The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  Lemuel says very quietly, “You will be when and where you will be.”

  Rain is startled. “Yeah, that’s it exactly. What you see is what you get.”

  Lemuel remembers the Rebbe’s description of Eve in the garden of Yahweh. “What I see,” he mumbles awkwardly, “is a saving grace— originality.”

  Rain stops in her tracks and scrutinizes his eyes. The freckles on her face burn. “Yo,” she says quietly.

  A barefoot young man wearing a djellaba comes hurtling into the room and whispers to the musicians. The music breaks off abruptly. The musicians stack their instruments and follow the young man out of the room. Dwayne tries to talk Shirley into going downstairs with the musicians. They have a whispered argument. Shirley shakes her head stubbornly. Lemuel hears her say, “I just don’t feel in the mood tonight, angel.” Annoyed, Dwayne stalks off by himself. Shirley, eyeing Lemuel across the room, slides a stick of gum into her mouth.

  Rain folds herself back into Lemuel’s arms and continues dancing. “They must be starting the cassettes downstairs,” she tells him. Still dancing, she presses her mouth against his ear and imitates the rat-a-tat-tat of a drumroll.

  “What is that?”

  “Drums.”

  “Drums?”

  “The drums I hear in my head, right?”

  “It is probably not serious.”

  “Can’t you hear them?” She leans her head against Lemuel’s ear. “Listen up. Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. I hear them. They’re sending me a Morse code message. Right in my goddamn ear.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They say, ‘You’re getting old.’ They say, ‘Pretty soon you’ll wear see-through shirts and nobody’ll wanna look.’ They say, ‘You haven’t done anything with your life besides wheel and deal. You are so obsessed with safe sex,’ they say, ‘all you get is no sex.’ Like some days I don’t notice the goddamn drums, right? But they’re always there. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I hear them. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat.”

  “You seem a little young to worry about growing old.”

  Annoyed, Rain backs away from him. “Like you’re never too young to worry about growing old. I’m taking D.J.’s Russian Lit 404, which is mostly L. Tolstoy, to fill a humanities requirement. So you’ve heard of L. Tolstoy, right? He once said something about how one thing in life was certain, namely, you live, therefore you are dying. The only time your body’s not dying is when you’re fucking. That’s me talking, not L. Tolstoy. Don’t smile that smug smile all men smile when they don’t understand something—it happens to be a goddamn scientific fact. When you’re fucking, time stops dead. When you’re fucking, there is no such thing as time.” Rain pitches the empty wineglass into a wastepaper basket. ‘That’s a three pointer,” she mutters. “I need to pee.”

  As Rain disappears through a door, Shirley meanders across the room toward Lemuel. She is wearing high heels and a flared miniskirt and shoulder padding under a sweater.

  “Great party,” she says.

  Lemuel nods in vague agreement.

  She holds out a stick of gum. Lemuel shakes his head. “I recognized you from the supermarket,” Shirley says, adding the fresh stick to the one already in her mouth, chewing away, “but I don’t remember seeing you around a Delta pour before.”

  “I have never attended a Delta pour before.”

  “You’re a gate-crasher,” Shirley exclaims. “I like men who aren’t invited. Do you dance or anything?”

  Backing against a wall, Lemuel clears his throat. “There is no music.”

  She pouts. “No music didn’t stop you from dancing with the Tender To.”

  She collapses into Lemuel’s arms, giving him no choice. “My name’s Shirley,” she announces. “I’m Dwayne’s main squeeze. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” She shifts her weight from one foot to the other in a lumbering dance. “That was some story you told before, about having two signatures. I can write my name backwards. Yel-rihs.”

  Lemuel, flustered, looks around. He sees the Rebbe, in the next room, rolling his head from side to side in mock admiration.

  Hanging from Lemuel’s neck, Shirley says, “Dwayne and me, we smoked some of the Tender To’s dope before we got here. I’m so high I’ve had this pain for two hours, but I don’t know where it is.”

  Lemuel gently pries Shirley’s wrists loose from his neck. She grabs his sleeve. “You talk with an accent,” she notes. “I like men who aren’t invited and talk funny. I like men who have two signatures.” When Lemuel jerks his arm free she says urgently, “I could teach you to write your name backwards. Oh, shit,” she moans as Lemuel backs away. “I never seem to get it right like Rain.”

  Lemuel wanders over to the Rebbe, who is talking animatedly with D.J. but breaks off to greet Lemuel. “Hekinah degul. This is your idea of study? On the other hand, who can say there is nothing to be learned about chaos at a fraternity party?”

  D.J., absorbed, aims a civil smile at Lemuel over the Rebbe’s head. “Go on about Sodom,” she prompts Nachman.

  The Rebbe picks up the thread of their conversation. “I was reading into Genesis 18 this afternoon. That’s where Abraham tries to argue Yahweh out of killing everyone in Sodom. ‘Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?’ Abraham asks. Abraham’s all for getting rid of sin, but not at the expense of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yahweh destroys Sodom anyhow. He kills the righteous along with the sinners. The riddle is, Why?”

  “He’s lazy,” D.J. suggests. “He doesn’t want to bother sorting.”

  Rain joins the group. “Who’s lazy?” she asks D.J. “Your sideburns look fantastic,” she tells the Rebbe. “When are you going to break down and give me the secret?”

  “Hekinah degul,” says the Rebbe. “My sideburns are classified.”

  D.J. smiles coolly at Rain. “Good evening, dear.”

  “Why does Yahweh kill the righteous along with the sinners?” Lemuel wants to know.

  “I’m glad you asked,” says the Rebbe. “Because Yahweh is high on randomness. Randomness is in His blood, in His bones, in His head. Randomness is His modus operandi. When He punishes, He punishes randomly. Which is why we never really know until the end of the saga whether His chosen people are maybe going to wind up alive and well in the land of milk and honey, or dead as doornails in the desert. Take for instance the story of Yahweh hanging out on Mount Sinai, I’m talking Exodus 19. He instructs Moses to warn the Jews sweltering in the burning fiery furnace of a desert down below not to gaze on Him lest many of them perish. Okay, He was maybe having a bad day—a toothache, indigestion, diarrhea, you name it. Sinai wasn’t your average Club Med. But is this a reason to make looking at you a capital crime? What we can deduce is that He’s being capricious. He’s being His old random Self. One day He threatens to kill Isaac, another time He dispatches an angel of death to do in Jacob, on still another occasion He personally tries to murder Moses, His anointed gofer. I’m talking Exodus 4:24–26. Ha! With Yahweh on our side, what do Jews need enemies for? He threatens as often as other people fart: Take one bite out of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and you’ve had it; look at Me and you meet your Maker; lay a finger on My ark and you get electrocuted—I’m talking 1 Chronicles 13.” Angling his head, transported by his text, the Rebbe recites in a singsong voice. “ ‘And they carried the ark of God in a new cart out of the house of Abinadab: and Uzza and Ahio drave the cart. And David and all Israel played before God with all their might, and with singing, and with harps, and with psalteries, and with timbrels, and with cymbals, and with trumpets. And when they came unto the threshing floor of Chidon, Uzza’—the poor son of a bitch, that’s me talking, not King James—’Uzza put forth his hand to hold the ark; for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzza, and he smote him, because he put his hand to the ark.’ “

  The Rebbe trembles in exasperation. “Consider, please, the possibility, I’m flirting with probability even, that this God
of our fathers, this Yahweh, holy be His name, maybe has a flaw in His character. The flaw is that He can only relate to people who fear Him. ‘Serve the Lord with fear,’ the Psalmist advises us—I’m talking Psalm 2:11. And how does Yahweh instill the fear of God? By being unpredictable is how. Which is to say, by inflicting punishment at random.”

  “I dig what you’re saying,” Rain remarks. Three heads swivel slowly toward her. “Like if God didn’t punish randomly, if He only killed certified sinners or blonds who stuttered or left-handed lesbians, everyone’d know where they stood. They’d know whether or not they were potential victims. And the ones who figured out they weren’t potential victims wouldn’t fear God. I mean, why bother? Fearing God? If you’re not a potential victim? It’s because God punishes at random that anyone could become an actual victim without even knowing she was a potential victim. So to be on the safe side”—Rain’s voice starts to peter out—”everyone fears God, right?”

  “I could have maybe phrased it better,” the Rebbe declares, “but you hit the nail on the head.” He turns back to D.J. and Lemuel. “Fear is His flaw, randomness is His vice, randomness is His middle name. Yahweh keeps the chosen people on their toes through randomness. He has decided that without yir’ah, which means fear of God, there will be no emunah, which means faith in God. And who can say He is wrong?” The Rebbe aims a lopsided grin at Lemuel. “Here you are, all hot under the collar to find randomness, and it’s staring you in the face. Seek God! Selah.”

  “You put on a good show,” Lemuel observes mildly. “Yahweh’s randomness, assuming He exists, assuming it exists, is neither pure nor unadulterated. It looks like randomness to us because we do not know enough about Yahweh and what is going on in that head of His. In the end, Yahweh’s randomness will turn out to be like all randomness—which is to say, fool’s randomness and nothing more than a footprint of chaos.”

  The Rebbe shrugs, leans toward D.J. and starts to whisper something to her. She blushes, murmurs “Not now” under her breath.

  The Rebbe is not put off. “You have maybe heard of Rebbe Hillel, an illui, which means genius, if there ever was one. He is remembered, among other things, for a second-century sound bite: ‘If not now, when?’ “

  Rain tugs at Lemuel’s elbow and draws him toward the door. “Where are you taking me?” he wants to know.

  The Rebbe’s taunting laugh follows them out of the room. “Remember what that archetypal goy Augustine once said,” he calls after Lemuel. “ ‘Lord, make me chaste’—ha!—’but not yet.’ “

  “I’m taking you to the bowels of the earth,” Rain confides gleefully, pulling Lemuel down the winding staircase toward the basement. They thread their way around boys and girls sitting on the stairs passing a cigarette from hand to hand.

  “Yo, Rain,” one of the boy says. “We’re almost high and dry.”

  A handsome boy with hawklike features and pitch-black hair grips Rain’s ankle. “We could use a refill.”

  Rain jerks her ankle free. “You need a refill, Izzat,” she shoots back, “see me in my orifice.”

  Lemuel is struck by the total concentration of the boys and girls as they follow the cigarette with their eyes. A whiff of smoke reaches his nostrils. The odor seems vaguely familiar.

  Passing an open door at the bottom of the staircase, he spots half a dozen boys wearing purple cardigans, each with a large yellow “BU” sewn on it, sitting around a bare wooden table with several pitchers in the middle. A girl with long hair falling across her pimply face is topping off tiny shot glasses from one of the pitchers. She glances at her wristwatch. “Okay—now,” she says. The boys raise their shot glasses and drain off the liquid in one gulp.

  “Kid stuff,” Rain comments, steering Lemuel toward a room at the end of the corridor. “I’ll show you what the consenting adults are into.”

  She pulls him into a room. Black-and-white images shimmer on a television screen. A haze drifts lazily through the flickering half-light. Lemuel sniffs at the haze. It reminds him of … ah! the rain cloud hovering over the Rebbe’s stock-market pages. He inhales again, begins to feel giddy.

  A voice comes out of the darkness. “Hey, Rain.”

  “Yo, Warren.”

  “I see you made it after all.”

  “Shhh.”

  “Shhhhhhhh,” someone says to the person who said “Shhh.”

  “Like there’s no sound track,” says Rain. “So why can’t we talk?”

  “What’cha doing, Rain,” someone else whispers, “robbing the grave?”

  “Fuck you, Elliott,” Rain whispers back. “In ways which are over your head, he’s younger than both of us put together.”

  Elliott laughs. “Aren’t you confusing youth with innocence?”

  “You guys want to have an intellectual conversation, take it upstairs,” Dwayne gripes.

  “For crying out loud, knock it off,” someone else calls.

  The television screen is obscured by the smoke swirling in front of it. Guided by Rain, Lemuel settles heavily onto a cushion, his back to a wall. As his eyes gradually become accustomed to the darkness, he makes out a dozen or so boys and girls crowded onto low couches and cushions. Several of them seem to be joined together like Siamese twins. From the darkest corner of the room comes the throaty purring sound that a cat produces when it is being caressed.

  Rain slips her arms through Lemuel’s. “This may be one of the best fucking films I’ve ever seen,” she breathes.

  Lemuel pats his jacket pockets in desperate search of his eyeglasses, fumbles them onto his nose, rivets his eyes on the television screen. Thoroughly intoxicated by the haze, he feels as if he is peering through the wrong end of binoculars. Everything looks incredibly small. … He wipes perspiration off his forehead, blinks hard several times, concentrates on the tiny images on the television screen. Through the haze, he manages to distinguish three silvery figures who appear to be engaged in some sort of stylized, musicless ballet, alternately leaning over each other and impaling themselves on one another.

  “Elliott, babe, why don’t’cha dial back and run that part again on slow?” suggests Dwayne.

  Someone sitting on the couch separates himself from his Siamese twin and points a small black box at the television set. The film skids backward. With a jerk the impaled figures disengage, causing everyone to laugh. The image freezes for an instant, then the ballet begins again in slow motion.

  In the darkest corner of the room a boy moans, “For God’s sake don’t stop.”

  A girl giggles quietly. “I need to come up for air.”

  “Knock it off, huh?”

  “Shhhhh.”

  “Oy!”

  Walking Rain back to her apartment after the film, Lemuel is lost in a beguiling fiction. He is twenty-five years younger, a student at the mathematical faculty of Lomonosov University on the Lenin Hills overlooking Moscow. Medium shot of Lemuel, a wallflower at a Komsomol dance in a basement cultural center. Suddenly the lights dim and loud rock music blasts from the speakers. Tight on Lemuel as he glances to his left, discovers that he has a Siamese twin attached to his hip, a girl with a long, dirty-blond ponytail. Various shots of students moving in excruciatingly slow motion, lighting up hand-rolled cigarettes and impaling themselves on one another. Pan to Lemuel’s Siamese twin as she leans toward him. On Lemuel’s face as he feels one of her breasts brush against his arm, smells her lipstick. “Kid stuff!” she calls over the music. Her words seem to tickle his ear. Quick cut of the Siamese twin reaching for the night moth hiding inside his fly. “I’ll show you what the consenting adults are into.”

  “Oy …”

  Walking next to Lemuel, Rain notices the faraway look in his eyes. “A ruble for your thoughts?”

  “There is no ruble anymore, at least not one that is worth anything.”

  Rain tries to keep the ember of conversation alive, but runs smack into his guttural “Uh-huh.” They pass a twenty-four-hour laundromat, swing into an unpaved alleyway, stop at a na
rrow wooden staircase leading to a second-floor loft. Rain, breathing into her mittens to warm her fingers, turns to confront Lemuel. She looks at him, trying to make up her mind.

  Lemuel holds out a hand. “I thank you for an interesting evening.”

  Rain ignores his hand, searches for an ironic tone. “I welcome you for an interesting evening. So what did you think of the flick?”

  “The flick?”

  She shuffles her feet nervously. “Flick, as in movie. Like they must have X-rated flicks in Russia, right? I’m curious how American pornography compares.”

  An agitated grunt escapes from the back of Lemuel’s throat. “I was looking through the wrong end. … The figures were too small. …”

  “You didn’t see it?” She reads the answer on his face. “Get a life, L. Falk. You’re not only a doorknob, you’re an earlobe. If I had an ounce of sense I’d be out of here like Vladimir. Here I go and take you to an X-rated flick and you don’t goddamn see it! How is a girl supposed to turn you on?”

  “Turn me on?”

  “Arouse. Stimulate. Stoke the fire for a major merge.”

  Lemuel says quietly, “You turned me on when you cut the hair sticking out of my nostrils. You turn me on when you walk into the room.”

  Rain’s mouth falls open, then slowly closes as she comes to a decision. “Like I could talk subtext, right? I learned all about goddamn subtexts in introductory psychology. You say one thing, but you mean something else? ‘I can’t’ means ‘I won’t.’ ‘I don’t know’ means ‘I don’t want to think about it.’ I could invite you up to Y-jack with me.” She spots the blank look in his eyes. “I keep forgetting you’re from another planet. Y-jacking is when you plug two sets of earphones into the same jack on a Walkman. So if I asked you up to Y-jack, what I’d really be saying, the subtext, right? is: I am totally stoked, I have decided you’re nonviolent enough to collaborate with me in a violent act. Are you reading me at all, L. Fucking Falk? Most dudes spend their lives saying one thing and meaning another. Not yours truly. Which is why I don’t beat around the goddamn bush.” Rain takes a deep breath. “Hey, would you or wouldn’t you? Like to fuck? R.S.V.P.”