by James Gunn
Wordshit, Gavin thought, and felt his eyes beginning to focus. “Clearly I've come to the wrong place. You seem to have matters all turned around.”
“Sir,” said the Professor. “'Curtsey while you're thinking what to say,’ said the Red Queen. ‘It saves time.'”
“Sir,” Gavin said. Let this odd Professor cherish his ancient ways and his archaic forms of address, he thought; he soon would leave the Professor to his well-deserved solitude and never see him again. But he did wish to get one thing straight before he left. “You're selling your services and I'm buying. Caveat emptor may be the operating principle, but this is a buyer's market, and the buyer may purchase or not, as he chooses.”
“A misleading comparison,” the Professor said airily, and blew a smoke ring into the air above his head, “though not ill-argued. You see, I am in possession of that which few have and some want, even though it may do them no good to have it. Nevertheless, this makes me a monopoly; you must come to me. What do you want?”
“What is it you have?” Gavin asked cannily.
“I cannot teach you a skill with which you can amaze your friends and satisfy your baser needs. What I have will not give you power over others; it will not make you famous or well-liked or happy. What I have, if you want it and I decide to communicate it to you, may make you miserable, and certainly will make you discontented. As with the most habit-forming drug, you never will be able to get enough. It will ride your back from now until you die. If you do not get your daily fix, you will suffer from withdrawal. All this and more.”
“Why would anybody want something like that?” Gavin scoffed, but he was intrigued in spite of himself.
“Why does a man seek beauty he knows he cannot possess? Why does a man keep probing his guilt, like an abscessed tooth? Why does a man torment himself with dreams of immortality when he knows that he must die? Man is perverse, and the sooner you learn this simple fact, the sooner you will stop asking foolish questions. Besides, there is a consolation that creeps like hope from Pandora's box.” The Professor lit a cigarette with an old-fashioned kitchen match and broke into a fit of coughing as he inhaled the smoke from the cigarette and the sulfurous fumes from the match as well.
“Why does a man smoke when he knows it will kill him?” Gavin echoed. “Why don't you get to a medcenter anyway?”
“'Get thee to a nunnery...'” the Professor said.
Gavin had a nearly subliminal glimpse of a scaredeyed girl in nunhabit.
“...besides,” the Professor was saying, “I am a dying breed, and no amount of medical rigor will save me. I am the last of the old-time professors, about whom Chaucer could have been thinking when he wrote ‘gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.’ You will not see his like again.” His voice assumed the scornful flamboyance of the snakeoil salesman in front of the pharmacy booth. “Get him while you can. Only a few days more at this special price. A vanishing species, ladies and gentlemen. A nearly extinct bird mostly found today in dusty libraries and deserted studies, abandoned by students and family, scarcely worth preserving were it not for the nostalgia involved in his occasional appearances before the unwary student, who, baffled by this apparition from the past, stares at his performance unaware that he may be viewing the last grand fling of the old-time professor.”
“What is it you teach?” Gavin asked.
“What do I teach?” the Professor repeated, sucking hard on his cigarette and, as a consequence, coughing the smoke out again like billowing phlegm. “I teach man—and woman, too, when I can get close to one. I teach beginnings and endings, creations and cataclysms, holistics and holocausts. I teach proportion and people, life and death, love and hate. I teach all things and nothing.”
“I think...” Gavin said, not knowing why he said it, “I think I'd like to take your course. Where do I sign up? But you aren't going to get a class filled like this, taking students one at a time, putting them off even more than you're putting them on. There aren't very many like me who are going to come in here out of curiosity and put up with your idiosyncrasies. Sir.”
“You presume too much,” the Professor said. “I haven't decided yet that I will accept you. As for the rest—we live in a fragmented world—more like Chicken Little than Humpty Dumpty, who was a fragmented person in a whole world—and the truest words to be spoken today surely are these: the sky is falling.
“Fragmented,” he said somberly, “each person an atom unto himself, whole and impenetrable, each group clinging only to its own kind, reacting with others not at all or violently. No longer do we feel the social pressure of necessity to rub us together, to smooth our rough edges, to fit us into a smoothly operating system of civility and custom.
“Where are our rites of passage, our initiations by which the youth is admitted into the mysteries of the tribe, those sacrifices and sufferings by which he or she proves a fitness to join the adults, by which he or she accepts tribal values, by which he or she gains the right to procreate, to commingle their consecrated seed and ovum for the greater glory of what is right and good and true? What happens when there is no longer right or goodness or truth? What happens when children procreate without sanction? What happens when they pass, unproven, into postpuberty states without ever becoming adults? What happens when nobody wants to be an adult, when childhood is so much more attractive that it becomes a lifelong state? The old ways crumble...”
“None too soon,” Gavin muttered.
“And with what savageries are they replaced?” the Professor mourned. “With what new traditions do the young console themselves? Youth!” The Professor dismissed the entire generation with a wave of the limp hand in which he held aloft his cigarette.
“What do you want?” he said again to Gavin.
“I don't know,” Gavin said savagely, feeling the clawed hand that had cupped and protected his brain beginning to relax its grasp. “No, wait—I want to know ... what you're talking about. I want to ... know—”
The Professor hit the coffee table with the fleshy part of his fist, and the end of his cigarette, ash and glowing coal together, flew into the air. “That's it!” he exclaimed. “You have said the magic word and you have won a one-way trip for one to misery and despair. I will accept you as a student, you poor, unhappy fellow.”
Gavin felt an uncharacteristic wave of delight. “May I get some others to sign up, too?”
“Why?”
Gavin rummaged for words. “This ... this experience ... I'd like them, a few of them, to try it, too.”
The Professor shrugged. “It doesn't matter. One or a dozen. As long as there is one.” He dropped the cigarette stub into the ashtray, lit up another, and coughing, picked up a book from the floor beside his chair. The interview was over.
But Gavin, dopefreed, feeling a kind of frustrated sexual excitement, wanted to go on. He had an intuition that he would never be this close to the Professor again. The truce of enrollment was over; the war between teacher and student would resume on Monday, and between them would descend all the barriers and precautions the teacher could devise. From this moment they would be like lovers separated by traditions or feuds or divided loyalties, or walls.
And yet, all the frustrated and voiceless longings that Gavin had experienced through his twenty years yearned toward the Professor, all the unanswered questions he had never asked rushed simultaneously to his lips, and he wanted more than he had ever wanted anything what he had not known existed until this moment, that for which he had never known a name.
“What?” he said to the Professor, extending both hands toward the seated teacher. The Professor did not look up from his book. “How?” Gavin asked, his need turning him inarticulate. The Professor flicked his ashes in the general direction of the tray. “Why?” Gavin asked, and let his hands fall.
Burning, aching, he turned and left the smoke-filled booth. The corridor with its endless array of booths circling the building seemed tawdry. The canvas was tattered and dirty, the bunting faded and cheap, t
he pitchmen sleazy, the milling students bestial. Dirt gritted under his feet, and he kicked trash out of his way as he headed for the nearest stairway leading to the arena.
What had happened to him? Then he realized that the hallucinogenic had worn off, burned out, perhaps, by the emotion with which he had responded to the Professor's provocation. His mind was clear, and he hated it. “You have won a one-way trip to misery and despair,” he heard the Professor say, and he almost turned to find a joyseller and resume his pillstate of innocence and well-being, but something stopped him. He looked down at his hand. It was shaking. “God help me,” he said softly. “I want something more than joy or peace or even happiness. And I don't even know the name of it.”
Distantly he heard the Savages. They were playing more softly now, either through fatigue or choice, and someone—a nasal girl, he thought, or a tenor—was singing. Gavin could not make out all the words, but occasionally one would come through, accompanied by an appropriate response from the audience.
“...lonely...” sang the voice, with a throb of self-pity.
From the remote audience came the sound of a sympathetic moan.
“...friend...” sang the voice, with a whine of despair.
Another antiphonal moan.
“...only...”
Moan.
“...end...”
Groan.
...you...”
“Ah-h-h,” the audience responded.
“...shove...”
“Ah-h-h.” The sigh was like an exhalation.
“...true...”
“Mmmmm,” said the audience.
“...love...”
“Ah-h-h-h,” said the audience, as if it had received final satisfaction.
Gavin searched his memory for a similar experience. Then he remembered: the political rally in the little auditorium. He reached the foot of the stairs and went into the main area, expecting a more complete information flow, but it did not occur. There were no connectives. The abstraction was sufficient to arouse in the audience the suspense of foreplay and the release of orgasm. By the time he was in the midst of the swaying students—some were dancing by themselves or in vague relationship with someone else—the Savages themselves had begun to shout another song:
“Aggression/repression/regression/depresson...”
And then a roll of the drum, a wail of guitar strings, and a shout of “Digression!”
“Deflation/'flagration/cessation/elation!”
The students swayed or danced, responding to the revolutionary lyrics and the music. Gavin listened, too, caught up by the rhythms and the ambience in spite of himself and his newfound hunger. The moodspell of the manyheaded beast had the power to entrance and to reward.
And then someone said in his ear, “Whatcha takin', Gavin?”
Gavin looked to his right. The voice belonged to a suckass named Simpson, a body without a leader, a follower eager to attach itself to any directing force, but not a bad sort really. “Philosophy.”
“Ah-h-h,” Simpson said, his face brightening as if someone had turned on his light. The choice was offbeat enough to become a fad.
Well, Gavin thought, let the Professor make a few bucks. Maybe he would be able to afford to get that cough taken care of. Some of the teachers who were not very popular were really poor.
As Simpson moved away through the crowd like a conspirator with a message, Gavin saw him dip his head by a series of students and whisper a word in their ears. Gavin knew most of them: Marlin, Miro, Buck, Ridgley ... And Gavin knew the word.
As he turned from watching Simpson's progress, a girl bumped into him. He knew it was a girl before he saw her, from the firmyielding of her body against his, from the yearning of his body to hers. Then he recognized the face from his earlier fantasies—the scaredeyed girl in nunhabit—and dark, frightened eyes looked at him, searching for something.
“You've got to help me,” the girl said. Her voice was husky and exciting, like the girlflesh that lurked hidden within the robes, that had pressed itself briefly against his body. Her hand caught his arm.
“What's the matter?”
“There's someone ... following me.”
His eyes followed where hers looked. Some yards away through the crowd was a tall lean man in a hardhat. Gavin recognized him now. His name was Gregory, and he was a man of growing power in campus politics.
“That's what Karnival is all about,” Gavin said.
“I know,” the girl said. Her hand quivered on his arm. “But I don't like him. He's ... ugly.”
He was ugly, Gavin saw now. He had a big nose that still did not separate sufficiently a pair of mean eyes, and thick, wet lips, and yet he fancied himself a stud. Gavin had seen him with some of the choicest girlgirls on campus, had seen him moving in with the natural grace of a ferret, all his attention fixed upon his mesmerized prey.
“You can always say ‘no,’ “Gavin said.
“He won't let me.”
“How do you know? Have you told him?”
The girl shook her head. “I know,” she said simply. “I'm afraid.”
“What can I do?”
“Take me home,” she said.
“Your home?”
“Yours. I don't have a place to stay.”
“No place?”
“I'm new,” she said. “I just got in today from California. I thought I might find ... a place to stay ... here.”
“Somebody to stay with?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Me?”
“Yes,” she said.
He could not be certain what she looked like behind the white linen that clasped her face, what she was shaped like beneath the folds of that black robe, but her face was attractive, with vulnerable lips, a small, short nose, feathery dark eyebrows—her hair, too, he decided would be long and dark and silky when it was uncovered—and eyes now that were frightened and all pupil, fixed now upon him with all her attention and what seemed to Gavin like love. She seemed, he thought, not like a girlgirl but perhaps a womangirl.
“All right,” he said. “I like your looks and your voice, and I don't want to see you hurt. I think maybe I could love you.”
He took her hand. It was cold and small and tense in his. He turned and threaded his way through the crowd toward the nearest exit. When they emerged into the still dark and breathed the clean air, she said, “Is love important?”
“To me,” he said. “You?”
“Maybe,” she said.
While they were walking up the hill and over the campus toward his pad, she told him that her name was Jenny and she had been born and raised in California, in Oakland.
“That's near Berkeley, isn't it?” he asked.
“Right next.”
“I never was any good at geography,” he admitted. “But why didn't you...?”
“Go to Berkeley? I spent three years in a college for Catholic girls until I couldn't stand it any longer. A few days ago, when my parents were sending me back, I just took off across the country—hitching—and I ended up here this morning.”
“Weren't you afraid?”
“Not until I got here.” She hesitated. “Actually, everybody was wonderful to me.”
Gavin took her arm in a gesture that was meant to be comforting but sent shivers through his body. “You're safe now,” he said. “As safe as you want to be.”
She smiled at him in the moonlight, as they passed between the shadows of the long, low administration Building on the north and the long, low humanities building on the south, and suddenly her face was transformed in a miracle of beauty. “I know,” she said.
They descended the steep hill on the other side of the campus toward the large, decaying houses that clung to the slope. The houses were more than one hundred years old, and there were blocks of them, with an occasional gap like the place where a rotten tooth had crumbled away. Several hundred yards away was the wall, but Gavin didn't tell Jenny about that. Daylight was soon enough to warn her a
bout snipers.
They climbed stony steps in the darkness, and went through a plywood-reinforced door, and up narrow, creaking stairs redolent with the old odors of onions and beans and potatoes and dirt. Directly opposite the head of the stairs was a door. Gavin fumbled in his pocket for a key to the padlock that held the door closed.
“Is this a commune?” Jenny asked, pressed against him in the dark.
“It's just a place to live,” Gavin said. He opened the lock and swung the door back. “It's not much,” he said as he switched on the overhead light, a naked bulb hanging from a cord that dropped through a black hole in the ceiling. “But it's better than the dormitories and favelas on the other side of the campus. It's not so clean.” His mattress was on the floor under the bay windows at the other end of the room; the sheets, Gavin noted with relief, had been changed relatively recently, but beer cans and bottles littered the floor and were stacked in the corners, and cigarette butts and ashes mingled with the dust and cobwebs and balls of lint like miniature tumbleweeds.
“I don't mind a mess,” she said as she closed the door behind her.
He looked around the room. “I wish I had a beer or something to offer you,” he said, keeping his back to her, “but they're all gone.”
“I don't mind,” she said.
He turned toward her. She had removed her headdress. He had been right; her hair was long and black and silky, and her face was lovely. He looked at the mattress and then back at her. This was the difficult moment. He understood the proprieties, but did she?
He cleared his throat. “There's only the one mattress.”
“I don't mind,” she said.
With great courage he took her face between his trembling hands and bent to her lips. They were cool and mysterious under his, and then they warmed and parted and welcomed him into the erotic plains and valleys of her mouth.
