by James Gunn
The light went out, and he realized vaguely that she had reached out with her right hand to turn the switch, but he did not have time to think of that as he heard a rustling sound in the dark and his hands slipped from her face to the naked velvet surfaces of her shoulders and her sides and indrawn waist and rounded hips.
She pulled him down to the mattress, sinking beside him like a lily when the sun has set, and the firmyielding of her silksmooth flesh surged quicksilver through his veins and moltengold into his brain. Under his melting hands and charring lips he found her buttonhard and breathhastened. Into roughsmooth moistpink he surged, and in that spinblurred, joysmeared, throbcentered universe he was lovelost, and he thought, I love you, Jenny, stranger, bride...
But later, sweateased and sane, he held her against him and listened to her even breathing. He thought again about the experiences of the past few hours, and the memory of his encounter with the Professor filled him with a new excitement that he carried with him into his dreams.
2. The Kidnapping
You students think you are dedicated to the ideals of revolution or justice or freedom, but you haven't yet understood the word. Dedication—that's the word you use to describe the mother whose son has fallen in love with a beautiful, greedy, vicious young girl who asks him to prove his love for her by giving her what he values most. And he gives her his own treasures and then those of his mother—china, silverware, heirlooms. And yet, unsatisfied, the girl asks for one more gift which finally will prove his love, his mother's heart. Sadly he returns home, and his mother asks what the girl wants now. “Your heart,” he says. “Then take it, my son,” she says, and hands him a knife. And after he has ripped it from her bosom and is running with it through the forest, he stumbles, and the heart says, “Careful, my son, you will hurt yourself."
—THE PROFESSOR'S NOTEBOOK
The morning they kidnapped the Professor, Gavin awoke with the clear certainty that everything was going to happen just as he had planned. His happy calm survived the discovery that Jenny had awakened early and was gone, as well as a foul cup of coffee in the cockroach-infested communal kitchen and the disturbances that had hit the campus overnight.
He was almost never alone with Jenny during the day. Their relationship was nocturnal and dark. She would not make love when the sun struggled past the dust-smeared windows or when the naked bulb above their heads chased shadows around the room. But in the blinded night she was wanton and insatiable.
“You are my dark love,” he told her when he was feeling gentle and relaxed. But other times he would scoff at her exposure neurosis—he had never seen her without her clothing, which she had rescued from a hostel just inside the walls—and he would say, “You're afraid that God will see you sinning in the light,” but she just shook her head and would not change. Sometimes, in the night, as they listened to the cockroaches wrestling in the kitchen, she would ask him what that noise was, and he told her, “Those are angels rustling against each other in the dark because they cannot see.”
To avoid the heart of the disturbance, Gavin took the long way to class. Ordinarily he went down the curving boulevard, past the museums, between the old law building and the behavioral-sciences building, past the library, between the journalism building and the education building, to the side door of humanities.
But the administration building had been occupied by the Revolutionaries. They had taken the Chancellor hostage, and they had liberated some machine guns from the military museum, and nobody was going to drive them out until they got what they wanted. Nobody was sure what they wanted, but the rumor was spreading that their leaders would present a list of seven nonnegotiable demands before noon. Their attitude, expressed in the words of Tom Hayden, an early hero, still was “First we'll make the revolution, and then we'll find out what for.”
Gavin went the long way, past the political-science building, where the Radicals had thrown up a picket line. One professor had been accused of trying to proselytize in his classroom for parliamentary democracy. Now pickets were stopping students and shaking in their faces signs printed with fluorescent ink. They must have been told what the signs said, because they were shouting their messages, “Abolish propaganda,” “Reactionaries Against the Wall,” and “The Telos of Tolerance Is Truth.”
Gavin stopped the last picket and asked him if he knew what his totesign meant. The student looked at him blankly and then turned to another picket. “Hey, Jack,” he yelled, “what does my sign mean?” The other picket shrugged, and the student Gavin was questioning passed it along. “Like, man, you know,” he said.
But Gavin knew what it meant. “Telos” was a Greek word meaning “end,” and the quote was from Marcuse, comparing liberating tolerance with repressive tolerance. The Professor had discussed Marcuse one day, and his concept of personal freedom and democracy at the end of a long tunnel of repression in the name of truth and virtue. “Truth is the end of liberty, and liberty must be defined and confined by truth.” For now, scholarship must serve the ends of a “liberating tolerance.” When we encounter doctrines that are regressive and repressive, we know they are false, and cannot enjoy the same right of propagation as those that liberate. “This tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation.”
The Professor was no Marcusian. As concerned as he was with truth and virtue, he was even more concerned about the conditions from which truth and virtue might emerge; and he was by no means sure that final truth and ultimate virtue had been discovered by anyone—with the possible exception of himself—and the hostility he encountered led him to suspect that his truth and virtue might be the first victims of a liberating tolerance.
The Professor quoted what Marcuse called his “apparently undemocratic means": “They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armaments, chauvinism, discrimination on grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security or medical care, etc.” The final “etc.” bothered the Professor almost as much as the means.
“Moreover,” Marcuse went on, “the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of disclosure and behavior—thereby precluding a prior a rational evaluation of the alternatives.”
The Professor re-created for us there in the classroom the old, didactic, bigotsure Marxian—Herbert Marcuse—from his published words, and knocked him down again and again. And if the sainted Revolutionary were stuffed with straw, why, it only made up for the fact that Marcuse had already won, that we were living in his world, in which everybody already knew what was truth and what was virtue, and knew that whatever was necessary to be done to liberate it excused—no, sanctified—the deed. The only problem was that every individual or little group had its own version of truth and virtue.
Sometimes the Professor called our institution “Marcamp-use,” when he was not calling it a “playground” or a “sandbox.” And after the dwindling figure of Herbert Marcuse, losing straw as it fled, he called out, “How do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death?” That last was a quote from an early-twentieth-century poet named E. E. Cummings.
Gavin walked behind the library and heard the ululations of the Kampuskops as they raced from their distant sallyport to remove the picket line. They would not touch the Revolutionaries—they had machine guns and a willingness to risk injury or even death in their cause—but the daily encounters with the Radicals was a ritual which both participants missed when for some reason they did not come off.
In the river valley below, the smog was thick this morning, but the hilltop campus was clean and bright like a green island in a
gray sea. The white buildings gleamed in the sun. Gavin drew in a deep breath of air. He smelled the incense of grass and trees warming in the sun, and only a trace of sweetish tear gas from a feminist confrontation the night before.
He walked behind the journalism building where the little offset presses were grinding out the day's handouts and ultimatums, and down the driveway with the word STRIKE stenciled in red on its blacktop, upon other fading messages like a palimpsest history of campus politics.
Dealers were hawking their pot and their pills at the entrances and on the open concrete levels around it and through it. But Gavin shook his head at all of them. He had not touched drugs since Karnival. He was hooked on harder stuff. If others wanted to shoot or sniff or swallow, that was their trip, but what he needed was learning. The Professor had been right about that.
Up close, the buildings did not look so much like white temples. They were pitted with the pox of random bullets, painted with calls to forgotten battles, punctured with stones and bricks, until few unbroken panes remained among the plywood surrenders.
One of the dealers angled eagerly toward him as Gavin approached the exterior steps that led concretely up to the classrooms of the second floor. Gavin knew him. He was a big-boned, broad-faced boy with no neck and medium-length blond hair. His name was Johnson. In earlier days he would have been a tackle on the football team, but now he drifted on the calm seas of campus life looking for a compass, or at least some bit of flotsam that seemed to be heading somewhere.
'Tom,” Johnson said, “I got some ponies here for the course.” He opened a large-knuckled hand to display some pink-and-blue capsules in his palm.
“What course?” Gavin asked, but he knew what course it was. They shared the Professor's course in philosophy. Johnson never attended. He said it was beneath his dignity as a human being, but Gavin thought he was either lazy or afraid. He kept trying the chemical route, kept trying to find that Northwest Passage, to learning.
“You know,” Johnson said.
“Who made them?”
“Some boys at the biochem lab. They swear they're the real stuff.” Johnson's big face was sweating; his eyes wanted to believe.
“How would they get the real stuff?” Gavin asked, trying to get around him, but Johnson was too broad.
“Maybe they got some blood at the Medcenter?” Johnson asked. “Anyway, the son-of-a-bitch doesn't put out a class issue. These got to be better than nothing. Right?”
“Maybe; maybe not,” Gavin said. “What makes you think the biochem boys can put together synthetic peptides? How can you trust them?” He feinted right, then sidestepped left, and got around Johnson to the steps. “Besides, I happen to know the Professor hasn't been to the Medcenter.”
Johnson hadn't heard him. He was wailing, “But, Tom, they're on our side.”
The building smelled sweetly smoky like pot, and sour like sweat, and pungent like tear gas. It was Gavin's madeleine; every time he smelled that mixture, he was magically transported back to the classroom.
The wide corridor was only dimly illuminated by an occasional fluorescent light recessed into the ceiling. In other places fixtures gaped darkly like unhealed wounds or dangled from the ceiling like strangely shaped stalactites.
Gavin walked along the corridor nodding to students as he passed. They slouched toward their classes like rough beasts or sat along the walls smoking and sipping coffee or soft drinks. Like him they were dressed in grubbies carefully preserved from disintegration by colorful patches, or artfully aged to achieve the same appearance, but all were based on simple peasant trousers and workman's blue shirt. Steel toe and heel caps on their boots rang occasionally on concrete exposed where carpet had been worn or burned or ripped away.
A few students affected jeans and tanktops in response to a nostalgia craze for the late sixties and early seventies; a few more wore one-piece suits or skirts from the straight world to show their independence of student culture. Of course, that was useful if you wanted to sneak outside the walls occasionally. Not many tried it. Of those who did, some never came back. Sometimes in the late hours, when topics of sex and revolution dragged, students would talk about eloping and somebody would tell a horror story he had heard directly from the source, or almost. Gavin didn't believe any of it; not much, anyway.
Jenny was waiting for him outside the classroom.
“Today?” she said.
He nodded. Outside most of the doors along the corridor were dispensers labeled with the name of the course and the number of the lecture, but here the dispenser was empty.
“You're going to class?” she said.
Sometimes he wondered how serious his fellow students were about the revolution. None of them wanted to make any sacrifices that involved effort. “Aren't you?” he asked.
“I guess,” she said, looking up at him with submissive brown eyes, willing to be led.
Gavin smiled. She wasn't exactly lazy, he thought, just a bit weak when it came to pushing herself. It was a small flaw—he thought of it as a womanly flaw, and then struck it from his mind as sexist—and he could forgive it. He was in love; he could forgive her anything, even that her relationship with him did not compare in intensity with his relationship with her. She was, he thought, a practical girl besieged by all sorts of fears and fancies. He didn't care.
They walked into the classroom together. They were the first, but not, Gavin hoped, the last. He did not want to be obvious. Even though the Professor did not take roll, some members of the class thought there were monitors or informers among them. In fact, a couple of his more impulsive classmates had beat up another, and the boy had almost died. It turned out to be a misunderstanding.
Three more students drifted through the door a few moments later. One, George Simpson, was involved in the project. In his sleeve pocket he had the detonator disguised as a package of marijuana cigarettes. Two more students wandered in, then a group of five, half a dozen, and three more. Four more came in after the class had started. Eventually about half showed up out of an enrollment of fifty or so; there always were a few students who wanted to attend class and a few others who had awakened early and couldn't get back to sleep and hadn't anything better to do.
The Professor hadn't arrived. He liked to make his entrance when the class, such as it was, had already assembled. Gavin didn't think he delayed out of any sense of the dramatic but that he didn't want late arrivals interrupting his lecture. Gavin looked out the one window that hadn't been boarded up. The Professor's car wasn't in its customary parking place. Gavin felt a flash of panic: Perhaps the Professor was going to skip class himself; he hadn't seemed well lately, and his cough was worse than ever. Gavin realized, for the Professor had taught him to be honest with himself, that his panic was tinged with relief.
And then the armored car was pulling up in front of the classroom. The machine gun in the administration building splattered bullets against its other side for a moment, and then stopped. It had jammed, perhaps, or someone had turned on the ad building's built-in teargas jets.
The guards stepped out of the car. They were big men, as big as Johnson, with black beards and mean eyes. They swung their riot guns from the hip, watching the passing students, daring them to move incautiously.
The rear door of the car opened. The Professor stepped out, looking small and tired and average. Then he raised his head, seeming to stare through the window where Gavin stood looking out. Gavin pulled back, his heartbeat accelerating, not wanting to be seen, not wanting to look into the Professor's eyes.
“What's the matter?” Jenny asked.
“He's coming,” Gavin said.
He looked at her, saw her eyes looking at him, her mouth composed and a little prim, but still desirable even at this moment, her long hair framing her dramatically colored face, and he thought, “You're beautiful How could I ever have had you in my bed, flesh to longing flesh? How could I have known you so intimately, and still not know you? Were you ever a child, sexless and
cute? Will you ever grow wrinkled and old?”
And he saw the outlines of her breasts and the roses of her nipples through the thin shirt, and he wished they were home in bed and he could put his lips against them and hold on to her.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I'm all right,” he said. He would have put his arm around her, but he knew she hated a public display of possession.
They took seats at the back of the room where they could see everything. The other students scattered around, none of them together, most of them toward the back of the room, in keeping with immemorial custom. In front were ranks of empty chairs looking like the incomplete skeletons of students waiting for flesh to gather and idea to shape.
Gavin wondered what they would think tomorrow—the students who showed up—when the Professor did not appear. He wondered if he should show up—he had not yet missed a class—and decided that it would depend on whether the grapevine reported the Professor missing.
And what would he think, he asked himself, when he knew what the Professor knew? Not just what was in the Professor's lectures, not what he had time and thought to formulate, but everything.
Gavin shook his head. He thought too much. That was, after all, the Professor's fault. He reached out for Jenny's hand. It was slender and firm and passive. Jenny let him hold her hand. That was permitted.
Gavin looked at his watch. It was right at the half-hour, and he looked up. At that moment the Professor came through his doorway into the podium. The bulletproof glass that surrounded him caught his reflections and made him seem four instead of one, a solid original and three pale shadows that all moved and gestured and opened their mouths together.
Many professors never ventured inside the classroom—or even inside the campus walls. They played it safe: electronics carried their three-dimensional images to the students, and electronics returned the student responses. The difference was subjective, but the Professor said the issue was morality. The Professor had a strong sense of morality, and he felt that the personal contact was irreplaceable. He would not shirk his responsibility to provide it.
