Professor Kabaka. Have you heard of him?”

  I was having some trouble moving past the incident with Professor P——, but I was indeed anxious to know how John Kabaka was settling in. I was worried that he wouldn’t feel comfortable here at Tripoli.

  “He says he doesn’t feel comfortable here at Tripoli,” Megan said, �
��but it’s no matter. He says the revolution can start anywhere, even here.”

  I asked her if she was enjoying his class, but she said it wasn’t about enjoyment; it was about injustice. She said she was fed up.

  “Did you know that the white sailors on slave ships sometimes died at greater rates than the slaves? They were practically slaves themselves. So ultimately it was just the old story. It was businessmen with soft hands getting rich on someone else’s misery. And it’s the same today with Big Anna®.”

  I nodded and finished my beer. She was really very beautiful.

  “Anyway,” she said, “what it gets me thinking is that I’ve got to make radical changes in my way of living.”

  I told her that it was always good to make positive changes. I admitted that I’d recently made a few changes of my own.

  “Radical changes,” she said.

  I waited a beat, but she didn’t seem inclined to continue, so I asked her if she was changing anything in particular.

  “No more Twitter. No more eating paninis out of the microwave. I’m just going to go for it, you know? No more lingering in doorways.”

  This seemed to accord with my own resolutions as well. After all, I myself had begun to feel that I was just hanging around at the margins of things, growing older and lonelier each year.

  “I’m going to learn how to garden. So the global climate is ruined? I’ll learn to grow manioc in New Hampshire. No more excuses. I’m never wearing these wedges again.”

  She kicked off her shoes and stuffed them into the trash. Then she thought better of it and put them back on again.

  “No more unreasonable things,” she said. “From now on, it’s a sense of proportion or nothing at all.”

  I was enjoying this conversation. My heart was beating like crazy, but I didn’t worry because I’ve always had the heart of a much younger man.

  Suddenly her eyes widened.

  “I’m not always so brave, though. Sometimes I just sit there and say to myself, ‘Oh no oh no oh no.’ I’ve practically stopped talking to my old friends. I practically don’t even have friends anymore!”

  She had gone from self-confidence to self-doubt in the space of an instant. I wanted to ask how she’d come to lose her friends, but in another moment she just laughed and shook her head. Then someone changed the music, and someone else knocked a table over, and Megan wandered away to get another drink. I stood there grinning from ear to ear.

  That was my first experience of nightlife at Tripoli, and what an experience! Even though I was exhausted and, to be honest, I’d had a little too much to drink, I had trouble falling asleep. It had been exhilarating to talk with Megan, hashing out basic questions of right and wrong. I hadn’t felt so alive in years, and certainly not since my wife died. I felt like I was a young man again!

  From

  The Telegraph Sunday Magazine

  October 8, 2009

  What Are They Thinking?

  Each month, we ask two Tripoli professors to weigh in on a controversial issue. This month, we hear from William Beckford, professor and acting chancellor of the English Department, and John Kabaka, visiting professor of history. The question: At times of great financial pressure, are institutions of higher learning justified in seeking support from for-profit corporations like Big Anna®?

  In favor: William Beckford

  The whole world, which is rapidly coming into neighborhood relations, is recognizing as never before the real needs of mankind, and is ready to approve and strengthen all the moral forces which stand for the uplift of humanity. Everyone agrees that there must be education for the orderly and permanent development of society, but so too must there be intercourse among peoples in the interests of commerce and economic growth. Every aspect of human endeavor is strengthened by exposure to the rigors of the free market, which is the great innovation of our time, and education is surely no exception. The upright and farseeing businessman and the honest and capable professor represent the com-bined forces which are to change the Tripoli of today into the greater and better Tripoli of the future.

  There are those on campus who argue that Big Anna® is not a worthy ally in this cause. They say that corporations like Big Anna® have retarded the political development of fledgling nations like St. Renard, that globalization has kept these nations in a postcolonial limbo. To these people I will say that globalization, far from being a late-twentieth-century bogeyman, can be said to have begun in 1492, or even before, with the settlement and cultivation of island groups like the Canaries, and that it must therefore be considered a fundamental feature of our society, the wellspring from which all good things come. Indeed, our very presence on American shores is an aspect of globalization.

  Additionally, when it comes to the island of St. Renard, it must be argued that the fine people at Big Anna® have as much right to the land as do any of the locals, who are themselves migrants. The indigenous population is extinct, and there no longer exist any people with an ancient claim to the land.

  Opposed: John Kabaka

  I am not interested in what Tripoli is or is not justified in doing, nor am I interested in the long-term viability of American higher education, but I will use this platform to remind readers of an important fact.

  Corporations like Big Anna® are guilty—there is no doubt about this—of extravagant human rights abuses. You read about the vicious exploitation of workers in a Big Anna® snack factory, you learn that the company sells muffins that contain a known carcinogen, and you say to yourself, “What gives them the right?”

  Here is what gives them the right: the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

  The Fourteenth Amendment was meant to guarantee all Americans equal protection under the law, but an 1886 Supreme Court decision extended this protection to corporations as well. Other decisions have reinforced the court’s initial ruling. Cynical politicians tell you that corporations are people too, and in the eyes of the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s the truth.

  I will note only the sharpest irony. The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to give full citizenship to recently emancipated slaves. It was meant to guarantee them equal protection under the law. The carnival of cause and effect is of course very complicated, but in essence the doctrine of corporate personhood denied them this right, and in granting American corporations the freedom to operate without the burden of accountability, it makes possible the enslavement, today, of garment workers and agricultural laborers all over the world.

  From: “Maggie Bell”

  To: “Chris Bell”

  Date: October 13, 2009, at 8:30 AM

  Subject: (no subject)

  I’m fine! Don’t worry! I’m just thinking about some of these things for the first time. I feel like I’m realizing every day that all these familiar things are not quite what I thought they were, like how in a dream you walk through your own house but there’s a door where it shouldn’t be and you think, Uh-oh. (And also, give me some credit, I’m not one of those narcissist creeps who bang their professors. Kabaka is good-looking but that’s not the main thing.)

  I know the football players aren’t slaves, but race is part of it. No one talks about it but race is there. And anyway, who are you sticking up for? You hate football. But never mind. I’ve got a moral trump card for you! A few days ago there was an article in the Tripoli paper saying that a football player named Depatrickson White is descended from a runaway slave owned by the great-grandfather of the guy who runs Tripoli’s remedial writing program. A guy called Bish Pinkman III. I know this doesn’t prove my point, but it’s pretty weird, isn’t it? They’re calling it the Pinkman Scandal. It’s not really a scandal but it’s a strange coincidence. I think the real problem is that the Pinkman family has given money to the college and now everyone thinks it’s blood money. Like Big Anna isn’t giving us blood money too? For me the consequence is that now everyone wants to prove to me that they’re not racist. I’m everyone’
s only black acquaintance. You’re lucky you’re at NYU and you don’t have to deal with this stuff. Why did I insist on going to a small college?

  Dad actually wrote to me about it. Think of that! It’s the first I’ve heard from him since coming back to school. He said he’d “have Pinkman’s head.” He is apparently very upset. Do we believe him? Dad with his polo shirts and his Republican shoes.

  Everybody asked Kabaka about it in class, but he wouldn’t even acknowledge it at first. He said, “Every American story is a slave narrative.” But on Wednesday, Professor Amundsen came to evaluate his teaching. Professor Amundsen is this soft faceless guy, sort of squiffy and blurred at the edges, and Kabaka was so angry that he was there. He stared at Amundsen for like two minutes in total silence. Then he gave this astonishing speech about how if Amundsen raped your sister and your sister gave birth then the child would be the child of a rapist just as much as he’d be the child of a person who’d been raped. He asked if it made sense to say that the child inherited some of the father’s guilt. He said (I wrote it down): “What is inheritance? If you fertilize your cabbage plants with horse dung, do your cabbages turn into horses?” He kept using phrases like “the rapist Amundsen.” We didn’t have the faintest idea what he was getting at until he said that Depatrickson White and Bish Pinkman III are probably cousins and if one was guilty, the other was guilty too. His point was that most black Americans have white ancestors, so how can you talk about inherited guilt? Then he said, “There is only now.”